essays, poems, cartoons – since 2007
I reviewed British poet Scott Manley Hadley’s debut poetry collection, “Bad Boy Poet,” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. The book, just out this week, is available from the publisher (Open Pen) and at Amazon (paperback and Kindle editions). Read my review here.
My novel “Alma Lolloon” is now available in Kindle electronic edition format. You can download a copy for $2.99 here (free if you have Kindle Unlimited).
A fun and generous review of Alma Lolloon has appeared on Amazon. Here is a link, and I’ve pasted the review below:
by, Rucker Trill
July 4, 2018Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Another review of “Alma Lolloon” released into the cybersphere, this one by Ashen Venema, author of “Course of Mirrors” and blogger friend. I paste below, and below that, please see the “TinyLetter” opportunity.
~~~
My this week’s Tiny Letter copied below. Would you like to sign up?
Three reviews of “Alma Lolloon” are now loose in the cybersphere:
Bill Currey bound his review in a tweet, to wit:
Bill Currey @williamcurrey
And here I thought I was going to get a Joycean map with footnotes and all to Linker’s Portland! I stumble blindly onwardly towards, if not to summation, at least to termination.
Joe Linker @JoeLinker
Replying to @williamcurrey @PhilippaRees1 and 2 others
Thanks for the review, Bill. Sounds like something Beckett might have said.
And Dan Hennessy posted a review of “Alma Lolloon” to his “Tangential Meanderings” blog (AKA: itkindofgotawayfromyou). Click here to read Dan’s review.
And if you’ve not read Philippa Rees’s review of “Alma Lolloon,” it’s at Queen Mob’s Tea House. Click here.
Bookmark Giveaway!
We’ll be spending the holidays with the grand girls, and for an art project we’ll be making bookmarks for a Joe Linker book.
The bookmarks use standard, toxic free materials, of paper and fabric, thematically linked to the books with original artwork.
If you’d like to receive a complementary bookmark, please send a reply to this tiny letter telling us what book you’d like the bookmark for (Penina’s Letters; Coconut Oil; Scamble and Cramble: Two Hep Cats and Other Tall Tales; Saltwort; or Alma Lolloon), and also include a snail mail address for us to mail you the bookmark. All bookmarks will be sent out by Dec 31st. If you prefer, we can send you an e-bookmark. Reply the same as above but with an email address. What’s an e-bookmark? Not sure, we’ve not made one yet.
You can view the covers of the five books here.
Philippa Rees has a review of “Alma Lolloon” up at Queen Mob’s Tea House. Please stop by for a cup and a read.
As The Coming of the Toads nears its 10th anniversary (our first post was Dec 27, 2007), we reflect on why and wonder what now.
The new book, “Alma Lolloon,” is out (“look inside” here). “Out” may seem hyperbolic – it’s now available. Others trying to write and publish will get the difference.
Most writers, excepting the besttellers, have to self-promote; yes, even when published traditionally by a standard house in the traditional manner.
It is, then, in the interest of shaking the bushes and the amateur spirit of writing, I invite readers of The Toads to subscribe to my TinyLetter notes.
Meantime, the amateur spirit in writing lives on at The Toads:
We do not have the New Yorker DVD library (though we do have in the basement a stack of paper copies we regularly prune for mold), but we do have E. B. White’s “Writings from the New Yorker, 1927-1976,” edited by Rebecca M. Dale (HarperPerennial paperback edition published 1991).
The “Talk of the Town” pieces these days only occasionally reach White’s wit or brevity. He often captures a moment of his own time while gazing into some distance, foretelling. A case in point, his May 11, 1929 piece, where he writes: “’Writing is not an occupation,’ writes Sherwood Anderson. ‘When it becomes an occupation a certain amateur spirit is gone out of it. Who wants to lose that?’ Nobody does, replies this semi-pro, sitting here straining at his typewriter.”
Yet today, as the reading crisis spreads its tangential wings to include newspapers pruning peripheral departments, some semi-pro and pro writers are forced back into an amateur spirit.
Where will they go? Continued White: “Nobody does, yet few writers have the courage to buy a country newspaper, or even to quit a city writing job for anything at all. What Mr. Anderson says is pretty true. Some of the best writings of writers, it seems to us, were done before they actually thought of themselves as engaged in producing literature.”
Or before, in other words, they thought of themselves as real writers at all. One blogs in the hopes the amateur spirit will prevail, painfully aware that blogging also makes it easier, as White later said, “for persons who are not artists and writers to continue the happy pretence” (May 21, 1938).
But it’s not only to gain even amateur status that we might entertain the doubtful purposes of writing – for self or for others; it’s because even though we know full well we’ll never play right field for the Dodgers, we still enjoy shagging balls in the back-yard; we will still ride a skateboard down the hill, though of course we are no Tony Hawk, as our spouse reminds us, shouting she’s not taking us to emergency when we fall; and though we could never follow “Da Bull” into the big waves, when we’re back in El Porto, we’ll always paddle out for a small one.
Whatever happens to the pros, this amateur writing spirit hopefully encouraged and evidenced in the best blogging, whether pretence or preface, may enable those who agree that writing is learned while writing, and in no other way, to find a subject, knowing that subjects often reveal themselves only once we’ve made the commitment marked by a few hundred words.
The novel “Alma Lolloon” opens with two epigraphs, both of which serve the ordinary purpose of the epigraph but are also part of the fiction being created. In each, the original is given, followed by an “interpretive translation” by the narrator of “Alma Lolloon,” who is Alma Lolloon:
Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynogh for me
To speke of wo that is in marriage…
But yet I praye to al this compaignye,
If that I speke after my fantasye,
As taketh not agrief of that I seye,
For myn entente nys but for to pleye.
from Chaucer’s The Prologe
of the Wyves Tale of Bathe
What atrocity this insult of experience
As if somehow right for me and all
Wode talk woe of the marriage camp.
But complain not in present company,
For all tales told in pitiful woe
Tell not a whole story
If want is not to please.
from interpretive translation of Chaucer,
by Alma Lolloon, 1966
Die Erste Elegie
Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem stärkeren Dasein.
from Duineser Elegien by Rainer Maria Rilke
The First Elegy
Who, if I cracked my little mouth, would listen to me in the din of rules of angels? And quickly so near his heart home of pounding hammers, sparkling nails, and gargantuan waves, I would fade in the muscle of his gaze, or in the back seat of his dark ride.
from Duino Elegies, interpretive translation of Rilke,
by Alma Lolloon, 1996.
I’m still working on editing and proofing and design.
Awaiting new hardcopy to proof. Meantime, here is another installment of the forthcoming novel, Alma Lolloon. (Alma has told her knitting group she is writing a book. The book is to be about her five husbands, and the knitters agree to hear Alma reading from her book in installments at their Saturday knitting sits.)
Well, Hattie, I said, but I was talking to all of them again, of all genres, I like fiction most. What a gas! I like novels for their mystery, the dialogue, the atmosphere, the unfolding of the story, like opening a table cloth and when you get it spread out all across the table there’s a wonderful pattern you had not expected to see. There’s that moment when preparing dinner, not sure how it’s going to come out, and it’s time to set the table, and the cloth is unfurled, and the table and the light in the room is clean and soft and hopeful. This is picking up a book. And around the table sit a dozen characters you don’t recognize chatting away, one prim, another slurping, one passing notes under the table, a couple playing footsie no doubt. I like books you don’t have to necessarily understand to enjoy or comprehend. And it doesn’t bother me when writers split your attention. I like a style that breaks or belies or betrays convention, just wants of some fixed eyeballs you want to push rolling. I like when I see something my eye did not expect to see. I like other kinds of reading as well, books on music and the mind, children’s books, comic books, graphic novels. I like talking about things I like more than talking about things I don’t like. I liked each of my five husbands, each in his own way. What did you expect me to say, I loved them? Please. What is love? Perhaps that will be my argument, Hattie.
Speaking of love, Curly said, what about these raspberry scones Starky has buttered up for us?
Love, love, love! Rufa declared.
I’m taking a couple home for Angel.
I come from a long line of circuit riders that ends in the dust bowl years, and we rode as hillbillies and Okies, carnies or enlisted men and women, or kept to the road as musicians and tinkers. My dad was a handyman, a plumber and carpenter and electrician and mechanic, and a sign painter and had a talent with brush painting and wound up out west where he got on with the studios painting backdrops for majestic movie scenes, a kind of scenic artist. He also did sketch portraits. He often spent Sunday afternoons down near the beach on the walkway where he’d set up an easel and for a quarter or fifty cents or a buck would draw character portraits for passing tourists. And of course he was a drunkard and left us early on, came back, and left us again. My mother was one of those wives who seemed like she was just along for the ride while she was really the differential gear. She knew how to do all kinds of things. She could cook, sew, knit, quilt, garden, herbal doctor and nurse, dance, sing, play guitar and piano, work carpentry and plumbing and tinker with cars. I suppose I have kinfolk spread like dandelions and poppies across the countryside and up and down city streets and out in the suburbs and up in the mountains and all around the coastlines, but I don’t know them, or I’m not close to any of them, and I was an only child, my folks are long gone, and I’m pretty much on my own these days but for the three kids left me by my first three husbands, one each, dandelions, all of us. I have grandchildren, and Freddy has a daughter, Marylu, who has a toddler, Molly, and they live nearby and sometimes come over for tea or for me to babysit for a spell and we walk to the park and play in the sun. Freddy was my first child, Mary and Gabriel’s son, my roommate and the boy she met and hooked up with my failed college year.
But so you had five husbands, Annie said, what of it? Life with one husband might make an even more gruesome tale.
She didn’t say gruesome, did she? Curly said.
A life with no husband the one I might have wished for to write about, Rufa said, and we all looked at Hattie.
Oh, sorry, Hattie.
And not for the first time we saw Hattie nonplussed by something Rufa said seemed packed full of meaning but no way out.
~~~
I’m still proofing and editing my new novel, Alma Lolloon. I hope to have it out by December. Meantime, I’m posting installments Saturdays here on the blog. Here is the third installment.
(Alma has told her knitting group she is writing a book. The book is to be about her five husbands, and the knitters agree to hear Alma reading from her book in installments at their Saturday knitting sits.)
I simply would like to have someone to talk to, someone who actually listens to me. Is that too much to ask? So even though I don’t know you, and you might not be listening anyway, I’m talking to you, and I’m going to share everything. That’s not a trigger warning. Simply a goal. You might safely skip parts, your attention wandering. I’ve already skipped a few beginnings. But I want you to get your money’s worth. Even if you’re reading on-line for free or something, or you picked up this abused paperback copy you’re holding in the neighborhood library box. Go on, take it, read it on the bus. It takes time to read, and most of us value time. The thing is to sit down and relax. Breathe. Smell the paper and the ink, or whatever it is they print words on and with these days. Pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea, a glass of wine, or pop a can of beer, or pour a juice or a clean clear glass of fresh water. Feel my hands kneading your shoulders. You carry tension there. I know. Let it go. Drop the shoulders. I know you have your own story. Let that go, too, for now.
We must have ritual. Ritual is what stops the crazy traffic on the bridge so the tall lovely ship can slip quietly by. Make some space in your day for reading as a kind of ritual. Nothing serious, of course, on the contrary, just a few quiet moments to yourself, for some peace and silence, to get away from your scares for a few moments, those voices in your head that won’t shut the hell up, or to find yourself, or to forget yourself, or to remember something you maybe should have never forgotten and is such a joy to find again. I’m well aware you could be reading something else, something more dramatic, sexy, literary, trashy, or some delightful ichor with goor and geer from some silly battle zone somewhere, or some soapy sap television shows are often stuck together with, if that’s what you like. Sure, and you’ll find soap here. I’ve eaten plenty of soap in my lifetime. My mouth is clean. Or non-fiction, some people prefer because it’s supposedly true. Nothing like getting one’s facts straight. We all need ritual, but we should not consider ritual what is merely compulsive.
Continuing from last Saturday’s installment, from chapter one of my work in progress titled “Alma Lolloon,” the first chapter titled “Casting On.” The book is finished, but I’m still proofing and editing. I hope to have it out in December. Meantime, I plan to continue putting up excerpts here on Saturdays:
from chapter one of the novel “Alma Lolloon”:
My first marriage was annulled within a couple of months. I never saw Mary or Gabriel again. We all signed complex legal documents sealing the moment. My second marriage was to a draftee. Joe wasn’t so much love or even a decision or a choice. But he adored Freddy and was a fun guy who made Freddy and me laugh and when we were together my bad thoughts vanished. Joe was a high school dropout, but he had a car, a 1953 Chevy, two toned, cream over turquoise blue. Joe walked off to boot camp, marched home and we married, and off he flew to Vietnam where he was fried up in napalm, his squad a straw basket of squids. Leaving me pregnant with Sally and a fragment of a family. My third husband drowned in a fishing accident, the sun that hot August day scalding, not a single blade of shade, the sand boiling, not a breath of breeze, and the rocks seething with seaweed and foam, Murphy’s body trapped in the eddies below the cliff, finally coming to rest atop a barnacled rock perch, the waves running on and on the tide coming in they couldn’t reach him and the water lifted him up and floated his body flotsam out to sea. My fourth husband took his own life. How could so many neurotic demons occupy one man’s mind? His head was an ant farm, ants like tiny cars digging tunnels through the clay. Wags was possessed by his corporate gig and rig and regalia and risk. He stuck a hose in the tail pipe in the garage, the other end through a wind wing, the car windows and doors all shut up, and Wags turned fifty shades of bluefish-purple. My fifth husband was shot and killed by a private eye, who mistook him for a wise guy at a poker game, shot him coming out of an outhouse between hands. Well, Jack was a bit of a joker, but not the kind the dick was thinking. Jack was a wild card.
Yes, and I told the knitting ladies I am writing a book, and they laughed. Rufa called to ask why I missed Saturday knitting group three weeks in a row and did I need a noise session. I told her I was writing a book. I went down to Lards Coffee to sit with them again, and they asked what I was up to, and I told them I was writing a book, and they all laughed. Why did they laugh? I’m not sure. Maybe they think I don’t have a story or a voice to tell it with. Or maybe they think no one reads books anymore, at least not one written by an old woman who has never traveled much, never finished college, never finished a marriage, a career part time waitress. But I’ve read a few books over the years, some over and over, the ones I really like.
But just because you can climb into a dress and maybe even look good in it, doesn’t mean you have any idea how to cut and sew a pattern together, Hattie said.
Hattie’s in a book club, Rufa said, so she reads books, presumably. I don’t recall her ever talking much in knitting group about the books her club reads. Do you think the rest of us can’t read, then, Hattie?
Who’s to say who should talk and who should keep quiet? Who should try their hand at a book or grow flowers, swing a bat, or go after the dogs and beer? Curly said.
Why are you writing this book? Hattie said. Do you not realize how difficult it is to publish anything these days? There’s a reading crisis in this country, newspapers disappearing, book shops closing up, kids born with a cell phone stitched into their palm, though there’s still a chance of some success with a children’s book, they say. So what are you writing, Alma, your memoir with all these husbands of yours? But I still don’t understand why. What do you get out of writing? Isn’t writing rather boring, actually, sitting, sitting, sitting? Oh, shit, I dropped a stitch. I never imagined you one with the imagination for it, anyway. So what is it? Memoir? Or some science fiction horror fantasy about these five husbands you’ve been through? And at that they all had another good laugh.
But why don’t you read it to us, Rufa said, on the installment plan? Saturday mornings with Alma.
Hattie laughed barkedly at that. Annie and Curly didn’t seem to get it.
The Coming of the Toads 