Guitar circle scene, ca. Summer 2004

Here's a little St. Louis time capsule for you: a scene from the guitar circle at Matt Fernandes' house in the summer of 2004 to observe my move home to St. Louis from New York City.

Left to right: KDHX host and unsung producer Roy Kasten, cracking up; Tim Rakel, then of Bad Folk (also of KDHX) on guitar; the writer and Flickr man Thom Fletcher and the poet Stefene Russell (also of KDHX), peering in; and Sunyatta Marshall, not yet then of the Helium Tapes, on the Glockenspiel.

The guitar circle, which has fallen out of circulation, is a local music scene tradition introduced by Roy's collaborator Michael Friedman. In the mid-'90s or so, Michael's little brother was passing through St. Louis. Little brother was emerging from a period of very bad decision-making, and Michael wanted to reinforce something new and good in his life: he had been playing guitar and writing songs.

Better musicians might have put together a jam session, but the Friedman boys, Roy, and myself are all porch musicians. We can't, in fact, jam. We can write songs and play them passably, and we're attentive listeners to a well-crafted song presented by someone else, so that's the structure the guitar circle took. It's a listening circle, more than anything else: you listen to everyone else, one at a time, and then do your own song when it's your turn.

It also always involved more than guitars. People led songs on accordion, handdrum, banjo, and fiddle, and poets did their thing. But we never could come up with a better name than "guitar circle" before it became too late to rename it.

Mainstays in the guitar circle in its early years, in addition to the above named, included Nymah Kumah, Pops Farrar, Bob Reuter, Fred Friction, Mark Stephens, Chris "Piedmont" Johnson, John Wendland, Scott Haycock, Adam Reichmann, Anne Treeger, Chuck Reinhardt, Dave Melson. Yeah, kind of a boy's club, though I know I am forgetting some folks, including more womenfolks.

Because of the, a'hem, charisma of some of the regulars, the role of "circle fascist" evolved. This was the person (often Roy or me) delegated to limit everyone to one song at a time, keep the circle moving, and curtail jamming unless it is invited by the songleader.

I miss the guitar circle. We should bring it back, I say.

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By the way, the circle pictured above was accompanied by a traveling exhibit of The Skuntry Museum, spread out on Matt Fernandes' billiards table. Tim Rakel is wearing a museum artifact, the late Pops Farrar's fishing hat. At this time in the circle's evolution, not long after the passing of Pops, his fishing hat passed from songleader to songleader, in his honor. Tim is wearing the hat because it's his turn to play the song!

Luke is the only gospel for Christmas stories!

Our family lives up the hill from the Catholic parish where our daughter is attending Sunday school. When she is not able to attend, it's easy enough for me to slip down the hill and connect with her teacher, to see what the girl is missing and to keep her up to speed.

This morning, the little girl is with her cousins in North County, so I went to chat with the Sunday school teacher. She said the big thing Leyla would be missing today is the story of the birth of Christ. I told the teacher I had her covered there.

Actually, I have been wanting to reread the gospels and see who said what about the birth of Christ. Mind you, I am not a Christian - I don't embrace Jesus Christ as a unique messenger, above all others - but I don't reject him as a messenger, either.

Above all, I cherish the storytelling in scripture, which I read in William Tyndale's translation, the first complete New Testatment in English translated from the original Greek texts. Tyndale's Bible was Shakespeare's Bible, and the best, most vivid passages in the King James Bible are all lifted straight from Tyndale. Good enough for Shakespeare, good enough for me.

So, cracking open my Tyndale this morning, I was surprised to be reminded that two of the four gospels - the gospels of Mark and John - skip the birth of Christ altogether and take up the story from John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus. That means half of the gospels in the Bible are absolutely useless for a Christmas reading! I would bet the large majority of Christians would get that wrong, if quizzed on this fact.

For the birth of Christ, I'll need to read to Leyla from the Gospel of Mathew (the opening track of The New Testament, as it were) or The Gospel of Luke, the third book of The New Testament. Like a great rock record, where the third track is often the money track, the unforgettable hit single, Luke is the longest of the four gospels and it alone has many of the greatest hits. The manger birth of Jesus, for example, would not be in the Bible were it not for Luke - no other gospel records it.

Luke is the sole source for much cherished imagery associated with the birth of Christ. There are four gospels, but you only get this from Luke:

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And there were in the same region shepherds abiding in the field, and watching their flock by night. And lo: the angel of the Lord stood hard by them, and the brightness of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them: Be not afraid: Behold I bring you tidings of great joy, that shall come to all the people: for unto you is born this day in the city of David a saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And take this for a sign: ye shall find the child swaddled, and laid in a manger. And straight way there was with the angel a multitude of heavenly soldiers, lauding God, and saying: Glory to God on high, and peace on the earth: and unto men rejoicing.

And it fortuned, as soon as the angels were gone away into heaven, the shepherds said one to another: let us go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing that is happened, which the Lord hath shewed unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe laid in a manger. And when they had seen it, they published abroad the saying, which was told them of that child. And all that heard it wondered, at those things which were told them of the shepherds.

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Reading Tyndale's translation, you see how many hooks of Christmas carols he wrote - "tidings of great joy," "peace on earth". In payment for his labors and gifts, he was strangled in public and burned at the stake as a public entertainment.

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Image of Luke at work us from an illuminated 12th century Byzantine copy of the Greek Gospels, probably produced in southern Italy or Sicily.

Keep your hands off my honey pot

Tomorrow (Sunday, Dec. 14) is the last chance to see an important retrospective show at the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, Pursuit of the Spirit. The museum, on the campus of Saint Louis University, is open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.


This exhibition includes works spanning a wide range of media and subject matter, and represents more than 40 artists who have been exhibited at MOCRA in the past 15 years - including Noli me tangere by Seyed Alavi, which I attempted to sketch the afternoon the show opened.

As a photo of the piece on Art Tattler makes clear (scroll halfway down the gorgeously illustrated page ...), it's nothing more (or less) than a lead bowl about two-thirds full of honey.

I'm not sure when Art Tattler got its photograph or how accurate my drawing is, but I have the lead bowl more full on opening day than it appears in the photograph. This actually is meaningful, based on what could be a literary source for the piece, one of the miracles of the Prophet Muhammad told in Mirat-i Kainat:

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A woman sent some honey to him as a present. He accepted the honey and sent back the empty pot. But when she took her pot she saw that it was full of honey. The woman came back to the Prophet and asked, "O! Prophet of Allah. Why didn't you accept my present? I wonder, what is my sin?" He answered: "We have accepted your present. The honey you see in your pot is the blessing given by Allah for your present." The woman ate the honey with her children for months. It never decreased. One day, they inadvertently put the honey into another pot. In the new pot the honey was eventually used up. They reported this to the Prophet of Allah (peace be upon him). He declared: "If it had been left in the pot I sent, they could have eaten it until the end of the world; it would not have decreased at all."



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Seyed Alavi's bowl of honey could refer back to this blessed pot of honey from Islamic tradition. Certainly, his honey should never decrease, being an untouchable museum piece - indeed, being a museum piece with a name that means (in William Tyndale's translation, which was picked up by the King James translators): "Touch me not."

Tyndale was translating Chapter 20, Verse 17 of The Gospel of John. Seyed Alavi's piece uses the Latin translation of the Greek original, the Vulgate: Noli me tangere. This is what Jesus Christ says to Mary Magdalene when she comes to his empty tomb and is surprised to find him risen from the dead (first, she mistakes him for the gardener!).

It's a puzzling moment, a fitting moment for art, and one that often has been painted. Jesus says, "Touch me not (noli me tangere), for I have not yet ascended to my father." It seems to me to be the recognition of a transitional undead status, Jesus as zombie - I've risen from the dead but not yet taken on the godhead. "You really don't want to touch me yet."

Not sure how you pour all of this back into a lead bowl of honey, but Seyed Alavi has given us plenty to think about. And the piece does have a quiet natural beauty.

Finally, I spent so much time on this piece, in part, because of a coincidence. One of the few poems I have memorized is a Sir Thomas Wyatt translation of a Petrarch love lyric that also includes that line in Latin, Noli me tangere. I have had the pleasure of attempting to mispronounce it (often, after a few cocktails, when I decide to show off) hundreds of times.

In Wyatt's adaptation of Petrarch, Noli me tangere is carved into diamonds worn around the neck of a beloved. There's much more to it than that - he was probably writing in not very well disguised code about Queen Ann Boleyn - but leave it to my boy Thomas Wyatt to sex up scripture!

Character studies by Truckey and me

This is the second posting in a series, "Sarah Truckey takes better pictures than I make drawings, but at least we run around with some of the same people." Subtitled, "Truckey, lighten up, and let people download and share your pictures already, so I'm not resigned to just embedding a bunch of links and making the people click back and forth, back and forth."

Okay. Character studies. I drew Steven Fitzpatrick Smith, not terribly well, talking about his frustrated attempts to mentor a young man he knows through boxing. Truckey photographed me pointing out how I botched the jawline.

I sketched Steve Green, the fancy beer scene's one resident scary right-wing Republican, talking about how he stupidly (in his own judgment) voted Yes on whether or not Illinois should have a new Constitutional Convention. (The measure was defeated.) Truckey did not, so far as I can tell, document Steve Green, but she took much better pictures of equally or more rugged looking men on the journey:

* Tattoo Joe saluting alongside Cigar Store Indian

* Joe and Sam eat beer

* Defeated-looking old men wait for beer at bar

The journey in question took a rather large contigent of denizens from the St. Louis bar and restaurant scene up to Wittmond's Hotel in Brussels, Illinois, on the peninsular Calhoun County, the "East Side" that is actually west of St. Louis, native grounds of birthday boy Brett Lars Underwood, to celebrate said birthday and that of Tony "Blood" Diamond.

Rakel and a Rat take on Haymarket in a suite

Tim Rakel gets points for prescient timeliness in putting the finishing touches to an e.p. about the Haymarket Affair right about now.

We had lunch today at Mangia to talk about altogether other matters, which come to think of it, we never got around to, and he handed off a homeburn CD I listened to twice in my car today.

Hmmm. Story song set in Chicago that dramatizes the struggle between the workers and the bosses? In a news cycle dominated by the selling of a U.S. senatorial seat associated with Chicago and a bailout of the auto industry that is getting packaged with the busting of the autoworkers' union? Is this 1886 or 2008?

Tim said he has been recording with Brien Seyle from The Rats & People. May Day Orchestra, as they are calling this project, will be a one-off project name, as they plan to adopt a new name for each recording.

Today Tim took on a new task for them, scoring the Stefene Russell poem "Thylacine" from her evolving new poetic sequence The Extinction of Species. For that recording, they will be Sabretooth Unicorn.

The name predated the assignment, which makes it a little odd that Tim picked an extinct tiger, blind, from a small batch of obscure extinct species, when one typically thinks, not of saber-toothed unicorns, but of saber-toothed tigers. And a unicorn is so extinct it never existed at all, except on black light posters.

The Haymarket recording has a very rare quality: it's plotted out, yet loose in feel. The musical approach shifts, from Neutral Milk Hotel soundscape to hootenanny throwdown to dark country dirge to imitative form fiddle jam, as the violin plays hangman.

Personal aside: I'm finally getting accustomed to the fact that Tim's voice sounds so much like Jay Farrar's. Since I grew up playing music in the same scene as Jay, and Tim came along a little later, and I have seen him since he was something of a wee pup, there have been moments when I have wondered if he was affecting his voice to sound like a great local singer he grew up listening to. Whether I've finally accepted that's just his voice or he's been wearing the mask so long it's grown into his face, it doesn't bother me anymore. That alone makes me enjoy this project much more than the Bad Folk recordings.

Tim said he would be releasing the Haymarket piece on vinyl. It's a musical suite in two parts, nicely formed for split sides of A and B. I'll buy one.

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Image of two nooses from the Cook County Gallows, originally built to hang the four men convicted in the 1886 bombing of Chicago's Haymarket Square, from the website of the auction house that handled its sale.

Me and Truckey on Brett's party bus sideshow

This is my rough sketch of birthday boy Brett Lars Underwood, doing a routine out of a side window of Sam Coffey's big green bus this week when a troupe of us drove and ferried up to Brett's native Calhoun County, Illinois, for a celebratory repast at the historic Wittmond's Hotel.

Here is what Brett really looked like, from Sarah Truckey's Flickr site (otherwise known as Trcky). Sarah is some kind of awesome photographer, judging from her Trcky, but unfortunately for blogging scavengers like me, she seems to know the secret for uploading your photos in a way that turns them into empty air when the public right-clicks to save and share. Oh, well. On slow blog days in the coming weeks, I'll post more of my sketches with, at least, links to Sarah's more superior photographic documents.

We were a gathering of smart, somewhat inward people, which is better or at least more fun than a gathering of inward, somewhat smart people. (Been, done.) Also, a band of discrete documentarians. In addition to Sarah's photos and my sketches, just about everybody was covertly nabbing bits of image, still or moving, on some sort of handheld device.

The most amazing thing about a delightful journey, however, was that a bar and restaurant scene remained active and open for business back in St. Louis while we were away, since just about every man who ever served me a drink or a reuben poured out of Sam Coffey's green bus when we got to the old hotel in Brussells.

Song sung by a thief crucified next to Jesus

I am doing a little Bible study tonight, to investigate some memories sparked by press reports of the Rough Shop Christmas Party tomorrow night at Focal Point in Maplewood.

Before Rough Shop was One Fell Swoop. John Wendland, Andy Ploof, and company did their Christmas Party with Swoop, too. One Fell Swoop was regular gigmates with my band, Three Fried Men. Out of collegiality, I suppose, they asked me to perform in the show one year, and I accepted.

I got up there and did the only song I know that relates to Christmas in any way, a song I wrote about the namesake of Christmas way back in college and used to perform all around the country with the band Enormous Richard: "Hanging Out with Jesus."

No way around it: it's a blasphemous song, told from the point of view of one of the two thieves (or "evil-doers") crucified on either side of Christ, according to the gospels. I decline to quote the lines that must have been most insulting to the sincere Christians at the party, but the opening stanza sets the tone:

I met Jesus at two bars

Held up by four nails

We both got pretty hammered

We both wore pony tails.

I know, I know, the Christmas cheer is just getting way out of hand here. Needless to say, I bombed and have not been asked back. Let me make it clear that I endorse wholeheartedly the decision not to ask me back!

Reflecting on that awkward memory tonight, I got out my favorite translation of the Christian books of the Bible, William Tyndale's 1534 New Testament (the first complete English translation that bypassed the Latin Vulgate to work directly from the original Greek texts). What does the text itself say about the thieves crucified alongside Christ? Where did I get this goofy idea?

Tyndale's Gospel of St. Mathew:

"And there were two thieves crucified with him, one on the right hand, and another on the left."

Tyndale's Gospel of St. Mark is very similar, but adds a proverb:

"And they crucified him with two thieves, the one on the right hand, and the other on his left. And the scripture was fulfilled which sayeth: he was counted among the wicked."

Tyndale's Gospel of St. Luke casts the thieves in the George W. Bushian term of "evil-doer" and gets them into the action earlier, on the approach to the cross:

"And there were two evil-doers led with him to be slain. And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the evil-doers, one on right hand, and the other on the left."

Tyndale's Gospel of St. John, which is thought to derive from a separate tradition than the synoptic gospels of Mathew, Mark and Luke, does not remember these two doomed men as thieves or evil-doers:

"Where they crucified him and two other with him on either side one, and Jesus in the midst."

John does have a new grisly detail about them, however:

"The Jews then because it was the sabbath even, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath day (for that sabbath day was an high day) besought Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken down. Then came the soldiers and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified with Jesus."

John goes on to say that the soldiers didn't break Jesus' legs because he was already dead, which suggests the "two other" were taken down before they died and were allowed to live, albeit with broken legs and memories of torture.

But John does not have the banter between the "two other" and Jesus that is recorded in the three synoptic gospels, and which apparently inspired my song.

Tyndale's Mathew:

"They that passed by, reviled him wagging their heads and saying: Thou that destroyest the temple of God, and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If thou be the son of God, come down from the cross. Likewise also the prelates mocking him with the scribes and seniors said: He saved other, himself he cannot save. If he be the king of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him. He trusted in God, let God deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the son of God. That same also the thieves, which were crucified with him cast, in his teeth."

Tyndale's Mark is very similar:

"And they that went by, railed on him: wagging their heads and saying: Ah, wretch, that destroyest the temple and buildest it in three days: save thyself, and come down from the cross. Likewise also mocked him the high priests among themselves with the scribes and said: He saved other men, himself he cannot save. Let Christ the king of Israel now descend from the cross, that we may see and believe. And they that were crucified with him, checked him also."

Tyndale's Luke provides an actual snippet of dialogue between Christ and the "evil-doers" and distinguishes between the two thieves, with one heckling Jesus but the other doing the right thing:

"And the rulers mocked him with them saying: He help other men, let him help himself if he be Christ the chosen of God. The soldiers also mocked him, and came and gave him vinegar and said: if thou be that king of the Jews, save thyself. His superscription was written over him, in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew letters: This is the king of the Jews.

"The one of the evil-doers which hanged, railed on him saying: If thou be Christ save thyself and us. The other answered and rebuked him saying, Neither fearest thou God, because thou art in the same damnation? We are righteously punished, for we receive according to our deeds. But this man hath done no thing amiss. And he said unto Jesus: Lord remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him: Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in Paradise."

I'll call this the primary source for my blasphemous song, which has its own version of the crucified dialogue between Jesus and evil-doer:

"So God is your old man?"

I asked Jesus, and he said, "Yup!"

"Then answer me, Jesus, if you can.

Why'd he let them nail you up?"

I guess I took the point view of the heckler evil-doer, not the good guy, who spoke up for Jesus and was promised a ticket to Paradise.

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Crucifixion painting by Andrea Mantegna.

MoDoT top wonk is blogging with Schwarzenegger

In my day job as a journalist, I have repeatedly come up against people who have worked in close quarters with Missouri Department of Transportation Director Pete K. Rahn - these are tough, smart power players - and they tend to agree that he is a bright and capable leader.

So it comes as no surprise to me to learn that has been invited by National Journal to participate in a weekly blog on transportation issues.

In his most recent post, Pete is one of 20 wonks answering the question: How should the infrastructure stimulus be spent?

His fellow blogging wonks include California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured), Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, former Department of Transportation Inspector General Kenneth Mead, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, Teamsters President James Hoffa and someone with the way cool moniker Phineas Baxandall.

National Journal is a Washington, D.C.-based, nonpartisan weekly magazine on public policy and politics.

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Picture of a younger Arnold showing his stuff to some little old ladies in Sydney, Australia by George Butler, 1980.

Che as banker begets Fidel as ballplayer

My sketch of Che Guevara as bank president that I submitted to the 2008 Poetry Scores Art Invitational provoked a wide range of response.

One guy, who seemed a little touched, was ranting about the choice of line and raving that it was the best piece in the show (it took me awhile, but I gradually came to accept that he was sincere, if mistaken).

On the other hand, when bidding on the piece climbed to a towering $30 (from a starting bid of $5), someone issued some graffiti on the bid sheet, by implication insulting the judgment of anyone willing to spend that much money on a childish sketch in foul terms I'd just as soon not reprint.

Jesse Swoboda outbid Tom Boyle on my sketch, but she and her manfriend Tony Renner split before the bidding was closed, so we accepted Tom's bid and closed the sale. Robert Goetz photographed me and my buyer, holding his new acquisition, at my request. Boyle joins Jay-Jay, Andrew Torch and the lovely and graceful Dawn Fuller in the ranks of collectors who have supported my habit.

Tom told me he was struck, not so much by my artistry, but by the imagery from K. Curtis Lyle's poem Nailed Seraphim that inspired it, Che as bank prez. I remember his saying something like that summed up his economic thinking perfectly. Reagan gave us Voodoo Economics. Curtis gives us Guerilla Econ.

Jesse Swoboda did manage to buy John Minkoff's drawing from the invitational. When Tony came to get the piece and pay up, he said Jesse is nuts for Che and (especially) for Fidel Castro. I told him Fidel's name was in the poem too and I could make a drawing of Castro and give it to her. "I'll buy it," he said. I told him bidding starts at $5 and she's the only bidder!

So, Tony, here's the drawing, "Castro will whip your astro." The act of ekphrasis here is not visualizing a poem but cartooning a David Letterman Top 10 list. My daughter, Leyla Fern, insisted on collaborating. She drew those cool little faces. I asked her who they were, and she acted like I had insulted her intelligence with an overly obvious question. "Can't you see the people in the crowd, Daddy?" Only after she drew them.

Come and get it, Tony or Jesse, if you want it.

Bruce Conner: a bombhead of a backstory

When I graciously accepted as a gift his painting Bruce from the Salt Lake City filmmaker Trent Harris, I had no idea it has an illustious backstory involving the great artist Bruce Conner, whose Bombhead I have borrowed from Magnolia Editions to illustrate Trent's bombhead of a backstory.

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Letter (actually, FaceBook message) from Trent Harris

Hi Chris ... just to let you know why the word "Bruce" is on my paintings

....BRUCE....

I arrived late to a sushi house in Los Angeles, 1982. Bruce was already there and mad. Three or four sakis later he went face-down on the table. Seems his liver was not his friend.

I didn’t know Bruce and I knew nothing about his work. A mutual friend, Larry Roberts, had brought me to dinner that night because he thought Bruce and I should meet.

Some months later I was at Mount Rushmore. I bought a rubber tomahawk and sent it to Bruce with a note reading, “Dear Bruce, use this to shave your ass.” I am not sure why I did it, but I did.

My gift confused Bruce and that made me happy.

Then Bruce started sending me things that I didn’t want, a terrible movie about Bigfoot, handwritten notes about astrology that made no sense, and a really awful UFO flick that he said he loved.

This back and forth went on. I almost always misspelled his name on the packages I sent, Connors, Conor, Coneres, etc. To this day I have to look up how to spell his last name. For some reason it just doesn’t stick.

1988 and I am in South Africa working on a story. My hotel has been bombed, my girlfriend has dumped me, and our mutual friend, Larry, is dying of AIDS. I managed to get Bruce on the phone. He was at some opening of his art. I told him about Larry, and Bruce dropped everything and immediately contacted his old friend. I liked Bruce for that.

It is something that has come back to haunt me lately.

Bruce started calling me in the late '90s. He was mad that Warhol had gotten famous off his ideas, he was mad that people wanted him to sign his paintings, he was mad at his galleries for not selling his work, he was mad that his various assistants kept walking out on him because he acted like an old cranky bear. He was mad that his body was giving out. He could only work a few hours in the morning.

I began sending Bruce painting and photographs and collages. Some of them teased him; I kind of made fun of Bruce’s famous artist role. I think he liked that. He wrote me once, “Your paintings are mildly insulting,” and I took that as a compliment.

2006 and I go off the deep end. I am on the Burma border doing another story, and I am paranoid. I am certain that I am going to be locked up in a little cement room with one light bulb and then beaten senseless with a rubber hose. This is not an unfounded fear, given where I was and what was going on.

In any case, the stress got to me in a big way. My drawings and notes to Bruce changed. They were, well, paranoid. I sent him a series of photographs that I called still life. They were photographs of other photographs that were surrounded by pill bottles. And there were cryptic messages scrawled on postcards that were also included in the photographs.

Bruce’s response to my work was different. He had studied the photos trying to figure out what medication I was on. Turns out we were on the same drugs. Then he called. He left a message that was truly kind. I think he felt my pain and wanted to help.

2007 and I am in Tanzania doing another story. I find out that my love of ten years has left me for a married man with two kids, and I start to get really nutty. I don’t eat, shower, sleep … and then I am sent back to Burma. I send Bruce a few postcards that I scribble while drunk in some dive in Bangkok. I tell him I have gone mad.

2008 and Bruce calls me. I am too weird to pick up the phone. He calls again. I am still too weird to pick up the phone. He calls again, too weird… A few weeks later I read in the paper that Bruce has died.

Free lesbian legal thrillers for the price of a review!

I'm looking for some help here.

What I need is a little relief from a minor but nagging portion of guilt. What you would get out of it is free local (St. Louis) lesbian legal thrillers.

What I would ask back is a review of the book or books you take off my hands, so I can post ir or them here and email that link or links to my friends, as I do from time to time, internet pest that I am.

The author: Terri Breneman. She knows her stuff. She is an attorney in the Federal Public Defender's Office in St. Louis who has an ongoing series of novels (The Toni Barston Series) published by a bona fide publisher (Bella Books).

Why do I have her books, and why do I feel guilty about it?

I have a drinking buddy who is friends with her boss. Since the condition of being a drinking buddy is transitive (if A enjoys drinking and bullshitting with B, and B enjoys drinking and bullshitting with C, then most likely A would enjoy drinking and bullshitting with C), I have drank and shot the bull with her boss.

I did enjoy it. Plan to do it again.

By the way, this man has the greatest name, ever, for a federal public defender: Lee T. Lawless.

Brother Lawless mentioned, in passing, that an attorney in his office writes lesbian legal thrillers. (Public defenders have more amazing things to toss out than most of us do.) Of course, I said I must know about this person, and he put us in touch.

At the time, I had more time to write for other publications, more patience to pitch other editors on my ideas (I became an editor precisely because I hate pitching stories - it's so much more work than writing them!) and magazines seemed to have more money to pay freelancers. So I had this little thing on the side with St. Louis Magazine, which seems to have gone the way of all freelance writing connections.

So this nice lesbial legal thriller author sent me several of her novels to read in preparation for a possible magazine feature about her, and by the time I got around to reading the newest of them, Compulsion, all Terri got out of the deal was a snippet review on my then-fledgling blog.

Now that this blog has something approaching an audience of respectable size, I thought I should bring this back up and offer her books to readers of lesbian legal thrillers - or readers of anything who want to try something new.

Who wants some books? I know they are around here somewhere! The books, that is. You want them, you got them. Just write about it for the people. Tell the people about Terri.