our cab driver

Cindy, Karen, Tom, and I were off to supper on Friday night in the pouring rain.  Headed from the Hilton to Plataforma Churraascaria on 49th.  We hailed a cab in the pouring rain.  I sat up front.  I like to talk, having been a cab driver myself.  Our driver was frm Egypt, and We talked about how much he missed it and was planning an cabbie.jpgeight-week trip this summer.  He told me he was busy getting ready for a movie being made about him and for a reality TV show.  I said you'll be able to quit driving.  He said, no the show will be filmed in his cab.  So I got the details.  A while ago he was driving a woman across town and her her weeping in the back.  He joked to cheer her up but she wouldn't stop. Finally, he said, 'You must stop!  I am a Muslim and if you continue to try I will have to not charge you for the ride.'  And she stopped and they exchanged cards.  A couple of moths later, our hero, Ahmed Ibrahim was driving a wealthy gentleman who said he was ready to settle down with a wife.  Ahmed called the woman, arranged the date, and after a brief courtship, the two got married in his cab, which was festooned with lights and favors.  That made the news.  He said he got thirty-eight phone calls the next day from people wanting mates.  And now he's the Matchmaking Cab Driver of Manhattan.  He showed us the clips from the Today Show, Letterman, from the Wall Street Journal.  He told us he was waiting on a call from his agent at William Morris! 

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filet o' fish

Terry Eagleton filets FIU's own Stanley Fish:"It is one of the minor symptoms of the mental decline of the United States that Stanley Fish is thought to be on the Left. By some of his compatriots, anyway, and no doubt by himself. In a nation so politically addled that ‘liberal’ can mean ‘state interventionist’ and ‘libertarianism’ letting the poor die on the streets, this is perhaps not wholly unpredictable.

"Stanley Fish, lawyer and literary critic, is in truth about as left-wing as Donald Trump. Indeed, he is the Donald Trump of American academia, a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect who pushes his ideas in the conceptual marketplace with all the fervour with which others peddle second-hand Hoovers. Unlike today’s corporate executive, however, who has scrupulously acquired the rhetoric of consensus and multiculturalism, Fish is an old-style, free-booting captain of industry who has no intention of clasping both of your hands earnestly in his and asking whether you feel comfortable with being fired. He fancies himself as an intellectual boot-boy, the scourge of wimpish pluralists and Nancy-boy liberals, and that ominous bulge in his jacket is not to be mistaken for a volume of Milton."

"To refer to Fish the Dean, however, is to reveal the fact that there are two Fishes, Little and Big. Little Fish is a sabre-rattling polemicist given to scandalously provocative pronouncements: truth is rhetoric, free speech is an illusion, unprincipled behaviour is best. Big Fish is the respectable academic who will instantly undercut the force of these utterances by insisting that they are descriptive rather than normative."

 He now seems to have written the same book several times over – after you have stated that everything comes down to cultural beliefs, it is hard to know what to do next but to say it again, this time with a few different examples.

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orbison redux

I have a character, of sorts, named Orbison in my upcoming novel.  Here's a paragraph where we and Deluxe the cat meet him:

While we busied and entertained ourselves all week, Deluxe befriended the lovely Orbison, an elegant and vainglorious red and blue Siamese fighting fish who lived on the coffee table in a heated ten-gallon tank with a porcelain srequiem-mass.jpgponge diver.  Deluxe was fascinated with this exquisite creature who seemed to defy gravity.  And Orbison seemed quite taken with Deluxe and his attention.  Whenever Deluxe hopped up onto the coffee table, Orbison swam in enthusiastic circles, rippled his long and flowing fins, and then nosed up to the glass and primped himself for Deluxe.  He might blow a bubble, execute a graceful turn, or fan his pectorals.  Deluxe spoke to Orbison in muted, sweet meows and chirrs.  When Deluxe left the table, Orbison retreated behind the frond of plastic kelp.  He seemed to deflate.  He’d sink to the bottom of the tank and lie there listlessly by the treasure chest.  There were times I saw him slam his head against the glass.  If Deluxe were gone too long, Orbison punished him by swimming to the opposite side of the tank and keeping as far from the circling and apologetic cat as he could until he felt that Deluxe had been punished enough. 

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today and tomorrow

Voted this morning for Barack.  Not that it means much since the Democratic Party has stripped Florida of its convention deegates.  The party would rather have the white states decide for the rest of us.  The poll worker tried three machines before he could find one that worked.  Said it had been like that since they opened.  Off to the AWP Conference in NY tomorrow and probably won't get back online till Monday or Tuesday. 

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how the dems can lose again

Frank Rich on Hillary, Barack, and Bill. "In a McCain vs. Billary race, the Democrats will sacrifice the most highly desired commodity by the entire electorate, change; the party will be mired in déjà 1990s all over again. Mrs. Clinton’s spiel about being “tested” by her “35 years of experience” won’t fly either. The moment she attempts it, Mr. McCain will run an ad about how he was being tested when those 35 years began, in 1973. It was that spring when he emerged from five-plus years of incarceration at the Hanoi Hilton while Billary was still bivouacked at Yale Law School. And can Mrs. Clinton presume to sell herself as best equipped to be commander in chief “on Day One” when opposing an actual commander and war hero? I don’t think so. "

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gonzalo barr

The Miami Herald has a nice piece on lawyer turned writer Gonzalo Barr.  Barr does not have an agent or a publisher for his novel, and Leejay Kline, his mentor and creative-writing teacher, gonzalo2.jpgcalls the move ''pretty ballsy.'' But what Barr does have is an impressive debut to his credit. His first book, the critically acclaimed short-story collection The Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa (Houghton Mifflin, $12 in paper), won the coveted Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize in 2005, garnering attention and admiration from several established writers.  (Thanks to Jeffrey in Miami Beach.)

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