Risley Ranch

Is there a reason I haven't posted on this blog since November 2008?

Yes.  But excuses are silly.  I'm thinking about creating a Wordpress blog instead, so I bought Scott McNulty's book yesterday.  Looks like a good how-to. 

On The Road @ 50

2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the publishing of On The Road by Jack Kerouac.  I'm a big Kerouac fan.  I've read most of his books.  On The Road was a milestone piece of work in American Literature, and it's impacted millions of people.

I didn't discover it until my late 20s.  Kerouac was one of many great beat writers I read at that time in my life.  I'm glad I was older when I read the book.  I think I had a different appreciation for it than I would have had I read it when I was, say, an impressionable, hormonal, angry, searching-for-meaning-17-year-old.  I appreciated it for its poetic aesthetics, not just the story.

I compiled a short Trailfire for anyone interested in diving deeper into the book and Kerouac.

technorati tags: kerouac, ontheroad, trailfire

Columbus was wrong

I'm about half-way through Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat.  It's mind-altering.  It's doing to my brain what Cluetrain or The Third Wave or The Tao of Pooh or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas did -- re-wiring it, in a good way.  It lays out the argument for what Friedman calls "Globalization 3.0" -- the time from about 2000 on in which our planet has "flattened" into a level playing field where individuals all over the world can connect and work one-to-one like never before. 

Of course, that's a serious over-simplification, which is why I urge you to read the book.  I read his previous work, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and it was good, but this surpasses it by ten-fold.  And no, I'm not singing its praises because I know Friedman or because I'm getting paid or because I'm earning BzzAgent points.  It's just that good -- and that important.

Blowing out the cobwebs

Lawrence has a great used bookstore called the Dusty Bookshelf.  Amy and I stopped by there Saturday night just to browse.  I picked up a copy of a 1985 P.J. O'Rourke book, "Age and Guile...," and immediately started reading it.  O'Rourke's writing was just what I needed to shake me out of my blogging slump.  He's hilarious.  Better yet, he awoke writing passions in me I haven't felt for many years.  It was a nice feeling.