The movie is famous; the novel has been almost forgotten. Although Alfred Hitchcock was the major artist and Robert Bloch the minor one, Bloch still deserved better than what he got.
This week I guest blog at Home Projectionist about Psycho the movie and Psycho the book.
Christa Polkinhorn has just published the third book in her Family Portrait series: EMILIA. The other two are LOVE OF A STONEMASON and AN UNCOMMON FAMILY. These novels—set in Switzerland, Italy, Peru, and France—trace the fortunes of artist Karla Bocelli as she grows up, finds her vocation, marries, and has children.
EMILIA begins with Karla discovering she is pregnant again at age forty-five. The birth of the little girl, Emilia, changes everything.
I asked Christa “Why do you write about families?” This is her answer:
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I think the seeds of the topics we chose are in our own personal life, no matter how fictional the final story is going to be. How do we choose our subjects, or how do they choose us?
I have always enjoyed reading stories about family and relationships, love relationships, relationships between parents and children, or between friends. When I started to write, this topic kept coming up again and again. I often tried to write in a different genre but never got very far. Perhaps part of this has to do with my own history when it comes to family and relationships.
I was born late into my parents’ life—just like Emilia in the novel with the same title, although the circumstances in my family were very different from the family in the novel. My only sister was eighteen years older. She married and had children when I was still a child myself. Since my sister and my brother-in-law lived right next door, I lived both at their house as well as with my parents. I was an only child with my parents and had “siblings” at my sister’s. So I grew up in a slightly “uncommon family” (which also became the title of one of my books, although here again the family in the novel was nothing like my own family).
In the end, it was growing up in my parents’ house as an only child rather than in a larger family like my sister’s that made a more permanent mark on my character. I became independent, adventurous, and somewhat of a hermit. I moved across continents as a young woman and lived far away from my childhood family. I got married, got divorced, and didn’t have any children. This dichotomy of being my own person yet yearning for and appreciating “family”—the joys, the disappointments, the turmoil, the peaceful times—followed me all through life.
It was at a time of a crisis in my own family in Switzerland that got me started on the first novel I wrote, LOVE OF A STONEMASON, which eventually became the second book in the Family Portrait series. My mother died at the ripe old age of 102, and she was the last person in my immediate family to go, my sister and father having passed earlier. As many of us know, the death of the last member of one’s childhood family is a crucial, painful, and unsettling event. It makes us aware that we are the last surviving member and that we are most likely going to be next.
Another important event was a discussion with one of my nieces in Switzerland. She expressed a fairly negative view of relationships between couples, telling me that so many of her friends were separated and divorced. I couldn’t deny the fact that a lot of couples broke up and relationships were some of our biggest challenges. My own experience with marriage and relationships should be testimony enough for me to agree with her. But because I am an optimist by nature, this whole negative attitude just didn’t sit right with me. Wasn’t “relationships don’t work” just an excuse for our inability (or selfishness or whatever else) to make them work?
I thought about this over the following few days. I started thinking about couples and relationships in my own family and among my friends and I suddenly realized that for every broken one, there were quite a few that survived. My parents certainly didn’t have a marriage made in heaven, but they stuck with each other until “death does us part.” My sister and brother-in-law and many of my married friends stayed married and weathered all kinds of storms. So it was possible.
One of the reviewers of LOVE OF A STONEMASON wrote the following quotation she had found somewhere while trying to think of what to write about my novel: “I don’t pretend to know what love is for everyone, but I can tell you what it is for me; love is knowing all about someone, and still wanting to be with them more than any other person, love is trusting them enough to tell them everything about yourself, including the things you might be ashamed of, love is feeling comfortable and safe with someone, but still getting weak knees when they walk into a room and smile at you.” (Review by Misty Baker, Amazon.com)
I couldn’t have said it any better. I guess my novels are a way of exploring both the challenges and joys of relationships. Being close to someone can be dangerous; it makes us vulnerable, it scares the heck out of us, but without it, we live an impoverished existence, no matter how “rich” we are.
Website: http://www.christa-polkinhorn.com
Blog: http://christa-polkinhorn.blogspot.com/
Author Page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Author.ChristaPolkinhorn
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/christa.polkinhorn
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cpolkinhorn
Goodreads page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4202173.Christa_Polkinhorn
Arts journalist Susan Eisenberg published a piece this week in The Huffington Post titled TV’s Smash Seems Doomed, But The Show Deserves a Third Season. I like SMASH myself and am writing this blog to figure out why.
SMASH is a big-budget, ambitious series set in New York. Season 1 centers around the rocky road to Broadway for a musical about the life of Marilyn Monroe called BOMBSHELL. It is a terrific musical. (To sample the music, search on “Smash Bombshell” at iTunes.) This year a second, RENT-like musical, HIT LIST, is in the mix. It is wilder, less sure of itself.
SMASH season 2 cast photo. ©2013 NBC Universal Media, LLC
Check out SMASH at NBC.
And on Facebook.
SMASH has lots of edges—individual qualities that make sparks fly. It has a high operating temperature, it is passionate, and it takes risks. The show is engaging in the best sense of that word.
There are SMASH haters, which does not surprise me. That is a side effect of being engaging. But if SMASH goes away, it is a safe bet that no network will aim so high again.
It has new show runners this season. Some of the changes make sense to me; others do not. However, none of them made it a better show. (Okay, getting rid of Ellis made it a better show.) Its second season has new edges—that’s all.
If the changes were made in response to the SMASH trashers, the low ratings this season are unsurprising. Who in their right mind would think the path to success lies in following the advice of people who hate you? But I don’t think that was what happened. I think SMASH just needs a third season to prove itself.
The good in this show is gold.
SMASH has been moved from Tuesday to Saturday. The next episode airs tomorrow, Saturday April 6, at 9 pm. Its name is The Surprise Party. Liza Minnelli is a guest star.
If you’ve never seen this show, check it out. Aiming high has its rewards.
The 18th century automaton called The Turk could play chess with humans and win. It once played Benjamin Franklin and presumably beat him. It attracted acclaim for this chess-playing ability.
Except the cabinet that supposedly held the Turk’s clockwork machinery held a human chess player willing to work anonymously and in cramped conditions. In short, the Turk was a hoax. But this hoax is interesting for what it says about our willingness to believe.
In this essay for BBC News Magazine, writer Adam Gopnik considers the Turk. He observes that people want choose beautiful and mysterious solutions over cynical ones. Then, Gopnik goes into a meditation on talent:
So the inventor’s real genius was not to build a chess-playing machine. It was to be the first to notice that, in the modern world, there is more mastery available than you might think; that exceptional talent is usually available, and will often work cheap.
Good stuff, all of it.
A Point of View: Chess and 18th Century artificial intelligence.
This is my sixth blog about The Artist’s Way course. The first five are Everything Is Connected, Fasten Your Seat Belts, Reading Deprivation, Do Fury Honor, and Becalmed.
Week 12 is the final week of the course. Not that the course is ever supposed to be “over.” The two key actions—morning pages and a weekly artist date—are meant to continue forever.
For twelve weeks, seven days a week, I have been writing three pages in longhand before I start the work of the day. By “writing” I do not mean WRITING. I mean putting down whatever comes to mind. Sometimes these pages are meditative. Sometimes they are really boring. When I re-read them after nine weeks, I was surprised at the insight and clarity that bloomed amidst the boring parts.
To do morning pages, you need to make up your mind to do them. That’s the main thing. Then you need a cheap notebook—Walgreens has them, and you could beat their price at Walmart. You should use a pen that feels good to the hand, because you are going to be holding that pen a lot. I like Papermate Ink Joy.
The morning pages are therapy. As therapy goes, they are an astonishing bargain. Your cost is about a half hour a day and the price of the pens and notebooks.
As I write these pages, I often think of the movie Annie Hall. Alvy and Annie spent a lot of time in their respective therapists’ offices, thinking out loud about their lives. With the morning pages, you write out loud about your life. “If I do X, then Y will happen. But if I don’t do X . . . .”
(Come to think of it, Annie was not on a couch. Her therapist had her sitting up in a chair.)
Here’s the thing: morning pages work the way that talk therapy does. You remember the same dreams, you work out the same issues, you return again and again to the same meaningful themes.
I didn’t know that to do talk therapy, you don’t actually have to pay anyone to listen. Writing gets it done.
I’ve spent the last month or so decluttering the place. I’ve donated things, made trips to Goodwill, and done all the throwing out, rearranging, and repurposing that came when I paid attention to things I had stopped looking at. I repotted the two permanent indoor plants and very happy they were that I finally noticed how cramped and suffering they were in old pots that they had long since outgrown.
At last! Things that should be put away are put away. Things I don’t like are gone. I know what I own. I found not only what I wanted to get rid of but 
also good stuff I had forgotten I had.
There is space now. I can’t call it new because it has been there all the time.
Physical clutter and mental clutter have things in common.
Everyone instinctively knows what mental clutter is. It is the stuff that stands in your way, yammering about the past. It is old habits that no longer serve a purpose, or never did. It is fears based not on reality but on self-talk. Such clutter does not go away easily. But it does, like spring coming. Which spring is actually doing right now, peeking up through the snow and cold.
Another indie author, Christa Polkinhorn, invited me to participate in a round-robin blog tour in which authors of various stripes would describe their next project. (See links for Susan Eisenberg and Christa at the end.) My new novel is a sequel to CEL & ANNA: A 22nd CENTURY LOVE STORY.
The sequel is due out this summer. This Q&A is the first look at it:
Its working title is WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING. The title came from my niece Brynn’s linear algebra notebook. She is studying physics at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.
From the book that preceded it: CEL & ANNA: A 22nd CENTURY LOVE STORY. At the end of CEL, a cataclysmic event occurs. The sequel deals with what happens next.
It is science fiction, with the caveat that there is no actual science in it.
The book has two settings: the Reunited States (Earthworld) and the internet (Networld). In Networld, actors could only voice the characters, and I don’t know who I would pick. In the Earthworld scenes, I would cast as many actors as possible from the series SMASH. I love that show.
Networld attacks Earthworld.
A little more than 2 years, though there was down time in that 2 years.
Self-published. I have wised up considerably about that process.
My book is centered around the rise of machine civilization. This is a common theme now; check out Science Fiction – High Tech at Amazon.
Extreme Reality Warning
The Government Is Down
The Strange Case of Rampal-E
Magic, As It Electrifies
In a World White as Dawn
Shadow and the Stovepipes
Time as humans perceived it had no meaning to Cel, either before he made the jump to Networld or after. A year was long as a lifetime; a millisecond was a nice bite-sized bit of time. Cel could move around comfortably in a millisecond. When he ran at top speed, he went far faster than that.
The first thing that surprised him about Networld was that it had become a kind of electronic primordial soup, from which life arose in abundance. The second thing that surprised him was how unintelligent and disposable most of that life was.
Visit Susan Eisenberg’s blog at Unsynchronized Passions to learn more about her next novel, LUCKY FOR YOU.
Visit Christa Polkinhorn’s blog at Christa Polkinhorn Bookworm Press to learn more about her new novel, EMILIA.
Visit Gloria Bowman’s blog at Gloria Bowman Stories to learn more about her new collection of short stories, MEN WITH LONG HAIR.
Check out hashtag #BlogNextBigThing on Twitter to find more author blogs about works in progress.
The only useful thing I learned in high school was how to touch-type. It a good thing to know, even with the awkwardness of the QWERTY keyboard. (Its purpose was not to slow typists down, by the way. It was to prevent early typewriters from jamming.)
Texting requires different skills though. For some reason, the hardest one for me has been getting initial caps where I want them with the iPad. Something about the timing of the touch for “Cap” — I haven’t got it down.
The age of written (versus spoken) communication has taken us back to another time. We now know what it was like to write a letter and wait for a response. Someone posts a Facebook status update and checks back in several times a day, hoping for comments and likes in the same way that a letter writer opens the mailbox every day, looking for an answer.
As an ex-English major, I greet the rise of written communication with pleasure. I am in my strength with it.
But the rise of written communication also means the rise of the typo. Dealing with typos is now part of everyone’s life.
Typos come easily in a world of keyboards. That is why we have spell-checkers, shortcuts, and auto-correct. The purpose is not just to save keystrokes. It is to ease the typo burden. We first-worlders spend a lot of time tapping out messages on little keyboards unsuited to human hands. But computers are inflexible, and we are adaptable, so we do what we always do: adapt.
Imagine how much time goes into fixing typos, apologizing for typos, and being embarrassed by typos. The productivity drain, on a worldwide level, must be staggering.
Like death and taxes, typos are certainties. In the 200,000 or so years that modern humans have walked the earth, we have never before had to deal with typos as a way of life. But here they are and here we are, and we fix, fix, fix them.
