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Category Archives: Books

The Anxiety of Non-Influence

Monday, July 19, 2010

“I Write Like” will identify
Your literary voice,
Comparing you to Stephen King
Or Hemingway or Joyce.
I dared to hope I’d be a Poe,
A Hawthorne or a Clemens.
At least a Philip Roth — but damn!
It seems I write like Emmons!
(For the record, I entered the next of my last entry,
“The Halfway Diet,” and evidently I write like
Cory Doctorow.)
 

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An Ephemeral Rhyme

Monday, April 26, 2010

“I’ve forged a creation more lasting than bronze,”
Said the poet whose odes had gone viral
In the town on the Tiber when nothing was Cyber
And writing was mostly papyral.
But modern-day e-authors write in the Cloud,
Where trillions of memes must compete,
Where verses can claim half a second of fame
And are gone with the next coming tweet.

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Thinking Inside the Book

Friday, April 9, 2010

The suits have read the latest book
With insights quite far-ranging.
It’s value-added, cutting-edge,
They’d even say GAME-CHANGING!
It leverages best practices,
It benchmarks excellence.
It champions global strategies
And oh, how it incents!
To read such gold is quite a perk.
It’s what they do instead of work.

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R.I.P., Which is Really Just a Thing People Say

Friday, January 29, 2010

A bunch of phony hotshots
have been praising Mr. Salinger.
They say he was a genius
with no literary challenger.
But really they’re no better
than those idiots who banned the book
And other goddamn phonies
who pretend to understand the book.
But still it’s pointless anyway
to make a major stink of it,
Or anything whatever
when you really stop to think of it.

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Adventures in the Million-Dollar Wood

Saturday, January 10, 2009

“Hooray!”  said Pooh to little Roo.
“Our brand new book will soon debut!
At last we’ve got our fondest wish.
(We’ve all been feeling sequel-ish!)
With gentle humor, charming art,
With dialogue that warms the heart,
A simple yet engaging plot,
Our sales will fill our munny pot!”
 
 

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