Things you can do instead of planning Part Two of your new novel. I finished Part One the other day … well I didn’t exactly “finish” it but I do have a draft that seems sort of alive and is stable enough that I have to stop tinkering with it and go on to the next part of the book. I’m trying not to dwell on the fact that it’s taken me almost four years to get to this point, nor to dwell on the fact that I’m back at the edge of terra incongnita, that place where I have…
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Crisis of Faith at LivingSmall Well, I’ve been having something of a crisis of faith about this whole blogging thing — not about blogging itself, but rather, about how on earth blogging about my own tiny little corner of the universe could in any way be a meaningful activity in the face of the global crisis into which our government is leading us. I mean really, we’re going to war and I’m blogging about cleaning? about floor machines? Compared to really insightful bloggers like Body and Soul, or Rittenhouse, or Blue Streak, or the Nielsen Haydens at Electrolite and Making…
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Sylvia Plath, Baking and Feminism: There have been a number of articles on the web lately about Kate Moses new book Wintering, a fictional account of Sylvia Plath’s last months when she was writing Ariel. The piece that got me thinking was the essay Kate Moses wrote for the Guardian called “Baking with Sylvia”. In this essay, Moses talks about how for both herself and for Sylvia Plath, baking was a way of creating order out of chaos, and how as she found herself up against her deadline for the book, Moses also found herself baking on a near-daily basis,…
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White House Postpones Poetry Symposium Both MobyLives and Blog of a Bookslut have blogged this today, but what really struck me was the following statement from the White House: “While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.” While I appreciate that the First Lady is at least interested in books, and in promoting literacy, one has to wonder where on earth she got the idea that the “literary” is not political. Please. Good for Sam Hamill,…
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Sometimes all you can do is iron the napkins. I’ve discovered that of the blogs I read daily, the ones I really look forward to are the domestic blogs, particularly Julie, and Leah who Struggles in her Bungalow Kitchen. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been thinking a lot about domesticity lately, and the unexpected pleasures I’ve discovered in domestic life. I’ve come late to this, having spent much of my twenties and thirties avoiding domestic entanglement. I had one of those childhoods that make one want to get out of the house as soon as…
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Bookslut notes that The Lovely Bones story lives on, and points to this totally inane conversation on Poynter which seems to argue that David Mendelsohn’s review could only be motivated by “backlash” against the book’s commercial success, and that critics should go easy on first novels, particularly if they are heavily promoted. There are so many holes in this argument that I don’t actually know where to start, so I think I’ll just start by saying, as an author, that any review which surpasses the level of “liking/disliking” and addresses the artistic ambition and accomplishment of a work is so…
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Bookslut pointed out this review of The Lovely Bones at the New York Review of Books. I just finished reading Alice Sebold’s first book, her memoir, Lucky. The most interesting aspect of the memoir was it’s narration of Sebold’s changing relationship to her own victimhood, and the ways that her attempts to deny and repress the emotional impact of being violently raped hobbled her emotional and artistic life for many years. I haven’t read The Lovely Bones yet myself, but I want to use Mendelsohn’s essay as a jumping-off place for a discussion (which I assume will be ongoing on…
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Book Alert For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch, by Dan O’Brien. He’s one of those writers who other writers rave about, but who isn’t well known to the general public, but he should be. This is a terrific book about O’Brien’s long struggle to keep his ranch afloat, and the huge leap of faith he took in the early nineties when he converted the ranch from cattle to buffalo. It’s also about the ecosystem of the great plains, and how we’ve messed it up, and…
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Bookslut has a surprising conversation about the independent bookstore issue. I must say, I agree about the clique-ishness of too many independent bookstores. If they want to survive, they need to stop vibing people
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The Meat Problem The problem for me is not whether one should eat meat, but how to eat meat without supporting factory farming. Here in Montana, several of my neighbors accomplish this by only eating wild meat, which aside from raising your own animals, does seem to like one of the least hypocritical paths out there. When it’s a deer, or elk, or antelope one has killed and butchered oneself, there’s no denying that death is an integral part of the cycle, nor that we can eat meat and retain our innocence of this fact. It’s been years since I’ve…