MightyWriters

Mighty Writers Sunday Schedule

11am: Write Like A Ninja, led by George Miller
3pm: Poetry Fun, led by Khanh-Anh Le
3pm: Drop-In Tutoring

Apropos of nothing except it looks to be a pretty wet weekend, here’s a list of top flight tough guy movies you might want to rent. The list comes courtesy of NPR and George Pelacanos, one of the best tough guy writers around. Then again, you just might want to read a really good tough guy book instead.

You can also easily wile away a rainy hour or two discovering music you may not know (or long forgot about) by checking out the playlists compiled by writers on Paper Cuts, the NYT book blog. There, for example, Samantha Peale, author of the “wittily and impressively observed“ debut novel “The American Painter Emma Dial,” has a playlist that includes “Trovatore, Act 3, Scene 1,” by Giuseppe Verdi, “Escribemé Pronto,” by the Mexican Institute of Sound and Sam Cooke’s “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

Just be prepared to pay the iTunes piper.

“If you live in denial of honesty, if you live
in fear, it’ll destroy you. If you bring it forth,
it will set you free.”

—Nick Tosches

Grew up: “Outside New York City, in a suburban town called New Rochelle, famous as the home of TV’s Dick Van Dyke. This affected my writing because my family got the New York Times (newspaper) and the New Yorker (magazine), both of which I read avidly as a kid, continue to read, and constitute my idea of what a newspaper and a magazine should be.”

Kind of books I read as a kid: “Baseball biographies, baseball biographies and paperback collections of the best of Mad Magazine.”

Person who inspired me to be a writer: “Russell Baker, who wrote a column for the New York Times from the early 1960s till he retired about fifteen years ago. He also wrote two great autobiographies, ‘Growing Up’ and ‘The Good Times.’ Baker’s column showed me how someone could use the written word to express humor, style, wisdom, and good sense.”

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“Cliches are the biggest turn-off of all.”
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Books I like to read now: “Books by smart people. By that I don’t mean books that are filled with with big words, or complicated formulas, or ideas that are hard to understand. But I mean books—fiction and non-fiction—that are thoughtful, and original, and imaginative, and respect me as a reader. Cliches are the biggest turn-off of all.”

Favorite all-time writer: “I would have to say either Mark Twain or Charles Dickens. I’ll go with Twain because he is an American. Probably THE American. Most everything he did is still as fresh and funny and pertinent as the day he wrote it.”

Hardest thing about writing for me: “Structure. Writing anything up to a page is easy. Two pages is twice as hard. Three pages is four times as hard. Four pages is eight times as hard. There must be a formula for that, but don’t ask me what it is: I’m a writer, not a mathematician.”

My writing makes me happiest when: “It’s expressed a thought I didn’t realize I had before.”

Best advice I can give about becoming a good writer: “Read as much and as great a variety as you possibly can.”

Ben Yagoda teaches English, journalism and writing at the University of Delaware, and is the author, coauthor or editor of nine books, including “The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing” and “About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made.” He has written about language, writing and other topics for numerous publications. Ben’s new book—”Memoir: A History”—will be released in Nov.

“Birth of the Cool,” a career retrospective of Philadelphia native and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) alum Barkley L. Hendricks, can be viewed until Jan. 3 at PAFA (Broad & Cherry sts.).

Hendricks is known for his bigger than life portraits of everyday people of color. His works capture the cool, empowering and often confrontational images of the times; he is clearly influenced by the civil rights movement of his youth.

PAFA has free admission and special programming on Sundays through the duration of the exhibition.

The Free Sunday Series begins at 2pm.and includes art-making workshops, music and dance performances, lectures, storytelling and video screenings.

Check out the video of Hendricks’ work on this GoPhila page.

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Here’s what NYT says about “Good Hair,” Chris Rock’s documentary about the world of African-American women’s hair: “Spirited, probing and frequently hilarious, it coasts on the fearless charm of its front man and the eye-opening candor of its interviewees, most of them women—including the actress Nia Long and the hip-hop stars Salt-n-Pepa—and all of them ready to dish.”

Trailer.

Illustration: Flygirl

“You learn that every good lie is
threaded with truth and every
accepted truth leaks lies.”

—Dennis Lehane

Ted Turner, iconic old guy, says newspapers are “the biggest solid waste problem that we have.”

Dave Eggers, iconic hip guy, says he plans to “demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive.”

Then, just today, comes more scary news about the future of the New York Times.

Which is really worrisome, because what other news organization could devote space for a series as important and compelling as “Held by the Taliban,” part three of which was published today?

Or publish an obituary as thoroughly gripping as the one that ran today on Camden, NJ, mass murderer Howard Unruh?