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I Heart You

Many thanks to those that came out to my reading last night. It has been regarded in the foreign and domestic media as a resounding success. There was, however, one complaint. I wore a natty outfit of tie and vest, and apparently my dapper look was so popular as to be distracting.

I never realized my sense of style would become a barrier to my literary career. Woe! Woe! I shall plan to be less well dressed at future readings.

For those that missed it! I shall be sending the excerpt I read out over my email list. Your reading experience will be bereft of my elucidating intonation but on the plus side, you will not be distracted by my wardrobe.

I won’t be posting the excerpt on my blog, so if you want to read it, you’d better be sure you’re on the list. And how do you do that? You subscribe. I have finally added a nice auto-subscribe form here. Simply fill out your name and email address.

I shall be adding a couple people to my list myself over the next day or two, and will plan to send the excerpt sometime later this week.

Posted 26 July 2010 † Lee § My Stories ‡ Comments (1) °

Reading Tonight!

Me! Reading! Tonight!

I’ll be at the Baltimore Hostel tonight along with a group of other literary worthies. You ought to check it out, for reals. They have AC!

7pm.

Posted 25 July 2010 † Lee § Miscellany ‡ Comments (1) °

Woolf Stalks the Kindle Board

Where do I come up with these titles?

I’ve finally reached the end of A Room of One’s Own. I found it considerably harder to get through than “How Should One Read a Book?”

A Room suffers from the fact that women have progressed so very far. Though sadly it is probably still pertinent to much of the world, in the United States at least women have escaped most of the chains of social impoverishment. (Of course Kristan was right in the comments section. Woolf: philosophies great, style hard. Woolf herself was so impoverished she couldn’t afford to indent. Seriously! Paragraphs three pages long.)

In holding with Woolf’s philosophies I’ve finally commandeered a room of my own and turned it into an office. I took one entire wall and painted it as a chalkboard and it is pretty splendid. I’ve set up all my toys and so far the inspiration has flowed. As Woolf says in “How One Should Read a Book,” we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it.

Woolf was not talking about writing, though I think the sentiment fits, but about reading, and about how crucial it is for us to develop our own ability to read critically.

And if everyone’s predictions are correct about the coming e-book universe, reading critically will be ever more important, for there shall be quite a bit to wade through, and we’ll have to learn the skill of throwing books aside in anger (or deleting them with stern keystrokes, at least).

All change is not sky falling, however, as a perusal of the amazing world of the Kindle boards will soon reveal. The boards are a glimpse at a vibrant and vigorous reading world of tomorrow, one that fits so nicely Woolf’s reasons why we should read well:

If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

In these days when the press’s gunfire grows ever more erratic, let’s embrace our own idiosyncrasy, enjoy our modern freedoms, and read and argue galore. It’s a good time to be writer or reader.

Posted 19 July 2010 † Lee § Miscellany ‡ Comments (2) °

Upcoming Reading

Some of you know, most of you don’t, sometimes even I wonder: What have I been doing with my life?

Lately, I’ve been working on a novel. It’s a novel about doctors. Specifically it’s a novel about doctors who figure that since they’re so good at fixing things, why don’t they start fixing broken hearts. Yep.

It’s  moving slowly towards completion, but if you want a glimpse, and I know you do, now’s your chance. I will be reading a tiny sliver of aforementioned novel-in-progress at Last Rites on July 25th.

If you remember, I was one of Last Rites’ very first readers. Despite this rocky start, the reading series has been going strong for a year now. Come celebrate with me. 7pm, at the Baltimore Hostel. They got beers.

Posted 16 July 2010 † Lee § Calendar ‡ Comments (2) °

Ironically Sneaky Theft of a Book on Ninja

Two weeks ago I used a gift card to purchase a book through Barnes and Noble’s website. I settled for a used copy which came from a third-party seller, since the book is out of print. Ninja, the True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult, by Stephen Turnbull, arrived quickly and turned out to be as awesome as its subject matter: full of historical fact, mythology, Japanese images, and library information.

<<Sound of brakes screeching>>

Originally from the Fond Du Lac Public Library, the book appeared to have been withdrawn from there. I would have thought it sold by the library, except inside the book was also information on an inter-library loan. The Winnefox Library System in Wisconsin had loaned the book to the Stonehill College Library in Massachusetts, with a return date of May 24, 2010.

I donned my fedora, holstered my 38 special, took a sip of bourbon, and launched my detective career. A call to Stonehill soon turned up the fact that the book had been requested by them but never arrived. Instead, someone had rerouted it to Big River Books, LLC, 5001 McNeel Industrial Way, Powder Springs, GA 30127.

Who steals from a library? The jerk apparently operates from Georgia, or at the very least has a dummy corporate address there (although judging by what follows, it’s hard to imagine my thief is smart enough to have a dummy address). The jerk is also, apparently, an idiot. Ninja is rarer than I thought (almost as rare as a real ninja! Pun!). Hardcovers are hard to find and go for $85 or more. Paperbacks are easier to find and cost about $15. I bought mine for $14, shipping included. It’s a hardcover, in very good condition.

Stealing from libraries is not unknown. The librarian at Stonehill informed me it is quite easy to find out which libraries possess which valuable books. Usually, however, the thief simply checks the book out, and does not involve the inter-library loan system. Also, one assumes, the thief is then smart enough to remove the incriminating evidence from the book before fencing it.

I’ve informed Barnes and Noble, but haven’t heard back yet. I have no doubt they’ll take some kind of action against Big River (even if the bookseller wasn’t the original thief, they could have done what I did and called the library), and hopefully they’ll also see fit to refund my $14. In the meantime, I will be mailing Ninja back to Stonehill.

Just another day in the life of a book detective.

Posted 08 July 2010 † Lee § Miscellany ‡ Comments (2) °

Woolf: not a Parvenu

Is it 103 degrees where you are? Is the bright harsh heat coming from everywhere at once like some titanic sun-fall? Are you inside reading like I am?

I’ve been swamped in words and want to share. This has caused me to fall behind on listing what I’m reading. I’ve already finished Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but thought it deserved to sit on my site for a moment in all its epistolary glory. Reading it has convinced me epistolary novels are the only way to go. I’ll probably be done with A Room of One’s Own by the end of the day, and Lost Horizon shan’t last much longer, I imagine.

I’ve also just finished Virginia Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?” which contained the quote “reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing.” Too bad we cut away so much of the long and complicated these days. Woolf also said in the essay that “facts are a very inferior form of fiction.”

Her other thoughts deserve a bit more reflection and maybe another post. I’ve been thinking about women, and reading books by women, and people with idiosyncracies and the bravery to have them. Shall I put all that in one post? Sounds dangerous.

Lastly, a word: Parvenu. From the French for to pass through or arrive (roughly), it means someone who is newly rich or powerful and does not know how to behave in this new exalted station. I do not think it would be too much of a stretch of the word to use it on the many “housewives” and other newly famous of reality television. Coined in 1802, perfect for 2010.

Posted 06 July 2010 † Lee § Miscellany ‡ Comments (2) °

Page of Words of the Day

I wrote the line “gave a wan smile” yesterday and, realizing that I wasn’t sure what wan meant, flew to the arms of Webster like a teenage girl flying to the arms of her loving vampire, or werewolf, or whatever violent nocturnal creature it is currently OK to encourage our young girls to snuggle with.

Wan (pronounced as one would pronounce “Han” of Han Solo): suggestive of poor health, lacking vitality. From the old English wann, for dark.

I’d used it correctly. My main character had been saving a seat for someone and had told someone else the seat was taken and gave her a “wan smile.” Lacking vitality! Exactly.

Better than finding I’d used the word properly, though, was perusing wan’s orthographic neighbors. On the same page I found some awesome proper(ish) nouns:

  • Walpurgis Night
  • Wampanoags
  • Wandering Jew
  • Wankel engine

As well as wallydraigle, walrus, wampum, wanderlust, wangle, wanton, and the onoemonapaic warble.

What a great dictionary page! Totally not wan!

Posted 25 June 2010 † Lee § Word of the Day ‡ Comments (1) °

Tone your Writing AND your Abs in Ten Easy Steps!

Perhaps because I’ve been closely following TH Mafi’s hilarious Querypolitan, I’ve been stricken by the bug to write about the intersection of physical fitness and a writing career, which I very briefly touched on here.

Writing seems to most the dreadful nemesis of physical fitness, a stony-faced Greek goddess armed with the ability to inflict spare tires and varicose veins. The more my writing and my fitness are left in my own hands, though, the more they seem to have some secret natural connection.

Writing seems less like Nemesis and more like Nora, the svelte and witty darling who when joined by her dapper husband Nick can overcome any number of gun-totting villains or olive-laden martinis (and Nick and Nora of The Thin Man drank all the time).

But when I sat to write this post I couldn’t think of much to add to my previous thoughts besides fanciful metaphors. The increased blood flow and energy from working out are obvious benefits to mixing physically strenuous activity with a writing lifestyle, but there’s clearly more, and that more to me seems to be centered around running.

I’ve tried, but have yet to exhaust all the connections between writing and running. I find both damn hard. Both require an iron self-motivation. Both are intimates with solitude. Writing is done alone, and as my friend pointed out, running is one of the few activities in modern society that allows for true solitude. When running we’re allowed to leave behind even our leach-like cell phones.

I was still trying to suss out the nuances of the relationships between running and writing when I finished Lolita and peered in my skyscraper-like stack of books-to-be-read and found What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami.

And so I point you, dear reader, to Murakami, as he’s far more lyric, even in translation, than I am, and an excellent chronicler of the interactions between writing and running. I’ve only just begun the book but it’s already cleared everything else out of my head, much the way a nice hard run will.

Posted 20 June 2010 † Lee § Motivation ‡ Comments (1) °

In Which the Secrets of the Library are Revealed

It is a fact generally observable by all that the world is filled with idiots and boors including (but not limited to) people who place perspiring beverages on antique wood surfaces, women waiting in line at the bank who declare loudly that the tellers should “stop checking their email and help customers” and individuals in blue Hondas that make right turns from the center lane without using a turn signal. However, since I find myself lucky enough to abide in the richest nation on Earth, I cannot justify complaining, even if I have to share said nation with said idiots and boors.

Instead I shall point out the delightful. The public library (at least its incarnation in Baltimore, the Enoch Pratt) not only offers a variety of books and videos for free, it also offers classes, research assistance, and expensive databases, all for free.

Since free is the price point at which I prefer most things, I found this exceedingly exciting. If only I had known while laboring on research projects at school that public librarians were eagerly awaiting the chance to do my homework for me, I would have lived a happier if slightly less educational youth.

I just took a class on grant researching and writing at the Enoch Pratt and it was wonderful. I also learned the library has a collection of sport memorabilia, a collection of old menus from Baltimore restaurants, and even a lock of Poe’s hair!

Though the world seems at times exclusively comprised of the idiots and boors, the truth is that they are just the most salient, often because they nearly run you over in their blue Hondas. So, stay nimble and you will make it safely in the library’s doors, to find that inside they offer, free of charge, the chance to forget the idiocy outside.

Posted 14 June 2010 † Lee § Views § Writing Classes ‡ Comments (3) °

Line Item Word of the Day

Also in news: I’ve begun grant writing. (What’s that? You need a grant written? Well, do let me know!)

In my efforts to understand the arcane arts that apply to grant writing, I’ve begun reading about budgets and have discovered this delightful etymological morsel:

Budget is from the middle French bougette, which is the diminutive of bouge, a leather bag. In the Middle Ages in England (where they liked to speak French to look classier and/or because half of them were Normans aka French), letters and documents on taxes and spending were brought before Parliament in… a small leather bag. Fast forward a bunch o’ centuries and you get budget.

Even better? The middle French came via the Latin bulga, which was of Celtic origin! Holy travels, Batman, was that kind of globe trotting even in the budget back then?

Posted 07 June 2010 † Lee § Word of the Day ‡ Comments (0) °