Submissions Wanted

by the view from here magazine on October 10, 2008

Latest issue of The View From Here available for full preview and purchase here:

http://magcloud.com/browse/Issue/3925

Includes interview with Paul Torday of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

AND ...

We are currently looking for short articles on writing or the publishing world for inclusion in the on-line and printed version of the magazine.

Send articles to The Editor at: viewfromhere@primemail.com

We are not accepting submissions of works of fiction or poetry.

Articles should be no more than 600 words long.
We may edit articles,they must be exclusive to the magazine and be your own original work.

Guidelines as to the type of article that is likely to be published:

Experiences and stories from within:

Publishing Companies
Literary Agents

& Experiences & pearls of wisdom from fiction writers/poets in:

Writing their novels/poems
Dealing with Agents & Publishers
Dealing with either rejection or success

We also consider books for review(published authors only.) Contact us for the address to send books to.

Note: We currently do not pay for articles but if you have a website or blog we will include a link to you. The copyright on any article published becomes the sole property of The View From Here.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 57 times .

Learning to Write Art Criticism

by dylan_k on September 30, 2008

I’ve been curious about what its like to be an art critic. I decided to try being an art critic first hand. I put together a sample of my writing and submitted it so that I could be considered for the 23rd Annual Critics’ Residency Program at the Maryland Art Place.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 155 times .

Allen Lane and the Paperback Revolution

by Clovis on September 24, 2008

Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin books, was personally responsible for publishing both James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the UK, despite the real threat of legal action for obscenity in both cases. He also introduced the Penguin paperback series, revolutionising the publishing industry.

The following is an excerpt from an article, written by Lane’s grandson Horatio Morpurgo, that examines the contradictions and complexities in Lane’s professional life.

“Even those closest to Allen Lane could never work out how many parts missionary he was to how many parts mercenary. He left Bristol Grammar at sixteen, a thoroughly unpromising pupil, and never read a great deal. He was not specially interested in or clever with money, though he understood its value. Yet he made his name as the greatest public educator of his day, and made a vast fortune at the same time. He was in some ways an unlikely champion of English letters, but the plaque in Vigo Street says his paperbacks changed the reading habits of the English-speaking world, and there is a strong case to be made for that.
[...]
After just five years with the Bodley Head Allen was made a director, the year before John Lane’s death in 1925. He inherited a majority share in the company when John’s widow died a year later. He went on to make some very expensive mistakes for what was by then an ailing firm. He got it into very serious trouble backing a libellous book of ‘diplomatic memoirs’ which turned out, after publication, to have been written by an unemployed actor. He initiated a disastrous series of children’s books which only made further losses.

The clairvoyant touch was still there. Copies of Joyce’s Ulysses, imported from Paris, had been burned by customs officials in Folkestone in the early 1920s. Allen had met Joyce in 1929 and had been in New York when Random House decided to press ahead with publishing the controversial book. When T.S. Eliot, at Faber, declined to become the novel’s first British publisher, Allen made an offer on it. The other directors made him personally liable for any legal costs incurred. There were none. It was the first of his triumphs against the odds and not the last.

[...]

For those who argued, as some did, that Allen Lane’s decision to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a publicity stunt, there was evidently a side to his personality they were unfamiliar with. Of course he was a publisher through and through - in 1946 the Shaw Million, 100,000 copies of ten of Shaw’s plays, all published on the author’s 90th birthday, had been an exhilarating and hugely successful project. He now wanted to emulate it with a Lawrence Million and you could not do Lawrence without doing Lady Chatterley. He also joked with his family that he only did it to wake up his editorial staff. But his defence of Lawrence went deeper than that. Some might argue that Allen shared Lawrence’s uneasy relationship with English class structures, but Allen was no ‘working-class boy made good’. It was more complicated than that, as I’ve tried to indicate. I suspect it had something to do, however absurd it may seem, with the summer holidays of his boyhood and with a connection to rural Devon which had over the years proved fortunate in every sense. I think that for him it had nothing to do with any real wish to hurry in the age of Rock and the Pill and LSD, which he was simply too old to understand. In a way his personal intentions of course don’t matter. It is possible for such events to take on their own meaning, different from anything intended at the time. The launch of Penguin in 1935 is a case in point. And yet the meaning of an event can surely never cut completely free from the motives of those actually involved.

“

The full article is online (free) at
Lady Chatterley’s Defendant - Allen Lane and the paperback revolution

This post has been viewed (on this page) 216 times .

Looking For Beauty In A Flat Place

by kharrinwrites on September 22, 2008

I’m a travel enthusiast and can honestly tell you, my passport gets a regular workout. Ever since I took my first trip to Europe when I was 26, my worldview expanded.  My notion that Texas was the center of the world dissolved. Suddenly, I wanted to know more about the whole planet. Since then, I’ve been to Taipei, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Italy, France, Germany, Scotland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Amsterdam. I am so passionate about how travel enriches a person, I believe travel outside the U.S. should be required to earn a college degree. Think of what that would mean?

But I live in a Dallas, TX suburb called Plano - the Spanish word for ‘flat.’ That might tell you something about our fair town. It is landlocked and devoid of any natural beauty or rich history. Our claim to fame in recent years has been the city of dozens of major corporations and a millionaire who paid her way to go into space. This really is a work-a-day town that is a good place to live because of the salaries, schools and low crime rate. In fact, in 2006, our town was ranked as the 11th best place to live in America. So, okay, those are great qualities, but snoooooze…where is the history, the personality, the natural beauty that I love so much about the places I travel to?

There’s not a lot to do except shop and eat and socialize – not altogether bad things to do. I enjoy all three. Still, as a writer, I wish I lived in a place with more character. More history. More beauty. I wished I could walk down my street and imagine the ghosts of Confederate soldiers or see magestic mountains in the distance. But I think this lack of natural muse is what I have come to appreciate about Plano. The fact that it lacks these things in an OBVIOUS way, forces one to search for them. Now that I have children, I am always on the search for some new park, some outside adventure…and I have found a few great spots like the Arbor Hills Nature Preserve – a 200-acre park with trails, creeks and huge swaths of natural beauty filled with wildlife. Once inside the preserve, it’s hard to even imagine you are still in North Texas. 

And now that I think about it, possibly the best feature of a town that’s known as a good place to live is this – a lot of people want to live here. And those people are from around the world! I know Russians, Israelis, Indians, Chinese, Germans and Greeks…and of course, people from all over the U.S. And my children are going to school with children from all over, too. I’ve been invited to Shabbat dinners, Greek festivals and Chinese New Year celebrations – all experiences (and flavors) that bring perspectives from around the world to my doorstep and remind me that it’s the people who make you love where you live.

“Geography is destiny” – Napoleon Bonaparte

This post has been viewed (on this page) 213 times .

Paint it Red

by Clovis on September 22, 2008

“‘Modern art is actually a means of espionage. … If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam.’” This is not the paranoid ravings of some modern-day war on terror nut. It is quoted in Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, (p.253) by Frances Stonor Saunders, dates from the early post war period and was apparently uttered in the US congress. Saunders shows how Abstract Expressionist painters were regarded with great suspicion by the likes of congressman George Dondero.

Saunders’s tale continues: “‘We had a lot of trouble with Congressman Dondero,’ Braden later recalled. ‘He couldn’t stand modern art. He thought it was a travesty, he thought it was sinful, he thought it was ugly. He put up a heck of a fight about painting, which made it very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad, whatever.”

“We” here means the CIA. Braden continues “‘That’s one of the reasons why it had to be done covertly; it had to be covert because it would have been turned down if it had been put to a vote in a democracy. In order to encourage openness, we had to be secret.’”

Saunders comments “Here again was that sublime paradox of American strategy in the cultural Cold War: in order to promote acceptance of art produced in (and vaunted as the expression of) democracy, the democratic process itself had to be cirumvented.” (257). Saunders’s book is full of revelations. An undercover CIA…
Continue reading at ItABITb

This post has been viewed (on this page) 197 times .

Eragon: The Hero’s Journey

by Bluestocking on September 19, 2008

In case, you haven’t been in Barnes & Noble for the last 7 months and you haven’t been reading this blog long, Brisingr which is the third book in the Inheritance Series comes out on Friday.  It will be a midnight release like Breaking Dawn.  This series follows the Hero’s Journey, so like Harry Potter and Farworld: Water Keep, I will be doing an essay on Eragon’s Hero’s Journey. 

1.  The Call to Adventure
The adventure begins with the hero receiving a call to action, such as a threat to the peace of the community, or the hero simply falls into or blunders into it. The call is often announced to the hero by another character who acts as a “herald”. The herald, often represented as dark or terrifying and judged evil by the world, may call the character to adventure simply by the crisis of his appearance.

The “Herald” in this story is Galbatorix, who is a former Dragon Rider who destroyed the rest of his order and stole the last 3 dragon eggs.  He has been slowly oppressing the people of Alagaesia.  Eragon is inadvertently drawn into the adventure by Arya.  Arya was being pursued by the Shade, Durza, and his Urgal guard and attempted to use magic to teleport the dragon’s egg she was carrying to Brom.  Due to her haste, Arya managed to send the egg to the Spine where Eragon was hunting.  Eragon takes the egg with him in order to trade it for food in his town in Carvahall. 

2. The Refusal of the Call
In some stories, the hero initially refuses the call to adventure. When this happens, the hero may suffer somehow, and may eventually choose to answer, or may continue to decline the call.
In this story, Eragon himself does not refuse the call.  Saphira refuses the call for Eragon by taking him deep in the Spine when they found out the Ra’zac’s had tracked the egg back to his Uncle Garrow’s farm.  Garrow ends up being killed much like Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle.  As Eragon’s cousin Roran had already left the farm, Eragon had nothing binding him and set out to take him revenge on the Ra’zac. 

3. Supernatural Aid
After the hero has accepted the call, he encounters a protective figure (often elderly) who provides special tools and advice for the adventure ahead, such as an amulet or a weapon.

The Supernatural Aid comes in the form of Brom.  Brom had been known as the town storyteller.  He was the only person who knew the complete history of the Dragon Riders and their downfall.  It is revealed in the middle of the book that Brom’s extensive knowledge came from the fact that he himself had been a Rider.  In fact he had been responsible for killing Galbatorix’ right hand man, Morzan.  As a result, Brom was uniquely capable of teaching Eragon the skills he would need as a Rider- sword play, magic, reading. 

4. The Crossing of the First Threshold

The hero must cross the threshold between the world he is familiar with and that which he is not. Often this involves facing a “threshold guardian”, an entity that works to keep all within the protective confines of the world but must be encountered in order to enter the new zone of experience.
The threshold guardian could be represented by the wall that surrounds the Varden.  Up until this point, Eragon was used to living in the wilds- quite simply.  Survival was a matter of not being caught by the Urgals or Ra’zac.  Surving with the Varden was not a matter of someone trying to kill you.  It was the more subtle survival of politics.  As the only Rider, every race in Alagaesia felt they had some claim on him.  For the first time Eragon had to beware of whom he was befriending and what he said to whom.  The threshold guardian is also Egraz Carn, who is the dwarf who telepathically examines anyone who enters the Varden stronghold. 
5. Rebirth

The hero, rather than passing a threshold, passes into the new zone by means of rebirth. Appearing to have died by being swallowed or having their flesh scattered, the hero is transformed and becomes ready for the adventure ahead.

This rebirth takes place during the Blood Oath Celebration in Eldest.  The dragon magic essentially gives Eragon a new body with new strength.  As he is the only true Rider left in Alagaesia, he needs every advantage that he can get. 

6. The Road of Trials

Once past the threshold, the hero encounters a dream landscape of ambiguous and fluid forms. The hero is challenged to survive a succession of obstacles and, in so doing, amplifies his consciousness. The hero is helped covertly by the supernatural helper or may discover a benign power supporting him in his passage.

Eragon’s road of trials begins with him fleeing his home.  Both he and Brom flee for their lives.  Along the way, Eragon inadvertently uses magic which nearly kills him.  As a result, Brom teaches him enough to survive.  He is helped directly by Brom who is his supernatural helper in the first book.  Eventually Arya and Oromis become his supernatural help.  His benign power could be seen as Murtagh and indeed Orik. 

7. Marriage

The ultimate trial is often represented as a marriage between the hero and a queenlike, or mother-like figure. This represents the hero’s mastery of life (represented by the feminine) as well as the totality of what can be known. When the hero is female, this becomes a male figure.

There aren’t any real motherly figures in this book.  Thus far the queen like figure could be Arya, Nasuada, Angela, or Islanzadi. 

Thus far, this is as far as I think Eragon has gotten in his journey.  After I read Brisingr I will update this essay. 

P.S. I’m planning to attend the midnight release.  I will be uploading pictures to my blog that night.  So check back on Friday night.  On Friday, I will be posting party information from Barnes & Noble.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 174 times .

David Foster Wallace: Depression, Suicide

by Jacob Russell on September 17, 2008

But for misery and suffering, I might, indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom could prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a few words, to any that I received, was the utmost that I could accomplish; and often that not until the letter had laid weeks, or even months, on my writing-table. Without the aid of M., all records of bills paid, or to be paid, must have perished; and my whole domestic economy, whatever became of Political Economy, must have gone into irretrievable confusion. I shall not afterwards allude to this part of the case; it is one, however, which the opium-eater will find, in the end, as oppressive and tormenting as any other, from the sense of incapacity and feebleness, from the direct embarrassments incident to the neglect or procrastination of each day’s appropriate duties, and from the remorse which must often exasperate the stings of these evils to a reflective and conscientious mind. The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations; he wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt. He lies under the weight of incubus and night-mare; he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love:—he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise.

From Thomas de Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He isn’t writing about depression in this passage. He’s writing about opium. The pain of addiction. It is, nevertheless, a remarkably accurate representation of the deepest stages of depression. I suspect the neurochemically induced states of opium addiction likely share many properties with the neurochemically induced states of “natural” depression. I note this in passing. It’s important to my concern but not its focus, not the motivation for writing this post. My motivation is the suicide of David Foster Wallace--or more accurately, some comments I’ve heard, and a few that I’ve read; comments that evince a profound lack of understanding of depression--of the experience of profound depression. This surprised me. With all that’s been written on the subject, this surprised and disturbed me.

Riding on the bus and the el to class I turned this over in my mind. What can I say that hasn’t been said before? I’m not sure I’ve come up with anything new (unlikely), but perhaps one or two neglected points--not clinical information, but regarding the experienced reality?

The normal everyday “healthy” mind goes through his or her routines with an unquestioned and seldom shaken belief in “free will,” or whatever name you want to use for this… this… whatever it is we mean by those words. Important words! An important--essential belief, however distorted the mythologies we wrap it in. I’m not a “determinist.” I too believe in freedom, but I don’t think of this as something possessed by, or a capacity of individuals. Rather, it is something that happens between us.

Something given. Given and received--or rejected. I like how Hannah Arendt represents this idea. That action--speech action--before another, action that is not “acting,” the purpose of which is not to control or manipulate, but to relate to--to present to the other one’s own reality--that such action releases, initiates, a chain of unforeseen and unpredictable consequences.

Therein is our freedom. And nowhere else.

The Roves of the world want to control every outcome, but in the end, make themselves slaves of the chain of cause and effect… or more accurately, the slaves of their pre-conceived notions of cause and effect, more and more profoundly divorced from reality, more and more profoundly enslaved to each bound action, each designed in turn to gain their desired ends against the threatening possibilities of genuine freedom.

Received notions of “free will” are not about reality. They are about preserving “necessary illusions.”

Law…

the very idea of law depends on this illusion. That we are free, and hence, responsible--in some simplistic way for all our actions. Nowhere is the illusionary nature of this assumption more apparent than in the formulations that tie responsibility with “knowledge of right and wrong.” As though “knowing” were in itself the necessary and sufficient condition for free action.

How many have we collectively, in the name of the law, disgraced, imprisoned, murdered in the name of this delusional claim?

Which brings me back to my subject: depression. The distinction has recently eroded between “pure” depression and it’s cyclical relatives. That seems wise. Even monopolar depressives are not always depressed--so there is always a degree of cycling, of transition from state to state. The need to categorize tempts us to make distinctions where they are not justified, or to ignore the spectral relationships--as early definitions of species ignored the genetic boundary lines.

Manic-depression (a term I much prefer… as does Kay Redfield Jamison--co-author of the definitive clinical text on this disorder), is likely the oldest described “mental” disorder. Understandable, as those who endure it pass though stages that must baffle those near to them… from “normal” intelligent… and not uncommonly gifted individuals… to manically delusional to profoundly melancholic… and suicidal.

A parenthetical note here: mania is commonly thought of as a kind of super euphoria. It may begin that way, but never ever lasts more than a few hours in this state… after which, it is really a kind of supper depression… on fast forward. Make that… super fast forward. Equipped at its worst--as are the depressive phases--with hallucinations and delusional episodes that parallel (why manic-depression is so often misdiagnosed) schizophrenia or other more intractable brain misfunctions.

Now I come to the point. What I wanted to write about. Two elements of the experience of depression. Or perhaps, two that are one. The first has to do with our assumptions about “freedom.” The second, with assumptions about the governing power of “reason.”

When we entertain taking action--from the trivial to the profound, we imagine the possibility before we set out.

Imagine this: you are profoundly depressed. You have to get up and go to work. You have to buy food so you can eat. You look out the window. Across the parking lot is a supermarket. This is what you see. You understand that it would take a few minutes to cross that lot and make your purchases… but that isn’t how it feels. It feels like you are looking across the Atlantic Ocean. And to get to that store, you would have to swim. And you cannot, cannot, cannot imagine how it would be possible. If you can’t FEEL the possibility, how do you take action?

But you do. You go to work. To perform the daily routines… but it as though you had weights clamped to you ankles, to your wrists-- an enormous weight on your back. Every exertion drains you… and you cannot, absolutely cannot.... until.. there is no more energy left.. There is nothing left for relief from this futile effort… which you’ve kept up for the sake of those you love… nothing.... but death

Second part.

You are standing on the platform of the el at rush hour. The train is speeding into the station.

You think: I could step forward now. Or I could wait.

If I stepped forward now, the speeding train would smash me to blood and splattered organs. I would become a nightmare to all who saw this…

Or… I could wait.

The train would stop. The doors would open. I would step in.

I understand the difference… but emotionally. Makes no difference.

Spock is not the answer. We need emotional intelligence. If we can’t FEEL the difference, we’re in big trouble.

Someone deeply depressed, or manic, may KNOW and UNDERSTAND way better than any goddamned normy in shouting distance… but their affective understanding has become ripped loose from their reasoned understanding....

... so it’s a toss of the coin.

...do I step forward now...and get smashed by the oncoming train?

... or do I wait 30 seconds… and walk through the open doors?

I walked though the open doors.

By the toss of a coin.

... I didn’t have time to pick up the penny…

This post has been viewed (on this page) 226 times .

VOTE FOR “THE STAIRCASE”!!!

by Ayesha_91 on September 17, 2008

Time to create history. With your help.

‘The Staircase’ is one of 25 finalists at Filminute, one of the largest film festivals in the world.
Chosen from over 1500 entries from over 16 countries.

There will be two winners, one selected by a highly acclaimed international jury headed by Paul Haggis - Academy Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker (Crash, Million Dollar Baby).

The second will be selected by you.

Watch “The Staircase” on the link below. Cast your vote. Send this message on to all your friends and family, and you will have helped us grow a little taller.

With thanks from the team at Crossfire Films.

The Staircase at Filminute.
http://www.filminute.com/2008/screeningroom/index.php?id=22

The Filminute 2008 Jury:

Paul Haggis - Academy Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker (Crash, Million Dollar Baby)
David Kennedy - co-founder of the Wieden + Kennedy advertising agency
Dr. Andrea Dittgen - editor of the German daily, Die Rheinpfalz, and board member of FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics)
Francisco Goldman - award-winning novelist and journalist, (The Long Night of the White Chickens, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?)
Taketo Oguchi - editor-in-chief and publisher of Japan’s SHIFT magazine
Filminute principals John Ketchum and Sabaa Quao

‘The Staircase’ was a simple little idea that caught fire.
An old lady labors down a staircase on her way to the market – only to suddenly remember something that makes her work her way up again.
A little film with an idea that has resonated through the hearts of all those who have seen it – regardless of nationality or background.
‘The Staircase’ won Gold at the Indian Documentary Producers Awards earlier this year.

Directed by George Mangalath Thomas

Cinematography by Sameer Mahajan

Edited by Vijay Singh Tomar

Line Production by Ashwini Chaudhary

A Crossfire Films Production

This post has been viewed (on this page) 163 times .

Call for submissions: The Cleave (Cleave Poetry Webzine)

by ptdiep on September 09, 2008

In a post-millenial age what do poets have to offer a fragmented and searching Society?

Is the pendulum swinging from analysis and fragmentation to synthesis and fusion?

After analysis comes synthesis - and the creation of The Cleave poetic form.

There are signs that our age will become an age of co-operation, fusion and synergy.

Join us at the beginning of this exciting and radical poetic form that has the potential to embody these core values.
Submit your Cleave poems, no matter how faltering your steps are initially.

We can all learn together along the way.

Submission Guidelines:

1. Please explore, experiment and extend this form in your own personal way.
2. Articles and thoughts on Cleave poetry welcomed.
3. Submissions by email only.
4. Send your submissions to cleavepoetry (at)gmail(dot)com and include the words CLEAVE SUBMISSION in the subject line.
5. Please supply a short biographical note and web URL if you so desire.
6. Your submissions should be in the body of the mail, preferably with hyphens separating the 2 parts of the cleave poem, further formatting will be done.
7. You retain full copyright of your work - by submitting you grant us a non-exclusive right to reproduce your work.
8. Contributions in English please.
9. We do not pay for submissions.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 210 times .

FieldReport

by Dewey on August 28, 2008

Hello, litfans!

If you’re interested in an online community where you can write as well as review other people’s writing, check out FieldReport, a site that gives cash prizes to what the community determines are its best writers.

What I like best, aside from the obvious possibility of winning thousands of dollars for writing a brief, personal anecdote, is that the site requires you to participate as both a writer and a reviewer. You can’t post your own writing there until you’ve reviewed at least a few other pieces. Details about how it works can be found at the Quick Start Guide.

I love this video: a postal worker won $20,000 while the site was still in beta.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 255 times .

Write for BookCrazy - A Blog Writing Competition

by BookCrazy on August 28, 2008

I am hosting a unique blog writing competition where a not-so-ambitious prize will be awarded to the best entry. The post has to be about one of the 20 books. For further details visit the author’s site

This post has been viewed (on this page) 297 times .

Not So Curious in a Long Time

by BookCrazy on August 27, 2008

I know I came to this late (The Curious Incident of the Dof in the Night Time by Mark Haddon), but I had my reasons. I have generally been weary of books that become too famous too soon, even with the people who have never read a book. This was one of those books. It was everywhere - streets, newspapers, magazines, and small talk between friends. Therefore, I dismissed without ever bothering to even find out what the book was all about…

Read the entire post at the author’s site”>

Lottie’s Wheel

by Jacob Russell on August 25, 2008

In 1988 I drove from Philadelphia to Spring Lake, Michigan for the last time. The year before, it had been my mother. Breast cancer. This time it was my father, who died a year and week to the day after my mother. I had noticed on the return trips, not far from where I would turn onto the Ohio Turnpike, off the to side of the highway in the front yard of a farmhouse, parts of disassembled carnival rides. On one of those long drives back I got to thinking about this--why were there carnival rides in a farm yard? How did they get there? By the time I got home, I had a story I was able write out almost in a single session.

It no longer represents what I want to do with my fiction--in some ways, it’s what I’m trying to avoid, to escape from, nevertheless, I like this story--for personal reasons, if nothing else: perhaps because of the circumstances, because there are qualities in Nelson drawn from my father, and because I have letters like those sent from Germany written by my father’s closest friend. While I no longer want to publish it, neither do I want to hide it away or destroy it. So I thought I would post it hear where, without pretending to be more than it is, it may find a few readers.

Read Lottie’s Wheel HERE

This post has been viewed (on this page) 201 times .

Killing With Indifference

by BookCrazy on August 21, 2008

”I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Elie Wiesel in Night

When I read these lines in Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, I got goose bumps. I read it a number of times again and again and somewhere deep inside vowed to find out about all injustice happening around, and speak out at least against the ones of the higher magnitude. Then, with a great feeling of satisfaction, I closed the book and felt good about having read such a good book.

It has been a couple of months, and like many other, that resolve remains postponed to the uncertain future. Like many other profound ideas that never get converted to action. Then, today, while browsing from link to link, from one blog to another, I received another jolt…

Read the entire post at the author’s site

This post has been viewed (on this page) 190 times .

Book Review: The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker

by Bluestocking on August 17, 2008

This story is for Amy Jane and the Lindorm. 

Bram Stoker has a thing for these supernatural thrillers.  This one was a little bit difficult to get through.  Mostly it was because the plot just moved soooo slow. 

The story begins with Adam Salton leaving his home in Australia to visit a grand uncle Richard ( the last of the Saltons) whom he had previously never met.  The nearby seat is Castra Regis which is owned by the Caswall family.  The Caswell family has an interesting history.  The family has not lived in the family abode for centuries.  As told by Sir Nathaniel de Salis (a friend of Richard Salton) over time, the Caswell family seems to have acquired some unusual mental abilities.  When Adam arrives, the region is quite excited because Edgar Caswell is returning to the family property. 

While on their way to Edgar’s welcome home party, the three men encounter Lady Arabella March who is the owner of Diana’s Grove.  She is always dress in rather form fitting white dresses wearing a stole about her neck covered in emeralds.  Her carriage wheel had broken during her trip.  Adam fixes it for her.  As he does so, he notices a lot of black snakes around the carriage.  As a result, he decides to purchase a mongoose. 

The plot becomes more curious.  Edgar Caswell clearly has some problems.  It appears that he is perpetrating some sort of mental attack upon Lilla Watford who is the cousin to the woman for whom Adam has feelings.  Edgar also creates a giant hawk shaped kite to keep the unusual migration of birds from destroying the crops.  In addition he has a servant named Oolanga who is clearly malevolent.  During this time, the mongoose that Adam purchases, tries to attack Lady Arabella, so she is forced to shoot it.  This is one of many strange occurrences around Diana’s Grove.  De Salis who is like Van Helsig in Dracula, tells Adam the myth of the White Worm, which he believes is in someway connected with Diana’s Grove.  It seems back in the primodial days of earth, larger than average creatures, including snakes lived.  As Man had not expanded throughout the earth, the giant serpent had lived for millenia.  Over time, the creature would have evolved intelligence plus in some myths these ancient creatures have the ability to change form. 

Both Adam and de Salis believe that Lady Arabella is the White Worm.  Of course they set out to stop her.  This is complicated by the fact that Lady Arabella seems determined to make Edgar Caswell her spouse.  She is constantly using her snake like ability to follow him, which s notice by Oolanga.  She also helps him with his psychic attack upon Lilla.  The only problem is that Mimi, Lilla’s cousin, possesses some inner strength that makes it impossible for Edgar to carry out his plan.  As a result, Lady Arabella decides Mimi must die.  Meanwhile, Oolange has decided to blackmail Lady Arabella into marrying him.  He is the first victim that gets eaten by the Worm.  Adam was present for this and witnessed Arabella dragging Oolanga down into the hole. 

Lady Arabella tried to play it off as though it was just the furry of motion that gave Adam the impression that she fell in the whole with Oolanga.  Of course, Adam knows what he saw and knows he cannot prove was she did.  Anyway, in order to save Mimi, Adam marries her and has decided to take her with him back to Australia.  Arabella gets wind of this and invites Adam, Mimi, and de Salis over for a disasterous tea.  Lady Arabella contrives to get Mimi to fall into the well; but Adam and de Salis whisk her away.  Arabella changes form and actually chases them to out at sea before turning back.  Her monster form is enormous. 

Anyway, the hunter becomes hunted.  Arabella tries to lure Adam back by offering to sell him Diana’s Grove.  Of course Adam purchases it determined to destroy the Lair, which he does by pouring sand and dynamite into the hole.  Meanwhile, Edgar psychically attacks Lilla again aided and abetted by Arabella.  Lilla began to succumb until Mimi comes for a visit.  Lilla is able to send Edgar packing, but the effort kills her.  Mimi visits Edgar and pretty much promises she will be sending him into the afterlife at some point in the near future.  As it turns out, Edgar possesses the Mesmer chest, and is trying to master the art of mesmerizing which is the forerunner to hypnosis.  What Mimi does not realize is that Lady Arabella followed her to Castra Regis.  She ran some metal wire that Edgar kept for his kite all the way back to Diana’s Grove and threw it into the well (apparently Lady Arabella likes the way sounding the well sounds).  Anyway, these created a dangerous situation because there was a huge thunderstorm approaching.  De Salis’ fear is that lightening will strike Edgar’s kit travel down and destroy the house and park of the surrounding village.  This doesn’t happen because Arabella runs the wire to the hole filled with dynamite.  To say that there is a band would be putting it mildly indeed.  Diana’s Grove is destroyed in entirety.  The well regurgitates the White Worm in pieces.  It was truly gruesome to read!!!!!!

The book was a little bit difficult to get through.  You really had to wait till the end for all the good stuff to happen.  Fortunately, the book was fairly short rather than being Dicken’s length.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 228 times .

Murakami’s Magical Madness

by BookCrazy on August 11, 2008

It happens rarely, but when it does, all the effort that reading takes is justified ten times over. Less than 20 pages down while reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I knew I was in company of a mastermind - in all senses of the word.

Read the entire post at the author’s site.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 287 times .

Hurry Down Sunshine, Michael Greenberg

by Nicole on August 10, 2008

Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg
Memoir, 235 pages
Publisher: Other Press LLC
Publication Date: September 2008
Topics: Sally Greenberg, Manic Depressive Illness in Adolescents, Parents of Mentally Ill Children

Why I’m Reading
I got lucky and got this as an advanced reading copy over at LT Early Reviewers.  That this particular book would come to me was fascinating because recently I have been giving a lot of thought to some close friends and their experiences with mental illness.  Getting this book in the mail at this particular time definitely made me sit up and pay attention.  Earlier this year I read An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, and while I appreciated her experience, her focus was mainly on broadly outlining the major episodes of her life, and using medication and monitoring to try to anticipate and manage bipolar disorder.  Her book left me with only a vague idea of her actual experiences during her psychotic episodes.  I was very interested to read an additional perspective.

The Skinny
Against the backdrop of alarming newspaper articles and reports, which he sees everywhere (Joel Steinberg’s arrest in the beating death of his daughter, Margaux Hemingway’s suicide, a pipe bomb at the Summer Olympics, and the doomed presidential candidacy of Bob Dole), Michael Greenberg relates the events of the summer that his 15 year old daughter, Sally, experiences a full psychotic episode due to an early manifestation of bipolar disorder, which usually occurs in early adulthood.  Over a period of roughly two and a half months he relates the details of Sally’s first “crackup”, stay on a psychiatric ward and subsequent reintroduction to society- just in time to begin 10th grade. Along the way we are introduced to several family members (including Greenberg’s mother- with whom his relationship is strained, his intensely artistic wife, his older brother Steve for whom he is responsible and is also mentally ill, and Sally’s mother, a Native New Yorker who has fled the city to enjoy the calmer environs of Vermont with her second husband), who must work through their differences in order to support Sally through her crisis.

My Thoughts
In crisp and engaging prose, Michael Greenberg presents an unflinching account of way he and his family struggled to cope with the sudden onset of mental illness and how it affects his family.  He “goes there”, as my mother is fond of saying, and asks tough questions of himself about his culpability in not recognizing the depths of the trouble brewing in his daughter.  He is unafraid to portray himself in a truthful if sometimes unflattering light as he struggles to deal with financial and marital problems, along with the mental health conditions of his daughter and of his middle-aged brother Steve.  Strong characterizations of his family, especially his mother, daughter, wife and brother had me riveted and turning the pages until I finished.

Passages That Got My Attention:
Describing his mother ~ “Her bright careful veneer calms us.  Everyday she arrives in a fresh outfit, stretching her wardrobe to the limit, not a hair out of place or a hint of summer wilt about her.  She enters the ward as if she’s stepping onto a stage, but it seems less a display of vanity than a tribute to order, to effort, to the way we must will things to be in the times of disaster.”

Describing his second wife, who is a vegetarian, and at this point not yet his second wife ~ “One night, I caught her sliding her fingers through the drippings of a leg of lamb I had prepared.  Bending forward so as not to stain her clothes, she sucked the crumbs of meat from her hand, blushing when she saw me, then withdrawing any hint of embarrassment as she grabbed her chopsticks and returned to her rooms in the back of the apartment, her chin shiny with pan grease.”

If You’re Anything Like Me:
You’ll be fascinated by this moving and honest account of how people deal with the sudden crisis and illness in their lives. I also really enjoyed the way he explained the details of the illness and drug treatments in a way which was accessible and easy to understand.  Bonus points for incorporating the stories of poet Robert Lowell and author, James Joyce.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 193 times .

Found Things

by Jacob Russell on August 05, 2008

About Found Things: from The Psychoanalytic Field.
other-than-me-more-than-me-more-than-mine

Links to posts on other blogs and websites, these too, are found things. They do not come from me, they are other and more than what I’ve experienced or thought, and they are not mine. Precisely why I… and I would venture to say, why we post them.

There are degrees of “foundness.” A link that reinforces an opinion or idea I already entertain is only weakly “other;” dependent on style, freshness of expression, a change in perspective, a view from a different camera angle. Tainted by the role I’ve assigned it: “look at this, this is what I believe, this is my idea of things as well.”

I have a folder of “Found Things.” Scraps of paper with children’s drawings, enigmatic lists: a letter from a young man in prison to a younger friend, advice in urban black vernacular: this note written on an index card.

Lisa,
Clean the toilet and anything else you did not clean in the bath room you have my work number and I don’t understand why you could not call me at work to find out where the toilet brush is. Even still I don’t understand why you did not clean the outside of the toilet. You live here just like I do and since I don’t have a problem with cleaning up and doing other things pertaining to the apt. I should hope you would not either. You were home all day and I don’t understand why the bathroom is not completely clean.
Linda

Here is a fragment of two lives, charged with feeling: anger, disappointment, household resentment… and nothing to do with me. Entirely outside of my life. There is a kind… mystery would be the wrong word--too strong, the wrong associations… wonder… it sets my mind to wonder, launches me on courses that are never fixed, like a Kafka parable.

The Psychoanalytic Field is one of my favorite blogs. I looks forward to new posts--which I experience like “found things.” They don’t make me “think,” If I were a serious student of psychoanalytic theory, perhaps. Then I would be obligated to “think” about Abou-Rihan’s explication of Winnicott. More a kind of play. Following the synoptic circuits, the associations set loose by their reading… the kind of play that opens into my writing. And isn’t that what we hope for in imaginative writing… to pull out of ourselves something no longer me, more than me, no longer mine?

There it is. The pleasure of “getting it right.” When the work is complete, it no longer matters. As an object to market, as something we would like to use to gain the good opinion of others--all of that, yes--but not for what it is, what is was as we worked on it.

Not me. More than me. Not mine…

This post has been viewed (on this page) 213 times .

Are Book-Blogger’s Killing Journal Reviewers?

by BookCrazy on August 05, 2008

Lisa Warren’s piece in Huffington Post has drawn the book-blogosphere into a debate as to whether they are replacing the book-reviewers from journals and magazines. The crux of her piece satirically titled “Will Blogs Save Books?” is that unprofessional, shabby, opinionated book-blogs are killing the book editors jobs as various newspapers are downsizing their book-review sections and laying them off. The piece also implies that this is a blow to literature and the literary culture.

Read the rest of the entry at the author’s site.”>Read the rest of the entry at the author’s site.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 200 times .

Under the Net of Iris Murdoch

by BookCrazy on August 05, 2008

Iris Murdoch’s existential inclinations are well-known. It is my belief that the novel is a marvellous achievement in that respect. It is in the character of youth to be dazzled by the ever prominent struggle between action and ideas in life. Whereas all within feels profound, everything tangible is uninspiring. This gap that has prevented so many potentiatialities from being realized is so vague that to be able to describe it in a story as simlple as this one speaks volumes about not only the literary skills of the author but her clarity of thought.

Read the entire post at the author’s site.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 179 times .

Politics, Realist Fiction, Propaganda

by Jacob Russell on August 01, 2008

Someone left a comment to an earlier post that, in effect, to suggest there might be a political dimension to this controversy between so-called “realist” fiction and whatever its alternatives might be… is comical.

Ha ha ha. He’d got my pupa!

... (sorry, almost finished with Ferdydurke… but this is something that deserves to be injected into universal common usage--American political campaigns are RUN by the impulse to grab the opponent by the pupa. Karl Rove is a Pimko master of the pupa!) A product of silly immature, or at the least, impossibly overcomplicated ideologically loaded way of reading.

Let me simplify. What is propaganda, but storytelling that obfuscates its methods? That pretends to offer an unmediated subject--that dances and prances and mims and mimes to concentrate the attention of the audience on the subject at hand--by slight of hand, dis-inviting awareness of the means?

A perfect distortion of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Every effort to produce work that perfects those means plays into the hands of the propagandists.

Of whatever persuasion.

The antidote?

Make the artifice part of the art.

Reveal the ropes and pulleys.

We are a generation at risk. And what we risk, may be all future generations.

Art and literature need not become explicitly political… but to ignore how politics uses the means we perfect, betrays at the deepest level, everything we make.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 191 times .

Playing for the Real

by Jacob Russell on July 28, 2008

Nigel Beale, asks in a COMMENT to my post “Narrative Game Theory” --am I ...."criticizing realism because it doesn’t get the “intra” part right?”

Nigel believes that:

a novel replicates ‘real’ human experience...by building up and describing a personality...by connecting the reader to the character...the more involved the reader becomes, the more profound and affecting the reading experience.

I have to ask: “seeing the world differently than what?”

I see very little “reality” in what is commonly designated as such. Rather, a felt need to reinforce received illusions, and the pleasure of not being thrown out of one’s comfort zone.

What do you really mean by “seeing” the world differently? Is that a general, and largely unvetted metaphor, or can you break it down? Does it include thinking?

The “realism” problem is important because our very socialization--the highly complex civil, political, legal and social structures, cannot function without a wide range of “necessary delusions,” like the legal understanding of the relationship between knowledge of right and wrong, and free agency (interestingly, one of the recurrent themes in The Man With No Qualities… the Moosebrugger thread): only one element of the modernist agenda Josipovici complains we have left unfinished.

I am not on the side of an aesthetic in opposition to representation. My complaint with conventional realism is that it isn’t, that it is too narrowly real, too dependent on unexamined conventions, to rigidly dependent on those tropes that reinforce received notions. I should not have to suspend the better part of my critical faculties to find pleasure in a work of fiction. That to me is where aesthetics comes in. There is no possibility of pretending the action on stage in The Tempest is “realistic,” or in Kafka’s fiction. The pleasure is found in enjoying them first on a freely imaginative plane, for their aesthetic daring, and at the same time, feeling the wonderful tension between that fantasy and how it challenges--demands of us, that we relocate our notions of “reality” within these dramatic and fictive worlds.

I think that’s a very good definition of play--of what happens when a child plays, of where play comes from. Play is at the furthest remove from “entertainment,” which only exhausts our capacity to question (or to play--the real thing) that we may return to selling ourselves without protest to what or whoever seeks to use and exploit us.

In play, we not a turn away from reality, but freely enter the fantasy to find the reality we have lost, or yet to discover. I relate the pleasure I find in reading--and my motive to write--not primarily from the joy of reading and being read to as a child (though certainly that), but hours spent digging channels in the outlet of Bass Lake on the beech in Michigan--building a tree fort in my back yard in Chicago--the kind of play that left my muscles sore, my body exhausted and my mind reeling with the pleasure of yet uncataloged discoveries. That’s what I want when I read, and without which, I know as soon as the words are on the page that my writing will be dead dead dead.

A final thought: work, not entertainment, is the true extension of play. Work versus labor, as Hannah Arendt understood it.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 552 times .

Figure and Ground: More Thinking Outloud

by Jacob Russell on July 25, 2008

Steven Beattie asked, in a post to my Thinking Outloud:

“I wonder, is there a way to reconcile the desire to view the reading of a novel as a purely aesthetic experience with the desire to engage in an act of interpretation? Should this even be an issue?”

Both of my posts are as much about writing as reading and interpretation--what I call the aesthetics of process. Writing is another form of reading--reading an unfixed text. Reading… drawing on the newspad, still in the dark.

Isn’t every interpretation an attempt to do just that? How could it not be? Because we have a split subject, aren’t we always talking about two things: the text or our own respose. We go wrong if we either forget that we are not involved and part of the subject, or overwhelm the text with a response that is not sufficiently engaged with it.

In the post quoted above I was thinking about painting--as though Emma and Mr. Knightley were figures on a ground in a painting and the question had to do distinguishing figure from ground.

to read the rest… go to Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog

This post has been viewed (on this page) 186 times .

Watch out for The Rippers!

by the view from here magazine on July 25, 2008

Age guidance on children’s books is in the news a lot at the moment after a suggestion in April by the Publishers Association to put a reading age on all children’s books.

Philip Pullman and JK Rowling have both campaigned against the age stamps appearing on their novels. More than 700 writers have now put their names to a statement made by Philip Pullman on the site No to Age Banding.

“We are all agreed that the proposal to put an age-guidance figure on books for children is ill-conceived, damaging to the interests of young readers.”

Flash back thirty years ago:

A boy chooses Gerald Durrell’s A Family & Other Animals in his local WH Smith and heads off to the till with his pocket money. A young girl serves him.

“I’m sorry you can’t buy this book.”

“?”

“It’s not an appropriate book for you.”

“?”

His Mum steps in and explains the book is for children about Durrell as a child in Corfu.

So a case for age guidance? Or would the cover give you a clue? Did the shop assistant have a clue?

Flash forward thirty years from today to 2038:

An article in Wikipedia:

24th July 2038.
BOOK RIPPERS
(From Classification to Book Rippers. A History.)

2009: Age Guidance labels applied to Children’s Books.

2020: The age guidance for children’s books spreads into the adult market. Books which have long escaped the rating systems given to films or the warning labels on music have to be rated U, PG, 12,15 or 18. Ratings have to be applied by law to the back cover of every book. Many authors complained at the time that they were increasingly put under pressure from their publishers to remove scenes of a sexual or violent nature that would increase the ratings and damage sales.

2025: Bookemas
To cut back their Carbon Footprint only a few issues of selected new books are produced. To help with the growing demand for paper instead of electronic books Cinema buildings, closed during the collapse of the film industry, are reopened where a copy of these new books are left on each seat. Books were available to read at set times. Ratings were amended to add a “R” to allow children at any age to read a book rated 15R and under in these new Bookemas, as long as an adult accompanied them.

2027: Warning labels have to be applied to the front of books with a government warning.

2030: An act backed by the Publishing Industry but fought by authors, was passed that stated that all books had to be rated 15 or below. Bookemas audiences grew as a result.

2038: The Rippers
Yesterday came the announcement of The Rippers by the Government Publishing Agency.

The Rippers will be a unit operating under government guidelines and funded by The Bookemas Association that will filter through every book held in public libraries.

Any book prior to the 2030 Act that has scenes that contravene the max ceiling of a 15 rating will be “modified.” That is, pages that contain the offending prose will be ripped from the book. Government officials say, “This way we ensure the survival of classics that otherwise would have to be reprinted or lost to the public.” A spokesman for the public libraries stated that this was a clear move to close them down to remove any competition to The Bookemas chains.

Come back now before your brain explodes!

Right, you okay? Well it’s a strange, bizarre and slightly silly future I paint. But who knows where things lead to when left to develop over years? There’s always a pressure between commerce and art. Let’s hope we tread a healthy balance as we move into the future. And what’s wrong with using book covers to signal to buyers what lies beneath? I mean My Family & Other Animals: Cute animal pictures? A clue there?

Article first appeared in http://viewfromheremagazine.com

This post has been viewed (on this page) 179 times .

Literary Magazine uses HP’s MagCloud

by the view from here magazine on July 20, 2008

Break out the champagne!

This post has been viewed (on this page) 232 times .

“Literature”… is Saying What You Mean by Not Saying What You Mean

by Jacob Russell on July 18, 2008

I’ve been reading The Europeans. After Musil, quite a wonderful contrast. Not for better or worse, but for how language works. This is early-middle James. More early than middle. 1878. Same years as Daisy Miller--which points in a whole different direction. Or maybe not so different. James just hasn’t made the integration yet between what he could do in Daisy Miller, and what he will be able to do on a much higher level when he’s learned to perfect the language he needs to do it.

Miller’s concession to the market--and he did very well by it on that score… but in The Europeans, he’s resisting the temptation to please the audience. No happy marriage for Eugenia. I feel Robert Acton standing in to those expectations. He doesn’t meet the test. Better to be disappointed in love and true to what you are, what you are meant to do.

But this post was to be about language… how wonderfully repression enriches the possibilities of style! And by contrast, how difficult, how resistant to aesthetic manipulation, is so-called “plain speech.” Saying (ahem) “just what you mean.”

Of course, no one ever says quite what they mean. Not all of it. And the challenge in a time that pretends to believe that all things are permissible--unless they’re political, or racial, or almost anything but sexual, is to find a way to include what isn’t being said in that anti-puritanical (which is only the mirror image and imitation of what it would appear to reject), “directness.”

James shows what can be done with indirection--and in this novel, and in The Americans--just where he’s learned it. The Europeans are up on these Emersonian New Englanders, not by being more direct, but knowing it, by being more conscious of it, and knowing how, and using it to their great advantage. He was going to do this book over and over… The Americans, The Bostonians… until What Maisie Knew. There’s where James found his voice.

By far my favorite. Like the difference between the tearly impressionists Barnes collected and the later workings and reworkings you find in the Annenberg collection--after they’d become quite collectible. James found himself in Maisie. A bold stylistic experiment (he’s had to have learned something here from Flaubert)--a narrative that spins itself out, not on what happens, but on this child’s ever maturing discoveries of stuff that’s mostly already happened. And he pulls it off. And in doing so, gets himself out of the “Americans/Europeans etc rut, back on track with what he’d found in Porrait of a Lady--but now he’s got the voice, the language… that will turn out the late masterpieces, The Golden Bowl, Wings of a Dove. Those long, ever digressing imbricated (Cynthia Ozick’s word for them) periodic sentences.. that shimmer like fish scales in changing light.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, though I may not be the one to know how to formulate it. A knife that cuts two ways. Against those who believe too naively in the power of mimesis--of the realists--literature as imitation of “life,” and those who would give up what has always been the greatest strength of the so-called “realists:” their way of avoiding too direct an expression of what they wanted to represent, and so finding, in that necessary indirection, a way back into the power of language.

Read the rest at: HERE

This post has been viewed (on this page) 190 times .

The Literary Cafe

by Donigan on July 17, 2008

I write in cafés, a habit going back at least twenty years. I don’t remember when this began, because I have been writing for well more than forty years. The first twenty years, there was no habitual work place; I wrote anywhere and everywhere; at some point early on in the next twenty, I became essentially unable to work seriously in what were a series of rather nice “home offices.” I found the quiet to be, oddly, debilitating, the lack of distraction to be stupefying. I am able—it is fair to say that I am only able—to produce concentrated creative work amid the human drama of a good café.

From about 1985, I worked in either McP’s Irish Pub or Clayton’s Café, both in Coronado, California. We left the States in 1991, but were unsettled and traveling for much of that period, before arriving in Slovakia in 1994. Until we left Slovakia at the end of 1999, when I worked at all (I was teaching philosophy full time during those years), my cafés were the Gemium Café, and more rarely, Maximillian Café, both located in Bratislava’s old town. I went often to nearby Vienna then, and my place there was the Café Griensteidl on Michaelerplatz. They had a no smoking section, meaning that except on the worst days I could go home after a couple of hours working and not have to wash the stink out of my hair and clothes.

During the years 2000 - 2002, we lived in South Africa. South Africa is not a café society; even if there were any sorts of traditional cafés, it wouldn’t be safe to try working in one. As a result, in those two years I managed write less than 100 pages of the manuscript that became Possessed by Shadows. I was stupefied in South Africa.

We pass through DC from time to time, language and training, between one post and the next, but seldom for long enough to bother trying to find a fitting café; the right café is not just any café. But we have lived in DC for the last two years now, and I work here in Café Bonaparte.

From February, 2003 until August, 2006, we lived in Berlin. I found my favorite café there, but not without a number of months trying to find the right one. I tried out the Café Bliebtreau and it worked all right until the owner, who was always present, figured out I was an American and I was instantly persona non grata. (These were not good times to be an American in Germany, to be an American anywhere, really.) Then I found a great student place across the street from the Berlin Technical University, Café Hardenberg. It could have become my place, except the food was mediocre and, unacceptably, the coffee was weak. One day, bending against a cold wind surging through the tunnel-like lane called Savignyplatz, I popped into Café Aedes for something hot and bracing: a caffé corretto (espresso corrected with grappa). It was perfect, the best, most honestly Italian coffee I had found in Berlin. So I kept going back for the coffee, then discovered the affordable and delicious tramezzinis, and began to notice that all the staff spoke Italian with each other, noticed that most of the other customers were regulars and frequently sat for long periods of time with a book, a magazine, a notebook. I sensed a fit.

During the subsequent two and a half years, I finished one book there and wrote well into another. I met my now good friend Ferdinand there. I became friendly enough with the owner, Giuseppe, who is originally from Sicily, that Holly and I have a standing invitation to stay with his family at their farm and olive orchard on the slope of Mt. Etna.

Café Aedes became a sort of home, and I still miss everything about it.

Should you find yourself in Berlin, be sure to stop by Café Aedes along Savignyplatz in the Charlottenburg area on the western side of the city. Look on the wall in the food preparation area, left of the bar, and there you will see a large framed photograph, a black & white copy of the same one that appears here. Say hello to Giuseppe. Tell him you are a friend of Donigan Merritt. I doubt if you will be able to pay for what you order. Be sure to have the fine caffé corretto, and bring a book.

Tell him I said that I continue to miss him and my café very much.

(There are photos at the original site post.)

This post has been viewed (on this page) 528 times .

[poem] Tattoo

by Ayesha_91 on July 17, 2008

Give me your feedback!! I’d love to hear from you!!!

Blue marks on your Body
letters and eyes Deep holes,
numbers curled,
Frowning
where the skin has sagged;
hanging loose Like old cloth So pale
Underneath
the make up

I touch your hands (Almost lifeless I have never seen them so still)
And they are so
Warm; Wreathed
Signs; Some familiar Some not
Like the cobalt hands of Hollywood aliens

How long has it been?
Twen…
ty…
two years.
Days and weeks and months -Lightning flashes
For all I can see is you- your hands Bright white
Almost

girlish;

I loved them

What have you become

This post has been viewed (on this page) 497 times .

The Art of Forgetting - The Amnesiac Reviewed

by The Buddha Smiled on July 15, 2008

Memory and the art of remembering is something that writers and philosophers choose to dwell on at great length - perhaps because in so many cases the creative process itself is a means of commemorating a past, and the act of creating a story is often the path to remembering something. Over the past two hundred years, authors ranging such as Kafka, Kundera, Borges and Murakami have spent a great deal of intellectual horsepower on what it means to remember, and what it means to forget.

Following this noble and illustrious line of storytelling is The Amnesiac, by Sam Taylor. The narrative opens in Amsterdam, where the protagonist, James Purdew, is recovering from a broken ankle. Living an apparently satisfactory life (he has a stable job, a loving girlfriend, an apartment in the heart of Amsterdam) his veneer of contentment is perpetually ruffled at the edges by premonitions of his past, and the fact that he has no memory of approximately three years of his life. What happened to him when he was a university student in the English town of H.? Why is he haunted by the strains of a tune that he cannot remember more than two lines of? And above all things, who is Anna?

Ankle healed, relationship with Dutch girlfriend Ingrid terminated, James returns to H. (why can’t we call it Hull and be done with?) to try to find out more about his past, and to (both figuratively and literally) find a key to unlock his past – because of all the diaries he’s ever kept throughout his life, the ones pertaining to the three years he cannot remember are in a locked black box, and he cannot find (or even remember) where the key is. From here on the novel begins its tortured tour through the past of a life that is at once fascinating and also equally dull and pointless. For Purdew’s life is very bourgeois, with all the trappings of a traditional English childhood in the seventies and eighties – the bad hairstyles, the quaint television shows on the BBC, the agony and the ecstasy of first love, sex and death. Add to this mix an ongoing renovation project that Purdew takes on (how could a novel so thoroughly English leave out the persistent English obsession with home equity?) and you have a classically English novel for our times. Through all these events, clues towards unlocking the past slowly accumulate; references (almost tongue in cheek) zip past as we hurtle along the narrative as the author throws in clues to the denouement.

Taylor does well in creating a haunting reality, almost Camus-like in his emphasis on duality; his one passage on how hope and fear, light and dark, are potentially merely two sides of the same emotion is very reminiscent of The Absurd. Taylor veers between different times and narratives, choosing to work in several voices (the hidden observer, the narrator, the first person) to move the story forward. Over the course of nearly four hundred pages, Taylor moves (sometimes smoothly, other times not) between genres, going from nihilistic twentieth century self-reflexive novel to Robin Cook-like medical thriller involving large sterile corridors and doctors with mind-altering chemicals speaking in hushed tones through to nineteenth century Victorian murder mystery, tracing its path through the narrow side alleys behind Waterloo.

But alas, that is where the good times end. The extended references to Borges are cute to start with but soon belabour the point, and there are sections where he insists on discussing philosophy that could have been handled with more subtlety; either readers will already know about solipsism, or they will have the good grace to find out; you don’t need to explain it a la Philosophy for Dummies. And perhaps most disappointingly, after all the build-up, the denouement is completely unsatisfactory; loose ends come together a little too neatly, the whodunit solved cleanly, all the pieces falling into place too well, but the overall conclusion is like the English football team (who also make an appearance, albeit tangentially, alongside Doctor Who) – just not good enough. And if you rely on Borges’ trick of nothing being as it seems, surely there was some way to keep the ending as engaging as Borges?

Despite its flaws, The Amnesiac is an engaging read; Taylor writes cleanly, albeit a little too consciously and cerebrally, and his prose is crisp and engaging. One has to acknowledge that despite the shortcomings, The Amnesiac is better than a lot of what passes as literary fiction these days, and Taylor knows how to dot his literary i’s and cross his cultural t’s; he just needs to do it with a little more aplomb. Maybe he’ll remember that for next time?

(The Amnesiac is published by Faber in the UK and Penguin the US)

This post has been viewed (on this page) 134 times .

Bookstores

by Ruricolist on July 13, 2008

I wish I could preach bookstores. Everyone should read: reading is, for most ends, both the best and easiest form of thinking—a conjunction which makes it one of life’s kindnesses, not to be scorned. But most readers do not need bookstores: a library card and the occassional mail order suffice those who only read a little.

But those of us who read much are drawn to bookstores. Theirs is a different allure from that of a library; a different temptation from that of simply buying books (even secondhand). I go to bookstores to be surprised, which is not an indulgence. More books are worth reading than life has time to read. I could try to prioritize; but how to judge? My tastes are individual enough that I cannot rely on others’ rankings. My solution is the simplest possible: I leave much of my reading to chance. Of books that appeal to me, some I go out of my way for; but more I resign myself to read only should I come across them in person. And of books I read, most are books I chose in advance, but many are books that took me by surprise. Lovers of music, of movies, of food, of any other art form or humane delight, are proud of this kind of openness, and love to recount their discoveries; but some perversity (a holdover from school, perhaps) drives readers to planning out reading lists. Such a list, if it relies only on recommendation or reputation, can comprise only the famous and the new—and how many good books are neither famous nor new?

Libraries and recommendation engines cannot be relied on for these surprises. They aim for order; but a bookstore should be the paradigm of artful disorder. That is, if I want a particular book, I should be able to find it; but I should pick up a few books by mistake along the way. And if I do not, at least once, innocently pick up a book I would be embarrassed to be seen with, and have to glance shiftily before I slip it back onto the shelf; then I must despair, for neither shall I find a book which, not having known to look for, I should be embarrassed never to have heard of.

It would be extreme to consider 20 personal or 100 automatic recommendations in a day. But in an hour in a bookstore a thousand books may pass under my eyes—books judged not by their covers, but by the company they keep: as recognizing a friend among strangers makes the others less than strangers. Libraries sometimes afford such meetings, but that is not their purpose. I have been in large libraries so well organized that they made me restless: where, unable to wander with my eyes, I had to wander on foot. I cannot object to that in a library, but I encourage bookstores to avoid it. Large gardens need planning, lest they seem wilderness; but plants in small gardens must be allowed their wildness, or them seem decorations—to claim the space, they must overgrow and mix a little.

I implied at the start that I could not persuade anyone of the appeal of bookstores, but that is not because I have no good reasons; rather, someone who does not love bookstores is likely to be so different from me that I do not see what we could have to say to each other.

Certainly, there are people who love bookstores more than I do. I have never made a bookstore my haunt (as I read that city people do); I have never made a friend in or through a bookstore (which some seem to take for their purpose). But I remember, I think, every bookstore I have ever been in: little blond-wood, shiny-cover chain bookshops; carpeted, café-harboring shelf-mazes; a cement-floored, steel-rack paperback warehouse; an amphitheatrically rising by levels university bookstore; overstuffed, impossibly narrow bookstores in the French Quarter with wood floors creaking and squeaking like untuned instruments; a shadowy book-laden mansion in North Carolina; and others, and more. As an adult, my dreams are inflexible; long familiarity and deep feeling, are not enough to bring new places into them—my dreams are always recombining old places remembered through childhood; but bookstores have a way to slip through that barrier, a shift to enter dreams. Willing or not, I return to them all.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 524 times .

Franchising Booksellers

by damongarr on July 06, 2008

I’m always thinking about ways to resurrect/save/reinvigorate the bookselling business. So, when I heard this week about Starbucks’ trouble (closing 600 company-owned stores), I begin to wonder about their troubles and translating it to another retail industry

I am one of those hypocrites who complains about the big-box bookstores killing the industry while simultaneously shopping there myself. There’s a Barnes & Noble gift card in my wallet right now. There are maybe two main reasons people like us shop at these stories. First is their ubiquitousness. These stores are everywhere. Certainly much closer to me than my nearest (decent) independent bookstore. The second reason we frequent these sorts of places despite our moral qualms is that we know what to expect.

The retail franchise model supports these two explanations, but does something more. It puts the success or failure of the store in the hands of the franchisee. This is why I think it could succeed as new model for bookselling.

The corporate office in the franchise provides branding, which may be the most important element of what they do, but they also offer support. Support is much different than mandates. I’m not sure how much liberty the buyer at the local Borders has, but I’m relatively certain the books they chose to promote, what ends up on the stores displays, in their windows, are directed from some corporate office far, far away. An independent owner/operator, though, would have freedom to respond to his/her individual market, absent of corporate mandates.

Now, since the time my mind crossed this possibility, I’ve been imagining many different scenarios, many different ways the relationship between franchiser and franchisee could work.  I just want to put the thought out there.  I know little about the industry in detail, and my knowledge of the franchise set-up comes from my time as a manager at a pizza delivery chain.  So, I’m no expert, but maybe someone out there knows more and could help build the business case--or, tell me I’m just wrong.

This post has been viewed (on this page) 137 times .

Musil on the Novel: The Break from Realist Fiction

by Jacob Russell on July 05, 2008