Readers and writers blog

Good writing is more than words and their grammar and syntax. It is the ideas and images they convey. So my next nominee for good writing is Bhaswati Ghosh.

Her weblog — At Home, Writing — carries the subtitle, “My learning curve as a writer. It’s not just about writing, you know.” Her home is New Delhi, India. I can’t argue with that, but I can say that for me, it is about the writing.

Which is why At Home, Writing, is the latest addition to our blogroll.

Consider, for example, her Dec. 12 entry in which she describes a morning walk up the terrace outside her home where she’s greeted by “the All-India Avian Congress.”

(It) is hard to ignore, what with the volume of its esteemed members’ throats. Crows clearly appear to dominate the proceedings, even as pigeons prefer playing the part of silent board members . . . The crowing supremacy cowers into a resigned defeat, however, when kites appear on the horizon. Where the crows and pigeons vie for slices of the sky, the kite claims the entire pie with a single sweep of its magnificent flight. My walk stops momentarily as I look up, transfixed to see this breathtaking stretched-wings wonder spanning across the blue canvas.

As I was ready to climb down the stair, the flight of two pigeons caught my glance. I couldn’t help stopping for a moment and be in awe. On more than one occasion I’ve suddenly noticed my footsteps gathering momentum automatically the second a catchy song is played on the phone radio I carry . . . As the pigeons flew overhead this morning, I found their flight to be effortlessly synchronized to the song that was playing.

What a scene. But poetic interludes are not the sum of what Ghosh writes. Her entries cover writers, artists, music, history, crafts, food and travel, not just from the broad reaches of India but from the world beyond.

Even politics. Her Aug. 26 post includes a music video of Vande Mataram, the national song of India, which on its centenary has sparked controversy because its meaning, “Hail to Mother,” is offensive to some Muslims who feel only Allah should be hailed.

And then there’s cricket: “I can proudly say being passionate about cricket adds as much to my Indianness as the food I eat and the language I speak do,” Ghosh writes in an Aug. 14 entry, quoting sociologist Ashis Nandy’s description of cricket as “an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British.”

Ghosh’s favorite music includes Rabindrasangeet, a body of songs composed by the late Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. She addresses the poet and one of his works, translated as “Rain Falls Pitter Patter,” in an entry May 8, 2006:

That’s how you came into my life — in the playful guise of a grandfather sharing this eternal childhood ballad with the five-year-old me . . . Back then, your name meant no more than a big, tough-to-pronounce word. You knew better; you drew the innocent heart in with the pitter-patter of rain and a million gem stones.

Ghosh’s writing sometimes suggests English is not her native language, and it is not. A homebred Bengali with family roots in east India near Bangladesh, she learned English as a schoolchild in New Delhi. She describes herself as “an ESL,” an acronym for English as a second language that she heard from an American online colleague.

Let’s see, besides English, she speaks Bengali, and she lives in New Delhi where she must also converse in the city’s principal language, Hindi, and she understands and speaks a bit of Urdu.

Friends, in a blogosphere cramped by barely literate fans fawning over celebrities and barely literate celebrities pandering to fans, there’s a wide open world indeed waiting in weblogs like At Home, Writing.

– Sid Leavitt

Fiction writers, compared with newspaper writers, have a disadvantage: A newspaper writer finding a good story needs only to tell it straight, without embellishment, because it is, after all, a good story. And it is real — at least most readers will accept it as so. Fiction writers have to make up their stories, and making up a good one, pathological liars notwithstanding, is not easy.

But it doesn’t stop there. Now the fiction writer has to convince the reader that the good story is real. And that’s where Ray Rhamey comes in.

Rhamey is an editor who gives novelists advice that is knowledgeable, straightforward and, get this, free. His website, Flogging the Quill, is the latest addition to our blogroll.

The site surely will interest a would-be novelist, but it also has a general appeal as a behind-the-scenes workshop showing just how difficult writing can be and just how determined a writer must remain.

Since the beginning of the year, Rhamey frequently runs a feature he calls the Flogometer that challenges authors to submit a manuscript with a first page that compels him to turn to the second page. About once a week, he reprints the first page of a submission — authors submit the first 15 or 20 pages of their manuscript — and he reviews the page line-by-line, giving his advice with an honesty that can be blunt but not disrespectful.

Still, it’s not for nothing that Rhamey calls these exercises “public floggings.”

A writer named Steve is told in the Feb. 22 entry that the prologue to his novel amounts to little more than “info-dump narrative” that has left Rhamey “stymied”:

I don’t see how a mere description of a man who is, according to this prologue, a person of not much accomplishment, will snare a reader. If the writer had included the ‘few unusual quirks’ (cited in the text), especially if he showed them in a lively scene, then maybe. That would be a character, someone I could be interested in. Sorry, Steve. I suggest you browse through the (Flogging the Quill) archives for posts on storytelling.

To the writer of the Feb. 12 entry, identified only as ‘number 21,’ Rhamey says:

Thanks, but no thanks. If the task for a first page is compelling narrative, for me a phone conversation in which two people I don’t know (read ‘care about’) bicker over which way to turn out of a parking lot doesn’t clear the hurdle.

Still, it’s not all negative. About Steve, he says, “Clearly the author can write — I had few nits.” As for number 21, Rhamey concludes that he or she “has done many things right. Your writing is clean, and the dialogue works (as far as it goes).”

And some entries are clear winners, such as the March 14 entry by Eugenia about a man looking at Egyptian coffins in an antiquities shop. The text is reprinted here.

The entry caused Rhamey to turn the page:

(It) was the promise of an intelligent story with interesting characters and insights. What really did it for me was this dealer’s speech:

‘Yes, we all want kings and queens, don’t we?’ The dealer smiled, revealing small pointy teeth. ‘To remind us that even they can come to this, mere merchandise.’

I really liked the touch of philosophy, and perhaps theme, in the dealer’s speech. And if the dealer could be such an interesting fellow, what must the main characters be? I was interested in finding out . . .. Good, professional stuff.

Rhamey, at one time a top Chicago advertising writer and creative director, then a Hollywood screenwriter, understands the slings and arrows of writing novels — he’s written five himself. As an editor, he does complete manuscripts on a variable per-word basis for clients throughout the world.

The free offerings on his website, besides the Flogometer feature, have included other sample edits, book reviews, guest articles and a wealth of other information and guidance for writers since the site was launched in October 2004.

– Sid Leavitt

I’m not a novelist or a poet, but my years in the newspaper business taught me something about personal writing that you’d think would be self-evident: If it’s going to be read by someone else, it better not be something that only family or friends would appreciate.

Granted, most of the millions of webloggers out here are ordinary people writing things that their family and friends do appreciate, and rightfully so. But it shouldn’t be hard to find professional writers who reach beyond those small circles. Alas, it is.

Which is why it is so rewarding to find in this overgrown blogosphere a site called McQuestionable Musings, a blog by freelance writer Karen McQuestion (above) and the latest addition to our blogroll.

Everything about McQuestion’s blog is personal, yet it has universal appeal. Playing a large part is her sense of humor about herself and her family:

What’s new with me since I last blogged, you ask? Well for starters, my husband had a monumental birthday at the end of January. I won’t say how old he is, but if you split a century in half . . .. Anyway, in honor of his birthday I tormented him with some memory math.

Him: Why are you doing this to me?

And then an exchange with her younger son, Jack, last May:

We have this same conversation every year.

Jack: Still dreaming the dream, huh?

But don’t think it’s all humor, even when it appears to be. An entry March 26 opens with a 911 call and her father being taken to the hospital:

Later, my mom said the ambulance had traveled at 85 miles per hour, the fastest she’d ever gone. I was telling this story to my husband when our older son, in the next room, called out, ‘That’s not that fast.’

Charlie: I’m not on God’s prayer list. He’d think it was spam.

The entry ends on an optimistic note that “my dad’s situation seems somewhat better (she says hopefully) so I like to think all our prayers were heard — even Charlie’s non-prayers.”

What I find wonderful about this entry isn’t the humor, which is good, but a deeper insight that resonates within me. Most of us, especially at my age, have been in situations where death lurks in our helpless midst. It is at these times that humor can be an irresistible respite from anguish.

Karen McQuestion’s work has appeared in Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, Denver Post and Christian Science Monitor, among others. She also is an essayist, a radio commentator, and has written a novel.

She actually has two blogs. The link in our blogroll takes you to her home blog where there is a larger offering of her posts but no place for comments. She also has a Publishers Marketplace site (here) that has fewer offerings but a place where you can comment.

– Sid Leavitt

There’s a disturbing pattern emerging as I search the Internet for well-written weblogs: Of the six sites I have until today considered worthy of posting on the blogroll at the right, five are written by people who do not write for a living.

Thank god, then, for Bernita Harris.

Now you wouldn’t think a guy like me, who could accurately be described as a skeptical old fart, would spend much time on a website devoted to “romantic suspense and magic realism.” Magic realism? Hmmm. But that’s good writing for you. And Bernita Harris’s writing hauled me in over my head.

I use the phrase ‘over my head’ advisedly. You know, I got the reference to T.S. Eliot in her Aug. 29, 2005, post entitled “These Are The Pearls That Were His Eyes,” but it took me the longest time to get the title of the blog itself — An Innocent A-Blog. Is an A-blog like an A-list? Or a B-movie? Then I said it out loud: Ah, Mark Twain, “Innocents Abroad.”

This weblog is crammed full of classic references, classic art — each post is accompanied by a print of a masterwork or a photo of a classic sculpture or just an appropriate photo by the author herself — and good writing on any number of subjects. As a published author of nonfiction and poetry, Harris often discusses writing, but she also discusses her garden, recycling, body parts, her house, motherhood, the weather, and sometimes she posts excerpts from The Minor Annals, which I assume to be one of her works of “magic realism.” It’s quite good.

There’s something else I’ve noticed in my burgeoning search: The writers whose weblogs I consider well-written all seem mature, whether by years or by attitude. Harris seems both. And while it may be a reflection of my own years, I am likely to pay more attention to a weblog that shows the author with attractive gray hair (see above).

Which is why I loved her recent remark about leprechauns: “Every time I see a set of those little green dancing men on websites, I have the urge to put my fist through the screen.”

That’s a great picture, a silverhaired lady punching out her monitor. Well, she admits to being “barely post-Luddite,” and I guess that describes me, too. I also owe her website’s Thinking Blogger icon for eventually leading me to another winner, Don To Earth, written by 93-year-old Don Crowdis, the subject of our previous post.

Like Crowdis, Harris is a Canadian, and that may explain more about her likability: I grew up in northern New Hampshire, not far from the Canadian border.

One more confession: Of my six blogrolled sites, five are written by men. Considering that my Internet search is turning up far more women writers than men, thus proving the conventional wisdom that women are more verbal than men, I guess it also proves that I have a predisposition for male writers.

On the other hand, it gives me more credibility about Bernita Harris. Read her in the latest addition to our blogroll, An Innocent A-Blog.

– Sid Leavitt

At 93, Donald Crowdis is believed to be the third oldest blogger on the Internet. He certainly is one of the best. His writing is clear, thoughtful, good-natured, at times tender and poignant.

Crowdis, a native of Nova Scotia now living in Toronto, is not a writer by trade, but he’s no stranger to communications: A pioneer radio and television broadcaster in Canada, he later was director of the Nova Scotia Museum for many years.

He is an ideal example of how clear thinking and straightforward expression make for good writing. And that is why his weblog, Don To Earth, is the latest addition to our blogroll.

A note of caution: His last post was March 8, a brief entry advising readers that “family concerns” have kept him from posting. While the icon on the post is a tombstone inscribed with ‘R.I.P.,’ his headline assures us that “I’m Not Dead.”

I found Don to Earth after scrolling through about 75 sites listed on Authors Blogs. Most of those authors were, well, pretty dull, unless you consider promoting a book, complaining about baby vomit, grousing about an agent or worrying about writer’s block interesting. And Don wasn’t even there. I came across him on one of the better writer’s blogrolls.

What a breath of fresh air he is.

Blogs are wonderful. Vanity is served at once . . .. Anyone can join in, rebut, whatever — surely this is democracy, whatever that is, at its most lively and pushy . . .. I don’t want to stop the momentum of whatever it is that will emerge from the tunnel. Stay tuned.

If a 93-year-old man can stay tuned, that book, baby, agent or block don’t seem like much to worry about. Which may be why his blog, just 56 entries since he started last July, has attracted such a large readership.

He does think about dying. In a Jan. 23 post, he admits:

For too long I have behaved as if I could postpone going indefinitely, and thus have so many things that I must do first . . .. There are numerous notes and letters I must write. There are places I’ve wanted to travel, but never had the chance. Actually, each of you can, if you think yourself into my age, fill out the list. At least you can try to understand why I say that I hate to go.

And he thinks about his wife, whom he usually describes as “my first wife,” as he sits at home in December in the ninth week of her hospitalization:

Here I am, in a home where I am surrounded by her choices of nearly everything I look at. As you come in the front door, a lovely big bowl of fake flowers greets you, and the walls have her framed selections, some of family memories . . ., and the junk in the adjoining kitchen is definitely OK. In short, Margaret Hilda MacLeod Crowdis, my present wife, is just everywhere . . .. In the middle of the night, I am careful when I get up for drainage purposes, so as not to disturb her who is not there. In the morning, I always come downstairs early to read the papers, and can’t help thinking about her preferences for breakfast . . .. Between missing Margie, and wondering when we will again share the same residence, I am simply reduced to this: I am in mourning among her souvenirs.

But his musings are never morose, and he finds plenty to celebrate, as in his post of Oct. 31:

Warm golden sunshine beams through the tall glass doors that lead to my balcony, reminding me they need to be cleaned. A large tree branch adds pattern, and nothing could be more beautiful, I tell myself, as I gaze out on the woodland beyond.

Events in the fall do seem to be intelligent, and what is intelligence if it is not survival in changing circumstances? As I bask in this lovely morning, I know it will not last; it will be followed by snow on ground and trees, and by ice that will glitter in the branches on bright, cold mornings. I know winter can be stunning in its own way, to be followed by spring with its return of bursting life.

Eventually, outside my kitchen glass doors, I know too that lovely late October days will come again, and again.

I hope Don hasn’t in fact gone to earth. He’s too young.

– Sid Leavitt

As I make my way through the dark forest of the Internet, I find I’m guided through the underbrush by lights from the most unexpected sources, the latest leading to a weblog called The Panopticon.

The blog is written by Franklin Habit, a photographer, educator and website designer who lives in Chicago, is a Zen Buddhist, is perhaps of Middle Eastern descent, is gay and writes mostly about his passion, knitting. Not much in common with us sports-loving, beer-drinking, East Coast he-men who wouldn’t know a knit from a purl.

But, man, can he write. Which is why The Panopticon is the latest addition to our blogroll.

Franklin, truth be told, can get a little bitchy, but always filled with a humor that makes you want to be slapped by him:

Will you non-knitters kindly remember that knitting is not synonymous with ‘crafting’? Using ancient techniques to fashion warm socks, handsome sweaters, or ethereal lace from spun fiber is not akin to making trivets out of Popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue.

In a recent snippet titled ‘Schadenfreude Corner,’ he writes:

Gym membership: $50/month
New, smaller Levi’s 501s that fit recently refurbished physique just so: $75
New heels for favorite cowboy boots: $35
Round of drinks for old friends at Charlie’s Bar on Saturday night: $35
Running into the ‘younger man’ that Mr. Ex dumped you for and realizing he’s easily put on forty pounds in the past year: Priceless

His account of meeting his imaginary friend, Dolores, a cheeky Romney sheep who shows up at his door one night, approaches high Gogolesque fiction in its dialogue. The sheep, it turns out, wants to be taken out for a drink.

Another conversation, this one real, with a man on a commuter train who pulls his daughter away from her fascination with Franklin’s knitting, shows a more serious side:

I honestly thought he was concerned that she might be bothering me, so I smiled and said, ‘It’s okay, I don’t mind questions.’

To which he replied, ‘You leave my kid alone!’ And then, not directly to me, but just as audibly, ‘Goddamned freaks.’

Rude? Oh yes. But this is not supposed to be another man-knits-in-public-and-attracts-idiocy story. Those are too common to be interesting in and of themselves.

This is a reminder to myself that my own brain’s not so different from his. I may not be inclined to tell a stranger on the subway she’s a freak, but it doesn’t mean I don’t think it. I do it all the time . . .. I look, I categorize, I judge. And just as I believe that man got me wrong in believing me to be a threat to his child, I’m certain I often misjudge others.

One of the aspects of elusive enlightenment I’m pursuing through Zen Buddhism is (I hear) a genuine understanding that between yourself and myself, there is no difference.

So who put us on to Franklin? My mother-in-law, Virginia Sunderman, 82, an avid knitter and Indiana native who has been known to have Republican proclivities. I am considerably to the left of her, but she felt the following note was necessary:

To prepare you, I will say that Franklin is a mid-Eastern-looking male who is gay, a knitter, very artistic . . . and has an imaginary friend, Dolores, who is a sheep.

I often think Virginia is a Democrat hiding in Republican trappings. But she may suspect that beneath my wool, a Republican is hiding. Well, maybe Franklin’s Buddhism has the answer.

– Sid Leavitt

Early on, most writers learn to avoid loading down their writing with adjectives, trying instead to connect those bare nouns with verbs that do some work. It’s a good rule, but not unbreakable.

The expression ‘purple prose’ always reminds me of a paragraph from Blue Highways in which William Least Heat-Moon Trogdon uses four adjectives in the first seven words, the sixth of them, coincidentally, a synonym for ‘purple.’

If you think Blue Highways is a travel book, think again. Or redefine the word ‘travel.’ Blue Highways is a long poem about America that doesn’t look like poetry until you read it and realize that the better prose and poetry are written, the narrower is the gap between them. But it does travel. The paragraph I remember, set in a trading post in Tuba City, Ariz., during a sandstorm, starts in the 19th century and ends in outer space, all in fewer than 200 words:

In viridescent velveteen blouses and violescent nineteenth-century skirts, Navajo women of ample body, each laden with silver and turquoise bracelets, necklaces and rings — not the trading post variety but heavy bands gleaming under the patina of long wear — reeled off yards of fabric. The children, like schoolkids anywhere, milled around the candy; they spoke only English. But the old men, now standing at the plate glass window and looking into the brown wind, popped and puffed out the ancient words. I’ve read that Navajo, a language related to that of the Indians of Alaska and northwest Canada, has no curse words unless you consider ‘coyote’ cursing. By comparison with other native tongues, it’s remarkably free of English and Spanish; a Navajo mechanic, for example, has more than two hundred purely Navajo terms to describe automobile parts. And it might be Navajo that will greet the first extraterrestrial ears to hear from planet Earth: on board each Voyager spacecraft traveling toward the edge of the solar system and beyond is a gold-plated, long-playing record; following an aria from Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ is a Navajo night chant, music the conquistadors heard.

So purple prose isn’t always a bad idea. But we’d better be really, really good at it. And judging from the fact that Trogdon spent four years rewriting Blue Highways, producing what a friend described as “a pile of manuscripts almost as tall as he is,” we’d better work at it really, really hard.

– Sid Leavitt

Nine people riding in an open convertible would catch anybody’s attention on the highway, and as I was cruising the Internet over the weekend, a weblog called Riding with the Top Down caught mine.

It’s a shared weblog — actually, a webring without the circular navigation — written by nine authors, all women, and what amazed me was that some old guy like me would find it interesting. But interesting it is. Even on topics I don’t usually care about — network TV, dieting, children’s soccer, home makeovers and the latest fashion trend in pants.

First, the superficial things I like about the site — its airy look, its light peach underlay and its use of serif type. (I don’t know why I dislike sans-serif type, unless my early years as a printer’s apprentice and then nearly four decades as a newspaper reporter and editor conditioned me to think that those little letters needed wings on them.)

But what I really like about the site is its lack of superficiality. While the topics are ordinary, the writers treat them thoughtfully.

Often the treatment is humor: Betina Krahn talks about having to become a coach in her son’s soccer league and inheriting as an assistant “a six-foot-six airline mechanic with biceps the size of Volkswagens . . . who had never played a sport in his life. (’Unless you call ridin’ Harleys a sport.’)” Debra Dixon goes on the Atkins diet and tells us her husband “didn’t know we were going on a diet the next day until I informed him. He was thrilled. Really. Speechless actually . . .. (H)is face was flushed and he looked about to explode.” Christie Ridgway discusses the trend away from low-rise pants: “Are we finally leaving the years of butt cleavage, uh, behind?”

The writers also spin off narrow subjects to wider thoughts: Kathleen Eagle, reminiscing about her favorite teachers, notes that public education “seems to be in trouble these days. These days? I heard the same dire warning when I was in college way back when . . .. (O)ne of the profs — a white guy visiting from South Africa — claimed that the very idea of universal education was absurd. Maybe it is, but without it, there’s no hope for the American dream.” Even Ridgway’s fashion concerns aren’t about herself but the characters in her books: “Today, my 17-year-old secondary character would definitely still be in her hip-huggers. Will they seem so yesterday next year?”

And then there’s the camaraderie: While each post actively tries to engage the reader with questions, most of the comments come from the other writers. Which makes you realize, of course, that the nine of them are not all sitting together in a room (or a convertible) somewhere. Like us, they’re readers, too.

So to you readers, we commend Riding with the Top Down, the newest addition to our blogroll.

– Sid Leavitt

I’ve been surfing the Internet, something I do more often now in my retirement, this time trying to get a handle on what weblogs are out here, and I’ve concluded that this post could be subtitled ‘What forest? Hell, what trees?’

As noted in an earlier post, Technorati tracks 75 million weblogs, and although it is the most popular, Yahoo lists it as only one of 61 blog catalogs. Number seven on the list tracks 10 million blogs.

As an experiment, I randomly picked the fifth on the list, BlogCatalog, and, again at random, went to the 125th page of writing blogs — each page holds 25 entries, so that page started at blog number 3,101. There I came across Being the Equator, a blog written by a smiling woman named Deb who describes herself as “relatively bright, moderately funny, (with) a spattering of creativity.”

Visit this site and you will see that the blogosphere is not all teenagers prattling about “American Idol”:

Deb looks like a teenager, but she’s 40, and her life hasn’t been easy — married at 21, a mother at 23, then, after earning undergraduate and graduate degrees, divorced at 34. Then about four years of the dating scene until a whirlwind marriage to her current husband. He’s a leukemia survivor who developed bipolar disorder from the radiation and chemotherapy, and his ex-wife is a witch trying to disrupt their lives. Now Deb’s mother is staying with them because she’s dying of cancer. Deb calls herself “The Equator” because she’s in the middle of everything, trying to “keep everyone on an even keel.”

I have no reason to doubt a word that Deb writes. In fact, I think she needs more than one blog.

In 38 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, I’ve read hundreds of thousands, no, make that millions of words, not to mention all the words I’ve written. Outside work, I’ve read everything from Homer to Herman Melville to Harper Lee, not to mention the Bible. But as I look around among the millions of blogs out here, I feel as overwhelmed as Deb the Equator.

It’s like being in a library without a Dewey Decimal System . . . no, without a card file index. To return to the forest metaphor, the underbrush is so thick, you can’t even see the trees.

What I think it’s all going to come down to is word-of-mouth. I tell you what I have found, you tell me what you have found. These days, it’s what they like to call networking. So let’s network.

– Sid Leavitt

You know what I like about writing? No, not text messaging, instant messaging or chat room exchanges. I’m talking about writing — where people sit down at a computer, word processor, typewriter or just with a piece of paper and pencil in hand and write. To someone else or, and this has special appeal to me, just to themselves.

What I like about writing is that it is contemplative.

This combination website-weblog has been up and running for less than three weeks, and so far, there hasn’t been a lot of interchange between readers and writers. But we’ve already either attracted or enlisted six writers. And only one of them — well, maybe two — write professionally.

That’s a pretty good record, considering the proliferation of weblogs these days. And the reason is that, despite society’s ever-increasing interconnectedness through radio, television, telephones, cell phones, computer chat rooms and instant text messagers, we humans are basically a contemplative bunch.

We need contemplation. We need quietness. We need connectedness with ourselves. We need to sort out our thoughts, our feelings, our memories, our observations and put them into written words.

That’s what the best writing is, even when it is intended for other people to read.

Our latest contributor is Barbara Phelps-McMichael, who plans in July to connect with a lot of people she hasn’t seen for a long time — her eighth-grade classmates at their 50th-year reunion. She communicates with them — and with us — in our latest nonfiction offering, “A Trip in Time.”

We’ve also had contributions from Virginia Sunderman in the poetry section and Blaise Schweitzer in the nonfiction section. In the blogroll, John H. Williams shares his thoughts about religion and life in the weblog Trite but True, Michael Moore — not the filmmaker but the Arizona philosopher-curmudgeon — offers essays and letters in Vox Clamantis, and an anonymous waiter tells you what he really thinks about his customers, his employers and his life in Waiter Rant.

Even though they need only their own, they could all use your contemplation.

– Sid Leavitt