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Expats Make Kabul Stew

2/28/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.
Marcel Pagnol
Born February 28, 1895

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureTodd St. John
February 29, 2016, Luke Mogelson, “Total Solar”: This is one of those stories I want both to speed by and yet s-t-r-e-t-c-h, at the same time. ¶ An American in Afghanistan narrates his tale about time spent there as a journalist. There is so much to be said for authors who travel, particularly expat journalists: they never want for subject matter. Mogelson repeats a number of motifs in this Kabulian stew: brown skies, dogs with tumors the size of cantaloupes, birds, elevated particulates of fecal matter in the air, and people talking on phones about those whom they intend to assassinate. The story has a Paul Bowles feel to it, except that the narrator is nearly suicidal over his visit to the region, whereas Bowles is perhaps more sympathetic concerning his Moroccan days (his The Sheltering Sky is published in 1949). After all, our narrator is in the middle of a war. He watches as a woman with whom he is acquainted stops to care for a child the narrator knows is faking illness as a lure. She is shot and killed: “That was the end of Sue Kwan,” (60), he thinks, quickly distancing himself from the event. He portrays himself as a buffoon, one of his CNN pieces having been YouTubed into oblivion for its comic qualities. Finally, he is injured by gunfire and escapes into the mountains, where the air is much clearer. The man he believes to be offering succor later turns him into authorities, who show up to interrogate him. The story’s conclusion reprises the telephone motif, as the narrator overhears the planning of someone’s demise:

“That’s when I saw the man talking on his cell phone.
‘No, no one is with him, I can easily grab him,’ the man was saying.
Or was he? I didn’t know. I still don’t” (63).
This story appears last in Mogelson’s new collection, These Heroic, Happy Dead, which  is out in April. It is certainly on my wish list!
Illustration by Todd St. John.

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Parkinson's Into Poetry

2/23/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
W. E. B. Du Bois
Born February 23, 1868

My Book World

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Seale, Jan. The Parkinson Poems. Beaumont: Lamar University Press, 2014.
 
Seale’s striking collection of poems is divided into four parts: Onset, Progression, Treatment, and Abiding.
 
The poems in Onset are beset with astonishment, anguish, a bit of denial. The “unwanted guest” serves as an extended metaphor for “The Guest”: “His name was Parkinson/and his presence was permanent” (15). Across these eight stanzas, this guest runs the gamut from one who “hung up his clothes/wrong side out” (16) to one who “dropped silverware, knocked over glasses,/spilt food, complained of dull knives” (17), one who “became the conversation director,/insisting they discuss him at least/several times a day” (18), one who “went everywhere with them/but wasn’t interested in staying long” (19), to finally, the one who “had no plans to leave,/because he dearly loved the husband” (21). He becomes “The Man Who Came to Dinner,/The bass ack[w]ards/of their lives” (23).
 
In Progression the unwanted guest becomes a slow-mover in “You and Turtles”: “You’ve absorbed their abilities: perfected ‘slow,’/the hokey-poke-along, stop and go,/the sudden hustle away from danger. Silence./More than once, you’ve been found on your back,/but helped to turn over, proceeded your stoical way” (43).
 
“Group Therapy” sums up Treatment, where caregivers and caremakers meet separately. “Here for an hour they will dump out/the boxes of their souls/and the dregs of their bodies./The caregivers will marvel that strangers/are saying their thoughts aloud./The Parkies will nod at their histories,/grimace at the previews./Some will wish only for home” (58).
 
“Abide” is a kind word for bearing or putting up with, and Seale captures that singular meaning, as well, in “Sleep-talking.”
 
They tell us the disease does not make distinctions
between dreaming and waking. The Parkinsonian
will speak his glossolalia, sometimes for all.
 
Even though I foolishly long to know him better,
this husband of many years, I am barred
at the gateway of his dreams.
 
His words waking me are like the light pebbles
he tossed upward at my dorm window in the days
when we loved, both dreaming and awake” (65).
 
I’m not sure why I am drawn to these poems. Is it with the hope that I and my loved ones will not be saddled with this unwanted guest? Or is it in some way to prepare myself for his coming, should he arrive for either me or my partner of forty years? If I could, I would offer Seale and her husband a bit of comfort, but what would it be? A soft word? A touch of understanding to the elbow? What can I offer the caregiver or the caremaker of any dread disease? Anything other than my attempt to understand would seem profane and empty.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016


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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!


Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Mathematics Made Simple

2/20/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Every day of my childhood, when I woke up for school, I’d glimpse Pablo Neruda’s house through my bedroom window, high up on one of Valparaíso’s fifty hills. Today, that house has become a museum, named after the poet, that attracts tourists from all over the world . . . [his] poems, many of them  born in his Valparaíso home, were a source of inspiration for many people as they fought the dictatorship and strove to create a more just society. As his Valparaíso neighbor, I owed Don Pablo a novel that portrayed his full being.
Roberto Ampuero, Author of The Neruda Case
Born February 20, 1953

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureAbbott Miller
February 22, 2016, Don DeLillo, “Sine Cosine Tangent”: As one who never advances through the study of mathematics to enroll in trigonometry, I am forced to research the three common terms in the title of DeLillo’s story. They provide a certain frame or form, I believe, for this retrospective narrative of a boy, his mother, and his father: sine, cosine, and tangent, respectively. (I could be wrong; I never was any good at math.)
 
DeLillo is a master in so many ways, a wordsmith whose prose is rather straightforward and simple, except when his character is exploring the meaning of words:

“Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke, but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. ‘Coarse woman, a shrew.’ I had to look up ‘shrew.’ ‘A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse.’ I had to look up ‘shrewmouse.’ The book sent me back to ‘shrew, sense 1.’ A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up ‘insectivorous.’ The book said that it meant feeding on insects, from the Latin insectum, for ‘insect,’ plus the Latin vorus, for ‘vorous.’ I had to look up ‘vorous’” (61).
The narrator thinks in strands of time that seem to wash over one another in waves. He’s thirteen. He’s fourteen. He’s in college. But not necessarily in that order do these events occur.
 
As a victim of his parents’ divorce, the narrator returns to the triangle again and again: his mother studies Portuguese in high school; it advances her professionally because she is able to communicate with Brazilian clients in her firm. His father, who leaves when the narrator is thirteen, can be seen on national TV and on the cover of Newsweek as a wizard of finance. The boy develops a limp when he is fourteen, an affectation that is designed to win him sympathy, but it only sets him farther apart from his peers—which may be his subliminal goal after all.
 
DeLillo’s wretched yet beautiful mathematical formula is repeated over and over again until one day the narrator calls home, only to be told by a neighbor that his mother has suffered a stroke.
“Ordinary moments make the life. This was what she knew to be trustworthy, and this was what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past, and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define ‘lint,’ I tell myself. Define ‘time,’ define ‘space’” (65).
Sine. Cosine. Tangent.
 
The author’s novel Zero K is due out in May of this year.
Design By Abbott Miller

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Old Frontier, Same Message

2/16/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
I have a theory . . . that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.
Richard Ford
Born February 16, 1944

My Book World

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late Anglo-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the eighth in a series of twenty.
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Auden, W. H. and Christopher Isherwood. On the Frontier: A Melodrama in Three Acts. New York: Random, 1938.
 
This play is another of three that Auden and Isherwood co-wrote. It tells of the conflict between the fictional countries of Ostnia and Westland—as one can imagine, the former symbolizing the East and the latter the West, or at least one that represents freedom and one that does not. The most interesting, perhaps innovative, aspect of the play occurs in Act Two, where an Ostnian household occupies the left half of the stage, and a Westland household occupies the right half. Some of the more moving and dramatic dialogue takes place here, as competing radio programs shout out their announcements, the very texts contrasting two ways of life:

OSTNIAN RADIO. In view of the extreme gravity of the situation . . .
WESTLAND RADIO. The Leader . . .
OSTNIAN RADIO. His majesty the King . . .
WESTLAND RADIO. Has decided . . .
OSTNIAN RADIO. Has graciously consented . . .
WESTLAND RADIO. To address the nation . . .
OSTNIAN RADIO. To address his people . . .
WESTLAND RADIO. The address will be broadcast from all stations at midnight.
OSTNIAN RADIO. The address will be broadcast from all stations at midnight (57).
At any rate, the Ostnian family and the Westland family proceed as if the other isn’t there, and yet, like their radio stations, their lives seem to dovetail. In a manner similar to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Eric, a son of one family is drawn to Anna, a daughter in the other family but only in a spiritual sense, perhaps indicating that love can cross all political boundaries. Their idealistic views hark toward an uncertain if hopeful future.
 
Another memorable scene could very well be the last one, in which the young people “meet” again:
[ERIC and ANNA, dressed and made up exactly as in Act Two, Scene I, emerge from behind the screens at the heads of their respective beds, and advance into the light-circle. The beds fade into darkness.]
 
ANNA. Will people never stop killing each other?
            There is no place in the world
            For those who love.
ERIC.    Believing it was wrong to kill,
            I went to prison, seeing myself
            As the sane and innocent student
            Aloof among practical and violent madmen,
            But I was wrong. We cannot choose our world,
            Our time, our class. None are innocent, none (118).

These last lines perhaps sum up why the two authors penned the play in the first place. Isherwood, having lived in pre-Nazi Germany, sees first-hand what it is like to exist in a country where one is relieved of the privilege of making choices, particularly the one to escape. It is a play that, precisely because of its time period, does not easily survive the future.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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'The Whole Enchilada' is a Huge Delight

2/13/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
In my experience ideology is a lot like religion; it's a belief system and most people cling to it long after it becomes clear that their ideology doesn't describe the real world.
Maureen F. McHugh
Born February 13, 1959

My Book World

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LaRue, Angelina. The Whole Enchilada: Fresh and Nutritious Southwestern Cuisine. Photography by Deborah Whitlaw Llewellyn. Gretna LA: Pelican, 2015.
 
Each month authors across a variety of disciplines read from their work to members of the Caprock Writers’ Alliance. I met Angelina LaRue the night of January 26, when she spoke about her new cookbook. I haven’t had an opportunity to prepare any of her recipes, but I also haven’t been this fired up about trying some new ones in a long time. Her dishes, accompanied by Llewellyn’s stunning photographs, will have your mouth watering in no time at all.
 
Angelina makes it clear that she prepares all her entrées using fresh ingredients. By her own admission, they vary from low-cal to high-cal, for those rare occasions when nothing else will do. She also includes a page of “Staples” any chef should keep on hand in order to prepare her cuisine, which originates from places like Arizona and New Mexico to Oklahoma and Colorado to right here in the Lone Star State itself.

Staples amount to three columns under the categories such as “Spices, Nuts, Seeds, and Flavorings,” “Fresh Produce,” “Dried Goods,” “Meat, Poultry, and Seafood,” and “Odds and Ends.” The average cook may already have as many as half or three-quarters of these ingredients on hand anyway, so don’t fret. You may only have to pick up a few items to prepare your selection. And now the only question is WHICH ONE TO CHOOSE?
PHOTOGRAPHS: Deborah Whitlaw Llewellyn

Will it be Grilled Avocado Salsa? Cowboy Sweet Potato Casserole? Blackened Chicken Tacos? Roasted Pork Loin with Mole Amarillo? Will you begin the meal with Prickly Pear Margaritas? Or will you add a mouth-watering condiment like Three Melon Mango Salad?
PictureAuthor LaRue
Today's post is only an introduction LaRue's  book. After I’ve made a few of her tantalizing recipes, I plan to blog once more about how good they are. The experienced cook can usually peruse a recipe and determine whether it is the same old or whether it appears to have a bit of pizzazz. That’s how confident I am that Ms. LaRue’s recipes are something to shout about.

So until next time, ¡Provecho! Bon appetit! Eat hardy, y’all!

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Shadow of the Lion-Hearted

2/9/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
Brendan Behan
Born February 9, 1923

My Book World

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late British-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the seventh in a series of twenty.
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Isherwood, Christopher. Lions and Shadows: an Education in the Twenties. Norfolk: New Directions, (1938), 1947.
 
As I examine this copy borrowed from the Texas Tech University main library (1.7 million volumes), I note that it is accessioned in 1964. By examining the date due slip, I can see I’m only the third person to check out this book since 1972—making me a rare cat indeed. In remarks at the beginning, Isherwood says that his book “is not, in the ordinary journalistic sense of the word, an autobiography; it contains no ‘revelations’; it is never ‘indiscreet’; it is not even entirely ‘true’” (7). He goes on to state that the book is a record of a man, him, in his twenties, as he forges ahead in his life as a young novelist.
 
This young artist makes a short trip to France. He attends university in England. “I had not been in Cambridge a fortnight before I began to feel with alarm that I was badly out of my depth. The truth, as I now discovered for the first time, was that I was a hopelessly inefficient lecturee. I couldn’t attend, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t take proper notes” (62).
 
He records the meaning that relationships there give him, including Mr. Holmes, a benefactor of sorts. “Isherwood the artist was an austere ascetic, cut off from the outside world, in voluntary exile, a recluse” (97).
 
Isherwood co-writes narratives with a close friend. One book in particular, a “Hynd and Starn” story, would be accompanied with fireworks, gramophone, and dialogue would be spoken. Copies would be free. “Our friends would find, attached to the last page, a pocket containing banknotes and jewels; our enemies, on reaching the end of the book, would be shot dead by a revolver concealed in the binding” (114). Isherwood simply doesn’t live long enough; today’s technology might have afforded him at least a few of these book innovations!
 
At the end of his second year Isherwood deliberately fails his exams by giving nonsensical answers. At the time, because the professors and administration act as if he has simply chosen to leave Cambridge, no one knows what he has done. Failure is painful, but he believes he is right to strike out on his own. “Suppose I stayed on and did, somehow, get a degree: what would become of me? I should have to be a schoolmaster. But I didn’t want to be a schoolmaster—I wanted, at last, to escape from that world. I want to learn to direct films . . . [h]ow I longed to be independent, to earn money of my own! And I had got to wait another whole year!” (125).
 
After leaving Cambridge, Isherwood takes a series of positions, one as a personal secretary, another as an English tutor for young pupils. During this time he also teaches himself how to write. A dear friend, also a writer, “Chalmers,” asserts his theories, and Isherwood concurs: “‘I saw it all suddenly while I was reading Howards End . . . Forster’s the only one who understands what the modern novel ought to be . . . Our frightful mistake was that we believed in tragedy: the point is, tragedy’s quite impossible nowadays . . . We ought to aim at being essentially comic writers . . . The whole of Forster’s technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers’-meeting gossip . . . In fact, there’s actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones: that’s what’s so utterly terrific. It’s the completely new kind of accentuation—like a person talking a different language’” (173-4).
 
The author chronicles his early experiences: “. . . I had sent the manuscript, already, to two well-known publishers. They had refused it, of course. One of them wrote saying that my work had ‘a certain literary delicacy, but lacked sufficient punch’—a pretty damning verdict, when your story ends with a murder” (205).
 
He indirectly addresses the idea of being gay, as well as the issue of being an artist, critical of society: “Does anybody ever feel sincerely pleased at the prospect of remaining in permanent opposition, a social misfit, for the rest of his life? I knew, at any rate, that I myself didn’t. I wanted—however much I might try to persuade myself, in moments of arrogance, to the contrary—to find some place, no matter how humble, in the scheme of society. Until I do that, I told myself, my writing will never be any good; no amount of talent or technique will redeem it: it will remain a greenhouse product; something, at best, for the connoisseur and the clique” (247-8).
 
Isherwood writes of the Great War: “I came to regard Lester as a ghost—the ghost of the War. Walking beside him, at midnight, on the downs, I asked him the question which ghosts are always asked by the living: ‘What shall I do with my life?’ ‘I think,’ said Lester, ‘that you’d make a very good doctor.’ He had already tried that at Cambridge and failed!
 
Most of all Isherwood continues to modify his craft: “Therefore epics, I reasoned, should start in the middle and go backwards, then forwards again—so that the reader comes upon the dullness half-way through, when he is more interested in the characters; the fish holds its tail in its mouth, and time is circular, which sounds Einstein-ish and brilliantly modern” (297).
 
Early on, “a lady novelist who was an old friend of our family,” reads his manuscript and in part tells him: “‘If you really have talent, you know, you’ll go on writing—whatever people say to you’” (119).
 
Isherwood takes her advice and—twenty books later—never looks back, except, of course, to write about it!

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

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Mothers and Hubris

2/6/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down.
Tom Brokaw
Born February 6, 1940

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureJeff Bark | Elana Schlenker
February 8 and 15, 2016, George Saunders, “Mother’s Day”: Alma receives a visit from her two adult children, sparking a long flashback about Alma, her late husband Paul, and the woman living across the street, Debi, with whom he has an affair just prior to his death. ¶ Saunders deftly shifts the point of view from Alma to Debi midway through the story so that the reader can get not only Debi’s side of things but perhaps Paul’s, as well. This narrative is mainly about hubris: thinking, first of all, that with two young children, a young couple can continue fucking any time, anywhere they want to, or second, that Alma, the woman scorned, can ignore her neighbor Debi forever simply because she’s had a blazing affair with her husband whom she’s dearly loved, or that even during Alma’s impending death-by-hailstorm she despises Debi enough NOT to accept her offer of a sturdy black umbrella. Usual Saunders’s biting satire, this time of an era of free love gone awry. Saunders’s most recent book is The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip.
Photograph by Jeff Bark
Design by Elana Schlenker


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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

0 Comments

Most Notorious Justice Yet

2/2/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Ayn Rand
Born February 2, 1905

My Book World

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Carmon, Irin and Shana Knizhnik. Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. New York: Dey St., 2015.
 
Without the effective images, the colorful and useful marginalia, this book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg might be reduced to a much smaller size, yet making it far less attractive. The young authors have fully exploited the capabilities of modern printing by taking such aspects to their most interesting extremes. Not only that but they have produced a fact-filled yet engaging tome about a woman who may be the most fascinating and knowledgeable justice now sitting on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States.
 
Each chapter title is penned in a splashy font that looks as if someone printed it with a black marker. The authors include an attractive timeline that demonstrates where RBG’s eighty-two-year-old life falls. They include not only interesting photographs of RBG but also those of important letters and documents. They include an effective chart of “RBG’s Women’s Rights Cases,” that illustrates what was at stake, RBG’s role, and the result. Important annotations in the margins are inked in red!
 
RBG’s rise is a difficult one, but once she sets her sights on something she doesn’t stop until she’s reached her goal. In fact, such an outlook guides her entire career. For example she shocks women by stating that Roe v. Wade is won too early:
 
“‘If only the court had acted more slowly,’ RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had ‘halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.’” (85).
 
But RBG does not plan to ease up on the issue. “Ten years into the Roberts court, much of what RBG has fought for remains at risk, starting with reproductive freedom. The court is poised to consider restrictions on abortion clinics that affect tens of millions of women. ‘We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country,’ RBG told me. An abortion ban, she said, only ‘hurts women who lack the means to go someplace else.’ Public sector unions and affirmative action are already in the court’s crosshairs” (175-6).
 
Of legalese, or more properly, legal prose, RBG says, “‘If my opinion runs more than twenty pages,’ she said, ‘I am disturbed that I couldn’t do it shorter.’” The mantra in her chambers is ‘Get it right and keep it tight.’ She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion’s opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. ‘If you can say it in plain English, you should,’ RBG says. Going through ‘innumerable drafts,’ the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. ‘I think that law should be a literary profession,’ RBG says, ‘and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft’” (121).
 
This Carmon/Knizhnik book is beautiful, informative, and smartly written! Buy it for your friends for birthdays, for Christmas, or for graduation from law school!

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

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    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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