Rosewater Press

A week after grandpa passed, Lily and I visited his son in Menasha. We took a short, chilly walk down part of the Loop the Lake trail, culminating in a trip back to the heart of Little Detroit. Almost exactly a year since I started writing about that place, as it happens. I’m happy to say the place is a little better than I left it. Right off the Lock, stretching the whole length of Water Street from the trail to Tayco, is a brand-new sidewalk. Fresh soil took the place of what used to be a bunch of crummy asphalt lurching over the river. A part of me wants to decry this as another act of gentrification. It’s difficult to be sated by a fully aesthetic revision to a working-class neighborhood. I worry, of course, that the city is trying to price the trash out of Metrasha. I also, perhaps selfishly, appreciate that we could now walk this part of the city in relative comfort, with a more picturesque shoreline and all that. Making our way down the sidewalk a particular structure caught m...

It’s probably going to become apparent, as this series goes on, that I read more comics and manga than prose. Of course, I can’t predict the future. I have no way of knowing which books will stick out to me. Maybe I’ll never write about sequential art again. But the simple fact of the matter is I grew up in a home that didn’t discriminate. Not against comics, I mean. My father brought Aquaman into my world with the same reverence he held for Ivanhoe or Ray Bradbury. It was all literature to me.          T hat being said, there is one major mark against both comics and manga: serialization. It’s not a problem for me as a fan; anyone who’s been to the comic shop with me knows how fat my pull box can get. But as a reviewer, I’d rather recommend standalone media, works that only necessitate a single purchase. I don’t want to saddle anybody with a subscription. So while I’ve been greatly enjoying everything from Absolute Martian Manhunter to Don’t Call It Myst...

  songs used: Orchestra Silvano Chimenti  Suspense Space Joop Stokkermans -- In the Chapel in the Moonlight King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Demo No 79 Pikmin 2 OST - Flooded Stump (Olimar) Lyman Woodard  By the Time I Get to Phoenix 佐藤允彦 - グラマ・グラス Piero Umiliani - My Old Country Carsten Bohn's Bandstand  Miles Smiles Ahead Don Rader - Aschiya Timothy Carpenter & Triunity - I Want To Make It 本田竹曠  エマージェンシー https://yamatomagazine.home.blog/2020/09/14/the-bodysuit-collector-doctor-fukushi-masaichi/   https://www.pathology.or.jp/en/meetings.html   https://www.congre.co.jp/114jsp/en/index.html   https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1228&context=gj_etds   https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/c0506817-6eb4-4885-acd7-4ff9d9d7bf8d/content   https://gemmaangel.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/an-unfortunate-amalgam-syphilis-tattooing-mercury/   https://web.archive.org/web/20160307162041/htt...

What feels like a lifetime ago now, I took a creative writing elective in tenth grade in place of regular English. This represents basically the only period in my life in which I was regularly writing fiction, unfortunately. For this reason, the better end of the stories written that year still enter my head whenever I think about picking fiction back up. There's a drabble where an assassin disguises himself as a button in his target's shirt that I've been meaning to come back to for years.           And there's also "Experiments in Artificial Companionship", a bizarre piece of fiction starring an incel-ish guy (before we had a word for 'em) implanting an artificial consciousness into a robotic female body he had constructed for... well, for reasons that are beyond the scope of a high school classroom. The AI is based on his favorite fictional character, of course, and the story ends on the implication that the character was literally transposed into his d...