I’m pleased that Jeanie Thompson is coming to read from her new book The Seasons Bear Us. I had the opportunity to read this manuscript on its way to publication and found it moving, smart, and beautiful all at once. The manuscript became a beautiful and moving book. Jeanie is a poet of national importance, and one of the pleasures of having her here is to introduce her to our formidable community of writers. What better place than the fine literary scene at Urban Think! I hope you get a chance to join us at 7 PM this Friday. Bring friends.
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You might take a look at this wonderful NY Times chronology of 1969. You’ll note below that my memory has drifted from the actual calendar dates but the spirit of the Times piece is the same idea as below, that 1969 was packed with stuff we’d never forget, and Walter Cronkite and the Times are who told us about it. Check it out.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/arts/20090717-1969-feature/?hp

I try not to take history personally. But Walter Cronkite, who as a news anchor, along with Eric Sevareid, embarked in the Sixties on giving us the nightly body counts from the Vietnam war as a way to put pressure on the administration to think a little bit about the terrific horror that was going on in Southeast Asia for no reason anybody could name, died yesterday, 40 years to the day after I was spirited out of Tuscola in the dead of night to serve my country. I was drafted by my lower jaw, like how you pull a Northern Pike from the water after he bites. A whiner by temperament, I had opposed the war with letters to the town newspaper but I was unable to make my opinion stick with moral action when it came right down to it.
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I’m pasting below a letter I received today from the only genuine writer of erotica I know, who graduated from the Stonecoast MFA program the same semester as her pal, the estimable Susan Lilley. I asked her in my note to help us find the path to real literary erotica and away from Ms. McNaughty. I hit paydirt, as you will see.
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I was talking with some people last night at the great Bloomsday celebration at yours and my favorite indy bookstore, Urban Think, in Thornton Park, and someone was saying that he knew a writer who writes first drafts on a typewriter, then puts them on the computer as a second draft. Why haven’t I ever thought of that? I’m so much more friendly to the keyboard than my own legendarily bad handwriting. One reason I have never thought of that is that first drafts usually go in my notebook which one would think is a place for handwriting, but sometimes I do a first draft on the computer, print it out, edit it by hand, and tape the edited copy into my notebook. So already it, the notebook, isn’t a place solely for handwriting. I paste, tape, and post many different things in there. Typed drafts would be fine.
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