Hey, this is cool. BEA is offering podcasts this year:

With these free podcasts you will be able to hear publishing leaders discuss how new Internet tools are changing the book business. You will hear “Upfront & Unscripted” — intimate one-on-one interviews with publishing, Web and marketing gurus. You will hear from your favorite authors and speakers. And, our roving pod-reporter will find out from attendees and industry experts what’s the “Buzz at BEA” – a buzz that often sets the book-buying agenda for the year.

Here is a new blog run by some folks I know–The Canadian Writers Collective. Good stuff, eh?

When I read this post The Madness Continues on MoorishGirl yesterday, I was chilled right to my core.

Then I read Patricia Zohn’s series on a soldier returning home–Part I, Part II (there will be two more parts) and I got even more depressed:

But RJ says, “A lot of things they preach over there were stupid to me: these weren’t my friends or people I was trying to help …this was my enemy, face to face shaking our hands, then trying to blow us up.” He “kept them at a distance” and didn’t learn the language; he didn’t want a guy approaching him saying “thank you mister, thank you, thank you, not knowing what he had strapped to his back.” Though he came to understand why someone might join the insurgency (poverty, no food, “hell on earth”), he “never got to a personal level with Iraqi women and children.” Unlike Joey, his strategic overview made possible by his post-Iraq service as a General’s aide-de-camp, he didn’t see détente as part of his mission. “You don’t join the military with prospects of changing the world,” he reiterates.

But then I read the best bit of news– Bush Approval Rating Drops to Record Low 31% in USA Today Poll–and I thought, Yes!!!!!

This is a fascinating article–Electronic smog:

Perhaps strangest of all, there is increasing evidence that the smog causes some people to become allergic to electricity, leading to nausea, pain, dizziness, depression and difficulties in sleeping and concentrating when they use electrical appliances or go near mobile phone masts. Some are so badly affected that they have to change their lifestyles.

While not yet certain how it is caused, both the WHO and the HPA accept that the condition exists, and the UN body estimates that up to three in every 100 people are affected by it.

Got my copy of AGNI 63 in the mail on Friday and went immediately to the Editor’s Note, this time entitled Finding Traction. Sven Birkerts always has something interesting to say in his essays and this one was no exception. In fact, I would consider it a must read for those folks out there who are writing and hoping for publication:

Keep in mind that while making selections appears to be a process of saying yes, editing is much more realistically an almost continuous search for reasons to say no. One becomes a philosopher of the art in spite of oneself, for after there has been enough of saying no, the realization strikes—as sketchily suggested above—that while I seem to be responding on the basis of taste, of “I like this, I don’t like this,” the taste itself is conditioned by deeper aesthetic biases and valuations, and some reflection on these quickly exposes assumptions about what is viable—needed—in the literary culture, which is in turn a thinly veiled way of pronouncing on the outlook for meaning in general.

And:

I am affirming an aesthetic assumption: Writing communicates its essential nature from the threshold. Sentences, even phrases, are not just units of construction, but organic tissue, encoded with literary DNA. Ten, fifteen strings of words, but for me they carry the breath, the vibration, the electricity of the entire piece. If I am wrong in my call? Then I must live with the conjectured loss of distinguished work. But I persist in my folly.

Read this essay. Read it again. And then read it one more time.

I was at the library yesterday and when I was looking over the new releases, I was shocked to see How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life on the shelves. Why was it there? Is there no library policy about plagiarized material?

I brought this up with the librarians. The first one I spoke to had only vaguely heard of the whole debacle, so she asked her higher up, who told me that they hadn’t made a decision about whether they would pull it or not yet but that there was (apparently) no formal policy.

I’m not shocked that they’ve made no decision–I can understand that a decision on pulling a book needs to take time and that as the guardians of books, they must be careful. What I don’t understand is how there is no policy in place about ADMITTEDLY plagiarized material existing in a library. Should there not even be an insert from the library alerting readings to the goings on in regards to the book? Something?

My concern is that it is just out there on the shelves for anyone to read and it feels not right to me that it should be given this privelege. In fact, it feels wrong. All wrong.

What do you think? Is this book in your town library? Do you think it should be? Does your library have a policy about plagiarized material? I’m truly curious.

Had a fun time at the Dire Literary Series last night. The space is a cool, small gallery in Central Square in Cambridge (for those of you not familiar with the area–the city Boston is on one side of the Charles River and the city of Cambridge is on the other. Cambridge is where Harvard University and MIT are and Boston is where Boston University, Fenway Park, and Faneuil Hall are).

One thing I was worried about was that it was approximately one million degrees yesterday–would sweat, then, be an issue? Luckily, though, the night cooled down and even though the space was small, it remained relatively cool.

I was delighted to see Xujun Eberlein and Rusty Barnes there. Incidentally, on July 7th, Dire will be a celebration for the release of Night Train VI–at which Xujun will be reading. This should NOT be missed!

The open mic readers were a great and diverse group and the other features David Surette and Norman Waksler were fabulous. Special hats off to the host of the eveing, Tim Gager a lover of literature who knows how to make people laugh.

All in all a great night.

I’m not quite sure why The Boston Globe chose to make this story about women’s clothing size a cover story, but it has got to be something you’ve noticed as a woman–that the size of clothes is not what it used to be:

”I tried on a size 0 skirt and it was too big,” said Chao, a 30-year-old graduate student of molecular biology at Harvard University. ”To me, a size 0 is antimatter; it’s something devoid of any physical reality.”

Chao was already mystified by how she’d shrunk from a size 8 in high school to a size 2 today, despite gaining 15 pounds in the interim. But now at size 0, she realized something curious was afoot.

The reason I find this fascinating is that I have no idea what size I am–it’s always a crap shoot at the store and getting worse, but now that I see it’s all about clothing makers and retailers appealing to what they perceive as women’s vanity, it irritates me. Here I thought it was ME. That my body had changed somehow. But no, instead the powers that be are fucking with our body image.

Pick a standard for clothing and stick to it! What is the big deal? I just want clothes that fit and now I know why when I buy the jeans I’ve always bought in the size I’ve always bought them and they are falling off me (even though MY size has not changed), that it’s not me, it’s them. I’m wasting money here, people! Knock it off!

Tonight I am a feature reader at the Dire Literary Series, along with Norman Waksler and special guest David Surette . Open mic starts at 8 and features start after 9 and run to around 10:30PM.

The readings are held at the Out of the Blue Gallery located at 106 Prospect Street, Cambridge, MA.

Should be fun and I’m looking forward to it. Maybe I’ll see you there.

Snow*Vigate is live, featuring such writers as:

Kim Chinquee: Skittles & Down the Road

Girija Tropp: Escalate

Claudia Smith: Swallow

Liesl Jobson: Litter-Bugs

Also read: Looking And Smelling Just Like A Present Participle:
An Interview With Kim Chinquee

Great stuff. Read the full interview here:

Satori Kick: So, Mr. Kesey, we’ve heard “Nothing in the World” has been happening to you lately–would you care to explain?

Roy Kesey: Oh yeah, it’s happening everywhere these days. Just this morning I tripped over a small stack of it on the way to the coffee-maker. Broken ankle, forehead lesion, the works. Dangerous stuff, this Nothing.

Phlox (and some Lamb’s ear on the side, spreading out its lovely, soft ears). We don’t have enough phlox. Next door they have a carpet of pink phlox. I want more, more, but we don’t have enough light.



Forget-me-nots. Our friends gave us these when we moved here. I’ve spread them out along the edge of the lawn. I love them.




These wild violets seem to be everywhere this year (at least, I think they’re wild violets). Gorgeous.