Earlier in this blog I mentioned that I would be presenting articles I wrote which were published in NEXT Magazine years ago. NEXT Magazine was a poetry scene magazine in start up when I gave a lot of energy to it for well over a year of my life. Like many such start up magazines it started up and sputtered, deficit of enough volunteers who shared the vision of what it might be by the editor and owner of the magazine, G. Murray Thomas. Like poetry magazines in particular it was started on small funds and failed to attract the kind of important advertising necessary to any magazine on any subject. But what was worse was the well known "fact" that poets were a stereotypically poverty-stricken group, bringing their own tea bags into independent artsy "coffee houses" and performance rooms because they just wanted the free hot water. Seems hardly anyone believed poets would read the magazine, read the ads, and actually spend.
Dealing with the poetry scene and the reality of poets who played upon those stereotypes as well was my forte. Coming up between music videos of songs that have come into my consciousness recently, I'll be running some of my articles from so long ago. Coming up first FROM RIGHT TO JONG, my review of the American Booksellers Convention of 1994...
Search for Erica Jong elsewhere on my blog...
Christine
8/30/08
8/27/08
THE FLOW OF THE BLACK GEL PEN
I remember a writing professor of mine talking about a famous author who wrote on long sheets of butcher paper using a fat pencil, the kind first graders use to print with. The author had big hands. I love the feel of a good black gel pen on smooth paper. Not the Chinese import kind of paper...
8/25/08
LISA HUBLER (My Mindful Meditation Teacher) Quote
Lisa Hubler says she probably got this quote from someone else.
"Meditation is a radical act
"Meditation is a radical act
of non-doing."
8/22/08
USING REAL PEOPLE YOU'VE OBSERVED, MET, OR KNOWN IN FICTION AND NON FICTION
USING REAL PEOPLE YOU'VE OBSERVED, MET, OR KNOWN IN FICTION OR NON-FICTION
By Christine Trzyna
Recently a proud poet presented to me and a few other friends a poem she had written about us and grief and loss. For each of us she had taken a bright yellow marker and colored the lines that were about us. She signed it with an artistic flourish in the bottom right hand side of the paper like a painter adding a little hug. She thought she was giving us a gift - empathy.
Being the fastest reader of the group I quickly sensed that my friend Joy was going to be insulted when she read what the poet had written about her. The poet had made an unfortunate word choice, using the word "lost" that made it sound like Joy had her legs amputated when actually she meant to say that Joy had lost the easy use of her legs due to knee injuries. Another woman was upset because her real name was used in a passage about her loss which was the custody of her children.
Situations like this are common within poetry circles and at readings where everyone knows everyone. But using real people you've met, observed or known during your life is literary tradition. Perhaps Truman Capote is now most notorious for having a used a group of society women he called "The Swans," as characters in a novel. They recognized themselves and all but one of them shunned him from that time on. He literally (!) ruined his career as a result.
Why did I use Joy's real name above, when Joy is actually not aware that I blog? Because when I think of Joy I attach to her more closely rather than using the distance of a fake name or alluding to "one." And I think that even the reader who doesn't know anyone named gets a sense about this, that ring of truth that is so important in fiction too.
In my own writing I sometimes struggle with creating a composite character out of a few people I know who are a lot alike in some way, and coming up with fake names that still "fit" a character born of my imagination or based on a live person.
Being the fastest reader of the group I quickly sensed that my friend Joy was going to be insulted when she read what the poet had written about her. The poet had made an unfortunate word choice, using the word "lost" that made it sound like Joy had her legs amputated when actually she meant to say that Joy had lost the easy use of her legs due to knee injuries. Another woman was upset because her real name was used in a passage about her loss which was the custody of her children.
Situations like this are common within poetry circles and at readings where everyone knows everyone. But using real people you've met, observed or known during your life is literary tradition. Perhaps Truman Capote is now most notorious for having a used a group of society women he called "The Swans," as characters in a novel. They recognized themselves and all but one of them shunned him from that time on. He literally (!) ruined his career as a result.
Why did I use Joy's real name above, when Joy is actually not aware that I blog? Because when I think of Joy I attach to her more closely rather than using the distance of a fake name or alluding to "one." And I think that even the reader who doesn't know anyone named gets a sense about this, that ring of truth that is so important in fiction too.
In my own writing I sometimes struggle with creating a composite character out of a few people I know who are a lot alike in some way, and coming up with fake names that still "fit" a character born of my imagination or based on a live person.
8/20/08
NATALIE GOLDBERG quote
"The responsbility of literature is to make people aware, present, and alive."
Natalie Goldberg
Natalie Goldberg
8/16/08
QUICK BOOK REVIEW : TRUE HALLUCINATIONS and THE ARCHAIC REVIVAL by TERENCE MCKENNA
TRUE HALLUCINATIONS and THE ARCHAIC REVIVAL
Tales and Speculation About the Mysteries of the Psychedelic Experience
Two Classics in One Volume by Terence McKenna
MJF Books New York (in arrangement with HarperCollins)
Copywrited by the author in 1991 and 1993 the material in these two books was written in the early-mid 1970's.
QUICK BOOK REVIEW by Christine Trzyna
I've never read Terence McKenna before, having only heard him on the old Art Bell Coast to Coast AM show being interviewed by Art, prior to his death from a brain cancer. I find that it interesting that his avocation was hallucinogens and their effect on the brain and that he died of brain cancer.
These two books reveal McKenna to be extremely sophisticated in his thinking about his hallucinogenic experiences particularly with mushrooms. McKenna seems to have suffered from not being an academic. I hasten to remember when I was taking an Anthropology course about the Native Americans and wished to produce a spectacular paper on the local Tongva and rock art and /or the use of local hallucinogens - which proved to be Jimsonweed. There wasn't enough time for the research I wanted to do, but when I mentioned the name of Terence McKenna as a possible resource to a grad student, she urged me that my research would not be acceptable to academia if I referenced him.
The excerpts chosen below have to do with memory, a subject that I as a memoirist like to explore.
EXCERPT :
Page 135
(Re his brother Dennis McKenna circa about 1971)
..."Dennis announced a new teaching. He said that one could see any point in time by closing ones' eyes, visualizing an eight, turning it on its side so that it approximated the sign for infinity, and then mentally sliding the two closed rings over each other to form a circle,. shrinking the circle to a dot, and thinking the word "please." and target the point in space-time. Usually I knew not whence these images came to him; however, this time I was amazed. I recalled with perfect clarity that six weeks before, shortly before I left Vancouver, British Columbia, I had gone to a dentist as pat of the standard pre-travel tune up. While int he waiting room, I had read a several-months old journal of some Canadian education association. In that journal, which I had not discussed with anyone, was a very short article about teaching machines and very young children. The "Picture This" scenario with which the article opened was of a child looking at a figure-eight on a television screen, rolling it on its side, squeezing it together, etc. It was a bit of media flotsam that my brother, or something working through my brother, was lift right out of my mind weeks after I had forgotten it. Something was able to refashion and use our memories in whatever absurd way that it wished."
page 196
"...Destruction of up to 95% of the brain does not impair memory function. It appears that memory isn't stored anywhere; memory seems to permeate the brain. Like a hologram, all of the memory seems to be in each part. Similarly, one can take a holographic plate of Mount Fuji and cut it in half; when a half is illuminated, the entire image is present. One can do this again and again: the holograph is made up of a nearly infinite number of tiny images, each of which in combination with its fellows presents one image."
Tales and Speculation About the Mysteries of the Psychedelic Experience
Two Classics in One Volume by Terence McKenna
MJF Books New York (in arrangement with HarperCollins)
Copywrited by the author in 1991 and 1993 the material in these two books was written in the early-mid 1970's.
QUICK BOOK REVIEW by Christine Trzyna
I've never read Terence McKenna before, having only heard him on the old Art Bell Coast to Coast AM show being interviewed by Art, prior to his death from a brain cancer. I find that it interesting that his avocation was hallucinogens and their effect on the brain and that he died of brain cancer.
These two books reveal McKenna to be extremely sophisticated in his thinking about his hallucinogenic experiences particularly with mushrooms. McKenna seems to have suffered from not being an academic. I hasten to remember when I was taking an Anthropology course about the Native Americans and wished to produce a spectacular paper on the local Tongva and rock art and /or the use of local hallucinogens - which proved to be Jimsonweed. There wasn't enough time for the research I wanted to do, but when I mentioned the name of Terence McKenna as a possible resource to a grad student, she urged me that my research would not be acceptable to academia if I referenced him.
The excerpts chosen below have to do with memory, a subject that I as a memoirist like to explore.
EXCERPT :
Page 135
(Re his brother Dennis McKenna circa about 1971)
..."Dennis announced a new teaching. He said that one could see any point in time by closing ones' eyes, visualizing an eight, turning it on its side so that it approximated the sign for infinity, and then mentally sliding the two closed rings over each other to form a circle,. shrinking the circle to a dot, and thinking the word "please." and target the point in space-time. Usually I knew not whence these images came to him; however, this time I was amazed. I recalled with perfect clarity that six weeks before, shortly before I left Vancouver, British Columbia, I had gone to a dentist as pat of the standard pre-travel tune up. While int he waiting room, I had read a several-months old journal of some Canadian education association. In that journal, which I had not discussed with anyone, was a very short article about teaching machines and very young children. The "Picture This" scenario with which the article opened was of a child looking at a figure-eight on a television screen, rolling it on its side, squeezing it together, etc. It was a bit of media flotsam that my brother, or something working through my brother, was lift right out of my mind weeks after I had forgotten it. Something was able to refashion and use our memories in whatever absurd way that it wished."
page 196
"...Destruction of up to 95% of the brain does not impair memory function. It appears that memory isn't stored anywhere; memory seems to permeate the brain. Like a hologram, all of the memory seems to be in each part. Similarly, one can take a holographic plate of Mount Fuji and cut it in half; when a half is illuminated, the entire image is present. One can do this again and again: the holograph is made up of a nearly infinite number of tiny images, each of which in combination with its fellows presents one image."
8/12/08
INUIT WISDOM about WORDS
"Words do not label things already there. Words are like the knife of a carver: They free the idea, the thing, from the general formlessness of the outside. As a man speaks, not only is his language in a state of birth, but also the very thing about which he is talking." Inuit (Native American) wisdom
8/11/08
WHY MARK TWAIN IS NOT ENDANGERED AT LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY WHILE I BOUGHT SEVERAL NADINE GORDIMER's FOR 25 CENTS
.... Because teachers still have children read Mark Twain, books by Mark Twain are still represented on the shelves of Los Angeles Public Library.
The library's funds have been so cut that according to a librarian I spoke with very recently, there HAS WAS NO BOOK BUYING BETWEEN JANUARY and JUNE 2008.
If you go to the LAPL start page you can follow the links to suggest a book purchase. This is something I do frequently. I was frustrated that not a single book I suggested had been purchased.
ON THE BRANCH level, any FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY GROUP can designate some of the funds that are earned through volunteer driven book sales be used for buying books that librarians at that branch prioritize. Librarians in general are NOT HAPPY WITH THE POPULAR LIBRARY MENTALITY OF LAPL...
"Popular Library" means that if a book is NOT TAKEN OUT FREQUENTLY it will be targeted to be taken off the shelf and make it to a free book cart, twenty five cent buy-a-book shelf, at a Friends sale, be donated elsewhere, or even make it to the Garbage Can. "Popular Library" means that if a book is a best seller there may be dozens of that title purchased, distributed among many branches.
Thus Pulitzer Prize winning South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who early on revealed herself to write political protest fiction as she plotted her characters through apartide, because she is not 'well read' by library patrons, got the boot based on not being well known among the general public of Los Angeles, while classic Mark Twain remains.
I have a suggestion to those of you who have library accounts at LAPL and favorite authors who are not 'well read.' Take out that author's books from time to time just to send a signal to a system that may well be more computerized than based on the knowledge and wisdom of expensively educated and intelligent librarians!
The library's funds have been so cut that according to a librarian I spoke with very recently, there HAS WAS NO BOOK BUYING BETWEEN JANUARY and JUNE 2008.
If you go to the LAPL start page you can follow the links to suggest a book purchase. This is something I do frequently. I was frustrated that not a single book I suggested had been purchased.
ON THE BRANCH level, any FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY GROUP can designate some of the funds that are earned through volunteer driven book sales be used for buying books that librarians at that branch prioritize. Librarians in general are NOT HAPPY WITH THE POPULAR LIBRARY MENTALITY OF LAPL...
"Popular Library" means that if a book is NOT TAKEN OUT FREQUENTLY it will be targeted to be taken off the shelf and make it to a free book cart, twenty five cent buy-a-book shelf, at a Friends sale, be donated elsewhere, or even make it to the Garbage Can. "Popular Library" means that if a book is a best seller there may be dozens of that title purchased, distributed among many branches.
Thus Pulitzer Prize winning South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who early on revealed herself to write political protest fiction as she plotted her characters through apartide, because she is not 'well read' by library patrons, got the boot based on not being well known among the general public of Los Angeles, while classic Mark Twain remains.
I have a suggestion to those of you who have library accounts at LAPL and favorite authors who are not 'well read.' Take out that author's books from time to time just to send a signal to a system that may well be more computerized than based on the knowledge and wisdom of expensively educated and intelligent librarians!
8/8/08
COMMENTARY ON DAVID BOWIE ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS
"I've nothing much to offer... there's nothing more to take...I'm an absolute beginner...but I'm absolutely sane... as long as we're together the rest can go to hell.. "
TRUE HALLUCINATIONS and THE ARCHAIC REVIVAL by Terence McKenna
TRUE HALLUCINATIONS and THE ARCHAIC REVIVAL
Tales and Speculation About the Mysteries of the Psychedelic Experience
Two Classics in One Volume by Terence McKenna
MJF Books New York (in arrangement with HarperCollins)
Copywrited by the author in 1991 and 1993 the material in these two books was written in the early-mid 1970's.
review/excerpt coming up
Tales and Speculation About the Mysteries of the Psychedelic Experience
Two Classics in One Volume by Terence McKenna
MJF Books New York (in arrangement with HarperCollins)
Copywrited by the author in 1991 and 1993 the material in these two books was written in the early-mid 1970's.
review/excerpt coming up
8/5/08
COMMENTARY ON I'D LIKE TO GET TO KNOW YOU / SPANKY AND HER GANG
In the summer mode to get to know a lot of people?
I can't promise.... I can't promise that I'll love you...but I'd like to get to know you...
This early music video of Spanky and Her Gang has fun with the swingin' 60's cocktail party-pick up. How retro!
I can't promise.... I can't promise that I'll love you...but I'd like to get to know you...
This early music video of Spanky and Her Gang has fun with the swingin' 60's cocktail party-pick up. How retro!
8/3/08
ARE MEN NECESSARY? by MAUREEN DOWD
ARE MEN NECESSARY?
When Sexes Collide
GP Putnam - Penguin Books
C 2005 Maureen Dowd (author)
On women, intelligent women, and the expression of opinion. Page 122
"There's a lot of evidence that Papa likes to preach more: Male shouters predominate on TV political shows, as do male bloggers. Teenage boys trash talk much more on the basketball court than teenage girls. men I know and men who read The New York Times write me constantly, asking me to read the opinion pieces they've written. Sometimes they'll e-mail me or fax me their thoughts to read right before I have lunch with them. Women hardly ever send their own rants.'
"My friend Zofia Smardz, a Washington Post Outlook editor whose job it is to find contributors for the Post's opinion pages, wrote an intriguing piece for the Post on "Opiniongate."
"I know who's constantly beating on my door to be heart and who's a little more inclined to hang back, she said. "I took an informal count while writing this, and over a recent span of seven days, unsolicited manuscripts to our section were running seven to one in favor of, yes, those pesky, ubiquitous men."
When Sexes Collide
GP Putnam - Penguin Books
C 2005 Maureen Dowd (author)
On women, intelligent women, and the expression of opinion. Page 122
"There's a lot of evidence that Papa likes to preach more: Male shouters predominate on TV political shows, as do male bloggers. Teenage boys trash talk much more on the basketball court than teenage girls. men I know and men who read The New York Times write me constantly, asking me to read the opinion pieces they've written. Sometimes they'll e-mail me or fax me their thoughts to read right before I have lunch with them. Women hardly ever send their own rants.'
"My friend Zofia Smardz, a Washington Post Outlook editor whose job it is to find contributors for the Post's opinion pages, wrote an intriguing piece for the Post on "Opiniongate."
"I know who's constantly beating on my door to be heart and who's a little more inclined to hang back, she said. "I took an informal count while writing this, and over a recent span of seven days, unsolicited manuscripts to our section were running seven to one in favor of, yes, those pesky, ubiquitous men."
8/1/08
GREAT HOLLYWOOD WIT compiled and edited by GENE SHALIT
QUICK REVIEW by CHRISTINE TRZYNA
GREAT HOLLYWOOD WIT
A Glorious Cavalcade of Hollywood Wisecracks, Zingers, Japes, Quips, Slings, Jests, Snappers & Sass from the Stars
Compiled and Edited by Gene Shalit (movie critic)
C 2002 by author
Saint Martin's Press
With a subtitle like "A Glorius Cavalcade of Hollywood Wisecracks, Zingers, Japes, Quips, Slings, Jests, Snappers & Sass from the Stars," I could not resist. And I imagine Gene Shalit, who himself has a great appreciation of humor, went through hundreds of obscure books and magazines - maybe even an secret treasure chest of them - to locate the best. This book had me laughing every page, but I do have one criticism and it's a criticism I have of many quote books and on-line quote resources... when a celebrity, in a movie, is quoted as if the clever thing they said was made up by them - instead of the writer, it makes me crazy! The TRUE QUOTE SHOULD BE CREDITED TO THE WRITER!
A few favorites...
page 2
quoting Joan Rivers on Elizabeth Taylor...
"My jokes are one of the reasons Liz Taylor went on a diet. When I took her to SeaWorld and Shamu the Whale jumped out of the water, she asked if it came with vegetables..."
page97
"In Hollywood, you can get sued for telling the truth. After all, it's Hollywood where the truth lies." Anthony Perkins
page 152
Lillian Hellman, writer
"If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say don't listen to writers talking about writing."
GREAT HOLLYWOOD WIT
A Glorious Cavalcade of Hollywood Wisecracks, Zingers, Japes, Quips, Slings, Jests, Snappers & Sass from the Stars
Compiled and Edited by Gene Shalit (movie critic)
C 2002 by author
Saint Martin's Press
With a subtitle like "A Glorius Cavalcade of Hollywood Wisecracks, Zingers, Japes, Quips, Slings, Jests, Snappers & Sass from the Stars," I could not resist. And I imagine Gene Shalit, who himself has a great appreciation of humor, went through hundreds of obscure books and magazines - maybe even an secret treasure chest of them - to locate the best. This book had me laughing every page, but I do have one criticism and it's a criticism I have of many quote books and on-line quote resources... when a celebrity, in a movie, is quoted as if the clever thing they said was made up by them - instead of the writer, it makes me crazy! The TRUE QUOTE SHOULD BE CREDITED TO THE WRITER!
A few favorites...
page 2
quoting Joan Rivers on Elizabeth Taylor...
"My jokes are one of the reasons Liz Taylor went on a diet. When I took her to SeaWorld and Shamu the Whale jumped out of the water, she asked if it came with vegetables..."
page97
"In Hollywood, you can get sued for telling the truth. After all, it's Hollywood where the truth lies." Anthony Perkins
page 152
Lillian Hellman, writer
"If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say don't listen to writers talking about writing."
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