Got up this morning and put the radio on and probably will be listening to coverage of the Storm Sandy, or Super Storm Sandy, which has already sunken the HMS Bounty pirate ship, and is on the way to New York, New Jersey... the eastern sea board ... all day. And night.
The new York subways are shut down, so is Wall street, so are thousands of air flights, and listening to Heraldo Rivera broadcasting from new York this morning, it sounds as if the streets are deserted, with just a few dare devil cab drivers determined to make their fares. Videos show sea foam whipped up by the wind covering beaches like snow. Millions of people have loaded up on emergency supplies of food and water, there's been a run on flashlights and other survival gear, but even with shelters open, it seems to me that the majority must simply STAY PUT. Who can even afford the gas prices and the motel rooms to flee?
I'm thinking about Art Bell, the radio host who began Coast to Coast AM and was on the air most nights for maybe a decade, and Whitley Streiber, the author of Communion and other UFO Abductee themed books, who with Art wrote a book called THE COMING GLOBAL SUPERSTORM. (I was a huge fan of Art Bell!)
I ordered this book from my library several years back and finally it came in. I settled back on the sofa to read the book on a day off, and did so cover to cover without any television or radio or phone on to interrupt my concentration. The book had short novelesque chapters between science - or alternative science - fact. I was very impressed with it.
It proposed that when the Gulf Stream and Atlantic Ocean current, which is the result of variant water temperatures reacting to each other, changes, the result is not global warming but a rapidly occurring ice age. According to this theory, snowfall would make much of the Northern Hemisphere unlivable. When I finished the book, I turned on the radio to hear, shockingly, that the Tsumani had just hit Thailand.
WHITLEY STRIEBER's UNKNOWN COUNTRY link here for a better explaination.
C 2012 Christine Trzyna / Christine Trzyna Writerly Life
All Rights Reserved including Internet Rights and International Rights.
10/29/12
10/28/12
MOP MEN : INSIDE THE WORLD OF CRIME SCENE CLEANERS : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW
Narrative nonfiction : Alan Emmins MOP MEN was a terrific book, sensitive and just gory enough. He was the everyman gonna look at that long dead body, and finally he overcame his gagging reflex and started doing some clean up for cash himself.
I think the recent Costa Concordia cruise ship beaching story, which I follow, might have influenced me in picking this book up from my library new book shelf (even though it was C 2008). You see, the story of the search for drowned bodies off the coast of Italy or on the sunken ship had been in the news almost daily. Nothing has been so newsworthy when it comes to finding drowned bodies since JFK Junior crashed his plane off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.
Alan's experience depends on Neil, who owns Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Neil is just the kind of guy who is business minded enough to consider what a top writer could do for his business if he lets him follow him around.
In the end you're not going to learn exactly how they do it, no Murphy's Oil Soap apparently, though elbow grease is in order. Instead you get inside the brains of Alan Emmins; what he's thinking, what he's feelings, and how the experience of cleaning up from murders, suicides, and accidents changes him. Luckily, not for good.
MOP MEN book is C 2004 and 2008 Alan Emmins Thomas Dunn Books
Saint Martin's Press
C Christine Trzyna 2012 All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
I think the recent Costa Concordia cruise ship beaching story, which I follow, might have influenced me in picking this book up from my library new book shelf (even though it was C 2008). You see, the story of the search for drowned bodies off the coast of Italy or on the sunken ship had been in the news almost daily. Nothing has been so newsworthy when it comes to finding drowned bodies since JFK Junior crashed his plane off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.
Alan's experience depends on Neil, who owns Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Neil is just the kind of guy who is business minded enough to consider what a top writer could do for his business if he lets him follow him around.
In the end you're not going to learn exactly how they do it, no Murphy's Oil Soap apparently, though elbow grease is in order. Instead you get inside the brains of Alan Emmins; what he's thinking, what he's feelings, and how the experience of cleaning up from murders, suicides, and accidents changes him. Luckily, not for good.
MOP MEN book is C 2004 and 2008 Alan Emmins Thomas Dunn Books
Saint Martin's Press
C Christine Trzyna 2012 All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
10/17/12
MY CROSS TO BEAR : GREGG ALLMAN with ALAN LIGHT
Midnight Rider is one of my favorite songs of all time and it's Gregg's too. Allman Brother's band, after the death of Duane Allman, always had one Allman - Gregg, who prefers Gregory.
OK, Gregg's writerly voice was preserved though working "with" another writer, which is always important, as is his sensibility, philosophy of life, and confessions. He has five children, all with different women, four musicians and a nurse out of those, has drunk hard, used lots of drugs, and been a heroin addict, notably married to superstar Cher.
I've been thinking about how much of the music I love(d) has been written and performed by alcoholics and drug addicts, in particular heroin addicts. I haven't knowingly welcomed any drug addicts in my adult life, but the ones I've met in coffee houses tell me that all addicts are liars who know how to hide their habits, even from those they live with. They seem to think that Twelve Step Programs are the way to go.
OK, Gregg's writerly voice was preserved though working "with" another writer, which is always important, as is his sensibility, philosophy of life, and confessions. He has five children, all with different women, four musicians and a nurse out of those, has drunk hard, used lots of drugs, and been a heroin addict, notably married to superstar Cher.
I've been thinking about how much of the music I love(d) has been written and performed by alcoholics and drug addicts, in particular heroin addicts. I haven't knowingly welcomed any drug addicts in my adult life, but the ones I've met in coffee houses tell me that all addicts are liars who know how to hide their habits, even from those they live with. They seem to think that Twelve Step Programs are the way to go.
****
video went poof! Taken down Nov 2022
10/16/12
10/10/12
LISA SEE : DREAMS OF JOY : A FANTASTIC PART TWO OF THE SHANGHAI GIRLS STORY : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW
Dreams of Joy is C 2011 Lisa See
LISA SEE : DREAMS OF JOY : A FANTASTIC PART TWO OF THE SHANGHAI GIRLS STORY : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW
This book is a fascinating page turner rich with historical details, cultural and generational conflict.
The story begins where Shanghai Girls left off. It's 1958, Mao is in power, and China is Red with Communism. Joy, the young daughter of two sisters, May and Pearl, has just found out that her aunt is her mother and that her father was a somewhat famous artist in China 18 years before who used her aunt and mother as models for his advertising posters.
Thinking herself to be one Chinese-American who wishes to return to the country of her heritage to embrace Communism wholeheartedly and stay there, Joy finds herself living in a village commune and marries the first man who has ever sparked her desire. Life in the country is much different than in the cities, and only by youth can she bear it. The communes banish western thought and individuality and starve doing so. Can May, the sister who raised Joy with her husband, who recently commit suicide and left her a young widow, make it to Communist China from Canton or Hong Kong and live there long enough to find Joy and bring her home?
You know she will, but not until years of struggle.
There will likely be another book to carry this story of the sisters May and Pearl, who came to the United States through arranged marriages, forward into the 1960's.
These women shared a daughter and kept the secret of her parentage until she was 18. Now they return to the United States with an entourage that includes Joy's birth father, a new husband, and an adopted son. Now with the sisters who stick together through everything ready to start life over, and some would argue for the first time, tell me, how can there not be more story?
C 2012 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
LISA SEE : DREAMS OF JOY : A FANTASTIC PART TWO OF THE SHANGHAI GIRLS STORY : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW
This book is a fascinating page turner rich with historical details, cultural and generational conflict.
The story begins where Shanghai Girls left off. It's 1958, Mao is in power, and China is Red with Communism. Joy, the young daughter of two sisters, May and Pearl, has just found out that her aunt is her mother and that her father was a somewhat famous artist in China 18 years before who used her aunt and mother as models for his advertising posters.
Thinking herself to be one Chinese-American who wishes to return to the country of her heritage to embrace Communism wholeheartedly and stay there, Joy finds herself living in a village commune and marries the first man who has ever sparked her desire. Life in the country is much different than in the cities, and only by youth can she bear it. The communes banish western thought and individuality and starve doing so. Can May, the sister who raised Joy with her husband, who recently commit suicide and left her a young widow, make it to Communist China from Canton or Hong Kong and live there long enough to find Joy and bring her home?
You know she will, but not until years of struggle.
There will likely be another book to carry this story of the sisters May and Pearl, who came to the United States through arranged marriages, forward into the 1960's.
These women shared a daughter and kept the secret of her parentage until she was 18. Now they return to the United States with an entourage that includes Joy's birth father, a new husband, and an adopted son. Now with the sisters who stick together through everything ready to start life over, and some would argue for the first time, tell me, how can there not be more story?
C 2012 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
10/7/12
I ADMIT IT! I NEED SPELLCHECK
I admit it! I need spellcheck. Don't know about you but at some time way long ago when I was either first learning to spell or first learning to type (and I HATED TYPING!) I began to chronically misspell certain words. I find my fingers typing these words wrong time and time again, and you'd think will SPELLCHECK that I would sort of get the hint already and start spelling these words correctly.
But the real reason I need spellcheck is that I think faster than I type and as I get tired of typing and make more and more typos, but I don't want to stop and be an editor at that point, I just want to get my thoughts down.
I typed four words wrong just now. The SPELLCHECK got three of them.
But the real reason I need spellcheck is that I think faster than I type and as I get tired of typing and make more and more typos, but I don't want to stop and be an editor at that point, I just want to get my thoughts down.
I typed four words wrong just now. The SPELLCHECK got three of them.
9/24/12
LOVE IS THE CURE : ELTON JOHN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW
LOVE IS THE CURE
On Life, Loss, and the End of AIDS
C Elton John AIDS Foundation
Publisher : Little Brown and Company
The writing was smooooth; Strunk and White would be proud!
Elton John kept the focus on AIDS, so while some personal information is woven in, it's not the focus, and the focus feels relentless.
The information Elton John has to deliver is appalling. Most utterly appalling is the frequency - normalcy - of RAPE OF WOMEN IN SOUTH AFRICA, where Blacks have extremely high rates of AIDS.
I cannot help but apply my own values; it's horrific and disgusting. Apartheid ended but insane sexism and homophobia has not. South African leader Nelson Mandela appears in ads but maybe these people DON'T WANT LIFE! This is not about Whites oppressing Blacks in South Africa. This is about Blacks doing themselves in. Elton John is too kind to say so.
There are other examples, other countries. In South Africa the women are raped and it's strangly frequent enough to be implied acceptable and yet they are afraid to admit it which means it is not acceptable, so people go without medical treatment until they are about to die, hiding the secret of their rape... and the children... they become orphans... they die too.
Yes, there are other countries where AIDS is taking lives because of ignorance, other examples in the book. Elton's not picking on South Africa.
So, after getting over my fury about South Africa, I took a moment to ask myself the question that that was part of the "prime directive" on the old Star Trek series.
(If you don't remember, on Star Trek the crew beams down to various planets surfaces where they are, by their very presence, going to influence the culture, while trying not to. They are supposed to attend to their business for going there, take care of a problem, and leave.) Can we take our values and try to make another culture conform to them because we think or know that these people would be better off with our values or can we avoid doing that?
How can we as outsiders address RAPE CULTURE in another country on another continent when we still have a rape culture here, though not as horrible as in South Africa? Or does change have to come from the inside, from people there admitting the truth about what's going on and how they are ruining their own lives and the lives of others and stop behaving that way?
Hard question. Left unanswered.
Celibacy still has its charm
C 2012 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
On Life, Loss, and the End of AIDS
C Elton John AIDS Foundation
Publisher : Little Brown and Company
The writing was smooooth; Strunk and White would be proud!
Elton John kept the focus on AIDS, so while some personal information is woven in, it's not the focus, and the focus feels relentless.
The information Elton John has to deliver is appalling. Most utterly appalling is the frequency - normalcy - of RAPE OF WOMEN IN SOUTH AFRICA, where Blacks have extremely high rates of AIDS.
I cannot help but apply my own values; it's horrific and disgusting. Apartheid ended but insane sexism and homophobia has not. South African leader Nelson Mandela appears in ads but maybe these people DON'T WANT LIFE! This is not about Whites oppressing Blacks in South Africa. This is about Blacks doing themselves in. Elton John is too kind to say so.
There are other examples, other countries. In South Africa the women are raped and it's strangly frequent enough to be implied acceptable and yet they are afraid to admit it which means it is not acceptable, so people go without medical treatment until they are about to die, hiding the secret of their rape... and the children... they become orphans... they die too.
Yes, there are other countries where AIDS is taking lives because of ignorance, other examples in the book. Elton's not picking on South Africa.
So, after getting over my fury about South Africa, I took a moment to ask myself the question that that was part of the "prime directive" on the old Star Trek series.
(If you don't remember, on Star Trek the crew beams down to various planets surfaces where they are, by their very presence, going to influence the culture, while trying not to. They are supposed to attend to their business for going there, take care of a problem, and leave.) Can we take our values and try to make another culture conform to them because we think or know that these people would be better off with our values or can we avoid doing that?
How can we as outsiders address RAPE CULTURE in another country on another continent when we still have a rape culture here, though not as horrible as in South Africa? Or does change have to come from the inside, from people there admitting the truth about what's going on and how they are ruining their own lives and the lives of others and stop behaving that way?
Hard question. Left unanswered.
Celibacy still has its charm
C 2012 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
9/20/12
IRVING STONE Quotation
There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.” Irving Stone (from Clarence Darrow for the Defense)
DOGS NEVER LIE ABOUT LOVE
DOGS NEVER LIE ABOUT LOVE as seen stitched on a pillow in the book "A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of a Misspent Life" by Mary Randolph Carter.
9/17/12
OLD SCHOOL? GOODBYE YOUTUBE STATION?
Musing today.
I've been meaning to delete my personal YOUTUBE station for a while now. One of these days I'm gonna do it. I opened it with a not g-mail account. Now to get into it, I have to open a new g-mail account. How dare they block me from using my old acount just because it's their competitor Yahoo? Is there no GRANDFATHER CLAUSE?
So my station has been sort of, song by song, becoming defunct for a while now and I don't even want it to show on the net. It's been a while since I personally listened to it while I wrote, though it's a lot of songs that that came to mind while simply living life and a few discoveries. The station was mostly for my personal pleasure.
I guess I have to admit that my musical choices are generally OLD SCHOOL. I have a huge inventory of songs remembered. A lot of these songs are "oldies" that I probably first heard on "oldies" radio stations. I did a lot of listening to the radio and was very influenced by friends who actually had the money to buy albums and turned me on to their favorite music when I was in my youth.
I used to collect lyrics as poetry, as story, and that's how I got to be a pre-teen who knew that Jimmy Webb wrote a lot of songs I loved.
I took a song writing class once and was not a natural. Since I love music this was unhappy for me. The teacher had written songs for Elvis and Barry Manilow and well, I thought he was a bit pompous and under impressed with my efforts. Most of the guys in the class were taking it to get laid.
In fact, I have only bad memories of that class, the teacher, and the people in it. It was the first I had a headache that lasted.
I love a good beat, love to hear drummers, and I can appreciate a rhyme as well as a rhythm but the rap phenomena leaped over me the way a fire leaps over the freeway.
Sometimes CDs sound tinny to me. I miss the old stereo with all the knobs to adjust things, the warmth of the plastic, even if it was popping.
Worse, at some point in music history, when there were too many love songs, song writers were striving to write about anything but love, but the songs with heart and emotion, those are the survivors. Maybe that's why I reach back past rap, to the singer-songwriters like the Allman Brothers Band, Neil Young and Led Zeppelin, to Carole King, Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Linda Ronstadt (to name a few).
A generation of Guitar Gods are moving into elderhood, and these people are all my elders, so I'm not of their generation really, but their music is mine.
I've been meaning to delete my personal YOUTUBE station for a while now. One of these days I'm gonna do it. I opened it with a not g-mail account. Now to get into it, I have to open a new g-mail account. How dare they block me from using my old acount just because it's their competitor Yahoo? Is there no GRANDFATHER CLAUSE?
So my station has been sort of, song by song, becoming defunct for a while now and I don't even want it to show on the net. It's been a while since I personally listened to it while I wrote, though it's a lot of songs that that came to mind while simply living life and a few discoveries. The station was mostly for my personal pleasure.
I guess I have to admit that my musical choices are generally OLD SCHOOL. I have a huge inventory of songs remembered. A lot of these songs are "oldies" that I probably first heard on "oldies" radio stations. I did a lot of listening to the radio and was very influenced by friends who actually had the money to buy albums and turned me on to their favorite music when I was in my youth.
I used to collect lyrics as poetry, as story, and that's how I got to be a pre-teen who knew that Jimmy Webb wrote a lot of songs I loved.
I took a song writing class once and was not a natural. Since I love music this was unhappy for me. The teacher had written songs for Elvis and Barry Manilow and well, I thought he was a bit pompous and under impressed with my efforts. Most of the guys in the class were taking it to get laid.
In fact, I have only bad memories of that class, the teacher, and the people in it. It was the first I had a headache that lasted.
I love a good beat, love to hear drummers, and I can appreciate a rhyme as well as a rhythm but the rap phenomena leaped over me the way a fire leaps over the freeway.
Sometimes CDs sound tinny to me. I miss the old stereo with all the knobs to adjust things, the warmth of the plastic, even if it was popping.
Worse, at some point in music history, when there were too many love songs, song writers were striving to write about anything but love, but the songs with heart and emotion, those are the survivors. Maybe that's why I reach back past rap, to the singer-songwriters like the Allman Brothers Band, Neil Young and Led Zeppelin, to Carole King, Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Linda Ronstadt (to name a few).
A generation of Guitar Gods are moving into elderhood, and these people are all my elders, so I'm not of their generation really, but their music is mine.
9/13/12
JOHNNY RIVERS : POOR SIDE OF TOWN
One of my favorite songs since I was yet to be a teenager. First heard it on a scratched up 45rpm that was handed down. That record got played over and over again on a plastic kid record player - mono - the worn needle scratching deeper.
9/9/12
DOGS IN LITERATURE : WOLF IN THE EARTH CHILDREN'S SERIES : CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR
I'm a fan of Jean M. Auel, the prolific author of the Earth's Children series that begins with the book Clan of the Cave Bear. The books follow the life of Ayla, who is separated from her parents and tribe as a child, is adopted by a Clan ( "the flat heads") that is not of her own people, and is eventually shunned by them for being so different.
Driven to survive on her own, she spends a winter surviving by holing up in a cave in a valley, only going out into the cold to hunt with a sling shot and surviving by foraging plants in summer weather. Eventually, she finds a wolf cub that is also alone to be a companion and through observation and training, turns him into a prehistoric pet wolf - dog who comes when she whistles, to the amazement of every person she encounters from then on. This then is Jean M. Auel's way of introducing the relationship that humans and dogs have had for thousands of years.
When all the breeding dogs into small and even incompetent animals began, who really knows? I once watched a video about what the world would be like if there were no humans. Dogs would quickly resume their traditional lives of hunting in packs, and most of the flat faced ones would be so bad at hunting that they probably wouldn't survive.
Driven to survive on her own, she spends a winter surviving by holing up in a cave in a valley, only going out into the cold to hunt with a sling shot and surviving by foraging plants in summer weather. Eventually, she finds a wolf cub that is also alone to be a companion and through observation and training, turns him into a prehistoric pet wolf - dog who comes when she whistles, to the amazement of every person she encounters from then on. This then is Jean M. Auel's way of introducing the relationship that humans and dogs have had for thousands of years.
When all the breeding dogs into small and even incompetent animals began, who really knows? I once watched a video about what the world would be like if there were no humans. Dogs would quickly resume their traditional lives of hunting in packs, and most of the flat faced ones would be so bad at hunting that they probably wouldn't survive.
9/6/12
DOGS IN LITERATURE : TAISHA ABELAR'S MANFRED
Speaking of Taisha Abelar's new book (see past posts) that still hasn't come out (I just checked a popular book selling site on the net) one of my favorite characters in her first and only published book is the "dog" Manfred.
Come on - we know he is a sorcerer trapped in a dog body! But how that happened?
In this book Taisha encounters Manfred in the mysterious house in Mexico where she is in a spiritual apprenticeship. Manfred likes to lay on her, taking as much of her energy as he can. Manfred is a sensitive beast, who overreacts when anyone says he looks like a toad. So of course the word must be spelled out around him. T O A D! He calms down when you say that someone else looks like a toad or that he does not look like a toad!
Carlos Castaneda said that Taisha wrote this book while in dreaming. I wonder if Taisha ever had a dog or dogs in real life. I wonder if Manfred will make a reappearance in the long awaited new book?
In this book Taisha encounters Manfred in the mysterious house in Mexico where she is in a spiritual apprenticeship. Manfred likes to lay on her, taking as much of her energy as he can. Manfred is a sensitive beast, who overreacts when anyone says he looks like a toad. So of course the word must be spelled out around him. T O A D! He calms down when you say that someone else looks like a toad or that he does not look like a toad!
Carlos Castaneda said that Taisha wrote this book while in dreaming. I wonder if Taisha ever had a dog or dogs in real life. I wonder if Manfred will make a reappearance in the long awaited new book?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)