I’ve just returned from my Thanksgiving Holiday in Florence — so long Fra Angelico frescos, truffle honey on cheese, chocolate & Galileo. Time to get back to MONSTERS! Here is a snippet of my new Candy’s Monsters novella — POED: If your nephew, or mine, killed his wife and child, slicing them up and preserving their bodies in the oversized freezer in his suburban garage next to the cherry vanilla ice cream and hot dogs, his arrest and trial would be known to all and you’d be hounded for your insights and abused for having “missed the signs” of his
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FEARS!
My pre-author-reading-jitters are not exactly uncommon. Stage fright and the fear of public speaking are two very common fears. Fears are Monsters. Some creep up on you and others jump out and scream BOO! In the end, I got up and read my excerpt from POED and once I was at the podium, it wasn’t all that bad. The program for the NYU semi-annual Poe event included a mixed bag of presenters including a veteran actor with a raven puppet reciting Poe’s most famous poem, a beatbox duo with a rendition of “Dream Within a Dream,” and a singer
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Screaming People!
A few days after “The Scream” arrived at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC, I ran uptown to the museum. I enjoy Edvard Munch and his moody, gloomy depictions of figures in disturbing landscapes. But when I got there, my focus changed to the crowd drawn to the color version of Munch’s iconic image. It was a bit scary! As usual MoMA attracts an international crowd of art lovers and tourists. Those two groups are not mutually exclusive — art-loving visitors to New York exist just as art-loving tourists go to Rome, Berlin, Paris…. I’m going to be
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A Stormy Little Book
POED, the third Candy’s Monster, went live on Amazon while Sandy stormed up the east coast of the United States. A few minutes after I checked the link, the lights flickered and I heard the Con Edison transformer blow on East 14th Street. A little more than a week later, Bill of The Bookcast interviewed me about Poe and POED. The tick, clatter, tick, tick, tick of frozen rain from the Nor’easter that followed the supercharged hurricane, became the soundtrack for our Poe-ish talk. POED is truly a stormy little story! Weather — from the classic “dark and stormy night”
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To Poe or Not to Poe — Is There a Question?
Nope! I’m Poe-ing; no question about it. Friday, November 9 my BOOKCAST Internet radio interview about POED will go live (I’ll post the link all over the place) and a week from Friday (November 16) I’m participating in the semi-annual Poe program at NYU. This time the event is called “In the Shadow of Poe” and I will be among the presenters. It’s been a long time since I was on stage. As a shy teenager I enjoyed it. Being on stage in a play or singing in a school concert, took me out of myself. I could be bigger,
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Poe Time
We live in very Poe-ish times. I know that many readers find Edgar Allan Poe’s writing style to be antiquated (convoluted, confusing & a bit too lavish), but I think we live in a time that Poe would understand. During his lifetime, Poe’s most notable stories were largely ignored or misunderstood. He made more money as a critic with scathing reviews of his contemporaries. His rabid approach to tearing into the work of his contemporaries is a slower, print version, of the cultural and political critics on TV, radio and the Internet today. Poe wrote about revenge, addiction, obsession, violence,
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Stormy Blog Post
This won’t be my usual MONSTER MEDITATION. Sandy hit New York City very hard and my part of Manhattan is still without power. This means no heat, no hot water, no phone, no cable, spotty cell tower coverage, no lights, no wifi and no subway in the neighborhood. I commute each day to a friend’s apartment on the Upper East Side where I shower and set my laptop up with her wifi. It’s hard to get any real work done. I’m not complaining. Things could be a great deal worse. When I walk downtown in the evening, I see the
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