This week three members of our Early Birds critique group had an ‘event’ at Panera Bread in Cary, NC. The idea came from a session I attended at the spring conference of the North Carolina Writers Network, where one of the presenters mentioned that they had had a book sale at the place where they ate lunch once a week. The EBers have been meeting at Panera for two+ years, where we work on our books, and three of us published in the last year. I thought why not have a book sale there? We contacted the manager and he gave us the thumbs up. After we got permission to use the Panera logo, my daughter, the clever artist, made us a banner (reusable!). I contacted the Triangle Writers group (of which the Early Birds is one small group; we now number over 500), a press release was sent out, and we also contacted a local TV station. In retrospect, we should have done this sooner, more than a week ahead. We set up shop at 9 AM and handed people bookmarks and cards throughout the day, but discovered that you really need to talk to people to get them to stop by. So I went inside and chatted to customers while they ate and told them what we were about. Shameless self-promotion! For the most part, they were very receptive and kind, and I avoided interrupting anything that looked like a business meeting. Note: Bring a lot of bookmarks, postcard, and business cards advertising you and your book. We sold ten books, possibly got a gig talking to a book group about our experiences, and had a great time meeting all sorts of people. We collectively decided it was a great experience and plan to do it again next year, when more of our members will have books out and two of us will be on our second! 0 0
When I was growing up, my year was always dominated by summer adventures. In late August, my mother’s sister and her husband and two boys would come for a visit. These visits were always awaited with great anticipation, since their oldest boy, Peter, was six months younger than I, while the youngest, Paul, was six months younger than my brother Jay. I could never figure out how Mom and her sister had managed this arrangement. We had built-in playmates for a week or two: Paul and Jay roomed together in my bedroom, while Peter and I were housed in the old servant’s quarters on our old house’s third floor, in a bedroom with twin beds under the eaves. After the first couple of days of the cousin invasion, the bloom was off the rose. Peter and I or Paul and Jay were either getting into trouble or fighting. Which raises the subject of punishment. Spoiling the child was never an issue for my parents. Mom had a Master’s degree in verbal tongue-lashing, while Dad was in charge of physical discipline. I had a “smart mouth” according to Mom, and trouble found Jay several times daily. Thus the switch, a thin green stick cut from a forsythia bush in the back yard, was frequently applied to our posteriors by Dad, with varying degrees of force and frequency, depending on the infraction. “Wait ’til your father gets home,” was an ominous sign of things to come. Pain never seemed to be an issue for Jay, who was hyperactive and barely responded to anything that hurt. The only time Mom wielded a whacking instrument to my brother was when in complete frustration she broke a yardstick on Jay’s backside. Part of the frustration was that Jay smiled all the way through its application. I, on the other hand, dreaded the switch, and only managed to avoid encountering it once over the years, when I hid under a bed. While I was hiding, Mom and Dad calmed down considerably, so when I finally dared to emerge, I was assigned to wash all the dishes all by myself, each day for a month. The hiding-under-the-bed tactic didn’t work the next time. Our uncle was of like mind with our father, only he applied a belt to our cousins. The belt was an old black leather strap that hung in the kitchen closet in their home, but it traveled with them to Plymouth each summer. Each pair of cousins swore that what they experienced was worse, usually at the conclusion of a lengthy recounting of recent times the belt and switch had been used, the infractions that had called for their use, and the virtues of each form of punishment. All this ended during one of the cousin invasions when, exasperated to the limit by our behavior, our respective fathers gave us a choice: switch or belt. While Paul and Jay were on the receiving end of the belt and switch respectively, Peter and I sat down on the kitchen floor and recommenced our discussion of the merits of each of these instruments of torture. “Well?” my Dad asked, when our turn came. “I think I’ll take the switch,” I remember answering rather reluctantly. “I’m okay with the belt,” said Peter. Later that evening, with our backsides smarting from the latest insult, we collectively decided not to discuss our different forms of punishment again, just in case discussing them somehow elicited their use. P.S. As a parent, I never used a switch. When my children were little, they infrequently got one swat on their diapered rears for effect, but we mainly used time outs. 0 0
When I was growing up, I recognized that my father had a keen sense of family proprietorship where it concerned our house and its land. Several times a year, he would make a pronouncement on Saturday morning: “Today we clear land” or “Today we shovel the driveway” or “Today we burn the lawn.” These statements would be made from the pulpit of the breakfast table, in between bites whatever breakfast he had made that morning, with all the imperiousness of a New England preacher. If it weren’t for the fact that the driveway was a quarter mile long, the land was about five acres, and my father had an addiction to kerosene, my brother and I might have laughed ourselves silly. Our house was three stories, with weathered gray siding, dark green shutters, and three brick chimneys. It had been built in the mid 1800s by a sea captain named Hornblower, and its many windows stared out blankly at the water of Massachusetts Bay. There were five terraces that led up to the house from the main road, wild and full of brambles and wild blackberries, and some had even been other sites for the house. My father told me he had seen pictures of the house, raised up on a huge platform, being dragged down the hill, to be repositioned wherever the owners wanted it. The foundations of those other sites were still visible in some places, and there had once been a round extension on one side of the house, but it had fallen off in a move. The lowest terrace was next to the main road, and it and the next one up had ancient apple trees that bore fruit sporadically. My brother Jay and I had once tried the apples, but decided that the small, tart fruits weren’t worth the briar scratches on our legs and the burrs in our socks. The third terrace up was half-full of day lilies, which bloomed spectacularly in summer, painting the terrace in a brilliant shade of orange, and which spread a little each year. The fourth and fifth terraces had the thickest bushes and brambles and were in a perpetual state of being cleared; on the fifth, Dad had established a beachhead for brush burning. While no one in the family doubted that he was determined to clear those terraces, the fact the job simply couldn’t be done in one or two weekends meant the brush never was truly removed. It just grew back to be cleared again. But he was undaunted, and as a result the entire family suffered together in true pioneer fashion. Clearing was always done in late spring and early fall, when it was warm and humid and the poison ivy in full bloom. Dad would get a burning permit from the town and start bushwhacking early Saturday morning with his machete and a scythe. My mother, Jay and I would pull on old gloves, whose insides smelled and frequently contained small bits of yuck, and follow behind Dad, grabbing the cut brush and dragging it to the towering inferno he would create with a liberal splash of kerosene. In the early days, when no one was particularly good at recognizing poison ivy, Jay and I usually came down with a good dose of it and would be wearing pink calamine lotion for the next week or so. Burning poison ivy was also unsafe, because good dose of the smoke, when mixed with sweat, also required a dose of calamine. It didn’t help my regard of this shiny green weed when my mother told me that years before, some crazy relative had died after eating poison ivy on a dare. Jay and I thereafter carefully inspected every load of brush we dragged to the fire and tried to stay upwind of the smoke. My father was immune to poison ivy and was never subject to the humiliation of sitting in a classroom with a pink-coated face, being driven crazy with the itching. My mother was the smartest one in the family, which was evident the very first time we bush-whacked the terraces. She would haul brush for about 30 minutes and then engage my Dad in a short discussion. “John, I think we’ve about cleared this area.” That would be followed by a grunt from Dad, who was dripping sweat into his eyes and trying not to slash himself with the machete. “Would you like something to drink? You must be getting thirsty.” “Sounds good.” “OK, I’m going to head in and I’ll bring you all out some lemonade after I have started lunch.” Then Mom would retreat to the house and wouldn’t appear until she called us for lunch. The lemonade would be on the table when we slogged inside. I never knew exactly why ham sandwiches took the entire morning to make, but whatever Mom was doing, I would have been only too happy to help her. “The family will shovel” days in the winter usually occurred after a several foot snowfall, which inevitably blocked the back door. In that case, the easiest way out of the house was through the cellar, since Dad hermetically sealed all the other doors each winter to keep out the cold. We would assemble on the stairs leading up from the cellar to its double doors and with might grunts, would heave upward, dislodging a pile of snow which would rain down inside our clothes. While most of the day would be spent clearing the large parking area in the back of the house and making two straight lines the width of the car axle down the driveway, there were also a lot of snowball fights and general mayhem. Dad also believed that burning a lawn made it come back rich and green. So with another burning permit, on one Saturday morning each spring he would set fire to the lawn by sprinkling it with his favorite flammable material, kerosene, and dropping a match. Before he
For my second book, Death in a White Dacron Sail, I did some research while I was vacationing in Maine two years ago. This was before our winter adventure and believe me, Maine in summer is far nicer than Maine in winter. I made three excursions during that trip, one a morning on a lobster boat, one a visit to a sail maker’s loft, and the third, a walk around a bog. All of these figure into the new book. Today I’d like to tell you about Nathaniel Wilson, the sail maker. Mr. Wilson is probably one of the foremost sail makers in the country, if not the world, and I stumbled on him doing research online. He has made sails for the USS Constitution and the Mayflower II, the Godspeed and Discovery for the Jamestown Settlement, as well as for many of Maine’s schooner fleet. I made an appointment with him to visit his loft for a short interview one morning. His business is located on the second floor of a barn on his property, and when we arrived, he was striding across the lawn from his house, a tall, lanky man with white hair, cornflower blue eyes, and a tan, chiseled face. Wilson is very modest and prefers to talk about his business, but told me that he has his own boat, large with two masts, and has sailed virtually everywhere in the world as crew or skipper, including a transatlantic trip. He also owns five antique cars, including the beautifully restored Model A truck that was parked outside the barn. Instant karma for me, because my first car was a Model B Ford phaeton. Inside the barn, the main floor is lined with pictures of sailboats whose sails he has made, most of them quite famous, and in one room he has a masthead from an old sailing schooner. In a corner of that room was an old, discarded sail. It was one of the original sails on the Mayflower I, and since I was a native of Plymouth and a tour guide when the Mayflower I sailed into the harbor from England, he gave me a cutting from the sail. This is now a prized possession. Magazine covers featuring his handiwork paper the stairwell to the second-story loft: a single, large, bright room with a planked wooden floor and windows all around. There are three sail maker’s benches on each of three sides of the room – low, wooden, elongated benches scored with the marks of years of labor. One old bench was tilted back to take the pressure off the back of the sail maker when he or she leaned forward over the sail. On the benches are hand tools that haven’t changed in 200 years: bench hooks to stretch the sail, seam rubbers to flatten seams and fids to stretch the grommets. Industrial sewing machines, charts, drafting table, and a wall telephone occupy the shop. Here, Wilson teaches his craft to workers. He never uses the word “traditional” when referring to his craft, as he feels it indicates that his profession is on the decline. And that’s hardly the case. His shop is busy. Wilson learned sail making when he was in the Coast Guard; he discovered he liked the craft while taking a turn making sails for the Coast Guard’s square rigger, the Eagle. He liked it so much, he deliberately failed his bosun’s exam so he could stay with sail making. He opened his business in 1975 and in 1979 bought the shop he’d been leasing, building the company through hard work. It’s still not a large operation, employing only two or three people plus himself. What is unique about his business is that unlike the sails that are mass made and marketed from China, his sails are constructed from woven fabric, synthetic and natural, as opposed to laminated material. The sails are cut on the loft floor, then shaped by eye and experience. Everyone in the loft learns to do that and he gives it the final say. While his sails are mainly polyester nylon, he will use whatever is needed for a reconstruction, for example, flax for the Mayflower II sails. He chooses cloth that holds its shape under a range of design factors, so that the sail is the perfect air foil. Next time you see a square rigger or a group of windjammers proudly sailing into New York harbor, you can bet that many of those ships have sails made by Nathaniel Wilson. And look for my inclusion of a sail maker in my next book. 0 0
I was introduced to this at the last meeting of the Early Birds, the critique group I have been with since 2009. I’d never heard it expressed quite as succinctly and it turned out that one of our group was taking a course on just this. Perhaps you are aware of this, and if so, you can stop reading here! The hero myth is an analytical tool with which you can compose a story to meet any situation, from comic books to novels. The principles are based on The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. This book is non-fiction, a seminal work of comparative mythology. Chris Vogler wrote a Practical Guide to this book when he was a story consultant at Walt Disney Pictures, and it has had a major impact on writing, story-telling and movie making, specifically Disney movies. You can read a lot more than I will write in this blog at: http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero%27s_journey.htm In a nutshell (taken from his article): “The hero is introduced in his ordinary world, where he receives his call to adventure. He is reluctant at first but is encouraged by the wise old man or woman to cross the first threshold, where he encounters tests and helpers. He reaches the innermost cave, where he endures the supreme ideal. He seizes the sword or the treasure and is pursued on the road back to his world, He is resurrected and transformed by his experience. He returns to the ordinary world with a treasure, a boon or an elixir to benefit his world.” I then compared the two books I have written to this guide, substituting truth for the sword or the treasure. It was an interesting discovery that I had, without knowing it, generally followed the guidelines. I’d be interested to know: Have you read Campbell’s book? Are you familiar with the Hero Myth and the guidelines? Have you used them in your writing? 0 0
In honor of Munchie, a cat who formerly owned a fellow blogger, Pete Denton from Great Britain, and who is now in kitty heaven….. I’d like to introduce our cat, Elijah Moon. In my opinion, he’s gone through several of his nine lives. We’d found him living in our crawl space, along with his brother Ezekiel (we didn’t know their names at the time). They were sporting plastic flea collars grown so stiff and tight, they were cutting into their necks. They’d been spayed, so they obviously had belonged to someone at some point in time, but they needed love and attention. So of course we adopted them, took them to the vets, got them their shots. They joined a household with three other cats: Tarby, my mother’s cat, who lived in our bedroom and didn’t get along with Lucy and Ruckus, who lived in the rest of the house. Elijah Moon and Zeke didn’t get along with anyone, so they stayed outside, living in the yard and on the deck near our back door. We got them two houses to sleep in at night and an umbrella to deflect hot sun and the rain. They seemed to like the accommodations. At Christmas time of the year we took them in, Elijah Moon and Zeke showed up with very nice collars and name tags. So we finally knew their names. We called the number on the tag. Their owner was a graduate student who had adopted them from a shelter in Providence, Rhode Island. She was off to a post-doc in Berkeley, where her living arrangements didn’t include cats. So she had left them with her mother, who lived about an acre away. Her mother didn’t want them inside because they scratched the furniture, so she dumped them outside and left food for them. We live in the country and the area is semi-wild. We have tons of deer, raccoons, possums, badgers, beavers, wandering dogs and lately, coyotes. I think Elijah and Zeke took shelter in our crawl space for safety. Over the last few years, all but one of our cats have died from either cancer or old age, so Elijah or Moonie, as I call him, has moved inside and now enjoys a life of leisure – sprawled on the couch or guarding the yard (until dark, when we bring him in), rolling in the sunshine and eating expensive food. Okay, we spoil him. He also likes to sleep in cozy places, such as the clothes dryer. We also discovered that he likes water. He only drinks from a faucet, where he gets his water at night before we go to bed, or our pool. He loves the pool. Usually he floats around on a mat while I am swimming, but one really hot day he took a swim. Here he is heading for the side of the pool. Needless to say he has taken over our lives. We’ve learned to interpret specific mewing noises for what he wants: food, outside, inside, or petting. His wants are simple. Would that ours were! 0 0
The last day pf the A-Z challenge – I have mixed feelings about it. Relief that I made it, letdown at not having amazing blogs to visit every single day. Many, many thanks to all of you who stopped by and thanks to all the wonderful bloggers I met and chatted with during April. I feel like I have a whole new circle of friends, and I look forward to following all of you in the future! 0 0
Do click on the artwork to see it’s beauty! Whew, here we are with Z, and I couldn’t find a renaissance artist with a name beginning with Z. So I give you instead one of the best: EL Greco! El Greco (1541 –1614) was born Doménikos Theotokópoulos and was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. El Greco (the Greek) was his nickname. He was born in Crete, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice and he trained as an icon painter. Dormition of the Virgin is one of his paintings during this period, and it combines post-Byzantine and Italian mannerist styles with iconographic elements. He was a master painter in Crete before moving to Venice at age 26. While El Greco was in Italy, he opened his own workshop and studied painters of the Renaissance movement in art in Venice and Rome, where he moved in 1570. There he learned perspective and the staging of narratives, the use of atmospheric light and also the elements of Mannerism: extreme perspective, the twisting and turning of the figures and tempestuous gestures. He was a disciple and student of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, one of the few artists who substantially altered his style and invented new interpretations of traditional religious themes. His View of Mount Sinai is a good example of the change in his style during this time. See also his Portrait of Klovio, which I showed you earlier under K. By the time El Greco arrived in Rome, both Michelangelo and Raphael were dead, but their influence remained strong. El Greco did not like Michelangelo’s painting, but he couldn’t resist his influence, which can be seen in a later El Greco works, such as the Allegory of the Holy League (Adoration of the Name of Jesus). It was apparently painted for Phillip II. The figures of the King, Pope, Doge and Don Juan of Austria are depicted at the bottom, with the figure of Don Juan inspired by Michelangelo. The jaws of hell and purgatory are also represented in El Greco’s unique way. His Purification of the Temple shows elements of Raphael. In 1577, El Greco migrated to Spain, first to Madrid, then to Toledo, where he lived until his death and were he produced his mature works. He signed a contract for a group of paintings for the Church of Santo Domingo and by 1579 had completed nine paintings, including The Trinity and Assumption of the Virgin, which established his reputation. He also managed to obtain two commissions from Phillip II: Allegory of the Holy League and Martyrdom of St. Maurice. However, the king didn’t like these paintings and gave El Greco no further commissions. In 1586 he was obtained the commission for The Burial of the count of Orgaz, probably his best-known work, in which he portrays a supernatural event occurring at the Count’s funeral. His trademark exaggerated Mannerist figures are evident as well as tiered composition. Each horizontal half of the painting is so composed that it could be an independent painting. Between 1597 to 1607 El Greco several major commissions for a variety of religious institutions. An example is the painting of St. Ildefonso for the Hospital de la Caridad and The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. In this painting, which is one of El Greco’s so-called ‘visions,’ pace, proportion, gravity, anatomical accuracy, light, day and night, logic— have been abandoned to transport the viewer into a state of spiritual ecstasy. Legal disputes contributed to the economic difficulties consuming El Greco toward the end of his life. In 1608, he received his last major commission, for the Hospital of Saint John the Baptist in Toledo. This painting is one of my favorites, perhaps because of the wistful look on the face of the Saint. The attenuated figure, the agitated movement of the sky and the scintillating light on the landscape is characteristic of El Greco at that time. During the course of the execution of a commission for the Hospital Tavera, El Greco fell seriously ill and died a month later in 1614, he died. He was 73. 0 0
Don’t forget to click on the artwork! There were no Renaissance artists whose names began with Y, so I thought I would tell you about Vasari, whose name has come up some many times in the telling of the lives of the other artists. Giorgio Vasari (1511 –1574) was an Italian painter, architect, writer -historian, and you have been introduced to him as the author of Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the book that founded art history. He was born in Arezzo, Tuscany, and as a child became the pupil of Guglielmo de Marcillat, a painter of stained glass. He was sent to Florence when he was 16, where he joined the workshop of Andrea del Sarto, a renowned painter during the late Renaissance and early Mannerist period. Vasari was befriended by Michelangelo, who would have a strong impact on his painting style. Vasari was a Mannerist, that is, his paintings were notable for their intellectual sophistication as well as its artificial (as opposed to naturalistic) qualities. Mannerism favors tension and instability in contrast to the balance and beauty of earlier Renaissance paintings. Some of his earliest work were frescoes for the hall of the chancery in Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, depicting scenes from the life of Pope Paul III. Note the disproportionate bodies, some with extensive elongation, and the tension in the scene. Vasari was consistently supported by the Medici family in both Florence and Rome, and many of his paintings still exist. The most important of his frescoes are considered to be those on the wall and ceiling of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, beginning in 1555, and the Last Judgment inside the vast cupola of the Duomo, begun by Vasari and finished by others after his death. Vasari’s paintings have often been criticized as being facile, superficial, and lacking a sense of color, and he is now regarded more highly as an architect than as a painter. His best-known buildings are the Uffizi in Florence, built for Cosimo I de’ Medici, and the church, monastery, and palace created for the Cavalieri di San Stefano in Pisa. Despite his architecture and paintings, Vasari’s real fame derives from his massive book, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, which was dedicated to Cosimo de’Medici. In it, Vasari offers his own critique of Western Art: the excellence of the art of classical antiquity was followed by a decline of quality during the Dark Ages, which was in turn reversed by a renaissance of the arts in Tuscany in the 14th century. It included a lengthy series of artist biographies. The work has a consistent bias in favor of Florentine artists and tends to attribute to them all the developments in Renaissance art. Vasari’s biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip, frequently of dubious veracity. Vasari enjoyed high repute during his lifetime and amassed a considerable fortune. He died in Florence in June of 1574. 0 0
Do click on the artwork to see it’s beauty! To paraphrase Monty Python, now for something really different! I did not find an X for my Renaissance artists, but I did find an artist living in China at the time of the Italian Renaissance, and he piqued my interest. Xuande was an Emperor of China who also happened to be a talented artist. His real name is Zhu Zhanji (1399-1436) and he was the eldest son of the Hongxi Emperor; Xuande’s father had been educated by Confusions tutors and had ordered the capital be moved back to Nanjing from Beijing. It is not surprising that Xuande himself was fond of poetry, literature and art, but he preferred Beijing over Nanjing as his residence and ruled from there. One of his notable accomplishments is that he permitted Zheng He, well known as a great Chinese explorer since the publication of Biography of Our Homeland’s Great Navigator, Zheng He, to lead the last of his maritime expeditions to the Indian Ocean. The Chinese at that time had invaded Annam, the country known now as Vietnam, but the Chinese garrisons suffered heavy losses at the hands of the Ammanese (70,000 men alone in 1427), so the Chinese forces withdrew and Xuande eventually recognized the independence of Annam. He also battled with the Mongols to the north, but during his reign, China’s diplomatic relations with Japan improved and relations with Korea were generally good (with the exception of resentment on the part of the Koreans for having to send virgins to the Ming court’s harem!). This emperor reformed the rules governing military conscription and the treatment of deserters. The huge tax burdens had caused many to leave their farms in the past forty years were changed in 1430, when the Xuande Emperor ordered tax reductions on all imperial lands and sent out representative to coordinate provincial administration and exercise civilian control over the military. Xuande fought natural calamities, safeguarded the borders and patronized the arts. So by all measures the Xuande Emporer was a good ruler. His ten years as Emperor were for the most part peaceful and are considered the Ming Dynasty’s Golden Age In the Emperor’s Approach, Xuande is traveling through the Countryside, in all the luxury in to which the emperor was entitled. Elephants were kept in the imperial elephant stables until around 1900. Here, the large number of horsemen suggests the emperor was on a longer journey in the countryside. The Xuande Emperor was known as an accomplished painter, particularly skilled at painting animals. Some of his art work is preserved in the National Palace Museum in China. I have also included two scenes from his life painted by court artists. . The Emperor also sponsored improvements in the manufacturing of ceramics, which led to the world famous Ming porcelain. Xuande Emperor died of illness at age 36, after ruling only ten years. 0 0
