While my computer was out of action my review of Ghettoside went up at BSR. Here’s the link:
http://www.broadstreetreview.com/books/jill-leovys-ghettoside
Windows
In case you’ve wondered about my absence, well, my computer died. I know the flaw in temporal causality. That Even B follows Event A doesn’t mean Event A caused Event B. But I blame Windows 10.
For months I’d been refusing all pop-ups offering me Windows 10 because I’d been warned it was an invitation to disaster. Then one afternoon I walked into my study and my computer announced it was almost through installing it. I called my IT guy, Steve the Great, knowing he would accuse me of having clicked the wrong click. “You won’t believe me,” I said. He believed me. I was the fourth person in 36 hours to call him with the same problem. It seemed Windows had modified its pop-up. Windows 10 was no longer an option. It was coming unless you stopped it.
(Windows slips these pop-ups into its mostly helpful up-dates. Even if you know the code that identifies Windows 10 and remove it, it will come back at you. “Unconscionable,” Steve said.)
Windows 10 and my two/three-year-old, never-sick-a-day-in-its-life Dell co-existed happily for about a week. Death came suddenly and without warning. Steve took 10 days to resurrect it. I lost a few hundred e-mails I had saved for sentimental and other reasons in my Inbox. “The good news,” Steve said, “is you don’t have Windows 10 any more.”
I just finished…
…”The Goldfinch,” by Donna Tartt. It’s a big, sprawling, novel, NYC, Vegas, Amsterdam, romance, tragedy, murder, art theft, drugs, and sinister Russians. Personally, I could have done with less Las Vegas, but the plot and the characters, especially the central one, the narrator, and his predicament(s) kept me turning the pages. As for the High-ness of the “Art,” there was a lot more awareness and description of light than I think a teenage boy would be inclined toward and seemed the author striving to add a layer of luster of her own devising, but the prose was well-styled and toward the end the thought became resonant and eloquent.
But, again, at 73, I again found myself, “thought-wise,” pretty well stocked. Maybe if I was an adolescent or young man or even Tartt’s age, forty-ish when she wrote this… But in my present, the what-will-happen-next was the main thing.
I just finished…
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.