MANIFESTO: On Poker Chips, Book Publishing and Health Care Reform

Unless you're color-blind like me (yes, I'm color-blind, and yes, that probably does explain the color scheme here on Literary Kicks), you probably see two different color chips in the photo above.

My great-grandfather Elias Trichter was a Mason, a member of the Cambridge Lodge 622 of the Free and Accepted Masonic Guild of Brooklyn, New York. He died before I was born, but I inherited an elaborate plaque, titled MASONIC HISTORY and signed and stamped to commemorate his initiation as a Master Mason on February 21, 1910, witnessed by brothers Mortimer Carman, Howard J. Fitzpatrick and James A. Nixon.

In January 2009 I began writing a memoir of my decade and a half in the Internet industry by blogging a new chapter each week. Here, still untitled, is a life in progress:

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Chapter One: THE BREAK



Summer 1993: why I was working on Wall Street; a co-worker alerts me to the existence of the Internet.

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Last Friday I "storytelled" at a Brooklyn storytelling event. The assigned theme was "gift". Here's a reasonable facsimile of what I said.

I began by describing the irony that I'd been asked to tell a story about gifts, because I hate gifts. I always seem to screw them up, both the giving and the getting. However (I explained to this patient crowd of North Brooklyn hipsters) I came up with three mini-stories about gifts, each of which portray a lesson I have had to learn in my life.

This is not good news. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a publishing group with a literary legacy dating back to 1832, is temporarily not buying new manuscripts, and apparently no longer accepting submissions from either agents or individual writers.

I'm coming at today's post from a slightly off-topic direction, mainly because I'm thinking about inspiration and discipline and the idea comes from an off-topic place. I hope you can forgive me.

1. Bob Dylan's poetry in the New Yorker? Bud Parr says the poems aren't particularly good, but I like the way Dylan's going back to that old enigmatic folksinger/hick voice he once used on his liner note poems for early albums like The Times They Are A-Changin'. Stuff like this:

i ran out t the phone booth
made a call t my wife. she wasnt home.
i panicked. i called up my best friend
but the line was busy
then i went t a party but couldnt find a chair