Sing soft and low
June 2026
This month’s title is inspired by Warren Zevon’s song, Mohammed’s Radio, which became my personal earworm this week because I drove for hours and hours. Trying to distract myself from the many ways I could do everything better, I decided to listen to complete albums instead of the usual random jukebox. I did an hour of Zevon which is pretty much the way to do it. Carmelita may be my favorite song ever, because a “pearl handed deck.”
Fun story: I got into trouble at my first radio DJ gig for straying outside the proscribed, approved, carefully analyzed songs. Warren Zevon got me into trouble. The big secret was that the station didn’t mind because it made them look good to tolerate such unimportant misbehavior. Besides, they could throw me under the bus anytime thereafter.
I have three poems in Horror en America and Beyond! Available soonish from Barrio Blues Press.
Also, two stories are in preparation for publication in the next few months. I’m discussing a big project with various folks. More on all that forthcoming.
One pic from my socials and one not
It’s a blurry image, but someone emblazoned their sailboat with the image of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride. I spent a week by the sea in Newport watching boats come and go. This joyful pirate made one of my mornings.
The sunsets are often spectacular viewing from the deck at the end of the world, which it can feel like. The worse the weather, the better (within reason).
You’ve Got to Check This Out
A blog I wrote for a few years about 300 things which had influenced me as a writer and a person.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (YGtCTO #20)
Book written by Patricia Highsmith
Few authors inspire such strong reactions as Patricia Highsmith, even from those who have not read her work, but only seen movies made from her writings. She started out writing a classic, Strangers on a Train, and proceeded to create the ultimate serial killer, Tom Ripley, whom she chronicled for thirty years. In the meantime, she wrote brilliant short stories about animals (not children’s stories and not for the faint of heart). Her memoirs revealed much, though the clues always seemed to be there in her tales.
Highsmith is an incredibly seductive writer. By now, you don’t crack one of her books without being vastly aware that bad things are going to happen. Even so, the prose lulls the reader into a state of comfort. No, she is not dull because she always gets to the point quickly, but rather she luxuriates in the emotions and surroundings that make life a commonplace around the world. She is always the observer, taking in the feelings and the choices that we all make and putting them back out there for us to see just off kilter.
Ripley is the perfect avatar for this style, as he is undoubtedly a psychopath, as well as extremely talented at mimicry. As a youth, that involves stealing the lives of others by inhabiting those lives better than the original. Amazingly, he grows beyond such thefts and instead takes on the role of country squire in the French countryside. Here, his skills are turned to emulating the emotions and behaviors of those around him (albeit with a thin skin too often affronted). Throughout his tales, Ripley is always observing and assuming the appropriate part for the moment.
Highsmith’s animal stories demonstrate another fascinating take on her distancing effect. I don’t know where the average elephant might score on the psychopathy index, but it might well surface some tendencies that make Dumbo rather frightening. Either way, I doubt animals view the world in any fashion like people, no matter how much we anthropomorphise. In Highsmith’s hands, the creatures around us do not view humanity in benevolent terms; often they do not view the world in anything resembling kindness. It is life and it must be lived. You observe and you react. Of course, that sounds an awful lot like Tom Ripley.
No one can read a lot of Patricia Highsmith without dabbling in pop psychology. From the very beginning of her writing, the crimes often touch that reptilian brain at the core of our reactions. The characters have blank spots about the warmer feelings upon which most of us base our behaviors. Hope and love often land one in a very bad place. Even simple curiosity can be a remarkably bad idea. I can’t say there is really anyone to root for, although the occasional victim of abuse gets to mete out some justice.
Maybe it speaks more about her dedicated readers, but I don’t find all this depressing. The shenanigans are plotted so well and seem to arise so naturally that every story is like getting into a rowboat with a slightly off oarsman, just hoping for the best.
Incomplete lists of current Reading…
Elegy for Opportunity by Natalie Lim
Jurassichrist by Michael Allan Rose
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
and Watching…
Paul McCartney: Man on the Run
No Other Choice
Kind Hearts and Coronets
consider watching the latter two one after the other
and Listening
Warren Zevon
A Night at the Opera - Queen
Jill Sobule
2016/01/19 Chicago, IL - Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Mr. B. and the Band - Billy Eckstine