The pink and purple and white canopies I mentioned recently have mostly given way to leafy clouds, the piercing yellow-green of springtime.

The hardiest bad-ass stems and tendrils are forcing themselves through cracks in sidewalks and retaining walls. Road and bridge repair crews have set up shop amid blooming orange traffic cones. College commencements and school graduations and artful recitals are underway and continuing.

Domestic progress is having its way.

Linda Hogan’s poem The Way In reminds us:

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty. …

The road to abundance necessarily requires the work of bodies and minds and spirits (where else comes the song?). I’m not sure what to make of “the three ways in the world” that are offered, two of which appear to contain sharp and pointy ends. Maybe the remaining handful of lines will clarify?

… To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water. …

The final five lines are a beautiful recounting of the way things work; they comfort and confront. To bring forth something that is not now here, something that is here must give way. And it won’t be easy; transformation takes work:

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.

My domestic progress these days will eventually encompass the beginning of the summer, but I must first endure the wintry end of another fiscal year. My desk blooms too, but with invoices and reports and spreadsheets.

The hardiest bad-ass documents are indeed pushing their way up and out, as much as I wish them cordoned by blooming orange traffic cones. I labor under a canopy of, yes, green, but the dollar-bill kind. So, my efforts at finishing tasks and meeting deadlines may not be as lithe and winsome as those of a dance recital, but there will be a certain effortless grace (if I do it right).

A budget? No fuss.

____________________

Linda Hogan is Writer-in-Residence for the Chickasaw Nation. Among her works of poetry are: The Book of Medicines, Indios: A Poem … A Performance, and Rounding the Human Corners from which “The Way In” has been drawn.

(“Honey” from zizzybaloobah / cc by-nc)

The Locus Award finalists have been announced.

The finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award have been announced.

The finalists for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award have been announced.

Who are the best contemporary writers of noir? Flavorwire names ten of them. I confess I haven’t even heard of more than half of them (those that don’t write horror fiction, to be precise, with the exception of Dennis Lehane), so it looks (as usual) like I have some catching up to do. So many books, so little time! It’s my constant refrain.

It must be tough to be Dan Brown — huge sales, more money than God, but absolutely no respect from the literary establishment. This piece from The Telegraph made me laugh until I cried. No wonder extraordinary measures are being taken to keep the book out of readers’ hands until the release date, making life difficult for everyone from bookstores to the secondary market — by which I mean those who write books “decoding” Brown’s work. The man’s an industry.

If you have trouble getting your writing done, perhaps you could benefit from these tips offered by David Farland. I was particularly taken with the advice to figure out what foods make you the most alert and ready to work. I usually eat only yogurt for breakfast, and I’m now rethinking that; perhaps an egg would help to battle the morning tiredness I usually battle. Or perhaps this is a biorhythm problem, another of Farland’s tips, and I should be reserving my most demanding work for the evening and even late at night, when I paradoxically feel the most awake. Certainly there’s much to explore here.

These twenty-five photographs of authors help remind me that they’re as human as the rest of us — with, perhaps, a few exceptions! It’s an enjoyable gallery to scan through.

Book covers have a gender, which happens to be the same gender as the author and/or the perceived audience of the book. What this often means is that books written by women are disguised to be for women readers only, when in fact they could easily be enjoyed by men as well. There’s a challenge called “Cover Flip,” that asks readers to design a girly cover and a boyish cover for the same book, and a number of examples are available to leaf through at the linked site. It’s right on the nose. And it’s an interesting issue to ponder.

And while we’re considering feminism, consider how Deborah Copaken Kogan has found her career shaped by publishers and others looking to girlify her books. I hadn’t realized that authors had so little say in the titles of their books, though I knew that they don’t usually have much input on the covers (which has led to such things as a white girl being pictured on the cover even though the book was about a black girl — just ask Justine Larbelestier). I confess to feeling very discouraged about such things these days; it seems that everywhere you turn there’s another example of women being put down based on their genitals. You would think that fifty years after Betty Friedan, we’d have made more progress.

I have never considered getting a tattoo, but these 50 tattoos inspired by books almost inspire me to get one.

I don’t usually recommend that people watch commercials, but hey, there are some great creative minds doing excellent work in that medium. This Audi commercial features Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto doing an incredibly funny send-up of all things Spock, and is well worth your two-and-a-half minutes.

Ironing, like so many other domestic chores, has about it the air of religion.

There is a compelling need for specific implements and special rituals, a curious balance of fire and water, a mix of dry and damp, and a fresh (unending!) supply of pristine garments — all looming overwhelmingly to wring order from chaos.

Michael Chitwood in Heat sums up such righteous labor with prophetic conciseness:

The crooked was made straight,
the wrinkled smooth …

And if you’re going to raise your young, then the stationary act of ironing does afford a platform and, likely, a rapt (or at least, captive) audience –

“If Old Scratch gets his claws
in your thigh or neck,
you burn a thousand years
and that is the first day.”

Her lessons are punctuated by the pounding iron. The sprinkled drops evaporate with a cautionary hiss. Which lasts longer — eternal damnation for the unwary or the household work of the always-weary?

The ‘rigid clothes’ and ‘matched seams’ eventually lie folded in neat piles or hanging in tidy rows. The smooth and cooling fabric lies in wait for a new day which brings its own temptations and challenges:

… Our bodies would ruin her work.

Wrinkles remain banished for just so long before appearing, once again, to signal our need for renewal.

____________________

Michael Chitwood, poet and author, is a lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. His most recent collection of poetry — Poor-Mouth Jubilee (and its companion CD) — are published by Tupelo Press. “Heat” is a Library of Congress Poetry 180 poem.

(“Mrs. J. Webster ironing while her sons look on. Tehama County, California” 1940) // from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division // Russell Lee (1903-1986), photographer

Many years ago, I bought a house while I was living with my then-boyfriend. Things weren’t going well between us, to the extent that I felt more comfortable getting into a 30-year commitment with Chase Mortgage than with him. Still, we stayed together, in no small part because at one point he told me accusingly, “I know exactly what’s going to happen—we’re going to move and then you’re going to dump me.”

So of course I couldn’t, even though the relationship had clearly run its course and neither of us was happy. We made it almost a year after moving, at which point he had the good sense to leave, but up to that point he had effectively inoculated the dynamic between us; he had thrown down, and for me to confirm his prediction would have been dishonorable in the extreme.

Christopher Hacker’s debut novel, The Morels, feels a bit like that kind of a throw down. It’s a book that dares you not to like it—it is, in essence, a powerfully alienating story about the power of a story to alienate, a tale about the ways art can redeem and destroy, the pernicious probing of authorial intent, the fragility of families, and damage done that can’t be undone—or can it? It wants to ask the big questions, but it wants to make you uncomfortable in the process. Whether the purpose is to force a more honest reaction from an off-balance reader, or simply to pre-empt easy judgment, is hard to say.

Consider, for instance, the narrator. A featureless 30ish guy who lives with his mother and works in a movie theater, he is passive to the point of remaining nameless all the way through. While he’s working on a film with his old college roommate, he doesn’t seem to be any kind of budding auteur, biding his time in the service business in Tarantinoesque dues-paying—he’s just a slacker to whom things happen, there to move the action along and, for purposes of the story, eventually run into a childhood friend, Arthur Morel.

Morel was a mysterious teenager, prone to pronouncements of the worthlessness of art as a radical statement, and who had gotten himself kicked out of their prestigious music seminary (think: act of art as a radical statement). When their paths cross 14 years later, Arthur is a writer and adjunct professor, on the verge of publishing his second novel. He’s also a husband and father, and he draws our narrator into the circle of his family—lovely wife Penelope, precocious 11-year-old son Will—in the weeks just before his family, and his life, implode. The catalyst, in this case, is the novel. It tells a story about a family called the Morels: Arthur, Penelope, and Will; a mild domestic drama that mirrors their own lives, and then culminates in a disturbingly transgressive sexual act.

It’s a work of fiction, Arthur explains, even as his father-in-law sues him, his wife takes his son and leaves, he loses his job, and is arrested and put on trial. It’s a made up story, he insists as the situation snowballs. Our hapless narrator and his film crew eagerly trade in their second-rate Hamlet adaptation for a documentary about Arthur, shining a literal spotlight on his parents and intensely dysfunctional childhood. But the more they find out, the less we know; the truth only serves to obscure the facts here. Is Morel a true artist willing to lose everything to make a statement? Is he a shameless self-promoter? Is he a hopelessly damaged adult child of abuse and neglect? Is he inventing, or remembering, or something else?

As The Morels sets up some weighty questions, the reader will find some gnawing metafictional issues to wrestle with as well: Do the characters’ lack of depth actually give them rhetorical strength? Is our inability to like any of them our fault, as readers, for requiring relatability rather than real-world homeliness? Does the narrator’s lack of any defining personality turn out to serve a different purpose in the story altogether? Are we supposed to like this book? Hacker makes sure, by the end of the novel, that the reader doesn’t even have the comfort of falling back on the shallow conventions of taste.

Any story about art and morals with a protagonist called Art Morel isn’t going to make an initial claim to subtlety (there’s also a character who cries a lot named Delores, and young Will, who sets events spinning by sheer… you get the picture). But there are layers that surprise, some vivid writing, and Hacker offers up odd moments that are, for all the book’s intellectual exercise, like little jabs to the gut:

An officer who could have been one of Arthur’s students took down his name on a pad and asked him some question, each one a spoonful of grief.

At the same time, it’s disconcerting on a purely literary level, changing tenses in a way that might have been designed to mimic a camera pulling out for a wide shot and then back in, but that felt more like grit on the lens. Penelope’s infatuation with Arthur the Artist is hard to take as well; he offers her a chance to read the manuscript before its publication and veto the whole enterprise, and she declines out of some servility to creative mystery that doesn’t quite come off:

Wasn’t it refreshing, after years of seeing everything Arthur wasn’t, of having pointed out to her everything Arthur could never be—and the kind of family she could never have—to be shown what her husband actually was? “So no, I don’t want to go back to an Art who doesn’t make art. I’d rather he offend my parents, offend me.”

But the package as a whole kept turning my reactions back on myself: I’m sorry, can you not handle unpleasant characters? Is the story too ugly for you? Is it making you think too hard? I’m sure there are some Anne Tyler novels on the shelf over there—those are nice. There’s something passive-aggressive about the book’s stance, and at the same time accomplished; you have to admire the ways it toys with you, even if you have reservations about how you’re being treated. The Morels knows you want to break up with it, but has no intention of letting you off the hook that easily.

It looks as though April showers—and snowstorms—have finally brought a few May flowers. With or without showers, we also have the May issue of Open Letters Monthly, which comes with some choice buds and blossoms of its own:

Rohan Maitzen gives us a review of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life… and then the review that might have been… and frankly, had she kept going I would have kept reading.

Max Ross looks at the divided lives of André Aciman’s Harvard Square.

Reviewing the reviewers, Elisa Gabbert takes a look at how Kate Zambreno’s “critical memoir” Heroines has been received.

Pedja Jurisic takes issue with the backward-looking myth-making of Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife.

John Cotter approves of Mark Wallace’s forays into fiction, Dead Carnival and The Quarry and the Lot.

Steve Donoghue clears off the coffee table for Abbeville Press’ handsome reissue of John James Audubon’s iconic Birds of America.

And speaking of iconic… Steve Danziger takes a sideways look at the “garbled madness” of Richard Hell’s biography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp.

Maria Rybakova muses on a father’s absence and Marco Roth’s The Scientists.

Colleen Shea looks at Yoko Ogawa’s Buddhism-inspired story cycle Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales.

Anthony Stewart is happily surprised by Shane Book’s Ceiling of Sticks: “the verse introduces us to the world as we thought we knew it, but then asks a lot more of our perceptions than it is our habit to commit.”

Greg Waldmann piques my interest by declaring Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady’s Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry a “very useful and annoying book.”

From Michael Ives, an original poem excerpted from his Soft Perimeter.

Jonathan Aprea tracks Ben Mirov’s through his poetry collection, Hider Roser.

Steve Danziger resurfaces with an interview with this month’s cover artist Laura Carton about her fascinating photographs of porn-less porn sets, “a kind of Rorschach Test of viewer perversity” (I’m not sure I agree with that, but if it gets readers to click through to the weird and wonderful art then I’m all for the pull quote).

Joshua Harmon waxes eloquent Talking Heads, Bohannon, and the death of cool by hyperlink.

Douglass Shand-Tucci continues his American Aristocracy series with the art of Copley Square.

Irma Heldman’s “It’s a Mystery,” gives us a bit of the British and Irish together, with her look at Mick Herron’s Dead Lions and Stephen Talty’s Black Irish.

Phillip A. Lobo has an imperative for Bioshock Infinite: “Go play this game. I unequivocally exhort you to skip this review until you’ve already finished the game, or if you truly intend never to play it.”

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett has won Arthur C. Clarke Awardthe Arthur C. Clarke Award. It looks like it’s been acquired for publication in the United States, so perhaps we’ll get a chance to read it soon.

The Scott Prize for Short Stories has been awarded to Kirsty Logan for her collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, which will be published in November.

The nominees for the Shirley Jackson Awards have been announced. I think this might be my favorite awards, because the judges customarily roam so widely. I note that this is at least the third major award for which Caítlin R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl has been nominated this year. I really need to get to that book soon! I had no idea that Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl has a fantastical element to it; that’s on my Kindle, waiting for my attention, too. And, of course, I’ve just ordered the two novels on the ballot that I don’t own. These lists, they get me every time.

Why read the classics? Because they can tell us a lot about ourselves and make us feel it, that’s why, as this article explains.

Surely there are some readers of comics — excuse me, “graphic novels” — around here, right? If so, you’re in for quite a summer. This article features 13 alternative comics — comics outside the universe of Marvel and DC — that sound like great fun.

Laird Barron has steadily been updating his list of horror writers any fan of the genre will want to discover. I’ve read at least a little of most of these writers, but there are still some who are new to me — and I’m looking forward to reading them.

Wouldn’t you think that science fiction would be the last genre that would be subject to sexism? It’s forward-looking genre, one that is based on reason and science, both of which are the opposite of sexism, at least in my mind. But science fiction has a long history of extreme sexism, so that women in the past routinely changed their names (like James Tiptree, Jr., who was really Alice Sheldon) or used their initials only (like C.L. Moore). I’d like to say that the problem has receded in the 21st century, but alas, it very definitely has not. Author Patty Jansen writes that sexism is alive and well in hard science fiction. You’d think we didn’t have any females who understood science! But folks, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee: we do. Lots of them. Start with C.L. Cherryh, Nancy Kress and Lois McMaster Bujold, and then come back to me for more.

If you’d like to do your part to correct the sexism that pervades just about all aspects of the literary, you might consider using this list of 101 women worth reading. It’s an amazing list, and I’ll be referring to it to guide my own reading for some time to come, because I’ve only read about half the authors on it (though I own books by a good many more).

I’ve been learning the joys of rejection lately, as I start sending my writing out to various magazines, both literary and genre. It’s the first time I’ve done this since my college days, at the latest, and as far as I can tell the biggest impact of electronic communications is that you can now get rejected in mere days. Sigh. I’ll keep trying. In the meantime, I’ll take comfort from these harsh rejection letters of undeniably brilliant work. Maybe one day one of my rejection slips will show up in a similar article. Hey, it could happen!

I’ve been reading the New York Times Book Review for about two decades now, with increasing dismay at its descent into graphs and charts for pages and pages and pages, fewer reviews, and the more-than-occasional really mean review written by the author’s enemy. I don’t think I agree that reviews are “an outdated form,” but this writer clearly has a point about the NYTBR needing a serious facelift. Maybe the new editor will make it a publication of the time, instead of one that tries to follow old conventions and fails.

I’ve posted before about the Night Shade Books meltdown. Here’s what it means to one new author. Imagine finally getting published, only to have it all ripped away by the impending bankruptcy of your publisher! Ugh. I sure hope things work out for these writers, because Night Shade had a tendency to publish people whose work I really wanted to read.

Room to Read is a charity organization dedicated to helping kids in Africa and Asia attain higher levels of literacy, and, therefore, a ladder out of poverty. I don’t think there’s much you can do that will change a kid’s life than to make him or her a reader. Add this to your list of worthy charities.

Writing is hard! A new writer learns lessons about adverbs, point of view and emotions.

The chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary discusses some interesting word origins. John Simpson is stepping down from his position as chief editor later this year.

These vintage photos of librarians are fun to look through.

I’ve always wanted to work in a bookstore. Or at least, I thought I did until I read this list of weird things customers say in bookstores. I’m proud to say that my questions have never been quite so weird; I’m more likely just to ask for a book they not only don’t have, but never even thought to stock. I have strange taste, I guess.

This doesn’t really have anything to do with books, but it struck me as sufficiently entertaining that I want to share: historical figures updated to today’s looks. Admiral Lord Nelson doesn’t look all that different, really; Shakespeare is fun; and Elizabeth I seems perfect to me. But Marie Antoinette is unrecognizable.

I’ve always loved fairy tales. In fact, I attribute my love of reading to the fact that my mother used to read to me from The Golden Book of Fairy Tales at naptime when I was a child. I have vivid memories of the illustrations in that book; and it sure helped me fall in love with my husband when he purchased a copy for me on one of our first dates (which included a stop at a bookstore, of course). That’s why these fantasy photographs hit me so hard. They are about as beautiful a series of photographs as I’ve ever seen. Hope you enjoy them, too.

Long into each winter I reach a point where I am drawn to believe that the weather and I will never be warm again. I often make it through the holidays and the year end/beginning before this moment of existential despair overtakes me, most often after several days of unseasonable cold and unrelenting winds. I can hardly be blamed for wanting to give up.

I am reminded now, also unseasonably, of my winter angst because this springtime has been sluggish to arrive. It’s May (hello?) and I would have expected leaves, by now, grandly unfurling, and temperatures, you know, measurably warm.

The flowers did arrive, thank you — crocuses and daffodils and tulips (some of the latter nearly as large as baseballs). The flowering trees are, yes, in bloom and I’m grateful for the pink and purple and white canopies. A month ago, to the day, I was once around the dance floor with Edna St. Vincent Millay and that experience was quite helpful and awakening. It seems, though, that something is still missing for me, something transformative.

Elsewhere, Kevin Young (wise and prolific poet, editor, essayist) has honored the birth of his son with great and boisterous joy in Crowning:

… since I’ve seen
your hair deep inside mother,
a glimpse, grass in late
winter, early spring, watching
your mother’s pursed, throbbing,
purpled power, her pushing
you for one whole hour, two,
almost three, almost out,
maybe never, animal smell
and peat, breath and sweat
and mulch-matter …

OK, now we’re getting somewhere. He observes, with great care, the episode of sacred turbulence unfolding before him and offers a breathtaking image (flower as verb) –

… her face
full of fire, then groaning your face
out like a flower, blood-bloom,
crocused into air …

Deep in winter, how improbable that spring will arrive. From deep within mother, how inevitable that we do arrive.

How did this happen?

Some primordial momentum; no small dose of courage; and trust that both of those will deliver. Open mind and open heart and open eyes, clear sight in a world renewed but changed:

warming now, now opening
your eyes midnight
blue in the blue black dawn.

Do you see?

____________________

Kevin Young is Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. Most recently, he is editor of The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink and author of Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels.

(“Crocus” from Geert Orye / cc by)

But think about it I am, chiefly because of a piece over at the New Yorker’s blog, The Impossible Decision: On Whether or Not to Go to Graduate School. In it, Joshua Rothman uses the occasion of being interrogated by his fledgling undergrads to muse on his own career in higher education, which leads to a general stock-taking—“They push you to think about the success and failure of your life projects; to decide whether or not you are happy; to guess what the future holds; to consider your life on a decades-long scale.” Which leads, in the Internet’s insidious domino effect, to my doing the same.

Of course, he’s talking about going after a humanities degree, which comes with its own implications. I’m on the social sciences end of the spectrum, working on an MLS—no offense intended, but these days you couldn’t pay me enough to get an MFA. Still, there are plenty of similarities. One big difference, though, is that Rothman is talking about counseling recent undergrads:

Being consulted about grad school is a little like starring in one of those “Up” documentaries (“28 Up,” ideally; “35 Up,” in some cases).

Dude, keep going… you’re not even warm. Michael Apted’s 56 Up was released here at the beginning of the year, and I think I saw it the first week it was out. At this rate the “Up” subjects have seven years on me, which is a comfortable margin for comparing and contrasting. Still, weren’t any of them in grad school last I looked.

My father was a tenured anthropology professor, and I grew up with a healthy distrust of academia and all its trappings. Which is probably why it took me another 25 years to go back to school after getting my BFA. And here I am, finishing up my last couple of semesters at nearly 50 years of age, every so often wondering just what the hell I’m doing.

I mean, I know what I’m doing: I’m getting my MLS, which will presumably increase my employment potential, and might lead to a good job where I can settle down and toil away the rest of my days. That’s kind of an abstract concept right now, though. For the time being I’m doing the reading, conducting the research, writing the papers, making the PowerPoints, all the while juggling part-time work, freelance work, graduate assistantship, and internship. Add ‘em up, that’s a lot of ships to be keeping afloat. The work is mostly interesting, often challenging, none of it over my head or terribly stressful. Still, it’s a slog. Age and good habits and impeccable writing chops give me a solid advantage, but I find I don’t have the same stamina I would if I were 28. I read slower, rest my eyes more often, and don’t get that sleep-deprivation high anymore; I can function on six hours, but a couple nights of that and I’m dumb as rocks.

Still, I don’t regret signing on for the ride. I don’t think I’m having the immersive experience Rothman describes to his undergrads—I try not to spend a single unnecessary minute on campus, for one thing—but I know it’s making me smarter in some indefinably ascetic way. There’s self-love, and then there’s self-tough-love, and this is definitely the latter; maybe not quite a hair shirt, but definitely a hair camisole. As midlife crises go, it’s still cheaper than a sports car, but rather more expensive than taking up knitting. At this point, I’m not sure I have much choice left.

Fortunately I have Daniel and Terry helping keep this little boat afloat for me while I navigate the waters of my ongoing education, and presumably it’s not forever—even if it feels like it might be. April’s kind of a cruel month anyway. I think some middle-aged guy said that.

Onward.

(Above image is Grad School Barbie ™—“Comes with two outfits: a grubby pair of blue jeans and 5 year old gap T-shirt, and a floppy pair of gray sweatpants with a matching ‘I hate my life’ T-shirt.”)

The winners of the Ditmar Awards, for works by Australian authors, were announced on April 26. Here are more books I want to get my hands on but can’t, especially including Margo Lanagan’s winning novel, Sea Hearts.

I’d love to get to the World Horror Convention in New Orleans this June, but it doesn’t seem to be in the cards. And the World Fantasy Convention is in England this year, which puts it out of reach for my budget. I could always console myself with something closer to home, though, because there’s a plenitude of conventions to choose from. Whether your thing is comics or Star Trek, anime or steampunk, there’s something for you coming this summer.

Speaking of comics, it’s going to be quite a summer in that genre.

I gave you a link to the latest of VIDA’s studies of how literary coverage is affected by gender a few weeks ago. Strange Horizons has followed up with its count of what happens in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. Alas, the story is just as bad in these genres as it is in mainstream literary magazines.

There’s been a healthy mixing of genres going on in fiction lately. Look at Kate Atkinson, who dabbled in mysteries for a time and has just released an alternate history book (the fantastic Life After Life, which I recommend highly). Or check out Michael Chabon, who never seems to write in the same genre twice. But there are still those who stick up their noses at anything that has any hint of genre, and they’re the ones who are killing books. Matt Haig has 30 things to say to the book snob who condemns what you’re reading.

In Virginia, one legislator is leaning in the opposite direction; he has proposed legislation to mandate that students read science fiction. It is this politician’s position that reading science fiction is a good way to encourage students to pursue careers in math, science and engineering.

The afterlife is a fertile subject for writers, but some have posited fictional afterlives that are worse than hell. It’s enough to make you wish for wings and a harp, no matter how boring that sounds.

Authors continue to be concerned about Amazon’s patent for selling used e-books. I feel a bit like I’m watching a slow motion car crash by observing the publishing industry these days. I hope the paradigm gets done with its shifting and turns up a model that works for authors, agents and publishers, and soon.

Publishers Weekly suggests ways that publishers of young adult fiction can help readers. A lot of their suggestions apply fully to adult-oriented fiction, for that matter. It would be great if publishers put the full list of a series inside the front cover, for instance, and put the series number on the spine of the book. There’s nothing worse than buying a book and finding out that it’s the second in a trilogy. Granted, this has the most application in science fiction and fantasy, but it also applies to mysteries (I’d rather read a series in order, wouldn’t you?) and even, occasionally, to mainstream fiction (as, for example, with historical novels). There are other ways to figure this stuff out, of course; I particularly recommend Stop, You’re Killing Me! for mysteries and Fantastic Fiction for SF, fantasy and horror. But publishers could make life a lot easier, and given the trouble they’re in, you’d think they’d try.

Need some more shelf space for your growing (and growing, and growing) book collection? Use your walk-in closet for shelves instead of clothes (see picture on left). That’s what I do, though my closet isn’t quite as pretty (see picture on right), because, after all, my husband and I have to put our clothes somewhere.

Perhaps we should just give up and move into one of these playful libraries. Aren’t they gorgeous?

Walking to the subway one recent morning, I saw a torn bit of plastic lying in the gutter: a common sign, found in any hardware store, made for routine use. This one had a jet-black background from which angry orange letters glared. It originally commanded “NO PARKING,” but all that remained (of insubstantial plastic) was just one corner, turned about, and no longer scolding.

It proclaimed, instead, “ON”.

“I like to find,” Denise Levertov wrote in Pleasures,

what’s not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.

Of joy this we know — it is often concealed; always pending; ever ON.

She marvels at a variety of discoveries: the fragile bones of a squid (“Gull feathers of glass”); the resolute sturdiness of mamey — peel, fruit, seed; and “butteryellow glow” — the sun trumpeting from within each morning glory flower.

All the most delicate items carry a message and invite closer scrutiny; discoveries await.

No Parking?

We hardly need worry; in the course of some journeys, we never stop.

____________________

Across a storied career that spanned a half-century, Denise Levertov (1923-1997) published more than thirty books of and about poetry. Her final work has been collected posthumously in This Great Unknowing: Last Poems. The University of California Press has just released the “first full-length biography” of this poet and activist, artist and humanist: A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, by Donna Hollenberg.

(“Spiral” from Jim Moran / cc by-nc-nd)