http://bhamweekly.com/birmingham/articles.sec-2-1-literature.html Did you ever dream of ships sailing by unattainable ancient cities in a lonely universe? Close your eyes, open them again, and find yourself in Cuba. ]]> You can make it, you can do it! I´ll be here cheering watching you get through it! It doesn´t matter what you do or don´t do, I love you anyway, I love you just because your you!!!.]]> Proclaiming progress and success in the face of our fears and terrors. Preparing the way for generations to come,.]]> Proclaiming progress and success in the face of our fears and terrors. Preparing the way for generations to come,.]]> Recognize the chemistry and stay/away from explosive combinations/Learn your algebra, life brings a/series of mathematical equations./Problematic biological creations./Ongoing unresolved situations./Several episodes will require/literary interpretations.]]> First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having]]> I ride the city bus. Hold your applause! No autographs, please! I’ve ridden the bus in Birmingham all my life. “Unnatural,” you say? “Unheard of,” you say? Well, wait for this shocker. Hold onto your hat, assuming you’re wearing a hat while reading this. ]]> (A hypothetical scenario that may or may not happen to any politico, local or otherwise. There’s no actual evidence that these conversations ever took place...but we sure hope they did.)]]> Prizes, from the Oscars to the Heisman Trophy to the Nobel, matter not at all to me, which is perhaps why I was surprised to find that so many of my friends were surprised last October when Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. ]]> Hi, kids. I’m back. It’s Syd. What up? After a long, strange trip from L.A., I’m in New York, chilling in Gramercy at the Carlton Arms.]]> We all have stories. We hold them close, for stories are the most potent form that memory can take. We carry them around with us, carefully polishing and honing them in the telling and re-telling, until they become integral parts of our identity.]]> I’m not having a good day. I have a splitting headache. I’m at a truck stop in Milesburg, Pa. waiting for the New York bus. My so-called book agent in Manhattan—a guy named Aubrey—is not returning my calls.]]> This is the end. My only friend, the end. See, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jim Morrison and the Doors and Apocalypse Now. I’m not alone. Charlie Sheen is drawing much of his snappiest patter from Coppola’s Vietnam flick, in which his old man Marty co-starred.]]> Legendary burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee was not easy to categorize. The former vaudevillian—who became a big star in New York during the Depression after being discovered by burlesque impresario Billy Minsky—befriended such gangsters as bootlegger Waxy Gordon.]]> Mickey Mantle’s image looms over American sports like a golden god from a time only dimly remembered but still strongly felt. The consummate blend of power and speed ever to play baseball (he was clocked going from home to first base at 3.0 seconds, the best time of his era), his prodigious 500-foot blasts created the term “tape measure home run.]]> Jeff Canja, an authority on pulp magazines, explains the essential difference between literature and most popular story telling.]]> Given the seriousness and pretension with which so many rock critics write about their favorite artists, you might expect an academician to bury Dylan beneath mounds of stentorian prose. But Wilentz is no ordinary academic. For one thing, along with Griel Marcus, he edited The Rose and The Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad.]]> Wilfrid Sheed once quipped that there were so many books about the Mob that “We now know everything about it except whether or not it exists.” We know for sure that Al Capone, America’s most famous and cinematic gangster, did exist, but a new biography, Get Capone–The Secret Plot That Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster.]]>