Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Goals

From the upcoming book, “Overcoming Obstacles With SPUNK! The Keys to Leadership & Goal-Setting” by L. Diane WolfeLife is all about overcoming.Living to the fullest requires determination. We must possess purpose and drive. We need set goals and a positive attitude. Fear must be conquered. Leadership traits and people skills are vital. To live a [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://publicliterature.org/2008/11/21/overcoming-obstacles-and-achieving-goals/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

WBBT Day 4: "I didnt wreck a minivan, and I did
not break into Sea World. I dont think Ill say anything more about the research I did do until the statute of limitations is up."

The interview round-up for today:

Martin Millar at Chasing Ray: "I like writing anything about Kalix, because I like her, and apart from that, probably the scenes between Malveria and Vex. I liked writing about Thrix and Malveria and their fashion obsessions, though that was difficult because although I sympathise with people who are very keen on fashion, I don?t actually know anything about it. So really I was relying on copies of Vogue bought from the local newsagent.

As for the werewolf violence, I quite liked writing that too. (I wouldn?t say it was on a very high level ? I?m not fond of gore or horror) It made for a change. I?ve never written about fighting before but possibly, having read a lot of comics as a youth, I had a secret desire to do so."

John Green at Writing and Ruminating: "So when I started writing Paper Towns, I thought it would only be about the treacherous lie of the manic pixie dream girl.* It is about that (at least I hope it is), but it is more broadly about the relationship between the world we draw and the world that is?when it comes to manic pixie dream girls and also when it comes to Santa and cartography and nerds and user-created encyclopedias and the dead and many other things. So hopefully the story becomes more interesting (and more true) in the writing."

Beth Kephart at Hip Writer Mama

Emily Ecton at Bildungsroman

John David Anderson at Finding Wonderland

Brandon Mull at The YA YA YAs

Lisa Papademetriou at Mother Reader

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ChasingRay/~3/459311301/wbbt_day_4.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Joe the Plumber Becomes Joe the Published Author

Joe the Plumber is about to becomeJoe the Published Author. Yes, Joe the Plumber has landed a book deal.

Samuel Wurzelbacher's book, Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream, will address his ideas about American values, his publisher says.Mr Wurzelbacher sprang to fame when he challenged President-elect Barack Obama about his tax proposals in October.

He said he had chosen a small publisher in order to help "spread the wealth".The term is a reference to the phrase used by Mr Obama when responding to a question from Mr Wurzelbacher about raising taxes for people who earn more than $250,000 (£166,000) a year.The Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, later used the term in an effort to discredit Mr Obama's tax policies, and gave Mr Wurzelbacher a starring role in his campaign rallies and debates.

Does America want to hear more from Joe the Plumber? Texas-based PearlGate Publishing is about to find out.

Permalink | Recent Headlines | Our News Feeds

Read The Full Article:
http://www.readersread.com/cgi-bin/bookblog.pl?bblog=1120081

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Dark Passages: They All Disappear

My newest column at the Los Angeles Times has a missing persons themes running throughout, looking at new and recent books by Stewart O'Nan, Jennifer McMahon and Johan Theorin. Here's how it opens:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, just more than 2,000children are reported missing every single day. The vast majority ofthem are found, sometimes quickly, but for the families and loved onesof those who are not, a canvas of unanswered questions opens up readyto be painted with a palette of psychological complexity.



No wonder that the plight of a disappeared youngster appeals to writerscrisscrossing into and out of genre: When a crime novel focuses onmurder, the expectation is that this chaotic event will be put rightwith the identity of the culprit. But disappearance suggests a moreelastic narrative that takes in a wide spectrum of emotions of thoseaffected.



In other words, a missing-person tale carries the weight of a dissonantchord perpetually unresolved but, as some of the most indelible novelsof the last few years demonstrate, also presents a wide swath of colorand tone rife for exploration from an array of vantage points.

Read on for the rest.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.sarahweinman.com/confessions/2008/11/dark-passages-they-all-disappear.
html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

The Witch's Trinity by Erika Mailman

The year is 1507, and a friar has arrived in Tierkinddorf, a remote German village nestled deeply in the woods. The village has been suffering a famine, and the villagers are desperately hungry. The friar?s arrival is a miracle, and when he claims he can restore the town to prosperity, the men and women gathered to hear him rejoice. The friar has a book called the Malleus Maleficarum??The Witch?s Hammer??a guide to gaining confessions of witchcraft. The friar promises he will identify the guilty woman who has brought God?s anger upon the town; she will be burned, and bounty will be restored. Tierkinddorf is filled with hope. Neighbors wonder aloud who has cursed them and how quickly can she be found? They begin sharing secrets with the friar.

Güde Müller, an elderly woman, has stark and frightening visions?recently she has seen things that defy explanation. None in the village know this, and Güde herself worries that perhaps her mind has begun to wander?certainly she has outlived all but one of her peers in Tierkinddorf. Yet of one thing she is absolutely certain: She has become an object of scorn and a burden to her son?s wife. In these desperate times her daughter-in-law would prefer one less hungry mouth at the family table. As the friar turns his eye on each member of the tiny community, Güde dreads what her daughter-in-law might say to win his favor.

Then one terrible night Güde follows an unearthly voice and the scent of charred meat into the snow-filled woods. Come morning, she no longer knows if the horror she witnessed was real or imagined. She only knows that if the friar hears of it, she may be damned in this life as well as the next.

The Witch?s Trinity beautifully illuminates a dark period of history; it is vividly imagined, elegantly written, haunting, and unforgettable.

When I read books like this I am always left thinking. How can we live in a world where people are capable of burning innocent women on stakes! We might think that we are better now and incapable of these atrocious acts, but when it comes right down to it, the hate has continued. We might not be burning witch's, but there is so much hate and blame in this world. I love to think we have moved away from the actions of the people in this book, but we have just found new ammunition and new enemies. While the townsfolk in this book blindly followed a friar because he was the voice of god, think of the men who followed a leader that flew planes into buildings and killed countless people; or another leader who declared war on helpless people and was allowed to legally kill innocent people for the crimes of a few select. We live in a scary world, as much as we would like to think that we are advanced...

Mailman is an excellent writer. Believe me, when I was reading about the living flesh being burned in raging fires, I could almost picture it happening right in front of me. I almost heard the screams of the innocent as they felt flames tear at their bodies. It was both captivating and disturbing that an author could achieve that. Frankly, books like this scare me. While this is a work of fiction, things like this really happened. A finger was pointed and next thing you know, you were a witch! Those that condemned others to death were just as easily sentenced to death themselves. The 'tests' were farces and the punishments and torture devices were severe. I am always horrified to know that people are capable of such cruelty, but if I was there, who is to say which side I would find myself on. I look back on it now and say I would never be involved, but things were a lot different back then...

So, while I can't say that I totally loved this book, I did really appreciate it. It was just disturbing, as books of this subject matter always are. I will definitely be keeping my eyes open for the next book that Mailman releases. She does tell a really good story, even if I got thinking about things totally unrelated. If you were meant to like the character, you liked the character, and if you were meant to hate them, you hated them. It think she has lots of potential!

Read The Full Article:
http://myreadingbooks.blogspot.com/2008/11/witchs-trinity-by-erika-mailman.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest: Millennium
trilogy, Vol. 3

Reg Keeland/Steven T. Murray, translator into English of that worldwide phenomenon known as Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, sends word in a comment that the third volume will be called The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest in its U.K. release, scheduled for 2010. The novel's title in its original Swedish is Luftslottet som sprängdes, which means "The air castle that blew up."

The English title is rather dynamic, I'd say, and I'd like to know what you think of it, especially if you've read one or more volumes in the trilogy, which also includes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. The title is evocative, promising action and letting us know who will be the center of that action. What other titles are similarly evocative? In what other ways do crime titles appeal to readers? Through atmosphere? By appealing to series loyalty? You tell me!

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Read The Full Article:
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2008/11/girl-who-kicked-hornets-nest-
millennium.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Happy Geography Awareness Week!

I didn't find out it was Geography Awareness Week until today, but since maps are one of my favourite things I thought I'd post about it anyway. The event is sponsored by the National Geographic Society and is aimed at improving geographic knowledge, particularly among Americans, but we can all participate regardless of, well, geography.

Mid-way through the week was GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Day, which celebrates digital mapping. I started working with GIS more than ten years ago, and I've been very pleased to see GIS coming to the internet in recent years. The most obvious manifestation of this is Google Earth, but many government agencies are also putting vast geographic databases online for people and businesses to use. Many of these web applications not only let you view geographic data, they allow you to create, annotate, and share your own maps. For anyone who likes maps, these are good times.

And for the classically inclined, you can also view digital maps of the past online. Check out Google Earth's Ancient Rome 3D layer. Happy mapping!

video details and more

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/Bookworm/~3/460196020/happy-geography.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

London day

London was, well wonderful London, and it's always good to whisk around on the tube and walk the pavements, pretending to be a local, playing at living there again and then head back to Devon.

I used to know exactly where to get on a tube train to then step off at the 'Way Out' sign at the other end but have generally lost the knack, however I did manage it for Russell Square which is my 'best known' tube station. I glanced at those 175 emergency stairs and half-thought of challenging myself as of old, but then realised I'd need oxygen after about thirty or so and resus after about fifty these days and sensibly headed for the lift as usual.

I was on my way to a talk given by the inestimable Elaine Showalter at the Art Worker's Guild in Queen Square. Her subject Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Home Maker and Susan Glaspell, The Home Wrecker and very good it was too. More when I have properly gathered my thoughts and placed them in the context of current reading, but old hunting grounds always hold that magic allure so I had to wander off along Great Ormond Street just to give the old place my fond regards.

I know quite a few ex God's Own Spot nurses now visit dovegreyreader scribbles, so please forgive us if we have a little nostalge together and for them especially some early evening pictures that reminded me of those dark winter evenings walking across Queen Square to go on night duty. Underneath the cape would be the basket holding the clean starched apron, a novel and the knitting/quilting for the quiet night that I don't think happened once in four years, but also the obligatory textbook which you always left open on the desk to impress Night Sister.

Me being The Hoarder found my 1971 Third Edition of Paediatric Nursing by Duncombe & Weller instantly. I see now that by 1991 it was into its Seventh Edition by which time it was probably time to pension it off and start anew.

Mine seems to have suffered from a surfeit of idle (fountain pen) doodling and still has patient notes tucked inside but heaven help you if Night Sister decided to pick it up and test you. Reading the diagnoses for the children that we were caring for that night on infectious diseases ward Cohen back in 1974, it's no wonder we didn't sit down; Tubercular Meningitis, Meningococcal Meningitis x 2, Post-Pertussis Vaccine Encephalopathy (remember the Whooping Cough vaccine scare?), Herpes Encephalitis, E.Coli Meningitis, TB and Epidermolosis Bullosa. Nor did we catch anything, it wouldn't have crossed our minds, masks, gowns, infection control and hand-washing ad infinitum were all second-nature to us.



 

I hate to remind anyone who lived here but yer 'tis, Guilford Street Nurses Home where pigeons were known to nest under beds and the entire cockroach population of London would gather to party in the kitchens at night.Then the glowing and glorious old Southwood Building and the sight thatwould greet us we turned the corner to walk up the drive and were wewould be scurrying round for the next twelve hours.

 

 

Read The Full Article:
http://dovegreyreader.typepad.com/dovegreyreader_scribbles/2008/11/london-was-wel
l-london-and-its-always-good-to-whisk-around-on-the-tube-and-walk-the-pavements-playing-at-living-there-again.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Reader's Diary #417- Hermann Hesse: Poems
(translated by James Wright)

If you'd asked me last month where Steppenwolf (Born To Be Wild, Magic Carpet Ride) got their name, I'd have smugly said from a German novel. Yet when I found the book on the left at a a used book sale recently, I admit this was the first man I thought of: Luckily, when I realized I'd been thinking of Howard Hesseman, not Hermann Hesse, I saw that it was safe to go back in the water, so to speak, and picked myself up a copy.

The first thing that struck me was the simplicity of the poems. Of course it probably helps (or hinders, depending) that translator James Wright has chosen poems that seem to represent "homesickness" and so a single theme runs through each. However, things got a little more complex when I was forced to reconsider what home meant: both to myself, and from poem to poem. Longing for something one cannot even describe seems to have been a common theme running through a few of the books I've read lately, but it's probably one we can all relate to; akin to feeling that something isn't right but having no idea how to fix it.

The second thing that struck me was the difference, or lack of, rhymes in the English version. Wright has the German originals followed by their English translations. Compare:

Wohl lieb ich die finstre Nacht;
Oft aber, wenn sie also bleich
Und duster wie aus Schmerzen lacht,
Graut mir vor ihrem argen reich

I like the darkness well enough;
But sometimes, when it turns bleak
And peaked, as my suffering laughs at me,
Its dreadful kingdom horrifies me.

Without understanding a lick of German, I can clearly see the rhymes at the end of the original (Nacht-lacht, bleich-reich). In the English counterpart, there is the doubling of "me" at the end and there's a near internal rhyme with bleak-peaked. This is about the closest Wright was able to manage.

A poem must be one of the most difficult pieces of language to translate. To find equivalent words in another language for all those subtleties and still convey the intent, possible connotations, and mood must require an amazing sort of skill to do well. And then to add in rhythm and rhyme? Is it even possible to do an adequate job? I'm not bilingual, so I can't answer.

Did I enjoy the poems in this collection? Absolutely. Did I understand them the way Hesse intended? I'm not sure. Then, I'm never sure of that, even with originally English poems. I usually consider it a moot point, but this time I got a little sidetracked. I started thinking of nectarines.

Last winter in Iqaluit, I couldn't get a decent nectarine. The ones at the local Northmart were half-rotten and overpriced, the ones I shipped up from Montreal were just rotten. Was it too much to ask for fresh tropical fruit in the Arctic?

Probably. It's the Arctic for God sakes! I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow I've come to expect the world to be completely accessible to me. (Blame globalization.) But judging by the outcry last year when food prices started to climb due to rising fuel costs, I don't think I'm alone.
And maybe it's not just commodities. Maybe it's also ideas. (Blame the Internet.) Surely that's not a bad thing... or is it?

Should a book of German poetry be accessible to me? If I have to rely on a translation, maybe not. How would I know if it was half rotten?

On second thought, what if I was to learn German? Maybe accessibility isn't the issue, maybe a sense of entitlement is. If I want to have a greater appreciation of Hesse's poetry-- in its German original-- I should have to work for it.

Nah. Who has the time for that?

I'll take Wright's nectarines. This one doesn't taste bad at all...

Without You

My Pillow gazes upon me at night
Empty as a gravestone;
I never thought it would be so bitter
To be alone,
Not to lie down asleep in your hair.

(Read the rest here.)



Read The Full Article:
http://bookmineset.blogspot.com/2008/11/readers-diary-417-hermann-hesse-poems.htm
l

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Geoff Dyer: The Missing of the Somme

It was the 90th anniversary of Armistice recently which led me to revisit Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme. But he was already on my mind as I had discovered that he will soon publish his first novel in a decade. His novels are perhaps the least of him, or their punning titles are anyway: his last was Paris Trance (1998) and his next is Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009). It’s in non-fiction where he excels: the compendium of essays Anglo-English Attitudes; the study of photography The Ongoing Moment; his brilliant account of almost failing to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage. A disciple of Berger and admirer of Bernhard, Dyer is nonetheless capable of shameless silliness in a way which still manages to be charming, as in his award-winning (well, a WHSmith award. But they all count) travelogue-cum-’memoir’, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. In that book he tells us, and it might apply to any of them: “Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head.”

The Missing of the Somme (1994) came about because

like the youthful Christopher Isherwood who wanted to write a novel entitled ‘A War Memorial’, I wanted to write a book that was not about ‘the War itself but the effect of the idea of [the War] on my generation’. Not a novel but an essay in mediation: research notes for a Great War novel I had no intention of writing, the themes of a novel without its substance…

This is typical Dyer self-deprecation. This is a substantial book despite its page count. Everything has been thoroughly considered, down to his reasons for sticking to ‘the Great War’ rather than the coldly associative ‘First World War’ or (even worse) ‘World War I’. “Was there not, amidst all this grief, a faint shudder or shiver of excitement at the unimaginable vastness of it all? … Was there not a faint glow of pride, an unavoidable undertow of semantic approval, in terming the war ‘Great’?”

That ‘vastness’ is backed up by the figures. “In total 918 cemeteries were built on the Western Front with 580,000 named and 180,000 unidentified graves.” “By the time of the great battles of attrition in 1916-17, mass graves were dug in advance of major offensives.” “France and Germany each lost more than a million and a half men; Russia, two million. Three-quarters of a million of the dead were British.” “If the Empire’s dead marched four abreast down Whitehall, it would take them three and a half days to pass the Cenotaph.” We could read these numbers all day and never get closer, even almost a century on, to comprehending the scale of the deaths. Dyer’s method then is to deal primarily with the act of remembrance of the war rather than the war itself.

The war paralysed not only a generation and a decade, but bled back to infect the past.

Life in the decade and a half preceding 1914 has come to be viewed inevitably and unavoidably through the optic of the war that followed it. The past as past was preserved by the war that shattered it. By ushering in a future characterized by instability and uncertainty, it embalmed forever a past characterized by stability and certainty.

Aspects of memories of the war are preserved in statues, cemeteries and photographs. “Every family has an album like this. Even as we prepare to open it, the act of looking at the album is overlaid by the emotions it will engender. We look at the pictures as if reading a poem about the experience of seeing them.” Dyer’s liberal use of photographs through the text brings to mind W.G. Sebald, and it’s in his discursive manner too, the ‘narrative’ which looks meandering or random but in fact is highly wrought and tightly structured.

Dyer records the use of statues of unknown soldiers (”they are all over the country, these Tommies”) and how, “rotted by pollution, powerless to protect themselves, their only defence, like that of the blind, is our respect.”

The most common form of sculpture - a soldier, head bowed, leaning on his downward-pointed rifle - actually represents the self-contained ideal of remembrance: the soldier being remembered and the soldier remembering. Sculptures like this appeal to - and are about - the act of remembrance itself: a depiction of the ideal form of the emotion which looking at them elicits.

Similarly, “at the Cenotaph it is the act of remembering together that is being remembered.”

My usual method when reading a book is to mark the page margins with a pencil at a notable passage. Here there were so many - barely a page unmarked - that the best way of reviewing the book would be simply to type it all out again. In a sense this is what Dyer has done. The Missing of the Somme is peppered with material from other texts - the notes cite some 300 quotations and sources in a 130-page book - but it is Dyer’s triumph to bring all the elements together in an elegiac whole. This also provides a handy source of other books I now need to read, such as Henri Barbusse’s 1916 novel Under Fire, which exemplifies one of Dyer’s central ideas. Here, French troops discuss the bombardments they are enduring in the trenches.

‘It’ll be no good telling about it, eh? They wouldn’t believe you; not out of malice or through liking to pull your leg, but because they couldn’t … No one can know. Only us.’

‘No, not even us, not even us!’ someone cried.

‘That’s what I say too. We shall forget - we’re forgetting already, my boy!’

‘We’ve seen too much to remember.’

‘And everything we’ve seen was too much. We’re not made to hold it all. It takes its bloody hook in all directions. We’re too little to hold it.’

The key here is that the war was, in certain respects, being remembered even before it was fought. When Siegfried Sassoon suggested that Wilfred Owen change ‘Dead’ in the title of his poem from ‘Anthem for Dead Youth’ to ‘Doomed’, it became a memorial “to those who are going to have died.” Similarly, I was surprised to learn that Laurence Binyon’s famous ‘For the Fallen’ -

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them

- was written in September 1914: “before the fallen actually fell.”

‘For the Fallen’, in other words, is not a work of remembrance but of anticipation, or more accurately, the anticipation of remembrance: a foreseeing that is also a determining. … We will remember them.

      

Read The Full Article:
http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/geoff-dyer-the-missing-of-the-somme/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!