tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-133334722024-09-09T16:21:28.371-04:00mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.comBlogger419125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-33661632650863167882021-04-20T14:16:00.005-04:002021-04-20T17:41:39.506-04:00

Today my memoir of growing up in San Antonio in the 1950s and 1960s was published by Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon. Here's the link:The whole process was very simple and straightforward. Amazon provides all the tools and instructions, and all the author has to do is write the book. The hardest part was the editing and proofing, and learning to cope with all the intricacies of Microsoft Word

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-78684315058091558402020-12-02T00:33:00.004-05:002020-12-06T13:04:52.048-05:00

I seem to be losing track of time lately, although if I'm honest, my sense of time passing has been a bit distorted ever since I retired nearly ten years ago. But our forced isolation from the corona virus pandemic has certainly contributed to the Groundhog Day sensation of doing the same thing over and over. But as Steve Miller once sang, "time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin', into the

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-57622764758691513032020-09-01T16:36:00.005-04:002021-09-27T22:02:15.304-04:00

As the world descends into some sort of death spiral, or at least that's how it appears if you pay any attention to the news these days, I'm happily closing off most access to the outside world and concentrating on the things I enjoy. My reading, for example, has been going well. I've now read seven of Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse mysteries. One, Death Is Now My Neighbor (1996), I read twice,

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-49761506049387137162020-05-19T00:01:00.000-04:002020-06-16T09:50:31.537-04:00

There has been a lot of blood under the bridge, and (as Dylan says) a lot of other stuff too, since my last post to this weblog. Seems like I've been living the same few days over and over. Self isolation and social distancing, which are the big things now, are pretty much my modus vivendi anyway, so I'm used to it. One day perhaps we will look back on this and figure out what really happened,

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-50852130953009800642020-01-23T13:37:00.000-05:002020-01-25T18:51:53.848-05:00

As I suggested in my previous post, I began the new year reading two of Colin Dexter's early Inspector Morse mysteries: The Last Bus to Woodstock (1975) and Last Seen Wearing (1976). I enjoyed seeing Morse before the influence of John Thaw, and while there are certainly similarities, the earlier Morse seems to have a bit more whimsy (for lack of a better word) than the later iterations, as well

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-1343898638350284582019-12-26T18:14:00.000-05:002019-12-26T19:04:00.983-05:00

For some reason, Boxing Day always seems to me a good time for summing up the previous year and peeking ahead to the new one. Christmas has come and gone and we've entered that interim period of the holiday season between the religious part and the secular part. Nowadays it's not so easy to see anything religious in most of our seasonal celebrations, but that's a discussion for another time.

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-39998196702386783572019-10-20T18:32:00.000-04:002019-10-21T16:45:14.960-04:00

By some interesting coincidence or confluence of random circumstances, the last three books I've read are all slightly different takes on white people. I suppose it all centers on Nell Irvin Painter's magnum opus, The History of White People (2010), which is a book everyone should read regardless of the shade of their skin's pigmentation. But just prior to re-reading Painter's book for my Men's

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-10383060692237185522019-09-03T18:21:00.002-04:002019-09-03T18:57:11.768-04:00

The book club's choice for September is Thomas M. Nichols' The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge (2017). He makes many of the same points I made in a post I wrote last month but then decided not to publish because it seemed to be too negative as well as too focused on nostalgic recollections of my own past. In that post I was remarking of the similarity I had

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-28318655601029918202019-06-24T16:09:00.000-04:002019-06-24T16:23:36.510-04:00

The fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing brings back some very strange and somewhat unsettling memories. That was not only a difficult time for the country but also for myself and quite a few of my friends. While many were focused on the moon, others of us were more concerned with a nasty little war going on in Southeast Asia. Still, the Apollo mission was also a welcome distraction

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-51604326668066926372019-05-31T13:29:00.001-04:002019-05-31T16:44:50.397-04:00

In the eight years we've lived here we've seen many new baby fawns arrive each spring, and although I'm not a huge fan of the enormous deer herd we seem to be home to, even I will admit that the fawns are cute and fun to watch as they frolic and learn how to be dear little deer. But this year one of the first babies to appear was behaving strangely. Every time we saw it, it had its tongue hanging

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-76415138805072159222019-04-22T19:11:00.001-04:002019-04-23T22:53:09.312-04:00

Every Earth Day I think to myself, why isn't every day Earth Day? Just as I can't live outside my body, we humans and other terrestrial life cannot live without our earthly habitat. A few weeks ago I read an article in the New York Times about the Biosphere 2 experiment, and I was struck with how difficult, if not actually impossible, it is to reproduce any sort of self-sustaining ecosystem.

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-39856665099540902822019-03-12T13:52:00.000-04:002019-03-15T10:42:15.144-04:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, I interrupted my reading of The Dream at the End of the World to read The Line Becomes a River. But I returned to reengage with Tangier and the expatriate world that Michelle Green describes in such interesting detail. I'm not exactly sure why I find that earlier period so fascinating. Perhaps it's merely that distance makes it more attractive than the

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-55695158059297143272019-02-28T17:19:00.001-05:002019-02-28T17:35:32.412-05:00

The end of February is another retirement anniversary, my eighth. And once again the only observation I have is that it still seems strange not to have to rise and go to work every day. Although sometimes I feel I've lost track of the day of the week, in reality Mondays and Fridays have a different feel than other days, and we still tend to go out and do our shopping, or some of it, on Saturdays,

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-82283055067702164282019-01-29T14:00:00.000-05:002019-01-29T17:14:55.111-05:00

I've been thinking again about The Water Tower Club (2019), which was published earlier this month. It's already had a pretty good reception from Amazon reviewers, and is a Kindle bargain at only $5.99. Robert (BK Mayo) told me he actually gets more royalties from the Kindle purchases than the paperbacks, which sell for $14.95, but when it was published I still bought a paperback for my library.

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-71172088515640795522018-12-02T18:23:00.000-05:002018-12-02T18:25:19.727-05:00

Generally, I anticipate the onset of cooler weather sometime in November, but there are years when the first genuine cold snap doesn't arrive until Christmas is approaching. Not this year though. We've already had several freezes, the yard is brown and what was left of my garden has died and wilted away. A few scraggly lantana plants were hanging on, and even had a few tiny flowers, but now they

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-80635038957874051272018-10-16T16:19:00.000-04:002018-10-17T19:52:46.460-04:00

Picking up where I left off more than two months back (not a great deal has transpired in the mean time, if you don't count medical adventures, but I leave those for another time), my foray into the world of Louise Penny and her favorite Francophone Canadian detective, Armand Gamache, turned out to be a bit more of a journey than I had expected. After reading A Rule Against Murder (2009), the

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-75318663779298728302018-07-31T09:47:00.002-04:002018-07-31T10:53:18.622-04:00

Life is strange, confusing, sometimes surprising, almost always interesting. If you can say this after more than seventy years, then you are probably in a pretty good place. I'm often struck by how frequently I've heard even much younger persons remark that summers seem more fleeting these days than they used to be. That's a perception we probably all share as we grow older and each summer

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-14314397248109393802018-06-18T15:58:00.000-04:002018-06-18T15:58:08.236-04:00

When things don't work there's usually a reason. Something's broken; either it's worn out or it was a faulty design in the first place, or some combination of the two. I've experienced some of that around the house recently. Things seem to be breaking just lately at a greater than usual frequency. So far it's been no big deal. I've repaired or replaced (or had repaired or replaced) each broken

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-951772788170999562018-06-01T13:14:00.000-04:002018-06-01T13:26:17.986-04:00

It's funny how fascinated we can become with news. What's new with you, people often ask me, and I'm never sure how to respond. On some levels very little with me is new, and that's how I like it. On the other hand, there is always something going on: emergent occasions that some would count as news. For example, I recently repaired a crack in the cement of our front yard bird bath; the radishes

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-49211594596260033442018-05-27T18:44:00.002-04:002018-05-29T17:51:28.212-04:00

I've done a fair amount of reading over these few weeks since my last blog post, but if there is any sense to be made of these choices, it's not immediately obvious to me. Once I finished Laura Snyder's The Philosophical Breakfast Club, I started on a sale-priced Kindle edition of Hunter Thompson's early letters, The Proud Highway, 1955-67 (1997). Like much of what he published in later years,

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-16062773320436321732018-04-19T18:30:00.000-04:002018-04-21T11:03:45.775-04:00

At my Men's Book Club meeting last evening we discussed Laura J.Snyder's The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World (2011). The four friends referenced in the book's subtitle were William Whewell, John Herschel (son of the famous astronomer William Herschel), Charles Babbage (sometimes credited with inventing digital computers), and

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-22302935079422396112018-04-04T13:51:00.000-04:002018-04-04T17:51:16.862-04:00

My Men's Book Club read and discussed George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) last month. I remember reading the review in the New York Times Book Review last year and thinking there's a novel I won't be reading. But then the group decided otherwise, and my first impressions were more or less confirmed. It's not that the book isn't interesting, but I thought it was sometimes a little silly

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-61023643390765448312018-03-27T14:10:00.000-04:002018-03-27T23:49:59.549-04:00

When I finished reading the Barbara Pym autobiography A Very Private Eye, cobbled together by Hazel Holt from Pym's diaries, journals, and letters, I wanted to learn more about her friendship with Philip Larkin, who was one of her favorite correspondents later in her life. As I mentioned in a previous post, I ordered both major Larkin biographies, Andrew Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-47400933851309229152018-02-26T11:09:00.001-05:002018-02-26T17:20:14.738-05:00

Today marks the seventh anniversary of my official retirement. I'm inclined to say it doesn't seem that long ago, but as I just recounted in a previous post to this blog, the passing of time is rather difficult to gauge as we age. Or maybe I should just quote John Stewart: "Time flows like a river, you can either sink or swim." What I find most remarkable, and so I will remark on it, is how

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13333472.post-29133747426988016392018-02-24T19:03:00.001-05:002018-02-24T19:55:23.572-05:00

Time, although it seems real, is nothing but a human construct, a way of measuring our existence. It ebbs and flows more in tune to our own attention than to any objective markers. Some days seem longer than others, some weeks fly by, and the years become harder to distinguish from one another as we age. But lately, the long Texas winter we've been having has made time appear to slow down. Seems

mlhall.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07664332077766196541noreply@blogger.com0