Jules Older waxes lyrical in the new year............

WRITER’S LIFEGUARD
More Bits, More Bobs

How time flies, Lifeguards; how it flies. Here we are in 2011, and there's news piling up everywhere.
No mo. All the news that fits, we print. Starting with…

Blog on, Brother
From the wilds of upstate New York, just beyond the Black Stump, Lifeguard Steve Foreman has started blogging about aging. Doesn't sound like fun? I thought his last entry was a real treat.

http://growingolderbystephenforeman.blogspot.com/?zx=c840f6ca16ae27f2

Sense of Place
To me, the words, “It has a great sense of place” is modest praise at best. You mean he can't plot? You mean she can't create characters? But I've recently read two books with such outstanding sense of place, they fill me with wonder and awe.

One is by one of my favorite authors, better known in the Southern Hemisphere than the North. He’s Tim Winton, and his place is the western fringe of Western Australia. His novels, maybe especially Dirt Music, are things of beauty.
And his chronicle of place, Land’s Edge: A Coastal Memoir, brings readers right onto the sandy fringe of the Indian Ocean. Unless you're Antipodean, you won't know that jarrah is an Australia hardwood or that a Holden is an Australian car or that the Freemantle Doctor is the evening breeze, but you'll get the big picture anyway.

The other knockout memoir of place is by Lifeguard Stephen Bodio. His book is Querencia; its place is the high country of New Mexico. It’s so moving, so grabbing, so elegant… the only problem is that it’s so hard to get. Best bet: Contact mailto:ebodio@gilanet.com

Oh, awright — while we’re on sense of place, you can do no better than an alleged children’s book by
another Lifeguard, Karen Hesse, Out of the Dust. Its place is Oklahoma, and it won the Newbery Medal in 1998. I. Just. Love. It.


White on White
If you ask ski writers to name their favorite ski writers, one name that will always turn up is Canadian Lifeguard, Leslie Anthony. His new book, which covers snowy mountains from Chile to Canada, India to Italy, is White Planet: A mad dash through modern global ski culture. It will be released in March. And, like everything he writes, it’s so damned good, you don’t have to be a skier to appreciate it.

Filming Napa
As I try to keep my balance on the ever-shifting fault line between the Gutenberg Era and the Digital Age, I'm more and more drawn to videography. That’s odd for a word guy, but there it is.

Effin and I have recently made two videos in Napa… but not the Napa of wealth and wineries. Both are set in the gritty, lunch-pail city of Napa. One’s about the effect of Prohibition on the region; the other’s about the historic restoration of the Napa River that’s led to the restoration of the town. Here they are:

The Story Of Prohibition... In Napa.
http://www.youtube.com/user/julesolder#p/u/1/aZVRorl0twM

Turn Toward Your River.
http://www.youtube.com/user/julesolder#p/u/0/8Bmk4kqJfhg

Begging for Pay
Oh, God forbid we should end on a high note. In the New York Times, Elizabeth Dwoskin has a long — a very long — piece on folks who don’t get paid for their work. About folks who have to beg for pay.

Guess who’s well represented? Yep, freelance writers. Here's the graf that made me squirm with embarrassed recognition:

Freelancers often engage in a delicate, disquieted dance. People showed me drawn-out e-mail chains with a subject line of “URGENT,” but the sign offs are peppered with “Thank you!” and “Please tell such-and-such-colleague I hope he feels better!” and assurances from the exasperated, resentful freelancer of how much she is looking forward to working with the company again in the future. “I’m in the professional equivalent of an abusive relationship,” said Ben Ryan, a low-income freelancer writer who says his former employer owes him $12,925. “I would describe an overriding, constant sense of anxiety. Of course, that’s what the freelancer experience is.”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/begging-for-your-pay

What I mean, Lifeguards, is take it easy. But take it.
— jules
jules@julesolder.com