by Alexandra Sokoloff

Rabbit rabbit – to JT and everyone else.  (Click through if you have no idea what I’m talking about.  And please think about starting off the year virtuously by donating to Wikipedia while you’re over there – they’re asking for just $5).

Hmm, wow, I get to blog on New Year’s Day.  That’s a lot of pressure!  Or not.  Maybe everyone will love me if I just speak very softly and in words of fewer than two syllables.

First of all, can I just say (for more than just myself, I know) –

THANK GOD IT’S 2011.

I wish everyone here at Murderati, and all our families and friends – and while I’m at it every sentient being on the planet – a joyful, ecstatically fulfilling, and transcendent year.

Okay, so the timing of this clearly means I was actually meant to do some actual resolutions.   But let’s say intentions, instead, because that word is more focusing for me and doesn’t remind me so much of dieting. 

What – (that is suitable for public posting) – do I really desire for this year, in the obvious main areas of my life?

– Living:  Be more conscious. 

Of everything – but what I mean by conscious is paying attention to what my life is telling me, and the Universe is telling me.   On good days I believe that the Universe is speaking to us all the time, even or especially on the bad days, and that the most fulfilling way of living is to listen for that guidance and be as much in the flow as we can be.  Unfortunately, most days I forget all that entirely as I get caught up in all the stuff, you know, the STUFF, and if you forget it too many days in a row you tend to start not believing it.   So I will pay attention to the synchronicities, and those small, insistent pushes, and those overtly symbolic dreams that scream at you in multileveled Technicolor  Stay away from that one you idiot or if you live you will regret it every day of the rest of your life  – and do my best to live every day as if I really have a purpose in life and even more importantly – that life has a purpose for me.

– Relationships:  Hmm, all right, without going into detail…

Love everyone more – but with better boundaries.  Look to recognize the god/dess in everyone.   As for the rest, sorry, but I did say only what was fit to post publicly.

– Dancing:  Dance more.  Period. 

I’m just a better person when I dance every day.  It makes everything better.

– Teaching:  Keep growing as a teacher, finding new ways to inspire people to tell the best stories they can.

But also, be more integrated about living my writing in my teaching and my teaching in my writing.  I think what I mean by this is – there’s no reason to compartmentalize.  It’s all part of the same process.   You only really teach by doing.

– Writing…

Hmm.  

Yes, this is my living, but I’ve got to say it’s terrifying to think of how many books I’ve committed to write this year.  Scary doesn’t begin to describe it – I must have been insane.   Actually, I think we’ve already established this.   But it’s too late to panic, now – I am just going to have to take it one day at a time, and learn how to not fight the process. Writing is always going to be exhausting: I like how Joe Landsdale puts it:  “You never really rest; the synapses are firing all the time.”  But I am starting – starting – to believe I can be more gentle with myself about it and get just as much done, probably more.  Or better.   I have an inner slave driver that needs to get over itself.  I’m going to be more aware of when that self-punishing impulse in me starts to take over and just not let that happen.  I hope.

My writing intention is to write better books. 

Right – but how?  I think it has to do with committing even more to each story and the process – to recognize fear when it comes up and instead of pulling back and doing things to distract myself, treat the fear as a signpost that I’m on to something important and treat it as an opportunity to go deeper.   Again, this seems to be about being more conscious.

– Career:   Well, not like you can separate this from writing, but –

At Bouchercon in San Francisco this – I mean last! – year, I was in the bar – I mean lobby – bitching to Our Rob and Marcus Sakey:  “I need to do something DIFFERENT.”  And Marcus said, “Honey, we’re all there.”

Hearing him say that was a huge reality check, because I realized he’s right in every way.  In fact, that’s always going to be the state of a writer’s career, or any artist’s.  We are always going to feel like we need to do something different – which means not just different, but also doing it differently.  And in fact we HAVE to always be doing something different, and differently.   It’s a good thing.

What I want to keep for every day of this year was the total inspiration I felt at Bouchercon – my sense of awe and pride about being able to live and work in the incredible worldwide community of mystery and thriller writers, to be constantly inspired and encouraged and often blown away by the creative risks my colleagues are taking, and to learn from their skill and commitment and passion to bring more depth and power to my own stories.   Lee Child says: “As crime writers we are all constantly building the genre with the work we do.”   My intention is to be more conscious that I am helping to build the genre, and to do my part with the work I do this year.   I think if I stay focused on that, the career will take care of itself.

I wish everyone here whatever is that inspiration for you.

So, um, anyone conscious out there who wants to share some intentions? 

– Alex

Oh, almost forgot – starting kind of today, but really more like Monday, I’m doing a New Year jump-start online writing workshop, 2 weeks for just $15 (we’re running 2 days over to accommodate hangovers.  I mean, the holiday.)   Come get motivated!  

Details and registration here.

By Cornelia Read

[I have no excuse, except that nothing says “Christmas Tradition” to me like stoned grownups and a bunch of twinkly lights wrapped around some palm trees…

Yeah, whatever, so it’s a cactus. So sue me.]

It was, like, whoooooa… Christmas, and all through So-Cal*

Not a stoner was surfing, neither Local nor Val**;

Our longboards were leaned up against the garage,

Cause we’d totally scarfed on pâté and fromage;

My best dudes were sacked out all biffed in their beds,

While visions of shred-betties*** danced in their heads;

And my chick in her drug rug****, and me in my Uggs,

Had just smoked a bowl of our taste Maui Bud,

When on the canal there arose such a ruckus,

I rolled out our hammock and said, “dude, what the fuck’s this?”

Cross the lawn I rocked steady, still awesomely cas’****

‘Til I’d unlatched the moon gate and sparked up some hash.

The moon on the breast of the tidewater’s flow

Gave the lustre of mid-day to this fat dude below,

He was riding a gondola, toking off a fat spliff

With all these, like, deer hanging out… um… him with.

He totally smiled up at me, sly and quick,

And I was all, like, “Dude, you’re that awesome St. Nick!”

Then he went, “Cha, kid, you’re onto my trip,”

And I was all stoked to be totally hip.

He had a broad face and a little round belly,

That shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly, like, elf,

That I so laughed my ass off, in spite of myself;

He chucked me this zip-loc of mushrooms, way phat,

And I said, “Dude you are awesome, and rockin’ that hat!”

Then I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he rowed out of sight,

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

 

*Southern California.

**People from “The Valley.” Which, as a pal of my sister Elena’s once pointed out, “is kind of like your best friend’s little sister. Hot, flat, and you don’t want to go there.”

*** Chicks who surf.
****

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**** Short for “casual.” Pronounced cazh.

 

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Yes, once again, I’m about to do that thing I do, the long drive.  It’s funny, but I seem to be repeating a childhood pattern (as we all tend to do).  In my case it is the full-out cross-country road trip once a year.

My father is a peripatetic kind of guy. Because of various revolutions and natural disasters and immigration restrictions, his family moved from Leningrad to Tokyo to Mexico City before he was three years old. (We think we live exciting lives – but if you ask me nothing we do holds a candle to what our parents have lived through.) That sense of movement never really left Dad; he got into the U.S. when he was 15 and rode the rails all over the country before he was 18, and I’ve never seen him happier than when he’s behind the wheel of a car (“King of the Road” is one of our family songs).

Though when he married and started a family he put down roots in California, Dad and my mother are both educators, and at the time my siblings and I were growing up, schools still had those three-month long summer vacations. And we spent those long summers on the road, driving all over the country, different routes every year, because Dad and Mom thought that we should see the country. All of it. Intimately. You might even say, would definitely have said if you had seen how grimy we all got after two months on the highway, that we became one with it.

So some of my earliest and most enduring memories and sensations are – movement. Perpetual movement. Constantly changing scenery and huge contrasts: endless brutal deserts turning into palm oases. Towering craggy mountain ranges with pockets of ethereal fields of wildflowers. Geysers and glaciers… and grizzly bears trying to claw their way into the car.

And while there are other life lessons generally associated with the back seats of cars, I really believe that the back seat was where I learned how to write.

I don’t think it’s any surprise that I’m a sucker for big visuals in my reading and my writing, or that I crave stories that have a constantly moving pace and surprises around every bend. I definitely picked up those rhythms and preferences on the road.

But as everyone knows, road trips aren’t necessarily a thrill a minute. Especially in portions of, say, Texas, where the same kind of flat landscape seems to go on for days. Oh, right, that’s because it DOES go on for days. So I did a hell of a lot of reading along some of those stretches, and sometimes would read the same book several times in a trip, which was great training for writing, because with multiple readings you start to see the mechanics of it all. I could recite whole sections of my favorite thrillers and mysteries to my family. I also learned to make up stories to entertain myself. What if that car following us was full of CIA agents? (Oh, right – the car behind us sometimes WAS full of CIA agents. My father is a scientist, and Russian, and that was a suspicious combination when I was a child).

But what if they kidnapped us? What if I was the only one who could get free?

What if those dinosaurs in Dinosaur World suddenly came to life? (Okay, Michael Crichton beat me to that one)

What if there were real ghosts in that ghost town?

You have a lot of time for those “What ifs” on the road.

And God knows all that traveling – the national parks, the different cities, the museums and art galleries and reservations and ghost towns along the way, gave me a whole lifetime of fodder for different stories.

I’m eternally grateful for the traveling because it’s made me completely unafraid about jumping in a car or on a plane and going wherever I have to go to research a story.  Not just unafraid, but eager for it. Especially writing supernatural thrillers as I do – the PLACE of a ghost story is sometimes the most important part of the whole deal. I always want to visit and explore the city or region I’m writing about, because it’s the best way to give a reader a true and complete experience. I need you to believe in the reality of the story – to feel and smell and hear things – so I can sneak in there and scare the pants off you.

All that traveling also prepared me for the author’s life – although I never would have known that going in. I don’t think anyone can possibly realize how much traveling is required of an author: not just the research, but the conventions, the book signings, the workshop gigs. It’s a wonderful gypsy life – you go to different cities every year for Bouchercon, Left Coast Crime, Book Expo America, the Public Library Association conference, Thrillerfest, Malice Domestic, Romantic Times – and all your friends are there, including your agent and editor, so you end up doing business in all these different cities. It’s a huge traveling circus, really.

And it helps me with dreaded book promotion that I have no problem driving all over the state – any state – to stop in at bookstores and sign stock. I’d prefer to be driven, but driving itself is relaxing to me, and a welcome break from writing, so I find it a great balance – exhausting, I won’t lie about that, but also rejuvenating.

I don’t panic if I get lost, I don’t worry when little things go wrong, and I really do end up enjoying the ride. And I never, ever forget how lucky I am: I always wanted the kind of life that would take me to new places all the time, and I’ve got it – in spades.

So, that’s going to be my Christmas vacation. And hopefully, I’ll leave all the not-so-optimal aspects of 2010 in the dust.   I hope the same for all the ‘Rati.

Now it’s your turn. Are you a road tripper?  Was there something else in your childhood that you think prepped you or turned you out as writer?   Or, if you’re not already out there shopping, what are you doing for the holidays?

– Alex



By Cornelia Read

So, just to glom on to JT’s word counts of yesterday…

Turned in the first draft of my fourth novel yesterday at about 3 p.m.

Deadlines blown: all of them

Pages: 395

Word count: 81,568

Word count last Sunday: I don’t remember. I think 50,000

What I remember of this last week: Um, in one straight twenty-five-hour stretch, I wrote 80 pages. Then I slept for 13 hours, and woke up and started writing at 4 p.m., and had written 60 more pages by 3 p.m. yesterday, at which point I’d reached the 81,568 word count above.

Year it feels like I’ve been awake since: 1952

What my brain feels like:

Favorite line written this week: “I felt like I was being sodomized by my own life. And not the fun kind of sodomy, either.”

What I looked like yesterday at 3 p.m.:

What I imagine my editor’s response will be:

What I felt like, around Thursday at 4 a.m.:

What the overall process of writing this book felt like:

1. I am in labor with a child who has a six-foot-wide head

2. Scratch that, I am undergoing a caesarean section with no anesthesia

3. Oh my fucking GOD, I am being forced to perform a caesarean ON MY SELF with NO ANESTHESIA 

4. With stone knives and bear skins

5. I’m a doctor, Jim, not a magician.

6. I’m not a doctor, Jim

What I would like to be doing right now:

What my brain felt like last night, and also how everything was starting to look around me:

How I wish the writing process actually went:

Song I think we should all be listening to right now:

 

Title of this book:

Valley of Ashes

Projected pub date:

March, 2012

 

by Pari

Since July 1, my grand experiment of committed daily writing has yielded: a YA novel, a lengthy novella (just shy of 30,000 words) and seven viable short stories ranging from 1500 words to nearly 7000. If you add those to the wonderful mystery I wrote that we couldn’t sell because it was “too original,” the novel I completed for NaNo, and about four or five more good short stories written since the beginning of 2010 . . . I’ve got quite a bit of inventory piling up here. And I’m adding to it every day.

Unlike many of my fellow ’Rati, I’ve never had the experience of publishing with a big NYC house. My chops come from a small press. At the time, it was a perfect fit; my work tended to the quirky (still does). But my fiction has never financially, completely, supported me. That doesn’t make my experience as a published writer any less valid than what my friends have experienced with St. Martin’s, HarperCollins or Simon & Schuster.

I’d argue, however, that it does yield a very different perspective because I haven’t had the benefit of
1. a New-York-centric view of the book/publishing industry
2. active editors who spend time looking at the story and working with me to make it better
3. major PR/Marketing departments pushing my books at trade shows and with the media (especially big national media), getting me online appearances, soliciting reviews etc etc (let’s not even think about funded tours)
4. active and built-in distribution & automatic ins with national retail outlets 

Though — embarrassingly — I felt sour grapes at one time, I am NOT complaining now. I’ve been in the field long enough to see the mercurial rise and fall of favored authors, the uncertainty they live with, the deadlines and publishing dates moved, the increasing responsibility/expectation for self-promo biting into dwindling advances, beloved editors dropped without a moment’s notice, publishing lines x-ed out, contracts neglected, pay withheld, e-book rights grabs . . .

I used to be one of those writers that scoffed at self-publishing. I thought people who opted for that decision – at least most of them – simply didn’t have the patience to do it the “right” way . . . to pay their dues and go through the fire of external vetting.

Now I have writer friends – some previously published by those big NYC houses, some never formally published – putting their work up on the internet themselves. They distribute their own books to Nooks and Kindles, on Smashwords and Lulu, they create online stores on their websites. They’re getting their work directly to readers without any middlemen whatsoever.

A particularly interesting development are the writers that have banded together to create a brand; my favorite group so far is Book View Café.

Sure, some of the creative work online is just crap. The same thing can be said for books/stories published traditionally. AND a lot of online fiction is well-edited and good. The same can be said for traditionally published works.

So what do I do?

Do I send my work out and wait — and wait — for publishers to respond? To tell me that my book is well written and fun but that they don’t see it having a big enough audience for them to publish?  Do I give up on that model and get my work out into the world immediately (after editing, thankyouverymuch) and embrace a totally paperless approach?

Is it even either/or?

Argh! I don’t know. That’s why I’m writing this blog.

Writers:
1. What are the real benefits NOW, today, of sticking with the traditional model of publishing? Or is that model obsolete?
2. What are the real benefits of striking out on your own?

Readers:
1. Do you look at publishers to make your purchasing/reading decisions?
2. Are your own opinions about self-publishing/traditional publishing changing? 

Help! The stories are piling up in my computer . . . and I write to be read.



By Cornelia Read

Mom and I

I have long been fond of and amused by George Burns’ very wise observation that, “The secret to a happy life is to have a large, loving family in a distant city.”

And that’s pretty much why, I think, having cousins is so awesome–and aunts and uncles and all that goes with them. You get to hang out with people who totally get your jokes about family stuff, because you’ve all spent time keeping an eye on the big pot containing the soup of communal backstory. Taking turns stirring, keeping the fire going, occasionally adding a bay leaf, asking if everyone’s okay with a little onion or garlic, and will the little kids want a small bowl of the stuff.

My second-cousins-once-removed by marriage

And a really fine and profound Thanksgiving is one at which everyone has taken their turn stewarding that rich potage, and you all get to sit down together around a long table and take communal strength from the finished product, breaking bread and pouring each other wine and sharing stories about the soups of years past and the soups yet to come. Gorgeous stuff, what the best parts of life proceed from, how we survive the kinds of fear JT was writing about yesterday.

This is the second year in a row that my kid Grace and I have been lucky enough to share in the Thanksgiving celebration of my Aunt Julie’s extended family. Julie’s my mom’s sister–my aunt AND my godmother–and her husband, Uncle Bill, has long been one of the greatest mensches in my life, through thick and thin. Well, both of them have, since I am going to extend mensch-dom to chicks, because it’s eminently true in the case of these two.

Uncle Bill and Grace

I was the flower girl at Bill and Julie’s wedding, on September 14th, 1968.

I wore a little ankle-length organdy dress–through which you had a hint of of the ice-blue silk petticoat beneath–and a tiny pair of ballet slippers that had been dyed to match the rich, clear emerald green velvet sash tied around me at a sort of Jane-Austen altitude above my waist.

I remember tons of details about that day, although I was only five. Aunt Julie’s bridesmaids, including my mom, getting dressed in a birdlike flurry upstairs in my grandparents’ house. The little bouquet I carried, walking up the aisle of Christ Church in Oyster Bay…

My Grandfather Thurston gives away the bride

…standing in the receiving line with the large buoyant wedding party on my grandparents’ verdant lawn, overlooking all the sleek boats that bobbed at their moorings on the sparkly cut-glass surface of the wonderfully protected little harbor below us… how young everyone was, in retrospect, though they were literally giants to me and so immensely sophisticated at the time, inhabiting the grownup world that seemed to shimmer at such an impossible distance I couldn’t fathom ever assuming a place in it….

And I remember everyone gathered at the bluff-edge of that lawn, every last guest coming forth from the stripe-tented dance floor, laughing and egging on Uncle Bill and his brothers Charlie and Tony and all the ushers as they clambered and jostled and tumbled over one another for the traditional Hoyt Family wedding-day pyramid.

This effort was captured for posterity by the wedding photographer right exactly at the Hoyt-boys-et-al’s final, brief, teetering moment of communal geometric triumph over the entropy of physics and gravity, high spirits and camaraderie and champagne–back when the latter was still served not in flutes but in those wide, shallow stemmed glasses which could themselves be stacked into a pyramid of celebratory translucence, allowing one of the white-jacketed bartenders to show off his professional chops by pouring from a magnum into the upper-most glass, the straw-gold liquid cascading downward from rim to rim until each vessel below veritably brimmed with its own portion of the bubbly.

Thurston and Julie

And both sets of parents were so happy, that day, because the moms had been friends since childhood themselves, and couldn’t have been more pleased that Bill and Julie had chosen one another as companions for the bright road ahead.

Betty Hoyt and my Grandmother Ruth

So–here and now–my daughter Grace and I have been staying at Bill and Julie’s house in Vermont these last couple of days. Cousin Allison is here, and yesterday we all drove half an hour over to Uncle Tony’s house–the place that was built by Great-Uncle Win and Aunt Lynn, no longer with us–for the day’s official culinary event. 

I made the sweet potatoes, having been emailed the perfect James Beard recipe by Uncle Charlie’s most fabulous wife Deborah. Uncle Bill took on creamed onions and the turnips. Cousin Victoria (Charlie’s daughter) was there with her excellent husband John and their two little kids. John was perfecting the mashed potatoes as we all tumbled into the warmth of Tony’s chic but cozy kitchen. Tony had brined the turkey and ordered the pies, then made hard sauce.

Bloody Marys were consumed, iPads shared and discussed (I shilled for a couple of pal’s books, which Charlie downloaded from Amazon),

 

the little children were charmingly well-behaved, and various distant relations called up on various cellphones and landlines. We even Skyped with Cousin Winthrop and his sublime wife Barrie, who were in their new place in Brooklyn with their brand-new baby, young Master August Elias.

August Elias

The wine was superb, the white-linened table arrayed with candelabra and beautiful plates, the forks and knives old family stuff polished to glory, and the talk was familiar and lovely and effervescent, overflowing with shared old jokes and joint beloved reminiscence of the two generations who’d come before all of us, now absent in body but never in spirit.

Uncle Bill had brought a big manila envelope of old photos that were passed from hand to hand, eliciting more stories and laughter and “Whatever happened to….” And at various intervals throughout this jollity, someone would pipe up with Great-Uncle Win’s favorite way to introduce any anecdote, no matter how dire: “Cute story! Cute Story!”

But I think that my absolutely favorite part of this most excellent day was when Uncle Bill looked around us all at the table with a dry wicked grin and said two words: “Mr. Whitney…” then paused for a sip of wine.

Aunt Julie said, “Jesus, Bill…” from the table’s far end.

And then Uncle Charlie said, “How is Mr. Whitney?”

And Uncle Bill said, “Oh, he died. Terribly sad. Hit by a car, dontcha know.”

And Uncle Tony asked. “And what happened to Mrs. Whitney?”

Whereupon Uncle Charlie confided, “Oh, she married Mr. Knott.”

Uncle Bill asked, “And Mrs. Knott?”

“She married Mr. Moseley,” said Tony.

“What about Mrs. Moseley?” asked Charlie.

“Well, she married Mr. Shields,” offered Bill.

“Mrs. Shields?” pondered Charlie.

“Married Mr. Galston,” Tony replied.

“And Mrs. Galston?” asked Bill.

Tony lifted his wineglass, rolling the ruby liquid around in it. “She married Mr. Von Briesen.”

“Good God,” I said, unfamiliar with this cherished litany, “what became of Mrs. Van Briesen?”

“Oh,” said Uncle Bill, twinkly of eye, “Mrs. Van Briesen lives down the road.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Oh, yuh,” said Uncle Bill, pronouncing that second syllable sound with the dryness of Old Vermont. “All happened over the course of a single year, when we were kids on Long Island. Quite a ruckus. You’d go to a friend’s house and never know which other friend’s parent you’d find there.”

“Jesus, Bill…” Aunt Julie said once again from the other end of the table, the other end of the forty-two-plus-a-little-bit years it had been since we’d all spent the afternoon of September 14th, 1968, together on my grandparents’ lawn on Centre Island in Oyster Bay. 

She was smiling, though.

Cute story… cute story…

I love these guys. They are awesome.

And of course, being me, I have to wonder whether Mrs. Van Briesen was driving the car that hit Mr. Whitney.

Tell me an old story you love, oh excellent ‘Ratis…

 

By Brett Battles

 

I admit it. I’m a TV junky. In my life I’ve watched FAR too much, and I’m sure I’ll continue to watch FAR too much moving forward, too.

It’s the stories that draw me in. Even the simplest ones can make me watch if there’s something that gives me hope the story might be good. I’m often disappointed, but, no matter what, I watch.

I talked earlier about how much I love the beginning of the fall television season. It’s full of promise and hope. My DVR just overflows with things to watch. But, inevitably, I start removing shows from my record list. Some flat out are bad. Some are good ideas that just don’t reach their full potential. And worst, I think, some are just mediocre. Occasionally, I’ll have to remove a show not because I don’t like it, but because they network has cancelled it.

Let’s look at some shows I had hopes for:

HAWAII FIVE-O – I had a lot of hope for this one, but after just a couple of episodes I all but gave up. The situations were ridiculous, and the characters were way too one-note for me. Too bad, too, because a couple of the actors are favorites of mine. I did try a more recent episode, the one with Kevin Sorbo. It was so obvious he was the killer from the beginning that I was yawning by the final reveal. STATUS: Show deleted from my record list.

UNDERCOVERS – This one I was excited about because of J.J. Abrams involvement. I loved LOST, and I loved ALIAS, so I was hoping to love this. I didn’t. But I didn’t hate it either. I liked the characters, and I thought that at some point the show might hit it’s stride. But that’s not to be. ABC has cancelled it. For me, this was an example of a show that was a good idea but just didn’t reach full potential. STATUS: Still on my record list only because I haven’t removed it yet.

RUBICON – WOW. Now this is a show. Unfortunately AMC has decided not to renew it for a second season. (THAT SUCKS AMC!!) If you can catch this, do. It’s very smart. STATUS: Still on my record list because I refuse to remove

THE WALKING DEAD – Also on AMC, but this one they’ve already re-upped for a second season. Funny how good ratings will do that. I’m enjoying this one. Good characters, interesting world, exciting situations. My only issues at this point are that we’ve seen some of the same type of situations in other shows and movies. Granted, this is based on a graphic novel I have not read, so it’s possible the novel came out before some of the other movies did, and they’re the ones that are derivative. STATUS: On my record list, and staying there.

That’s just a sampling, of course. Some of the other shows I record that have made the cut from the previous years.

COMMUNITY – Love this show! Hilarious.

30 ROCKS – Still a ton of fun.

GLEE – Loved this last year. This season not as good, so it’s on the verge of getting into my iffy list.

FRINGE – My guilty pleasure. This show rocks. My fellow geeks know what I mean.

And just for fun…one of our local stations airs PERRY MASON every morning at 5 a.m. I record that, too. Love, love, love it. (In fact I’m watching a episode as I’m writing this.)

 

So, here are my questions…what’s on your favorite’s list? What show’s have you given up on? Any gems out there we should all be watching?

By Cornelia Read

So, again with my procrastinatory Googling of dead relatives… but this time I think I may have decided where I want to live next, weather and finances and fate permitting.

This pretty much all started when I heard from the lovely and inimitable Lee Child that he would be going to Saratoga, New York, for a library gig–at which I hope he was madly feted since he’s really cool and stuff. For some reason, I remembered from earlier dead-relative Googling that my great-great Uncle, Dr. Valentine Seaman, had done the first chemical analysis of the waters of Saratoga and Ballston Spa in the late 1700s.

He looks quite a bit like my dad, actually–including the sideburns.

 

Totally the same forehead and cheekbones, even though you probably can’t tell since this is of course not a profile shot of Dad (my scrapbooks are all in storage in California.) Dad had a better nose, though. Not to mention way longer legs.

Here’s Valentine’s great-niece, Caroline Seaman Read, with her daughter Carol. She was Dad’s grandmother:

Great-Great-Uncle Valentine was also the guy who introduced Jenner’s cowpox vaccine for smallpox to America, after his eldest daughter died of a live-smallpox inoculation. Valentine traveled to England to ask Jenner about his work, became lifelong friends with the guy, and returned home to New York City with some cowpox in his luggage. There were apparently riots in NYC because people were terrified that he’d start an epidemic, plus his colleagues at The New York Hospital were pretty freaked out by it, so he volunteered to treat his own remaining children with the stuff first.

He also did the first training classes for nurses in the United States–a twenty-two-lecture series on midwifery. 

Oddly enough, my daughters were born at what is now New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. I remember the morning the cab let my husband and me out at the entrance to the maternity ward. There was a small bronze plaque near the front doors which, if memory serves, read “New York Lying-In Hospital, 1793.”

I thought to myself at the time that I was totally fucking glad not to be standing in that spot in 1793, since they probably had dirt floors and stone knives and bearskins, and I badly wanted an epidural, but I had no idea that had I been suddenly whisked back 199 years that I might well have met up with my great-great uncle. Weird, huh?

Anyway, interesting guy and he died of consumption at age 47 (my age this year), in the front room of the family house on Beeckman Street. His son Valentine, also a doctor, lived to the age of 96 and was written up in the New York Times the year before his death because he was thought to be at that time the oldest native inhabitant of the city.

Here’s Valentine the Younger’s obituary from The New York Times, which is pretty interesting reading about the old days further downtown:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FA0B12FF355413738DDDAC0994DA415B8984F0D3

THAT Valentine and his brother John bought 25 acres at the northern tip of Manhattan and John built a country place on the site. Henry and his wife referred to it as “Mount Olympus,” but the locals called it “Seaman’s Folly.”

 

 Here’s what it looked like later, after it became the home of a riding club:

 Though from a different angle, this would have been what the house had a view of:

 Actually, maybe that building at the top left WAS the house? Not sure…

Here’s a fuller description from myinwood.net (quoted from an article in The New York Herald, August 29th, 1869):

The mansion is built entirely of white marble, quarried by Mr. Seaman on the spot. It is seventy-eight feet deep and in plan is nearly square. It has a main dome reaching a height of ninety feet from the ground, with its top painted a dark maroon color. There are also two smaller domes, whose arches are surmounted by the statues of Love and Music respectively. It is hardly possible to give a correct view of this house—a house that has few equals in the world, and one that is a combination of capacious wings, towering chimneys, vaulted domes, Roman windows and sharply defined, yet not ungraceful lines. If defies classification according to the schools of art, yet it is inferior to none of them, while a combination of all.  The plan of breaking away from what is pure Grecian or Roman is a praiseworthy innovation, and one, which has been followed with triumphant success along the river. From the northern porch the ground assumes a gently declining surface till it touches the drive in continuous groves of beautiful evergreens; from the eastward it descends on eight terraces, along which are constructed the extensive hothouses; from the southward the garden spots and statuary dot the green, and to the southward are the stables and the valley.

Let us enter the house. The door is flanked with fine pieces of statuary, and once within a wide and lofty hall, with the usual furniture, is seen. To the extreme south end of the house is the octagonal library, fitted up at great expense. Closets whose doors support long and beautifully gilded mirrors, statues of Scott, Shakespeare, Byron, Milton, Homer, Esculapius, Socrates and Pluto fill niches in the wall, and also the mind from the measures of heroic verse to the eternity of dreary philosophy. Some fine paintings hang on the walls, and the western windows look out into a small conservatory, in which statues of the four Seasons are placed in appropriate positions. These figures are about two feet high….

Looking north can be seen Spuyten Duyvil creek and the rich and fertile acres which it washes; the Harlem river with its torturous course winding like a snake through the tall grass and thick shrubs; a section of the Hudson shining like a lake of molten silver, and tinged with crimson by the setting sun; the misty hills rising from the valley and just perceptible through the haze, the weird glens, the weather beaten crags and torpid mountains. A scene like this is but a portion of what strikes the eye at every point; and this sublime panoramic view has been gazed upon by many eminent Europeans, who declare that nothing equals it in the Old World.

At the entrance to the porch two figures in the dress of the time of Louis XIV stand out in conspicuous prominence, and a statue of America caps the main dome: the interior is frescoed with Cupids. The house is connected from room to room with an alarm telegraph, so, that should burglars aspire to transfer some of Mr. Seaman’s valuables the dial would at once indicate their location and anxieties, when doubtless he would treat them with becoming civility….

The hothouses are very extensive. They consist of graperies, a pinery and greenhouses. The pinery is fifty feet deep, and is very fruitful. The graperies now groan under heavy loads of their delicious fruit. They are two in number, separated by a plant house, and have a through depth of 212 feet, with a width of 22 ½ feet, with a lean-to quadrant shaped roofs. A steam engine is used to throw the water on the grape vines, which have hothouse peaces just in their rear; and against the wall some rare figs. The whole arrangement of these graperies is a model of neatness. No finer fruit of this kind is grown in America. Every species abounds. There are the black Hamburgs, the Victoria Hamburgs, some bunches of which weigh six pounds; the white Nice, the Muscat Alexandrias and the royal muscadines; the Timothy de Burgh, the earliest golden Chasselas [below],

grizzly Frottingaus and white Prottingans. The plant house in winter contains 2,500 pots. The western slope is now broken up for improvements. A small lake is to be constructed; and adjoining, an ice house, so that he can make his own ice.

 

This being my family, of course, what with their absolute genetic genius for losing fortunes and squandering swaths of gorgeous bountiful real estate, all that’s left of the place today is what’s known as the Seaman-Drake Arch, touted as a perfect scale model of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris:

 

The above is from sometime in the Twenties, I suppose. Below is how it was situated when the house was still a going concern, at the center of the photograph (looking towards the Hudson, with the Johnson Iron Works in the foreground–manufacturer of cannons during the Civil War):

Check out the billboards along the Harlem River… 

These days, it looks like this:

It’s now at 216th Street and Broadway. They think maybe there was once a gatekeeper’s residence on the interior, but it burned out decades ago.

Henry Seaman had a made a fortune in “drugs” (no shit), but lost it all. Luckily, his wife Ann was rich, so she kept the place up during her lifetime. When she died, 140 relatives contested the estate. She left it all to her nephew Lawrence Drake, whom her late husband had forbade from ever visiting the property when he was still alive. Which just goes to show you that George Burns was right about the secret to a happy life, to wit, “having a large loving family in a distant city.”

Here’s a little description of local street names from the deeply fabulous Inwood historical website myinwood.net, the following a description of the road that runs in front of the arch:

Broadway Generally acknowledged to have followed the old Weckquaesgeek Indian trail that ran the thirteen mile length of Manhattan. Early settlers called it the Bloomindale Road. Going north the original trail crossed the then shallow Spuyten Duyvil Creek into what today is Marble Hill. At low tide a traveler could cross the Spuyten Duyvil Creek on foot. Records show that Indians referred to the crossing as “The Wading Place.” Future generations would see a ferry crossing and eventually the King’s Bridge.

There’s also Indian Road, just a block and a half long off 218th Street, near the northern end of Seaman Ave.

It’s the last street on Manhattan that’s still officially named a “road.” I’ve read that it was named that because this is approximately the spot at which Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the Lenape tribe for sixty guilders. Aunt Jean says we all have some Lenape blood, which is way cool, not least because Mom’s side of the family killed of the Pequot in Connecticut.

View Larger Map

Click on “view larger map” and then zoom in twice to see the street names. Where the Seaman house once stood is now Park Terrace East and Park Terrace West

There’s a 400-unit apartment complex there now, designed by Albert Goldhammer. It was built in 1940 and is still wonderfully deco, with lots of actual garden lacing between the buildings.

But to back up again a little, here’s what the old neighborhood looked like:

Those were apparently the last cows kept in Manhattan. We’re looking towards the Hudson again, over Spuyten Duyvil Creek (pronounced SPYden DYEvull.) This is possibly now the site of Baker Field, where Columbia plays football (there’s a sixty-foot tall “C” painted on a palisade across the river.)

It’s funny, I remember trying to go find an apartment in this neck of the woods the last time I lived in the city… the rental prices were just so amazing, I asked my husband if we could drive up there and check it out. We got lost in Washington Heights, then at the peak of a Dominican crack fest, and all the cars were on fire. Never made it all the way up to Inwood, and it’s all of course since gotten really gentrified. At the time, I had no idea I had roots up there.

Quite a bit of the Inwood neighborhood is still parkland, though, which is very cool. Here’s a contemporary view from further south and east… the humpy bit with all the trees behind the cows is still a humpy bit with trees, only now it’s got the Henry Hudson Parkway nestled behind it, leading to the Henry Hudson Bridge there, kind of in the middle. This part of town has the only untouched Manhattan forest land left, with a salt marsh.

Here’s what walking along Spuyten Duyvil Creek looked like, back in the day. The lady with the basket and child was basically abroad on a dirt road in the South Bronx. I’m thinking picnic:

Today she might be walking in front of the yellow brick building, I guess:

The other remnant of my dead relatives having frolicked in this vicinity is a street name… Seaman Avenue.

Here’s another snippet from myinwood.net:

Seaman Avenue First opened in 1908 and extended in 1912, Seaman Avenue is named for the family of Henry B. Seaman. The Seaman estate once covered some 25 acres from Park Terrace Hill to Spuyten Duyvil Creek.  Henry was a descendent of Captain John Seaman who settled in Long Island in the 1650′s.

 

Here’s what the corner of Seaman and Payson used to look like:

Another wonderful quote on myinwood.net is from a 1921 article by Eleanor Booth Simmons. She wandered around Inwood talking with elderly residents, describing many of the old family houses then falling into ruin. Here’s my favorite bit:

 

Do you like to dream about old houses? Do you like to investigate neglected mansions of a past age, picturing the life that flowed through the high-ceilinged rooms now so musty and decayed?

If you are a New Yorker it isn’t necessary to travel to New England to indulge in this pastime. Forty minutes by subway from the shopping district, a brief walk, and you are in a region of old houses. Some crown the green hills of Inwood, which downtown excursionists are beginning to discover, and some, stranded on the streets, are rudely shouldered by modern apartment houses of glaring brick. But there they are, and in some of them you will find white-haired men and women whose talk takes you back to a day earlier than that in which the characters of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” lived.

Fancy going into a house a few steps from the Dyckman ferry and finding two brothers and a sister who have dwelt there sixty years! These are the Flitners, children of the Maine sea captain, who, landing at the Hudson River dock with barges of lumber from the North, was so charmed with these shores that he brought his family here to live. Get them talking and they tell you of a time when there were but seven buildings above 187th Street east of Kingsbridge Road. In their childhood the winter skating was the social event of the locality.  The lads damned up a brook that ran just north of Inwood Street, now Dyckman Street, and made a wide pond between two small hills. At night they lighted fires of Tar barrels and waste wood on the banks, and the community gathered and sang and shouted and did marvelous things on the ice. Perhaps the winters were colder then, for, as Charles Flitner remembers it, there was always ice from fall to spring.

Where Cobwebs Thrive on Manhattan Isle, by Eleanor Booth Simmons, New York Tribune, November 6, 1921.

Doesn’t that sound like something straight out of Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale?

 

Okay, this is a photo of people skating on Central Park, when the Dakota was still new, and it’s probably at least a couple of decades later than what was described above, but it’s still one of my favorite photographs of Manhattan.

So now my real estate fetish has kicked in fully, and there’s actually a five-room apartment for sale on Seaman Avenue that I’d give my eye-teeth and right arm to live in:

109 Seaman Avenue, built in 1917. And hey, it’s a two bedroom in Manhattan for under $400k, so maybe it’s time to buy some Powerball tickets? I went and drove around the neighborhood this week, when Grace and I drove down from Cow Hampshire for her Barnard interview (and drove BACK that same day–ten hours total.)

Turns out my initial impulse to go check this neighborhood out was right on. Only wish we’d moved there instead of Boulder, back in 1995…

Take a look at the rest of that apartment: http://www.corcoran.com/property/listing.aspx?Region=NYC&ListingID=1982033&ohDat=11/7/2010%2012:00:00%20AM;

Ossum, right? Plus, it is NOT at this intersection, one of the most ridiculed and photographed in all of the city:

 

But you can still go for a walk in the park along Spuyten Duyvil Creek:

Okay, dear ‘Ratis, where would you live if you could live ANYWHERE?

I am extremely grateful to Cole Thompson, a real-estate agent with New Heights Realty in Inwood. Much of the information about the Inwood neighborhood and the majority of the images in this post are from his fascinating blog, myinwood.net. If I ever have any money, I hope to buy an apartment from him. Or at least rent one…

 

By Cornelia Read

 

1. Bouchercon

 

San Francisco was so so so so amazing. Rae Helmsworth rocked the Hyatt and put together an amazing team of volunteers, and this time it was like a really, really fabulous high school reunion only we all looked better than in high school and there were no evil cheerleaders. Not to mention Lee Child’s wonderful Reacher Creature party, this time open to all attendees for the first time ever, which is tremendously kind and generous of Lee to do for a lobby-full of 1600 people who, let’s face it, can probably outdrink the Shriners and the Kennedys combined. Not to mention tanker captains.

For a taste of what it was like (and to see the fabulous Ball O’ Twine sculpture), click here:

 

 

 

 

2. Roger Vivier shoes

Viviers are what Queen Elizabeth the II wore at her coronation (hers had 3,000 garnets on them), and what Cathering DeNeuve wore in Belle de Jour. Also, the guy invented the spike heel to match Dior’s New Look. Credit where credit is due–take that Manolo.

 

 

 

3. B. Kliban cartoons

 

I used to have B. Kliban sheets, in boarding school…

 4. The view from Nepenthe, in Big Sur…

 5. The Exeter-Andover game, especially when we beat those Smurfs…

6. Playing with quick snapshots from my iPhone until they’re hallucinogenic…

7. Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations…

 

 

8. Berkeley… and the sun setting over the Pacific in general.

.

9. Sargent paintings

10. The odd little brick building in the vegetable garden at Monticello. Those windows are triple-hung, so you can slide them all the way up from the floor to let the breeze through on all four sides, and there’s still a Windsor chair in there that you can sit in and read, or just take in the view.

10. Yah, too much “gracious living.” How about a little Velvet Underground?

 

 

 

 OK, guys, what’re your top ten this week? Movies? Music? Pharmaceuticals?

Here’s a bonus from me:

11.

 The Photoshopping my sister Elena did of my daughter’s ex-boyfriend.

 

By Cornelia Read

I don’t often review books any more. I know too many people who write them, I don’t want to damn anyone with inadvertant faint praise, nor forget to write about anyone. I know how often my own feelings get dinged if I read a friend’s list of random “great reads” when I’m not on it, which is petulant and lame on my part but hey, I just don’t want to bruise anyone else’s tender feelings.

So when I comment on books directly, these days, I try to talk about the ones that are really, really good, and I try to talk about books by people I haven’t actually met. There are VERY few people I will buy in hardcover who aren’t actual friends (I want to buy friends’ books in hard cover because I like to think I’m adding a couple of bucks to their coffers–and I like to do that sometimes even if they’re already richer than god. Just saying.)

Charlaine Harris, Denise Mina, Mary Karr, Alan Furst, and William Gibson are on this list right now. I will go without food and electricity in order to wallow in these people’s words.

The book I’m on the verge of finishing, just at the moment, happens to be William Gibson’s zero history. I have loved his work since I first scored a ratty paperback of Neuromancer back in Syracuse, which is, like, when Pteradactyls were still gliding up the Mohawk Valley, practically. Uphill both ways, in the snow. He was a godsend, and it still just thrills me to the bottom of my tiny black heart that someone so goddamn sublimely and lapidarily SMART can be a bestseller.

If you have worries about civilzation or anything, pick up this book. Mr. Gibson, as always, affirms my belief that the tribe of those who care about what matters, about subtlety, about elegance and grace and precision on the page, is alive and goddamn well. Hosanna.

I think that on a paragraph level (though he succeeds mightily in both more macro and micro ways than that), his work is also illustration of what precision can do for a writer. Sometimes I think a list of three things can define space, in a fictional world. Especially if there’s a frisson of not-same-ness among them.

I’m trying to figure out how to word this properly, since I’m writing about wording things properly, so my fuzziness is kind of annoying the hell out of me, but it’s a little like apposition, only deeper.

Here’s a definition of apposition:

 

Apposition is a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side, with one element serving to define or modify the other. When this device is used, the two elements are said to be in apposition. For example, in the phrase “my friend Alice,” the name “Alice” is in apposition to “my friend.”

More traditionally, appositions were called by their Latin name appositio, although the English form is now more commonly used. It is derived from Latin: ad (“near”) and positio (“placement”).

Apposition is a figure of speech of the scheme type, and often results when the verbs (particularly verbs of being) in supporting clauses are eliminated to produce shorter descriptive phrases. This makes them often function as hyperbatons, or figures of disorder, because they can disrupt the flow of a sentence. For example, in the phrase: “My wife, a nurse by training,…,” it is necessary to pause before the parenthetical modification “a nurse by training.”

Okay, not exactly apposition, since I’m talking about actual objects, here, and their difference when suspended Calderesque-ly near one another is what makes this work–maybe it’s more like opposition? Fuck it, I’m just going to quote the man so you see what I mean. This is a description of one of the character’s rooms at a gorgeously byzantine private-club hotel in London (also, hyperbatons? What an immensely fabulous word…):

“Which room is Heidi in?” Hollis asked him.

“Next to yours.”

“Good,” said Hollis, with more enthusiasm than she felt. That would be the one with the yellow chaise longue. She’d never understood the theme. Not that she understood the theme of her own, but she sensed it had one. The room with the yellow chaise longue seemed to be about spies, sad ones, in some very British sense, and seedy political scandal. And reflexology.

Hollis’s own room features what her friend and former bandmate Inchmale has named the “Piblokto Madness bed.”

[I]ts massive frame covered entirely in slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, staunchly ecclesiastical-looking lower jawbone of a right whale, fastened to the wall at its head….

Piblokto Madness itself?

“Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivity to cold, echolalia.” She kicked her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe’s open door. “Hold the coprophagia,” she added. Cabin fever, this culture-bound, arctic condition. Possibly dietary in origin. Linked to Vitamin A toxicity. Inchmale was full of this sort of information, never more so than when he was in the studio.

The whole thing is like a Viking barrow of word-riches: “gutta-percha” and wunderkammer,

boiler suits and “specialized apprehender gloves.”

One gets the sense that for Gibson, as for one of the characters, “Reading, [Milgrim’s] therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.” God knows it was mine, and reading this is like falling face first into a lovely glowing pile of what I believe Jay McInerney once called “pink Peruvian flake.” If such a drug held traces of frankincense and psilocybin.

And the apposition of the archaic and the po-mo makes it all fresher and wittier:

Heidi shrugged out of her leather jacket, tossed it aside, and pulled her black t-shirt off, revealing an olive-drab bra that looked as combat-ready as any bra Hollis had ever seen.

“Nice bra.”

“Israeli,” said Heidi. She looked around, taking in the contents of the room. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “The wallpaper’s like Hendrix’s pants.”

 

And you totally know what the stripes on those pants look like, even though God help me if I could Google up a rendition that matched what I see in my head.

Meanwhile, I totally want Milgrim’s therapist, in Basel:

Addictions, he thought, turning right, toward Seven Dials’ namesake obelisk, started out like magical pets. Pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were, his therapist in Basel said, less intelligent than goldfish.

 

What makes this stuff go deep, makes it be so eminently satisfying and right-on, is the precision. Every image is carved and faceted out of something translucent, hard, exact. Briolettes of rock crystal:

…Something was unfolding within him. Like a brochure, he thought, rather than the butterfly he imagined to be the more common image. An unpleasant brochure, the sort that lays out symptoms all too clearly….

…A cross between Grand Central and the atrium of the Brown Palace, Denver, structures aimed heroically into futures that had never really happened….

…She’d favored artboys, of any stripe, and unfortunately the dodgy hybrids as well, artboy-businessmen, with personalities as demanding as ambitiously crossbred dogs….

It’s like Saki without the veneer of archness. And when a writer does this well, you get both a clear movie of the textured world in which the choreography is unfolding, and tremendous depth of perception into character, as in this description of a pickup truck with “cartel-grade” armor:

Aldous had proudly pointed out the narrowness, the extreme evenness, of the gaps between the doors and the bodywork. They were too narrow for the insertion of any kind of pry bar, he’d said, too narrow even for “the jaws of life,” an expression Milgrim was infamiliar with, but which he took to be Jamaican, some potent icon of existential dread.

Or Hollis’s brief flash on previous conversations with her lover:

[S]omething in his tone now reminded her of his explanations of asymmetric warfare, a topic in which he had a keen and abiding interest. She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries.

I love that. I love this book. Buy it.

Give me a paragraph that rocked your world recently, O dearest ‘Ratis…