Link to a Book Newsletter

Found a smart, literate newsletter to recommend, Meredith Sue Willis's BOOKS FOR READERS: http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/booksforreaders.html Latest isssue has a discussion of DANIEL DERONDA, one of my favorites. Earlier issue includes a review of RIDERS ON THE STORM.

Art Historian's thoughts on The Thinker

Allen Farber, a fellow student at Case Western Reserve, was an art history major when the real bombing of Rodin's Thinker took place in March 1970. Now a professor of Art History at SUNY Oneonta, he has written about seeing the fallen statue and the damaged entrance on his way to class as part of an on-line essay on Politics and Art. Most interesting to me, he offers a way to understand why people (say, the fictional Ivy Barcelona, who loves art) would participate in the bombing. Ivy's little explanatory note (see below*) is written with the limited vocabulary and reflection of a stressed out 20-year-old in a hurry. Allen Farber discusses (among other things) a selection from Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (a BBC series and THE authoritative text on Western culture, published in 1969).
Some changes in the past forty years: I can't use the word "civilization" (or the British spelling with an s) without putting it in quotation marks. I can't believe I took Kenneth Clark's version of the world for truth.
Here is Prof. Farber's website. Read. http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/art_politics.html

*What Ivy wrote, in the heat of her moment, from page 371 of Riders on the Storm:

Rulers know who they are, and they can no longer deny they are complicit in the oppression of a majority of people throughout the world. The Art Museum, its very size and shape based on centuries of European imperialism, its marble walls, staircases, and statues asserting the insidious principle of white supremacy and the power of the ruling classes, can no longer pretend to be benign. We repudiate cultural elitism.

Did people really write like that in 1968-69? I'm afraid so.

Seasonal change

Back at the college with a schedule of classes and four rosters of students:
Did I really mean to write for months about the storms of becoming a novelist with a book titled Riders on the Storm? No wonder there's been no news since July. Had I written in August I could have told you that thunderstorms on the Colorado Front Range inspire mostly joy, and that there are two new novels in the works if you picture "the works" down in the basement of the psyche.
The published novel is in fact getting some road time (see website list of events) and some on-line time:
There's a short version of the Yellow Springs News review published on Meredith Sue Willis's Books for Readers -- a wonderful newsletter: http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/booksforreaders.html . I'm not just saying it's wonderful because my book is mentioned; all of Books for Readers is a pleasure to skim, with delicious bits to bite into.
The first blog interview is published by Case Western Reserve (okay, the English Department of my Alma Mater) and you can read it here: https://sites.google.com/a/case.edu/department-of-english-the-annex/alumni/carpenter-interview.
AND I found more on the Thinker. See next post.