I hear via a grapevine that the book review editor at the Houston Chronicle has been let go. No word yet on what that means for the book review section that appears as part of the Sunday Zest supplement. Maybe the reviews will go to all freelance contributions. Hopefully they won’t vanish altogether.
I worked on book reviews all weekend myself. A total of 2500 words due on April 15th. I’m pretty much finished as of this morning. One more read-through and, barring any major changes to the text, I’ll be sending them in to the editor tomorrow. That clears my desk for the month of April except for a Storytellers Unplugged essay and a Cemetery Dance column. I also have a short story due on May 1st, so that will be my main focus in the coming weeks.
I was sorry to see Mike and Mel get ousted on The Amazing Race last night. They were a genuinely likeable and congenial team. They rarely got ruffled with each other, and they seemed to bring out the best in each other. I like the son’s parting comment, about how he and his dad had always been close but this was the first time they were actually partners in an activity, which added a layer to their relationship. All it took was one bum steer on the King Kong clue and they were out of it. I thought that Mike and Mark’s sins might be the death of them, an hour-long penalty for two infractions, but they managed to end up in third place even after sitting on the sidelines for what was probably the longest hour of their lives.
We watched Spike Lee’s The Miracle at St. Anna’s this weekend. We’d never seen it before, and liked it well enough but found it confusing in places. It starts in 1984 with a postal worker shooting a man who comes up to his wicket to buy stamps, and then backtracks to 1944 to explain why. I think we missed the clues that told the audience which of the four members of the Buffalo Brigade corresponded to our 1984 killer, so we spent much of the film speculating about which one he was. After reading a few reviews, I don’t think that was supposed to be a mystery. The last five or ten minutes were also somewhat befuddling. However, we enjoyed it and the 2.5 hours didn’t seem overlong. The actress who played the woman from the Italian village who could speak English looked familiar to us, but it took some research to figure out that we knew her from the movie Artemesia, a biopic about the 17th century artist Artemisia Gentileschi.
