No offense taken. I did mention frothing on the right. I said, "We see frothing on the right, as well. The Republican party's neocons are often hard to differentiate from leftists...." John McCain's a good example of what I mean. Lately he's been doing the Democrats' dirty work, while he r...

Thank you for the thank you. I joined BookTalk for the literary aspects but, you know, politics. Sometimes it seems that EVERYTHING is politics. And it's hard not to be intrigued by politics in America at the moment. I don't have anywhere near the knowledge of the Frankfurt School that you do but, y...

Oh, there are uncivil conservatives, and uncivil moderates, but liberals have systematized the practice of incivility. The systemization can be traced from HR Clinton and Obama (with their Antifa, BAMN and so on) back to Saul Alinsky. And Alinsky based his Rules for Radicals work on the Frankfurt Sc...

Civility in America has fallen victim to the Frankfurt School: It was here that Marcuse coined the term “liberating tolerance.” It called for tolerance of any ideas coming from the left but intolerance of those from the right. One of the overarching themes of the Frankfurt School was total intoleran...

I've moved on from this book and can't really recommend it as cover-to-cover reading, unless you want to be stupefied with minutiae. Some people like that, but I can do without. So when I saw that it was tedious, I marked the chapters that interested me and read only those. The book has an excellent...

Somebody just told me that one of my stories from a couple of years ago is online: http://themissingslate.com/2014/03/29/if-thy-right-hand-offend-thee/ I thought that the piece was being published in a print-only agreement, but I guess not. So that's the lesson here, quiz those magazines about the e...

Cross Creek was a movie about Rawlings. I saw it a long time ago and remember thinking it was pretty good. Malcolm McDowell played Perkins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Creek_(film) Years ago I read Thomas Wolfe's four novels and then one of the biographies about him. His mother was the fami...

lol. Yeah, Wikipedia. Well spotted. You have the eye of an editor. Thanks.

When people ask me for books they should read, I mention the name Maxwell Perkins. He was an editor who worked for Scribner's. He was F. Scott Fitzgerald's editor, Ernest Hemingway's, and Thomas Wolfe's. Those three writers are a big part of the heart of American fiction. Look at Perkins' career wri...

You can translate one of my stories if you want. https://mikesheedy.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/dsm.pdf That's a link to a collection of several pieces that don't fit into any of the print projects I'm working on. One called "What Ha'e the Dobkins Willy?" might fit your length requirement....