…”Ghettoside,” by Jill Leovy. But I’ve also almost finished a review of it for Broad Street or FOM, so I don’t think I’ll say anything further now, except that it’s a fine book, with whose conclusion I did not agree. Stay tuned.
blog
I just finished…
…”The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins. Kate Atkinson aside, I don’t normally like crime fiction. I didn’t like “Gone Girl” or “Dragon Tattoo” or a couple Gillian Flynn’s. I got bored by Alan Furst and Henkell Menning (or whatever his name is) and I couldn’t finish the one Jo Nesbo I began. But this one’s plot kept me going.
Until the morning after I’d finished, when I woke up staring at a hole in the denouement I could have driven all of Russian literature through.
Hawkins cheated.
The director of the fitness center at the Claremont was looking for stories to post on the bulletin board and feature in the newsletter which would inspire the club’s members. She heard about mine, and thought it would work. (Things seemed a bit slow, since my immediate predecessor had been a 14-year-old girl who had mastered the hula hoop.) Here it is: http://files.ctctcdn.com/84b02f5a301/9ee9fa90-8713-4a9d-a6b3-1b0586974b83.pdf
Book and film rights remain available.
Breaking and Entering
My latest, an expansion upon something noted here a couple weeks ago, has been published at http://bit.ly/1XINEsM
It begins:
Before Daniel Ellsberg, before Edward Snowden, were the Media burglars. On March 8, 1971, eight non-violent, anti-war activists broke into the FBI’s Media, Pennsylvania office and walked out with its files. Over the next two months, they released portions to members of Congress and the press. Revelations in these documents led to a wrenching rethinking of the role of investigative agencies in a democracy, a reform (some would insert a prefatory “insufficient”) of their practices, and an unmasking of J. Edgar Hoover’s, the FBI’s director for 48-years, as a (some would also say) corrupt, deceitful, law-breaking, bullying, homicidal paranoid. Which proved insufficient to strike his name from the bureau’s national headquarters.
I just finished (almost)…
…”Toward a Radical Middle,” a collection of reviews and reportage by Renata Adler, all of which previously appeared in “The New Yorker.” I had read the collection when in first came out, in 1969, and when I spotted it on Café Bongo’s Free Shelf, I thought it warranted a second look. Adler, now 82, whose writing career has not been without bumps and gaps, including a digression to get a degree from Yale Law School, has drawn renewed interest lately. Her two novels have been reissued by NYRB Classics and a best-of collection of her non-fiction was published last year.
Adler is a fine writer, with a deep (sometimes, for me at least, impenetrable) intelligence, and she can be as nasty as anyone you run into. It was fun to see where she turned her eye and how her judgments, both in terms of what she deemed important and how she analyzed them, held up. Does anyone, for instance, really care about Herb Gold enough to appreciate the hammer she smashed him with? Her optimism for the Mid-East after the Six Day War and the beneficial aspects of encounter groups seem misplaced, but her portrayal of Sunset Strip teens sets Charlie Manson lurking in the wings and her devastating depiction of the New Politics Convention in 1967 still has smoke rising that can sear the lungs.
A New Story
“A Palace of Wisdom” has been accepted for publication in the soon-to-be anthology “Speaking of Atlantic City.” Scholars of Bob Leviniana will recognize its roots in “Mad 5,” which marked his debut in “The Comics Journal,” and was anthologized in “Outlaws, Rebels, etc…”, still available from the author. A comparison of the two works will provide an interesting discussion about the relationship between memory, truth and fiction, as well as, perhaps, the drying-up of the creative imagination.
Credit where due
I just finished…
…”Back,” by Henry Green. Green, whose admirers included W.H. Auden, Terry Southern and Eudora Welty, was the first author I heard referred to as “a writer’s writer’s writer.” He wrote nine novels, of which I’ve now read five, though none in more than a decade, when I tripped over this one in Half-Price Books. “Back” concerns a partial amputee, just returned from a German POW camp, seemingly before VE Day, adjusting to a life thrown further off-balance by the death, while he was away, of the married woman by whom he may have fathered a child.
Green writes terrific dialogue, tellingly rendering its halts & stumbles & circumambulations and the “accuracy” these inaccuracies communicate. He penetrates characters deeply and painfully. He captures light with painterly skill. In fact, like an English Lit professor of mine once said of writers he admired, he is at all times a conscious artist, adding each word to a page as a painter applies each pigment. (If you pick this one up, just look at how he uses the word “rose.”)
“Loving” was Green’s most highly regarded — and most successful book — but I recommend all — and any — of them.
I finished…
…”The Burglary,” by Betty Medsger, an account of the 1971 break-in of the FBI office in Media, PA, by a team of anti-war activists, who made away with suitcases full of documents, which they release — before Ellsberg, before Snowden — to members of the press. These documents led to the discovery of the FBI’s secret, decades-long, illegal, nay, felonious — arguably (on occasion) murderous — campaign against those of whom its untouchable, though megalomaniacal — arguably insane — director J. Edgar Hoover disapproved. The burglars were never caught, not for want of effort on the part of the FBI, which went to massive — if frequently inept — efforts to do so. And until Medsger’s book, there identities were never known.
They turned out to be ordinary people — just like you and me — only, in unfathomable ways — better.
I wish Medsger had spent more of her time “fathoming,” but that wasn’t in her game plan. I could have done with more focus on the subject of the book’s title — the burglary — and the burglars and less on the subsequent history of the FBI and government surveillance, which I can just hear some editor or marketing specialist suggesting should be tacked on for “relevance’; but that’s just me and my preferences. It’s a great story about people before whom one stands in awe.
Adventures in Media Baronhood (con.)
It’s officially over between me and Lulu. The “Executives” didn’t call me Monday, as promised, or Tuesday or Wednesday, for that matter, so I called my Publishing and Marketing Consultant. “You were on my list of people to call today,” he said. It was make-the-changes-or-else, he said. “Else,” I said. My refund will be “processed” within 30 business days. We shall then see how much it is. Now if someone knows a site where I can review the quality of Lulu’s services…
Meanwhile, I have been learning about cover choices — gloss and high glass and mattee and fold-overs. I have also familiarized myself with warehousing fees for stock I don’t want to stuff in my garage. That is fun. (I will do “Cheesesteak” myself, once “The Schiz” is done.)
Several cartoonists have asked for more information about the characters who appear in the chapters they are providing and illustration for. That seems fair, so I have provided it.
And with sales of one copy of “The Pirates & Mouse” apiece to (a) the Brigham Young University library (ordered by the English department) and (b) Joe the Banker, my web site has, I believe, moved into the black.