Before this last week, I had never heard of “book packagers” before and, frankly, I find the whole concept depressing. However, this piece about one writer’s experience, made me laugh–I Coulda Been a Pretender:

However, having never lived in the United States, I had no idea about what was permissible in terms of cussing, especially in kids’ fiction. We had agreed, previously, that I would write the thing as naturally as I could, and the people at 17th Street would filter out the unacceptable elements. So, I did just that, leaving in the text a modest fistful of shits, craps, a bastard, and several fucks. I even told them so when I mailed the finished text. Did they filter? Did they read? No; they gave the manuscript straight to the 8-year-old son of the company president. Little Timmy saw a shit and a fuck. He cried. He read the word bastard and needed counseling. It was a catastrophe.

The first annual Newburyport Literary Festival runs today-Sunday. I’m looking forward to catching some of the events tomorrow.

Next week at this time I will officially be shitting myself as it will be the day of my Dire Literary Series reading. Not quite sure what time I’m going on, but it will be at some point after the open mic readers.

Okay. That’s it.

Thanks to my buddy Robin Slick, I learned the Jordan Rosenfeld has a cool new story up at Juked. Check it out (by the way, I’m aware that I’m being tres 1980s when I say, “check it out”–it’s not something I actually say in real life; rather I reserve it for here. Check it out!): The Change.

In other news, last week Sue Henderson asked folks about their mentors. I offered a response, which Sue kindly posted on her blog: Mentors. Thanks, Sue!

I have a fondness for these tulips in particular. They are shorter than the others and their leaves are bluish, their flowers orange, red, purplish.









Here’s a shot of all of some of my spring flowers.








Darby is aloof this morning because I was up in the night and he’s pissed that he didn’t get enough sleep.

Kathy Fish is one of those writers who makes me swoon. And her story in the latest Night Train–put on their website via .pdf–is no exception. I promise it will move you. Read it: What Kind of Person Gives Secrets to the Sky?

Bev Jackson (who leaves on a cool trip soon!) and Steve Kane tagged me on this

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place (parentheses) around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (sorry! I’m embarrassed!)
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
(His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
The Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
1984 – George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
(Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell)
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Atonement – Ian McEwan
(The Shadow of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Dune – Frank Herbert
Sula by Toni Morrison
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
(The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo)
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
(Brighton Rock – Graham Greene)
(The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rusdie)
(We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Schriver)
Disgrace – JM Coetzee
(Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro)
The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureshi
(Small Island – Andrea Levy)
(Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake)
Ivanhoe – Walter Scott
(Patrick Suskind – Perfume)
(Bernand Shlink – The reader)

Bev’s additions:

Father and Son – Larry Brown
Crooked Hearts – Robert Boswell
She’s Come Undone – Wally Lamb
Postcards – E. Annie Proulx
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (stories) – Robert Olen Butler
(Defiance – Carole Maso)
Being Dead – Jim Crace

Steve’s additions:

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
Don Quixote by Cervantes
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
(Illywhacker by Peter Carey)
The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
(if on a winter’s night a traveller… by Italo Calvino)

Also, what titles would you add to this list?
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, by John Berger
Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard
Bear Attacks–Their Causes and Avoidance, by Stephen Herrero
Desert Notes–Reflections in the Eye of a Raven, by Barry Lopez
River Notes–The Dance of Herons, by Barry Lopez

I am tagging:

P.A. Moed
Kay Sexton
Katie Weekley

Today, I am in need of guidance and inspiration. Here is Virginia Woolf, from “A Sketch of the Past,” discussing her “moments”:

It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that is has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we–I mean all human beings–are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the rods; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.

The house is on the lake. Georgia pine with large stone fireplaces. There are trees–balsam all around it and the lawn is not a lawn at all but a carpet of needles. There is an old piano and a study lined with books and a long covered porch. In the kitchen there is a pantry, and a long ceramic counter. There is a screen door that squeaks. There is an upstairs with many rooms and sometimes there is the low, sweeping sound of bat wings at night. The bathrooms have clawfooted tubs and sinks that are cool to the touch. And always it is dark inside and it smells like a memory of childhood summers.

The birds are not quiet today. The cold will not stop their singing. Yesterday, a dead finch on the road–a red head and a small tongue sticking out its beak. It was sadder than sad.

There is a cold spot on my cheek as if someone is here with me. Are you here with me? I keep feeling it. Is it your cool hand on my cheek? Can you answer me?

I stop to let you type but all I see is the sun through the slats of the shade on my fingers. The sun on my fingers.

Your void is endless. It is the black of the beginning. It is that nothingness.

A man with an axe running across the street. What is he going to do with that axe?

A man outside a window. He is wearing a white suit, a pink shirt a tie, and he is looking up and waving at me. This was in a dream.

Do you like to party? A man asked at a gas station. I got in my car and locked the doors. I drove away. Afterwards, I thought about how I could have gone with him. How I could have died.

At the end of the night I would mop up the piss on the floor of the men’s room. The water was black with dirt, ash, beer, blood.

Soccer. The sun is shining and we run and we run and we run. I don’t want the game to end. The exhilaration and the fear of it. I want to be good at it. I want to be the girl who scores a goal and gets her name in the paper but I never am. I’m the one who tries really, really hard.

The sky is gray today. I can’t hear any birds because there is rain coming and they have sought shelter. There is no sun through slats on my hands today. I can see the blue house cut up into slices. Bottom, middle, middle, middle, top. And the thing is I don’t even know who lives there. There’s a truck and a pink bicycle and the people–I don’t know their names.

That’s what I was thinking–Pity poor me, all the way to my bank:

Historical note: A friend with a memory remarks that ”today’s temporarily disgraced Ivy League child novelist” is tomorrow’s Hollywood successnik. Yale’s own Jacob Epstein, come on down! Epstein’s 1979 novel, ”Wild Oats,” bore remarkable similarities to Martin Amis’s ”The Rachel Papers.” The kerfuffle barely nicked him. Epstein became a writer for ”Hill Street Blues” and executive story editor for ”L.A. Law,” among other credits.

Here she is (and trust me, you will love her. I do): Chrysanthemum Vulva

Great interview in The Sycamore Review with Andre Dubus III, who said in the response to what was he working on at the time of the interview:

I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you. I can never talk about a work in progress. It’s like masturbating before you make love. When you are writing a story you are pregnant with the story and you have to protect it until it’s ready to come out. I can tell you this: I’m working on a novel.

And for advice to struggling writers, this:

Honestly, if I had a divine premonition that I would never be published again I would still write. It’s a better day to have written badly than to not have written at all. If you’re writing four, five or six days a week because you can’t help yourself, the world is eventually going to take notice.

This morning, I could talk about the two plagiarism articles on the front page of The Boston Globe but instead I’m going to talk about stuff that really interests me: James Joyce, reading, drinking, Irish pubs–all of which can be found in this article:
They’ve been reading ‘Finnegans Wake’ since 1996. They’ll probably fi nish it in 2021:

It’s a quiet night at The Thirsty Scholar, an Irish pub and dating bar on Beacon Street. A handful of bored-looking guys sit at the bar, watching a hockey game on the TV, and a few couples and small groups chat quietly at scattered tables. But in what Irish pubs call ”the snug,” an alcove off the dimly lit main room, conversation is animated, laughter frequent, and there are more books than bottles on the table. The Boston-area ”Finnegans Wake” Reading Group is in session.

Somebody ought to pay these guys $500K just for being dedicated and passionate readers. That’s what I’m saying.