Readers and writers blog

By the time you see this — if you ever do — I’ll be halfway to Indiana. Halfway from where? It doesn’t matter. Because Indiana is a state of mind.

I’m getting there with my wife and her parents, tooling along the eastern interstate highway system in a rented 2006 red Chrysler van with tinted windows, a special step for the elders, both of whom use canes, and an abundant cargo that includes luggage for four people for nine days, five musical instruments — two guitars, a banjo, a mandolin and a violin — and a Gateway laptop computer that hasn’t yet become my best friend.

Oh, the Gateway and I are on pretty good terms, and they will get better when I become more accustomed to its tiny keyboard and its inability to download anything from the Internet because its operating system is not my customary Microsoft XP but a more exotic OS called Ubuntu.

Ah, not to worry. I have transferred what I hope are all the files I will need from the big desktop to the Ubuntu-loaded laptop. In fact, I plan to post this entry when we stop at the next motel, which I assume will have the wireless technology that we now call wi-fi.

I hope the entry gets to you.

It was my wife’s sons, Brett and Todd, who hooked me up with the laptop — it was one of Todd’s old machines — and Brett tutored me on it, explaining about Ubuntu in terms that I mostly followed. What sold me on the laptop was not the price — although it was ridiculously reasonable (thanks, Todd) — but what I first noticed when I opened the top: The Gateway logo.

It’s a Holstein. And as all of us hicks know — hey, we just live in the New York exurbs, we’re not from there — that means high production with a decent fat content.

My wife, Bonnie, and her parents, Glenn and Virginia Sunderman, are all natives of Indiana. As for me, I’m a New Hampshire boy apprenticing to be a Hoosier. We’ve made this trip several times in the past, and I’m no stranger to long-haul driving.

In fact, the image at the top is not any of us driving the van. It’s an old image I used in an April 2007 entry about some of my years living in a truck and traveling the country in the 1980s and early ’90s. Man, after two days in this van, I’m glad I did it then.*

Enough of this silliness. We’ve got to get to Huntington, Ind., by Sunday for a 90th birthday celebration for Bonnie’s Aunt Maxine, the kindly matriarch of the Sunderman family.

Meanwhile, may we recommend today’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter Four of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess Dyer and her new neighbor, Brian LaChance, an attractive man at least a decade her junior, visit a local diner where a little girl takes Tess for Brian’s girlfriend, an assumption that makes them both blush. The heat between them already is rising.

• Cross Roads, a new short story by James L. Fox, the Mojave Hermit, that blends the past, present and future in the tale of an old prospector, a young motorcyclist and a man named Jan all meeting at a place called Devil’s Gulch.

• Chapter 16: Clift Hotel of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard begins a diary in 1965, but the daily entries end on Jan. 9 after his friend Elliot confides an interest in Ginny. The next entry — the diary’s last — is about Ginny’s trip to a hospital Feb. 17 for an abortion.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*In fact, at today’s gasoline prices — they’ve flirted with $4 a gallon in the last two days — I think that old truck and I would have stayed parked most of those years.

Today we welcome back one of the first writers to inquire about publishing his work on R&W Blog — and the first to ask why in hell he should do it in the first place.

So welcome back to the colloquy, Ian Spitzig. We present the second poem you’ve submitted to us, ‘Oh Mathilda,’ in our Works section.

Colloquy. I like the sound of that.

That’s what we seem to have become — a colloquy. It sounds less formal than a symposium. Friendlier, too. Yet a bit more serious than a bullshit session.

Of course, what sounds good to me may be a good question in itself. After our blog entry Thursday in which I exposed my musical tastes for all to see and hear, some of you may not be reading this anymore.

For those of you still here, Ian James Michael Spitzig is a struggling writer in Ontario, Canada, whose introduction to us came pointedly last November in the following email, which we quote in its entirety:

Hi Sid,

I don’t see the point of publishing if not for money.

Ian Spitzig

My response was:

Some people don’t see the point. Maybe many people don’t see it. But there are some people who write because they cannot not write and need to share that writing with others, regardless of money. Those are people I want to read, and I think others do, too.

Because have you looked at what gets published these days for money?

What then followed was an exchange of lengthier emails in which Ian and I considered the merits of writing, the difficulties of getting published and the frustrations of young writers who would like to do it for a living.

Actually, much of what was said has been expressed rather well by other writers who have since volunteered their work to R&W Blog and are now contributing as well to our comments section.

We have become a colloquy.

According to my Webster’s New World Dictionary, the 1980 edition, one of the definitions of colloquy is “a literary work written as a dialogue or conversation.” That’s a little too fancy — shades of Plato and his dialogues involving Socrates and other classical Greek philosophers. We prefer to think of our colloquy as a conversation about, yes, reading and writing.

One final note: While a symposium is now generally defined as a series of knowledgeable speakers who may also interact with an audience or as a collection of essays by knowledgeable writers, the archaic definition of the word comes from the ancient Greek symposion — “a drinking party at which there was intellectual discussion.”

Sounds like a bullshit session to me. My, how far we’ve come.

And speaking of long trips, today’s offerings in Works include:

• The final chapter of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing. In the conclusion, titled Finale: Shiprise, some 200,000 humans, including some scientists who finally managed to communicate with it, rise with an alien ship above the sands of New Mexico on a voyage through space and time to the ship’s home world.

As they begin their new trip, we end ours — a good trip through life on Earth after War Three. Thank you, Mr. K.

• Again, there’s Ian’s latest poem, ‘Oh Mathilda,’ which joins his earlier work, ‘One way to steal beauty from the city,’ published last November.

• Chapter Three of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess Dyer moves to New Mills, Maine, a tiny community no longer with mills but with a growing gentry, where she begins to yield to an attraction for one of its native sons, a young carpenter named Brian LaChance.

• Chapter 15: Boulder Creek of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard moves ahead to the Christmas of 1964, which he and Ginny spend at her father’s house and where Gerard concludes that Ginny’s father has no idea what to do about her, either.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is a stone sculpture, ‘Colloquy,’ by Rosie Musgrave, a sculptor in Dartmoor, England. Her work is featured in the art section of the website Atkins Law Solicitors.

I’ve been reintroduced to an old song that reminds me how important words are in music.The song is — now, no giggling or catcalls, please — an old Sons of the Pioneers number called ‘Cool Water.’

Antiquated, yes. Outdated, no. As a leitmotif, a fancy word for a recurring musical theme, “Cool Water” is as effective today as it was when Bob Nolan wrote it in 1941. It’s a simple song with only three chords (what musicians call the I, IV and V chords) where all the verses end in the same words — “cool, clear water.” But, oh, what words lead up to them.

All day I face the barren waste without a taste of water — cool water. Old Dan and I with throats burned dry and souls that cry for water — cool, clear water.

If you can get through that and the other three verses without thinking about a beverage, you’re better than I am.

“Cool Water” came up as a request from a resident at a local nursing home where our family band does weekly singalongs. And speaking of that, another song with words that affect me is ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold,’* which, as I’ve said before, I can’t sing without getting teary-eyed:

Darling, I am growing old. Silver threads among the gold
Shine upon my brow today. Life is fading fast away. . .
But, my darling, you will be always young and fair to me.

The golden age of lyrics was 1910 to 1950 with a revival from 1960 to 1975. For eloquence, try the 1915 song that speaks of “Memories, memories, dreams of love so true. O’er the sea of memory, I’m drifting back to you.” For cleverness, try Ira Gershwin’s 1930 lyric: “I’m just bidin’ my time, ’cause that’s the kind of guy I’m.” But for pure ingenuity, my prize goes to 1925’s ‘Five Foot Two’, which manages to get the expression ‘coochie-coo’ — in those days, it meant an exotic dance — embedded as a homonym at the end of a line that goes, “But could she love, could she woo, could she, could she, could she coo?”

From the golden age’s latter days, one of my favorites is Pete Ham and Tom Evans’ 1970 song ‘Without You,’ which was redone explosively by Harry Nilsson in 1971 and was covered, also with resounding success, by Mariah Carey as recently as 1994:

No, I can’t forget tomorrow
When I think of all my sorrow. . .
And now it’s only fair that I should let you know
What you should know:
I can’t live if living is without you. . .

Lyrical cleverness hasn’t gone anywhere. In fact, it abounds in the rap lines of hip hop music. Now if they could just add some melodies. Because — sorry, kids — words and rhythm by themselves are to music what drum-and-bugle corps is to an orchestra.

Melody is a key ingredient to classics like “Without You,” complex as it is, and, yes, “Cool Water,” simple though it may be.

But one of the most beautiful popular songs of all time — words, rhythm and melody — is a gondolier song called “Barcarolle.” Of course, it was a pop song in 1881, and it’s in French. It’s from an operetta — no hissing, please — called “The Tales of Hoffman” by Jacques Offenbach. Give it a listen here (be patient — the orchestral introduction is more than a minute long). And while you’re at it, listen to this ‘Life Is Beautiful’ spinoff I found by an Israeli singer named Noa, proof that people are still writing — and singing — great songs.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter Two of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring about a woman in small-town Maine forced to confront her painful life.

• Chapter 20: Preparing for Departure of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing.

• Chapter 14: Pacific Heights of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*If you follow the link to the YouTube version, please note that the song isn’t ‘country.’ Just these performers are.

Talk about a cautionary tale. We’ve got one for you today in our nonfiction section from Hugh Yonn, a Florida writer who reflects on the inadvisability of becoming a big-time marijuana dealer.

His short story, ‘Shoulda Robbed a Bank,’ is an account of Yonn’s own experiences, and while the title may seem a bit on the flippant side, the story raises serious questions about America’s drug laws.

I know, I know, all drugs are risky. And, no, I don’t want my surgeon or airline pilot smoking weed. Of course, I don’t want them drinking booze, either. Because while marijuana can lead to addictive behavior — as can caffeine, sugar or, for that matter, food in general — alcohol is a hard drug that can lead to physical addiction.

And there are other risky behaviors to which most of us have legal access — namely, possessing handguns.

So is a man who’s hiding three pounds of marijuana on his person more of a threat than a man who’s hiding three pounds of a loaded .45-caliber automatic under his jacket? Or, to carry the example to the extreme of Yonn’s case, is a man who flies a load of marijuana into this country — even six tons of it — more dangerous than a man who endangers everyone in your neighborhood bank by demanding money at the point of a gun?

A supply-side economist might argue that the marijuana importer is the only one meeting a demand — that of the nation’s millions of marijuana users — while I don’t know of any banks that want to be robbed.

I’m just asking. You decide.

Yonn was a supply-sider of sorts himself when he got into the marijuana import business: He wanted to increase his supply of what he calls “toys”: cars, boats, motorcycles, airplanes and antiques.

“I may have been able to find the same satisfaction with a nice Matchbook collection,” he writes. “Then again, maybe not.”

Yonn, 61, a native of Jacksonville, Fla., worked in the field of sales until a divorce in the 1970s led him to a bartender’s job in Delray Beach, Fla., where he met what he calls the “customer base” for his marijuana sales.

His ill-fated shipment — he said it was going to be his last since it would have netted about a million dollars — ended when he was arrested aboard his aircraft on a North Florida landing strip.

He was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. Even though good behavior cut that to about five years, Yonn saw bank robbers who served less time than that.* By the way, he earned one of his two associate degrees while in federal custody.

That was all about 20 years ago, and he’s now in the real estate business in Grant, Fla. Check out his story in the nonfiction section.

Other new offerings today in our Works sections:

• Chapter One of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. On a numbing winter morning, Tess Dyer’s marriage of 11 years ends in a brief proceeding that her husband doesn’t bother to attend. Then, in a local cafe, she is called a whore. She looks beyond the borders of her small town to an even smaller one.

• Another short story in the fiction section from James L. Fox, the self-styled Mojave Hermit, although this tale does not involve prospectors or other likable desert rats. ‘Feeding Frenzy’ is about a young survivalist, turned into a terrorist by bad experiences with the news media, and a veteran detective who must stop him. It is Fox’s longest — and darkest — offering to date.

• Chapter 13: Stockton Street of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard and Ginny finally consummate their love, and Gerard gets serious about her expectation that he will be a writer, wandering across the country in search of subjects to write about until a phone conversation with her brings him rushing back to San Francisco.

• Chapter 19: Boarding Call of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing. After several months of conversations between an alien ship in the New Mexico desert and a team of scientists, preparations are made for the ship’s departure for its home world with 200,000 humans aboard.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*In fact, when Yonn researched the federal system, he found that incarceration for large-scale marijuana offenses averaged 34 months, for armed bank robbery 22 months.

Most people have a lot of thoughts, but Jennifer Weber writes hers down. She does it very well. And some of her thoughts come out as poems.

We offer three of them today in our poetry section.

Ah, you poets. What you do, I love, but do not pretend to understand. My only theory about poetry and prose is that the better each is written, the more they become indistinguishable.

The prosaic side of Weber is to be found in her weblog, I’m Having a Thought Here, a collection of family experiences, news, personal philosophy, much of it related with humor, and an occasional groupie paean to Johnny Depp or Josh Groban — this from a grandmother of two, no less.

Actually, we have a lot in common. I’m at least a half generation older than Weber, and I also am a big fan of Johnny Depp — “Edward Scissorhands” is still one of my fondest cinematic memories.

Weber also has a profession I identify with — court reporter. No, not a news reporter like me who used to cover court trials, but a member of the court who records every word said in the proceedings, an ability I’ve always considered remarkable.

She lives in Columbia, S.C., where her husband, Greg, is a small business owner. Now that their four children, ages 19 to 27, have left the nest, Weber has turned seriously to writing.

“(It’s) something I wanted to do and should have done a long time ago,” she told us in an email. “I let lots of things stop me, not the least of which was fear that I’m no good as a writer. Now I know that even if I’m no good, I still have to try.”

I don’t think there’s a writer among us who hasn’t shared those feelings.

Weber is hard at work on two novels, has sketched out a few short stories, loves flash fiction and has been published several times on Six Sentences, a unique website where writers contribute works limited to, yes, six sentences. (It’s interesting. Check it out.)

And, of course, she regularly writes poetry.

Now, I don’t know how Weber and other poets do their work. I’ve always imagined it’s done at times like Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour” — you know . . . ‘Between the dark and the daylight, when the night is beginning to lower, comes a pause in the day’s occupations . . .,’ and so forth. In other words, quietly.

Longfellow is a favorite poet mostly because he and I both used to live in Portland, Maine. I also like Robert Frost — he and I both used to live in New Hampshire. And I really like Walt Whitman for a lot of good reasons, including his love of lilacs and Lincoln.

No, my idea of a good writing environment comes from my first newspaper job where my desk was separated from the press room by only a thin wall and I wrote obituaries in the afternoon with the press running at ear-splitting decibels, forcing verbal communication into hand signals and lip reading. For all those succeeding years, noise was good. And if a fist fight happened to break out in the newsroom, so much the better. It forced me to focus even more. (I still talk when I write, either to anyone else in the room or, if alone, to myself.)

Which is why I leave the poetry to Weber and the others.

Besides her poems, today’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter 12: Clayton Street of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard recalls the Christmas of 1963 that he spent with a girlfriend with Mafia connections and that the love of his life, Virginia, spent with a black poet.

• Chapter 18: Revelations of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing. Now that humans have demonstrated their intelligence to it, an alien ship in the New Mexico desert gives them nearly unlimited access to its own intelligence.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is from an illustration on the website deviantART from a contributor identified only as darktwilite, who apparently is an American artist named Krista Jean, no last name given.

It’s difficult to think of America as increasingly illiterate when there are such fine writers as R.J. Keller out there.

Today we begin serializing her novel, Waiting for Spring, the story of a newly divorced woman, numbed by years of rejection, who trudges out of one small Maine town into an even smaller one where she is forced to confront her pain.

R.J. Keller is the pen name of Kelly Hewins, who has written three novels, a screenplay, is an assistant editor for and frequent contributor to the Movie Fanatic website and, more happily than her protagonist, also lives in small-town Maine with her husband, two children and a family cat.

Her writing makes me nostalgic for Maine, even though I know from personal experience that those small towns aren’t the most prosperous places in the world and, from reading about Tess Dyer in Waiting for Spring, still not the most idyllic.

Neither is the book-publishing world, if it ever was a nice place. It’s certainly getting smaller for aspiring novelists, Hewins told us in a recent email:

Waiting For Spring is the first work of mine that’s made it past the query stage. I’ve become rather disenchanted with the publishing business — not because I can’t get published, but because of the reasons I’ve been given. I’m not commercial enough for the ‘mainstream’ agents (for lack of a better term), and not educated enough for the more literary crowd. I guess what I wonder about is this: If a book is ‘well-written, with engaging characters and a good story,’ then how is it not marketable? Isn’t that the reason people buy books? Or, if my writing is good, why does it matter that I don’t have an MFA? Perhaps I’m naive.

By the way, today’s new offerings also include the latest chapter in Disconnected, a novel by an author from the other coast, San Francisco writer Jeri Cafesin, who has expressed many of the same sentiments as Hewins about the publishing world.

It’s not just the imagination of a couple of frustrated authors. There’s plenty wrong with the publishing world these days. If you want one reason, just look at our most popular television shows or, worse yet — and this is particularly sore point with me — at TV “news” and its inevitable spinoff, dumber newspapers.

Yes, America’s reading habits — and reading levels — have changed. I don’t think television is a product but rather a cause of this phenomenon. Now there certainly are other underlying factors — notably, a breakdown in homes and parental oversight as well as a growing disdain for education — but one thing is clear to me:

Americans have developed an increasing appetite for mindless junk.

Which makes it harder for authors like Hewins, Cafesin and the other writers we feature in our Works section to get published on paper. And which brings up the one bright aspect of our new age — e-publishing. Right now, we’ve got two e-books-in-progress — Cafesin’s Disconnected and Joseph Cigan’s Sniper in the Mist — and two other novels in serialization, not to mention short stories and poetry.

So while they wait the wait, check ‘em out here:

• Prologue of Waiting for Spring by R.J. Keller.

• Chapter Two of Disconnected by J. Cafesin.

• Chapter Eleven: Farmer’s Market of Ginny Good by Gerard Jones.

• Chapter Seventeen: Invitations of The Unearthing by Steve Karmazenuk.

By the way, Hewins also maintains a weblog called Ingenious Title To Appear Here Later, an interesting and entertaining collection of her thoughts and experiences. I’m curious just thinking what the eventual title will be.

– Sid Leavitt

I need a laptop computer, but shopping for one reminds me of a theory proposed by some astronomers that the universe will expand to an apogee, then come slowly shrinking back on itself. Because that’s what’s happening to us.

Fifty years ago, we couldn’t wait to get that bigger car with its bigger swept wings, that bigger house with the bigger family, that bigger job with its bigger paycheck . . . yes, even that bigger hamburger. Now, of course, there are still some idiots consumers who yearn for a big SUV, big muscle car or Big Mac and think that ingesting the latter while watching the former endlessly circle a track is harmless fun. But their day is fading along with the oilmen in the White House.

The rest of us are trying to make smaller footprints on the Earth until somebody realizes there are too many feet.

I suppose I should be thinking about something else — like exactly what I need in that laptop — but it’s too damned confusing. The more compact our technology becomes, the more complex its specifications. I can barely understand this big desktop computer I’m working on right now.

Do I need Dell’s Inspiron 1520 laptop — of which there are three models with various Intel Pentium microprocessors ranging from a 1.73GHz / 533Mhz FSB / 1MB cache to a 2.0GHz / 667Mhz FSB / 2MB cache and prices ranging from $649 to $1,208, not counting the rebates? Or would the Inspiron 1525 be more to my liking with its Vista rather than XP operating system, a similar variety of caches and prices ranging from $499 to $1,253, not counting other rebates?

Are they kidding?

Well, I’m not kidding about needing a laptop. Because at the end of this month, my wife and I and her parents are taking our first extended trip since this website-weblog began. And we’re going where there are numbers that I can understand and appreciate.

For example, 90. That’s the birthday my wife’s Aunt Maxine will celebrate on June 2 in Huntington, Ind. She’s the benign sovereign of a family of six siblings, and a nicer woman you won’t find. Second in that line is my father-in-law, Glenn, who’ll be 88 a few days later. My mother-in-law, Virginia, will be 84 before then. So the four of us are going to pack into the smallest van we can find and head for Indiana on a nine-day trip.

I can’t pack up this desktop, so it’s going to have to be a laptop if I hope to continue posting entries twice a week on our weblog.

Like technology, large families also are shrinking, but there are four other footprints on this Earth that I’m glad of — my wife’s two sons, Todd and Brett, who grew up smart about computers and who just may have bailed me out.

Todd gave me general information about laptops, and Brett helped me review some of the offerings on the Internet before noticing that I didn’t seem to understand much of what was being said, then diplomatically mentioning that he and Todd have a laptop they haven’t used for a while. A little slower than the new Dells, but plenty for what I need. A lot less expensive, too.

What this world needs is not more people but more smart people. Thanks, guys. Now I’ve got to learn how to use the damned thing.

More new offerings today in Works:

• A new short story by James L. Fox called ‘Lonesome Charlie,’ the tale of a grizzled old prospector who has an unusual way of finding people to talk with in his remote desert existence.

• Chapter 16: Conversations of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing. Scientists have their first communication with an alien spaceship in the New Mexico desert, a craft that seems to have its own life qualities, including an intelligence that dwarfs that of humans.

• Chapter 10: 45th Avenue of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard goes to his first date with Ginny but runs into a few pitfalls — she apparently has forgotten the date, the battery runs down on his borrowed car, and later, when he’s finally making headway at her house, she is called away by another boyfriend.

Talk to you later. I’ll be the guy wrestling with the laptop.

– Sid Leavitt

Once again, I went to the annual dinner that a local nursing home gives for its volunteers. And once again, they didn’t suspect a thing.

The fools.

Everyone was so nice. They had little gifts for all of us. And the food was great, as good as any local restaurant, and that’s saying a lot because just across the Hudson River is the Culinary Institute of America, which sends trained chefs into the local economy as well as across the world. I’m not saying this nursing home is the fanciest place where I’ve ever played music for senior citizens, but it’s a lot fancier than the first place where I did.

That was the county infirmary, and it was 15 or 16 years ago. How I came to play my guitar there is a long story that I will try to shorten here:

My latter-day musical career was inspired by a girlfriend I had 16 or 17 years ago — that’s right, about a year before I moved here to take an editing job with the local newspaper. This girlfriend . . . how can I say this? Well, she was, as I once told her in a moment of exasperation, the Girlfriend from Hell. Self-absorbed, narcissistic, rude, argumentative, ungrateful, spoiled. But she was a pretty good musician. She had a passable voice, basic guitar skills and — now, this is what killed me, because she had such short arms — was an accomplished trombonist.

One of my attempts to improve bonds between us was to try to get involved with her music. I got out my old guitar and sang with her. She, of course, said my playing sucked and my singing was too nasal. That was shortly before she drifted off somewhere else and I came here to New York.

And I vowed that I would prove her wrong.

So my old guitar and I went off to a local music store to sign up for lessons, and, to give me incentive to pay attention, I signed up as a volunteer at the county infirmary to play backup guitar at singalongs. I figured they had plenty of singalongs since it’s a large, multistory facility that cares for hundreds of elderly folks — and, as I later discovered, does a remarkably good job of it. (Yes, New Yorkers in some cases do get something back for their taxes.)

Now, I was no musical novice. As a kid, I took piano lessons for a number of years. And in the 1960s, I too switched to the acoustic guitar to impress all the young hippie women, although by now, I’d forgotten most of the chords.

The activities director at the infirmary was glad to see me, handed me mimeo sheets of a half dozen old songs with words and chords, and off we went to a singalong, she on lead guitar, me on backup. It was great.

But then, the second week, she didn’t show up — and never did again. But I did. Elderly people in a nursing home aren’t very mobile, and I needed that captive audience.

Since then, I’ve collected about 250 old songs, gotten a lot better on the guitar and tried to work my nose out of my voice. And something even better than that happened:

My musical career led me to my wife. Well, actually, to my wife’s parents, both retirees with musical talent who also played at local nursing homes. So we started playing together, and I eventually managed to inveigle their daughter to join us. And me.

By the way, she’s an excellent singer — much better than the GF from Hell — and a good basic guitarist. And, what’s more, she likes me.

The four of us still play once a week at the local nursing home, and we all again enjoyed the volunteer dinner. The difference is, they’re all altruists — they do it out of the goodness of their souls. But not me. Because when I look out over my guitar, I still see that captive audience that I’m still taking advantage of.

But let’s just keep that between you and me.

This week’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter 9: San Bruno of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which Jones talks about his career as a Kinney shoe salesman where he meets an attractive brunette who likes her feet played with, then remembers he has promised to tell his readers about his first date with Virginia Good.

• Chapter 15: Progress of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing in which a team of scientists brings in a world-class mathematician to help them decipher a rune-based language found within an alien ship unearthed in the New Mexico desert.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is from the website of SEO Consultants, an Internet marketing and development group that uses a lot of monkey pictures on its staff page.

Although not a naive person, I have a streak of optimism that occasionally gets me in trouble. In the latest episode, it has gotten me spammed, if not scammed.

For I am now, you see, a member of Who’s Who in publishing.

Well, isn’t that fine, you might say (if you suffer from that same sporadic optimism as I do), and I certainly must be pleased that I will be included in the upcoming 2008-2009 honors edition of the registry published by Madison Who’s Who.

I was. Until I googled them.

Scam, scam, scam, said the bloggers — one a college professor who said “having a PhD doesn’t mean you won’t get duped,” another a young woman who was nominated as an attorney but doesn’t have a law degree, yet another a 70-year-old who paid $708.95 for which, she said, “I got a piece of paper.”

Now I’ve had enough experience with spam so that I should recognize it when I see it — it makes up nine-tenths of the comments we get here at R&W Blog. And I’ve been phished often enough so that I should be able to avoid a hook. (Sorry, “Bank of America,” I can’t “reconfirm” my password, account number and credit card number because I’ve never had an account with “your” bank. And sorry, “IRS,” but I doubt the real agency has really lost my Social Security number.)

But the Madison Who’s Who hit me at just the wrong time (or right time, for them): Like the professor, who was up for tenure and thought someone was doing him a favor by nominating him for a prestigious listing, I thought I knew who might have nominated me:

My wife and I know several publishers, and we had just had dinner with two of them, an amiable evening that was followed by an email exchange of pleasantries about how much we enjoyed talking about each other’s publishing ventures, they in books and we on the Internet.

Isn’t that nice, I thought. They sent my name to Madison Who’s Who. What a lovely surprise.

Then, too, Madison took a low-ball approach that seemed believable. All I had to do was fill out a form asking for information that anyone reading this weblog would know — name, company name, title, email — and my telephone number, something anyone with an Ulster County, N.Y., directory would know. No credit card numbers, no passwords. And it’s free.

So I filled out the form and emailed it back. Then, having a second thought that should have been a first thought, I checked the Internet. Apparently, I am going to get a phone call.

Although I now have a “basic listing” in their registry, “each applicant will be reviewed before the membership is approved,” Madison informed me. Judging from what I’ve read on the Internet about others’ experiences, I think that “review” comes over the phone.

That’s when I get the option of getting a “lifetime” membership in their directory for $700 or a five-year deal for $400, plus other benefits.

Well, I may have my moments of optimism stupidity, but I’m very good at getting rid of telemarketers.

And now, today’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter Eight: Coyote Point of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which Jones takes up studies with author and literary editor Gordon Lish after starting a journal and telling his sweetheart, Virginia, that he is a writer.

• A Special Investigative Subcommittee Report in Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing, a summary of events leading up to and repercussions following worldwide attacks by religious fanatics unsettled by a huge alien spacecraft unearthed in the New Mexico desert.

Meanwhile, I wait for that phone call. Oh, and just in case you don’t quite follow the headline on this entry, the answer to the mystery word is: I’m the “he” who should have said, “What’s this?”

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The type on the image at the top of this entry comes from a poster advertising a rock program by Who’s Who, a tribute band that recreates the legendary group The Who.