Noiseless Chatter Archive

I was devastated to learn this morning of the recent passing of Stephen Dunn . To many, he was a name in poetry collections. To others, of course, he was a friend. To me, he was a mentor. I’ve had the good fortune of being encouraged in my writing for just about my entire life. Teachers and colleagues and friends all encouraged me in my work. I was told that I was good, then I was told that I was very good, and at some point I started to believe it. By the time I enrolled at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (it’s a university now), 22 years ago, I was already a writer. Not really, but that’s the answer I would have given you if you’d asked. Stockton had a top-notch literature faculty. I am confident that that fact has not changed. But Stephen Dunn was its crown jewel. He was a celebrated poet, and he taught writing workshops. I was told many times to take one of them, and I did as soon as I could. They were small courses — around eight students — and they met for ...

Well, sort of! My time with Star Trek has come to an end for now. I’ve made it to the end of The Original Series, but I do intend to watch the films at some point in the near-ish future. After that? I’ll almost certainly get around to The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager , and maybe some other things as well. I’m open to suggestions, but those are all stories for another time. Right now, I’m taking a look back at season three of The Original Series. I was interested in this season for extremely selfish and thoroughly disrespectful reasons. Or, reason: “Spock’s Brain.” For decades I had been hearing about how terrible this episode was. It wasn’t just the worst episode of The Original Series; it was among the worst episodes of television, full stop. How could I not want to watch it? That, as Van once put it, was honey to the bee. We can learn a lot from the way things fall apart. Sometimes it’s our only real chance to get a peek inside something we love. When a pi...

With our other two films this year, the YouTube personalities behind them had clear areas of expertise. For James Rolfe, it was video games. For Red Letter Media, it was films. In each case (in different ways), the films they made used that expertise as their creative focus. That made sense, however successful or not the end results might have been. Now we have Ashens, and…what is Ashens? I suppose I could also ask “Who is Ashens?” There’s an easy answer to that, though: Ashens is Stuart Ashen, a Norwich-based…humorist? Technology buff? Author? Okay, I take it back; that answer is not much easier. Let’s start at the beginning. In my review of Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie , I laid out a hypothetical pitch for a television version of the YouTube show Technology Connections. It was, of course, hilarious. My point was that it would have been impossible to get a show with such a loose format made. Ashens is even looser. The most universal description of Ashens videos I ...