Writing
Poetry
Poetry is where much of my time and energy have been going for the past decade. Lest you think me a mere dilettante, I should add that I began my writing life as a poet at age 16 and never abandoned it when I took up writing humor. I simply stopped sending the stuff out for publication until late in 2016. Following are links to those of my poems that are available online, along with explanatory (hopefully not mansplaining) notes about them. In some instances the publications don’t make their content available online for free, so I have instead posted links to where digital or print copies can be purchased.
Other Writing
BERNARD HERRMANN
I have not written much outside the fields of humor and poetry, but I make an exception for Bernard Herrmann.
I am a devoted fan of his music, both his well-known scores for Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and many other great directors, and his less familiar work for the classical concert stage and in the all-but-forgotten realm of radio drama. I think he is not only the greatest film composer of all time but quite possibly the greatest American composer, period. Yes, he’s even better than Ives in my opinion. Save your arguments, people! I’ve heard them all and I refute them by playing the score for Vertigo. I have just about everything officially released by Herrmann in my CD collection, and also quite a few things that were never released, such as his scores for the radio series Crime Classics, and everything he recorded for the film Torn Curtain before Hitchcock unceremoniously and quite foolishly fired him.
It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s REALLY Funny)
It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny), is a collection of short prose humor pieces written over several decades. They originally appeared in a variety of publications, from the famous and highly esteemed — such as the New Yorker, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Slate — to the more obscure but still influential — such as Yankee Pot Roast, Monkeybicycle, Modern Humorist, and Kugelmass. Some were first published at The Big Jewel, a literary humor site that the author founded in 2002 and oversaw until 2019, when he sent it far away to live on a farm.
Read more: It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s REALLY Funny)
Humor
I have published humor pieces in many different outlets over the years, including a number of them that no longer exist. There are few things more ephemeral than a humor magazine, and frankly most of what they publish is also doomed to be outdated and forgotten in short order, with some notable exceptions. Here you can find links to all of my humor writing that is still available online, if not always at the same place where it was originally published.
First up is my own literary humor site, The Big Jewel, founded in 2002 by myself and Neil Pasricha, and continuing up until 2019, though Neil left to do other things quite a while ago. Mostly, I selected and edited material by other writers for the site, with the help of five other editors, but occasionally, I also contributed myself.