Coming appropriately on Flag Day, the IG report is out. Let the left-right spin begin. Prediction: the five FBI execs in trouble will get a slap on the wrist and Hillary will skate as she always has. It will be interesting to see if congress has the balls to subpoena the rank and file agents who threatened to revolt because of the behavior of the upper echelon. That's the only thing that would take the matter to a level beyond politics as usual.
Here's some fun literary stuff gleaned from thoughtco.com: “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” – Kurt Vonnegut. Although I wouldn't describe my reaction as "terror," I remember how happy a dear friend was when Bill Clinton - "one of our generation" - was elected president. Although I was happy when the second Bush - another of our generation - was elected, he was a colossal disappointment. As for Vonnegut, he incorporated push-ups and sit-ups into his writing routine and, calling it quits around 5:30 each afternoon, unwound with a glass of Scotch.
“Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today,” said Mark Twain and, given each day's news, he was so right.
E.B. White, author of beloved children’s classics Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web never listened to music, which is unimaginable. Music is one of the things that keeps me sane or, at least, approaching sanity.
Leo Tolstoy's immortal character Anna Karenina was inspired by the daughter of one of Russia’s greatest poets, Alexander Pushkin.
What elevates genre writers above their peers? Here's a few lines from Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, the second novel to feature Private Eye Phillip Marlowe: “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”
The first novel written and published by an African-American is William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, which was published in England in 1853 and offers a fictional account of Thomas Jefferson’s slave daughters. And we all thought that wasn't known until fairly recently.
Also on the literary front: I was in the middle of my morning walk when I had a revelation concerning what will be my last book, which I plan to self-publish in January 2020. It's influenced by James Joyce's Ulysses, which I've read twice and understood five-ten percent of it, and that may be a generous assumption. I had nearly as much trouble with Virginia Woolf's works. They employ stream of conscious. I so love the idea of being inside a main character's head that I longed to create such a novel most folks would understand. Maybe that means mine is likely to be shallow. One of the titles I considered is Ulysses for Dummies, which, though amusing, seems a put down of the content. At one time I considered Ulysses of Brooklyn, which lacks smoothness. I was going to go with American Ulysses, although I wondered if people would think I was putting it on the same plane as Joyce's work. I also wanted to name the protagonist Ulysses, but there has probably never been an Italian-American with that moniker. That problem was solved this AM. His nickname will be Yul, short for Ulysses, dubbed so at at time when he sported a full beard and a friend had just seen a film based on the Greek hero of mythology. During lunch, the title occurred to me - Yulysses.
It was insanity today at the floating book shop. Rob, a local porter, came along with a shopping cart filled with books. Nearly every one is valuable. I rejected only those that were damaged. Whoever gave them up was a fan of the arts. There are beautiful pictorials of the works of many great painters, bios of Hollywood stars, books on Jazz, and a bunch of literary fiction. They took quite a while to sort. I stayed an extra hour, hoping the load would be reduced. My thanks to Barry, Boris and Steven, who bought five between them, and to the Frenchman, who'd selected eight earlier. My thanks to the other kind folks who made purchases, and to the gentleman who dropped off about 15 Debbie Macomber novels. Help!
My Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Fortezza/e/B002M4NLJE
Read Vic's Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza
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