Our new “Famer” is a Savage blogger. I’ve been reading her for close to four years. It would be hard to exist in a blogesphere without her. A long post that has been long time coming.

Please Welcome Pia Savage, of Courting Destiny, to the Hall of Fame.

Only fear (mine) kept her from being the inaugural “famer”. The fear I wouldn’t able to do her blog justice by this post. The fear is still there, but it is time.

She’s been quoted in CSM, her blog readers called “a cult” in the Long Island Press.

There is a reason for this.

As noted San Fransisco activist Miz Bohemia puts it,

Two sentences are too little and volumes could not capture the essence of our dear Pia Savage… All I can think of when asked about Pia is that I love her. I just love her. That’s all there is to it. And I don’t love freely or easily but Pia bewitches me… she weaves words into an intricate tapestry of seemingly disjointed words and thoughts, fraught with a cutthroat yet fragile and sensitive honesty, that magically falls into place and, in doing so, shatters my illusion of randomness and leaves me breathless as I realize that Ms. Savage is fully in control of these magical rides. I am honored to know her “behind the scenes” and believe me when I say that if there is magic in her writing, words cannot describe the beauty that is in her heart. Forever smitten am I and I would have it no other way.

Pia writes like no one I have ever read. A New Yorker who lived through the trauma of 9-11, an adopted daughter to a set of parents we know as if they were our own, she is audacious enough to defy her lifelong NYC hairdresser and friend by getting her hair done in South Carolina, and brave enough to write about it. The reading it all is an addictive joy - even if the topics are not always joyful. This, and so much more, shared with her readers in a pleasantly non regimented fashion.

To list the characters, or the topics of her prose, whether fiction or real would be an endless endeavor, but reading her is like accessing a bottomless well and finding each time the water tastes like nothing that has ever touched my lips before.

She explains, in the way only Pia can, the only reason she became a Riverside Drive coop owner. “They only let me in because I had cash, good credit, good manners,”. She writes of a time when she was annotated with the title of “hippie princess”. Add to her resume that of being an unapologetic liberal, a political blogger who was part of the original cast at Bring it On, a site much worse for her departure.

Word smith and well known cynic Doug Pascover of Waking Ambrose says of Miss Savage,

“No one makes words eddy like Pia”. “Pia’s prose is extraordinary because words, sentences, sentence fragments and retractions find their own patterns in her writing, waves of assertion rise between troughs of embarrassment, tipping every boat. Her typing skills seem excellent.“

Cooper

Pia is the genuine article. And moreover, she’s extremely important to us. As for me, I consider her to be a mentor. When and if the day comes that I’m a published author, it will be in no small measure due the encouragement and guidance I’ve received from her.

I’m on the record (in pulped dead tree format in fact) as saying I found the pink too jarring at first to get into her writing, and that was true. That I eventually become an avid reader of Courting Destiny is a testament to the quality of her storytelling and her commentary at other blogs.

She grew up in the sixties and she’s unashamed of it, and moreover unashamed of having been a part of it all. As the son of two baby boomers and a nephew of almost 20 others, that’s a breath of fresh air.

She finds a way to draw my interest in matters foreign to me. Coop Wars? Shopping at an NYC department store? Doormen? Would have provoked a yawn or a cocked eyebrow from me before Cooper introduced me to Pia.

Writing permeated by a profound honesty that seems to exist even in the rhythm of the words let alone their content. She calls herself a “proud moral relativist,” much to the chagrin and confusion of right wing blowhards who can’t imagine that people like Pia aren’t offended by the phrase.

Her approach to politics is deeply personal. Her first blog went up in 2004, “Free NY from Bush,” expressing her frustration and anguish that her city was going to throw a big party for the man whose administration had made political hay demeaning people like her. She co-founded a political blog that for a brief shining moment was quite excellent. Unfortunately not all of the people involved could be her.

I’ve collaborated with Pia on a number of occasions—a short-lived fan blog about Boston Legal, our favorite show, a parallel fiction piece, and most notably as an editor for her memoir—and I love working with her. In particular I’ve enjoyed watching as the pieces fall into place as she crafts her stories. Soon they’ll amount to a successful book, and some publishing company will indeed vindicate our declaration here. Namely, that Pia Savage should be famous.

Patrick

The only excuse for not reading Courting Destiny is illiteracy.

An Addendum: Since this post The Long Island Press has published Pia’sOur Children’s Brains Part XVII: More Than Just Clumsy: What It’s Like to Live With Nonverbal Learning Disorder. A spectacular piece in which the technical and personal mix to tell the story of non verbal learning disorder from the author’s perspective.

The time has come
The blogger said
To Post
Of many things

Our Doug, The Dawg
The Prattler, and
Most Cynical
Word geek.

This weeks Famer” is Waking Ambrose, or more accurately Doug Pascover, who since February of 2005, posts daily Bierce words to his blog Waking Ambrose. At Waking Ambrose he one ups Bierce with a contemporary and timely definition of his own, while encouraging his readers to do the same via comments.

There were segments of time where his readers would take the Wednesday position of guest poster. Assigned a word, not in the Devil’s Dictionary, it would be up to the guest poster to try to pull a Bierce, or a Doug, causing more than a little fingernail bitting in anticipation of Doug’s judgment of their effort. My only attempt was the assigned word “insouciant” in November of 2005, and before judgment day I suffered a few sleepless nights, believe me.

In a very organized fashion his words from Waking Ambrose are all listed nicely in alphabetical order at The Prattler Notebook.You can find all guest definitions listed there as well.

The Bierce words, and new definitions, are made to fit nicely into the news/political/societal events of the times. Though some readers come and go, most become “groupies”, (of which yours truly is one), who refuse to leave the dog alone for long.

Not to dismiss his work at The Prattler, a separate entity consisting of Political and Social commentary followed by words and definitions which always work. It’s on hiatus and is greatly missed.

Doug himself defines the whole gamut at The Prattler Welcome, where you can then follow links to The Prattler Wordbook , which when choosing any word will bring you to the post on the Waking Ambrose site where the word was defined, and where the gang hangs out. You can also explore the links to his Serialized Short Stories, The Meditations of Diogenes The Cynic, and Shahrazade’s Wedding. Doug posts the stories on the weekend at Waking Ambrose as well, in both written and audio format.

One of the few blogs I check daily, one of the first blogs I ever read, and I’m still reading.

If you’re looking for something smart and well written, or just want to learn a few new words, or meet the groupies, head on over to Waking Ambrose to begin your journey.

This is a timely post as Waking Ambrose goes on blogcation in mid February making it a good time to become familiar with Doug’s large body of work, and consider if you are up to the task yourself.