K. Velk's Blog, page 10
June 8, 2013
A Gift For The Queen's Birthday
HRH Elizabeth II in 1968 - the famous "Admiral's Boat Cloak Portrait" by Cecil BeatonDid you know Elizabeth II R has a birthday coming up next weekend? It isn't her actual birthday, which is on April 21. The weather is a little too dodgy then for a parade or trooping the "colour" etc. so they move the party to late May or June.
This year, it is on June 16. Have you thought what you might get for HRH? I am happy to say that, for once, I have planned ahead.
Are you sitting down?
I am offering her Majesty, and everyone else with a Kindle and working knowledge of English, a free download of my book, Up, Back, and Away.
The giveaway commences at midnight on June 14, 2013 Pacific TIme, and ends midnight June 15. (With the time delay that covers her big day).
The book is a time travel adventure story wherein our hero, a fifteen-year-old boy from suburban Dallas, is sent back to England in 1928 (on a vintage English three-speed bicycle) to "find a girl with a gift, a girl born out of her time," and a "secret that was not meant to be" and then return home with them both.
So, if you have a Kindle and the slightest bit of interest wait til next weekend and pounce, or click, really. Remember Queen's Birthday = free book. Queen's Birthday = free book. Queen's Birthday = free book. (This is supposed to be like a Manchurian Candidate style trigger for you).
Incidentally, the paperback is on sale now at one third off the cover price so, there ya go. Also, if you have Amazon Prime you can borrow the book (and other Kindle books) for free anytime.
June 6, 2013
Hitch-22: A Brief Review
Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher HitchensMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Admittedly, I read this (actually listened as an audio book) more than a year ago now, but I formed some quite definite views at the time so felt moved to add a little review to my rating. A famous Russian once said that the works of an artist more closely resemble him than his children do. (I am paraphrasing). When I read this book, I thought of the mind on display and I disliked it. Hitchens was so smart and so nimble, he ran rings around everybody in every debate, and he spoke, all the time, with such authority that he overwhelmed anybody who stood up in front of him. In this memoir, I found a person who was almost unbearably domineering and, in an oblique way, self congratulatory, mostly for being so unflinchingly honest: it seemed to me that as a subtext, he was ever giving himself credit for showing every wart. " I am the most honest about me - no BS here." OK. I get it. But that's a kind of pose and meant to bully in its way. No one could get one over on him. He saw it all. Even that was a form of egomanical BS. Looking over the things he believed and then didn't believe in his life it is blindingly obvious that from era to personal era, Hitchens wasn't right about everything and, in the end, I wondered if he was really right, ever, about anything.
View all my reviews
May 25, 2013
"The Past Is Never Dead..."
It isn't even really past.
- William Faulkner
In one of the more delusional maneuverings of a literary executor, as you may have heard, the Faulkner Estate sued Woody Allen and Sony Pictures last year for misquoting that line in the fabulous film, Midnight in Paris. (Allen's script rendered it: "The past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past.")
Anyway, let's put that aside. I came here tonight to praise and commend the thought and its expression by both Faulkner and Allen. It recurred to me again tonight when this lovely bit of film, which I watched part of during my research for U,B, and A, was posted on Twitter.
The past doesn't seem so very far in the past, when you can see it in color. Here's London in 1927, amazingly, in color (or "colour" if you prefer). (The code to embed the video just wouldn't work so you'll have to click through. Sorry).
- William Faulkner
In one of the more delusional maneuverings of a literary executor, as you may have heard, the Faulkner Estate sued Woody Allen and Sony Pictures last year for misquoting that line in the fabulous film, Midnight in Paris. (Allen's script rendered it: "The past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past.")
Anyway, let's put that aside. I came here tonight to praise and commend the thought and its expression by both Faulkner and Allen. It recurred to me again tonight when this lovely bit of film, which I watched part of during my research for U,B, and A, was posted on Twitter.
The past doesn't seem so very far in the past, when you can see it in color. Here's London in 1927, amazingly, in color (or "colour" if you prefer). (The code to embed the video just wouldn't work so you'll have to click through. Sorry).
May 13, 2013
Don't Let the Sun Go Down on This Book
I am more or less compelled to write a review of Bricks and Flowers, a memoir by Katherine Everett, because it seems to me a kind of cosmic injustice that a work of this quality should slide into obscurity. Everett wrote this book in her mid 70s and it was first published in 1949. She lived a remarkable life in remarkable times. She was a daughter of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy with an impeccable pedigree but that never got in the way of her using her own considerable brains nor did it shield her from life's difficulties. She was a poor relation to some very grand people and a friend or acquaintance to many famous people (Augustus John and W.B. Yeats moved in her circle). A bad marriage left her on her own with two sons to fend for and fend she did by becoming a contractor in the building trades and a garden designer. There is a remarkable tale in here of her bicycle ride through miles of territory occupied by the Irish rebel army in 1916. (She was riding out to check on the home of her very grand and good, if somewhat clueless, relation the Baroness Ardilaun. The Irish, alas, had burned the mansion to the ground). Everett was a fine and lively writer and a very wise woman. At the time of its initial release, this book was very well reviewed by A.A. Milne in the (London) Sunday Times and Milne knew what he was about.
May 7, 2013
Giddy London
I have been spooking around British Pathe again... While I was writing Up, Back, and Away, I was always dipping into bits and pieces of the 1920s for inspiration. There was a popular musical at the London Hippodrome in 1925 called Mercenary Mary. The story was forgettable, but a couple of the songs are favorites of mine and, (getting back to British Pathe) here's a little film clip that speaks to the glories (and the oddness) of London in the 1920s:MOVIE MOMENTS FROM MERCENARY MARY
The film is silent, but maybe you can watch it after you listen a bit of to the music. (Sorry, I can't seem to get the movie and the music to open separately):
The film is silent, but maybe you can watch it after you listen a bit of to the music. (Sorry, I can't seem to get the movie and the music to open separately):
May 6, 2013
The Funnies
The Funnies
If you thought the people at the Paris Review didn't have a sense of humor, click through. Happy Monday!
If you thought the people at the Paris Review didn't have a sense of humor, click through. Happy Monday!
May 2, 2013
Speaking of Illegitimacy...
Does anybody anymore?
My interest in the topic is as an observer of the changes in society over the last 100 years. One of the the great contrasts for Miles in Up, Back, and Away, between life in 1928 and his life back home in contemporary America is the difference in moral attitudes toward sex. Of course, whenever this topic comes up these days, it is the evolving (now in some corners fully evolved), attitude toward homosexuality. But Miles finds himself grappling with the (now) dull, old-fashioned issue of what is still technically known as fornication - that is, sex out of wedlock. I think it is next to impossible for young people today, at least those who live in mainstream America, to grasp the risk that unmarried women took when they "gave in." The great terror was of pregnancy. At least for middle class people, illegitimacy was a shame of Biblical proportions and one that contorted many women's lives into terrible shapes.
I am a great admirer of the writing of Dorothy L. Sayers' - although (oddly) I haven't really found the mystery story that moves me. My admiration is chiefly for her book The Mind of the Maker which is (in its quiet, reflective way) a thrilling bit of philosophy. (And believe me when I tell you I am not one who normally reads for anything but fun).
Sayers' personal story, along with the ideas she articulates in M of M, was very much on my mind as I was writing my own book. I don't think people today have any sense at all of the absolute crushing scandal that illegitimacy caused in those days, at least for middle-class people. Dorothy Sayers was the daughter of clergyman and her family was nothing if not respectful. When she was a young woman in the early 1920s, she became pregnant by her married lover. She went into seclusion until after the baby was born, with all the secrecy that could be managed. The baby, John Anthony, was was sent to live with a cousin of Sayers's who ran a foster home. While Sayers remained part of his life for all of the rest of her life, the truth of his birth was never publicly discussed. (For a nice blogpost detailing Dorothy Sayers life and career, click here). In my own family, we found out only after my mother's older sister died a few years ago that she'd had a child out-of-wedlock in the 1950s. It had never been spoken of, even among family. My mother had no idea about it it at all, though she was in her 60s when her sister passed, and her parents (my grandparents) had never gotten over it, and really, had never forgiven my aunt.
My poor aunt's hard experience, and Sayers' herculean efforts to hide her relationship to her child, provide just a couple examples of how drastic the change in social mores have been in the last 100 or so years (and which account for attitudes and codes of conduct that baffle Miles).
My interest in the topic is as an observer of the changes in society over the last 100 years. One of the the great contrasts for Miles in Up, Back, and Away, between life in 1928 and his life back home in contemporary America is the difference in moral attitudes toward sex. Of course, whenever this topic comes up these days, it is the evolving (now in some corners fully evolved), attitude toward homosexuality. But Miles finds himself grappling with the (now) dull, old-fashioned issue of what is still technically known as fornication - that is, sex out of wedlock. I think it is next to impossible for young people today, at least those who live in mainstream America, to grasp the risk that unmarried women took when they "gave in." The great terror was of pregnancy. At least for middle class people, illegitimacy was a shame of Biblical proportions and one that contorted many women's lives into terrible shapes.
I am a great admirer of the writing of Dorothy L. Sayers' - although (oddly) I haven't really found the mystery story that moves me. My admiration is chiefly for her book The Mind of the Maker which is (in its quiet, reflective way) a thrilling bit of philosophy. (And believe me when I tell you I am not one who normally reads for anything but fun).
Sayers' personal story, along with the ideas she articulates in M of M, was very much on my mind as I was writing my own book. I don't think people today have any sense at all of the absolute crushing scandal that illegitimacy caused in those days, at least for middle-class people. Dorothy Sayers was the daughter of clergyman and her family was nothing if not respectful. When she was a young woman in the early 1920s, she became pregnant by her married lover. She went into seclusion until after the baby was born, with all the secrecy that could be managed. The baby, John Anthony, was was sent to live with a cousin of Sayers's who ran a foster home. While Sayers remained part of his life for all of the rest of her life, the truth of his birth was never publicly discussed. (For a nice blogpost detailing Dorothy Sayers life and career, click here). In my own family, we found out only after my mother's older sister died a few years ago that she'd had a child out-of-wedlock in the 1950s. It had never been spoken of, even among family. My mother had no idea about it it at all, though she was in her 60s when her sister passed, and her parents (my grandparents) had never gotten over it, and really, had never forgiven my aunt.
My poor aunt's hard experience, and Sayers' herculean efforts to hide her relationship to her child, provide just a couple examples of how drastic the change in social mores have been in the last 100 or so years (and which account for attitudes and codes of conduct that baffle Miles).
April 30, 2013
A Happy Can Lit Discovery
I picked this up when it was free on Kindle as I knew Mary Walters to be an excellent blog writer. (Someone famous once said that a person who writes good letters is a good writer, and I have found the same to be true of those who write good blog posts). I thought I would dip into it a few nights after I got it, and found myself in that happy situation of not being able to put it down. I went to college in Canada (though American born and bred) and I have a great affection for the best Canadian literature. I found here shades of Alice Munro and even of Robertson Davies in the way that the social mores of southern Ontario are illuminated. There is a slow reveal of here of the core of Ms. Guthrie, the main character, and of the incidents that made her into the woman she has become. It is a carefully made book and I enjoyed it from beginning to end.
Review: King of Pain
The King of Pain: A novel with stories by Seth KaufmanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
With a title like this, you can't be too sure what you're getting into. (Even with the "very funny" call out quote and comic-book style old TV on the cover). The story of had me from the first page, however. I knew right away I was in the hands of someone who knew what he was doing and the story did not let go til the bitter - or really, rather sweet - end. Rick Slater, an aging, bright and thoroughly compromised producer, has been saved from the Hollywood has-been ash heap by becoming the guiding light of a horrid, torture-based reality TV show. As the show reaches a crescendo of awfulness (and popularity), Slater finds himself one day pinned beneath his collapsed, massive entertainment center. As he endures the varied agonies that come with being pressed like an old Salem witch, he reflects on his shabby, checkered past. When he isn't reminiscing, regretting, reforming, he distracts himself with a book of stories that has fallen off the shelf. The book was given to him by a worthy young woman (and just-out-of-reach object of desire) who once served as his assistant. She has inscribed it with a cryptic message about a lesson he needs to learn. These stories are all written as stand-alone works are uniformly excellent, really often rising to brilliance. Slater's search for the meaning of this inscription helps tie the front of the book to the back. This was a book I looked forward to finding on my night stand for as long as it lasted.
View all my reviews
April 28, 2013
The E-Book Has Launched!
It costs less, as it should since there's no paper involved or anything, and it has a snappy, slightly different cover, and a hyperlinked table of contents and EVERYTHING.
Follow this yellow brick link.
If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow it for FREE and what kind of a great deal is that?
Follow this yellow brick link.If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow it for FREE and what kind of a great deal is that?
