Category: Reading

Continuing to Celebrate National Library Week

4/22/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Libraries always remind me that there are good things in this world.
Lauren Ward
Personal Finance Writer

L. Ward

Texas Tech University Library:
1.7 Million Volumes Strong

Texas Tech University Library | Photo by TTU

In 1973-74, I earned my state certification in elementary teaching at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The University Library building of contemporary architecture had opened in the fall of 1962, and I was impressed with its sheer size, that the multiple floors of stacks would take a long time to fill, such a liberal amount had been accounted for. At that time, because of my having worked in the Southwestern College Library, one organized by the Library of Congress system, I easily procured a student job at the TTU Library (there is also a Law Library, an Architecture Library, and the Southwest Collection/Special Collections building). I worked exclusively for cataloging, which, at the time occupied the sprawling south wing. Again, I reshelved books and “read” the shelves, but I also worked for the cataloging librarian whenever she had projects for me. Perhaps because I was a bit older than most student workers, she trusted me to hunt down information in large Union Catalogs so that she could develop a call number for certain volumes. Once more, I found the library to be sort of a temple to learning, the heart of the university. Among other duties, however, I also ironed on call number labels to new or recataloged books. I strolled out to the large stand of card catalog cabinets and interfiled cards for those new books. Because of my class schedule, I worked an eight-hour day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One of the younger librarians in the department wasn’t much older than me, and she would invite me to break with her in the faculty lounge over in the student union building. She advanced my LC training by giving me faster ways to recognize the correct order of books. I worked in the library that summer, and even after I had taught one year, I was given a job during the next summer when the extra money came in handy.

Beginning in 1983, I began working on an MA in English, and the TTU Library once again became a necessary haunt of mine. The books I checked out largely came from the “PQ,” “PR,” or “PS,” sections. Since I retired in 2002, I visit the library infrequently, largely because of access. Oh, I do have circulation privileges as an alumni member. However, if I want to visit the library during the day, I must park off campus (at most a three-block walk) if I can’t garner one of the coveted Visitor spots. If I want to come after hours I can park in the library parking lot free but only after eight p.m. I’ve found the best time for a nonstudent to go is on weekends or during student holidays when the library maintains business hours only. And I learned NOT to go late on a Sunday afternoon because that’s when a lot of students begin thinking about the research paper that’s due Monday. Still, within those parameters, I’ve been able to conduct research projects related to my reading and writing. For example, a few years ago I tackled all works—twenty-four—of author Christopher Isherwood. I was able to check out about half of them from the TTU Library, thus saving me a bit of money. When I study the TTU Web site now, I am astounded at the changes that have taken place over nearly fifty years, for one, the digital experiences students can tap into. It has held onto and continued to add to its traditional core but also added a number of valuable digital sources. In short, the TTU Library is fabulous source for information.

TOMORROW: How the Library of Congress Helped Me Organize My Library

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Continuing to Celebrate National Library Week

4/21/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a library.
Jorge Luis Borges
Born 1899. Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator.

J. Borges

SOUTHWESTERN COLLEGE LIBRARY --
SMALLER DOES NOT MEAN INFERIOR

Reading Room, Southwestern College Library, c1966 | Photo from 1967 Moundbuilder Yearbook

For three years in the late 1960s I worked in the library of my undergraduate school, Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas. In part, I was trained by a young woman whose husband had just been hired as an instructor. She possessed a quiet, “library” voice, but if you displeased her, she would certainly let you know. She trained me to work circulation, checking in and out books at the front desk, but mostly my work was done in the stacks. The woman taught me that the SC library was catalogued according to the Library of Congress system, and once I learned it, I spent much of my time reshelving books. After a while, I was assigned to “read” the shelves. It was a tedious job in which I checked to make sure that books within an assigned section were arranged in the correct shelf list order. There were signs that asked people NOT to reshelve books, but often I would find books out of place and felt a certain satisfaction in returning them to their proper home. Sometimes the book would be off by a spot or two, a shelf or two, and sometimes it would belong to a shelf on the next floor! Among other things, I may have labeled the spines of new books with call letters. I would inevitably become curious about one and spend a bit of the college’s dime studying its contents. I was often one of the first to check out a book, and I would feel very privileged. Though I was a music major, I sometimes entertained the idea of going to library school or becoming a music librarian after graduation. That's how much I enjoyed my work.

The Deets Library, Southwestern College, Today — Stephen Woodburn, Photos

I was fascinated with the LC system, how it had a category for every subject in the world. As a pupil, off duty, I would roam the stacks, and once I learned what was what, I would browse, searching for what I needed. Just as often as not, this proved as good a method for research than merely studying the card catalog. If, say, I knew where a certain author’s books or a certain subject’s books were housed, I could go there immediately and find what I needed, searching through the books’ indexes or tables of contents. Even though the library contained only 250,000 volumes (I believe), I never seemed to have any problem locating what I needed to write my papers. The stacks also housed carrels where one could study in silence. Most weekday evenings, to avoid dormitory noise, I would head for one of those spots and spend three or four hours before the building closed at ten p.m. The library wasn’t just a place where I worked and studied. It felt like the heartbeat or perhaps the brain center of my education. I worked there until after graduation early into the summer. I soon missed it and the people I had gotten to know there.

TOMORROW: I Celebrate National Library Week | Texas Tech University Library

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How Editors Work

11/9/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Thinking it was easy to take a chance on things if you had nothing to lose—politics, ideas, almost anything in fact; from the bottom of the ladder you could safely risk a fall, but the higher that you climbed the more cautious you must be.
Martin Flavin
Born November 2, 1883

M. Flavin

My Book World

Ginna, Peter, ed. What Editors Do: The Art,
Craft, and Business of Book Editing.
Chicago: U of Chicago, 2017.

Ginna has amassed a large number of essays by editors and agents, or those who used to be one or the other. He organizes their pieces around broad topics such as acquisition, editing process, and publication. But he also includes a section concerning memoir and one about careers in publishing. Writers have heard ad infinitum what editors want when they attend workshops, but somehow, when one is suddenly on the other side of the desk peering through the eyes of those editors one begins to understand. One begins to change how one might structure one’s book or write a book proposal. One suddenly sees what is important. One sees what editors do not want to see. I found three essays to be particularly helpful to me, but I imagine that each reader of this book may find others more attractive precisely because they have different priorities than I do.

1. “The Other Side of the Desk: What I learned about Editing
   When I Became a Literary Agent,” by Susan Rabiner.

“It’s the value added by the author to what is essentially a set of facts, stories, and commentary in search of a larger meaning. To conceptualize is to link these facts, stories, and commentary to a compelling point. A successful book proposal offers to take the reader on a journey. It may be one he has taken, in some form, many times before. An author’s concept for the book is her promise [is] that with the benefit of new research, new stories, new insights, and her authorial guiding vision, the reader will see new things on the journey and arrive at a new destination—and even, at the end, be changed by the experience” (77).

2. “The Half-Open Door: Independent Publishing and
   Community,” by Jeff Shotts.

“There is now, as a result, a vast commercial enterprise around book publishing, where annual profits are valued above cultural currency, books are spoken of in terms of ‘units,’ and readers are sorted by algorithm into categories by which they can be told with increasing accuracy just what it is they want. Commercial values have conflated quantity with quality, and commercial publishers are forced to create the appearance of quality, if there is none, in service of quantity. High advances and movie deals make the news, as do celebrity authors and their book parties and television appearances” (142).

3. “Marginalia: On Editing General Nonfiction,” by Matt
Weiland.

“I also remind the reader that clarity is king. ‘There is nothing that requires more precision, and purity of express, than to write in a familiar style,’ as the great English essayist William Hazlitt put it nearly two hundred years ago. ‘To write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force,and perspicuity. . .’ To me these are the cardinal virtues of strong, convincing English prose. (Hazlitt’s last term, meaning ‘clarity,’ is now, alas, an antique word)” (173).

These essays are ones that I shall refer to again and again as I attempt to maintain a writing and a publishing life. Perhaps the reader might like them, as well.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-29 Hawaii

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A Writer's Wit

8/7/2018

I've wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.
Garrison Keillor
Born on August 7, 1942

G. Keillor

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-17 Colorado

'Forty Autumns' a Moving Memoir

5/4/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
It's impossible to control the reception of your work—the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.
Kim Edwards
Born May 4, 1958

K. Edwards

My Book World

Willner, Nina. Forty Autumns: A Family’s
Story of Courage and Survival on Both
Sides of the Berlin Wall. New York:
Morrow, 2016.

Just under twenty-one, young Hanna flees East Germany to pursue a life of freedom in the West, and she must do it twice to succeed. The second escape, however, sticks, and she makes a life in America.

Her daughter, Nina, is the author of this amazing and absorbing account of what the division of Germany following World War II did to Hanna’s family. Under the heavy thumb of Erich Honecker, the East German regime was perhaps more repressive than its mother, the Soviet Union.

This forty-year tale follows the lives of those left in East Germany, as well as the life of Hanna and her children in America. Daughter Nina winds up working for the US government in West Germany and comes very close to where her family lives, but she is unable to visit with them or even let them know she is present.

Hanna’s father, Opa, is a respected and revered school teacher in the town where they live, but eventually he is exiled to a small village because he will not fully support the Communist line. His children who remain in East Germany, however, become somewhat more compliant, although none of them ever joins the Communist party—which does inhibit their success.

Wellner’s story of how the family finally unites after forty autumns is more than touching; it is the richest kind of poignancy.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-13 New Jersey

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The Miracle That Is Trevor Noah

9/30/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market—it knows nothing about target markets.
Julianna Baggott
Born September 30, 1969

J. Baggott

My Book World

Noah, Trevor. Born a Crime: Stories from a
South African Childhood. New York:
Spiegel, 2016.

Noah, host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, has written a touching and transformational memoir. In writing honestly of his metamorphosis through the years, he thus transforms the reader. Most Americans, myself included, probably have only a vague idea of what South Africa’s apartheid was really like. Noah makes it crystal clear: blacks, whites, coloreds, the latter having a different definition than it had in the US. Noah was colored: half white and half black. Under the first nine years of his life, his birth was illegal, according to apartheid; his life with his black mother and his white father was illegal. But it wasn’t nonexistent.

This joyful book reveals the ways in which he and his mother negotiate their way around Noah’s lack of existence. He tells tales of attending church on Sunday, his mother seeing that he always makes it to three services in three different churches. Noah divulges tales of naughty behavior when he is in his teens and twenties. He even does a short stint in jail but avoids a long prison sentence, all for illegal sales of pirated audio material. But though he is enterprising and makes a good living for the ‘hood, he realizes he will never do any better than that if he doesn’t get out. The book’s climax takes place when a near-fatal fit of violence occurs between his stepfather and mother, itself a miracle of survival. I had hoped to read of Noah’s continuing education, as he becomes a comedian, and now host of an incredibly important source of satire and news. But we will have to wait for his next book, when he will hopefully be as generous as he is in the first and share once again his miraculous story. Can’t wait.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction

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The Men in Bosworth's Life

6/30/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
If people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic, the corruption will slowly become more brazen, the intimidation of opponents stronger. Laws intended to ensure accountability or prevent graft or protect civil liberties will be weakened. If the president uses his office to grab billions for himself and his family, his supporters will feel empowered to take millions. If he successfully exerts power to punish enemies, his successors will emulate his methods.
The Atlantic, March 2017
David Frum
Born June 30, 1960

D. Frum

My Book World

Bosworth, Patricia. The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.

For the same reasons I enjoyed reading her biography Montgomery Clift years ago, I sucked down Patricia Bosworth’s memoir of her own life. She is not afraid to search out and write the truth of any situation and do it with dignity and empathy for involved parties. Because for about a decade she is an actor, she becomes acquainted with Montgomery Clift personally, and she approaches her subject with honesty and a certain kindness. The same can be said for her book: all of the members of her family are loved ones, but they are also, at times, bad actors who undermine her life. Her father is a narcissistic alcoholic attorney, a closeted homosexual (according to her mother) whose love is not entirely unconditional; he profoundly affects Patricia’s life when he commits suicide. Her mother is a published novelist (Strumpet Wind) whose career stalls and becomes an ambitious stage mother who plays on all Patricia’s insecurities: Patricia’s actions and achievements are never good enough. The relationship that affects Bosworth the most, perhaps, is her brother, Bart.

When they are young they establish a special bond, with even their own form of Pig Latin which their parents cannot understand; they share that language for many years until Bart ceases to think it appropriate. A particularly effective tool peppered throughout the book are her continued conversations with Bart’s ghost. Eerie how she makes it seem as if he’s still alive as he advises her. In his teens, her brother is attracted to males and has sex with a couple of them, including a friend at an exclusive boys’ boarding school. There, after they are discovered together, the friend commits suicide, an act from which Bart never recovers. He, too, eventually kills himself before reaching the age of twenty-one. Bosworth’s father and brother are not the only men she writes about in her page-turner; she outlines in detail her love (and sexual) relationships with several different men, including two husbands.

She reminisces about her acting career in which she appears on Broadway with the likes of Daniel Massey and Elaine Stritch. The highlight of this period may be when she appears with Audrey Hepburn in a film, The Nun’s Story. Nonetheless, in spite of Bosworth’s success on the stage, she comes to the realization that she can no longer bare her soul in that manner but must establish a writing career instead. And glad we are that she does. Bosworth’s book—taken from her diaries, her notes, but most of all her remembrances—is a stunning read.

[I’m still amazed in this day and age how a book produced by one of the top companies in the country can make it through all that scrutiny with a typo:

“I was able to slip into the wings just as Bobby begain [sic] belting out ‘I Believe in You,’ the signature number” (350).

How many copyeditors overlooked this error and how many times? How many times did the author or her staff herself read the galleys? Amazing.]

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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A River That Divides

6/9/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
A really interesting life has embraced everything from the most magnificent exultation to the depths of tragedy. I would say that's tremendous experience—but I wouldn't say enjoyment is an accurate summary of it!
Marcia Davenport
Born June 9, 1903

M. Davenport

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

Carlos Javier Ortiz

***June 5 and 12, 2017, Will Mackin, “Crossing the River No Name”: Some Navy seals in Afghanistan, in 2009, set out to ambush a group of Taliban. ¶ In this rich story the narrator relates two flashbacks, one rather lengthy, which seamlessly portray the complexities of wars and those intrepid souls who fight them. The author creates character more by interior shots and with zingy names such as Hugs and Cooker than by things visual. He creates character when the narrator encounters a vision of the Virgin Mary in a near-drowning situation. The narrative’s climax may occur when Hal, the Big Kahuna, disappears beneath the surface of a river that appears on no map, that virtually disappears in different seasons. Is Hal alive or not? The narrator apparently does not know because even though Hal is his best pal, he must carry out a mission of war. This story—with its rich imagery and figurative language—is the sort I love most, one that carries me into a world I would never encounter first-hand, nor want to, but with great skill Mr. Mackin snatches me up and returns me safely to my seat when he has finished with me. If I were awarding four stars it would receive five. The author’s debut collection, which I can’t wait to read, will come out in March 2018.
Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2017

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Uncovered Ground

5/13/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
I always thought the saddest feeling in life is when you're dancing in a really joyful way and then you hit your head on something.
Lena Dunham
Born May 13, 1986

L. Dunham

MY BOOK WORLD

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground
Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 2016.

The tight structure of this novel is based on twelve chapters—six named for characters and six named for states or regions in the US. Each one shifts readers to where they need to be to follow the life of a runaway slave, Cora, in the pre-Civil War South. Cora’s grandmother, Ajarry, was a slave, and so was her mother, Mabel, who abandons Cora when she’s eleven. Rage governs Cora’s life, fuels her temper and her senses, both of which serve to save her life as she shapeshifts to fit varying situations above ground. The unsuspecting reader who learned in elementary school that Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad was not literal is in for a fantastical ride as Whitehead brings it alive, with stations and steam engines and schedules, even a pump handcar that serves as Cora’s final vehicle of escape. The author’s grasp of history, his simple yet elegant prose, and his understanding of the complex humanity of master and slave serve to create a novel that is worthy of all the praise and accolades it has received.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Book-TV Update: Clavin's Dodge City

5/5/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination.
Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochran Seaman), Ten Days in a Mad-House
Born May 5, 1864

N. Bly

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below a presentation I believe to be of interest to a broad audience.

Tom Clavin. Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West. New York: St. Martin’s, 2017.

Clavin’s reading, held at Watermark Books and Café in Wichita, Kansas, is one that holds your attention throughout, as he reveals the real history of Dodge City, this infamous town of the Wild West. The author digs deep to dispel all the myths. The players—Earp, Masterson, and others—are neither all bad nor all good. With the dogged pursuit of a fine journalist Clavin uncovers the truth, and it is more interesting than the myths! Tune into find out. This first aired March 8, 2017.

Click here to view Clavin's presentation at C-SPAN's Book-TV.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Book-Tv Update: Wiesel's 'Night'

4/29/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
We need sex education in schools, but we need it at home first. We need parents to learn the names of the teachers who are teaching their children. We need families to question day-care centers, to question other children and their own as to what goes on.
Rod McKuen
Born April 29, 1938

R. McKuen

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below a presentation that recently affected me very deeply.

Elie Wiesel. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, FSG, 2006.

On January 29, 2017, 3:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., the Museum of Jewish History in New York City presented an oral reading of Wiesel’s moving work, Night. Readers of all kinds—actors, directors and producers, rabbis and other Jewish leaders, authors, students, journalists, police and politicians, among many others, about a hundred—read straight through with only two ten-minute intermissions, until the late Wiesel’s horrific account of the Holocaust was told.

Each reading segment was no more than five minutes, and some segments were read in Yiddish. There were old readers, young, black, white, Jewish, Gentile, Asian, Latin—the total effect being that six million ghosts were telling their stories through Wiesel. In his work, night serves as an extended metaphor, that the entire ordeal is one long, hellish night, is every murdered Jew’s story, every detail, and this simple production/tribute may be one of the most powerful of its kind that I’ve ever witnessed. Everyone must view it, then read the book. You may view the five-hour presentation at one of the following Web sites:

Book-TV
Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
YouTube

#WeRemember | #nycReadsNight

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Book-TV Update

4/21/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
I spent a lot of time in the White House in the public areas where reporters are allowed to go, but I spoke to people about the private quarters as well. Some of the things I learned were small, novelistic details. For example, the fact that there were still pet stains on the carpets from the Bush cats when the Obamas moved in.
Jodi Kantor, New York Times Correspondent
Born April 21, 1975

J. Kantor

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below one presentation that recently piqued my interest.

Daniel Connolly. The Book of Isaias: A Child of Hispanic Immigrants Seeks His Own America. New York: St. Martin's, 2016.

This panel presentation was part of the Tucson Festival of Books, in which author Connolly speaks of the status of children of undocumented immigrants. In the book that takes five years to research and write, he says that the vast majority of these children are citizens, yet they are often not only mistreated but when their parents are deported they have no lifeline. He states that enforcement of immigration laws varies from region to region. For example, in Arizona there are guards and walls. In Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives, the workforce depends heavily on immigrants, and the laws are not always adhered to. A fascinating discussion, and it looks like a fine read—on my wish list, for sure. He shares the stage with Julissa Arce, author of My (Underground) American Dream: My True Story as an Undocumented Immigrant Who Became a Wall Street Executive.

Daniel Connolly's Book-TV Presentation

NEXT TIME: Earth Day 2017

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Book-TV Update

4/14/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
We might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class guys, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys. The Difference Engine
Bruce Sterling
Born April 14, 1954

B. Sterling

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below two presentations that recently piqued my interest.

Maureen Dowd. The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics. New York: Twelve, 2016.

I’ve viewed both of these presentations, one held at the Miami Book Fair and the other at the Tucson Festival of Books. In the first one, shortly after the 2016 election of our forty-fifth president, she speaks directly to her book, how, after covering 45 for over thirty years, she’s arrived at some conclusions as to how he won the election. In the second video, she is questioned by host, Peter Slen, of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, a fine interviewer, who speaks to her about not only the book but her entire career. In both events the New York Times columnist from Washington, DC, is quite candid and astute in her assessment of President 45. She says we’re in for quite a ride. Tune into to one or both talks to find out why!

Maureen Dowd at the Miami Book Fair
Maureen Dowd at the Tucson Festival of Books

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Is Duckspeak the Same as #Trumpspeak? Is TWITTER THE NEW DOUBLESPEAK?

3/31/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate—it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.
Leo Buscaglia
Born March 31, 1924

Buscaglia

My Book World

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four.
New York: Harcourt, 1949.

For summer reading in 1966, I was required to peruse Nineteen Eighty-Four for my first college humanities class, along with Huxley’s Brave New World and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Sometimes a book begs to be re-read because it whispers to you. Yes, as I pass by my bookshelf words like HATE WEEK (two minutes of hate is rather like 140 characters of venom) and BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU carry a familiar ring, yet as if for the first time making sense. Other Orwellian terms spring from this novel: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, a language called NEWSPEAK in which words are deliberately manipulated by the government to control people’s thoughts. When I first read this book at eighteen, I did not stop to realize that the character Winston Smith, by Orwell’s own calendar, was born in 1945, a few years before me, his girlfriend Julia, in 1957. At the time, 1984 didn’t seem like eighteen years away; it seemed like FOREVER.

Now one has to wonder. Like citizens of Orwell’s London with telescreens in every room (two-way cameras), we can be hunted down at any moment by way of our cell phones, the GPS systems in our cars, the fact that a certain G entity has photographed every one of our houses and connected them to our addresses so that anyone in the world—whether a relative or an assassin—can locate us within minutes. That the government can record our telephone calls at will or monitor our Internet use are ubiquitous realities that have become invisible to us. And how much does Orwell’s term DOUBLETHINK smack of 45’s ALTERNATE FACTS, DUCKSPEAK OF #TRUMPSPEAK?

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy” (80).

And how is this for Orwell’s prescient definition of DOUBLETHINK:

“the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”? (214).

“It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is” (215).

Upon my first reading years ago, I rather shrugged off Orwell’s dystopian depiction of life in the future. I wasn’t overly upset by Winston Smith’s treatment in the end, where he is severely punished physically and mentally for not believing in Big Brother because, to Smith, it is all make believe. Yet, in spite of the novel’s ugliness, Orwell does manage to limn the purity of human love, how Winston and Julia fall for one another but must hide their love, how the glass paperweight with a colorful piece of coral embedded inside is an extended metaphor for their hidden relationship, how in the end the paperweight is shattered like their love is shattered once they are discovered. In spite of the State’s efforts to “change” the two individuals, to erase their thoughts and make them party members, the State really doesn’t quite succeed, for in the end Winston sheds tears of love for who else, but Big Brother himself.

I purposely omit plot elements because many of you will already have read the novel, and if you haven’t, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. It would not be a waste of time to work it into your schedule at some point. If around today, characters Winston and Julia would be about seventy-one and sixty, yet it's hard to believe, given their plight in the novel, that they would be much more than folds of skin with hair.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Book-TV Update

3/24/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Everything has two sides—the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.
Olive Schreiner
Born March 24, 1855

O. Schreiner

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below a presentation that recently piqued my interest.

Adrian Miller. The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2017.

I found Mr. Miller’s reading, held at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, not only entertaining but quite edifying. His book scours history to locate the African-American men and women who cook for the nation’s first families and tells of their struggles. He includes anecdotes about presidents without much of a palate to tantalizing recipes that have survived. He describes one concoction, which sounds fascinating, in which one empties out a jar of pickles, mixes a packet of Kool-Aid with the remaining juice, repacks the jar with pickles, and lets the concoction cool in the fridge for two weeks. Mm, yum! The sweet-tart nature of that description creates a curiosity I can’t pass up (this book is on my Wish List). Perhaps you’ll find it tempting, as well, and tune in to Adrian Miller's presentation. I hope you'll be moved to buy a copy of his book.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Book-TV Update

3/17/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
Born March 17, 1933

P. Lively

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most all cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Below I list a presentation I recently found interesting.

John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney. People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy. New York: Nation Books, 2016.

In spite of the apocalyptic title, authors McChesney and Nichols lay out for the reader what to expect in the future and perhaps ways to deal with it. From Amazon’s blurb: “The consequences of the technological revolution are about to hit hard: unemployment will spike as new technologies replace labor in the manufacturing, service, and professional sectors of an economy that is already struggling. The end of work as we know it will hit at the worst moment imaginable: as capitalism fosters permanent stagnation, when the labor market is in decrepit shape, with declining wages, expanding poverty, and scorching inequality. Only the dramatic democratization of our economy can address the existential challenges we now face. Yet, the US political process is so dominated by billionaires and corporate special interests, by corruption and monopoly, that it stymies not just democracy but progress.”

In his portion of this discussion held at the Tucson Festival of Books, John Nichols gives everyone a reason to grasp where we are in history and come to grips with it. Click on this link to view the entire presentation, about an hour in length.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Book-TV Update

3/10/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
On sherry: The destiny of a thousand generations is concentrated in each drop. If the cares of the world overwhelm you, only taste it, pilgrim, and you will swear that heaven is on earth.
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
Born March 10, 1833

de Alarcón

My Book World

OFTEN, if I’m involved reading two or three lengthy books at one time, I may spend two to four weeks completing them.

I am in one of those periods right now, perusing a lengthy biography of author E. M. Forster, revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eight-Four, a novel I read fifty years ago for college freshman orientation, and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters.

Each weekend, however, I do watch C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of new nonfiction literature hitting the shelves, often recording the ones I want to watch and viewing them later in the week. Sometimes the reading venue is a coveted bookstore, such as DC’s Politics and Prose, or it might be a university setting. Sometimes, conservative, sometimes progressive. Many times, the subject matter is not political at all. Now, here is the best part, you can view any one of these readings at Book-TV’s Web site at any time. You do not have to have cable TV. And if you do wish to watch them on television, you can view and download and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule. Below I list a couple of readings I recently found interesting.

Terry McDonell. The Accidental Life: An Editor's Notes on Writing and Writers. New York: Knopf, 2016.

As editor of Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, McDonell reveals scintillating details about his relationship with such writers as Hunter S. Thompson. His fascinating presentation sustained my interest throughout. First aired February 18, 2107.

Dean Baker. Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Washington DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2016. In this book Baker “argues that government policies, not globalization or the natural workings of the free market, have led to the upward redistribution of wealth seen around the world over the past four decades.” His logical and comprehensive lecture offers one of the most compelling arguments I’ve ever heard on the subject. First aired January 17, 2107.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Ode to The Daily Show

1/27/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
The corporation is one of the great unheralded human inventions of destruction. It is a way to absolve from any personal liability a bunch of people. They form together in a massive ID and they do whatever they want.
Keith Olbermann
Born January 27, 1959

My Book World

Smith, Chris. The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History As Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests. With a foreword by Jon Stewart. New York: Grand Central, 2016.

For those who watched Comedy Central’s The Daily Show for many years, this book is a joy to read. It allows one to revel in its hallmark moments, following the script as you remember watching it. As the title suggests, a panoply of people, in short bursts, tell this story. Smith has done an admirable job (à la George Plimpton in his biographies of Edie Sedgwick and Truman Capote) of threading together this massive narrative by way of individual recollections, sometimes contradicting or engaging one another, as one might do at a table reading of a script. Below I list but a few nuggets gleaned from the text.

Rory Albanese (executive producer):
“The root of every Daily Show script, like the root of any good sitcom script or any story, is a narrative arc. This is another Jon Stewart-ism: ‘The jokes are easy. We’ve got a lot of funny people. We’ll get the jokes. You know what’s hard? Why the fuck are we talking about this, and what are we saying about it? What’s the arc? What is the essay that we’re structuring?’” (59).

Jon Stewart (star of Daily Show):
“Can I tell you the craziest thing? Tracey and I were walking that afternoon of 9/11, or it might have been the next day, in just the quiet of it. We didn’t really know where we were going, just walking, and we walked by a building and there was a little street mouse, I don’t even think it was a rat, a little street mouse. All of a sudden a dude—I guess it was the super in the building, we hadn’t seen him—fucking clubbed it right in front of us. I remember us just both bursting into tears, and we just kind of like . . . I just remember us bursting into tears on a constant basis, as everybody was. The smell is the things that I’ll never forget, just that was . . .” (72).

James Dixon (Stewart’s manager):
“‘Jon Always said, ‘I don’t need to be on a broadcast network to validate myself. I’ll do what I do for basic cable, and if I do it well it won’t matter where I do it from. That will be my legacy’” (85).

Ben Karlin (head writer and executive producer):
“It felt like we were crazy. How could we be the only people who were recognizing this ridiculous disparity? It became one of the signature things for the show to find these quotes and have people contradicting their own words, but in the early stages it felt pretty novel to do something like that so vividly with one person” (109).

Rakesh Agrawal (founder, SnapStream):
“What we invented was a unit that connects to a company’s computer server. One of them can record up to ten television shows at a time. The recordings you make can be watched on the network, from any desktop inside an organization, by multiple people at the same time. But for The Daily Show, the point is not really about watching TV. We translated the TV audio into text, and made it possible to search inside shows” (259).

“The original notion was to stage dueling rallies, with [Stephen] Colbert leading ‘The March to Keep Fear Alive.’ Instead it was merged into a single event, ‘The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.’ What never changed was the intention that Stewart announced on The Daily Show, to put on a pageant for noncrazy, non-book-and-flag-burning, nonscreaming America: ‘Not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority.’ In other words, a plea for rationality in an increasingly irrational political and media landscape, a reminder that there’s a distinction between ‘political’ and ‘partisan.’ Plus Colbert in an Evel Knievel jumpsuit” (261).

Jessica Williams (correspondent, 2012-2016):
“But the first few months were really tough. The Daily Show, it had been on for a while, and I think people can be very possessive of the show. When I first started, I got . . . you know just . . . you know the negative racial comments in my inbox. You do anything that ruffles a few feathers on the show, there’s always going to be some racist dude ready to like call you a nigger, you know? I think a lot of it has to do with people just being really stupid . . . . At that time, it really bothered me a lot. Now, either I get it less or I just don’t give a shit anymore” (324).

“[Lewis] Black’s segments could still be wildly funny tangents about, say, artisanal crystal meth or the need for a Trump 2012 presidential campaign (‘This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life, a president who’s not afraid to tell the truth about being a lying asshole!’), but over the years many of Black’s rants were vein-bulging exclamation points to The Daily Show’s main themes” (329).

Jon Stewart:
“So we also did a longer piece partly about how Fox [Network] was ‘outraged’ that Ferguson [Missouri] was being cast in racial terms. And I talked about how we’d recently sent a producer, Stu Miller, who was dressed like a homeless elf with a week’s worth of five o’clock shadow, and a correspondent, Michael Che, dressed in a tailored suit, out to do an interview—and how it was Che who got stopped by security. The point being, here’s how ubiquitous racism and indignity is. To Michael, this wasn’t ‘You’re not going to fucking believe what happened.’ It came up in the course of the conversation about other things. That’s what I meant in the piece when I said, ‘You’re tired of hearing about racism? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it” (351).

Ramin Hedayati (studio production, field producer):
“It became the first of the three big pizza rants—the other two were about Chicago deep dish, and then Mayor [Bill] de Blasio eating pizza with a fork. And they were funny and really silly. But they were also great illustrations of the show’s process.
Jon was all about the passion. He always said, ‘We need to make sure we’re channeling our emotions. What do we find joyous? What makes us have a strong emotional reaction? If something makes you angry, why? Bring that to the idea. If something’s just purely fun, let’s just have fun with it.’ He wants us to be writing to, and pitching to, that strong feeling. Plenty of times it’s outrage about something serious. But we don’t need to do the congressional takedown every night” (381).

Jon Stewart:
“And this, this, is their genius. Conservatives are not looking to make education more rigorous and informative, or science more empirical or verifiable, or voting more representative, or the government more efficient or effective. They just want all those things to reinforce their partisan, ideological, conservative viewpoint” (383).

The Daily Show, of course, continues under the leadership of comedian, Trevor Noah. Ratings have drooped some, but Jon Stewart started something that, as long as our country remains in flux, tugging against itself, will charge on into the future. It must.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Words More Powerful Than the Story

1/13/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
No period of my life has been one of such unmixed happiness as the four years which have been spent within college walls.
Horatio Alger
Born January 13, 1832

My Book World

Cunningham, Michael. The Snow
Queen: A Novel. New York: Farrar,
2014.

Not Cunningham’s best outing, although, as a fan, I don’t think he could write badly, ever. This novel just seems to echo motifs in other novels he’s written: two men, one woman in an odd sort of triangle, this time brothers, one straight, one gay, and the straight one’s wife, who is dying of cancer. Yet, I’ve noticed, as often happens with writers who work autobiographically, a writer might not be “finished” with a certain motif after using it once. In The Hours Cunningham also repeats the motif of a mother baking a child’s birthday cake; however, its usage seems more significant in The Hours. Cunningham’s writing always seems so facile, that is, he so easily appears to articulate exactly what he wants to say; it seems, however, that this time his verbiage is more powerful than his story.

E-book typos:

“Nor is he [is] a pedant” (110).

“‘[It] Is that it? Does she do things because Liz would do them?” (176).

[Why are these flubs important? I’m not sure. Is the text copyedited by the same person who copyedits the print copy? If so, are these errors also present in the print copy? If not, why would there apparently be two different copy editors for different versions of the same text? And why in this day and age, after thirty years of computerized printing, should there be even one typo in a published book? Just asking.]

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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A Life Well Lived

10/28/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
I'd go to the library so I could sit in a big, quiet room and listen to pages being turned. There was a boring librarian who everyone in fifth grade hated. But I loved her because when she would read us stories in her soft voice, she'd turn my head into a snow globe.
Andrea Seigel
Born October 28, 1979

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 twenty-first in a series of twenty-four.

Isherwood, Christopher. Lost Years: A Memoir 1945-1951. London: Chatto, 2000.

With the completion of this book I’ve now read all 3,069 pages of Isherwood’s diaries. Though he calls this one a memoir, it is a reconstructed diary of the years 1945-1951. In essence, Isherwood keeps two records: a day-to-day account of people he interacts with, major and minor events. In the more expanded Diaries Volumes One – Three, he writes out detailed accounts of events, observations, prejudices, fears about his health, and high and low spots with his lovers, particularly Don Bachardy. In Lost Years, however, Isherwood holds nothing back. Except for changing some names of partners, he tells all about his sex life during these six years. At one point he quietly boasts (or otherwise he would not mention it) that he has had over 400 sex partners (and he’s only in his forties, heh, heh). His pattern in this volume is to list the day-to-day events, and, as of this writing (1973) he combs his (excellent) memory to expound on those events. At the same time, as a heavy drinker, he often admits he can remember little or nothing about things he has written.

Still, he does comment on his writing projects, his relationship at the time (a younger man, William Caskey, a photographer), and notes about books he is reading and films he’s worked on as a screenwriter or viewed for entertainment. His prejudices against Jews, the French, and dark-skinned people seem more entrenched than when he is older. Again, is he a victim of his time and place of birth, or does he willfully deny that these prejudices are immature and wrong-headed? In spite of his flaws, I find much to admire in Isherwood: a man who creates, sings, listens to and critiques his own tunes. Opinionated people often become that way because they realize they are correct about so many things, and that reinforcement causes them to be even more opinionated. We trust them. And often we should.

Some nuggets:

Editor Katherine Bucknell, from her Introduction: “Isherwood never gave up his writing as [Edward] Upward did; for he was a writer above all, not an activist, even when it came to his homosexual kind. By writing in explicit sexual detail about his intimate behavior and that of his close friends and acquaintances in the years immediately following the war, he was portraying the hidden energies and affinities of homosexual men all over the United States who during that period were gathering increasingly in certain, mostly coastal cities as peace and prosperity returned to a country much altered by vast wartime mobilization. This hidden social group, whose consciousness of itself as a group was intensified by the demographic shifts brought about by the war and then extended throughout the 1950s, was to emerge in its own right as a significant force of change in American and in western culture generally during the final third of the twentieth century. Much of this change began in southern California, and Isherwood was living at its source. His personal myth is part of, and in many ways emblematic of, the larger myth of the group to which he belonged: and his reconstruction of his life during the postwar years foretells much of what was to come” (xiv).

Writing about himself in the third person, CI says, helps him to separate himself from the “I” of the rest of his writing: “Isherwood would never cease to be aware of the way in which all success, and indeed all art, excludes or marginalizes somebody. In a sense, his art tries to do the opposite, but whatever is brought to the fore must push something else aside. As a schoolboy he had written to his mother: ‘I have an essay on “omission is the Beginning of all Art” which it may amuse you to see.’ And he explains at some length in Christopher and His Kind, much of the difficulty he had with his work, throughout his career, can be understood as his struggle with the question of how the artist decides what to leave out of his art. The subjects not chose, the themes not addressed, haunt the imagination with the pain of their rejection; for the novelist who feels a strong loyalty to historical fact, the necessity to omit is like the burden of original sin, a crime of neglect which must precede the possibility of artistic creation” (xxxiii).

Isherwood reveals a romantic notion has: “The rest of the day was spent at Bill’s La Cienega apartment. It seems to me now that La Cienega was perhaps the most romantic street in Los Angeles, in those days. It had an un-American air of reticence, of unwillingness to display itself. Its shops were small and unshowy; its private houses were private. Also—and this was what really appealed to Christopher—it seemed to have a bohemian, self-contained life of its own. It was a ‘quarter,’ which didn’t make any effort to welcome outside visitors. Many of its dwellers were hidden away in odd little garden houses and shacks, within courtyards or on alleys, behind the row of buildings which lined the street. It was in one of these that Bill lived” (15).

A bit of literary gossip: “Katherine Anne [Porter] treated them like favored nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher’s deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression. By her implicit claim to be the equal of Katherine Mansfield and even Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne had stirred up Christopher’s basic literary snobbery. How dare she, he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up cook in her arty finery, how dare she presume like this! And he imagined a grotesque scene in which he had to introduce her and somehow explain her to Virginia, Morgan [Forster] and the others . . . [t]hus Katherine Anne became the first of an oddly assorted collection of people who, for various reasons, made up their minds that they would never see Christopher again. The others: Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, Lincoln Kirstein” (68-9).

CI became acquainted with the famed Joseph Pilates, designer of physical education for compromised bodies, when CI joined the man’s gym: “Mr. Pilates was a bully and a narcissist and a dirty old man; he and Christopher got along very well. When Christopher was doing his workout, Pilates would bring one of his assistants over to watch, rather as the house surgeon brings an intern to study a patient with a rare deformity. ‘Look at him!’ Pilates would exclaim to the assistant, ‘That could have been a beautiful body, and look what he’s done to it! Like a birdcage that somebody trod on!’ Pilates had grown tubby with age, but he would never admit it; he still thought himself a magnificent figure of a man. ‘That’s not fat,’ he declared, punching himself in the stomach, ‘that’s good healthy meat!’ He frankly lusted after some of his girl students. He used to make them lie back on an inclined board and climb on top of them, on the pretext that he was showing them an exercise. What he really was doing was rubbing off against them through his clothes; as was obvious from the violent jerking of his buttocks” (120). Lust may be in the eye of the beholder!

CI on screenwriting, something he did to pay the bills: “Christopher had always been a model employee. He despised amateurs like Brecht who, when they condescended to work at a film studio, whined and sneered and called themselves whores or slaves. Christopher prided himself on his adaptability. Writing a movie was a game, and each game had a different set of rules. Having learned the rules, Christopher could play along with enjoyment—especially if he had a fellow player like Gottfried Reinhardt who was enjoying himself too. Once Christopher had accepted the fact that this game was to be played according to the Viennese code, he became almost as Viennese as Gottfried and Fodor. I have no doubt that some of the script’s most Viennese touches were contributed by him, though I can’t remember which they were” (152).

CI quotes author Cyril Connolly: “. . . the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece . . . no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, for they will not acknowledge that it is their present way of life which prevents them from ever creating anything different or better” (275).

This statement may have continued to resonate with Isherwood as his life progressed, because he kept an active social (and often sexual) life, rife with smoking and drinking. Though he did finally give up the former, drinking (though he was not a classic alcoholic, often giving it up for weeks or months at a time) to excess remained a part of his life until quite late in life.

Isherwood begins keeping journals when he is a schoolboy and continues during his short time at Cambridge. He continues while living in 1930s pre-Nazi Berlin. After he writes The Berlin Stories, he destroys those diaries, thinking that they have served their purpose, that he’d rather relive his past through his fiction than his journals. However, he lives to regret his decision and spends the rest of his life attempting to document his life. I believe that perhaps these diaries may end up being his true literary legacy. They provide the scaffolding upon which his other twenty or so works rest. And for all his “fumbling,” his is a life truly fulfilled. He both works hard and has a great deal of fun, and he never apologizes for either.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

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Trusting the Float

10/17/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
If you are going to write, nothing will stop you, and if you are not going to write, nothing will make you.
Alan Garner
Born October 17, 1934

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Emiliano Ponzi

October 17, 2016, Cynan Jones, “The Edge of the Shoal”: A man gone fishing in a hidden bay, in his kayak, withstands a storm, has his finger stripped by fish while unconscious, and is weathering yet another event as the story ends. He assesses his situation:

“He keeps to hand the thick jumper. Tucks the cagoule in by the seat. Takes a brief inventory of the boat. He does not add: One man. One out of two arms. Four out of ten fingers. No paddle. No torch. One dead phone” (77).

Without said paddle he can only count on what he calls the rhythm of the water, perhaps of life—waves and wind that might or might not move him to shore. The more his life is threatened, of course, the more he wants to survive. “Trust the float now. You have to trust the float” (79). Not surprisingly, Jones’ new novel is titled Cove.
Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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A Rose by the Name of Macaulay

9/16/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them . . . .
William Carlos Williams
Born September 17, 1883

My Book World

Macaulay, Rose. The Towers of Trebizond. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York, 1956.

I came upon Ms. Macaulay when I was searching for a female writer born on August 1 to use in my “Writer’s Wit” citation for that date. The book sounded interesting because according to the woman’s biography, she struggled at times with whether she would live a secular life or a Christian one, and her work reflected such a conversation.

The book obviously takes place in Turkey, throughout the Middle East of a much earlier time. And obviously, neither men nor women could easily travel there today.

Information I’ve adapted from the back cover tells the plot in a nutshell: The narrator, Laurie, relates the story of herself, her Aunt Dot and camel (whom Laurie borrows from time to time), and Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. They are traveling from Istanbul to Trebizond to spread Christianity; Laurie is perhaps more devoted than her Aunt Dot, though they both seem to fade in and out on that matter. Along the way this troupe encounters spies, a Greek sorcerer, an ape, and Billy Graham with a busload of evangelists. The novel is part travelogue and part comedy of manners, “a bracing meditation on the perils of love, doubt, faith, and spirituality in the modern world.”

This novel is considered by many to be Macaulay’s finest. I found it interesting, but I must confess that it would have been more entertaining had I ever traveled to that part of the world myself . . . and if I’d studied more ancient history; many of the references were lost on me. And I believe her “wit” to be a bit anachronistic, perhaps understandable to the British and/or those who lived as adults at the time she wrote this book. I have the hard copy if anyone should want to borrow it! Let me know.

NEXT TIME: DIY PUBLISHING 101-C

DIY Publishing 101-A

9/3/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.
Mary Renault
Born September 4, 1905

Taking the Plunge

Since 2005 twenty literary journals have published my short stories, and I've featured a number of them under the "Published Stories" page of my website. The conventional wisdom has always been that after one has published at least fifteen stories, one then seeks to publish them as a collection. Well, as conventions go, this one now stands on its head. Companies are usually willing to publish a writer’s collection only after he or she has premiered a novel, preferably a best-selling one—and often editors would prefer that the stories be linked, making a collection seem more like . . . guess what . . . a novel. They sell better.

Short story collections have always sold "poorly," but prior to the turn of the century (this one), publishers had used the sales of their best sellers to subsidize what they called mid-list writers: solid writers, who didn't draw wide audiences but had respectable sales. I wouldn't presume to say that I'm equal to one of those, but several times in the last few years I've almost placed a collection, and yet, for one reason or another certain independent presses passed—while claiming to like my work! Painful. Then I read a short article—"Presto Book-O (Why I Went Ahead and Self-Published)"—at The Rumpus by fiction writer, Steve Almond. He'd already published several collections but decided to publish a collection himself. I believe he makes some great points.

Almond's words inspired me, some years later—I'm not the most courageous person in the world—and my short story collection, My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories will be out later this year. Before that time the PDFs of my stories will come down off the "Published Stories" page of my website, and if interested parties wish to read them they will then have an opportunity to buy a copy of those stories from Amazon. Yes, I chose to go with Amazon's CreateSpace, which will produce the book and the Kindle version, as well. In the coming weeks, though I'm sure other writers have already done this, I will be posting my experiences—from researching companies to seeing the manuscript edited and uploaded to selecting artwork for the cover. All the heartache and love of seeing my work come to fruition—just the way I envision it! As Rachel Maddow says, "Watch this space!"

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
NEXT THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11: DIY PUBLISHING 101-B

Heart

8/25/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”
Christopher Isherwood, from his novel, *A Single Man*
Born August 26, 1904

My Book World

O’Brien, Edna. A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O’Brien. With a foreword by Philip Roth. New York: Plume, 1984.

These twenty-nine stories are the best plucked from four of O’Brien’s prior collections plus four previously unpublished stories. Yet when I read them, they all seem of a kind: all of them taking place in various decades of her native Ireland. Moreover, one hears the same bells going off in different stories, but always with a slightly different timbre. One of these ringing motifs is men who drink heavily and cause one kerfuffle or another for the women in their lives. Is it the hard edge of Irish life itself—the damp cold, the grinding poverty—that cause men to act badly, or is it a man’s will to do so? Another motif is brash women who yet still have a small fear of the Catholic church, its strictures. And yet another one is the woman hungry for the flesh of love, whether it is with a man or a woman. And yet each time O’Brien presents the reader with one of these jeweled motifs, it is fresh, not much like the bell that went off previously. The collection might be compared to a musical form: variations on a theme, in which these various themes crop up again and again until their final rendering is heard.

One of my favorite stories is “Sister Imelda,” in which a teenage girl in a Catholic school falls in love with her teacher, also a nun. It is a love that is mutual, and yet her friends only think she is sucking up to the sister. No trouble arises. The turmoil between them—whether they should associate in any way but as teacher and pupil—lies just beneath the surface. And then Sister leaves the school.

“I knew that there is something sad and faintly distasteful about love’s ending, particularly love that has never been fully realized. I might have hinted at that, but I doubt it. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things” (143).

In another passage, from the story, “Paradise,” a woman performs the following action ever so subtly that one almost does not recognize what is happening:

“Then she knelt, and as she began he muttered between clenched teeth. He who could tame animals was defenseless in this. She applied herself to it, sucking, sucking, sucking, with all the hunger that she felt and all the simulated hunger that she liked him to think she felt” (214).

In “A Scandalous Woman,” the reader learns that another character has had a certain procedure:

“She had joined that small sodality of scandalous women who had conceived children without securing fathers and who were damned in body and soul. Had they convened they would have been a band of seven or eight, and might have sent up an unholy wail to their Maker and their covert seducers” (252).

Though all these stories were written more than thirty years ago, they still are fresh. The language. The situations. The conclusions. All fresh. O’Brien’s brogue is always something you feel as well as hear: sweet and rough, like chocolate candy with nuts.

NEXT TIME: PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY OF A PARADE IN RENO

New Yorker Fiction 2014

7/31/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.
Rose Macaulay
Born August 1, 1881

Youthful Hazards

August 4, 2014, Paul Theroux, “Action”: Albert, the fifteen-year-old son of a Boston shoe store owner, runs an errand for his father in the late 1950s and faces some unforeseen hazards. ¶ Danger seems to lurk everywhere, whether it’s a man that steals his dime pastry or a store owner who asks Albert if he want to get “bollocky” and have his picture taken. Albert’s friend Eddie has told him about his girl, Paige, who is twenty, stating that she’s “action.” After attending to his father’s errand of picking up some shoes, Albert stops to visit Paige at her flat. She is ironing and offers him some lemonade. Having survived the previous perils, Albert

Edel Rodriguez

doesn’t fare so well now, as a rather large men enters the apartment. During Paige’s brief absence an incident occurs, and Albert exits in a hurry, leaving his father’s shoes behind. Instead of punishing his son, Albert’s father, who is normally quite strict, senses something has happened, something profound, something he cannot change on behalf of his son. Theroux’s collection, Mr. Bones, is out this fall.
Edel Rodriguez, Illustrator

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