Ray Bradbury

Damn it is a bad day all around.  Ray Bradbury died. 

How about a short story?

Well at least, given his beliefs their shouldn't be much of a funeral.

No Real Politics

Just finished Gore Vidal's Lincoln and I'm starting James Jones' unexpurgated From Here to Eternity plished in ereader form by Open Road Media.  I wonder if Vidal writes as he does naturally or he gets there with massive rewrites?  I read somewhere that Fred Astaire would not let anyone watch him practice: "Never let 'em see you sweat."

The question about Vidal was brought about by reading Jones and the different styles of Jones and Vidal.  Jones does not seem to have that same ease with language that Vidal does.  And since I've just read Williwaw I think that the comparisons are fair since both of these books (Williwaw and From Here to Eternity) were written at around the same time and when the authors were about the same age, and Williwaw does have that apparently easy facility with words.

I thought I had read Lincoln when it first came out, but now I'm not sure, there is so much in it I don't remember.  The book is fascinating for its depiction of the mature Lincoln and his political skill and the politics of the time, which from what I get from the histories of the time is pretty accurate.  A Civil War book with no (or almost no) battles.  One sees what the people who lived in Washington, D.C. saw, and little more.  We see Grant and Sherman when they visit Washington, and not in the field.  The politics are what are important to Vidal.

Well at any rate, now I'm trying to figure out how to load a Barnes and Noble ebook The Hammer of Thor onto my Sony ereader.  For the most part when there is a difference in price both Nook and Kindle are cheeper than Sony.  Also, and this is the first time this has happened, I've been looking for a good book about the Norse myths and there are more than a few that are on Kindle which are not on other ereaders.  First attempt a failure, but will try again.  Thank god for Google.

Current politics are simply too depressing.  The nursing homes in the area have combined to put the county home out of business, because to quote the CEO of one the county home doesn't charge enough.  Then there is this from one of the Common Pleas judges in town.  I had thought that he was one of the least bad, well perhaps he is the least bad, but what does that make the rest.  Not that the FOP is a model of a progressive union, but still.  Back into my paper worlds (or perhaps some more Charlie Chan).

Interestingly enough could not find a photo of Vidal writing, also most of his pics were of him in more or less "dressed up" outfits.  Jones the opposite, and most in worker or casual clothing.

Writers

Off posting for a week and seem to be overwhelmed by work again. A couple of permanent custody cases coming up soon and just after that a client who didn't, stab her ex-husband at a seriously drunken party involving a couple of 17 year olds and significantly faulty memories decreased by alcohol and other things. There is no chance that this last case is going to do anything other than go to a jury trial. I got the client off probation last month early because she couldn't stop using. There is no way she will agree to go back on in some kind of a deal.

Today went to a writer's conference here in town. My wife had started this writers group about eight years ago and about three years ago they started to put on this conference. She decided that she didn't want to be in charge after the conference last year (too much politics and it interfered too much with her writing), but we still went today. It is kind of nice to go to one of these things when they are put on fairly well. And this one is put on quite well given that we are in a rather small city and pay the presenters no money.

The first year there was no money except the money we put in ourselves for our own registration. We discovered something very interesting: Writers (for the most part, not the big boys and girls, but those a little farther down the food chain) will travel quite a distance for free for a table to hustle their books from, throw in a free lunch and they are more than willing to talk for an hour about how it is done.

There isn't a lot of quality control, but some are very good. You can never tell before hand, last year the one with the biggest rep. was the weakest presenter.

One of the presenters today told my wife (who is very short and handicapped) that he hoped that she would meet some people here and possible she might even begin to try to write some little something. My wife has both solid aluminum crutches and a temper, I generally try to move out of the range of those things when discussions of this sort start. But for some reason she decided to respond with a: "Why, thank you kind sir, I shall do my best." I'm not sure the guy picked up on it, but I thought it was a remarkable show of restraint. Otherwise the thing went off without a hitch and a good time was had by all.

Writing

So I'm in this writers group (can't you tell) and we are having a writer's conference here in October. There will be a writing contest and there will be prizes given out. Last year (our first) we had ten entries. This year there are going to be eight prizes. It appears as though we have now got a special olympics writing contest: Show up and get a prize.

OOOPS: They cut out half the prizes sonow there will be only four. no longer no writer left behind.

Writing

Archie and Mehetabel, what more perfect example of the ink stained wretch than the poet as cockroach.

Went to a writer's conference yesterday. Well actually my wife was the person who (along with two others) organized it and put it on. It was put on by the writers group that I am a member of. I was day labor, so I just went around carrying things, selling things (writers love to come to a place where they get lunch for free and have a table to sell their books).

So while the writers were eating or schmoozing with others or giving their presentations, I sat at their tables and took money and sold their stuff. We discovered a couple of things that next year (this was the first year we did this) we will apply. First: only one person gets the food for breakfast (we had enough bagels to feed an army left over, there were no starving writers there). Second, brown paper lunch bags work just fine for keeping money that we've collected for each separate writer in.

It is amazing to me that there are so many real, not just wanna be writers, out there. There were twelve published -- and I mean really published -- writers there. Novelists, religious and non-fiction writers. Of course, the most popular speaker was the one who told how to make $100,000,00 a year writing. Everyone there is willing to write for nothing, but would not object if someone wanted to pay them huge amounts for doing it.

The other thing that amazes me is the number of people who can write and write well in a city as small as this one. The other thing that amazes me is that there is at least one novelist out there whose forte is writing Amish love stories. That is just weird. She didn't show, but sent some books to raffle off.

So in the end I got to see no presentation, but I did meet several writers and all were very pleased to meet me because I had money to give them.

Politics later.

Life is Hard

You know it requires a certain kind of short term memory loss to continue to write about the politics and election in this country. They steal an election, they steal an election. The Democrats cave, the Democrats cave, the Democrats cave, the Democrats ........ Well you get the idea.

Great athletes can do the same things over and over and it has a certain kind of new elegance every time. A home run, beating out a base on a short hit, broken field running, chasing down the quarter back, a pass on a bull. Bad athletes seem to be bad in their own interesting way each time. I would guess that great sports writers like Red Smith could make depressing teams interesting. There is after all little of a real stake (short of your relationship with the bookie) ridding on the outcome. So the writer can concentrate on the grace, uniqueness and elegance of the winners. And let's face it most of the political writers are in the bag for the Republicans, so it would be as if all the sports writers wrote as if they were writing publicity for one of the teams, all the same team.

In politics there really is a lot riding on who wins unlike sports (absent that bookie).

The other problem is that the winners win in the same boring way and the losers lose in the same boring way. The truly spectacular individual horrors of the results are only seen in the homes' of the hoi poli, us little people. And really who wants to read about us.

So here I am trying to write these little pieces about the world and it turns out the politics in my wonder country and none of the major participants are helping me. No one has any compassion.