Latest news in re to what appears on blog

Of the links to published stories you can search my name on Blackheart and it comes up.  The other two will get you to the magazines but I'm not sure how to find my stories.  Will let you know when I figure it out.  Just let me know if you want to read one and I'll send it to you.  Same goes for longer works, which I took off because publishers are starting to include on-line pubs, even self-published, as if they were print.  Magazines too, which I found out the hard way, a previously accepted story then rejected when editors saw it on this blog.  

Martina

Although not exactly a sports idol of mine, I've always admired and respected Martina Navratilova.  If you have ever followed tennis closely, you know it's difficult to separate talent and personality completely.  Aside from her talent, I always found her reserve and dignity appealing.  That's all smashed to hell now.  Not only did she get a face job, but she's appearing on Dancing With the Stars.  Humiliating?  Degrading?  Take your pick and apply to either or both.   Surely she made plenty of money playing tennis.  Why would she do such a thing?  It makes Joe Louis opening doors in Vegas seem almost dignified, especially since he really needed the money.  My wife tells me she recently got engaged.  I know we will do a lot of foolish things for love, and I like to think I'd forgive most of them, but if love is behind this it doesn't bode well.  I know this isn't steroids or gambling, but should I ever meet her, I'd be tempted to say what we all say when confronted with a fallen idol:  Say it ain't so Martina.            

Lines from The Alexandria Quartet, re-visited forty some odd years after first reading

   

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Apart from the wrinkled old peasant who comes from the village on her mule each day to clean the house, the child and I are quite alone.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential--the imagination.

. . . days became simply the spaces between dreams . . .

The city unwrinkles like an old tortoise and peers about it.  For a moment it relinquishes the torn rags of the flesh, while from some hidden alley by the slaughter-house, above the moans and screams of the cattle, comes the nasal chipping of a Damascus love-song; shrill quartertones, like a sinus being ground to powder.

I suppose the secret of his success is his tremendous idleness, which almost approaches the supernatural.

"There are only three things to be done with a woman," said Clea once.  "You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature."  I was experiencing a failure in all these domains of feeling.

Streets that run back from the docks with their supercargo of houses, breathing into each others' mouths, keeling over.
And then the street noises:  shriek and clang of the water-bearing Saidi, dashing his metal cups together as an advertisement, the unheeded shrieks which pierce the hubbub from time to time, as of some small delicately-organized animal being disembowelled.    

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Moldava

Decided to move some of the blog posts I had on my space (which makes no sense to me anymore) to this location.  Just when I feel like it.  Here's the first one.  Dates don't matter.

Moldava.  Article in NY Rev of Books.  Looked it up in Wikipedia.  It's like a country that someone would invent for a novel.  Maybe Nabokov did and I'm forgetting.  Don't think it was him but sure I read something about a scholar in such a place.  Slowly coming back to me.  A prof of the very obscure and isolated language and literature.  Does he get involved in some mystery?  There is something in Wiki that suggests they have this thing for something called the "Moldavan (Moldavian?) language," but it's also true, apparently, that the languages spoken there are Romanian, by majority, and Russian.  No one says anything about there being a Moldavan language.Wendy and Lucy.  Got impatient and pissed off at Wendy as she was being taken away from store where she shoplifted.  Told CG I didn't want to watch it anymore, so we turned it off.  CG convinced me that the gay porno star in doc we watched was an interesting guy, specifically in the way he wanted to please everyone, which, when he could manage it, made him happy.  I did like the story he told of his first serious heartbreak.  3 weeks of getting drunk and he was over it.  No downward spiral of substance abuse and self-loathing.  Should admit I fell asleep about halfway through.  Not because of that.  Would probably have fallen asleep even during substance abuse and self-loathing.  Claudine at School.  Charming and funny.  Didn't really mind that it went on and on rather aimlessly.  Noticed one glitch in transition to Claudine in Paris.  She says in School she's going to Paris to stay with aunt.  In C in P, she and her father move to Paris with no mention of aunt until later.  Colette must have decided that staying with aunt would not work as well in re to how she wanted C to be.  Plus the father is funny.  Just remembered yesterday an Asian director I meant to watch more of.  Film I watched was 2nd in trilogy about a chef.  Conflict with his kids who don't share his interests.  Japanese, Korean, Chinese?  Well known director I'm sure.

Don DeLillo site

I especially like the second quote.  DeLillo