Archive for the 'Reading' Category

Studying Ralph Waldo Emerson

Published on February 21, 2011 in Author Blog, General Information, Harper's Magazine, Journaling, Journals, Old Journals, Phillip Lopate, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Reading, Walt Whitman, writer blog and writing.

2 Comments

Once in a while I will choose an author or poet to read about in some detail, typically because I am being called to them or because their name crosses my desk a few times within a short period of time.

This week, Ralph Waldo Emerson is that poet. I first stumbled upon his name while investigating a doctorate in Transpersonal Psychology and he was quoted on numerous occasions, mainly because he was part of the transcendental movement which began in the mid-nineteenth century. Transcendalism is at the core of transpersonal psychology which is orientated towards many streams of thought and experience—philosophy, religion and psychology. In fact, Abraham Maslow, who played a key role in the emergence of this new psychology, studied Emerson and viewed him as a self-actualizing person. Both Maslow and Emerson rejected organized religion and believed in the transcendent forms of love, goodness, justice and beauty, in a similar way that Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman did.

Speaking of Whitman, I just finished the wonderful book Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass by Matt Miller where I learned about the poignant relationship between Whitman and Emerson. Emerson wrote Whitman one of the most famous letters written to an aspiring writer which gave Whitman the confidence to forge ahead with his work. You can view the letter on this website:

http://www.classroomelectric.org/volume1/belasco/whitman-emerson.htm

Just after finishing this book, I heard from a good friend that he had recently written an essay for Harper’s Magazine on Emerson called, “Between Insanity and Fat Dullness: How I became an Emersonian.” (January 2011). For a few months prior to writing the essay, Phillip Lopate submerged himself in Emerson’s recently published journals. Lopate’s poignant essay intrigued me on many levels, and I am grateful for his writing, since I do not believe I will be able to carve out the time to read the 1,900 pages of Emerson’s journals.

Lopate says Emerson began keeping his journals “as a dreamy would-be-poet.” He goes on to say that “the journals give us, in full, Emerson’s thinking about his life.” Lopate confesses that he was truly taken by Emerson’s life and how he has become a model for him on how to overcome anxiety and despair, while at the same time making resilience eloquent.

As a journal-keeper myself, I liked that Lopate pointed to the idea that Emerson’s journals revealed his most vulnerable side. I ask you, if you cannot be vulnerable while writing in a journal, then where can you be?
Emerson began keeping journals at the age of sixteen and he filled more than 182 volumes which until now, remained unpublished. Lopate eloquently declares that Emerson was “indeed the weatherman of his own consciousness, charting his moods just as he observed on walks the changing aspects of nature and sky.” He continues, “What I respond to most in Emerson is his even keeled preoccupation with daily life, the daily mental round, and with that his resistance to the bullying closures of the apocalyptic imagination.”

Lopate also discusses Emerson’s social side and how he tried to stretch himself to accommodate others and become larger soled and more responsive, a sentiment at the core of transpersonal psychology. He also revealed that Emerson oscillated between being enchanted and annoyed by his friend’s eccentricities. Interestingly, he worried that Thoreau’s going to jail was ‘one step to suicide’ and that his retreat to the woods might end in ‘want and madness.’ I also learned that Emerson was the one who inspired Thoreau to keep a journal.

I surmise that these wise men who studied transcendentalism were simply seeking spiritual guides who could lead them into their own personal futures. In the end, they decided that the spiritual guide or God (or whatever term you prefer) is within each of us and does not represent any external entity. I could not agree more profoundly.

The Magic of a Good Book

Published on January 24, 2011 in Anais Nin, Author Blog, Creativity, General Information, inspiration, Reading, The Catcher in the Rye, writer blog and writing.

2 Comments

What makes a good book? What makes it hang around for so many years? Why is it that some books you are unable to put down? Many people have speculated on the answer to this question. Personally, I’m not so sure what makes a book timeless. Let us speculate together.

When you cannot put a book down, it might indicate that the author logically composed the book and that the book flows intuitively. The story and its characters are believable. A believable character is also one who wants something. In fact, the author might spend an entire book helping them character get what he or she wants. It has been said that an unmet desire is what makes a story move forward. In fact, when the protagonist gets what they want, the story is usually over.

I also believe that voice makes a good book. The voice is the individual writing style of a writer and what distinguishes one writer from the next. Voice refers to the tone and feeling of the writing, accomplished and this is done through word choice and sentence structure. It is the way an author’s writing sounds on the page, whether it be friendly, formal, chatty or distant. Every writer has a distinct voice and it is this plot which propel a story forward. Often the voice in memoir is easier to detect, because it’s written in the first person.

One of my favorite first-person booksis still as popular as it was at the time of its first release in 1951—Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger who died about one year ago at the age of ninety-one. Salinger used the repetition of certain words which helped to establish both voice and the character development of his protagonist, Holden Caulfield.

In summary, a good classic book teaches you a great deal about life, enriches your mind, provides you with a moral and reveals a passion worth investigating.

Here’s a partial list of some of my favorite books, in no particular order. Perhaps you can share some of yours:

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
La Comedie Humaine by Honore Balzac
The Journals of Anaïs Nin
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
The Color of Water by James McBride
Blue Angel by Francine Prose
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr
My Invented Country by Isabel Allende
Darkness Invisible by William Styron
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
A Separate Piece by John Knowles
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

The Fine Art of Storytelling

Published on December 20, 2010 in Author Blog, autobiographies, Creativity, General Information, inspiration, Journaling, Journals, Reading, writer blog and Writing, journaling.

2 Comments

Lately I have found myself contemplating the fine art of storytelling. Some people are wonderful at it and others just want to make you yawn. The idea of storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images, sounds and embellishments. It is a way to express the emotional power of information. Robert McKee, in his book, Story, says “Stories are equipment for living.” In fact, when a story is told well, the listener is transported on a journey to a new place.

According to John Gardner, “Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat’s; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.”

The holiday season is a good time to share stories amongst friends and family. Some people are better at verbal storytelling, while others, like myself, prefer to revert to the written word. Many of our preferences and comfort zones reflect back to the patterns of our childhoods. As an only child of working parents, I spent a lot of time reading and writing in my journal. My parents were first generation immigrants and worked very long hours to provide food for our table. Dinners were often rushed with a minimum amount of storytelling unless we had a visitor who probed us. As a result, I was raised with books and paper, but gravitated to friends who were good storytellers because my situation made me a good listener. Things haven’t changed. I am who I am.

Lately, I’ve become good friends with a few great storytellers and I have been captivated, mesmerized and curious about what it is that’s missing for me to tell a good story. I have also done some reading to improve my own verbal storytelling (my family often tells me, I neglect to build up the tension and/or I omit the punch line). Heading into my sixth decade, I plan to improve this. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

- Before telling your story, you need to know it well and/or memorize it
- Vary the pitch in your voice when telling a story
- Make sure your facial expressions coincide with the story’s mood
- Make sure the sequence of events is correct
- Build up to the story’s climax
- When finished do not go on to another story
- Practice storytelling in front of a mirror

One thing I also read was the importance of putting on a “story hat.” In other words, just before you are to tell a story, put on your story hat which gets you in the mood to tell your story. It is a way to take your mind off your audience, particularly if you are on the shy side.

If you are curious about some more tips in this area, I suggest you check out a great you-tube on the subject, called, “Storytelling: Theory and Practice.”

A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one and all!

This blog will be taking a two-week hiatus.

Namaste,
Diana

Audio Books: A New Horizon

Published on May 24, 2010 in Creative Nonfiction, Creativity, General Information, Memoir, Musings, Publishers, Reading, writer blog and Writers and Their Notebooks. Tags: , , , , , .

0 Comments

The first book on tape I ever listened to was of Frank McCourt reading his memoir, Angela’s Ashes. I had a two-hour drive to Los Angeles and no doubt, my destination came too quickly. In addition to hearing his amazing story, Frank had a distinctive and compelling reading voice which simply made you want to listen to the entire book at once, but in reality that was not possible.

A few weeks ago, I was invited by a colleague to read my latest book, Writers and Their Notebooks for a reading marathon at The Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic in Santa Barbara. The small and efficient office was set up with a few recording booths and after signing in I was asked what I wanted to read. T.C. Boyle had just read there the day before and obviously the person checking me in did not know I was also an author. My friend stepped in (thankfully) and said, “She’s going to read her own work, of course.”

It was one of those honored moments when I felt proud to be a published author. I was equally honored to learn that soon my book would be made available to blind and learning disabled persons across the country. I had read sections of my book at book signings, but never entire chapters at a time.

I was handed a copy of my book which had been marked up with instructions on to how to read it out loud. My glass-enclosed booth faced another glass-enclosed cubicle occupied by a woman who would spot me and give hand signals telling me when to start and finish.

At the start of each page I was to announce ‘new page.’ When I forgot, she stopped the tape and rewound it for me to start over. After a few pages I got into the rhythm and, as difficult as it was, I had to resist the temptation to change or edit the words.

After reading for a while, I came to the beginning of a new page, looked up, but did not see the woman make any motions. I coughed to get her attention while watching her eyes following the lines on her copy of  my book. She stopped the recording and said, “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry, your voice was so hypnotic.”

There are not many times in a writer’s life when one gets that mushy feeling in the heart and I can safely say this was one of those times. I was delighted that my reading was seemingly as effective on this woman as Frank McCourt’s was on me. It made me want to donate more of my time to the worthy cause.

That night I came home to find a recent issue of Publisher’s Weekly which was highlighting, “Everything Audio.” One article of great interest to me was called, “Storytelling: Authors Reading Their Own Work,” by Adam Boretz. He made a few comments which really resonated with me. “The greatest challenge,” [of recording an audio book] said novelist Sam Lipsyte, “was being shut up in a booth with no sense of how things are really going. With an audience, you can tell if you are losing them, if they are falling asleep, laughing in the wrong places. But this was more of a floating-in-space deal.”

One author compared audio books to the southern tradition of oral storytelling. Other authors feel that reading their book out loud changes there perception of it and offers them new insights. Deepak Chopra who has  done many audio books says that reading his books out loud sometimes leads to new insights and ideas. It can also give the author ideas about where to edit in the book’s next revision.

Some writers claimed that it was important to get a good night’s sleep before the reading and make sure to also drink enough fluids. The funniest statement about doing audio recordings, however, was made by novelist Joshua Ferris who said, “I think the biggest lesson I learned is don’t drink sparkling water because it makes your stomach gurgle.” Now that’s something to remember!

AWP Recap

Published on April 12, 2010 in Baby Boomers, General Information, Publishers, Reading and writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

3 Comments

Dear Readers:

I recently attended the annual AWP conference which this year was held in Denver, Colorado. As usual, it was a stimulating conference, highlighted by the huge book fair and exhibit. Last Thursday I moderated a panel called, “Writing Biographies: Making Someone Else’s Story Your Own,” (panelists: Phillip Lopate, Honor Moore, Robert Root, Kim Stafford and Joy Castro). I was thrilled that the conference room we were given was filled to its capacity of 350 persons. I was also delighted that there were two Santa Barbara attendees – Paul Willis and Glenna Luschei. I thought the panel went as well as it could have gone.  I bow to my stellar panelists – you all shined and I thank you!

There were many highlights at this years’ event – Michael Chabon was a keynote speaker and he was hysterical. Although I have not read any of his books, he has inspired me to do so. On Saturday, writers from THE SUN Magazine gave a great reading featuring editor Sy Safransky and writers Steve Almond, Alison Luterman, Ellen Bass and Frances Lefkowitz. The stories made us laugh and cry—just what we want our readers to do. There were quite a few panels discussing the role and future of small presses, and others addressing the future of book publishing. Here’s a summary of one panel I attended which was moderated by Mary Gannon, the editorial director of Poets & Writers. The panelists included agents, editors and publishers. Mary did a fabulous moderating job and she and the panelists left me with many issues to They all gave me many thing to ponder, such as:

1)    The new technology (ebooks) will make readers out of those who are not readers.

2)    There will no longer be professional book reviewers, but the readers or actual buyers of the books will do the reviewing. Book promotion will be done via word of mouth, in the same way people spoke about books in the past—passed on to friends during lunch, coffee and in the same way independent store owners suggest books to their regular customers and book clubs.

3)    Nielsen’s BookScan which has been in place since late 2009, is a monitoring and analysis service which monitors English-language books by providing weekly point-of-sale data. It tracks about 75% of retail sales which includes chains, independent stores, discount stores and  internet retailers. This service now gives publishers the chance to see how many books of a particular title were sold, so if a big publisher is thinking of taking on an author who was published by a small press, they can tell exactly how many books were sold and if sales were low, they might decide not to take them on.

The way I look at it, this is good and bad news for authors, but either way, we are entering a new era in the book industry where not much is predictable except one thing and that is  that our  children’s children may not even know what a paperback novel is. In many ways I feel sorry for them, but in other ways I’m excited for them because the technology might inspire more people to read. I’m not sure this affects those in their 50s like me who has not yet used my Kindle which has been sitting on my desk now for two months. I thought it a good idea to get ‘with the program,’ and buy one, but somehow, I just cannot bring myself to use it. I grew up in libraries and the paper books are a part of my blood.

I’d love to hear how you feel about the book publishing industry—where you think it’s headed and how you feel about it. Please write into my comment section here.

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Diana

In Memory of J.D. Salinger

Published on February 1, 2010 in j.D. Salinger, Journals, Musings, Reading, The Catcher in the Rye and Writing, journaling. Tags: , , , , .

0 Comments

If I had to choose my favorite novel of all time, it would be Catcher in the Rye. Learning about the passing of J.D. Salinger’s passing last week, marked the end of a personal and societal era. It was consoling to know that he died peacefully in his home in New Hampshire at the age of 91, after what have been fifty reclusive years.

I always wondered what makes an author become a recluse. Or anyone for that matter. Are they trying to escape the attention of fans or are they just antisocial characters? Perhaps they are a combination of the two. If we look at literary history, we observe that many creative people do indeed seek solitude, either to focus on their work or stay out of the limelight. In reality, Salinger’s private life is irrelevant because what we should remember about him will be that he produced a book with a very memorable protagonist, one who has resonated with more than five generations. Catcher in the Rye is one of those rare books like Le Petite Prince that parents and children both stand to gain something from discussing.

There are so many things I love about the book, including the personal narrative of Holden Caulfield who truly depicts the angst and issues of adolescence by illustrating his deep sense of alienation, continuous questioning, and rebelling against authority. I loved Salinger’s blending of the typical adolescent character with his cynical sense of humor and sensitivity which sometimes peeked through the terror of his inevitable hormonal rages. Holden frequently voiced the common belief held by many adolescents that adults are both phony and superficial.

Salinger’s writing style and voice has so inspired much of my own writing. In fact, I have read the book a number of times, particularly when trying to find the voice in my prose. I have tried reading his short stories, but they did not resonate with me nearly as much as Catcher in the Rye. Much of Salinger’s writing focuses on the youth and in fact, he was once quoted as saying, “I almost always write about very young people.”

As I prepared to write this blog, I did some research on Salinger’s life and came upon some interesting factoids that coincidentally resonates with my New Year’s resolution. Although the son of a Polish Jew, in his late twenties Salinger studied Zen Buddhism and adhered to Vendanta Hinduism which advocated celibacy and detachment from responsibilities. Perhaps these interests contributed to his reclusive nature. Salinger also adhered to the principles of kriya yoga and other eastern spiritual, medical and nutritional beliefs including those of Edgar Cayce.

I am curious to learn more about Salinger. Perhaps his heirs will discover hidden secrets, journals or unpublished manuscripts that they might choose to share, as such is usually the case. It seems to be that we are more inspired and curious about the lives of deceased artists than living ones. and as my son recently mentioned in an email, “some of the most famous artists are only recognized through their death.”

What do you think?

What Books Nourish You?

Published on November 13, 2008 in Anais Nin, General Information, Musings, Poetry, Reading and writing. Tags: , , , , , .

0 Comments

Over the years, my attitude has changed. I used to not be a fan of rereading books, proclaiming that there are simply too many books to read.

But now as a seasoned writer and one who studies the works of my favorite authors, I’ve changed my view on this. I believe it’s important for writers to have books near them which provide nourishment and inspiration.

Anaïs Nin believed that the books which nourish us are not books which tell us how things are, but rather books which show us how to change things in our lives. Nourishing books give us a feeling of being pushed into life. They are books which make us smile and stand proud. They are books we don’t want to sell to the used books stores each time we relocate. They are books which travel with us from residence to residence or from town to town.

For me sometimes the most nourishing book is poetry and sometimes it’s fiction and other times it’s memoir. As a teenager, the most nourishing book for me was Salinger’s book, Catcher in The Rye. As a budding writer, I was fascinated by his honesty and candor and wondered how one could write in a way that was easy for everyone to understand. I also loved the writings of the prophet Khalil Gibran and the poetry of Rod McKuen. I admired their simplicity.

These days, the books which follow me from residence to residence are the journals of Anaïs Nin, the novels of Balzac, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s One, Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. On those days when my attention span is shorter, I might gravitate to my favorite quotation books for the fuel for my creations, and the poetry of Billy Collins is always my favorite, no matter my mood. 

What books nourish you?