Book review on Deborama's Books - Borkmann's Point, by Håkan Nesser

My quiet return to blogging is heralded by a nice cozy book review.

RIP Harvey Pekar

In These Times and the NYT cover the death of Harvey Pekar. I loved this film, American Splendor. My British husband "didn't get it." But that happens a lot with him and not just American stuff either.

Book Blogging at my other blog

I have reviewed a few books over on Deborama's Book Reviews and Store :E. L. Doctorow's The March, John le Carre's A Most Wanted Man and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document. Check it out.

Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest post on Deborama's Books

Millenium Trilogy on Amazon UK
Check out my latest cultural (books, films, celebrities!) blogging over at Deborama's Book Reviews and Store.

Random Appearance of Deborama's WWW and My Life, My Family, Travelling

I'm in Atlanta, which it is now hip to call ATL. I am visiting my son and his girlfriend, and I am staying in the poshest hotel I have ever been in, at a fantastically reasonable rate, thanks to Expedia. (I have a picture of it on my phone, but I will have to upload it later as this computer in the hotel doesn't seem to have a USB port available.)


I have to do another Deborama's Wednesday Website of the Week, but I cannot wait until Wednesday (I will be mostly on the road to Hattiesburg then anyway) and technicallly I should not call it WWW anymore since it is far from being weekly. But I discovered the Believer magazine, a McSweeney's publication, at my son's apartment, and I have been obsessively reading it ever since. Absolutely brilliant, and I hope they'll forgive me lifting the image, since I am using it to plug their product.
Everybody here is laid off, or about to be laid off. It's quite sad what this recession is doing to those of my kids' generation, as if they haven't suffered enough. It's bad for my generation too of course; getting made redundant just as the verdant pastures of retirement come hazily into view is no picnic, I'm sure. Hopefully, I won't find that out firsthand on my return to Blighty, although it is a possibility.

John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey,1923 - 2009

Photo Credit: Associated Press Photo

Sir John Mortimer, celebrated barrister, playwright and novelist, died 17 January, 2009. He was best known as the creator of the popular crime series Rumpole of the Bailey, featuring Horace Rumpole, a figure only slightly autobiographical, as he never aspired to, let alone attained, anything like Mortimer's own achievements. He was also the author of the Paradise Postponed series, which was made into a great TV series, Voyage Round My Father and several other popular plays. As a barrister, he had a long career during which he also published books on the law and defended free speech in high-profile obscenity cases.

George Orwell, August 1938

The Orwell Prize, in association with the Orwell Trust and others, have begun a daily blog of George Orwell's diary entries in real time but 70 years later. It just began a few days ago (9 August) and not much "has happened" yet (he is in some sanitorium in Kent), so it won't take you long to catch up. The diaries were kept daily from August 1938 until some time in 1942, so they cover the period of his recuperation (partial) after being shot in the neck in Spain, his sojourn in Morocco, and his thoughts on the coming of WWII and the first two years of that conflict. And as with any blog, you can interact and leave comments and read those of others. Or you can just go for quality over quantity and stick to Orwell.

Blogkeeping

It has been more than three weeks since I posted a blog. Where does the time go? I will try to do a catch-up, but it may take more than one.

There have been some notable deaths - Anthony Minghella, who was too young, and Paul Scofield who was so old I didn't know he was still alive. (Great actor though.) Arthur C. Clarke. More banks have gone to the wall, and there has been a little farce with the Bank of England.

The Democrats Abroad primary votes came in and Obama got about 2/3 of our votes, Clinton the remaining 1/3. That was a couple of weeks ago. The race has been absorbing my attention, but I don't have anything major to add to the buzz. But what a buzz it is over here! The Brits just cannot believe they're not allowed to participate, just cannot believe how long it takes and cannot understand why our elections are so much more thrilling and interesting than theirs. But even though I have nothing much to say myself, I will share some of my favourite commentary by others:
Gary Younge on "the speech"
Ian Williams on Samantha Power
Sasha Abramsky on Hilary Clinton
Paul Krugman on the economy as election issue
Maureen Dowd on Hilary the Terminator

The Erudite Conservative, RIP, WFB

I Am Lapidary But Not Eristic When I Use Big Words said the headline of one of William F. Buckley's articles in the New York Times. Buckley died yesterday at the age of 82. He was the man I loved to hate, and I learned a lot from him in my youth. I guess I sort of admired him, even though mostly I deeply rejected his beliefs and his arguments. This NPR eulogy is an excellent summing up of a remarkable life.

Norman Mailer dead

Norman Mailer, author of The Naked and the Dead and many other fine books, a prolific writer in the New York media, and an often controversial political commentator, has died aged 84.

Blogkeeping - catch-up

Wikipedia's image of the day - the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland OR (I've been there!)

I have been in a fog. Too many things competing for my attention. Almost every day at work, except the days when I have been really busy, I see a few things I ought to, want to, blog about and I email myself a link (or two or ten) and then I don't do any blogging in the evening. To be fair, my computer keeps turning itself off. There have been some family issues, and I have been fighting off a cold, probably due to stress caused by all of the above. But still . . . I'll start with the silly, move through the serious, and hopefully something sublime will turn up.

In the Onion, "Entire Family Projects Neuroses Onto Their Innocent Dog" is priceless.

Received in an email (I'm sure it's on the web somewhere):

The entire city council of Ashland, Ore., has decided to enter relationship
counseling. The catalyst was Councilman David Chapman's telling Councilman
Eric Navickas to "shut your f...ing mouth" during last week's meeting,
though Navickas had previously called the city's mayor "a Nazi," and
tensions have generally been running high. Taxpayers will pay $37,000 for
the council's five months of therapy, which "may seem like a lot of money,"
said City Administrator Martha Bennett, "But if the council doesn't function, the city doesn't function."

The Vatican has had a bit of a rethink about the Knights Templars.

I was thrilled to bits that Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature, even though, yes, it was a bit overdue.

The Guardian Society section today profiled Edgar Cahn, the founder of "time banking", a sophisticated form of bartering and valuing social contributions as much as commercial ones.

And finally, how about that England rugby team, eh? Watched all the games so far except the first one (I was out). (I guess this is going to be the sublime bit.) In related news, facebook has a new Jonny Wilkinson Appreciation Society site.

Grace Paley dies at age 84

Grace Paley died Wednesday at the age of 84; she had breast cancer. Obituaries of note at NPR, the NY Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Guardian. There were lots of nice recent pictures of her in the various articles I read, but I just loved this picture of a much younger Paley from 1959.

I first became really aware of Grace Paley (although I had heard of her, and may have read some of her stories in my teens, a voracious reading period for me) through an independent film released in 1983 and based on her stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. And Paley was more than just a great writer; she was also a peace activist and a central figure in her community in her New York days, and in her later years she lived in Vermont and continued in political activism right into old age.

Deborama's WWW Number 22 - The Flash Girls, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly and QWERTY Ranch

A homage to lost Minneapolis things. At the May Day parade, I saw a young woman wearing a T-shirt that read "Keep Minneapolis Weird". Amen to that.
Some excerpts from Wikipedia about the Flash Girls and Emma Bull:

The Flash Girls are a now defunct folk music duo based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota..
The duo consisted of Emma Bull, a noted science fiction author, and Lorraine Garland, who went by the stage name "The Fabulous Lorraine". Garland is also notable as Neil Gaiman's personal assistant; the group formed at a Guy Fawkes Day party at Gaiman's home. The connections that both Bull and Garland had with the science fiction and fantasy communities allowed them to have an unusually notable group of people writing songs for them, including Jane Yolen, Alan
Moore, and Neil Gaiman. These songs are mixed in with traditional songs such as Star of the County Down, and Lily of the West, as well as poems put to music, including works by Dorothy Parker and A.A. Milne.

Emma Bull is a science fiction and fantasy author whose best-known novel is War for the Oaks, one of the pioneering works of urban fantasy. . . She sang in the rock-funk band Cats Laughing, and both sang and played guitar in the folk duo The Flash Girls while living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Her 1991 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Bone Dance was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Bull wrote a screenplay for War for the Oaks, which was made into an 11-minute mini-film designed to look like a film trailer. She made a cameo appearance as the Queen of the Seelie Court, and her husband, Will Shetterly, directed. Bull and Shetterly created the shared universe of Liavek, for which they have both written stories. There are five Liavek collections in print.
She was a member of the writing group The Scribblies, which included Will Shetterly as well as Pamela Dean, Kara Dalkey, Nate Bucklin, Patricia Wrede and Steven Brust. With Steven Brust, Bull wrote Freedom and Necessity (1997), an epistolary novel with subtle fantasy elements set during the 19th century United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Chartist movement.

Emma's Blog, Dark Roast
Will's Blog, it's all one thing
Steven's website, Dream Cafe
Neil Gaiman's Journal
Emma and Will's website QWERTY Ranch

I would dearly love to put a link to my Amazon.co.uk site and sell you CDs of the Flash Girls and Cats Laughing. They are unheard of at co.uk, and Amazon.com, there is one used CD available for each group (they both made several). The Cats Laughing CD is $44 and the Flash Girls will only set you back about $120.

Deborama's WWW Number 21 - Bookslut

While I was on holiday in Minneapolis, my friend Lou dragged me bodily into a Border's bookstore and forced me to buy books. No, I'm lying. I told her I needed books, and she is such a nice person she had to take me there. I needed books because I had no computer with me (no internet, no Mah Jongg) and I have gone off American TV and newspapers (mostly) and the radio reception was horrible. And you can only do so much Sudoku.
I bought one book for Lou, as a thank you (The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion) and I bought six books for myself, one of which was This Book Will Save Your Life, by A. M. Homes. So this week's website of the week is the result of my Googling the title, to see what there was out there, and rediscovering Bookslut. Bookslut is the kind of book review blog I meant to have (but obviously, don't, because I am so lazy.)

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84 from complications of a fall. And nothing to do with smoking, even though he referred to it as a form of sure but gradual suicide. Vonnegut is one of the heroes of my adolescence. Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and especially Slaughterhouse Five were all cultural beacons that led me out of the haze of the 1950s into my teenage years and enlightenment.

A video of Vonnegut on The Daily Show (Comedy Central) with Jon Stewart.

Thanks to Alix and Julie for alerting me to this. The obituary was not even in the Guardian today although it is now on the "latest" website:

Vonnegut's writing career spanned more than half a century and saw him
produce 14 novels (many of which were bestsellers) as well as dozens of short
stories, essays and plays. He ranged from the conventional science fiction of
his 1963 novel, Cat's Cradle (which hangs around the discovery of "ice-nine", a
substance with the properties of water but which is solid at room temperature)
to the satirical Breakfast of Champions (1973) and the semi-autobiographical
Slaughterhouse-Five, the catalyst for which was his own experience as a soldier
with the US 106th Infantry Division and as a prisoner of war during world war
two.

Art Buchwald, Columnist and Humourist

Art Buchwald died 18 January at the age of 81. I remember when his column was one of the first things I would read in the newspaper. I was a schoolgirl/young teen when he was at the height of his popularity, but he aged very well, because since his humour was absurd, sharp and never bitter or cruel, it never really went out of fashion. In fact, click on the link above, and then click on the link for the video feature, to see Art at his most sublime, with his self-made, one sentence, video obituary made especially for the web. Brilliant.

New Orleans writers struggle to pen rebirth story

Tonight and tomorrow night BBC Four TV will be showing Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. Earlier I posted about a spate of excellent books that came out over the year and a bit since Katrina. One that I didn't know about then but later discovered was by one of my great favourite authors from New Orleans, Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans Mon Amour (actually a collection of stories, poems and essays spanning the last 20 years, from and about NOLA.) I bought the book for my daughter, another doomed lover of the Big Easy, and I have heard that she liked it a lot. And now I found this story, one of many concerning how the various communities of New Orleans, the musicians, the artists, the political activists, have been struggling creatively but often painfully, to rebuild in the wake of the great deluge.

After the deluge

Here is a plethora of books on Hurricane Katrina,reviewed by NPR's All Things Considered. The links below are for possible purchasers in the UK and Europe. In the US, follow the links in the article to purchase and benefit NPR:

• Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? by Toni McGee Causey, Colleen Mondor, Jason Berry


• The Storm by Ivor van Heerden, Mike Bryan


• The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley


• Breach of Faith by Jed Horne


• Path of Destruction by John McQuaid, Mark Schleifstein


• Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper


• 1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose, Charlie Varley (Photographer)

And one that NPR missed:

• Come Hell or High Water by Michael Eric Dyson

IGN: A Scanner Darkly Review

Philip K. Dick's paranoid drug war novel A Scanner Darkly has been made into a film by director Richard Linklater. Probably not by coincidence, it stars a sort of who's who of Hollywood drug use and/or recovery graduates: Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder, plus the is-he-is-or-is-he-ain't stoner Keanu Reeves. Reviews are mixed.

Funny little facts

Three of the top female British authors' names form the pattern AX, BY and XY : Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and Ali Smith.

A word of the day that came up this week forms a Highly Improbable Anagram with another little-known word that I just happened to know. The two words are : neoplasm and pleonasm.

Shelby Foote, Walker Percy and William Faulkner all hailed at various times from the same little Mississippi town - Greeneville.