City Mouse, Country Mouse
Larry and I met years ago in the cubicle-pen of a Fortune-1000 company. Looking back, our separate paths through jobs and geographies now seem to have meandering coherency.
By Todd Decker
Jazz, the Devil, and Jess Stacy
Something odd and beautiful happened to Jess Stacy that night in 1938. It is easy to have the impression he never experienced anything quite like it again.
Stacy had played piano for the Benny Goodman orchestra since 1935 and was on stage the night they (with other musicians) played the…
Big Boxes Write American History
Local media has been reporting the demise of St. Louis’s Chinatown, another victim of big-box development. But it is not so much a Chinatown—officially it is called the Olive Link—as a small polyglot area of Olive Boulevard near Highway 170, which the Post Dispatch calls “the gritty back door” of…
“The Promise of Failure”
Writer John McNally’s work has appeared in more than 100 periodicals and anthologies. He is the author of two story collections, three novels (one of which became a YA book), a memoir, and three books for creative writers, including most recently The Promise of…
The 32 Tells in Your Head
A professor I knew was very interested in the ways class got represented in fiction. He pointed out that due to the vagaries of fashion there would always be new markers of it available to writers. One of his favorites then was “bad teeth,” by which he meant crooked or…
Hot Wheels
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Hot Wheels, the little cars that are the number-one selling toy in the world. Manufacturer Mattel has a 16-city tour in progress that includes a design contest, life-size fleet, die-cast historical display, and Forza X-Box gaming.
My mother, who was…
Everyday Communion
If you use social media, you know the difficulties. How to feel about those who love something you love but who, you believe in the sub-basement of your heart, have missed the point?
A childhood friend, educated, prosperous, posts a tribute to Aretha Franklin on his wall. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” he writes.…
The Future is Now
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
A municipal garden is a beautiful contradiction, an embodiment of the struggle between nature and human control.
Visitors to The Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis on a recent afternoon stepped from the welcome center into the Garden grounds, where the…
The Frankenstein We Deserve
If there is a Frankenstein that best serves our time, it would be “The Frankenstein Chronicles,” a BBC series that barely made it to the US market via Netflix three years after its original airing in the UK. It is not loyal to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” by a stretch.
Mackin’s Time
Will Mackin became a literary friend when we both wrote briefly for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His excellent “Dispatches from Iraq” there (written as Roland Thompson) were sharply observed and sometimes surreal.
“I can understand the dogs, too,” he says in the final installment. “[One] looked…
Friends Indeed
Most everyone knows that bit from Thoreau on technology and communication in his time:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. […] We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas;…
Oddly Cool
Take Highway 55 east from St. Louis, to Illinois 70, then into the rolling hills, soybeans, and hamlets where Lincoln lunched to find Carlyle Lake, the biggest manmade lake in Illinois. The Army Corps capped 69 oil wells and dammed the Kaskaskia River to make the 15-mile-long lake, which was…