While the personnel may shift slightly from week to week as band members honor other commitments, this is definitely not a pick-up or a jam band, and watching the interplay and between the musicians is one of the highlights of the set. Not every note is perfect, but hey, that's jam-session jazz! Another highlight is the venue. Without even trying, the dark, wood-adorned basement room harkens back to San Francisco's speakeasy days. The three dollar cover is just right for a mid-week night out.

Or, if you're more in the mood for an old-fashioned two-tenor quintet, make your way to Bruno's, 2389 Mission Street in SF, on any Monday night. Each week, the Eaton-Barics Quintet featuring Danny Grewen holds forth, providing excellent, straight-ahead, blues-based jazz. Tenor saxophonists Gabe Eaton and Rob Barics, both of the Marcus Shelby Orchestra, along with vocalist/trombonist Grewen, are backed by Shelby on bass, pianist Adam Shulman, and drummer Jeff Mars. 

In addition, the later sets are open jam sessions, and jazz players across the Bay Area are invited to bring their instrument and it in. As the gig becomes better know around town, it will be interesting to see who shows up. The music starts at 9:30 PM,  the jam session at 10:30 PM. There's a $6 cover charge.

For the past year and a half or so, my friend writer Kim Addonizio and I have hosted a series of readings/events/hoedowns that we call the Indoor Salon for obscure reasons that I can't remember. These events take place at Rocket Words World Headquarters in Cole Valley, SF approximately every two months, or whenever Kim and I can get our schedules together. The salons are always great fun, with a mix of poetry/prose readings, artist and photographer slide shows, live music, food, wine, etc. 

On April 12 we struck again, with a great night featuring Mary Roach, giving the first public reading of her new book, Stiff, the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, a great short story from Kim, and a presentation by perfumer Mandy Aftel, who read from her book Essence and Alchemy and created a perfume right before our eyes. We also had a great slide show from artist Lydia Ricci and the soulful guitar/poetry duo of Joe Vance and Katharine Harer. After the "art" was over, we partied until the wee hours. 

Want to know about upcoming Salons? Don't worry. If you remain on this email list, you'll get announcements about all future events. Stay tuned.

Reality, as you know, is always stronger than the human imagination. Not only that, reality can permit itself to be unbelievable, inexplicable, out of all proportion. The created work, to my regret, cannot permit itself that.

--Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, as interviewed by Philip Roth. The interview appears in Roth's recent interview collection, Shop Talk.

The subject and the verb create the foundation of each sentence. So if the sentence isn't working, that's a good place to look first. Here are two rules of thumb:

1. The subject of each sentence should be the "agent of the action" taking place or the condition being described. It should tell you who is actually doing what.
   
2. Try to use concrete, specific subjects rather than abstract, general ones.

OK, what am I talking about? Take a look at this sentence:

"The incidence of moonlighting in academia is high."

The subject here is "incidence." Not exactly a specific item. And the agent of the action (what's happening and who's doing it) is not too clear.

So instead let's try . . .

"Many college instructors and professors are now forced to moonlight."

OR

"College instructors and professors are moonlighting at a higher rate than ever."

Now your subject is concrete: instructors and professors, the real people who are actually doing the moonlighting. The differences between the original and the two rewrites may not seem that dramatic. After all, if I'm the reader I can figure out who's doing the moonlighting in the original. But in the second sentence, I don't have to figure out anything, so you've saved me a step. Over a paragraph, a page or an article, that will add up to an easier, more enjoyable reading experience for me. As a writer, that's what you want.

Obviously, we've changed more than just the subject. But by starting with the subject and working your way outward, it becomes easier to see other changes that can make your sentence even easier to understand. A couple of notes:

1. Clearly, this is a rule of thumb, not a commandment. There are times when you're talking about more "global" concepts and so you’ll want to use a more general word in your subject.
   
2. Sentence focus is mainly a revision tool. You'll drive yourself nuts worrying about this stuff while you're writing your first draft.

Hope that helps. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions on this topic.

Have a question about grammar, punctuation, syntax, sentence structure or anything related to writing in general? Send it along. I'll include my answer to one question each month.

Here's our question for this month:

Question: The sentence below doesn't seem quite right. Is there anything really wrong with it?

Looking for the turnoff to my cousin's country house, the dense fog made things difficult for us.

Jerry: Yes, we do have a problem here. This is your basic "dangling participle." That's one of those mysterious sounding grammar terms, I know, but the concept isn't really that complicated.

Basically, the phrase "Looking for the turnoff to my cousin's country house," is a present participle phrase. Don't worry about the terminology. Call it an "ing" phrase if you like. The important thing to remember is that "ing" phrases are always attached to sentences (i.e. ". . . the dense fog made things difficult for us.")

OK, here's the rule: The "ing" phrase always refers to the subject of the sentence it's attached to. In this case, the subject of the sentence is "fog." So, grammatically speaking, our sentence tells us that the "dense fog" was "looking for the turnoff to my cousin's house."

Happily, this one's easy to fix, once you spot it. All you have to do is rewrite the main sentence a little so the subject fits the "ing" phrase. Maybe like this:

Looking for the turnoff to my cousin's country house, we found that the dense fog was making things difficult for us.

Now, "Looking for the turnoff . . . " refers to "we" (the subject of the rewritten sentence).

By the way, those phrases come in "ed" versions, too:

Locked in the basement, the darkness scared my little brother.

It wasn't "the darkness" that was "locked in the basement." So:

Locked in the basement, my brother became frightened by the darkness.

During the past few months, there's been a lot of action at Rocket Words World Headquarters, including:

• helping artist Aondrea Maynard produce her artist's statement for her gallery on itheo.com
• producing the copy for a new website for Ira Spilky, a Los Angeles-based real estate broker and consultant who specializes in finding homes for restaurants and night clubs
• striking up a new relationship with JazzWest.com, a great website offering comprehensive coverage of the Bay Area jazz scene. My first JazzWest feature, on East Bay trumpeter and educator Khalil Shaheed, is online now
• writing a review of Dorothy Parker's Elbow:Tattoo on Writers, Writers on Tattoos for Skin & Ink Magazine
• participating in a large online marketing project for Providian Bank.