It’s that time of year again, when the snow get shy and slush falls instead; when the sun seems like a distant memory from when you were a kid; when customers show up at the last minute wanting rare imported titles, like, yesterday. In short, it’s Christmas, the worst […]
(…because Famous Penultimate Words just doesn’t have the same ring…) Next month I will write my last column for The Cultural Gutter. I wrote my very first column as a Gutter Guest way back in 2005, about Magic Flutes by Eva Ibbotson. Although Ibbotson died in 2010, she was […]
For someone with a well-documented history of cowardice, I really like Hallowe’en. Yes, the holiday comes replete with ghosts and ghoulies, and a porous boundary between the living and the dead. It produces scads of creepy costumes, and an endless supply of horrible slasher films. But to all that I […]
I talk a lot. This comes as zero surprise to anyone who has ever met me. But it’s not just a personal preference. No, really! It’s also pretty much required for what I do. I run an independent bookstore: talking to customers is a large part of my job. […]
I’m going to flat out admit I know very little about the Roaring Twenties. What little I do is mostly cribbed from still images and movies like Chicago. You know: jazz! Drinking! Dancing! More drinking! Guns! And did I mention drinking? Not exactly what you might call a rigorous examination […]
Now is the summer of our discontent… We’ve finally gotten down to actual summer weather in the last two weeks. So of course I spent the last two weeks without AC as I dealt with a series of cascading electrical problems. One complete power shut-down later, things are finally […]
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The Cultural Gutter 