Readers and writers blog

James L. Fox is a fellow hermit, and we have a deal: He likes to write, and I like to read what he writes.

We present his latest short story, ‘All That Glitters,’ in our fiction section today.

Fox and I do have our differences. At 80, he’s a few years older than me (but not that many). He served in the ‘Tin Can’ Navy of Admiral Bull Halsey’s 7th Fleet, while I pounded various parts of the Earth in the old 1st Army. He admits to being a hermit — he lives in the Mojave Desert of southern California in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains — while I am sort of a recluse but really more of a lollygagger, a dawdler who likes to sit at home on the suburban outskirts of New York City and daydream.

Fox likes to describe his short stories, posted in a Hermit’s Cave section of his website, as ‘tall tales,’ but I see them more as what we used to call ‘good yarns.’ Because his tales could never be as tall as some told by relatives of mine.

I got my first name from a great-uncle who used to tell of winters so cold that he once saw a chain of lightning frozen in a pond. Or mosquitos so big that the only escape was to run inside a house and wait until they shoved their beaks through the window screens, then hammer the beaks over to trap the buggers. (Of course, they once flew away with the house, he said.)

I have another uncle who tells such whoppers that some members of the family actually get angry:

“Every word that comes out of his mouth is a lie,” they say.

“I know it,” I say, “but I love the stories.”

I’m sure Fox has a much better reputation for veracity, but I have the same affection for his stories. I’m still thinking about where Jim Graham’s boots went in “Lucky Dawg,” the first of Fox’s short stories that we published April 10. (Note: You won’t find the story under that title now. It is now included in a new fiction entry titled ‘Short Stories by James L. Fox,’ now topped by “All That Glitters.”)

Fox’s website is a rambling place of long and short stories, essays, community services and a few commercial touches, one of them a website he set up for his daughter, Sherry, who takes care of him. The nameplate of his Reading Room shows a smiling bat welcoming you to a cave full of stories with the following introduction from the Mojave Hermit:

Ya get lots a’ time to think about how things oughta be when you’re all by yer lonesome in the desert lookin’ for gold and wonderin’ what if this and what if that were different. I never ever started a yarn with a plot in mind . . . I just created some ornery characters (some of them are real people, but I ain’t tellin’), I just threw them together and let the fur fly. Sometimes, I never knew how it was gonna end ’til it did. Hope ya enjoy my make-believe people.

Spoken like a true hermit.

And now, today’s other new offerings:

• Chapter Seven: North Beach of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which Jones and his friend Elliot, who is about to ship out to Vietnam, go to a jazz club where they first meet Ginny Good, a cute girl with a giggly voice and a tight black dress.

• Chapter Fourteen: A New Light of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing in which scientists notice a strange blue energy coming from cell samples taken from an alien ship unearthed in New Mexico.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image above is an illustration by Scott Mayhew showing Plato’s cave, an allegory used by the classical Greek philosopher in his work The Republic. The cave symbolizes, among other things, that what we perceive may be only shadows of a deeper reality, notably of The Good. The illustration is from a website, Matt Lawrence’s Home Page, now a dead link.

By definition, anyone who submits a comment to this site is intelligent, good-looking and, as Garrison Keillor would say, has above-average children — we’ll even throw in your ancestors as well — but sometimes a comment is especially meritorious.

So thank you, Kevin Dickinson, for raising a subject in our April 13 comments that merits further discussion — the pressure on bloggers to post more material and more frequently than most other writers write.

It’s a good point. For example, our blog entries average from 600 to 700 words, about the same as a 15- to 20-inch newspaper column, and we post entries twice a week. Most newspaper columnists these days, unless they’re working very hard, generally don’t file more than one or two columns a week.¹

(Remember to ask me about a column I once wrote.)

As I told Kevin, certain subjects like his — Words — and ours — writing — are harder to post about frequently than, say, those personal diaries you find all over the blogosphere where the writer can post the equivalent of “Well, not much to report today, but here it is. . .” I’m sure these weblogs, like daily letters home, are great for people who know the writer personally rather than electronically, but for the rest of us. . .

There are exceptions, and they’re on our blogroll. For example, June at Bye Bye, Pie, is an astonishingly good daily diarist, but that’s because she is an astonishingly good writer with a lot of imagination and a lot of personal, chit-chatty style. (Good proofreader, too.)

Bernita Harris at An Innocent A-Blog also is remarkable, and she usually writes about our hard subject, writing. She’s cut back temporarily to three posts a week, but that’s because she has a book in progress.

Another difficult subject, art, is handled with apparent ease by Charley Parker at lines and colors, again on an almost daily basis. And there’s Heather Armstrong at dooce, Franklin at The Panopticon, May at about a nurse, Rod McBride at Midwest Rock Lobster . . . well, you can see them all over there at the right.

I admire them all because they all have something to say, they say it with grace and integrity, and they do so at their own pace — some of them much more amply and expeditiously than we do.

Anyway, here are our new offerings today in Works:

• Chapter Six: San Mateo of Gerard Jones’ Ginny Good in nonfiction and Chapter Thirteen: Descent of Steve Karmazenuk’s The Unearthing in fiction.

Oh yeah, the column I once wrote:

I remember as a reporter being envious of columnists — what a soft job, I thought — until I was asked to write a weekly column. Of course, I still had to do my reporting job, and since I was so old-fashioned that I didn’t want to express opinions about issues I reported on, finding subjects was more difficult than I had foreseen.

There’s an old joke about news being so slow that newspapers are tempted just to run names from the telephone book. I actually wrote a column like that — not a bad one, either — using names from a phone directory of a city of about 25,000. I found a man named Mailman who in fact was a milkman. I found a Dr. Scholl who didn’t specialize in feet. I added up loose change — the total of Penneys, Nichols and even a Dime listed in the directory.

My real coup was that I found a guy who was a real credit to everyone who knew him — because that was his name, Real Credit. Of course, it was a Franco-American city in northern New England where ‘real’ would be pronounced ‘rey-AL’ and ‘credit’ would be ‘cre-DEE.’ But it worked in print.

And now that old story has helped me get another blog entry done. We recycle.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. The legendary Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith at one time was writing five columns a week, but even he had to cut back in his later years.

2. The image above was borrowed from the May 3, 2007, entry at HRmarketer.com blog, no photo credit listed.

Time again for a little housekeeping, which at our place means just shifting stuff around without throwing anything away. But this time, if they haven’t already been at your fingertips, it means getting out those dictionaries and encyclopedias again.

Because Conrad is back.

Actually, Conrad H. Roth never was away, just stored in the inactive section of our blogroll after he announced the day after New Year’s that he would quit writing his weblog, Varieties of Unreligious Experience. Well, earlier this month, he started Vunex up again.

Sadly, an urbane colleague of his, Aaron Haspel of the weblog God of the Machine, will be taking Roth’s place on our inactive list. Maybe Haspel will come back, too.

Conrad H. Roth isn’t his real name, and since he prefers anonymity, suffice it to say he’s a young Englishman who’s smarter than anyone of any age has a right to be. But everyone ought to know someone like that. We’re glad to.

His first entry back shows Roth still is as mind-bendingly erudite and sesquipedalian as ever. His April 6 post bears a headline in Gaelic — Thanum an Dhul, which is a line from an old Irish song called “Finnegan’s Wake” in which a drunk is mistaken for a corpse until he’s sprayed with whiskey, a revival theme central to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — and to Roth’s return to blogging. Circuitous, eh?

The man is conversant in Latin as well as some French and German, and the motto on his website is in Italian, supposedly advice given to Goethe in 1786 — Non deve fermarsi l’huomo in una sola cosa, perchè allora divien matto: bisogna aver mille cose, una confusione nella testa — which, as best we can make out, means:

A man shouldn’t stop at just one thing because that will make him crazy. He needs to have a thousand things, a pandemonium, in his head.

In Roth’s case, it’s a lovely pandemonium. Welcome back, o erudite one.

Now, as for Haspel, his website opens very slowly and hasn’t had a new post — actually, most of them are briefs in a center column, the larger entries on the left being much rarer — since Jan. 21. Haspel, a critic and reviewer particularly fond of poetry, quit God of the Machine once before, in 2005, but returned a year later. We hope he does again.

As with everything on our inactive list at the bottom of the blogroll, even if God of the Machine doesn’t start up again, we think what’s written so far is still worth reading.

And speaking of that, here are today’s offerings in our nonfiction and fiction sections that are worth reading:

• Chapter Five: Pacifica of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which the author continues moving back in his personal history — a playwrighting triumph cut short by a bitchy teacher in Michigan, a disappointing move to California, an abortive attempt to ship around the world on a yacht — until he has a thespian encounter with a Mormon kid from Salt Lake City who will become his friend.

• Chapter Twelve: Inquests and Inquisitions of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing in which a series of worldwide attacks is launched by a group of religious fanatics stirred into unrest by the presence of an alien spacecraft in New Mexico. The group’s leader escapes into the ship itself and for some mysterious reason knows how to manipulate its complex controls.

So, between these and the resurrected Roth, there’s plenty to read today.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at the top is a work called “Fagin Knew a Sin,” an ink-on-paper anagram on Finnegans Wake by Ben Stack, a Dublin-born artist now living in Australia. His website is at http://www.benstack.com.au/.

And now, a little self-congratulatory celebration. Because as of tomorrow, we’re 1. No, not No. 1. That would be a little too self-congratulatory. No, R&W Blog is 1, as in one year old.

As for our number in the blogosphere, well, that’s somewhere around 395,000. Which, considering that Technorati says it’s now tracking 112 million weblogs, isn’t as bad as it might sound.*

Our biggest surprise after our first year, although we haven’t set any readership records, is that we seem to have tapped into a growing Internet phenomenon — the e-book-in-progress.

More about that in a minute, but first, a little backstory.

The year got off to a slow start. Because, actually, the website Readers and Writers is now a year and a half old, and it took us six months to realize that we needed to add a blog or — and here’s another water metaphor to add to the one we led with Sunday — go under.

Our first blog entries were April 18, 2007, but they were just excerpts from my book, Adrift in America (which you can still conveniently find on this site by clicking on the aforementioned title). It took us three more days — April 21 — before we said hello as bloggers and started explaining ourselves:

Here is the whole idea: Amid the explosion of websites and weblogs in recent years, much of it dedicated to the type of personal chatter you hear on cellphones these days, it occurred to us that someone should put up a website dedicated to that passion so many of us bear — the passion to write, along with its corollary, the curiosity to read what others are writing — that would be free and unlimited. To be fair, there are many fine sites and blogs dedicated to the free part, but very few to the unlimited. Well, Readers and Writers Blog is unlimited.

That entry also quoted a gentleman we consider our predecessor, an Internet pioneer named David Guest who 10 years earlier had put up a website also called Readers and Writers. Although he used a slightly different URL, the purpose was the same — to give writers a place to publish their works for readers to read free.

“The site never took off,” he told us. “Writers all seemed to want to earn money from their efforts and were afraid to put their works in the public domain . . . (and so) I just let the site sort of die.”

Well, things have changed, and it seems to have happened in the last year or so.

For us, it all broke in February when a nice guy from Montreal, writer Steve Karmazenuk, sent us a note that he’d like us to run the first four chapters of his science fiction novel, The Unearthing. Right out of the blue. For free.

Then along came Joseph Cigan, a nice guy from Chicago who makes his living as an independent trade contractor but had done some writing and wanted to try his first novel. It wasn’t finished, but when we saw the first few chapters of Sniper in the Mist, we knew we had to serialize it.

Our first e-book-in-progress.

Then Karmazenuk came along after talking with some of his web-savvy friends and advisers and said he’d decided to release all of The Unearthing on our site. Wow. So we’re serializing that.

Then along came Gerard Jones, a nice guy (well, he’s a little curmudgeonly but a pussycat at heart) from Ashland, Ore., who not only let us serialize his book, Ginny Good, but gave us a link to free audio copies of it.

And now comes Jeri Cafesin, a nice woman (I just couldn’t keep the parallel with ‘guys’ and call her a ‘gal,’ sorry, that’s too Texas) from the San Francisco area who’s sending us chapters of her novel, Disconnected — yes, also an e-book-in-progress.

So check out the latest installments — Karmazenuk’s Chapter Eleven: Crisis, Cigan’s Chapter 7: Tsunami in Heaven and Jones’ Chapter Four: Fifteen Mile — as well the other writers in nonfiction, fiction and poetry, some of whom I haven’t mentioned, but bless them all.

One more note about our place in the blogosphere. Our number, 395,000, has stayed about the same in the past six months or so, and since Technorati estimates that’s about the same amount of time in which the total number of blogs usually doubles, R&W Blog seems to be doing all right.

If you’ll forgive one more aquatic metaphor, we may be treading water but the sea is rising to new levels. And so we float off into another year.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*Actually, a more realistic total might be between 1.5 million and 3.5 million, which still would put R&W Blog in the upper 25th to 10th percentile. It could be even higher, depending on who’s counting what. It’s not clear to me whether the Technorati figure of 112 million includes inactive as well as active blogs — and whether it’s blogs in all languages or just English, which is only about a third of the worldwide total. (A surprising statistic in the latest annual report by Technorati CEO David Sifry is that the largest number of blogs worldwide are written not in English or Chinese but Japanese.)

Wow, I’m rolling in waves of words — so much to read, so little time to do it. And even as I verge on sensory overload in this literary sea, it’s not an unpleasant sensation.

I’m basically a nonfiction guy, due no doubt to all those years I spent writing and editing newspaper copy. I’ve read a fair amount of fiction — mostly as a young man and mostly the classics of either antiquity or the 17th through the 20th centuries. As I grew older, my reading tastes gravitated to nonfiction — history, memoirs, trade stuff.

Now I administer this website-weblog where we’re serializing three novels and one nonfiction novel, all of them well-written, and it’s like I’m a young man again.

Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about — it’s the final paragraph in our first installment of J. Cafesin’s novel Disconnected that we began serializing on Thursday:

I angled the gun so it pointed toward my brain and fingered it until I found the trigger. Every microscopic movement of my fingers registering in my head, but it felt unreal, like it was happening to someone else and I was just watching. Or like I was playing a game and even if I pulled the trigger and the bullet ripped the back of my skull out, it would only be temporary, like in a dream or cartoon, and after, I would get up, go into the kitchen and get a Diet Coke while I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my evening. I squeezed the trigger very slowly. I could barely hear my intuition screaming at me to stop, but I didn’t. I never listened to my intuition anymore, anyway, why start now. . .

Man, that’s good writing. And it made me want to read today’s installment, Chapter One.

I should also mention today’s other installments:

• Chapter Ten of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel, The Unearthing, subtitled “First Contacts,” in which members of a scientific survey team begin deciphering the language of an alien ship unearthed in the New Mexico desert.

• Chapter Three of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction work, Ginny Good, in which Jones talks about his early years in Michigan, including confrontations with a couple of teachers and the beginning of a steamy liaison with . . . well, you’d better read it for yourself.

As a result of all this good stuff, I’ve been spending a lot more time at this computer, doing a lot of type conversion and proofreading and whatever small amount of editing is required to adapt these works to R&W Blog’s general style — mostly punctuation.

And, as I said, I’m reading a lot more fiction these days, which is good, but it has made me realize how much my horizons narrowed over the years. Now that I’m retired, they’re broadening again.

A fellow blogger, Kevin Dickinson of Words, one of our blogroll listings at the right, talks in his April 3 entry about how much more he wants to read and how little time he has to do it: “I’m a dish sponge trying to be a car-wash sponge,” he says.

It’s a familiar feeling. And according to a recent newspaper article, it’s not just shared by me. The article cites the increasing pressure that bloggers put upon themselves and lists two of them, men ages 60 and 50, who died of heart attacks and a third, age 41, who survived his coronary.

Well, I’m older than all of them, but I don’t worry about keeling over at the computer. For one thing, I can’t worry about it — I’m in my late 60s where death shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. For another thing, right behind this space I use as an office is a treadmill where I walk for 20 minutes a day — about a mile — most every day. And I do get out regularly.

And finally, what I feel as I sit here blogging is not pressure or dread but excitement and satisfaction. And if that kills me . . . well, I can think of worse ways to go.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is “River over Yin and Yang,” a 2005 painting in acrylic by Max Riggs, whose website is at http://www.maxriggs.com/.

Well then, after emailing a bunch of literary agents, introducing a new author friend and chit-chatting about my personal triumphs, it’s time to get back to our business here at R&W Blog — putting up more works for you to read.

Oh, and also an announcement about new offerings by one of our blogroll colleagues.

But our latest news is that we will have a new e-book-in-progress in our fiction section: Jeri Cafesin, a freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, will be contributing chapters of her new work, Disconnected, which we begin serializing today.

It’s an unusual work about a young woman in conflict that begins not with a prologue but an epilogue and has a narrative style that brings to mind images of unusual vividness, perhaps cinematically so. On Sunday, we’ll move on to Chapter One, and Cafesin will be sending more chapters as they become available.*

It will be our second e-book-in- progress. The first, of course, is Sniper in the Mist by Joseph Cigan, and he’s hard at work on Chapter 7. We’ve seen a preliminary version of the chapter, which shifts from his Chicago neighborhood of the 1960s to the war in Vietnam and a powerful description of a company of soldiers there. It’ll be ready soon, Joseph tells us.

We also have another new work in the fiction section today — a short story by James L. Fox called “Lucky Dawg” that involves a retiree-turned-prospector and his lop-eared hound, a work that in the old days we would’ve described as “a good yarn.” There may be a bit of autobiography here since Fox lives in the Mojave Desert area of southern California near the San Gabriel Mountains. He promises more short stories to come.

Also today, we offer the latest chapter in The Unearthing by Steve Karmazenuk, who has been a good friend to us. He was the first author to let us serialize his book — a finished work already on the paperback market at a price — free of charge. Our latest installment is Chapter Nine: Discoveries.

And while we’re on the subject of freebies, what can we say about Gerard Jones, another new contributing author, who not only lets us serialize his book, Ginny Good, but gives away copies of both the paperback and audio versions to anyone who asks.

In Sunday’s initial installment of Ginny Good, an autobiographical work he describes as a ‘nonfiction novel,’ Jones begins his circuitous route back into the 1960s, giving us a hint of the trail of broken icons he will leave along the way. In today’s installment, Chapter Two: Del Mar, he continues his introduction of the love of his life, Virginia Dixon Good.

To get to any of these offerings, either click on the links provided in this blog entry or go to the appropriate section under Works at the upper right of this page — nonfiction for Jones, fiction for Cafesin, Cigan, Fox or Karmazenuk — and follow the trail there.

And now our announcement of new offerings on the website of our friend Ted Knerr at Art-spirit, the only artist’s site on our blogroll. So here they are:

In his gallery — walls: the art of my friends — there are three new members, photographer-painter Orlando Richards, painter Anne Bucher Tilghman and photographer Aline Tisato. And five of the gallery’s now-28 members have updated their works — new photographs by Bob Drouin and Allan Michael, new sculpture by Ernie Gerzabek, new ceramic sculpture by Ralph Holker and new paintings by Miriam Hirschhorn.

And Ted has posted a new painting of his on the home page as well as a new essay on authentic art on his quotes page.

I saw the new painting on one of my rounds through our blogroll, but I missed the essay before Ted announced his new offerings. I apologize for my oversight, Ted, and thanks for the announcement.

In fact, I apologize to all of our blogroll buddies listed over there to the right. What once was my daily rounds through our blogroll has now become less frequent as we get more contributions from writers for our Works section.

I can’t complain. It’s a welcome problem.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*Cafesin also is author of Reverb, a novel about a man who is consumed by his music until he undergoes a bizarre journey that awakens him to the world outside himself.

In the newspaper business, the opening paragraph of a story generally is called the lead¹ — well, it’s still spelled ‘lede’ by some journalists, a usage supposedly started to avoid confusion with the metal, lead, which was what most newspaper type was cast in when I started in the business, and there was never any confusion even then, which is why I have steadfastly refused to misspell the word all these years, especially now that it seems just an affectation by bushy-tailed journalists and editors too young to remember when newspaper type wasn’t set electronically.

Whew, now that’s an example of a bad lead.

And now for some good leads — great leads, actually, not by journalists but by writers. The greatest lead ever written, for literary, theological, historical and other reasons way too long to get into here, is Herman Melville’s opening to Moby Dick:

Call me Ishmael.

And anyone who has read The Metamorphosis will never forget Franz Kafka’s opening words:

As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

And then there’s:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . .’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?’

The screaming voice, of course, is that of the narrator, Hunter S. Thompson, in his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And the bats, of course, are . . . well, you know the story.²

And now, I’ve got another lead for you, the opening to what is described as a novel. I don’t know if this lead is great, but it’s very, very good:

I’m using everyone’s real name. They can all sue me. I hope they do. I could use the excitement.

And the author, Gerard Jones, apparently does use everyone’s real name in his book, Ginny Good, which is subtitled A Mostly True Story and is described by Jones not merely as a novel but as a ‘nonfiction novel.’

What struck us not just about the lead and the book but about Jones as well is . . . you gotta like the guy’s attitude.

Well, maybe you don’t, but we do, and that’s why today we’re offering the first installment of Ginny Good. You can either click on this link, Ginny Good, Chapter One, or go through the nonfiction section under Works at the top right of this page.

As we said in our previous entry about Jones, the book is a chronicle of a classic 1960s love affair, and like everything from that decade and into the ’70s . . . well, it was just a different time, a time that a lot of us wish had translated more effectively into today’s world.

By the way, Jones also has issued Ginny Good in audio form, and you can find that, as well as the entire book in electronic print, at his website, Everyone Who’s Anyone.

Also today, after a week’s hiatus, we continue serializing Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel, The Unearthing, with Chapter Eight: Continuation and Contrast, in which a team of scientists learns more about an alien spacecraft in New Mexico and one of them gets an exciting ride in one of its satellite vehicles.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. But not always. Sometimes the lead is in the second or third paragraph, but that’s about the limit. Any deeper than that, the journalist is in danger of what is known as ‘burying the lead.’ Or ‘lede,’ if you must, o j-school grads.

2. Just in case you don’t, the bats are hallucinations produced by the aforementioned drugs.

Big excitement at our household this week. Mr. That Guy (that’s what our cats call me*) got himself a letter printed in the New York Times.

You know, I’m not a big letter writer, a fact my friends and relatives will verify. And I hardly ever write a letter to a newspaper, mostly because all the papers I worked for during nearly four decades had a policy against printing letters from their own writers and discouraged us from writing to other papers as well. In fact, this was only about the second letter of mine that I remember being printed by a newspaper. (Remind me to tell you about the first.)

But lo, there it was on Tuesday. Not just on the New York Times website but in the print editions as well. Right there at the top of the editorial page, the third of six letters about the current Democratic primary race. And thanks to the way the type spilled over from column 5 to column 6, there was my name right under the end of the two-column headline.

Talk about giddy. As soon as I got back from the local newsstand with a copy of the paper Tuesday morning, my wife and I were doing high-fives and saying yay, causing the cats, unimpressed, to wonder what the hell was going on. It got in the paper, you dumb felines, that’s what’s going on. You’d have thought I was a cub reporter again.

Well, now that I’ve had a few hours to reflect on the whole thing, I’m thinking the cats weren’t so dumb. Because what little I had to say about the controversial race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has already been in and out of Wednesday’s bird cages.

It sure didn’t impress Maureen Dowd, the columnist who inspired my letter, if in fact she saw it at all. My point — and here’s a link to the letter (it’s No. 3) — was that if Obama and Clinton were interested in unifying the country, they should start with the Democratic Party by agreeing to a unity ticket, winner at the top.

Ms. Dowd doesn’t agree, judging from her column Wednesday in which she talked about “hand-wringing” Democrats and asserted that “the whole point of a presidential race is to win.”

Well, that’s not the whole point (I almost said, “you dumb feline.” Sorry, cats). That’s how we ended up with the guys we’ve got now. The point of a presidential race is to put the best-qualified people in office.

Don’t worry, R&W Blog is not about to go political. Our subject is reading and writing, and as I have said before, politics is one of the three subjects that bore my ass off, the others being religion and celebrities. Politics and religion have been so polarized for so long now that my anger has turned to apathy. And celebrity worship always has been pathetic.

In fact, if this were a political blog, I not only wouldn’t be writing it, I wouldn’t be reading it.

By the way, I did get some reaction to the letter, mostly from Times readers who wondered how I got it in the paper. Certainly not my amazing facility with words. The letter actually was my second to the Times, the first a month earlier on the same subject — different words, same idea. I got an automated reply and then silence. This time, the automated reply was followed by an email asking me a lot of questions about the letter and me, and then it was in the paper.

It was timing. People are starting to think and talk more about a unity ticket.

Timing also played a role in the first letter I ever got published. It was written in the 1960s to my home state’s right-wing paper, The Manchester, N.H., Union Leader, which continued its obsession with communists long after the McCarthy witchhunts were dead. I sought to ridicule this obsession by sending them the following letter on May 1:

“Snoopy celebrates May Day. The Soviets celebrate May Day. Therefore, Snoopy is a communist.”

They printed it along with a much-longer editor’s reply about what a threat I was.

Come to think of it, there may have been another aspect of timing with the New York Times letter. I noticed later that Tuesday was April 1. I might have been one of the fools.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*As in that guy who feeds us three times a day, that guy who cleans our litter box with nearly the same frequency, that guy whose body we curl up on at night for warmth. Sometimes they just call me T.G.