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Tuesday, August 09, 2016

Index (2016)

Updates:
Reviewed by Andrew Hamlin in City Living Seattle
Featured at Balloon Juice
Interview with Scott Woods at and you can dance to it
Reviewed by Phil Dellio
Reviewed in Steven Rubio's Online Life

As mentioned earlier this year, I've published a book, which can now be purchased on Amazon. It's available as a trade paperback or in a kindle edition. You should also be able to order the paperback through your local bookstore. The book is a collection of pieces—about three-quarters appeared originally on this blog and the rest are older ones I've written since 1996. Get your copy today and tell everybody you know all about it. While you're at it get a copy of my first book too. Thanks to all of you for reading this blog.

4 comments:

  1. Good reviews! I have always enjoyed this blog.

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  2. Re both Phil's and Steven's comments about Jeff's revelation of his interest in tabletop baseball games in his new book, this is an "obsession" that came up more often than its participants often realized, even before the mainstreaming of "fantasy" baseball in recent years. Jack Kerouac invented a horse-racing game in his bedroom when he was a teen in the 1930s, and then in his adult life, played a baseball game with cards when he was on his own, as when he worked as a fire-spotter in a mountain cabin in the 1950s -- there are a number of references to this pastime in the various Kerouac bios.

    Interestingly, an interest in tabletop baseball often seems to coincide with an interest in rock criticism, not just in the "confessions" above, but also in my late Creem colleague and great friend Rick Johnson, who played tabletop baseball games in his various Macomb digs for years. Rick always refused to use dice to determine the moves in his games, preferring instead to consult a spinner he'd appropriated from some old board game.

    I confess to playing a bit of dice baseball myself, when I was about 14, but I didn't stick with it, mainly because I wasn't that interested in baseball as such. I was my father's son, and for him, the ONLY sport to follow was open-wheel auto racing, and all the races he took me to left a permanent imprint. When I was 17, I designed my own Formula 1 dice game, with the various drivers' performance keyed to their real-life standings in the 1964 GP season, and I enjoyed playing that for a time, but drifted away from it too. After all, it was the '60s, and everything (namely girls) was starting to happen for me! -- Richard R.

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