My first podcast

The credit, however, does not go to me, but to Dominique James. In my characteristic bubbly and, er, slightly clueless manner, I talk with DJ about working on the maiden issue of Force & Valor Magazine, about writing for the PNP-Special Action Force, and, of course, about the boys I love.

Download the Fabulous! Podcast Episode 04 from the iTunes Music Store US, or from the sidebar. It's free!

Force & Valor Magazine now out

This is the maiden issue, dated June 2006. Copies have already been labelled individually for all SAF Troopers and non-uniformed personnel. We have extra copies to give away, and although they are quite limited, I will try to have copies for all who are interested. For the next issue, which is in December 2006, we will print a larger volume.

However, for now, you can download a free pdf version of the 24-page magazine from the sidebar, or from dominiquejames.com. DJ and I already recorded the podcast at The Studio, and it was just hilarious! Most of the 16-minute recording is composed of bursts of laughter, stray topics, funny anecdotes, and even more laughter. I'm sure, though, that DJ will be able to edit the audio to make the podcast shorter and sound a lot more dignified. The podcast will be out soon on iTunes.

Here is an image of my favorite spread in the issue. Incidentally, it is also the centerfold.


This is so cool! That is the photograph of the combat boots of Police Chief Superintendent Silverio Alarcio, SAF Commander from February 24, 2006 until May 20, 2006. Why so short a term? Read the magazine.

This one's for the boys

Here's a sneak preview of the cover of Force & Valor, the new magazine of the PNP Special Action Force. This is the maiden and anniversary issue, with art direction by the untiring, ineffable and fabulous Dominique James, photographer and layout designer extraordinaire. All articles are written and edited by moi, and printing is by LexMedia Digital of Print Town. Work on this magazine has been done on the Mac -- DJ's and mine -- and unless Print Town uses something other than a Mac for production, this must be the first ever PNP magazine to be done entirely on OS X!

It will be out sometime next week. All copies are for SAF Troopers and employees only, but extra copies will be given away. A PDF version is available for downloading through DJ's server at dominiquejames.com. I will be posting the dowload link here, too, once the magazine is out. A podcast will also be available soon.

The uberlist

Time Magazine has come up with a list of the 100 best novels of all time from 1923 to 2005. Original reviews of the novels, the story of how the list was created, and reader inputs and reactions on http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/.

I have marked the books I've read already and the books I already have but have not yet begun reading. I can't believe I have a 96-book backlog on top of my existing 30-book backlog! Oh, well. I guess it's true what they say -- So many books, too little time. I wish there were 126 of me.

Thanks to Dominique James for the Time link.

The Complete List

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (Not yet read.)
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
A Death in the Family by James Agee
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance by James Dickey
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
Falconer by John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (Read.)
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Read.)
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Light in August by William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (Not yet read.)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving by Henry Green
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Money by Martin Amis
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
Native Son by Richard Wright
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
1984 by George Orwell
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (Read.)
Rabbit, Run by John Updike (Not yet read.)
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (Read.)
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (Not yet read.)
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise by Don DeLillo (Read.)
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Copyright © 2005 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

Dusk

I see in him a stillness, and other things that no one else can see: the luminosity of impending night, a sonorous quiet, pure melancholy that swells and ebbs with its own logic, a maneuvering of words that embed themselves in my breath. These are the details that propel me towards love. These are the things that lengthen my longing.


Even the sea, vast and ancient, blushes when the sun sets. Why not I, then, when I know that nightfall always brings him to my door, with the promise of fire that could rival the sun, which sets upon his arrival, as if in deference to a greater power?