Martin Cruz Smith writes novels that consistently engage readers, expand their experience of the world and resonate long afterward.
Read moreSKROWERIF | Knate Myers
Knate Myers is a photographer and artist who creates multimedia experiences with images, motion and music. He is also an accomplished videographer. This piece reminds me of the way Explosions In The Sky's music transports us.
In SKROWERIF, Knate demonstrates that he is at home with metaphor. Don't think about it too much, just enjoy.
Thanks, Knate, for sharing your remarkable work.
... Music used with permission: "An Ocean Tumbled By" - Lowercase Noises http://www.lowercasenoises.com/ http://www.facebook.com/lowercasenoises www.facebook.com/kn8photo
NO GREAT MISCHIEF | Alistair MacLeod
ISBN 978-0375726651
As I begin to tell this, it is the golden month of September in southwestern Ontario. In the splendid autumn sunshine the bounty of the land is almost overwhelming, as if it is the manifestation of a poem by Keats.
MacLeod’s opening lines had me straight away. I trust him. Like his fellow Canadian, Farley Mowat, he tells it simply. This is a deeply felt, passionately imagined and beautifully written novel.
MacLeod's truth isn’t simple; it is complex, nuanced, seasoned over time to a depth and richness that calls to us in our unguarded moments. And his voice is authentic, like the family myths that knit our experience to the lives of our parents, their parents and those who preceeded them.
He continues in a responsive son-sibling-nephew voice that dutifully cares for imperfect elders without judgement. He cares for his family members and his past, yet never drifts into sentimentality. He doesn’t question his role. He accepts his responsibility to his inherited DNA, his red hair and innate talent for epic songs. He embraces his obligation to his living relations. And he contentedly shoulders his obligations to the future of his clan Chalum Ruaidh.
This novel celebrates writing and one of North America’s and Scotland’s hardy family histories. It will endure.
Call of the Writing
Call of The Wild, first edition (1903)
Imagine how rewarding it could be to have a tradition of sharing the day’s pages with a few fellow writers around the fire as Jack London did early last century at Wolf’s Lair.
He’d read aloud what he had written that day and get real-time reactions from friends. If Buck’s howl resonated in the imaginations of his listeners, then the passage succeeded. Buck’s extraordinary connection with his canine ancestors as he dreamt of freer days in the pages of the manuscript that would become Call of the Wild (published 1903) came alive in the flickering darkness and Jack knew that what compelled him had found its voice; his pen had touched truth that morning. When that happened, imagine his excitement. He had penetrated the universal heart and borrowed a pulse or two of Life.
That arrangement among fellow writers was unusual back then. In today’s publishing market where only ‘finished’ manuscripts are read by agents or editors, much less published, it may be vital to a writer’s survival.
THE CAT'S TABLE | Michael Ondaatje
Occasionally, writing penetrates the walls we build around ourselves, opens the windows to let sunlight in, and reminds us of who we are, what events shaped us, and hints how we got to this particular place. Michael Ondaatje’s writing does this for me.
Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
This truth, a defining presence in Ondaatje’s writings, is a powerful current in the flow of this novel. The Cat’s Table is understated and life-affirming, with a cast of characters that capture a lifetime of experiences during several weeks at sea.
THE BIRD ARTIST | Howard Norman
Fabian Vas is a young man with talent and a passion for sketching and painting birds in turn-of-the-century coastal Newfoundland.
His powers of observation are so finely tuned that he rarely needs to describe events. He simply lives them and, in so doing, brings every scene alive. A complex achievement skillfully executed by Howard Norman.
It is written in a stripped-down style that inspires colorful notions and emotions. The characters are vivid, flawed and fun to know.
National Book Award Finalist
BEYOND THESE WOODS | Mark Roger Bailey
Announcing the release of my new novel and an exciting new character: Beyond These Woods featuring epidemiologist and rogue scientific gadfly, Dr. Lotte Keene.
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Voyager Rewrites What We Know About the Universe
Like a good blog thread, the Voyager 1 spacecraft keeps surprising us with startling new insights that help us navigate the universe. Scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA announced today that Voyager I has left our solar system and continues to send data about its discoveries back to us. The spacecraft was launched from Earth 36 years ago.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory Voyager 1 File
IT'S FINE BY ME | Per Petterson
True, Lonely, and Uplifting
Rare is the author or his/her work that I can order sight unseen and know. Know that the book will be a permanent presence on my shelf of quality literature, revisited and reread often. Per Petterson’s novels are among the rarest for me.
I promised myself that I would understate these observations about Petterson’s third book, the novel, IT’S FINE BY ME (1992), but I’ve failed already.
With exceptions for love and great ambition, restraint is a desirable quality in most things. Writing, in particular. Petterson’s mastery of restraint shows in his spare use of adjectives, and his refusal to embellish any description of setting or action. He simply writes what is, what happens, period. It’s up to us to figure out the why of it. Just like life. And he does this without affectation or apparent effort, which reinforces his credibility with the reader and simultaneously sets the stage for profound, moving and often tender human insight.
Audun Sletten is Petterson’s 13-year old protagonist in IT’S FINE BY ME, a working-class teen who identifies with Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, and is annoyed by adult hypocrisies, and his sister’s choice of her James Dean wannabe boyfriend. He has outgrown the rules of childhood and is experiencing the contradictions of adulthood as he strives to understand his emerging identity, which is being defined as he responds to the messes that parents, sisters, friends, strangers and co-workers create for themselves. The culture of adulthood is a strange and chaotic bazaar of public selves and private rules that his elders seem to have accommodated in their own failed personal dreams of freedom and success. In this world seen through Audun’s adolescent senses, adulthood is life lived under a succession of truces in which the line between what might be and what is shifts and morphs like light under water.
Previous Reviews of Per Petterson’s works:
A trained librarian, Petterson worked as a bookstore clerk, translator and literary critic before he became a full-time writer. He cites Knut Hamsun and Raymond Carver among his influences.
Full Moon Silhouettes
I invite you to pause for a moment to view this video by Mark Gee of Wellington, New Zealand
Shot on a Canon ID MkIV in video mode with a Canon EF 500mm f/4L and a Canon 2x extender II, giving the equivalent focal length of 1300mm.
Music – Tenderness by Dan Phillipson : premiumbeat.com/royalty_free_music/songs/tenderness
markg.com.au
facebook.com/markgphoto
Mark Gee – Wellington, New Zealand
The KILL ARTIST | Daniel Silva
The restorer raised his magnifying visor and switched off the bank of flourescent lights. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the murkiness of evening in the cathedral; then he inspected a tiny portion of the painting just below an arrow wound on the leg of Saint Stephen.
The KILL ARTIST by Daniel Silva
So begins The KILL ARTIST (2000), Daniel Silva's fourth novel, the first in the Gabriel Allon series. GABRIEL ALLON is back to the solitary life he requires, the life of the artist tending to great works of art injured in never-ending wars of commerce, transcultural migrations, and time. He bandages the detritus of clumsy repairs, incompetent preservations and restorations, even overpaintings of classic works by the original artists in response to client patrons who could not bear others seeing his portraits of them. Allon finds meaning in peeling back layers of time, varnish, and the dust of timeless centuries. It is more rational and productive than his professional past of dark operations for the state of Israel, the up-close assassinations of ruthless terrorists, the cycle of personal vengeance that resulted in the death of his daughter, the damaging of his wife, the self-imposed exile from life, professional work, and any meaningful connections with another woman, let alone love.
He is alive in technical terms only. His heart beats. His mind turns. He eats, drinks, sleeps, sails, and restores great paintings. This is the life of Gabriel Allon.
Until he is called back to the service of his mentor, uncle, grandfather, boss, confessor, protector and tormentor, Ali Shamron, director of the Office. Gabriel is drawn back from his anonymous life as a recluse art restorer for one important mission, a secret sanction, the elimination of the terrorist Tariq before he can hurt Israel on the eve of its historic signing of a treaty with the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.
Silva’s storytelling makes a contract with his reader in the first sentence and honors that contract through nearly 500 pages with hardly a false note, a rash edit, or ill-considered choice of color and texture.
"Shallows At Dusk" Wins Mitchell Environmental Conservation Award
“North Cove Shallows at Dusk” (2012) by Mark Roger Bailey
My photograph, “North Cove Shallows at Dusk,” has received the 2013 John G. Mitchell Environmental Conservation Award.
The award by the Land/Conservation Trusts of Lyme, Old Lyme, Salem, Essexand East Haddam (CT) honors the American environmentalist and former editor of National Geographic Magazine, John G. Mitchell (d. 2007). Past editor of Sierra Club Books and a longtime field editor and writer for Audubon Magazine, he also wrote many books, including LOSING GROUND (1975), ALASKA STORIES (1984), and DISPATCHES FROM THE DEEP WOODS (1991).
I captured this photo in Essex, CT late one April afternoon. The river bottom stones in the foreground, the larger boulders in the middle distance sharing the deepening water and the reflected glow of sunset spoke to me about the interconnectedness of our existence along the banks of one of America’s great rivers.
