Zen in the Art of Writing

Zen in the Art of Writing
Ray Bradbury
RosettaBooks (May 2, 2017), 126 pages
originally published in 1990
Kindle edition $14.99
Purchased during an Early Bird Books sale for $1.99

I am always looking for ways to improve my writing, so when this title turned up on Early Bird Books for $1.99 I grabbed it.

Zen in the Art of Writing is a collection of essays Bradbury wrote over a period of years on the topic of, obviously, writing.  He writes about the importance to him of writing every day. He also describes how he would simply make lists of words, nouns mostly, and how much of his work came out of a word that got his attention on the list.

Bradbury writes about the importance of reading broadly. He writes, “I have known Bertrand Russell and I have known Tom Mix, and my Muse has grown out of the mulch of good, bad, and indifferent.”

He makes one point that particularly struck me:

This does not mean to say that one’s reaction to everything at a given time should be similar. First off, it cannot be. At ten, Jules Verne is accepted, Huxley rejected. At eighteen, Thomas Wolfe accepted, and Buck Rogers left behind. At thirty, Melville discovered, and Thomas Wolfe lost.

Just because I loved Tom Robbins in my twenties doesn’t mean I will enjoy his work today.

Some great stuff here from one of America’s most respected authors.

Surfacing

Surfacing
Kathleen Jamie
Penguin Books (September 24, 2019), 254 pages
Kindle edition $12.99, Amazon paperback $12.59

In Surfacing Kathleen Jamie has compiled a collection of her essays that touch upon a variety of topics, although her selections display a particular interest in archaeology.

The first half of the book is an extended essay about Jamie’s visit to an archaeological site in Alaska. She describes not only the archaeological work but the native Americans in the area, their daily lives, and their attempts to maintain a cultural identity in the present day. Other essays in the book describe the challenges of archeology in her native Scotland. Jamie also writes about nature, making sure her father was eating properly, and being stuck in China at a time of social unrest, presumably in the 1989 Tiananmen Square era.

Jamie’s writing style moves the reader along quickly and she maintained my attention throughout. Surfacing may be of particular interest to readers interested in archaeology in the New World.

Listening for America

Listening for America: Inside the Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim
Rob Kapilow
Liveright (November 5, 2019), 472 pages
Kindle edition $19.24, Amazon Hardcover $22.49

Rob Kapilow is a renowned music educator and in this book he has done a first rate job of educating his readers about the history of the Broadway musical. He delivers what he promises in the title, starting before Gershwin, in fact, with Jerome Kern and Cole Porter and taking us right through to Stephen Sondheim. He points out in the epilogue that the most popular post-Sondheim shows have either been from overseas (for example, the many shows of the British master of spectacle Andrew Lloyd Weber or French productions such as Miss Saigon and Les Misérables) or Disney movie reincarnations (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and the like).

Each chapter focuses on one song from one show, for example George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” or Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.” Before getting to the song, however, Kapilow discusses the life of the composer, tells us about his collaborators, and explains where the show from which the song came stood in the history of Broadway and the country. When he gets to the song he describes, in fairly technical terms, what makes it special. He has an associated YouTube channel in which he offers clips from the songs, and demonstrates how the composer was innovative in contrast to how the song might normally have been written. The marvelous thing about the Kindle edition is that the book links directly to the clips.

The notes are done in a rather odd way. The references are numbered footnotes and are in the back of the book. There are also notes that use symbols: asterisk, double dagger, the section sign (§), and the pilcrow (¶, the paragraph marker – I’ve been waiting for the chance to use “pilcrow” in a sentence). These add additional details and are at the end of each chapter. Fortunately in the Kindle edition both types of notes pop up seamlessly at the bottom of the screen. This convention, however, must be very annoying in the print edition where the reader must constantly flip back and forth.

There is a lot of interesting detail in the book. For example Kapilow tells us that Richard Rodgers “collaborated exclusively with [Lorenz] Hart from 1919 until Hart’s collapse and death at the age of forty-eight in 1943, and then with Oscar Hammerstein II from 1943 until Hammerstein’s death in 1960,” while other composers frequently changed collaborators. You might be interested in knowing that Fred Astaire would adhere scrupulously to what the composer wrote, while “Judy Garland, for example, scarcely sings a single rhythm of “Over the Rainbow” as [Harold] Arlen wrote it.”

While the book discusses in detail only sixteen songs out of the entire Broadway canon, it provides, in a highly readable manner, a fairly comprehensive history Broadway and how the musical has evolved.