Editors Feeling Quotes

I don't feel particularly proud of myself. But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

Being editors is not the best way to wealth. We all feel this now, and highwaymen are not respected any more like they used to be.

There’s a good feeling about them. It’s something I like to find in fiction. So many writers master form and technique, but get so little feeling into their work. I think that’s important.

I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me.

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that wont the game.

Dear 2600: I think my girlfriend has been cheating on me and I wanted to know if I could get her password to Hotmail and AOL. I am so desperate to find out. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. And this is yet another popular category of letter we get. You say any help would be appreciated? Let’s find out if thats true. Do you think someone who is cheating on you might also be capable of having a mailbox you don’t know about? Do you think that even if you could get into the mailbox she uses that she would be discussing her deception there, especially if we live in a world where Hotmail and AOL passwords are so easily obtained? Finally, would you feel better if you invaded her privacy and found out that she was being totally honest with you? Whatever problems are going on in this relationship are not going to be solved with subterfuge. If you can’t communicate openly, there’s not much there to salvage.

Deep Throat stamped his foot. “A conspiracy like this . . . a conspiracy investigation . . . the rope has to tighten slowly around everyone’s neck. You build convincingly from the outer edges in, you get ten times the evidence you need against the Hunts and Liddys. They feel hopelessly finished—they may not talk right away, but the grip is on them. Then you move up and do the same thing at the next level. If you shoot too high and miss, then everybody feels more secure. Lawyers work this way. I’m sure smart reporters must, too. You’ve put the investigation back months. It puts everyone on the defensive—editors, FBI agents, everybody has to go into a crouch after this.” Woodward swallowed hard. He deserved the lecture.

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain-porridge unleavened literature licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

I know that what had happened with my father - his insults, his criticism, the way he made me feel that I was defective and deformed - had hurt me. I'd encountered enough of those self-help articles in women's magazines to know that you don't go through that kind of cruelty unscathed. With every man I met, I'd watch myself carefully. Did I really like that editor, I'd wonder, or am I just searching for Daddy? Do I love this guy, I'd ask myself, or do I just think he'd never leave me, the way my father did?

[Democracy] is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

Deep Throat stamped his foot. 'A conspiracy like this...a conspiracy investigation...the rope has to tighten slowly around everyone's neck. You build convincingly from the outer edges in, you get ten times the evidence you need against the Hunts and the Liddys. They feel hopelessly finished - they may not talk right away, but the grip is on them. Then you move up and do the same thing at the next level. If you shoot too high and miss, the everyone feels more secure. Lawyers work this way. I'm sure smart reporters must, too. You've put the investigation back months. It puts everyone on the defensive - editors, FBI agents, everybody has to go into a crouch after this.' Woodward swallowed hard. He deserved the lecture. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?

You know what I think?” Touching him feels so good, so strangely uncomplicated, like he’s the exception to every rule. “What?” “I think you love your job,” he says softly. “I think you work that hard because you care ten times more than the average person.” “About work,” I say. “About everything.” His arms tighten around me. “Your sister. Your clients. Their books. You don’t do anything you’re not going to do one hundred percent. You don’t start anything you can’t finish. “You’re not the person who buys the stationary bike as part of a New Year’s resolution, then uses it as a coatrack for three years. You’re not the kind of woman who only works hard when it feels good, or only shows up when it’s convenient. If someone insults one of your clients, those fancy kid gloves of yours come off, and you carry your own pen at all times, because if you’re going to have to write anything, it might as well look good. You read the last page of books first—don’t make that face, Stephens.” He cracks a smile in one corner of his mouth. “I’ve seen you—even when you’re shelving, you sometimes check the last page, like you’re constantly looking for all the information, trying to make the absolute best decisions.” “And by you’ve seen me,” I say, “you mean you’ve watched me.” “Of course I fucking do,” he says in a low, rough voice. “I can’t stop. I’m always aware of where you are, even if I don’t look, but it’s impossible not to. I want to see your face get stern when you’re emailing a client’s editor, being a hard-ass, and I want to see your legs when you’re so excited about something you just read that you can’t stop crossing and uncrossing them. And when someone pisses you off, you get these red splotches.” His fingers brush my throat. “Right here.” “You’re a fighter,” he says. “When you care about something, you won’t let anything fucking touch it. I’ve never met anyone who cares as much as you do. Do you know what most people would give to have someone like that in their life?” His eyes are dark, probing, his heartbeat fast. “Do you know how fucking lucky anyone you care about is? You know . . .

Few people read coffee-table photo books, and indeed they are not intended to be read. I find the text in these books is often surprisingly good, perhaps because the author--or more importantly, the editor--feels no need to pander.

Speech therapy is an art that deserves to be more widely known. You cannot imagine the acrobatics your tongue mechanically performs in order to produce all the sounds of a language. Just now I am struggling with the letter l, a pitiful admission for an editor in chief who cannot even pronounce the name of his own magazine! On good days, between coughing fits, I muster enough energy and wind to be able to puff out one or two phonemes. On my birthday, Sandrine managed to get me to pronounce the whole alphabet more or less intelligibly. I could not have had a better present. It was as if those twenty-six letters and been wrenched from the void; my own hoarse voice seemed to emanate from a far-off country. The exhausting exercise left me feeling like a caveman discovering language for the first time. Sometimes the phone interrupts our work, and I take advantage of Sandrine's presence to be in touch with loved ones, to intercept and catch passing fragments of life, the way you catch a butterfly. My daughter, Celeste, tells me of her adventures with her pony. In five months she will be nine. My father tells me how hard it is to stay on his feet. He is fighting undaunted through his ninety-third year. These two are the outer links of the chain of love that surrounds and protects me. I often wonder about the effect of these one-way conversations on those at the other end of the line. I am overwhelmed by them. How dearly I would love to be able to respond with something other than silence to these tender calls. I know that some of them find it unbearable. Sweet Florence refuses to speak to me unless I first breathe noisily into the receiver that Sandrine holds glued to my ear. "Are you there, Jean-Do?" she asks anxiously over the air. And I have to admit that at times I do not know anymore.

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind.

My friend Maile Carpenter, the remarkable editor of Food Network Magazine, who's wise beyond her years, told me that the definition of a good marriage is that each person thinks they got the better deal. That's exactly how I feel about Jeffrey as we approach our fifty-sixth anniversary, and I know he feels the same way about me.

I need to believe that there is more to this world than what we know. I need to believe there is magic out there. I cannot believe these things blindly, though, and maybe that is why I had to do this mission—to prove to myself that we can do things which are bigger than ourselves. I needed to walk through a minefield to feel protected.

My feeling,” he explained, “is that a publisher’s first allegiance is to talent. And if we aren’t going to publish a talent like this, it is a very serious thing.” He contended that the ambitious Fitzgerald would be able to find another publisher for this novel and young authors would follow him: “Then we might as well go out of business.

We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to feel good. Most reporters, editors, and producers—swept up with the rest of us—will shy away from real skeptical scrutiny. He won’t be selling you prayers or crystals or tears. Perhaps he’ll be selling you a war, or a scapegoat, or a much more all-encompassing bundle of beliefs than Carlos’s.

Tom looked at St. Vincent. “I assume the editor at the Chronicle refused to divulge the writer’s identity?” St. Vincent looked rueful. “Categorically. I’ll have to find a way to pry it out of him without bringing the entire British press to his defense.” “Yes,” Tom mused, tapping his lower lip with a fingertip, “they tend to be so touchy about protecting their sources.” “Trenear,” Lord Ripon said through gritted teeth, “will you kindly throw him out?” “I’ll see myself out,” Tom said casually. He turned as if to leave, and paused as if something had just occurred to him. “Although … as your friend, Trenear, I find it disappointing that you haven’t asked about my day. It makes me feel as if you don’t care.” Before Devon could respond, Pandora jumped in. “I will,” she volunteered eagerly. “How was your day, Mr. Severin?” Tom sent her a brief grin. “Busy. After six tedious hours of business negotiations, I paid a call to the chief editor of the London Chronicle.” St. Vincent lifted his brows. “After I’d already met with him?” Trying to look repentant, Tom replied, “I know you said not to. But I had a bit of leverage you didn’t.” “Oh?” “I told him the paper’s owner would dismiss him and toss him out on the pavement if he didn’t name the anonymous writer.” St. Vincent stared at him quizzically. “You bluffed?” “No, that is what the business negotiations were about. I’m the new owner. And while the chief editor happens to be a staunch advocate for freedom of the press, he’s also a staunch supporter of not losing his job.” “You just bought the London Chronicle,” Devon said slowly, to make certain he hadn’t misheard. “Today.” “No one could do that in less than a day,” Ripon sneered. Winterborne smiled slightly. “He could,” he said, with a nod toward Tom. “I did,” Tom confirmed, picking idly at a bit of lint on his cuff. “All it took was a preliminary purchase agreement and some earnest money.

Chances are you have a deep connection to books because at some point you discovered that they were the one truly safe place to discover and explore feelings that are banished from the dinner table, the cocktail party, the golf foursome, the bridge game. Because the writers who mattered to you have dared to say I am a sick man. And because within the world of books there is no censure.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

the tart values of New England were the essence of his character. He was full of Yankee quirks and biases. He could be crotchety in his behavior and literary taste, obtuse and old-fashioned. And yet, Brooks believed, Windsor and all it stood for had kept him at heart ”so direct, so uninfluenced by prejudice, so unclouded by secondary feelings, so immediate, so fresh.“ Max’s was a New England mind, filled with dichotomies.

The winter was harsh. Kay had been spending days in her trailer hunkered down under piles of blankets—some even say with an older bear named Betty Sue. Her skin was turning gray, which could suggest emphysema, pneumonia, or a pending heart attack. The fact that her outerwear was found untorn could also suggest hypothermia, which sometimes makes victims feel like they’re burning up. Hopkins told me that Kay probably collapsed while walking back to her home. He said it’s even possible that

Outside the White House, Wilson’s many notes to Germany and their replies became the target of wry humor, as when one editor wrote: “Dear Kaiser: In spite of previous correspondence on the subject another ship with American citizens on board has been sunk. Under the circumstances we feel constrained to inform you, in a spirit of utmost friendliness, that a repetition of the incident will of necessity require the dispatch of another note to your majesty’s most estimable and peace-loving government.” As

I don’t complain about the work so much as about the sluggishness of swampy time. The office hours, you see, cannot be divided up; even in the last half hour I feel the pressure of the eight hours just as much as in the first. Often it is like a train ride lasting night and day, until in the end you’re totally crushed; you no longer think about the straining of the engine, or about the hilly or flat countryside, but ascribe all that’s happening to your watch alone, which you continually hold in your palm.

Passion is a feeling that tells you: this is the right thing to do. Nothing can stand in my way. It doesn t matter what anyone else says. This feeling is so good that it cannot be ignored. I m going to follow my bliss and act upon this glorious sensation of joy.

In 1884, Charles Dudley Warner, an American editor and essayist, gave vent to the popular unease, echoing Plautus in the process: “The chopping up of time into rigid periods is an invasion of individual freedom and makes no allowances for differences in temperament and feeling.

Writers have come to master nearly every trade. They are inventors and entrepreneurs of character, plot, and dialogue. They are the eager scientists that can’t wait to try out their new experiment. They are the maestros of the symphony that plays in their head, conducting what happens, where, and at what precise moment. They are engineers and architects that design the structure of their piece so it stands the test of time and continues to fire on all cylinders. They play mechanics and doctors in their revisions, hoping they prescribe the correct diagnosis to fix the piece’s 'boo boos'. They are salesmen who pitch not an idea or a product, but themselves, to editors, publishers, and more importantly, their readers. They are teachers who through their craft, preach to pupils about what works and what doesn’t work and why. Writers can make you feel, can make you think, can make you wonder, but they can also grab your hand and guide you through their maze. Similar to what Emerson stated in 'The Poet,' writers possess a unique view on life, and with their revolving eye, they attempt to encompass all. I am a writer.

Perkins’s first piece of advice came from Hemingway, the only survivor of his great triumvirate of the twenties: “Always stop while you are going good. Then when you resume you have the impetus of feeling that what you last did was good. Don’t wait until you are baffled and stumped.

There was also a deliberate exploitation of prejudiced mentalities among their listeners by revivalist preachers such as Billy Sunday. Above all, there was a feeling that Prohibition was a winning global crusade, and that those first on the wagon would be first in the promised land.” (Sinclair, 1962).

If he were alive today, Plato—to take him as an example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived—would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. And of course if Plato were to walk suddenly into a news editor’s office today and prove himself to be indeed that great author who died over two thousand years ago he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers. If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even turn one or the other of his older works into film, he could undoubtedly do very well for himself for a considerable period of time. The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remember the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, because there were so many other good writers to be considered. And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European publicists but still was a bit outdated, and certainly not in a class for current newsworthiness with a man like, for instance, Paul Arnheim.

After a while, however, the desire to write begins to mount. I can feel my material building up within me, like spring melt pressing against a dam. Then one day (in a best-case scenario), when I can’t take that pressure anymore, I sit down at my desk and start to write. Worry about journal editors impatiently awaiting a promised manuscript never enters the picture. I don’t make promises, so I don’t have deadlines. As a result, writer’s block and I are strangers to each other. As you might expect, that makes my life much happier. It must be terribly stressful for a writer to be put in the position of having to write when he doesn’t feel like it. (Could I be wrong? Do most writers actually thrive on that kind of stress?)

A Chinese proverb I came across gives insight: “Assume a cheerfulness you do not feel, and shortly you feel the cheerfulness you assumed.” Or as editor and publisher Elbert Hubbard says, “Be pleasant until 10 a.m. and the rest of the day will take care of itself.” When you get up in the morning, you need to remind yourself of the decision you’ve made to have a positive attitude.

SGT Steven C. Ganczewski, a Ranger in editor Chuck Holton's unit, had been asked by a high-school guidance counselor why a young man with his "potential" would join the Army. "Someone with his potential"--as if selfless service, even to the point of giving one's life for a cause greater than any one of us--is somehow beneath one's "potential." Thankfully, Patrick Henry and George Washington didn't feel that way in 1775.

We are all writers from an early age. Most of what we write is nonfiction—essays for school, letters to friends, memoranda to colleagues—in which we are trying to pass on information. We are raised with a traditional nonfiction mind-set. Even when we write love letters, we are trying to communicate how we feel and not necessarily trying to evoke an emotion in the recipient, though that might be better suited to our purpose.

Many people who have an interest in politics feel they should proclaim—loudly, and at any given time—what their views are and why the “other side” is wrong. These proclamations appear in many forms, from scathing letters to the editor to frothing-at-the-mouth comments on blogs and internet videos. Although expression and debate are vital parts of policymaking, political speech should be used to push forward ideas that will help others.

And of course, if there's one thing we feel we can take as truth in these books it's Katniss and her narrative. But we should ask ourselves whether even this should be above suspicion. Like all first-person narrators, Katniss is her own editor with her own biases: she chooses how to present herself and those around her. Katniss has a stake in the story she's telling and what that stake is changes how she portrays the events and her emotional reaction to them.

I'd been told before by editors to pare back on violence. This always feels like a gendered suggestion to me - the parameters of what's allowed and what isn't from a female-identifying writer. I can't imagine anyone telling, say, Roberto Bolaño or Cormac McCarthy to ease off on the blood and gore. Women should write in pastel shades about love, domesticity. Leave the hardcore realism to the fellas. Well, fuck that. The fury is there; I had better write it than perform it.

August 16, 1945, the day after the Japanese surrendered and World War II ended, "The guns are silent now and so are many of the men whose hands once held them. Never again will they see their wives or mothers. Never again will they hear their children laugh. And never again will they smell the sweet scents of home. And for what? For what did these husbands and fathers, these brothers and sons, give their lives so many thousands of miles from home? I say it was for one word, and that word is freedom. The freedom to pray. To write. To speak. To feel. To be. As we see fit, and not as others would dictate to us. To this freedom, which has been so dearly bought for us, it is up to us, the living, to dedicate our lives and our futures... to its eternal protection." These words were written by Frederick Beeman, the editor of the Peoria Dispatch. And I sincerely hope that Mr. Beeman would see it in his heart that all we are looking for here is... a little freedom, too.

HOW TO DRIVE A WRITER CRAZY “1. When he starts to outline a story, immediately give him several stories just like it to read and tell him three other plots. This makes his own story and his feeling for it vanish in a cloud of disrelated facts. "2. When he outlines a character, read excerpts from stories about such characters, saying that this will clarify the writer's ideas. As this causes him to lose touch with the identity he felt in his character by robbing him of individuality, he is certain to back away from ever touching such a character. "3. Whenever the writer proposes a story, always mention that his rate, being higher than other rates of writers in the book, puts up a bar to his stories. "4. When a rumor has stated that a writer is a fast producer, invariably confront him with the fact with great disapproval, as it is, of course, unnatural for one human being to think faster than another. "5. Always correlate production and rate, saying that it is necessary for the writer to do better stories than the average for him to get any consideration whatever. "6. It is a good thing to mention any error in a story bought, especially when that error is to be editorially corrected, as this makes the writer feel that he is being criticized behind his back and he wonders just how many other things are wrong. "7. Never fail to warn a writer not to be mechanical, as this automatically suggests to him that his stories are mechanical and, as he considers this a crime, wonders how much of his technique shows through and instantly goes to much trouble to bury mechanics very deep—which will result in laying the mechanics bare to the eye. "8. Never fail to mention and then discuss budget problems with a writer, as he is very interested. "9. By showing his vast knowledge of a field, an editor can almost always frighten a writer into mental paralysis, especially on subjects where nothing is known anyway. "10. Always tell a writer plot tricks, as they are not his business.

We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. That is the case with the German singer, the American actress, and even the tall, stooped editor with the big chin. . . . The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. hey are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. . . . Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. . . . And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.

I am often asked by editors, fans, friends about what I read or which authors influence my writing. My answer seems surprising to them, for people expect names and quotes from me, while I give them the source of "feelings". I believe that becoming a writer is not about finding similarities, nor following the same trends, with different accessories. I often un-follow subscriptions and newsfeeds when I want to write about something. When I write I follow, read and am inspired by Life, People and Passion. I guess my "current" is personal and universal. (Soar)

I couldn’t help but smile to read of an ex–newspaper editor from my country, who, when speaking of his discomfort at recent efforts to reveal the slave history behind many of our great country houses, complained, “I think comfort does matter. I know people say, ‘Oh, we must be uncomfortable.’… Why should I pay a hundred quid a year, or whatever, to be told what a shit I am?” Imagine thinking of history this way! As a thing personally directed at you. As a series of events structured to make you feel one way or another, rather than the precondition of all our lives?

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/ Unitarian, Irish/ Italian/ Octogenarian/ Zen Buddhist, Zionist/ Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/ Republican, Mattachine/ Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain-porridge unleavened literature licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist, Unitarian, Irish, Italian, Octogenarian, Zen Buddhist, Zionist, Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib, Republican, Mattachine, Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

And I think now, as my fiftieth birthday draws near, about the American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was only thirty-eight years old when he died. He got a lot of help in organizing his novels from Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. I have heard that Perkins told him to keep in mind as he wrote, as a unifying idea, a hero’s search for a father. It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike looking for mothers instead. This needn’t be embarrassing. It’s simply true. A mother is much more useful. I wouldn’t feel particularly good if I found another father.

A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work in itself is good in itself—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery. I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this: "We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry fort you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.” This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance if it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions. Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothings else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres” by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. “Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.

Pretty soft!' he cried. 'To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, over-heated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St Vitus's dance, and imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!' I felt rather like Lot's friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent. 'It would kill me to have to live in New York,' he went on. 'To have to share the air with six million people! TO have to wear stiff collars and decent clothes all the time! To - ' He started. 'Good Lord! I suppose I should have to dress for dinner in the evenings. What a ghastly notion!' I was shocked, absolutely shocked. 'My dear chap!' I said, reproachfully. 'Do you dress for dinner every night, Bertie?' 'Jeeves,' I said coldly. 'How many suits of evening clothes have we?' 'We have three suits full of evening dress, sir; two dinner jackets- ' 'Three.' 'For practical purposes, two only, sir. If you remember, we cannot wear the third. We have also seven white waistcoats.' 'And shirts?' 'Four dozen, sir.' 'And white ties?' 'The first two shallow shelves in the chest of drawers are completely filled with our white ties, sir.' I turned to Rocky. 'You see?' The chappie writhed like an electric fan. 'I won't do it! I can't do it! I'll be hanged if I'll do it! How on earth can I dress up like that? Do you realise that most days I don't get out of my pyjamas till five in the afternoon and then I just put on an old sweater?' I saw Jeeves wince, poor chap. This sort of revelation shocked his finest feelings.

What Silly Values their readers have, if they can’t grapple with it! I think the editors are silly, and the readers would like it. It’s the same silly attitude that film and theatre managers have, that you must ‘write down’ to the public. For once, I think Winifred is wrong in telling you to get on quickly with another book. You don’t want to be the kind of writer who just writes anything to show she is writing. It will give you angst, to do so! All right if you were a journalist, and had to get out an article once a week, that is a matter of training. But for a sensitive (crumb!) writer like yourself to feel bound to turn out something is morally wrong. You have got to feel it well up in you, like K.M. and her stories!

ED ABBEY’S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at that point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a Communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing, following his many moves. They will note when he heads west and, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. The Bureau will become particularly intrigued when Mr. Abbey attends an international conference in defense of children in Vienna, Austria, since the conference, according to the FBI, was “initiated by Communists in 1952.” Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor that he sends to the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes: “In this day of the cold war, which everyday [sic] shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens” and then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.

Arthur Less's life with Robert ended around the time he finished reading Proust. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less's life - Marcel Proust, that is - and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish. And on that fifth summer, when he was lying abed in a friend's Cape Cod house one afternoon, about two-thirds of the way through the last volume, suddenly, without any warning at all, he read the words The End. In his right hand he held perhaps two hundred pages more - but they were not Proust; they were the cruel trick of some editor's notes and afterword. He felt cheated, swindled, denied a pleasure for which he had spent five years preparing. He went back twenty pages; he tried to build up the feeling again. But it was too late; that possible joy had departed forever. This was how he felt when Robert left him.

When we blame those who brought about the brutal murder of Emmett Till, we have to count President Eisenhower, who did not consider the national honor at stake when white Southerners prevented African Americans from voting; who would not enforce the edicts of the highest court in the land, telling Chief Justice Earl Warren, 'All [opponents of desegregation] are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big, overgrown Negroes.' We must count Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., who demurred that the federal government had no jurisdiction in the political assassinations of George Lee and Lamar Smith that summer, thus not only preventing African Americans from voting but also enabling Milam and Bryant to feel confident that they could murder a fourteen-year-old boy with impunity. Brownell, a creature of politics, likewise refused to intervene in the Till case. We must count the politicians who ran for office in Mississippi thumping the podium for segregation and whipping crowds into a frenzy about the terrifying prospects of school desegregation and black voting. This goes double for the Citizens' Councils, which deliberately created an environment in which they knew white terrorism was inevitable. We must count the jurors and the editors who provided cover for Milam, Bryant, and the rest. Above all, we have to count the millions of citizens of all colors and in all regions who knew about the rampant racial injustice in America and did nothing to end it. The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam's and Bryant's acquittals: 'The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don't want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.

One evening in 1930, as he was struggling to recapture the feverish spirit that had fueled his first book, Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe decided to give up on an uninspired hour of work and get undressed for bed. But, standing naked at his hotel-room window, Wolfe found that his weariness had suddenly evaporated and that he was eager to write again. Returning to the table, he wrote until dawn with, he recalled, “amazing speed, ease, and sureness.” Looking back, Wolfe tried to figure out what had prompted the sudden change—and realized that, at the window, he had been unconsciously fondling his genitals, a habit from childhood that, while not exactly sexual (his “penis remained limp and unaroused,” he noted in a letter to his editor), fostered such a “good male feeling” that it had stoked his creative energies. From then on, Wolfe regularly used this method to inspire his writing sessions, dreamily exploring his “male configurations” until “the sensuous elements in every domain of life became more immediate, real, and beautiful.

But she had to write. And one letter to the Times, she used to say to Miss Brush, cost her more than to organise an expedition to South Africa (which she had done in the war). After a morning’s battle beginning, tearing up, beginning again, she used to feel the futility of her own womanhood as she felt it on no other occasion, and would turn gratefully to the thought of Hugh Whitbread who possessed — no one could doubt it — the art of writing letters to the Times. A being so differently constituted from herself, with such a command of language; able to put things as editors like them put; had passions which one could not call simply greed. Lady Bruton often suspended judgement upon men in deference to the mysterious accord in which they, but no woman, stood to the laws of the universe; knew how to put things; knew what was said; so that if Richard advised her, and Hugh wrote for her, she was sure of being somehow right. So she let Hugh eat his soufflé; asked after poor Evelyn; waited until they were smoking, and then said, “Milly, would you fetch the papers?

Quanta. On Yom Kippur Eve, the quanta went to ask Einstein for his forgiveness. “I'm not home,” Einstein yelled at them from behind his locked door. On their way back, people swore loudly at them through the windows, and someone even threw a can. The quanta pretended not to care, but deep in their hearts they were really hurt. Nobody understands the quanta, everybody hates them. “You parasites,” people would shout at them as they walked down the road. “Go serve in the army.” “We wanted to, actually,” the quanta would try to explain, “but the army wouldn't take us because we're so tiny.” Not that anyone listened. Nobody listens to the quanta when they try to defend themselves, but when they say something that can be interpreted negatively, well, then everyone's all ears. The quanta can make the most innocent statement, like “Look, there's a cat!” and right away they're saying on the news how the quanta were stirring up trouble and they rush off to interview Schrödinger. All in all, the media hated the quanta worse than anybody, because once the quanta had spoken at an IBM press conference about how the very act of viewing had an effect on an event, and all the journalists thought the quanta were lobbying to keep them from covering the Intifada. The quanta could insist as much as they wanted that this wasn't at all what they meant and that they had no political agenda whatsoever, but nobody would believe them anyway. Everyone knew they were friends of the government's Chief Scientist. Loads of people think the quanta are indifferent, that they have no feelings, but it simply isn't true. On Friday, after the program about the bombing of Hiroshima, they were interviewed in the studio in Jerusalem. They could barely talk. They just sat there facing the open mike and sniffling, and all the viewers at home, who didn't know the quanta very well, thought they were avoiding the question and didn't realize the quanta were crying What's sad is that even if the quanta were to write dozens of letters to the editors of all the scientific journals in the world and prove beyond a doubt that people had taken advantage of their naiveté, and that they'd never ever imagined it would end that way, it wouldn't do them any good, because nobody understands the quanta. The physicists least of all.

For some reason newspapers are not the laboratories and experimental stations of the mind that they could be, to the public's great benefit, but usually only its warehouses and stock exchanges. If he were alive today, Plato—to take him as an example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived—would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. And of course if Plato were to walk suddenly into a news editor’s office today and prove himself to be indeed that great author who died over two thousand years ago he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers. If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even turn one or the other of his older works into film, he could undoubtedly do very well for himself for a considerable period of time. The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remember the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, because there were so many other good writers to be considered. And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European publicists but still was a bit outdated, and certainly not in a class for current newsworthiness with a man like, for instance, Paul Arnheim.

Americans today enjoy a prosperity like no other people in human history. So if money produces pleasure and pleasure produces happiness, we should be the happiest people ever assembled on this planet. The fact is, we are not. How can this be? This is the question New Republic editor Gregg Easterbrook addresses in his provocative book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Easterbrook reviews the extraordinary progress made since the time of our great-great grandparents: Average life expectancy has increased dramatically; we are far healthier, without the threat of dreaded diseases like polio and smallpox; the typical American adult has twice the purchasing power his or her parents had in 1960, with the quality of life immeasurably improved.[11] We ought to be very happy, Easterbrook concludes. Yet Americans rank number sixteen in a survey of the happiest people in the world. (Nigerians rank number one.)[12] Americans tell pollsters that the country is on the wrong course, that their parents had it better than they do, that people feel incredibly stressed out. More people are popping Prozac and Zoloft pills; the number of people clinically depressed has increased tenfold in the post–World War II era. Remember the paradoxes we talked about earlier? Well, here is another: Life is better, but we feel worse.

Today Judith was dealing with the problem of grief. Her longtime editor at Harvard University Press who had published all her seminal texts and others not so seminal had died in a freak accident. He had gone out for a walk on the Cape (his second home) at the height of the afternoon, when the glare off the water was most intense. His foot had lost contact with the rocky footpath, sending his body over the edge. He was discovered the next day by a group of high school students who had gone to a cove to smoke angel dust, a fact that had come out when the parents took a closer look at why their children were on the shore in the middle of the day instead of in school. “Some people have been saying he did it on purpose, but that’s because they can’t accept the real tragedy: the accidental nature of the world,” Judith said, motioning to the waiter for another round of piña coladas. “It’s all very sordid.” Objectively that had to be so, although it was hard, while reclining in her luxuriously sturdy plastic chaise, poolside with a second piña colada on the way, for Dorothy to feel the impact of the story, to be there on the New England coastline with the angel-dust-smoking teenagers, the bloated editorial body, the cold gray ocean, the tragic inexorability of mischance. It wasn’t that the pool seemed real and the dead body seemed false; it was that nothing seemed real.

I struggle with an embarrassing affliction, one that as far as I know doesn’t have a website or support group despite its disabling effects on the lives of those of us who’ve somehow contracted it. I can’t remember exactly when I started noticing the symptoms—it’s just one of those things you learn to live with, I guess. You make adjustments. You hope people don’t notice. The irony, obviously, is having gone into a line of work in which this particular infirmity is most likely to stand out, like being a gimpy tango instructor or an acrophobic flight attendant. The affliction I’m speaking of is moral relativism, and you can imagine the catastrophic effects on a critic’s career if the thing were left to run its course unfettered or I had to rely on my own inner compass alone. To be honest, calling it moral relativism may dignify it too much; it’s more like moral wishy-washiness. Critics are supposed to have deeply felt moral outrage about things, be ready to pronounce on or condemn other people’s foibles and failures at a moment’s notice whenever an editor emails requesting twelve hundred words by the day after tomorrow. The severity of your condemnation is the measure of your intellectual seriousness (especially when it comes to other people’s literary or aesthetic failures, which, for our best critics, register as nothing short of moral turpitude in itself). That’s how critics make their reputations: having take-no-prisoners convictions and expressing them in brutal mots justes. You’d better be right there with that verdict or you’d better just shut the fuck up. But when it comes to moral turpitude and ethical lapses (which happen to be subjects I’ve written on frequently, perversely drawn to the topics likely to expose me at my most irresolute)—it’s like I’m shooting outrage blanks. There I sit, fingers poised on keyboard, one part of me (the ambitious, careerist part) itching to strike, but in my truest soul limply equivocal, particularly when it comes to the many lapses I suspect I’m capable of committing myself, from bad prose to adultery. Every once in a while I succeed in landing a feeble blow or two, but for the most part it’s the limp equivocator who rules the roost—contextualizing, identifying, dithering. And here’s another confession while I’m at it—wow, it feels good to finally come clean about it all. It’s that … once in a while, when I’m feeling especially jellylike, I’ve found myself loitering on the Internet in hopes of—this is embarrassing—cadging a bit of other people’s moral outrage (not exactly in short supply online) concerning whatever subject I’m supposed to be addressing. Sometimes you just need a little shot in the arm, you know? It’s not like I’d crib anyone’s actual sentences (though frankly I have a tough time getting as worked up about plagiarism as other people seem to get—that’s how deep this horrible affliction runs). No, it’s the tranquillity of their moral authority I’m hoping will rub off on me. I confess to having a bit of an online “thing,” for this reason, about New Republic editor-columnist Leon Wieseltier—as everyone knows, one of our leading critical voices and always in high dudgeon about something or other: never fearing to lambaste anyone no matter how far beneath him in the pecking order, never fearing for a moment, when he calls someone out for being preening or self-congratulatory, as he frequently does, that it might be true of himself as well. When I’m in the depths of soft-heartedness, a little dose of Leon is all I need to feel like clambering back on the horse of critical judgment and denouncing someone for something.

THE DEMANDS MADE by a work of this nature upon the generosity of specialists are very numerous, and the Editor would be wanting in all title to the generous treatment he has received were he not willing to make the fullest possible acknowledgment of his indebtedness. His thanks are due in the first place to the scholarly and accomplished Bahadur Shah, baggage elephant 174 on the Indian Register, who, with his amiable sister Pudmini, most courteously supplied the history of ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ and much of the information contained in ‘Servants of the Queen’. The adventures of Mowgli were collected at various times and in various places from a multitude of informants, most of whom desire to preserve the strictest anonymity. Yet, at this distance, the Editor feels at liberty to thank a Hindu gentleman of the old rock, an esteemed resident of the upper slopes of Jakko, for his convincing if somewhat caustic estimate of the national characteristics of his caste–the Presbytes. Sahi, a savant of infinite research and industry, a member of the recently disbanded Seeonee Pack, and an artist well known at most of the local fairs of Southern India, where his muzzled dance with his master attracts the youth, beauty, and culture of many villages, have contributed most valuable data on people, manners, and customs. These have been freely drawn upon, in the stories of ‘Tiger-Tiger!’ ‘Kaa’s Hunting’, and ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’. For the outlines of ‘Rikki-tikki-tavi’ the Editor stands indebted to one of the leading herpetologists of Upper India, a fearless and independent investigator who, resolving ‘not to live but know’, lately sacrificed his life through over-application to the study of our Eastern Thanatophidia. A happy accident of travel enabled the Editor, when a passenger on the Empress of India, to be of some slight assistance to a fellow-voyager. How richly his poor services were repaid, readers of the ‘White Seal’ may judge for themselves.

Roan studied the photo in his hand. Shiloh Gallagher had to be twenty-nine years old according to what Maud had told him. Damned if she didn’t look twenty-five or so, her features unlined. She wasn’t model pretty, but she had an arresting face, with huge intelligent-looking green eyes. His gaze dropped to her mouth and he felt himself stir. Her mouth would make any man go crazy. Her upper lip was full, but thinner than her lower one. The shape of her mouth made him feel heat in his lower body. “Is she married?” “No,” Maud said. She’s single. Never did marry. I don’t know why. Shiloh’s a beautiful girl.” She was hardly a girl, but Roan said nothing because he was fully reacting to her as a woman. He wondered if she was curvy or rail thin. He was disgruntled over his avid curiosity. “I have no problem with it. You know I get up early and come in late. She’s going to have to fend for herself. I’m not cooking for her.” “Right,” Maud agreed. “She’s pretty shaken up, Roan. You might find that stressful until, hopefully, Shiloh will start to relax.” Shrugging, he slid the photo onto the desk. “Maud, I just hope I don’t stress her out with my award-winning personality,” he said, and he cracked a small, sour grin. Maud cackled. “I think you’ll like her, Roan. She’s a very kind person. An introvert like you. Just remember, she’s trying to write. Because of the stalking, she’s suffering from writer’s block and she’s got a book due to her editor in six months. So, she’s under a lot of other stress.” “I’ll handle it, Maud. No problem.” “Good,” Maud said, relieved. She sat up in the chair. “I’ll call Shiloh back, let her know she can come, and I’ll find out what time she’s arriving tomorrow. I’d like you to pick her up at the Jackson Hole Airport. So take that photo with you.” He stood, settling the cowboy hat on his head. “Don’t need the photo.” Because her face was already stamped across his heart. Whatever that meant. “I’ll find her after she deplanes, don’t worry. Just get back to me on the time.

Once the writer was at the deathbed of a fellow writer. What interested his dying colleague more than anything else was what was being said in the cultural section of the newspapers. Did these battles of opinion take his mind off his illness by infuriating him or making him laugh? Did they put him in mind of an eternal repetition, preferable after all to what was in store for him? There was more to it than that. Even in his hopeless situation, far-removed as he was from the editorial offices, he was their prisoner; more than his nearest and dearest, the critics and editors were the object of his dreams; and in the intervals when he was free from pain, he would ask, since by then he was incapable of reading, what one publication or another had said about some new book. The intrigues, and the almost pleasurable fury they aroused in the sufferer - who saw through them - brought a kind of world, a certain permanence into the sickroom, and the man at his bedside understood his vituperating or silently nodding friend as well as if it had been his own self lying there. But later, when the end was near and the dying man still insisted on having opinions read out to him from the latest batch of newspapers, the witness vowed that he would never let things come to such a pass with him as they had with his image and likeness. Never again would he involve himself in this circuit of classifications and judgments, the substance of which was almost exclusively the playing off of one writer or school against another. Over the years since then, he had derived pride and satisfaction from staying on the outside and carrying on by his own strength rather than at the expense of rivals. The mere thought of returning to the circuit or to any of the persistently warring cliques made him feel physically ill. Of course, he would never get entirely away from them, for even today, so long after his vow, he suddenly caught sight of a word that he at first mistook for his name. But today at least he was glad - as he would not have been years ago - to have been mistaken. Lulled in security, he leafed through the local section and succeeded in giving his mind to every single news item.

When we left, we were told it would be another month before the winner was announced. Then I felt really discouraged. Friends were telling me that my injuries and my fitness level guaranteed me the cover. I felt the opposite. I didn’t feel I was as fit as the others and I felt like the war was too controversial a topic for the magazine to want to feature a wounded veteran. I had completely talked myself out of even the slightest possibility of winning by the time I was back on a plane to New York a month later to find out the results. My family didn’t believe that I didn’t know already. They thought I’d been told and kept asking me about it. But I really didn’t know. The winner was being announced live on NBC’s Today show. I had made my peace with not winning and Jamie and I were just excited to go to New York and be on Today. We had a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina, and when we landed there I had a voice mail from my friend Billy. His message: “I thought we had to wait to see who won? It’s already out!” I clicked onto my Facebook app and saw that Billy had posted a picture of him and some of his buddies at a truck stop in Kentucky posing with a Men’s Health magazine--and I was on the cover! I was shocked. But even then I was convinced this wasn’t real. Maybe the editors had decided to give the cover to all three of us and we each had a different region of the country. It felt incredible to see myself on the cover of that magazine but I just wasn’t convinced I was the outright winner. Jamie and I got to our hotel room late. I called my contact at Men’s Health, Nora, and said, “I’ve already seen the magazine.” There was a beat on the other end of the line before she flatly said, “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” So Jamie and I went to bed. The next morning we met up with Finny and Kavan and headed over to 30 Rockefeller Plaza for the Today show. I didn’t say a word about what I’d seen. When we arrived, Nora was at the door. I waited for the others to go in before I said to her, “So we’re not going to talk about what we’re not going to talk about?” I was smirking a little but quickly wiped the grin off my face when I saw the look on Nora’s. “You’re not the only person in this competition, Noah. Not everyone knows.” Roger that. I wouldn’t say another word.

The centre of the conception of wisdom in the Bible is the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author, or rather, chief editor, is sometimes called Koheleth, the teacher or preacher. Koheleth transforms the conservatism of popular wisdom into a program of continuous mental energy. Those who have unconsciously identified a religious attitude either with illusion or with mental indolence are not safe guides to this book, although their tradition is a long one. Some editor with a “you’d better watch out” attitude seems to have tacked a few verses on the end suggesting that God trusts only the anti-intellectual, but the main author’s courage and honesty are not to be defused in this way. He is “disillusioned” only in the sense that he has realized that an illusion is a self-constructed prison. He is not a weary pessimist tired of life: he is a vigorous realist determined to smash his way through every locked door of repression in his mind. Being tired of life is in fact the only mental handicap for which he has no remedy to suggest. Like other wise men, he is a collector of proverbs, but he applies to all of them his touchstone and key word, translated in the AV [the Authorized Version] as “vanity.” This word (hebel) has a metaphorical kernel of fog, mist, or vapour, a metaphor that recurs in the New Testament (James 4:14). It this acquires a derived sense of “emptiness,” the root meaning of the Vulgate’s vanitas. To put Koheleth’s central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness. We should not apply a ready-made disapproving moral ambience to this word “vanity,” much less associate it with conceit. It is a conception more like the shunyata or “void” of Buddhist though: the world as everything within nothingness. As nothing is certain or permanent in the world, nothing either real or unreal, the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal. All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them. We may feel that saint is a “better” man than a sinner, and that all of our religious and moral standards would crumble into dust if we did not think so; but the saint himself is most unlikely to take such a view. Similarly Koheleth went through a stage in which he saw that wisdom was “better” than folly, then a stage in which he saw that there was really no difference between them as death lies in wait for both and finally realized that both views were equally “vanity”. As soon as we renounce the expectation of reward, in however, refined a guise, for virtue or wisdom, we relax and our real energies begin to flow into the soul. Even the great elegy at the end over the failing bodily powers of old age ceases to become “pessimistic” when we see it as part of the detachment with which the wise man sees his life in the context of vanity. We take what comes: there is no choice in the matter, hence no point in saying “we should take what comes.” We soon realize by doing so that there is a cyclical rhythm in nature. But, like other wheels, this is a machine to be understood and used by man. If it is true that the sun, the seasons, the waters, and human life itself go in cycles, the inference is that “there is a time for all things,” something different to be done at each stage of the cycle. The statement “There is nothing new under the sun” applies to wisdom but not to experience , to theory but not to practice. Only when we realize that nothing is new can we live with an intensity in which everything becomes new.

A Community in Conversation Last week I went to the Chill Out and Proud festival to sell my books of poetry. It was not my first gay pride festival, but it was Somerset’s. There are a few observations that I had this particular day. My observations have very little to do with morality and more to do with wanting to live in a community that can communicate. My first observation was that my family and I were on high alert and felt a sense of fear for the first time in my life in the town of Somerset. It was not the people attending the festival that left us feeling uneasy, but rather the protestors. My second observation is that there were two groups of what would seem to be opposites, Christians and Neo Nazi white supremacists, standing side by side holding signs and yelling into an otherwise quiet and peaceful group of citizens. I understand everyone’s right to protest and be heard but the method of communicating our differences should be a checkpoint of self reflection. I had a calm conversation with one of the protesters who approached me. I asked him to consider that yelling at people might result in them putting their guards up, increasing the tension, and in turn, people yelling back. It’s a cyclical deterioration where no one hears or understands one another. Anger and fear are the brothers that are born of this kind of relationship. I would say the same to those who yell back at the protesters. We are going to be a community of diverse people who do not think the same or live the same lifestyle, but if we are going to live together peaceably, we need to find a better way to disagree. My last observation is that the protestor also asked me why I was there, did I have a family member who is gay? He stated, “You don’t just come to these things for no reason”. I replied, “Honestly, I did start going and taking my family to gay pride festivals just to be amongst other cultures. It’s good to get to know people who are different from yourself.” The world’s a big place and you may find that you have more in common with people than you think or, in this case, that you know more gay people than you think. I would like to say the same to you. Somerset is a lot more diverse than you think and we have a lot more in common than you think. The only way we will love our neighbor as ourselves is by getting to know our neighbors, even in the midst of our differences. Protesting often times takes a stance of offense; a form of violence that may not always be physical but is a form of violence all the same. Everyone has the right to be heard, but only if they are willing to really listen to others in an attempt to understand. As an atheist, I have never stood outside a church and disrupted their gathering, although I am willing to have a conversation about how my journey brought me here and how you have come to this point. For me to enter a gathering and protest is an offensive move that would cause the people involved to put up walls. It would not be welcomed and I would not do it. It would be a hindrance to us actually knowing and understanding each other. The only way to truly know someone is by being with them, by conversation. We will not agree. There are too many of us and if we agreed on every point of life then that would be another checkpoint for self reflection. I am just asking us to practice a certain amount of hospitality no matter your beliefs about each other, whether gay or straight; whether Christian, Agnostic, or Atheist; whether Democrat, Republican, or Democratic Socialist; whether you’re the protestor or the protested against; in person or on Facebook, let us contemplate mindful listening, empathy, patience, kindness, and the well-being of people who are different than yourself. Eric Overby Eric_o_84@hotmail.com

joke around—nothing serious—as I work to get my leg back to where it was. Two weeks later, I’m in an ankle-to-hip leg brace and hobbling around on crutches. The brace can’t come off for another six weeks, so my parents lend me their townhouse in New York City and Lucien hires me an assistant to help me out around the house. Some guy named Trevor. He’s okay, but I don’t give him much to do. I want to regain my independence as fast as I can and get back out there for Planet X. Yuri, my editor, is griping that he needs me back and I’m more than happy to oblige. But I still need to recuperate, and I’m bored as hell cooped up in the townhouse. Some buddies of mine from PX stop by and we head out to a brunch place on Amsterdam Street my assistant sometimes orders from. Deacon, Logan, Polly, Jonesy and I take a table in Annabelle’s Bistro, and settle in for a good two hours, running our waitress ragged. She’s a cute little brunette doing her best to stay cheerful for us while we give her a hard time with endless coffee refills, loud laughter, swearing, and general obnoxiousness. Her nametag says Charlotte, and Deacon calls her “Sweet Charlotte” and ogles and teases her, sometimes inappropriately. She has pretty eyes, I muse, but otherwise pay her no mind. I have my leg up on a chair in the corner, leaning back, as if I haven’t a care in the world. And I don’t. I’m going to make a full recovery and pick up my life right where I left off. Finally, a manager with a severe hairdo and too much makeup, politely, yet pointedly, inquires if there’s anything else we need, and we take the hint. We gather our shit and Deacon picks up the tab. We file out, through the maze of tables, and I’m last, hobbling slowly on crutches. I’m halfway out when I realize I left my Yankees baseball cap on the table. I return to get it and find the waitress staring at the check with tears in her eyes. She snaps the black leather book shut when she sees me and hurriedly turns away. “Forget something?” she asks with false cheer and a shaky smile. “My hat,” I say. She’s short and I’m tall. I tower over her. “Did Deacon leave a shitty tip? He does that.” “Oh no, no, I mean…it’s fine,” she says, turning away to wipe her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I just…um, kind of a rough month. You know how it is.” She glances me up and down in my expensive jeans and designer shirt. “Or maybe you don’t.” The waitress realizes what she said, and another round of apologies bursts out of her as she begins stacking our dirty dishes. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Really. I have this bad habit…blurting. I don’t know why I said that. Anyway, um…” I laugh, and fish into my back pocket for my wallet. “Don’t worry about it. And take this. For your trouble.” I offer her forty dollars and her eyes widen. Up close, her eyes are even prettier—large and luminous, but sad too. A blush turns her skin scarlet “Oh, no, I couldn’t. No, please. It’s fine, really.” She bustles even faster now, not looking at me. I shrug and drop the twenties on the table. “I hope your month improves.” She stops and stares at the money, at war with herself. “Okay. Thank you,” she says finally, her voice cracking. She takes the money and stuffs it into her apron. I feel sorta bad, poor girl. “Have a nice day, Charlotte,” I say, and start to hobble away. She calls after me, “I hope your leg gets better soon.” That was big of her, considering what ginormous bastards we’d been to her all morning. Or maybe she’s just doing her job. I wave a hand to her without looking back, and leave Annabelle’s. Time heals me. I go back to work. To Planet X. To the world and all its thrills and beauty. I don’t go back to my parents’ townhouse; hell I’m hardly in NYC anymore. I don’t go back to Annabelle’s and I never see—or think about—that cute waitress with the sad eyes ever again. “Fucking hell,” I whisper as the machine reads the last line of

Jobs fill your pockets, adventures fill your Spirit. I found my happy place by after recent visit to Thailand. A good problem with making travel plans is that there are a lot of funny activities in Travelling. Make your presence a simple clip and easily show you how rustic it is For all adrenaline fans and movements out there, you will be amazed to find that Thailand has so much to offer! Aside from the various temples, tuk-tuk and Pad Thai weighed down the streets, Thailand is a wonderful place to travel and thriving. Enjoy a wide variety of hiking activities from mountain biking, bungee jumping, all the way to the sky. The Kingdom of Smiles explores so many containers that make it an ideal destination for all travelers. You will find bustling cities, sandy beaches, lush forests, and ruins of historic empires. Delicacies are a delicacy in the world, and nightlife is a myth. This is one of the countries with the best travel prices. Your money will go some distance here, ensuring a good feeling about bank robbery.

Palmer Hoyt, the editor and publisher of The Denver Post, thought McCarthyism required a new way of reporting. In a memorandum to his staff, Hoyt suggested that neutrality was not the highest virtue—truth was. Reporters should “apply any reasonable doubt they [might] have to the treatment of the story.” In other words, if a McCarthy statement was demonstrably false, the journalists should feel free to say so—in print. “It seems obvious that many charges made by reckless or impulsive public officials cannot and should not be ignored,” Hoyt wrote, “but it seems to me that news stories and headlines can be presented in such a manner that the reading public will be able to measure the real worth or value and the true meaning of the stories.

Katy Cannon, a UK-based novelist, reports that she has developed this more persistent and abundant perspective on time over the years. At the start of 2013, she had a four-year-old daughter and had just sold her first book. Her contract called for her to turn in another book six months later, which seemed like the sort of work/life disaster one might need to write a very British novel about. But she did it, and in 2016 she wrote and edited five books, a novella, and three short stories (also using the pen name Sophie Pembroke). This is how she makes such prolificacy work. She takes about two weeks to plan her books, outlining scenes and working with her editors on characters and plots. Then, execution happens in small bursts. She sets a timer, and in a twenty- to thirty-minute block of total focus, she can write an 800- to 1,000-word scene. She does two or three of these blocks a day, generally putting down 2,000 to 3,000 words. This is not a huge number; I suspect the average office worker cranks out close to 2,000 words in emails daily. But 2,000 is enough, because Cannon just keeps going. Over a four-day workweek of these two or three bursts per day, she produces about 10,000 words. That means she can write a 70,000- to 80,000-word novel draft in seven to eight weeks. Add in the planning time and two weeks for editing, and that’s a full book in eleven to twelve weeks. Are the books perfect? No, but no book is ever perfect, even ones that take eleven to twelve years to write. As for some idealized book that never made it out of the author’s head, where it would be sullied by reality? We don’t even need to have this conversation. Cannon’s books have the virtue of being completed and out in the world, giving readers pleasure. Done is better than perfect, because there is no perfect without being done.

He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Specialists in information technology are the new lawyers. Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose. (Easy example: I can write a book, and my editor can edit a book . . . but neither one of us can read and understand the contract that allows those things to happen.) IT workers became similarly unstoppable the moment they realized virtually every machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he’s a nitpick—but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for no reason whatsoever (because how would anyone understand what he’s lying about). He can smoke weed at lunch, because he’ll still understand your iMac better than you. It doesn’t matter how he behaves: The IT department dominates technology, and technology dominates the rest of us. And this state of being creates a new kind of personality. It creates someone like Kim Dotcom, a man who’s essentially an IT guy for the entire planet.

I was about to call you,’ she says. ‘Is everything OK?’ Libby nods, takes her phone out of her bag, then her lip balm and her cardigan, tucks the bag under her desk, unties her hair, ties it up again, pulls out her chair and sits down heavily. ‘Sorry,’ she says eventually. ‘I didn’t sleep last night.’ ‘I was going to say,’ says Dido. ‘You look awful. The heat?’ She nods. But it wasn’t the heat. It was the insides of her head. ‘Well, let me get you a nice strong coffee.’ Normally Libby would say no, no, no, I can get my own coffee. But today her legs are so heavy, her head so woolly, she nods and says thank you. She watches Dido as she makes her coffee, feeling reassured by the sheen of her dyed black hair, the way she stands with one hand in the pocket of her black tunic dress, her tiny feet planted wide apart in chunky dark green velvet trainers. ‘There,’ says Dido, resting the cup on Libby’s table. ‘Hope that does the trick.’ Libby has known Dido for five years. She knows all sorts of things about her. She knows that her mother was a famous poet, her father was a famous newspaper editor, that she grew up in one of the most illustrious houses in St Albans and was taught at home by a

The Meaning of Democracy.” The request got White thinking. “Surely the Board knows what democracy is,” he wrote in the magazine. “It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.” “I love it!” Roosevelt said when he read the piece, which he would later quote, adding happily: “Them’s my sentiments exactly.” They were Churchill’s, too, though he would have phrased the point in a more ornate way. The Americans and the British, he said at Fulton in 1946, “must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence

Gandhi wrote: ‘I seem to have detected a flaw in me which is unworthy of a votary of truth and ahimsa. I am going through a process of self-introspection, the results of which I cannot foresee. I find myself for the first time during the past 50 years in a Slough of Despond.’ One wonders what readers of the press statement made of this decidedly odd interpolation. To them, the cause, manifestation and the precise nature of this flaw was left unelaborated. Gandhi’s close disciples knew the details; and the labours of the editors of his Collected Works have since made them public for us to examine it. Here is what happened. On 14 April 1938, Gandhi awoke with an erection; and despite efforts to contain his excitement, had a masturbatory experience. He was sleeping alone, and it was decades since he had been aroused in such a way. The details of the incident were kept from his ‘political’ followers such as Jawaharlal Nehru, but discussed with the spiritual followers who had stayed with him in Sabarmati and Segaon. To one Gujarati ashramite he wrote that ‘I was in such a wretched and pitiable condition that in spite of my utmost efforts I could not stop the discharge though I was fully awake.... After the event, restlessness has become acute beyond words. Where am I, where is my place, and how can a person subject to passion represent non-violence and truth?’ To Mira, Gandhi wrote in a language even more vivid in its self-abasement: ‘That dirty, degrading, torturing experience of 14th April shook me to bits and made me feel as if I was hurled by God from an imaginary paradise where I had no right to be in my uncleanliness.’ To his other close woman disciple, Amrit Kaur, Gandhi spoke of ‘an unaccountable dissatisfaction with myself’. But he had not lost faith, and was resolved to overcome the memory of his failure. ‘The sexual sense is the hardest to overcome in my case,’ he remarked. ‘It has been an incessant struggle. It is for me a miracle how I have survived it. The one I am engaged in may be, ought to be, the final struggle.’ Gandhi had taken a vow of brahmacharya, as far back as 1906. He thought sex was necessary only for procreation, and rejected the idea that sex might be pleasurable in and of itself. In his writings and speeches, he had often spoken of the importance of the preservation and husbanding of sperm, which he termed ‘the vital fluid’. After this (to him) shocking experience, how could Gandhi best control his passions, best preserve and husband that vital fluid? Several ashramites (Amrit Kaur among them) thought he should avoid close physical contact with women, especially younger women. He should abandon ashram girls as supports while walking (he rested his hands on their shoulders to propel his frail frame along), and discontinue the practice of having his nails cut or his body massaged by women disciples. Gandhi was not convinced of the sagacity of this advice. He had, he reminded one disciple, not ‘advocated total avoidance of innocent contact between the two sexes and I have had a certain measure of success in this’. To Amrit Kaur, he insisted that ‘it is not the woman who is to blame. I am the culprit. I must attain the required purity.’ Gandhi had wanted to write about the experience of 14 April in Harijan, baring to the world his failure and lack of self-control. He discussed this with Rajagopalachari, who was then in Segaon. Rajaji dissuaded him from making his experience public. Afterwards, Rajaji wrote to his son-in-law Devadas, who was also Gandhi’s son. The Mahatma, he said, was deeply worried ‘that he was still unable to overcome the reflex action of his flesh. He discovered, it seems, one day and he was so shocked and felt so unworthy that he was deceiving people and he wrote an article about it for publication in Harijan, which, thank God, I have stopped, after a very quarrelsome hour'.

I find it curious that the Bible allowed so many authors in a collection so important to setting the trajectory of a people. In my Protestant tradition, we acknowledge sixty-six books of the Bible. Within those sixty-six writings, who would dare to venture counting the number of fingerprints on those pages? In the collection known as the Psalms alone, a whole gang of psalmists are identified as contributors. That’s to say nothing of letters like Hebrews, where no author is identified. And let’s not get started on books where biblical scholars aren’t so convinced that the author named in the book actually owned the hand moving the quill. I won’t lie to you: I feel like God chose an awfully sloppy process if the goal was for us to receive each and every single word as though it were spoken by the mouth of the same God. God could’ve given it all to Moses on Sinai that first time and provided a little more uniformity to all of this. But that is not what happened. Instead, we are left with a collection of various writings: wisdom literature, poems, songs, letters, teachings, sermons—and even some stories that seem a lot like what we’d now consider folktales. We even have some writings put in there twice. Either God is a sloppy editor, or the voice of the people was preserved in the text on purpose. If God is a sloppy editor, then the Bible is of marginal value. If the voice of the people is preserved in this text, then the Bible is an invitation to seek God in our history, present, and future.

Teachers of creative writing used to urge their students to write about what they know – perhaps they still do. But when you’re eighteen or nineteen and keenly aware of how thin your experience really is, it’s hard to put a directive like that into action. The truth is, a family and a hometown will afford you material to last a lifetime, but when you’re a youth neither seems important enough to address. It’s as if only distant places and other families are worth writing about. Even young New Yorkers and Londoners must feel this. For somebody writing from the wrong side of the wrong continent in the wrong hemisphere – which is more or less what it felt like when I was first writing and publishing – the feeling is acute. When you’re starting out, it takes nerve to write about home and to do it in a language that’s unapologetically local. Some voice in your head is telling you to moderate the demotic and the specific, to accommodate the ‘cosmopolitan reader’. You waste a lot of time second-guessing this abstract stranger from somewhere far more important, and sadly, in time, you’ll get to meet him or her and realize they weren’t entirely imaginary. For writers at the margin there will always be an imperial pressure to relinquish particularity and conform to something more familiar, and what is most familiar to the world of publishing is an urban and largely denatured life. Whether they acknowledge it or not, many editors like to see their own lives reflected. Readers in New York and London often prefer a friction-free reading experience, so when you stubbornly write about regional lives in local vernacular you test the cosmopolitan reader’s patience. These were lessons I had to learn at home before I began to be published abroad.

The number one mistake in rhyming texts is when the rhyme overwhelms the story rather than serving the story. The monotony of a 32-page story all told in the same rhythm can wear a reader down after a few pages. As an editor, I often start these submissions thinking, “Okay, let’s see if this can be sustained . . .” and after a few stanzas say, “Oh please stop. I can’t do this anymore.” The sing-song-y-ness of “dah-duh dah-duh dah-duh, dah-dah” in line after line pummels a reader with sameness. It also encourages authors to make terrible word choices: odd or forced descriptions or line endings because that last word HAS. TO. RHYME. My test: Extract a line out of your rhyming text and ask yourself if you’d write it the same way if it DIDN’T have to rhyme. If the answer is no, it’s a bad line. The rhyming has to feel effortless." Frances Gilbert On Rhyming Picture Books in Goodreads  "The number one mistake in rhyming texts is when the rhyme overwhelms the story rather than serving the story. The monotony of a 32-page story all told in the same rhythm can wear a reader down after a few pages. As an editor, I often start these submissions thinking, “Okay, let’s see if this can be sustained . . .” and after a few stanzas say, “Oh please stop. I can’t do this anymore.” The sing-song-y-ness of “dah-duh dah-duh dah-duh, dah-dah” in line after line pummels a reader with sameness. It also encourages authors to make terrible word choices: odd or forced descriptions or line endings because that last word HAS. TO. RHYME. My test: Extract a line out of your rhyming text and ask yourself if you’d write it the same way if it DIDN’T have to rhyme. If the answer is no, it’s a bad line. The rhyming has to feel effortless." Frances Gilbert On Rhyming Picture Books in Goodreads  "The number one mistake in rhyming texts is when the rhyme overwhelms the story rather than serving the story. The monotony of a 32-page story all told in the same rhythm can wear a reader down after a few pages. As an editor, I often start these submissions thinking, “Okay, let’s see if this can be sustained . . .” and after a few stanzas say, “Oh please stop. I can’t do this anymore.” The sing-song-y-ness of “dah-duh dah-duh dah-duh, dah-dah” in line after line pummels a reader with sameness. It also encourages authors to make terrible word choices: odd or forced descriptions or line endings because that last word HAS. TO. RHYME. My test: Extract a line out of your rhyming text and ask yourself if you’d write it the same way if it DIDN’T have to rhyme. If the answer is no, it’s a bad line. The rhyming has to feel effortless." Frances Gilbert On Rhyming Picture Books in Goodreads  "The number one mistake in rhyming texts is when the rhyme overwhelms the story rather than serving the story. The monotony of a 32-page story all told in the same rhythm can wear a reader down after a few pages. As an editor, I often start these submissions thinking, “Okay, let’s see if this can be sustained . . .” and after a few stanzas say, “Oh please stop. I can’t do this anymore.” The sing-song-y-ness of “dah-duh dah-duh dah-duh, dah-dah” in line after line pummels a reader with sameness. It also encourages authors to make terrible word choices: odd or forced descriptions or line endings because that last word HAS. TO. RHYME. My test: Extract a line out of your rhyming text and ask yourself if you’d write it the same way if it DIDN’T have to rhyme. If the answer is no, it’s a bad line. The rhyming has to feel effortless." Frances Gilbert On Rhyming Picture Books in Goodreads  "The number one mistake in rhyming texts is when the rhyme overwhelms the story rather than serving the story. The monotony of a 32-page story all told in the same rhythm can wear a reader down after a few pages. As an editor, I often start these submissions thinking, “Okay, let’s see if this can be sustained . . .” and after a few stanzas say, “Oh please stop. I can’t do this anymore.” =

But when I became a published poet, I couldn’t suspend my Asian female identity no matter what I wrote. Even in the absence of my body, my spectral authorial identity hampered the magnitude and range in which my voice reached readers. How naïve to think that my invisibility meant I could play God! If Whitman’s I contained multitudes, my I contained 5.6 percent of this country. Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?

It is imperative to be enough in touch with yourself to know when you are feeling creative, and at those times, stifle the little editor; take the textbooks and the rhyming dictionaries and hide them away. Let the creativity flow of its own accord and let it be in control of you, rather than the reverse.

He said he could pick up any one of the dozens of stories that drifted across his desk every day and after reading a few paragraphs he could feel whether or not the author liked people. “If the author doesn’t like people,” he said, “people won’t like his or her stories.” This hard-boiled editor stopped twice in the course of his talk on fiction writing and apologized for preaching a sermon. “I am telling you,” he said, “the same things your preacher would tell you, but remember, you have to be interested in people if you want to be a successful writer of stories.

In his summary of these heroic efforts on the part of the behavioral geneticists to meet this frequent objection of the environmentalists [that identical (MZ) twins develop similarly because they are treated more similarly than fraternal (DZ) twins], [Kenneth] Kendler made no mention of the complete substantiation these studies have received from the Minnesota and Swedish reared-apart twin studies, which lack the potential pitfall of different MZ-DZ upbringings in the same home. He laboriously showed that the one complaint has no basis in fact. It would seem to put to rest once and for all this one complaint and force the critics to find different ones. This was not to be the case. For more than ten years after Kendler’s paper, opponents continued to cite the possibility of different upbringings given identicals as opposed to fraternals as invalidating twin studies. As late as 1994, the objection was raised in the pages of Scientific American. Sometimes the criticism is not alluded to directly. When other critics referred darkly to the “seriously flawed” nature of twin studies that compared monozygotic with dizygotic twins, more often than not the unnamed flaw turned out to be the one Kendler and others had refuted a decade earlier. And there is no possibility the critics who keep resurrecting this charge are unaware of the refutation. Each time the flaw is cited in print, a weary behavioral geneticist will write a letter to the editor pointing out the research that obviates the complaint, but the critics continue to make it year after year. As an outsider, I came into this field believing scientists were simply truth seekers, men and women dedicated to discovering the functioning of the world around them, to understanding the givens. I saw them as driven by profound curiosity. It was, therefore, disheartening for me to learn that many scientists with broad reputations do not place truth at the top of their agendas and react in sadly unscientific ways when confronted with evidence they feel threatens their ideological positions. Aware of the scientific rules, they first attempt to discredit with counterarguments, but when these are shown empirically to be invalid, they simply pretend that the evidence they were unable to shoot down doesn’t exist. Such selective memory permeates the behavioral genetics debate. In the nonscientific world we have a word for such behavior: dishonesty.

How many refugees have fled from Britain, or from the whole of the British Empire, during the past seven years? And how many from Germany? How many people personally known to you have been beaten with rubber truncheons or forced to swallow pints of castor oil? How dangerous do you feel it to be to go into the nearest pub and express your opinion that this is a capitalist war and we ought to stop fighting? Can you point to anything in recent British or American history that compares with the June Purge, the Russian Trotskyist trials, the pogrom that followed vom Rath’s assassination? Could an article equivalent to the one I am writing be printed in any totalitarian country, red, brown or black? The Daily Worker has just been suppressed, but only after ten years of life, whereas in Rome, Moscow or Berlin it could not have survived ten days. And during the last six months of its life Great Britain was not only at war but in a more desperate predicament than at any time since Trafalgar. Moreover – and this is the essential point – even after the Daily Worker’s suppression its editors are permitted to make a public fuss, issue statements in their own defence, get questions asked in Parliament and enlist the support of well-meaning people of various political shades. The swift and final ‘liquidation’ which would be a matter of course in a dozen other countries not only does not happen, but the possibility that it may happen barely enters anyone’s mind.

When I’m writing, I sometimes unconsciously know that a part of what I’m writing is not working. I have these vague vibrations that something is wrong, kind of like the vibrations you feel when you leave the house and you subtly sense you’ve left something important behind but you don’t know what. I often suppress these vibrations because I’m lazy or I want to be finished with the work. Invariably a good editor will locate the exact spot I semiconsciously knew wasn’t working. It’s only when the editor has named it for me that I fully face the fact that I need to make some changes. Critiquing with care works best when someone names something we ourselves almost but did not quite know. Critiquing with care works best when that naming happens within a context of unconditional regard, that just and loving attention that conveys unshakable respect for another person’s struggles.

Dear …, I’m writing as a Canadian woman and a member of one of the so-called “visible” or “ethnic” minorities to protest the exclusionary—racist and sexist—practices of Canadian publishers. Why racist? Because they discriminate against white writers. Why sexist? Because they discriminate against male writers. I feel quite perturbed about Penguin Canada’s submission policy which solicits exclusively unagented LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC writers (as well as those from "traditionally underrepresented” communities). This is publishing madness that has gone too far in the name of diversity. If publishing exclusively white male writers (and that has never been the case) is a clearcut wrong, two wrongs do not make a right. Oddly enough, only Penguin Canada has this bizarre exclusionary policy. Penguin Australia and Penguin New Zealand, in contrast, welcome submissions from writers of all backgrounds. Penguin UK Merky Books New Writers’ Prize aims to discover new UK voices and writers regardless of race, creed, or colour. Could this be the reason why Canada lags so far behind UK and arguably even Australia/NZ in reputation in the literary and publishing worlds? You may say, oh, look at the history, white male writers have traditionally dominated the publishing field. But why should white male writers TODAY be discriminated against in order to address the inequities of the past? That's the crux of the problem created by Penguin Canada’s woke madness. So, let’s look at the books published recently. Are white males still dominating the field? The truth of the matter is, they don’t, with a whopping 73% of editors being female (Editor Demographics in the United States, 2023). The quality of books isn’t decided by a writer’s colour or gender. It’s decided by the story and writers’ skills in presenting that story. As an avid lifelong reader of books in 3 languages (one of them English), I love books. At times I can’t even remember a writer’s name, far less their skin colour or sexual orientation, but I DO remember the story. Yet today’s exclusionary publishing policies at Penguin Canada imply that only people of colour have the chops to write about people of colour (ditto for any social subgroup you choose). This not only suffocates the world of fiction writing but, as a logical corollary, limits writing about 59-year-old, ethnically Chinese, twice-divorced soccer moms with 2 mortgages SOLELY to 59-year-old, ethnically Chinese, twice-divorced soccer moms with 2 mortgages. For the record, I—and thousands of others, judging by mountains of internet posts—am interested in how men write about women, how white writers write about other races, how old men write about youth—and of course vice versa. I’m interested in how writers see the world regardless of their sexual orientation. Paying the piper to play only a single +ALPHABETSOUP tune, we get to hear only that single tune, reducing the depth of human experience to only what passes through that one artificially imposed filter. One last example: Simon & Schuster (US) has books like us first novel contest to discover new local writers regardless of who they are. Only in Canada’s Orwellian publishing world some writers are more equal than others. Shame on my country. Let the books speak for themselves!!

Dear …, I’m writing as a Canadian woman and a member of one of the so-called “visible” or “ethnic” minorities to protest the exclusionary—racist and sexist—practices of Canadian publishers. Why racist? Because they discriminate against white writers. Why sexist? Because they discriminate against male writers. I feel quite perturbed about Penguin Canada’s submission policy which solicits exclusively unagented LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC writers (as well as those from "traditionally underrepresented” communities). This is publishing madness that has gone too far in the name of diversity. If publishing exclusively white male writers (and that has never been the case) is a clearcut wrong, two wrongs do not make a right. Oddly enough, only Penguin Canada has this bizarre exclusionary policy. Penguin Australia and Penguin New Zealand, in contrast, welcome submissions from writers of all backgrounds. Penguin UK Merky Books New Writers’ Prize aims to discover new UK voices and writers regardless of race, creed, or colour. Could this be the reason why Canada lags so far behind UK and arguably even Australia/NZ in reputation in the literary and publishing worlds? You may say, oh, look at the history, white male writers have traditionally dominated the publishing field. But why should white male writers TODAY be discriminated against in order to address the inequities of the past? That's the crux of the problem created by Penguin Canada’s woke madness. So, let’s look at the books published recently. Are white males still dominating the field? The truth of the matter is, they don’t, with a whopping 73% of editors being female (Editor Demographics in the United States, 2023). The quality of books isn’t decided by a writer’s colour or gender. It’s decided by the story and writers’ skills in presenting that story. As an avid lifelong reader of books in 3 languages (one of them English), I love books. At times I can’t even remember a writer’s name, far less their skin colour or sexual orientation, but I DO remember the story. Yet today’s exclusionary publishing policies at Penguin Canada imply that only people of colour have the chops to write about people of colour (ditto for any social subgroup you choose). This not only suffocates the world of fiction writing but, as a logical corollary, limits writing about 59-year-old, ethnically Chinese, twice-divorced soccer moms with 2 mortgages SOLELY to 59-year-old, ethnically Chinese, twice-divorced soccer moms with 2 mortgages. For the record, I—and thousands of others, judging by mountains of internet posts—am interested in how men write about women, how white writers write about other races, how old men write about youth—and of course vice versa. I’m interested in how writers see the world regardless of their sexual orientation. Paying the piper to play only a single +ALPHABETSOUP tune, we get to hear only that single tune, reducing the depth of human experience to only what passes through that one artificially imposed filter. One last example: Simon & Schuster (US) has books like us first novel contest to discover new local writers regardless of who they are. Only in Canada’s Orwellian publishing world some writers are more equal than others. Shame on my country. Let the books speak for themselves!!

the Board of Directors feels we need a male editor for some reason,

Editor’s Note Exhibit F Further case notes prepared by Kathleen Prichard, mental health counselor at HMP Edinburgh. 17 October 2017 Today patient disclosed past mental health struggles, namely a three-year bout of what he calls “satanophobia,” i.e., extreme fear of the Devil coupled with persecutory delusions that the Devil is “after him,” visual hallucinations of winged creatures (“fiends”), feelings of hopelessness, and suicidal ideations. Multiple times patient mentioned having felt, at the onset of and throughout his condition, that there lay inside of him a kind of darkness, or evil, that attracted the Devil like a magnet. Patient could not describe this “darkness” further. Unclear what it could represent. Possible manifestation of some form of unconscious repression, perhaps as the result of patient’s religious upbringing? Will continue to explore in future sessions but will need to tread carefully.

I never sell my conscience for fame and status; I create that by purity and beauty of inner self, thought, and vision as creative writings, not as borrowing words of a copy editor. Therefore, I feel proud of my independent pen and perception.

The lies are of a scale and of a nature that in modern political life I think you can only compare to Donald Trump. I don't think anybody has lied or can lie as casually and as cooly and as completely as Boris Johnson does - except Boris Johnson. We have learned over the last few weeks that his closest colleagues thought he was diabolical. The cabinet secretary that Boris Johnson appointed because he would prove to be, or he was believed to be, a soft touch has described Boris Johnson as being utterly unfit for the job. The advisor that he brought in as a sort of mastermind - having overseen Brexit - Dominick Cummings has described Johnson in terms that you would reserve for your worst enemies. These are the people working closest by him. The only person who's had anything vaguely warm to say about him is Matt Hancock and let me tell you why. They've shaken hands on it. I'd bet my house on some sort of gentleman's... let's rephrase that... I'd bet my house on some sort of charlatan’s agreement behind the scenes that they won't slag each other off because everybody else is telling the truth about them - about Johnson and about Hancock. Hancock's uselessness facilitated and enabled by Johnson's uselessness, by Johnson's moral corruption effectively. And now the lies begin. 5,000 WhatsApp messages. ‘No idea. No, no, no, no idea. Don't know. Don't know technical people. Uh... factory reset. Don't know. Bleep, bleep.’ And then the classic: the flooding of the Zone. With so much manure that it's hard to know where to start. ‘We may have made mistakes’ is one of the latest statements to come out. Turns up 3 hours early so that he doesn't have to walk the gamut of people congregating to remember their lost loved ones and to share their feelings with the man that they consider to be partly responsible for their death. Absolutely extraordinary scenes, truly extraordinary scenes. How does he get away with it? Hugo Keith is a much tougher inquisitor than Lindsay flipping Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons. He's a much tougher inquisitor than any of the interviewers that Boris Johnson deigns to have his toes tickled by on a regular basis. He's a much tougher interviewer or scrutineer than the newspaper editors who have given him half a million pounds a year to write columns or already published articles about why he's the real victim in this story. Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph today writing an article before Boris Johnson has given a single syllable of evidence, claiming that Boris Johnson is the real victim of this. I'd love him to go and read that out to the Covid families assembled outside the inquiry. And remember it was Daily Telegraph columnists and former editors that convened at the Club with Jacob Rees-Mogg and others to launch the Save Owen Paterson Society after another one of these charlatans was found to have breached parliamentary standards. Their response of course was not to advise their ally to accept the punishment that was coming his way but to attempt to get him off the hook and rip up the rule book under which he'd been found to be guilty.

And of course, [Boris Johnson will] never get questioned like this over at the BBC while the political editor remains a fully paid-up member of the Boris Johnson Admiration Society. So how does he get away with it? Andrew points out that factory resets obviously weren't covered in the technology lessons that Boris Johnson received from Jennifer Arcuri. Again, it's a funny joke. It's a good line, but he was the Prime Minister, and everyone knew he was a liar. Is it all about that guy that rang in when Donald Trump was here. That I always remember saying ‘but you must know he's lying’. Donald Trump was giving a speech in London about the size of the crowds outside the building he was in. And we had a camera outside the building he was in. We were looking at no crowds. And that simple juxtaposition of rhetorical claim by a politician with observable reality was chilling. It was spine tingling. I can claim that there are huge crowds, huge crowds, the biggest crowds, the greatest crowds outside this building. And I said, ‘how does it work? How does that happen?’ And someone rang me and said, ‘I know he's a liar, but it really upsets people like you and Sadiq Khan.’ And at the time I laughed but maybe that's all there is. Maybe your life - and sorry this is going to sound quite rude - but maybe your life is so weird, and your personality is so twisted that you find the frustration of people who care about the truth the closest you ever get to feeling joy. Is that it? Nadine Dorries watches Boris Johnson lie and claims that he's the most trustworthy person on the planet. What is wrong with her? It's not really a question about what's wrong with him; what's wrong with her? Whatever transpires at this inquiry or whatever emerges during these hours of evidence, I can tell you this: there will be a significant number of people who think that Boris Johnson has done nothing wrong or that he is somehow the victim of another witch hunt. You remember? It was a witch hunt when he was caught banged to rights by a parliamentary committee containing a majority of conservatives after even Chris Bryant had stepped down to avoid any accusations or allegations - false allegations – really, of impartiality. And they still called it a witch hunt. It would have been a witch unless the committee consisted entirely of 14 Nadine Dorries clones. That's the only circumstances in which those people would have claimed that he could receive a fair trial. Where do you even begin today? Do you begin with the 5,000 WhatsApp messages that a man who was in charge of the nuclear code somehow doesn't understand and can't find? I don't know. So, what is your theory now because I don't think I've got one any more. I watch him now, and I feel something very new, very different to what I thought when he was in power because when he was in power there is an urgency to the situation. There is a desperate need to share with the population the awfulness that they apparently can't see. Just now that he's not in power any more, it's almost as if I've allowed the full horror of what he represents to bubble to the surface. It’s now that he can't actually break anything, it's a retrospective reflection upon the abject awfulness of him. I mean the unbelievable awfulness of this man, the things that he's done. You can begin with Brexit. The lies that he's told, the damage that he's done. The contempt in which he holds all the things we're raised to believe are important: rules, obligations, standards, behaviours, fidelity, honesty, kindness, friendship, loyalty, all of these things we teach our children matter. And Boris Johnson teaches us that you can become the most powerful person in the country by treating all of those things with absolute contempt.

When we experience the interdependence and boundaryless nature of things, we don't feel the heaviness of the world against us -- the world as opposed to me. Instead we feel the fullness of the world, and we are part of that fullness. (Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel)

the Party attempts to create terms that unite all contradictions, and thereby do away with them. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is one of these. Or the “socialist market economy.” These formulations contain left and right, up and down, Maoist and neo-liberal all at once. Language has overruled logic and in doing so believes itself untouchable. Of course, in reality it is becoming ever more empty and absurd, but in a country where what matters is power and not letters, that doesn’t really make a difference. Here, more often than not, the function of words is to convey an order rather than a meaning: Nod! Swallow! Forget! Kneel! And so the propaganda machine feels perfectly free to compare the Dalai Lama with Adolf Hitler, and at the same time to warn the country’s newspaper editors never to confuse “truth and lies, good and evil, beauty and ugliness.” The true, the good, and the beautiful are always the Party and its Word.

Editing can feel incredibly burdensome for self-published authors when you are tasked to reread your work, for what feels like, a thousand times. Because even with your sharp attention to detail, typos can still go unnoticed. My recommendation is to hire a professional editor to go over your writings as well. There are a plethora of freelancers who are highly skilled at ensuring your work is done with precision and more ease.

In addition to the romance, this story explores several interesting subjects. Politics, fashion, and questions of personal fulfillment lend the manuscript a complexity that feels very true to life. This situates Kate as an interesting, admirable, and very classy heroine—a woman who knows how to run a city and also how to rock a pair of Jimmy Choos.” ~Siren Bookstrand Editor

Scientists agree that social learning largely shapes the male-female gap in emotional responding. Boys are toughened up in a way girls rarely are, making them less expressive but also less attuned to others’ feelings.

When the author is not traveling, he works at an L-shaped desk, which affords a view north through a large sunny window. He writes everything on an electric typewriter because "it has to be a book from the first day," he explains. He has no daily routine because of all the traveling he does, but follows a very disciplined writing process. He writes each page six times, then places it in a three-ring binder with a DePauw University cover ("a talisman," he calls this memento from his alma mater). When he feels that he has gotten a page just right, he takes out another 20 words. "After a year, I've come to the end. Then I'll take this first chapter, and without rereading it, I'll throw it away and write the chapter that goes at the beginning. Because the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise." He always hands in a completed manuscript, and his editor is his first reader.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. Lunch with Diana. A big day--a massive, humongous day, in fact. I got there ten minutes early, feeling decidedly nervous. The Kensington Palace front door was opened by her beaming butler. He walked me up the stairs, chatting cheerfully about the weather and my journey, as if a tabloid editor prowling around Diana’s home was a perfectly normal occurrence. He said that the “Boss” was running a bit late, joking that “she’ll be furious you are here first!” and invited me to have a drink. “What does she have?” I asked. “Water, usually,” he replied, “but wouldn’t you rather have a nice glass of wine? She won’t mind in the slightest.” I readily agreed, if only to calm my racing heartbeat. He then left me alone in the suitably regal sitting room. Diana had a perfectly normal piano covered in perfectly normal family snaps. It’s just that this family was the most photographed on the planet. Lots of pictures of her boys, the young heirs, perhaps the men who will kill off, or secure, the very future of the monarchy. To us, they were just soap opera stars, semi-real figments of tabloid headlines and the occasional palace balcony wave. But here they were, her boys, in picture frames, like any other adored sons. Just sitting in her private room was fascinating. Her magazines lay on the table, from Vogue to Hello, as well as her newspapers--the Daily Mail at the top of the pile, obviously, if distressingly. After I had spent ten minutes on my own, she swept in, gushing: “I’m so sorry to have kept you, Piers. I hope Paul has been looking after you all right.” And then came what was surely one of the most needless requests of all time: “Would you mind awfully if William joins us for lunch? He’s on an exeat from Eton, and I just thought that given you are a bit younger than most editors, it might be good for both of you to get to know each other.” “I’m sorry, but that would be terribly inconvenient,” I replied sternly. Diana blushed slightly and started a stuttering “Yes, of course, I’m so sorry…” apology, when I burst out laughing. “Yes, ma’am, I think I can stretch to allowing the future king to join us for lunch.” The absurdity of this conversation held no apparent bounds.

Ingrid Seward Ingrid Seward is editor in chief of Majesty magazine and has been writing about the Royal Family for more than twenty years. She is acknowledged as one of the leading experts in the field and has written ten books on the subject. Her latest book, Diana: The Last Word, with Simone Simmons, will be published in paperback in 2007 by St. Martin’s Press. Although Diana assured me that she was happy and finally felt she had found a real purpose in her life, I could still sense some of her inner turmoil. When we were gossiping, she was relaxed, but when we moved on to more serious matters, such as her treatment by the media, her body language betrayed her anxiety. She wrung her hands and looked at me out of the corner of her starling blue eyes. “No one understands what it is like to be me,” she said. “Not my friends, not anyone.” She admitted, however, that there was a positive side to her unique situation in that she could use her high profile to bring attention to the causes she cared about, and this, she assured me, was what she was doing now and wanted to do in the future. But it was the darker, negative side that she had to live with every day. After all this time, she explained, it still upset her to read untruths about herself, and it was simply not in her nature to ignore it. “It makes me feel insecure, and it is difficult going out and meeting people when I imagine what they might have read about me that morning.” Diana had no idea how much she was loved. To the poor, the sick, the weak, and the vulnerable, she was a touchstone of hope. But her appeal extended much further than that. She had the ability to engage the affections of the young and the old from all walks of life. That summer, she wrote a birthday letter to my daughter that read, “I hope for your birthday you managed to get those grown-ups to give you a doll’s house and the cardigan and the pony hair brush you wanted. Don’t believe their excuses.” She wrote similar letters to thousands of other people and always in her own hand. The effect was magical. “Please don’t say anything unkind about her. She’s my friend,” our daughter instructed her father. That, I think, explains the extraordinary outpouring of grief we witnessed when Diana died. Her appeal was as simple as it was unique. Diana touched the child in each and every one of us. She wasn’t the “people’s princess”--she was the people’s friend. The words of a London cabbie still ring in my ears when I think about the week after her death. “We’ll never see the like of her again,” he said as he dropped me off near the ocean of flowers outside Buckingham Palace. He was right.

But what I wanted to capture was the connection we felt, feel, for each other. And how it enhances our work and, well, um, our lives.” Saying it out loud it sounded as if she’d been too lazy to imagine something and so had decided to rip off their lives. “Originally I thought one of the writers would have a real problem and the others would come to her aid.” Kendall looked around the table and smiled sheepishly. “I had no idea I’d be the one needing help so desperately. I’d pictured a car crash or an illness that kept the protagonist from being able to write, not an evil editor and a disappearing husband.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” The

As they moved out, one soldier recalled, “As far as could be seen, to both left and right of us, men were advancing with their rifles in the porte position, their bayonets glinting in the pale moonlight. Full moon had been days ago so it was quite dark…As we advanced, the feeling of pride and exhilaration was unmistakable. We didn’t realize or think of the danger we were in; we were doing a job and the thought of being killed or wounded was far from our minds…I remember seeing forms sink to the ground but our orders were to keep going and not to stop for wounded or dying. Later we passed slit trenches with forms slouched over them facing in our direction …

During the first day that Jim spent working with the research editors, he discovered the existence of a library that only the manager and the research editors could access. Jim had never seen or been in a library in his entire life. He stood in the library and was astounded by the sight, smell, and presence of so many books. He was overcome with emotions because he was standing and looking at something that he had only heard of, something that he thought, up until now, only existed in the past. He got the feeling that he was standing inside history.

While most of the men felt patriotic and even nationalistic attachment to Germany, their motives centered mostly on being able to finally obtain the funding needed to create the rockets all of them dreamed of, as von Braun once explained: “There has been a lot of talk that the Raketenflugplatz finally ‘sold out to the Nazis.’ In 1932, however, when the die was cast, the Nazis were not yet in power, and to all of us Hitler was just another mountebank on the political stage. Our feelings toward the Army resembled those of the early aviation pioneers [...] The issue in these discussions was merely how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.” (Neufeld, 1995, 26).

I think (if I can make a judgement about writers coming into the business), I feel everybody is in a horrific hurry these days. You write one book and you're ready for fame and fortune. I don't know that people are spending the time and attention on learning how to write -- which takes years. Everybody sees the success stories. So instead of taking five years to learn how to write a decent sentence, they're writing a book proposal and asking who your editor and your agent are. So I find it a little infuriating that there is not more care given to the issue of being wonderful at writing.

Appearance Like it or not, appearance counts, especially in the workplace. Dressing appropriately and professionally is a minimum requirement when applying for a job. Do whatever you can do to make a favorable impression. Dressing appropriately is a way to say that you care about the interview, that it is important to you, and that you take it seriously. It also says you will make an effort to behave professionally once you are with the company. Keep in mind that you are owed nothing when you go on an interview. But behaving professionally by following appropriate business etiquette will nearly always gain you the courtesy of professional treatment in return. The following ideas will help you be prepared to make the best impression possible. In previous exercises, you have examined your self-image. Now, look at yourself and get feedback from others on your overall appearance. Not only must you look neat and well groomed for a job interview, but your overall image should be appropriate to the job, the company, and the industry you are hoping to enter. You can determine the appropriate image by observing the appearance and attitude of those currently in the area you are looking into. But even where casual attire is appropriate for those already in the workplace, clean, pressed clothes and a neat appearance will be appreciated. One young photographer I know of inquired about the style of dress at the newspaper he was interviewing with; informed that most people wore casual clothes, he chose to do the same. At the interview, the editor gently teased him about wearing jeans (she herself was in khaki pants and a sports shirt). “I guess your suit is at the cleaners,” she said, chuckling. But her point was made. Making the effort shows that you take the interview seriously. Second, you should carry yourself as though you are confident and self-assured. Use self-help techniques such as internal coaching to tell yourself you can do it. Focus on your past successes, and hold your body as if you were unstoppable. Breathe deeply, with an abundance of self-confidence. Your goal is to convey an image of being comfortable with yourself in order to make the other person feel comfortable with you.

Paris had heard of Helen of Sparta’s beauty, and though she was married to the warlike Menelaus, he immediately consented to awarding Aphrodite the apple. “Discord” was brought to the Mediterranean. 10 years later, the world was still feeling the effects of Aphrodite’s actions and Menelaus’s response. The Greeks and Trojans had been well matched, and the Greeks just could not bring down the magnificent walls of Troy. Then Agamemnon’s insult to Achilles tipped the balance in favour of the Trojans, and the gods found themselves embroiled in the mire too. Hera and Athena, still furious at Paris’s decision, chose to side with the Greeks, whereas Aphrodite sided with Paris’s countrymen.

Feeling increasingly at odds with his superiors, in a letter sent from Gaines’ Mills, Virginia dated June 28, 1862, a frustrated McClellan wrote to Secretary of War Stanton, “If I save the army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to any other person in the Washington.  You have done your best to sacrifice this army.”  McClellan’s argument, however, flies in the face of common knowledge that he had become so obsessed with having sufficient supplies that he’d actually moved to Gaines’ Mill to accommodate the massive amount of provisions he’d accumulated.  Ultimately unable to move his cache of supplies as quickly as his men were needed, McClellan eventually ran railroad cars full of food and supplies into the Pamunkey River rather than leave them behind for the Confederates. Despite

Behind the bar, tall females in white feathered tops danced on poles, their faces set in masks of lascivious contempt. Keith Blanchard, then Maxim’s editor-in-chief, told me, “It’s a sexy night!” To me, “sexy” is based on the inexplicable overlap of character and chemicals that happens between people…the odd sense that you have something primal in common with another person whom you may love, or you may barely even like, that can only be expressed through the physical and psychological exchange that is sex. When I’m in the plastic “erotic” world of high, hard tits and long nails and incessant pole dancing—whether I’m at a CAKE party, walking past a billboard of Jenna Jameson in Times Square, or dodging pillows at the Maxim Hot 100—I don’t feel titillated or liberated or aroused. I feel bored, and kind of tense.

Following its publication in 1981, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks received further scrutiny from scholars in a series of reviews published in newspapers and professional journals. Stanford J. Layton, Managing Editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly, praised the book in the Salt Lake Tribune. The volume, Layton opined, projected “the heft and feel of scholarship . . . apparent on every page,” which deserved the attention of all those seeking to understand “how a racially discriminatory priesthood policy emerged during Mormonism’s formative years and solidified over time.”21 Likewise, Eli M. Oboler, head librarian at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho, wrote in the Idaho State Journal and characterized the volume as

In the darkest days of the Second World War, when America’s very future was at risk, writer E. B. White was asked by the U.S. Federal Government’s Writers’ War Board to write a short response to the question “What is democracy?” His answer was unassuming but inspiring. He wrote: Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the “don’t” in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

To publish besides the results the way (and the order!) in which they were reached, to mention the blind alleys as well, to mention whether the solution was found in three months or twenty minutes, to express the author's personal feelings (of hope, despair, or fascination), all this is regarded as "unscientific", and, therefore, "bad style". (Just try to include such remarks in your publication: if the referees don't object to them, the editor will!) This taboo seems to extend itself over the teaching of mathematics as well

Your memory of any sunny day in your childhood is merely a version of the last time you thought about it. Among the stunning implications is that intervening in the reconsolidation process can alter a memory and change how it feels. Some of the most intriguing research on this idea has been led by Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist who has been working since the 1970s to investigate how processes in the brain generate emotions. In recent years, he and colleagues have investigated whether giving people an antianxiety drug as they recall a traumatic experience can reduce the dread they feel upon further recollections. If it works, it could be one of many opportunities for reshaping memory, as LeDoux told MIT Technology Review ’s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein, in his NYU office.

Chris Krueger, long-time Capitol Hill watcher for Guggenheim Securities, says the people expecting this kind of kumbaya moment are “Pollyannas”. He said: “My reading of the White House is that they already feel pretty good about their legacy, having done what no administration since Harry Truman has done and extended access to healthcare.” These are the facts on the ground, which bode ill for investors, but there is a conundrum: history suggests we are at a point in the political cycle when markets usually do well. After some volatility around the midterms, the stock market has historically settled into a very strong year in the third year of the presidential cycle, according to an analysis by Jeff Hirsch, editor of the Stock Trader’s Almanac. Sweeping in 180 years of data on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and predecessor indices, he calculates the average Year 3 gain to be 10.4 per cent, almost double the next best year, the presidential election year itself.

ANNALS OF LANGUAGE WORD MAGIC How much really gets lost in translation? BY ADAM GOPNIK Once, in a restaurant in Italy with my family, I occasioned enormous merriment, as a nineteenth-century humorist would have put it, by confusing two Italian words. I thought I had, very suavely, ordered for dessert fragoline—those lovely little wild strawberries. Instead, I seem to have asked for fagiolini—green beans. The waiter ceremoniously brought me a plate of green beans with my coffee, along with the flan and the gelato for the kids. The significant insight the mistake provided—arriving mere microseconds after the laughter of those kids, who for some reason still bring up the occasion, often—was about the arbitrary nature of language: the single “r” rolled right makes one a master of the trattoria, an “r” unrolled the family fool. Although speaking feels as natural as breathing, the truth is that the words we use are strange, abstract symbols, at least as remote from their objects as Egyptian hieroglyphs are from theirs, and as quietly treacherous as Egyptian tombs. Although berries and beans may be separated by a subtle sound within a language, the larger space between like words in different languages is just as hazardous. Two words that seem to indicate the same state may mean the opposite. In English, the spiritual guy is pious, while the one called spirituel in French is witty; a liberal in France is on the right, in America to the left. And what of cultural inflections that seem to separate meanings otherwise identical? When we have savoir-faire in French, don’t we actually have something different from “know-how” in English, even though the two compounds combine pretty much the same elements? These questions, about the hidden traps of words and phrases, are the subject of what may be the weirdest book the twenty-first century has so far produced: “Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,” a thirteen-hundred-page volume, originally edited in French by the French philologist Barbara Cassin but now published, by Princeton University Press, in a much altered English edition, overseen by the comp-lit luminaries Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. How weird is it? Let us count the ways. It is in part an anti-English protest, taking arms against the imperializing spread of our era’s, well, lingua franca—which has now been offered in English, so that everyone can understand it. The book’s presupposition is that there are significant, namable, untranslatable differences between tongues, so that, say, “history” in English, histoire in French, and Geschichte in German have very different boundaries that we need to grasp if we are to understand the texts in which the words occur. The editors, propelled by this belief, also believe it to be wrong. In each entry of the Dictionary, the differences are tracked, explained, and made perfectly clear in English, which rather undermines the premise that these terms are untranslatable, except in the dim sense that it sometimes takes a few words in one language to indicate a concept that is more succinctly embodied in one word in another. Histoire in French means both “history” and “story,” in a way that “history” in English doesn’t quite, so that the relation between history and story may be more elegantly available in French. But no one has trouble in English with the notion that histories are narratives we make up as much as chronicles we discern. Indeed, in the preface, the editors cheerfully announce that any strong form of the belief to which their book may seem to be a monument is certainly false: “Some pretty good equivalencies are always available. . . . If there were a perfect equivalence from language to language, the result would not be translation; it would be a replica. . . . The constant recourse to the metaphor of loss in translation is finally too easy.” So their Dictionary is a self-exploding book,

I also began to have a pretty disturbing attitude toward eating. I developed a real superiority complex to people who ate actual food. I realized that this is how fashion editors at women’s magazines must feel all the time. Oh God, look at those sad piggos, munching away on their sandwiches. I’d just sit there, sipping my kale juice, quietly judging everyone as they happily ate their lunches. And

With everything that has happened to you, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has happened as a gift. Everything is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose.

want to take a special moment to thank my editor, Jennifer Enderlin, to whom this book is dedicated. I came to Jen when my writing life was well-established and my habits somewhat entrenched (if not ossified). But getting to know her, to listen to her suggestions, and to watch her approach to my work has opened my eyes, and heart, in so many ways. A great editor has the talent and power to bring out the best in a writer, and I feel Jen doing that for me, encouraging me to go deeper, and truer, with each book and even each sentence. Jen, I can’t thank you enough, and this dedication is only a start. Thanks and big love to my incredible

The prime minister was provoked by what he considered to be unfriendly or inept coverage, or both, over many months. He concluded that the editors had lost control of the newsroom. . .What was probably the last straw for him was coverage of Israeli president Chaim Herzog's visit. When the Foreign Ministry announced the visit, fury flared across the Causeway. The Malaysian prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, recalled his high commissioner to Singapore and demanded the visit be cancelled. For Singapore to do so after the visit was announced would inflict serious damage on its sovereignty. Demonstrations erupted in many parts of Malaysia, and at the Malaysian end of the Causeway more than 100 demonstrators tried to stop a Singapore-bound train. Singapore flags were burnt. There were threats to cut off the water supply from Johor. Malaysia saw the visit as an insult. It did not recognise Israel, and had expected Singapore to be sensitive to its feelings. Singapore, however, could not refuse the Israeli request for its head of state to make a stopover visit in Singapore, the tail end of his three-week tour of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and the Philippines, the first visit to this part of the world by an Israeli leader. Singapore could hardly forget the crucial assistance Israel had provided the Singapore Armed Forces in the early days of independence, when other friendly countries like Egypt and India had declined to help. What angered Lee Kuan Yew was our coverage of the Malaysian reactions to the visit. He felt it was grossly inadequate. . .Coverage in the Malaysian English press was restrained, but in their Malay press, Singapore was condemned in inflammatory language, and accused of being Israel's Trojan horse in Southeast Asia. A threat to target Singapore Airlines was prominently reported. . .And by depriving Singaporeans of the full flavour of what the Malaysian Malay media was reporting, an opportunity was lost to educate them about the harsh reality of life in the region, with two large Muslim-majority neighbours.

Data matters. It’s the very essence of what we care about. Personal data is not equivalent to a real person—it’s much better. It takes no space, costs almost nothing to maintain, lasts forever, and is far easier to replicate and transport. Data is worth more than its weight in gold—certainly so, since data weighs nothing; it has no mass. Data about a person is not as valuable as the person, but since the data is so much cheaper to manage, it’s a far better investment. Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, points out that a user’s data can be purchased for about half a cent, but the average user’s value to the Internet advertising ecosystem is estimated at $1,200 per year. Data’s value—its power, its meaning—is the very thing that also makes it sensitive. The more data, the more power. The more powerful the data, the more sensitive. So the tension we’re feeling is unavoidable.

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television - you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.” – Andy Warhol

She’s probably going to be chair of our department in a couple years. She’s the editor of the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience. She’s involved with basically every committee possible at the university. She’s the kind of person who wakes at four in the morning and writes a couple manuscripts before the kids wake up at seven. And she’s the leader of our daughter’s Girl Scout troop. She’s just the kind of person who makes everybody feel like: What am I doing wrong? And she’s an incredibly nice person, too. She’s not arrogant or egotistical. And she picked me. That’s the one thing that stops me from feeling insecure. She must have seen something.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.” – Florence Nightingale

The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough...There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms...but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.

From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Pebbles, Rocks & Mountains Rocks can be formed in many different ways and are found in just about every corner of our planet, the Moon, up in space and who knows where else. Now pebbles are the mini-me’s of rocks and generally are about one to three inches in size. Geologists will tell you that they are about 5 millimeters in diameter, but who’s counting? In fact there are two beaches that are made up entirely of pebbles such as the Shingle Beach in Somerset, England. Generally pebbles are found along rivers, streams and creeks whereas mountains are usually a part of a chain that was created along geothermal fault lines. The process of Mountain formation is associated with movements of the earth's crust, which is referred to as plate tectonics. See; now that I looked it up, I know these things! What I’m about to say has absolutely nothing to do with geology and everything to do about human nature. In the course of events we never trip over mountains and seldom over rocks, but tripping over pebbles is another thing. Marilyn French, a writer and feminist scholar is credited with saying, “Men (she should have included Women) stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.” She was the lady (I should have said woman) whose provocative 1977 novel, “The Women's Room” captured the frustration and fury of a generation of women fed up with society's traditional conceptions of their roles (and this is true). However, this has nothing to do with the feminist movement and is simply a metaphor. Of course we’re not going to trip over mountains, not unless we are bigger than the “Jolly Green Giant!” and so it’s usually the little things that trip us up and cause us problems. What comes to mind is found on page 466 of The Exciting Story of Cuba. This is a book that won two awards by the “Florida Authors & Publishers Association” and yet there are small mistakes. They weren’t even caused by me or my team and yet there they are, getting bigger and bigger every time I look at them. Now I’m not about to tell you what they are, since that would take the fun out of it, but if you look hard enough in the book, you’ll succeed in discovering them! I will however tell you that one of these mistakes was caused by a computer program called “Word.” It’s wonderful that this program has a spell check and can even correct my grammar, but it can’t read my mind. In its infernal wisdom, the program was so insistent that it was right and that I was wrong that it changed the spelling of, in this case, the name of a person in the middle of the night. It happened while I was sleeping! I would have seen it if it had been as big as a mountain, however being just a little pebble it escaped my review and even escaped the eagle eyes of Lucy who still remains the best proof reader and copy editor that I know. When you discover what I missed please refrain from emailing me, although, normally, I would really enjoy hearing from you! I unfortunately already know most of the errors in the book, for which I take full responsibility. The truth of it is that my mistakes leave me feeling stupid and frustrated. Now, you may disagree with me however I don’t think that I am really all that stupid, but when you write hundreds of thousands of words, a few of them might just slip between the cracks. None of us are infallible and we all make mistakes. I sometimes like to say that “I once thought that I had made a mistake, but then found out that I was mistaken.” And so it is; if you think about it, it’s the pebbles that create most of our problems, not the rocks and certainly not the mountains. I’ll let you know as soon as my other books, Suppressed I Rise – Revised Edition; Seawater One…. And Words of Wisdom, “From the Bridge” are available. It’s Seawater One that has the naughty bits in it… but that just spices it up. Now with that book you can really tell me what you think….

I never sell my conscience for fame and status; I create that by purity and beauty of inner self; thought and vision as creative writings, not as borrowing words of copy-editor. Therefore, I feel proud of my independent pen and perception.

I went to Pakistan Army, in the war of 1965, to sacrifice my life for my beloved Pakistan, without thinking that I was still a teenager of fourteen years old; however, I managed to enter the Pakistan Army, as the MT driver; I got a short training within six months, but when that war went stop; I felt nothing to stay there. On my awkward conduct, Pakistan Army let me go; however, after a short break, all were allowed to leave the Army. I left the Army and started my study again; after my graduation, I went to Karachi for higher education and a bright career. I had forgotten the Army service. When I was an assistant editor in Daily Aaghaz Karachi, I received a letter from my elder brother, in 1974, who resided in Larkana. He wrote that the Pakistan Army had awarded me a Tamgha-e-Jang (A War Medal). I became surprised that the Army gave me the medal after nine years. However, it was an exceptional pleasure and honor that such an incredible institution rewarded me with a war medal. The pics, display that war medal, which executes a proud feeling of pride and dignity. Some news cuttings, from my document file; several newspapers published that, including Daily Jang, Karachi.

Many well-known writers and editors joked that Straka "must live in a cave somewhere," mocking his need for solitude and privacy. What these publishing-industry extroverts failed to understand is that many more people in the world share Straka's feelings than theirs.

I have the job and the title and the letters after my name that black people are so fond of calling our educational credentials. Still, there is some tension about how I got here and what I do here. I feel the tension from colleagues who cannot process why I receive so much attention. I feel it from publics who cannot fathom why I do not get more attention or different kinds of attention. Editors want me to be a journalist. Journalists want me to stay as far away from their beat as possible. Publishers want a black woman on their pages without the expense of adding one to their mastheads. No one quite knows what to make of the work that represents the intellectual journey I took from little black girl to black woman who thinks for a living.

This time around, True Biz’s audiobook woke me from a dead sleep. I’d made my peace with audiobooks of my books, conceptually, and had kind of forgotten about the eventuality of this one. But this novel presented a whole new existential problem: in the writing itself, I had worked hard to make use of space on the page as a way to highlight the strength and clarity of ASL as a visual language. The result was just a small token of appreciation for what ASL can do—I had still flattened a 3-D language to two—but the signed dialogue looks and feels different than spoken dialogue in the novel, and I had no clue how they’d be able to make that distinction for a listener. I sent a low-key panic email to my editor. She said she’d flag it as a “challenge” for the audio team. Here’s what they came up with: The audiobook team would record the book as usual, and then record a signer performing the ASL dialogue in the book. Very sensitive mics would pick up the sounds of signing—the skin-on-skin contact, the mouth morphemes, the rustling of clothes. The listener would learn that these sounds beneath the dialogue were to mean the character was speaking ASL rather than English. We can’t capture ASL in sound form but, like the use of space in the printed text, it’s a token. I appreciate that a hearing team put some thought into the project, and were paying enough attention to notice that neither signed languages nor deaf people are silent. So yesterday, I went to the studio, rigged up with two heavy duty mics. When I first got into the soundproof room and looked around, I started to laugh. It was mostly foreign territory, but there was also a trace of the audiologists’ booths all of us deaf and hard-of-hearing people have spent so much time in".

Hollis asked me, “How’d the meeting with the editor at the Daily News go?” “About like you’d expect. It’s very clear to me that they’re only interested in the number of papers they sell or clicks the story gets online, not in helping out our homicide investigation. I swear, sometimes it feels like there are some awfully bloodthirsty people in the media who want more murders so they can have juicier stories that sell more papers.

The work is an absolute necessity for me. I can't put it off, I don't care for anything but the work; that is to say, the pleasure in something else ceases at once and I become melancholy when I can't go on with my work. Then I feel like a weaver who sees that his threads are tangled, and the pattern he had on the loom is gone to hell, and all his thought and exertion is lost.” – Vincent van Gogh

What has it been like editing comics? It’s been a real learning experience. I think it makes you a better writer. Suddenly viewing things from that editor’s perspective it makes you aware of so much. I guess I like it. I feel like years of doing comic strips and constantly having to simplify them to fit everything into four little panels has given me tools to look at a piece and cut out excessive verbiage and to get things as concise as possible. It has been really interesting suddenly wearing the editor’s hat and realizing how involved an editor’s job is and how many details they have to keep track of. It’s certainly made me more sympathetic to editors. [laughs] We cartoonists like to complain about them, but it is a tough job. (Interview with Comicsbeat)

Nodding and smiling broadly again he says, “I’m am so fortunate to have you as my editor, Vinny. You understand the heart of the book.” “The heart?” I ask. “Yes, I believe each book is an entity, like a living person. I am a cardiologist, so I feel the heart is everything for a person, and so it is for a book. If you put your ear on it, you should hear it beating and then you grasp its essence.

People often ask me what it was like to grow up with this kind of abuse. Therapists, strangers, partners. Editors. You’re telling us the details of what happened to you, they’d write in the margins. But how did it feel? The question always feels absurd to me. How would I know how I felt? It was so many years ago. I was so young. But if I had to guess, I’d say it probably felt fucking bad. I probably hated my mother for being impossible to please.

But the idea that features of our personality may contribute to the onset of pathology is anathema to many. In her still-influential 1978 essay “Illness as Metaphor,” the late filmmaker, activist, and brilliant woman of letters Susan Sontag—then a forty-five-year-old cancer survivor—flatly and forcefully rejected the possibility that ill health might signify anything beyond bodily calamity. “Theories that diseases are caused by mental states . . . are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease,” she wrote.[1] To assert that emotions contribute to disease was, for her, to promote “punitive or sentimental fantasies,” to traffic in “lurid metaphors” and their “trappings.” She found this view especially distasteful because she perceived it as a way of blaming the patient. “I decided that I was not going to be culpabilized.”[2] Sontag’s acerbic rejection of the mind-body connection resonated not only in intellectual circles but also in some of the most hallowed centers of medical thinking. A few years later, the New England Journal of Medicine’s future first woman editor, Dr. Marcia Angell, cited it approvingly, deriding as “folklore” the idea that “mental state is a factor in the causing and curing of specific diseases,” a “myth” for which the evidence is at best “anecdotal.” Like Sontag, Dr. Angell espied in this line of thinking an insidious patient-blaming tendency: “At a time when patients are already burdened by disease, they should not be further burdened by having to accept responsibility for the outcome.”[3] I agree wholeheartedly that no one, ever, ought to be made to feel guilty for whatever transpires with or within their body, whether that guilt arises from the self or is imposed from without. As I stated earlier, blame is inappropriate, unmerited, and cruel; it is also unscientific. But we have to take care not to fall into an easy fallacy. Asserting that features of the personality contribute to the onset of illness, and more generally perceiving connections between traits, emotions, developmental histories, and disease is not to lay blame. It is to understand the bigger picture for the purposes of prevention and healing—and ultimately for the sake of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. My intent in reframing Sontag’s perspective, then, is to offer a more helpful view. I empathize with her apprehension about being blamed for becoming ill, even as I see her refutation of the mind-body confluence as misguided and scientifically untenable. A clear and honest look at the biographical factors that can disrupt our biological well-being helps us respond intelligently and effectively to illness—or preferably, to mitigate the risks in the first place. This is as true for individuals as for society.

Writing surrogate letters wasn’t quite so easily justified; there was something slightly but definitely dishonest about it. To get one placed, you had to sound like the real thing, but not so much that you discredited your own position or insulted the intelligence of the supporter whose name you were hoping to attach to it. You had to start the letter off with some sassy stock phrase or rhetorical question: “Representative So-and-so just doesn’t get it” or “Which constitution is Senator So-and-so reading?” Then you’d make your case without sounding like you knew too much about the topic. That’s where surrogate letters sometimes went wrong. They would refer to specific revenue numbers or to the names of subcommittees or explain the difference between house and senate versions of bills. Average people didn’t know these things, and if a surrogate letter used them, it sounded like what it was, and editors wouldn’t run them. I spent a day writing these wretched things. It wasn’t worth it unless you produced ten or fifteen; newspapers likely wouldn’t print a letter taking a certain view if they got only one, but if they got a handful they’d feel bound to run one or two. It was a mind-numbing exercise: each one had to sound clumsy but not stupid; each had to approach the question from a different angle; and none could use the same vocabulary. We sent them out to the ostensible authors, and over the next two weeks or so I would see my little creations pop up in a variety of newspapers. Sometimes a few words had been changed by the surrogates, but by and large they slapped their names on the letters and forwarded them to their hometown newspapers. I felt the whole exercise was pointless, but perhaps the letters did contribute in a small way to the sense that Knotts’s allegations had been grossly unfair and that the governor had acted properly. Had he? I thought so at the time, but enough time has passed that I can admit I don’t know. One of the melancholy facts of political life is that your convictions tend to align with your paycheck.

I do. I feel wonderful. Are you sure it’s Carol Mardus?” “Yes. Certainly. It shouldn’t have taken me so long.” “Who and what is she?” “She got Dick started. She was a reader at Distaff, and she got Manny Upton to take Dick’s stories. Then later he made her fiction editor. She is now.” “Fiction editor of Distaff?” “Yes.” “She wasn’t on your list.” “No, I didn’t think of her. I’ve only seen her two or three times.” “C-A-R-O-L? M-A-R-D-I-S?” “U-S.” “Married?” “No. As far as I know. She was married to Willis Krug, and divorced.

people, people in every room: Clare, Viviana, Clare’s new father Gordon, Teo’s parents, my parents, Rose sleeping her fragrant sleep a few feet away. “We’ll get hotel rooms,” everyone had offered, but we told them all, “No. Stay.” Sometimes, I think I would like to have us under one roof, all of us, everybody here, which makes no sense, of course. No house is big enough to hold us, with all of our tensions, all our wariness and histories. But imagine the nights, those separate breathings, everyone within my reach and safe, everyone together. I stand here on this spring day in the center of my life. Chaos, din, and beauty. For a moment, I am still. Then “Cornelia,” cuts across the noise, and because one of them is calling me, I go. Acknowledgments I am so grateful to the following people: Brilliant agent and true friend Jennifer Carlson, whose instincts, heart, and good sense never stop amazing me; My editor, Laurie Chittenden, kind, tenacious, and wise, for making me feel that my books and I were born under a lucky star; Everyone at Morrow, especially Lisa Gallagher, Lynn Grady, Will Hinton, Tavia Kowalchuck, Debbie Stier, Sharyn Rosenblum, Dee Dee DeBartlo, Emily Fink, and Mike Brennan; Susan Davis, Dan Fertel, Annie Pilson (seeker of blooming hydrangeas, mellow light, and the perfect shot), and my sister Kristina de los Santos, the sharp and generous early readers without whom I

Fair. There was that word again. And her father was right about life not being fair. Especially for a woman. Especially for a woman who valued independence and learning above men and marriage. Not that she had any objection to the institution of marriage itself. There were numerous examples of good marriages right here in her own town. Her parents, for one. But few men seemed to want a wife with the courage to speak her mind openly. At least, no men she’d met. Even her father preferred that she keep most of her opinions to herself. When she turned thirty-five earlier this year, she’d accepted that she was—and would remain—an old maid. Being unmarried wasn’t the worst fate in the world. But she did want to be useful. She would like to feel as if the work she did was valued by others. What would she do when her father sold the newspaper? Something he’d begun to talk about more and more often. Would a new owner employ a woman reporter? Or a female editor? Her father wouldn’t even make her the editor. Why would someone else?

I feel like a failure,” I wrote my editor during one particularly dispiriting moment. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” When he wrote back, he pointed out the obvious: Maybe I needed to take what I was learning from the experts and apply it to my own life. I had to live by the principles described in this book.

It seemed like the time to mention Abilene, where Bill shot Mike Williams. Mike was the only man Bill ever killed by accident, to Charley's knowledge. He was a policeman--they'd had an election and the winners hired their nephews as policemen, after Bill had made the place safe to be a policeman--and it was the luck of things that when Phil Coe came after Bill in the street, Mike Williams came around a corner and Bill shot him through the head, thinking it was one of Phil Coe's brothers. Then he shot Phil. The newspaper wouldn't let it heal. It brought Mike Williams back from the dead every week, like a blood relative. The editor called him a fine specimen of Kansas manhood, and declared a "Crusade to Rid Abilene and the State of Kansas of Wild Bill and All His Ilk." Those were the exact words, because for a while after that Bill called him "Ilk." It wasn't the newspaper that got Bill and Charley out of Kansas, though. It was a petition. It was left with the clerk at the hotel where they stayed, three hundred and sixteen signatures asking Bill to leave, not a word of gratitude for what he'd done. He sat down in the lobby with the petition in his lap, running his fingers through his hair. He read every name--there were six sheets of them--and when he finished a sheet, he'd hand it to Charley and he'd read it too. It was the worst back-shooting Charley had ever seen; they even let the women sign. Bill shrugged and smiled, but some of the names hurt him. He thought he'd had friends in Kansas, and looking at the names he saw they were all afraid of him. What ran Wild Bill out of Abilene was hurt feelings.

You are good enough. You are worthy of love. You are beautiful inside and out. There's nothing to fix. You are whole. You are you, and Christ, Miranda, I wouldn't want you any other way." Andy took a deep breath and watched as Miranda's eyes widened at her words. "You are not pathetic. It is the men who have called you such, those that have made you feel as if you are broken, that you are at fault for the failure of your relationships, that you are incapable of creating happiness or loving with your whole heart, they are the ones who are pathetic because they could not admire the strength of the fire burning brightly inside you. They could not handle your success, your fantastic mind or your sharp tongue.

Kenny, used a ramrod to force the ammunition down the length of the barrel of a gun that everyone referred to as Nuke-U-Ler. “Okay,” Kenny said, his speech slightly slurred, beer cans scattered around his feet, “now I just open the valve here on the propane tank and set the pressure regulator to sixty PSI.” Buster struggled to write this down in his notebook, his fingers frozen at the tips, and asked, “Now what does PSI stand for?” Kenny looked up at Buster and frowned. “I have no idea,” he said. Buster nodded and made a notation to look it up later. “Open the gas valve,” Kenny continued, “wait a few seconds for it to regulate, then close the valve and open up the second valve here. That sends the propane into the combustion chamber.” Joseph, missing two fingers on his left hand, his face round and pink like a toddler’s, took another swig of beer and then giggled. “It’s about to get good,” he said. Kenny closed the valves and pointed the contraption into the air. “Squeeze the igniter button and—” Before he could finish, the air around the men vibrated and there was a sound like nothing Buster had ever heard before, a dense, punctuated explosion. A potato, a trail of vaporous fire trailing behind it, shot into the air and then disappeared, hundreds of yards, maybe a half mile across the field. Buster felt his heart stutter in his chest and wondered, without caring to discover the answer, why something so stupid, so unnecessary and ridiculous, made him so happy. Joseph put his arm around Buster and pulled him close. “It’s awesome, isn’t it?” he asked. Buster, feeling that he might cry at any moment, nodded and replied, “Yes it is. Hell yes it is.” Buster had come to Nebraska on assignment from a men’s magazine, Potent, to write about these four ex-soldiers who had been, for the past year, building and testing the most high-tech potato cannons ever seen. “It’s so goddamned manly,” said the editor, who was almost seven years younger than Buster, “we have to put it in the magazine.” Buster had been in his one-room apartment in Florida, his Internet girlfriend not returning his e-mails, nearly out of money, not working on his overdue third novel, when the editor had called him to offer the job. Even with the terrible circumstances of his life at the moment, he was loath to accept the assignment.

In my thirty-fourth year to heaven, I find myself at the copy machine of an exalted, ivy-embroidered university, pressing down on the spine of a memoir by Vladimir Nabokov. The green light under my hands slides over the book’s face, and the spillage from the edges scalds through my shut eyelids. It’s seven-thirty a.m., and I can feel the corpse tint of my face: Frankenstein-monster green. The machine goes whap…whap at slower intervals than the throb in my head, which sounds like thunk. The whaps stab me. The thunks make my eyes bulge in their sockets like a squeezed rubber doll’s. It’s my first year teaching six classes, which has freed me from the deeply respectable but non-writer-esque telecom consulting I could spend eighty hours a week at. Not a new-mom job by any stretch, that work. The sole vestige of the career? I’m on retainer freelancing for a business mag whose editor has left two strongly worded messages on our machine. I’m late with my article on the new Russian perestroika. Whap…thunk. The image of my blond three years’ son this morning, sobbing and holding out his arms to me while Warren strapped him into the child seat, is a hot stove I can’t stop touching. Warren drops him off at daycare now for reasons that are complex.

Samantha Bee, asked me, “How does it feel to be the managing editor of the paper that makes stuff up?

Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the “don’t” in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

Really, who doesn’t enjoy a massage? It feels really good, but despite all the love that athletes feel toward having their muscles rubbed and pressed, “There are very few evidence-based benefits for massage,” says Paul Ingraham, a massage therapist, former editor at ScienceBasedMedicine.org, and publisher of PainScience.com.

Surely the Board knows what democracy is,” he wrote in the magazine. “It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.

You know what, sweetheart? If you ever feel even slightly inclined to come into my office and seduce me while I’m writing, you should act on it. Immediately. Even if I’m on the phone with my editor. Even if my parents are there. Even if I happen, for whatever reason, to be hosting a meeting with the pope. I will stop the discussion, and I will pleasure you right then and there, in a wholly spectacular fashion.

scale. This was a welcome departure from what Zuckerberg maligned as the “top-down way” that Google organized the internet, which made the user feel like a casual reader alone in the Library of Congress. Facebook, by contrast, felt like a Friday night house party. The top-down way was also how editors molded news at the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Wise about the Times’s internal politics and protective of the institution, he gave an honest appraisal, perhaps the most perceptive commentary of anyone, on my firing: “You should feel bad about it and a little scared for our shop. We always manage to mangle success. Even if you accept Jill was a handful—not to me and a lot of the people I like at the paper—still doesn’t scan. i.e. . . . business was good, journalism was good, culture was tough. All the editors of the paper . . . become monsters and she was an incredibly effective one. A great, forgive me, newsman. And regardless, did she deserve to be dragged out into the public square and be stoned to death for being a bitch? Hell no.

I never sell my conscience for fame and status; I create that by the purity and beauty of the inner self; thought and vision as creative writings, not as borrowing words of copy-editor. Therefore, I feel proud of my independent pen and perception.

It was left to Senator Isidor Rayner to conclude the hearings by saying: “As the ship was sinking, the strains of music were wafting over the deck. … It was a rallying cry for the living and the dying - to rally them not for life, but to rally them for their awaiting death. Almost face to face with their Creator, amid the chaos of this supreme and solemn moment, in inspiring notes the unison resounded through the ship. It told the victims of the wreck that there was another world beyond the seas, free from the agony of pain, and, though with somber tones, it cheered them on to their untimely fate. As the sea closed upon the heroic dead, let us feel that the heavens opened to the lives that were prepared to enter. “…If the melody that was rehearsed could only reverberate through this land ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ and its echoes could be heard in these halls of legislation, and at every place where our rulers and representatives pass judgment and enact and administer laws, and at every home and fireside…and if we could be made to feel that there is a divine law of obedience and of adjustment…far above the laws that we formulate in this presence, then, from the gloom of these fearful hours we shall pass into the dawn of a higher service and of a better day, and then…the lives that went down upon this fated night did not go down in vain.

Listening to this soothing music brings back a lot of memories of the 1960s. Nothing really special, though. If they were to make a movie about my life (just the thought of which scares me), these would be the scenes they’d leave on the cutting-room floor. “We can leave this episode out,” the editor would explain. “It’s not bad, but it’s sort of ordinary and doesn’t amount to much.” Those kinds of memories—unpretentious, commonplace. But for me, they’re all meaningful and valuable. As each of these memories flits across my mind, I’m sure I unconsciously smile, or give a slight frown. Commonplace they might be, but the accumulation of these memories has led to one result: me. Me here and now, on the north shore of Kauai. Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore.

Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit,” an editor says. “Jobs are not big enough for people.

To use the term “Fascist” is to reveal oneself. For those on the far left, virtually any corporate bigwig fits the bill. To some on the not-so-far right, Barack Obama is a Fascist—in addition to being a Socialist and a closet Muslim. To a rebellious teen, Fascism may apply to any parentally imposed cell phone restriction. As people vent their daily frustrations, the word escapes a million mouths: teachers are called Fascists, and so, too, are feminists, chauvinists, yoga instructors, police, dieters, bureaucrats, bloggers, bicyclists, copy editors, people who have just quit smoking, and the makers of childproof packaging. If we continue to indulge this reflex, we may soon feel entitled to label as Fascist anyone or anything we find annoying—draining potency from what should be a powerful term.

. Then I found myself toying with pomposities like The Time of the Hero, but my feeling is, if the title is too boring to read all the way through, it might keep readers from trying the novel. So Kahawa it is. The original publisher of Kahawa, in 1982, was in the midst of an upheaval. My original editor was let go before publication, to be replaced with an oil painting of an editor; pleasant, even comforting to look at, but not much help in the trenches. The publisher moved by fits and starts—more fits than starts, actually—and though the book received good reviews, no one at the publishing house seemed able to figure out how to suggest that anybody might enjoy reading it. So it didn’t do well. My current publisher is not suffering upheavals, my current editor is lively and professional, and when it was suggested that Kahawa might be given a second chance of life, I was both astonished and very pleased. I’ve made minor changes in the text, nothing substantive, and agreed to write this introduction, and here we are, by golly, airborne again. By coincidence, I ran into that oil painting at a party a few months ago. He said, “Are you writing any more African adventure novels?” “No,” I said, “but Warner is going to put out Kahawa again, in hardcover.” His jaw dropped. “Why?” he asked. (This is what we have to put up with, sometimes.) “I think they like it,” I said. I hope you do, too.

When we talk with someone with whom we don’t feel completely safe, our social editor jumps in on full alert and our guard is up. Writing is different. If you ask your editor to leave you alone for a while, things will come out that you had no idea were there.

The book covers are a crucial part of my work - personally speaking. Particularly because, I cannot write a single word of a book unless I feel the entire book in the cover. That's why, once the title of a book sends thunder down my spine, and the cover image flashes before my eyes, I immediately get cracking with the cover. And once I have the title and the cover image, words and ideas just keep pouring. In the early days I used to make my own covers, because I could not afford to hire professional help. Today I still make my own covers, because no designer can bring out the distinct feel of Naskarean ideas through the covers better, than Naskar himself - just like no literary editor has the capacity to edit a Naskarean manuscript, except for Naskar himself. You don't edit the Everest, you edit yourself to be able to climb the Everest. If editing is required, it can only be conducted by the Everest himself. Mark you, this doesn't mean you must gobble my ideas word for word - rather it means that, Naskarean ideas are presented to the world exactly as they pour out of my mind, undiluted and unaltered - after that, what you accept, what you don't - how you accept, how you don't, is up to you.

The endless use of these images, as well as the pernicious, corrosive and sly term 'bikini body' are phenomena that I would happily see wiped from the face of humanity. Sure, I get that that phrase refers to you being your best for your two weeks in the sun each year, but the damage done by the implication that we are substandard for the remaining fifty weeks is so much greater than any fun and sunshine could repair. It doesn't matter that most women only need to think about wearing swimwear for a fortnight per year — the language around it works on us daily as it drip drip drips on our souls like the salt water hitting Brighton's beautiful wrought-iron seafront. Eventually we are worn down. We begin to believe that a bikini body isn't one that is simply us, wearing a bikini, by the water, relaxed and enjoying ourselves. We begin to believe that it is an unattainable goal, available only to those who buy the right supplements, trainers and cosmetics. We begin to believe that it is a body whose secret is shared discreetly among magazine editors and Instagram superstars only. We begin to believe that it is a body that belongs to other people. It is not *this* shameful body here, always here, beneath our clothes; the body whose shape we have to reveal if we want to experience the glorious freedom of running around a park on a spring day; the body whose flesh we have to expose if we want to feel the gleeful weightlessness of floating in the sea as the sun hits the water like sequins.

All my life I’ve been getting notes. I get them from producers in London and New York, from directors, from Jill, from lead actors . . . even, on occasions, from their partners. My books are scrutinised by editors and copy editors and (more recently) sensitivity readers. I sometimes feel that I’m surrounded by notes, like a cloud of midges. But I never lose my temper. I always try to see the alternative point of view. It wasn’t easy with Hawthorne.

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