Books for Readers # 79

Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers

BOOKS FOR READERS is a free, independent newsletter written and produced by Meredith Sue Willis, copyright Meredith Sue Willis 2006. To have this Newsletter sent to you by e-mail, send a blank email to Readerbooks-subscribe@topica.com. To unsubscribe, send a blank email to Readerbooks-unsubscribe @topica.com. Write to Meredith Sue Willis at MSueWillis@aol.com. Unless you specifically request otherwise, your responses or selections from them may be included in future Newsletters.

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Newsletter # 79
January 21 , 2006

Let me recommend most enthusiastically both to writers and readers Adam Sexton’s new book MASTER CLASS IN FICTION WRITING: TECHNIQUES FROM AUSTEN, HEMINGWAY, AND OTHER GREATS (LESSONS FROM THE ALL-STAR WRITER’S WORKSHOP). The idea of the book is that you can learn to be a better writer by studying specific techniques of excellent writers: Hemingway for voice, Austen for characterization, etc. He puts in all the sections you’d expect– structure, plot, characterization, dialogue, description, point of view, etc., and each section focuses on one work– a short story, long story, or novel. He actually tells you to “Stop now and read....” so you’ve got an excellent guide to reading or re-reading some twentieth century classics plus SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. I didn’t read every single thing he suggested, but I did re-read Joyce’s “Araby;” Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” and Hemingway’s A FAREWELL TO ARMS.

Plus I read my first ever book by Iris Murdoch, A SEVERED HEAD. I don’t know why I’ve been so slow to dip into Murdoch’s work, but I’m glad I was pricked to try this weirdly funny book with lots of dialogue and lots of silly people switching sexual partners. It had a brown and red quality to me, I suppose what I imagine to be wealthy British interiors with oak paneling and damask. Murdoch tells the story from a man’s point of view, creating the illusion of a man’s voice very well because (a) the milieu is one where men and woman talk the same language and even a man who goes to business is a bit of a dilettante, and (b) there is a lot of yearning after women’s bodies which she does very well. I can’t imagine plunging into Murdoch’s world every day or even every week, but it was fun to try out.

Does anyone have any suggestions for my next Iris Murdoch book?

As for the Hemingway, which I read years and years ago, the simplest way to describe my reaction is to say that the war parts are superb, but I could have done with less of dear brave Catherine. The ambulance drivers, the famous retreat in disarray, the casualness of death, the disorganized reality of war on the ground– even descriptions of rain and flat agricultural country are as good as anything I’ve read from the last century. But the love affair became tiresome to me. Even Catherine’s tragic end annoys me because it is really about the narrator, not about her. I sound terribly crabby here, and I don’t pretend that this is anything but personal, but is it really fair that the lover’s death is just a part of the young man’s coming-of-age experience? It’s still a really worthwhile book, of course, and I intend to recommend it to one young man I know.

That latter reaction is mine, not Adam Sexton’s. For a quick course in some great fiction and to study fiction techniques for your own writing, get hold of Adam Sexton’s MASTER CLASS.

A couple more: I re-read THE WARDEN by Anthony Trollope at the suggestion of Ingrid Hughes. This chronologically first of the Barchester novels is perhaps the best portrait I know of a morally good man whose goodness doesn’t keep him from having to make a hard choice.

A Christmas gift from my husband: THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING by Joan Didion. I didn’t start it until hearing of the sudden death of an acquaintance. It is a powerful book about the loss of a husband, perhaps made more fascinating because most readers know that shortly after publication, Didion’s daughter, whose illness is a part of the book, had a relapse and died. So the facts are shocking and moving in themselves. Still, I had some of my usual Joan Didion reactions, which include jealousy of her fame and accomplishments. She always assumes that her life is somehow typical–as she jets around to Malibu and Hawaii. She has an interesting passage about people she knows who think they are great life-managers because they have the phone numbers of all the top doctors and good friends at every consulate overseas. Of course part of the point is that those at the top are also subject to massive heart attacks and septic shock and the insanity of grief.

Most of the time as I read Didion, I am totally wrapped in her life (I made a typo here and wrote “wrapt,” conflating wrapped up and rapt) and observations and insights, but every so often the spell fails, and I think, Yes, yes, but why are YOU the one who gets to tell your life instead of, say, some Ethiopian mother whose sons were stolen to be soldiers and whose baby died of starvation? The point isn’t count your blessings and think of the starving children in Africa, but that recognizing the common humanity of the privileged is only a small part of what we need to be doing.

Meredith Sue Willis

MORE TO READ

Shelley Ettinger says, “I'm just finishing Michael Cunningham's SPECIMEN DAYS. It didn't get very good reviews and I'd had mixed feelings about THE HOURS so I hadn't rushed to read it, but I took it out of the library last week and it's bowling me over. His writing, as always, is extraordinarily beautiful, but I'm also loving the story--or rather, the three stories, set in NYC in three different eras, including a dystopian future, all harking in some way to Walt Whitman's poetic vision.”

Sheila Belt says that in the busyness of life, she finds that keeping a short story collection beside the bed the best way to get some reading done. She recommends BREAKING ICE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY BLACK WRITERS edited by Terry McMillan with a preface by John Edgar Wideman. Featured writers include Gloria Naylor, Darryl Pinckney, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, Terry McMillan, and many others.

I’ve read a couple of books on artists lately. I liked the little CARAVAGGIO: PAINTER OF MIRACLES by Francine Prose from the “Eminent Lives Series.” It’s a short introduction to Caravaggio written in graceful sentences. He was a street fighter in life, but he conveyed an astoundingly materialistic splendor in his religious paintings– Prose calls them Caravaggio’s miracles– Paul getting his vision, Peter being crucified. Then there are all the paintings of seductive little boys....

Also read/looked at DAVID: FIVE HUNDRED YEARS by Antonio Paolucci. This was a Christmas present from my son, a picture book of Il Gigante’s inhuman brilliant eye close up and his infinitely more expressive and appealing flanks, feet, hands, etc. with several articles offering a general appreciation of the statue, its history, and short bio of Michelangelo. This will make a good resource–issues of preservation and political meaning and well as the innate splendor of the thing.

FICTION, MEMOIR, AND TRUTH – SOLICITING RESPONSES

Carol Rosenthal mentions the current scandal about memoir– the James Frey Oprah pick A MILLION LITTLE PIECES. She says that the scandal strikes her as crazy, “given all the big lies we are told every single day, the official lies that lurk in every nook and cranny of the public imagination.”

I had actually been following more closely the brouhaha about J.T. LeRoy (who used to sell raccoon penis bones on his website). I talked a little about J.T.’s novel SARAH in one of the early issues of this newsletter, saying of the novel at the time, “SARAH, by J.T. LeRoy, a young West Virginia native who now lives in San Francisco...is set in the back lots of the barren gas station-restaurant truck stops of the Interstate highway system. Here pimps of various degrees of kindheartedness and brutality run stables of prostitutes of all genders, primarily servicing truck drivers.” The main character of the book is a boy who appropriates his mother's clothes and name. Predictably, as all the people in this world are involved in the sex trade, he becomes a prostitute too. This was supposed to be a gauze-thin disguised version of LeRoy’s own life. The book got a lot of attention, and the boy was taken up by celebrity types– and now is exposed to be most likely a middle aged woman writer plus a skinny younger woman who pretended to be J.T. in public, wearing dark glasses and wigs. (See http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/features/14718/ and http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30616FA34540C7A8CDDA80894DE404482).

So here’s my question: What is going on here? Are we so starved for something to believe in, for truth, that we are confusing Truth with Real? As a fiction writer, I find this a fascinating topic. What’s wrong with a middle aged woman imagining the life of a boy prostitute? And mainly why would such a book have a better chance if written by an actual boy prostitute?

Thoughts on this topic welcome.

SOME GOOD FOLKS ON THE WEB:

There is a Daniella Gioseffi issue of SUGAR MULE!

GHOTI magazine has an interview with Nathan Leslie where he talks about what it takes to be a writer today– and says something nice things in passing about me and Lynda Schor.

Barbara Crooker has more in her series of post 9-11 poems. Also, see her new book, RADIANCE at
http://www.word-press.com .

MORE QUOTATIONS ABOUT BOOKS:

Phyllis Moore offers this one from Winston Churchill: "If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them....arrange them on you own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances." ( Winston Churchill from Book Lovers Quotations edited by Helen Exley. ) Then she goes on to say, “My personal plan is to arrange my Appalachian collection by genres but to not let books touch each other if I know the authors don't like each other or if one is a prude and the other a free spirit. Good friends and lovers are side by side.”

CAT PLESKA ON EUDORA WELTY

Cat Pleska has an interesting blog/article on Eudora Welty.

IS YOUR TITLE A BEST SELLER???

And here’s what all you writers have been waiting for: a website that compares the qualities of a title to the titles of best sellers.

WHERE TO FIND BOOKS

Books mentioned in this newsletter with no associated website are available from your public library and your local independent bookstore as well as online and at the mall. For online shopping, try Bookfinder or a site that specializes in textbooks but includes general trade books too– Direct Textbook. Other places for comparison shopping are http://www.cheapbooks.info/ and http://www.allbookstores.com. Sources for used and out-of-print books include Advanced Book Exchange and Alibris.

You can also, of course, get almost any book online from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble, but keep in mind that both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble avoid unions and are responsible for the demise of many independent book stores.

Please send any responses and suggestions directly to me. Unless you say otherwise, your responses may be edited and published in this newsletter. Please e-mail Meredith Sue Willis at Meredith Sue Willis.

Big Sky Warm January

Exceptionally warm and pretty today, houses a little naked without their bushes and trees, generally in colors of dun brown and a fair amount of green. I've been working on what seeds I have in the freezer-- next comes ordering seeds, then preparations for the Big Deer Exclusion. Meanwhile, on the family front, Joel is about to rent an apartment for next year! I remember my apartment when I was at Barnard. Not my first, because I had two the year I was in VISTA, but the 929 West End Avenue was the real thing.

Eleven hours and 45 minutes without power

Well, the power finally came on-- Just four houses were without it, due to a blown down tree, and the almost-twelve hours due to the tens of thousands of other folks without power. Total disruption of my day's plans, of course, but at the end, I was in front of a fire with a candleabra burning beside me, reading-- and the light of fire and candle was making me calm in a way that these flickering screens can never do, which makes me wonder if we're really living right. But when it came on-- after I'd gone out on the porch and cheered for the "overhead" crew up in a cherry picker -- I got so excited: setting clocks, starting a wash that had been planned for first thing this morning, listening to the heat go on-- checking the stove with its electric spark-- the old light calm and making a safe place in the darkness, the new light all eager and chipper and full of activity!

MLK Celebration in South Orange Maplewood

January 16
The Interfaith Outreach Committee's MLK celebration was excellent today-- Dr. Clement Price was the speaker, with Muslim, Jewish, Baptist, and Unitarian prayers or readings. The Voices in Harmony choir sang, with a super splendid solo by someone I don't know who just woke me up and got me soaring up into the arches of Our Lady of Sorrows. A big crowd, and downstairs, Barbara Heisler Williams's book collection plus several tables suggesting help on the Academic Achievment gap, so the Achieve tutoring program was there, and a mentoring group or two plus us, the Schools Committee of the Coalition and the Coalition itself. It is so good at least once or twice a year to be part of something harmonious-- a hint (as several of the speakers said) of what we are all struggling to create, the taste of the Beloved Community, which is of course what all of our wrangling is about: the possibility of a place where people really do reacj acrpss the lines of race and religion, not to lose their identity, but to learn from each other and create something new. Music always does it for me.

Magical Thinking: Mine, Yours, and Didion's

January 14
More thoughts on magical thinking: My insistence on doing whatever seems to have worked in the past to keep airplanes in the air: staying awake, tracking its progress across the continent, etc. The strange ordinary marvel of a cross country flight. Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking is on my mind too, of course, and how what she marvels at– her own irrational belief out of grief that she can bring back her husband if only she has everything ready for him– is really totally common and maybe even normal. We are the animal that understands the existence of cause and effect, and understand it over greater distances of time and space as the other animals don't, or at least I don't think they do. We are thus are tortured by a sense that if we play the game right, we might manage to influence it.
This is probably one source of religion as well as of superstition and magic. Probably another source of religion is what I think of as the deep calm, the serenity of the center– the feeling of well-being and oneness that may be as natural as the cause-and-effect nonsense. Both of them probably essential to the full human experience. What wise friendly aliens in science fiction always refer to as the youthful, unfinished, and even callow quality of our species...

Airplanes again

My mom is safely back in Shinnston, WV, after her marathon travels: from before Thanksgiving to now, West Virginia to Tennessee, to California, to New Jersey to Cleveland and back to WV. Now I have to keep Joel's plane in the air tonight as he returns from California with Doug and Alex K. after their Kobe versus Bron Bron basketball game last night.
His plane left late and is in flight now. This is the magical thinking problem-- that somehow I am responsible for keeping planes in the air, and it seems like a lot of people who are important to me are flying.

New Toshiba laptop on my lap

5:10 PM or so and my new Toshiba laptop is on my lap in front of the fire. This is what I’ve been waiting for, preparing for. I’m sitting on the couch, with my feet on the big pine IKEA coffee table with a duraflame log flickering away in the fireplace. It’s rainy and I’m damp from having gone out to the garden to get some mâche and greens for salad. Small red pool of Three Buck Chuck in the goblet. I just read an article in The New York Review of Books about Fra Angelico, an exhibition at the Met, which I might possibly see, but even if I don’t is a direct line to having been in Florence and having been in those old churches where the candles for sale and the fresh modern kids are mixed in with the altar pieces that are studied around the world and stun with their human apprehension of what they perceived to be the divine. I have not had an easy day–woke with concern aboutr some phone calls, various difficult business with the Coalition. So there was (to me) strenuous work on a document, various phone calls, schlepping the publicity box back to the Coalition office, difficult phone calls I had to make, and an unexpected invitation to speak at a college in a couple of months and be paid nicely. But all of that nerve wracking in different ways, and this fire and glass of wine and article about the Florentine painter like a sweet song, a deep breath.

Sunset on Mars...

Small sunset on Mars...at once familiar and very, very strange...

Beloved Community

January 8
Andy and I went to the Beloved Community Award of the South Orange Civic Organization-- a forty year old local civil rights organization that did realtor testing and such way back. This was their 36th Martin Luther King celebration, and getting awards were Carol Barry-Austin, Mila Jasey, and Nancy Heins-Glaser, all associated with the Coalition one way or the other. Coalition trustee and priest at St. Andrews Sandye Wilson spoke; really super music from the choir of the East Orange Elmwood Presbyterian church. Best rendition of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" I've ever heard.

Think Light Thoughts...

Joel is almost halfway across the country now-- left at 8:45 this a.m., going to L.A. to visit with Sarah and meet her family. The Zakowskis, according to Sarah, are preparing for Joel by having their dog groomed two weeks early. I continue to be terrified of airplanes, but after last year's Xanax soothed trip to Italy, I am willing to say the terror is worth it. Maybe. Sometimes.

Fun Fact for 2006

Fun fact of the day from the New York Times: if the minimum wage had gone up at the same rate as CEO compensation since 1990, the minimum wage today would not be $5.15 but rather $23.00 and change. Greed and injustice. And who thinks they could live on $42 or even $45 a day? Raise children? make car payments, buy a computer? A house?

New Year's Day Resolving Itself

White lines of snow on tree branches from last night, and streets melting to black and slush. We went to Harrington's across the street lastl night, and it was especially wonderful to be with young kids on New Year's Eve-- lots of determination to stay up and See the Ball Drop--a tradition that we used to keep in Shinnston, too-- going to Hardesties and staying up. I remember the first year David went to some party to which I wasn't invited, so I didn't go to the family party either, embarrassed and awkward and feeling terminally left out. Instead, at midnight, I sat in the unusually warm evening at the bottom of our stairs and felt at once profoundly lonely and sad and also awed and stimulated by my own awareness of myself.

I remember the thrill of sheer lateness-- the blackness of the night-- voices shouting in the distance.

Family Fun

December 30
Some family time, Andy, Joel, and me. We went to a new barbecue place way the heck out in Somerset county called R.U.B. , which was thoroughly delicious, then took a short trip to the L.L. Bean outlet to get Joel a new duffle bag (with the name "Butch" stitched on it, hence the cheap price). Then home to watch Serenity, the DVD of the movie of the Firefly t.v. series, which I really like. I'm not used to being a fan, but I was really upset when a couple of the crew actually got killed in the movie. Very satisfying. You like the people in this quirky cowbody science fiction show so much.

Youthful itinerary follies

Joel's friend Sarah is having problems with her Volvo. She had to go back to Providence (today, by bus) where she is meeting a friend to bring down to some other friends in New York City, while Joel takes the car into a Volvo dealer on Friday morning and gets the electronic throttle reprogrammed or something so she can drive to Atlanta and give the car to her sister at Emory before flying out of Atlanta home to Los Angeles a day before Joel flies out to join her... and I think her family will be back from Hawaii and oh yes two of Joel's friends are flying out later in the week for a L.A. Lakers game against Cleveland who just lost to the Nets. Well, you get the picture....

Much more relaxing was a lovely lunch at Mary and Tony's for me and Mom and Joel, with Ryan and Ann there, their green table cloth and beautiful Christmas dishes and everything Christmas and delicious.

Twas the Day After Christmas...

December 26
Great fun yesterday with Takeshi, Chiaki, Tak's Aunt Yazuko, Joel, Sarah, friend Kasper, and Andy and me! Christmas and Hanukkah! Exhaustion today, and latkes and applesauce for dinner to come. Photo thanks to Takeshi Achiwa:

Christmas Eve

December 24
Christmas Eve Day, and I'm cooking and running around getting ready for Christmas! I wrote this for my Books For Readers friends:

Dear Friends,
Please accept my best wishes for the coming year, and my hopes that you are all enjoying a holiday of family, friends, good food, fires, candles, and whatever is reassuring and hopeful to you in this dark season. My mother and son Joel are here with me and Andy today, and two of Joel’s friends are arriving later (one is his girlfriend!). Tomorrow come three friends from Japan. We will have Christmas with Buddhists, Jews, one serious Christian and a couple of secular humanists, followed by the first night of Hanukkah. This newsletter is all the writing I’ll get to do today, and I don’t expect anyone to read it till after the holidays. When you do get a chance, please get back to me with your suggestions and thoughts.
Meanwhile, Happy, Happy, Holidays!

Books for Readers # 78 Holiday Issue

Newsletter # 78
December 24 , 2005

HOLIDAY ISSUE– FINAL OF 2005

Dear Friends,
Please accept my best wishes for the coming year, and my hopes that you are all enjoying a holiday of family, friends, good food, fires, candles, and whatever is reassuring and hopeful to you in this dark season. My mother and son Joel are here with me and Andy today, and two of Joel’s friends are arriving later (one is his girlfriend!). Tomorrow come three friends from Japan. We will have Christmas with Buddhists, Jews, one serious Christian and a couple of secular humanists, followed by the first night of Hanukkah.
This newsletter is all the writing I’ll get to do today, and I don’t expect anyone to read it till after the holidays. When you do get a chance, please get back to me with your suggestions and thoughts.
Meanwhile, Happy, Happy, Holidays!
-- Meredith Sue Willis

NOTES ON RECENT READING

I read a contemporary book, THE HILLS AT HOME by Nancy Clark. This is an interesting attempt to create a novel of manners, and it has lots of characters and some really amusing scenes , but it is light to the point of floating away–except for its inordinate size. Some commentary called it a satire, but it is gentle satire, which, of course, means satire with no bite. In the end, how do you satirize a society like ours that is at once self-referential and self-parodying? Jon Stewart on THE DAILY SHOW often does it by simply showing clips of real television news that demonstrate official and media stupidity and lying. THE HILLS AT HOME is just making fun of a family. Much of the time Clark seems to be doing what children do when they have small world play: she created this family and now she makes up stories about them. Some of the stories are terrific fun, but some are tedious and self-indulgent. A couple of the characters, the former school teacher family matriarch Aunt Lily and the middle-aged self-deceiving Ginger in particular, were wonderfully quirky, and also viewed affectionately by the author. There’s also some interesting plot material, especially towards the end, bringing in rapacious land developers and the CIA, but over all there were just too many characters and too many pages.

Which brings me to my recent re-read of Thomas Hardy’s TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES. As I have said repeatedly in this Newsletter, I greatly enjoy a Victorian novel as the days get shorter. TESS is a wonderful, sad, gripping story. I had trouble getting started because I remembered from my first read thirty years ago that it was going to be tragic– Hardy is one of the world’s experts on creating a terrible sense of foreboding. And you can guess right away where it’s going, even if you weren’t an English major in college at a time when TESS was a major stopover on the Great Tradition. But this time, TESS seemed to me less depressing than– just to stick with Hardy– JUDE THE OBSCURE. In the end, Hardy manages both his tragedy and a brief period of happiness for Tess before she is crushed by the hand of Fate and the Law.

TESS is in many ways a novel about belief systems that are too rigid: Tess’s husband thinks he is a liberal thinker, but his philosophy is even more destructive than his father’s strict religious beliefs. Tess too chooses a bad religion – total faith in one individual man. Not that conventional religion would have saved her from the forces of society and the Victorian emphasis on technical purity for women. Hardy’s landscape description is stunning, and the details of farm life beautifully highlighted. Hardy’s laborers, unlike those in books written by Victorians with roots in the upper classes, have rich lives. There are interesting details such as how laborers have one day a year when they switch jobs, whole families on the move, and an almost festive atmosphere as they move from farm to farm. A number of Tess’s working class friends live vagabond lives, and the varieties of working class experience are refreshingly displayed as background. Tess’s tragedy unfolds from her father’s discovery of probable aristocratic roots. It’s a lovely, sad story. Yay, Thomas Hardy!

I also finished THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JEAN STAFFORD, which has some real knock-out wonderful pieces. I finally know why people speak of her as a writer’s writer, incredibly skillful. I liked the stories set in Colorado best– the ones about Manhattan and the northeast are in their own way as grim as Hardy with huge amounts of drinking and depression. But all beautifully written, and the Colorado stories were superb.

READING FOR WRITERS

What do those of you who write read to help you write? Greg Sanders says “It's hard as hell to find the time to sit down, get in that 20 minutes we need to get the thoughts rolling, then actually attempt to write. I've been reading in the interstices--the COLLECTED STORIES OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV (humbling, so very humbling), Stephen Dixon (to inject me with frenetic dialog juice and darkly sardonic whit, and fearlessness), and I've started a collection of Gogol short stories, THE OVERCOAT. Wonderfully weird stuff--and esp. ahead of its time when you consider how long ago he lived (1809-1852).”

SOME ARTICLES ON READING

Don’t miss a piece by Phyllis Moore on how her parents encouraged her to read: http://www.rednecromancer.typepad.com/mouth_of_the_holler/

Also, this newspaper column by Georgia Green Stamper tells about her first visit to a library plus the books that have meant the most to her in her life: http://www.owentonnewsherald.com/20051116/community/georgia.asp

And if you enjoy that essay, take a look at Stamper’s about the day Kennedy died: http://www.owentonnewsherald.com/20051123/community/georgia.asp

SPECIALLY FOR WRITERS:

A book by Adam Sexton called MASTER CLASS IN FICTION
WRITING: LESSONS FROM AUSTEN, HEMINGWAY AND OTHERS has just been published by McGraw-Hill. You can find it at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.

Brighid's Fire Books specializes in First Fiction: http://www.brighidsfirebooks.com/

For writer- run workshops in NYC – see their web page at http://www.newyorkwritersworkshop.com/ or call 212-479-7383.

Ellen Bass gives poetry workshops in all kinds of interesting places. Coming up soon is her February 11-12, 2006 Poetry Workshop at UCSC Extension in Santa Cruz, California. Go to
http://www.ucsc-extension.edu.

Services for self-publishing and other things at Novel 2 Go Publishing: http://www.novel2gopublishing.com/

GOOD NEWS

Ellen Bass reports that her mentor Dorianne Laux has just published her fourth, “amazing”
collection of poetry, Facts About the Moon. Read more at http://www.curledup.com/factsmoo.htm.

Greg Sanders has a story called "Choco," about a retired circus bear in Moscow, coming out in Pindeldyboz #6 (www.pindeldyboz.com/issue6.htm) plus a story called "Port Authority, Part I," coming out in the next issue of Lit (Winter or Spring '06).

INTERVIEW WITH NANCY CLARK

There’s an interview with Nancy Clark, author of THE HILLS AT HOME at
http://www.absolutewrite.com/novels/nancy_clark.htm

BEAUTIFUL BOOKS– SWAMP PRESS

This company makes books by hand with a letter press– so beautiful they count as art objects. They don’t seem to have an online presence, but you can call them at 413-498-4343 or write Ed Rayher 15 Warwick Avenue, Northfield, MA 01360

DON’T FORGET THESE GREAT WEB SITES

Jane Hicks is at http://cosmicpossum.com/

George Ella Lyon’s new website is just up. It is for everyone, but has special appeal for kids, as she writes many books for children: http://www.georgeellalyon.com/ .

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS BRINGS BACK CLASSICS!

The NYRB Classics series (http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/) reintroduces some of the many remarkable books that have fallen out of print or out of sight in recent years. The series, now entering its fifth year, currently includes more than 100 titles, from Richard Hughes's dazzling tale of childhood, A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA, to Edward Gorey's illustrated selection of ghost stories, THE HAUNTED LOOKING GLASS; from the complete works of J.F. Powers, brilliant comic chronicler of the ways and woes of Midwestern priests, to such blazing singularities of the literary universe as J.R. Ackerley's MY DOG TULIP and Robert Burton's THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. It features an exceptional roster of international authors, too, including Alberto Moravia, Robert Walser, Colette, and Álvaro Mutis.

MORE THOUGHTS ON READING FROM PHYLLIS MOORE AND CAT PLESKA:

From Phyllis Moore: “I once read that sailors in submarines were observed craving cottage cheese. Later, research shows it contains nitrogen, a substance needed in the closed environment they were in. Books are the same, it is my belief readers of all ages find what it is they need to read and should be allowed to read it.”

Cat Pleska adds, “My mother never believed in age appropriate stuff. It was the times, I'm sure. Mothers didn't hang over us so closely. But she was not one to censor in any case. I owe much of my free-thinking to her. Bless her.”

DUSTBOOKS–SINCE 1964!

Still giving information about the small and tiny presses– look for the new editions of the ever-useful Dustbooks publications at http://www.dustbooks.com .

Poem by Halvard Johnson

Here's a poem I like a lot by Halvard Johnson, one of the Hamilton Stone Co-opers:

Old Virginia Trees

Here's one called "Only Our Chagrin Remains"
standing alone in the middle of a cow pasture, forsaken
by its leaves, left starkly branched against a partly clouded sky.
Another called "Liberation of the Mind" hunches
over the road to the highway, dropping its late fruit
on passersby. A nearby copse cries out, "Come!
Join us! We, united, shall prevail!"

Our refusal does not stop there. It is insatiable
and knows no bounds. Our leader, thinking beyond
the limitations of space and time, says, "At the hour
in which I write, new tremors fill the air above the field.
We must be brave enough to face them." His collected works
wave from his branches like tiny hands. His name,
we think, is "Poverty is Not a Crime."

"The hand that writes," he says, "is worth the hand
that ploughs." And we all say, "Amen." Our revolutionary
will is strong in us. We wish the transformation
of the world to be as radical as it can be. On this mental
slope, the mirrors of inconstancy do not disturb us.
What, indeed, could they expect of us? Everything leads us
to our belief that "The Last Days of March" will be our savior.

-- Halvard Johnson

Gingerbread House!

December 18
Another all day Coalition Day yesterday, interviewing for the Executive Director position, the Village Trattoria in Maplewood last night, a lovely solstice event today at Ethical, and Mom went to the Prospect Presbyterian church. Then she and I came home and built a gingerbread house from a Costco kit, and now I'm in desperate need of a nap, but I think I'll walk instead..

Single Digits

December 14
We've got single digit temperatures this week! My mother visiting, Joel not coming till next week, Andy working till all hours. Last night Adrienne Bolden and I spoke to a mixed group at Wincester Gardens, mixed of League of Women Voters (it was their yearly party) and Wincester Gardens residents. Except for major problems with their PA system ("Speak UP!!!") it went very very well. I so enjoy these public outreaches. Give me an audience and I'll be high as a kite. Adrienne said her cold felt better after speaking!

snow..

Snow is down, a good six or eight inches of it--and as I write, Mom is en avion coming from Phoenix to here. Supposed to arrive just before 5:00 P.M, and Andy wants to come along to pick her up. I've got dinner under control, a Sherry Weinberger pot roast sliced and ready to heat; potatoes to heat; bread in the bread maker, an apple and cabbage cole slaw, and a fruicake for dessert. I wish the Coalition were so well under control...

Lucille in California

December 6
My mom in California with brother-in-law Goro, viewing the elephant seals! She's coming to New Jersey on Friday.

First Serious Snow

December 4
The first serious snow of the season! Just a couple of inches, but enough to have to shovel (Andy got out his new Big Blower). There will be more tomorrow night, they're saying, my last class at NYU. Also the day the Provost says he's going to lower the boom on the graduate students who are striking to have their union recognized. Bad days for workers uniting, I'd say.
Boe did a nice Colloquy on Acceptance today at Ethical. Buddhist quotations about how we will do harm, so the objective is to do as little as possible. Also a fable about a woman who goes to a fortune teller and is told that she will have ups and downs for six months, and beyond that, the fortune teller says, she can make out nothing. The woman is terribly anxious for the full six months, and then, at the end of the six months, the fortune teller dies. This isn't quite as good as Appointment in Samarra, but it's good.

December 2

As usual, brother-in-law David "Joho" Weinberger's blog is hilarious. See his insightful comments on Helsinki.

Loving Couples

November 29
Reading Ted Hughes' The Birthday Poems -- wonderful stuff, his incredible belief in language that is at once admirable and enviable and also old like polished oak panels on walls: the muscularity of the poems. People write that sometimes about poets, usually guy poets. When my revision work is going best, it feels that way, like a strong forearm, flexed, taut, impulses moving up and down its length. Very apparent in these poems, which don’t have a lot of his mystical Jungian hoo-hah. I just read the Diane Middlebrook book about him and Sylvia Plath, Her Husband.
I’ve been intrigued occupied by couples lately: Hughes and Plath, then Carter and Cash thanks to the movie and the internet. I found an image of John Carter Cash, the late baby of Johnny and June, who is in his mid thirties now, and his parents both gone. Even if Andy and I live into our eighties, we’ll be gone when Joel is our age, so I hope he does get himself attached to some big family, his own or another.

Thanksgiving is over...

November 27
End of the long week-end which included going in to NYC Wednesday night to have dinner with Ken and Linda and see their hotel room which was really a one bedroom apartment, then early the next a.m. off to Ellen's for Thanksgiving-- after Andy dealing with a broken lock on the door, scrambling around to find keys to the old lock in the door handle that we never use. Then Weinbergers and Cavanaghs and Joel and Sarah and a couple of Ellen's friends for dinner, followed by Jurassic Park and the traditional walk and shopping at the outlets at seven a.m. the next morning like real Americans. Sarah and Joel drove down together in her car behind and then ahead of us, then hanging out with Joel and Sarah when they weren't hanging out with Joel's other friends.

Friday Morning

November 18

Eleven a.m., and I feel ready for a nap– we had the the Fund-raiser breakfast this morning, and I felt good about my little speech, I don't know why, but this was one of the ones where at a certain moment you feel the people out there, that a line of energy has opened up between you and them
I've been especially happy to have Andy home--I think it's because this was the first time he's been gone since my dad died, and I had that sense of the missing person in your life, and in this case it was Andy only missing for five days. Daddy, of course, I haven't lived with in forty years. He's in most ways as present in my imaginative life as ever– but of course for my mother, whose life for five years was totally centered around the man in the chair and his physical needs– well, it’s a great rent in the fabric for her, as well as the loss of the love of her life and companion since girlhood.
I’m re-reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles and can hardly stand it. It’s a wonderful book, but you feel doom foreshadowed from the first page. By golly Thomas Hardy had a grim view of this vale of tears.

More grad student strike

November 15
My NYU class met at midtown in a lovely conference room at one of the students' offices--and it had windows! This was in support of the Graduate Student Strike. There was a good article in the Village Voice today--I really don't get why NYU is being to hard-nosed about this, and it makes me suspect they'd like to get rid of our union too, the adjuncts. Which has made me feel so safe.

Fall colors

It’s a return to the colors, not as brilliant as some years but bright oranges and yellows, the leave falling fast now. We still haven’t had a true hard frost, but I’m down to my last three tomatoes (ripening in the house), and I’ve had to cover the greens and lettuce not against frost, which they can take a little of or they wouldn’t be out all winter, but because Somebeast chomped the radicchios. Is this another deer? A cat wanting a tonic for a bad stomach?

Books for Readers Newsletter # 76

Newsletter # 76
November 5 , 2005

After missing October entirely, I finally sat down to put together this newsletter– only to have my hard drive die. I spent hours a day for almost a week on the phone with #$&*!* Dell computers, waiting for a human being while loud advertisements were broadcast from my speaker phone. Then, once #$&*!* Dell finally agreed that my contract did indeed include repairs, I had to wait to hear from the technician who would be coming to install a new hard drive. Now that I have a hard drive again, I’ve been installing software, copying files, making sure of what I still have and what I lost.

I am now wildly dependent now on the computer– and increasingly on the Internet as well. I’ll be writing a note, or actually working on fiction, and I’ll need to know something— usually a fact, a birth date or death (is Mary Lee Settle in the same age cohort as Mary McCarthy? McCarthy is five or six years older). I just flip over to the ever-available Internet. It’s a kind of super-sizing of my memory if not my whole brain. And it’s right here on my desk in chunky beige plastic. Some other time, I’ll write about the serious negatives of the computer (the option of obsessive ego surfing, shopping when you could be creating– addictions are only a mouse click away).

Another reason for the slowness of this newsletter is that I’ve been focusing my reading on a couple of books by Mary Lee Settle, who died a month and a half ago. She was born in 1918 in West Virginia, although she lived all over the world and died in Charlottesville, Virginia. She wrote the Beulah Quintet, a series of five historical novels covering the history of West Virginia, and the National Book Award winning Blood Tie. I’m reading her two earliest books, written when she was making the switch from being a playwright and actress (she is said to have done a screen test for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind), plus The Clam Shell, a later novel that explored the events of her eighteenth year. She was in my parents’ generation, when the drive to leave home regions was probably even stronger in America than it was for people of my generation. The present young people of Appalachia are not, I don’t believe, so convinced that you have to go to Paris or New York to have adventures or make art.

Even before Settle died, I was reading books by some of the old grand old dames of the twentieth century, especially those who came to adulthood before the Second World War: stories by Jean Stafford, who is a marvel, and the redoubtable Mary McCarthy, whose cool judgmental mind is as refreshing as iced spring water. I re-read THE GROUP, which I liked much better this time around. I also read HOW I GREW, a memoir written when she was in her sixties, that covers some of the same period as THE GROUP, and is full of opinions and a breezy tone that makes it feel more like journalism that a memoir. But the most interesting surprise was CANNIBALS AND MISSIONARIES, a novel that centers on an act of terrorism in the style of twenty years ago– that is back when people were taken hostage and threatened with death rather than simply blown up.

The novel’s characters include several art collectors and politicians, and is full of discussions of art as consumer product as well as terrorism as art for art’s sake– very interesting indeed. The title of the book, by the way, comes from a mental game in which you have to figure how some cannibals and missionaries can get ferried back and forth across a river with no one getting eaten. I think the game I knew was about foxes and ducks.

One of McCarthy’s great strengths is that she is so interested in details of the physical world as well as details of argument and social behavior that her books don’t feel dated. Even a book like this with what on the surface appears to be a kind of passé terrorism is so full of interesting detail about the nineteen eighties that it seems fresh. One of the difficulties for most people of writing about your own time is that we have so many assumptions– that we will always and forever know who Paris Hilton was, for example. McCarthy, by contrast, looks so closely at everything that if she uses slang or refers to a figure in pop culture, it is always with close analysis and critique.

CANNIBALS, like most of her work is very cool. She seems to prefer her most annoyingly superficial characters to the ones who have depth– not that she doesn’t know they are annoying, but they seem to amuse her most, and thus she keeps them alive when others die. The violence, which you know has to happen, is presented almost off-handedly, which gives it a kind of bracing realism. McCarthy, also has rather more affection for the rich as a class than I do, but the book is engagingly intelligent– and inexpensively available in the online used book stores.

-- Meredith Sue Willis

BOOKS TO CONSIDER AS GIFTS

I’m still working on a list of books to give as gifts. Around the middle of November, I’m going to e-mail and post a special page recommending these books, and I would greatly appreciate your suggestions. Two requests: (1) The book should be from a small publisher or long out-of-print so that people probably won’t see it advertised elsewhere, and (2) try to write a brief line about who you think would really enjoy the book. See Issue 75, plus some samples here:

SHANNAGANEY BLUE, a novella by West Virginian native June Langford Berkley, gets Phyllis Moore’s vote as one of the best publications by a small press. First published in 1983 in The Akros Review, Spring, 1983, Number 7, the intriguing volume is now in its fifth printing. Never advertised, it has a loyal readership and has been used in classrooms. Shannaganey's protagnoist Kate calls to mind another much loved fictional character, Scout in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Each child tells a story as only a child can, a story set firmly in a place they know and love. Kate and Scout are the real deals, each speaks with an authentic, sometimes amusing, voice. Each tells the truth as they see it. Moore says, “I've read SHANNAGANEY's 47 tightly crafted pages many times. In case of a house fire, it's one of the books I'd rescue.”
To order SHANNAGANEY BLUE readers may contact the author. Berkely.jberkley@columbus.rr.com . The cost is $5.00 and postage is included

Here’s one I think I’ll get for my mother, who is 86 and likes to be inspired and comforted: EVERYDAY BLESSINGS: A Year of Inspiration, Comfort and Gratitude Compiled by June Corner (Source books, Inc., $11.99, ISBN 1-4022-0606-2) Available now at bookstores nationwide. For more information, visit www.junecotner.com.

In the same vein, Barbara Crooker has a 2006 Everyday Blessings calendar, a 365-day, page-a-day boxed calendar, is now in bookstores.Click here: Everyday Blessings

That’s the idea. You can always, of course, recommend best sellers and classics as well, but for this special page I’m looking for books that people might miss otherwise.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

South Orange resident James VanOosting has just published his tenth book (See HarperCollins’ page on him at http://www.harpercollins.com/global_scripts/product_catalog/author_xml.asp?authorid=12835 ). Actually, he has two new books out– one is a novel called WALKING MARY that is the object of a censorship campaign by a librarian in South Carolina! He also has a book of reflections on ways to think about words, from writing and book making, to reading and sharing what we have read, called AND THE FLESH BECAME WORD: REFLECTIONS THEOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC.

Kenneth J. Harvey’s new novel is out: THE TOWN THAT FORGOT HOW TO BREATHE, which concerns what happens when the art of storytelling begins to die out in a small, coastal community. His work has been highly praised and well reviewed, and J.M. Coetzee gave this book one of his rare blurbs: "An eerie and gripping story, the work of an extravagantly haunted imagination."

Barbara Crooker’s poem "Elegy for New Orleans" is up at
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/Secure/Content/cb.asp?cbid=4766, and information about her new book RADIANCE is available at http://www.word-press.com/ or through
http://www.barbaracrooker.com

NONFICTION ON IRAQ AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Here are some books on Iraq recommended in an “Essay”column at the end of the 10-30-05 NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW by Robert F. Worth. He especially likes Wilfred Thesiger: ARABIAN SANDS (1959) and (better) Thesiger’s book THE MARSH ARABS, plus OUT OF THE ASHES by the Cockburns and books by Hiro, Kelly, and Atkinson. The best general books on the Middle East and Iraq, says Worth, are Bernard Lewis: THE MIDDLE EAST and THE CRISIS OF ISLAM and David Fromkin’s PEACE TO END ALL PEACE. The latter gives the background on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and British efforts to govern Iraq in the early 20th century. Worth also recommends Makiya on Baathism and Saddam Hussein and Ajami on the Iran-Iraq war, a book called DREAM PALACE OF THE ARABS, as well as Yitzhak Nakash on Shi’ism.

DUSTBOOKS–SINCE 1964!

Still giving information about the small and tiny presses– look for the new editions of the ever-useful Dustbooks publications at http://www.dustbooks.com .

ARTICLE BY BELINDA ANDERSON ON PHYLLIS MOORE AND THE WV LITERARY MAP!

See Belinda Anderson’s article on West Virginia’s own Literary Map at http://www.wvculture.org/arts/artworks/artworksfall05.pdf

SUBMIT

I found two little online magazines that actually welcome long fiction: THE KING’S ENGLISH at http://www.thekingsenglish.org and the OREGON LITERARY REVIEW at http://www.oregonliteraryreview.org.

NIMROD INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL has themes for its spring and fall 2006 issues– “The Healing Arts” and “Doings the Hundreds at Fifty.” Send work to NIMROD, The University of Tulsa, 600 S. College Ave., Tulsa, OK 74104. Please send email submissions only if you are a writer living overseas. If you have any questions, please write to us at nimrod@utulsa.edu .

MORE FOR WRITERS: DO YOU NEED NAMES?

These websites will give you ideas (Suggestions thanks to SOCIETY OF CHILDREN’S BOOK WRITERS AND ILLUSTRATORS NEWSLETTER):
20,000 names at http://20000-names.com/
Random name generator at : http://www.kleimo.com/random/name

My NYU class plus strike

November 8
I’m feeling extremely affectionate towards my Beginning Your Novel class this fall. Great group, full of talk, and even the people are not the big talkers feel present and accounted for. I was heartened last night by their willingness, indeed eagerness, not to cross the picket lines if the NYU graduate students strike tomorrow. This was especially funny because we were reading from a novel in which a grocery store-owning family has trouble with the grocery workers union! Anyhow, they all agreed they’d like to meet off campus if there’s a strike, and two people volunteered offices. I look forward to the class– comfort with liveliness, familiarity of situation including my own confidence in my ability to teach this class, and, always, the fun of talking about writing plus Life.

November 5

November 5, 2005
This would have been my father's 88th birthday. The photo is from the early 1970's, when he was principal of Victory High School in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

Up Close and Personal with the Computer

I’m getting very close to having things fixed up with the computer: as my husband says, I’m having a few days “up close and personal” with my computer. I would like to be writing but find it hard not to be obsessed with getting my website whipped back into shape, and now I’m fooling with the Big Dreamweaver, #8, which I’ve got on a 30 day free trial, and while I’m not doing anywhere near what it’s capable of , it has some solid improvements: you can have the “properties” screen and the code available while you’re looking at the “design.” I’m not convinced that all my work with the web is truly useful– and yet, aside from being a certain kind of fun, I keep thinking there is something important about it, to be able to publish this way.
I really enjoyed Writers’ group last night. My friends there are wonderful writers and people. Carole Rosenthal read a very interesting beginning to her memoir, really lovely. Rebecca read some new fiction, don’t know if it’s old or new, but definitely strong, and if it’s new, that’s great news. Also of course in the group are Edith Konecky and Vera Williams along with Joan and Suzanne. And they liked my bar mitzvah boy story.

Halloween in Greenwich Village

Last night I came out of the NYU class to the middle of the Halloween insanity around NYU and up to Fourteenth Street and right on to 23rd— the cops weren’t letting you through to get to the PATH train till 23rd. I ended up getting a later New Jersey transit train than I'd planned, and that was okay becasue I read a little in the train waiting and had something to eat, and cetera. I didn’t see the real parade, of course, but lots of people dressed up and taking pictures of each other, of themselves with strangers: there must have been tens of thousands of people— it felt like a demonstration, except there was so much preening, so many white angel wings, one transvestive “wedding” party very funny with the biggest guy of course as the bride, plus tons of body suits and fancy gold octupus arms drifting out. Pirates and bikers, although I thing maybe the bikers were really bikers. People milling around, enjoying their own wonderfulness. The pressure of the crowd a little frightening, a little annoying to have to walk so far clutching my bag for fear of pick pockets, but mostly delightful for the concentration of pleasure and mutual admiration.

Arrgh! Still no hard drive!

I still don't have a hard drive-- I'm limping along going from computer to computer, Andy’s for the Internet, and Joel’s I think in the end is going to be useless, because there’s nothing it does that Andy’s doesn’t, and his has the Internet besides. But writing on my clunky aged IBM Thinkpad that no longer gives the correct date, where the dictionary program doesn't work, where the floppy gets stuck and you have to pry it out, etc. etc. But it's in my office (where I blew a fuse of some sort, or maybe it is something with one of the surge protectors.) Sigh...

Software Crash!

Yikes! I'm in the middle of all kinds of things that need computer attention-- and I have had a crash that appears to be major software failure. I can't get windows to start. Writing this from Andy's computer.

Parrots galore!

Okay, I admit I've always loved parrots. My aunt and uncle had one that actually said, "Polly want a cracker" when I was a tiny girl, and I have owned parakeets and tried to put at least one parrot or parrot image in each of my novels. So take all that into account as I share my enthusiasm for this website, which was mentioned in today's New York Times. This is a guy who's more obsessed, and a much better photographer, than I am: His interest is the wild monk parrots of Brooklyn, but we've got them in New Jersey as well.

The photo is In Memoriam, Charley Brown.

Successful species

Here's something a little more philosophical than the things I usually write on this blog. I imagine sometimes taking a little vacation and sitting down with all the good reviews and nice comments people have made about my books (and none of the not nice ones!). To lie back in that warm bath of love. Only, it's not love-- that was a slip– not love, but a substitute. I don't think other animals do so many things to get back to the sensation of unconditional love as we do: we do drink, drugs, sex, reading our good reviews.

The cat, writes Borges, lives now: "...man lives in time, in successiveness, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant."

It is both our lust for the future and our powerful nostalgia for the past that so cripple us. If you judge the success of a species by the happiness of the individual, then, I think cats and English sparrows probably beat us hands down.

I'm hitting one of my periods when writing
seems the least of the things I do. I've got teaching, but mainly,
at this moment, endless tasks and conundrums and relationships within
the South Orange Maplewood Community
Coalition on Race. Chairing this large, vital, wonderful oganization
has been like a half time job. For which I don't get paid. And which
fills computer time, writing time. This week there were committee
meetings, one-on-one meetings, a crisis or two, which always means
many phone calls, many e-mails, plus drafting and mailing letters,
more e-mails, today giving a tour to people in Leadership
New Jersey-- it goes on and on.

I'm working on a YA novel, maybe YA,
and it makes me aware of how much I want to focus on literature again,
and yet at the same time these other things have raised my admiration
for people who are activists, in the world, not just observers of
the world. It makes me see that literature, too, is limited, is one
small part of the world of thinking and acting, not the whole thing.
Balance never easy. Not to mention the drain on family finances from
Our Ivy.

October 16, 2005

Just back from Parents' Week-end at Brown, where we spent time with Joel and Sarah Zakowski. Below: MSW, Joel, Sarah, & Andy. The usual excellent good time-- meals at Rue de l'Espoir, Adesso, and Mill's Tavern-- lectures by Brown faculty, continental breakfasts compliments of the university, a tour of Providence as loved by H.P. Lovecraft the horror writer, speeches by President Ruth Simmons and parent Candice Bergen, a play, Joel's "What's On Tap" open rehearsal. And now back to things besides eating and drinking and taking in culture...

Socializing over the week-end

We had a lovely small birthday supper for Andy with Sciainos, and Joel came home too! He was on his way to Rutgers to see WVU beat New Jersey's University--visiting Doug Parsons-- but he stopped off for Friday evening. We're on our way to Brown in a couple of days to see him again for parents' week-end. Chocolate raspberry cake AND apple pie with apples from our ancient tree.

Rain, football, motorcycle mamas

LOTS of rain. Rain last night and rain all day. We drove Joel down to the Busch campus of Rutgers where he will be visiting with friend Doug Parsons for the night and tomorrow--then he's dashing back to NYC to get his ride back to Brown. They went (in the rain) to see Rutgers lose to WVU. WVU happens to be (it turns out) Joel's favorite college team. This may be his deepest connection with my home state, except for my family, see below. Joel borrowed a WVU hat from Andy and intended to be a WVU supporter at the game. I wonder if anyone attempted to drown him.

Speaking of sports: My mother (born April 17, 1919) went for a motorcycle ride last week with her pastor Reverend Ivan Hawkins, who is a lovely man who happens to ride a motorcycle, and he offerred, and she accepted. These Baptists.

Names, anyone?

Well, here's a funny site (thanks to an article in the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Newsletter) -- a random name generator, and boy are some of them random!
http://www.kleimo.com/random/name

Norberto Skilski, anyone?

October 2
Boe spoke about religious extremism today, and quoted extensively from Yeats's "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," which remains one of the creepiest poems ever--wonderful, but scary:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And then later, when theThing comes, it comes

moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

Then I came home and built a new cold frame, picked the yellow sunflowerlike blossoms of the Jerusalem artichokes.

New Month, Beautiful Day

This is the new month, the early fall always a favorite for me, because I actually get more work done, both because of clement weather weather and teaching's slow start-up in my life, and a general industriousness of the people around me. I've been working on a new story, sending off some potential projects, finishing up with my new book for children, to be published in January.
And it's a beautiful day.

MSW's Books for Readers Newsletter #75

September 27, 2005

To have Meredith Sue Willis's occasional newsletter about books and writing sent to you by email, send a blank email to Readerbooks-subscribe@topica.com. To unsubscribe, send a blank email to Readerbooks-unsubscribe@topica.com.

For a list of back issues, click here

I have a beloved book to report on, and then a proposal to satisfy your gift giving needs easily and at the same time to support literature.

First, I reread a book that was introduced to me years ago by Phillip Lopate when we worked together for Teachers & Writers Collaborative. The MAKIOKA SISTERS by Junichiro Tanizaki was, apparently, published first as a serial, and Japanese friends tell me that it is at the present time most popular as a stage drama. This is a book with a strange quality that is somehow analogous to flatness– but a flatness that is like a great flowing river with many eddies of events and powerful, deep currents.

The novel takes place during the early stages of the Second World War, long before the American nuclear attacks, back when upper class Japanese admired their clever German allies, and when affluent families in Osaka were still living a generally comfortable and graceful life. The plot line is about the marriage possibilities of the two younger of four sisters whose family has come down in the world but is still very choosy about who it marries. The question of a husband for Yukiko opens the novel, and the answer to the question closes it, but the real point is the lives, relationships, and sensibilities of the sisters– and unsettling changes in their world. Yukiko, the older of the unmarried sisters, is described as an old style Japanese lady (and potential husbands comment on whether or not they have a taste for this style). The youngest sister, on the other hand, is quite modern and has a small business of her own– and affairs with men. There are squabbles and illnesses, the selection of kimonos for particular events, a miscarriage, cherry blossom viewing, meals out with the special Osaka delicacy of sea bream, a great flood with physical danger and heroism, and above all the endless marriage negotiations that involve everyone in the family. The pace– what I called above analogous to flatness– takes a little getting used to, but was totally addictive to me. Towards the end of my reading, I began to fall asleep thinking I could hear hearing voices in Japanese endlessly discussing, debating, and dissecting the various candidates for Yukiko's husband.

And now, Part II, a Special Proposal:

I wrote a little in an issue of this newsletter earlier this month about how hard it is to find readers for small presses, and my idea is to ask you to help me come up with a special Gift Book edition of this newsletter in which there are recommendations for books from small presses and perhaps commercial books that were never publicized very well. My idea is to create a list of books that people might not have heard of but which would be perfect gifts for certain people: for example, a small press children's book for a boy who is a fan of HARRY POTTER or a book for a great-aunt who loves to read but is often unhappy with graphic sex . Or, for that matter, a book for a great-aunt with a taste for feminist erotica.

The rules are: Books from small presses (or books that have been forgotten), plus a guess as to who might like the book. Also, while you are welcome to recommend your best friend's book, you may not recommend your own book. I am totally open to sharing news and reviews sent by authors (and I use this newsletter to publicize my own work too), but for this particular project, I want recommendations of other people's books.

Some sample recommendations follow my sign-off.

Thanks for reading!

– Meredith Sue Willis

BOOKS TO CONSIDER AS GIFTS

Here's my first go at a list that I hope will get much longer. To recap: Please send me suggestions for books from small, very small, and university presses, or commercial books that were ignored and should not have been. Include a short description of who you think would love to get this book at a gift.

1. For anymore who reads Kafka or literary science fiction or general literature, I cannot recommend highly enough Carol Emshwiller's I LIVE WITH YOU from the small science fiction press Tachyon (website at http://www.tachyonpublications.com.) Some of Emswhiller's stories are stunners: she has a whole set of war stories in which people have forgotten why they started fighting, and my favorite is a love story called "The General." Another love story about attraction across species (sort of) , is "Gliders Though They Be," in which strange gopher-like creatures, some pink with wings, some blue with no wings, live in constant danger from "the sky people" who snatch the occasional exposed child or adult. Emswhiller's world moves in and out among locations in science fiction, modernist experimentation, and the wide, wild blue yonder of her rich, quirky individual imagination.

2. An excellent gift book for a reader with an interest in American history and/or adventure would be Ardian Gill's fast moving and carefully researched historical novel THE RIVER IS MINE, based on John Wesley Powell's exploration of the Colorado river. Learn more at http://uconnmagazine.uconn.edu/fwin2002/fwin02cc.html and http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/riverismine.html.

3. Valerie Nieman's new collection of short stories called FIDELITIES is published by Vandalia Press, an imprint of West Virginia University Press. This book has a lot of emotional punch, and Jennifer Lynch's review at GRAFITTI NEWSPAPER (http://www.grafwv.com/) says, "No matter where you open FIDELITIES, a collection of short stories by Valerie Nieman....it's full of intriguing people [and] interesting puzzles that leave the reader wondering about their complexities long after reading it.....Taken individually, each story looks at the life of characters so real and intricate, I felt I knew someone just like many of them. Taken as a whole, the collection is an interpretative look at the motivations, loyalties and obligations of a group of ordinary individuals. " To learn more about Valerie Nieman, go to http://www.wvwc.edu/lib/wv_authors/authors/a_nieman.htm. To buy the book, use the online booksellers or go to the Vandalia press site at http://www.wvupress.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=41&products_id=17

4. Are you looking to buy books for children and young adults about real life adventure? From the small Montemayor Press come three excellent stories by Ed Myers, a writer who has published over forty books for children and adults with presses of all sizes. I mentioned his young adult novel ICE last issue (see http://meredithsuewillis.com/bfrarchive71-75.html#ice ) , but his books for slightly younger children are also excellent. I especially like his novel about children lost in the rain forest, SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST and, for something really different, DUCK AND COVER, a story about a boy who lives during the days of the Cold War– and gets involved in a cold war of his own, right on his own street. Check these out at http://www.montemayorpress.com.

5. Finally, a special treat for people who like to listen while they drive! MountainWhispers.com has released its 7th audio drama on CD– LOST HIGHWAY by Richard Currey, performed by Ross Ballard II. A nuanced and poetic first-person narrative, Richard Currey's novel tells the story of Sapper Reeves, a gifted country music singer/songwriter working the rainy backroads and smoke-filled taverns of the southern mountains after World War II. The performer, Ross Ballard, is an actor and producer with a mastery of regional dialect and the age-old art of fine storytellng. The story's fictional song "Miranda" comes to life along with additional award winning bluegrass music. Learn more at www.mountainwhispers.com.

That's the idea. You can always, of course, recommend best sellers and classics as well, but for this special page I'm looking for books that people might miss.

MORE CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Carol Brodtrick writes to say: "I wonder if you'd consider a section now and then for a review of work for children. Many creative, talented writers pen novels that are exquisite (just check out the years of Newberry winners), books such as Kate Di Camillo's THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX and Sharon Creech's WALK TWO MOONS, both with a depth adults can appreciate. And who can challenge the popularity of the HARRY POTTER books when readership spans ages 9 to 80? Of course it's because beyond the surface wizard's tale there are layers of human conflict to think about....Your newsletters always remind me there are more books written than can be read in a single lifetime– but you offer a path, often to little known jewels that enrich the everyday. Maybe some of those jewels can come from the juvenile section of the library."

DEPARTMENT OF ENTHUSIASTIC READERS

"I read a wonderful book over the weekend," writes Shelley Ettinger, "again by a Scottish writer, HOTEL WORLD by Ali Smith. She's nominated for the Booker Prize for her latest book, but HOTEL WORLD is from a couple years ago. It's very sad and true. The writing is exquisite, blew me away. The last five pages in particular are just heart-achingly perfect, left me stunned and breathless. She seems to me to be a, if not the, successor to Virginia Woolf."

And Fran Osten writes that she was pleased to have SMALL ISLAND suggested in last issue "I recently finished it." said Fran, "and was going to recommend it myself! It was the best book I have read in quite a long while!"

ROBERT STONE

Last issue I complained about not liking my first novel by Robert Stone. Ardian Gill says, "Well, you had bad luck in starting with Stone's weakest, a Hollywood potboiler. With New Orleans so much in the news, Stone's A HALL OF MIRRORS would be a good choice. I remember it as wonderful. DOG SOLDIERS is similarly very good and A FLAG FOR SUNRISE worth the time."

JOHN AMEN'S NEW BOOK

John Amen, publisher of THE PEDESTAL online magazine (http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com) has just finished a book tour for his second poetry collection, MORE OF ME DISAPPEARS. The book is now available at his website (http://www.johnamen.com/books_writings.asp) with sample poems and ways to purchase. Also, if you visit his music page at http://www.johnamen.com/music.asp, you can sample tracks from his CD.

NEW TEXTBOOK INCLUDES APPALACHIAN WRITERS

Professor Robert (Jack) Higgs is one of the authors of a new text book called TOUCHING ALL BASES, A RHETORIC OF SELF DISCOVERY. This new publication, a creative literature anthology for readers and students, includes work by a medley of emerging American voices. Among the Appalachian writers included are Rita Sims Quillen, Linda Parsons, Nan Arbuckle, Elizabeth Hunter, George Ella Lyon, Jim Wayne Miller, Fred Chappell, Ray Hicks, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Marilou Awiatka, Lynn Powell, Judy Odom, Garry Barker, and Jo Carson. The book uses strategic questions to stimulate the reader to think by using different functions of the mind: sensing, rational thinking, symbolic thinking, and valuing. As a textbook, it is suitable for college freshman composition, or for Advanced Placement or research courses. To learn more here.

KEITH MAILLARD'S LATEST DUE OUT NOW!

Keith Maillard has a new set of four books coming out now and in the next few months. See his publisher's web page about RUNNING at http://www.brindleandglass.com/books/difficulty.htm.

BARBARA CROOKER WINS THE 2004 WORD PRESS FIRST BOOK PRIZE

Garrison Keillor says of Barbara Crooker's RADIANCE: "A pleasure to read, straight through, for its humor and intelligence and for the sheer bravery of sentiment. It dares to show deep feeling, unguarded by irony. It's a straight-ahead passionate book by a mature poet and rather suddenly I've become a fan." Crooker is the author of many poems published in places like YANKEE, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NIMROD, and many more. She is the recipient of the 2004 W. B.Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2004 Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2003 "April Is the Cruelest Month" Award from Poets & Writers, and, again many more! The author of ten chapbooks, she lives with her husband and son in rural northeaster Pennsylvania, and has two grown daughters and one grandson. See her website at http://www.barbaracrooker.com/.

MORE GOOD NEWS

Elizabeth McCord is a finalist in the New Jersey Romance Writers' "Put Your Heart in a Book" contest in the historical division! See http://njromancewriters.org/pyhiab.html.

SUBMIT

Check out THE ROSE & THORN LITERARY E-ZINE at http://www.theroseandthornezine.com.

NIGHT TRAIN EDITOR Rusty Barnes reminds us that the Richard Yates Short Story Award Competition (judged by Ed Falco) begins September 1st and runs through November 18th. See http://www.nighttrainmagazine.com/home.html. .

WHERE TO FIND BOOKS

BOOKS mentioned in this newsletter are available from your public library and your local independent bookstore as well as online and at the mall. For online shopping, try a site that specializes in textbooks, but includes general trade books too– Direct Textbook. Another good choice is Bookfinder. A good site for comparison shopping is http://www.cheapbooks.info/ . Another is http://www.allbookstores.com. Sources for used and out-of-print books include Advanced Book Exchange and Alibris.

You can also, of course, get almost any book online from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble, but keep in mind that both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble avoid unions and are responsible for the demise

Please send any responses and suggestions directly to me. Unless you say otherwise, your responses may be edited and published in this newsletter. Please e-mail Meredith Sue Willis at Meredith Sue Willis.

New Jersey Equity

Paul Scully, Executive Director of New Jersey Regional Coalition spoke at Ethical Culture today. He does a great overview of the relation between how some western counties of New Jersey are getting more and more businesses/jobs, less taxes, less affordable housing, and fewer poor people. And how the inner cities have fewer jobs, a higher tax rate (although the low value of houses means not necessarily more tax dollars paid), more affordable housing, including getting paid to take far western cities' Mount Laurel obligations, and, of course, many many poor people. Middle income, inner ring suburbs like South Orange-Maplewood get squeezed on taxes, on poor people looking for good schools, etc. etc. His solutions include rationalizing tax support for schools, more organizations like the Coalition, and organize organize organize-- especially for inner ring suburbs to figure out who their real allies are.

Thousands Rally...

I didn't go to the demonstration today, but CNN online says that the Washington police chief said theat organizers had hoped to draw 100,000 people, and, they quoted him: "I think they probably hit that."

Tomatoes at last!

It's been a rough year for tomatoes-- for the garden in all ways. We had deer eating the young cucumber plants and the beans and squash and the usual slugs after the lettuce and radicchio, and I still am not sure if they ate the tomatoes too or if there wasn't enough sun or if I simply chose late fruiting varieties. Well, we finally have a nice batch of tomatoes.

An Evening with the Achiwa family

September 22
Takeshi Achiwa, our friend and Joel's cousin Alex's cousin, is in New York for two years working at the Port Authority. I was invited to go out with him,his wife Chiaki, and his parents. The photo is of us having an elegant dinner at Petrossian, where even the gazpacho has a touch of caviar!

Last Day of Sunmmer

Summer is going out--today warm and sunny and gorgeous, and I'm finally getting tomatoes! Also the squash, eaten by dear, are at last starting, but too late, too late!

A Busy Sunday

I had a rather too typically busy Sunday yesterday–everything from a Social Action committee meeting after a presentation by Madelyn Hoffman on her trip to Afghanistan to an hour at the South Orange Newcomers meeting and greeting, and then also talking to Art Taylor and Mark Rosner and SO police Chief Chelel. Then a quick trip to the Livingston Mall for gifts for a baby and for our Japanese friends whom I'm meeting in New York tomorrow. Is that all? It felt like more.

Later that same night....

Lovely South Orange Newcomers meeting in the open next to the recreation center. Lots of families just moved in from Brooklyn and Manhattan, quite busy, really, and speeches by Village President Bill Calabrese who loves being mayor and gets lots of affection in return. Still experimenting with pictures, I'll just put a picture from a recent South Orange event in here, namely me, Dawn Williams and Mark Mucci at the Two Towns in Harmony that the Community Coalition sponsored. Dawn and Mark are the co-chairs of the committee on faith communities. We're wearing our Two Towns in Harmony tee shirts.

Golden Cool

The weather has lifted! It's golden cool with warm sun, just right. I'm on my way to ethical, with a social action committee meeting to follow a talk by Madelyn Hoffman of Peace Action, then a visit to SO newcomers this afternoon, and what I'd really like to do is sit on the back porch and read. I did sit on the back porch and put notes in my gardening book after some more sowing of fall lettuces etc. yesterday.

Trashy Comments

Now I'm getting a lot of automated trashy comments on this blog, saying what a good blog it is and wouldn't I like to buy a nice printer to go with it?

Experimenting

I'm trying to see if I can put pictures in here-- I know I can do a link but what about pictures? I want to try one of my books. I don't get it. I could do one earlier today. What's wrong now? Here's a try with something already online: That didn't work either. Oh well.