Sarah E. Moffett

Each day with so much ceremony
begins, with birds, with bells,
with whistles from a factory;
such white-gold skies our eyes
first open on, such brilliant walls
that for a moment we wonder
“Where is the music coming from, the energy?
The day was meant for what ineffable creature
we must have missed?” Oh promptly he
appears and takes his earthly nature
  instantly, instantly falls
  victim of long intrigue,
  assuming memory and mortal
  mortal fatigue.

More slowly falling into sight
and showering into stippled faces,
darkening, condensing all his light;
in spite of all the dreaming
squandered upon him with that look,
suffers our uses and abuses,
sinks through the drift of bodies,
sinks through the drift of vlasses
to evening to the beggar in the park
who, weary, without lamp or book
  prepares stupendous studies:
  the fiery event
  of every day in endless
  endless assent.

Thus said Elizabeth Bishop in Anaphora and Sarah E. Moffett about Monday mornings in D.C. Just replaced “assent” with “descent.”

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Writers writing should not join gamblers gambling. It’s just bad. And writers should definitely not go gambling when in the midst of writing a book. It’s just stupid.

But, oh so much fun.

When I walked into the grand and wide marble foyer, I was willingly drowning in the persuasive waves of ringing machines, purified oxygen and pulsating energy that signals one thing—CASINO. I followed Sinatra’s favorite leading lady, Luck, straight to the roulette table where I turned a crisp Benjamin (do they come any other way from a Casino ATM?) into $300 on numbers 12, 23, 27 and 20, and then in a wave of grandiose narcissism turned singles into nickels to spin my way up to $500.

Kids, this is when you walk away.

But of course, I didn’t.  (If I had left, it would have meant Chinese water torture–i.e. working on book 2.  No thank you.)

In a haze of increasingly strong drinks and turns of the wheel, I turned nickels into thin air faster than Houdini.

I told myself it was because of too many Jack and Cokes, so I promptly ordered another one and had a second go that lasted as your attention span to this blog.

So again, kids, this is when you walk away. Lady Luck has left and you should just follow her out the door.

But the lights were so pretty. So quoting Ocean’s Eleven thru Thirteen to myself, I powered up for redemption in the form of Black Jack, with another several Jack and cokes on the side. And did redemption ever come. Up from $200 to $800, I should have walked. Proving that I have absolutely no common sense and am incapable from learning my own mistakes, I did not.

Ever lose $200 on a -15 card count? Oh yes, that was me.

So now I’m home, nursing my bruised ego, empty purse, and throbbing temples. All of which has taught me a very important lesson. I absolutely, unconditionally, completely and totally must finished reading the Duluouz Legend.

After all, if Jack can’t make me feel better, nothing can.

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A friend lost a friend this weekend.

He was a loveable soft, gray furball of Cheshire infused smiles and Mufasa sized yawns bought for eleven dollars and a Pokemon card by a wide eyed boy a lifetime and several girls ago. Deemed Max, this fearless tom cat used his bantering paws to tame three yipping Chihuahuas and win over a pair of twin Texan boys, a green eyed sister, and the begrudging acceptance of a soft hearted father and graciously indulgent mother. It should also be noted he was a tireless Title VII advocate, discriminating against neither bird nor mouse as an appropriate gift for his owners.

From all signs, he went out as he spent his days doing—sleeping.

I had only met Max once before, so I can’t speak to all his virtues or talents. The best I can say is the truth—I’m not a cat person, but Max actually made me consider being one.

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Only in the literary world. This past week in the literary world we lost some, we lost some more, and we just…kept…on…losing. First up was the death of Thelma Keane, the inspiration for the Mommy character in the long-running “Family Circus” comic created by her husband, Bil Keane, has died. The latest James Bond novel, The Devil May Care, was recently released to the world in the form of 21 languages and “a blaze of publicity not seen since the last Harry Potter book.” (CNN’s words, not mine.) And, brace yourself, titillating publishing news forthcoming: Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccone, is writing a memoir about his sister, to be released in mid-July by an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Cough. Cough. Cough.

So anybody have any REAL literary news I want to hear?

No. I didn’t think so. I’m off to Atlantic City to go find some “news” of my own to mentally purge the past few weeks’ stimulating headlines from my mind. Happy weekend writing.

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Sunday morning I glanced at the columns in Washington Post’s Book World and promptly felt the need to add another shot to my Bloody Mary. It read like a Who’s Who for newly released titles covering divisive politics and doomsday economics. Over ten columns of lovely Sunday morning reading stared back at me with euphoria inducing titles such as For Richer for Poorer, You Are What You Buy, Bankrupt Nation, Millennial Voters, How We R.I.P., Dangerous Minds, and Debt Be Not Proud and Other Tenets of the World of Economics. (Yes, those last twelve words are the tile of un libro.) Bankrupt Nation had my favorite uplifting subtitle—“WHILE AMERICA AGED How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis.” You can pick up this Roger Lowenstein’s gem of good tidings from Penguin Press for a mere $25.95. Prozac sold separately.

It seems the geniuses behind marketing books took the Book Industry Study Group’s plummeting projections seriously, and have taken a leaf out of the politics and consumerism marketing guide book—fear sells. And perhaps it does, but I believe books can be marketed and sold on something other than apocalyptic headlines. Don’t get me wrong. In this age of wars, rumors of wars, famines, pestilences and earthquakes, most people are not reaching for books emblazoned with happy puppies frolicking in fields of daisies. But does marketing have to promote and the media need to focus solely on those titles showing the puppies having their wallets stolen or getting mowed down?

Tellingly, Sunday was Father’s Day, and Book World only gave up one column to honoring dads, the Poet’s Choice, which entailed the author reminiscing about “shadow[ing] [her dad] through pool halls, but—with time and alcohol—he eventually dwindled into a form that fit nowhere except on a barstool at the Veterans’ Club.”  Good times.

So much for having to only fear, fear itself.

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In honor of Father’s Day, below are some of my favorite literary quotes on dads. Ten points if you work it into a last minute Father’s Day card. Double it if you use one in a phone conversation.

“To be a successful father…there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.”
~ Ernest Hemingway

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
~ Mark Twain

A father is a man who expects his children to be as good as he meant to be.
~ Carol Coats

“The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.”
~Robert Frost

“My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.”
~Aldous Huxley

One father is more than a hundred Schoolmasters.
~George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs, 1640

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.
~ Gabriel García Márquez

My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century.
~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

It is much easier to become a father than to be one.
~Kent Nerburn, Letters to My Son: Reflections on Becoming a Man, 1994

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.
~ Sigmond Freud

And my personal favorite~

Two little girls, on their way home from Sunday school, were solemnly discussing the lesson. “Do you believe there is a devil?” asked one. “No,” said the other promptly. “It’s like Santa Claus: it’s your father.”
~Ladies’ Home Journal, quoted in 2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs by Edward F. Murphy

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Atleast, that’s what the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit organization supported by the publishing industry, all but predicted with the release of its projections for the industry, which include a paltry 3 percent to 4 percent growth through 2011, when revenues should top $43 billion. CNN reported that the BISG expects little change in the actual number of books sold and sees a drop in the general trade market by more than 60 million, from 2.282 billion copies in 2007 to 2.220 billion in 2011. 

In other words, no more Potter means no more huge sales.

One expert claimed that the children’s market will barely break even. Modest gains are projected in most adult categories, and the biggest losers likely will be mass market paperbacks, which continue to plunge as baby boomers seek formats with larger print, while religious books should keep growing, by more than 5 percent annually. (If ever there was a time people were looking for faith…)

For more on their report, go here. Otherwise, ignore and write on.

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“It’s nice to have your own place, I will admit that. And it’s nice to have your own time because you can keep people from calling you on the phone and breaking your concentration. Of course, what they’re really doing by breaking your concentration is scaring that scruffy little fleabag back into the bushes.

“That part of the romance I really believe. There is indeed a half-wild beast that lives in the thickets of each writer’s imagination. It gorges on a half-cooked stew of suppositions, superstitions and half-finished stories. It’s drawn by the stink of the image-making stills writers paint in their heads. The place one calls one’s study or writing room is really no more than a clearing in the woods where one trains the beast (insofar as it can be trained) to come. One doesn’t call it; that doesn’t work. One just goes there and picks up the handiest writing implement (or turns it on) and then waits. It usually comes, drawn by the entrancing odor of hopeful ideas. Some days it only comes as far as the edge of the clearing, relieves itself and disappears again. Other days it darts across to the waiting writer, bites him and then turns tail…”

Thus saith Stephen King, whom I’ve never read but couldn’t agree with more. For more insight into his painfully accurate assessment of the writing life, go to the Washington Post article here.  Happy writing.

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My heart is propped up by a Scotch. I just finished one of those books. The ones that pull your insides out through your eyeballs, wash them in enlightened intelligentsia and marinate them in emotion before shoving them back in word by word, page by page, chapter by chapter. “A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.” So before I collapse in exhaustion from this literary experience, I am passing on a list of those books. Add your own through comments as you see fit to share.

• Elie Wiesel’s Night
• Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Julia Alvarez Time of the Butterflies
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle
• Graham Greene’s End of the Affair and Monsignor Quixote and, why stop there, Quiet American
• Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
• Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection
• Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist
• Frederic Buechner’s Godric and ABC’s of Grace
• Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body

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