Beth Kaplan's Blog, page 19

Huckster PP sells Canadians on Fantasyland

Aren’t we lucky, Canadians? Pierre Poilievre has figured out a way to turn Canada into paradise, his kind of paradise. Here’s the Star report of a recent speech he gave here in Toronto: “Towards the end of his speech Poilievre described idyllic scenes of what life will be like under his government. Children skipping to school without fearing for their safety. Seniors waving at friendly shopkeepers. Parents calling their road-hockey-playing kids to bed. A young couple sitting on the porch, “soaking in the warm evening air, with a Canadian flag gently hanging from the front of their brand new home.”

Poilievre’s last words could barely be heard above the cheers,” reported the Star. Wow. He forgot to mention that every boy will get an adorable puppy and every girl a pony. The sound of the white picket fences being built will be deafening. What a reassuring image … of 1953.

Too bad it never existed. Just where we want to go as a society, you nasty petty lying little man — back many decades into an absurd, unattainable fantasy. Thanks, PP. I can’t wait to see how you sell this fake Disneyland idyll to my fellow citizens.

No, I take that back. I can wait. Really, please, I can wait a very, very long time.

Haven’t written in nearly a week; things piled up. Had a home class and the U of T classes, a dentist appointment, a showing for the admin people renting my house while I’m away, did a podcast interview for the interesting and lively Rhonda Douglas that I’ll post here when it drops. My Vancouver friend Judy was staying here for the weekend, so we watched the Oscars together. I always end up thinking, those are 3 plus hours I won’t get back, but still, it’s hard not to watch. Was thrilled The Last Repair Shop won — a beautiful, very moving short documentary by a Canadian — and any time the real world appeared on that stage, like the talk about peace in Gaza and Ukraine, and Jimmy Kimmel reading Trump’s hilarious tweet at the end. “Mr. President, isn’t it past your jail time?”

Here’s the repair shop film. Don’t miss it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xttrkgKXtZ4

Patrick has been editing and sending me chapters of the audiobook, so I’ve been listening to my own voice telling some of my most important stories and have surprised myself by erupting, often, into tears. I guess it’s not so surprising — I’m writing, speaking, about divorce, the death of friends and parents, difficulties and struggles — and joys, there’s lots of laughter too. More listening today. More weeping and laughing.

And … this makes me feel famous … my words are on the back cover and the ad materials of Robin Pacific’s Skater Girl, a new memoir I loved and recommend highly. Nice to lavish praise on a terrific book, available, pre-release, at Amazon and Indigo. My own, four months after its launch, is STILL only available from Ben McNally Books, Mosaic Press, and me. Only the publisher knows why. Makes me sad and mad. The ebook is now available for Kindle and Kobo; Ben will be happy to send the print book to you, and if you want a dedicated copy, so would I. Let us know.

An excerpt from a review on Amazon: “Beth Kaplan brings a sharp wit, a generous heart and a keen eye for character to her story of rekindling purpose and connection in the tumult of midlife.” And another, also five star: “Because this book was out of print for so long on Amazon, I had to search elsewhere to find a copy. It was worth the effort! I loved this book. Some of the tales are poignant, all are witty, some laugh-out-loud funny, and all uplifting and packed with wisdom. It’s a book that provides good medicine for these troubled times, but in a wonderfully entertaining package. I highly recommend it—and in fact, my Christmas shopping has just been taken care of. No higher praise than that!”

The post Huckster PP sells Canadians on Fantasyland appeared first on Beth Kaplan.

Generous words about the book

Monday, it was 16 degrees in Toronto. On March 4! Talk about “in like a lamb.” Crazy Canucks were out in tank tops and shorts. Nature is confused; flowers and buds are appearing, many weeks early. We all know it’s terrible and wrong, but it’s also hard to complain. We’ve had one real snowfall so far. Maybe winter will be in April, who knows?

Everyone in the family is better, almost; Eli and Ben are both at school for the first time in ages, but now Anna is sick. My cold has nearly gone except from my congested, wheezy lungs. These frequent bugs always hit my lungs — something to discuss with the doctor when I see him, which I’ve no reason to do at this time. I’m reading Harry Potter to the boys in the evening, as always marvelling at Rowling’s endless imagination and inventiveness. Hippogriffs! Dementors! Boggarts! How did she do it?

Otherwise, I’m starting to gear up for March 31, my overseas trip with a very small suitcase, picking out clothes that will do triple duty. Extraordinarily, a local theatre company advertised that they needed a place for an artist to stay starting March 31 — too coincidental to pass up, so I’ve rented out my bedroom. Some extra work, cleaning and tidying and making sure all is ready for a stranger who’ll feed Tiggy, but the rental money will help pay for a fence I need to put up in the back to keep her inside my yard. She got out the other day, I know not how, slipped through the current fence into the neighbour’s yard, was chased by their dog, and ended up miaowing high in a tree; it took an hour to cajole her down. Ah, the exciting life of downtown Toronto! The other day an enormous groundhog scurried across the deck. A first.

Still teaching two U of T courses and my home class this week, editing, doing a podcast interview about Midlife Solo Friday, and a dear friend arrives from Vancouver to stay Friday night. Sam moves into a new apartment in his building today, one with easy yard access for Bandit, and just found out from the sleep clinic that he has severe sleep apnea, stops breathing every few minutes as he sleeps. Good to know. CPap machine to come.

In the blowing own horn department, want to share a note about Midlife Solo I just received from Kathy, a good friend and writing student: “This book is your tour de force. Individually they were such great vignettes; together they become something much more: a triumphant declaration of hope in a growing darkness. Good, good medicine in a time when I fear society is going to need all the medicine it can get.”

And then she wrote that a friend of hers, who’d had a terrible childhood and fought alcoholism and depression, used to love going to the Christmas pageant at Riverdale Farm that was produced by a friend and me and is described in the essay “Baby Jesus Comes to Cabbagetown” in the book. “It was one of the things that was a life saver for her and extended her life. She died by suicide. But you bought her extra time.”

I wrote back that sometimes, all writers ask themselves why they bother. And then readers come up with the only answer that counts: because someone was moved. The words matter. In a time of growing darkness, as she says — such incomprehensible darkness, such wanton cruelty and stupidity, the heart is constantly heavy — maybe our very small words can make a difference to someone. And perhaps doing something for the community can matter too. You never know to whom.

The post Generous words about the book appeared first on Beth Kaplan.

Midlife Solo audiobook recording finished

Overjoyed to tell you that today my young tech assistant Patrick and I finished recording the audiobook of Midlife Solo, blasting through the last 70 pages in 2 1/2 hours. We finished the whole thing in record time, in fact, but still, it was a long, tiring process, especially today, because my cold has lingered in my throat and my voice was gravelly. So I was at my most neurotic, doing vocal exercises all morning, quaffing honey tea and sucking lozenges … but we did it. Patrick needs to edit, there may be do-overs, corrections, we need to make sure it’s all there, and then we submit to Audible and maybe another site or two. And then fame and glory and vast wealth will be mine.

Mwa ha ha!

Patrick turned 22 yesterday. Can we remember 22, friends? Barely. He was listening to me read a piece about the ravages of age, the splotches and crevices in my face, the facial hair, the creaks in the joints, and had the nerve to complain that he too is feeling old.

I didn’t hit him.

Hard at work.

The book is still only available in print form at Ben McNally and Mosaic Press; I checked Amazon in France, incidentally, which announced cheerfully that the print book would be delivered sometime between May and September. Wow, they’re really on the case. Sigh. But hooray, the ebook is out at both Indigo, for Kobo, and Amazon, for Kindle. So that’s the good news. I can start to contact book clubs, which operate mostly with ebooks. I’m available to discuss my book, clubs!

More good news: our library is back. The Toronto library system was hacked last year and it has been months since we could put books on hold. How happy I was to be told the hold I placed last summer was available for pickup. How to Stand up to a Dictator, by Maria Ressa, is riveting.

Sam and Eli came over yesterday – Eli in a spot of trouble at school so not there for the day. Long story. He came over to get help writing an essay for school. The boy is like a creature from another planet to me, he is so closed-mouthed and reticent. His grandmother’s life pours forth in a nonstop torrent, and this boy can barely offer a word for print. Not my genes, obviously. He’s savvy, thoughtful, really good at sports and practical things, figuring things out. Not good at words.

Three of my four favourite males on the streetcar. Ben was sick.

One of my greatest thrills is that recently at night, after I’ve finished reading him another chapter of our story on the phone, I tell him I hope he has a good night’s sleep and a great day at school tomorrow, and that I love him very much. And a very quiet, hesitant voice replies, “I love you.”

As perhaps I have said before – does it get better than that?

The post Midlife Solo audiobook recording finished appeared first on Beth Kaplan.

in which she boasts about public speaking

There are times, a few times, when I’m deeply grateful for my past and training as an actress, and yesterday was one of them. There are actors who say they can’t give speeches or talks, because they’re good at being other people but not themselves. I’m not one of them. I am good at being myself, and I seem to be good at giving talks.

My thirty years as a teacher have helped, certainly, and the chats at the end at my reading event So True. Yesterday, for my talk on memoir at the Arts and Letters Club, I was worried about my voice, since I still have this vile bug that’s clogging my chest and lungs. And I wanted the talk to be spontaneous but also to know exactly what I needed to say. So as usual, I wrote out the speech mostly with bullet points that could get me back on track if I got lost, and I had strong cough syrup before leaving and took a thermos of tea with honey with me.

And when I found myself standing behind the podium, in a gorgeous room in a building built in 1891, facing a crowd of over 60 artistic types, I was ready, I’d rehearsed the talk a few times, and it all flowed. The voice was fine, as I knew it would be. I’m a trouper, trained to be one. Actors don’t have the right to be sick. Or to show nerves.

I’d brought a bunch of books to sell, a few of each of my five, and they all sold. Two people asked me for editorial help. And they gave me a three-month free membership in the club, so I’ll be able to go back. It’s an oasis of dignity and calm celebrating art of all kinds, half a block from the madness of Yonge Street. Miraculous, really. Grateful.

Speaking of miraculous, this review of Midlife Solo appeared on Goodreads:

This is a fabulous book. These essays about love, loss and life are page-turning jewels. I’m not a nonfiction reader, but Kaplan’s essays held the same spell for me as an Alice Munro short story. She has a way of shining light on a small detail that casts a warm glow on other elements around it. Like a Vermeer painting each essay draws you into an intimacy with the different people in her life. I didn’t want it to end. Highly recommended.

Yes, it’s by Lynn in France, one of my dearest friends, and she got a little carried away perhaps – jewels, Alice Munro, Vermeer. If only! But still, she’s a critical French academic who would never say something she didn’t mostly mean. What lovely lovely words. Thank you so, ma belle.

And a student wrote, after receiving praise for her writing, You just made my week. I am so enjoying your class. It replenishes my soul.

Does it get better than that?

And now to get ready for Anna’s call so I can read to the boys over the phone. We finished Dogsong, about Inuit life, terrific if a bit too full of hunting for me, and have just started Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Rowling is such a good writer, so vivid, immediately grabbing young readers. And old readers too.

The main reason to have children is so you get to read to them, and eventually to their children too. A reward for surviving it all.

The post in which she boasts about public speaking appeared first on Beth Kaplan.

a bit of a moan

Not a happy camper. It’s cold out, and I have a cold, or something – coughing, aching, nose blowing – for the third time in six months.  Some time ago I bought a ticket to a stellar production of Uncle Vanya for today at 2. I am going to put on a mask and go, at least try to last for the first half, to wallow in Chekhov’s characters’ miseries instead of my own.

I am also feeling sorry for myself because of my book. It has been out in the world for almost four months and is still unavailable at Amazon, Indigo, and most bookstores. Yes, you can buy it from Ben McNally Books and from Mosaic Press. But people have been writing to me in frustration, and I have been writing to the publisher in frustration, and still, no change. After all that work and time – and money – lavished on a work of literature, it’s difficult to know that, for some incomprehensible reason, it’s still so inaccessible. Or perhaps not so incomprehensible.

A dear friend emailed, after reading my complaints, Why do you care so much about the money? Why can’t you just be happy that you’ve written a good book your friends like a lot?

It’s not the money, God knows; anyone in this business for money needs their head examined. Yes, I’d like to think I’ve written a good book, and I’d like people to READ IT. And to do that, they have to be able to find and buy it.

I know: first world problems, nothing nothing laughably nothing in comparison with what so many are enduring right now. I apologize. Just wanted to share with you that I am not always impossibly perky and upbeat. Sometimes I am down.

But the sun is shining, the cat is on my lap, I’m less sick today than yesterday. Need to get better – we’ve booked the studio for tomorrow to try to finish taping the audiobook. So I need to get my voice back to its normal level, from the gravelly depths to which it fell last week.

My amazing cousin Ted and I What’sApped yesterday. I didn’t know that he is the executor of the wills of Martin Amis and the great editor Robert Gottlieb and friends with his widow Maria Tucci, who tells him stories of making Mike Nichols laugh. Ted is good friends with the superb writer Stacey Schiff. He gardens and cooks and has a huge collection of valuable antiquities. Quite the guy. His partner Henry is working on restoring the Alice and John Coltrane Home, “the spiritual home of jazz,” near their home in NY. Wish we lived closer. He is almost my last remaining extended family, at least, the ones I know.

Yesterday I dragged myself to the Bay to pick up a suitcase I’d ordered online – recommended in the NYT’s Wirecutter as by far the best carry-on, and at 65% off, I couldn’t resist, needed a new suitcase for upcoming trips. But … it’s tiny. So small, recommended for a week’s travel. I’ll be in Europe for nearly 3 weeks and am known for the vast amounts with which I journey. Can I make the shift to taking almost nothing? The thing is, I’ve realized – no one is looking at me. No one in Paris or London cares if an elderly Canadian wears the same thing day in and day out, or is out of fashion. No one cares.

Still, it is an awfully small suitcase. Not sure I can do this.

Okay, time to get dressed, you slovenly creature, and march into the day. That you can do.

The post a bit of a moan appeared first on Beth Kaplan.

my talk at the Arts and Letters Club Tuesday Feb. 27 at noon

As I started the Life Stories II class, the advanced section, on Zoom last night, I was about to tell them I have a cold. I opened my mouth, and one of the students said, Hi Beth. Sorry you have a cold.

I guess I mentioned it in the blog. They know more about me than I do! I was pleased to tell them their essays this week were all superb, the best yet. A new flock of good writers unleashed on the world.

I’m supposed to be taping the audiobook, but my voice sounds like Tallulah Bankhead’s so taping is delayed. I think this bug is partly stress about the whereabouts of my elusive book. But also, perhaps, my beloved grandsons passed on their bug to me. They’re both happily back in school, which is the good news.

FYI: I am speaking next week at the venerable Arts and Letters Club downtown, a very old institution and fabulous old building that’s a support and gathering place for artists of all kinds. My talk is, of course: Writing a memoir: How, when, what, why? If you’re not a member, you can still come; for $32 you get a communal lunch with a lot of interesting artists, and then moi. What a deal! My mellow tones will be back, guaranteed.

Have to say, The Taste of Things – a poorly translated title, incidentally – is haunting me. I heard it was submitted by France as their Oscar foreign picture offering and was turned down. Hard to believe. Anatomy of a Fall was a good movie, but Taste is a masterpiece in every regard: cinematography, acting, story. I’m sure a bunch of L.A. people — skinny, starving — watched and were bored out of their minds. Appreciate food, enjoy cooking? What a waste of time, I can hear them thinking. Too slow; where are the car chases, the superpowers, the murders?

It’s a gorgeous film. Don’t miss it.

I may have told you that I had transcribed and printed my blog – now in eight fat books, a million and a half words. I picked up one at random – 2015 – and plunged in, completely absorbed, because I’d forgotten so much. An incredible trip to Europe that April — Paris, London visiting friends; Florence, Cortona, Lucca, and Cinque Terra with Bruce; then the train to Nice, Gordes, the Alps, and Montpellier with Lynn and Denis, then back to Paris and home. Amazing energy, that woman had nine years ago! Lots about Eli, who was three and didn’t have a brother yet.

This is what I will talk about at the Club – the joy of being a chronicler. To me, the world is divided into those who chronicle and those who don’t. I cannot imagine living without keeping track. “We is bof kitties.” I would have forgotten that. He’ll be twelve soon and taller than his mother.

And finally, Famous Friend alert: here’s Dame Harriet looking very glam in black, standing between Twiggy and Penelope Wilton and right behind Queen Consort Camilla and a very small Vanessa Redgrave. Good times!

The post my talk at the Arts and Letters Club Tuesday Feb. 27 at noon appeared first on Beth Kaplan.

The Taste of Things: sublime

OH so delicious! This afternoon Ken and I went to see The Taste of Things, a French film in which people cook and eat and drink and cook and cook and eat, and that’s about it. No, it’s not, the film is about a great love, about friendship and loyalty and grief, but most of all, it’s about respecting food: how it’s grown, prepared, presented, eaten, analyzed, discussed. What a sublime culture that is.

The film is set in 1889, and every shot is exquisite, a Vermeer. OMG I wanted to smell those dishes, let alone taste them. The audience was moaning, as were the actors as they ate (and I read that the food was not fake, as is usual in films, but real). But at its heart, there’s the love story: gorgeous Juliette Binoche works as cook for expert gourmand and chef, Benoit Magimel, the owner of the chateau where they live and a man deeply in love with her, although she is in charge. The fact that the two actors were once lovers and have a child adds to the depth of emotion on the screen.

Cooking for someone is love. Cooking the way these people cook, with endless little details, is the greatest love of all. It’s a long slow film, and as all the reviews say, you’ll be starving at the end. In fact, I think my relationship to food may be permanently altered. Slow down. Smell. Taste. Taste again. Savour.

Last night, the opposite – the season finale of All Creatures Great and Small, which we do not watch for the cuisine. Of course we knew that James was going to make it home, but still, the detail, the sets, the actors, not to mention the endlessly green countryside – the British side of me loves it all.

Again, my book is haunting me. I was at Indigo today before the film and looked it up on the store’s computer; it’s there but without even an “out of stock” sticker. Just nothing. It’s been out months and is still only available from Ben McNally Books and Mosaic Press. Hope you can find it there. Have received more lovely notes:

BRAVA, Beth! It’s a wonderful book, beautifully written. I love how I can dip in and out, enjoying a vignette or two or five, laughing and thinking and learning.I love how you write about your children.I love how you write about dead friends.I love how you write about anything and everything.AND: I am slowly consuming each story in your memoir, pausing after reading one and savouring the sentiments which resonate in ways unexpected. I find myself living through the triumphs, losses, joy and heartache with the writer. I don’t want to rush through. The stories are moving, I want  to let them linger a while.AND a student wrote: Before I took your class I was terrified of memoir. I didn’t think anyone would care about my story. However, through your encouragement and the wonderful connections I have made with the other contributors, I have learned to trust others with my story, an invaluable experience. I will always be indebted to you, and count you among the most influential people in my life.Thank you all! I was thrilled to read this, in an article about Navalny: In a letter last April to Mr. Krasilshchik, Mr. Navalny explained that he preferred to be reading 10 books simultaneously and “switch between them.” He said he came to love memoirs: “For some reason I always despised them. But they’re actually amazing.”Thanks for that vote of confidence in memoir, Alexei. Your legacy will live on. Surely your murder will be the beginning of the end for Putin.I spent Saturday with my grandsons; Ben was still sick and Eli has a bad cough still. And now I have a cold, but possibly it was incubating before I went over. C’est la vie. If only Juliette Binoche would whip up a little dinner, un petit pot au feu, I think I’d recover instantly.

The post The Taste of Things: sublime appeared first on Beth Kaplan.

Update on the mysterious Amazon listing. No. My God, Navalny.

I guess it is winter, after all. Snow yesterday – very pretty. The garden:

Must go fill the bird-feeder, shown on the right.

So, an update on my book, which was supposed to be released yesterday on Amazon, 3 1/2 months after its release locally. I and others were looking forward to this. Nobody is enamoured of Amazon, the behemoth, but it’s the biggest bookseller in the world where many turn to buy books and ebooks, particularly those in far-flung places.

My book is listed as “temporarily out of stock.”

The publisher would prefer readers buy from his press, Mosaic. I understand; keep the money in Canada. However, as a writer, my wish is for as many people as possible to be able to effortlessly buy my book, and that means a listing, among others, on Amazon. I hope it will be up there soon.

I am currently taping the audiobook; it’s going well, and I think it’ll be pretty good and released in a couple of months. If you want the book now, please order it from the wonderful Ben McNally Books, your local bookseller, or from Mosaic.

In other news, I treated myself on Valentine’s Day. People have given me a few good bottles of wine that are saved for special occasions with others, like during the visit of my friends from France. But on Feb. 14, as I contemplated dinner — Christmas dinner unthawed from my freezer, surprisingly good — I decided to open a good bottle. Luckily Monique came over and had a glass, and next day Toronto Lynn came for dinner and we finished it off, so it was not a solo bottle after all. Delicious.

P.S. Apologies for this impossibly trivial post. I just found out that the heroic Alexei Navalny is dead. Why oh why did he go back to Russia? Surely he knew what fate awaited him. That extraordinary man, despite impossible odds, kept his sense of humour until the end. The only good thing about this horrendous, sickening news is that surely it will remind the world, and the fucking venal, power-hungry, conscienceless Republicans, what a loathsome murderer Putin is.

The world desperately needed a man of your caliber, your courage and vision, Alexei. We mourn your loss. Your murder.

The post Update on the mysterious Amazon listing. No. My God, Navalny. appeared first on Beth Kaplan.

Ira Glass, and Tom Allen’s J.S. Bach

Two marvellous events to recount: last night, Ira Glass at Roy Thomson Hall, and this afternoon, Tom Allen’s musical drama, J.S. Bach’s Long Walk in the Snow, at Hugh’s Room. Delicious and nutritious, both of them.

Ira Glass — who’d imagine a skinny bespectacled Jewish egghead who specializes in radio documentaries would pack a concert hall? Last time I saw him in TO it was at Massey Hall, a humbler venue. Ira is the producer of This American Life on NPR and talked about “7 Things I’ve learned,” which, I see from Google, he has been doing for some time. It consisted of him talking, backed by a big screen for graphics and video. He has a wonderful sense of humour and is, of course, a superb storyteller.

Though one of the seven things he learned was “It’s normal to be bad before you’re good,” which he personalized for us in telling how very bad he was when he started his media career at nineteen. He even proved it, with a clip from the early days of his portentous delivery from an Oreo cookie factory. He outlined good storytelling: PLOT — a sequence of events always moving forward, plus IDEAS, to illustrate a point or feeling and make listeners feel they know you. (Exactly what Dinty Moore said in his webinar the other day.) Jesus, Ira told us, used this format and was a great storyteller.

Another great storyteller, he told us, is Chris Christie, who managed to convince a group of Trump-loving anti-vaxxers to get the vaccine, not by trying to convince them with facts, which we know mean nothing, but by telling them his authentic personal story about how he got Covid and what it did to him and others, including killing two close family members. Glass was illustrating one part of the dark times we live in, where truth is dying, and sides are entrenched. “On the other hand,” he said brightly, “television has never been so good!”

There were marvellous segments about a kid who dismissed love, only to recant ten years later; about another kid whose joy at doing his dream job in an amusement park lifted everyone around him; about how Americans refuse to believe that key figures in the States — Peter Jennings, William Shatner, so many others — were Canadians. “But Canadians are so … off,” said one disbeliever. He finished with a segment about the extraordinarily elusive Vivian Meier, who shot hundreds of thousands of superb photographs which no one saw during her lifetime and were only discovered later by chance. In an interview he showed, it was clear she lived exactly as she wanted and would have hated the posthumous attention. “Does it matter what the dead want?” he asked. “Where are they, anyway?” As Vivian did, artists, he concluded, must make their art for themselves first.

Easy to say when you’re talking to thousands of people on another of your endless successful tours. He’s a wonderful man and speaker. I was sitting in the cheapest seats, in the gods, and the people around me were kindred spirits. 100% enjoyed.

Tom Allen and I became friends when I read a lot of essays on his CBC show Fresh Air (the best are reprinted in Midlife Solo). It was a great sadness to me when he was bumped up to the afternoon show and I lost that easy on air camaraderie. He has gone on to acclaim as a broadcaster and now as a writer and producer. The show follows Johann Sebastian Bach at age twenty, when he left his job and walked 300 miles north to Lübeck, to live and work with the famed Buxtehude. Tom narrates, backed by five fabulous musicians who play Bach pieces and also music by a diversity of others, including a rendition of Lesley Gore’s feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me.” Hugely enjoyable, in the lovely new high-ceilinged Hugh’s Room, a small former church a ten minute bike ride from here, with the afternoon sun glowing through the stained glass.

There’s a big sporting event going on right now, I gather, and some pop superstar flew in from Japan to watch her big hulking boyfriend. What a wonderful feeling to say, I do not care. Not one tiny bit. I will watch All Creatures Great and Small — poor James has just gone off to war, we are filled with trepidation — and prepare for a big day of audiobook reading tomorrow. Filled to the brim with good art. Which is a good thing because there’s not much in my fridge. How long can your faithful correspondent live on sandwiches and art? Stay tuned.

The post Ira Glass, and Tom Allen’s J.S. Bach appeared first on Beth Kaplan.

thank you, Ed Sullivan, and spring in February

Today, my friends, is the 60th anniversary of the day the world changed, when the Beatles sang on Ed Sullivan and most of North America watched. By some miracle, I got to watch too; my dad hated TV and refused to get one, but he rented one occasionally, and we happened to have a little black and white box on Feb. 9 1964. What ecstasy, what absolute joy I felt, even with him sitting behind me mocking every moment. And to think that Macca and Ringo are still out there making music, and I am loving them still. Faithful, that’s what we are — they to us, and we to them.

All of this, and so much more, detailed in All My Loving: coming of age with Paul McCartney in Paris. FYI.

Mind-blowing! As I write, I’m sitting outside on the deck in the hot sun; it feels like April. A brave crocus has appeared in the front yard, where there’s hardly any light. February is usually the most brutal month of winter, and today it’s over eleven degrees. People are out in shorts.

And I have to spend this glorious afternoon in a tiny recording booth. I am taping the audiobook of Midlife Solo, spent yesterday afternoon, another lovely day, doing so, and will have one more day after this. I’m a fast reader and I know what I’m doing,  but still, it just takes time. And it’s emotional work — I’m not narrating any old book, I’m recording my life. Today I will be reading about my father’s death and the death of one of my good friends. It’s part of the job to allow emotion into my voice but not let it take over. We don’t have time for me to sniffle and weep.

At least this audiobook won’t cost much, just paying my young tech assistant Patrick for his time taping and editing. I’m lucky Patrick is finishing the journalism program at what was Ryerson, and has free access to the studio. I taped the audiobook for Loose Woman at a local studio; the whole thing cost me about $800, and I have made back at least $17.50. But a friend in Africa told me what a pleasure it was to hear my voice tell the tale, and an artist in the States found my address and sent a card that’s tacked up on my bulletin board: “Just finished listening to you read Loose Woman and LOVED it. Such an interesting story. I loved it all, but in particularly following the deepening of you into such full humanity. Your writing is musical, so a pleasure to hear.”

I talk in class about the importance of the music of sentences. It’s a huge help when a writer has an innate musical sense. Can’t be taught.

Excuse me while I take off my turtleneck, to reveal the Paul McCartney t-shirt underneath. It’s HOT!

The other day I took a webinar with the esteemed Dinty Moore, telling us about “the invisible magnetic river” that should run through our writing. As a result, I realized the scene I’d decided on to start the next book is not the right one. Just after that, my editor Ellie Barton wrote to let me know she thought the scene I’d decided on to start the next book is not the right one. Good to know Ellie, Dinty, and I are unanimous. Now to find the right one. As Dinty said:

Hard to be gloomy about the world when sweltering in the sun on February 9. Happy Beatle Day to you all!

The post thank you, Ed Sullivan, and spring in February appeared first on Beth Kaplan.