The Olive Reading Series: season thirteen,

Anyone following this blog for any amount of time might already be aware that I’ve long been a fan of Edmonton’s Olive Reading Series [see previous posts here, here, here, here, here and here], currently held at The Empress Ale House. With a featured reader (or readers) monthly during the academic year, each event also features a new chapbook, which also sees limited distribution within the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta. Frustratingly, I don’t have a full run of the chapbooks, but here are some of the recent ones Olive member Jenna Butler has been good enough to send along:

Season 13-1: Iman Mersal’s Anger in its back roads. (Tuesday, September 11, 2012)

The author of four poetry collections in Arabic, poet and editor Iman Mersal is currently anassistant professor of Arabic literature at the University of Alberta, with one collection of poetry translated into English, These Are not Oranges, My Love (New York NY: Sheep Meadow, 2008). Anger in its back roads. is a short selection of her prose poems from three different translators, including this one, translated by Youssef Rakha and first published in English in Banipal 38 – Arab American Authors:

LOVE

            A man decided to explain love to me. Leftover wine, and noon is crossing over to the other side. He was doing up the last button on his shirt as darkness edged into the corner.

Directionlessness, like the moment the screen fades out, and the viewer has to start looking for the exit. In this way he decided to explain love to me, placing the glasses firmly over his ears while I was still naked.

            The room fogged up when he said, “Love is the search for…” I opened my eyes to see hordes of Spaniards looking for gold in Chile. They were hungry and empty-handed, while a Red Indian hid, terrified, behind a rock. When he said, “Love is being content with…”, my fingers started caressing a mountain of dark chocolate, while Ella Fitzgerald’s wailing slipped into my ears. “And it is happiness…” Then I imagined absolutely nothing.

            It must be that I never saw him again, because I don’t remember ever asking him whether love was forgetting his watch by the bedside.

Mersal’s poems weave their way underneath the skin in the most magnificent ways. Her short, meditative poems also manage the difficult tightrope of prose narrative while maintaining the unmistakable cohesion of poetry. One can only hope that a Canadian publisher might be smart enough to take on a collection of her work.

Season 13-2: Sheila E. Murphy’s I don’t often write on purpose I just write (Tuesday, October 9, 2012)

I don’t often write on purpose I just write

A skein of lariats defames heraldic acquisition

Just right for a glut of storage sheds

Where history will not find them

Or their innards

Or the mind beneath them.

Phoenix, Arizona poet Sheila E. Murphy has been developing quite the relationship with Edmonton over the past few years, triggered by her ongoing collaboration with Douglas Barbour, collected now in two trade books (and counting), their Continuations [see my review of such here] and Continuations 2 [see myreview of such here]. During my time in Edmonton, they were not only launching the first of their collaborative books, but reading together for the first time. Through multiple trade books, chapbooks and other ephemera, Murphy’s solo work is expansive, very much part of the bpNichol mantra of “the poem as long as a life.” Everything, it would appear, fits into a single, never-ending project; but a fragment of something large, the scope of which we can’t yet see.

One Hundred Ninety-Fourth

Tired eyesight, redaction of inaction, as if dream

released its legs, lived on invisibly as the mute key.

The specific horn lived in worn velvet blue

dented where the bell and valves had pressed too hard.

Imprimatur, wisdom presumed accessible

via remote, next best to pure absorption.

People, non-neighborly, refer to brandnames

of their weaponry, in hope of sharing that taut bond.

In music, a challenge occurs, and the conductor

oversees the change in seating for the innocent.

There is always such a lovely cadence in Murphy’s poems, and her language brings such an unexpected music. These are poems that might require to be heard.

Season 13-3: Titilope Sonuga’s Snapshots (Tuesday, November 13, 2013)

Fearless

Tonight

we are fearless

we will run

with scissors

stare down

a spitting cobra

play chicken

with a high speed train

we have known

our share of pain

swallowed a deeper

kind of poison

we are not afraid

to crash

We will walk

naked

into

the eye of storm

call down lightning

and dare it

to touch us

One of the strengths of this series is very much the cultural range of the writers featured, not simply repeating the same English-language Canadian poets again and again, such as Nigerian-born spoken word poet Titilope Sonuga, who left Nigeria at thirteen to live in Edmonton, where she later achieved a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering. Author of the self-published Down to Earth (2010), the fierce clarity of her poems in Snapshots are striking, and show just how powerful these poems must be when they’re performed.

Season 13-5: Anna Marie Sewell’s Dark Season (Tuesday, January 22, 2013)

things you give up

arranging six small cups on your kitchen window sill so that

the plum blossom design arcs from cup to cup around

a perfect curvature

wondering whether the world has a place for you

that curvature is now perfected

Author of the poetry collection Fifth World Drum (Frontenac House, 2009), Anna Marie Sewell is Edmonton’s fourth Poet Laureate. The strongest pieces in her small collection Dark Season are the shorter pieces, where the strength of her meditative narratives are boiled down to their essence, keeping to the bare bones.

Season 13-6: Jeff Carpenter’s affordances of fear (Tuesday, February 12, 2013)

1:30 AM, November 12, 2012

North Saskatchewan River, Emily Murphy Park, Edmonton

1.

I fear you least of all the fears afforded me. Your ice narrates and

forgets. Its advent meanders through the forest you forged, in the

valley you forged, through the city you forged. I feared my walk here,

alone in the woods at night. I was relieved to step out of the trees onto

your shore. I could see your other side where all the lights downtown

projected an orange nimbus above us.

During my tenure as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, I was fortunate enough to see the emergence of Edmonton poet Jeff Carpenter. All potential, raging and exploring and seeking, it’s fascinating to see how his work has been developing since, from a publication in The Peter F. Yacht Club and sound-collaborations (as Tonguebath) with glenN robsoN to work in the manifesto issue of The Capilano Review [see my review of such here] and a chapbook with Red Nettle Press, his malachi on foot (2008) [see my review of such here]. What is compelling about Carpenter’s work is its constant movement, even restlessness, not knowing exactly what might happen next. In this small chapbook, poems include title, notation, visual and text, the latter of which exists as a kind of poetic shorthand, whether sketch or notebook offering, all of which cohere into something difficult to explain or trace, and yet, one can’t look away.

3:00 AM, October 27, 2012

My backyard, Old Strathcona, Edmonton

5.

The concerned firefighter drove down to Emily Murphy Park on his

day off to find me. I was trudging uphill to work. He rolled up beside

me and said, were you walking on the river? My beard was frozen

over. I said, why do you ask? and faced him. It was Brad, Glenn’s

brother-in-aw. He recognised me too and said something that

sounded like the ice talking to itself. He gave me a ride up the hill and

explained the dangers of the frozen river, its inconstancy, especially

in the city. He told me not to walk on the ice anymore.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Howard Chaykin

Howard Victor Chaykin has been a comic book professional for over forty years.  forty years.  Think about it.  He took a hiatus from the comics’ industry for about fifteen years, to work his way up the ladder of television, on shows which he’d never watch—while keeping his hands in the comics business, because he knows nothing lasts forever.  He has a terrible reputation among fans for profanity, limited patience with nonsense, and spite, an attitude he’s finally and gratefully aged into. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It's been a long time--nearly 42 years--but I can truly say that I was daunted by that first job.  I had no work ethic, and little skill, so that job--and much of my first ten years of work--makes me cringe.

2 - How did you come to writing and drawing for comics, as opposed to, say, prose fiction or non-fiction?
I never dreamed of doing anything but comics.  Until I was in my mid 30s, I was never able to visualize myself as any other kind of talent.  I first came to Los Angeles as a visitor in the early '70s, but was incapable of translating what I saw as my skill sets into a money making proposition in Hollywood until the late '80s, after FLAGG! had generated an interest in me as an exploitable property.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
My process as a writer is informed by my long experience as a cartoonist, and by the fifteen years I spent as a journey television writer/producer.  It's all about a germ becoming a sentence, then a paragraph, then a page, until I've got a rough beginning, middle and end.  At this point, I begin to apply the tropes and necessities of the delivery system.  In comics, this rough document becomes a series of (frequently cryptic, often nonsensical) sentences on individual index cards, each representing a page.  This process evolves geometrically, from page to panel to final dialogue, at which point I do pretty much the same thing visually--thumbnail, layout, rough, pencil, rough ink, polish, finish.  It sounds like it takes forever, but it's actually a very time serving efficient approach,  For me.

4 - Where does a story usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
The context of story dictates its volume.  As I speak, I'm doing precisely what I describe above with a project to be drawn later this year.  I'd had an eight page outline in my book for awhile, and had presumed, based on the volume, that it would break down into eight parts.  When I started carving, however, the natural breaks came to five issues--but issues that were a bit longer than the current standard.  After confirming with my publisher that this would work, I proceeded.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Oh god--not a chance on this specifically, but I will admit, once you put me near a microphone, my natural oralalia, tinged with a touch of tourette's, takes over.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
None of the above impacts on my comics stuff.  On the other hand, when I'm solicited to provide introductory essays, I believe it's my responsibility to do more than talk about brushes, ink, and drawing technique.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I believe the role of the writer in contemporary life has been profoundly diminished by the internet and blogs. It's along the lines of what's happened in the legitimate theater over the last two decades.  The audience gives everything a standing ovation--which, of course, leaves no room for a response to genuine excellence.  By democratizing opinion, an actually informed opinion gets lost in the shuffle.  I've always felt my tombstone should read "My informed enthusiasms found wanting by your ignorant indifference."  Snobbish?  Sure.  Elitist?  Fucking A.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both.  For the past year, and for the foreseeable future, I'll be working with companies where I've had to hire an editor myself.  Thus, I find myself fighting hammer and tong with someone I'm paying to fight me.  Go figure.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Humility is best defined as being comfortable with one's own insignificance.  And secondly, serenity is learning to live with Plan B.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between writing a story and drawing a story? What do you see as the appeal?
Writing and drawing your own stuff is a control freak's wet dream.   That said, I still love drawing other people's stuff.  It keeps me from getting stale.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Whatever I'm doing, writing, drawing, yelling, my day begins at around 5:30 AM.  I do my clerical stuff, then take two hours off for breakfast with colleagues and friends.  then my desk from 9:00 AM until 5:00 PM.  Yes, I'm that organized--this, to deal with my natural bent toward chaos and distraction.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Never happens.  And when it does, you can't beat Count Basie's old testament band.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The sea.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I'm a product of television, movies, comics, crime fiction, the American popular song, and the American musical theater--all of which have lied to me about my entitled expectations in the realm of happiness and romantic love--and all of which have been forgiven as I've gotten over my own collusion in my own delusional expectations.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I'll only list the dead, in no order--Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Dawn Powell, Gore Vidal, Frank Loesser, Lorenz Hart, Donald Westlake, Fritz Leiber, Philip Farmer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Cole Porter,  S.J. Perelman, Patrick Dennis...more will occur to me later, but since they're all dead, no hurt feelings from omission.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I'd very much like to live abroad for a few years.  This has been a life long dream.  Personal circumstances which are no one's business have taken this off the table, at least for the foreseeable future.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I'm afraid I'm unemployable, so my other dream, becoming a working musical comedy actor, is a perfect choice.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
See above in re: unemployability.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Great?  I loved a novel called RULES OF CIVILITY by Amor Towles, which got me rereading Dawn Powell. I loved Wes Anderson's MOONRISE KINGDOM, the best romantic comedy made in what feels like decades.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm reviving BUCK ROGERS in a four issue miniseries for Hermes press.   I'm drawing SATELLITE SAM, a crime thriller taking place in the world of 1950s children's television, written by Matt Fraction.  I'm writing a drawing a crime piece entitled MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL, the story of a damaged war vet who finds a spiritual awakening.  And finally, I'm doing a BLACK KISS CHRISTMAS SPECIAL, and a sequel, BLACK KISS3--which, if history repeats itself, will also be unavailable to Canadians everywhere.

For fuck's sake, I'm incredibly busy.  I'm exhausted thinking about it.

Thanks for your kind attention.

[Howard Chaykin reads in Ottawa at the ottawa international writers festival on Sunday, April 28, 2013]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Profile of Karl Jirgens' Rampike magazine, with a few questions,

My profile of Karl Jirgens' Rampike magazine is now up at Open Book: Ontario.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tamas Dobozy

TAMAS DOBOZY was born in Nanaimo, BC. After receiving his Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia, he taught at Memorial University. His work has been published in journals throughout North America, and in 1995 he won the annual subTerrain short fiction contest. When X Equals Marylou, his first collection of short fiction, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award. His Siege 13 was winner of the 2012 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Fiction. Tamas Dobozy now teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book was a mistake. It made me aware of what was at stake in writing. The company went bankrupt, so I'm safe. No one will ever put that book out again. I think this recent work is stylistically an extension of "Last Notes and Other Stories" but also a departure into a lot of 3rd person writing, so in that regard a return to the book before that, When X Equals Marylou. It's the first time I've tried to put together a book of stories that has a cohesive subject matter, so in that way it's different.

2 - How did you come to short fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I started as a poet, actually, but sucked at it. So I turned to short fiction because novels take too long to write, and I get bored. A short story is like a poem in a way, highly compressed, except that it has a plot (or at least mine do).

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Sometimes it's fast, sometimes slow. This time around it took me seven years to put together the book. I guess that's slow, though it didn't feel that way to me at the time. Sometimes stories come whipping off my fingers, sometimes they are an agony of snail's pacing. "Rosewood Queens" took 27 drafts, and I'm not talking proofer's drafts, where you're changing the "the's" to "a's," but serious ground-up rewriting each time. It eventually turned into two stories, "Rosewood Queens" and "Old Water." I make lots of notes, go back and delete stuff, shift things around. It's a terrible process. I hate it. But there's no other way.

4 - Where does a story usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Lately stories begin with a title or first line. I usually write discrete stuff, and publish more of it in journals than eventually come together in a book. I love publishing in journals more than anywhere else. I take breaks from the "big book" and work on discrete stuff as it comes to me. It's pretty random, though the final book is a very carefully shaped object.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like the travel, but I'm not a big fan of readings. But at least readings are easy. What I really hate are giving lectures. They take so much time to write up and organize, and I have so little time already. I'd rather be working on my own fiction. I've decided not to do them anymore unless I'm offered so much money I can't say no, and who in his right mind would offer me that kind of money anyhow?

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I like Benjamin, Agamben, Blanchot, De Certeau. Those are theorists I read a lot of. But when I'm writing a story the main questions are just, "How am I possibly going to make sense of all this stuff? How is this going to end? When can I move on to something else?" The questions are all issues of problem solving, very practical, even pedestrian. There's very little magic. I don't know what the current questions are in general, but my own all revolve around how awful human beings are, and why can't they be made a little better.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Other writers can do whatever they want. I have no prescription for them. It's their business. I like to attack certain kinds of truths or certainties and demonstrate how they're never absolute, and how uncertainty is really the best position to assume in almost all instances. That's a political, cultural and epistemological project. I also really like to entertain readers, make them interested in how a story is going to turn out. Entertainment above all else, I say, but of course there's entertainment and then there's entertainment.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. I have always liked working with editors, and been lucky to have worked with some good ones.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"You will never make any money at this." This is a liberating statement; there's no money in writing, so you get to do whatever you like. How many other occupations offer such liberty?

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I do critical prose for my job. If it wasn't required by the university I'd never write another scholarly essay in my life. It's a totally different thing. You drop the quarter in, the machine moves across the page, out pops a critical piece. Stories are totally different, not mechanical at all, susceptible to the vagaries of accident, weather, mood, etc. I can force out a scholarly piece no problem; but I can't force out a story, no matter how I try.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
If I get an hour a day I'm lucky. No routine. I write wherever and whenever I get a break. A typical day for me begins with dragging four kids out of bed to get to school, and then a pile of committee meetings at the university, and then a big glass of Redbreast at night to get me to sleep.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Self-flagellation, usually. I just keep attacking the page until I get a breakthrough, or I throw the whole thing away and start something new. There is no such thing as inspiration. It's all just work. Sometimes you think you've been inspired, and then you realize it's just the announcement of a big job that needs to get done.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The sea.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Music is a big part of my life, and my working life as a writer, mainly jazz and classical. I used to love Pop music, but it bores me very quickly now; it doesn't present enough information. Two weeks of listening and the CD's ready for the garbage. Maybe that's the point of Pop Culture, instant recycling, I don't know. I also love visual art and spend a fair bit of time looking through it.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I like Alvaro Mutis, Mavis Gallant, Eudora Welty, Kenzaburo Oe, Mikhail Bulgakov, Claudio Magris. Those are the big ones. There is no distinction between the work and the life in that regard.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
It would be great to learn to skate very well. I'd love to be able to do that.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would love to be an electrician, something that's definite, hands-on, that at the end of the day produces something of actual effect in the world. If I hadn't been a writer I'd probably be a scholar, which I am anyhow. I was no good at dealing with the material world.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was the only thing I loved unequivocally.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I can't remember the book, there's so many. I loved The Changeling by Oe. The last great film was just a few nights ago: Insignificance by Roeg. Marilyn Monroe explains relativity to Einstein. Fantastic.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Just stories, really. A bigger project hasn't yet fully emerged. The story I'm working on right now is called "Ileo." I may have to throw it away. At this point it would be a relief.

[Tamas Dobozy reads in Ottawa as part of the ottawa international writers festival on April 26 and again on April 27]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Charles Bernstein, Recalculating

Imagine poetry as a series of terraces, some vast, some no bigger than a pinprick, overlooking the city of language. The sound and light show begins in the dark: sentences dart by, one by one, forming wave after wave of the rag and bone shop of the quotidian, events passing before our eyes like the faint glimmer of consciousness in an alcoholic stupor. Facts, facts everywhere but not a drop to drink. (“The Truth in Pudding”)

In his third poetry collection with the University of Chicago Press, New York poet Charles Bernstein’s Recalculating (Chicago Il: University of Chicago Press, 2013) reinforces his exploration of the procedural, the shifting sands of what exactly poems are made of, and how they are constructed. Bernstein’s oeuvre is a constant recalculation, even as the title refers to a technology that didn’t exist when he first began composing and publishing poems. There is something exciting in the way his poems work to keep up with and even ahead of not just technology, but the culture itself. Take the poem “Poem Loading…” made up of the single line, “please wait” (p 12), or a longer poem that harkens back to his previous collection, “The Most Frequent Words in Girly Man,” that opens: “the / is / of / to / in / and / like / you / that / it / on / for / but / with / not / as / war/ no” (p 141). Something of this piece is reminiscent of a poem from the “sound poetry” issue of Prism International from decades back, when a poet I can’t recall the name of reworked Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” reordering the entire poem’s words in alphabetical order. And yet, Bernstein composes poems from a series of foundations, including “translations and adaptations of” pieces by Sylvia Plath, Paul Celan, Cole Porter, Pessoa, Baudelaire, Marjorie Perloff, Wallace Stevens, Robin Blaser and Apollinaire, among so many others. This collection manages somehow to contain the multitudes of constant questioning and re-questioning and a considerable re-grounding.

Todtnauberg

after Paul Celan

Arnica, hold-in-trust, tear

Trump out dim Bruise admit dim

Stern waffled drought,

indigo

Hut,

die in that Bush

—lesson Naming nouns off

where dim mines men—

die in die’s book

gust’s ribbons fail one

I’m an huff-none, hurt

Oaf I’m a dunken den

commends

Wart

in heart’s end

World-wizened, uneyed and bent

Arc is un-arc is, eye’s realm,

Crude, spatter in führer

Deutsche light,

Tears a fog, dear Mensch,

dares admit abort

die halved

beschmuddled Cudgel

fade in Hock’s moor

Folded,

veil.

Always admirable in the work of Charles Bernstein is the sense of play and wry humour, and the wide variety of forms he is willing to explore. Part of his exploration of the poem relates very clearly to how poetry is not only composed, but in how it is read, and the shifting ways the internet has shifted the contemporary reading of the poem, such as in the piece “This Poem is in Finnish”:

This Poem is in Finnish

Translate it by toggling here

While I remain in English, either stranded

Or as one drunken and wheeled to a paddy

Wagon. There was a time I drank blueberry

Wine but that was long ago and my powers

Of recollection are still too strong to forget.

As one overcome by waves of wanton flash-
Backs, acid dreams of moments all too real,

Finds himself mirrored by the mind of a very

Little boy trapped in the body of an old man.

This is an age where the evolution of the internet has increased poetry production and readership, as opposed to what had been earlier feared, and Charles Bernstein has long been at the forefront of such, as both writer and reader. Even this review, one might say, which will most likely receive more “hits” than most literary journals have print runs. Charles Bernstein works a pretty big canvas in his writing, far broader in scope than what lives within the boundaries of Recalculating, a collection that contains a constant movement. The title of the collection reads as the perfect metaphor for Bernstein’s work as a whole, moving in one direction until he takes a deliberate turn and adapts, all the while driving, constantly driving, never lost, but confidently searching, seeking and wondering.

my Electronic Poetry Center - EPC author page has finally been updated,

After five years, I've finally managed to update my author page over at SUNY-Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center. It's filled with a ton of links to my books, reviews and other somesuch, along with this classy photograph Christine McNair took of me during our honeymoon last October, as we visited the Louvre. Thanks much to donato mancini who originally offered the page, and to Jack Krick for all his efforts to help me update.