Tony Abbott's Blog, page 10

"I've decided to go to China . . . "

They come in threes, don't they? On Tuesday (when we'll be on the road for a whirlwind, windstorm, stormfall trip to Cape Cod, which is why the pre-post), we'll see the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Truman Capote.

On August 25, 1984, Truman was holed up in Joanne Carson's house in Los Angeles, fresh from his breakup with Jack Dunphy, his companion of thirty years, tortured by his seeming inability to write sustained fiction after In Cold Blood appeared in 1965 (and '66, in book form),

Les Paul . . .

<>Another post another death. Yesterday it was Les Paul. I had a 1967 Les Paul Goldtop that I bought new at Banko's in Ansonia for $300 or so and was in a number of bands finally fronting my own which was the worst of them. My recollection is that it was called Raccoon. The Goldtop replaced a flesh-tone Danelectro pressboard "convertible" instrument with a single lipstick-case pickup wedged across the hole and a movable bridge that never stayed in tune; quite a step up. After some while I removed </>

A Side of Slaw and a Couple of Beers . . .

While the bronze plaque outside the building does not mention his name (among Faulkner, Thurber, and others), today marks the 50th anniversary of Preston Sturges's death at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Working on his autobiography (later published as Sturges on Sturges), he had paused to order cole slaw and a couple of beers from room service, consumed same, complained to his secretary of indigestion, and keeled.

<>It struck me the other day that ten years ago at this time, I also happened to b</>

Among All the Minor Annoyances . . .

We are interested in different things, some obsessively. So this book has come into our little library (because we order all books on the topic), Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, and James Agee by one Tom Dardis. We won't say anything here about the warning that sounds in the mind of the reader when the author uses the relaxed form of his name on what might reasonably be considered a scholarly work.

<>Nevertheless, a</>

The Responsiblity . . .

<>Two years ago, I was on a moderated panel of writers for young people — this was in Charlotte — attended mainly by young readers, but also their parents, local writers, librarians, and all manner of interested parties. The final portion of the hour or so was a question and answer period, and a nervous woman, overlooked once or twice, but who clearly had a question to get out there, was finally called on. She stood and said, with a hint of zeal, "Do you think you bear a moral responsibility when </>

The Golden Age . . .

Recently, a book came into my workshop, The Collected Short Prose of James Agee, in which is included as engrossing a document as any I've found for quite a time. It's Agee's submission to the Guggenheim Foundation of his "Plans for Work: October 1937." This is a wide-ranging descriptive list of nearly fifty projects that, as he states, "I am working on, or am interested to try, or expect to return to . . . "

<>Among the jewels is one described as "An Alabama Record." Ha! We know what that became (</>

A Few Words about Research . . .

<>On one of the many rainy days last week I headed up to the University of Connecticut to do some newspaper research for a book. Turns out, after consulting online catalogs and calling a couple reference librarians (including those at Bridgeport Public and the Sterling library at Yale), that UConn's is the only library in the state with certain holdings. So I made the familiar trip, got to the junction of 195 and 44, known happily in my day as "Four Corners," a little before 10am, and experienced</>

Just a Thought . . .

It may seem obvious, but isn't the eloquence of human thought a product not of conversation, but of the printed word? In discussing literacy, I suppose I simply want to acknowledge that a mind will be able to express itself in subtlety only if its owner learns subtlety of expression, and that quality can most effectively be learned by reading it on the page.

<>It's that old thing: I write to know what I think (who's responsible for that nugget?). Reading is how we learn to express the depth and sha</>

In Search of Quiet . . .

<>A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of speaking about literacy at Channel Thirteen's Celebration of Teaching and Learning in New York. For their educational blog, I wrote a few words, and also chatted on the panel about a problem I see, and I've been wanting to look at this in more depth. I'll begin here by excerpting a bit of the original post, but over the next weeks I want to develop the idea of quiet — in our minds, our lives, our reading. Quiet is becoming impossible to attain, because of </>

The Edgar Award . . .

The short version is: I won the Edgar.

<>The longer version is that each year the Mystery Writers of America award their stylish and weighty statuette of Edgar A. Poe to the best mystery of the year in a slew of categories: best novel, best first novel, best short story, best original paperback, best Young Adult, play, teleplay, film screenplay, etc. My book, The Postcard (2008, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), won the Juvenile award. Alvina Ling, my indefatigable editor, and Ames O'Neill, L</>