What BOOK are you reading right now?

I dunno about that book, but I read about Kenneth Clark's efforts at same - though I read it years ago and forget the details.

Cooked by Michael Pollen. Good enough to finish, but too preachy for me. Also there is some real BS here, for instance the claim that bleached flour is useless as a food because it has no nutritional value, he says. For the record bleached flour in the form of bread cures hunger and gives us energy, two very useful functions of food.

You have to understand what is Pollan's schtick. Hes into
1eat mostly veggies

2spend lots on them

3Eat mostly in season.
While you make a point, your reasoning may not coincide with his sales pitch.

Im reading
AMERICAN MIRROR, the life and art of Norman Rockwell
By Deborah Solomon

Its a good read but her obsessive focus on Rockwell as an emerging homosexual is kinda lame. Her thesis needed some spicing up I suppose so she added that. It may have been a benefit to book sales several decades ago, today its kinda tiresome. His neuroses and bad money decisions were enough SChadenfreud for me.

It tickles me that he's getting serious art exhibitions in Europe

he was ahead of his time neh?

The French are suckers for Jerry Lewis and Norman Rockwell.
I don't have any use for either of them

I just finished J.A. Jance's Second Watch. One of her better stories, but the author's 15 page note at the end was nothing less than great. Two of the characters and most of the events are real people, neatly blended into the fictional stories.

Rockwell seems to be a thing right now, was reading not long ago a piece claiming that Norman Rockwell America never existed, it was a creation of small minded people who were afraid of reality, a daydream created to calm the nerves.

I can understand Jrry Lewis (I think the French interest in him is more like we used to gawk at Benny Hill and wonder what was so damned funny)
Norman Rockwell has been talked into oblivion by several art critics who were more trying to "cash in" on the works of abstract expressionism.
Rockwell had often to "peddle his work through various agents who screwed him royally".
You cannot deny his amazing talent at creating astory with a gifted hand and eye. His meticulous illustration style fit an entire tale into a single canvas.

Im fascinated by his and ANdrew Wyeths work. Both were able to convey a POV without engaging in revealing too much background information. Andrew Wyeth is now considered a great abstract painter (he would kill and dry a rose before painting it)and Rockwell is enjoying great interest by millenial art students . Art study isn't merely a tool for the gamers and art schools are beginning to teach the craft of art before they get on with CGI tools, and Rockwell is already pre packaged for them.

Rockwell's America may never have existed and Im sure Rockwell didn't try to convey such a POV. When he painted the "Four Freedoms" in 1942 he was rebuffed by the clients(The US govt Office Of War Information, of the WAR DEPARTMENT). Theywanted "Modern artists" to develop these themes. Such artists as Dali were invited. It took 2 years before the OWI realized that Rockwell's depictions were PRECISELY what was needed.

Rockwell saw his topics as a way of interpretation and it took his clients time to catch on.
He has always been an easy target to denounce. His work is conceived and painted as a full narrative in mind and , of course, not everyone appreciated the narrative.

That is quite consistent with your general position fm.

I could hardly abide Jerry Lewis, especially over time. I don't have much opinion about Norman Rockwell but that he was pretty good at what he did, and as a child of the age and a reader of the Saturday Evening Post (my father had a poem of a small sort in there once, 1926, and 'we' subscribed) I'm sure I liked some covers.
My parents weren't at all into art, at least that I noticed. My mother liked holy cards. The Sacred Heart was over their bed. Let's say I got interested in art gradually, and the Degas bit was a poster at a book store. A boyfriend - not just a boyfriend, a major person sparking the rest of my life though he wasn't around long, introduced me to art and I was hooked. (I saw the Keinholz car, for example, not that I was all that impressed but my sense of stuff sort of moved a bit).

Wyeth, I always somewhat liked. Not particularly fascinated by.
Anyway, when I first was into art I liked Degas and Siqueiros.

I'm still reading Pamuk, stopped for a while. He writes dense, and, talk about art, My Name is Red takes you there.

I have admired Norman Rockwell as long as I can remember. I love his paintings.

You still do. It's not been shown over here since the 7os. Most British teenagers have never heard of him.

ALICE MUNRO
She and I are into different stuff….

Part 1:

A Canadian, Alice Munro now 82, won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week, on 10 October 2013, as the autumn season was adding its richest colours to many places in Canada.1 Like the Australian Patrick White, who has been the only Australia never to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, Munro is the only Canadian to ever have won that coveted award.Saul Bellow, the 1976 prize winner, lived in Quebec until he was nearly 10 but, then, he and his family moved to Chicago; he has always been typically seen as an American writer with much of his work set in that third most populous city in the USA.

White’s novels are epic. They possess a psychological narrative art which introduced the Australian continent into world literature. I remember teaching one of White’s novels back in the early 1990s when I was a lecturer in English literature in western Australia.

Munro, though, is not a novelist. She’s into short stories, and has been since her teens back in the 1940s. These were the years just after I was born, and not far from Huron country in Ontario where Munro started her life. It also looks like she will end it there sometime in the next few years whether she continues writing or not.

Part 2:

Munro has been frequently omitted from conventional lists of the greatest writers of her age. This is due, perhaps, to her chosen form, the short story, as well as the apparent narrowness of her literary palette. Most of her works explore the warp and weft of small-town life in western Ontario. Fans praise her ability to express, in brutally honed sentences, not just the nature of small human hardships and dilemmas, but the very feeling of living within them. The world hardly needs to be introduced to small town life, though, in Ontario or anywhere else.

ColmToíbin(1955-), theIrish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic and poet, described one of Munro’s stories as "tough, tough, but yet written using sentences of the most ordinary kind, and constructed with slow Chekhovian care".Readers unfamiliar with Chekhov, or with Alice Munro’s work, can now buy her collections of short stories which book-stores will be marketing with some zeal in the weeks ahead.

It’s not small town life that will excite and please readers. Rather, it is the fact that Munro’s writing is a great example of the writer who illuminates universal themes by writing about the seemingly small and particular. Most people’s lives deal with the small and the particular. Increasingly, though, people are inhabiting a universal, a planetizing, a globalizing, world seen through the lens of the print and electronic media. But peoples’ lives are still lived, for the most part, in a small, small place of family and friends, job and local interests.

“Her traditional-seeming stories are anything but,” wrote one reviewer.“She’ll shift multiple points of view or time schemes — hair-raisingly complicated stuff — not to show off formally but to find a means of packing her stories with maximum density. She’s the most savage writer I’ve ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive.”
Part 3:

The only short-stories I remember reading were in high school. I grew up in a small town in Ontario, and then spent many years in other small towns in: other parts of Ontario, in the Canadian Arctic and in several states of Australia.

The Swedish Academy said it picked the 82-year-old author—known for her easy-to-read writing style charting the struggles and moral conflicts of everyday characters in rural Ontario—because she is the "master of the contemporary short story." Fellow Canadian writer and much more well-known, Margaret Atwood, said of Munro in her introduction to a collection of Munro's stories: "The wallowing in the seamier and meaner and more vengeful undersides of human nature, the telling of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for vanished miseries, and rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life, stirred all together: this is Alice Munro."

Part 4:

After her 20 year marriage ended in 1972 when she was 40, Munro moved back to Ontario, remarried and continued to set most of her stories in the small-town environs of Huron County, which she says caused her the ''level of irritation'' she needed for writing.Huron county is in the southwest part of Ontario. The county seat is Goderich, also the county's largest settlement.

I remember going to Goderich back in the 1950s to a youth camp organized by one of the denominations of Protestantism. It was during the hottest part of a Canadian summer.I had become more interested in the Baha’i Faith at the time, and this Faith still holds my allegiance. I never joined the folds of any one of the many sects and denominations of that major branch of Christianity. I don’t recall ever going to Huron county again after that summer. Oh, and just for the record, Munro says that her religion is “fiction.”

Part 5:

My life has been so very different from Munro’s. My first marriage of 8 years ended in 1973 when I was 29. That was the year Patrick White won the Nobel Prize. I was living in South Australia at the time and teaching high school. I then moved on to Tasmania, and remarried in 1975. I had moved to Australia from Canada when I was 26. Munro got divorced that same year.

Munro published her first story in 1950 at the age of 19. I was only six back in 1950. She knew she wanted to be a writer just about from the word go. A writer’s life hasonly grown slowly on me, by sensible and insensible degrees, from my teens and 20s into to my mid-50s when I took an early retirement at the age of 55 from the teaching profession, and a 50 year student-working life: 1949 to 1999.

Part 6:

I read novels at high school, and very occasionally over the decades, especially historical fiction. I taught them in the late 1980s and early 1990s in my role as a literature teacher in Australia. The rest of my 60 year reading life from1953 to 2013, has been as a student-and-teacher, lecturer and tutor, writer and author, poet and publisher, editor and researcher, online blogger, journalist and scholar, among many other roles and statuses over my 70 years in the lifespan.

Reading novels and short stories has always been at the periphery of my intellectual life, a life filled with the social sciences, autobiography and biography, as well as the physical, biological and applied sciences.-Ron Price with thanks to 1 several major newspapers for their reviews of Munro’s writing and her life.

Part 7:
I hardly knew you, Alice.
We shared life in a small
town in Ontario, and we’ve
both written a great deal, eh?

But that is just about where
this comparison of our two
lives ends.What can I say,
Alice? Congratulations are
certainly in order, but you’ll
never know me as much as I
know you. You are rich and
famous, & I am one of many
millions of ‘also-rans’ in that
literary world which we both
sharein such different ways.

I wish you well as you go on to
finish your life before entering
that hole from which none of us
everreturns, where one writes no
more…..Finish your work, Alice,
surely there is more to say and do?1

The roll will soon be called-up
yonder, for me too, Alice, for me
too, but without fame andwealth,
& none of the famed short-stories.

I’minto a whole lot of other stuff
that will keep me busy until that
last syllable of my recorded days.

1 Munro said in an interview after she received the Nobel Prize that she may just keep on writing, but she was not sure. After 70 years of writing she had expressed the desire to stop.

Ron Price
13/10/’13.

A bunch of us here are Munro fans; I definitely am.

Thanks, ossobuco. I wish you well in your reading--and other aspects of your private---life.-Ron

Which of her story/ies or book would you recommend to someone who never ever red her?

Hmm. I've read several of hers, and can't just pinpoint. Will consider, but I'll have to look at some book commentaries to remind me. If I had it all to do again, I might start from the beginning; I probably more or less did, though as a used book addict for decades, things can show up out of order in my reading. She goes through her own changes with time so there is a progression as her writing years go by.

I also like William Trevor, a tad hard for some. I gave the book of his I most liked to someone to read, never to be seen again. I'm older now but I still can't seem to learn that lesson. All I can say is it was one of his thick short story compilations.

I leave it to readers to decide what book or books to read. There are so many. There are also so many writers of other genres.-Ron
-----------------------
The world has had, and now has, some fine essayists. I am not in the same league as the finest, but they set the bar for me. An essay is an experiment, not a credo. It is something made up in response to an excited imagination; it is a short story told in the form of an argument or a history or even, once in a very great while, an illumination. These are not my words, but the words of Cynthia Ozick, one of the many fine essayists whom I have come to read in these years of my retirement without 60 to 70 hours a week of job, family and community responsibilities breathing down my neck. I don't mean to imply that job, family and community were not good for me. I would not want to have missed that half century of wall-to-wall people, say, 1949 to 1999, for the world. But now that those 5 decades are gone another me has emerged and is emerging.

There are many writers capable of creating those glittering and bewitching contraptions, pieces of prose, known as essays. It has taken me many years to come up with a short list of the best, at least the best from my point of view, of the myriad people who now write, and who once wrote essays. This is only one literary form; the world is now the home of a pantheon of literary forms which will keep me happily occupied until the roll is called-up to the proverbial "yonder."