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Book Nook provides readers with insights into the world of books. Vick Mickunas takes you into the center of the publishing world with the latest book buzz, book reviews, and exclusive chats with authors..Home > Blogs > Book Nook > Archives > 2008 > December
December 2008
remembering JD Salinger
No, he’s not dead. In fact, the reclusive author of CATCHER IN THE RYE will turn 90 years old on New Year’s Day.
It’s just that nobody has seen him in a long time. Or, at least the people who have seen him aren’t talking.
Here’s the latest on JD from the New York Times:
CLICK HERE to learn more about this man of mystery…
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GW Bush did the right thing…
I didn’t really know him. I saw him around town. His reputation wasn’t the best…
His dad was our high school football coach. I graduated in the same class as one of his sisters.
Somewhere along the way something went terribly wrong with him. He was sentenced to life in prison for another drug offense. Third strike. He was out. For life.
But obviously there were some people who still really cared about him….
I hear he turned over a new leaf in prison… finally figured it all out.
His name is on a list of presidential pardons just announced by President Bush. He will be a free man again come February.
I’m hoping that he has learned something. He went from way unlucky to way lucky.
President Bush, you done good this time. Thank you.
Maybe this now fortunate fellow will write a book about his life? I would certainly read it….
Happy New Year….
Vick Mickunas
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writer defends “Magic Negro” song….
Have they really gone too far this time? Have you heard about this song? It’s called “Barack the Magic Negro….”
Here’s the latest from UPI:
Writer defends Obama ‘Magic Negro’ song
Published: Dec. 29, 2008 at 3:11 PM
MEMPHIS, Dec. 29 (UPI) — The writer of a controversial song called “Barack the Magic Negro” says critics targeting a Republican Party leader for distributing the parody are misguided.
Paul Shanklin, a Memphis, Tenn., political satirist and contributor to Rush Limbaugh’s conservative talk radio show, is defending the song as a parody and says Republican National Committee chairman candidate Chip Saltsman did nothing wrong in sending it to GOP colleagues, The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal reported Monday.
“They are trying to paint Chip as some kind of racist — which he’s not,” Shanklin told the newspaper. “Whether he should have sent it out, I’ll let history decide. Is it provocative? Well, most political satire is. What I do for a living is major league provocative.”
Saltsman has drawn fire from some GOP leaders for including the song in materials sent out to promote his bid for the party’s chairmanship.
The Commercial Appeal said that in the 2007 song, Shanklin poses as the Rev. Al Sharpton. One refrain of the song, sung to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” goes: “Barack the Magic Negro made guilty whites feel good/They’ll vote for him and not for me/Cause he’s not from the ‘hood.”
What do you think?
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Oprah gets duped again…
Once bitten, twice shy; or not. Oprah Winfrey has apparently been plugging another bogus memoir. You would think that her people would do a better job of checking these bogus books out before Oprah starts praising them.
Check out the book’s cover; it proclaims that this new book is a “true story”. Do you remember how angry Oprah became with James Frey for his imaginary memoir when she found out that “A Million Little Pieces” was more fiction than fact?
Here’s a report from the New York Times:
This time it’s a bogus Holocaust memoir:
December 29, 2008
False Memoir of Holocaust Is Canceled
By MOTOKO RICH and JOSEPH BERGER
A man whose memoir about his experience during the Holocaust was to have been published in February has admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday evening his publisher canceled the release of the book.
And once again a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true story.
This time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary this year.
Ms. Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show. On Saturday night, after learning from Mr. Rosenblat’s agent that the author had confessed that the story was fabricated, Berkley Books, a unit of Penguin Group that was planning to publish “Angel at the Fence,” Mr. Rosenblat’s memoir of surviving in a sub-camp of Buchenwald with the help of his future wife, canceled the book and demanded that Mr. Rosenblat return his advance.
Harris Salomon, who is producing a movie based on the story, said he would go ahead with the film, but as a work of fiction, adding that Mr. Rosenblat had agreed to donate all earnings from the film to Holocaust survivor charities.
Berkley’s decision came in the same year that another unit of Penguin, Riverhead Books, was duped by Margaret Seltzer, the author of “Love and Consequences,” her fabricated gang memoir about her life as a white girl taken into an African-American foster home in South Central Los Angeles. She had in fact been raised by her biological family in a well-to-do section of the San Fernando Valley. It also followed the revelations, nearly three years ago, that James Frey, the Oprah Winfrey-annointed author “A Million Little Pieces,” had exaggerated details of his memoir of drug addiction.
This latest literary hoax is likely to trigger yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking.
In the latest instance, no one at Berkley questioned the central truth of Mr. Rosenblat’s story until last week, said Andrea Hurst, his agent. Neither Leslie Gelbman, president and publisher of Berkley, nor Natalee Rosenstein, Mr. Rosenblat’s editor at Berkley, returned calls or e-mail messages seeking comment. Craig Burke, director of publicity for Berkley, declined to elaborate beyond the company’s brief statement announcing the cancellation of the book. In an e-mail message, a spokesman for Ms. Winfrey also declined to comment.
After several scholars and family members attacked Mr. Rosenblat’s story in articles last week in The New Republic, Mr. Rosenblat confessed on Saturday to Ms. Hurst and Mr. Salomon that he had concocted the core of his tale. Ms. Hurst said that in an emotional telephone call with herself and Mr. Salomon, Mr. Rosenblat said his wife had never tossed him apples over the fence.
In a statement released through his agent, Mr. Rosenblat wrote that he had once been shot during a robbery and that while he was recovering in the hospital, “my mother came to me in a dream and said that I must tell my story so that my grandchildren would know of our survival from the Holocaust.”
He said that after the incident he began to write. “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” he wrote in the statement. “I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”
According to Ms. Hurst, who represents other inspirational writers including Bernie Siegel, author of “Love, Medicine & Miracles,” Mr. Rosenblat first concocted his story in the mid 1990s as an entry to a newspaper contest soliciting the “best love stories.” In 1996, he appeared on Ms. Winfrey’s show with his wife and repeated the fabricated story. From there, it snowballed, with versions appearing in magazines, a volume of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series, and a children’s book, “Angel Girl,” by Laurie Friedman, released in September by an imprint of Lerner Publishing. Mr. and Mrs. Rosenblat, who now live in North Miami Beach, appeared on CBS’s “Early Show” in October.
As media coverage of Mr. Rosenblat’s story spread, scholars and others began to question the veracity of the romance throughout the blogosphere, pointing out that, among other things, the layout of the camp would have prevented the pair from meeting at a fence.
In a telephone interview in November, Mr. Rosenblat defended his story against such doubts. He said that his section of Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, was not well guarded and that he could stand between a barracks and the six-to-eight-foot fence out of sight of guards. Roma was able to approach him because there were woods that would have concealed her.
In recounting the stunning “reunion” with Ms. Radzicki 12 years later as survivors living in New York, Mr. Rosenblat said Ms. Radzicki told him she had saved a boy by hurling apples over a fence to him.
“Did he have rags on his feet instead of shoes?” Mr. Rosenblat said he asked her.
She said yes and he told her, “That boy was me.”
In a telephone interview Sunday, Ms. Hurst, who sold the book to Berkley for less than $50,000, said she always believed the essential truth of Mr. Rosenblat’s tale until last week. “I believed the teller,” Ms. Hurst said. “He was in so many magazines and books and on ‘Oprah.’ It did not seem like it would not be true.” On Sunday, Ms. Hurst said that she was reviewing her legal options because “I’ve yet to see what kind of repercussions could come from this, and I was lied to.”
Ms. Hurst said that Mr. Rosenblat did provide some documentation, including a 1946 letter from a warden with the Jewish Children’s Community Committee for the Care of Children From the Camps that said Mr. Rosenblat had attended a technical school in London. Evidence of an organization with that name did not appear in Internet searches on Sunday.
Susanna Margolis, a New York-based ghost writer who polished Mr. Rosenblat’s manuscript, said she was surprised by his description of his first blind date with Ms. Radzicki. “I thought that was far-fetched.” she said. “But if somebody comes to you, as an agent and a publisher, and says, ‘This is my story,’ how do you check it other than to say, ‘Did this happen?’ ”
That so many would get taken in by Mr. Rosenblat’s inauthentic love story seems incredible given the number of fake memoirs that have come to light in the last few years. The Holocaust in particular has been fertile territory for fabricated personal histories: earlier this year, Misha Defonseca confessed that her memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” about her childhood spent running from the Nazis and living with wolves, was not true.
A decade ago, a Swiss historian debunked Binjamin Wilkomirski’s 1996 memoir, “Fragments,” which described how he survived as a Latvian Jewish orphan in a Nazi concentration camp. It turns out the book was written by Bruno Doessekker, a Swiss man who spent the war in relative comfort in Switzerland. Mr. Rosenblat, at least, appears to have told the truth about being a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps.
The primary sleuth in unmasking his fabrication of the apple story was Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University. He has been working on a book on how 904 boys — including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel — were saved from death by an underground rescue operation inside Buchenwald, and has interviewed hundreds of survivors, including boys from the ghetto at Piotrkow in Poland who were taken with the young Herman Rosenblat to the camp.
When Dr. Waltzer asked other survivors who were with Mr. Rosenblat about the tossed apple story, they said the story couldn’t possibly be true.
In his research of maps drawn by ex-prisoners, Dr. Waltzer learned that the section of Schlieben where Mr. Rosenblat was housed had fences facing other sections of the camp and only one fence — on the south — facing the outside world. That fence was adjacent to the camp’s SS barracks and the SS men there would have been able to spot a boy regularly speaking to a girl on the other side of the fence, Dr. Waltzer said. Moreover, the fence was electrified and civilians outside the camp were forbidden to walk along the road that bordered the fence.
Dr. Waltzer also learned from online documentation that Ms. Radzicki, her parents and two sisters were hidden as Christians at a farm not outside Schlieben but 210 miles away near Breslau.
Holocaust survivors and scholars are fiercely on guard against any fabrication of memories because they taint the truth of the Holocaust and raise doubts about the millions who were killed or brutalized.
“There’s no need to embellish, no need to aggrandize,” said Deborah E. Lipstadt, the Dorot professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University. “The facts are horrible, and when you’re teaching about horrible stuff you just have to lay out the facts.”
I just got this notice from Amazon.com on January 7, 2009:
Hello from Amazon.com.
We are sorry to report that we will not be able to obtain the following item(s) from your order:
Herman Rosenblat “Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived”
Though we had expected to be able to send this item to you, we’ve since found that it is not available from any of our sources at this time. We realize this is disappointing news to hear, and we apologize for the inconvenience we have caused you.
We have cancelled this item from your order.
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scribbles and scraps to close out a year…
Some reasons why the book publishing industry is in trouble….
and
some reasons why the book publishing industry is doing just fine, thank you…..
Some people don’t read much fiction. Others read only fiction. Fiction helps us to forget reality; non-fiction connects us to our world. I enjoy both forms of literature. Here are my favorite non-fiction titles from 2008:
“Books - A Memoir” by Larry McMurtry, (Simon&Schuster, 259 pages, $24). Think about Larry McMurtry and his classic books like “Lonesome Dove” and “The Last Picture Show” come to mind. Did you know that he has had a long career as a rare book dealer too?
In “Books” McMurtry describes the bibliomania that has driven him since childhood. His passion for book collecting has taken him to odd places. He introduces us to eccentric characters he meets along the way, book dealers, book hunters, rival collectors, devoted customers. During his career he has bought and sold entire bookstores, libraries, and personal collections; over a million books so far. Experience the thrill of the chase as he pursues elusive rarities.
“Ghost Train to the Eastern Star - On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar” by Paul Theroux, (Houghton Mifflin, 496 pages, $28). Paul Theroux wrote a magnificent travel book, “The Great Railway Bazaar,” that pinned his name to the literary map. That was 35 years ago. In “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” Theroux re-traces that original train journey from Europe to central Asia and all the way across the Far East. Many things were different, including the traveler. Theroux’s splendid powers of observation remain intact.
“Voluntary Madness - My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin” by Norah Vincent, (Viking, 283 pages, $25.95) Norah Vincent is an immersion journalist. She really gets into her projects. For her book “Self-Made Man,” Vincent spent 18 months disguised as a man to find out what it was like to live as an American male. Conducting the research for that book was difficult. Vincent got depressed. She checked in to a psychiatric ward.
That’s how she got the idea for this latest project; “Voluntary Madness.” Vincent spent a year immersed in our mental health system. She checked in to three different types of psychiatric care facilities. Her discoveries will shock, surprise, and disturb readers. This is a brave book.
“The Secret Life of Words - How English Became English” by Henry Hitchings, (Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 440 pages, $27). Books about language are catnip to this reviewer; impossible to resist. This marvelous examination of how our English tongue has evolved and developed over the centuries is fascinating. Hitchings makes a subject that could be dry and boring thoroughly delightful.
“Reading the OED - One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages” by Ammon Shea, (Perigee, 223 pages, $21.95) Did I mention that I’m a sucker for books on language? Ammon Shea read the entire Oxford English Dictionary over the course of a year. A celebration of obscure words fueled by prodigious quantities of espresso; Shea made the ultimate sacrifice to chart this dazzling verbal terrain for the benefit of eggheads like your reviewer.
Vick Mickunas
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what are the best books you’ve read this year?
The final days of 2008 are upon us. I have been trying to decide which books were my favorites from the past year.
I’m curious to know which books you enjoyed the most in 2008. Try to remember which books they were then leave a comment. Share your favorite titles with the other readers of this blog.
Thanks!
Vick Mickunas
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blaming China for our troubled economy…
An article today in the New York Times makes the assertion that our current economic recession is in a large part the direct result of our profligate spending and borrowing from China. The article states that:
“In the past decade, China has invested upward of $1 trillion, mostly earnings from manufacturing exports, into American government bonds and government-backed mortgage debt. That has lowered interest rates and helped fuel a historic consumption binge and housing bubble in the United States.”
“China, some economists say, lulled American consumers, and their leaders, into complacency about their spendthrift ways.”
A recent book by Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, provides a more in-depth analysis of how we allowed this situation to occur.
In her somewhat critical review of the book Michiko Kakutani of New York Times stated that:
“In 2007 the United States needed to borrow around $800 billion from the rest of the world; more than $4 billion every working day,” he writes. “China, by contrast, ran a current account surplus of $262 billion, equivalent to more than a quarter of the U.S. deficit. And a remarkably large proportion of that surplus has ended up being lent to the United States. In effect, the People’s Republic China has become banker to the United States of America.”
I have a few observations to make; first, we need to stop consuming like spendthrifts. Second, we need to start saving. Third, we should consider learning how to speak Mandarin so that we can communicate better with our Chinese “investors.”
What do you think?
Vick Mickunas
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remembering Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, Nobel laureate playwright, dies at 78
By Mel Gussow and Ben Brantley for the International Herald Tribune
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London.
The cause was cancer, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said on Thursday.
Pinter learned he had cancer of the esophagus in 2002. In 2005, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm but delivered an acceptance speech from a wheelchair in a recorded video.
In more than 30 plays — written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” “The Homecoming” and “Betrayal” — Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence.
Along with another Nobel winner, Samuel Beckett, his friend and mentor, Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace.
An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet and director as well as a dramatist, Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but that it had also “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship” in the last 50 years.
His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power.
The dynamic in his work is rooted in battles for control, turf wars waged in locations that range from working-class boarding houses (in his first produced play, “The Room,” from 1957) to upscale restaurants (the setting for “Celebration,” staged in 2000). His plays often take place in a single, increasingly claustrophobic room, where conversation is a minefield and even innocuous-seeming words can wound.
In Pinter’s work, “words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other,” said Peter Hall, who has staged more of Pinter’s plays than any other director.
But while Pinter’s linguistic agility turned simple, sometimes obscene, words into dark, glittering and often mordantly funny poetry, it is what comes between the words that he is most famous for. The stage direction “pause” would haunt him throughout his career.
Intended as an instructive note to actors, the Pinter pause was a space for emphasis and breathing room. But it could also be as threatening as a raised fist. Pinter said that writing the word “pause” into his first play was “a fatal error.” It is certainly the aspect of his writing that has been most parodied. But no other playwright has consistently used pauses with such rhythmic assurance and to such fine-tuned manipulative effect.
Early in his career Pinter said his work was about “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.” Though he later regretted the image, it holds up as a metaphor for the undertow of danger that pervades his work. As Martin Esslin wrote in his book, “Pinter: The Playwright”: “Man’s existential fear, not as an abstraction, but as something real, ordinary and acceptable as an everyday occurrence — here we have the core of Pinter’s work as a dramatist.”
Though often grouped with Beckett and others as a practitioner of Theater of the Absurd, Pinter considered himself a realist. In 1962 he said the context of his plays was always “concrete and particular.” He never found a need to alter that assessment.
Pinter’s ranking among his countrymen was first after Beckett. Beginning in the late 1950s, John Osborne and Pinter helped to turn English theater away from the gentility of the drawing room. With “Look Back in Anger,” Osborne opened the door for several succeeding generations of angry young men, who railed against the class system and an ineffectual government. Pinter was to have the more lasting effect as an innovator and a stylist. And his influence on other playwrights, including David Mamet in the United States and Patrick Marber and Jez Butterworth in England, is undeniable.
The playwright Tom Stoppard said that before Pinter, “One thing plays had in common: you were supposed to believe what people said up there. If somebody comes in and says, ‘Tea or coffee?’ and the answer is ‘Tea,’ you are entitled to assume that somebody is offered a choice of two drinks, and the second person has stated a preference.” With Pinter there are alternatives, “such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea,” Stoppard said, “or that he preferred the stuff you make from coffee beans under the impression that it was called tea.”
As another British playwright, David Hare, said of Pinter, “The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play or film he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected.”
Though initially regarded as an intuitive rather than an intellectual playwright, Pinter was in fact both. His plays are dense with references to writers like James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. The annual Pinter Review, in which scholars probe and parse his works for meaning and metaphor, is one of many indications of his secure berth in academia.
While it was not immediately apparent, Pinter was always a writer with a political sensibility, which became overt in later plays like “One for the Road” (1984) and “Mountain Language” (1988). These works, having to do “not with ambiguities of power, but actual power,” he said, were written out of “very cold anger.”
He and his wife hosted gatherings in their Holland Park town house for liberal political seminars. Known as the June 20th Society, the participants included Hare, Ian McEwan, Michael Holroyd, John Mortimer, Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer. In their discussions, Pinter expressed the great struggle of the mid-20th century as one between “primitive rage” and “liberal generosity,” Hare said.
Through the years Pinter became known, especially to the English news media, for having a prickly personality. “There is a violence in me,” Pinter once said, “but I don’t walk around looking for trouble.” The director Richard Eyre said in a testimonial book published for the playwright’s 70th birthday that Pinter was “sometimes pugnacious and occasionally splenetic” but “just as often droll and generous — particularly to actors, directors and (a rare quality this) other writers.”
Harold Pinter was born in Hackney in the East End of London on Oct. 10, 1930. His father, Jack, was a tailor; his mother, Frances, a homemaker. Pinter’s grandparents had emigrated to England from Eastern Europe. His parents, he said, were “very solid, very respectable, Jewish, lower-middle-class people.”
With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Harold, an only child, was evacuated from London to a provincial town in Cornwall. His feelings of loneliness and isolation from that time were to surface later in his plays. When he was 13, he returned to London and was there during the Blitz when his house was struck by a bomb. He rushed inside to rescue a few valuable possessions: his cricket bat and a poem — “a paean of love” — he was writing to a girlfriend.
Sports, poetry and his relationships with women were to remain important to him. Vigorously athletic, he was a fierce competitor in cricket and tennis. Ian Smith, an Oxford don and cricket teammate of Pinter’s, equated the playwright’s art with his bold style of playing cricket. “Everything is focused,” he said. “It’s about performance and economy of gesture.”
Pinter grew up on a diet of American gangster movies and British war films. From the first he was a great reader and a hopeful poet, with strong political judgments. When he was called up for military service at 18, as a pacifist he refused to serve.
In diverse ways he remained a conscientious objector in the years to come, echoing a line in “The Birthday Party,” in which Stanley, a lodger in a seaside boarding house, is suddenly taken away by two strangers to some ominous future as a friend cries out, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” Years later, Pinter said he had lived that line all his life.
Pinter’s first poem was published in a magazine called Poetry London when he was 20. Soon afterward he completed a novel, “The Dwarfs.” After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, he signed on with a repertory company and, performing under the name David Baron, toured Ireland in plays by Shakespeare and others, often in villainous roles like Iago.
In 1955, at a party in London, Pinter was struck by what he referred to as “an odd image.” A little man, who later turned out to be the writer and professional eccentric Quentin Crisp, was making bacon and eggs for a large man who was sitting at a table reading the comics. Pinter told his friend Henry Woolf about the incident and said he thought he might write a play about it. The next year, Woolf, then a graduate student at the University of Bristol, asked him if he could write that play for a group of drama students.
The resulting work, “The Room,” was Pinter’s first play. And with its story of mysterious intruders and its elliptical speech, it showed that Pinter had already found his voice as a dramatist. It opened in Bristol on May 15, 1957, and was restaged three years later at the Hampstead Theater Club in London.
In 1956 Pinter married Vivien Merchant, an actress in the company. After their son, Daniel, was born in 1958, they moved to the Chiswick section of London. He wrote “The Birthday Party,” his first full-length play, drawing on his memories of touring as an actor in Eastbourne, on Britain’s south coast.
The Pinters, who were temporarily unemployed and desperately poor, had an offer to act in Birmingham, and Merchant wanted to accept it. But Pinter said: “I have this play opening in London. I think I must stay. Something’s going to happen.” She replied, “What makes you think so?”
They turned down the acting offer. “The Birthday Party” opened in the West End in 1958 and received disastrous reviews. Then, prodded by the theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, Harold Hobson, the eminent critic of The Sunday Times of London, came to see it at a matinee. What he wrote turned out to be a life-changing review.
“It breathes in the air,” Hobson wrote. “It cannot be seen but it enters the room every time the door is opened.” He continued, “Though you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere.” He concluded, “Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.”
Despite that review, the play closed that weekend. By contrast, Pinter’s next full-length play to be produced, “The Caretaker,” which opened in London in 1960, was a dazzling critical success. “Suddenly everything went topsy-turvy,” Pinter said.
In that play, two brothers live in a seedy house in London and, for inexplicable reasons, invite a homeless man named Davies to share their quarters and to act as a kind of custodian. Michael Billington, a critic for The Guardian and Pinter’s biographer, has called the play “an austere masterpiece: a universally recognizable play about political maneuvering, fraternal love, spiritual isolation, language as a negotiating weapon or a form of cover-up.”
Pinter’s next play, “The Homecoming,” opened in London in June 1965, in a Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Hall. The story of an all-male family headed by a Lear-like father and the woman ( Merchant, who starred in many of his plays) who enters and disrupts their domain scored a major success in London. Though it received a mixed reception in New York, “The Homecoming” won a Tony Award as best play and had a long run on Broadway.
After these first three full-length plays — all stories of raffish characters in shabby environments — Pinter shifted his focus. His next three dramas were set in the worlds of art and publishing: “Old Times” (1971), “No Man’s Land” (1975) and “Betrayal” (1978), all studies of the unreliability of memory and the uncertainty of love. In “Old Times,” a husband and wife encounter a woman they may or may not have known in the past.
In “No Man’s Land,” a faded poet visits a wealthy patron for an evening of recollection and gamesmanship, roles played in the original production by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, who repeated their performances in New York the next year. The elegant “Betrayal” is a play about marriage and duplicity and, despite its use of reverse chronology, is among Pinter’s most accessible works. It was made into a 1982 film starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge.
During the run of “No Man’s Land,” Pinter began an affair with Lady Antonia Fraser, the biographer and historian, who was then married to Hugh Fraser, a conservative politician. In 1980 Pinter and Lady Antonia were married, with Pinter becoming the substitute paterfamilias of an extended family.
In addition to his wife, his survivors include his son, Daniel, and his stepchildren, Benjamin, Damian, Orlando, Rebecca, Flora and Natasha. Years ago, his son changed his last name to Brand, his maternal grandmother’s maiden name. He had been estranged from his father, living as a recluse in Cambridgeshire.
After “Betrayal,” Pinter’s plays became shorter (like “A Kind of Alaska”) and then, for about three years, they stopped. “Something gnaws away,” he explained, “the desire to write something and the inability to do so.” He added, “I think I was getting more and more imbedded in international issues.”
At the same time, he continued his involvement in films, highlighted by his close collaboration as screenwriter with the director Joseph Losey, which began in 1963 with “The Servant,” a depiction of class relations in Britain. That was followed in 1967 by “Accident,” about a professor infatuated with a student ( Pinter and Merchant each had minor parts), and “The Go-Between” (1971), about a boy’s complicity in an adult affair in turn of the century Britain, with Julie Christie and Alan Bates.
His many screenplays for other directors include “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964), about a woman (Anne Bancroft) drifting through multiple marriages, directed by Jack Clayton; “The Last Tycoon,” Elia Kazan’s 1976 adaptation of the Fitzgerald novel; and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981), a Karel Reisz film with Meryl Streep and Irons.
With his plays “Moonlight” (a portrait of family relationships undermined by years of divisiveness) and “Ashes to Ashes” (a story of “torturers and victims” reflected in a typically uncommunicative marriage), Pinter returned to the longer, somberly meditative form.
His final work, “Celebration” (2000), is a wry look at power-conscious couples dining in a chic restaurant that bears a striking resemblance to the Ivy, a famous theater gathering place in London. “Celebration” was inspired by the playwright’s early days as an unemployed actor, when he took a job as a busboy at the National Liberal Club. Because he dared to intrude on a conversation among several diners, he was fired.
He often directed plays by others, especially those by Simon Gray (“Butley,” “Otherwise Engaged”), and occasionally his own work. Increasingly and with greater zeal he appeared as an actor — onstage with Paul Eddington in “No Man’s Land” and in films like “Mojo,” “Mansfield Park” and “The Tailor of Panama.” Throughout his life, he specialized in playing menacing characters, including several in his own plays (“The Hothouse,” “One for the Road”).
In July 2001 the highlight of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York was the presentation of nine Pinter plays, including a revival of “The Homecoming,” and a pairing of his first and last plays, “The Room” and “Celebration.” Pinter participated as a director and also acted in “One for the Road” in the role of a dapper and sadistic government interrogator.
The Pinter festival was the capstone of a season that, in London, featured the premiere at the National Theater of a stage version of his film script for “Remembrance of Things Past.” Late in 2001 he directed an acclaimed revival of “No Man’s Land,” starring John Wood and Corin Redgrave at the National Theater.
In December 2001, during a routine medical examination, he was found to have cancer of the esophagus. In January 2002, while undergoing treatment, he acted in his brief comic sketch “Press Conference” at the National Theater in a malicious role as a minister of culture who was formerly the head of the secret police. In 2006 he appeared in a weeklong, sold-out production of Beckett’s one-man play, “Krapp’s Last Tape,” at the Royal Court Theater.
“Pinter looks anxiously over his left shoulder into the darkness as if he felt death’s presence in the room,” Billington of The Guardian wrote, “It is impossible to dissociate Pinter’s own recent encounters with mortality from that of the character.”
Revivals of Pinter’s work have become increasingly frequent in recent years. In December an acclaimed production of his “Homecoming” opened on Broadway.
Pinter said he thought of theater as essentially exploratory. “Even old Sophocles didn’t know what was going to happen next,” he said. “He had to find his way through unknown territory. At the same time, theater has always been a critical act, looking in a broad sense at the society in which we live and attempting to reflect and dramatize these findings. We’re not talking about the moon.”
Speaking about his intuitive sense of writing, he said, “I find at the end of the journey, which of course is never ending, that I have found things out.”
“I don’t go away and say: ‘I have illuminated myself. You see before you a changed person,’ ” he added. “It’s a more surreptitious sense of discovery that happens to the writer himself.”
Few writers have been so consistent over so many years in the tone and execution of their work. Just before rehearsals began for the West End production of “The Birthday Party” half a century ago, Pinter sent a letter to his director, Peter Wood. In it, he said, “The play dictated itself, but I confess that I wrote it — with intent, maliciously, purposefully, in command of its growth.”
He added: “The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work.”
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holiday tipping
When I was 10 years old I got my first paper route. I delivered the Des Moines Tribune, an afternoon paper (remember those?) six days a week. On Sundays I got up at 3am to deliver the big paper, the Des Moines Register.
There’s one thing that I learned at that early age: never quit your paper route before Christmas. I had some very generous customers then. This was back when you could get home newspaper delivery for $1.30 every two weeks.
I had a couple of customers who would tip me a hundred dollars each at Christmas. That was a lot of money to a ten year old. Heck, it’s still a lot of money.To put those sizable tips in perspective; they were tipping me more that the annual cost of my newspaper deliveries to them…very generous holiday tippers indeed.
Which brings us to the subject of holiday tipping…..
Do you do it? Do you give out cash gratuities around the holidays? I’m talking about special tips that are given to people who are important to you?
Who do you tip? I was thinking about this subject because I just passed out holiday tips to some people who are important to me. Most of them were in cash. Others were holiday goodies.
My newspaper carrier gets a cash tip - you can bet on that. I tipped my UPS man. I tipped my mail carrier. I tipped my FedEx guy. I would have tipped my DHL delivery man but he stopped coming by a while back. A pity, that.
The women who wait on me at the post office got bags of goodies, gourmet chocolates.
So it seems that the people I tipped are all involved in delivering things to me. That’s why I make a point of giving them something to show my appreciation for their service.
Who do you tip during the holidays? What do you give them? Why do feel that it is important to tip those individuals? Or, if you are somebody who gets holiday tips, what are they? Share your war stories with our readers….
Leave a comment, please. Here’s my tip for you: have a safe holiday….
Vick Mickunas
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the worst vice president ever ?
According to CNN:
“A new national poll suggests that almost a quarter of Americans think that Dick Cheney is the worst vice president in American history.”
“Twenty-three percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday say that Cheney is the country’s worst vice president, when compared with his predecessors.”
“An additional 41 percent feel that Cheney is a poor vice president, with 34 percent rating him a good number two.”
“Only one percent of those polled say that Cheney is the best vice president in U.S. history.”
Wow! Most Americans probably can’t even name more than 2 or 3 former vice presidents. Do you agree? Is Dick Cheney the worst ever?
Who would be your choice for our worst vice president ever? Please, leave a comment and the reasoning behind your choice.
P.S. If you didn’t get a chance to vote in our previous survey of the worst presidents ever you still can by clicking here:
(Note) This CNN poll surveyed “1,013 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.”
Vick Mickunas
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Caroline Kennedy’s qualifications are…
Caroline Kennedy has decided that she wants to be appointed to Hillary Clinton’s vacant US Senate seat.
Hillary is Barack Obama’s choice for Secretary of State. Governor Paterson of New York will be appointing a replacement to fill out her term.
So, what are Caroline Kennedy’s qualifications?
Well, she has written a lot of books, stuff like The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis …hmm…I guess there wasn’t that much writing involved.
She has co-authored and compiled books that would seem mostly to bank on her Kennedy name; as JFK’s and Jackie’s daughter.
Has she ever run for office? Not as far as I can tell? Does anybody know of any elected office that Caroline has held? Class president? Book club secretary?
She wants to be a US Senator, right? There are only 100 US Senators and Caroline thinks that she should be one?
Has anybody heard her make a speech? Or do an interview? How did she perform?
She is qualified to be appointed to the US Senate because she is Caroline Kennedy, right?
Am I wrong? What do you think? Is she qualified? If so, explain why….I’m not seeing how she is qualified?
Vick Mickunas
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favorite fiction from 2008
2008 was a banner year for fiction. Although I was hard-pressed to narrow down my list of deserving books to just a few exquisite gems, here are my absolute favorites:
“The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon, (Riverhead Books, $24.95). America was caught up in a hysterical swirl of paranoia and fear. In Chicago, a flood of immigrants speaking unfamiliar languages made some Chicagoans nervous. The year was 1908, threats of terrorism and anarchism made for electrifying headlines in the Chicago newspapers. A young Jewish immigrant named Lazarus Averbuch appeared at the door of George Shippy, Chicago’s police chief. Shippy shot him dead.
Aleksandar Hemon was intrigued by this true story. He observed some parallels between then and now. His novel revisits the hysteria ripped from century-old headlines. Brik, a Bosnian-American writer somewhat like Hemon, retraces Averbuch’s odyssey from anti-Semitic pogroms in central Europe to his death in that Chicago mansion. A finalist for the National Book Award, “The Lazarus Project” should have won it.
“Knockemstiff” by Donald Ray Pollack (Doubleday, $22.95). For 30 years Donald Ray Pollack labored in the paper mill at Chillicothe. He never relinquished his dream of becoming a writer. Knockem-stiff was the name of a little hollow outside of Chillicothe where Pollack grew up. The young Pollack observed how the inhabitants of this hardscrabble sort of place struggled and brawled. This collection of short stories immortalizes a vanished community with a potency that will knock a reader right upside the head. Pollock’s pithy tales swerve across the pages in angelic agony. These tortured souls extract a measure of bitter redemption out of brutality and desolation. An awesome debut.
“Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26). Ghosh takes readers on an epic journey of the mind. Set in India in the 1830s, “Sea of Poppies” revolves around the opium trade that English traders plied as they shipped Indian opium to China. Ghosh creates numerous vivid characters and scenes. There are love stories, shocking violence and soaring flights of linguistic fancy as the author re-creates the polyglot languages of the period. This novel, the first in a planned trilogy, comes to a startling climax as most of the main characters sail from India on a ship called “The Ibis.” I can’t wait for the next book.
“A Mercy” by Toni Morrison (Knopf, $23.95). In “A Mercy,” Toni Morrison explores slavery before it became a form of institutionalized racism. In the 1680s slavery came in many forms. Morrison’s novella examines the impact of enforced servitude upon a cast of characters of different races who are brought together on a Virginia farm. Haunting, brilliantly rendered, “A Mercy” illustrates once more why Morrison is one of our greatest novelists.
Honorable Mentions: “Home” by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25); “The Mayor’s Tongue” by Nathaniel Rich (Riverhead, $24.95); “When Will There Be Good News” by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown, $25); “The Hour I First Believed” by Wally Lamb (Harper, $29.95).
Next Sunday I’ll have my favorite non-fiction titles for you…
Vick Mickunas
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deadbeats, delayers, and re-gifters…
Here it is: the last weekend before Christmas and perhaps you still need to get a gift for that individual who is probably expecting one from you.
You aren’t a bad person. You have been busy. Distracted. Thinking about other things. You are a DELAYER.
Then there are the DEADBEATS, and the RE-GIFTERS. We know them too well… if they give us anything at all it’s probably something they got for free or a repackaging of a gift that somebody else gave them.
We all have our horror stories, don’t we?
I know the ideal gift for you DELAYERS, the AMAZON KINDLE, Amazon’s paperless reading device. With a Kindle you can download thousands of books, periodicals, blogs, etc. Here’s why it’s the perfect gift for those who have procrastinated; Amazon is out of stock. That’s right, Kindles are on back order and they have been for a while. So, you can buy someone a Kindle and print out a little certificate from Amazon.com and tell your giftee that they were out of stock but they can redeem their certificate and get one when they become available again. They’ll never know that you waited until right before Christmas to buy it. Isn’t that just perfect?
Now let’s talk for a moment about those DEADBEATS and RE-GIFTERS. I want to hear your stories.
Here’s one of mine. An old friend, a guy I have known for 30+ years used to give me lavish gifts. Here’s one example, one Christmas he sent me an entire wheel of Maytag blue cheese. That was a lovely gift. We still exchange gifts. Last year I sent him a photo of his favorite musician. It wasn’t just any photo, it was a limited edition taken by a professional photographer.
My friend works in the financial industry so I can understand how he might be feeling a bit less lavish than usual about his gift giving.
Even so, the last Christmas gift he sent to me (before the financial meltdown) was in the DEADBEATSand RE-GIFTER category.
My friend sent me a partially used gift card from a restaurant chain. Their Des Moines location had closed so my friend could not use the rest of his gift card.
So he sent it to me with a note expressing his holiday wish that there were some of these restaurants in my area and that I would be able to use the rest of the card up.
How sweet! This chain does not exist in our area. That gift card is lost somewhere in the junk on my desk. Junk, is the operative word here.
Do you have some tawdry tales of DEADBEATS, and/or RE-GIFTERS?
Do tell. Leave a comment that we all can enjoy…happy holidays!
Vick Mickunas
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remembering Deep Throat…
The individual known as DEEP THROAT, an identity cloaked in mystery for decades, has died.
Watergate, Nixon, Woodward and Bernstein, and scores of amazing books were all linked in one way or another with this mysterious individual. To read more about DEEP THROAT, click here:
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Wall Street tycoons need your help now!
It’s time to lift up these heavy loads - place our shoulders beneath the wheel - grease up those elbows. Find out what you can do to help out by clicking here.
Mail your checks today….hahahahaha….precious metals will also be accepted…Euros, whatever you’ve got!
Vick Mickunas
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an Obesity Tax ?
Residents of the state of New York might soon be curtailing their consumption of sugary soft drinks like Coke and Pepsi. Governor Paterson of New York has proposed a wide ranging array of new taxes to fill in the gaps created by soaring deficits.
One proposed tax is being called the Obesity Tax.
According to the Financial Times of London:
“New Yorkers have reason to pause before they guzzle their next can of soft drink. Their choice of beverage may cost them a little extra. David Paterson, the New York state governor, is introducing an “obesity tax” on high-calorie soft drinks. Milk, fruit juices and bottled water will be exempt from the new 15 per cent tax, as well as “diet” versions of drinks such as Diet Coke. But regular Coke and Pepsi will get slugged.”
“The move represents the latest attempt by the US authorities to buck an alarming trend of increasing obesity. Estimates place two-thirds of American adults as overweight, with a third clinically obese. An obesity crisis is looming, well, large. Supersized Americans are suffering from heart disease, diabetes and chronic disease at levels previously unseen, with the situation getting worse.”
And that’s not the only new tax that is being proposed for New Yorkers….
Paterson is also suggesting that a new tax be placed upon the downloading of music. They are calling it the iPOD Tax
According to the Business Review:
“Gov. David Paterson has proposed a so-called ‘iPod tax’ on downloaded music and entertainment services to help his state close a $15.4 billion budget deficit.”
“However, Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) products aren’t Paterson’s only targets. He has proposed 88 new fees and taxes that go far beyond, including on movie tickets, taxi rides, soda, beer, wine, cigars, massages, cable and satellite TV.”
“That’s just one aspect of Paterson’s proposed $121.1 billion budget released yesterday. The budget attempts to make state government leaner while relying on a wave of new taxes and fees that will be passed down to businesses.”
Massages!? Talk about SIN TAXES. I can give up lots of sins that I don’t commit in the first place; sweet soft drinks, cigars, cable and satellite TV, even massages… that particular vice would probably not have been included on any list of new taxes that would have been proposed by Paterson’s disgraced predecessor, Gov. Elliott Spitzer.
After all, it was the exposure of those gubernatorial “massages” that torpedoed Spitzer’s ship of state. They better not start placing extra taxes on books. Be careful what you tax for…remember the Boston Tea Party? Get ready for the New York Coke Party….
If it happened in your community, would you be willing to pay extra taxes on your guilty pleasures? Which ones are you willing to give up? Or, is there a fat chance that you would give up anything? TV or not TV, that is the question…
Vick Mickunas
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growth industries in 2009…
I have been thinking a lot about the economy lately. Lots of people losing their jobs-losing their houses-their investments-their rationality…
It tends to put a wee crimp in ye olde holiday merriments. So I have been thinking, wondering, what will be the growth industries in the new year? Where will they be hiring? What jobs will be hot?
Here are some of my notions on that topic. Let me know whether you agree, disagree, or just have some other ideas.
Here are the jobs that I think will be viable and my thinking on what will make them in demand in 2009:
Bill collectors - there will be a lot of bills to collect. That Wall Street con artiste who has Ponzi-ed his “clients” to the tune of 50 billion dollars will certainly be hiding out from the bill collectors. Lots of delinquent bills coming due in 2009. Time to pay up.
Liquor sales - a growth industry in hard times. Sad but true. Drink yourself into oblivion to forget all the bills coming due. (See above).
Chimneysweeps - Even with fuel prices in decline folks will be turning to wood burning stoves for heat. My next door neighbors just installed one and they went from fretting over propane consumption in their frigid home to basking in an 80 degree family room. Chimneysweeps will have all the work that they can handle. Heaven knows we dropped a bundle upgrading our chimney last summer. Glad we did.
Security guards - with lots of people out of work and lots of things to steal (that 50 billion dollar schmuck knows all about that) there will be a high demand for security in insecure times.
Book reviewers - my phone is ringing off the hook right now-everybody wants me to write book reviews for next year… hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?
These are just a few of the potential employments that came to mind right off the top of my head. What are your thoughts for growth industries coming up in 2009? There have to be some, right? Your input is greatly desired…
Vick Mickunas
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“Yankees Sign Iraqi Hurler”
Andy Borowitz has his usual comedic take on the recent incident when an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at President Bush. He posted it at The Huffington Post.
To check out Andy’s latest whimsy: click here.
Borowitz is a very funny fellow. He has written a lot of books, some have been prescient. I came within minutes of interviewing him once on my radio show for his book WHO MOVED MY SOAP? The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison. I still have the soap-on-a-rope that came with that book. They cancelled our interview at the last moment…
In an eerie foreshadowing of the epic corruption and fraud that is currently roiling worldwide markets back in 2000 Andy Borowitz published the book THE TRILLIONAIRE NEXT DOOR-The Greedy Investor’s Guide to Day Trading
Sometimes you have to laugh just to keep from crying…
Vick Mickunas
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dashing through the books….
New seasonal books are piled high as snowdrifts. Here are some of my favorites:
“The Christmas Chronicles as told to Jeff Guinn,” (Tarcher Penguin, 735 pages, $19.95): This mammoth edition combines Jeff Guinn’s modern Christmas classics, “The Autobiography of Santa Claus,” “How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas,” and “The Santa Search.” Guinn’s history of Santa Claus spans centuries. Then Guinn spins fiction around the Christmas March of 1647 and finishes up with a modern tale of Santa versus reality TV.
“The Curious World of Christmas — Celebrating All That is Weird, Wonderful, and Festive,” by Niall Edworthy, (Perigee, 189 pages, $16.95): Have you ever wondered about the origins of Christmas traditions? This book explains some obvious ones like kisses beneath the mistletoe as well as utterly unfamiliar ones. Fascinating.
“The Man Who Invented Christmas — How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits,” by Les Standiford, (Crown, 241 pages, $19.95): “The Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens is a fabulous Christmas story. When he wrote it, his career was in a shambles and Christmas was barely celebrated in England. That all changed after Dickens wrote his incredible tale of Scrooge. This is the amazing story behind the novel that has inspired more movie adaptations than any other.
“The Handmaid and the Carpenter,” by Elizabeth Berg, (Ballantine Books, 153 pages, $10): When a poor carpenter and his pregnant wife sought lodging in Bethlehem, they were turned away like ordinary people — no room at the inn. Almost 2008 years later, their story is regarded by millions as extraordinary. The world changed forever that night. Elizabeth Berg imagined that young couple as just ordinary people. Berg has delicious fun with the traditional Nativity story. Finally available in paperback.
“Nothing With Strings — NPR’s Beloved Holiday Stories,” by Bailey White, (Scribner, 193 pages, $24): Fans of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” know the voice of Bailey White. In tones dripping with gravel and molasses, White enthralls listeners with sweet tales of small-town life in the South. In her title story, “Nothing With Strings,” “Louise and her sister, Lily, were standing in the middle of the parking lot of a Super Walmart in Despera Springs, Fla., trying to decide where to sprinkle their mother’s ashes.” Just imagine the Sweet Potato Queens meeting up in Lake Wobegon.
“Holidays on Ice,” by David Sedaris, (Little, Brown, 166 pages, $16.99): The humorist David Sedaris is another public radio staple. This updated version of the Sedaris holiday chestnut contains his marvelous reflections on life as a Christmas elf at Macy’s, as evergreen a classic on the air as on the page. There’s a good reason why this collection has sold more than 800,000 copies; it’s hilarious. There’s also an extra goodie in our stockings this time around — a Sedaris story that has not been published before. And if you absolutely must have these stories told in that distinctively whiney Sedaris voice, then you should pick up the audiobook version. It’s unabridged, and the author gets a boost from his equally funny sister, Amy Sedaris.
Vick Mickunas
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bathing at the Burger King…
Do you remember that creepazoid who decided it would be cool to take a bath in an industrial sink at a Burger King in Kentucky?
This weirdo was “working” there. He filmed his revolting bath and put it on his MySpace page. The other day he inspired some copycats; three women who were working at a KFC bathed in another sink that was actually intended for sanitizing things. Their video appeared on MySpace as well….
The guy at BK was fired. The women at KFC were canned. Do you remember the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer prepares food in his shower? Do you recall the reaction from one of his dinner guests when she learned that the food that she was eating had been treated in this disgusting fashion? Yucko!
KFC, BK, and every other fast food emporium now needs to be vigilant to make sure that their employees are not taking baths on the premises. How absurd!
This week Anastasia Goodstein appeared on The Today Show. Anastasia is an expert on how our young people are using the Internet. She is the author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online.
I got to know Anastasia a little bit when she attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs. To view the report that aired on the Today Show and hear Anastasia’s comments about this disturbing fast food bathing trend click here:
Vick Mickunas
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this will blow your mind…
Well? What did you think of that? Mind blowing, eh?
Beautiful….
Magnificent….
Stunning…..
Words fail to describe those views…
Happy Holidays….
Vick Mickunas
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would you read Joe the Plumber’s book?
Joe the Plumber appeared on Glenn Beck’s radio show recently to talk about what it is like to be Joe the Plumber. Joe was putting some hype on his forthcoming book when he expressed some dismay over John McCain….
According to The Christian Science Monitor Joe was riding on McCain’s campaign bus and…..
“When I was on the bus with him, I asked him a lot of questions about the bailout because most Americans didn’t want it to happen - yet he voted for it,” he said. “At the same time he’s talking about making someone famous if they even think about putting pork in the bill. We all know how much pork was in the $700 billion bailout package. Why did he vote for it?”
“I asked him pretty direct questions, and some of the answers you guys are going to receive … they appalled me,” he said apparently alluding to the promise that his book will be a tell-all. “I was angry. I wanted to get off the bus after I talked to him.”
Why didn’t he?
“Because the thought of Barack Obama scared me even more,” he said.
Hmmmm…. OK, Joe. We’ll see if your strategy of throwing Senator McCain under the bus works out - even if he didn’t discard you when he could have.”
Ouch! Joe, do you think your book will sell better by planting your plunger on John McCain’s forehead?!
AOL is conducting an on-line survey today asking their members if they plan to buy Joe the Plumber’s book? Here are the results so far….they asked..
Will you buy his book?
No
88% 197,773
Maybe
8% 17,943
Yes 4% 9,233
Total Votes: 224,949
It appears that most people don’t plan to buy it. But then, about 4% say that they will. Almost 10, 000 books possibly sold so far….and that is just to AOL users who responded… not bad at all….
Of course, a person can read it without paying for it. You could borrow your friend’s copy. You can check a copy out from your local library.
Do you plan to read it?
Vick Mickunas
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some more gift ideas…
The Founding Fathers Collection (Audiobook) contains the first four presidential biographies in the American Presidents Series. These audiobooks would make a lovely gift for that American history buff who appreciates presents that were selected with special care. There’s George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. (By MacMillan Audio)
Note: The Washington audiobook is available for the first time in unabridged format. The James Madison is available for the first time on CD. The Madison bio was written by Gary Wills.
Behind the Wheel SPANISH (Audiobook) Level One. This 8 CD set will get you on the road to learning how to speak Spanish. Knowledge of Spanish will be quite useful the next time you are in a Spanish speaking area. The Hispanic population of the USA is booming and learning to communicate in Spanish will be essential no matter where you live. This audiobook will make a wonderful gift. (MacMillan Audio)
Note: This audiobook is unabridged and has a running duration of 9 hours. There is a 128 page companion book that comes with it
Both of these audiobooks would make superb listening enhancements in your automobile.
Vick Mickunas
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George W. Bush versus Jimmy Carter
The previous post has gotten quite a response. Thank you. So far it appears that Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush are in a dead heat for the dubious honor of being deemed by our readers as the “Worst Presidents Ever.”
Our incredibly unscientific sampling method has a margin of error that isn’t much to talk about but we sure got a lot of people interested in voicing their opinions. Hooray for that!
So keep those votes rolling in. By the way, Bill Clinton is running a distant third in this race to be voted first as worst….
Vick Mickunas
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the worst president ever?
As the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln approaches we are seeing a plethora of Lincoln books being issued to mark the occasion.
I have a stack of Lincoln books to read. Here are a few of the titles that I have set aside so far:
OUR LINCOLN - New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (Norton)
GIANTS - The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln (Twelve) by John Stauffer
TRIED BY WAR - Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (The Penguin Press) by James M. McPherson
ABRAHAM LINCOLN - Great American Historians on Our Sixteenth President (Public Affairs)
LINCOLN - President-Elect (Simon and Schuster) by Harold Holzer
THE LINCOLN ANTHOLOGY - Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now (Library of America)
As we celebrate the legacy of Abraham Lincoln we can take a moment to reflect upon his place among our presidents. Was he our greatest president? Some would argue that he was.
Which begs the question; who was our worst president ever? Was it Nixon? Buchanan? Grant?
Or, is it that fellow who is quietly melting into obscurity as he observes the final days of his term?
So what do you think? Who was our greatest president? And who has been our worst?
Vick Mickunas
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an interview with Wally Lamb
“The Hour I First Believed” by Wally Lamb, (Harper, 740 pages, $29.95)
Wally Lamb wrote “She’s Come Undone” and “I Know This Much Is True.” His latest, “The Hour I First Believed,” immerses the tragic Columbine shootings within an expansive fictional framework.
Q Did you have difficulty writing this?
A I did. I had to survive my good fortune — the bestseller stuff -— going from thousands to millions of readers. It was a joyride, but then the ride was over. I had to come up with something else. I was intimidated by that. I was a little too focused on reader reaction.
Q Why Columbine?
A One day I sat down and Googled “school shootings”… this tidal wave of stuff came back at me. I was very disturbed by the videos that the shooters, Klebold and Harris, had left behind — both as a high school teacher for many years and as the dad of a then teenaged son …. I was suddenly in the middle of it — emotionally involved in the sadness of that.
Q Klebold and Harris aren’t characters, yet their presence is felt on every page,
A I felt that rather than try to psychoanalyze them I would use their actual voices partly as a reminder of just how lost and really depraved they were and how viciously they sought to wreak some kind of vengeance. I went back and forth with whether or not to do that. Then I just took the gag off them and let them speak for themselves.
Q You’re in Denver now — how does that feel?
A I don’t mean to speak for the people out here nor do I pretend to understand the level of pain and the terrible ripple effect that it has had in the Denver area. I do have a sense from what people have said that they feel these victims and this tragedy should not be forgotten. We’re almost 10 years away from it at this point — I think in some ways we need to learn from all this — hopefully, to prevent other things.
Q Do you keep wall charts to track loose ends?
A Have you seen the Russell Crowe film “A Beautiful Mind?” There’s one scene where his wife goes into his office and there’s stuff all over the walls; pictures and scrawlings. I hate to say it, but that’s kind of what my office looked like.
Q What’s your structure?
A The novel is in two parts. Part one investigates chaos; the way that our lives can go reeling in a whole different direction than we had planned. The second part investigates the possibility that there is some sort of guiding principle, or some universal order to things … my work always balances despair and hope …
Ultimately this story became an investigation of people who carry pain inside and how debilitating grief and shame can be … silence can just make people kind of sick. I think it needs to be talked about … the way I’m different from Caelum (the narrator) is that he’s a cynic and I’m not. I do hold out hope.
Vick Mickunas
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The Real Bill Ayers
William Ayers is a name that was brandished like a torch by some people during our recently concluded presidential campaigns. In stump speeches Sarah Palin repeatedly denounced Bill Ayers as a “terrorist.”
Today, William Ayers finally broke his silence and responded to some of those accusations and slurs with a piece in the New York Times:
December 6, 2008
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Real Bill Ayers
By WILLIAM AYERS
Chicago
In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.
Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”
Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.
I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.
With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.
Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:
I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.
The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.
Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.
I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.
I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.
The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.
We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.
The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.
President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.
Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.
William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of “Fugitive Days” and a co-author of the forthcoming “Race Course.”
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New Yorker to publish Mark Twain excerpt…
Mark Twain’s birthday was November 30. According to a post on the blog the 26th Story, The New Yorker magazine will be publishing a piece by Twain in their December fiction issue….
Here’s a squib from that blog posting:
* “In the piece “Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture” a young Twain spies two men hunched over a poster publicizing his talk at Cooper Union. (Twain is terrified no one will show up.) The one guy says to the other: “Who is Mark Twain?” The other responds “God knows- I don’t!” Hence the title Who is Mark Twain?”
Harper plans to publish WHO IS MARK TWAIN?, 24 previously unpublished pieces by Twain next spring. Gosh, Twain is my favorite American humorist. I sure hope Harper plans to send me a copy…
Vick Mickunas
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the ruination of Lexulous…
Some readers might recall how utterly devastated I was when the social networking site Facebook shut down the Scrabulous application last summer.
The Scrabulous application was developed by two brothers in India, the Agarwallas. It was a fabulous application. You could play that famous word game with people all over the world. I played against total strangers in South Africa, Singapore, and Thunder Bay. The Scrabulous application on Facebook had millions of users when it was shut down.
You know that word game; there are 100 tiles, two of them are blanks. I’m not going to say that name.
The copyright holders for that game took the Agarwallas to court. That was the end of Scrabulous. Soon thereafter this wonderful application was reborn as Lexulous. Everything was the same except that it was no longer available on Facebook.
I loved Lexulous. I was completely addicted to it. I wasn’t alone. Lexulous quickly got 200,000 players worldwide. One of them lives in Mansfield, Ohio. They call her the Garrulous Granny.
According to a recent article in a British newspaper, the sales boom that game is experiencing right now in England can be attributed in large part to the now vanished Scrabulous application.
Shane Richmond reports in The Telegraph that:
“Scrabble is Britain’s most popular board game and, according to market research firm NPD, this is the first time the word game has been number one for 15 years. However, experts suggest that Scrabble is more popular now than at any point since the mid-1980s, when board game behemoth Trivial Pursuit was first released.
The Scrabble boom follows the huge success of Scrabulous, an application that allowed people to play a Scrabble-esque game in Facebook. I say “allowed” because Scrabble’s owners took legal action this summer to close Scrabulous down.
Sadly this aggressive protection of so-called ‘intellectual property’ is becoming ever more common. As I wrote a few weeks ago, ITV recently shut down an application that made their catch-up TV service better, meanwhile Prince has his lawyers patrolling YouTube and demanding the removal of clips that feature his music, even if it’s an accidental background snippet.
Strictly speaking all three companies are in the right and it’s tempting to view such infringements and say to yourself ‘if we can’t make money out of this, nobody can’ but that’s not a practical business stance. In fact, it’s counter-productive.
For a brand as strong as Scrabble, unlicensed community interaction can enhance the brand and act as advertising. Had the Scrabble rights-holders, Hasbro in the US, felt obliged to protect their intellectual property, they would have been better advised to license Scrabulous rather than close it. They thought that having the IP gave them the stronger position. It didn’t. The person with the audience has the power, the person with the IP has only a veto.
In place of Scrabulous came two official Facebook applications - one for the US and Canada and another for the rest of the world. These applications have, combined, around 300,000 fewer users than Scrabulous was getting at its height.
Lexulous, the successor to Scrabulous, has not appeared on Facebook yet, though the same developers do have 200,000 users for another Facebook game, Wordscraper.
NPD’s statistics for Scrabble sales go up to the end of September, which is, by coincidence, when Scrabulous was finally closed down. It will be interesting to see what happens to Scrabble sales post-Scrabulous. My bet is that Scrabble’s owners have killed off the best promotional tool they ever had.” (The Telegraph/Nov. 18, 2008)
OK, I let him speak the name of that game. I won’t sully my tongue by uttering that once glorious word. The beauty of Scrabulous and the successor game, Lexulous, was that the board setup, the tiles, the point values, and most other aspects of it were exactly like that other game. I dare not speak it…
Are the copyright holders grateful that Scrabulous has given their game a huge sales boost? Apparently not.
This week the Agarwalla brothers completely revamped the Lexulous application. Obviously, this was done to placate the copyright holders.
Lexulous has been ruined. The application that the copyright holders have available on Facebook of their authorized version of the game is a pathetic joke, far inferior to the applications created by the Agarwalla brothers. For example, the authorized version available on-line in the US and Canada is not even available in SOWPODS, the most popular dictionary for worldwide play. Heck, you could play Scrabulous in French or even Italian. I used to love playing it in French.
The Agarwalla applications were educational. They were fast. They were incredibly fun. The copyright holders have strangled the geese that were laying all those golden eggs; corporate profits. By exercising their legal right to suppress the Agarwalla versions of this word game they have squelched the pleasure of potentially millions of new participants in this game. Every one of those on-line users of the Agarwallas’ delightful Scrabulous and Lexulous applications was likely to go out and purchase the official version, further enriching the copyright holders.
I’m honked off. That honking sound you hear off in the distance is all those golden geese flying away into cyberspace, never to return to lining the pockets of the copyright holders.
I learned new words every day on Lexulous.Now I cannot even stand to look at the reconfigured design that the Agarwallas have been forced to adopt. Nor can I utter the name of a game that has been tainted in my opinion by avarice and greed.
Another paradise has been paved over.
(sob)
Vick Mickunas
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the adventures of Skunky
When you live in the country you are bound to encounter feral cats. I have a soft spot for them. It’s not their fault that they live out in the elements.
When feral cats come around they get fed. If they can be captured, they get fixed so no more ferals come out of their lineage.
There are a pair of feral brothers who have been living around my place for 5 or 6 years. Mogey is all black and he has become somewhat domesticated. When it’s cold outside he is smart enough to come indoors. He’s still wary but he loves the warmth.
His brother, Lazzy, is a butterscotch tiger cat. Lazzy has never been inside a house. When he was captured as a kitten to get fixed he got quite frightened. That early trauma has made him extremely cautious.
Since Lazzy stays outdoors there is some concern for his welfare. In the hope that Lazzy will choose to live in warmer digs I just set up a little kitty condo outside for him. It’s a trademarked shelter; The Feral Villa.
Lazzy was sniffing around today outside the entrance to it. The manufacturers say that some feral cats will take weeks to enter. Some cats never do. Perhaps they have better lodging elsewhere?
Tonight I let Buddy, my office cat, outside for his evening constitutional. Buddy has markings like a skunk in reverse - mostly white with black markings. After a bit, I opened the front door to see if Buddy wanted to come back inside.
There was a bowl of cat kibble just outside the door. When I looked down I saw Buddy off in the distance a bit. Another animal was eating the cat food; our local skunk. I call him Skunky.
When I encounter Skunky I retreat very slowly. Skunky doesn’t see too well. He peered at me for a moment, then scampered off.
You guessed it. Skunky ran right over to The Feral Villa and went right inside the door. The Feral Villa is right alongside the house.
Oh my. Life in the country is unpredictable….
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Knopf kicks you know what…
The New York Times just published a list of their top ten books from 2008. Seven out of the ten titles were published by Alfred A. Knopf. Year in and year out the house that Knopf built publishes outstanding stuff.
I’m working on my best books list from 2008 right now. To check out the New York Times list click here:
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Obama’s Election was predicted by “Average President”
Check out this press release:
“Other than his skin color, Barack Obama looks far more like the other 42 men who have been President of the United States than John McCain. He is much closer to being the average President than McCain.”
“Presidential historian Ian Randal Strock has compared, contrasted, combined, and divided the 42 Presidents (Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms make President Bush’s administration the 43rd) and distilled out the “average President” in his book, “The Presidential Book of Lists” (published by Random House/Villard on October 21). For instance, the average President is 55 years 117 days old on inauguration day, has 3.7 children, has been married 1.15 times, and is 50% likely to have served in his state legislature or have been a lawyer. Obama will be 47 years 169 days old on inauguration day (McCain will be 72 years 144 days old), he has 2 children (McCain has 7), is married to his first wife (McCain is married to his second), and he did serve in his state legislature and is a lawyer (McCain is neither). These are only a few measures in which McCain is closer to the average than Obama: military service, first name (one quarter of the Presidents were named either John or James), and skin color. But going strictly by the numbers, an Obama Presidency moves the needles far less than would a McCain Presidency.”
“Ian Randal Strock is an able speaker, available to talk about the historic—and in some ways, expected—election results we’ve just witnessed, and what it means to the historian, the trivia buff, in all of us. For instance, this was the first election since 1972 without a Bush or a Dole on the ticket. And while John McCain may look more like the other Presidents, Barack Obama is actually related to five of them.”
“Strock blogs about the Presidents at http://uspresidents.livejournal.com, and is the editor and publisher of SFScope.com.”
“He’ll be appearing in the Dayton area in the next few days:
Friday December 5, 11am-1pm at the Wright State University (Barnes & Noble) Book Store (E-182 Student Union, Dayton, OH 45434; 937-775-5600)
Tuesday December 9, 7-8pm at Books & Company on the Greene (4453 Walnuti St, Dayton [Beavercreek], OH 45440; 937-429-2169”
Note: Strock rhymes with SPOCK. If you check out the websites that are mentioned in the press release you will gain an insight into why Strock and Spock are relative terms.
The author attached a personal note on his press release:
Dear Mr. Mickunas,
I’m the author of “The Presidential Book of Lists”, which Random House published under their Villard imprint at the end of October. My wife, Kit Hawkins, is from the Dayton area (specifically, Kettering; she graduated from Fairmont East High School), and she’s helped me set up a signing tour of your area in the next few weeks. Her parents and their neighbors all recommended you and your column, so I’m sending the press release below, in hopes that you’ll find it newsworthy.
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Too Fat To Fish
Every time I check out the top selling books I see this title: TOO FAT TO FISH by Artie Lange.
This guy is a comedian on the Howard Stern Show, right? I’m not familiar with him. I haven’t read the book. Can somebody clue me in?
Who is this guy? What’s his sthick? If he’s on Howard Stern does that mean he has a pottymouth?
Please, fill me in. I want to understand the attraction. From the picture on the cover it would seem that Artie is one of these guys who is larger than life? Way larger….
Vick Mickunas
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Christmas Cookies
Are you looking for a nice gift for a young child? A toy? No way.
A video game? Forget that.
Candy? Uh uh.
Try a book. I have the perfect book for a young child. It is fun to read and it will increase that child’s vocabulary. It’s CHRISTMAS COOKIES - Bite-Size Holiday Lessons (Harper Collins) by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. This book is beautifully illustrated. Your kids can learn some great words as they talk about making a batch of Christmas cookies.
Here’s an example:
“CELEBRATE means, time to get out the sprinkles.”
Here’s another:
“APPRECIATIVE means, thank you so much for taking the time to bake with me.”
Kids are never too young to learn some good new words. This book is supposedly directed at children aged 9 through 12. I think many third graders would enjoy it. Even a second grader might like it. Heck, your precocious 1st grader could love it!
Vick Mickunas
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