JULES OLDER RESUMES DUTY

WRITER’S LIFEGUARD

Hello, writers. New Year’s greetings from San Francisco.

First, the SMS — Still More Steinbeck.

From Vermont poet and playwright David Budbill:I come out of working class stock in Cleveland, Ohio.

I'm the first person with my name to graduate from high school, not to mention college. In other words, as I was growing up, books and words were not much a part of my life. My relatives were factory workers, Post Office employees, domestics, addressograph-multigraph operators, waitresses, and so forth.

All my uncles were in WWII. One uncle, Uncle Judy--his name was Charles Judy--had been in Europe. He worked at the Post Office and he, unlike anybody else in my family, loved books. Uncle Judy had a set of identical, fake leather bound, hardback books with gold lettering on the spine and an embossed cover with a picture of a house top in blue and a red signature that read: JOHN STEINBECK.

All the books in the series and there were a lot were bound exactly the same way and published by an outfit called P. F. Collier & Son Corporation, New York.

As I said, there were a lot of books in the series, maybe 6 or 8 or 10. The first one I read was OF MICE AND MEN.

It was the first real book I'd ever read on my own. I was in high school at the time, I think, sometime in the middle 1950s. It was the first time I'd ever been totally take in by a book I'd read all by myself, the first time I had ever heard a "real" writer talk about people like the people I knew, even if they were from the countryTo this day OF MICE AND MEN remains one of my favorite books.

And from Philadelphia author and translator Larry Schofer:

Jules, This has been a wonderful thread. There are still people out there interested in literature.I'm afraid though that we Americans might be as insular as the Nobel literature prize secretary accused us of being.If you were to ask me what the most memorable novels I have ever read – those that touched my soul - (as opposed to the greatest novels I have ever read), I would have to include I.B. Singer's The Slave, Heinrich Boell's The Clown, and Siegfried Lenz' The German Lesson.

And now, on to AFINZ — Almost Famous In New Zealand.

One of the Writers Lifeguarders (there are 114 of us as we speak) is Graham Beattie in Auckland, New Zealand.

Graham has been a bookseller, publisher, editor and consultant; he's now the sole proprietor of Beattie’s Book Blog, New Zealand’s best-read literary website. You can see for yourself at http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/

On said blog, Graham has posted my original Steinbeck essay and your subsequent thoughts on the subject.

So, should Christine and Kim, J.B. and Moira, David and Steve, et al ever turn up on New Zealand’s beauteous shores, they will be:

Really, Truly, Deeply, Almost famous.

Kia ora from

jules