There’re countless reasons to be counted among the fallen. Theological, physiological, logistical…and ecological. This theme seemed to match itself against a neologism I ran across in the New York Times. Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher, coined the word solastalgia to describe a form of homesickness or nostalgia one gets when still at home. Albrecht makes particular reference to environmental change in one’s surroundings due to development or climate change.
Thus, marrying solastalgia to the fallen resulted in “The Curious Reason Greta’s Heart Stopped Beating,” my whimsical look at the extremes in our culture. Super-editor Lisa Logan at MysteryAuthors--a Californian, environmentalist and founder of The Green Writing Challenge--may have recognized this situation.
Read it in its entirety at MysteryAuthors.com –http://mysite.verizon.net/mysteryauthors/. (Click on the “Minute Mystery” in the right-hand column, then on the contents page for June in the left-hand menu .)
Cruising the Green of Second Avenue
What’s a friend for if not to make you feel good, eh? A very early (1959 or so) friend just wrote, “Indeed, let me tell you how much I enjoyed reading your short stories” in Cruisng the Green of Second Avenue. (Okay, commercial break: take a moment and click on http://www.wildchildpublishing.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=74&zenid=ff94c21f95111b27e8b7210244ac97a3.)
Now, that is really nice, first, because many friends have promised to buy the book since it was published a year ago, but the royalties don’t even approach the number of commitments I’ve gotten. Second, he not only bought the book, he read it. “I really admire your talent,” he wrote, “to recreate and invent those most improbable situations and these wonderful characters who resurface รก la Faulkner from place to place, smoking (as I used to) Picayune cigarettes or needing to hide their tattoos. Your surprising codas or abrupt plots turning around as in the “Sound of Music” with la belle Ellen Schuster or the hermaphrodite-assumed son of the forger-embezzeler Carl [“The Man Who Put the Sin in Cynic”] give the reader a deserved kick in the pants. Notice I am practicing compound nouns preparing myself for Germany. It’s a delight to “se promener, oder spazieren” in the company of Anderson (a nasty but correct portrait of the Lit Prof in “Donna and the Love Contract”) with his verbal duels. (Once I bought the same sheets at Conran’s and for the same purpose), or Klein the biker and his practical jokes [in “Klein Comes Back Abashed”], the precocious Benny Three Sticks [“The Kid’s Got Smarts”] in remembrance of J.D. Salinger to whom you introduced me in 1959.
Ah, mon vieux ami, you made me go back and read “Astroturfing Benjamin’s Books” the eighth story in Vol. I. And here I am astroturfing my own book, reality imitating art. Thank you for bringing a ray of sunshine into this snowy, overcast January day!
Now, that is really nice, first, because many friends have promised to buy the book since it was published a year ago, but the royalties don’t even approach the number of commitments I’ve gotten. Second, he not only bought the book, he read it. “I really admire your talent,” he wrote, “to recreate and invent those most improbable situations and these wonderful characters who resurface รก la Faulkner from place to place, smoking (as I used to) Picayune cigarettes or needing to hide their tattoos. Your surprising codas or abrupt plots turning around as in the “Sound of Music” with la belle Ellen Schuster or the hermaphrodite-assumed son of the forger-embezzeler Carl [“The Man Who Put the Sin in Cynic”] give the reader a deserved kick in the pants. Notice I am practicing compound nouns preparing myself for Germany. It’s a delight to “se promener, oder spazieren” in the company of Anderson (a nasty but correct portrait of the Lit Prof in “Donna and the Love Contract”) with his verbal duels. (Once I bought the same sheets at Conran’s and for the same purpose), or Klein the biker and his practical jokes [in “Klein Comes Back Abashed”], the precocious Benny Three Sticks [“The Kid’s Got Smarts”] in remembrance of J.D. Salinger to whom you introduced me in 1959.
Ah, mon vieux ami, you made me go back and read “Astroturfing Benjamin’s Books” the eighth story in Vol. I. And here I am astroturfing my own book, reality imitating art. Thank you for bringing a ray of sunshine into this snowy, overcast January day!
Saturday, September 6, 2008
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