Back to Mr. Dickens

I kept thinking how much the US Congress dickering over the debt ceiling is just like Dickens's Circumlocution Office, with all the talk of why "it can't be done." So I put aside Susan Isaacs's LILY WHITE, which was boring me, in favor of LITTLE DORRIT, which isn't.

The cinematic opening, which I looked for in vain when I watched the BBC series, fits right in with the breathless weather we're having:

Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.

There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour, or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or day, for months.

This may be the last time I read my Penguin paperback edition, which I bought in 1984, as the pages keep fluttering out of the cracked binding. It's odd to have a book that I remember buying new to be looking--and especially smelling--so old.

Strange & Beautiful: Kevin Wilson & THE FAMILY FANG

The Family Fang, Kevin Wilson’s debut novel from Ecco Press, opens with:

Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief. "You make a mess and then you walk away from it," their daughter, Annie, told them.

And what a mess Caleb and Camille Fang have made of Annie and her younger brother Buster! Labeled “Child A” and “Child B,” from infancy they were pressed into service—not always willingly, or even wittingly—as key players in their parents’ notorious performance art pieces.

Having attended art school and hung around the Manhattan art/music scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I came of age with people like Caleb and Camille Fang. I was curious how Kevin Wilson managed to capture them and their milieu with such piercing, tragicomic accuracy....
More at Wild River Review

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Lionel Stander (center) in "The Big Show-Off"

My father would have been 103 years old today (the simplest date of all: 1/11/11). My latest acquisition of Lionel Stander memorabilia is a publicity still from The Big Show-Off, released in January 1945. I haven't seen it, but per the synopsis it seems to be a typical Republic Pictures "B" movie. Its one claim to fame is that it stars Dale Evans just before she hitched up with Roy Rogers.

I visited my mom and stepfather in Maine two weeks ago. While I was doing my morning stretches, I suddenly noticed a book, which I'm sure had been on the same shelf for 20 years: BUILDING A CHARACTER.

"Huh," I thought. "This might be useful in writing fiction." (I've been working on The Great American Potboiler, in fits and starts, for several years.)

I pulled the book down, and saw that the author was Constantin Stanislavski, inventor of "The Method" espoused by Jacob & Stella Adler, and countless other of Dad's actor friends. I opened it and was surprised to see that it was from the New York Public Library's Bloomingdale Branch, on West 100th St.

Even more surprising, my father's temporary library card was in the pocket, with our old West End Avenue address and phone number--proof that he had indeed moved back in with Mom and me. The book was borrowed Dec 16, 1961, and due on Jan 26, 1962. The overdue fine is 5¢ "per calendar day." That's almost $900 by now, so this is a very valuable book.

I felt a mental connection with Dad when I started reading BUILDING A CHARACTER: this was a book that he went out of his way to read. The Dewey card is stuck between the first two pages of Chapter Four: "Making the Body Expressive." Did Dad get bored and stop there? That chapter is a bit of a slog. But he was such a voracious reader--often a book per day--and Stanislavski's work so important that I'd like to think he read all the way through.

As luck would have it, today I found a bit on YouTube from "The Danny Kaye Radio Show," in which Kaye hilariously explains the Stanislavski Method to my father, who was a regular on the show. What I miss most about Dad is his voice, which is like no other. (I've never heard a credible imitation. When I was little my mother took me to the doctor because my voice was hoarse. Turned out I was trying to speak like Daddy.) So it's wonderful to be able to hear him long after his death--and long before my birth. He gets a few lines to set up the bit, then it's all Danny Kaye. Listen:

Patrick Dennis Forever!

Holiday thoughts from razor-witted Patrick Dennis (aka Edward Everett Tanner III), who deserves to be remembered as the author of books beyond AUNTIE MAME.

AROUND THE WORLD WITH AUNTIE MAME (1958) begins with this:

Christmas is nearly here and I look forward to it more and more with loathing. All the shops that didn't have their holiday decorations up by Michaelmas made up for it with sheer ostentation by Halloween. Canned carols bleat from every corner. The clerks at Saks are surlier, the ones at Lord & Taylor lordlier, the ones at Bergdorf's bitchier than at any other season.

From THE JOYOUS SEASON* (1964), narrated by a 10-year-old boy:

Daddy always said that Christmas is a joyous season when suicides and hold-ups and shoplifting and like that reach a new high and that the best place to spend the whole thing is a Moslem country.

*Confession: I've put down THE FINKLER QUESTION twice to reread Patrick Dennis. Interpret as you wish.

Timeless Truths in Fiction

He offered the honest terms that a sound concern and an honest man had to offer. But that was not what people wanted nowadays. They wanted their hypothetical arrangements, their wild rumors, their manipulated booms with nothing behind it all but hot air....He could see them now at that very moment--all these many-colored and frivolous articles of fashion which captivated the world on the persons of equally frivolous young girls.

How fresh and contemporary, eh? This is from the 1931 edition of GRAND HOTEL by Vicki Baum, published in Germany in 1929 as MENSCHEN IM HOTEL ("People in a Hotel"). There's one thing that's dated, though: the casual use of n*gger in the narrative. Blech.

Oh, and Greta Garbo's famous line, "I want to be alone," was lifted right from the book.

Quotes for a Month

Eek! Did I really not post at all in August? I was busy and distracted; some day I'll tell you about it. In the meantime, here are some choice nuggets I've come across in the past month. (And yes, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm an Anglophile.)

From Eyes on the Prize by Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for WOLF HALL, and whose memoir GIVING UP THE GHOST I'm happily devouring:

You don’t ask a plumber, what makes you plumb? You understand he does it to get his living. You don’t draw him aside and say, “Actually I plumb a bit myself, would you take a look at this loo I fitted? All my friends say it’s rather good.”...

I think there is one kind of writer who might be scalped and skinned by the demands the prize imposes, and that is the writer who finds public performance difficult, who has failed to create a persona he can send out to do the show....Generally, it seems to me, authors are better at presenting themselves than they were ten years ago. Festivals flourish, we get more practice; you could give a reading somewhere every week of the year if you liked. For me the transition between desk and platform seems natural enough. I think of writing fiction as a sort of condensed version of acting and each book as a vast overblown play. You impersonate your characters intensively, you live inside their skins, wear their clothes and stamp or mince through life in their shoes; you breathe in their air. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Of course she is. Who else could she be?

From OUR TRAGIC UNIVERSE, the latest novel by Scarlett Thomas (my other new favorite author), which should get a prize for book design:

You can identify someone who works in publishing because they tell every anecdote as if for the first time, with the same expression as someone giving you a tissue that they have just realised has probably already been used. [p67]

Almost everyone who came along to spend the week [at the writers' retreat] in the hotel in Torquay seemed to have the idea that all novels possessed the same sort of value, and took roughly the same amount of effort from the author, and that Tolstoy was a 'a novelist' in the same way that the latest chick-lit author was 'a novelist'. 'How do you even begin to write eighty thousand words?' someone would always ask, admiringly. And I'd always explain that 80,000 words is not that much, really, and that you could do it in eight weekends if you really wanted to, using Aristotle's Poetics as an instruction manual. Making the 80,000 words any good is the hard bit: making them actually important. [p115]

Fun with Books

Diamonds Are a Reader's  Best Friend
Stephen Parris is promoting his debut novel The Tavernier Stones with an "armchair treasure hunt" that offers a 1-carat diamond for the lucky winner. See tavernierstones.com.

Per Booklist: Parris's "odd-couple protagonists (John Graf, the Amish cartographer, and David Freeman, the gemologist and jewel thief) make an interesting pair of heroes, and their jaunty relationship gives the novel an agreeable, lighthearted feel. The story itself, which involves a race against time...is intricate without being annoyingly elaborate."

Miss Austen Forever!
This just in from Laurie Viera Rigler, author of the delightful novels Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict:

I have some exciting news to share. There's a new comedy web series inspired by my Austen Addict novels, called SEX AND THE AUSTEN GIRL. In it, my two protagonists face off over the pros and cons of life and love and being a woman in Regency England vs. 21st century L.A.

SEX AND THE AUSTEN GIRL premieres on the broadband network Babelgum.com on May 17. In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy a peek at the teaser trailer:

Quote of the Week

"I would go as far as I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in."

--Patti Smith, JUST KIDS

My Wildest Interview Ever:Philip Smith on WALKING THROUGH WALLS

In the 1950s, dashing Lew Smith and his chic blonde wife Esther would go out on the town to drink cocktails and “listen to Dean Martin or laugh at Shecky Greene.” As Miami’s “only heterosexual decorator,” Lew catered to clients ranging from jet-setting socialites to the dictator of Haiti.

It was unusual enough that a Jew who fled pogroms in Poland should become the go-to guy for Miami home décor. But Lew’s life took an even stranger turn in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, he had become a psychic healer under the tutelage of spirit guides.

All this makes for a good story. And more than 20 years after his father’s death, artist Philip Smith wrote it.
More at Wild River Review

Photo: Philip Smith & one of his paintings.

Julian Fellowes Talks About PAST IMPERFECT

Photo © Giles Keyte

PAST IMPERFECT opens with its anonymous narrator, a member of the minor aristocracy, being contacted by Damian Baxter, an ex-friend from Cambridge whom he hasn’t seen in decades. Thus begins a journey that contrasts the naïve debutantes and would-be debonair beaux of the London Season of 1968 with their surprisingly altered (or not) selves 40 years later.

Reached by phone in Chicago on Halloween morning, Julian Fellowes observed to freelance writer Bella Stander that “Lake Michigan is like an enchanted sea around a fairy castle.” Later that day, From Time to Time, which he produced, directed and wrote, was screened at the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival. Starring Maggie Smith, the picture went on to win the Best of Fest Award and two other prizes.... more at BookReporter.com

IN MY FATHER'S SHADOW: Orson Welles's Daughter Speaks

"Ignore your children and they will be obsessed with you for life."—Alain de Botton

From the moment I saw In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles in the Algonquin Books fall catalog, I knew that I must read the book and speak to author Chris Welles Feder. As the daughter of actor Lionel Stander (a contemporary of Welles), I wanted to learn how Feder managed to survive with—and more often, without—a famous, larger-than-life father.

A few days before she took off for California to start her book tour, I reached Feder by phone in her New York City home. The voice that greeted me was so youthful, I found it hard to believe it was coming from a 71-year-old. I started off by asking why she wrote In My Father’s Shadow....

Read more at Wild River Review

Photo of Chris Welles Feder © Gregory Downer

No Brian, You Don't Always Have to Look on the Bright Side

On "The Daily Show" last week, Jon Stewart interviewed Barbara Ehrenreich (my new hero) about her new book, BRIGHT-SIDED: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

She brought the house down when she tartly declaimed:
"I never think delusion is OK."

My sentiments exactly.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Barbara Ehrenreich
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Sucess Story

Woohoo! Book Promotion 101 workshop alum Kelly McMasters just informed me that her book, WELCOME TO SHIRLEY: A Memoir of an Atomic Town, tops the Oprah Book Club list of Addictive True Stories.

Kelly is the co-director of the KGB Nonfiction Reading Series, and teaches writing at Columbia and mediabistro.

Same Old, Same Old

I haven't been posting lately because not much has been going on in my life, except:

1. I went to NYC for 4 nights for BookExpo, and also gave a "Polish Your Pitch" workshop with Ron Hogan at Backspace Writers Agent-Author Day.
2. Then I spent 3 nights in the Kingston, NY, area, where I hope to live in the not-too-distant future.
   
3. Just as I was returning the rental car in Poughkeepsie, Darling Husband called to say that he'd been laid off his job of 8 years--the one we'd moved to Denver for 3-1/2 years ago.
4. I have to crank out the text (some 17 K words) for the Bella Terra Massachusetts Lighthouses map so it can go to press in 10 days.
   
5. I'm giving another phone seminar on June 28. (Details in sidebar.)
   
6. Last Thursday, I had 3+ hours of excruciating nerve tests on my dysfunctional right arm, which has had 3 surgeries since I broke it 3 years ago. Preliminary results: Further neurosurgery would probably do more harm than good; my 3 middle fingers will remain numb forever.
7. I had 8 days of debilitating headache (technically neuralgia), caused by Denver's unusually damp & stormy weather. On the plus side, my garden has never looked more lush.
   
8. Tomorrow I go back to Dr #13, a hand/arm specialist at Denver Health's Center for Complex Fractures (which I wish I'd known about 3 years ago, GRRRR...), who will tell me whether further orthopedic surgery will help. If he says not, I'm giving up.
9. My wonderful dog Jenny, who turned 13 yesterday, is rapidly succumbing to arthritis. Once upon a time she'd run for hours without stopping. Now she can walk--slowly--for 10 minutes at most, and can barely make it up the 3 steps into the house. We've tried all sorts of meds, to no avail. Today I started her on Dog Gone Pain as a last-ditch effort, and tomorrow she'll get codeine too. There's a wonderful new book, HOW SHALL I TELL THE DOG? I keep asking myself (and the vet): How shall I kill the dog? And when?

As a palliative, I've been gardening and immersing myself in novels written or set in the 19th century:

• PRIDE & PREJUDICE
• RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT by Laurie Viera Rigler
  
• CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT by Rigler (again; even better after RUDE AWAKENINGS)
• LITTLE DORRIT, though Dickens's sentimentality & weakling heroines may have me reaching for Trollope's Palliser novels before too long
  

Watch for These Books

Look what some of my YA clients have been up to!

Katie Alender, BAD GIRLS DON'T DIE


Tanya Egan Gibson, HOW TO BUY A LOVE OF READING


Fran Cannon Slayton, WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS

My Past, In Paperback

You know you're getting old when someone writes a book about The Scene that played an important part in your misspent youth--and your kid gives it to you as a present. The Boy Wonder, who's really into neo/proto/post punk music (he loves The Cramps, just like his daddy the Ex did), gave me a copy of NO WAVE by Marc Masters for my birthday in November.

I'm finally getting around to reading NO WAVE now, though of course I leafed through the book when I first unwrapped it. Was BW ever surprised when on one page I showed him a reproduction of a flyer with one of the Ex's bands listed at the top, and on another page a photo of the Ex himself in a poster for a well-known (between Max's Kansas City and Barnabas Rex) underground movie.

Once upon a time in 1979 I thought I wanted to be a music promoter, and I hung out with (or very near) a lot of the people featured in Masters's book. Looking at these 30-eek!-year-old photos is eerie; I remember many of them so well. How skinny everyone was then! (Sigh...as was I.)

I gave up on being a music promoter once I discovered that it was barely a step up from fight promoter. "These people don't read!" I remember exclaiming in disgust. Not to mention that club owners had to give a cut to the Mob in order to stay in business. Friends of mine shut down their Alphabet City bôite rather than pay protection money, then (ironically) fled to rural Italy for a year.

But I still have fond memories--and the Boy Wonder.

Ten Cents a Dance Makes ALA Top Ten

Last week, I detailed consulting client & workshop alum Christine Fletcher's outreach efforts to YA bloggers in It's an Honor (and a bunch of work) Just to be Nominated.

When I opened my email this morning, I found this euphoric message from her:

Just had to tell you...Ten Cents a Dance was just named one of the 2009 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults!

TOP freakin' TEN!!

I'm so glad to have events scheduled in Chicago next month!

I'd steered Christine (who'd cleverly set aside her advance so she could spend it on promotion) to publicist Kelly Powers of Obie Joe Media. She posted this comment:

Effort begets awards...especially when the book is as good as Ten Cents a Dance!

And the book is good. Set in Chicago at the outset of WWII, it's about a girl from the stockyards who drops out of high school to become a "taxi dancer" (dime-a-dance girl). I couldn't put it down. A little birdie told me that the Denver teens who met with the ALA BBYA committee last weekend were raving about it. Here's hoping it wins a Cybil Award as well.

Quote of the Day

From the NY Times review of Carrie Fisher's new memoir, WISHFUL DRINKING. She's the daughter of Hollywood stars Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher ("the Jennifer and Brad of their day"), who left Debbie for Elizabeth Taylor ("Angelina, plusher and without the tattoos").

When the author was 15, Ms. Reynolds gave her a vibrator for Christmas, and also gave one to her own mother, who declined to use it for fear it would short out her pacemaker.

Quote of the Year...or,Mr. Galbraith Gets the Last Laugh

Over lunch, I read the Quote of the Day to the Boy Wonder. He said, "I have something better. You gotta hear this one!"

He whipped out THE GREAT CRASH: 1929, by John Kenneth Galbraith, which the Ex sent him for Christmas. (BW is starting college on Jan. 20 as an economics major.)

From Galbraith's new introduction, written in 1997:

Always when markets are in trouble, the phrases are the same: "The economic situation is fundamentally sound" or simply "The fundamentals are good." All who hear these words should know that something is wrong.

Last night, BW, Darling Husband and I had dinner with Chris Matthews. (OK, we ate off trays while watching "Hardball," on DVR.) Yesterday's show listed the best and worst political moments of 2008. Guess what was #1 in "Biggest general election moments"?

Give up?

"The fundamentals of our economy are strong."
--John McCain

BONUS QUOTES:

"We all didn’t quite see what was happening.”
--Margaret Hedberg, director of the International Debutante Ball, per the NY Times.

She brushed off the $14,000 cost of a table — “Watches cost more.”
--Marie Antoinette. Oops! I mean Margaret Hedberg.

For Your New Year's To-Be-Read Pile

Wondering what to read in the coming months? Take a gander at my clients' books:

• UNDONE, by Brooke Taylor (July '08)
  
• WILL I EVER BE GOOD ENOUGH? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers, by Karyl McBride (Sept. '08)
• CANCER IS A BITCH: Or, I’d Rather be Having a Mid-Life Crisis, by Gail Konop Baker (Oct. '08)
• VIDALIA IN PARIS, by Sasha Watson (Oct. '08)
  
• THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica, Leslie Carol Roberts (Oct. '08)
• LAST KNOWN POSITION: Stories, by James Mathews (Nov. '08)
• THE BLACK GIRL NEXT DOOR: A Memoir, by Jennifer Baszile (Jan.)
• ACCORDIAN DREAMS: A Journey into Cajun & Creole Music, by Blair Kilpatrick (Jan.)
• HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER & SWEET, by Jamie Ford (Jan.)
• GLOBAL WARMING IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS: How Savvy Entrepreneurs, Large Corporations, and Others are Making Money While Saving the Planet, by K.B. Keilbach (Mar.)
  
• VAMPED, by Lucienne Diver (May)
• THE KING OF VODKA: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov & the Upheaval of an Empire, by Linda Himelstein (May)
• REAL LIFE & LIARS, by Kristina Riggle (June)