So she didn't kick you or bite or anything like that?

I'm of the separate the art from the artist school.

Teaching is another one of those professions that would be decent if it wasn't for the students. I might have remained a lawyer if I hadn't had to deal with all those pesky clients.

I one time shepherded around a fairly famous English poet. He was in the bag most the time and didn't have the greatest personal hygiene habits, but his poetry remains excellent.

i read My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Lucid, beautiful sentences and ferocious emotional intensity. I've started the next one.

lame.

Finished Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood. Was disappointed; one of those novels where it felt like the author just wanted it to end.

Certainly enjoyed his 3 previous novels (Bonfire, A Man in Full, and Charlotte Simmons) much more than his latest.

Enrique,

King's Bachman books are pretty awesome, some of his most violent, macabre stuff. I think I still have the omnibus laying around somewhere. It contains the now-infamous Rage which he let go out of print due to all the school shootings that came after its publication. Long Walk is probably the best, though.

King does great work in short novels / novellas. If you haven't read them, I'd recommend his novella collections Four Past Midnight (Langoliers!) and Different Seasons (Shawshank!).

When I read half of the Long Walk on my first try I had that Bachman collection from the library, but I didn't finish it. I heard Running Man was good and that Rage was not so good.

I'll add those collections to my goodreads list. My plan for the next King book to read is 11/22/63, but before that I'm reading a nonfiction book first: Among the creationists by Jason Rosenhouse, about a mathematician that followed the creationist circuit for a couple of years trying to understand them.

started Shawn Vestal's Daredevils and really enjoying it, hard to put down

Girl escapes utah/arizona border mormon fundamentalism in the 1970s

Indeed, Gallant was for me a lesson in how it's usually best to do so. Having interacted with her changed the way I read her fiction (and not for the better). In some of the stories there are unpleasant people I thought were being treated ironically. But after having her on campus as a visitor for 6 months ... not so much.

It may be where I work, but I have had many wonderful students who were fun to teach. (Though, of course, I have also seen those who were sleepwalking through life. And, on occasion, worse than that.) It was always the students that kept me in the game; when I finally retired it was because I was burnt out on the other things: administration, the bureaucracy involved in the pursuit of funding, etc. And I'm still teaching every summer.

For George Saunders fans and followers, as well as those trying to figure out the Trump phenomenon, I thought Saunders recent piece in the New Yorker was an excellent outing: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...-trump-rallies

Chalk it to failed humor.

Finished The Girl in the Blue Beret by Bobbie Ann Mason. Well written fact-based fiction regarding the search of a WWII B-17 co-pilot for a French girl, now, woman, who helped him hide and escape after being shot down over Belgium. The customary fiction disclaimer on the copyright page is replaced with this explanation:

My late father-in-law, co-pilot of an allied bomber shot down by a German fighter plane over Belgium during the Second Word War, owed his eventual escape from Occupied Europe to the help he received from members of the French Resistance, including a teenager he would remember as: "the girl in the blue beret." Inspired by my father-in-law's wartime experience, The Girl in the Blue Beret is nonetheless a work of fiction: names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of my imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintentional.

The book begins with a list of the real flight crew of the last flight of The Dirty Lily and ends with an Acknowledgments that identifies the individuals who inspired characters in the novel and gives brief descriptions of their wartime experiences. If you have seen and enjoyed the French TV series A French Village, you'll like this book.

My only complaint: Mason intrudes a bit too much for me in advising how the main character feels about things and what his thoughts are, but she's an experienced and skilled writer and I think most readers won't be bothered by it.

A copy available from the Las Vegas Clark County Library District, at least when I return this one.

Good to be reminded of her work. I remember how much I admired her early short stories and I have always loved In Country, which I've read three or four times. I haven't looked at any of her more recent fiction.

Quote:
Originally Posted by RussellinToronto View Post
I once spent a day with her, guiding her through some events, when she was writer-in-residence at my place; then, later in the term, I had her over to dinner with some colleagues. A crankier, more whining, more self-centred person would be hard to imagine. It's one of those instances where you wonder how a writer can seem so wise and insightful--so wonderfully wry and ironic--on the page and yet fail so badly at self-assessment in her own life.

She tried to get one of my tenured colleagues fired because her office didn't have, for the first week or so, a typewriter. And she terrified students, all the while complaining to the world about how much work it was to deal with them (though she was only asked to have four office hours a week).
lame."
I quite understand what you're talking about.
Many (many) years ago I took a poetry course from a writer in residence...Carolyn Kizer. There were many things I didn't understand at the time including the happy fact I was the only male in the class. She repeatably showed up to class drunk...she split town without posting grades (at least mine) which almost derailed my graduation.
Often these visiting luminaries feel entitled and take advantage of those in powerless positions.
How can you not view their work with a jaundiced eye?

i just opened it and this is everything i've ever wanted.

Finished Gone With The Wind not too long ago. Was I supposed to like any of the characters?

I haven't seen the movie. How similar is it?

Halfway through the George Saunders article on Trump. I think it's good to try to reach for common ground.

I liked this paragraph:
The Trump supporters I spoke with were friendly, generous with their time, flattered to be asked their opinion, willing to give it, even when they knew I was a liberal writer likely to throw them under the bus. They loved their country, seemed genuinely panicked at its perceived demise, felt urgently that we were, right now, in the process of losing something precious. They were, generally, in favor of order and had a propensity toward the broadly normative, a certain squareness. They leaned toward skepticism (they’d believe it when they saw it, “it” being anything feelings-based, gauzy, liberal, or European; i.e., “socialist”). Some (far from all) had been touched by financial hardship—a layoff was common in many stories—and (paradoxically, given their feelings about socialism) felt that, while in that vulnerable state, they’d been let down by their government. They were anti-regulation, pro small business, pro Second Amendment, suspicious of people on welfare, sensitive (in a “Don’t tread on me” way) about any infringement whatsoever on their freedom. Alert to charges of racism, they would pre-counter these by pointing out that they had friends of all colors. They were adamantly for law enforcement and veterans’ rights, in a manner that presupposed that the rest of us were adamantly against these things. It seemed self-evident to them that a businessman could and should lead the country. “You run your family like a business, don’t you?” I was asked more than once, although, of course, I don’t, and none of us do.

I thought the last sentence in the paragraph is very funny.

Finished The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. I liked it, but I couldn't get over thinking that it should have been sub-titled "BEE Re-Writes Play It As It Lays."

I remember really liking George Saunders' Tenth of December, but I've since gone on to read Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation with much less enthusiasm. Why is is nearly everyone in these stories so dumb? I get that he likes to explore an Idiocracy future, but no one at all in this future has an IQ above 80? He also overuses the technique of bad writing to express character. Sure, for a story or two misusing grammar and punctuation or reveling in poor style is interesting. But when his main go-to is intentionally bad writing, the obvious downside is that the reader is subjected to a whole lot of bad writing. Meh. Maybe I'm just grumpy.

A terrific piece of writing. I ask my yeoman neighbors on my rural road with their Hilliary for Prison signs..."you do drywall...your son is an electrician...why would you vote for someone who has made a living cheating people exactly like you?" I can see their eyeballs rattle...no good answers. But I'm okay...I let their sons hunt on my farm...and I have a Bernie sticker...which makes me strange...but they already knew that...but okay
Saunders gets closest to explaining this divide as anyone.

I have the same problem. I think Saunders creates characters and invites us to join the author in feeling superior to them. But that's why I found that piece of journalism so interesting. For me it's the best thing he's done: it really plays to his strengths.

I'm reading Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin, bought it for a quarter at a library sale. I've liked some of his Jack Ryan novels in the past but haven't read any since the 80s I guess. I think I quit on the series halfway thru Clear and Present Danger.

I liked Saunders' CivilWarLand and Pastoralia a lot more than Tenth of December. Seemed like a lot of the magic was gone for me, alas.

I agree. The article was great.

Interesting, I've not read Saunders, but I got that sense of superiority strongly from Frantzen, despite all his protestations (and also from I Am Charlotte Simmonds, since Thomas Wolfe was mentioned earlier on this page)

really enjoying Ben Lerner's essay on poetry. I don't know **** about poetry but the points he makes are really clear and understandable.

Finally finished Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Exhaustingly negative, but not as bad as people made it out to be. A cynical man that bounces around from the army in WWI France to Africa to Detroit and back to Paris. Based on all the hype I read beforehand I was non-plussed. It wasn't as misanthropic as I was lead to believe.

Finished Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I may be one of the few people unimpressed by this work.

My summer reading continues at break-neck (for me) speed. Finished these 5 in the last few days:

Red Rising by Pierce Brown. I enjoyed most of the book and am looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy. I would have preferred less dialogue and deeper description.

The Wave in the Mind by Ursula K. Le Guin. Fantastic collections of essay and literary criticism. Of Le Guin's novels, I've only read The Lathe of Heaven -- but I'll read another soon.

The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Good but not memorable or actionable business/self-help book on stoicism. I liked the short chapters.

The Vital Question by Nick Lane. Very difficult read as a non-biologist about bioenergetics, cell biology, cell evolution, etc. Lane attempts to answer some of the most important unaswered questions in cell biology and suggests energy is the overlooked determining factor. Enjoyed it but much of the book went in one ear out the other.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Wow!!! Great collection of imaginative sci-fi and fantasy stories. I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in short fiction generally or these genres.