K. Marvin Bruce

Do you admit that you’re a writer?  If it’s in your job description I suppose you do, but for many of us being a writer presents us with a dilemma.  Do you admit to your boss that you’re hoping to get paid for what you do off the clock? I have a friend in the publishing industry whose employer has strict rules about such things.  Any “employment” that takes away from work time has to be declared in written form and sent to the office that investigates conflict of interest.  If you’re a writer who’s paid to do something else you can already see where I’m going with this. Inspiration doesn’t obey time-clocks.  In fact, it almost always makes a mockery of them.  When you’ve arrived at work and punched in (i.e., booted up your PC) does that story idea obediently bed down until 5 p.m.?  Of course not.  Even after you’ve dug into today’s business, it’s probably playing like muzak in the back corridors of your gray matter.  It sometim...

I can’t help it.  Inside every man there’s locked a puerile little boy.  The other day I was on the website of the Catholic University of America.  As everyone knows, Catholics have some of the greatest hangups about sexuality in all of Christendom.  Like most universities, however, CUA has to appeal to both genders to make ends meet. In any case, I was looking over the undergraduate programs for a friend and the head picture struck me as impossibly funny.  All the more so because it was totally unintentional.  Over the past few years institutions of higher education have been using plenty of photos of coeds to attract the guys.  That’s just the way it is. In this photo, however, the two women have inscrutable smiles on their faces as one makes the universal “inches” sign with her fingers.  It doesn’t help that there’s a guy sitting right there, not looking their way.  On the blackboard behind, although blurry, is the word “tube....