More Book Buying Abroad

So I went to the US for a short trip of gambling, stocking up on American consumer goodness, and book buying. I visited a few fantastic bookshops but the best of all was Calico Cat Books in Ventura, California. Here I snapped up a rare edition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the 1956 edition of Proust's In Search of Lost Time in 7 volumes, and a very nice copy of Journey to the West. At Starlight Books in Flagstaff Arizona I bought an odd book edited by Italo Calvino of Italian Fairytales, W. Somerset Maugham's book on Kipling, and a first edition of Knut Hamsun's Pan. This was an exciting purchase as it is an extremely rare printing by Knopf from 1921 after Hamsun won the Nobel.

Needless to say I came home with so many books that I had to rush to Walmart with my best friend THL at 3 in the morning to buy another suitcase and repack (after we drove back to Vegas for our flight back to Paris along Route 66) as we were a bit over the max weight limit per suitcase.

One thing I find amusing is that bookstores here in Paris are always trying to be more American and bookstores in the US are always trying to be more European. Europeans read a lot. But don't lose faith America - aside from the Les Pleiades, printed by Gallimard (which are for French people the ultimate editions and rightly so, they're AMAZING and cause me to drool whenever I see them) - American books are much better printed in general.

The real score of my American book buying was finding a first edition Charlotte's Web by EB White for $4.00!!!! No seriously. It even had a printing flaw, where the last chapter's start page had to be written in by hand...would be interested hearing from any collector's if this means anything? I'm adding this on my shelf beside my 1st American Edition of The Trumpet of the Swan, which is my favorite EB White Book.

Read more >>

A Good Ol' Vent

I've been keeping this blog rather sporadically. But in the month or so that I've been away, I've actually been very busy with lots of stuff other than blogging...

1. The book buying continues, as if I could stop it. I'm currently reading a lot of fairy tales and Colette. Freud would love to get me on the sofa over that I'm sure. But even today I went to two place that sell books and passed by the closed WH Smith with regret. I need a 12 step program and Jesus.

2. I went to the book launch for the letters of Samuel Beckett at the Irish Cultural Center in Paris. The two editors who put the book together, Daniel Gunn and George Craig read some of his letters and Daniel kept mentioning that Beckett struggled with being a writer. I waited until after to ask him if he ever became more confident about it and Mr. Gunn said he struggled his whole life. Take this as you will. For me it simply meant no matter what you might accomplish as a writer, you'll always be uncertain. But he also said Beckett knew he had to write and that he knew he wasn't fit for anything else. Inspiring thought.

3. I bought a bike and have been riding all over Paris. It is by far the best way to see the city. I think it's the best thing I've bought since I've come to Paris. I see the city through new eyes and plus it helps burn off all the pastries.

So expect more from me, but in snippets. I'm getting ready to begin my book. I can feel it...or maybe it's just gas?

Read more >>

Helpful Links & Inspiration

"We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your devine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity."
~Rejection slip from a Chinese economic journal
(from Sophy Burnham's collection of inspiring thoughts for writers, "For Writers Only," Ballantine Books, 1994)

Character Trait Chart


Essay on Writing from Kurt Vonnegut

Be Brutal

Online library of scanned book covers

From bard-de-boulogne

“In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.”

Look for L'Age d'Or


Blog Full of Interesting Facts

Read more >>

Top 25 Things to Do Instead of Writing

1. Cut off my split ends with cuticle scissors.

2. Browse through books written by better writers than me.

3. Fantasize about Morrissey serenading me from six stories down as I stand on the balcony.

4. Fantasize he's not singing "You're the One for Me Fatty", even though I'm doing a lot of late night binge eating.

5. Late night binge eating.

6. Light entire packs of cigarettes on fire, while unfortunately inhaling the smoke.

7. Put on lipstick and admire my reflection in my computer screen.

8. Download interviews from the Paris Review website before they take them down just to make you buy the back issue.

9. Look for random weird things on ebay.

10. Randomly get up and drop my ghetto booty.

11. Write love notes to my boyfriend I don't give him.

12. Look at style.com.

13. Criticize myself after looking at style.com because I can't fit into the clothes I like.

14. Replan my existing wardrobe.

15. Think of all the cool things I'd make if I had a glue gun.

16. Plan vacations

Read more >>

Tenderize the Night

She is sleeping on a bed as soft as an overcooked steak. The lumpy mashed potato pillows and the afghan with its unraveling bit of string bean yarn frame her body, as still and old as a two day old roll.

But her dreams are sweet. The dull flat, with its dirty tile floor and weathered facade are replaced with walls made of graham crackers. The lifeless posters and cracked plaster are in this sugar spun temperaneous world smell of peppermint and the jewel tone gum drops twinkle. The dining table is bare of good china or her grandmother's heirloom silver. She takes a bite. It's made of chocolate and its joint meet one another in nougat.

She slumbers on. The maid sleeps transformed. The sun bleached uniform is pink and the once sagging skirt twirls in mid-air, dancing with the silk ballet slippers.

In this dream she dresses; not with haste and reluctance, but with expectation. When she looks in the mirror there is a smile there, as if it had been waiting for her face to simply show up and complete the happy reflection.

There is a hint of doom. Behind her she seems the glare of the evil witch's red eyes. Next, she hears the horrible cackle of the witch's laugh. She flees. She tries to fend off the monsters with her licorice whip.

A white hand lashes out from under the overboiled green beans, slapping the top of the alarm clock like a mosquito.

She crawls down the stairs that groan profanities at her, and places her coffee mug on the well worn table. By the time she adds the sugar, the sweetness of her other life is already forgotten.

Read more >>

On pain...

"I've got this little thing I've learned to do just lately...When it's so hard I think I shan't go on, I try to make it worse. I make myself think about Berkeley. Our camp on the river. How good it was. When I'm certain I won't stand it, I go a moment more. Then I know I can bear anything."

Read more >>

Books and Bindings

There are books that are like a wind through your life. They can send a shiver down your spine or offer up a refreshing breeze. They are random. If you had read them perhaps at another moment instead of that moment, perhaps they would have had no effect at all.



Then there are those other books. The books that you keep beneath your pillow, beside your bed, and in your heart.

Read more >>

Recent Acquisitions

Letters from Africa - Isak Dinesen
Heaven and Hell - Emanuel Swedenborg
The Roots of Coincidence - Arthur Koestler
The Betrothed - Alessandro Manzoni
The Sailor Who Fell from the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Bored of the Rings - The Harvard Lampoon
The Counterfeiters - Andre Gide
The Unvanquished - William Faulkner
The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Innocent Libertine - Colette
The Farewell Party - Milan Kundera
Deception - Philip Roth
Fathers and Sons - Alexander Roth
Youth and the Bright Medusa - Willa Cather
The Other Woman - Colette
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Cosmicomics - Italo Calvino
Demain - Herman Hesse
Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Seven Gothic Tales - Isek Dinesen
The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid - Octavio Paz
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Waves - Virginia Woolf
The Book of the Five Rings - Musashi
D.H. Lawrence - Anais Nin
Children of the Albatross - Anais Nin
A Spy in the House of Love - Anais Nin
Seduction of the Minotaur - Anais Nin
Orlando - Virginia Woolf
The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen
No Name - Wilkie Collins
Anatomical Drawings - Leonardo da Vinci
Les Belles Images - Simone de Beauvoir
Gravity - George Gamow
A House is Not a Home - Polly Adler
Chanel - Edmonde Charles- Roux
Letters Summer 1926 - Pasternak, Rilke, Tsvetayeva
A Beside Nature, Genius and Eccentricity in Science 1869 - 1953 (foreword by Stephen Jay Gould)
Memories of Childhood - Marcel Pagnol
The Flounder - Gunter Grass
Losing Battles - Eudora Welty
Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs
The Green House - Maria Vargas Llosa
Group Portrait with Lady - Henrich Boll
The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
The Mystic Masseur - V.S. Naipul
Leafstorm and Other Stories - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Delta Wedding - Eudora Welty
Creatures Great and Small - Colette
Tutankh-Amen and His Tomb - G. Elliot Smith
The Age of Fable - Thomas Bullfinch
Call It Sleep - Henry Roth
Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck
Anti-Memoirs - Andre Malraux
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and six more - Roald Dahl
Nijinsky - Nijinsky
The Search for Modern China - Jonathan D. Spence
The Best Cartoons from Punch
Histoire de Paris et des Parisiens
French Gourmet Cooking Volume I & II - Julia Child
Infinity and the Mind - Rudy Rucker
Lectures on Literature - Nabokov
Marquis de Sade - Simone de Beauvoir
Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence
Psychology and Alchemy - C.G. Jung
Corydon - Andre Gide
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges - Richard Burgin
The Captive Mind - Czeslaw Milosz
We - Eugene Zamiatin
American Power and the New Mandarins
Everything that Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor
Invitation to a Beheading - Nabokov
The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino
Conversations about the End of Time - Eco, Gould, etc
The Intuitionist - Colson Whitehead
The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico - Bernal Diaz del Castillo
The Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Complete Poems - D.H. Lawrence
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Memoirs - Pablo Neruda
Closing the Gap - Chandler Brossard

Read more >>

Writing Tip #1

Always put clarity before cleverness. Your reader will love you for it.

Read more >>

Children's Writing, The HP Phenomenon

Deciding to write a children's novel in the post-Harry Potter era is a daunting task.

Since I rarely read literary criticism as I prefer to judge a book (and its cover) for myself, I never knew that the HP received any criticism, given that the series has sold 400 million copies and be made into video games and put to film.

So in the need to encourage myself further, I allowed myself to be sucked into yet another Wikipedia Wormhole and discovered that a critic/author I much admire, A.S. Byatt in an article published in the New York Times, said that HP is a, "secondary world, made up of patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature ... written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip".

Now don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the HP series. I had a system where I would buy the recent HP book, read a chapter and hand the book to a random child on the subway. So I personally think I contributed greatly to the 400 million copies that were sold.

But I did so because as a child reading was my absolute favorite way to pass the time, and the idea that parents were expected to shell out 30 bucks for a hard cover book for children simply baffled me. While Rowling has been charitable, given her position she should have insisted that a less expensive format be available alongside the hard back release; something should I ever enjoy the success Rowling has I would definitely fight for.

Still, A.S. Byatt's criticisms about aspects of the book that I found a bit too simple are not unfounded. For example Rowling took a lot of the components from mythology, such as the 3 headed dog that guards the Philospher's Stone and many other of the creatures are based on myths.

Rowling herself has stated that Paul Gallico was a huge inspiration for her. A simple search lists countless sites that accuse Rowling of everything including full out plagarism of the Harry Potter name, the idea that Harry Potter was a wizard, and even his scar.

The sad part might be that because children moved away from reading, very few children might pick up and find the references that are so obvious to others.

Last night I completed the first sketch for my book. Every author draws from the books they have read, it's unavoidable. But for my part, I do honestly feel that my story will something new, if only because I have read a considerable amount and believe in the power of my imagination in a way not much different than when I was seven, the age my main heroine is when the story begins.

Line for line I do not think Rowling compares to C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland, E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan (which I prefer over Charlotte's Web); and cannot compare to the literature that was once considered the domain of children written by Dickens, Hugo, or Dumas (Senior).

But as of last night, the idea of my heroine became more than an idea. She took form in my mind. Like me she has raven hair and big dark eyes. Like me she has a kind heart, a tendency to be naughty, is inventive, precocious, and determined. I believe in her. I believe in the quest I will set her out upon, though it has not yet begun.

A.S. Byatt gave me hope that people do still expect more from children's literature. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, despite its faults gave me even more hope that children want to read intelligent and thoughtful stories and that those stories are still sellable.

But I'm not just writing this story to sell books. I'm writing this story to entertain children, to pay hommage to those writers whose stories kept a lonely little girl company, and ultimately so that one day I might be able to do something good with whatever proceeds I might make.

And plus, now that my little seven year old heroine has come to life, she is every bit a child and not content to sit still in my mind. She wants out and fast. She knows there is a whole world waiting for her and a fantastic journey that is meant for her alone.

I am glad that I will be the first to make this journey with her and hope I will not be the last.

Read more >>

The Old Television Set

From Blog Photos

The television had been there for thirty years. You got the sense that if you turned it on, a thirty year old television show would play.

Read more >>

Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima

My plan to read the Sea of Fertility series by Mishima was thwarted.

I did however finish the first book, Spring Snow, The Amber Spyglass, and read a few Borges stories. I excuse my inability to finish the SoF series because I was writing in earnest most of the month for my new novel.

That aside, now that I've read the work, I took the time to read a few non-professional reviews. I do see the political significance of Mishima's work - the time period in which he choses to begin his series - but beyond that is a sort of desperation, frustration, and his personal idea that one must die to prove their point and sacrifice for their ideals.

I am going to finish the SoF series and read Scott-Stokes biography on Mishima - I chose not to read the other way around because I don't want to have too much on my mind as I read.

The work itself is beautifully written (I have the Charles Tuttle edition) and so very moving that in times the sadness that pervades the novel gets its hands on you and I had to stop. What Mishima does try to do he does with the aid of a love story gone wrong and knowing that it can never be righted is a sorrow that lingers with you.

The ending did not tie up all the loose ends, so those who say it's possible to read the books out of order or read one and then stop - I can't yet disagree with them. But since one of the main characters has a novel of his own in the series, I'm suspecting that this might not be possible. It's a lot of reading, but the first book was in itself what I would call a masterpiece.

Read more >>

Recent Acquisitions

Books bought today:

T.S. Eliot, a Life - Peter Ackroyd
The Custom House of Desire, Half a Century of Surrealist Stories - Translated by J.H. Matthews
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck - Charles Bukowski
The King & The Corpse - Henrich Zimmer (edited by Joseph Campbell)
The History Man - Malcolm Bradbury
Writing, The Story of Alphabets and Scripts - Jean Georges
The Comfort of Strangers - Ian McEwan
The Egyptian Book of the Dead - E.A Wallis Budge
Problems of Leninism - Joseph Stalin
The Proper Bostonians - Cleland Amory
The Master and Magarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Literary History of England
Myth & Legend - Thomas Bulfinch
The Light that Failed - Rudyard Kipling

Read more >>

Apparently, The Grapes of Wrath Could Have Been Longer...

I like so many other addicts, abuse a drug called Facebook because it makes me feel better about myself. I don't have the worst of the many Facebook habits - I don't use FB for eye crack. I am not a Friends junkie. No, my addiction is to the great white dust covered Virtual Bookshelf.

Yes, it makes me feel better to save all the books I've read and to write scathing critiques on Kundera or the recent failure of Murakami and every now and then I get to come across a book I've long forgotten, like the Scarlet Letter. How is that for old school?

But my favorite moment today was clicking past Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and coming across the GOW Cliff's Notes, which is a study guide and seeing the following review:

"interesting story but I felt it could have been a bit longer"

I don't think this was tongue-in-cheek sadly.

Though I nearly wet myself showing the poor reader's review the appropriate amount of comedic appreciation.

Read more >>

New Year's Reading Resolutions

I've decided I will devote each month of the year to reading either a) books only by a specific author, b) books on a specific subject, or c) one immense work that normally takes a month (i.e. say Ulysses).

The purpose of this is to make notes (I've loads of notebooks that must be put to use!) and see where reading the first author takes me either to another author or to a certain subject. So basically throughout the year I will progress naturally from a starting point.

After much thought, I've decided to start this experiment with Yukio Mishima and more specifically with Mishima's Sea of Fertility, his great masterpiece that is composed of four books: Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn,and The Decay of the Angel.

I also plan to read Madame de Sade and a biography on Mishima (by Henry Scott-Stokes) in order to find out what the month of February has in store.

So in short, if you do a search through my archives for Mishima, you can keep track and maybe predict where I might go next.

Read more >>