Forget Me While I Dream Of You

Meridian is working its way towards publication. Teddi Black and I are working on the cover. I can't say for sure when, but you should be able to get the book from Amazon within a month.  An old-time song called Forget Me Not appears throughout the novel. If you would like to listen to it, you can do so at the link below.  You will need Real Player, which is available for download for free.


Forget Me Not

Old Documents Come To Light--Update

Back in January of this year, I promised to make public the ancillary files I created while writing my novels.  It took a while, but I finally got around to it.  If you want to know more about my process of writing these books, you can click the link below.   You can look at the character sketches and timelines and other files for each novel. This includes Meridian, which I have not even published yet.  It does not include Home, which I won't have out until this fall.


Happy reading. Let me know if you find anything notable or interesting.


Click Here For The Documents

Theodore Dreiser

I am not sure if anyone reads much anymore. I am even less certain that people read classics of American literature.  This is notably true for long, complicated novels.  Which means there is a very good chance that nobody is reading the novels of Theodore Dreiser. That is a pity. 
For whatever reason, literary titans go in and out of favor. Some never achieve a great deal of fame. I think that prominent in that group is Dreiser.  He wrote at least two book that are among the greatest of all American novels: Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925). You may be generally aware of American Tragedy because it was the basis of the movie A Place in the Sun (1951). As wonderful as that film is, the book is even better.  Notably, both Carrie and Tragedy feature men who find themselves in impossible positions with a woman in their lives.  In each case, the role of fate is central to what happens. In Carrie, it is the safe swinging shut after Hurstwood takes the money. In Tragedy, is it the tipping of the boat on the lake where Clyde Griffiths took the pregnant Roberta. Both Hurstwood and Griffiths are overcome by the absurd, by random chance. In that sense, I think that Dreiser anticipated some of the literature of the later 20th Century that focuses on how random acts in a chaotic world can cause significant events to unfold. See if you don't hear echoes of Tragedy in The Stranger by Albert Camus. 
Even if you are not persuaded by my literary arguments, you should still read Dreiser.  His novels are damn good stories if nothing else.  The scenes at the end of Tragedy where Griffiths' mother is trying to save him from execution are extraordinary. So, too, are the scenes of Hurstwood after he has come to ruin in New York.   If you seek out these two novels, be sure to get the restored versions. Dreiser's editors had to impose a lot of cuts to get the books onto shelves.  These forced edits did not serve the stories.  Read them in the original if you can.  Dreiser was a huge influence on me.  I see evidence of his style and technique in almost everything I wrote. Check him out. I think you will be very glad you did.

Forced Prespective

I finally came to the point where I could not tolerate the lousy vision in my right eye any longer. I went to see a very fine eye doctor who told me I had cataracts and needed surgery.  That was good news to me. I have never been able to see well. The cataract surgeon told me that with a new lens implant, I might not need to use eye glasses at all, save to read.  That seemed a wondrous notion, almost like magic and not science. I underwent the procedure on the right eye on April 13, 2015. Within a few hours, I could see out of that right eye. I am sitting at about 20/30, uncorrected. That may not seem like much, but if you have had poor vision for your whole life, it is worth celebrating. I am going to have my left eye done on April 27, 2015.  So, yes, that means that for two weeks I have two different corrections in my eyes.  I am still utterly dependent on eye glasses on the left and have very clear vision on the right. So I am walking around with the right lens popped out of my eye glasses. My depth perception is off. I have run into more things with my right shoulder and leg in the last ten days that I did the rest of my 54+ years. I keep thinking that this is some sort of metaphor: the ability to take in two different views of the world and harmonize them. But that idea is going nowhere.  This is no metaphor--this is a pain in the neck. I trust that by next week my eyes will be back in sync and I will stop walking into door jams.  If you have good vision, be sure to be grateful for it. If you don't, talk to an eye doctor. Maybe there is something to be done.

The Great Gatsby Turns 90

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I have often thought that Gatsby is one of those books so essential to American literature that you cannot imagine their absence. I would put Twain's The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn in that group, along with Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner.  Just take a moment to think of the size of the void left behind if these books did not exist.  The extraordinary thing about Gatsby is how much Fitzgerald got out of so few words. In truth, Gatsby is a very brief novel.  By some estimates, it is barely more than 47,000 words. Ana Karenina is more than seven times longer, for example. But, oh what Fitzgerald did with his carefully chosen words.  No other work of American literature better punctures the myth of the American dream.  We see Gatsby gathering great wealth and prestige (at who knows what cost) all in pursuit of a goal not worth having: the vapid, childlike Daisy Buchanan. The Green Light, indeed.  The message of the book must still resonate. Scribner is still selling 500,000 copies a year.  If by some chance you have never read The Great Gatsby, do so now.   It will change the way you feel about any number of things, mostly about the folly of the American dream.

Meridian Update

I am happy to report that Meridian is out for proofreading. I also got in touch with Teddi Black to have her start cogitating over a cover design.  I suspect it is still going to take a month or two, but Meridian is getting closer to publication.  I will keep you updated as I go along. I will announce, of course, when the book is available on Amazon and CreateSpace.  

A Foreigner's Take On The Murder City

If you have not yet read it, I suggest you take a look at a long travel piece that appeared in the New York Times recently. Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian writer, accepted an offer from the times to come to America and write about his time here. Most improbably, Knausgaard ended up spending a large part of his time in Detroit.  Though he had no particularly original takes on Motown, it is still interesting to read what he has to say.  I think is must astonish foreigners to see Detroit.  For most non-Americans, the USA represents everything that is new and polished and bright. But Detroit is none of those things.  So how to reconcile your notions of America with square miles of abandon and ruin? You will have to read it for yourself.  It is well worth the time.





My Saga by Karl Ove Knausgaard.