4/20/09
PULITZER PRIZES ANNOUNCED ! LAS VEGAS SUN CONGRADULATIONS ALEXANDRA BERZON !
" The Las Vegas newspaper was cited for the "courageous reporting" of Alexandra Berzon, whose stories about lax enforcement of safety rules on the Las Vegas Strip led to changes in policy and improved workplace conditions.The death toll on the Strip had reached nine in 16 months as casino giants undertook a $32 billion building boom, including the largest private commercial development in U.S. history. Berzon described how the rush to build quickly and at highly congested work sites led to safety shortcuts that contributed to deaths."
4/18/09
SYLVIA PLATH and TED HUGHES son - Another Suicide
Just reading DIVINE MADNESS which profiles Sylvia Plath among many other creative geniuses and their struggle with mental illness...
OR is mental illness and creative genius linked? Sylvia and Ted's son, who also struggled with depression... and I dare say, notoriety. (Link to Yahoo article may be live if you click on the title!)
"It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16th March 2009 at his home in Alaska," his sister Frieda Hughes said in a statement published by The Times of London.
There is one comment I have to make... If you get seasonal depression don't live in Alaska or anywhere where the sun doesn't shine almost everyday. Get yourself into the sun belt!
OR is mental illness and creative genius linked? Sylvia and Ted's son, who also struggled with depression... and I dare say, notoriety. (Link to Yahoo article may be live if you click on the title!)
"It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16th March 2009 at his home in Alaska," his sister Frieda Hughes said in a statement published by The Times of London.
There is one comment I have to make... If you get seasonal depression don't live in Alaska or anywhere where the sun doesn't shine almost everyday. Get yourself into the sun belt!
4/17/09
UCLA and LOS ANGELES TIMES FESTIVAL OF BOOKS
IS APRIL 25th and 26th this year....
I usually go when I'm in town. I find the panel discussions interesting but I wish there were more concentration on individual authors speaking and reading...
Free tickets if you hurry.
I usually go when I'm in town. I find the panel discussions interesting but I wish there were more concentration on individual authors speaking and reading...
Free tickets if you hurry.
4/15/09
GORE VIDAL Quote From PALIMPSEST
From PALIMPSEST a memoir by GORE VIDAL
page 239 hardback
...Although I have had several lifelong friends who were writers, I have never much enjoyed the company of writers. I also did not realize, nor did the others at ... gatherings, that we had arrived on the scene to witness the end of the novel. Today the word novelist still enjoys considerable prestige, so much so that both Mailer and Capote chose to call works of journalism novels. But that was thirty years ago. Today an ambitious writer would be well advised to label any work of his imagination nonfiction, or perhaps, a memoir.
One day, in the spring on 1950, I was invited to lunch by a very ambitious, very young southern novelist who wanted to shine in those social circles that are, for the most part, closed to very young ambitious southern writers. Like Capote, he wanted to be accepted by what was known than as cafe society, and like Capote, he had mistaken it for the great and largely invisible to outsiders, world that Proust had so obsessively retrieved from lost time. In later years , I liked to pretend that Capote had actually picked the right ladder and I would observe,... "Truman Capote has tried, with some success, to get into a world that I have tried, with some success to get out of." Truman was surprisingly innocent. He mistook the rich who liked publicity for the ruling class, and he made himself far too much at home among them, only to find that he was to them no more than an amusing person who could be dispensed with, as he was when he published lurid gossip about them. Although of little interest or value in themselves, these self-invented figures are nothing if not tough, and quite as heartless as the real things, as the dying Swan discovered when he found that his life meant less to his esteemed ... than her pair of red shoes."
...Although I have had several lifelong friends who were writers, I have never much enjoyed the company of writers. I also did not realize, nor did the others at ... gatherings, that we had arrived on the scene to witness the end of the novel. Today the word novelist still enjoys considerable prestige, so much so that both Mailer and Capote chose to call works of journalism novels. But that was thirty years ago. Today an ambitious writer would be well advised to label any work of his imagination nonfiction, or perhaps, a memoir.
One day, in the spring on 1950, I was invited to lunch by a very ambitious, very young southern novelist who wanted to shine in those social circles that are, for the most part, closed to very young ambitious southern writers. Like Capote, he wanted to be accepted by what was known than as cafe society, and like Capote, he had mistaken it for the great and largely invisible to outsiders, world that Proust had so obsessively retrieved from lost time. In later years , I liked to pretend that Capote had actually picked the right ladder and I would observe,... "Truman Capote has tried, with some success, to get into a world that I have tried, with some success to get out of." Truman was surprisingly innocent. He mistook the rich who liked publicity for the ruling class, and he made himself far too much at home among them, only to find that he was to them no more than an amusing person who could be dispensed with, as he was when he published lurid gossip about them. Although of little interest or value in themselves, these self-invented figures are nothing if not tough, and quite as heartless as the real things, as the dying Swan discovered when he found that his life meant less to his esteemed ... than her pair of red shoes."
4/13/09
THE LIVING LIBRARY EVERYONE'S AN OPEN BOOK
As reported by Jeanne Storck in the January 2009 Whole Life Times, people ARE books, in The Living Library, an organization that fights prejudice by hosting discussions in local libraries (click on the title here to link which is under construction). "Readers check out "books" (people) by sitting down and talking to those whose lifestyles are subject to preconceptions, "everyone from Buddhists to homeless people to police officers."
The living library was founded by Ronni Abergel, a Danish anti violence activist, and has staged events around the world. LIBRARIES are considered to be neutral spaces, where such discussions can take place on purpose.
The living library was founded by Ronni Abergel, a Danish anti violence activist, and has staged events around the world. LIBRARIES are considered to be neutral spaces, where such discussions can take place on purpose.
4/7/09
4/5/09
VIRGINIA WOOLF quote
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
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...
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