Jack Zipes, Emile Zola

Jack Zipes translated the Brothers Grimm to English. He is an authority on fairy tales and well known with people interested in the study of fairy tales.

http://people.camden.rutgers.edu/jbarbarese/files/2013/05/Zipes_Breaking-the-Disney-Spell.pdf

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9676.html

Most of you are not surprised that Disney has taken liberties with traditional stories. What is interesting about these stories is that they have long histories in preceding cultures that go back thousands of years. In the Grimm fairy tale, the little mermaid does become sea foam and is not
rewarded for her bravery and perseverance.

Steps to Indian Mound at Ocmulgee National Park

Emile Zola is an 19th Century French writer. He is listed here to impress you. His writing was more profitable in his lifetime than Victor Hugo. He was noted for defending Alfred Dreyfuss.

Rick Yancey

This post is dedicated to lucky pen names or names. It gets the Ian Ludlow award. In short, I have never read this writer's work. He just has a last name that ends with Y. I am sure after I finish this blog, good writers I know will pop up. But for now, I'll have to bandy about the name of Rick Yancey.

Rick Yancey stood out to me in that he wrote the screenplay for "The Fifth Wave". They did a great deal of filming in Macon, Georgia which is near me. One night during filming, there was such an explosion that it damaged buildings.

Local new's story

http://www.macon.com/news/local/article30165192.html

Local new's pictures

http://www.macon.com/news/local/article28545541.html

I looked over Rick Yancey's website. It is slick and polished much like Lee Goldberg who used the pen name for a book he wrote and published when he was nineteen. The pen name was chosen because it was likely to have the book placed next to Robert Ludlum and would hopefully capture some of Ludlum's audience.

Rick Yancey worked for the IRS which would probably have a certain amount of intrigue for the observant. He is a writer to be jealous of. He wrote a screenplay and was so successful, he quit his job to write full-time.

http://www.rickyancey.com

He certainly seems to be all that and a bag of chips. If you are looking for a good read, which is improbable in that you are reading a blogs, do check his books out. They do look like a good read.

Now, let's move on to Z. Yippee!

What downtown Macon looks like.

X - Qui Xiaolong - Khushwant Singh

To find an X in the English language was difficult.  I purchased the set of short stories written by Qui Xiaolong called "The Red Dirt Road".  Qui Xiaolong has written a series of crime novels based in China. He is an expat from China who lives in the United States. Publication of his selling spring rolls to donate money to students participating in the Tiannamin Square uprising caused him to obtain political asylum in the United States.



Khustwant Singh wrote a series of essays called "Sahibs Who Loved India". I've always enjoyed reading about India since I read the books by M. M. Kaye based in India. It is a fascinating place. There are so many people from India that blog that paints an interesting picture of the country.

W - E. B. White & Tennessee Williams

E. B. White wrote "Charlotte's Web", "The Trumpet of the Swan" and "Stuart Little". He is less known as the co-writer of "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. E. B. White had a long career as a writer and contributing editor of the New Yorker magazine.

http://www.biography.com/people/eb-white-9529308

Below is a link to an essay of E. B. White which was published in Harper's magazine in 1941 called "Into the Lake".

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=YXNiLmFjLnRofG1zLWVtbWEtYXNiLTIwMTQtMjAxNXxneDoyYzQ1YjU5ODBlMDhkODk2

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Tennessee Williams estate finances the Sewanee Writer's Conference. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who has not been exposed to two of his plays, "The Glass Managerie" and "A Streetcar named Desire". When I hear his name, I can hear Stanley yelling "Stella" in the background.

Tennessee Williams name was actually Thomas Lanier Williams III. He adapted the name Tennessee from the roots of his hard drinking shoe salesman father. Tennessee Williams life is one of great success, dysfunctional family, and alcoholism coupled with depression in later years.

I would think a biography would be better than most biographies. There are many aspects of his life that will touch you. His sister Rose suffered from schizophrenia. A lobotomy was used to treat this disorder to disastrous results. Tennessee Williams took care os this sister by paying for her treatment at a good New York treatment facility and visited her often. 

One anecdote I read about Tennessee Williams when I read the autobiography of Jordan Massee is that he was prone to start laughing uncontrollably for no reason.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/tennessee-williams

V - Kurt Vonnegut

In my early twenties, I read five or six of Vonnegut. I remember reading one of his short stories to a class of mine. The kids said the guy in the story was crazy. The character was a millionaire who pretended and lived the life of a poor piano player by choice.

Even though high school kids love sarcasm. Satire is another matter.

I have to confess, I don't remember what any of the books were about. I just remember they were a wild ride. Now I read so  I can learn to write. I've become an even bigger book snob and critic. But my taste for a little joyful fun in a book is keener than all that deep thought from my youth. I doubt I revisit Vonnegut. But you might enjoy the ride.

Slaughterhouse Five made Vonnegut financially secure. We should all be so lucky. The book was based on his experiences in World War II. He survived the bombing of Dresden by hiding in a metal locker of a slaughterhouse as prisoner of war.

U - Eudora Welty

I have the complete works of Eudora Welty. The idea of reading a bit of her writing with a portion of Flannery O'Conner's book "The Habit of Being" about an hour before sunrise and my house is quiet. And like a pianist playing an impassioned, loud piece of music, I start typing my masterpiece. You're never too old to dream or embellish in my case.

The reality is at 5 am, I call my brother on his cell phone and tell him to get up. Usually, I go back to sleep. My two dogs know we don't wake the house up until daylight comes. It gets light outside at about 6:30 am. But pandemonium happens when we get up. We have a pack of chihuahua mixes that can create a cacophony that I am sure startles the dead for their three mile run and my half mile stroll.

Upon return, all dogs go to their daytime beds in the house and I take my brother to the bus that will take him to the workshop he attends. Then I feed the hounds which concludes with another walk. I cook breakfast for the others in the house. I assist my sister with her morning rituals before she eats. Since I have energy in the morning, I do chores. Somehow during this time, I've taken the garbage out, tossed the scrap bowl in the front field, washed dishes, made coffee, and a couple of odds and ends like starting a load of clothes in the washer.

So the books sets primly on a bookcase. I have read several of Eudora Welty's short stories. Being a Southerner, so much written about the South seems a bit overdrawn and false. But the characters drawn by Welty probably existed somewhere besides Welty's mind.

Welty was known as well for her photography as for her writing. A sense of place tells part of her stories which melds with keen observations of how people relate to one another. Welty employs mythological symbolism in her work.

T - Mark Twain/ Zora Neale Hurston

Louisa Mae Alcott spurred writers such as Helen Hooven Santmeyer to become writers.

Mark Twain was my original inspiration. Twain was part of my education. I read his books before they were assigned. I think the humbleness of his origins as well as the earthiness of his writing related to me as a child. It had that ring of truth that resonated. The shrewdness and mischievousness of Tom Sawyer convincing other children to whitewash a fence for him. I wished I was that smart.

When Samuel Clemens autobiography became available 100 years after his death, I ordered it and paid full price. I've yet to seriously read it. You have to make time for what is important. He postponed publishing his biography until 100 years after his death in 1910. Mark Twain's birth and death are famous in that both coincided with Haley's comet 75 year cycle swinging by the Earth.

Samuel Clemens spent a great deal of time touring and writing to cover debts due losses from bad investments in the technology of the day. He had a strong and enduring friendship with Nicoli Tesla. A friend, Henry Rogers, began to manage Twain's money and Twain became solvent as a result.

Twain's views on society changed and became increasingly cynical as he aged. Becoming more aged, I can understand that too. Life was cheerier when I understood less or was too busy to notice.
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Zora Neale Hurston wrote "And Their Eyes Were Watching God" in 8 days which is a remarkable feat when you look at the quality and merit of the book. One line that stood out to me was the comparison of a black woman having a white woman's hair like the string that bound a ham had ham qualities. The aspect of a woman's value with being attractive and that a black woman feeling like she had to look white to be attractive; two sides of a very ugly coin in our country's past and present.

Zora Neale Hurston was never paid in a comparable amount as her contemporaries. Hurston worked as a freelance writer, anthropologist and wrote short stories, plays. She was educated at Howard, Barnard and Columbia. During the later portion of her life, Thurston had to scrape by a living.

Her work was obscure in that her heavy use of dialect put some people off her folklore style. People living through difficult situations and a living history of that era is what appealed to me. Some of her opinions were not popular; but, considering the treatment of African Americans when she lived, criticism is a moot point. Hurston died in 1960 before the Civil Right's Movement brought significant changes for black Americans.

Hurston's work saw a revival in 1975, fifteen years after her death, due to writer Alice Walker writing an article in Ms. magazine.  Walker identified Hurston's unmarked grave and had a marker placed with the words, "A Genius of the South" there.