Goldberg Variations Released

 I've not been well recently and am not up to a full "Book Launch" for my Goldberg Variations.

So I'm letting Anna and Ruth slip out into the world, doing their own thing as they have been for some years now. Over the time they'd drop by, uninvited like as not, whisper a story or two (or a hint of a story or two), and then waltz off again.

I swear I could hear them laughing.

Well, we're done.

They've whispered their last. They've plotted and played with the variations, covering so many aspects of our human lives. Birth, and before. Death, and beyond. The many stages in between.

There are themes, recurring themes. The Mother/Daughter one, for sure. But others too.

I hope these tales bring... the reader to the table, co-creating the lives and loves of these women.

The volume has been accepted into the Smashwords Premium Catalog, so it should be appearing on the iBook Store and others soon.

There will be a paperback version from CreateSpace in due course.

This is the Smashwords link.
This is the Amazon (US) link. Also available at all other Amazon stores.
This is the Nook link.

Enjoy.

It could have been worse...could it?

We've only one room left in our condo that's playing host to un-emptied boxes. I'd feel better about that were it not for the fact that this has been the state of affairs for the past two to three months.

Sigh.

It's the library. The library is, according to the floor plan, the master suite walk-in closet. It's 19' long! Seems large for a closet but I've been assured by a number of my women friends that they'd fill it in little more than a heartbeat.

Given the master bathroom suite has been taken over by the cats and the master bedroom itself is the home office and TV room—not to mention the primary domain of the cats, the closet won't be housing any of our clothes. The closet in the second bedroom suffices.

Last weekend I undertook to begin on the remaining boxes. I emptied a good dozen of same. They mostly contained books. The dead-tree variety. I was impressed to note how much money I've invested in my technical career over the years—as measured by the abundance of "charge for by weight" software-related books.

I also uncovered many volumes from my leather-bound anniversary edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. You know, that thing we all used before the advent of The Google.

I stacked all these books, and more, against the long wall of the closet and congratulated myself on a "good start made."

The plan was to empty another box or two each morning before the start of the work day and spend another day over the weekend making a serious dent in the remaining boxes. A couple of weeks like that and there'd be no more boxes and we could declare this "moving thing" done.

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men..." as Robbie Burns was moved to say.

Sunday evening we heard a crash. I wasn't sure whence it came, but thought to check the closet/library.

I haven't had the heart to do anything with it since.

Not by Dark Alone

To the left is the cover of my first long format work. Science Fiction, for I love the genre and always have.

I recall my younger sister saying, "Science Fiction? No. That gene skipped me."

And it's true. I and my other two siblings inherited our father's love of the genre. But the third in the family, no.

This story — more about it at this link — began life as a National Novel Writing Month exercise. My first. As such, it suffered from early KjM writing, to say nothing of the tricks NaNoWriMo writers get up to to make their word count.

It needed to marinate for a couple of years before an actual story could be made of it.

When I was younger, traveling to school on city busses, I had the experience of sitting off to the side of a group of people my own age — all of them signing. Utter silence. But much hilarity, excitement, animated conversation going on five feet from me. And I was as one deaf. I knew nothing of what was going on. The image, the feeling, have stayed me to this day.

What would it be like for a non-telepath in a race of telepaths? What could such an individual bring to society? What would one like that see that others might miss?

And so, Alphard, the protagonist of this story.

If you get to read the story, I'd love to know what you think. Honest!

A Rich and Rare Land

A Rich and Rare Friend.

The land? Ireland. The richness referring to the wealth of wit and words, in this case represented by poetry.

These words are complemented by paintings hailing from that same land. In some cases, one in particular, from the same family. William B Yeats is joined in the book by his brother the artist, Jack B Yeats.

The friend? That would be Va. Richness in this case referring to her wealth of story, art, fun, skill in the kitchen(!) and so much more.

The same Va gave me the book that shares the title of this entry — A Rich and Rare Land.

When I got home I opened the book and was lost to friend and foe for the next...period of time — I couldn't tell you how long.

The words. The words. Ranging from Seamus Heaney to translations of Turlough O'Carolan, from Jonathan Swift to John Millington Synge, from WB Yeats to Katherine Tynan. And then there's Patrick Kavanagh — of Raglan Road fame.

The art is no less evocative but my ear is attuned to the lilt of the language. It brings its own warmth.

Poetry does that to me. The sounds of that rich and rare land of Érin do that to me.

As does friendship.

On Love and Barley...

On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho

A few days ago, I picked up the book shown to the right of this text. Given my fondness for haiku, how could I not? Basho was the pen name, if you will, of Matsuo Kinsaku who is known as the first great haiku poet. He lived in Japan in the latter half of the 1600s and is credited with, almost alone, reinvigorating the haiku form.

To quote the man on the subject of the lightness that belongs in haiku, "In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse, and the joining of its two parts, seem light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed."

And his work is light, often quiet, sometimes fanciful. Always beautiful. I don't read Japanese - although haiku is one poetry form that could drive me to learn.

The works are translated by Lucien Stryk and, in English, the translator has chosen not to concern himself with syllable count. This seems right to me. The intent is to convey the sense and beauty of the original poem - unlikely to be possible while tying oneself to English's syllable structure. No more than one could translate a sonnet, trying to maintain its specific rhyming structure, from English to Japanese and still have a poem.

Many of the works struck me, but the following just tickled my funny bone:

No hat, and cold
rain falling –
well!

I come from Ireland. It rains there, a lot. I can hear the exasperation in the final word.

The title of the book comes from the following:

Girl cat, so
thin on love
and barley.

The notes inform the reader that "Left-over barley and rice are still the staple diet of Japanese dogs and cats."

I feel for the poor girl cat.

Reading - a life-long passion

As mentioned in my previous post, I didn't "win" NaNoWriMo 2011. Though I wasn't far off.

I blame November, Thanksgiving, and the seduction of The River Reader bookstore in Guerneville, a hundred or so miles north of San Francisco. Don't blame me if it's less, or more, than one hundred - travel and directions are not my thing, y'know?

We spent fours days in the environs of Guerneville, as we have for many years. There are several compulsory stops to be made, made compulsory by well engrained tradition by now.

One of them is the above-mentioned bookstore. A small independent store, they used to have a section of a wall dedicated to magnetic poetry, created by customers. Both of us left artily arranged words there over the years.

The store is eclectic in its stock, with local artists and writers well-represented.

So, why blame the proprietor for my NaNo fail? Ah well, the seduction of the books within. I always buy books there - it's one of the few places I buy "dead tree" books anymore. And I buy them by the armful.

The Natural Law of Water, poems by Kathleen Culver, caught my eye and her words caught my ear, and more than my ear.

I sat with the book, there in the bookstore and let the words sink in. I just like poetry. I like the art that transforms words, line, metre (forgive me, that's how I learned to spell it and how the word looks to me), shape, into feeling, into insight, into something that touches below the level of conscious thought.

And Ms. Culver can do this, and more.

A second book was A Radiant Life, by Nuala O'Faolain. Ms. O'Faolain was, among other things, a columnist and essayist for The Irish Times. This book holds between its covers columns of hers that span nearly twenty years.

Robust views, a clear-eyed perspective of Ireland and her society, and sometimes playful writing, the book is an education in the art of the column, the essay. And no small education on the realities of Irish society across the two decades they were written.

The title to the American edition, "A Radiant Life", is taken from the title of one of the essays. It tells of a young Irish-American woman, in whose honor there exists a statue in Japan. Maura O'Halloran became, at the age of 27, a Zen Master. And died but six months later in a motor accident.

Her book of journal entries and letters, "Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind", became another I had to go buy.

Perhaps it's not only the River Reader that has an eclectic collection of books.

Three movies and a novel...

Yes, that should about do it and then I can...

Oh, this is a blog entry, not that little fantasy I have. Well now, where was I?

Three movies seen recently, "Avatar" being the first. It swept the world, even if it did cause concern in some higher ecclesiastical circles. I believe it was even called "bland" and "rather harmless". I suppose you could take that view.

I mean, it's the standard hero journey, with some romance and a little of the Pinocchio story thrown in. And no small number of explosions.

This really serves to underscore a thought I have, that there are about six good ideas in the world. Ah, but it's the telling of the tale where the art lies. And to this, far from humble one regrets to say, viewer's eye, this tale was told well.

The characters, as envisioned by the director, as rendered by the, really rather cool, technology, as given life by the actors (Sigourney Weaver - I mean, how can you go wrong?), created a story that I had little difficulty becoming lost in. Bland? I beg to differ.

Staying with an ecclesiastical theme, in some small way, we viewed "Into Temptation" recently. Again, we are dealing here with my fondness for artists - and so we have Kristin Chenoweth. Few lines. None of them "zingers" - other than one of the early ones. The rest - acted, silently and deeply. A powerfully told story.

"The Other Man". Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, Antonio Banderas. Need I say more? Whether I need to or not, I will. This and the previous movie are worth studying from the perspective of storytelling. They are carefully constructed plots, well-built, designed to take viewer through the experience without spoonfeeding them. And it's just a blast to watch people, good at what they do, doing it.

The novel? "Songs of Distant Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke. I found it in a second-hand bookstore in Kansas City, over Christmas. That and several others.

Elegiac is the word that comes to mind for me. But then, I have a substantial dose of Celtic melancholy about me. This would explain the appeal - of the book. The last and greatest starship of Earth, stopping off at one of the first "seed colonies" before going on its way, bringing the last humans ever to spring from our solar system to a new home.

Hard science fiction because Clarke, as he mentions in an "Author's Note", did not believe we would "warp factor n" our way around the galaxy. Ah but, again, it's what the storyteller does with the ideas that's of importance. And Clarke is a favorite storyteller of mine.

Still writing - words, not code

I shipped off three short stories today to various on-line publishers. Two stories under 1,000 words, so they are really short-shorts or "flash fiction", and one longer. We will see what comes of them.

Ray Bradbury has stated, both in print and during lectures, that a goal should be one short story per week. He posits that, after a year, a writer will have 50 short stories written and that it will be impossible to have 50 bad ones.

In the act of writing is writing done. "En gerundio" as the Spanish say.

I cannot promise, myself I mean - I promise no one else anything, to write a short story a week. I have enough difficulty meeting the deadlines for my writing course. But, interestingly enough, ideas seem to generate other ideas and, as I write the stories flowing from some ideas, others surface.

I am reading a series of stories by Roddy Doyle, of "The Commitments" fame. His most recent book, "The Deportees: and Other Stories", is a set of collections of related stories, each 800 words or less. They were written as articles for a publication in Ireland and deal with the strains of incorporating the influx of immigrants into modern Ireland - and all that flows from that.

The 800 word limit provided the author with a challenge, one he meets with great style.

And Dublin fairly hops off the page at you. What more could you ask?

"How did it get so late so early?" - a quote stolen from the book

We saw a film today, oh boy. Well, not actually today. A little while ago. We had seen a preview of it on some DVD or other. "Gotta see that" was the immediate, shared thought.

All hail NetFlix.

Frank Langella in a performance made up of the tiniest details. A quiet film. Not a car chase to be seen. And, given it deals with writing, writers and their milieu, of much interest.

I caught sight of the "based on..." information and very soon afterward ordered the book, and have now finished reading it.

The same quietness. Some elements more explored, more detailed, than film allows for. But the essence caught by the screen writers, the director, and the actors. The enfolded stories fitting together more neatly in the film, because the audience has less time to devote to that medium.

I have always liked Frank Langella as an actor. This is a performance I will never forget - and, as is often the case, cannot imagine anyone else in this role.

"Starting Out in the Evening" - a powerful and subtle hymn to life. Nice work by the author, Brian Morton.