2/26/10

HERMANN HESSE Quote

"Be on guard against too much cleverness." - Hermann Hesse

2/23/10

MY OLD WRITERS GROUP WAS TERRIFIED OF SENDING WORK OUT

I belonged to a writers group years back that was comprised of some talented people who were dedicated to short story writing. But they were so perfectionistic, that despite writing and rewriting stories, and going through our critique process, they were terrified to send work out.

THE REASON WAS NOT JUST REJECTION! The reason was that they feared that everyone in publishing knew each other - and that if they had the nerve to send out a story that some editor thought of as less than A-plus, unworthy, then they would face something equal to being blackballed out of being published - ever. Their efforts - their very name -would exclude them from the very world they so desired to be in, that is if there were a lot of truth to this almost paranoid notion.

Being published does not make you a writer, writing does. And the best way to become a better writer is to write. No doubt being published can sometimes be a personal rather than professional matter. I simply do not believe that a writer who wants to be published should worry that rejections, even a series of rejection, means that they will become infamous within publishing circles.

If you have had an experience that would prove the paranoid notion, please contact me and tell me your story!


Christine

2/21/10

SHEILA WELLER DANCING AT CIRO's

pages 155-156 C Sheila Weller "Dancing at Ciro's" Published by Saint Martin's Press

Helen Hover Weller, Sheila Weller's mother, was a reporter in Hollywood writing on celebrities. Weller is setting up the mood of Hollywood at the grand opening of her uncle Herman's new restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. It is World War 2, the troops have invaded North Africa and Winston Churchill is optimistic. It is the day after Christmas... and the doors open.

"Consequently, "they came in twos and fours and sixes," Herman recalled..... Joan Crawford ...Cary Grant... Lana Turner came with her new husband, restaurant owner Steve Crane, and my mother - supervising the cigarette and coat-check girls with one eye, sleuthing for column items with the other - got the actress she most avidly chronicled to sit down with her in the cigarette girls' lounge.

"The movie stars of the forties had a combination of qualities that are the mirror opposite of their counterparts today. On the one hand, they gave off a glamour unheard of in our era, when ten-million-a-picture actresses wear jeans on David Letterman. But the jeans-wearing actresses are sophisticated; those glamour girls were not. They were often socially naive contract-worker-bees completely beholden to studio bosses. They were raised in a culture that still inculcated obedience and in an America deeply gridded by the caste system. A lot of them were insecure about their rough edges (high school drop out Betty Hutton told my mother she kept a dictionary on her bedstand to look up words whose meanings she didn't know) and their recent poverty (ex-elevator operator Dorothy Lamour remembered when she and her mother had to stretch $1.75 to last five days. However, they were still able to be human beings. They didn't have minders and bodyguards; they opened their own front doors; they worried about getting pregnant; and when they got drunk, they would pour out their hearts in a powder room.

2/15/10

CHARLES JOHNSON Quote

"It has been well said that all true art is a contagion of feeling; so that through the true reading of true books we do indeed read ourselves into the spirit of the masters." Charles Johnson.

2/12/10

AMMA Quotation

"Stuck in the intellect,
we fail to get to the heart.
Since the intellect is very calculating,
we need spirituality to find our way.
Mother is not saying we should
completely eliminate the intellect,
but that we need a discriminating intellect
that distinguishes between truth and untruth.
Awareness is the most important act of all."

As edited by Janine Canan

2/10/10

HATING WOMEN by SHMULEY BOTEACH American's Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex

QUICK REVIEW by CHRISTINE TRZYNA
HATING WOMEN
American's Hostile Campaign Against The Fairer Sex
10 Regan Books an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Schmuley Boteach sounds like a feminist, or at least that's the best way I can categorize his Jewish-religious based POV that women need to be respected and the hell with pornography and adultery and all those things that degrade women. He hates what Madonna and Donald Trump have done to American morals so much that he refers to them repeatedly.
CT's O
pinion: Where does erotica end and pornography begin? When did women agreeing to be victimized as porn stars become "Positive Sex Feminism?"

page 33 in Chapter Without Ladies, There Cannot Be Gentlemen

"In 2004, the biggest-selling relationships book in the United States was coauthored by a man and a woman, both of whom were screenwriters for "Sex and The City." The book is called "He's Just Not That into You," and its premise is that a man who treats a woman poorly does not have a real character flaw, but rather, "he's just not that into her." The book tells women to stop blaming men for being jerks, and just accept that they have a right not to like any specific woman that much: If he doesn't like you, move on and enjoy life. Amazing, isn't it? A book that says if men treat women like garbage, it is because, essentially, they are just not hot enough. So we have come full circle. Rather than asking men to take responsibility for their selfish behavior towards women and finally become gentlemen, we are telling women that they empower themselves by being honest enough to admit that, when men dump with barely an explanation, it is because in the men's eyes they are no great catch...

CT's opinion: I read "He's Just Not That Into You," and while I believe it counsels women to be strong and not accept bad boy behavior from men they are having romantic-sexual liaisons with, I don't believe it's an excuseology for men to be selfish or to victimize women.
Page 183


"The cleaning woman mentality leads directly to husbands having empty sex with their wives, with no sense of reverence and with no sense of awe. When a man makes love to his wife but thinks about another woman, then climaxes and climbs off his wife, he has treated her like an available whore who is there to satisfy his needs.

Page 296

"Let me explain just why pornography is so nefarious. Far from being a healthy outlet for raging hormones, pornography is a cancerous proclivity that slowly undermines healthy relationships. On a basic level, excessive viewing exposure to nude, female bodies contributes to the penchant of men to think about other women while making love to their wives. In fact, 84 % of men admit to doing just that (and they're dumb enough to believe that their wives don't notice.) We can even go so far as to say that once you bring another woman into your bed. even if only mentally, you are practicing a form of mental decapitation and merely using your wife's body for friction, replacing her head, her essence, with the images of another woman. The Torah, which is very concerned with fostering the mental and emotional intimacy that physical intimacy is meant to promote, actually calls men to task by deeming it a prohibition to fantasize about other women while being with one's wife....

2/1/10

COMMENTARY ON PINK GLITTER IN THE AIR

My favorite from last night's Grammy's ? PINK... the lyrics of the song are a relief from so much raunch... imaginative and romantic and the acrobatics in air? Perfect for the mood... Nearly nude yes but erotic not pornographic. Did you expect this of me after all the bitching I did about the American Music Awards.

New Video Summer 2016