by Rob the Slob

WARNING.  RANT AHEAD.

What is it about mediocrity that is so attractive to people?

I just finished watching the second (?) episode of Hawaii Five-0 and I have to say that while it’s not a terrible show, it’s no Dexter.  It’s no Justified.  It’s not even Law & Order.

There were enough holes in the episode I watched to have me raging out loud to my long-suffering wife.  “If they wanted to kidnap the guy, why smash into his limo and turn it on its head, then use the jaws of life to pry him out?  Wouldn’t it be better to maybe, you know, take him in a way that couldn’t potentially kill him?”

Just the presence of the jaws of life alone was proof that nearly killing him must have been part of their ridiculous plan. 

In fact, wouldn’t it be better all around to do the kidnapping as quietly as possible?  Why draw attention to yourselves and get the police involved? 

Ohhh.  But wait.  That was why it was staged that way.  Because otherwise Five-0 wouldn’t have gotten involved and you wouldn’t have a story.

And that was only one of the flaws. 

I work very hard to make the logic in my stories sound.  Now, granted, this may not always happen.  I may sometimes miss something or come up with a situation that makes people go, “give me a break,” but I try my very best not to.

This show, however, didn’t even seem to try.  All the plot points were used for effect and nothing else, and the story moved along in a way that was convenient, not plausible.

In other words, we’re talking mediocre.  At best.

Yet, according to the ads, it’s America’s #1 new show.

Go figure.

Or let’s talk music.  

I confess I don’t pay much attention to mainstream music anymore.  I know the names of maybe three current hot artists because, frankly, what I hear on the radio sounds like complete shit.  As the top 40 always has.  

On American Idol it seems that the “safest” or most mainstream artist wins every year.

Every decade we have a number of great artists writing/performing great songs, but for every great artist we have a hundred cookie-cutter overproduced banal autotuned idiots who render the radio impossible to listen to.

Check this out and I swear you will really wonder what’s wrong with people who love this particular singer (assuming anyone still does):

Even when she’s in tune, she’s tough to stomach.

Yet this same crap makes record companies millions of dollars.  Millions. So obviously somebody’s buying this stuff.

Then there are books.  

Obviously, because I work in the business I’m not going to name names, but we all know there are people writing out there who truly define mediocrity, yet they sell like hotcakes.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a party or the dentist’s office or wherever and heard:  “Oooh, are your books like FILL IN THE BLANK?  (S)He’s my favorite author.”

Unfortunately, more often than not, FILL IN THE BLANK is a truly mediocre writer whose version of fiction makes me cringe in horror every time I try to read it.

Yet millions love it.

And don’t even get me started with movies.  

I went and saw EASY A this past weekend because it was set in and filmed entirely in my town, and the only thing the movie had going for it was an engaging lead actor.  The story was ridiculous—the kind of story that relies on the main character’s inability to simply say, “enough” before things get out of hand.  

If she were George Costanza, that might work.  But she’s an intelligent girl and the story set-up is so strained it’s ridiculous.  If she’d had a halfway decent justification for doing what she did, I might have bought it.  But no.

It was the perfect case of the plot dictating character rather than the other way around.  She had to react and do what she did because otherwise the plot would not have worked.

Now, I understand that we all have differing tastes.  One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure and all that. But I’m not really talking about garbage here.  I’m talking about middle-of-the-road boring bullshit.

Why does America love it so much?

I have yet to figure it out.

So my question to you this week is not why, but who?  

What popular singer, artist, television show, movie do you think is waaaaay overrated, and who do you think deserves to be more popular than the usual middle-of-the-road suspects?

And if you do have an answer to the embracing mediocrity question, feel free to chime in.

By Cornelia Read

I’m like Alex–for me writing is not Ass in Chair, it’s Ass on Cushioned Horizontal Surface. Mostly here, at the moment:

The monogrammed pillow is from my pal Mags, who got it for me from Land’s End, if memory serves.

The most important thing you need to write in bed are pillows… lots and lots of pillows.

Originally, when I moved into this apartment near the Arctic Circle last year, I planned to write here:

The desk is from IKEA, but the toile wallpaper I bought online. My daughter and I went to a garage sale last summer and they had two sets of large gold letters spelling “LOVE” for sale, for $4 each. I said, “hey, if we buy both of them, we can spell ‘EVOLVE’!” So we did.

I think maybe I’ve written exactly half a sentence at that desk. Finally, I told Grace to use it for homework and now it’s filled with a pile of Grace detritus. Oh well. It looks nice, in the living room. When I close the front flap to cover the Grace detritus.

I miss writing at my friend Sharon’s house. We used to write together at her dining room table pretty much every weekday. I was really productive there, especially for the first ten months when we couldn’t figure out the key code to get me into her wireless service. We would gossip a lot and stuff, but after an hour or so we’d get down to work, and finally I would be so in the zone that I didn’t even hear her kids when they came home, and would finally come up for air, most nights, when the family needed to set the table for dinner.

When I first moved to the Great White North, I thought I’d get a TON of writing done, since I didn’t know anybody and wouldn’t have to fight the urge to go out to lunch with people a lot and stuff. It turns out that talking to people and hanging out and non-writing social stuff is actually excellent fuel for writing stuff. You need to recharge your batteries, and often. That doesn’t happen so much here, unless I drive down to New York and hang out with pals. That’s about a five-hour drive. I go down whenever I get really stir crazy, which has been a lot over the last year or so.

At any rate, even after I got the pretty desk from IKEA, I tried to write at the cool dining room table I got on craigslist:

I got maybe the second half of that first sentence written at the table. But I spent two days painting the chairs dark green. Except for when Sharon came to visit–I got ten pages written then. It was almost as good as living in California again.

I took her to see Portsmouth:

And Salem, Mass.:

Which was fun but not writing.

And we went for a walk along the banks of the Mighty Squamscott, here in Exeter:

Which is pretty great. But not writing.

In fact, my writing–in terms of quantity and probably quality–has pretty much sucked for this past year. My pals try to reassure me that this is because the year itself was pretty sucky. Sharon is especially good at cheering me up this way. She’ll call from California and say, “well, let’s see–in the past year you’ve moved three thousand miles away to a town where you didn’t know anybody, because your daughter needed you; you got divorced; you had to leave your other daughter with your ex because you can’t physically care for her anymore on your own; your father committed suicide two weeks before your original deadline; your editor died of cancer; and you did publicity and touring for your third book; oh, and you tried to mediate amongst all the crazy relatives after your dad died. Look at it this way–you should cut yourself some slack, and you’re never going to be short of material.” This is why I love Sharon. But still, here is what my writing has been for the last year:

Now I seem to have the ball rolling, at least a little bit. Probably going to blow my new October 1st deadline, though. Especially since my Mom flew in on her way home from Greece last night, and wants to go on a roadtrip. I should stay home and write, but I have people here so seldom I kind of want to milk the opportunity for real conversation that doesn’t involve sixteen-year-olds, although the latter is not without charm.

As for methodology… well, no index cards, whiteboards, post-it notes (giant or otherwise, until we get to the copy edit stage of things.) I’m not an outliner, though I had to write a synopsis for this fourth book. My editor wasn’t crazy about my first three ideas for it, and I had so few pages over the last year that my new sweet editor asked if I could summarize what I was thinking of doing for the salespeople. Not sure they’re going to need that, now, as this book certainly won’t come out in 2011, but I guess maybe it was helpful–though the next twenty pages I wrote after the synopsis totally negated the synopsis.

I remember Lee Child once saying at a book signing that he never outlined, and when editors wanted an outline he’d make something up and then write what he wanted anyway. I suppose that’s a lot easier to do when you’re LEE CHILD. But I still raised my hand at the end and asked, “do they make you do that for every book?”

He said they did, pretty much.

I asked, “so since you never write the book that’s in the outline, can you just recycle the outline the next time they want one?”

He said he hadn’t thought of that, but that he’d definitely do it the next time he got asked for one.

I usually start a book with a scene in my head. It’s always something very place-specific, usually with a telling event at the heart of it, though the event may have nothing to do with the eventual mystery.

In A Field of Darkness, the opening is in my old apartment in Syracuse, New York, on the night a building on the next block caught fire for the second night in a row–which actually happened. It’s funny how many little things I just jotted down in the first draft ended up being themes that carried out through the entire narrative: fire, my heritage, and even photography. I said that walking into the next street to see the fire at first felt like a photograph by Weegee, by which I mean an image somewhat like this:

This is actually titled “Brooklyn Children See Gambler Murdered in the Street,” but it’s the kind of late-night spooky crowd scene I had in mind. I believe the description in Field was something like:

I cut across the tar-soft street and between the woodframe hulks facing ours. For just a second, coming out the other side, it was like stepping into one of that guy Weegee’s photos from a forties copy of Life: black-and- white, some police-scanner tragedy back when everyone wore hats and cars were bulbous as the Hindenburg.

I blinked and it was just my neighbors milling slack-jawed, tank tops and stretch shorts bursting with that translucent flesh I always attribute to Kool smoke and government cheese. I stepped in among them and chastised myself: no worse snob than a poor relation.

For The Crazy School, I thought back to the classroom I taught in at The DeSisto School in West Stockbridge, Mass, in the fall of 1989. The walls looked like this, except painted glossy mustard, and the general attitude on campus is well represented by that officious little note next to the thermostat:

In the first chapter, I wrote:

It was an ugly room. Demoralizing. I didn’t want to be in it, either, only you’re not supposed to say that when you’re the grownup.

I talk about mostly real places, in my books. Like the family cemetery on Centre Island, in Oyster Bay, New York:

That’s my favorite gravestone. It says:

Behold and see

As you pass by

As you are now

So once was I

As I am now

You soon must be

Prepare for death

To follow me

I’ve also written about the family camp, in the Adirondacks:

Here’s Dad, sitting on the porch outside the dining room last summer. We all thought that ceramic deer should’ve been thrown into the lake sometime in the Mid-Fifties. It’s fucking fugly.

My fourth book is set in Boulder, Colorado, and opens a day before my twin daughters’ first birthday. I’m cleaning the house (a lost cause) because my mother is due to fly in at any moment. It’s going to be a pretty sad book. The title is now officially Valley of Ashes. Here’s how it opens:

When we first moved to Boulder I was entirely too happy, a state of being so rare in my experience that I found it rather terrifying.

My twin daughters Parrish and India were beautiful, precocious, and brimming with health. My husband Dean was happily successful at his new job and my best, most trusted friend. We lived at the eastern feet of the Rocky Mountains in a cozy old house on the loveliest street of a charming university town. The air was fresh, the sky was blue–our yard a lush and maple-shaded green, our mellow brick front porch banked in spring with a cobalt-and-amethyst embarrassment of lilac, iris, and grape hyacinth.

Everything I’d ever wanted.

Hubris.

Sorrow is always your own, offering no temptation to fickle gods. Fucking joy, on the other hand? You might as well string your heart from the ceiling for use as a frat-party piñata.

Once I get that first scene established–in this case I’m standing in the living room of a rented house at 1913 Mapleton Street with a vacuum hose in my hand, despairing over the ugliness of the orange shag carpeting and the bomb-just-went-off housekeeping–I just hope that the characters start talking to me, or to Madeline,

my alter ego. 

If you’d like to see the house we rented, go here: http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&q=1913+mapleton+street+boulder+colorado&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=1913+Mapleton+Ave,+Boulder,+Colorado+80304&gl=us&ei=

4taUTKiFBsL88AaJ4fWcDA&ved=0CBYQ8gEwAA&z=16

Then click on the little pinkish-reddish pointer pin marked “A” and then click on “Street View,” under the little thumbnail photo. It was a pretty great house.

It’s kind of like lowering your face through the surface of a swimming pool and watching a movie, when the going’s good. I see everything that’s happening while I’m typing–the furniture, the choreography of everyone in the scene. I just try to get that down precisely without too many brushstrokes; just enough detail to make it take on three dimensions.

Either it comes or it doesn’t, and boy is it terrifying when it doesn’t, let me tell you.

So here I am, lying on this bed, typing this blog… and now it’s time to try to finish the scene I’ve been working on, at Alice’s Restaurant on the shores of Gold Lake, another 3,000 feet of altitude above Boulder. Madeline has just told a joke to her friend Cary. They’re at a business dinner with Madeline’s husband Dean. Now they have to start talking about arson. They’re both in danger, but they don’t know it yet….

Maybe today I’ll write a little on my sofa, so I can talk to Mom when I get stuck.

That’s a bottle of absinthe on the table. I may need it.

By Cornelia Read

I dragged my daughter Grace all over Manhattan the other day, doing kind of groovy errands. We toured Barnard in the morning, which she loved so much she was on the verge of joyful tears throughout the entire information session, and I think was just about ready to chain herself to the gates in order to get accepted to the freshman class of year after next. Then we got to go to Belgian Shoes and exchange a gift pair from my Aunt Jean that were slightly too big for a really groovy mock-alligator black patent leather.

like this except NOT GREEN

The very nice salesman assured me that you can now wear patent leather BETWEEN Memorial Day and Labor Day, but I disagree totally. I mean, if John Waters thinks Kathleen Turner can fictionally want to kill off Patty Hearst for wearing white shoes after Labor Day, I’m pretty sure I’m still on safe ground here, right?

But the coolest thing we did was go to Tiffany to ask whether they still had a Read family crest on file. My cousin Eric had told me there were two in the files, an older one that has like a bear paw or something, IIRC, with a motto along the lines of “Angry When Roused” only in Latin. The newer one is what my Grandfather designed for himself, which is the crest Eric had made into a ring for himself.

My mother had said that she wanted to have my dad’s version of this ring copied for me and my sister, if we wanted them. I told her that sounded terrific, especially if she felt like doing it for my fiftieth birthday (still thankfully… ahem… three years away.) Mom thought my stepmother might have Dad’s ring, but I’d found out she didn’t, and promised to go check with Tiffany, etc.

After some confusion on the part of the very courteous staff as to where one might actually GO in the store to find this information out (we were sent to the second floor, which is engagement rings and diamonds and pearls, then back to the ground floor [REALLY big sparkly stuff],

and then finally to customer service on the sixth floor, which proved to be correct ding-ding-ding.)

The tremendously kind Mr. Mark Harty helped me out with all this, promised to contact the branch of the company that keeps these things on file, and then emailed me that same afternoon to ask whether I’d forgotten a shopping bag at his desk.

I wrote back that if the shopping bag were from Belgian Shoes, then it contained merely a pair of totally jankity ballet flats from Target, and that I’d be honored if he’d throw them away.

He emailed back later that same day and attached a jpeg of Grandaddy’s crest (and also said he’d successfully disposed of my “beloved” ballet flats, which was most excellent of him):

I don’t know a lot about heraldry, so just looked up a list of what the symbols mean this morning. Here are a few I thought were cool:

an ANT: great labour, wisdom, and providence in one’s affairs

an ASS: patience and humility

an AXE: execution of military duty 

a BAT: Awareness of the powers of darkness and chaos

BAY LEAVES: poet or victor’s laurels

a BEAR: strength, cunning, ferocity in the protection of one’s kindred

a BEAVER: industry and perseverance

a BEE: efficient industry

BELLS: Power to disperse evil spirits; a hawk’s bells denotes one who was not afraid of signalling his approach in peace or war

a CENTAUR: eminence in the field of battle

a COCK: courage and perseverance; hero; able man in politics

a CRANE (stork): close parental bond; vigilance if holding a rock

a DOG: courage, vigilance, and loyalty

a DOLPHIN: swiftness, diligence, salvation, charity, and love

a DUCK: person of many resources

an EAGLE: Person of noble nature, strength, bravery, and alertness… if wings “displayed,” it signifies protection.

an ELEPHANT: great strength, wit, longevity, happiness, royalty, good luck, and ambition.

an ESCALLOP (scallop shell): traveller to far places…

It’s a long list, but kind of fun to check out. Here’s a link to the full thing.

If I were to design my own, it would definitely have an inkhorn or inkwell (art of writing) with a panther (fierce, but tender and loving to children and will defend her children with her life.)

Grandaddy picked a stump with a branch sprouting from it, which apparently means “new life sprouting from the old.” Not sure what the bird is. An eagle? A cock?

Cocks in heraldry can sometimes look like this, rather than totally roostery (this is apparently a “moorcock”):

As for his new motto, I’d definitely keep that.

Here’s another crest I found online this morning, which I think is really cool:

I presume it was designed for an African-American family, given the visual references to slavery and Africa. I like the sound of these people very much.

Okay ‘Ratis, your turn. If you’ve got a family crest, let us know what it is and whether or not you’re comfortable with it. What would be in your crest if you designed it yourself? What would you want as your motto?

by Rob the Slob

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as getting an email from your editor telling you that your latest draft is a job well done.  Especially when you knew in your gut that the first draft was quite possibly a disaster.

After doing this for a few years now, I can tell you with great certainty that the difference between the success and failure of a book (from a writerly POV) can often come down to your relationship with your editor.

As some of you may know, I’m with a new publisher (Dutton) and am working with the brilliant young editor (Ben Sevier), who first acquired my debut novel Kiss Her Goodbye over at St. Martin’s years ago, shortly before he left there.

I was mightily bummed when he left SMP, and I tried to tell myself that all would be good—and for the most part it was—but now that I’m working with Ben again, I realize how different things might have been if he’d stuck around.

You see, Ben is an exceptionally good editor.  He has a keen eye for story and character, and a lot of great ideas, but he also has a way of challenging you, helping you to really dig deep until you find your best work.

The book we’re working on right now (I’m in the midst of a polish) has without a doubt been the toughest book I’ve ever had to write—partly because I’m in territory I’ve never fully explored before, but also because Ben has not spared me.  When he thinks I can do better, he pushes for it.

And that, my friends, is what you want in an editor.

After four books, I was at the point where I was starting to have trouble getting excited about writing.  I had no intention of quitting, mind you—and I think those four books are pretty good (although I also think there’s always room for improvement)—but I can’t tell you how nice it was to work with someone who was not only a cheerleader, but wasn’t afraid to give me that slap in the face that I needed to wake me the hell up.

I think it’s important that, no matter what we do for a living, we find a way to shake it up once in a while. Look for ways to challenge ourselves.  Go places with our thinking and our creativity that we’ve never gone before, because there are discoveries to be made.

After turning in a less than perfect first draft of this book and hearing Ben tell me, in the kindest possible way, that I could do better, I have to say that I was spurred on to work harder than I’ve ever worked before.  And I think the results show.

Believe me, when I turned in the revised draft, I was sweating bullets.  Was it as successful as I thought it was?  I spent my entire vacation in Hawaii waiting for that phone to ring or that email that said, “Dude, this is a screaming piece of shit.” (Not that Ben would ever say anything like that. But my imagination tends to run wild when I’m anxious.)

Fortunately, the response was just the opposite, and I was both relieved and overjoyed that all of my back-breaking work had paid off.

And it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have a terrific editor.

Every writer should be so lucky.

—-

Today’s discussion:  Do you ever feel as if you’re just going through the motions?  Have you ever had someone really challenge you and found yourself digging deeper and working harder because of it?  If so, tell us about it.

Or if you’ve ever lost an editor in the middle of a deal, how did that work out for you?

By Cornelia Read

This has been kind of a sucky summer, on the home front (suicide, death by cancer, brokeness, WIP reading like MAJOR ass…) but I’ve found some things that have really cheered me up, too. So I am going to share a few right now, in case any of you guys need cheering up too.

1. Ian Dury 

2. What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

3. Jane Austen’s Fight Club

4. The Ending of Black Orpheus

5. La Femme Nikita–the real one…

6. Chuck Berry. Dayum.

7. Newman… hockey… blood…

8. Joe Cocker, subtitled

9. Bambi…

10. Bill Clinton, back in the day…

11. MORE Python!

What’ve you guys seen lately that’s cheered you up?

By Cornelia Read

(Apologies for the cross-posting, as this appeared on The Lipstick Chronicles last Saturday, but this week has been a giant suckfest and Les was truly a fine man.)

Take a look at this face. It’s the face of a good man, a true mensch: kind and wise, gently amused. It’s one of those rare adult faces in which you can still see the full spirit of the original (indigenous?) little kid–luminous, undimmed.

This is the face of Les Pockell.

He came up with the title for my first novel, and was my editor for books two and three. Last Monday night he died in his sleep, after a long fight with cancer. His wife and his brother were with him, and if ever there was someone who deserved to have his most beloved people beside him at the end, I’m pretty sure this was the guy.

Earlier in my life, I worked with some ginormous buttheads in publishing–not as an author, but as a lackey. Over the years I’ve been grossed out to read their obituaries, to see how their coffee-mug-throwing, profanity-laced, and grotesquely shrill sense of entitlement was glossed over as “sensitivity,” “generosity of spirit,” and even “tremendous patience and compassion.”

Sadly, it’s often the ginormous buttheads who end up getting eulogized most extensively in New York Times obits–the ones who stole all the credit, jockeyed endlessly for position, played favorites, treated waitstaff and assistants like dog shit, and just generally, as my pal Rae says, “played ‘cupid’: Kiss Up, Piss Down.”

That wasn’t Les. If you Google him, you’ll find testaments to the man’s character from an astonishingly broad spectrum of people, but his own humility isn’t hard to spot. He edited a number of anthologies, and in almost all of them, his author bio reads simply, “Les Pockell lives in Westchester County, New York.”

This is a man who edited Jerzy Kosinski’s Passion Play and The Devil Tree, going to bat for him when Kosinski was accused of plagiarism.

On Google Books Les shows up in the acknowledgements of an astonishing number of authors:

Our wonderful editor, Les Pockell….

I was very fortunate to have Les Pockell direct this project. He had wonderful ideas that improved this book immeasurably. And he is a very patient man — an indispensable quality in an editor….

Les Pockell, who at that time was an editor at St. Martin’s Press, had a bit more perception and put his tail on the line for my first book….

Oh yes, there is Les Pockell, our editor, who was forced to tolerate the authors’ casual attitudes and impossible schedules. Without Les, there would be no book, and we hope that like the Snopes, he endured….

Author and photographer Hank O’Neal describes how he came to work on a book featuring the work of Farm Security Administration photographers of the 1930s and ’40s:

A Vision Shared came about because of a photograph I purchased from Lee Witkin in 1972. The photograph was by Walker Evans and this ultimately led me to the treasure trove of photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. I decided I wanted to learn more about these photographs and photographers but there was no overall survey of this monumental project. I went to Les Pockell at St. Martin’s, pitched an idea and he told me if I could gain the cooperation of five or six of the original Farm Security Administration photographers, he’d do the book. Ultimately, nine of the original men and women signed on as well as the Estates of Ben Shahn and Dorothea Lange. The book was published in 1976 and was a success. 

That’s just a random quick smattering of projects Les was involved with. His Associated Press obit described him as “a publishing executive and literary anthologist known for his deep and unpredictable intellect and an equally eclectic range of book projects.”  The number of books he helped bring into being, the authors he supported, the ideas he helped midwife–yea, verily, the man’s sheer, formidable magnitude of contributions to our culture–is humbling to consider. Les worked at St. Martin’s, Doubleday, Kodansha, Book of the Month Club, and Warner/Hachette/Grand Central. He was Donald Westlake’s editor and Harold Bloom’s and John Lithgow’s.

That AP obit’s author, Hillel Italie, wrote that Les “was also regarded as a mentor with a great deal to teach and a willingness to let others take the credit.” That’s certainly how my wonderful original editor at Warner Books’ Mysterious Press, Kristen Weber, remembered Les on her own blog, To Live and Read in LA:

I wasn’t sure what to make of Les when I first met him. He was enthusiastic and expressive and I was a scared baby editorial assistant…. But everything changed when my boss, legendary Mysterious Press editor Sara Ann Freed, passed away. I was an editorial assistant without an editor to assistant, and Les became one of my biggest advocates. He watched over me when I had to pack up Sara Ann’s office. And when all of her authors slowly but surely decided they wanted me as their new editor, he was as excited for me as I was.

Mysterious Press became me, Les, and publicist Susan Richman. We’d have weekly meetings in his office that were as much about fun as they were about business. I was thrilled to discover how much of a mystery fan he really was, and he became one of the first readers for any project that I wanted to buy.

Sara Ann gave me the tools for becoming the editor that I am today, but Les was the one that watched over me while I implemented them. He was an amazing mentor and I know there are many other editors who feel this exact same way.

Les was on the editors’ panel at a literary trivia competition sponsored by Slice Magazine (co-published by Les’s former assistant editor, the fabulous Celia Johnson*.)

One of his authors, Susan Jane Gilman, was competing against Les on the authors’ panel that night. She summed up the experience on the Powell’s Books Blog:

But the editors? It’s their job to know more than writers. And my current editor, Les Pockell, knows just about everything. And I mean everything. He’s a guy who goes into a Japanese restaurant and orders in Japanese, and then converses casually with the wait staff in Japanese. And he isn’t even trying to get laid. His daily functioning intelligence is slightly higher than that of, say, the entire nation of Sweden.

As a fledgling author under Les’s aegis, I got to have lunch with him too, and it was really, really cool just to get to listen to him. He was enthusiastic about EVERYTHING. He loved surprising details and lovely ironies and obscure little factoids, and he’d join into just about any conversation with tremendous glee.

And to have this guy get excited about your work, as a writer… well, all I can say is that it makes me tear up just thinking about it. Having received praise from Les Pockell will always count as one of the best, most lapidary, most sublime things I’ve ever had happen in my life.

When Les looked across the restaurant table and said why he liked a particular thing, and just got so happy and excited, grinning and waving his hands around… I don’t think the experience of working with an editor can get any better than that. And he was willing to wait for liking something, through draft after draft, just being encouraging and thoughtful and smart about the work as I tried to figure out what the hell the book was about and everything.

I’m not saying he pulled punches, or sugar-coated his critique when a manuscript needed work. He was forthright, and usually just, well, right. Even about the details–like when I referred to the mournful second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, but ended up typing “Beethoven’s Second.” Well, Les caught stuff like that, which is no small thing when you’re trying to whip three-hundred-odd pages of manuscript into shape without embarrassing yourself, you know? But he was never a jerk about anything, never pretentious or didactic or even harsh at all.

Goddamn it, the world needs more human beings like Les–men especially. Losing him hurts, and I think all the best people involved with making books happen in New York feel the pain of his passing. He was a shining exemplar of goodness, in a world containing far too many ginormous buttheads.

And at the end of the day, here is the problem with ginormous buttheads, in publishing and elsewhere: they tend to kill off ideas. Even if they don’t think, or admit, that that’s what they’re doing.

As Richard Hofstadter wrote, in his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life: “Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture. Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: ‘Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!’”

It takes courage to nurture ideas, and to nurture people. It takes patience. It takes wit. It takes tremendous compassion. It takes people like Les.

Alice Walker once said, during a graduation speech at Sarah Lawrence: “No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.”

Les was both friend and kin, a man who coaxed gifts into the world.

I just finished re-reading Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club yesterday, and was really struck by her final paragraphs in that beautiful book as this has been a year marked, for me, by a lot of death:

It’s only looking back that I believe the clear light of truth should have filled us, like the legendary grace that carries a broken body past all manner of monsters. I’m thinking of the cool tunnel of white light the spirit might fly into at death, or so some have reported after coming back from various car wrecks and heart failures and drownings…. Maybe such reports are just death’s neurological fireworks, the brain’s last light show. If so, that’s a lie I can live with.

Still, the image pleases me enough: to slip from the body’s tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes grow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.

Amen to that. (And, yes, I think the afterlife should look like the former Penn Station.)

But here’s the best way I think Les can be remembered:

Les Pockell Makes a Sandwich

*  I am blessed that Les worked on my last two novels with the luminous and extremely gifted Celia Johnson, now the full-fledged editor in whose capable hands I find myself for book number four. I am a lucky, lucky writer, and Les was (once again) a farsighted and very smart man.

By Cornelia Read

So I’m sitting there watching Lord of the Rings on TNT last night, and I just can’t help thinking that a lot of the actors look like other actors, in this Spy Magazine kind of way. (God, how I miss Spy! Especially the headlines… like the time they did an article on Charlton Heston at an NRA rally and called it “Guns ‘n’ Moses.” I mean, how great is that, right?)

I had never seen LOTR before, other than the Hobbit doors on an episode of America’s Next Top Model when they all went to New Zealand this one season. So maybe it was because the whole thing was kind of fresh to me, but it really started to get weird after a while.

I mean, doesn’t Saruman

Look an awful lot like Uncle Junior?

And Boromir…

Totally look like Terry on True Blood?

And I know it’s kind of a cheat to compare LOTR with Harry Potter, but still… Legolas…

And Mr. Malfoy?

And then of course there’s Frodo…

and Susan Boyle…

A hairy Orc…

And this guy leaving voicemails for his girlfriend?

Well, and Galadriel…

And Stevie Nicks is just too easy…

And then of course my mind started to wander, and I matched Kendra…

with Dr. Cornelius

McNulty…

With Geico…

These guys…

And these guys…

Rahm Emanuel…

With Joe Piscopo…

Journey…

With the Bay City Rollers…

And Daniel Day Lewis…

With Robbie Benson…

Last but not least… Donald Trump

And a day at the county fair…

How ’bout you guys, thought of any unlikely twins lately?

and…

By Cornelia Read

Okay, so for the past three days I have had at least one meal a day at the Maine Diner on Route 1 in Wells, Maine.

And may I just say here that IT IS TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME.

Pictured above is their world-famous Lobster Pie (I should probably have capitalized world famous, but whatev.)

This is five ounces of hand-picked amazing lobster freshness baked under a crust of crushed Ritz crackers. And see that little thingie of melted butter? You pour that over the top.

This is a meal, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler, which could make a cardio-thoracic surgeon kick a hole in a stained glass window.

Or, how about this:

This would be the Hot Lobster Roll. Note the lobster, and the melted butter. Are we noticing a pattern? A very very very good pattern.

Here’s part of the breakfast menu:

I admit I opted for the Irish Benedict. But my pal Rae had the Lobster Benedict, and it looked–you guessed it–FUCKING AWESOME!!!

Should you find yourself on Route 1 in Wells, Maine, I recommend just about anything on the menu (except for the biscuits and gravy, which are kind of lame.)

I especially think that the she-crab soup is a cup of feminist crustacean heaven, though Maggie preferred the seafood chowder, go figure…

Also, in Cornelia’s Islamic Republic, there would be no dessert but Indian Pudding:

This is described on the menu as an old New England favorite consisting of “corn meal, molasses, light cream, butter, brown sugar, ginger, cinnamon” which is served warm with home-made vanilla ice cream. Trust me, it doesn’t suck. At all.

Anyway, I think you should all come eat here, at least once in this lifetime.

I have had wonderful summer road food in my life–Ambrosiaburgers at Nepenthe:

Fried clams in Ipswich, Massachusetts:

Where the building is almost as cool as the food:

I’ve had deep-fried artichoke hearts at the Giant Artichoke in Castroville, California:

Cuban food on Calle Ocho in Miami:

And yea, verily, I have eaten yak cheese in Kathmandu (also Tiramisu in Kathmandu, but that’s another story…)

Or “ring-sting” rijstaffel in Bali…

Daddy Bruce barbecue in Colorado…

Spiedies in Binghamton:

Manapua on Oahu:

Green chile pizza in Boulder:

It’s Its in San Francisco:

Manhattan Special…

And soup dumplings in NYC…

But I’m still pretty damn happy with the Lobster Pie.

What’s your favorite sentimental summer road food, O ‘Ratis?

By Cornelia Read

Many years ago, when I had small children, was still married, and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, my intrepid spouse and I decided we should go camping over the Fourth of July weekend. Newly handy with Google (or Altavista, or whatever it was back then), I found us a campground that still had vacancies up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which I’d once visited on a high school ski trip.

We went to check out the hotel at Bretton Woods during the course of that trip, and on the way drove through a small crossing called “Fabyan’s,” which intrigued me. My dad’s mother’s maiden name was Fabyan, and it’s one of my middle names.

I was bored last week and started Googling dead relatives, and ended up finding out a bit more about an ancestor named Horace Fabyan, the namesake of that little White Mountains spot. He did indeed come from the same family in Maine that my Boston-born Grandmama Read derived from, but there was a whole other passel of info I stumbled into because I’d Googled old Horace, which I will relate below…

Horace himself

A random disaster in the early 1800s near Crawford Notch in these mountains, it turns out, launched not only the first serious wave of American tourism, but a school of landscape painters, a number of American poets and fiction writers, the concept of “artists-in-residence,” two of America’s first artists’ colonies, and even a bit of scary slang that’s still with us.

A hunter named Timothy Nash discovered Crawford Notch while tracking a moose over Cherry Mountain in 1771. He made a deal with the then-governor of New Hampshire–if Nash could get a horse through the pass, he’d be given a large tract of land in exchange, along the route of a proposed road at the head of the notch. Nash and a friend managed to get an old farmhorse through, at times having to lower it over boulders by rope. In 1775, the first official road was opened–a turnpike used to bring goods from Vermont to the ports of Maine.

Small houses along the way started putting up travelers for the night, turning a decent profit.

In the fall of 1825, a man named Samuel Willey moved into a house at Crawford Notch with his wife, five children, and two hired men. The three men spent a year enlarging the building into a serviceable inn for passing travelers.

According to http://www.nhstateparks.com/crawford.html:

During the night of August 28, 1826, after a long drought which had dried the mountain soil to an unusual depth, came one of the most violent and destructive rain storms ever known in the White Mountains. The Saco River rose twenty feet overnight. Livestock was carried off, farms set afloat, and great gorges were cut in the mountains. Two days after the storm, anxious friends and relatives penetrated the debris-strewn valley to learn the fate of the Willey family.

They found the house unharmed, but the surrounding fields were covered with debris. Huge boulders, trees, and masses of soil had been swept from Mt. Willey’s newly bared slopes. The house had escaped damage because it was apparently situated just below a ledge that divided the major slide into two streams. The split caused the slide to pass by the house on both sides leaving it untouched. Inside, beds appeared to have been left hurriedly, a Bible lay on the table, and the dog howled mournfully. 

 

Sixty years later, an elderly man named Ebenezer R. Tasker, who’d been an eyewitness among the first group of neighbors to arrive at the scene related what they found to the Lewiston, Maine, Journal. His account was reproduced in The New York Times on August 20th, 1894

I was a young boy then, and I suppose the events of that fearful period when the mountains echoed for days with the noise of rumbling slides, are impressed more strongly upon my mind than they otherwise would be….

On the 28^th of that month it began to rain, and many of the farms in Bartlett, Carrol County, were damaged with landslides that covered the loam with gravel and rubbish in great tracts. At Judge Hall’s tavern in Bartlett the next day the farmers were sitting around the hearth when in came a man named John Barker, who told us about the fearful slide at the Willey farm.

Barker had visited the Willey farm, and not finding the family, concluded that they were safe at the home of a neighbor, Abel Crawford. But others among us thought differently…. [that night a group including Tasker and his father started for the farm]… All night we were struggling up through the notch toward our destination. At last we arrived and as soon as day broke we commenced our search.

The course of the mountain slide presented an appalling spectacle.  Its track had reached to within three feet of the house and had carried away one corner of the barn. Rocks, trees, and broken timber laid piled up and ended over all the track. The avalanche seemed to have suddenly stopped, for the lower end was more than perpendicular. The upper crust hung over the lower part and formed several large caves. Great crownds had arrived, as the story of the missing family had spread far and wide. No sign could be found of the bodies, until at last, noticing a cluster of flies about the entrance of one of the caves, my father called the attention of Mr. Edward Melcher to it, and the latter crawled in. He came out with a white, drawn face that scared me, boy that I was, nearly out of my wits. He told the crowd he had seen the hand of a man jammed between two logs, and indicated where to dig.

Three men took spades and soon revealed the body of David Allen, a hired man. Directly behind the body and clasping the hand of Allen was the body of Mrs. Willey. The remains of the rest of the family were recovered in like manner with the exception of three of the children, whose bodies were never recovered….

I suppose the family had started to escape from the house upon hearing the avalanche bearing down upon them, and had been overtaken in flight…. the house was saved by a big rock deeply imbedded in the ground, which first stopped a hemlock tree and then turned the course of the avalanche.

The tragedy, described as an “almost-miracle” (the house untouched, its inhabitants crushed) was reported nationally. As historian Randall H. Bennett reports in his book The White Mountains: 

“Soon after the Willey Disaster, hundreds of tourists began to flock to the scene of this great catastrophe. To accommodate these visitors, Horace Fabyan of Portland, Maine, built a hotel…”

The drama of the location drew dozens of writers and painters.

According to http://www.aannh.org/heritage/primer.php:

During this period artistic appreciation of the mountains reached its apogee. Nature poets such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Lucy Larcom brought forth cascades of verse.

 

Winslow Homer, “Artists Sketching in the White Mountains”

Many of 19th century America’s best-known landscapists worked in the White Mountains: Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, John Frederick Kensett, Benjamin Champney, Homer Dodge Martin, Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and photographer William Henry Jackson.

Two of America’s first art colonies sprouted in the valleys of West Campton and North Conway. Painters’ works drew tourists to the mountains, and souvenir-hungry tourists eventually drew more painters.

We now entered the Notch, and felt awestruck as we passed between the bare and rifted mountains. . . . The site of the Willie [sic] House standing with a little patch of green in the midst [of] the dread wilderness of desolation called to mind the horrors of that night. . . when these mountains were deluged and rocks and trees were hurled from their high places down the steep channelled sides of the mountains. . . .

 

 

The frisson of tragedy experienced at this site drew so many tourists, in addition to these artists (and certainly encouraged in their curiosity by the paintings, poetry, and stories further publicizing the plight of the Willeys,) that innkeepers began building more expansive hostelries to accommodate the new crush of travelers.

Enter Horace Fabyan, who not only bought an existing hotel to expand so that it could accomodate 150 guests (The White Mountain House, which Fabyan purchased in 1837.) By 1844, this hotel had become so successful that Fabyan bought the actual Willey House and built a second hotel beside it (both the hotel and the original Willey house burned to the ground in 1899.) The White Mountain House, in turn, was destroyed by fire in 1853. This was not an uncommon occurrence for many of the most famous hotels in the region–all of them large, wood-frame structures with only the most primitive means of fire prevention and fire fighting.

Fabyan gained such renown as a host in the region that when a new hotel was built on the site of his White Mountain House by a conglomerate in 1872, the owners named their new 500-guest accomodations “Fabyan House” in his honor.

That hotel burned to nothing in 1951, and now the only evidence left of his impact on the region is the name of the railroad stop that serviced these grand hotels in turn.

The original station has now apparently been converted to a restaurant and lounge. I might go for a sandwich… and I also want to find a copy of Eric Purchase’s book Out of Nowhere: Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains, which sounds utterly amazing. Purchase does the most thorough job of delving into the cultural and artistic impact of the Willey disaster to date, illustrate the manner in which “the disaster becomes the apt juncture of the interacting forces of capitalism and art as they together create an American appreciation for nature.”

Purchase also says that the impact of the slide is the first American expression of the newly industrialized Europeans’ aesthetic response to natural “scenes,” particularly in the Alps, which gave rise to the concept of “the sublime.”

The book’s jacket copy sums up everything I’ve been trying to thread together here far better than I’ve probably done in my longwinded Asperger’s way…

In Out of Nowhere, Eric Purchase examines the surprising connection of this disaster to the rise of tourism in America, investigating developments that ranged from land speculation to new interpretations of the meaning of nature and landscape. The Willey tragedy, widely recorded in literature, art, travel writing, newspapers, and scientific journals, was the first natural disaster in the United States to capture national attention. Nineteenth-century Americans were intrigued with nature’s sheer perversity in destroying an entire family while leaving its house untouched. They marveled at such dramatic evidence of the natural world’s vastness and power. Suddenly the White Mountains became, in the public’s imagination, a mythical place where nature was preserved in its original, potent state.

Hundreds and then thousands of tourists, including artists, scientists, and writers such as Thomas Cole, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Charles Lyell, began traveling there every summer to take vacations amid the romantic landscape. The Willey’s undamaged house became one of the area’s most popular attractions-fittingly, Purchase notes, since Samuel Willey was among the first entrepreneurs of White Mountain tourism. It was businessmen, after all, not artists or intellectuals, who were the first to exploit picturesque notions of untamed nature in remote landscapes to lure wealthy tourists to their inns. Ultimately, the fame of the Willeys’ gruesome deaths only enhanced the tourist trade they had helped launch.

…Traces the rise of tourism in the White Mountains from the 1826 landslide which killed nine and garnered national attention. Arguing that this event marks the beginning of a new American awareness of landscapes, the author explores the European notion of the sublime (an appreciation of one’s insignificance in the face of the forces of nature) as it became harnessed by businessman wishing to bring wealthy travellers to their inns.

Anyway, that’s what an afternoon of Googling last week led me to discover about a distant cousin many times removed–old Horace Fabyan. Kind of cool, I think.

I wonder if that early American fascination with the physical evidence of tragedy has anything to do with our interest in crime fiction? That same frisson, that same wonder at how bad things happen to decent people, that same sense of needing to seek an explanation for the unexplainable?

What think you, O wise ‘Ratis?

And p.s.!! That phrase the Willey tragedy gave rise to? Remember this poor lost family the next time you say something “gives you the willies…”

By Cornelia Read

(“Pearl of Great Price,” decoupage, Frederick H. Read 2005)

So I am a big dodo, today. I totally thought it was Alex’s Saturday to post, which it SO is not.

Today I have to get my daughter ready to fly to India tomorrow–which means finding someplace to buy a mosquito net and water purification tablets and apparently a new pair of sandals since hers just broke, which is interesting since “broke” is what currently describes the amount in my checking account (my mom is paying for India for Grace and her cousin Sasha, which is astonishingly great of her.)

Also just got a letter in the mail this morning which seems to indicate that Grace’s school neglected to give her financial aid for senior year, and would now like me to come up with $30,820–$15,435 of it by July 1. I am wondering if walking into the fin aid office Monday morning and saying, “you know, I filled out all the online paperwork back in April and got it in on time and everything, and if there’s something more recent I neglected to do, I apologize but my father just shot himself and the whole family kind of went off the rails and everyone required a lot of long-distance phone call handholding for upwards of eight hours a day for the first couple of weeks after that, because it’s not like a suicide makes a crazy family suddenly SANER, you know? And could you possibly help me out here because at the moment I have $250 in my fucking checking account…”

And Dad checking out when he did also means I blew my June 1 deadline for book four, which means said book will probably not be published next year, and I kind of am having trouble getting my head back into the work, go figure.

On the bright side, my writing group back in California just read what I have of that manuscript, to date, and I made everyone cry twice, in just the parts that are supposed to do that, and they think the rest of it is funny and poignant and they like my arson investigator chick, so that is a huge relief (unless they’re just saying that to make me feel better because everything else in my orbit sucks so hard right about now, which is always a possibility but I think I’ll just go with hypothesis A, here, for the moment anyway.)

The memorial service in California was fabulous, though. It was so beautiful, and we all worked really hard to make it look good, and a friend of my dad and stepmom offered up his house for the day. My writing group and my publisher sent gorgeous flowers, God Bless Them Every One. A hundred fifty people came, twenty people got up and spoke. Everyone brought his favorite foods. One woman flew in from Australia to be there, two people came from Hawaii, lots from the East Coast. May pals Sophie Littlefield and Julie Goodson-Lawes and Muffy Srinivasan drove down from the Bay Area, which was such a hugely blessed occurrence that I can barely believe I know such fabulous women.

I have been thinking a lot lately about whether it would be harder to lose a parent who was wonderful and beloved and a pillar in your life, or tougher to have the kind of fraught relationship Dad and I had–missing the good parts, wishing there had been more of them, knowing that now that can never be fully resolved. I guess both options suck profoundly, only in different ways.

I miss the man I knew back in 1967,

(showing off for Dad in front of his new Porsche–Belgian shoes and all, Jericho, NY, 1967)

when I was four and he was my favorite person in the entire world–before the drugs and the Primal Therapy and the pain of life in general killed that guy off, so that I only got glimpses of his ghost for the following four decades.

(“Upper Orchard,” Centre Island, New York. September 17th, 1988)

He stopped speaking to me for twelve years, starting when my daughter Lila’s autism was diagnosed. That was a deeply shitty month–a week later I found out that my husband had been sleeping with a woman he’d worked with in Colorado for a year and a half. October of ’97 SUCKED, let me tell you.

Dad only got back in touch when my first novel was published. He came to a signing I did with Lee Child in Thousand Oaks, after having sent my mother (to whom he hadn’t spoken in decades) a note saying “we plan to see the author at her T.O. appearance.” He wrote that on a sheet from a small notepad, embossed with “Proud Supporter of the California Rifle and Pistol Association” across the top.

The weekend before that I was in Scottsdale with Lee, at Poisoned Pen for our first signing together. We were smoking outside the building, leaning up against the wall in the heat, and I said, “look, my dad is planning to come see us next weekend, and I haven’t seen him in twelve years. He thinks the KGB reads his mail and that ninjas want to barbecue and eat his feet and steal his collages. Plus which I still have his Marine Corps sharpshooters medal, and he’s now a postal worker, and he wrote my mom this weird note on gun-nut stationery… so if you want me to rent us both some Kevlar vests or totally pull out of the event, I’m totally okay with that. Because he’s pretty insane and it’s all freaking me out a little, here.”

Lee took a drag of his Camel and said, “well, if you’re really nervous, I think we have two choices. Either I can hire security, or I can just take him out into the parking lot and slap him around a little.”

And I thought to myself, “Lee CHILD wants to beat up my dad for me… that’s the coolest thing EVER!” Which in and of itself is pretty fucking weird, right? In an awesome Reacher kind of a way, of course.

And Dad thankfully didn’t shoot us, he just ate most of the plate of brownies the bookstore had put out, and got in the back of the line to have his copy of Field of Darkness signed, behind the 150 people there to see Lee, and he was actually kind of sweet about it all, and I didn’t even cry until I got back into the media escort’s car, which took a lot of fortitude.

After that he was back in my life, in the best way he could manage to be–not without mentions of ninjas and Primal tantrums and stuff, but still, my dad was back, and he got to know my daughter Grace, and told me how sorry he was about Lila, and I grew to love my half-sister, and get close again with my stepmom. They even invited us to spend three weeks with them at Camp in the Adirondacks last summer.

And Peter Riegert came up to visit and see if it would work as a location for the film of Field he’d like to do, and stayed for three days.

On the last day, Dad rowed Riegert and me around the lake in an old guideboat for a couple of hours, telling us stories about what it was like there when he was a kid, and being totally charming.

Peter said later, “I know you have kind of a tough relationship with your dad, and you have to deal with Angry Dad and Crazy Dad, but he was totally charming today to me, and I greatly appreciate that.”

(See: “Read Camp,” pp. 189-195)

And I told him it was really nice having a friend who was famous enough to make my dad get his head out of his ass for an entire afternoon, and not even mention a single ninja, but it also made me really happy. When Peter called up a couple of weeks ago to tell me how sorry he was to read my email about what had just happened with Dad, I told him that that afternoon is one of the best times I ever had with my father, and thanked him for making that possible.

I told the story of Dad showing up unexpectedly at “Father’s Weekend” at my boarding school when I was seventeen (he showed up with nothing but a sleeping bag, not having told me beforehand that he was planning to attend, and asked me to find him a place to sleep. Unfortunately he ended up bunking at the headmaster’s cottage, through a series of odd coincidencs, and I’m pretty sure Dad was the first person EVER to do marathon bonghits in my headmaster’s guest bathroom…) at Murder By The Book in Houston when I was on tour earlier this year. It’s kind of a long story, but it’s pretty funny. And it ends with the headmaster of my school coming up to me and saying, “I’ve been doing these weekends for twenty years now, and your father is the ONLY interesting man I’ve ever met at a single one of them…” which was especially nice since I figured he was going to tell me I was expelled because my dad had done marathon bonghits in his bathroom all weekend. Anyway, I made everyone in the store laugh a lot, which was awesome.

I told that story again at the memorial gathering. And people got to laugh again, which was good, and it made everyone cry, too.

Crap. Now I’m crying again, too. It’s been a couple of days since I’ve done that, and I’ve got a lot to get taken care of today… I will leave you with the following, the obit my Aunt Jean wrote for the NY Times:

(Dad with Grandmama Read and his eldest niece Edith, Camp, 1945?)

READ–Frederick Harvey. Frederick Harvey Read the eighth son of the late Vice-Admiral USNR and Mrs. William A. Read, of Purchase, NY died suddenly, May 13, 2010 in Malibu, CA. Fred attended Buckley School in New York City, St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, graduated from Lawrenceville School and attended the University of Colorado. He then joined the Marine Corps where he was the outstanding marine in his division at Camp Pendleton and learned how to sky dive with Jacques Istel at Hemet, CA. After his military service he married Deborah Smith of Centre Island and had two daughters, Cornelia L. F. Read, the author, and Freya Read Read, a designer for The Pottery Barn, who survive him. He then became a Junior Partner at the Wall Street firm of Hayden Stone. In his early years, he was a member of The Brook Club in New York. He also sailed at The Seawanaka Corinthian Yacht Club. That marriage ended in divorce and after a brief stint in Nassau, Bahamas and Chandolin, Switzerland, Fred moved to Malibu to be near his children. During his years in Malibu, he was a short order cook at The Neptune’s Net, a taxi driver and a master Volkswagen mechanic. A fine hockey player, he played with Charles Schulz’s pick-up team. He married Bonna Newman and had their daughter, Elena Jean Read, both surviving. A loving father, he is also survived by four grandchildren, Lila and Grace Eggert and Indy and Sasha Read, his eldest brother, William A. Read, Jr. of Palm Beach, FL, his other brothers, Peter B. Read of Jaffrey, NH, Donald B. Read of Old Lyme, CT, his sister, Jean Read Knox of Williamsville, NY, and numerous nieces and nephews. He was predeceased by four other brothers, Curtis S. Read, David W. Read, Roderick F. Read, and Alexander D. Read. Fred was a wonderful trout and salmon fly fisherman, a lover of nature and beautiful green places, and a very talented artist. His work showed in 2009 in Toronto, Ontario, and at Diesel Bookstore in Malibu, CA. He was also noted for his scrimshaw which is in many private collections. Until recently, Fred was a 17 year employee of the United States Post Office in Malibu, CA. Fred will be missed by all who knew and loved him and his many friends. A memorial service will be held at the convenience of the family.

Dad’s collages are online at http://www.artforcetwo.com/home

(“Big Indian,” decoupage, Frederick H. Read 2003)