NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Nothing like the right kind of friends and beautiful surroundings to foster creativity.

Book Artist Claire Van Vliet’s cat….and their view:

Poet Galway Kinnell’s dog…

and their surroundings

Louis Menand on Mark McGurl’s much talked about “The Program Era” (Harvard):

"The nature of that [University creative writing programs] experience mutates as the folk wisdom of the workshop mutates—from “Show, don’t tell,” which was the mantra in the nineteen-forties and fifties, to the effectively opposite mantra “Find your voice,” which took over in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. McGurl suggests that these mantras encode shifting patterns of cultural assumptions—about identity, about work, about gender and class, and, of course, about what counts as good writing—and that they have had a big effect on the stories and novels that American writers have produced. “The rise of the creative-writing program,” he says, “stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history.”

I tend to agree with Menand. It’s not so much that these programs can teach you to write better, rather it ’s that being in such an environment (any educational environment) teaches you about yourself and how to live with those around you, also says Menand:

" they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make. And if students, however inexperienced and ignorant they may be, care about the same things, they do learn from each other."

This photo does not do it justice. The line stretched all the way around a full New York city block…wide with excited young women. The sun was hot. The wait, for most, would be at minimum 2-3 hours. All for a chance to buy

TEAGAN GLADIATOR PUMP $375.00

Tory Burch footwear at sale prices.

I’ve gotta figure out what it is about Tory’s shoes, or shoes in general, that make them so appealing to women, and then somehow distill and meld the essence of this appeal into what I’m doing here. Seems to me there’s an essential, unfathomable truth about human nature lurking somewhere on these sidewalks…

Image from here.

This from the Humane Society of the United States:

HSUS: While most Canadians oppose the commercial seal hunt, the Canadian government defends it as an important tradition. Do you think tradition can justify the commercial slaughter of seals or any other animal?

JMC: One might as well argue that because Canada used to hang convicted murderers by the neck until they were dead the tradition should not be allowed to disappear. Sealing in Canada is not a tradition, it is just an unenlightened, outdated practice.

HSUS: Millions of people—including a number of prominent authors such as Farley Mowat, Timothy Findlay, Michael Ondaatje, Barbara Gowdy and yourself—have spoken out against Canada’s commercial seal hunt. What is it about this slaughter that provokes such strong reactions from the public?

JMC:  In the first place, baby seals are highly photogenic. In the second place, they are entirely helpless and haven’t the faintest idea of what is about to happen to them. In the third place, even the hardest-hearted among us has private reservations about killing creatures that have barely tasted the sweetness of life. In the fourth place, the people who do the killing are very unappealing, very unphotogenic.

Did I mention

that I have a bit of a

sweet tooth?

Taken in a candy store in St. Albans, New York.

From Mr. Wikipedia: "In 2002, McEwan discovered that he had a brother who had been given up for adoption during World War II; the story became public in 2007.^[10] The brother, a bricklayer named David Sharp, was born six years earlier than McEwan, when his mother was married to a different man. Sharp has the same two parents as McEwan but was born from an affair between McEwan’s parents that occurred before their marriage. After her first husband was killed in combat, McEwan’s mother married her lover, and Ian was born a few years later.^[11] The two are in regular contact, and McEwan has written a foreword to Sharp’s memoir."