TONY HILLERMAN from SELDOM DISAPPOINTED answers "Where do you get ideas?"

Tony Hillerman
Seldom Disappointed - a Memoir
C 2001
Harper Colins Publishers

page 253

The answer to the "Where do you get the ideas" question is that writer's minds are a jumbled, chaotic attic cluttered with plot notions, useful characters, settings for events, bits and pieces of information, overheard remarks, ironies, cloud formations, bumper sticker slogans, unresolved problems, bon mots, tragedies, heroics, etc. One's memory contains enough stuff to produce three or four longer versions of "War and Peace" if only once could sort it out and from it into a coherent fable.

That leads to the next FAQ. "When do you write?" One writes while peeling potatoes, driving to work, standing in line, suffering through a boring mo vie, eating oatmeal, digging out dandelions, trying to drift off into naptime sleep. Finally when the sorting is mostly completed and the next scene is set in the imagination, one goes to the computer and types it onto the screen.

I liken the writer to the bag lady pushing her stolen shopping cart through life collecting throwaway stiff, which, who knows, might be useful some way some day....

COMMENTARY ON THE PRETENDERS are BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG - AND THE ROAD

THE PRETENDERS, one of my favorite bands, is back on tour... and Chrissie Hynde is really allright with me.

JEAN COCTEAU quote

"A writer develops the muscles of his mind. This training leaves hardly any leisure for sport. It demands suffering, falls, laziness, weakness, setbacks, exhaustion, mourning, insomnia, exercises which are the reverse of those which develop the body.



From OPIUM, the Diary of a Cure, Peter Owen Limited Publishers, London MCMLVII

SCRABBLE OFFICIAL WORD LISTS ADDS THREE

Za," "qi" and "zzz" were added recently to the game's official word list for its original English-language edition. Click on the title to get to the Wall Street Journal article!

From JOHN ADAMS by DAVID MC CULLOUGH - about THOMAS JEFFERSON in PARIS and BOOKS

JOHN ADAMS
by David McCullough - Pulitzer Prize Winner EDIT
C2001 the author
Simon and Schuster Publishers

Page 321 of the hardback (note: Thomas Jefferson's library upon his death founded the University of Virginia. Both JOHN ADAMS and THOMAS JEFFERSON DIED ON THE SAME DAY - 4th of July - the same year!)



"Paris booksellers soon found they had an American patron like no other. In the bookshops and stalls along the Seine were volumes in numbers and variety such as Jefferson had never seen, and his pleasure was boundless. To Madison he would describe the surpassing pleasure of "examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hand and putting by everything related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable to every science." There were weeks when he was buying books every day. In his first month in Paris, he could not buy them fast enough, and ran up bills totaling nearly 800 francs... The grand total of books he acquired in France was about 2000, but he also bought books by the boxful for Washington, Franklin, and James Madison."

OUR DAILY MEDS by MELODY PETERSEN (ARE YOU ON MEDS BY DRINKING WATER FROM THE TAP?)

OUR DAILY MEDS How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked The Nation on Prescription Drugs. By Melody Petersen C 2008 Sarah Crichton Books Farrar, Straus, and Giroux... If you're like me you want to be healthy and energetic and live without pain, WITHOUT DRUG addiction - prescription of otherwise. So Petersen's book of how the Big Pharmaceutical Companies manage to get doctors to prescribe their products and people legally hooked on them - at great expense to insurance companies - is fascinating. Actors and athletes in interviews seem to mention their happiness with a particular drug they are taken and thousands call their doctors asking for the same... But what about this? Those frog mutations may not be from solar flares or Global Warming after all. A lot of people on prescriptions pee into their toilets and the drugs turn up in the PUBLIC WATER SUPPLY IN Iowa - THE CORN BELT. Is the water I've been confidently drinking from the tap in Los Angeles TESTED for prescription drugs such as HORMONES AND PAINKILLERS! Until now I thought bottled water was unnecessary. Now I'm not so sure. Pages 255 to 257 Thirty percent of the water samples from Iowas rivers in 2001 were laced with TAGAMENT a heartburn medication Twenty percent had codeine, a powerful narcotic. Another 20 percent CARDIZEN for hypertension. 70 percent of downstream waters polluted with TEGRETOL. for epilepsy..which had been also given for mood disorders and pain. Found also, fragrances, insect repellents, disinfectants, household chemicals in 80 percent of the streams sampled in Iowa and twenty-nine other states. ARE THESE DRUGS THE REAL CAUSES OF CHANGES TO THE ECOSYSTEM that have genetically mutated frogs and killed off fish rather than global warming ?

YIDDISH LITERATURE ARCHIVE IS NOW ONLINE

Interested in Yiddish literature which preserves language, culture, history, and religion? An archive of over 10,000 works of modern Yiddish literature which includes about 150 years of out of print novels, poetry, stories, fiction and nonfiction is on line thanks to Brewster Kahle, founder of Internet Archive, Aaron Lansky, founder and president of the Yiddish Book Center non-profit, and Steven Spielberg Digital library. You can read, download, and print...

Click on the link above for more information...