30 Years Ago Today

A good stopping place

2009-07-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid and my mother wanted to pry me away from whatever I was reading, she used to ask me in her gentle way to set down the book, "when you reach a good stopping place."

I think I've reached a good stopping place for this blog. I will have a new novel coming out soon, Bride of the Living Dead, and I need to stop looking in the rear view mirror and focus on what's right in front of me.

I started writing this blog in late December of 2005, and it's been fun, self-indulgent and educational. I learned, as usual, by doing things wrong--or at least making my own choices, which may look wrong even when they are right for me!

Lesson one, obscure blog titles are probably not the way to go!

Lesson two, complicated concepts like looking back 30 years compared with now..... What can I say? I'm a novelist, I like a lot of layers!

Although I continued my orange notebook listing books I read until December of 1982, I feel okay about leaving my 30-year-old, 30-years-ago self in 1979. That was when my life began to change and deepen in many ways. My mother died in 1980 and a few months later I met and began to live with the man I would marry. I published my first novel in 1988.

Now here's the scary part. I'm not really giving up blogging. I will keep in touch in the more immediate, unpolished (eek!) form of Live Journal. Simple concept, simple title lynnemurray.livejournal.com

Usually I hide behind material that I've revised and flea-combed for months or, at the very least, days. When Laurie Edison suggested Live Journal, my first thought was: "Fine, for her, she writes about making jewelry, that's colorful, concrete, three-dimensional and intriguing."

Myself, I sit in a trance spinning webs of words. At least spiders get out and slaughter the occasional housefly, but I leave housefly capture to the cats. That's pretty much my life. Who wants to read that? The jury's out on who will read it. But I did get the idea to write a bit about writing, getting Bride ready to go to press, doing revisions on my next (Vampire) book, forging ahead on my ongoing (Ghost) manuscript, book promotion (a major obsession) and all that jazz.

I've been doing guest blogs for Body Impolitic--the next one will be on writing fat fiction. Laurie and Debbie have invited me to blog more frequently. I shall, and I will put up links here when I do.

Thank you for hanging out with me on memory lane! I will leave the archives of this blog where they are and simply post the forwarding address for new stuff. Feel free to visit me in the present day. My new motto is

word salad, word soup, words on fire!

Live large and prosper!

Lynne

Turning Points & Hill's Law of Work

2009-07-05T20:47:00.000-07:00

I had this quote above my typewriter for years although I don't where I got it, or who "Hill" is. Internet searches bring up Napoleon Hill, the "think and get rich" guy, but this doesn't really sound like him. Maybe it's a lost cousin of Murphy's Law, but it describes my life pretty well:

"Hill's Law of Work: Everything takes 8 times longer than you expect it to."

By the same token you never know when you're reaching a turning point until way afterward. In 1979 I came back to San Francisco after a few years hiding out in Los Angeles, That dark time in my life taught me how to write my way out of the hole I'd fallen into. That didn't happen overnight, when I wasn't working a day job or scribbling down my suffering, my other hobbies were drinking too much and alternately dieting and bingeing. I was isolated from most of the people around me, which gave me lots of time to read and write my first novel (as well as some very self-pitying journals). The journals show the darkness starting to lift around 1978-79.

I finally finished the novel, a sensitive story of disillusioned youth. It was essentially unreadable, but I didn't know that then, and anyone who did look at it was too kind to tell me--fortunately. The major thing those years taught me was that I liked writing novels. So the next question I asked myself was. What kind of novel do you want to write next? That's a question I still ask myself often. I also discovered Susie Orbach's Fat is a Feminist Issue somewhere in here, though I haven't found it in the list of books I read, it began to have an impact on me that took several years to fully manifest itself.

Last week I did another guest blog for Body Impolitic on the subject of
fat women in film fat women in film (or the lack thereof).

May 2, 1979

Bird, the Legend of Charlie Parker by Robert George Reiser
Dispatches by Michael Herr
Note: very well done.
The Suicide Cult by Michael Kilduff, RonJaners, SF Chron staff
Oscar Wilde by Philippe Julien
Compromising Positions by Susan Isaacs
Murder on the Yellow Brick Road by Stuart Kaminsky
Kaminsky
Sandlot Peanuts by Charles M. Shultz
Murder R.F.D by Leslie Stephan
Designing Your Face by Way Bandy
Dr. Zismor's Brand name Guide to Beauty Aids by Zizmor & Foreman
The Magician of the golden Dawn, story of Alistair Crowley by Susan Roberts
Altered States by Paddy Chaefsky
Super Wealth, the Secret Lives of the Oil Sheiks by Linda Blandford
Women of Watergate by Edmunson & Cohen
Killed in the Ratings by William L. DeAndrea
Marriage with My Kingdom, the Courtship of Elizabeth I by Alison Plowdon
The Face of Rock and Roll, Images of a Generation by Bruce Bollack & John Wagman
I looked up Bruce Bollack and found an interview he did in 1977 with Leonard Cohen, the interview was more about Bollack than Cohen, yeah, I know, humor
the website owner at Speaking Cohen went looking for Bollack also, and mainly found the book listed above. However, I managed to find out
what Leonard Cohen is doing nowadays. Cool! Happy 75th birthday, Leonard Cohen!

Watership Down by Richard Adams
Note on June 19, 1979 "peculiarly comforting"
I remember reading this book while camping out on my friend's sofa after moving back to San Francisco.

July 3 I read
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, another comfort read

From May 3 to July 5, 2009 I read:

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
A tour de force
about Connie Willis

Starring Xavier, a short film review, a July 8 conversation...and a bit of catching up!

2009-06-21T18:42:00.001-07:00

Many good things are happening, but I keep falling further behind on those books from 30 years ago. When I catch my breath, I'll address that--I wish I could hire my youthfully energetic 30 year-old self to help me out even with typing the titles of all the books she read. But she's become me and time travel remains stubbornly fictional. So I'll just have to do my best. I'll put the Pearlsong Conversation info into a sidebar to make it a little less confusing.

Now the film review and a link to a longer Body Impolitic piece on Fat Men in Film:

Briony Kidd's short film about an Australian fat man on welfare playing Macbeth , Starring Xavier
had me searching the internet for "fat men on film." I did a guest blog for Body Impolitic on that subject, which you can read here.

Kidd's hero, Xavier, beautifully played by actor, Jason Seperic, finds himself an object of ridicule in an amateur theatrical for "unemployed losers." Gradually, he begins to understand Macbeth's dark ambitions and finds ways to dig himself out of his depression and fight for what he wants. By the end of the film, he discovers a voice he did not know he had..

Starring Xavier is a 15-minute film and, due to my elderly TV/DVD player, I had to watch on my computer, but it was an uplifting experience. In an email, Kidd mentioned that a small film like this can take years to put together. My admiration for independent filmmakers increases the more I learn about this kind of devotion.

From March 14, 1979 to May 1, 1979 I read:

I Am Blind and My Dog Is Dead (cartoons) by S. Gross
Line of Duty by earnest Tidyman
Freeway by Deanne Barkley
Jazz-Rock Fusion, the people, the music by Coryell & Friedman
The Japanese Corpse by Janwillem van de Wetering
Idi Amin, Death-Light of Africa by David Gwyn
Instant Beauty, the Complete Way 6to Perfect Makeup by Pablo of Elizabeth Arden
The Great movie Comedians by Leonard Maltin
One Man's Fancy by Saxon
The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery by John Chester Miller
The Wise Wound - Eve's curse and Everywoman. Menstruation as a powerful and positive resource by Shuttle & Redgrove
1979 note didn't finish but will check out again- quite good
2009 note: I LOVED this 2009 blogger response, at Period Piece, "wtf"!
Mood Control by Gene Bylinsky
True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne
Callahan's Cross time Saloon by Spider Robinson
Fat and Alive and Thinning in America by T. I. Rubin, MD
The Women We Wanted to Look Like by Brigade Keenan
Buried in so Sweet a Place by Stanton Forbes
Grave Humor by Fritz Spiegl, Ed.
Writing a Novel by John Braine
My note: A good book, but not a good time for me to read it. Made me impatient so I skipped around in it.
A good review of it
Jack's Book, an oral bio of Jack Keroac by Barry Gifford and Laurence Lee
Note from the future, interesting that Barry Gifford would speak to our Mystery Writers of America group about Black Lizard Press
Celluloid Rock by P. Jenkinson and A Warren
Our Kind of People, American Groups & Rituals by Bill Owens
link
He, an irreverent look at the American Male by Florence King
My note: very funny
2009 note I later read her Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, also funny link
Big Star Fallin' Mama, 5 Women in Black music by Hettie Jones
Hettie Jones website

From March 14, 2009 to May 1, 2009
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Great book. Sad that
Larsson Larsson died in 2004, but at least he finished the trilogy.

Carved in Bone by Jefferson Bass
website

Spyderwick Chronicles, book 1, by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi

I have to stop here. If my hands could hold out I'd type a wonderful Holly Near quote I copied by hand in 1979 that starts "Popular music has contributed more tothe misery of women in the United States than any other single thing except maybe film and television"
Later maybe.

Coming soon in paperback, my new novel, Bride of the Living Dead!

2009-06-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

For those of you often read this blog, I've been promising GOOD NEWS! Here it is!!!

IT'S OFFICIAL! Pearlsong Press will publish a trade paperback edition of my new romantic comic novel, Bride of the Living Dead! Yes, I know I'm repeating the headline, I just can't stop saying it! I've got a new book coming...Yay!

The heroine is Indie film critic, Daria MacClellan. Big, beautiful and rebellious, Daria, who is most comfortable in a horror movie poster T-shirt and blue jeans, finds that her wedding is hijacked by family drama. How did she sign on for a formal wedding planned by Sky, her perfectionist, anorexic, older sister? Daria adores her fiancé and she loves horror films, but her wedding seems to be turning into one. Will a picture perfect pink wedding turn her into the Bride of the Living Dead?

THE EVEN BETTER NEWS - I'm thrilled to be working with Pearlsong Press, a niche publisher featuring body positive fiction and nonfiction with a particular emphasis on Health at Every Size (HAES). Pearlsong is the home of many wonderful authors including the Queen of the Rubenesque Romances, Pat Ballard! I'm so happy to be in royal company.

One of the joys of working with a small press is the personal touch and the commitment to keeping the books available for readers.

With, founder Peggy Elam, Ph.D., at the helm, Pearlsong Press connects with readers in some innovative ways including weekly Health at Every Size broadcasts on Radio Free Nashville. I love the super positive music she plays! Peggy also schedules call-in teleconferences called Pearlsong Conversations, where anyone can call in to chat. I'll let you know when I get to do one of those in case anyone wants to call to talk!

I'll keep you posted as we start the journey toward publication.

The book news from 30 years ago will resume in the next post.

That pesky existential terror again....now starting to catch up

2009-03-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

I am still planning to announce some positive publishing news, but I have to finalize it before I can talk about it. Meanwhile, I do apologize to the few, the brave, those kindly people who read this blog, for such a long stretch between posts. I have been working many hours per day for laughable reimbursement in an effort to survive. As a novelist I'm used to working for practically nothing, but this is a semblance of a "day job" so I haven't been able to excuse it as "what I did for my art."

I thought I might blog here around March 13, but I couldn't finish the post before I had to return to rowing as fast as I could to keep from submerging in the white water rapids also known as my turbulent finances. I just contributed a guest blog to Body Impolitic so it seemed only fair to start catching up with my posts here.

Ironically 30 years ago I was moving back to San Francisco after a couple of years of exile in West Los Angeles, I was too distracted to read a lot. I picked up several books and never finished them. This Jan-March, well, I've been reading some when I needed to escape the whole occupation, preoccupation and obsession with making a living thing. So far I have survived to write this. Friends and family have helped...we all have treasures in our lives, and they are mine. I'll try to catch up next time, and I hope to deliver some good news then.

January 30 to March 13, 1979 I didn't finish any of the books below (except the Rocky Handbook)

Life Is a Banquet by Rosalind Russell

Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be by Simone Signore

Sylvester Stallone' Official Rocky Handbook
(I was a big Rocky fan then)

The Honorable Schoolboy by John Le Carre
I kept getting the characters mixed up in this one.

I DID finish:

Hate Don't Make No Noise, Anatomy of the New Ghetto by Etta Resvey

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Rolling Thunder Logbook by Sam Shepard
my note: self-indulgent in the extreme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_Thunder_Revue

January 30 to March 13, 2009 I read

Dead to Me by Anton Strout
Not too many paranormal fiction novels are this funny Strout's Amazon blogI couldn't find another and I don't have time to keep looking right now!

Mistral's Kiss by Laurell K. Hamilton
A Lick of Frost by Laurell K. Hamilton
Swallowing Darkness by Laurell K. Hamilton
These are the Meredity Gentry series with more plotting than the Anita Blake series has these days!

Cautiously hopeful...

2009-01-29T16:10:00.000-08:00

"I was waiting to call you till I had some good news to report, but there just hasn't been any." That's what I told an old friend when apologized for not having called in a few years. She said her situation was similar. It was bad news that finally got me off the dime to call her (if that expression still makes sense--I didn't use a pay phone to call and it would have cost only a dime if I had. I had heard that the independent bookstore where she's worked for decades will be closing. That sort of bad news is all too common these days.

So I am a bit cautious in saying that I will soon have good news to report on the publishing front soon. I can't say more until things are finalized. Like Emily Dickinson's feathered friend in Hope something somewhere within "sings the tune without the words and never stops at all."

I'll let you know when it's official (and yeah, I hate suspense that trails off to nothing, so if my hopeful publishing news falls through I'll say so).

From December 27, 1978 to January 29, 1979 I read:

Linda Goodman's Love Signs by Linda Goodman
Aiii! Later I even owned a copy. Mostly this book was useful for rationalizing why various romances fell through. Is there a net abbreviation for "rueful laugh"?

Doonesbury's Greatest Hits by G. B. Trudeau

Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man, the Founding of EST by W. W. Bentley, III

Love Kills by Dan Greenberg

The Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Holloran

Sane Occultism by Dion Fortune Mary Violet Firth

The Most Dangerous Man in American, Scenes from the Life of Benjamin Franklin by Catherine Drinker Bowen

It's Your Body, a Woman's Guide to Gynecology by Laverson & Whitney

On Becoming American by Ted Morgan

Does She Know She's There? by Nicola Shaefer
This story of a woman whose daughter, Catherine, has extreme disabilities and Nicola updated her daughter's story a follow-up book from Inclusion Press entitled, Yes! She Knows She's There, telling the story of Catherine's moving into an independent living situation in 1986.

From December 27, 2008 to January 29, 2009 I read:

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith
I held on to this book till I was in a more warm and fuzzy mood. The story is enjoyable, but McCall Smith is such a gentle writer that he makes Agatha Christie look like a dark-hearted serial killer.

This book set me to thinking about Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, and whether someone who liked the No. 1 Ladies Detective stories set in Botswana would enjoy Dinesen's lyrical stories of Kenya circa 1920s. I'm not sure. Dinesen's stories are much sadder and less pretty, although the writing is exquisite.
I love this quote from Questions on the website devoted to her work and life:

...[Isak Dinesen, aka Karen Blixen] spoke publicly about her literary persona...:

"I belong to an ancient, idle, wild and useless tribe, perhaps I am even one of the last members of it, who, for many thousands of years, in all countries and parts of the world, has, now and again, stayed for a time among the hard-working honest people in real life, and sometimes has thus been fortunate enough to create another sort of reality for them, which in some way or another, has satisfied them. I am a storyteller."

Remembrance of heartbreaks past and bagpipes present

2008-12-08T10:40:00.000-08:00

November 25 to December 27, 1978

Bird Lives, the High Life & Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker by Ross Russell
Note from 1978: A tough book for me to read and almost as tough not to read

This note gives me a personal insight, which I'll try to share, even though it highlights what a sad young woman I was in 1978. I sigh to confess that I had a hopeless crush on a jazz musician after a brief affair. Hence the Charlie Parker connection--research I might call it. I carried that torch for an amazing number of years, but fortunately rather than playing it out in life, my heartbreak inspired my first novel--a sensitive story of disillusioned youth. The novel was unreadable, but I learned a lot by writing it. The quaint memory of my youthful misery gives me hope that my current problems will similarly fade once I've come out of the tunnel.

Janus by Arthur Koestler
Note: Only the ch. on wit and humor

The Night Lords by Nicholas Freeling

Emma Hamilton by Norah Lofts

The Thin Game by Edwin Bayrd

The Black Marble by Joseph Wambaugh

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

Air Time, the Inside Story of CBS News by Gary Paul Estes

Movie Stars, Real People and Me by Joshua Logan
Joshua Logan

Soul Rush,Odessey of a young woman of the '70s" by Sophia Collier
- note: a Guru Maharaj Ji survivor

I was interested to see that Collier did well later in life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Rush

November 25 to December 27, 2008 I read:

The Saint City Sinners by Lilith Saintcrow
More demons and necromancers

The Little Country by Charles de Lint
http://www.sfsite.com/charlesdelint/little-desc01.htm

Music and bagpipes in particular play such major role in this book that I went looking for some YouTube examples of bagpipes, etc. This is the one I liked best.

Making Money by Terry Pratchett
It doesn't seem as if I've 30 books by Terry Pratchett, but I have, and I'd happily as many more as he writes and re-read the ones I've already read!

Kyptonite and what women want

2008-11-24T16:51:00.000-08:00

Porno, romance and loading the dice
.
I just read The Devil's Right Hand, the third in a series I enjoy by Lilith Saintcrow. Am I the only person who thinks the cover looks like the bank camera shot of hostage Patricia Hearst robbing the Hibernia Bank?

Patty Hearst

I did have an insight as I read this book into how paranormal romances target women's greatest wish/fear. To give a little background Dante Valentine is necromance who raises the dead and who has formed a relationship with a capital D Demon--the tragic Byronic figure to the tenth power. I don't want to put in much of a spoiler, but when the demon falls for the human, he literally falls....gives her a portion of his power and is inextricably linked to her.

A great deal of the tension in the series so far is Dante's inability to trust this bond. But what struck me was the tension between the Uber-testosterone-laced demonic hero and the way that the heroine has ensnared him.

This reminded me of a conversation with a gay male friend who had just read some women's erotica written by a friend from high school. He had to shake his head at what different fantasies women have. I can't speak with any authority about gay porn, but what little I've read of it leads me to believe that it's similar to heterosexual male porn--with lots of focus on equipment, anatomy and performance. Wait is that a car commercial?

What I've observed about erotica written by women for women is the degree to which power replaces plumbing as the focus. I'm not saying that porn written by women for women doesn't get into serious anatomical exploration. Please feel free to correct me if my baby boom generational thing makes me miss new developments in feminist sensory adventures, but as a general rule I think women often savor the validation involved in arousing desire as a major component of the erotic experience.

In the paranormal romance I see women protagonists loading the dice so that a little sliver of kryptonite pierces the male and renders flight impossible.

There's a similar dynamic of males who breed well in captivity in both of Laurel K. Hamilton popular paranormals series. In each of these the heroine has all the guys to herself and they cannot roam or stray.

And a "Hey Nonny Nonny" to ya'll.

From October 21 to November 24, 1978 I read:

Scribble Scribble by Nora Ephron

The Empty Copper Sea by John D. MacDonald

Confessions of a Compulsive Eater by Diane Broughton
Note: I read this during my dieting days, surprisingly enough when I stopped dieting I no longer had compulsive overeating problems. My own experience has been that the deprivation caused what I will now call "self-starvation related re-feeding."

Copper Gold by Pauline Glen Winslow

Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon? by Wayne L. owdrey, Howard A Daws and Donald Scales

Will Shakespeare, the Untold Story by John Mortimer

The Duchess of Jermyn Street, the Life and Good Times of Rosa Lewis of the Cavendish Hotel by Daphne Fielding

Brat Race, Cartoons by Norman Thelwell

Who's Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor? by Brenda Maddox

Quiet as a Nun by Antonia Fraser

Tell Me Who I Am Before I Die by Christina Peters and Ted Schwartz
Note: Multiple personality

From October 21 to November 24, 2008 I read:

The Devil's Right Hand by Lilith Saintcrow

The Tomb by F. Paul Wilson
the Repairman Jack series

The Write Stuff in 8 Words from Tony Hillerman

2008-10-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

Rest in peace, Tony Hillerman. This NY Times piece by Marilyn Stasio ends with the essential eight words from the man himself.

“The name of the game is telling stories.”

"Quality" Lit and the Zombie Factor

2008-10-23T20:26:00.000-07:00

I should preface this rant with a conversation I had with a friend describing a book she was reading--beautifully written, complex characters, multi-layered relationships, resonant with current affairs and worldview.

"Um, are there any vampires or flesh-eating zombies?"
"No."
"Sorry, then I'm probably not going to read it."

It used to be murder that I required in fiction, but now it's a rare book that gets my attention unless it goes beyond death to spin a yarn on the dark side, mapping that undiscovered country.

This brings me to a recent article on the latest trends in the publishing industry (no zombies there, but I'm always curious about the publishing business). Unfortunately the article totally focused on a narrow spectrum at the top New York Magazine.

For every Pretty Young Debut Novelist who snags that seven-figure prize, ten solid literary novelists have seen advances slashed for their third books.

Of course, back in the boom nineties, the corporations themselves were pumping up the expectations of midlist writers.Consider Dale Peck. His first novel, Martin and John, came out in 1993 to excellent reviews, and by his third book, in 1998, he was, by his own account, wildly overpaid. Books, he says, “were like Internet stocks, getting enormous advances without demonstrating any moneymaking whatsoever.” Having rarely sold more than 10,000 copies, he took up with superagent Andrew Wylie, developed a reputation for being a “diva,” and pretty soon couldn’t sell a book to save his life. Until he started specializing in genre fiction—first children’s books, then horror. Last year, Peck sold Body Surfing, a thriller about demons exiting people through sexual release. He’s now splitting $3 million with Heroes writer Tim Kring to produce a trilogy of conspiracy thrillers.

Peck sees an increasingly hostile environment for the kind of books he used to write. “When you get $100,000 for a novel,” he says, “you want $150,000 and then $200,000, so when they pay you $25,000 for the next one, and my rent is $2,500 a month, what do you do? The system works just fine for commercial fiction. But for literary fiction, I think we had a nice run of it in the commercial world.”

The experiences of the "quality lit" authors described in the article don't bear much resemblance to any of the authors I've met in the genre fiction realm. Many of them had larger sales, received tiny advances and were dropped by their publishers. In case you hadn't noticed, there's a class system in literature. Chip on my shoulder, who me? Sour grapes--not exactly. I wouldn't trade my life for anyone else's even though I've taught myself to write by reading and writing, and I seem to be a slow learner! I couldn't live the kind of life one would have to live to build a literary diva career. It's hard to network with a chip on your shoulder and I'm always better off holing up with my words.

At the risk of sounding like the Sour Grapes Wine Tasting tour, I gotta say that the "quality" books they describe sound tedious rather than tempting. It's not so much a gender thing. The books I read these days are mostly written by and aimed at women, but gender is only part of the story. There's a caste system involved that sets off an alarm in the aforementioned chip on my shoulder. (Who knew the chip had a microchip and the microchip had a Caste System Proximity Alert Buzzer?)

The books that do interest me are dismissed as beneath the notice of the elite publishing crew quoted in this article. If you chopped the cash numbers drastically and upped the sales figures, some of the writers' experiences sound like those of authors I've known--all genre authors, mostly female--the ones who lost their contracts for insufficient sales.

The sentence that angers me most is the throwaway statement that "the system works just fine for commercial fiction." They are too contemptuous of commercial authors to even examine how the industry really affects that "lower sort" of fiction. Let's tell the huge percentage of mystery novel writers who have lost their contracts because they didn't meet unrealistic sales goals that "the system works fine." No one is offering them a few million dollars to slum in the horror field. I'm not speaking myself here--I'm not sure I'd be a good collaborator. But I know several very well-qualified, hardworking (non-Diva) authors who would have been happy to collaborate in the sordid commercial field.

Sorry, but the longer I contemplate this, the angrier I get, so enough on THAT topic.

However, the violence of my own reaction to this whole "pity the poor quality author forced to whore in genre fiction" gave me some insight into how living as an invisible person in this society has stirred up dark emotions that require books that feature flesh-eating zombies, blood-sucking vampires and girl exorcists. I shall however avoid Mr. Peck's thriller with the orgasmo-demons. If someone has contempt for what they are writing, I'm not going to argue with them.

My own experience in the publishing industry has been totally and completely in the genre world. I started writing them when I did the math and found that 80% of what I read was mysteries. Now it's fantasy/horror, so I'm writing that.

The second longish quote from an article in
the New York Times spoke to the fact that many of the writers in the horror and horror-ish line are now women.

In recent years, though, women — perhaps emboldened by the success of the florid vampire novels written by the pre-Jesus Anne Rice — have been claiming a much larger share of their genre birthright, even devoting themselves, in many cases, exclusively to horror. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say they’re writing fiction that uses the traditional materials of horror for other purposes, because novels like those of the wildly popular Laurell K. Hamilton or the Y.A. phenomenon Stephenie Meyer don’t appear to be concerned, as true horror should be, with actually frightening the reader. (Rice wasn’t, either.) The publishing industry has even cooked up a new name to brand this sort of horroroid fiction, in which vampires and other untoward creatures so vividly express their natural and unnatural desires: it’s called “paranormal romance.”

Unreadable as most of this stuff is (at least for us males), there’s a certain logic to this turn of pop-cultural events, in that we the reading public no longer share a clear consensus on what constitutes abnormal, or indeed scary, behavior. In the unlamented prefeminist world, women were themselves so routinely marginalized as “different” or “other” that perhaps it’s not such a stretch for them to identify, as many now seem to, with entities once considered monstrous, utterly beyond the pale. And, further, quite a few of these monsters, notably the vampires, are beautiful, worldly and unstoppably strong — which makes them useful vehicles for empowerment fantasies.

A measure of doubt, or at least ambivalence, about what should terrify us isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a writer. Times change, as do the shapes of our fears: it’s probably just as well not to be too sure where the real threats to our bodies and souls are coming from.

"Unreadable" by males????? Okay, I'm not going to examine that topic at all. I've ranted way too much already. Return with us now to those library-obsessed days of yesteryear--

September 21 to October 21, 1978 I read (or at least started to read):

Books I didn't finish--
The Dragons of Eden, Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence by Carl Sagan

The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
note: Sampled

The Anatomy of Swearing by Ashley Montague

The Women's Room by Marilyn French
- Irritable note (I guess I was crankly 30 years ago in Oct as well!): Poorly written and overpriced at $2.50 paperback. I got about 5 pages into this--what a rotten book. Even now the angst aspect doesn't appeal much to me.

On the other hand I did finish--
Louisa May, A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott by Martha Saxton
note: v. good

Inside Las Vegas by Mario Puzo
My recollection was that this was an illustrated book--not a lot of copy but many pictures. My note then: poorly done. Doesn't quite make it to 4th rate, but bettter, I now realize than the novel for which this was the reseeach prologue (Fools Die) that one really sucked.

The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Closing Time, the true story of the "Goodbar" murders by Lacey Fosburgh
note: very finely written

September 21 to October 20 2008 I read:

Blood Noir by Laurell K. Hamilton
There's a somewhat interesting plot in this one, particularly if you skip the sex scenes (unless you want to read them for comic relief, I find them cringeworthy without being evocative).

Re-reads this month

Dracula by Bram Stoker
Re-reading the classic reminds me how much more slowly life moved in those days, and to what degree vampires were linked with fear of women's sexuality, and the helplessness of watching loved ones waste away and die (a much more common experience back then). As the NYT article above suggests, vampires have a different meaning in some modern texts.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare - 1599 by James Shapiro

Help me find those parts of myself I thought I'd lost forever...

2008-09-21T15:08:00.000-07:00

Perhaps we could start by looking under the sofa.

Sorry, but I heard that line in a television movie trailer. I had to write it down because I could not stop laughing. Turns out I got a few words wrong. If you're masochistic enough to watch to the end of this extended trailer you can hear it for yourself. It's from the new Diane Lane, Richard Gere "middle-aged romance" movie, Nights in Rodanthe. The real quote is "You came along and helped me find those parts of myself I thought I'd lost forever."

Anything that makes me laugh is worth the effort, but this is almost the quintessence of the sort of movie I stay away from. Author of the book the movie is is based on is Nicholas Sparks, who also wrote the megahit The Notebook, and he's definitely hit a nerve with many people.

I was also moved, but to laughter rather than tears.

We now return you 1978.

August 19 to September 19, 1978 I read:

You Need Help, Charlie Brown by Charles Schultz

It's a Dog's Life, Charlie Brown by Charles Schultz

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Surprise! surprise!: How the lawmen conned the thieves by Ron Shaffer, Kevin Klose & Alfred E Lewis

Cheap Thrills, History of Pulp Fiction by Ron Goulart

The Wolf Children, by Charles MacLean
Review on feral children.com

Risk by Dick Francis

Scott & Earnest, the Fitzgerald Hemingway Friendship by Matthew J. Bruccoli

The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson

Links by Charles Panati

My Bike & Other Friends, Vol. II of Book of Friends by Henry Miller

Poetry of the Blues by Samuel Charters

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Another sensitive book that didn't do it for me, my comment: "Whyever did she write this banal book?"

Fear of Flying by Eric Jong (a re-read)

Wit's End, Days & Nights of the Algonquin Round Table by James R. Gaines

Dickens of London by Wolf Mankowitz

The Natural Mind by Andrew Weil

August 19 to September 19, 1978 I read:

Brightness Falls from the Air by James Tiptree, Jr.
Crown of Stars by James Tiptree, Jr.
wiki on James Tiptree,Jr

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich

The Summoning by Kelley Armstrong
I have to comment that while this book offered state-of-the art storytelling, it also had a cliffhanger "to be continued" ending, which I found unethical. Particularly because the book is a hardcover marketed to young adults.

The Devil Inside by Jenna Black
Jenna Black

I liked the concept of a free-lance exorcist in a demon-ridden world, but getting to know the characters and even the plot itself was for me at least, undermined by every-other-chapter graphic sex, beginning with phone sex and progressing to BDSM, dungeons and so on. One blurb called it "early Anita Blake" but it's much closer to more recent of Laurell K. Hamilton's novels. Your mileage may vary, some people read these books for the hot scenes. I find that when you don't know the characters before they are merging their stripper-toned bodies, a book becomes more like actual pornography where the characters are not supposed to have depth. Porn characters like the heroines/heroes of conventional romance and thrillers, are stand-ins for the reader, so they don't exist as individuals in the same way as more rounded characters do. An example of such a narrative problem is when the heroine provides plot complications simply by refusing to cooperate with all the other characters even when it makes no sense and puts everyone's life in danger. Those kinds of crankiness need to be strongly motivated or they just look like a case of perpetual PMS.

Where did the summer go?

2008-08-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

Wow, I missed more than a month in there. My only excuse is that I've been writing and I've even managed to find some books I enjoyed reading. Well, here goes.

July 2 to August 22, 1988 I read:

The Best Plays of 1975-76 (Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., Ed.)
I especially loved the Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests. I had seen it on PBS and the tour de force structure fascinated
me. I eventually bought a hardcover copy in order to study it.
wiki on The Norman Conquests

I just found a link with an intro explanation of how Ayckbourne write the triplex of plays. That kind of thing still fascinates me.
http://books.google.com/books?id=qMDkGDe3nSoC&dq=the+norman+conquests+alan+ayckbourn&pg=PP1&ots=qSUp9KSUk-&sig=yYvLz2Vip-pZ0zPWDT1o03OKjjs&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA11,M1

Public Trust, Private Lust: Sex, Power & Corruption on Capitol Hill, Marion Clark & Rudy

The Squeal Man, the true story of Mat Bonora, Suburban Homicide Detective by Martin Flusser

Shakespeare & His Playersby Martin Holmes

George Eliot, A Biography by Rosemary Sprague
Note: has an irritating "for young readers flavor" otherwise okay.

Butley by Simon Gray

Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister by Evelyn Keyes

The Other Woman, A Life of Violet TrefusisIncluding Previously Unpublished Correspondence with Vita Sackville-West by Julian Philippe and John Phillips
My note at the time was "Who cares?" I think I'd even forgotten even who this woman was, but I looked her up and this website is kind of interesting.
scandalouswoman/violet-trefusis

The Blond Baboon by Jan Willem van de Wetering

The Serial by Cyra McFadden
wikii

Recent note - this suburban serial moved across the Golden Gate Bridge when it was continued by Armistead Maupin and became
Tales of the City

The Michigan Murders by Edward Keyes

The Moving Target, from Archer in Hollywood by Ross MacDonald

Children with Emerald Eyes by Mira Rothenberg
note: honest frank and stunningly written, intensely moving
http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?id=2363&type=book&cn=28

Maigret and the Lover by Simenon

Dickens and Crime by Phillip Collins

Dear Me by Peter Ustinov

The Final Solution, Jack the Ripper by Stephen Knight

Pool of Tears by John Wainwright

The Mask of Merlyn by T.H. White
I can't find this book on the net. Could I have been reading White's The Book of Merlyn that was published in 1977? Probably. Either way, much as I love T.H. White and The Once and Future King, I didn't like and couldn't finish this one.

The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö

They Went Thataway, a Front Row Kid's Search for His Boyhood Heroes, the Old Time Hollywood Cowboys by James Horowitz

Body Politics, Power, Sex & Nonverbal Communication by Nancy Henley

The West End Horror by Nicholas Meyer

Hunters Point by George Sims

Aupres de Ma Blonde by Nicholas Freeling

A Proper Book of Sexual Folklore by Tristram Potter Coffin

The Redd Foxx Encyclopedia of Black Humor by Redd Foxx & Normal Miller

Cults of Unreason by Dr. Christopher Evans

Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear by Erin Pizzey

By Persons Unknown, George Jonas & Barbara Miel

July 2 to August 22, 1988 I read:

Witches Grave by Phillip DePoy
Depoy's website with mystery & theater information The Preacher from the Black Lagoon production looks funny.

Queen of Angels by Greg Bear
Greg Bear

Blue Moon (A Night Creature Novel, Book 1) by Lori Handeland
Lori Handeland

The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell
and Dustin Thomason
DaVinci Code style website
I had to smile a little at the website, maybe the Renaissance code thing was similar, but what I enjoyed about The Rule of Four was its measured pace and not-too-intense plot--"will the guys finish their Princeton senior theses and graduate in time? Will they stay in touch after they graduate? Will the proctors catch them playing laser tag in the steam tunnels and expel them?" It had charm but no homicidal, masochistic monks....

The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
Article about Chabon, Sitka and The Yiddish Policeman's Union
I've been looking forward to reading this for a long time. Chabon's use of language is a pleasure in and of itself.

San Francisco....for fiction's sake

2008-08-04T21:26:00.000-07:00

I'm particularly happy to have a new e-book, The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About San Francisco available at
author Holly Lisle's site
in her "Holly Shop, where the Writing Geeks Shop" (gotta love the slogan). Holly believes in paying it forward with her lessons for writers and I'm proud to have two e-books now as part of her "Worst Mistakes Writers Make..." series.

I wanted to write about San Francisco because I've lived here since 1968. I've used the backdrop myself and had reviewers comment that the city seemed like a character in the book. Like many local residents and visitors, I enjoy reading books set in the city, except when writers fail to check the basic details, that drives us crazy--well, crazier. In The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About San Francisco I provide some essential details to help keep writers from making outsider mistakes.

For example, you'll want to know how the physical layout of streets and hills shape life in the city and even influence the weather and the social climate. I hope this book can help writers both to avoid mistakes and also to pick up some of the "only in San Francisco" flavor of the place. There are lots of useful links to changeable things such as bridges and traffic. Anyone who's lived in this crazy city for awhile will understand why I couldn't resist throwing in some other fun stuff, such as who calls it "Frisco", who never will, and how that one little word can get you arrested.

You can also still get my first "Worst Mistakes" e-book, The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Courtroom Law.
In that e-book, I tried to cram 35 years of experience working in law offices, transcribing police interrogations, watching the legal system in action, while taking note in my spare moments of twists in the law that I could use to lend reality to plotting mystery novels.

Books, Mountains, Resources

2008-07-01T18:21:00.001-07:00

(Wherein the blogger whines or mourns, depending on how you look at it. Uplifting lesson optional.)

I'm thinking a lot about my father's goal for my brother and me. He said "I want you to learn to use yourself as a resource." In World War II, as a bombardier in the Army Air Corps, he was shot down over Germany and held as a prisoner of war by the Nazis. That experience helped form his view that you never know what life will throw at you, and you need to be able to cope with whatever you bring with you.

Those thoughts arose as I reflected on the fact that it's been awhile since I've read a book, even though I've seen a great many I would like to read. Quite simply I can't access them.

The closest I came to reading a book this past month was watching a PBS showing of a 2003 documentary, Touching the Void, based on the book by the same name written by Joe Simpson. It tells the story of his amazing survival as a mountain climber in the Peruvian Andes, thought to be dead by his fellow climber and trapped alone in a crevasse with a badly broken leg. (I have knee problems and I had to briefly turn off the sound while he described his horrific leg break and knee injury)

Touching the Void

Simpson's amazing feat in getting down off that mountain all on his own resonated with me enormously.

My own obstacles are not mountains--well, I have several obstacles but the topic of the day is books--specifically the lack thereof. Mind you, I don't have a shortage of books in my living space--I probably own about 1,000 give or take. I try to winnow down the number when I can. Some I haven't even read, some I've read repeatedly, some I may never read. People in times and places where one book was precious would shake their heads at how keenly I mourn the fact that I can't read what strikes my fancy simply because I can't afford to buy books and I physically can't get to a library to borrow them. But when you can't do what has always comforted you most, it becomes a challenge.

What I miss most is the pure luxury that I had for the first four or five decades of my life of walking into a library and checking out anything that caught my fancy. It was free. I always took home as many books as were allowed, books I could never have afforded to buy.

In the late 1980s and 1990s I worked in the financial district and had less time to go to the library and more money to buy books. So I bought the ones that really interested me (often but not always in paperback) and borrowed books from friends who shared similar tastes.

Now I find myself in a stretch of road where I can't afford to buy books at all and I also can't physically get to a library or even easily go downstairs to the mail boxes in my building to bring up books. The library offers to ship books to the disabled but that program only works for the disabled who can get to their mailbox. I was hopeful when I got an electronic library card, but I had to laugh when I saw that the only e-books they had available were ones I could get online for free at Project Gutenberg. I like books that are out of copyright, but that is a far cry from the freedom to explore the newest books as you wander through a library or bookstore.

For those who hung in hearing my woes, let me say that Joe Simpson's story of survival against incomprehensible odds encouraged me to cope in small increments. That is how he got out of the crevasse, climbing toward the light. That is how he got down off the mountain, sliding through the snow on his butt watching out for the other crevasses in 20 minutes increments. Then at the base of the mountain he hopped on his good leg and an ice axe, often falling painfully on the rocky moraines, until he reached the base camp--a four day journey.

My pain is a mere twinge compared to that, no life-threatening dehydration, blood loss or hypothermia. Not an armed Nazis prison guard in sight.

My own small sadness is that I have to use my own resources, often reading snippets on the web when I would prefer to get lost in a book of my own choosing. I have hopes of getting down off this particular personal mountain, but at the moment I simply keep going, even though I go rather slowly.

From June 4 to July 1, 19788 I read:

The Blue Hammer, Ross MacDonald

Poetry and the Age, Randall Jarrell
Note: very endearing

Call for the Dead, John Le Carré
Looking Glass War, John Le Carré

Big Bad Wolves, Masculinity in the American Film, Joan Mellen

The Sexual Outlaw, a Documentary, John Rechy
Note: not very documentary. Too many exclamation points and artsy "descriptive" passages. Still alive and working and with a website and a my space page at 74.

Shakespeare & the Actors, Ivor Brown

A Guide to Jane Austen, Michael Hardwick

The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play, John Russell Taylor

Free to Act, How to Star in Your Own Life, Warren Robertson

Christopher and His Kind 1929-1939, Christopher Isherwood

Vivien Leigh, a Biography, Anne Edwards
Note: Very sad

A Preface to Jane Austen (not sure of the author)

Not above the law: The battles of Watergate prosecutors Cox and Jaworski: a behind-the-scenes account, James Doyle

Jane Austen, Jenkins

Persuasion, Jane Austen

From June 4 to July 1, 2008 no books read.

I did tame some ferocious feral kittens, but that's a different story.

Moving forward slowly, looking back unavoidably

2008-05-15T21:12:00.000-07:00

It's been a month when I did a lot of work-related reading of non-books. The most literary thing I did was watch a netflix movie rental, Wonder Boys. I watched it more than once, just as I read the book it was based on more than once.

This adaptation was wonderful in itself and also did justice to the Michael Chabon book. How often does that happen? I did not realize till I watched the Special Features that the Bob Dylan song "Things Have Changed" was written for the movie. Can't get much cooler than that.

In the latter part of the month, I found myself with a taming cage of three feral kittens in my front room. I never said I was sane. I posted a bit about this on the Body Impolitic Blog link at the right.

May 3 to June 3, 1978 I read:

Van Gogh's Letters. [Vincent Van Gogh, a Self Portrait and Dear Theo]
Made little headway, perhaps a biography would help

Sylvia Plath, the Woman and the Work, Ed, with intro by Edward Butscher
Quote p 107 - "Magna est veritas et prevae labit." - "Truth is mighty and will prevail, in a bit."

The Making of the Wizard of Oz, Aljean Harmetz
Note: fascinating
The Making of The Wizard of Oz

Breaking It Up! The Best Routines of the Stand Up Comics, Ross Firestone, Ed.

Straight, Steve Knickmeyer
My note: Convoluted, cardboard but amusing, at least the guy has read The Princess Bride.

Other Other Side of the Rainbow, with Judy Garland on the Dawn Patrol, Mel Torme

Jacks or Better, CTS Matthews

The Life and Crimes of Errol Flynn, Lionel Godfrey
Note: brings back fond memories of the first dirty book that ever crossed my path--Flynn's autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Read it serialized in a men's magazine that got left in a hotel room that I got to stay in when my parents and I were leaving Fairbanks, Alaska. There was a nudist magazine there too. We had been living in a two-room cabin for the year or so before that and I think my parents were glad enough to have the privacy of their own room and didn't pay much attention to what I might find in my room. Coincidentally my brother was born about 9 months later.

Condominium, John D. McDonald

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John LeCarré
Note: spies with depth

Poets on Poetry, 16 Essays from Sir Philip Sidney to Wallace Stevens,
Charles Norman, Ed.
Note: renewing an old friendship, still a fascinating book
Current note: I think I still have a copy of this book

Possession, L. P. Davies
Note - I got very cranky with the author for sloppy details such as a character wearing "pleasantly tight black slacks" that inexplicably turned tweed during the scene, then turned into a tweed skirt a few pages later.

May 3 to June 3, 2008 I read:

The Body Sacred, Dianne Sylvan
Dianne Sylvan blog

2008-05-02T17:00:00.001-07:00

I had an opportunity to read The Program, by Charlie Lovett before its May 1 publication date and I can report that it takes a fictional look at just how far women can go to meet the supermodel thin ideal. It also offers a male author's view (through the characters) about just what the majority of men consider sexy. A major plot bombshell detonates on page 25, but obviously I'm sworn to secrecy about just what that is. The Program is available on the Pearlsong web page and the usual online book dealers.

Pearlsong Press has some great resources and I admire founder, Peggy Elam's commitment to publishing body positive fiction and nonfiction. I'm already seriously taken by Pat Ballard's 10 Steps to Loving Your Body (No Matter What Size You Are) and it won't even be published till fall of this year.

We now return you to your irregularly scheduled time warp.

From April 17 to May 2, 1978 I read:

The Poe Papers ["A Tale of Passion"?] N.L. Zaroulis
The brackets and question mark were mine and I noted "very poorly written"

After Claude, Iris Owens

This reminds me how I got a copy of this book to read. I had just finished my first novel in May of '88. My friend, JB, had the kindness and stamina to read through it, essentially at one sitting. (Which is more than I could do when I tried to re-read it a few years later--arggh, it was a sensitive story of disillusioned youth and all that that entails.) I believe we drank brandy and he put his entire collection of ALL the records from the Supremes on the stereo while I waited and he read my book. He must have had some reactions, probably charitably vague, I don't remember much except that after he read my book, he lent me After Claude and told me my book reminded him of it, and perhaps I could get some pointers from it. My note when I concluded reading After Claude was: "quite an insult to be compared to this author--but perhaps my inept 1st novel deserved it."

I can't find anything else by Iris Owens, but JB either didn't know or failed to mention, that Owens, under the name of Harriet Daimler, was a prominent Parisian pornographer for Olympia Press:

Hip young Americans Iris Owens and Marilyn Meeske had never so much as read any pornographic literature before meeting Girodias, but as 'Harriet Daimler', Owens became one of Girodias's most celebrated pornographers, someone who struggled 'against her impossible tendency to write more explicitly than the courts will tolerate'.

Bloomsbury Magazine

Odd Job #101, Ron Goulart
Note: SFSS

From April 17 to May 2, 2008 I read:

Magic Bites, Ilona Andrews
The title made me hesitate, because it looked as if it might be one of those "cutesy" paranormals, reading it was such a wonderful experience that it reminded me how rarely I enjoy a book that much. It turns out to have been written by a husband-wife team, and to have been very, NY Times bestsellerly popular, and deservedly so. I'm looking forward to reading more from them.
their website

60 Minutes' infomercial on gastric bypass surgery

2008-04-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

Laurie Edison and Debbie Notkin over at the Body Impolitic Blog gave me the opportunity to rant a bit about the scarcely researched valentine that 60 Minutes broadcast on April 20th - Gastric Bypass - It’s Not Just for Fat People Anymore, recklessly throwing around terms like "cure for diabetes" and "decreasing incidence of some cancers." The report didn't even touch on the possibility of any of the well-documented side effects. Sigh. Sad to say, 60 Minutes, I used to love you, but it's all over now.

What's Sex Got To Do With It....Jaki's new novel

2008-04-18T17:16:00.000-07:00

I met Jaqueline Girdner at a writers' critique group about 20 years ago. We became friends when we found that we consistently made each other laugh with our manuscripts. Over the years we have dealt with finding and losing agents, publishers and mystery series contracts. Now she has a brand new dysfunctional-family-disaster comedy novel coming out in e-book form from Synergebooks.com.

We have also been collaborating on a blog about E-book fiction. It seems to be a format that has potentials in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Outside the Labyrinths, looking in..,

2008-04-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

This is only indirectly related to what I read this past week or so, but I thought it was an interesting image of the Grace Cathedral Labyrinth.

The connection being that Grace Cathedral is selling Tim Farrington's The Monk Downstairs as a fundraiser and I liked that book (the Upstairs sequel um, not so much, I will get a bit cranky on that subject later in the blog.) I should say that I have no connection even karmically with Grace Cathedral, Episcopalianism or labyrinth walking. The odd connection I have to labyrinths is that I have had books published by St. Martin's Minotaur in the US and by Argument Verlag, Ariadne Krimi in Germany. Ariadne was the girl who got through the labyrinth and the Minotaur was the monster at the heart of it.
But I'm including the graphic because it's a pretty image and so is the book cover.

Returning to the thrilling reads of yesteryear--April 6 to April 16, 1978 I read:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

Marlene Dietrich, Sheridan Morley

Swindled! Classic Business Frauds of the 70s, the staff reporters of the Wall Street Journal

The young romantics: Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Vigny, Dumas, Musset, and George Sand and their friendships, feuds, and loves in the French romantic revolution, Linda Kelly
Didn't like this one. My note was too negative to quote, but included the word "pompous".

Monty, a Biography of Montgomery Clift, Robert LaGuardia
Note: a little difficult to read because he was so sick and sad and tragic, poor bastard
Interesting site with the kind of stuff one collects when one
idolizes...

The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler
Note: The Santa Monica one, v. good
Ah, Raymond Chandler!

Gone, No Forwarding, Joe Gores

April 6 to April 16, 2008 I read:

The Monk Downstairs, Tim Farrington
Interesting that this book is being sold by Grace Cathedral as a fund raiser.

Ironically, I hadn't expected to like the Downstairs book but I heard it was so well-written that I gave it a try, and I liked it. It was a bit like a Nicholas Hornby book with a bunch of religious meditation thrown in. So, I thought I would try Upstairs, the second one, based on the first one and I found it unreadable.

The Monk Upstairs, Tim Farrington

In all fairness I think it's major challenge to write a sequel that starts off with "then they got married." A book that ends with a wedding in the offing is a very different animal than a book about marriage. And Upstairs...sigh...

Downstairs had much less meditation and much more tension between the hero's uncertainty coming out of a 20-year monastery stay and the single mother's gradually learning to trust him and the process of intimacy.

For the purposes of full disclosure I should say that although I practice Buddhism daily, I never got into silent meditation, and reading about someone else's meditation has never been on my list of interesting pastimes. That said, the first book kept a balance between the hero's conflicts about going back into the secular life and his yearning for the divine.

In the second book the hero's going off to meditate is just annoying. He's totally irresponsible, leaving his fragile, old former abbot (who has just had a couple of rounds of chemotherapy and is about ready to fall over) standing at the altar waiting to perform his wedding while he meditates off in the woods, not deigning to appear till his exasperated bride hauls him out of his meditation hut to go to the ceremony. He seems amazingly similar to her stoner, surfer first husband and the heroine's annoyance with the ex-monk's frequent absences do not make entertaining reading for me. In fact, he looks a bit like a jerk.

Downstairs was seen from the point of view of the heroine with the hero's feelings being disclosed in letters to a fellow monk who is still in the monastery. The suspense was whether the two would get together, with the heroine's mother having a stroke that brings the two together dealing with the young kid and life or death hospital stuff.

With Upstairs one of the points of view is the mother-in-law who is not recovering well from a stroke. The suspense item is when, not whether but when she will have another stroke and die. I kid you not. I was rooting for earlier rather than later. The book had as much of the hero's meditation as it did any other thing, and I finally put myself out of my own misery, skimmed the last scene (Yup, I don't want to be a spoiler but I wasn't the only one put out of my misery).

I said I was cranky, right? Sometimes I just enjoy being cranky. This is probably one of those times.

2008-04-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

As the PBS Masterpiece versions of the Jane Austen novels draws to a close I have to applaud the dramatization of Emma.

I thought it gave a much clearer sense of how the friends and relatives of a high- spirited young woman of wealth might worry about the particular dangers her situation would pose for her. I have to confess that Emma is not my favorite Austen novel so maybe I didn't mind quite so much seeing it boiled down to the the essential story. Didn't much warm to the "chicken rustling" scenes...although this dramatization made the income and social rank gaps among the various characters very clear, which made the story easier to understand.

I also very much liked the decision to explore the complexities of Sense and Sensibility with a two-part version that captured all the nuances of a mother and sisters suddenly fallen from a great height by one of those pesky wills that leave impoverished women at the mercy of unsympathetic relatives.

I'm looking forward to the conclusion tonight (Sun. April 6).

Returning to the somewhat-less-distant past of 1978--

From March 2 to April 5, 2008 I read:

Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood
I clearly recall reading this book because it was the first time I found a novelist who openly discussed some of the repercussions of being a fat little kid. The book made me very uncomfortable though, and her other books have approached women's lives from a point of view that depressed me so much that I have shied away from her books since.

The Trees, Conrad Richter
The Fields, Conrad Richter
The Town, Conrad Richter
My note: Very moving, gorgeous old-timey talk

I saw the three part miniseries with Elizabeth Montgomery (yes, from Bewitched), and Hal Holbrook. It set me off reading the Richter trilogy, which was well worth it.

This site goes into how Pulitzer-Prize-winning Richter researched and intuited how people lived, and thought, and spoke on the Ohio frontier during the pioneering that he wrote about
About Richter

Life after Life, Raymond A. Moody, Jr., M.D.
My note: Foreword by note death groupie, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D.

I don't remember why I was feeling snarky about Kubler-Ross, I did like the book.
Moody's website

Blye, Private Eye, Nicholas Pileggi

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, John D. McDonald

Laidlaw, William McIlvanney
McIlvanney is still publishing

How to Save Your Own Life, Erica Jong

A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion
My note: Quite boring, but at least short

A Family Affair: The Margaret and Tony Story, Roger Hutchinson & Gary Kahn

Valentines and Vitriol, Rex Reed
My note: Good for people with short attention spans. But some amusing lines, e.g. "Japanese Emperor Hirohito, just interviewed on his 50th wedding anniversary, was asked 'what do you regard as your greatest mistake?' His answer: 'World War II.'"

The Woman Warrior, Memoirs of a Girlhood Among the Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston
Some interesting and valuable things she has been doing
Kingston on Moyers Journal

From March 2 to April 5, 2008 I read:

House of Whispers, Margaret Lucke
Couldn't put it down, definitely a page turning ghost story (must note that for me it wasn't scary, just suspenseful).Review

Neuromancer, William Gibson
William Gibson

Silicon Noir--Reading this author's groundbreaking 1986 book so long after most people have provides an odd perspective. I can see how much of his work has been borrowed and expanded upon, for example in The Matrix. But the echoes I got from were from noir books that it hearkens back to like Nathaniel West, even Chandler. Hammett, Heinlein, Jim Thompson and William Burroughs..

For writers, from a writer...ignorance of the law is no excuse

2008-04-02T15:37:00.000-07:00

Where to get a copy

This is pretty exciting for me, so I have to share it. Holly Lisle invited writers to come up with the 33 things that we know about from real life and get exasperated to see other writers getting wrong. I picked courtroom law, because I worked for lawyers for three decades, and it's amazing how many people get their knowledge of the law from novels, TV, and movies.

I have transcribed A LOT of police interrogations and you would be surprised to find out how detectives really use the Miranda warning about incriminating oneself. Almost as important is when they don't use it and the surprising ways that suspects respond when they hear, "You have the right to remain silent..."

Some other areas I have found where writers get into "legal" trouble:

● What is the one basic rule of questioning that all trial lawyers learn?
● Can lawyers who are married to each other represent opposing sides in a lawsuit?
● A wife cannot be forced to testify against her husband--except in these circumstances....

What about a defense lawyer who wants to switch sides? What would happen if a lawyer found such horrifying information that he decided to quit in the middle of a trial--what can he do and what would he never do?

As a writer I believe that getting the small details can give a story an air of truth, while getting them wrong can irritate the reader and throw a monkey wrench into the finely tuned workings of the most beautifully constructed plot.

Fiction writers don't live by crime alone. Even in stories with no murder or criminal element, the law can loom large. Characters filing lawsuits to haul each other into court can spark major plot conflict, but in order to make a situation believable to readers it's important to know the differences between civil and criminal law.

Okay, so much for my obsession with getting back into print. I've got into e-print...tomorrow, well...

"Tomorrow is another day." Thank you Scarlett, I knew that 12-step group for "Southern Belles with Commitment Issues" would help.

I think to jump from writers' mistakes about the law directly to my obsession with the PBS Jane Austen dramatizations is a subject change that might cause a bad case of whiplash, so I'll leave that subject for next time.

Life in the "to be continued..." lane

2008-03-07T21:00:00.000-08:00

I'm in the middle of a learning curve--not quite sure what I'm learning, but it involves a lot of reading of unbound materials and writing of the same. I did see a beautifully done farce, gorgeously written by Dean Craig, with superb acting, and direction by Frank Oz.
Death at a Funeral

February 17 to March 10, 1978 I read:

Playing for Keeps in Washington, Laurence Leamer
Note: Modes/methods of power

The Ends of Power, Joseph Haldeman
My note "for what it's worth, which is little enuf"

Win or Lose, a Social History of Gambling in America, Stephen Longstreet
Note: didn't finish

Haywire, Brooke Hayward
Note: read about half, incredibly depressing
Her movie star mother
But it sounds like Hayward is doing well now--though it might take a genealogy chart to sort out exactly how: Brooke Hayward now

Eastward Ha! S. J. Perelman
And I found this lovely excerptfrom Westward Ha!

It was pikestaff-plain and Doomsday-certain to me, a deep-water sailor since boyhood, that the Marine Flier was little more than a cheesebox on a raft and would momentarily founder with all hands. Even the veriest landlubber could perceive that the man whose duty it was to drive the ship --- the chauffeur or the motorman or whatever you call him --- was behaving with the grossest sort of negligence; more than likely he was asleep at the tiller or tickling the waitress, abandoning the craft to any, caprice of wind or wave.

February 17 to March 10, 2008

The Traveler (Fourth Realm Trilogy, Book 1, John Twelve Hawks
Not for the paranoid--unless you get off on being paranoid about the surveillance society and lack of personal freedom and privacy! I personally found paranoia more enjoyable when it didn't so closely resemble reality. The book did have an interesting method of turning astral travel into martial arts. I really do have to say that the male lead had a bad case of "Let's go up in the attic, I'm sure the monster's gone by now, and if not, it'll be okay, because, well it just will that's all." I think the author's plot demands were clouding the character's mind.

The author is reclusive, and rumored to be living "off the grid" although it may just be that the mystery of his identity is to add to the book's mystique.

Blood Brothers (Sign of Seven Trilogy, Book 1), Nora Roberts
No paranoia problems here, pretty mainstream, like 1 part Stephen King and 99 parts distilled water. This author has written over 150 novels under several pen names, and spent literally years on the best seller list. I don't feel qualified to comment.

Okay, I will indulge in one comment about both of those "book 1 in a series" books--a little more of an ending wouldn't hurt, would it? When I was a kid they had "Saturday matinee" movie serials for kids at the local movie theater (Okay, it was the 1950s, but the same serials were on TV too--cowboy and space operas) and each one ended with a cliff hanger. We never managed to get closure on ANY of the cliff hangers. Too much time passed between the episodes and the adults putting the kiddy matinees together didn't care. It was like stroboscopic story telling.

Jane Austen Action Figure

2008-03-07T11:34:00.000-08:00

We all have our superheroes, and I just went a little graphically wild starting up a cat blog, so I will attempt graphical action!

A Book I Know I Won't Read

2008-02-21T14:10:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick post. On the NAAFA mailing list someone posted this link to Kim Brittingham appearing on the Today Show to discuss her experiences as a fat woman reading a book entitled Fat Is Contagious. Brittingham made the cover to dramatize some of the experiences she has had as a fat woman riding public transportation in New York. If you can get video on your computer here's the URL--

Brittingham on Today Show

I really like the poise and positive attitude she displays.

Brittingham

One reason no one read this book because it does not exist--except as a cover.

Jane Austen, Amy Winehouse, Life versus Art

2008-02-16T11:31:00.000-08:00

One of my guilty pleasures is award shows. My excuse is that I need to keep up with the current films, music and Broadway plays. Last Sunday the pleasures were guiltier than usual when Grammy Awards had the added soap opera of whether singer, Amy Winehouse, who was nominated for six awards, would be able to attend despite visa problems and substance abuse issues. Ironically one of the songs she won an award for was "Rehab" explaining why she wasn’t going to rehab, while one of obstacles she faced in attending was the fact that she actually is now in rehab.

The Grammy awards, however, were scheduled opposite the PBS airing of the first few hours of Pride and Prejudice, the Colin Firth version, so I missed them. I was still curious enough about Winehouse that I checked her out online
Amy Winehouse

Wow.

She has an amazing voice that is strong enough to hold up against a baritone saxophone and a Phil Specter-style Wall of Sound. The songs on the Back to Black album stand out like dark, twisted jewelry in the glittery "girl group" setting. Layered, ironic, funny, dangerous, magnetic, sensual. Grafting her bad girl persona onto the girl group sound demonstrates a wicked genius. Those songs invariably feature lyrics like: "Nothing you can do can make me untrue to my guy." A major contrast to Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good." I haven’t been so amused since I heard a gay male group sing "He’s So Fine."

What, you may well ask, did this teach me about Jane Austen?

Well, the public buzz about Winehouse is that she’s a bad role model. (Goodness, a popular musician being a bad role model! Most unusual.) Sorry, my point was that she’s taken a whole raft of personal problems and turned them into gorgeous works of art.

Jane Austen, a lifelong impoverished spinster who struggled with living on the crumbs of family charity, didn’t even see all her novels published in her life. Yet she created a world so seductive that many of us go there repeatedly.

PBS aired a biographical film, Miss Austen Regrets, on February 3rd that I did not post here about it just after I saw it because it was so painful for me to watch. The film tried to scrape up some romance in Austen’s not-very-eventful life. They turned excerpts from her letters to her sister and her niece into dialog. I’ve heard others say that they found these exchanges witty, but they really don’t dramatize well. Nothing in her novels suggests that she would be that cruel and bitter in a social setting. The problem is that, unlike the surgically deft dialog in her novels, the scathing wit in Austen’s letters was never meant to be spoken aloud in social setting. It was very private and meant for intimate correspondents she trusted.

In the last scene of Miss Austen Regrets, after she and Jane agonize about their poverty and Jane dies, the surviving sister, Cassandra, burns most of her letters. Really the only thing I took away from that film was a more complete understanding of why this was necessary. People look at Austen’s life and want her to be one of the heroines of her novels, but she is their creator, and that is so much more. It would take a biographical genius to portray Austen's life in a way that showed the magic of what she created in her fiction.

We want artists to be saints, but they have other work to do. Their task is to built dream vessels to transport us into their own worlds, to share their visions, songs and stories. Then like all other humans, the artists have to return to real life to deal with it as best they can can.

I have been through substance abuse problems both as a participant and an observer, and I can see how Amy Winehouse is walking a narrow path at the edge of a cliff. I hope she can come to safer ground soon. In the meantime it’s not fair to try to force her to also carry the burden of being a role model, just as it’s cruel to jam Jane Austen into the role of disappointed spinster--we don't know her well enough to say that and conversely we know her too well to limit her that way.

February 5 to 16, 1978 I read:

Breakdown, N. S. Sotherland
My note: A psychologist’s personal account of manic depression with some gossipy put-down sketches of the founders of the main schools of psychotherapy.

Love, Honor and Dismay, Elizabeth Harrison

By Force of Will, the Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway, Scott Donaldson
My note: Much better than Hemingway & the Sun Set, which was remarkable only for a picture of Duff

The Professor Game, Richard D. Mandell
My Note: Fairly witty, which is rare, but with that characteristic poverty of joie de vivre one finds among existentialists. So I’ll say witty and gritty.

The Vagabond, Colette
My note: Wow.

Streets, Actions, Alternatives, Raps: A Report on the Decline of the Counterculture, John Stickney
A 1971 view

February 5 to 16, 2008 I read:

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, Carol Karlsen
Interesting book, originally a dissertation about who was singled out as witches n Colonial New England and why. Many insights into fears of women that are still alive and flourishing.
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/salem/scholarship/karlsenrev.html

Happy publication note and low tech freebie

2008-02-09T16:18:00.000-08:00

I wanted to let the select few (the happy few I hope!) who read this blog know that I will have a small ebook coming out soon in Holly Lisle's series The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About... My first entry for this series will be The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About the Legal System.

Do you think a better title would be "...About Courthouse Drama" or "...About the Law"? The book will encompass both of those, and I am entertaining suggestions up until the end of February.

Holly Lisle's online shop, where my ebook will be soon!

Okay, now for the freebie! It is a very useful 52-page ebook, in the form of an Adobe PDF file that Holly created from her Create-A-Plot Clinic. I have the Adobe file and permission to send it out free, but I have hit the limit of my expertise in blogger, so I am hoping I can send it to anyone who wants it as file attachment. You can email me at the link on this blog. I won't put you on a mailing list--believe me I don't know how to do THAT yet either--LOL! I hope to learn, but this is just a one-shot request thingie! If someone requests this and it doesn't work I will modify this post and try another strategy. I may be low tech, but I am nothing if not persistent!

Militant self-acceptance & 80% sincerity -one more time!

2008-02-04T17:18:00.000-08:00

Apologies if this shows up twice, it posted below a January post, I guess because I started it earlier. So I'm reposting and deleting the earlier one. A bit primitive but it should work.

This week I read David Roche's amazing book called The Church of 80% Sincerity. David was born in 1948 with a facial disfigurement called Cavernous Hemangioma (a benign tumor consisting of blood vessels), and he suffered further trauma through the medical treatments available at the time-- radiation scarring and many surgeries. His candor and wicked sense of humor put the reader at ease, just as he puts the audience at ease as a motivational speaker. David calls his face “a gift from God. He is quick to add that it is one of those gifts where you say, “Gee, you shouldn’t have.” I have a special fondness for books that make me laugh out loud, and I also value books that aim to foster self-esteem in people just as they are. This book has all that and more. David writes, "The church of the title is not a formal organization but a concept – the church of choice for recovering perfectionists."

I reviewed The Church of 80% Sincerity for Irked Magazine and I'll post a link when that review is available. His entire schedule and much more information is on his website, but I've posted his SF Bay Area event schedule Feb 11-20 for anyone who wants to meet this remarkable man.

Anne Lamott observed in her Foreword, "Everyone watching [David] gets happy because he's secretly giving instruction on how this could happen for them, this militant self-acceptance. He lost...the good looking packaging, and the real parts endured."

I highly recommend the book. I highly recommend militant self-acceptance.

Previously, well, roughly 30 years previously--January 27 to February 4, 1978 I read:

The Black Charade, John Burke

Whatever Became of Jane Austen and Other Questions, Kingsley Amis
My note was: Vitriol ordinaire

Betrayal, Lucy Freeman and Julie Roy

January 27 to February 4, 2008 I read:

The Church of 80% Sincerity, David Roche

Mansfield Park...the chase scenes, the lavender, the dew!

2008-01-31T19:10:00.000-08:00

I don't know what to say about the Masterpiece Classic version of Mansfield Park. I've mentioned when talking about the feature movie that the character of heroine, Fanny Price, is a mouse who never roars. Seeing so many elements missing from the dramatization reminded me that the suspense in the novel is whether this painfully shy, unassertive woman will ever get the man she adores and the happiness that she deserves.

The 1999 motion picture resolved the problem of Fanny's passivity by reinventing her as a writer and assertive wit. Gillian Anderson's introduction The Masterpiece PBS version begins by suggesting that witty, hardened Mary Crawford in Mansfield is very much like Jane Austen herself--excuse me? Then she adds a bit regretfully that the actual heroine of Mansfield is Fanny Price, who has been always urged to be grateful.

This version of the story depicts Fanny as a sort of holy fool--with touseled blonde hair and the urge to play childish games on the lawn. This version doesn't go far into the threat hanging over Fanny--who lives with her relatives on sufferance. Fanny's primary persecutor-in-residence is the self-righteous Mrs. Norris, who never misses a chance to belittle Fanny. In this PBS version, Mrs. Norris is basically gutted like a trout--she has just a few lines.

The Masterpiece production perhaps did not have the budget to stage the episode where Fanny is returned to her impoverished family in Portsmouth after years of living a ladylike life with her rich Mansfield Park relatives. I'd better stop here. The primary realization I had watching this show--and missing Mrs. Norris's malevolent threats--was that Mrs. Norris is the name of the watch cat at Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter books. That must be a reference to the character in Mansfield Park.

Okay, okay, one more comment...what IS it with the insertion of a chase scene into Persuasion and now into Mansfield Park, where it seems even more forced--quick propose to her before the dew dries on the lavender!

The mysteries of writing... know some, glad to learn more

2008-01-27T00:03:00.000-08:00

Sometime, not tonight, I want to talk about ebooks and how differently people treat them from paper books--when they treat them at all. Okay, reporting back, I read Holly Lisle’s 21 Ways to Get Yourself Writing, which had some practical strategies that were well worth the $9.95 price of admission for an ebook. I was even happier to get the bonus ebook she threw in Mugging the Muse, Writing Fiction for Love and Money, which contained over 200 pages of extremely useful information about the highly dysfunctional publishing industry. There are things there I haven’t seen elsewhere. These are also available as POD (Publish on Demand) editions for those who are interested, but who need the paperback book in hand.

January 13 to 26, 1978 I read:

Shadow Box, George Plimpton
Note: The man sure can write, what a pleasure

All My Sins Remembered, Haldeman
Note: there is no way to keep the characters straight in this book

Blue Skies, No Candy, Gael Greene
My note on this contained four four-letter words — I’m not going to quote it beyond the mildest part. The gist of my conclusion was that in this book, the character did not grow and the work was not profound, my mildest pronouncement was: "cock-deep ain’t too deep.”

Homer’s Daughter, Robert Graves
Note: Wow. I thought Graves was an MCP a la D.H. Lawrence, but this book shows him to be much wiser than I could have imagined. Entertaining too.

Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, 4th Series, George Plimpton, Ed.
I adored the way they showed a reproduction of an actual edited page by each author interviewed. I'm still a bit of a sucker for "how do they do it?"

Growing (Up) at 37, Jerry Rubin
Note: Honest, but sappy

Wife to Mrs. Milton, Robert Graves

I went on a Robert Graves and George Plimpton kick in January ‘78. On the facing page I listed 10 historical and one contemporary Robert Graves book (from Hercules, My Shipmate to Watch the North Wind Rise) and the contents of George Plimpton’s Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews e.g. 1st Series, Ed with intro by Malcolm Cowley, E.M. Foster, etc. to 4th Series, Ed. By George Plimpton, Intro by Wilfred Sheed, Isak Dineson, etc.

I’m not going to inflict copying this list on my hands or this blog.

January 13 to 26, 2008 I read:

21 Ways to Get Yourself Writing When Your Life Just Exploded, Holly Lisle
Mugging the Muse, Writing Fiction for Love and Money, Holly Lisle

Singer from the Sea, Sheri S. Tepper
Locus Interview

Researching Holly Lisle books on writing...more to come

2008-01-23T10:18:00.000-08:00

Holly Lisle's fiction spoke to me so much that I was interested to see her books on writing and I am now checking them out.

Picking up my fluttering manuscript pages from the slow-motion train wreck of my last year...more to come -- oops! Clicking on the cover takes you to a more expensive option, the singular ebook I'm looking at can be reached through this link
21 Ways to Get Yourself Writing

Northanger Abbey....what happens in Bath..

2008-01-22T22:01:00.001-08:00

A happier adaptation last Sunday in PBS's Northanger Abbey. One of the Austen observers at the Republic of Pemberley noted "What happens in Bath, stays in Bath." This version was spiced up with much ado about wild goings on at the resort of Bath. However, this adaptation also managed to make a point I had missed before about the story. On one level it is a satire on the Gothic romance novels of Ann Radcliffe, etc. Yet heroine, Catherine Morland, shows innocence and youthful exuberance that Jane Austen must have shared when she wrote the book at the of age 23. The sinister shadows of the Gothic tales disappear before the sunny optimism of youth. This adaptation certainly clarified how sexuality was masked and released for readers in novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Gregory Lewis's
The Monk, the Laurell K. Hamiltons of their day.

The old BBC dramatization of the book from the 1980s did give a little more screen time to the amusing character of old Mrs. Allen, with her unshakable conviction that the most important thing in the world is dresses--specifically her own--and the an interesting scene in the baths. But I was quite satisfied with the new version.

Not persuaded...

2008-01-16T15:59:00.001-08:00

Just a few words about the Masterpiece Theater's adaptation Persuasion. Sigh. Okay, somehow the confines of the 90-minute length inspired screenwriter Davies to chop the material up in a very odd way. I hear some Austen fans having induced friends or spouses to watch this as a rare treat ended up spending a lot of time explaining what the heck was happening. This is not good, and I hope anyone who saw this Persuasion as an intro to Austen will check out the '95 film--which I've widgeted up in the sidebar. It was totally coherent, heartfelt and made sense!

For those who already know Persuasion, who want to watch this, I'll just say that there were some very odd stagings. Maybe the idea was to "chick-lit-ize" it. I was interested to find that the ardent Austenphiles on the Republic of Pemberley shared my disbelief at the insertion of a "Run to the airport" penultimate scene that has graced so many chick lit flicks. Only in this case, we had Anne Elliot and her invalid(!) friend Mrs. Smith pelting through the streets of Bath, with the camera following, hollering out important plot points. The fact that they were shot from behind did not help. Someone asked why Mrs. Smith needed a nurse to look after her if she was capable of competing in the Bath Marathon.

I don't trust myself to discuss what happened to the pivotal scene where Captain Wentworth is writing a letter and eavesdropping on Anne Elliott. Cutting that scene was like cutting the heart out of Persuasion. The place where Davies put Anne's moving speech about the constancy of women turned it into a throwaway.

And furthermore, the only thing I can say about Rupert Penry-Jones, the actor playing Captain Wentworth, is that he is quite handsome but looks entirely too sheltered to have just worked his way up to captain in the British Navy and made his fortune in booty from the Napoleonic wars. At the very least they might have given him a little scar or a sunburn. But that might just be my fondness for Ciaran Hinds in the '95 version talking. As they say, your mileage may vary.

I’m liking this year better already!

2008-01-13T11:33:00.000-08:00

This past week I read Holly Lisle’s Tayln, which took me just where I needed to go—away, but with fascinating characters in a believable “other” world. It was good enough that I was up till 1:00 a.m. to read the end. I also discovered Holly Lisle's web page with some great stuff for readers and writers!

Then there's heaven on earth starting today for lovers of the works of Jane Austen. PBS is presenting dramatizations of all the Jane Austen novels, beginning tonight, January 13th, with the last, though certainly not the least heartfelt, Persuasion.

The URL above also offers is a great interview with the legendary Andrew Davies, whose 1996 dramatization of Pride and Prejudice is still the gold standard for Austen (and which PBS will air Feb 10, 17 and 24th).

I had to laugh at PBS's Online Dating Profiles for the men of Jane Austen’s books!

January 6 to 12, 1978 I read:

Working, I do It for the Money, Bill Owens, author of Suburbia.
Note from 1978: Actually a photo collection, (Suburbia was also an interesting book—I read it in a bookstore in SF)
Note 2008—what? It’s a photo book I looked at all the pictures, standing up in a bookstore. It’s not like I could have afforded to buy the book, good as it was.

The Far Side of Madness, Perry
Note from 1978: Didn’t finish

Close to Colette, Maurice Goudeket

The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank, Erma Bombeck

Healing Benefits of Acupressure, Acupuncture without Needles, F. M. Houston
1978 note: Quite useful, Keats Publishing, Inc., must get several copies

January 6 to January 12, 2008 I read:

Tayln, Holly Lisle

All over the map and on to fantasy land

2008-01-05T19:43:00.002-08:00

December 25, 1977 to January 5, 1978 I read:

Good Company, a memoir mostly rhetorical, Irving Drutman

1977 Note: p. 219 - “Goldwyn remained on the Coast during my first two months and I had no opportunity to make his acquaintance and gather my own little bouquet of his malapropisms.In fact I never got to meet him because when I was in town my boss Nathanson didn't introduce us...”

2008 note: I'm kind of with Nathanson on this one.... If this was supposed to make the author appear more impressive, it had the opposite result.

Writers in Love, story of George Eliot & George Henry Lewes, Collette & Maurice Goudeket, Katherine Mansfield & John Middleton Murray, Mary Kathleen Benet

My note: Didn't finish all but most, not bad

Dr. Zismor's Skin Care Book, Zismore, Foreman
My note: I read an earlier version or something

Rex, an Autobiography, Rex Harrison
My note:Quite a shallow and self-serving book

The Carlos Complex, a Study in Terror, Christopher Dobson Ronald Payne

Mitsou, Colette

Super Chic, Brady
My note: Could also be called “Superficial”

Short novels of Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
Includes: Cheri, The Last of Cheri, the Other One, Duo,The Cat, The Indulgent Husband, Plus a nice little intro written in 1951 by a reverent Glenway Wescott

December 25, 2007 to January 5, 2008 I read:

The Language of the Night, Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ursula K. LeGuin
A 1979 collection of essays on writing fantasy, revised in 1989. It took even longer for me to get to it, but it still applies and Le Guin is still going strong.

fearful symmetry

2007-12-27T09:54:00.000-08:00

From my window I can see the San Francisco Zoo in the foggy distance across the park. Pondering the Christmas day escape, attacks on zoogoers, and execution of Tatiana, the Siberian tiger, I wonder if I am the only person in the city haunted by the William Blake lyric today.

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire in thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art?
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand, and what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The web page where I looked up the poem has a tiger drawn by Blake himself, showing what looks like an untigerly, sheepish grin. The words evoke more to my mind and I'm more inclined to follow the example of the stars in the poem and shed tears for all concerned.

No new books, but a magazine with attitude

2007-12-27T08:56:00.001-08:00

I had to make a new blog entry to take down the link to my cat essays. It seems my cats are quite content to have me support them and have no interest in seeking gainful employment. I may still write about them but not at that link which has thawed, and resolved into a dew...

I will share a very inspiring link for Fat Girl Magazine, which features some young voices with refreshing attitude. Information courtesy of Lara Frater at Fat Chicks Rule who is no slouch in the attitude department either.

If I don't post another entry before that--Happy New Year!

Lynne

Flickering fires of nostalgia

2007-12-24T19:21:00.000-08:00

I am a Buddhist, not a Christian. There's no particular reason for me to do or not "do" a Christmas celebration. Buddhists are usually mellow about telling one another what to believe or do. One major appeal of Buddhism when I joined nearly 40 years ago was that it offered no commandments or recipes for life, except the strictest of all: Cause and effect. Buddhists celebrate the New Year in the Asian fashion--starting fresh, making good causes for the year to come and so on. However, if I wanted to sing carols and so on, it would not be as they used to say "against my religion."

However, the holiday season sometimes finds me stiffening my resistance to sentimentality, simply in self-defense against overwhelming nostalgia and a sort of Holiday Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Case in point, a line from T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi caught me unawares and transported me back to the little theater holiday presentation where I first heard the poem recited--and heard recited many times because I was doing props for the show and attended all rehearsals and performances. It sent a shiver down my spine now as it had when I was 16 instead of 59. The words have a different depth to me now than they did then.

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'

The link below is supposed to have an audio clip of Eliot reading the poem, but I couldn't make it work. It's been one of those weeks. Maybe it will work for you. If not the whole text of the poem is there.
Eliot poem

What keeps occurring to me as I slowly re-read In Cold Blood is the interplay of truth and fiction. The rafts and rafts of observed facts in the book give it more heft and volume than Capote's more slender, totally fictional works. Sometimes reading fiction, you can actually pick out the true episodes (often the ones that don't fit) and sometime a whole forest of shards of glass that the writer picked up from real life and scattered on the page. Honestly, you can very often tell those "real" notes, because they stand up off the page. There's quite a lot of that in In Cold Blood. Odd holiday reading, but it somehow seems like a New Yorker article to me--which is part of its genius. The wealth of factual detail meshes so well with Capote's dreamy flights of lyrical speculation.

December 11 to December 24, 1977 I read:

Blind Ambition, The White House Years, John Dean

Vibrations: Improving your Psychic Environment, Daniel Logan

December 11 to 24, 2007 I read:

Greywalker, (Greywalker, Book 1), Kat Richardson
Kat Richardson

and
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
very slowly

Nights in pink satin, days in pink collars

2007-12-10T10:31:00.000-08:00

This past week was a sugar-coated fiction week, watching the Pixar/Disney film Ratatouille and reading Stephanie Rowe’s Date Me Baby, One More Time, which could be classified as paranormal chick lit.

The experience set me to thinking about the large quantities of gloss that gets slathered over stories in our era. Disneyfication of fairy tales is a case in point. As a cynical adult, my interest flagged a little in Ratatouille, and I think it was in part because the story was convoluted without being rooted in a reality I could access. You could see the cooking genius rat as an eternal outsider, aiming for an impossible dream. Yet, it was a strain to keep suspending that disbelief.

As my Web Diva, Sue Trowbridge put it in reviewing the film, “Rats, in a kitchen?” I’ve had pet rats, and they are charming little critters, but not shall we say housebroken or extraordinarily clean. A colony of rats living in and around your kitchen and flooding around the neighborhood, pouring into (or out of) a house in great masses evokes a visceral reaction that is hard to sentimentalize. We don't have this problem with Mickey Mouse because he looks and acts very little like the rat you do not want to find in your cupboard and much more like a human despite the ears.

Watching Ratatouille set me to contemplating how much harm has been done by “happily ever after” and yet how ingrained it is. If I were reading a story to a child would I prefer the “happily ever after” fairy tales than those of the Brothers Grimm, which end with "happily until their deaths." But that doesn’t mean the child would prefer the more sanitized version. I know those who fondly recall the bloodthirsty Grimm tales, envisioning the punishments inflicted on some characters as happening to siblings or mean kids on whom they wish vengeance. I think that’s similar to children’s love of dinosaurs—Tyrannosaurus Rex makes great imaginary backup.

“These fairy tales are not senseless stories written for the amusement of the idle; they embody the profound religion of our forefathers,” . . . -- W. S. W. Anson, Asgard and the Gods, p. 21

I’m not sure how much that the above quote relates to anything I read or watched this week, I just liked it when I found it while I was searching for
happily ever after,

The title of Date Me Baby, One More Time is a satire on Britney Spears’ 1999 mega hit song, "Hit Me Baby One More Time." Yikes. I don’t know how serious the sadomasochistic undertones are to the target audience (20-30 somethings). Date Me is filled with violent threats that are thrown out with the same casual tone that is used to contemplate buying pretzels. It's kind of a convention of the genre. The heroine and her love interest are each hoping to cut the other’s head off for complicated magical survival reasons. The characters take it seriously, that is their job after all. But it is not to be taken seriously by the reader who knows that this is a romance. The fragility of the threats dilutes the suspense somewhat, as does the fact that most of the characters are immortal or extremely hard to kill. But the kill-or-be-killed romance would be an extremely dark tale if the reader did imagine that actual murder would ever happen.

The heroine of Date Me, has a convoluted supernatural pedigree, a fire-breathing dragon for a roommate, and a dead mother who keeps returning from purgatory to complain that she is being courted by Satan, who is portrayed as a hopelessly ineffective lounge lizard who only lives to make the heroine’s mother Queen of Hell. The Satan character was at first irksome, but I eventually accepted him as a sort of Wile E. Coyote figure (with the part of the Roadrunner played by the heroine's dead mother--see? I said it was convoluted!)

The story and all of its conventions float on a veritable sea of horniness—I won’t say “hormones” because the characters' lusts seemed as formalized as a minuet, but I have to give it an "A" for inventiveness and I did keep turning the pages. Kind of like Laurell K. Hamilton on laughing gas.

December 3 to 10, 1977 I read:

The Pink Collar Workers, Inside the World of Women’s Work, Louise Kapp Howe

A Time Magazine review:

To assemble her disquieting portrait of the work life of the average woman, Howe interviewed scores of women, met with unions and management and even took a job as a sales clerk. The vast majority of women, she writes, are in "pink collar" occupations: beautician, office worker, sales clerk, waitress. Among the problems contributing to their generally low wages: too many applicants and not enough jobs, indifferent unions, and company policy predicated on "A and P" (attrition and pregnancy) to hold down the office payroll.

Louise Kapp Howe died in 1984, just a year after Stallard, Ehrenreich and Sklar took her work a step further and coined the term "pink collar ghetto."

In 1998 Salon Magazine reported that Public Relations was becoming a new pink collar ghetto
article

In the 21st century this situation has changed in some ways, and in other ways has not
2004 pink collar update

December 3 to 10, 2007 I read:

Date Me Baby, One More Time, Stephanie Howe
Stephanie Rowe web page/

Winter hearts, ironic rewards

2007-12-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

I watched the film Infamous recently and found that it sent me back both to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I consider one of the best-written books I’ve ever read, but to some other books that surround it—including Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Last year I saw the film, Capote, which was powerful and dominated by Phillip Lee Hoffman’s tour de force performance. It took about a year for me to be ready to revisit the harsh subject matter of a cold-blooded killing in the American heartland. The intriguing spectacle of the glitteringly, openly gay, Capote charming his way into the hearts and minds of 1960’s small town people of 1959 Kansas has some humor.

Writer/director Douglas McGrath’s Infamous focuses on the damage inflicted by lost love while in Capote writer Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller zero in more on the damage inflicted by betrayal, some of the improvisation took me out of that film's reality.

The Futterman/Bennett film was primarily based on Gerald Clark’s biography, while Infamous was more based on George Plimpton’s book of interviews Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career.

For me, Infamous was easier to view, less bleak, I guess. It was surprisingly evocative—not just of its time period, my 1960s were considerably different than either the glittering world of New York or the small town, but of the power of art and the price... Sandra Bullock's gentle words as Nelle Harper Lee about the "blue" at the heart of the the brightest flame was as affecting as some of the more dramatic moments.

November 22 to December 2, 1977. I read:

Literary Women, the Great Writers, Ellen Moers
Note: elusively written, didactic, disorganized. What is the odd feminist obsession with George Sand?

Media Sexploitation, Wilson Bryan Key
Note: a wealth of unsubstantiated statements, and some actual data.

Patternmaster, Octavia E. Butler

J. R. R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle Earth, Daniel Grotta-Kursk
Note: very nice, clean, literate

Loose Changes, Three Women of the 60s, Sarah Davidson
Note: It took about a week to finish this. I did not like it

November 22 to December 2, 2007 I read:

The Ghost, Robert Harris
A thriller, state-of-the-art escape reading!

Thanks to you who read! Plus anger—less of it—thankfully!

2007-11-22T15:23:00.000-08:00

To those reading this blog now, thank you for your time, and I hope each of you has a great day. If it doesn’t happen to be Thanksgiving on the day when you read this, well, appreciation is a good thing for every day, and I appreciate your reading my words.

This past few weeks I’ve been studying up on anger and rage for purposes of literary research, however I myself have not actually been experiencing anger or rage—for which I am supremely grateful. I used to have a very short fuse and hot temper. But one of the unlooked-for results of decades of Buddhist practice is that my temper, while still white-hot, gets triggered less often and no longer sets off smoke alarms and forest fires.

During one time in my life I could literally rage for days, and it was not a pleasant experience—like a merry-go-round through hell. You keep buying tickets for another go-round without realizing you have any choice in the matter. Nowadays when I do get angry (and frequently that will happen when I am quite tired or sleep-deprived) a kind of built-in sprinkler system of non-attachment gets triggered and I have the choice to disengage from rage—which I always do—nowadays.

There’s a genuine adrenalin rush to be had from anger, be it righteous or un-…but the toxic cost is too high. The reason it was never a personal goal of mine to control my temper is that my own anger was invisible to me. It seems to be part of the condition of anger that a person manages to stay there by focusing on other people or situations as the cause of his or her ire. So I was first able to see in other people how they chose to keep rekindling anger rather than stopping the cycle. By the time I began to be able to see how damaging this was in myself, I was already beginning to figure out how to choose not to be angry…and again…and again. It gets easier with practice.

October 28 to November 22, 1977 I read:

Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic, Barbara O’Brien
I think this was a re-read, this book was very haunting and I’ve read it many times

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Dorothy L. Sayers
My note is – “still soothing, amusing” so another re-read

Clouds of Witness, Dorothy L. Sayers

Whispers, An Illustrated Anthology of Fantasy and Horror, Stuart David Schiff

Gromchik & Other Tales from a Psychiatrist’s Casebook, A. H. Chapman, M.D.
Um, I didn’t like this one. My note was: “self-satisfied bastard”

Ringworld, Larry Niven

Jane Austen & Her World, Ivor Brown
Another re-read. My note is: “again—this time noticing that it’s 48 less-than-brilliantly illustrated pages, more of a skimpy essay than a book.

The Five of Me: the Autobiography of a Multiple Personality, Henry Hawksworth with Ted Schwartz
Okay, this note is from 2007, but I am guessing that Ted Schwartz is a collaborator and not one of Hawksworth’s other personalities. But wouldn't it be an intriguing idea if he were!

October 28 to November 22, 2007 I read:

A Violent Heart: Understanding Aggressive Individuals, George K. Moffatt

Rage, Michael Eigen

Anger’s Past, the Social Uses of Emotion in the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein, Ed
Lots of fascinating stuff among the scholarly stickery weeds.

Widgets gone wild...not as much fun as Gidgets...

2007-10-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

I just posted a moment ago and looked at the widget thing I'd managed to generate.... Graphics, okay, I expect them to go screwy. For some reason when I try to perpetrate graphics it's like I'm typing wearing oven mitts. But that little sucker shows the movie Truly, Madly, Deeply as selling for like $59! I mean it's a classic movie, but please don't think I'm suggesting anyone pay that much for it. Why...how...? Never mind, I'm fried, I'm talking to a widget, which is a little piece of computer code.... The good news is that as of this moment the widget is not talking back. Signing out! Lynne

"Just because it's fixed doesn't mean it can't be broken."

2007-10-28T16:27:00.000-07:00

The quote above is from Simon Beaufoy, from the movie Blow Dry. I can't tell you how much better just the memory of Alan Rickman delivering that line makes me feel.

I didn’t read much since the last entry (major editing job—exhausting but necessary). I did watch a movie, which set me thinking about how much I admire certain screen writers. I selected Blow Dry in part because it starred Alan Rickman in a non-villain role. Then I discovered that Beaufoy also wrote The Full Monty.
The Full Monty

The screenwriters (in one case writer/director) of the four “Alan Rickman fascination” movies entries I listed are: Anthony Minghella who wrote and directed, Truly, Madly, Deeply has since written Cold Mountain (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)
Cold Mountain.
Richard Curtis, who wrote and directed Love Actually has a resume of greatest hits that would eat this space totally if I tried to list them. I’ll list Notting Hill Notting Hill (Collector's Edition).

The screenplay of Sense and Sensibility was written by Emma Thompson, who acts and writes (another screenplay she wrote was Nanny McPhee (Widescreen Edition) Nanny McPhee).

I’m so glad they all appreciate Alan Rickman! He sneers well and with great depth, but it’s good to see him displaying other facets of his talent.

October 21 to 28, 1977 I read:

Private Lives, Noel Coward

Hollywood is a Four-Letter Town, James Bacon

The Provoked Wife: The Life and Times of Susannah Cibber, Mary Nash
Note: Oddly very soothing

Sane Asylum: Inside the Delancey Street Foundation (Charles Hampden-Turner)

I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression, Erma Bombeck

The Savage God: a Study of Suicide, A. Alvarez
Note: No more interesting than before

October 21 to 28, 2007 I read stuff that I was editing for hire.

That's done for now, and I'm officially recuperating at Club Shred, which is where you go when you've concentrated on something so long that your brain is not focusing well till it recuperates.

Good news

2007-10-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

I’m thrilled to report that my friend (and USA Today bestselling author) Jaki Girdner is preparing for the re-issue of all 12 of her Kate Jasper mysteries from E-Reads in trade paperback POD (Publish On Demand) and e-book formats. The books are scheduled to begin in January with the hard-to-find series opener Adjusted To Death, about murder in a chiropractor’s office. Her web page won’t be updated with this info for a few weeks because the web diva we both use, Sue Trowbridge, is moving to a new house even as we speak . . . well, even as I type this.

E-Book Fiction is also the subject of a new blog I’m going to collaborate with Jaki and her high-tech savvy Super-Spouse, Greg, in examining that phenomenon--maybe a few guest bloggers, the odd interview. Luddite perspectives on E-books. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, as you can see below, I’ve been reading up again on book marketing and blogging.

October 6 to October 20, 1997 I read:

The Alias Program, Fred Graham
Note: very well written, clearly told

The Co-ed killer, Margaret Cheney

I noted that I didn't like the axe-grinding and pop psychology but I've got to say this woman is versatile, she’s since written about Serial killers, Mabel Mercer, and Nicolo Tesla

The Life and Times of Chaucer, John Gardner
Note: Not bad once you get into it.
I see this is out of print now.

Lupe, Gene Thompson
Note: Undigested psychism [I don’t think that’s actually a word, but that’s what I said, I did define it, kinda…], i.e. bullshit and poorly written

October 6 to October 20, 2007 I read (well, chipped away at, these are reference books!)

1001 Ways to Market Your Book, John Kremer

This book got glowing reviews, and so much of it is aimed at print on demand and self-published nonfiction that I thought it might not be so relevant for fiction. But I was wrong. Only a small portion of the resources in this book are relevant to fiction, but they are presented so clearly and sensibly that you can easily use them.

Incidentally, as a shy author who is obsessed with the marketing end of writing (because it does NOT come easily to be and it so often makes the difference as far as continuing publication) I think this and every book on marketing should be followed with an eye to what you can do without feeling too overwhelmed. This book can easily be used that way and that's another reason why it's the best resource book on marketing I’ve seen. Go John Kremer!

Great website too.

Publishing a Blog with Blogger, Elizabeth Castro
I live in hope to improve my skills with this book!

Of bookstores, graphics...bright colors, heavy machinery

2007-10-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

Once again I have tangled with the graphic elements and ... well, it's like trying to hold an inflated balloon under water for me. I love the bright colors, but if there had been heavy machinery involved someone might really have got hurt.

I had meant to use a nifty little widget software thing Amazon offered to put pictures and info on a web page. However before posting anything with the Amazon site logo, I wanted to acknowledge that some people I know and respect deeply feel that the online giant has something major to do with the breaking the hearts and destroying the businesses of independent book dealers we have all known and loved. I don't totally agree with that viewpoint. True, I have known booksellers whose dreams were crushed. However, small bookstores are fragile things, and Amazon is one of many hazards. I also know people who wouldn't buy books at all if they didn't buy them online, and they buy through Amazon and don't go to physical bookstores.

Anyway, enough foot-shuffling. I'd meant to put up at least a partial list of Independent Bookstore I know and love to sit next to the Amazon widget thingie, but it slipped away from me and got posted before I could do that. So I'm doing it now.
I'll try to put it in the sidebar thingie to stay on the template, but just so it doesn't get lost:

Green Apple Books is a bookstore I haunted from my college years—the used books were
the reason
Green Apple Books

A true San Francisco Institution—and a mystery booklover’s Bermuda Triangle
SF Mystery Books

Staceys, a store that helped me survive working in the SF Financial District!
Staceys

Another wealth of books in downtown SF
Alexander Book Company
Alexander Books

A little further south on the SF Peninsula in San Mateo is the amazing M Is for Mystery bookstore
M Is for Mystery

for the record:

October 5, 1977 I read:

The Main, Trevanian

October 5, 2007
I saw the great French-language film The Visitors on DVD.

DVDs did not exist in 1977 by the way!

Normal entry to follow in another day or so! Whew!

The Curse of the Giant, Blind, Albino Penguins?

2007-10-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

Wandering in time and geography from West Los Angeles circa 1977 to Neanderthal prehistory with a side trip to Antarctica ... wondering how those giant blind albino penguins managed to get through customs ... a little R&R in Terry Pratchett's Disc World, and finally landing in 2007 San Francisco.

When I check on books read 30 years ago, often I do search out the authors to see what they are doing now.

I was never able to complete reading Stan Gooch’s Total Man in 1977 (see below) but the book drew me back to keep trying. A similar mystifying but sticky experience happened when I looked him up on the internet. It sounded as if he had fallen upon hard times. M. Alan Kazlev outlines some of Gooch's ideas at This link shows supporters distressed that he was (is? I hope not!) living in a caravan in penury in Wales. another link also shows concern.

Glancing over some summaries of Gooch's work I saw a reference to possible remote Neanderthal civilization in Antarctica before that continent was covered with ice. I couldn’t help being perversely reminded of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and those pesky giant, blind, albino penguins in the abandoned cities of Antarctica. This page describes encountering At the Mountains of Madness at a used bookstore, anyone who has wandered in such places will recognize
the experience.
I know the book cover he’s referring too—creepy!

Lovecraft's GBA (Giant Blind Albino) Penguins served pretty much the same function as the crowds running away in the Godzilla movies: When the penguins were restless in the fathomless underground corridors, nameless horror was on its way. Yet I spent an idle moment considering that those huge flightless, sightless critters might impart a curse, totally apart from slipping on their “detritus’ as Lovecraft calls it, for those who dare to contemplate civilizations beyond time buried under the Antarctic ice. Perhaps not. As of 2005, Gooch’s thoughts on his original psychic encounter with a Neanderthal were released on a CD I hope all is well with Mr. Gooch and that giant, blind, albino penguins are not besieging a trailer park somewhere in Wales.

September 8 to October 5, 1977 I read:

What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?, Michael Medved and Wallechinsky

Total Man, Stan Gooch
Note – I also have this listed a few days later on 9/25, evidently I kept coming back trying to finish it, and finally got to about half way through and gave up.

more on Gooch

Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats, Gene DeWeese, Robert Coulson

Home Free, Dan Wakefield
Note: Couldn’t get into it at all, poorly done.

Crash, Rob and Sarah Elder
Hard-edged, journalistic prose, an unpleasant but very, very well written book

How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer, Jimmy Breslin

Agatha Christie, First Lady of Crime, H.R. Keating, Ed.

The Condensed World of the Reader’s Digest, Samuel A. Schreiner, Jr.

Black Sun, the Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby, Geoffrey Wolff
rather too admiring bio but you get the idea.
Not the guy you want to see your niece or sister involved with, and if she did, she might be well advised to memorize the following phrase – “Sorry, Harry, but I make it a rule not to make suicide pacts on the first date, particularly with married men...”

His poetry is also a clue--anyone reading this poem would certainly be aware that the guy had some serious depression problems, and was also in dire need of a thesaurus...

Man in a Cage, Brian Stableford

September 8 to October 5 I read:

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, Terry Pratchett

American Gods, Neil Gaiman
journal

Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett

Neil Gaiman for fantasy noir and Terry Pratchett for fantasy bright and shiny—both fascinating!

Take two horror novels and call me in the morning

2007-09-07T16:55:00.001-07:00

I guess I've been in a Stephen King state of mind (yikes!), reading It again. I'm a sporadic rather than a dedicated King reader. Sometimes he's too disturbing for me. But that is part of how he grabs the reader, and sometimes, as readers, we need to be grabbed and held. I think of my friend, Merry, who is a major fan of his. I am sure that measured doses of the solid hook and locked-in escape of King's books--and other horror and fantasy books, but first and foremost King's work--sustained her through 18 years of a job she detested. I'm glad she's in better circumstances now--though still reading Stephen King.

August 27 to September 7, 1997 I read:

Report to the Commissioner, James Mills

A Visit to Haldeman and Other States or Mind, Charles L. Mee, Jr.

Psychic Summer, Arnold M. Copper & Coralee Leon
College kids, a summer rental a Ouija board...sounds like a recipe for a slasher film. I'm not sure if I'd get as intense as the folks atthe shadowlands.net
but ya know, maybe I would. Some things I wouldn't have in my house and a Ouija board is one of them.
Evidently now there's psychic summer camp. I am so not going there.

Big Mac of McDonald's, The Unauthorized Story, Max Chain & Steve Boas

Bright Orange for the Shroud, John D. MacDonald

MacDonald was an author I loved enough to buy his newest in hardcover 30 years ago. Alas, I can no longer stand to read him due to the way his male characters treat his female characters. That once whizzed right over my head, now it's irritating to read.

Convention, Richard Reeves
Richard_Reeves

Important to Me: Personal Record, Pamela Hansford Johnson

The Privilege of His Company: Noel Coward Remembered, William Marchant
Noel Coward

The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV Journalist, Dan Rather & M. Hershowitz
Dan Rather

The Cracker Factory, Joyce Reba-Burditt
(I hope I spelled the author's name right, I'm worrying about this blog getting vaporized because of certain mysterious error messages--possibly caused by irate Ouija boards--no just kidding). Anyway I don't want to navigate away from this page and risk losing it!)

August 27 to September 7, 2007 I re-read:

It, Stephen King
I remembered that King was a visceral writer, but I’d forgotten the degree to which he seems to simply open his character’s heads and dump out every gross perception--another reason I don’t read him so much anymore. I say “seems” because King is far from the artless writer some seem to think he is. On the contrary, he’s made it clear that he aims to reach the reader on whatever level he can. The gross-out is one of his techniques and it gives the reader the impression of really being inside the character's head.

Death in the land of denial

2007-08-26T10:36:00.000-07:00

My house-feral cat, Belladonna died on August 13th, and the process of being with her, particularly in her last few hours reminded me how words just cannot truly describe it. I feel like a jerk for all the times I've written using the word death, that now seem to have nothing to do with its implacable reality.

Whatever I’ve learned about the experience of death has been totally from sitting with my mother in 1980, my husband in 1991 and some of my cats who died at home when I could be with them. These experiences had enough common elements that the morning of August 13th I could tell that Belladonna wouldn't see another dawn as clearly as anything I've ever known.

Death used to happen at home and the process was pretty common knowledge, but now in our “advanced” culture it is often hidden behind hospital walls. I couldn't help but think of how the young Siddhartha Gautama (later the Buddha) was shielded by his loving parents from even the sight of illness, old age and death.

I was more sheltered than many, and never even attended a funeral till I was in my 20s. I certainly never sought that knowledge. So I’m always a little surprised at how clear it now seems once someone has entered on that last part of life’s journey. I believe in fighting for health up to the last moment. But I learned the hard way the price of denial when someone you love is actually dying.

Most people I’ve talked to who have had relatives die go through doubts about whether they did the right thing—having a relative die while driving to a hospital instead of calling an ambulance, calling the paramedics to resuscitate someone who then stayed on a respirator for a month before dying. Sometimes you just don’t know. Can’t know.

Sometimes you can.

Having seen it a few times with cats who just wasted away and then died at home, I’ve also taken a dying cat, my poor black Persian, Ophelia, to the emergency veterinary hospital to suffer through IVs and steroids to extend her life for a few more hours of suffering. I can only plead fear and ignorance. It was like trying to stuff a baby back in the womb when it’s ready to be born.

It was very, very hard to stay by Belladonna on the day she died. Feral that she was, over the last her last eight months, she had begun to let me pet and very gently brush her more although she fiercely resisted being picked up or restrained in any way. Her daughters came, nosed around briefly, and then retreated--shy Betty to hide and more outgoing Tigerlily to nap with the senior male, El Nino. The last few hours I just sat by Bella, though she was beyond seeing or knowing what was around her. As a Buddhist, I was fortunate to be able to chant because that made it easier to be with her and not be distracted. So I chanted, talked to her and petted her gently from time to time. I mixed up a little codeine in cat food gravy and put a few drops in her mouth now and then in hopes of dulling any pain from the convulsions, which did get milder. She seemed more peaceful, and finally was utterly still.

Since then my surviving cats are comforting each other and me, and we’re all learning to live without Bella’s tough but affectionate presence. I’m retreating into DVDs--I saw Trevor Nunn’s 1996, The Twelfth Night a couple of times. It was very good. I cried a lot, although I would probably cry at anything at this point. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows kind of demands it, but even so that dreaming world seems very familiar and safe.

August 12 to August 23, 1977 I read:

Gates of Eden, Morris Dickstein
Note: Couldn’t read all of it. [Sometimes I like literary criticism but clearly not this one. My note continued: “Literary criticism is hard for me to pay attention to”]

None Dare Call It Witchcraft, Gary North
Um, I can’t bring myself to quote my note on this. The most polite word I used was “propaganda.” Suffice it to say I found the author’s agenda intrusive and his attitude willfully ill-informed.

The Investigative Journalist, Folk Heroes of a New Era, James S. Dygert
I think it's been quite awhile since THAT new era faded.

Beyond Control, George Leonard
Note: Not bad. Not great but not bad.

The Living Buddha, Daisaku Ikeda (trans. Burton Watson)
Speaking of Shakyamuni Buddha, I think this was a bio of Gautama.

August 12 to August 23, 2007 I read:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling

Fanny Price, born to be mild

2007-08-11T20:43:00.000-07:00

This past week, I was drawn back to re-read Mansfield Park after watching the beautiful but not-spectacularly-satisfying film adaptation written and directed by Patricia Rozema. The review below dislikes the movie. I liked the movie as a kind of meditation on Mansfield Park, but I missed the “real” heroine—Fanny Price as Austen wrote her.

One controversial aspect of the film was Rozema’s focus (it qualifies as a subplot) on what one character calls, “the people who pay for the party.” She takes pains to point out the ugliness of aristocratic families who derived most of their income from the slave trade and/or slave labor on colonial plantations. I think that added a reasonable dimension to the film and probably came close to expressing Austen’s actual views on slavery (see quote below).

In the DVD director’s comments segment, Rozema uses the word “prig” to refer to Fanny, and her solution is to give meek and mild Fanny a personality transplant. She uses material from Jane Austen’s own life – including impulsively accepting an unwise proposal followed by the next morning’s anguished withdrawal of that acceptance. That happened in real life to Jane Austen, but not to Fanny Price in the book Mansfield Park.

Rozema also has Fanny writing wildly satirical adventure tales, using excerpts from the actual stories a young Jane Austen wrote for her family’s amusement. In the movie Fanny indulges in Elizabeth-Bennet-style teasing of other characters. Fanny Price as Austen created her is missing from the film. Maybe she’s just not movie material, but I missed her.

It’s clear to me after last week's re-reading of Mansfield Park that Fanny Price had what we used to call an inferiority complex, and would nowadays call low self-esteem. Carol Shields’ 1998
salon article uses the words “wimpy, passive and “doormat” to describe poor Fanny, but Shields also gives a very keen perception of why and how she got there and how she manages to keep a light of spirit intact and burning. Raised to age 10 in degradation and poverty, then scooped up and dropped into an aristocratic household where she is daily hammered with demands to be grateful for every crumb that falls her way.

How could Fanny not be shy and reserved? She might not have survived if she was not very, very cautious, living in a snakes’ nest of indifference, neglect and cruelty. The life of the mind and spirit are her only refuge. The suspense in the book concerns Fanny’s survival. She can't go back to a life of grim poverty with her parents and 9 siblings in Portsmouth. This was not a time when women could work outside the home. The best she could hope for would be marriage or a kind of slavery as an attendant to a female relative. Fanny's hopes for happiness seem as impossible to the reader as they do to her throughout the book. (I also noticed as I never had in previous readings how precarious Fanny’s health was in the book and it brought home how close Austen was to her death at 41 when she wrote this book, which was published posthumously.)

In regard to Rozema’s strong (and graphic) statements about how owners of plantation in Antigua financed their lavish lifestyles through the use of slave labor, there is evidence that Austen would have agreed about this evil. The Republic of Pemberly website has a word search feature and I found the word "slave" used 3 times in the book. Once to refer to the actual slave trade, and twice to refer to women's situations.

In regards to the slavery theme, I found a scholarly, but interesting article tracing Jane Austen’s probable views on slavery, based on correspondence with her naval officer brother who hated having to protect the slaving ships, and a list of books and authors she reported loving, including prominent abolitionists.

One of the responsibilities of Commander Francis Austen was to engage in policing activities in the Americas, but he was authorized to intercept only English vessels. He reported on his deep revulsion not merely at the inhumane and heinous treatment of the African slave cargo on the Middle Passage, but also at the entire slave system, which he observed at first hand in other parts of the world as well. Commenting on the "harshness and despotism" of landholders and their managers in the West Indian context he writes that "slavery however it may be modified is still slavery." [footnote omitted] It is clear from this documentation that Francis Austen was, to his credit, truly appalled by the institution of slavery as such and, in this respect, as Southam points out (loc.cit.), he was considerably ahead of his time. In view of the attested close relationship Austen had with her sailor brothers, the elder Francis and the younger Charles, it is highly probable that she shared the former's unequivocal antipathy to the system.

article

08-03-77 to 08-11-77 I read:

America in the Movies, Michael Wood

Michael Wood is evidently now teaching at Princeton and still publishing books and articles. Here’s his
review of The Simpsons movie

Inside Story, Brit Hume

High Stakes, Dick Francis

Note: My unfavorite Francis book
’07 note – I forget why I didn’t like this one. I’ve read every book I could find, and studied many of them to see how he achieves that effortless storytelling (I wish I could say I found the secret, but in any event it was time well spent.)

Who is Teddy Villanova?, Thomas Berger
Note: An esoteric cop story is a contradiction in terms

Thomas Berger info.

August 3, 2007 to August 11, 2007 I read:

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

Our kitties, ourselves

2007-08-03T13:28:00.003-07:00

I have been reading Susun S. Weed’s Breast Cancer? Breast Health! The Wise Woman Way. There's a lot of strong cancer prevention information here, but I think it’s safe to say that most people read it because of a direct or indirect encounter with breast cancer. In my case I’m looking for more herbal wisdom for my “house feral” cat, Belladonna, who has been living with a different variety of cancer for several months now. Until I got this book I was working from what I could find on the internet with a some help (mainly moral support) from Ragnar Benson’s Survivalist’s Medicine Chest. You don’t have to be out in the wilds away from the rest of humanity to be on your own medically speaking.

I wish there was a magic house call vet I could call who would be supportive through this, and I have the odd whiny moment when I think if I had enough money I could command that kind of care for her. But Belladonna and I had the single worst quasi-medical experience I have ever experienced with the vet I could afford. The main thing this house call vet did was tell me that the bump she had was not an abscess but cancer. I'd just get angry again if I tried to describe his incompetent handling of a cat who was born feral and cautious about even letting me touch her. He traumatized my already very shy cat and he charged more than twice what any vet had ever charged me for a house call. He could see from my apartment that I didn’t have enough money for more extensive treatment, so he needed to extract as much cash as possible while I was still in shock from his diagnosis. (I couldn't afford biopsy or lab tests, but subsequent tumor development confirmed the diagnosis, not that that particular vet is getting asked back.)

Herbs and vitamins have helped Belladonna so far, although I haven't observed any diminishing of the tumor. There is no mythical, magical vet to call, so I try to help her however I can. Seven months since the visit of what my brother called, "the suicide vet," Bella is getting very thin, but her appetite is excellent, she uses the litter box as usual, and she hangs out with her “boyfriend” and daughters. She naps a lot, in the sun if it's available.

The herbal tinctures are 15-50% alcohol, and Bella comes to sit and stare at me significantly when she is ready for more. This may sound awful, but my gut level feeling is that, if asked, Bella would prefer it to the treatment I saw when I helped a friend dose her cat with vet-prescribed “chemo for cats.” That poor kitty struggled against the pill, and was always nauseated, had no appetite and stumbled around like a zombie until the inevitable euthanasia. (The chemo for cats option is never presented as a cure by the way, there are no stats to support it as lengthening the cat's life.)

Bella is the only mother in our kitty household. She and her two kittens, daughters, were trapped in our backyard and spayed with help from friends and the SF SPCA Feral Fix program. Bella is a fierce mom, I saw her face off a raccoon over a food bowl in the week before we trapped her. The raccoon retreated. She was spayed the day after she came to live here, but she’s still a passionate female. She’s the only cat I have who’s “experienced” as Jimi Hendrix would put it. When El Nino, our alpha male cat, got frisky with one of Bella’s daughters (who was immune to his charms) Bella literally ran over and threw herself under him—and continued to do so and every time he was interested.

Now I just stay near her as much as I can and I listen to her wishes which are crystal clear if you observe carefully. Mainly she wants to be left alone, occasionally to be lightly massaged or brushed or have the herbs in tasty cat food.

I am a bit amused reading Weed’s book because I kept thinking of a seriously feminist friend who is allergic to “womanist” things like Motherpeace Tarot. Despite being an unreconstituted hippie (Haight Ashbury, Class of ’68), I don’t go in for healing circles (maybe a little light energy balance work), and you’ll never find me at a sweat lodge or Tantric intensive.

Weed’s book caught my eye because I’d read and liked her book on Menopause Years, the Wise Woman Way. As a side note, I’d heard it held up as one of the rare examples of a self-published author creating sales for her book. Looking more closely at Weed’s schedule, I wouldn't call it a book-sales strategy so much as a calling, and a lifestyle arranged around her passion.

I found the book balanced and useful, without ever being bossy. According to the FAQ on her web site, Weed seems to have enough of a firey side that participants in her intensive workshops are warned in advance not to be intimidated by her yelling. That's an unusual warning to put on a website. Whatever may happen in person, on the pages of the book, the passionate caring comes through, and sometimes that is what’s most sorely needed.

Weed’s invocations to the GrandMothers and their replies to the GrandDaughter deeply moved me at a time of doubt and personal survival struggles in my own life that would have shaken my coping skills with even if Bella were not sick. Her message from the Ancient GrandMothers:

We have no right answers, no rules to follow, no promises of life eternal. Death is certain for every living thing. But there are many ways to prevent and reverse the cancerous changes in your cells….

And we insist that you trust your inner sense of rightness and be willing to act on you own convictions. Walk with truth and beauty, GrandDaughter. There are no wrong answers. There are no wrong paths. Each woman is unique. We are here to support you no matter what confronts you. And to remind you that you can leave a trail of wisdom, a trail of beauty, no matter what path you choose. That is the Wise Woman Way the world ‘round.

I also love the last part of Weed’s dedication/acknowledgment:

...to all the trees whose fiber we use here, I offer my deepest respect and my ecstatic gratitude for all the pleasure and support you have given and continue to give to me.

Ditto to the trees from me on that one.

From July 26 to August 3, 1977 I read:

The Murderers, Emanuel Tanay, M.D., and Lucy Freeman

Future World and
New Voices in Science Fiction, J.W. Campbell Awards,
Note: Tried to read 1st one, couldn’t stand too much of it, forgot to write author and editor’s name down before returning to library.

Unnatural Causes, P.D. James

Surgeon at Work, Clarence J. Schein, M.D.
Note: an infuriatingly imprecise writer

Rainbow’s End, James M. Cain
Note: a 1975-written fairy tale including wicked step mother, oh dear. Well, hell, the man was 83 when he wrote it. To write a readable novel that is even semi up to date at that age deserves applause. It is semi up to date.

Of course now in my late 50s I wonder if I’ll be able to write a semi-up-to-date novel at 83. But the main thing that cause my attention was
JAMES M. CAIN as in Double Indemnity????
Yup. I have no memory of the book. Some internet sources say it's a bank heist book and they don't mention a wicked step mother. The above link with all the book covers describes a 1950's “weight loss” hard-boiled novel, Galatea, which sounds like the Weight Watcher’s version of The Postman Always Rings Twice. I’ll borrow a little of my 20-something arrogant condescension and look down my nose at that one.

July 26 to August 3, 2007 I read

The Harlequin, Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita Blake seems to be moving toward her roots, or at least to her office! There was more story and less free-floating orgy in this book. It’s seems clear that these books are rushed from her to the publisher to the bestseller list with a minimum of revision, but maybe that’s the price of riding the tiger. There are tigers in the book, as a matter of fact, were-tigers.

Breast Cancer? Breast Health! The Wise Woman Way, Susun S. Weed

And the winner is...Tragedy as usual

2007-07-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

On a slightly unusual paying assignment, I spent many hours analyzing Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Novel writing doesn’t get any better than this, Robinson deserves the Pulitzer Prize she won. I had read the book in the late ‘80s around the same time as I saw the film version with the luminous Christine Lahti. My memory of the film diluted some of the deep sadness of the story of two young girls who lose every caretaker they have until they end up with a mentally ill aunt. In the film, there was a hopefulness about the ending, while in the book it was clearer and more tragic. I've unashamedly confessed before how much I choose comedy over tragedy. But this was one of those rare books so gorgeously written that the lyrical voice of the text overcame the pain of the subject matter—isolation, dysfunction, insanity, suicide—you know all that fun stuff.

Housekeeping won the Pen/Hemingway Award decades before Robinson won the Pulitzer for Gilead, I was left contemplating how literary awards usually go to tales of excruciatingly painful experiences told with exquisite skill.

Tragedy truly is more timeless than comedy. Laughter explodes like fireworks, while the flame of solemn suffering burns on and on. Comedy is also more perishable because it's linked to the era when it was written. Even when freshly presented in its own era, not everyone will laugh. Worse yet, humor's shelf life expires when people stop understanding what's being mocked. Then there’s that irreverent anarchy element of even the mildest comedy that can make some people nervous--too nervous to give it an award.

That said, I don't think we have that much choice what we write. Even if I tried to go tragic, my irreverent brain wouldn't go for it.

June 30 to July 23, 1997 I read (or in many cases re-read):

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
Emma, Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York, Gail Parent

Look Ma, I Am Kool! And Other Casuals, Burton Bernstein, Ed.
Note: read some, not all, mostly Woody Allen

Blood and Money, Thomas Thompson
Here’s an appreciative review of this book

Hope and Fear in Washington (the Early ‘70s), The Story of the Washington Press Corps, Barney Collier
Note: poor dude appears to be coming apart at the seams and writing about it, and seeing it everywhere he looks.

Some kind of Hero, James Kirkwood
Note: Makes you yearn for J.D. Salinger, I really couldn’t stand this book…I did like some of his other stuff but not this one.
web profile

Future World, Mayo Simon and George Schenck
Note: Poorly written but it does have suspense appeal.

Smokescreen, Dick Francis

The Murderers, Emanuel Tanay, M.D., and Lucy Freeman

June 30 to July 23, 2007 I R3,

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
A modern classic.

Strange Candy, Laurell K. Hamilton
These short stories were polished and fun to read. One, A Lust of Cupids, was a light-hearted paranormal chick lit story, which is not what I think of when I think of Hamilton.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, James Shapiro
a comprehensive review.

This was fun. This historical perspective provided abundant insights for a Shakespeare fiend like myself. For example, Shapiro suggests a probable reason why Shakespeare reneged on his promise at the end of Henry IV, Part 2 to bring back the popular Sir John Falstaff in Henry V. Instead Henry V contains a report of Falstaff's death. Early in 1599 Will Kemp, the comic actor who played Falstaff, left the Chamberlain’s Men. There was likely no other actor equal to the part. Shapiro has some telling evidence to prove his speculation that Shakespeare also wasn’t too keen on wild and wooly Kemp’s famous habit of improvising jokes to get a laugh. During the same year he has Hamlet instruct the Player in Hamlet:

…And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them...” Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2

George S. Kaufman had the same problem with the Marx Brothers:

Kaufman wrote The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, and A Night At the Opera for the Marx Brothers, but hated their improvisations. Once during an Animal Crackers rehearsal, he walked up onstage and said, "Excuse me for interrupting, but I thought for a minute I actually heard a line I wrote."
Gotta love
George S. Kaufman.

Revenge: some like it hot, some like it cold

2007-06-29T23:22:00.000-07:00

Someone sent me a link to an Ebay listing with the caption, "How can you tell this picture was taken by a man?" It turned out that the nude photographer had not realized there was a mirror on the wall across from where he stood to photograph the furniture he was selling. His photo, complete with his reflection in the mirror, bore witness that the photographer was indeed male.

Similarly, it’s quite clear when an author writes for revenge or payback. All writers do it, often it's why we started writing to begin with. We have so few fringe benefits, revenge is an important one. But when an author doesn’t let the piece cool off, rework it, and make it part of the story, it becomes a roadblock to enjoying the book. There are increasingly more of these passages in Laurell K. Hamilton, but the first two chapters of Danse Macabre, which I read this past week, are glaring examples. Essentially, the author (as Anita Blake, the 1st person narrator) is saying "you're just jealous" to critics (as embodied by the Ronnie, heroine’s former best human friend). This is so poorly presented that the author goes out of her way to give Ronnie a personality transplant, turning her into a vicious, sniping, bitter woman with severe psychological problems demonstrated by her envy of Anita's harem of adoring long-haired male shape shifters, who moonlight as strippers, do all the housework, and only live to service Anita, never looking at another woman.

Hamilton seems to be saying that anyone who criticizes her work only does so from jealousy of her monumental success.

Hmmmm - I definitely think Hamilton would be justified to say: “Go write your own best selling series and come back and we’ll talk.” But that doesn’t make those payback chapters less annoying, or the characters in them more appealing. Anything so close to authorial ventriloquism is unsettling—and that’s before the author even launches into the first of many sex scenes that make up most of the plot.

That said, I’m still reading whatever Hamilton writes. She gives good cliff-hanger. But I’m skipping more. Reading while rolling one’s eyes to the ceiling is hard work.

From June 7 to June 29, 1977 I read:

The Space Gods Revealed: A Close Look at the Theories of Erich von Daniken, Ronald Story
Interesting interview with Von Daniken on the Monk site

Son of Giant Sea Tortoise, Mary AnnMadden, Ed. NY Magazine competition)
The 1995 column by Marylaine Block (discovered while looking up this title) is about books bought solely because of their titles and it’s great, and I don’t remember any of the tidbits from this book, but I laughed a lot at the essay.

In the Frame, Dick Francis

Intelligent Life in the Universe, Joseph Shklovsky, Carl Sagan
Barely touched the book. Oh, dear, perhaps I don’t qualify!

Dancing Aztecs, Donald E. Westlake

Rumor of War, Philip Caputo

The Fan, Bob Randall

Off Guard: A Paparazzo Look at the Beautiful People, Ron Galella
This is interesting because paparazzi are an important part of the book I’m writing now. I’ve always thought it wasn’t fair that no one looked at it from the point of view of the piranha.

Future Power, Jack Dann & Gardner R. Duzois
Didn’t finish

Final State (Ed Ferman & Maltzberg) encore, taking notes

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
I think this was the beginning of periodically re-reading Austen’s work, a habit that continues to reward.

Only a Novel: The double life of Jane Austen, Jane Aiken Hodge
Read it in ’76. This time I notice a certain incoherency of prose, in irking lack, of explanation of esoteric or specifically British points. But the synopses of Austen’s works and worthy copying – quite good. (At that point I was teaching myself to write by handwriting out synopses, passages that were beyond what I could do, or that I wanted to study, etc.)

June 7 to June 29, 2007 I read:

For a Few Demons More, Kim Harrison

A paranormal series I like a lot. Harrison has a fresh voice, but I also have to point out that this series is still only 4 or 5 books in--definitely in the single digits, unlike Hamilton's book below which is 14th or 15th in the Anita Blake series.

Danse Macabre, Laurell K. Hamilton
Condoms come to Anita Blake’s ménage.

Feng Shui, a control freak way of knowledge

2007-06-06T23:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, by Karen Kingston, and it’s a slow read, although there are some useful clutter-taming techniques in it, somewhat marred by the author’s bossiness.

Feng Shui, when marketed as a nifty thing for Westerners to do, is similar to Zen in that we know so little about it that you can mix it up with whatever you want and it will seem legitimate. Eastern philosophies in general are slippery to the Western mind. Even if we read the texts these methods are based on, they don’t always make sense to us, so we have only common sense to measure them against.

I knew before picking up Kingston’s book that the author had at least a minor case of the Dieters Disease because I first heard of it through flylady.com. It was pretty clear that Ms. Flylady (I’m forgetting her name, halfway on purpose) got her “body clutter” phrase that snapped her into full-scale (pun optional) diet dementia and diet book profiteering. So I was prepared to just skip any of Kingston’s Feng Shui material that pushed diets.

Kingston’s mild diet obsession, however, pales before some of her other rule-making. She tells the reader how often to change his/her sheets and not to store dirty laundry in the bedroom (perhaps those in small apartments should be keeping it out in the hallway, or dangle their laundry bag out the window)? I found myself frequently exclaiming “What b.s.!” aloud. That’s when I reached the chapter on Colon Clutter—complete with diagrams and instructions. Yes, folks, the author is telling readers when to poop, providing graphic descriptions of how to analyzing said poop, and suggestions for “Feng Shui-ing” one’s end product. Not your usual home decorating/reorganizing book.

It may sound like I’m dissing this book, I’m really exercising the famous “take what you want and leave the rest” method here.

Now a few words in defense of clutter. My favorite room is Henry Higgins’ library in the movie My Fair Lady—I want to live there--so much easier to maintain order with a full domestic staff too. My cats don't do more than cover the occasional hairball on the carpet with whatever they can find nearby such as slippers. But next to that library I like Merlyn’s cottage in T.H. White’sThe Sword in the Stone:

It was the most marvelous room that he had ever been in.

There was a real corkindrill hanging from the rafters, very life-like and horrible with glass eyes and scaly tail stretched out behind it. When its master came into the room it winked one eye in salutation, although it was stuffed. There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure. Then there were stuffed birds, popinjays and maggotpies and kingfishers and peacocks with all their feathers but two, and tiny birds like beetles, and a reputed phoenix which smelt of incense and cinnamon. It could not have been a real phoenix, because there is only one of these at a time. Over by the mantelpiece there was a fox’s mask, with GRAFTON, BUCKINHAM TO DAVENTRY, 2 HRS 20 MINS written under it, and also a forty-pound salmon, with AWE, 43 MIN., BULLDOG written under it, and a very life-like basilisk with CROWHURST OTTER HOUNDS in Roman print. There were several boars’ tusks and the claws of tigers and libbards mounted in symmetrical patterns, and a big head of Orvis Poli, six live grass snakes in a kind of aquarium, some nests of the solitary wasp nicely set up an a glass cylinder, an ordinary beehive whose inhabitants went in and out of the window unmolested, two young hedgehogs in cotton wool, a pair of badgers which immediately began to cry Yik-Yik-Yik in loud voices as soon as the magician appeared, twenty boxes which contained stick caterpillars and sixths of the puss-moth, and even an oleander that was worth sixpence—all feeding on the appropriate leaves—a guncase with all sorts of weapons which would not be invented for half a thousand years, a rod-box ditto, a chest of drawers full of salmon flies which had been tied by Merlyn himself, another chest whose drawers were labeled Mandragora, Mandrake, and Old Man’s Beard, etc., a bunch of turkey feathers and goose-quills for making pens, an astrolabe, twelve pairs of boots, a dozen purse-nets, three dozen rabbit wires, twelve corkscrews, some ants’ nests between two glass plates, ink bottles of every possible colour from red to violet, darning-needles, a gold medal for being the best scholar at Winchester, four or five recorders, a nest of field mice all alive-o, two skulls, plenty of cut glass, Venetian glass, Bristol glass and a bottle of Mastic varnish, some Satsuma china and some cloisonné, the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (marred as it was by the sensationalism of the popular plates), two paint-boxes (one oil, one water colour), three globes of the known geographical world, a few fossils, the stuffed head of a cameleopard, six pismires, some glass retorts with cauldrons, Bunsen burners, etc., and a complete set of cigarette cards depicting water fowl by Peter Scott.,
The Once and Future King The Sword in the Stone, p. 30-31

My other favorite book by White is
The Goshawk, but I digress.

May 29 to June 6, 1977, I read:

Paddy Chaefsky, John M. Clum
Note: read most
When I moved to LA from SF for a few years in 1977, the first little mom and pop store I went to in Culver City had a sign by the cash register, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” I hadn’t heard about much less seen Network at that point, so I thought, “Wow, people really are on edge here.” What they actually were was very tuned in to the latest movie in-thing—before people in other places, and with more enthusiasm.Chaefsky

Bittersweet, Teri Schultz
Note: surviving and growing from loneliness

Science Fiction Handbook, de Camp
Note: both ’53 and ’75 editions

Heartland, Mort Sahl
Note: poor man. Don't remember why that was my reaction.

Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut

The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach, Peter Schickele
Note: Nice
A more aesthetic friend took me to task for preferring the Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and PDQ Bach, to the Royal Ballet and J.S. Bach. I like a lot of serious culture and a lot of parody/satire. But I love to laugh more than anything, so I will always seek out something that might make that happen

Calling Dr. Horowitz, Steve Horowitz, M.D., and Neil Offen

To Abolish Children and Other Essays, Karl Shapiro
I like Karl Shapiro’s poems, but evidently his essays didn’t do it for me. My note was: read most, rather tedious

May 29 to June 6, 2007, I read:

Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, Karen Kingston

Fun things to do in hell

2007-05-29T11:37:00.000-07:00

I’ve been re-reading Descent to the Goddess, about the Sumerian goddess, Innana,(aka Ishtar)“queen of heaven and earth,” paying a visit to her sister, Ereshkigal, “queen of the Great Below” who lives in “the land of no return.” Inanna's visit is to attend the funeral of Ereshkigal’s husband, but the grieving widow greets her sister by demanding that she follow the customs of hell and be stripped, judged, killed, and her rotting corpse hung on a peg. I detect serious sibling rivalry here. Most hostesses just take your coat.

It’s too late to have second thoughts while being stripped, judged and killed, but Inanna might have been wondering whether she should have just sent regrets, flowers, and a nice card. Furthermore, this casts some doubts on the circumstances of Ereshkigal’s husband’s death. She seems to have been studying up on black widows, praying mantis mating behavior, and all those Alien movies.

Seriously, it's a very absorbing book. Jungian, feminist analysis—see below.

May 22 to May 28, 1977, I read:

The Season, a Candid Look at Broadway, 1967, William Goldman
Charlotte Bronte, the Self-Conceived, Helen Moglen
Note: read most of it.
Is There Intelligent Life on Earth? Jack Catran
Women, Women, Women, Dody Goodman, Chris Alexander
Evidently Ms. Goodman was alive and well in 2004, interesting about her difficulties with Jack Paar, etc…amazing how blatant, and unconscious, the sexism was then.
http://www.dodygoodman.com/index.html
Slan, A. E. Van Vogt
The Joy of Money, Paula Nelson
Note: Couldn’t relate to it, only looked through it (Note to self, 30 years later, this explains a lot, no?)
The New Apocrypha, John Sladek,
Note: sampled its encyclopedia offerings
Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist, James A. Brussel, M.D.
Controversy, William Manchester
Note: Read some essays, not all. The pace of his prose is irritating. (I think I meant slow & measured!)

May 22 to May 28, 2007, I read:
Tea with the Black Dragon, R. A. MacAvoy
web page
I’m glad to see this reissued in an Ereads paperback and ebook. Considering that the author was in her 30s when she wrote it (as I was when I read it), I now notice and find intriguing that the heroine is a free-spirited 50-year-old with gray hair who finds romance with a mysterious Chinese man, who may in fact be an ancient dragon. Not your usual paranormal romantic suspense novel—beautifully written!

Descent to the Goddess, A Way of Initiation for Women, Sylvia Brinton Perera
Another book I read in the 80s. I still remember discovering it at the SF Public Library, and the usual feeling of having mysteries revealed when I read it. I still have pertinent photocopied pages in my files. Then a friend was pruning her library and offered me anything I liked from the discards, and this small paperback was among them!

On reading again, these sentences stood up for me in red letters of fire:

We also feel unseen because there are no images alive to reflect our wholeness and variety. But where shall we look for symbols to suggest the full mystery and potency of the feminine and to provide images as models for personal life?
Descent to the Goddess, p. 12.

Eeeeeeeeeeeebook adventures

2007-05-21T23:29:00.000-07:00

“A” book by any other name might be “E” book? Hmmm. I’m not sure what an ebook is, except that I just wrote one, or Jaki Girdner and I did….kinda. I’m calling it an “E for Experimental”-book because the next ebook I have in mind involves sex and may actually have some hope of selling a few copies. The current one is also E for Exploring the ebook world.

Jaki Girdner and I put together Writer-to-Writer Reminders, Tickles, Tips and Tricks. Between us, we’ve had a total of 22 books published—16 for her, 6 for me. We should know some things worth sharing. The tips take place as a dialog between two writers: Ms. Reminder, who is extraordinarily organized, with tickle files for events planned years in advance, and Ms. Amnesia….well, she has a little problem with authority, outlines and planning ahead. We had a good time writing 52 tips, one a week for a year and an extra one to finish.

With a little help from a graphically sophisticated friend, this was translated into an Adobe PDF, and officially put out as an ebook.

As Hamlet says, "the rest is silence." Silent meditation? Actually last weekend it was silent medication because my back went out the minute the book was all Eeee-ed up, and introduced to Paypal.

Coincidence? I think not.

Of course any novelist is capable of functioning with zero feedback and encouragement. It goes with the territory. Most of the fiction being published even by large presses as such a minimal promotion budget that authors learn quickly to use any publicity idea they can manage to get the word out about their books. Like many authors, I’ve become obsessed with this subject. Not particularly expert, just obsessed.

But how to promote an ebook? Bookstores wouldn't be involved. Hmmm. Repeated internet searches yielded predatory websites that had more in common with “work at home” and multi-level marketing scams than they did with anything remotely applicable to promotion of entertaining material that someone might want to read.

Obviously never telling anyone about the book isn't going to work either.

So, now that my back is better, mentioning Writer-to-Writer Reminders on this blog is the next baby step into the Mountains of E-Madness. You can probably tell I've been re-reading H.P. Lovecraft--but that was this past week--30 years ago I was hitting the library like a locust infestation.

May 4 to May 20, 1977 I read, in whole or in part:

SnowBlind, A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade, Robert Sabhag

The Fight, Norman Mailer

The Omnivorous Ape, Lyall Watson

The Sound of Two Hands Clapping, Essays by Kenneth Tynan
Sigh, theatrical criticism, Olivier playing all the great classic roles in the 1940's and 50's, I have a weakness for theatrical critical essays, and Tynan was such a superb writer.

Three Tales, Paul Bowles
Note: Esoteric almost to the point of nonexistence

Tiny Tim: An Unauthorized Biography, Harry Stein
Tiny Tim

Intent on Laughter, John Bailey
Couldn’t find much on this, out of print. But when I looked for it, I found and loved, this website.

About Those Roses, Frank D. Gilroy

A Burnt Out Case, Graham Greene
For me the anticipation of reading Greene is always more fun than the actual reading. He just can't seem to make me savor his world-weary depression.
Ya gotta grant him the prize for angst, though.

How the Comedy Writers Create Laughter, Larry Wilde
Turns out this guy is still around, and he invented National Humor Month (April, I missed it, who knew?) I like his good-humored web site.

The Plays of Ferenc Molnar (1929, intro only)
I still have the quote I got from Molnar, slightly paraphrased, on the wall above my writing desk: “Shakespeare was a genius. The rest of us must simply strive to be honest.”

Translation, Stephen Marlowe
Note: very disturbing cover art. Poorly written story

May 4 to May 20, 2007 I read:

The Orchid Thief,Susan Orlean
I also watched the film Adaptation wherein screenwriter suffers so much turning The Orchid Thief into a script, that he takes that struggle as the film's subject matter. Reading the book after watching the film, I could see his problem. The book was essentially a magazine article on intercut with lots of background and information. Interesting but not essentially a story. The movie also had one of my favorite writing teachers, Robert McKee, teaching his seminar on Story. Very cool.

Blood Bound, (Mercy Thompson Series, Book 2): Books: Patricia Briggs
Moving slowly back into the tamer paranormal novels I like so much

At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft
An old favorite, a paperback that must be nearly 40 years old. I’ll talk about obscene vegetation another time.

Secret teachings, the power of positive denial

2007-05-04T23:37:00.000-07:00

I slowly eased reading books that are not by Jane Austen (my comfort reads for the past few months!) with a transitional period listening to 4-hour(!) audio DVD of The Secret, which a friend lent me.

The hook that gets people “into the tent” for this product, whether in video, book, or audio, is the pitch that this is a life-transforming "Secret." Yet the underlying principles, whether called The Laws of Attraction, the Power of Positive Thinking are familiar to even the most casual student of self-help books.

I like positive thinkers and New Age presentation people. As Douglas Adams said of the planet earth, they are “mostly harmless” and occasionally helpful. But the kindest thing I can say of The Secret is that it is partial—as in a fragmentary or limited. In its truncated fashion, it explains how, with single-minded thought, a person can affect his or her environment. There are some useful ideas in The Secret, presented with the maximum of smoke and sizzle and very little insight or responsibility.

I will consider using any mental or physical tool that doesn’t clash with my Buddhist practice. (I won’t channel, don’t ask me.) So I’ve encountered (and enjoyed studying) some of these New Age Usual Suspects. I didn’t like the metaphor of ordering your reality from a catalog. That one was too aggressively shallow for me. Also as a world view, the idea that you create the entire universe with your thoughts strikes me as childish at best and delusional at its worst.

I do like the metaphor of “change the frequency of your thought vibrations, like changing the radio channel.” I can almost hear an echo of an explanation of Buddhism as it was presented to Americans in the 1960s and ‘70’s (and it may have been a direct steal—such metaphors do get around). One of the unlooked for side-effects of a Buddhist practice is learning how to become aware of and move out of negative life conditions (as an exercise that must be repeated by the way, it’s not a one-time thing!)

The latter half of the DVD set made me a bit queasy with its exhortations to “believe” when doubt attacks. That sort of talk always induces deep mistrust in me--and an urge to head for the nearest Exit sign.

I’m not going to get into the “negative thinking caused the Holocaust” thread (my brother hit the nail on head when he said, “So, the Holocaust victims were all thinking negatively and the Nazis were thinking really positively?”) This is not the first time such views have been brought forth, but that doesn't make them less offensive.

For me it’s a sure-fire indicator of a con game when the salesperson plays the weight loss card. The weight loss issue draws con men like an overripe banana draws fruit flies. it's such a gold mine that few can resist. Such a large percentage of Americans are freaked out about their weight that playing on the hopes of a magical solution causes many to instantly reach for their wallets.

As a fat person, listening to their spiel, I was pleased at the suggestion not to dwell on your body’s flaws, that’s always more constructive. But I was wryly amused to hear the suggestion that followers "achieve their perfect weight" ("losing” is one of those banned, negative words)by looking away when fat people appear and instead envisioning their internal perfect body. I guess if I walk down the street and see people bumping into lampposts rather than look at me, “la, la, la, you don’t exiiiiiist…la, la, la, I’m thinking of my own perfect body…” I’ll know that it’s a Secretarian. Or will I?

Actually, invisibility in social situations is one of the side effects of getting old and/or fat. All of which The Secret assures me do not have to happen.

When I first started listening to the DVDs I wondered if there was any correlation at all between actual secret teachings in mystical tradition, and the positive thinking stuff they are invoking as the secret of the ages. A friend who is into the Western alchemical/metaphysical tradition pointed out that the concept of secret teachings can be to protect a student from getting in too deep too soon. My own experience in Buddhism has been that even when a secret teaching is revealed it is usually so simple that an untrained mind can’t see any profound meaning at all there. It can take decades of practice to realize how deep something so simple can be.

I suggested to a friend who was about to listen to the DVDs is “take what you need and leave the rest.”

April 16 to May 3, 1977 I read:

1876, Gore Vidal

English Humour, J.B. Priestly
Note: v. fine, also beautifully illustrated. (didn’t finish though)

Stop the Presses, I Want to Get Off, [MORE Magazine] R. Pollak [Ed]

The Man with the Candy, the Story of the Houston Mass Murders, J. Olsen
Read most of it

The American Tradition, A Gallery of Rogues, John Greenaway

Patchwork Mouse, Joseph Hixson

Darker Than Amber, John D. MacDonald

Gateway, Frederick Pohl

Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman
I first encountered Hellman in her preface to some of Dashiell Hammett’s posthumously published work. She was a glamorous figure, not the least because of her life with the magnetic Hammett. Who wouldn’t want to be with Hammett? Many were called and briefly chosen, but Hellman was the one who lasted. The fact that he told her she was the model for Nora, of Nick and Nora in The Thin Man made her even more interesting. Nick and Nora Charles have always been the ideal fun couple for more than one generation. Early in their marriage my parents named their dog Asta in honor of the Charles’ memorable terrier. I’ve read all of Hammett several times, but never have read any of Hellman’s non-memoir work, although I did see the movie The Little Foxes, and was startled by how over-the-top melodramatic it was.

From April 16 to May 3, 2007

Aside from listening to The Secret DVD, in the past few weeks I re-read:

Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman.

I remember noting what a thin book it was when I first read it, sitting on a bench at a bus stop in 1977. The edition I read recently has it collected along with Hellman’s other memoirs, An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento. Scoundrel Time only takes up 123 pages—with wide margins.
Hellman

I think nowadays Hellman would be called “high maintenance.” She savors and shares her emotions the way some people share fine cuisine. This is part of her charm, and yet one can’t help but mistrust it.

One of the anecdotes she tells is of an old friend, unsuccessful Progressive candidate for President, Henry Wallace, who presented her with a large bag of manure on the occasion of her selling her farm due to financial disaster after she and Hammett were blacklisted and unable to find work. Hellman mildly complains that this was not a gift she could use in the New York apartment she was moving to, and puts it down to Wallace’s total cluelessness—and she gives several other persuasive examples of this. But something about the gift made me wonder if there weren’t others who might have wished to give her such a gift, but just didn’t have it handy when the occasion presented itself.

A debt to pleasure...of the literary kind

2007-04-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

Another almost-month with no books read. Existential anxiety has that effect on me. However, I have been revisiting a manuscript of my own that needs work. That process reminds me why I have always traded financial security for time. (In the interests of full disclosure I should say that every job I've done that offered financial security has been so excruciatingly dull that my mind might have snapped under the strain. So the psychiatrist's bills I have saved by pursuing the muse should be factored into the equation.)

A phrase that keeps coming back to me recently is the title of a book Bruce Taylor set up by the cash register in his Mystery Bookstore in SF, now ably commanded by Diane Kudisch as Bruce has retired. The book Bruce was handselling was John Lanchester’s excellent crime novel, The Debt to Pleasure

Lanchester plucked the quote from John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. I'd never heard of Wilmot, which is not surprising, considering how outrageous his work was. I'm not a scholarly student of his time period, and if Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence couldn't be published during most of the 20th century due to censorship, Wilmot wasn't going to be showing up in any poetry anthologies. He was notorious, even among his fellow Restoration Rakes.

“Hazlitt judged that 'his verses cut and sparkle like diamonds', while 'his contempt for everything that others respect almost amounts to sublimity'.”
Rochester's bio.

Most of his poems seem to include all the commoner Anglo-Saxon four-letter words. His subject matter is either ruttish or scurrilous and the phrase that stuck in my mind from his poem, The Imperfect Enjoyment, is used during a discussion of premature ejaculation—

When, with a thousand kisses wandering o'er
My panting bosom, "Is there then no more?"
She cries. "All this to love and rapture's due
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"
Note, this site is not for the prudish.

The debt Wilmot refers to is the pretty simple, "you pleased me and now I'm incapable of pleasing you, sorry about that, dear." Wilmot died at 33, probably of syphillis--another debt to pleasure paid.

But for me the phrase seems to refer to the cost of doing what you want to do...or need to do.

The book I began to write in the spring of '77 was a good learning experience, but essentially, unreadably bad. Even the title is too embarrassing to quote. I am hoping the friends upon whom I inflicted this book have mercifully forgotten it.

The manuscript I’m now editing is my 10th book. Book 11 is with my agent. Book 12 is in progress, put it aside to do this edit. Although it hasn’t found a publisher yet (and I am finding things to improve in the ms.) Book 10 after lo these many re-writes/re-reads still makes me laugh. It ain’t Shakespeare, but I knew that going in. There are no cringe-worthy moments.

(If you're mathematically inclined, I'll explain that 6 of my books have been published, and 3 sit in the closet, including the abysmal first novel.)

So that’s what I did with my last 30 years. I’m not naïve enough to think that this entitles me to anything in a material sense. But it’s what I wanted to do with my life.

Damn that existential anxiety! I think it’s insinuating a whiny note into this blog. So enough about now, looking back 30 years--

March 11 to April 15, 1977 I read.

Orbit 18, Damon Knight

Victorian Murderesses, Mary S. Hartman
Only got three-quarter way through it.

Carrie, Stephen King
This was one of those books I remember reading, where I was when I read it (on a cockroach-menaced sofa bed, in the dim light of afternoon, at a time when absorbing storytelling was welcome). Whatever one may think of Stephen King after the crushing juggernaut of his success has swept its way through the reading world, I think back to reading Carrie and thinking—wow, that’s good.

A Plague of Demons, John Creasy, as Gordon Ash

The Art of Seeing, Aldous Huxley
Had to skip last few pages.

So You Have Glaucoma, Viers
Note—I didn’t. But the Lions’ free glaucoma testing van student doctors thought I might, and that netted me an anxious few weeks—during which I read this book. Also a free appointment for more extensive testing that indicated I just had weirdly shaped eye nerves…I was the only person under 50 in the waiting room. Also the experience of having my father reassure me that if I did have glaucoma, he would personally drive me to Mexico to get marijuana if I also needed that—my father’s version of worrying, although he was by nature more of a warrior than a worrier.

The Medically Based No-Nonsense Beauty Book, Deborah Chase
Oy. I was 27, living in LA and far from immune to the beauty obsession. I do give myself points for a little common sense with this one.

Magic, William Goodman

Born on the Fourth of July, Ron Kovic
My memory was that I had reviewed this book several months earlier for the Buddhist newspaper. Maybe I was re-reading, as it was quite a powerful book

1876, Gore Vidal

From March 11 to April 14, 2007

Reading and re-writing one of my own manuscripts.

Jane Austen, hell, heaven, and perfume

2007-03-11T17:29:00.000-07:00

I won’t go into exhaustive detail about why, but I’ve had enough of a disruptive month that I’ve been communing with Jane Austen (and a little with Virginia Woolf) these past few weeks. I don’t do images much—but I’ll share with you an image that paradoxically helped me stay sane.

Money and the lack thereof are an issue Virginia Woolf dissects so brilliantly in A Room of One’s Own.

Jane Austen also considers women’s issues around money in all her works, as she said in an 1816 letter: “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.”

While coping with my own employment drama the past few weeks, I found it useful to think of some of the things Virginia Woolf did to support herself before she received the famous liberating inheritance that she wrote about in the aforementioned book.

"I earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers.” A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

I must report that for the old and broken among us, the employment opportunities are somewhat, although not vastly, improved since she wrote those words in 1928. I seem to have found a momentary harbor, so I am now calm enough to write this blog.

But to get back some of my strategies for staying sane while losing sleep over survival issues. I read (and re-read) only three books. (Contrasting with 14 books I picked up in 1977 in the same space of time, with an even shakier personal life, but coasting on youthful vitality!) I also visited ther DVDs of Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, um, more than once.

Why were these so uniquely comforting? Of course, there is sex—or should we say the heartfelt portrayal of youthful passion.

The Republic of Pemberley website provides the graphic I referred to in the first paragraph. It's the last item of their FAQ:

What is "The Look"?

Get ready.
Here.

I was surprised to find that it was the same image that caught my attention. Why should I be surprised? It’s the Bluestocking version of the money shot. But it’s a bit more than that.

The actor and filmmaker’s recreation of the intoxication of young love is like a distillation of the scent of flowers. Spring has gone, but an artfully created perfume stirs a chord that resurrects spring flowers in the heart and mind.

Jane Austen’s books go one better. She re-creates on the page, not only the pleasure of intimacy achieved, but also the satisfaction of integrity rewarded.

That’s the paradox of art. Jane Austen didn’t have that ideal partnership in her life. She never married and died at age 38. I can only speak for myself in saying that at 58 I would contemplate with dismay the vast drain of time and energy that a fulfilling partnership would entail. Of course, a happy ending is just a snapshot in a long story.

Young love pierces our souls (as Frederick says of Anne's words in Persuasion) because it depends on the exquisite sensitivity of innocence, inexperience, ignorance, call it what you will. That naiveté has a season and it does not come again, Botox notwithstanding.

Robert Frost put it well:

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of- was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?

. . . .

Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

To Earthward by Robert Frost From “New Hampshire” 1923.

Well, Frost did seem to have a little S&M thing going there that’s only marginally relevant to what I’m mainly talking about, but never mind. He’s right about how complex things become, and how it catches our breath to remember how simple they once seemed—and perhaps were.

From February 8 to March 11, 1977 I read:

Thirty years ago I had just moved twice in the space of a few months (down to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Then out of the Culver City garage apartment I first landed in, to a more serene studio apartment in West LA where the cockroaches came as single scouts--not in battalions), and was sailing on a questionable sea of temp work. Yet I managed to read or attempt 14 books.

Midnight Baby, Dory Previn

The Psycho Sqaud, William W. Crain

The Romeo Error: A matter of Life and Death, Lyall Watson
Note: couldn’t finish in time – had to return to library. Will try again. (note—so far haven’t, but then it HAS only been 30 years)

The 9th Annual Best SF: 75, Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss, Ed.

The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, Donal Spoto
Note: AH is a Leo- Aug 13! Very fascinating book. I also guessed correctly by the author’s use of the adjective “tenebrous” that he was French.

Tricks and Treats: an anthology of Mystery Stories by the Mystery Writers of America,
Joe Gores and Bill Pronzini, Ed.

Something’s There, Dan Greenberg

The Voices of the Guns, Vin McLellen and Paul Avery

The Aliens, Ed. R. Silverberg

Tetrosomy Two, Oscar Rossiter

The Choirboys, Joseph Wambaugh

The Documents in the Case, Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace

Journey, Robert and Suzanne Massie
Very painful to read, medical students’ disease-I vaguely remember that this book was about a couple coping with spinal cord injury, but I could be wrong.

The Blue Knight, Joseph Wambaugh

From February 8 to March 11, 2007 I read:

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
With some attention to the excellent introduction Penguin Classics edition by Tony Tanner that among other things, speaks to the idea of “the dream of Pemberley” that so many women have mentally inhabited since Austen built the place.

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

Persuasion, Jane Austen

Old wine, new bottles

2007-02-07T14:53:00.000-08:00

The internet came to my rescue once again last week, when I couldn’t locate my paperback copy of Jane Eyre during a week when I was indulging in the stunning BBC dramatization of that work. The BBC site is very cool by the way, Grace Poole's diary was surprisingly touching! But to return to my rescue by the internet--a few days later, while delving into the 1996 (6-hour!) DVD of Pride and Prejudice, I couldn't find that paperback either!

Most classic texts are now available online, so I didn’t have to wait for the delivery of the new copies (or haul out my very heavy Complete Novels of Jane Austen hardcover) to check out how the dramatizations might have changed the sacred texts that have provided emotional healing for me (as for so many others) at various times in my life when it was most needed.

But even the best dramatizations--often the best!--take certain liberties with the text. For example, Jane Eyre’s parting with Rochester after his secret was revealed. I was able to confirm what I kind of remembered from my reading--that no bed was involved in their parting scene in the book (though there was a sofa, it was more used for sobbing than for touching). The breathless chemistry was appropriate to the novel though.

A friend lent me the A&E Pride and Prejudice dramatization, and in return I lent her the 1986 BBC Northanger Abbey, confidently assuring her that Colin Firth was practically a chameleon to be able to play Mr. Darcy in P&P and also play Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, and look so different. Almost like a different person.

Astute readers and BBC aficionados will be way ahead of me here. Colin Firth was so amazingly different-looking in his characterization of Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey because the part was, in fact, played by Peter Firth—another actor entirely. Also excellent--with his own gift for revealing thoughts as well as emotions on screen--just not the same person.

I guess there’s no point in having so many Gracie Allen moments if you can’t laugh at yourself in the process.

At least I discovered that Henry Tilney has his own fan club, who refer to him as "Da Man"--who knew?

My Jane Austen obsession flares often enough that one friend gave me a
Jane Austen Action Figure for a Christmas gift.

I visited The Republic of Pemberley
for the online texts of Pride and Prejudice, and found that Austen summarized, rather than exactly quoting, a great deal of Mr. Darcy’s original, ardent proposal to Elizabeth Bennet, and the A&E dramatization did quite well putting the summary into dialog.

The Republic of Pemberley, by the way, has the subject of each chapter in the link(and a lot of other links to topics in the books).

John Barrymore was of the opinion that stopping to read footnotes while enjoying great works of literature is like answering the doorbell on your honeymoon. I tend to agree. But once you’ve had the enjoyment of a read or two or twelve of some of these books, an appropriate footnote can help deepen the experience. Marital aids, perhaps?

January 21 to February 7, 1977

I can’t help but notice my restless library roving in 1977 brought me home 13 books (some I only partly read, versus the two books, I own but ended up reading online during the same days of 2007).

The Mote in God’s Eye, Niven & Pournell
I enjoyed this book a great deal and have re-read it more than once.
A 30-year-old review goes into the “Crazy Eddie” concept at some length

The Jacqueline Susann Story, Jeffrey Ventura
My note: “effeminate prose” whatever that means.

We’re Going to Make You a Star, Sally Quinn
My note: “a little celebrity watching in the haute monde of the journalism world. Having been fascinated by the Washington Post’s role in investigating Watergate, I read quite a few behind-the-scenes books. My final note was: “The ‘society’ orientation makes me bristle a bit.”Sally Quinn on wikipedia

Lonely in America, Suzanne Gordon,
My note: didn’t finish

Memoirs, Tennessee Williams
My note: Such frankness that one is forced to applaud, yet not particularly painful to read

The Life of Raymond Chandler, Frank McShane
My note: Read some of it. Very sad, dreary
I think that one was really painful to read, although I totally admire his prose, his life was less exuberant and more agonizing than Williams' life.

The Deep, Peter Benchley
My note –Skimpy & trivial but readable. All the villains are black, all the heroes white, coincidence no doubt

Headache: Understanding—Alleviation, James W. Lance
My note: Not helpful

On the Edge, James Mills
My note: Skimpy

Bubbles: a Self-Portrait, Beverly Sills

Future Corruption, Ed. Roger Elwood
My note: very amateurish. Didn’t finish

Combat SF, Gordon R. Dickson
My note: Didn’t even half finish

Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, Maya Angelou
No note on this, but I read every Maya Angelou book I could find, poetry and prose.

January 21 to February 7, 2007

I probably enjoyed re-reading these two books as much as I enjoyed reading the 13 from 1977.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Hermits, sociable writers and the quest for myth

2007-01-20T19:26:00.000-08:00

For me 1977 was the year that my writing began to take the form of a novel. Writing is such a personal and private thing for me that it's taken me years to understand that some people write well in groups (as it was for Anne Beatts below). That kind of writing still seems to me to be more akin to music than words, but I could see how it would work well for comedy as a performing art, which has a particularly strong rhythmical component.

January 3 to 20, 2007

Titters : The first collection of humor by women, Deanne Stillman and Anne P. Beatts
It’s been awhile since I read this. I didn't quite get at the time just how difficult it was for women to be taken seriously in humor...does that make sense? I mean that there were a lot more male humorists being published than women.

Beatts has famously written about the early Saturday Night Live as not welcoming women:

"The only entrée to that boys club was basically by fucking somebody in the club," Anne Beatts tells Shales and Miller. "Which wasn't the reason you were fucking them necessarily. I mean, you didn't go "Oh, I want to get into this, I think I'll have to have sex with this person.' It was just that if you were drawn to funny people who were doing interesting things, then the only real way to get to do those things yourself was to make that connection."

Here's that quote

This book has been called dated, but I don't have the copy I bought, so I can't check it. I still remember selling my copy at a garage sale. It was the first thing to go—snapped up immediately at a premium price. Maybe the cover…?
Here's what Beatts is doing now.

Intermission, Anne Baxter
This was a fascinating book, one I’ve read more than once—the story of Baxter’s leaving Hollywood for love and a life on a remote cattle station in Australia

Anne Baxter

Homage to Daniel Shays, Collected essays, Gore Vidal
This page gives an idea of the scope of Vidal's life and accomplishment, and ideas that shine in his essays.
Vidal

Early del Rey, Lester del Rey
Here's an interesting 1968 review of 2001 by del Rey
Review

Wampeters, Foma & Grandfaloons, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
My comment was “bravo!”
Vonnegut Quotes

January 3 to 20, 2007

Lately I've been retreating even further from the sociable model. The Middle Earth book below gave me some insights into why. I think it's a cyclical thing for me. I remember (like so many people) reading Tolkien as a refuge at 14, and again at 24. After an intermission of decades, I'm back seeking fantasy wherever I can find it.

Crazy in Alabama, Mark Childress

This was unexpectedly fun and funny (I understand there was a movie, and reading the book I can imagine that). The narration alternates between the parallel stories of 12-year-old orphan Peejoe Bullis in a small Alabama town in 1965, and his Aunt Lucille, who has parked her six children with her mother and is bound for Hollywood accompanied only by her murdered husband’s head in Tupperware container.

The Publisher’s Weekly review suggests that the author manages to inject: “magic in his mixture of humor and pathos, boyish candor and time-earned understanding. The narrative has a unique gentleness that tempers even the most extreme horrific or comic events without dismissing or oversimplifying them. Terrible crimes go unpunished, and good people face tragedy--not always nobly--but this remains a tale of laughter and great hope, one not easily forgotten.”

That’s a pretty accurate assessment of an extraordinary narrative accomplishment.

Thunderbird Falls, CE Murphy
The second book featuring Joanne Walker, Seattle beat cop and apprentice shaman. Not as fast-moving as the first book Urban Shaman, but still worth the read.

Meditations on Middle Earth, Karen Haber (Ed)

This book has some great contributors like Terry Pratchett, Poul Andersen, and Robin Hobb
The essays in this book gave me some insight into my own reading tastes lately—

Lisa Goldstein’s essay put it:

“Why do people read and reread these books? Why are they so powerful? What do we get from them that we can’t get anywhere else? ...

“My guess is that it’s because we need myth. Not just because myths are entertaining stories, or because some of them come attached with a moral. We need them, the way we need vitamins or sunlight.

...

We need them because they are magnificent stories, of course, tales that have been told as long as people have existed. But we also need them because they are stories about the hero who journeys into a dark place and comes out transformed, and that is a story we allknow intimately, a story each of us experiences in his or her life. Those dragons are our dragons, those magical helpers are our helpers. And sometimes the dragons are inside us, a part of us, and this is the most terrifying struggle of all.”

Resolute words

2007-01-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to All!

People really do ask what your resolutions are. I don't much like the term "resolutions." I have goals, but they are intensely personal and I think of them all through the year, although a little more on New Year's Day. One thing that brings extra pain to this process of sharing resolutions for the next year is when I run into people who are throwing themselves into the not-so-harmless idea of solving all their problems by losing weight. (Few people call it a diet any more, but most of the resolutions involve restricted eating, and those who get to hear about them often have to suffer through hearing sample menus. Then there's the unavoidable postscript about how unhappy they are with their bodies and how the new "eating plan" will solve all that.)

Lara Frater at Fat Chicks Rule talks about how difficult it is not to resist the fantasy world when everyone around you is buying in big time to the madness and deprivation, and pressuring you to do likewise.

Lara quotes Marilyn Wann’s response last summer to a woman drowning in an ocean of Weight Watchers fanatics swimming in the high tide of "shrink-yourself-to-fit-the-bathing suit" season:

I totally appreciate the constant, pervasive pressure to buy the hate. This is the second-biggest time of year for people to go crazy hoping to be thin. There's January 1 and then there's bathing-suit season. So it's not about you. Fat hatred is just at high tide.

Diets are hate rituals. Any practice that involves a goal of weight loss is a hate ritual. I don't care whether it's "sensible" or extreme. I don't care whether Weight Watchers advises exactly the same food that I choose for myself because it's tasty and nutritious on any given day. They are selling hate. I won't give them a dollar or a minute of attention. As an ethical person, I could never advise another human being to undertake such dangerous, harmful, deceitful scams.

Marilyn's article is in the Summer 2006 NAAFA newsletter.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled reading “retro” book action.

December 24, 1976 to January 2, 1977

The Final Days, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
There's even been a book written about how Woodward and Bernstein's spectacular early success overshadowed later life... Woodward and Bernstein book page.

Ah, well, as they say in the Midwest, thank heaven for small favors. Being a late-blooming, non-spectacular achiever has at least rescued this writer from THAT trauma.

The Once and Future King, T.H. White

This was the second or third time I read this book, which I discovered when I was 14. It was one of those books where you remember the first time you picked it up, where you were and what it looked like. A family friend stored some books and games with us and said I could play with any of the games--which I did, a little--and read any of the books. Wow. This one was a much-read hardcover, but I remember being careful with the dust cover. It’s still a book I make sure to have a copy of at all times.

The Wind Chill Factor, Thomas Gifford

Oddly enough all I remember about this book was that at some point the hero was driving through a blizzard in a Lincoln Continental.

The Middle Mist, Mary Renault

This was one of her modern novels. The Charioteer was my favorite of those, but it is her novels set in ancient Greece—The Last of the Wine, etc.--that I remember with most fondness.

The Samurai, George MacBeth
No recollection of this book

December 24, 2006 to January 2, 2007

The Bromeliad Trilogy: Truckers, Diggers, and Wings, Terry Pratchett
This is not a Discworld book, but Pratchett is always entertaining and these three books about 4-inch Nomes looking for a home is charming, suspenseful and oddly heartening. Pratchett’s theme in this book (as in most of his works) is how learning and growing, and how it gets done in ways you never could plan. A good book to start the new year.

Big Fat Lies, Glenn Gaesser, Ph.D.

This book has been reissued (updated by the author) by Gurze Books, which does a tremendous service in keeping available books on body positive issues, eating disorders and size prejudice. As a baby boomer, I was nine when I ran into my first doctor waving a diet sheet and an amphetamine prescription the late 1950s. The one thing that struck me about this book was how every aspect of the anti-fat obsession affected my life as the national hysteria took root.

Big Fat Lies traces the life insurance industry’s meaningless charts (fervently embraced by the American Medical Association in 1951) and the drive to turn weight into the single measure of health, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

Backstage at strips…and with strippers…

2006-12-23T22:35:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday--whatever yours might be. I like the Buddhist idea of starting fresh with the new year--paying bills by year-end, pre-spring housecleaning, etc. A Buddhist friend pointed out that you could (and we probably should) start out fresh every day of the year, but being humans we need to be reminded by having a day set out for the purpose. It certainly serves the purpose of allowing me to postpone the whole new start thing till next week when the actual new year arrives.

Nostalgia and holidays seem to go together, but I try to resist it by means of escaping into fiction, and more recently movies on DVDs. Thirty years ago I couldn't have imagined watching all the BBC dramatizations of Jane Austen's novels (advertised as 17 hours of Jane Austen!); now modern technology has made it easier to escape into the the past.

My holiday reading 30 years ago and this year provide some common themes, or maybe just strange bedfellows. "Backstage at the comic strips" in 1976 and backstage at strip clubs in 2006. Then there's the Alan Alda autobiography that includes fond memories of watching from the wings as his father performed in burlesque, singing while showgirls paraded onstage.

I do find it a little amusing that the one "literary" work on this list back in 1976 is the one I never managed to finish reading.

From December 11 to 23, 1976, I read:

Heroes, Joe McGinnis
I've read some of his other books, notably: The Selling of the President 1968 and Blind Faith, but I don't always connect them as being written by the same person…for what that's worth as an insight.Here's an article on him.

Backstage at the Strips, Mort Walker
One of the major motivations to learn to read for me was to be able to read the comic strips, including Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey, in the Sunday newspaper.

How It Was, Mary Hemingway
This 1961 Time Article
is actually a pretty comprehensive appreciation of Hemingway.

Turquoise Lament, John D. MacDonald

The Sentinel, Jeffrey Konvitz

Konvitz co-authored the screenplay as well (too scary for me, though the book wasn't quite so scary).

Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
My note is "Only got as far as page 67…" Oh, well, maybe one day...

From December 11 to 23, 2006, I read:

Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America, Lily Burana
Backstage at a whole different kind of strip, Lily Burana is taking a final strip odyssey across the US in order to come to terms with a five-year stretch stripping in her teens and twenties before getting married. Burana now lives in Wyoming and writes fiction as well as nonfiction.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned, Alan Alda
Interesting autobiography and insights from Alan Alda, who seems as genial and witty on paper as he is on film and video.

website

Structural integrity in characters & character integrity in life

2006-12-10T23:11:00.000-08:00

November 25 to December 10, 1976 I read:

Caution, Inflammable, Thomas N. Scortia
Short stories.
Thomas N. Scortia

Josh, My Up and Down, In and Out Life, Joshua Logan
What I now remember about this book was Logan's thoughtful discussion of his struggles with manic depression and how it both helped and hurt his art.
an appreciation

However, my note to myself on reading the book was more structural:

Interesting point: Maxwell Anderson's definition of enduring drama--a hero must learn his own fatal flaw and grows in the process.
And--
Logan's def. of farce as desperation of characters over a misunderstanding or problem that is tragic to them, ridiculous to the audience. The characters' mounting desperation captures the attention and makes the farce "move rapidly."

November 25 to December 10, 2006 I read:

Don't Weight: Eat Healthy and Get Moving Now!, Kelly Bliss

I wouldn't have bought this book if I hadn't read Kelly Bliss's website. I was curious to hear the rest of her story. But I'm glad I did. In 1980, long before Jennifer Portnick's discrimination case against Jazzercise, detailed in an interview here, Kelly Bliss was encountering blatant prejudice against instructors, however fit and talented. At 5 feet tall and 127 pounds, she was frankly told that she could not be hired, despite her excellent qualifications, because she did not fit their company image of an extremely thin instructor. The suggestions the interviewer made were identical to the advice Bliss had received years earlier that had sent her into an eating disorder.

She responded first of all by tell the interviewer just what kind of damage she was doing by handing out such advice(go Kelly!), then she went out to start her own classes, offering low impact exercise at a time when it was rarely offered. She made such a success of this business that she was about to start her own studio in 1991, when a traffic accident left her with a seizure disorder and she had to begin again. Just coming back from that kind of injury is impressive, but she gained the wisdom from the experience to reach out to others in new ways. Bliss's accomplishments in mentoring and inspiring others are very healing just to read about. Few people offer such a contagiously positive attitude. Her creative problem solving approaches to fitness for people of all sizes and levels of ability totally charmed me.

Touch the Dark, Karen Chance

This book raised a question for me--at what point do I put down a book that has a fat joke or jokes. Sometimes, as in the case of several of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, I will read the whole book despite long, painful scenes of blatant fat bigotry, simply because the author is an irresistible storyteller. In this case, when the evil master vampire is described as "a soccer ball with legs" I realized that the author was trying to whip up the reader's negative emotions by describing the villain as disgustingly fat. Mission accomplished. Negative emotions whipped up.

I was only on p. 43. Maybe there were other fat jokes, or just the usual horny paranormal critters with flat stomachs. The author did bring out disgust in me, and hadn't hooked me hard enough with her storytelling to keep me reading. So I decided I'd hit a good stopping place and put the book down with no interest in picking it up again.

Anybody Out There?: A Novel, Marian Keyes

I have read most of Marian Keyes books with great pleasure and this was no exception. Part of her skill here is to keep suspense high simply by slowly revealing why and how the heroine sustained her serious physical injuries and what is behind her emotional pain, and then, once that is revealed unfolding how she copes with it.

Dead Man Rising, A Dante Valentine Novel, Lilith Saintcrow
In this second in the series, heroine and Necromance, Dante, doesn't actually go visit hell and accept an assignment from the Prince of Darkness as she did in Working for the Devil, but the plot is equally dramatic. I enjoyed it.
A detailed review.

Triskaidekaphilia

2006-11-24T15:08:00.000-08:00

Because both of our parents were from the Midwest, my brother and I heard a lot of G-rated swear words when growing up. One of my favorites my father used was "Triskaidekaphobia" which means fear of the number 13. The wikipedia page on this was fun, because it introduced me to the word friggatriskaidekaphobia, which sounds like something Sylvester The Cat might mutter when really perturbed.

Evidently there is at least one person who loves the number. I'm neutral on the actual number 13, but I really loved the book I read this past week The Thirteenth Tale (see below).

November 12 to 24, 1976 I read:

Bring on the Empty Horses, David Niven
I recall this as a charming and amusing book.
one Niven site.

Change Lobsters and Dance, Lili Palmer
I couldn't find much about Lili Palmer online until I looked for Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer. Being married to Harrison seems to have captured more public attention than her acting, which is generally held to be excellent, though she never became a star of the same magnitude. If this link works, here's a lovely picture of her.

Palmer tells the story that Harrison (then known as "Sexy Rexy" for his philandering ways) asked for a divorce so as to marry Kay Kendall, who was dying--the idea being that he would remarry Palmer afterward. That story sounds like the plot of an old-style "weepy" movie, and it's a little hard to believe. They divorced, Harrison married Kendall, who did die a few years later. Harrison and Palmer did not get back to together. Did anyone really think that would happen? Maybe so. People say and do equally as weird things around relationships and give equally as bizarre explanations every day of the week. In this case all three parties were actors, who dealt spent a great deal of their lives creating illusions. Perhaps they exercised the famous "suspension of disbelief."

Those Who Can, R. S. Wilson, Ed.
No memory of this book.

November 12 to 24, 2006 I read:

Speaking of believing things, sifting truth out from smoke and mirrors, that's a major theme in the book that I liked so much....

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield
This book captured very well the hypnotic power of stories--the quote on the back gives its flavor:

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. Vida Winter.
in The Thirteenth Tale

I think it’s something closer kin to dreams rather than lies that stories tell. But part of the art of story telling is in the difference between those two words. "Lies" is a word with a stinging hook in it, while "dreams" is a sweet and sappy word, without enough of a barb in it to snare you in to hear the tale. The quest for the truth among thickets of seductive stories is the theme of this book. The hidden secrets of a reclusive novelist are gradually revealed in the story she needs to tell, but can hardly bring herself to utter. The story needs to be drawn out of her by the narrator, a young woman who has her own ghosts to exorcise in the process. It doesn't get better than this book.

Gil's All Fright Diner, A. Lee Martinez

This book has the dubious distinction of being the first one I've ever posted a negative review about on amazon.com. I got very angry when a book that looked like silly fantasy fun suddenly started dripping authorial venom on one of its characters--a fat woman. The first 14 pages introduced the heroes, Duke and Earl, a grubby werewolf and vampire--seedy vagabonds who wander into Gil's All Night Diner. At that point the author throws in several sneering paragraphs of contemptuous description of the fat woman who owns of the diner.

This woman treats the down-on-their-luck guys very decently, offering them work, food and a place to stay. Then on p, 47 (also known as where I stopped reading), the diner owner tries, in a hesitant way, to seduce the seedy werewolf "hero" who turns away. The author then provides a detailed interior monologue--four pages worth!--of the hero's revulsion at being offered such an unappetizing body, culminating in the werewolf's self-loathing for being the kind of male (one can hardly say "man") who only attracts such a "fat/ugly" women. Let me just say, as I did on Amazon and have elsewhere, that I think telling fat jokes is simply another manifestation of the same prejudice that was reinforced when in-group solidarity was affirmed by telling jokes targeting racial minorities, women, gays and Jews. The assumption was that the targets of these jokes would never be in the audience to hear them. The purpose of the joke was to unite "us" against "them." When it comes to fat jokes in a book, I am the "them" being targeted, and it makes me sick to pay money to be insulted.

I won't comment on the fate of this particular copy of the book, except to say that it won't be spitting venom at any other fat readers--paper can be recycled.

Working for the Devil, Lilith Saintcrow

As if to offset the above disappointment, this author was definitely a happy discovery for me. Dante Valentine, her tough-minded, psychically gifted heroine, raises the dead for a living. This owes a debt to Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, etc. It's set in a gritty, Blade-Runner-with-Psychics-Unchained world. A world that has suffered an apocalyptic meltdown of religion and many of its institutions in the face of events that proved undeniable truth of the existence of supernatural entities. The first few scenes take the heroine literally to hell to accept a job to assassinate a demon for the Devil--the alternative being her own death and quite possible the end of human life. Definitely a high stakes game, and a well-told tale.

Saintcrow's cool web site

Reading Thomas Harris without a helmet and other desperate acts

2006-11-12T17:57:00.000-08:00

October 28 to November 12, 1976, I read:

Crime Prevention in the 30th Century, Hans Stefan Santesson, Ed.
Still around.

The Odd Couple, A comedy in Three Acts, Neil Simon
In those days I read a lot of plays. Neil Simon writes funny, even on the printed page.

The Subject Was Roses (A Play in Two Acts) , Frank Gilroy
This play won the Pulitzer Prize.

Marathon Man, William Goldman
Nobody does it better. No matter what "it" you're talking about.This is the book (and later the movie, the script for which Goldman also wrote) that set dentistry back a-ways.

Black Sunday, Thomas Harris
In this, his first novel, Harris demonstrated that he was/is a superb writer. It was his next, even better-written book, Red Dragon, that I wish I hadn't read. Worse yet, Harris is a slow writer, the book was reprinted, and I was half way through a second read before I realized I had been down this road once and I wasn't going to enjoy where it went. I finished it--I didn't say it was bad, just extremely disturbing.

After being traumatized by Red Dragon, I read The Silence of the Lambs some years later only because I was in a kind of death wish state. Others might ride motorcycles with no helmet--I read Thomas Harris, also without a helmet. I'm happy to say I have not got to the point since where I need to read any of Harris's others. At the end of The Silence of the Lambs, I could see that he had fallen for his villain and was revving up for a sequel and I personally was not crazy about making Hannibal the Cannibal the hero of the next book. Did you realize that if he'd named the character Norman, he would have had to be Norman the Mormon. I'm just saying is all…. It would have been a different book that's for sure.

October 28 to November 12, 2006 I read:

Assassin's Apprentice (The Farseer Trilogy, Book 1), Robin Hobb
Speaking of being in a kinder, gentler mood, this was a medieval-style fantasy world, with an apprentice assassin, who had a troubled origin and undeveloped occult powers. It was a page-turner without being bone-chilling. I rarely chill my bones these days unless it's totally inavoidable--just a lifestyle choice.
Robin Hobb's web page

The Other Side of the Story: A Novel, Marian Keyes
This author is one I particularly like, and I'm so persnickety about what I read nowadays that it's hard to predict what I will enjoy. This was a long book--like 600-plus pages, but the characters were all interesting and going through some difficult times, with humor and a satisfying resolution. I did find the various viewpoints a little jarring the first time the author suddenly switched focal characters. But it's the author's voice that makes Keyes books enjoyable to me, so I hung in with her.

Wandering the web...with or without aim

2006-10-27T22:16:00.000-07:00

October 22 to 27, 1976 I read:

Mom, the Flag & Apple Pie, ed of Esquire and others, particularly Gore Vidal, Gordon Parks, Marshall Brady, Andy Warhol, Jean Stafford, R. A. Arthur

Murder and Madness, D.T. Lunde
This book turned out to be a frequent re-read when I was writing mysteries some years later

The World of Jimmy Breslin, Jimmy Breslin
Didn’t finish this.

How to Talk to Practically Anybody about Practically Anything, Barbara Walters & friend
Would that it were that easy.

October 22 to 27, 2006, I didn't read any books at all.

I'm overhauling my web page--at long last. When I started talking to my web diva, Sue Trowbridge, about this, she pointed out that I do have a chatty little note in my bio along the lines of, "As I write this in 1998…" Eeek! The cute little tuxedo kitten sucking on my neck as I wrote that, has now grown up to be a compact adult cat, who…well, he's grown up enough to only drool a little and we've worked out a deal where he confines the claw-kneading/drooling to a towel around my neck. Unfortunately, every time I pick up a towel…

Anyway, I've been looking around to see how web pages are done in this millennium…

So I spent way too long trolling through the shallows of the net, looking for what I know not. They say that Truman Capote's last years were spent reading magazines when he coulda, shoulda been writing that unfinished book that offended so many people. I get the impression that alcohol involved in that case.

In this case, no alcohol--just the insidious lure of information. Wandering on the net, you can snare things you never expected, even as large segments of your life slip down a black hole never to be seen again.

I blame the New York Times online or maybe YouTube for the last episode. The NYT story on Weird Al Yankovich provided a link to YouTube's where Yankovich's parody of Star Wars was performed to the tune of American Pie.

As a totally word-obsessed sixties survivor I fixate on song lyrics the way more visual people fixate on album cover art. Weird Al's parody ensured that I woke up the next morning pondering, "Do you recall what was revealed the day the music died?"

Um, no, I don't recall it, because I never figured those lyrics out at all.

The folks at Don McLean's web page didn't seem to have figured them out totally either, but the effort to do so has evidently become a cottage industry, which is probably even better. On his web page I saw a link with something else I hadn't realized. As it says: "Don McLean is immortalized as the subject of the Roberta Flack/The Fugees No. 1 hit, Killing Me Softly With His Song." The link on that page takes us to a page explaining that this song was originally written for Lori Lieberman, inspired by a poem she wrote after watching Don McLean perform. Who knew?

"Who is Lori Lieberman?" you may ask--even as a sixties survivor. I asked. So I searched out her web page and found that she's been living the good life in LA and writing songs all this time, presumably having come to terms with the past

Lieberman has a new CD out and it was endorsed by Christine Lavin, another person I never heard of, but who sounded interesting when I looked her web page. I also loved the wonderful (free download) Stop Your Sobbing wherein the friends of a jilted person do the Happy Dance that she/he has gotten rid of the jerk they have hated for lo these many years. Certainly this song should be provided at a judicious moment to heartbroken people everywhere

song

And furthermore, Lavin has collaborated with many other artists on a CD (with cookbook!) of food songs entitled One Meatball…which just so happens to be the name my father gave my pet alligator, whom I remember fondly in a recent essay. (My father named the alligator that after the Andrews' Sisters hit song by that title, although most folksingers reference the Dave van Ronk version.)

album

This brings me back full circle, so here's where I had to stop.

 <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/One-Meatball" rel="tag">One Meatball</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Christine+Lavin" rel="tag">Christine Lavin</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Weird+Al+Yankovich" rel="tag">Weird Al Yankovich</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Lori+Lieberman" rel="tag">Lori Lieberman</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Roberta+Flack" rel="tag">Roberta Flack</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Killing+Me+Softly" rel="tag">Killing Me Softly"</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Lynne+Murray" rel="tag">Lynne Murray</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/30+Years+Ago+Today" rel="tag">30 Years Ago Today</a>

Crates full of genius, dream lives & fictional refuge--once more with links!

2006-10-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

--somehow the links didn't come up, I hope they do this time! L

From October 9 to October 21, 1976 I read:

The Rest of the Robots, 8 Stories from Isaac Asimov
This was fun to read, I still remember Robopsychologist Dr. Susan Calvin
wikipedia.

The Clewiston Test, Kate Wilhelm
My note--mucho depressing feminist "attitude" study

The Silent Clowns, Walter Kerr

The Story of a Novel, Thomas Wolfe
this site shows a picture I particularly like of Wolfe standing with his foot propped up on "one of three crates containing the sprawling manuscripts for
Of Time and the River.

Yikes. I read all of Wolfe's books when I was a teenager, and he appealed to my enthusiasm and energy. I don't know if I could re-read him. Maybe. He's pretty much overflowing with lyrical stuff. Of course, he did die at the age of 38, so maybe he had to squeeze it all in.

I had to love the (probably untrue) story of editor Maxwell Perkins informing Wolfe that his book was now complete and getting the reply, "It is?" I probably wouldn't be so fond of that story if I hadn't absorbed the idea that it is somehow "better" to be a genius pouring out great quantities of prodigious manuscript. You write what you write. Legendary editors like Perkins aren't available for most of us poor slobs either. So we have to deal with it the best we can.

Such a Strange Lady, Janet Hitchman
Bio of Dorothy L. Sayers, my recollection is that it seemed like a very sad life--perhaps a motivator to create such a strong dream world in her fiction. this site has a more intimate picture than you usually see of her (though not as carefree as the one of Agatha Christie with her surfboard--I kid you not, there is such a picture!)

Shogun, trying to finish
I had thought I finished this earlier, but I guess I put it down and picked it up again. My note was: 10/17 = finished whew!

October 9 to October 21, 2006 I read:

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
This is an interesting book, and an exquisitely written one, as the evocative title suggests. But it's definitely not a fast read. The author is covering 17 years of living and teaching Western literature in her hometown of Tehran, as it slipped into the kind of totalitarianism where the works of Western fiction she was teaching about were viewed as dangerous. Eventually, to satisfy her need for uncensored educational experience, she began teaching a special class in her home for the more motivated female students. I finished the book at a leisurely pace, and was glad to have read it for the evocation of an unknown world as well as the insights on Nabokov, Henry James and Jane Austen as they relate to the condition of women who have been robbed of most of their civil rights due to a fundamentalist religious state.

One thing that made my interest level in the book rise and fall was the way it slipped back and forth in time. I identified enough with the author that I was relieved when she got out of Dodge, as it were, without getting arrested for teaching an illegal class, letting her veil slip or getting caught having a cup of coffee with a male colleague. Just reading about that degree of repression was claustrophobic, and hearing of the sad fate of so many people in the book saddened me. The author's powerful belief in the elevating effect of literature gave it a transcendent quality as well.
this site has an article by Nafisi.

 <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Asimov" rel="tag">Asimov</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Thomas+Wolfe" rel="tag">Thomas Wolfe</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Dorothy+L.+Sayers" rel="tag">Dorothy L. Sayers</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Janet+Hitchman " rel="tag">Janet Hitchman</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Azar+Nafisi" rel="tag">Azar Nafisi</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Lynne+Murray" rel="tag">Lynne Murray</a>

yarnspinners and fun research

2006-10-08T23:06:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update with more links than comments.

October 1 to October 8, 1976

The Man in the High Castle, Phillip K. Dick
a website maintained by the author's family.

The Quick Red Fox, John D. MacDonald
an appropriately nostalgic site

Colette, a Taste for Life, Yvonne Mitchell

The Super Crooks, A Rogue's Gallery of Famous Hustlers, Swindlers and Thieves, R.M. Williams

October 1 to October 8, 2006

Haunted Land: Investigations into Ancient Mysteries and Modern Day Phenomena, Paul Devereaux
This was research for me, to factual to be very juicy, but I found some possibly useful things.
web site

Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
Rereading a book I first read a few years ago. Just as good the second time.
website

Topper,, Thorne Smith
This was a re-issue with a great foreword by Carolyn See. Definitely humor from a byegone age. Smith's hero has something in common with the Thurber daydreaming guys who live in fear of women. For me, the movie (Cary Grant as a ghost, wow) and the television series with Leo G. Carroll evoke fond memories that the book didn't quite...
one site
also
and a critiquey site.

still escaping after all these years

2006-10-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

[Apologies about the wierd formats. Too late for me to figure out!] L

September 16 to 30, 1976 was a good time for biographies, a mixed bag of nonfiction
and escape into thrillers and political cartoons, I read:

Jack Lemmon, Don Widener

Sylvia Plath, Method and Madness, Edward Butscher
My note: a psycho-critique -naïve in the extreme, lovingly calling Plath "neurotic" and "manic depressive" as if synonyoms for "nervous" and "moody."

Oscar Wilde, Louis Kronenberger

Pumping Iron, Charles Gaines & George Butler
This was a book, not the film, but by the same people

Post-mortem, D.M. Spain, M.D. w/Janet Kale

For Money or Love, Robin Lloyd
I had to look this up to see that it was about homosexual boy prostitution. Not the same boys as the Boys from Brazil below, that was about Nazis coming out of hiding.

The Boys from Brazil, Ira Levin
Gotta love the Stephen King quote in Wikipedia calling Ira Levin "the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels."

Speaking of Inalienable Rights, Amy, G. B. Trudeau

September 16 to 30, 2006, I took a pretty simple escape route into an alternate world, I read:

A Fistful of Charms, Kim Harrison.

More about Rachel Morgan, the witch and "runner" (essentially a paranormal private investigator in an alternate world where half of humanity has been decimated by genetically engineered "killer tomatoes" and the witches, vampires, werewolves, pixies & etc., & etc. are able to come out of the closet without fear of lynching, and live in an uneasy state of truce.

I love this interesting world Harrison has created, but I see symptoms of a syndrome that affected both Laurell K. Hamilton and Patricia Cornwell's heroines. I don't know how to describe the way the effect is created. It may be worth studying, but the upshot (for me anyway as a reader) seems to be that

(1) Almost everybody (except the bad guys) loves our heroine, who is markedly deficient in common sense on many occasions, but that's just part of her charm.

(2) people who used to be close to our heroine have now turned into "bad guys" and it's not our heroine's fault, she's just too much of a softie to realize that they aren't worth her time and/or they're just jealous of her.

I have no idea where these fictional quirks come from, but they took me out of the story and made me impatient with the characters (which I think was the opposite of the intended effect).

T'ain't funny, McGee…or is it?

2006-09-16T17:18:00.000-07:00

A short essay just posted on my web page was inspired by the recent death of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin. I started thinking about the alligator in my life--My Pet Alligator. It's a true story. When I do a web page revamp in a month or so, I hope to post more short essays, and make a more prominent place for them.

I've been thinking about what people find funny. One young humor essayist posted a rejection he got from an editor who said essentially "humor is a knee-jerk reaction" and I agree with that. Humor is fragile and ephemeral and can get lost in translation or in time.

Oddly enough, the catch phrase "T'ain't funny, McGee" popped into my head. It's from the 1930s to '50s radio show Fibber McGee and Molly. (Lots more info on a great Wikipedia entry linked below.) I must have heard the radio show in its latter days in the 1950s because the famous closet-contents-pouring-out sound effect is burned into my memory. And it's still funny to me. Maybe because my closet is in a similar state--don't stand too near when you open the door. I love the burglar idea described below!

[N]one of the show's running gags was as memorable or enduring as The Closet---McGee's frequently opening and cacophonous closet, bric-a-brac clattering down and out and, often enough, over McGee's or Molly's heads. "I gotta get that closet cleaned out one of these days" was the usual McGee observation once the racket subsided. . . .

Exactly what tumbled out of McGee's closet each time was never exactly clear (except to the sound-effects man). But what ended the avalanche was always the same: a clear, tiny, household hand bell, and McGee's inevitable postmortem. Naturally, "one of these days" never arrived. A good thing, too, in one famous instance: when burglars tied up McGee, he informed them cannily that the family valuables were in The Closet. Naturally, the burglars took the bait. And, naturally, they were buried in the inevitable avalanche, long enough for the police to come and cuff them and stuff them.
Wikipedia entry.

The entertainment landscape, and the internet in particular are littered with would-be funny stuff, and that adds to the anxiety of those of us who try to write things that make people laugh. We spend a lot of time wondering if we're playing the Main Ballroom in the USS Titanic, while the real action is in the Lifeboat Lounge.

September 10 to 16, 1976, I read:

Hustling, Gail Sheehy
I liked this book, which was an investigative reporter's exploration of prostitution.

When I searched online, I found this quote from the book:

There is no more defiant denial of one man's ability to possess one woman exclusively than the prostitute who refuses to redeemed. (The quotation site where I found this didn't give exact details of book, page number, etc., but I'm guessing it's from Hustling rather than Passages)

If you look at Sheehy's website, you can see that her mega-bestseller Passages kind of put her into the "passages" business, and that word is used somewhere in the description of every one of the books listed on her site. I don't know if I've got Passages on my 1976 books read list--it was published that year, and for a long time I had trouble having a dialog with other women who kept citing chapters of it. I know I tried to read it, and I don't think I got far. I've got nothing against pop psychology but for some reason I couldn't get through that particular book. However, it seemed to have helped a lot of people feel good about themselves, which is good. Hustling isn't mentioned on her website, I personally think it shows diversity, but I guess it might alienate some who would enjoy all her other works.

The Brain Changers, Maya Pines
My note was: shuffled thru, clumsy, rather irritating read

Wasted: The Story of My Son's Drug Addiction, William Chapin
I remember this as a sad but powerful book. I hadn't realized it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize till I read the link below.
website

Modern Science Fiction, Norman Spinrad, Ed.

Science Fiction today and Tomorrow, Reginald Bretnor, Ed.

September 10 to 16, 2006 I read:

Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett

Thud, Terry Pratchett

Once again a Terry Pratchett orgy is coming to an end when the books run out. I know when I buy more I will be back on the Pratchett express to wherever he decides to go. No frequent flyer miles, alas!

 <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Terry+Pratchett" rel="tag">Terry Pratchett</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/William+Chapin" rel="tag">William Chapin</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Gail+Sheehy" rel="tag">Gail Sheehy</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Maya+Pines" rel="tag">Maya Pines</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Fibber+McGee+and+Molly" rel="tag">Fibber McGee and Molly</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Steve+Irwin" rel="tag">Steve Irwin</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Crocodile" rel="tag">Crocodile</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Alligator" rel="tag">Alligator</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Lynne+Murray" rel="tag">Lynne Murray</a>

Books to escape with and into...

2006-09-10T19:49:00.000-07:00

The names change, but reading to escape remains the same. All these books were fun to read.

August 30 to September 9, 1996

In Search of Wonder, Damon Knight
web site

Eaters of the Dead, Michael Crichton
Interesting that Crichton used historical materials from the 10th century explorations.
web site

Norstrillia, Cordwainer Smith
The only novel by Cordwainer Smith, pseudonym of the late Paul Linebarger, a professor and part-time spy, but it portrays the same future world as his amazing short stories.
web site

This was a pretty cool Virtual Reality Tour of the 160th century worlds Smith imagined.
web site

Shogun, James Clavell
Like Chrichton, Clavell wrote about an actual historical situation--a handful of Europeans in isolated 16th century Japan.
web site

August 30 to September 9, 2006

Only You Can Save Mankind (Johnny Maxwell Trilogy, 1.), Terry Pratchett

Johnny and the Dead (Johnny Maxwell Trilogy, 2.), Terry Pratchett

It might be awhile before I get to 3 of this trilogy, because these are very slight books, more like a Terry Pratchett sample compared to one of his full-length books. I probably will eventually read it though, because I'm fairly solidly addicted to Pratchett's work and eventually I'll run out of books to read…it's getting down to the last few already…

Dates From Hell, novelettes Kim Harrison, Lynsay Sands, Kelley Armstrong, Lori Handeland

I hate to say it, but after a few days I remember some of these more than others.

"Undead in the Garden of Good and Evil" by Kim Harrison is a prequel to Harrison's Rachel Morgan series (Dead Witch Walking), in the form of a story of vampire Ivy's point of view. This one I liked and remembered, and felt it added to the "witch" series.
web site

"The Claire Switch Project" by Lynsay Sands. This uses a "molecular destabilizer" plot device, allowing the heroine to morph into different forms simply by looking at a picture. Paradoxically it was way too giddy to be funny to me, and an early scene establishing that most of the lead character do experiments on "bunnies" threw a bucket of ice water on me that chilled the rest of the story so that it was neither funny nor cute to me. (I couldn't quite "get to" the website for Linsay Sands, the URL links didn't work for me, sorry.)

"Chaotic" by Kelly Armstrong was a very strong read for me, introducing Hope, who is half demon, with an ability to see and an appetite for chaos that allows her first to apprehend and then to bond with jewel thief and werewolf, Marsten there are some interesting twists and turns in the story. I'll definitely check out more of Armstrong's books. web site

"Dead Man Dating" by Lori Handeland was enjoyable, featuring Kit Morelli, whose hot date winds up with her nearly dying in an alley at the hands of a demonic life-draining entity. I guess we haven't really all been there, but sometimes it feels like it. Rescued by demon hunter, Chavez, she finds that to save herself she has to get involved in his mission to hunt every kind of monster and demon there is--talk about a workaholic boyfriend.
web site

Close encounters of the paranormal kind

2006-08-29T18:43:00.000-07:00

For those who are considering buying the new obesity epidemic, I've written an assessment in the form of an owner's manual, now up on my website at The Care and Feeding of Your New Obesity Epidemic.

August 26-29, 1976 I read:

The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, Robert Graves, Alan Hodge

I didn't finish this book, which I believe was recommended by Mel Gilden, whose science fiction short story writing class I had just taken. The main point I got from the book was that everybody writes crap--even the great ones, if you sample their work at random, will write garbage. So shut up and write already. Reading some reviews of the hardcover on amazon.com I see that the authors rip up the poor examples of prose from Hemingway, Huxley and Shaw and are very strict with perpetrators of poor syntax. Oops, didn't get that far. I evidently misunderstood the thrust of their argument, but I can't say I regret the message I took away from the part of the book I did read. I also don't regret not finishing it.

Capricorn Games, Robert Silverberg

F&SF July '76, The First Time
(The magazine, The First Time might be a novel or novella…?)

Insanity Inside Out, Kenneth Donaldson

August 26-28, 2006:

I read a so-called paranormal romance novel this week. I didn't know that such a subgenre existed till recently. But almost as soon as I finished the book, I found that Susie Bright had done a fascinating interview it's the August 28, 2006 entry of her web log, the full text of an interview for Publisher's Weekly on the success of the romance genre and its impact as mainstream erotica for women. She also offers some sobering perspectives about the publishing industry

The book I read was:
Night Play (A Dark-Hunter Novel), Sherrilyn Kenyon

Speaking of Publishers Weekly, I can't improve on this description from their review:

Can a gorgeous werewolf with magical powers and an overweight boutique owner with a broken heart have a future together? They can in Kenyon's fantastical world, which imagines a contemporary New Orleans teeming with vampiric Daimons, immortal Dark-Hunters and various were-bears, leopards and wolves. Vane Kattalakis is a lone wolf in every sense. His brother, Fang, is in a coma; his werewolf father wants to kill him; and his mostly human mother, who was taken by force by Vane's father, would happily see them all dead. But after Vane shares a sizzling sexual encounter with Bride McTierney, he realizes his life is about to change. Bride is Vane's "predestined mate," which means that he has three weeks to convince her to be his partner or he'll spend the next several decades impotent and alone.

I wasn't so sure I'd continue, but once I started reading, I spent the day with the book. Can't argue with that. It worked for me as escape. Interesting how commenters on Amazon freaked out over the heroine being a size 18 and feeling no one could love her because of her size.

Sherrilyn Kenyon also writes as Kinley MacGregor and has an interesting web site at
this link

 <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Kinley+Macgregor" rel="tag">Kinley MacGregor</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Sherrilyn+Kenyon" rel="tag">Sherrilyn Kenyon</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Susie+Bright" rel="tag">Susie Bright</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Paranormal+romance" rel="tag">Paranormal romance</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Robert+Graves" rel="tag">Robert Graves</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Publishers+Weekly" rel="tag">Publishers Weekly</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Mel+Gilden " rel="tag">Mel Gilden</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Obesity+Epidemic" rel="tag">Obesity Epidemic</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Lynne+Murray" rel="tag">Lynne Murray</a>

A wild buffet (I'd avoid the surrealist casserole...unidentifiable fragments)

2006-08-25T14:32:00.000-07:00

August 9 to August 25, 1976 I read:

The Magic Barrel, Bernard Malamud

I had no memory of this book. The author died in 1986. I found this story online that only brought back the faintest whisper of memory, but it's a brilliantly written, evocative story.

Papa, A Personal Memoir, Gregory Hemingway, M.D.
I don't remember much about the book except, obviously, that it was written by the novelist's son.

I wasn't a cat person when I read this book, that came later. But Ernest Hemingway the descendents of some of his cats at the Hemingway House on Key West are embattled. It's a stable, cared-for, neutered group (with the exception of a select few descendants of the Hemingway original 6-toed cats). The cats live at the museum/house and they are threatened.

home website

FYI, if interested: petition website

Space, Jan Faller
My note is: The personal account of a divorce. Tres dreary.

New Dimensions, Robert Silverberg, Ed.

The Doctors Metabolic Diet, Kremer & Kremer

30 years ago I was still on the diet rollercoaster. I went online to see if Kremer & Kremer were still around and still marketing their diet (maybe there was a Kremer v. Kremer lawsuit over the book--sorry couldn't resist). Anyway loads of other profiteers have their own metabolic diets for sale circa 2006, I guess you can't patent that concept, even though it was about as effective as every other diet plan. Is primary goal was enriching the book's authors. In 1976, I didn't get that. And I suffered for not getting it.

I've been separated from the diet wars for so long, that when I searched for the book title, I saw an ad for "the metabolic typing diet" I thought it must have something to do with keyboarding--the carpal tunnel diet, etc.

Comic-Stripped American What Dick Tracy, Blondie, Daddy Warbucks and Charlie Brown Tell Us About Ourselves, Arthur Asa Berger

I looked at some of this author's other books--yikes, semiotics! That's a word that always looked to me like it should be on a label: "warning this product contains semiotics." No, don't ask me to look it up. I've looked it up several times over the decades and my brain rejects it every time--I think I'm allergic. Interesting range of works though: educational murder mysteries, books on Jewish comedy, oceangoing tourism, visiting Vietnam, television. I look further and see him listed as a professor at my alma mater San Francisco State University. Okay, now I'm not surprised. San Francisco State is a place where you can have freedom to experiment wildly. The downside is no one will notice, no matter what you do.

Blue Money, Carolyn See

I liked this book--still remember it--and I'm glad to see that Carolyn See is still alive and
writing

Without Feathers, Woody Allen

Interesting website, about, not by Allen, has a list of all his work.

August 9 to August 24, 2006:

Haven't read so much during the last few weeks. I've been writing more, reading less. That happens, although I can tell I'm about ready to jump into some escape fiction and stay submerged for awhile.

The Essential Kathy Acker, Kathy Acker, Ed & Intro: Amy Scholder, Jeanette Winterson, and Dennis Cooper

The great French writer, Colette, famously said: "Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you."

I was warned in the disclaimer that this was experimental, and usually I don't take well to being an author's lab rat, but I was curious. Wikipedia has an interesting entry on Acker.

Dennis Cooper wrote the intro to this book, and in the one Cooper book I've read so far, The Sluts, he used his fragments to actually tell a story. No such luck with Acker. I didn't find much more than tiny splinters of stories in Acker's work, even though the prose is powerful, sometimes even oddly ingratiating.

I followed Colette's advice and looked at it carefully to see what I disliked. It's highly graphic, in places pornographic and visceral, but that in itself doesn't always put me off. Finally I realized that what irritated me even more than the lack of story was the fact that Acker seemed to want to alienate the reader. Mission accomplished.

A strong metaphor or vivid detail in her prose may hold your attention, but she appears to have the attention span of a housefly. Segments of disconnected prose are like a pile of pieces from different puzzles that she has mixed up on purpose. I did read that she used the "cut up" technique famously employed by William Burroughs of composing prose like ransom notes from fragments. Personally I think disconnected segments are more rewarding as a visual rather than a literary device.

This is very much a matter of personal taste. I will look into Acker's nonfiction essays before I give up totally. Sometimes the halter of reality guides a wild, stampeding prose escapist to follow an actual narrative.

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Many shades of humor

2006-08-09T21:54:00.000-07:00

July 31 to August 6, 1976 I read:

The MAD World of William M. Gaines, Frank Jacobs

This was a bio of Gaines, founder of MAD Magazine--a bright light of laughter and sanity for a lot of us growing up. Biographer and that Frank Jacobs was a writer for the magazine. And a MAD website

One Man's San Francisco, Herb Caen

This was one of the first books I bought in hardcover, and possibly the last I reviewed for the Buddhist newspaper. I loved Herb Caen's column--gentle or pointed, up-to-the-minute sometimes romantic, sometimes snarky comments…separated by three dots. Six days a week for 50 years. Wow.

He was enough of a presence that in the '80s when I worked for a famous local liberal whose office was considering not giving us the Martin Luther King holiday off, we called Herb Caen! I don't know if any contact was made from Caen's office over this item. Our boss loved to see his name in the column--but not being teased for exploiting his workers. The boss decided we would get the holiday, and we dutifully called Caen's assistant back, so the item never ran.

I was way too broke to buy this book just because I loved Herb Caen. I believe there was a waiting list for it at the library and I wanted to review it for the Buddhist newspaper. It was one of the last things I wrote for them. I wanted to include a wonderful Caen joke from it, which I'll have to paraphrase: "Now that it's six weeks past Christmas, don't you think it's time we took down the TransAmerica Pyramid?" After so many years of self-censoring for the Buddhist newspaper and I thought that might be too edgy. (!!!) Then they published the review with a picture of downtown SF with the TransAmerica Pyramid in the center! Aiii! Definitely time to leave off writing for the Buddhist newspaper.

The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hogue, Robert Heinlein
Goodness, there's a
society. Well, of course there is.

Best Sci Fi Stories of the Year, 5th Annual Collection, Lester Del Rey, ed.

July 31 to August 6, 2006 I read:

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel

After eleven or twelve Dykes to Look Out For collections of her wry cartoons, Bechdel has written a graphic novel/memoir. Clearly a labor of love, a beautiful book, exploring her childhood in a family where the family business was operating of a Funeral Home (which the family called the "fun home"), and her father, lived a closeted gay life until Bechtel, in college, came out as a lesbian. Soon after that he was killed by a truck, which Bechdel suspects was a suicide. One of her primary means of bonding with her father, who also an English teacher, was over his favorite novels and Fun Home is elegantly steeped in literature. A wistful book.

A Hat Full of Sky, Terry Pratchett

This book about a young witch's apprenticeship was aimed at younger readers, but it's totally enjoyable for any age readers. As is anything by Pratchett).

 <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Terry+Pratchett" rel="tag">Terry Pratchett</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Alison+Bechdel" rel="tag">Alison Bechdel</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Robert+Heinlein" rel="tag">Robert Heinlein</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Herb+Caen" rel="tag">Herb Caen</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/William+M.+Gaines"rel="tag">William M. Gaines</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Frank+Jacobs" rel="tag">Frank Jacobs</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/MAD+Magazine" rel="tag">MAD Magazine</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Lynne+Murray" rel="tag">Lynne Murray</a>

New York on zero dollars a day with no sign of Liz Taylor

2006-07-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

July 19 to July 30, 1976 I read:

Universe 6, Terry Carr (ed)
My note is "again" so I must have liked it the first time.

I didn't read much else during this stretch 30 years ago, and I think it was because I was attending my last NSA/SGI (I forget when they changed the name) "Buddhist convention." I was already alienated from the group and it must have been a last attempt to reconcile. It was like attending a family reunion in the midst of a messy divorce. The convention fee included meals and a shared hotel room. I brought a little money, which my mentors told me to conceal on my person rather than carrying a snatchable purse (they also told us not to get in an elevator alone with strangers, and not to go alone to parts of town we weren't familiar with--which was everywhere). I was so paranoid that I sewed the money I brought into the hem of my bell-bottom pants. I didn't buy anything so I didn't need to go looking for the cash. I found it there after I got back to San Francisco. I wonder if there's a T-shirt or bumper sticker for I survived NY on Zero $ per day. I'm guessing not.

What did I see in New York? Hmmm, the Avenue of the Americas (I think we had a parade there) and Central Park from the outside in the early afternoon. I didn't see the Tall Ships that were rumored to be sailing into the harbor. There was one funny story from New York 1976 that I didn't see personally, but it sounds true. One of our top lay organization leaders was dining at a very upscale restaurant during the convention (I guess somebody spent more than zero dollars a day that week) and he remarked what an unusually beautiful woman was sitting across the dining room. It was Elizabeth Taylor. So, fancy restaurant or no, I guess I wasn't the only one who led a sheltered life.

July 19 to July 30, 2006 I read:

Winter Moon: Moontide\The Heart Of The Moon\Banshee Cries, Mercedes Lackey, Tanith Lee, C.E. Murphy

The Tanith Lee novella didn't engage me, so I passed on it.

I hadn't read Mercedes Lackey before, and enjoyed it--so I guess there are lots more to choose from to continue to read her. I think her website is mercedeslackey.com, but I could be wrong about that.

I had read C.E. Murphy before and found this fun also.
But I find from her website at cemurphy.net that she also writes under the name Cate Dermody.

This Mean Disease: Growing Up in the Shadow of My Mother's Anorexia, Daniel Becker
A sad memoir of how deeply a woman's anorexia affected her family. I read this to get some insights into an anorexic character I'm writing about. I hadn't realized the close ties to clinical depression and anorexia.

Skinny Women Are Evil, Notes of a BIG Girl in a Small-Minded World, Mo'nique and Sherri A. McGee
I loved this book even though I am not the target audience. Mo'nique's sit-com, The Parkers distressed me because she was mostly shown chasing a reluctant man. That was way too close to a fat joke for me. She addresses that in the book on p. 110, "The first thing I told the producers…was not to have Nikki wear muumuus and sit around the house all day. She must to out on dates, have adventures, boyfriends and as much sex as possible. Thankfully they understood my desire to make a statement with this character and agreed with everything--except the as much sex as possible."

Mo'nique provides some charts and descriptions to sort out the evil skinny women from the supportive allies. This book tells the story of Monique's life in a way that's both funny and rabble-rousing. It's refreshing to see how Mo'nique's parents unconditional love and confidence made it possible for her to feel, as her father said, like "the prettiest girl in the world" from infancy to now.

Mo'nique's solidly positive attitude livened up a lot of the material in her book that's pretty far from the my own interests--like fashionable shoes, nightclubbing and competing to get the most phone numbers from a night on the town. But I do look forward to viewing Mo'nique's film Phat Girlz, and I cried when I heard Nigerian musician 2Face Idibia's song, African Queen, featured in the film and on the website. He said it was "my own way of paying my tribute and respect to the African woman." You don't have to be African, or African-American to appreciate the tenderness, affection and positive spirit there.

 <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/C.E.+Murphy" rel="tag">C.E. Murphy</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/anorexia"rel="tag">anorexia</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Mercedes+Lackey" rel="tag">Mercedes Lackey</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Daniel+Becker" rel="tag">Daniel Becker</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/2Face+Idibia" rel="tag">2Face Idibia</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/ Phat+Girlz" rel="tag">Phat Girlz</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/ Mo'nique" rel="tag">Mo'nique</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Lynne+Murray" rel="tag">Lynne Murray</a>

Endings, loose ends, ladies, and tigers

2006-07-18T19:51:00.000-07:00

I am in the incoherent daze that comes with dispatching a manuscript off into the world to seek its fortune, so I don't have a lot of extra wit today, I'll just have to go on pure instinct.

July 7 to July 18, 1976

The Woman Said Yes, Encounters with Life and Death, Jessamyn West

I don't mean to be irreverent, and I did love The Friendly Persuasion, but my recollection is that this one was sad and the theme was basically, "the woman said, yes, Dr. Kevorkian." Um you know, without Dr. Kevorkian himself being involved. Oh, I don't know, maybe I do mean to be irreverent, it happens too often to be accidental.

All Her Children, Dan Wakefield
Something about soap opera actors...?

The World Jonas Made, Philip K. Dick

Break of Day, Colette
Wonderful

The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh
This was funny--particularly having seen the motion picture years earlier.

Magazine of F&SF October '75 (esp. novelette Down to a Sunless Sea, Cordwainer Smith and. novelette Deadpan, E. Wellen)

July 7 to July 18, 2006 I read:

Enchanted, Inc., Shanna Swendson

This was a fun read, about a heroine whose magical "power" is that she is so utterly normal that she can see through magical illusions. Having just moved to New York from a small Texas town, she assumes the gargoyles, elves and fairy beings with wings are all eccentric New Yorkers. It's a gentle funny book. Swendson has a
web site, web log, all that stuff.

Marriage of Sticks, Jonathan Carroll

Jonathan Carroll as a writer is beyond excellent. His strong suit is bringing you into the dreamlike state his characters exist in, and he does it very well. He did some powerful things with the narrative up to about the middle of this book that will stay with me for a long time. However, that is part of my problem with this book. I wasn't comfortable in the world that he has created here, and as the end got closer, I wanted it over. I began to actively dislike it until I got to the ending, which I hated. Part of that seemed to be that Carroll had a mild case of what I call Lady-or-tigerism (after the ending of the famous Frank Stockton short story The Lady or the Tiger, that is a trick worked once--for Stockton, and I've never seen it work yet for anyone else). Oh, hell, for all I know, Carroll may have been crystal clear about the ending for those paying close attention, but as the conclusion of the book got more and more irritating, I was happy to get to the end, unsatisfying though it may have been, and so glad to have the book over that I had no desire to revisit it to understand anything I might have misunderstood. Interestingly, a penchant for "unsatisfying" endings is discussed on Carroll's web site. Some people evidently find the unsatisfying endings "endearing." As they say on the net, "your mileage may vary."

 <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/ Jonathan+Carroll" rel="tag">Jonathan Carroll</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Jessamyn+West" rel="tag">Jessamyn West</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Frank+Stockton" rel="tag">Frank Stockton</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/ Shanna+Swendson" rel="tag">Shanna Swendson</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/ Waugh" rel="tag">Waugh </a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Lynne+Murray" rel="tag">Lynne Murray</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/ Colette" rel="tag">Colette</a>

Reality tested and found wanting

2006-07-06T14:18:00.000-07:00

July 6, 2006 - Some shorter material I read with pleasure this week was a charming online brochure celebrating San Francisco's Columbarium, which is a wonderful neoclassic building that has housed cremated remains since 1897.

Originally designed in the middle of a 27-acre Odd Fellows cemetary, the Columbarium was the jewel at the center of a kind of necropolis of many cemeteries outside the city limits. Over next century, the city kept expanding and pushing the dead out to the suburbs. Now it stands alone in accepting newly deceased tenants.

This is your typical San Francisco real estate situation, so when I read this deliciously funny brochure I thought, "only in San Francisco is there enough sophistication to appreciate an ironic, yet charming sales approach." Particularly when selling an extremely limited quantity of luxury items. You can't build up, down or out in San Francisco. Even when it comes to urn space, there ain't much of it, so that might lend itself to an unorthodox sales approach.

So I thought. I printed out the brochure and gave my only copy to a friend who used to live in San Francisco who needed cheering up. I thought I could find it again easily on the net, but I couldn't. I called the Columbarium, and described the booklet in glowing terms. The nice lady there clearly had no clue what the hell I was talking about--but she was kind enough to send me some lovely, not particularly funny, brochures. It turned out they were having a sale that month--15% off. I missed that one, but I might catch the next.

I ended up having my friend send the brochure back. With the correct title I found it again easily here

Okay, once again I've mistaken parody for reality. But check it out, it's a lovely project by a witty design major, inspired by an inventive professor. Another reason I stay in my fictional world--even San Francisco's Cloud Cuckooland is too real for me.

The illusion probably entered my mind through my weakness--an obsession with San Francisco real estate, which I observe with the fascination of a virgin daydreaming about a rock star from afar. When something shows up close to my price range, I'd have to be dead and cremated to move in! When I told another friend that I had actually called the Columbarium looking for this, she agreed that I probably shouldn't be allowed out of the city limits without an escort for my own safety and that of others.

June 24-July 5, 1976 I read:

Is it my imagination, or did celebrity bios seem a bit classier 30 years ago?

Olivier, An Informal Portrait, Virginia Fairweather

Colette, The Difficulty of Loving, Margaret Crosland

The Best from Fantasy and SF/8th Series, Ed Ferman, Ed.

My Heart Belongs, Mary Martin
It may be a generational thing to be able to finish the phrase--My Heart Belongs. . . to Daddy. That's the Cole Porter song that Martin, sang at age 24, creating a sensation in her 1938 Broadway debut. I remember about her autobiography, she notes that she seemed innocent enough even to her fellow actors that they weren't sure she understood that the character was in fact singing about a sugar daddy. Those of us who grew up in the 1950s remember her as Peter Pan in the annual television broadcasts of the play.

The Wine of Dreamers, John D. MacDonald
Sci fi from the Travis Magee creator. I don't remember my reaction at the time, but I'd probably already read everything else I could find by him at that point.

June 25 to July 6, 2006, aside from the Columbarium brochure, I read:

What's Eating Johnny Dep, Nigel Goodall
The most charitable possible thing I can say is this was not a well-written book. It reads as if stitched together from movie magazines and tabloids with none too fancy needlework and very little regard for the sequence or readability. I understand there's a new, updated version of this work, and I hope that it was edited, because Depp is an interesting actor and the story of his life and work deserves better narration.

The suspense did not last long

2006-06-24T18:08:00.000-07:00

In answer to the question what will I screw up format-wise this time? Today the blog mistake (blogomistake?) will be posting the same entry more than once. Sorry, no bets accepted--I'd go broke paying them off! Lynne

Books to remember, and not...

2006-06-24T18:05:00.000-07:00

Let me see if I can avoid screwing up the word wrap feature, or some other vital formatting function this time. Sigh.

June 18 to June 23, 1976 I read:

SF Author's Choice, Harrison, Ed.

David Meyer Is a Mother, Gail Parent

I don't remember this book. Even reading a short description of it didn't bring anything back, except a vague memory of also having read Parent's Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York, and I understand this author has written for television and movies, including 2004's Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. It's always good to hear that someone who 30 years ago was writing comic novels (and evidently proto-typical chick lit--who knew?) is alive, writing and evidently thriving--I tend to assume that people who write movies are thriving, call it jealousy if you will, because that would be accurate.

Laughing all the Way, Barbara Howar

Milton Berle, an Autobiography, Milton Berle with Hashell Frankel
My note in '76 was: engagingly honest.

The book made enough of an impact on me with its vaudeville reminiscences and candid personal revelations that I remember many of the anecdotes to this day--particularly the more graphic ones--with an odd kind of affection. I think that's the larger-than-life charm that Berle was able to put across in his performances as well.

By contrast the Barbara Howar autobiography above was much more zipped and buttoned up, and I can't remember any part of it. Of course, the double standard flourished a lot more 30 years ago and unabashed candor was an even more risky action for females then.

Rhythms of Vision: Changing Patterns of Belief, Lawrence Blair
My note was: dense as hell. Someone called it "lyrical" on the jacket--unintelligible would be more apt.

Interestingly, I did quite enjoy the PBS-broadcast documentary Ring of Fire, following Lawrence and his brother Lorne Blair's 10 years of exploration in Indonesia. There's a book of that entitled Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey. I'd be interested in reading that book.

I might be just as impatient with mystical speculation now as I was 30 years ago, but I had an instant, visceral reaction when I thought, "should I perhaps re-read Rhythms of Vision? That reaction was--"No!" Perhaps the Ring of Fire book appeals because there's a story instead of metaphysical speculation (urk!)

Universe 6, Carr

June 18 to 24, 2006 I read:

The Last Hero, Terry Pratchett

This is the first large-sized, illustrated Pratchett I've read. Paul Kidby's color illustrations have their own wit, notably the sepia-toned Da Vinci notebook style invention notes and sketches and "Mona Lisa" of Leonard of Quirm, and portraits of Cohen, the Barbarian and his geriatric Silver Horde, on one final rampage with the mission of returning fire to the gods (thereby ending the world). Hot on their trail, in Leonard's brilliant, if unpredictable, dragon-powered rocket is a contingent from Ankh-Morpork's City Watch and Unseen University's wizards trying to save to save Discworld.

This is an unusually short Discworld book--160 pages--a great many of which are the illustrations. At 40,000 words it's called a "Discworld Fable" rather than a full novel

Even though it was shorter than the usual Pratchett books, and I'm not the most visually inclined audience for the graphic enrichment, I enjoyed it. And the review on Amazon.com was by Donald E. Westlake--wow! I admire Westlake a lot and it was good to know that he's a Pratchett enthusiast.

 <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Gail+Parent" rel="tag">Gail Parent</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Paul+Kidby" rel="tag">Paul Kidby</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Terry+Pratchett" rel="tag">Terry Pratchett</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Lawrence+Blair" rel="tag">Lawrence Blair</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Lorne+Blair" rel="tag">Lorne Blair</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Indonesia" rel="tag">Indonesia</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Ring+of+Fire" rel="tag">Ring of Fire</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Discworld" rel="tag">Discworld</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Hashell+Frankel" rel="tag">Hashell Frankel</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Barbara+Howar" rel="tag">Barbara Howar</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Westlake" rel="tag">Westlake</a><a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Milton Berle" rel="tag">Milton Berle</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Lynne+Murray" rel="tag">Lynne Murray</a> <noembed><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Books to remember, and not...</h1> 2006-06-24T17:28:00.000-07:00 Let me see if I can avoid screwing up the word wrap feature, or some other vital formatting function this time. Sigh. June 18 to June 23, 1976 I read: SF Author's Choice, Harrison, Ed. David Meyer Is a Mother, Gail Parent I don't remember this book. Even reading a short description of it didn't bring anything back, except a vague memory of also having read Parent's Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York, and I understand this author has written for television and movies, including 2004's Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. It's always good to hear that someone who 30 years ago was writing comic novels (and evidently proto-typical chick lit--who knew?) is alive, writing and evidently thriving--I tend to assume that people who write movies are thriving, call it jealousy if you will, because that would be accurate. Laughing all the Way, Barbara Howar Milton Berle, an Autobiography, Milton Berle with Hashell Frankel My note in '76 was: engagingly honest. The book made enough of an impact on me with its vaudeville reminiscences and candid personal revelations that I remember many of the anecdotes to this day--particularly the more graphic ones--with an odd kind of affection. I think that's the larger-than-life charm that Berle was able to put across in his performances as well. By contrast the Barbara Howar autobiography above was much more zipped and buttoned up, and I can't remember any part of it. Of course, the double standard flourished a lot more 30 years ago and unabashed candor was an even more risky action for females then. Rhythms of Vision: Changing Patterns of Belief, Lawrence Blair My note was: dense as hell. Someone called it "lyrical" on the jacket--unintelligible would be more apt. Interestingly, I did quite enjoy the PBS-broadcast documentary Ring of Fire, following Lawrence and his brother Lorne Blair's 10 years of exploration in Indonesia. There's a book of that entitled Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey. I'd be interested in reading that book. I might be just as impatient with mystical speculation now as I was 30 years ago, but I had an instant, visceral reaction when I thought, "should I perhaps re-read Rhythms of Vision? That reaction was--"No!" Perhaps the Ring of Fire book appeals because there's a story instead of metaphysical speculation (urk!) Universe 6, Carr June 18 to 24, 2006 I read: The Last Hero, Terry Pratchett This is the first large-sized, illustrated Pratchett I've read. Paul Kidby's color illustrations have their own wit, notably the sepia-toned Da Vinci notebook style invention notes and sketches and "Mona Lisa" of Leonard of Quirm, and portraits of Cohen, the Barbarian and his geriatric Silver Horde, on one final rampage with the mission of returning fire to the gods (thereby ending the world). Hot on their trail, in Leonard's brilliant, if unpredictable, dragon-powered rocket is a contingent from Ankh-Morpork's City Watch and Unseen University's wizards trying to save to save Discworld. This is an unusually short Discworld book--160 pages--a great many of which are the illustrations. At 40,000 words it's called a "Discworld Fable" rather than a full novel Even though it was shorter than the usual Pratchett books, and I'm not the most visually inclined audience for the graphic enrichment, I enjoyed it. And the review on Amazon.com was by Donald E. Westlake--wow! I admire Westlake a lot and it was good to know that he's a Pratchett enthusiast. <noembed> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Gail+Parent" rel="tag">Gail Parent</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Paul+Kidby" rel="tag">Paul Kidby</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Terry+Pratchett" rel="tag">Terry Pratchett</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Lawrence+Blair" rel="tag">Lawrence Blair</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Lorne+Blair" rel="tag">Lorne Blair</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Indonesia" rel="tag">Indonesia</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Ring+of+Fire" rel="tag">Ring of Fire</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Discworld" rel="tag">Discworld</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Hashell+Frankel" rel="tag">Hashell Frankel</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Barbara+Howar" rel="tag">Barbara Howar</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Westlake" rel="tag">Westlake</a><a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Milton Berle" rel="tag">Milton Berle</a> <a href= "http://technorati.com/tag/Lynne+Murray" rel="tag">Lynne Murray</a> <noembed><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>sorry, my "inner pit bull" requires completing this</h1> 2006-06-17T15:51:00.000-07:00 Okay, so this post got lost and then truncated. Here's the last bit. (on the subject of seeing the documentary Don't Look Back five times and still totally missing Dylan's unkind treatment of Baez: My reaction to the relevant portions was along the lines of, "Look it's Joan Baez. What a beautiful voice. Love is Just a Four-Letter Word. Cool song." Of course, I was 16 and paying attention to the poetry, the James Dean-ish, hyper-cool edge that Dylan was presenting, and the spectacle. I had to have that whole interaction explained to me 40 years later. There may be others who have not forgiven Bob Dylan for other transgressions of the 60s. As a Buddhist, of course, I would wish Dylan (and everyone really) to make the best possible karmic choices. And maybe it's the chip of ice in my writer's heart speaking here. Although I can't imagine what it would be like to be gifted with a talent such as Dylan's, I've always thought that his first loyalty was to his creative genius, and I would have regretted it if he'd been nicer and written less. Bob Dylan has a <a href= "http://bobdylan.com/index.html">web site</a>, who knew? http://bobdylan.com/index.html <noembed> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Fort+Apache" rel="tag">Fort Apache</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Tom+Walker" rel="tag">Tom Walker</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Bob+Dylan" rel="tag">Bob Dylan</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Joan+Baez" rel="tag">Joan Baez</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Martin+Scorsese" rel="tag">Martin Scorsese</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Pennebaker" rel="tag">Pennebaker</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/ Terry+Pratchett" rel="tag"> Terry Pratchett</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Frederik+Pohl" rel="tag">Frederik Pohl</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Kornbluth" rel="tag">Kornbluth</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Lynne+Murray" rel="tag">Lynne Murray</a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/orangenotebookoflynnemurray" rel="tag">orangenotebookoflynnemurray</a>