The 30th Day

One of the anomalies of the writing life that could stand more attention is the time difference between (a) events in what I call (rightly or wrongly) 'real life' and (b) their translation into prose.

For example, the events in my own life that come to mind as likely source material for my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me occurred for the most part in the 1980s or even earlier. A relationship begun and ended; career changes, culminating in brushes with stockbrokerage; frequent trips to Paris; work as a translator, and as a services coordinator in a marginally '12-step' environment; 'family drama'--these scattered bits of source material came and went in my 'real life' more than 20 years before they resurfaced, transformed, in Kiss.

The time difference isn't always to be measured in decades. The processing, the transformations, may work themselves out in a few years or months. And there are other kinds of writing--blogging, for example, or reportage--where the time difference may seem to disappear altogether.

Still, I'm continually aware of the absence from my writing--or, at the very least, the underrepresentedness--of so much that is characteristic of my 'real life' today. To cite only two examples: a beatific relationship of over 20 years' standing, and over three years' study and practice of qigong and related arts.

Qigong is on my mind today because this post completes my experiment of 30 consecutive days of blogging. As I wrote on the first day, I undertook the experiment on the advice of my sifu, Anthony Korahais, and at the same time resolved to practice qigong every morning. For now, I'll say of my own experience only that it's been very positive in both areas, and a definite success. And I'll refer you to Sifu Anthony's own post from yesterday, which explains the 'The 30-Day Trial' in detail and which may give you some ideas for your own real life in the month ahead.

Banned Books Week, 24 September - 1 October 2011

Banned Books Week has been observed annually in the United States since 1982. It's sponsored by the American Library Association and nine other groups. For more information on the goals and importance of the week in the US, see this ALA page. For an international perspective on issues of censorship, see this AI page. And for a site focussing entirely on Banned Books Week, including videos, click here. YouTube even has a dedicated channel for Banned Books Week.

It seems likely to me that most readers of this blog sympathize with the goals of Banned Books Week--raising awareness about issues of censorship, advocating for intellectual freedom. It's good to err, though, on the side of greater vigilance, and to look for creative ways to help extend to others, wherever they live, the freedoms that some of us already enjoy. (One condition for these readerly freedoms, obviously, is literacy itself. Consider visiting the website of First Book [for the US and Canada] or the UNESCO literacy portal.)

One frequent suggestion from the organizers of Banned Books Week: celebrate your freedom to read by reading a banned or challenged book. To get some ideas, see the ALA's lists of banned and challenged classics and most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century. Or link directly to some historically banned/challenged classics that you can download for free: books like Fanny Hill, Huckleberry Finn, The Awakening, The Jungle and Ulysses.

I hope you'll share here your experiences with banned and challenged books and your ideas for improving access for others to all books. And I'll return to the topic of (specific) banned and challenged books throughout the months ahead.

Kindle: If You've Been Waiting, the Wait Is Over

This morning Amazon has announced a dramatically extended line of Kindles. Now you can have the features you want, leave out what you want to leave out, and pay an unbeatable price.

In retrospect it seems to me that we've all been paying too much attention to speculation about this rumor or that, this model or that. What we've all known all along is that getting the price of a new Kindle down into the double digits for the US market would mean an historic tipping point for the ebook revolution. It happened this morning.

These new Kindles start at $79. True, with that price the buyer agrees to receive onscreen notifications of 'special offers'... and to do without a (physical) keyboard. But there are other options as low as $99. And... oh, yes... that tablet we've all been waiting for, which will set us back all of $199.

The news is good. Start learning more at Amazon.com. Or at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.de--making sure to go to the £89 or €99 model's product page for a complete comparison of all the Kindles available.

Free eBooks: A Few Links

Nowadays ebook retailers offer (typically) thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of free books, usually as an incentive to attract customers who will, presumably, spend money on reading devices, 'paid' books and other merchandise. I'm going to assume that regular customers know how to find the free ebooks at their retailers' websites (e.g., by using each site's bestseller lists and search engines).

I want to make sure that you also have access to a few websites that offer free ebooks in multiple formats. (Note, however, that not all books are available in all formats.) Books are typically in the public domain (more about this later), and all are offered 'DRM-free', i.e., do not contain additional code to prevent file-sharing. (Among other things, this means that you can use software like Calibre to convert files to different formats.)

First, what I'll call 'the Gutenberg family': the Project Gutenberg sites for the US, Canada and Australia. Think of the US site as your free download site of first resort, and the two others as complementary sites that focus on filling in gaps left by the US site. (The US site offers only books that are in the public domain [i.e., no longer under copyright] in the US. The duration of copyright is different in different countries. In general, the laws of the country in which you are located determine what it is legal for you to download.)

Each Gutenberg site includes information on ebook formats (generally EPUB for reading devices other than Kindle), the mechanics of downloading, and the conditions under which it is legal for you to download ebooks from the site.

There is also at least one French-language site with an admirable breadth of offerings: Ebooks Libres et Gratuits. Most users will need to go to the search engine  for the site, which can be found here. (Note that files labelled 'Mobipocket' can be read on a Kindle.) All materials are in French; they may or may not be in the public domain in your country.

Let me add one final link--a site where I frequently find things that are available for free nowhere else: Munsey's. Munsey's is where you'll find more free pulp fiction and more free Henry James--and quite a bit in between--than anywhere else on the Web. The database may not have the sleekest interface you've ever seen, but there's a lot to love at this site.

One tip, applicable to all these sites: if you're going to be reading your free ebooks on a tablet, it may be easiest for you to browse these sites and download your books using the same tablet you're going to read on. This saves you one subsequent file transfer (e.g., laptop to tablet).

Also, some ebooks, conspicuous classics, are just elusive. You may want to use your usual Web search engine... always including, of course, a term like 'EPUB', 'Kindle' or 'ebook' with the title.

Finally, you may want to investigate ebook lending (friend to friend, as offered for Kindle and nook users), and borrowing from public libraries (long available via nook and recently announced for Kindle users in the US as well).

As always, I encourage you to use the comments function below. Be sure to mention your own favorite sites....

A Few Lines on the Name of a Cat: Alcestis

I'll come clean with you. I decided to blog today about my choice of 'Alcestis' as the name for one of the cats in my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me because I knew that I could never make any real headway with future posts about Euripides and Plato (two  of 'the 26') and the Plato quotation about love, self-sacrifice and gender that is the final epigraph in Kiss--could never get anything said in any of these three future posts if I didn't devote a few paragraphs to Alcestis first.

Alcestis, in A Kiss Before You Leave Me, is the name of Kathleen Kincaid's cat. Kathleen communes with her Alcestis in the first chapter, where we learn in passing that Alcestis may have kittens on the way. Later in the novel, one of those kittens will save Jack Emery's bacon on Miranda Kincaid's birthday. Miranda will adopt her and soon name her Sido (for Colette's mother), and the kitten, then adult cat, deaf from birth, is seldom far from Miranda's side from that day onward.

But what about the mother cat? What about Alcestis?

She seems to be there just to give birth to the future Sido and send her packing. As Kathleen suggests in that first chapter, a mother cat has it easier than a human mother: once Alcestis has given birth to her kittens and nursed and loved and taught them for a few weeks, she gets to say goodbye to them forever. (Unlike Kathleen, Alcestis will never have to serve as a mother-in-law.)

But what's in that name?

Although the character of Alcestis goes back to Greek legend, the earliest account of her story that survives intact is in Euripides' play Alcestis (first produced in 438 BC), which is also his earliest surviving work. By the time of the Renaissance, Alcestis had become a widely-used reference for pure, selfless love. But the 'classic' Alcestis is the one we find in Euripides.

Alcestis is a Greek princess, the wife and queen of King Admetus. The preordained moment arrives when Admetus must die unless he finds a surrogate to die in his place. Only Alcestis is willing to sacrifice herself. She is remembered for that sacrifice--to which Admetus agrees--although the story is more complicated: Admetus' friend Heracles arrives shortly after Alcestis' death (about which Heracles is not informed), and for reasons of 'hospitality' Admetus proceeds to break, one after the other, the vows he's made to Alcestis on her deathbed. Heracles produces a 'new' woman, veiled, whose hand Admetus takes--only to discover that she is Alcestis, whom Heracles has won back from Death. After three further days of silence, she is fully restored, purified.

The play is, at least potentially, and especially for present-day readers, thorny and controversial.

My own reading of the play has always begun, inevitably, with the speech in which Admetus denounces his father's refusal to die for him. It is a simultaneously powerful and alienating speech that must suggest to some modern readers the question of Admetus' own tacit refusal to die for Alcestis--a possibility he never invokes but which is clearly there: he would need only to decline to make her his surrogate. He would die; she would live.

This is not to say that Alcestis would welcome such a sacrifice on his part, nor that there is no possible justification (for reasons of family or state) for his failure to make it. (Commentators, even if they ignore the issues of self-sacrifice, always explore the cultural justifications for Admetus' apparent breaches of faith after Alcestis' death.) Indeed, I hold no brief here for any one approach, and I do not claim to hold the key to Euripides' intentions. I ask only that you hear in the name Alcestis not merely the Renaissance ideal but also the multiple possibilities that are there for readers of today.

I propose between A Kiss Before You Leave Me and Euripides' Alcestis no simple analogies or parallels (and thus no easy keys to anyone's intentions). The cat Alcestis is of course not called upon to sacrifice herself, temporarily or permanently, for love or anything else. She was named, however, by her highly literate human (an editor, a fancier of crossword puzzles), who knows--and has yet to learn--a great deal about self-sacrifice in the name of love.