The Smell Of Henderson The Rain King

I can't look at a copy of Bellow's "Henderson, The Rain King" without smelling the chocolate turtles I would buy every morning from the bakery at the corner where I would catch the streetcar to work in New Orleans. Not a great breakfast, but what a smell to keep with a book locked away in the back of your mind. The reason is of course, that's where I read it, on that streetcar going to work. "Omensetter's Luck" by William Gass belongs to the front desk of Beckham's Bookshop in the Irish Channel where I worked later. "Light In August" was a tree in front of some public building on Royal Street in the French Quarter. "October Ferry To Gabarola" by Lowry, a boarding house above Canney Row. "War and Peace" on our building rooftop just below Nob Hill in San Francisco. Freud on a stool in the front area of the A & W Drive-In in Bloomington Indiana where I was working as a car-hop (yes, there were boy car-hops)

I found a copy of "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers" by McMurtry recently in a thrift store and almost bought it. I had lost it somewhere on a hitch-hike to LA from New Orleans in 1976 and never finished it. I decided it was too late.

Fitzgerald's short storys in the back seat of my mother's car in front of the drugstore where she worked.

Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs on my mother's couch in a moble home park in LA after that long hitchhike.

"Sentimental Education" on my long front porch on Louisiana Avenue in the Irish Channel in NO.

"Travels With A Donkey" the first summer in our new house in Westchester because all of my books were in storage still.

"All The King's Men" in Drexel Mo. where I was stranded one summer at 16.

God, they are family, aren't they. I could do a similar list with my friends and family

Lions and Hem

About halfway through "Under Kilimanjaro" (the complete version of the manuscript that was published as "True At First Light" by Mr. Hemingway. Beside the little sexy subplot of the African girl that has the hots for our hero, most of the book is about helping Mary kill her lion.  Why do we care about her shooting her lion cleanly and with style? Perhaps we really don't. Perhaps we care because of the thinly veiled emotions of our narrator. In "Old School" by Tobias Wolf

there is a long discussion about the raw under current of emotion in a few of the Michigan stories that our guide in this book thinks is the real reason for Hem's force. I'm beginning to come around to that opinion myself. "The Sun Also Rises" is a silly premise for what was probably a young man's infatuation with a woman that didn't want him. "Islands In The Stream" is just Hem killing off his son(s?) and ex-wife. "A Farewell To Arms" is just him killing off Hadley. Maybe that's really what it- nothing to do with the actuality of the situation he is writing about, but rather the 'fuse that drives the green machine' The willingness to expose one's flow of soul. Of course, it doesn't hurt if you are technically a prose genius, which he could be.

Blixen in "Out Of Africa" gets her lion with Denis under similar circumstances. It's a lion that is killing the native livestock. Just as romantically drawn- our, of course, beautiful man and woman out on the plain with rifles and they are pure and full of honor (like something out of a Ayn Rand book).

Hem goes on about how they had to make sure that this lion they wanted to hunt was a bad lion and they were then duty bound to kill it.

The world has changed. There's a little article in the New York Review of Books this month about a homicidal serial rapist lion which the game preserve folks are allowing to continue on his way in Africa.

Tony and GLAWS yet again

"In that same vein, our forums are for education and sharing of information, perhaps a bit of socializing, but not for solicitation. We won’t even pitch LAT/FOB there." more of old Tony's judgement about my flyer post. A day later I get this:

                          as a mass emailing to all GLAWS members. 
I'm glad our little exchange made him remember to post this. We don't want his wife mad at him.

GLAWS and LA Times Book Festival

I traded emails with old Tony Todaro at GLAWS yesterday and basically told him what I've posted here, that it wasn't a fun experience sharing a spot at their booth last year. I received two emails back at the end of the conversation which he cc'd to 5 people the first time and then 6 people the second time. I hadn't cc'd anyone on my mail to him, maybe I should have included my old aunt Mable. This is the first time in my life I've ever received a first draft and a second draft of a canned response letter. And he rewrote it in only 15 minutes. I suppose he didn't think he had sent the first one.

I won't bore folks with the whole thing, bur basically he said:

"I was not there Saturday, but Sunday I spent most of the day well out in the sidewalk where I held meetings with the presidents and officials of other writer groups. I had my own agenda, looking at the big picture and future of the society, and only went into the booth when someone approached me with an issue needing personal attention — or my aching back was about to break."

Which was obvious- I think Obama stopped by to shake his hand and Ray Bradbury rolled by in his wheel chair and told him to keep up the good work. Of course, Ray says that to everyone. I didn't really read anything that said they had a different game plan. He also encouraged me to get more involved to make the organization a great one. In my old age, I really only join things if it serves my purpose or I think its a worthy cause. I've donated weeks of my time to the Boy Scouts long after my son got his Eagle because its fun and I'm not being told what I can and can't do, like I'm a nearly sixty year old child. (Of course, I am) 
Why on earth would I want to devote time to a self-serving non-responsive group?

My Cake and Eat It Too

Well, the saga of the Coop Table at the LA Times Book Festival continues. The Pres of GLAWS wants to know what they did wrong to make me want to do my own table (via email). I replied with my own question- why did he feel it was nrcessary to take my post off the GLAWS site?

It turns out if you are non-profit the price for a table goes to $600.00. Wish I was non-profit. Anybody out there got a charity Tax ID number they could loan me?
I'm not trying to make money out of this- I'm trying to reduce my cost to abut $250.00 for a place at the table. That's sort of non-profit, isn't it?
Who would of thought this was so hard?
Course I thought self-publishing a book would be easy.

Christopher Morley

Washing the Dishes

WHEN we on simple rations sup

How easy is the washing up!

But heavy feeding complicates

The task by soiling many plates.


And though I grant that I have prayed

That we might find a serving-maid,

I'd scullion all my days I think,

To see Her smile across the sink!


I wash, she wipes. In water hot

I souse each pan and dish and pot;

While taffy mutters, purrs, and begs,

And rubs himself against my legs.


The man who never in his life

Has washed the dishes with his wife

Or polished up the silver plate--

He still is largely celibate.


One warning: there is certain ware

That must be handled with all care:

The Lord Himself will give you up

If you should drop a willow cup!

 

 

For those who don't know, old Morley wrote "Parnassus On Wheels" and " The Haunted Bookshop" two books that I assume that anyone who has ever worked in or owned a used bookstore has read. For the rest of you, find them and read them. Morley died in 1957.

I turned up a copy of "Letters of Askance" 1939 a collection of his essays and short things for magazines- just the sort of thing you'd find as a thrift store throwaway. Funny stuff. I'm reverting to my childhood. I loved Ring Lardner and Thurber and Bret Hart and O. Henry as teenager. Found a little book by Thurber called "The White Deer" recently. Happy little afternoon read. 




Anyway, the opening essay if about Mrs. Piozzi, who knew Boswell and Johnson and 80 began writing marginalia in the "Life of Johnson" -At first I thought this was stuff like some Beerbohm or Borges inside made up joke about some mythical literary rarity, but apparently its real stuff, I think. If you are really a Boswell nut, then you know this stuff. From the looks of the photo below, me thinks old Christopher was raised correctly

GLAWS Reaction

Look what I found: (Above- does the membership hire this firm?)

I had posted my flyer up to the GLAWS Bulletin Board a bit ago. I'm a member. I guess I can't compete with the organization I am a member of. Me thinks this is getting absurd. Why should they people care if there is another table or not? Am I cutting into their profit margin? I thought this was a non-profit endeavour. I thought GLAWS was a non-profit organization for HELPING Writers. 

Makes it kind of hard to recommend this organization to anyone.
Oh, did I mention I participated at their table last year and was shafted on my time and found myself out on the sidewalk passing out flyers because the GLAWS recruiters wouldn't let the people walking by get to my table.


Here's what they said:



Hello mcnay,
The following is an email sent to you by SarahBeach via your account on The Greater Los Angeles Writers Society. If this message is spam, contains abusive or other comments you find offensive please contact the webmaster of the board at the following address:
ntodaro@glaws.com
Include this full email (particularly the headers). Please note that the reply address to this email has been set to that of SarahBeach.

Message sent to you follows
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi Dan,
This is to let you know that your post with the request for people to share a booth at the Festival of Books has been removed, at the request of GLAWS President Tony Todaro.
This is because your post basically competes with GLAWS' own plans to have a booth for members to sign and sell at.
I'm not sure how aware you were that GLAWS does indeed secure a booth for such purposes (they have done so for the last two years).  Sign-up for author slots won't take place until after the New Year, but the organization has already paid for the booth.
I realize that there are not at present posted guidelines about the appropriate etiquette for such things.  As a new administrator, I'll be working on coming up with such.  In the future, please double check with the message board administrators, or with Tony Todaro.  Our concern is to continue building the public image of GLAWS in a consistent fashion.
If you have any questions regarding this matter, please feel free to email me at slbeach@scribblerworks.us.

Cordially,  Sarah Beach

Message Board Admin and Acting Recording Secretary.

Help Pay For Someone's Party

I'm finding a lot of these: 

http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1231 
They want $75.00 and you have one chance in ?10,000? of winning a prize.

http://www.diyconvention.com/

The 2009 Los Angeles Book Festival
Thursday, February 25, 2010 
They want $50.00 and at least you get snacks- there's really no Festival- its an award dinner for another prize.
I think it may be smarter to buy lottery tickets- at least they tell your odds.

Browsing Facebook pictures of a wedding, I kept trying to spot someone I recognized (pictures posted by somebody that I went to high school with) but had no luck at all. Later it dawned on me that I was looking at the faces of the thirtysomething and fortysomething faces, when I should have been looking for the little white haired people that were really my age. I'm just not ready to be this old.

IWOSC

http://www.iwosc.org/

I just went on their site and tried to subscribe to their on line group in yahoo, but it can't be found. I've visited their table at several book fairs in the last few years and repeatedly signed up to do stuff with them, but no one has ever contacted me. They are not doing a Writers' Workshop which I offered to do several times. Apparently they have an informal group that meets on the westside once a month.

I had gone once a few years ago to a Writers' Workshop that they were charging for, although the meeting I went to was free. It was at some woman's house up in Westwood and the group of maybe 20 people were being critqued by a Playwright that was faculty at USC and had some success with production of his plays I guess, though I've never seen one. Can't find his name. Anyhow it was deadly. No one else spoke and this guy was holding forth on prose and all. He let one woman read for nearly 30 minutes, on and on, with this horrible boring piece and then proceeded to NOT tell her how deadly it was. I was glad I wasn't paying money.

It was sad. Anyhow, I don't recall seeing any writers or authors at their table in the past, it just seemed it was older women that weren't too organized and not very outgoing.

They were there last year for the LA Times Fair:

Independent Writers of Southern California    Booth 428
P.O. Box 34279 Los Angeles CA 90034
1 (877) 79-Write (799-7483)
www.iwosc.org
Professional development for writers

They want $110.00 a year to start. Ya wonder what that pays for exactly. Their web site is pretty dead.

Excuse me while I nap.

The Flyer -

Coop Table at LA Times Book Festival

This was the response from "pa-la.org" as a result of my asking to pass out a come-on to their members for a coop table for the LA Times Fair in April of 2010. He wants to see how big my house is, I guess. I also listed it on the GLAWS Bulletin Board and they immediately reminded me that they have a table.  IWOSC was forwarding it to their President for review, they also reminded me that they have a table. Since this guy is in IWOSC as well. I will probably not get it seen there either. I looked up the Lifetime Achievement Foundation he says he is a Director of and its basically a come-on site for his own books and plays. Welcome to the world of the writer's hype. I thought I'd just go over to next month's meeting and put it on everybody's windshield. 

 

Dan:

I will discuss this with Sharon later today.  My inclination is negative until I see a fully operational website, and confirm successful statistics.  I am always looking for ways to promote our member publishers, but I am very careful about costs versus success.  I know you understand.

Can you direct me to a working website and send successful statistics that can be confirmed?  A one-page powerpoint does not tell me anything.

Thanks.

Best,

Gary Young

Executive Director, Lifetime Achievement Foundation (lifetimeachievement.org)

President, Publishers Association of Los Angeles (pa-la.org)

Director of Professional Development, Independent Writers of S CA (iwosc.org)

Vice-Chair, Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights (laplaywrights.org)

Hazel and $400.00

I had a couple of chances in my life to kiss rear ends and I never could really do it. An older friend, Ralph came to visit me one day in the used bookstore where I worked in the Irish Channel in New Orleans when I was barely 25 and started asking how much money I needed to live on if there was a writing project available. We worked it out, but he seemed upset that I insisted on cigarette money- I was living on $400.00 a month back then. It seems Hazel Guggenheim McKinley was looking for a ghost writer for her autobiography. Everyone back then told her I was the one that had something- little did they know. Anyhow, I had met her and became friends with her secretary, a girl my age that was out in the world on trial before going to take her final vows to be a nun. All of us 'arteests' that were friends with Ralph were invited to Hazel's apartment for a salon. I sort of remember discussing John Horne Burns ("The Gallery") with her- she had known him.

And all of the good wine on the table. I guess my price was too high, which was probably just as well, because I probably couldn't have written the book then- just not enough know-how. I had to go spend another two years writing my first very bad book. I avoided going to any more of the salons- I had no interest in old women. Hem probably wouldn't have passed up the opportunity.     

There was also a big house in Beverly Hills and several jobs I missed out on (but those are other stories)- cause I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

Hazel's painting above- she died in '95 -really old- I don't think the autobiography ever got written.

Hem as an ass kisser

For those who don't know Hem was a full time sucker upper. He connected with Sherwood Anderson in Chicago. Made great friends with him (Of course Ernie had great talent) and got a letter of intro to Gertrude Stein in Paris and even got Sherwood to hook him up with Liverwright (Anderson's publisher) who published "In Our Time" Once in Paris he glomed onto the whole circle around Stein which included Ezra Pound. He was actually typing up Gertrude's manuscripts at one point. Got Ezra to give him writing lessons in exchange for boxing lessons. Hooked up with Fitzgerald and the Murphys and proceeded to write a parody of Sherwood Anderson to give to Liverwright as his second book (had a 2 book deal) so they would turn it down because Fitzgerald had promised to take "A Sun Also Rises" to Scribner's for more money. It was also assumed that Pauline could offer him a better life style (the second wife). With all of this in mind, one should read "A Moveable Feast" as the book of an ungrateful twerp. Lord knows what they are going to try to do with "A Moveable Feast" -make it more of an ugly book about the people that helped him? They are republishing a new version, if you haven't heard.
Broke up with Dos Passos after years and years because Dos had slept with the same groupie Hem had.

Anyway, who sez these people have to be good people.

Me thinks Blixen was a better sort.

Da Book

http://dept.kent.edu/upress/books/Hemingway.htm

Transition

Finished "Out of Africa" and was left wanting more. I had found a only sightly worn first American edition for nothing and so I had a feel of a solid book in my hand and the very real prose drew me in. There really wasn't any fiction in the book. The plan was to continue on with "Under Kilmanjaro" Hemingway's last book- the version published by The Kent University Press that has the entire version. The transition from the very womanly voice of Blixen who saw and felt everything and felt responsible to 30 years later to a very male voice concerned with perfection of his behavior in a very romantuc world of chivalry and honor and old man little boy silliness was a bit drastic, but about 30 pages into it, it starts to warm up. It is Hem writing without editing, so the prose is very different from a lot of the other books. They had published an abridged verison called "True At First Light" which tried to make this into a "Hemingway novel" and while it did have moments, it really wasn't a Hemingway novel. He had given up mostly shooting things by the early 50s which does bring it into a modern sensibility a little. Mary is still trying to bag her lion though. I grew up where the men went rabbit and squrrel and deer and quail hunting and did myself until my mid-twenties. The descriptions are a bit wooden so far, none of Blixen's poetry or metaphor, though Hem can get on a very good roll himself sometimes. I know too much about Sherwood Anderson and Ezra and Gertrude not to see the influence in Hem's style even late in life. Blixen was written for herself on her dining room table on the farm. Hem was writing for his audience me thinks. He is still a master and I plan to steal from him still. I'll keep you posted about the good parts.

http://books.google.com/books?id=lulwwdvQQAgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Out+Of+Africa&ei=J8DPStGUFqqIkwTI9rjEBQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Out Of Africa

"The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air. Looking back on a sojourn in the African highlands, you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air. The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigour in it, and at short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects, and created great Fata Morgana. Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be...
       ...The hills from the farm changed their character many times in the course of a day, and sometimes looked quite close, and at other times very far away. In the evening, when it was getting dark, it would first look, as you gazed at them, as if in the sky a thin silver line was drawn all along the silhouette of the dark mountain: then, as night fell, the four peaks seemed to be flattened and smoothed out, as if the mountain was stretching and spreading itself."

From the opening of the book. The language is cool clear water after a dry spell when all you've had is soda pop.

Rejections

Thinking about my problem with the dog, it occurred to me that we are inclined to hurt other human beings in much more inhumane ways than how we treat animals.  How many times have has one been rejected in one lifetime? How many times have you rejected others?

There can be big rejections- like divorce or murder. And little ones as simple as removing your hand from someone else's. I've quit a relationship as simply as that.

My mother had to be driven from the house at gunpoint- after years of abuse. I've probably rejected more people in my life than most, probably as a reaction to that. Several lovers, a wife, several good friends, a couple once because I couldn't deal with the wife trying to seduce me behind her husband's back.

Some rejections are mutual. Those are probably the easiest ones to remember.

How many are just imagined? How many rejections never really happened, we just think they did. 

Blue's Faces In The Golden Triangle

www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/543637

Blue's Book

Blue's Music

http://home.earthlink.net/~bangkokblue/

He turned me on to his music and I've been sitting here all evening listening to it. It's great! I'll post up the link to his book as well

West Hollywood Book Fair

It was a great day. The weather was good. The sun only hit the front of my booth for about an hour in the morning, just enough to set up my California tan. Blue Johnson, sat with me all day. A great guy, a musician and band manager and a great photographer. His photo book about the hill tribe people on Thailand was very cool. Sparked a lot of interest from people strolling. I passed out about 60 flyers for my book and gave away about 50 ebook copies and sold some. I was also peddling a friend's biography of Hal Marchman recently published. The people came by were all fun to talk to. Lots of folks with self-published projects and even a lady that works in stone. Next time, I need to get folks' names and contacts so I could post them here. I was giving away one of my prints as well that was popular. We were between the panel discussion tent and the Poetry Salon Tent so we got a lot of traffic while the events were in progress.
Even sold some of my used and rare books I had brought. Had a two volume bio of Bach written by Albert Schweitzer that the perfect owner showed for.

The Dog

Well, the dog is still here in my mind. His last presence was one of an outside dog only. Mostly because he was peeing big time all over the house and I couldn't train it out of him. In fact, the dog was acting out because I was trying to train him. We even tried putting a diaper on him when he did allow him in the house. I got one of these Velcro waist support bands from the drugstore and wrapped him up in it so he could stay in the house at night and sleep on the carpet, which was really smelling like him. We ended up with two of these things so we could keep one clean for him to wear. I would tell my kids' friends when they were over that I was only doing it to humiliate him. In the last few months, he was outside only. I had put up a tent for him to sleep in. Every morning and every every I would take him with our other dog through the house to do our twice daily routine of getting the paper or putting out the garbage while the two dogs sniffed and smelled the perimeter of the front yard and left their marks on it and chased cats away and ever so often would encounter the neighbor dogs on a stroll.
Otherwise, when we were home he would lay just outside our bedroom screen door or the kitchen screen door or outside my studio door.
It started out sort of all right. We decided our one dog was lonely. The lady across the street had picked up a stray and we arranged a play day and then a sleep over to see if the two dogs got along. After adopting him formally and having him spayed we brought him in with all the privileges. We soon found that he marked in various places around the house. The kitchen wasn't too bad, easy to wipe up there. The kids learned not to leave their things on the floor- that was good. Of course the Christmas Tree was hard to resist. Also my CDs on racks in my studio would turn up from time to time with yellow spots. I discovered by encouraging to spray out front and by giving him a lot of attention, he seemed to reduce the amount he was doing inside.
He hated loud noises and when he left him with the other dog outside to go to a Fourth of July fireworks, he broke into the back door and broke into my son's bedroom and caused about a $1,000.00 worth of damage- which made me mad, but it was ok, I'm handy and I repaired it sort of without spending billions.
As the kids went off to college and got busy, there was less and less attention given to the dog and so he began acting out. When in desperation, we made him stay out, he got no attention except when my one daughter would brush him about once a month and I would still take him out front and pet before I gave him his supper. No one else had time for him or wanted to deal with him. So he decided he didn't like it here anymore and began trying to break out. When he broke through the gate I had just repaired the week before, and I was faced with with yet another repair and the fear he might start attacking the back doors of the house, I decided it was time to take him to the pound. This was not a decision made lightly, it took me seven years. I knew I had to do while I was still angry, because regret would seep in. And it has.

My mother took our german shepard puppy (who had dragged her into a snowbank for 5th time) to the pound while we were away at school one day and brought back a poodle. I swore I would never do this.
I didn't bring back a poodle at least.

Anyway, he's still sitting just outside my studio door, listening to me play banjo. He looked back at me at the pound for a moment before the attendent took his lease and then pulled her after him to get where he was going. I gave him a good recommendation on the paperwork. Everyone deserves a clean start.

I've told my kids that I wouldn't into heaven now, and probably won't.