"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
4/5/09
4/2/09
KCRW JASON BENTLEY LISTEN LIVE
Jason Bentley has taken over MORNING BECOMES ECLECTIC, my favorite local radio station, broadcasting from Santa Monica, California.
3/30/09
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....
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....
3/25/09
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
From OPIUM, the Diary of a Cure, Peter Owen Limited Publishers, London MCMLVII
3/18/09
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!
3/16/09
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."
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."
3/11/09
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 ?
3/6/09
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...
Click on the link above for more information...
2/28/09
TONY HILLERMAN - SELDOM DISAPPOINTED
Tony Hillerman
Seldom Disappointed - a Memoir
C 2001
Harper Colins Publishers
pages 262-263 about teaching in academia in the mid 1960's:
"The middle sixties were the ideal time to start if one was fated to spend almost twenty years teaching journalism at an university. Student lethargy still ruled as late as 1963, providing a taste of lecturing to a disinterested audience. But even then the long, loud, and lusty revolution was moving in. Before I could conclude that a professor's life tended to be boring, the late sixties were upon us and students were showing up full of fire, demanding to be taught something relevant, protesting war; the establishment, parking tickets, poorly prepared lectures, prejudices against pot smoking, unisex rest rooms, police brutality, and so forth.'
"Odd as this may sound, it was a wonderful time to be teaching. Students were interested, grade mania and the resulting grade inflation had barely emerged, the curse of political correctness had not yet paralyzed deans and department chairmen and corrupted the faculty. Teaching a roomful of bright young folks who yearned to learn and were willing to argue forced you to defend your position. Sometimes you couldn't. You were learning as much as they were, and it was fun. it wasn't until the early eighties that lethargy restored itself. The numbing dogma of PC hung over the campus, tolerating no opinions but anointed ones. With free speech and free thought ruled out by inquisitors running Women's Studies and the various minorities studies, the joy of learning had seeped out of students. With it went joy of teaching. Time to quit.'
Seldom Disappointed - a Memoir
C 2001
Harper Colins Publishers
pages 262-263 about teaching in academia in the mid 1960's:
"The middle sixties were the ideal time to start if one was fated to spend almost twenty years teaching journalism at an university. Student lethargy still ruled as late as 1963, providing a taste of lecturing to a disinterested audience. But even then the long, loud, and lusty revolution was moving in. Before I could conclude that a professor's life tended to be boring, the late sixties were upon us and students were showing up full of fire, demanding to be taught something relevant, protesting war; the establishment, parking tickets, poorly prepared lectures, prejudices against pot smoking, unisex rest rooms, police brutality, and so forth.'
"Odd as this may sound, it was a wonderful time to be teaching. Students were interested, grade mania and the resulting grade inflation had barely emerged, the curse of political correctness had not yet paralyzed deans and department chairmen and corrupted the faculty. Teaching a roomful of bright young folks who yearned to learn and were willing to argue forced you to defend your position. Sometimes you couldn't. You were learning as much as they were, and it was fun. it wasn't until the early eighties that lethargy restored itself. The numbing dogma of PC hung over the campus, tolerating no opinions but anointed ones. With free speech and free thought ruled out by inquisitors running Women's Studies and the various minorities studies, the joy of learning had seeped out of students. With it went joy of teaching. Time to quit.'
2/20/09
JUDY GRUEN - HILARIUS!
Judy Gruen writes a column for a give-away magazine called Jewish Life. In the February 2009 issue she wrote an article called YOUR RESULTS MAY VARY.
Judy Gruen's latest book is "The Women's Daily Irony Supplement." Clever title!
to quote the article...
"Most of us have been severely chastened by bad economic news, along with an epidemic of business chicanery. Now we are left to wonder: How can we protect ourselves from bunco artists, flimflammers, bamboozlers, rouges and the otherwise slippery, shifty, and shameless? ... One relatively easy way to protect ourselves is to pay closer attention to advertisements, because darned if those ads are not always cleverly sneaking in critical information about their products and services right under our noses.... I became suspicious, however, when it finally dawned on me that the woman pictured in the ad looked young enough to be far more likely candidate for acne cream rather than wrinkle filler. Sure enough, when I whipped out my handy Hubble telescope, I was just able to make out the words: "Model pictured is not an actual customer. In fact, she's not even old enough to buy liqueur legally in most states."
Judy Gruen's latest book is "The Women's Daily Irony Supplement." Clever title!
to quote the article...
"Most of us have been severely chastened by bad economic news, along with an epidemic of business chicanery. Now we are left to wonder: How can we protect ourselves from bunco artists, flimflammers, bamboozlers, rouges and the otherwise slippery, shifty, and shameless? ... One relatively easy way to protect ourselves is to pay closer attention to advertisements, because darned if those ads are not always cleverly sneaking in critical information about their products and services right under our noses.... I became suspicious, however, when it finally dawned on me that the woman pictured in the ad looked young enough to be far more likely candidate for acne cream rather than wrinkle filler. Sure enough, when I whipped out my handy Hubble telescope, I was just able to make out the words: "Model pictured is not an actual customer. In fact, she's not even old enough to buy liqueur legally in most states."
2/16/09
CONVERSATION by Elizabeth Bishop
CONVERSATION
by poet Elizabeth Bishop (deceased)
The tumult in the heart
keeps asking questions.
And then it stops and undertakes the answer
in the same tone of voice.
No one could tell the difference.
Uninnoccent, these conversations start,
and then engage the senses
only half meaning to.
And then there is no choice,
and then there is no sense;
until a name
and all its connotations are the same.
by poet Elizabeth Bishop (deceased)
The tumult in the heart
keeps asking questions.
And then it stops and undertakes the answer
in the same tone of voice.
No one could tell the difference.
Uninnoccent, these conversations start,
and then engage the senses
only half meaning to.
And then there is no choice,
and then there is no sense;
until a name
and all its connotations are the same.
2/13/09
CHRISTINE TRZYNA QUICK BOOK REVIEW OF JUST DO IT BY DOUGLAS BROWN
JUST DO IT
How One Couple Turned Off The TV and Turned on their Sex Lives for 101 Days
(No Excuses)
C Douglas Brown
Crown Publishing New York
(CHAPTER: MAKING LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON)
"Love happens. Yes, it takes nurturing, heat, and light. It demands commitment. it requires certain chemistry. Bur for lucky people, for whatever combination of factors, love blossoms. It's unconscious: a force, a fire, a spirit. Romance, by contrast, is alert. It's intentional. It has an intelligence. It's a dance, of sorts. Both people in a relationship must consider what please their partner; but surprise - something new - claims an important piece of the romance puzzle. So delivering romance is much more complicated than simply referring to a list of likes, picking one, and going for it. In sum, it's magicians' work.
Page 217. I learned something new: asshole bleaching is the latest craze - big thing on both coasts - pornography gone mainstream... No. I don't think I personally want a lighter shade of pink!
How One Couple Turned Off The TV and Turned on their Sex Lives for 101 Days
(No Excuses)
C Douglas Brown
Crown Publishing New York
Douglas Brown looooves his wife, Annie, and (of course) she loves him. Fourteen years into married life, they have two children who are doted upon and (of course) like to interrupt their parent's sex life whenever possible. The kids got on my nerves with their demands for attention but hey, that's the reality of having children in a household. Annie also got on my nerves. She's entirely too cute. But that's not her fault, it's her husband's perception...And it occurs to me that if she had written the book, from her perspective, I don't think she could get away with being as descriptive of Douglas...
Don't read this book if you're hoping to read for graphic erotica. There are some details but most is left to the imagination. There's a focus on the changes that Douglas and Annie go through as a married couple in their search for permanent "home" which turns out to be - well - WHERE THE HEART IS! Yeesh! But, yes, it's true.
page 267
(CHAPTER: MAKING LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON)
"Love happens. Yes, it takes nurturing, heat, and light. It demands commitment. it requires certain chemistry. Bur for lucky people, for whatever combination of factors, love blossoms. It's unconscious: a force, a fire, a spirit. Romance, by contrast, is alert. It's intentional. It has an intelligence. It's a dance, of sorts. Both people in a relationship must consider what please their partner; but surprise - something new - claims an important piece of the romance puzzle. So delivering romance is much more complicated than simply referring to a list of likes, picking one, and going for it. In sum, it's magicians' work.
Page 217. I learned something new: asshole bleaching is the latest craze - big thing on both coasts - pornography gone mainstream... No. I don't think I personally want a lighter shade of pink!
HAPPY VALENTINES DAY !
2/11/09
COMMENTARY ON HARRY CHAPIN TAXI
"Se was going to be an actress and I was going to learn to fly...now she's acting happy and I'm flying in my taxi..." A bitter sweet love song, and lyrics that tell an entire story...
2/10/09
RUMI LOVE POETRY
The intellectual runs away.
afraid of drowning;
the whole business of love
is to drown in the sea.
-Rumi.
afraid of drowning;
the whole business of love
is to drown in the sea.
-Rumi.
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