Tomorrow night, Tanner Hill Gallery is hosting a fund-raiser for the Arts & Education Council of Chattanooga with a silent auction on the work of local artists.
Literary Contests
I’ve gotten word of two literary contests currently running. First, novelist Warren Adler is taking submission for his second annual short story contest in an effort to exalt the short story “and restore its place as a prime literary format.” Read about it here. There’s a $15 fee for English stories of 2,500 words or less, submitted through January 15, 2008.
Second, Abebooks wants to send you to the Steinbeck Festival in Salinas Valley, California, August 2-5. This year’s festival theme is “A Culture of Discontent – Steinbeck and the 60s.” No, I don’t think it sounds like fun either, but with the right people anything can be just the thing for a few days in August. It could be a great place to air out one of those shirts and carry around a Michelle Malkin book.
Didn’t see that coming
Instead of my usual single long post today, you’ll have to make do with 3 small posts, for reasons I shall explain.
I recall that when I was a kid on the farm, when my dad wanted a cow to move and it wouldn’t move, he’d take hold of its tail and twist hard.
No doubt this will shock some animal lovers, but it accomplished its purpose, and I never saw a cow actually injured.
I thought about that kind of tail-twisting as I twisted my own tail last night, forcing myself to actually get out of passive mode, select one (just one) of the agents whose information I’d downloaded the other night, and send an e-mail query to her.
(This is how it’s done most of the time, for you aspiring authors out there. You find a list of agents, you select a few you think might be interested in you [someone suggested sending out 12 at a time, so I selected 12), and then you follow their individual directions for queries. This is not one-size-fits-all. Each agent has a way he/she likes to be approached. Approach them that way. No sense teaching them to hate you even before they know you.)
So I sent a single query last night, and to my amazement I had a reply this morning. (I’m accustomed to being ignored by agents, even my own.) She wants to see a sample chapter and a synopsis. So that’s how I’ll spend my evening. Fortunately I have the basic material backed up, so it didn’t die with my laptop hard drive a couple months back. Let that be a lesson to you. And to me, for that matter.
I’ll keep you posted.
The limits of environmental concern
Dale forwards this link to an article in the National Catholic Register, about one possibly dangerous chemical that’s affecting fish, about which environmentalists seem to have little concern.
Alfred, Bruce and Percy
Another of my columns is available today at The American Spectator Online.
Disreputable BBC
It appears light is exposing lies and deception at the BBC.
Oh, you beautiful Dahl
It was a quiet weekend in Lake Woebegone (to paraphrase a program I stopped listening to years back). The weather was mild for July hereabouts. On Saturday I made a full frontal assault on my renter’s door latch and finally got it working properly. On my uncle Orvis’ advice, I took my Dremel tool to the hole in the striker plate. After some work I discovered that the hole needed to be extended, not sideways, but up. I wore down a grinder head (they made those old striker plates strong back in 1929. Nowadays they’re thin brass. I think this one must have been cast iron), but I prevailed in the end.
Another crisis met and mastered.
On Sunday I actually went to a museum to look at paintings, something I never do.
It came about in this fashion: My friend Chip called me some time back and said he had tickets to this exhibit of Scandinavian landscape paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (the link includes a slide show featuring some of the artworks, in case you’re interested).
I took it for granted he’d gotten the tickets from somebody, didn’t want them, and was trying to give them away. Most anything Scandinavian is fascinating to me (except for their furniture and their politics), but I wasn’t keen to drive around looking for parking in that particular “vibrant, diverse” neighborhood. And anyway, I had no one to use the second ticket. So I told him no.
Then he explained, and I comprehended at length, that he actually wanted to go himself, and was planning to go, and just wanted company. So I agreed.
I enjoyed it more than I expected. The sorrow and pity of the thing was that as the exhibition went on (it was more or less chronologically arranged), the paintings got less interesting to me. I loved the earlier, realistic, Romantic pictures with ships at sail and big storms and bent trees. As the fashion grew more impressionistic and abstract, it all became more and more about the artists and their own states of mind (usually depression). Yes, I’m a Philistine, and I’m proud of it.
Still, it was all interesting. I can look at art with a small trace of comprehension, because I used to draw myself. A lot.
When I was a kid, my life plan was to be some kind of artist. Not a fine artist, but either a commercial artist or a cartoonist. I drew obsessively. Whenever I run into an old classmate, I can count on them asking me, “Are you still drawing?”
My subject matter was a “dead” giveaway. I liked guns. I liked swords. I liked fighting and battles. If were a school kid today, they’d ship me off to a psychologist for counseling (which wouldn’t be a bad thing, come to think of it). My chief subject was the Civil War, until I discovered Vikings. Then I drew Viking battles. Two recurring characters in those old Viking pictures eventually became Erling Skjalgsson (as I think of him) and Lemming, both familiar if you’ve read The Year of the Warrior.
And then, toward the end of high school, I started writing. I think the catalyst for the change may have been my learning to type. I’d always been frustrated with my drawing. What ended up on paper was never exactly what I’d been shooting for, and I always felt I was hammering at the brick wall of my talent limitations. When I started making stories, that frustration vanished, or at least was greatly reduced. I felt I had (or would be able to attain) real mastery of this medium.
So I stopped drawing, pretty much unconsciously. It was some time before I even noticed I’d given it up.
But it’s still enjoyable to look at well-done painting.
There were a couple Edvard Munch’s (the Scream guy’s) works in the collection, but give me J. C. Dahl, for my money.
What Horror Awaits When Writers Read!!
Time asked several writers what they are reading. This first book sounds disgusting, just to be judgmental. (via Books, Inq.)
Settling Down to Read
Where do you like to read? Favorite chair? In the tub? Down on the ccean floor? I have a chair in my house which is cursed with a sleeping hex, I suspect. Whenever I try to read in it, I have to fight off sleep.
How I was corrupted early by degenerate literature
It occurs to me that this is a book blog, and I ought to post about books occasionally.
I’ve already told you pretty much everything I know about writing. I’ll probably be recycling that stuff again after a while, but not quite yet.
So I’ll write about books.
You want to know about books that were important to me growing up, don’t you? Sure you do.
The first book I recall vividly is one of those Golden Books that were so popular back then (do they still have those? Not that I actually care.) It was about Davy Crockett, with pictures based on scenes from the Disney series. I think the Davy Crockett craze happened simultaneously with the arrival of sentience in my life, so I imprinted on Davy Crockett with great intensity. I don’t actually recall seeing the programs on their first showing, but I remember very vividly the Crockett stuff I had. Aside from the book, my brother Moloch and I both had Crockett caps and tee-shirts. I also remember some kind of jigsaw puzzle or board game.
There’s a family legend that I was able to read the Davy Crockett book at a very young age. This was an illusion. The truth was that I had memorized the entire text, and I could recite it by page.
I still have a soft spot for Congressman Crockett, whatever kind of hat he actually wore.
Strangely, I don’t have much clear memory of my other kids’ books, although I’m confident we had a fair number. The next book that really caught my interest (helped by the fact that I could actually read by the time it showed up) was a book called What Cheer?, an anthology of light verse edited by David McCord and published by The New American Library.
The book was actually a Christmas gift to my mother, as I recall, but I was the one in the family who seized on it and spent hours and hours in its pages. Bear in mind that this was grown-up, pretty sophisticated poetry, originally published in journals like The New Yorker or Punch, a lot of which was definitely unsuited to my age. But I escaped corruption through my inability to understand more than maybe an eighth of what I was reading. It didn’t matter to me. I loved the play of words. I loved the jokes, when I got them, or thought I did. I loved the rhythm of the stuff, and the challenge of big words I didn’t know yet. We didn’t have a lot of books in our house, but I think that one was what made me a writer. I still have a copy (though not that particular one, as it happens).
The other published work I’d have to count was The Universal Standard Encyclopedia, published by Funk & Wagnall. My folks bought it one volume at a time, at Nelson’s Super Valu grocery store in Faribault, Minnesota. It was not a premier reference work, but it was what we had, and I took advantage of it. I did not read the books through. I took down volumes at random, and high-graded them for stuff that interested me. I picked up a lot of odd facts that came in handy from time to time throughout the years of my education.
That’s enough for tonight. Have a good weekend.