Word Strumpet

Announcing...Bookstrumpet

You may have noticed my periodic call for people who would like to become contributors to a new book review site.   I am pleased to announce that the new site is live and ready to roll.  Here's the site url:

http://wordstrumpet.typepad.com/bookstrumpet/

This is only the very modest beginning.  Expect more to come, with additional reviews from a roster of fabulous reviewers and essays about books and interviews with authors to come.

So go check it out.  And if you decide you want to be involved, email me!

Literary North Carolina: Carl Sandburg

This is a photo of Carl Sandburg's home, Connemara, in Flat Rock, North Carolina, which is south (I think) of Asheville, not too far, and is apparently now a retirement community.  I can see why--it is quite beautiful and peaceful and charming.

I never knew that much about Carl Sandburg, except for the "fog creeping in on little cat feet" poem, and, of course, he was pretty much a household name when I was growing up.  But he was a social activist all his life, and a musician and a poet and biographer of Lincoln.  He won two Pulitzer Prizes.

He married his wife Paula in the 1920s and she could well have become a typical wife of the era, not doing much except supporting her husband in his endeavors.  However, she became interested in raising goats and she was the one who instigated the family's move from Michigan to North Carolina, because she wanted more room to raise goats.  And I love this--she became a world-renowned expert on goats.  The farm today still raises goats.

The Sandburgs had three daughters, only one of whom married and had children.  The other two lived with their parents all their lives.  One of them had epilepsy back in the day when nobody knew how to deal with it, and the other was mildly retarded from being hit by a car. 

But what a place to live--the house perches at the top of a green hill that flows down to a pond and Sandburg loved to hike the trails around the house.  On his 87th birthday he partook of his favorite kind of exercise besides walking--lifting an Adirondack chair above his head multiple times.  The house is full of books--thousands of volumes--which are all being painstakingly taken care of, down to preserving his bookmarks in them.    Sandburg's other love was music, and that is much in evidence in the house also, with his grand piano and guitars.  Also many stacks of old magazines.  My kind of place!

Connemara is well worth a visit if you are in the area.

Literary Asheville: Thomas Wolfe

This is a photograph of Thomas Wolfe's grave, which is in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina, where I happen to find myself today.  Turns out that North Carolina is a state with an amazing literary heritage, claiming authors as diverse as Wolfe, Carl Sandburg (more on him later), O Henry, and tons of others. 

But Thomas Wolfe grew up in town, and wrote about it in Look Homeward, Angel, and You Can't Go Home Again.  His work was all autobiographical and people familiar with Look Homeward, Angel, will recall the boarding house in the novel.  It was based on the house he grew up in.  (Do I have any photos of it?  No, of course not, because I forgot to take any.  I still can't get used to having my camera with me.)  But you can see the website here.

Its a pretty snazzy spot, complete with visitor's center that has exhibits and a movie and lots of books you can buy.  The only way you can get into the house is to take a guided tour, but at $1 it won't break you.  However, the annoying tour guide might.    Could we have a little bit of humor, people?  And not be quite so certain that the miscreants you have to guide about the house are going to touch the precious Wolfe artifacts?

Anyway, Tom was 6'4" and when he first wrote about Asheville everyone hated him and was royally pissed.  But then, eight years later, he returned and because he was famous everyone fawned over him.  He was quite a handsome man, but he never married because he was in love with an older married woman, Aline Bernstein.  And alas, our Tom died young, at age 38 from brain tuberculosis.  He was actually on a tour of the west and spent time in Portland before falling quite ill in Seattle.  And then--get this--he had to be taken back home via train, a journey which took 4 days, much of which he spent unconscious or delirious.  He died a short time later in Baltimore.

I am really fascinated with Tom's mother, Julia, who ran the boarding house he grew up in.  Because Asheville was a resort town, the boarding house was really more like the B and B's of today.

Julia was quite the business woman, and because she grew up poor, once she got a taste of making money, she just wanted to earn more.  She sort of turned her back on poor Tom, the last of her brood, because she was busy waiting on her clients and plotting ways to make more money.  She added on rooms to the house willy-nilly in order to have more to rent out and worked the boarding house until her death in 1945, eight years after Tom.

Today the house is surrounded by downtown Asheville, with a Renaissance hotel looming in front of it and some sort of huge building under construction to the north.  It reminds me of a short story I once wrote in which an artist starts adding on rooms to her house because she believes the carpenter she hires is magical and makes good things happen in her life.  Many years in the future, the house is a tourist attraction along the lines of the Winchester Mystery House and the entire city has grown up around it.

The other place we visited was Carl Sandburg's house, but I'm too tired to write about it tonight.  Oh, and the cemetery where Wolfe is buried is very close to the grounds of the Highland Hospital, where Zelda Fitzgerald lived while F. Scott was out in California, writing screen plays.  She died there in the fire that destroyed the hospital.  The way they identified her body was by the single slipper of hers that remained under the bed. 

And on that cheery note I will end this post. 

Elizabeth Gilbert's Thoughts on Writing

So, I'm currently finishing up reading Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, which has been on the best-seller list for quite some time.  I generally don't read bestsellers.  It is the anti-authoritarian streak in me, or perhaps more to the point, the I-don't-want-to-do-what-everyone-else is doing streak.  My family knows the best way to get me to do something is to ask me not to do it.  And if someone tells me, "You'll love this movie," or "You should read this book," forget it.  Won't do it.

In the case of Eat, Pray, Love someone did tell me to read it, but it happened to be someone whose opinion I trust.  Thank you, Candace, for insisting.  And be aware that you are the only person in the last dozen years whose advice on reading I have taken.

I'm glad I did.  Eat,Pray, Love is a wonderful book, charmingly written, and it came to me just as I've been renewing my spiritual quest.  It is a memoir about the year Gilbert spent traveling, specifically, four months in Italy, four in India and four in Bali.

Today the thought occurred to me that I might check out Gilbert's website.  It is fun to spin around and waste a few minutes on, but I really loved were her thoughts on writing.   She writes as charmingly about writing as she does about travel and spirituality:

"I believe that --if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression--that you should take on this work like a holy calling.  I became a writer the way other people become a monks or nuns.  I made a vow to writing, very young."

I love that.  It makes me feel better about the long days I spend at my computer.  I love this, too:

"As for discipline, it's important, but sort of over-rated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness.  Because your writing will always disappoint you.  Your laziness will always disappoint you."

It is a good essay, well worth reading.

Oprah Chooses Ken Follett

It feels obligatory to write a post when Oprah chooses a new book for her book club.  As if she doesn't get enough publicity already.  But Oprah's choices are often odd and interesting.   And all of us novelists and would-be novelists know its a long shot....but we still fantasize about Oprah choosing our book.  Other, normal, people fantasize about Brad Pitt or George Clooney.  Novelists fantasize about Oprah.  What a world.

At any rate, her highness has chosen and the author is... Ken Follett.  Though the author is best known for his thrillers, this month's Oprah book is Pillars of the Earth, which is apparently about a village in Wales in the 12th century and is reputedly Follett's favorite of his own books.   You can read the USA Today article about it here.

Last week I went to an event called Women and Words or maybe it was Women and Writing.  It was the opening event of Wordstock, a book festival here in Portland, and it featured two authors who had appeared on Oprah.  One of them, Janet Fitch, was a bona-fide Oprah author, since her book, White Oleander, was an Oprah pick.

The other was Carole Radziwill, who wrote What Remains, a memoir of her life with Tony Radziwill, niece of Jackie O and cousin to John F. Kennedy Jr.  The memoir centers on the death of Tony and JFK Jr. and his wife within the space of a few weeks.   

What interested me was the two women's wildly different reactions to her highness, the O person.  Janet Fitch, California dowdy beside New York hip Radziwill and the South Africa adorable Alexandra Fuller (author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) praised Oprah to the heavens.  I'd have to kill her if she didn't, because Oprah made her career.

But Radziwill was New York cool about it all and said that Oprah only wanted to talk about the Kennedys, when really, her book was about a lot more than that.  And really, it was all just so declasse.  Okay, okay, she didn't say that, but she implied it.  And she later redeemed herself with a story about the most annoying person in the world, Jerry Seinfeld, appearing on David Letterman and how rude he was about the fact that his wife is being accused of plagiarism.  (I know, I am one of only two people on the planet who dislikes Jerry Seinfeld, and since I've never met the other person could he or she please contact me?)

I rarely watch Oprah because I rarely watch TV and I tend to forget that it exists and hence never turn it on, but I do like Oprah and I do read O, her magazine.  And I am of the Cormac McCarthy school when it comes to Oprah books--c'mon, get off your high horse and accept that she's done more for reading than anybody else in the last twenty years. 

McCarthy earned my undying affection (just don't make me read his books) when Oprah chose his novel The Road and he agreed to go on her show--breaking a years-long policy of not talking to the media specifically because he appreciated what she has done for the industry.

So take that, New York hipsters.

And, by the way, I am making a solemn vow at this very moment, here and now: when my novel is published I am not going to diss the publishing industry.  I am not going to be so cool and above it all that I can talk about how awful the industry is and so forth and so on.  C'mon folks, there's about 50,000 of us who would gladly stand in your shoes, without all the whining.

Doris Lessing: List of Books

Just found this link with an extensive (she's prolific) list of Doris Lessing's books.  You can access it here.

A God Is Nominated

This is a good week for us literary freaks, what with Doris Lessing winning the Nobel Prize for Literature today, which you can read about in my previous post here, and the National Book Award Nominations being announced yesterday.

So, let's just cut straight to the chase here--Denis Johnson was nominated for Tree of Smoke.  Have I mentioned that the man is a god yet?  Well, he is.  Tree of Smoke is the definitive Vietnam novel that you didn't know you were waiting for.  I've got the heavy tome waiting for me to read by the side of my bed.  I've read the first few pages of it, and the way the man writes is pretty amazing.

You can read a little more about him here, and the NYT review of his book here.

Plus, I think he lives in Idaho and that automatically qualifies him for coolness.  No, the state is not only home to white supremacists.

And now, for my National Book Award brush with greatness moment.  When I was working on my MFA, I got Brad Watson as my mentor.  He is the author of The Heaven of Mercury and the story collection Last Days of the Dog Men.  It is customary at brief residency MFA programs to have a meeting with your mentor to discuss what you will be working on for the semester.

Well, moments, and I do mean moments, before I had my meeting with Brad, he got a phone call telling him that he had been nominated for the National Book Award. 

Now is that a brush with fame moment or what? 

Not sure what Brad is doing now, but I'm hoping he comes out with another novel soon.

Doris Lessing Wins the Nobel Prize

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature today.

You can read the Reuters story about it here and the New York Times piece here.

The Times piece has a great photo of her sitting on her front steps in London, surrounded by reporters. She was apparently out shopping when it was announced, and learned of the prize from the reporters when she returned home.

The Swedish Academy described her as: "the epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

Lessing is 88 years old and I've always thought she rocked.  The Times article mentions how she never finished high school and educated herself through reading.  I bought a copy of The Golden Notebook, her seminal work, this summer at the beach, and this edition has an introduction Lessing wrote in which she describes the benefits of this type of education.

I always loved the idea of The Golden Notebook, because it is the story of a woman becoming whole.  Anna, the heroine, keeps four notebooks.  The black one is about her early years in Africa; the red one about her political life (chiefly communism, which seems rather quaint now); the yellow contains a novel she is writing and the blue one is her diary.  By the end of the book she has brought all four threads together into one golden notebook.

I'm still trying to get all my various notebooks into one.  Let's see, I've got two green ones, a purple polka dot one, a purple striped one, one with a black over and blue letters saying "journal" on the cover, one with a brown cover that started life as a sketchbook....and those are just the ones I can glance quickly around and see.  I think I love my notebooks way too much to coordinate them into one.

But I digress.  The Golden Notebook has inspired legions of feminists.  The Academy noted: "The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th century view of the male-female relationship."

So it is interesting to me that the two males that I've mentioned Lessing's name to today have never heard of her. 

Lessing also writes science fiction upon occasion, and I'm sure that has the knickers of the literary establishment in a twist.  I adore science fiction myself. 

Madeleine L'Engle Redux

Just found another L'Engle tribute from a fan like me.  This one is worth checking out because she has links to the New York Times obit, which I couldn't find yesterday, and a couple other stories.  Check it out here.

Madeleine L'Engle: A Personal Heroine Passes

One of my favorite authors of all time died today.

Madeleine L'Engle died in a nursing home in Connecticut at age 88.  She was best known, of course, for her book A Wrinkle in Time, which my sister and I read and re-read and read again as we were growing up. I read it to both of my children as they grew up, and I've re-read it on my own as an adult several times.

It is simply of the best books ever, all about the power of love.  Besides the main characters of Meg and her supposedly "slow" brother Charles Wallace, it features such wonderful characters as Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which, and the Happy Medium. 

I love the opening scene, in which a stormy night has awakened Meg and her brother and her mother and they are having hot chocolate in the kitchen of their big, book-filled home, when the door flies open and in bursts one of the Mrs. Ws (my brain refuses to remind me which one.)

"Wild nights are my glory!" she exclaims.

I just love that.  Every time we have a storm I think of that line. 

And of course, the neighborhood on the planet of Camazotz where the children all open the door at precisely the same time, and then bounce a rubber ball in rhythm, is a standard short-cut description for certain places of extreme conformity.  "Just like Camazotz," we'll say. 

I've also read her Austin family books, most of them when I was an adult.  And her Crosswicks Journal trilogy. 

I had the honor of meeting L'Engle when she gave a lecture here in town several years ago.  She was dramatic, and funny, and beautiful, and informative.  When the lecture was over, my sister, who came with me, turned to me, sighed, and said, "I wish I was a writer."

I met her in person at the reception afterwards and she graciously told me that Charlotte was one of her favorite names, and the name of one of her grand children.  She was as wonderful in person as you would imagine she was from reading her books.

If you haven't read them, go now and do so.    Pay no attention to the fact that many of them are supposedly Young Adult or children's books.  You'll love them anyway.  Start with A Wrinkle in Time.

I envy you, getting to read it for the first time.

You can read the Yahoo obituary here.

New (To Me) Author

I mentioned in my previous post that I've been lolling about all day.  The reason for this, besides the fact that it is the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend, is because I am reading a novel I cannot put down. 

The book is called The Monk Downstairs by Tim Farrington and it is about a cynical single mother who falls in love with a former monk who has lost his faith in his vocation. I'm enjoying it so much, its kind of a "women's novel" for lack of a better term, but deep. Apparently Tim Farrington has written numerous novels, including a sequel to this one that just came out, called, (wait for it) The Monk Upstairs.

I've got a couple great novels lined up from the library to read, including the latest from Lionel Shriver but once I'm done with those I'm going to have to start reading everything from Tim Farrington .

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan  Lethem, author of Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn , among other books and novels, was at Portland Arts and Lectures last night.  I'm embarrassed to admit I've never read him, but my friend Lauri had an extra ticket, and being the book slut that I am, I figured I'd go.

I'm glad I did, Lethem gave a good lecture--deep and informative and full of pithy commentary on current events (aka Imus) and he was funny, too.