Writing, Books, Painting, Politics, Neuroplasticity

Author copies of Angels And You Dogs have arrived from PS Publishing in huge blue Royal Mail Bags.

                                           Pam Noles

As part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival, Theatre Unleashed held a 24-hour play event. A play written, cast, directed and up on stage within 24 hours. The theme was “There’s No Place Like ….”

Writers got the prompt at 5 pm Saturday evening. Pam got hers at 8 pm; she was character busking on the Boulevard all that day. Her prompt was There’s No Place Like … An Elevator. She was told to write for two females.

She started writing at 8:30 pm. Finished at 7:45 am. Emailed it in by 8 am deadline.

Pam’s story: A corporate woman and a cleaning lady are trapped on a broken elevator that is slowly falling from geostationary orbit down to the surface of Mars. They both work for the corporation in charge of developing Mars.

Actors in the photo are Lauren Flans and Liesl Jackson. Director is Allsion Keating. Lauren won Best Actress for her role in Pam Nole’s play.  Noles says, “First time I’ve had someone else interpret my work or writing for someone else, so the whole thing was really interesting. I thought they did a great job, and I was particularly surprised and happy with how the three interpreted the piece.”
She is expanding the piece into a full length play.

Pam Nole’s blog “And We Shall March” is a an intellectual and cultural treasure trove.

Martha Gellhorn on a Collier’s assignment with Ernest Hemingway with unidentified Chinese military officers, Chungking, China, 1941.

I considered myself a fan of Martha Gellhorn, although I have only read Travels With Myself and Others, being unaware of the many novels and nonfiction books that she wrote, which I will soon remedy.   I have been studying Hemingway for many years in conjunction with writing a novel in which he is largely tangential, so perhaps it is rather in the spirit of those who fancy catastrophe in biography.  I have read every scrap that he has written, every biography I can find, critical work, you name it. 

Therefore, I came to the HBO Hemingway and Gellhorn movie quite fully prepped.  I enjoyed the effort to make their rather public lives real, and thought that Kidman was flawless as an older Gellhorn being interviewed as the movie opens.  

A few things bothered me.  I saw Kaufmann, the director on the Charlie Rose show before watching the movie and was faintly annoyed with his take that Hemingway inspired Gellhorn to be a foreign correspondant.  She was one before she met him.  She was apparently the only woman Hemingway married out of love and admiration–he married Hadley because she could support his ambition to write fiction, and Pauline because Hadley’s source of money dwindled after the crash of ’29 whereas Pauline’s fortune was assured enough to afford the purchase of a nice home in Key West (yes, I know there was attraction each time, but he was conveniently not attracted to unmoneyed women).  In Gellhorn, he had a mirror and a soulmate, someone he could discuss craft with, someone he could never bully with the sarcastic label “poor old mama” (as he did Pauline after she gave him two sons, a home, and opulent safaris).  When he did pointedly bully her and try to force her into the position of subservient wife by stealing her Colliers position as war correspondent, that was the last straw.  Reluctant at the outset to marry him, she trumped him by actually landing on the beach on D-Day and divorced him shortly thereafter. 

I was really surprised at the frequent characterization of Gellhorn as somewhat squeamish.  I don’t believe that for a second.  It just doesn’t fit the rest of the picture.  But perhaps that is supported by the copious written record.

I disliked the way the movie tried to say that Hemingway carried a torch for Gellman for years after their divorce.  The lietmotif of H & G knowing a particular Spanish song and singing it together in Sloppy Joe’s when they meet is repeated when Hemingway tries to teach it to Mary Welsh, also a war correspondent, in Paris when separated from Gellhorn.  Unlike Gellhorn, Welsh did give up her carreer for Hemingway, so she had nowhere to go when the inevitable grand-scale bullying began.  However, I do not think that she sang that song to him in Ketchum, Idaho, right before he committed suicide, thus implying that he did so because he’d lost Gellhorn (if you could call it that) fifteen years earlier.  He did not kill himself while she sang in the kitchen, as the movie shows–he did so early in the morning, being sure not to wake Mary, who had prevented earlier attempts.  That may have been cinematic shorthand to show fifteen years of his life, but in that case it is also false.  He was mentally ill; he had suffered concussions and shock treatment.  I believe he was a sensitive child and, just as the prototype child in Alice Miller’s psychology book The Drama of the Gifted Child does, took everything to heart in ways that became hidden to him as he grew, as happens to most of us.  When he “deadpans,” as the Newsweek review points out, that he learned how to have fun in hell “On family vacations,” the Newsweek review makes fun of that bit of dialog.  I think it actually makes perfect psychological and historical sense.  Their vacation home in Michigan was the scene of many deciding experiences in his life, experiences that left scars. 

No ostensibley biographical movie gets it all right; there is the need to dramatize, cut and compress, to flout reality for a few seconds of false punch.  But I enjoyed this new look at these writers who became willing characters in their own dramatic lives. 

Just turned in “Bootstrap,” a short story for this fall’s issue of MIT Technology Review’s fiction issue.  Here is a link to information about the 2012 issue.

Review of JUBILEE HITCHHIKER,  a biography of Richard Brautigan.

One of my favorite authors in the Sixties, Seventies, and into the Eighties.  I was stunned when I heard of his suicide on the radio and felt very guilty about not reading beyond THE HAWKLINE MONSTER.  It was only because I’d started a business and was working sixty hours a week.   I wrote a paper about TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA in college, and lines from IN WATERMELON SUGAR often spring to mind. 

Anyway, of course I ordered this posthaste, being a biography junkie

The John W. Campbell Award finalist list for Best SF Novel of 2012 has been released, and it includes THIS SHARED DREAM.

IN WAR TIMES, the precursor, won the 2008 Campbell Award, much to my delight.

http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/angel-and-you-dogs-hc-by-kathleen-ann-goonan-1266-p.asp

ANGELS AND YOU DOGS can be ordered now from PS Publishing.  This is the signed, limited-edition HC (100 copies).  A paperback will be out in June.

Rob Thornton, author of the blog metawyrd, notes from a fan of fringe music, sf/f,  and sustainable culture, wrote a nice post about the convergence of music and sf/fantasy. He mentions IN WAR TIMES, as well as George R.R. Martin’s AMRAGEDDON RAG, Norman Spinrad’s LITTLE HEROES, Patricia McKillip’s SONG FOR THE BASILISK, and Lew Shiner’s GLIMPSES. 

Nice blog!

I think I’m (finally) getting ready to paint again. 

I painted Pam’s Orchid for Pam Noles a few years back.  Very few of my paintings are digitized; mostly, I just give them away.  I’m going to be more diligent about that in the future.

A link to Arlan’s excellent summary of SIGMA’s participation in the Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyadh January 2012.