Timothy Miller's Blog

San Francisco-- Americans were stunned by another act of senseless brutality this week when a San Francisco street performer went on a terrifying spree.Randy Heppelwhite, a San Francisco mime, was arrested by police yesterday after perpetrating what one onlooker called "one of the most hideously ambiguous performances I've ever seen." 
Union Square in the aftermath of the horror
"He jumped right out in front of a group of tourists, and without saying a word, he seemed to pull out a large caliber ...

As you're aware, I’m a novelist. Published. Traditionally. Three Sherlock Holmes adventures. But I’m not here to hawk them (not today). I just wanted to get that out of the way, because this post is about my fourth novel, which I’ve just finished, having finally discovered something crucial—my theme. I discovered it after adding one word to the text:

Pinocchio
(We’ll get back to that.)

You might think I’d have figured out theme before setting down word one. Or you might think the exact opposite, th...

 

"Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?" 

-- Arthur Phillips

Thanks for reading!

 

I missed the boat on music, and it still rankles. Let me say up front that, had things gone differently, I would not have become a musical prodigy, a rock star, or even a lounge singer with a baby blue tuxedo and a coke habit. There’s not a music molecule hiding anywhere in my SNA. But I might have at least been musically literate. Or what’s audio equivalent of literacy?

Let me try to dredge up the relevant memories here. The impetus? I was listening to a song the other day recorded a few year...

 Let’s try an experiment. Read the following quote by Morgan Freeman.

When you read it, did you hear Morgan Freeman’s distinctive baritone? Likely. There are memes all over the internet that ask you that very same question. It’s the natural outcome of having such a well-known voice and style.

But, as you may have guessed, that’s not actually a Morgan Freeman quote. It’s from Malcolm X. (And if you try to say it now in Malcolm X’s voice, you may find yourself actually borrowing Denzel Washington's ...

 

Maybe it's time we talked about mutants. No, not cool mutants with cool powers. I'm talking about the ever-growing minority who seem to have been born without the gene for empathy. Call them homo miserabilis. How long have they been among us? Are they here to stay? Does their mutation give them an advantage over homo sapiens that will eventually write our demise as a species? Is there some sort of treatment we can administer? Can we co-exist with them? I would have preferred mutations like eye-...

James Stephens, an Irish contemporary of James Joyce, largely forgotten today, wrote one of my three favorite books, The Crock of Gold -- a tale like no other I've ever read: by turns humorous, philosophical and poetic, whose premise is what happens when the leprechauns of Gort na Cloca Mora exact revenge for having their pot of gold stolen. 
So it seems incumbent upon me to share a couple of quotes from the man.


“He saw a square room furnished as a library. The entire section of the walls which h...

 
Dinner with King Tut is a strange sort of beast: let’s call it an anti-sphinx. Like the sphinx it’s composed of three dissimilar parts—not the face of a woman, the wings of a bird and the haunches of a lion, but science, fiction (but not science fiction) and DIY—where DIY involves the author learning how to knap stones, how to tattoo himself, to style hair like an ancient Roman matron, bake bread for Egyptian pyramid builders, and operate a trebuchet, among other skills once necessary for a pre...

 This will not be an ad for Ozempic. Nor will it be a jeremiad against the drug. My cardiologist told me a story about GLP-1 and the gila monster. (Yes at a certain age, you suddenly have a "my cardiologist.” Mine is a grandfatherly story-spinner.) Three to four extensive meals in spring are claimed to supply a gila monster with enough energy for a whole season. Scientists wondered why, which is what scientists do. What they also do is investigate.

.What they found was a hormone in the venom of t...

“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

--Michelangelo Buonarroti

I came across this comic strip the other night in my Memories feed on Facebook. It was originally posted by a friend nine years ago. I obviously didn't pay it much attention (and attention is today's coin of the realm), because I gave it a like, but didn't bother to comment.

Consider this reparation. This time I pull...