Book Alert Although this summer was a tough one for the UC Davis Creative Writing community, as we lost both Walter Pavlich and Louis Owens, one happy result was that I found my old friend Margaret Young again. I ordered her first collection, Willow from the Willow months ago, but for some reason I’m still not able to pin down, I’ve been unable to read poetry for a couple of months. It happens sometimes. My brain just won’t work for poetry and it all just sits there on the page looking like words that have been arranged, words that fail…
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Thanks to Blog of a Bookslut for pointing out this terrific essay by Jeanette Winterson on the problems of publishing a posthumous collection of Italo Calvino’s nonfiction prose. Considering that he was such a tough self-editor, and non-documentary artist, Winterson ponders the ethical ramifications of the collection, noting that: “The cult of celebrity that surrounds writers now is rather like those sonic frequency machines that force moles above ground. In this collection, Calvino talks enthusiastically about the ‘dream of being invisible’ and he goes as far as to say that ‘writers lose a lot when they are seen in the…
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Book Alert When two writers become friends there’s always an interesting moment when you exchange books. It’s fraught, especially if the new friend is someone you really like, because there’s always that chance that the book will, well, not be quite what you had hoped (we all have writer friends who we like better than we like their books). I spent the weekend totally engrossed in my friend Maryanne Vollers book Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South (try Alibris since this fine book is…
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Amazon and LivingSmall — what’s with all the links to Amazon on the site? Doesn’t the behemoth Amazon represent everything that is Big in just the way that this site is seeking to question? Well, yes. I have a vexed relationship with Amazon — as a book-addict it is almost impossible to resist the lure of their speedy delivery of almost any book one might want. So, more often than I’d like, I find myself ordering from Amazon. However, Amazon’s size isn’t the only problematic aspect of their business — their practice of putting links to used book sales for…
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It’s over, thank goodness. Some years I’m all Christmas cheer, but this year I just couldn’t get into it for some reason. Because I’m new in town and don’t know when they pick up Christmas trees (and since we’ve had 50-75 mph winds the past three days) I compromised by taking all the ornaments off the tree and putting them away, but I left the tree, with its white lights, in the living room. It was sort of a Charlie Brown tree to begin with (but once you’ve walked into the Round Barn at the fairground, you’re pretty much committed…
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Christmas was perfect — I got almost no stuff. My brother bought me an adult ed class with a Master Gardener from MSU and a cookbook (well, a gift certificate for The Pleasures of Slow Food by Corby Kummer which is out of stock at the moment). Mom sent socks and PJs. And we all avoided the pile of interesting stuff that no one really needed anyhow. Not that I’m against presents … I love presents. I just hate the forced nature of Christmas presents … my perfect Christmas involves a bunch of people sitting around a long table having…
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So, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to live more locally, how to resist the siren call of consumerism, how to build a sustainable life. I bought a house this year, and moved to Montana. It was important to me when I was looking for a place that I didn’t buy a “ranchette”, that I didn’t contribute to the development creeping across the open spaces of the West. So I found a 100 year old house in a funky town, a house with an old established vegetable plot in back. Planning the garden has me thinking about eating…