Ernest Hemingway -- was he cheating?

Shame on you, Ernest.

"The John F. Kennedy Library here in Boston owns a copy of Ulysses whose pages—other than a few at the very beginning and very end—are completely uncut,” she says. “This tells us something about the owner of the copy—who happens to be Ernest Hemingway."

Read the whole story:
http://chronicle.com/article/Secret-Reading-Lives-Revealed/136261/

Mark Twain

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1

Though this is not a great book, it is a good contribution to the picture of the man who was perhaps our greatest idealist. He lived through and witnessed so much important history. He knew presidents, kings, scoundrels, and very simple people. He speaks with a great deal of warmth and humanity about many different people. And he pokes as much fun, and scorn, at himself as he does anyone else (particularly editors) in this rambling reminiscence.

The book is too long. It is best digested as an audio book. The editors produce a long and perhaps too detailed introduction. Fortunately, they had enough sense to quote extensively from long passages of Twain's works, and thus periodically make the introduction interesting. As an example, they include Twain's narrative about the survivors of the US clipper ship Hornet, which sank in 1866. That narrative appears online, for anyone to read:

http://www.twainquotes.com/18660719u.html

Pick it up when you have a couple of weeks of long, boring driving ahead of you.

Reading all the time ...

Reader, Writer: What One Writer Has Read

One thing a writer or would-be writer should do is read. I've been busy these last few days with the following:

The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1. This has been my 'big' book -- and big it is. Everyday I've tackled a several dozen pages, and it's been interesting and revealing. His humor is as sarcastic, self-deprecating, and biting as you would expect. His story is rich with incidents, triumphs, and tragedies, and these he shares in non-linear narrative. In one moment we might read about his experiences as a newspaperman, a son, and a brother -- with bits of information about his father or mother thrown in. What comes out is an unstructured reminiscence that at times is as bright as anything he has written.

Twain is master of the personal essay. This Autobiography presents a river of them, and they reveal the man in all his roles: You see Twain as the husband, father, son, brother, student, apprentice, newspaperman, gold miner, riverboat sailor, and author. You realize, also, Twain participated or witnessed extraordinary historical events -- the Gold Rush, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the War in the Philippines -- and knew remarkable historical figures: Ulysses S. Grant, Kaiser Wilhelm, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rockefeller, and many others.

In all, the book is interesting from a literary point of view. I believe it sold well when published one or two years ago. The legend behind it, that Twain banned publication until he'd been dead for one hundred years, helped increase interest and sales (it was on the NY Times Best Seller list for at least twenty weeks). Twain's memorable stories are transmitted to us in an authentic American voice that crosses and encompasses our various and different regions -- south, west, east. He is one of us, and of all of us, and I believe everyone has a personal connection in some way with either Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, or the Prince and the Pauper.

The next two volumes will probably not sell as well. But I will read them. Each will be in the six hundred page category, I am sure.


"Afternoon Waltz" and "Natica Jackson," two short stories by John O'Hara, published in his 1966 story collection Waiting for Winter. You read O'Hara only because you want to read him. Only a handful of works are in print, most notably his first novel Appointment in Samarra and a handful of nis New Yorker short stories, particularly "The Doctor's Son."

This collection, one of his last before his death in 1970, contains standard O'Hara material, and the two stories I read this week -- noted above in the subheading -- are representative types.

"Afternoon Waltz" delivers a sarcastic picture of a hypocritical love affair between a dull, spoiled, and sexually inexperienced young man and a manipulative, selfish, and status-conscious middle-aged married woman. Years earlier, the woman married a much older man for money and convenience. The young whelp, the son of an unimportant minister, inherits his parents' home shortly after college, and he retires into his library to live a life of reading only. The strong woman initiates a very unlikely love affair with this easy-to-control young man. In time, fate punishes them for this very private transgression, however. The young man is going blind, due to some unidentified malady that has been made worse by his reading. The wise old doctor -- who quickly analyzes his patient and knows intuitively that he is involved in affair with a married woman -- tries to compel the boy (he seems a boy throughout) to go on a trip to 'see' the world, while he still can. The boy's vision will be lost forever in less than three years. The story ends on the notion that the boy will send up his lover to talk to the doctor, who is confident he can persuade the woman to take the boy on an adventure before it is too late.

"Natica Jackson" provides a typical gossipy, name-dropping vision of the Hollywood film industry of the 1930s, an O'Hara specialty. Again, a couple drifts into a romance. The actress, Natica, is an up and coming movie actress, selfish and focused on her career -- and ably guided by a hideous yet always wise and insightful husband-and-wife team who represent her and promote her career. Her previous love affairs are hinted at, and the sexual aberrations and love affairs of other actors, producers, and agents are painted in broad and nasty brush strokes. The wife of Natica's newest lover -- a smart and thoroughly complacent oil engineer who knows nothing of the ways Hollywood -- senses quickly that she has been wronged, and is in fact a representative of a subsection of the O'Hara universe of self-centered, crazy, cruel women who are always thinking  of social status. The cruelty and insanity of this woman had been carefully concealed until she learns of the affair. Then she coldly, methodically murders her children to punish her husband and force him to abandon his lover in shame and horror. The story ends with Natica and her agents scrambling to avoid bad publicity as well as blackmail and to protect the actress's career, which is the thing that is uppermost in the minds of all three of the Hollywood professionals.

O'Hara is an interesting anachronism. He does not understand women. He barely understands sex. His gossipy tone, and his ability to tap into and reveal human selfishness and cruelty among his people interests me.

Oddly, he mainly stages his stories in the America of the Twenties and Thirties. This is his primary playground. He will reach back further, for a back story, and sometimes his back story consumes hundreds of pages of his novels. Appointment in Samarra, his first novel, was published in 1935, and producing a story involving bootleggers just two years after the end of Prohibition seems to make sense. But his last novel, The Ewings, was published in 1970, and it takes place in the Teens and Twenties of the Twentieth Century, but the plot is creaky and mechanical and unconvincing. The behaviors depicted are as self-centered, complacent and nasty as ever, just not up to O'Hara's usual high standards.

I still like to read him, and he has a vast library of titles to get through. His best, to my mind, is the long story "Imagine Kissing Pete."


The Monkees: This week I also indulged in complete and total trash, and I skimmed a celebrity autobiography written about ten years ago by Micky Dolenz, singer and actor of The Monkees. A quick read, and a confirmation of all the basic information we've heard elsewhere about these guys and their two-year roller coaster (up and then down) career as the most popular rock-and-roll act from 1966 to 1968. Hard to believe they were selling more records than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in those days, or that they hung out with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson, Brian Jones, and other celebrities of that era.

When I was ten and eleven, I watched the show. I became recently interested in this group after reading an article online, published two or three weeks ago, that the surviving members of The Monkees will appear in concert this fall or next winter, in honor of Davy Jones, the teenage heart-throb band and show member who died last year due to heart failure.

Today in American literary history

Jack London Returns from His First Sea Venture

Today, August 26, 2012, marks the one hundred and nineteenth (119) anniversary of the day that seventeen-year-old Jack London returned from a eight-month seal-hunting voyage that ranged from the northern Pacific coast of the United States and Canada, and eventually to Japan.

On January 20, 1893, a week or so after his seventeenth birthday, London signed the articles that enrolled him as a merchant sailor on the hunting vessel Sophie Sutherland. London describes his adventures in his alcoholic memoirs, John Barleycorn, and the trip was the source of his very first published story, A Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan, which had been published by the San Francisco Morning Call newspaper on November 11, 1893, when he was still only seventeen.

With this trip and the subsequent narrative the seed was planted for a literary career that was fully launched in 1899 -- which included more than two hundred (200) short stories, twenty-three (23) novels, and several memoirs and nonfiction works -- and ended only with London's death at age forty in 1916.

Catholic fringe -- not really Catholic

This one is nutty.

A priest who fathered a child:

"It was tough to top the bizarre inquisition of self-sacrificing American nuns pushed by the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law. Law, the former head of the Boston archdiocese, fled to a plush refuge in Rome in 2002 after it came out that he protected priests who molested thousands of children."

Also,

"The Rev. Thomas Williams belongs to the Legionaires of Christ, the order founded by the notorious Mexican priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, a pal of Pope John Paul II who died peppered with accusations that he  sexually abused seminarians and fathered several children and abused some of them."

And,

"The Society for Truth and Justice, a fringe Christian anti-abortion group, compared Sebelius to Himmler, and protesters showed up on campus to yell at her for being, as one screamed, “a murderer.” "

And the definition of a Catholic: 'All embracing':

"As James Joyce wrote in “Finnegans Wake:” “Catholic means ‘Here comes everybody.’ ”"

Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/dowd-here-comes-nobody.html

Wrote a Review

I wrote a restaurant review. I tell myself any writing will do ... especially now. I am just trying to get started.

How to come up with new ideas for content/writing?

How to come up with new ideas?

This thread started on Tycoon Talk.

How do how do you come up with ideas for new  content?

Authorship Blog

You Should Write, she said

           Everyone who knows me well often tells me that ‘you should write.’

           This evening, my daughter said, ‘You should write.’ Hearing this made me uncomfortable. Thinking about it now, the flesh beneath my skin itches. When she spoke those words, I wanted to look away in shame and embarrassment.

‘You should write.’

When I was a child, I used to say that I wanted to become a writer. I read voraciously. Fiction was  my primary diet. Fiction books were my closest friends – my BFF’s – so-called best friends forever. In those days, I cared for Steinbeck’s people, such as Lennie and his friend George (in Of Mice and Men). I admired the stoic heroism of Tarzan (a knight from the Dark Continent, and an avenger who predated the Dark Knight himself). I cataloged the adventures of Holmes and Watson – men who never once demonstrated fear, who were confident and strong and vigorously active and energetic (how I wish I had the chance to march across a dank, dangerous, dark moorland to face death and reveal the truth!).

            Now I believe that I mistook these imaginary friendships as a sign that I wanted to write. Now I believe I wanted to live – by reading novels of every stripe. I really didn’t want to write per se as much as I wanted to enjoy the feeling of satisfaction and insight that fiction often bestows.

For me, and people like me, authors are the wisest of humans. They and their creations explain what and why, and occasionally provide enough information to show us how to live. Inadequate though they are as a replacement for actual peoples, books were a deep source of my life energy.

I could bore you with that silly the lonely, shy child stuff. But won’t go into that. What’s really important to me now is that I must change my reaction to this statement: ‘You should write.’

When my son and daughter tell me this, I feel an enormous obligation. And fear … that I am letting them down.

I have nothing important to say or show you, truly. Nothing new or unique.

I can only write about what I hope is a worthy sentence or two. But only because my kids, who are at the door to young adulthood, just a couple of years away from leaving for college, tell me that I should.

I must rise to their challenge: I must provide an example of perseverance, of overcoming doubt and fear, of rising to meet the higher expectations of those I love, of demonstrating that I am worthy of their love, attention, and praise.

I must be worthy of their concern.

Hence these few words. We’ll see what more I may be able to produce.