From Book Riot:

As a reader, few things are more intriguing or emotionally satisfying than uncovering a family secret. First, they make our own family secrets not seem so strange—after all, everyone has them. And the more astounding they are, the easier it is to get hooked in the story. I’ve collected 15 of the best books about family secrets—fiction and nonfiction, classics and recent debuts.

. . . .

Undiscovered Country by Lin Enger

When 17-year-old Jesse Matson embarks on a deer hunting trip with his dad, he never imagined only one of them would make it home alive. Everyone, even the doctors, believe the death to be a suicide. But the ghost of his father still haunts Jesse, and he’s restless with grief and the need to set things right. In this contemporary Hamlet retelling, Jesse must unravel the family secrets behind his father’s death before they consume him.

. . . .

The Good Daughter by Jasmin Darznik

While helping her mother move after her father’s death, Jasmin Darznik discovers a perplexing photograph of her mother. In it, she is wearing a wedding veil—but the man standing next to her is not Jasmin’s father. At first, her mother refuses to discuss the photo or how it relates to her past. But then, her mother sends a series of ten cassette tapes that reveal her troubled and abusive first marriage, as well as a sister Jasmin.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

From The Wall Street Journal:

On Jan. 4, 1960, the world lost one of the most profound voices of the 20th century. Albert Camus, the 46-year-old author of “The Stranger” and “The Plague” and a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was riding in the passenger seat of a Facel Vega en route to Paris when the car swerved off the road and crashed into a tree. Camus died instantly, while the driver—Camus’s publisher, Michel Gallimard —would die from his injuries a few days later. The man who taught us how to face an absurd world had died an absurd death.

The Italian writer Giovanni Catelli contends that this was no accident. In his book “The Death of Camus,” first published in 2013 and translated into English by Andrew Tanzi, Mr. Catelli lays out the theory that Camus’s car crash was a political killing engineered by the KGB. Camus, Mr. Catelli notes, had issued various broadsides against the Soviet Union in the wake of its 1956 invasion of Hungary. Greatly charismatic and internationally revered, Camus posed a serious challenge to Moscow. He was, the author writes, “a free, indomitable and dangerous man.”

In short, staccato chapters, Mr. Catelli recounts his investigation into the circumstances surrounding Camus’s car crash. He also revisits the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Camus’s connection to a pair of literary figures: the Czech writer Jan Zábrana and the Russian writer Boris Pasternak. Mr. Catelli’s case is compelling but far from ironclad, and some readers will be more convinced than others. But his book provides a clear and useful window into the currents that political writers were forced to navigate during the Cold War.

Zábrana (1931-1984) is central to Mr. Catelli’s narrative. A poet and translator whose parents were persecuted by Czechoslovakia’s communist regime, he rendered Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” into Czech. Mr. Catelli chances one day upon Zábrana’s posthumously published diaries in a Prague bookshop and alights on a passage from 1980, which reads: “I heard something very strange from a knowledgeable and well-connected man. He says the car crash that cost Camus his life in 1960 was set up by Soviet intelligence. They rigged the tyre with a tool that eventually pierced it when the car was travelling at high speed.”

Zábrana’s man (who wouldn’t reveal his source) told him that the order was issued by Soviet minister Dmitri Shepilov, in response to an article Camus wrote in March 1957 that attacked Shepilov over the events in Hungary. Mr. Catelli writes that Camus “let loose with all the indignation of a libertarian who refused to bow to tyranny.” He first attacked Shepilov in a speech delivered on Oct. 30, 1956, during a meeting of the exiled Spanish Republican government. He continued to denounce Moscow over the next few years; in 1958, he wrote the preface to “The Truth About the Nagy Affair,” a book published by the anticommunist Congress for Cultural Freedom refuting the charges brought against Imre Nagy, Hungary’s revolutionary prime minister, whom the Soviets executed for treason.

. . . .

One of the book’s longer digressions concerns the fraught publication of Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago.” Zábrana wouldn’t live to see his translation published—the Czech edition wasn’t released until 1990, after Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. “Doctor Zhivago,” due to Soviet censorship, was first published in an Italian version in 1957, and the CIA helped produce and distribute Russian-language copies at the Brussels Expo a year later. Camus was in touch with Pasternak during this time. Mr. Catelli notes admiring letters between the two, and reports that Camus sought to influence the jury to give Pasternak the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pasternak indeed won the Nobel in 1958—one year after Camus won his—to the great embarrassment of the Soviets, who forced him to decline it. Camus had poked his thumb once more in the eye of the Kremlin, which, if Mr. Catelli is to be believed, would soon orchestrate his demise.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

PG is a sucker for Cold War intrigues, particularly in the communist nations in a geography formerly referred to as Eastern Europe (now Central Europe). Communists there sometimes tried to outdo their Soviet overlords.

Although the difference between the ideal of a worker’s union and its current instantiation, at least in the US, is substantial, the problems of downtrodden workers and their feelings about their lives has generated more than one song that PG enjoys.

Following are a few examples:

Joe Hill, an early 20th century Swedish-American union activist and martyr, wrote a song titled, There is Power in a Union in 1913.

.

American singer, Johnny Paycheck, part of the 1970’s “Outlaw Movement” in country-western music, performed a song about a poorly-paid laborer who has finally had enough, Take This Job and Shove It, written by David Allan Coe, who, per Wikipedia, spent much of his early life (starting at age 9) in reform schools and prisons.

.

Woody Guthrie, an American singer/songwriter who grew up in Oklahoma and Texas during the Great Depression, known as the “Dust Bowl Troubadour”, wrote Union Burying Ground in 1941.

.

Most union songs were originated and written by men, but Bread and Roses is an exception.

The term is associated with the strike by mostly female textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, between January and March 1912, now often referred to as the “Bread and Roses strike”. The slogan pairing bread and roses referenced an appeal for both fair wages and dignified conditions for women.

Per Wikipedia, the “bread and roses” term originated in a 1910 magazine article written by Helen Todd describing an Illinois campaign for women’s rights to vote.

Woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.

The phrase was applied to the right to unionize in 1912 by Polish-born union activist Rose Schneiderman of the Women’s Trade Union League of New York

What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.

The lyrics of the song originated in a 1911 poem by James Oppenheim. The first stanza reads:

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, “Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.”

Per Wikipedia, the song has been sung by graduating seniors at Mount Holyoke College each year since 1932.

Mimi Farnia wrote the following version of Bread and Roses.

.

Finally, back to Joe Hill.

The performer in the following video, Paul Robeson, became the third African-American student ever enrolled at Rutgers College in 1915 and graduated as the valedictorian of his class. Robeson was also a star football player in college and during the early years of the National Football League.

Robeson was the son of a mother who was an African-American school teacher from a prominent Quaker family and a father who who had escaped from slavery in the American south while in his teens and became a Presbyterian minister in Princeton, New Jersey.

While playing professional football, Robeson also attended Columbia Law School and quit football a month before he graduated in 1923. He started his long and successful professional performing career in 1924 as the lead in a Eugene O’Neil play in New York City.

In 1934, Robeson traveled to the Soviet Union at the invitation of famous Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, stopping in Nazi-dominated Berlin on his outbound trip. During the Spanish Civil War, Robeson was an active and open supporter of the Republicans in opposition to the Fascists. During and after World War II, he was labeled a Communist by the FBI which ultimately lead him to be prohibited from traveling overseas during the McCarthy era of the 1950’s and seriously harmed his performing career.

Ultimately, a landmark US Supreme Court decision in 1958, Kent v. Dulles, holding that the right to travel is a part of the “liberty” of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law, permitted Robeson to travel and resume his performing career outside of the United States.

In 1961, Robeson’s health began a severe decline, including a suicide attempt in Moscow followed by extended in-patient psychiatric treatment, including electroshock therapy, in Moscow and East Germany. After returning to the United States in 1963, Robeson’s remaining years were spent in seclusion until he died in 1976.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Never judge a book by its cover. And never, probably, begin a review by quoting that line. But I think it’s appropriate here. For as I gazed at the cover of Francesco Boldizzoni’s “Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx ” and noticed the presence of the Grim Reaper, I prepared myself for a detailed discussion of the millenarianism that has characterized leftist thinking, not only since Marx but indeed long before him.

Such a study would involve an investigation into the religious or quasireligious reasons that have underpinned belief in capitalism’s impending downfall. Their origins stretch back to antiquity, stemming from a desire to overturn the existing order—whatever that might be—and replace it with a heaven on earth. Mr. Boldizzoni offers a glimpse of this: “Fantasies about . . . the second coming of Christ, and speculation about the advent of a classless society, were not different in function. In both cases, at stake were the restoration of justice and the just rewards of the deserving at the end of the turbulent process of contemporary life.”

Despite some backward glances, however, Mr. Boldizzoni’s narrative focuses mainly on the mid-19th century and later, when the rise of capitalism was quickly accompanied by the first forecasts of its replacement. Drastic social change raised questions of whether it was the right social change. As Mr. Boldizzoni demonstrates, those expecting capitalism’s eclipse went beyond the usual suspects: John Stuart Mill turns up, as does John Maynard Keynes. Both looked forward to a time when humanity would be prosperous enough to rise above grubby, sharp-elbowed capitalism, a vision that perhaps reflected their own privileged backgrounds more than anything else.

. . . .

That said, the predictions of capitalism’s extinction made in the past 200 years or so are of considerable interest. There were, for example, Depression-era writers who thought, with more than a nod to Marx, that underconsumption would bring capitalism down. Such doomsayers have (so far) been proved wrong, but their analyses can be well worth the effort Mr. Boldizzoni puts into examining them, even if some are treated with more seriousness than they deserve—out of a deference maybe to the author’s own political inclinations. On the other hand, his adherence to, roughly speaking, midcentury social democracy—an “arguably . . . mild variety of capitalism” with its strong unions, mixed economy and generous welfare state—also gives him valuable distance from his subjects.

Mr. Boldizzoni attributes the failure of predictions of capitalism’s fall to factors that range from overly crude analysis to wishful thinking to mistaken trust in “progress.” The last is usually dated back to the Enlightenment but, I’d argue, is in no small part a relic of centuries of religious thinking. Mr. Boldizzoni writes that “the entire history of social forecasting and its mistakes is intertwined with faith in progress.” His use of the word “faith” is telling—and faith is an unreliable guide to the future.

. . . .

Even soundly based arguments have underestimated the resilience of capitalism or, perhaps, capitalisms—it can take many forms, whether the laissez-faire version of the early 19th century, the more tightly regulated varieties that followed or today’s information economy, and there are plenty more to choose from. Nevertheless, rather than look to capitalism’s adaptability or effectiveness, the author prefers a more complex and not altogether convincing explanation of capitalism’s durability, one resting on the way it is maintained by the combination of a “highly hierarchical social structure” and an “individualistic orientation” of those at the top.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

PG notes that capitalism has been practiced on a small scale for centuries, sometimes even in the midst of socialist or communist societies. Neighbors have sold or swapped. Government officials in socialist societies have accepted bribes for additional services or products. Workers on state farms have set a little aside for themselves here and there.

Capitalism as a recognized system of economic organization has proven remarkably useful in most societies in which it has been tried or officially permitted.

From The Literary Hub:

In the 70 years since the comic strip “Peanuts” first appeared, countless other comic strips have come and gone. All the while, seemingly seamlessly, utterly unconsciously, some of the themes and touchstones of “Peanuts” have woven their way into our vocabulary, our views and voices, our senses and sensibilities.

“Peanuts” may not have the cool factor of other things in our culture, but it has transcended the test of time; it has become an almost Talmudic totem, a talisman, one that we take with us, celebrate with, and perhaps cling to all the more tightly in times of trouble.

It plays a singular role in the popular culture, especially in the context of a society in which it seems that there is little, if anything, on which we can all remotely agree, divided as we are on politics, values, technology. That’s what makes the strip—which officially ended in 2000, when Charles M. Schulz died, but continues in syndication, plus the holiday TV specials, the books, the adaptations for screen and stage, the apps and the ads, and all of the paraphernalia—sacred and even more cherished than ever. It may be hard to imagine considering something as universally popular as “Peanuts” as under-rated, under-appreciated, for what it is. But it is, and its status deserves recognition: it is one of last great shared texts in our culture.

It’s axiomatic that we live in a highly polarized culture. To ideate about enduring cultural consensus about almost anything seems an exercise in wistful nostalgia. And yet, we would do well to imagine what such broad consensus might look like. And we might find ourselves thinking, about the most recent and arguably final example of a great American work of art loved broadly and without reservations by the masses, the elite, and everyone in the so-called middle.

. . . .

Looking back, when “Peanuts” (a title that Schulz detested) first started in 1950, Harry Truman was the president. “All About Eve” was in movie theaters, and Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees was a bestseller.

Fifty years later, when Schulz died, in 2000, “Peanuts” was read in 75 countries, 2,600 papers and 21 languages. In all, well over 18,000 strips appeared over the course of almost a half-decade, making it, according to Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being.”

Along the way: “Peanuts Gallery,” a concerto, was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1997; Schulz received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture; in 1990, his work was shown at the Louvre. Just last year, Apple TV launched the Peanuts Channel, featuring “Snoopy in Space.” “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” continues to be the most produced musical ever, with over 40,000 productions and counting. And as happens perennially, faithfully, over the coming weeks and months, we will come together to watch the Peanuts holiday specials: “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” and the under-appreciated Thanksgiving special, sandwiched in between.

What is it about the world of “Peanuts,” then, that still compels us to enter? Until “Peanuts” came along, comic strips where largely populated by grown-ups acting like children. One of the refreshing revelations, part of what has made “Peanuts” resonate so strongly, for so long and with so many, was that it’s a world of children who act, talk, think, and feel more like adults. This spiritual system peopled exclusively by children, preternaturally wise beyond their years, included among its core beliefs that: Life can be hard; perseverance is required; joy is fleeting but attainable; and imagination is essential.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

IT IS OUR LAST full day in London, my daughter Melissa and me. We take an Uber to the Tower of London and book the hour-long Beefeater tour. The guide is dressed as a guardsman in a red suit, trimmed in gold, and a tall black hat. He cracks jokes on the lawn that used to be the castle’s moat — jokes about the plague and the lack of modern amenities and the beheadings. We laugh, blissfully unaware that we are less than two years away from a plague of our own. It is an unusually warm summer day in London. California weather, ironically. My daughter and I are enjoying our trip, excited to be in a different country, the day filled with possibilities. I am exhilarated.

The guide shows us the White Castle, the Crown Jewels, the battle turrets. When we come upon the Tower Green Monument, my mood changes. The monument stops me cold. This is not the spot where Anne Boleyn was executed, but we are surrounded by her death. Boleyn was beheaded by sword on May 19, 1536, at the age of 35, in a spot that is visible from the monument, to the right of where we are standing. It is now a tourist-filled walkway between the White Tower and the building where the Crown Jewels are kept. Boleyn’s body lies within the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula, just behind the monument and directly in front of us. Behind and to the left of us, the prison towers rise — the Beauchamp Tower, the Bloody Tower, the Bell Tower — the cramped quarters where Boleyn and so many others awaited their deaths, prayed for mercy, witnessed the executions of their friends through grated windows the size of postcards, scratched their names and their last words into the stone walls. “The bell tower showed me such sight / That in my head sticks day and night,” the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote in 1536 from a prison cell overlooking the Tower Green. He was imprisoned with Boleyn and is said to have witnessed her execution. “These bloody days have broken my heart.”

I feel a kinship with Anne Boleyn, with women whose portraits will not end up in the National Portrait Gallery for their accomplishments. Women whose only accomplishment was having survived for a brief period of time in a world which did not belong to them. The monument jolts me from a sleep, reminds me that here a man ordered his wife’s head severed from her body without remorse. The crimes of which Boleyn was accused hardly matter. Her biggest crime was not holding her king’s attention.

In her book Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, anthropologist Frances Larson writes that beheading another human being is an act requiring feelings of both distance and superiority. In the 1500s, King Henry VIII was already superior to any woman by virtue of his birth as a man. Perhaps not so different from today, I think, except the optics have changed. But he was also born a Tudor and became the king of England. In terms of privilege, entitlement, and appetite, I picture him a 16th-century Donald Trump.

At one time, Henry was so infatuated with Boleyn that he broke with the Catholic Church in order to marry her. Three years and three miscarriages later, his feelings had cooled. I imagine King Henry VIII going through the mental gymnastics necessary to distance oneself from a former lover, the rationalizations required to convince oneself the leaving is justified, the cruelty needed to cut the ties, to harden the heart, to take a new lover while the old one is still living, breathing, crying. I have done it. I have had it done to me. However he managed it, Henry distanced himself enough from a woman he once loved, the mother of one of his daughters, to have her killed. He was engaged to his new crush, Jane Seymour, the day after Boleyn’s beheading. They were married 10 days later.

King Henry VIII had between 57,000 and 72,000 people executed during his 40-year reign. The tens of thousands of people who were killed here could never have imagined what this place would become 500 years later. They could not have imagined the people like me, coming here for amusement, gawking and joking and snapping photographs.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books

PG notes that, as many around the world, including many of the visitors to The Passive Voice, worry about sickness or death from Covid, there have definitely been more dangerous and difficult times to live during the past.

PG is presently reading an excellent biography of Peter the Great by Robert Massie.

Peter was the the 14th child of Czar Alexis by his second wife, Natalya Kirillovna Naryshkina. All the other sons, except one, died before Peter, at age ten, became the Tzar, chosen over an older half-brother, Ivan, due to Ivan’s severe physical and mental disabilities.

Immediately prior to Peter’s affirmation as Tzar, at the instigation of a competing Russian royal family, the elite Streltsy Guard fomented a huge riot in Moscow. During this turmoil, Peter witnessed the slaughter of several members of his family, including two of his uncles at the hand of the Streltsy.

Covid sounds benign by comparison.

Well, I wish your mom was ugly

And your dad was ugly too

Then they couldn’t have a girl

To be as beautiful as you

Bob Schneider, Wish the Wind Would Blow Me

Not necessary relevant for all authors, but certainly of interest to authors with day jobs.

From The Wall Street Journal:

For much of the past century, work has been a place where people went. For big organizations, a workplace meant “concrete, steel and glass monuments built to service commerce and Mammon; commanding the skyline of the modern cityscape and dominating the lives of the millions of people who work in them.” So observes corporate real-estate veteran Chris Kane in “Where Is My Office?” But now, he says, “the world of work is changing.” Office work especially is “no longer anchored in one place.” Indeed, he notes, work has become a thing that people do and not a place where people go.

So what is to become of those monuments to Mammon? And how about all those workers whose lives were dominated by them? Mr. Kane explores this question in his intriguing, if meandering, book on “reimagining the workplace for the 21st century.”

Much has been written on the future of work, mostly by management gurus. Mr. Kane comes at the question from a different angle, with a background in the property business—mostly, though not exclusively, in the U.K. He calls himself an “industry provocateur” who has spent his career persuading the people who finance and build offices to think about what their tenants will actually want. (Oddly enough, they don’t seem to want the “uninspiring spaces of beige, grey or off-white” that the industry delivers.) He has also helped large companies rethink their property portfolios, urging executives to see that property can be converted “from a cost centre into a value creator.” He observes that “a well-designed and well-run workplace has beneficial effects on the performance of its occupants.” They collaborate. They feel inspired. They don’t quit quite as quickly. Handled well, property can be a strategic tool.

. . . .

Mr. Kane is also keenly aware that many past attempts to rethink office life have resulted in ideas that are questionable at best: Witness seas of soul-deadening cubicles or the attempts to do away with assigned seating completely that ended up with much-hated “hot desking” policies—everyone has to fend for herself every morning to score a workable spot.

While noting that companies will want more flexible spaces to scale up and down and shorter leases, Mr. Kane wisely doesn’t endorse no-personal-space policies that seem unaware of human nature; nor does he recommend shrinking square-footage requirements to save money and then hoping for the best. He argues that smaller, fluid spaces can’t just be about cutting costs; they should be “about choice of how and where we work.”

The options include renting space in commercial co-working spaces such as WeWork and working from home—something companies were loath to allow in the past, since “many managers insist on being able to see their staff and have them physically present in the same office.” Managers fear that “no work gets done unless they can see their staff at their desks.” Mr. Kane is quick to argue against this fear, but 10 months into Covid, much of this debate seems moot.

The proportion of Americans who had ever worked from home doubled in the span of about two weeks in March 2020. There is every reason to think that, even if “normal” life returns, many companies will aim to keep at least part of their workforce away from central hubs and office towers and that many employees will refuse to endure commutes after a year or more of skipping them. To what effect? one wonders. While Mr. Kane refers to the pandemic from time to time, “Where Is My Office?” feels as if the bulk of the manuscript was written before this game-changer. He says that “the corporate sphere now needs to take a Darwinian approach—adapting and evolving in order to cope with uncertainty.” But the BBC’s new spaces were created with the idea that employees would show up at them more days than not. Now it’s unclear how many organizations really need a gleaming headquarters—no matter how well-designed the headquarters happen to be.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

PG has seen more than a few articles discussing how former office workers should set up and outfit their home work spaces. This type of information can also be helpful for any author who writes some or all of their work at home.

A short, non-comprehensive list for PG would include the following:

1. A comfortable chair that won’t make you ache if you sit in it for several hours a day.
2. A good keyboard.
   1. As a sidenote, at his mother’s wise insistence, PG took a typing class in high school and became the fastest and most-accurate typist in his class (it was a very small class).
   2. PG’s typing skills were valuable for him in college since he earned money by typing papers for other students at exorbitant prices because he could start typing a 20-page term paper at midnight and get it finished in plenty of time so the procrastinating student paying him could turn it in at 8:00 AM and PG could get some sleep before his own 8:00 AM class the next day.
3. PG typed the answers to all of his law school exams (essay questions were standard) as well as the essay portions of his bar exams. Since he could type far faster than he could write (legibly or illegibly), PG could put a lot more of the extensive information he pretended to have in his head into these exams.
4. While PG did a lot of dictating while he had a more typical law practice than he has now, he also did some typing on documents, or parts of documents, that required particular attention and detail that was not conducive to efficient dictation.
5. When computers first came into law offices, PG bought the first computer for himself so he could amply explore its potential uses in his practice. Typing well meant he could experiment quickly. After this learning process, PG gave his computer to his secretary and provided suggestions about how she could use it efficiently (PG always hired the smartest secretaries he could find and paid them well so they stayed with him for a long time). Of course, PG bought the latest faster and more powerful computer available for himself to replace the one that migrated to his secretary’s desk. Whenever he bought a new computer, his secretary got the one he had used before that was typically about a year old, so everybody stayed up to date.
6. This is a very long explanation of the basis upon which PG recommends a good keyboard for anyone who spends much time typing. The difference in cost between a good keyboard and a cheap one is relatively small. PG has used ergonomic keyboards for a long time because he finds them more comfortable and faster. Currently, he uses a wireless keyboard to reduce the substantial clutter on his desk a tiny bit. If you want to do all your writing in a coffee shop, you will want to use a laptop. For PG, however, the keyboard on laptop computers (he has owned and used many) are definitely second-rate. At times (like on an airplane), using a separate keyboard is not feasible. However, it’s not difficult to slide a small cordless keyboard into a canvas briefcase, backpack, carry-on bag, etc., so typing is better when your not on a plane or in an airport.
7. For fellow keyboard nerds, yes, PG does miss the old Northgate keyboards with their lovely key-switches, but we all have to move on from tragic losses like that.

From The Paris Review:

The work of the literary editor is conducted in a kind of shadow, cast by the name of the author. A few editors have stepped out of that shadow, becoming perhaps more infamous than famous, for the labels “editor” and “famous” seem like a contradiction in terms, essentially incompatible. An example is Gordon Lish, who became known in the literary world as “Captain Fiction” and whose authors included Raymond Carver. Another is Maxwell Perkins, editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, whose epithet was the “Editor of Genius.” One of the most celebrated editing jobs ever done was carried out by Ezra Pound, not in any formal capacity, but as a friend, his ruthless hand paring down an early version of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into the form in which we know it today. Gordon Lish’s editing was quite as unconstrained and uncompromising, the style we think of as Carver’s being in fact Lish’s work. Carver himself was rather ambivalent about it, though it unquestionably established his name as a writer. This became apparent when Carver’s own manuscript was published after his death, his stories there being quite differently ample and expansive, barely recognizable. There is little doubt that the editor’s Carver was better than Carver’s Carver, and how must that have made the author feel as he stood in the spotlight to receive his accolades, hailed as the great new name of American literature? The example is interesting, for the job of the editor is to exert influence, not for his own good, nor necessarily for the author’s, but for that of the book, and if we can suggest that Lish went too far, we must also ask in relation to what? After all, the book was certainly the better for it. Were the wounded feelings of its author more important? Without Lish, Carver’s books would have been poorer and he would have been a reasonably good writer rather than a brilliant one. This raises the question of what a writer is, and where the boundaries run between the author, the book, and the surrounding world.

America has a tradition of strong editors, though the issue is not specifically American. I know of Norwegian editors who to all intents and purposes move their author’s feet, so to speak, in the dance of their literary endeavors, who basically instruct them: left foot here, right foot there, left foot here, right foot there. And I know, too, of Norwegian writers at the exact opposite pole, who deliver print-ready manuscripts to their editors and would change publishers promptly at the suggestion of reworking anything.

Lish’s job on Carver is perhaps too extreme to serve as an example of the role of the editor, but what any kind of boundary breaking always does is to draw attention to the boundary itself—in this case between editor and writer, who together with the text form a kind of Bermuda Triangle within whose force field everything said and done disappears without trace. Had Lish not gone as far as he did, everything in Carver’s texts would have been attributed unequivocally to Carver, the way all novels, short stories, and poetry collections are attributed unequivocally to the writer. To understand what goes on in this shadowland, we could ask ourselves: What would the books have been like without their editors? In my own case, the answer is simple: there would have been no books. I would not have been a writer. This is not to say that my editor writes my books for me, but that his thoughts, input, and insights are imperative to their being written. These thoughts, this input, and these insights are particular to me and my writing process; when he is editing the work of other authors, what he gives them is something particular to their work. The job of editor is therefore ideally undefined and open, dependent on each individual writer’s needs, expectations, talent, and integrity, and it is first and foremost based on trust, hinging much more on personal qualities and human understanding than on formal literary competence.

I remember a time in my late twenties when I was working for a literary magazine, we had commissioned a contribution from an established poet, and I was given the job of taking care of it. I read the poem and responded with a few comments, some suggestions as to minor changes, and a tentative inquiry as to whether the poem might be developed a bit further in the same direction. The reply that came back can be summed up in a single question: “Who are you?” In fact, there may well have been an undertone in that reply warranting an even more forceful wording: “Who the hell are you?” I was vexed by this, my comments had been cautious and, as far as I could see, justified. It was how I was used to commenting on the works-in-progress of my writer friends. Surely a poet of such experience and standing could relate more professionally to their own writing?

But the reaction wasn’t about the poem. It was about a faceless editor wanting to change the poem, which I guessed was being construed as an attack. As if there was something wrong with the poem and this faceless young male academic thought he knew what was needed to fix it. Objectively, I think my comments were on the right track, but when it comes to writing there is no such thing as objective, it’s all about the person writing and the person reading. If I had met this poet a few times, if we had been able to gain an impression of each other, perhaps get an idea as to each other’s literary preferences, I think my comments might have been taken differently, perhaps even prompted changes to the work, though not necessarily in the way I had envisaged.

The situations in which creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly—anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that it is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination—and working with writing in that kind of context means that a concept such as quality is a poor standard indeed, at least if we think of quality as an objective norm. In literary editing, quality is a dynamic entity, more a process than a grade, and one that will vary according to the individual writer and editor.

That the books that come out of this are treated in almost exactly the opposite way in literary criticism, which is very much about weights and measures and comparisons to other books, can often throw an author into shock and is something one never quite gets used to. It feels almost as if there are different books, one belonging to the editor, another to the critic, and for the author this can be difficult; should he or she listen to his or her editor, who will invariably say that critics don’t know what they’re talking about, that they are insensitive and stupid, driven by their own agendas, and so on, or to the judgement of the critics?

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

PG could (as usual) be wrong, but he suggests that not all (perhaps not even a majority) of authors are rife with “neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination.”

Based solely on his personal experiences, PG would guess that there are a higher percentage of attorneys that manifest some, many or all of such problems/issues/behaviors than there are authors that do the same. Certainly, due to the pressures of their work (or whatever), a higher percentage of attorneys have problems with alcoholism and drug abuse that is typical of the general population at large.

A great many bar associations sponsor seminars and other educational programs for their members that deal with addiction, drug abuse, mental illnesses, etc. Some even require participation in such programs for a specified number of hours every couple of years.

PG will end this late day of blogging with a handful of additional classic Noel Coward songs.

From Writer Unboxed:

Happy 2021! Now that the longest year in history is over, it’s a good time for reflection and taking stock of things. And by “things” I mean those Christmas and/or Hanukkah gifts you got. If you’re a writer, you probably got a lot of writing-centric gifts. I’m going to say it so you don’t have to: some writer gifts are better than others. (I know, you don’t want to seem ungrateful, but another coffee mug? Really?!)

If Santa decided to go off-list for you, take heart that even the worst Christmas gift for you may be a reasonably serviceable birthday gift for someone else. That’s right, we’re talking about the greatest of holiday taboos: regifting. Some may frown on it, but a properly executed regifting prevents waste and saves you a trip to the store, which is more important than ever during a pandemic, so really you’re doing everybody a favor. The 2021 Regifting Guide for Writers will help you decide what to keep, what to give away, and how to do it without looking like a jerk.

Let the foisting begin!

• Motivational posters: The implicit premise behind many writing-themed gifts is that writers are in an unceasing funk in which they have no ideas or inspiration. This is accurate, of course, but it’s kinda mean to broadcast it to everybody, right? Few gifts signal writers’ daily desperation as loudly as the motivational poster. Designed to fill writers with creative inspiration, writing-inspiration posters more often remind writers of all the writing they’re not getting done. Verdict: Regift it.
• Notebooks: Cracking open a brand-new notebook fills writers with inspiration, and can be a fun way to kickstart a new writing project. Verdict: Keep it.
• Pens: The most ubiquitous tool of any author, pens are portable, useful, and make a statement about your commitment to your craft (or that you snagged a promotional pen when you dropped off your suit at the dry cleaner). Writers get a lot of pens as gifts, some of which are impractical, fussy, or require a very spillable inkwell. However, there are few things more frustrating for a writer than not having a pen when you need one. Verdict: If it’s a fancy pen, keep it. If it’s a box of cheap, ordinary rollerball pens that will actually fit in your pocket, keep it and write a very nice thank-you card.
• Writerly coffee mugs: If there’s one thing people know about writers, is that they’re always drinking coffee, unless they’re drinking alcohol. Coffee mugs emblazoned with statements like, “BE NICE TO ME OR I’LL PUT YOU IN MY NOVEL” and “I AM SILENTLY CORRECTING YOUR GRAMMAR” are popular gifts from folks whose friendship is good enough that they know you’re a writer, but not so close that they will read your work. While each author mug has a different catchy slogan, they all contain the same subtext: “I AM NOT PUBLISHED.” Verdict: Regift it to an unpublished friend.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

From Publishers Weekly:

I am a published novelist and a rabid reader, but I’ve been stalled in both those areas. Between the cultural tumult and my almost-15-year-old dog’s terminal kidney disease, I’ve become a worried political activist and an exhausted canine hospice caregiver.

. . . .

Between my dog’s IV drips and endless treks up and down my four flights of stairs to walk her, I found I cannot concentrate on reading new novels, let alone meeting new characters and remembering who everybody is. So suddenly my reading habit—a great source of joy—stalled.

In these incredibly dark days, I’ve found solace talking to people I’ve known since childhood. And, likewise, I realized I need books with a personal foundation already in place: books that I already know are outstanding, that I know will transport me—books that I trust because of my long history with them. I have such books already on my shelves, but I also bought a couple more.

I’d read a library copy of Percival Everett’s God’s Country in the past, and I bought a new one from Bookshop—assuring him a royalty, a local indie bookstore a sale, and me the leisure to take my time and mark it up for my second reading. I bought a used edition of And the Birds Rained Down by Jocelyne Saucier, translated by Rhonda Mullins, from Better World Books, whose profits support literacy programs, and I read it twice within two months, taking as long as I wanted to savor the delectable prose.

. . . .

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve read my paperback and my parents’ 1951 hardcover of The Catcher in the Rye, and it is beckoning again. In these rough times, there might be something sweet about hanging out with Holden Caulfield.

Likewise, I’ve lost count of my readings of A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s brilliant and hilarious novel whose rejections may have contributed to his suicide. How could publishers have ignored this book? How could a writer do something this original and alive and not meet the sort of welcome that would include the Pulitzer Prize he posthumously received?

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

Today is New Years Day in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere (although PG may be a little fuzzy about the effects of the International Date Line and whether it may 2020, 2021, 2022 or still 1960 in Australia or not).

The traditional book biz was trying to sell books as Christmas presents, but after that, it really went dark.

PG doesn’t know whether regaining his sanity after this strange year is a hopeless endeavor or not, but a day off can’t hurt that process (or make it worse).

PG wishes one and all a good/better/best 2021 and he will be back tomorrow providing that he has not devolved into a pool of primeval slime before then, in which case, he may need to spend another day evolving back to the point of at least limited coherence.