Betsy Robinson

Yippeeee! On sale today: Cats on a Pole, a novel (with humor and an edge) about curmudgeon Harmony Rogers and healing teacher Joshua Gardner, and their duel of psychic wills. It's available wherever you like to buy books and e-books. But here is a link to buy it at a discount directly from Ingram, the distributor. (Cheaper for you, more royalty for me, no Amazonians chewing up the majority of the price, and only one shipment—smallest possible carbon footprint): $10+shipping for paperback for sale to addresses in U.S.A. only:

 

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?KD7AtCWE6EmYWL6RGzaLBcFDddACvPC4RxwU9SPSj5O

 

To see more--videos, etc.--go to the Cats page on this website.

Yesterday I went to a 1:00 matinee of Merrily We Roll Along. It was wonderful as only Stephen Sondheim played by actors at the top of their game can be wonderful. The first scene shows a man whose life is a career success and a personal debacle, and then the music asks, "How did I/we get here as we seemed to be just merrily rolling along?" The answer plays out in reverse chronological order.

 

Everything about this production, from the Playbill cover to the music to the mess that ensued in the last row of the balcony behind me was perfect. But it took till this morning's contemplation to see that.

 

The successful mess of a character, Frank, was at a crossroads after producing a Hollywood hit: would he completely fuck up his life and his family by giving in to addictions for sex and money, or would he stop himself? It was during the church silence of the moment of this decision that the usher decided to seat an entire row of high school students behind my row. They tried to be quiet, but they were kids, so they disrupted the mood and tension that the entire play had built to.

 

Shortly after this, at intermission, one audience member took it upon himself to scold the students, whereupon their teacher refused to allow that they'd made the mistake which had disrupted the dramatic tension, and he reprimanded the man for his anger, deflecting with an impenetrable smile and finally accusing the angry man of intolerance, thereby enraging him more. In the teacher's mind—he later explained to me—the entire problem was upper-class theatergoers disparaging inner-city students who they believed didn't belong there. When the "Fuck yous" erupted, the usher took the two men outside.

 

During their exeunt, I tried to explain to the girl behind me, who'd asked a question right in the middle of the silence, that the problem was that they had interrupted a tense emotional moment; that it's necessary to understand the environment they'd entered.

 

"It's not my fault," she protested.

 

The teacher, still with his impenetrable smile, returned and explained to me about mass intolerance of his students. I pointed out that the entire balcony had been jarred out of the play, and finally, he mentioned almost as an aside that the whole thing was his fault because he had thought the show began at 2:00, not 1. (Meaning he had ignored three emails from the theater verifying the time.*)

 

I asked the girl who'd been trying to understand the plot if she'd like to know the plot. "Yes," she replied with gratitude and relief. So I gave her and the students around her an emotional recap. They seemed to appreciate it.

 

What dawned on me this morning was that we "principals" all took on mirror roles to the principal actors. I became Lindsay Mendez's peacemaker/explainer, Mary; the attacking audience member became Daniel Radcliffe's irate jilted writing partner, Charley; and the smiling teacher became Jonathan Groff's irresponsible writer, Frank.

 

All the world's a stage . . . It is mind-blowing how we be. But if we principals in our own plays can see this device as a principle of life, if we can admit what we're really doing, maybe we'll stop being so angry.

 

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*And my need to point this out in this blog is me, once again, taking on the Lindsay Mendez role of being the smart one who's seeing the whole thing, cannot affect it, so she gets sarcastic. Oy vey, it never ends.

Happy New Year!

 

Thirty-one years ago, with the help of editor/filmmaker Steve Clarendon,  my dog, Daisy, and my actor friend Shelley Wyant, I made this little film short that I had written to the score of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Long before digital technology, adding music from an LP became too cumbersome to attempt, so the VHS of the rough cut languished in a dusty bag on my top book shelf.

 

Recently, I had the video digitized and finally finished it with the help of Vivaldi, royalty free courtesy of John Harrison with the Wichita State University Chamber Players.

 

(Please excuse the frame counter; there is no way to eliminate it easily and cheaply.)

 

I hope you enjoy this love letter to New York City, seasons in Central Park, human and canine oddities, and angels in dog suits everywhere.

 

 

 

Vivaldi recording, by John Harrison with the Wichita State University Chamber Players, is royalty free.

License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm an editor as well as a writer, and recently I couldn't resist correcting an error in a library book (see illus). When I posted about it on Facebook, I was overwhelmed by comments with people's grammar peccadilloes. People who read a lot get annoyed about errors in published material. Their ire made me retire my own. However it also brought up—not annoyance, because I get paid to fix mistakes—a screaming head full of chronic errors, which resulted in an article, just published by a site called Writing Bad.

 

They cut two of the most annoying errors, so I'm pasting them here—as a teaser … and for closure:

 

WELL/GOOD

Using "good" instead of "well" is commonly misspoken, but when this gaff makes it into print and is not part of a quotation, it's just annoying.

 

Wrong: He was offered a good-paying job.

 

"Well" is an adverb, meaning it describes the verb—how you do the verb.

 

Correct:

He was offered a well-paying job, and boy, did he feel good about that.

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I made this video as part of the Authors Guild's initiative, #SupportAuthors, to promote new books in the age quarantine.

 

The websites mentioned are Graywolf Press's page for Percival Everett's new book Telephone

and the wonderful new bookshop.org that supports independent bookstores--here is their page for the book: bookshop.org.

 

 

Now that I have just finished this magnificent book, my review:

 

How on earth do you review a book that is as personal, as tender, and as unnamable as your own soul? Reading Percival Everett, and this new novel in particular, is like entering the territory where all life comes from. I had such a hit of this when I first began the book that I literally passed out. In yoga there are names for this. Suffice it to say that it's when your consciousness is overwhelmed, stretched beyond its normal capacity.

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As a person who woke with dread for the four decades I was compelled to work with other people in offices, silently thinking "if only I could work alone," I may have some wisdom for people who normally leap out of bed in anticipation of social contact—people who are now forced into a routine that requires low levels of oxytocin to enjoy. So to you, I offer the following tips, the first one of which got me through my years of mandated social agony:

 

1. It's only temporary. If you can just do this for the required time in order to stay well, know that one day you will be able to revert to your happy natural self. Anything is do-able, even life, if you remember that the only consistent thing is change, and this too shall change.

 

2. No more makeup, no more appropriate dressing of any kind. No more need for clothes! Think of the money you'll save.

 

3. You can fart with abandon.

 

4. Relax your facial muscles. I'll bet you have no idea how much time you've spent stress smiling, faking care when you really didn't want to hear about Bob's grandmother's operation, pretending you were okay with that guy/girl in the neighboring cubicle latching onto you when their very presence made you want to shower. No more pretending! Feel the relief and let it move through your now-flaccid body.

 

5. To keep that flaccid body from melting into a puddle of adipose, exercise at home—YouTube videos, Kathy Smith videos are my go-to, free weights, a treadmill, dance like nobody's watching—because nobody is. Nobody to impress. Enjoy some private endorphins. Work up a sweat. And, again, fart with abandon.

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On the anniversary of publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, my friend Karen Troianello posted a Facebook homage to her multiple copies of the book, and it got me thinking about my own multiples (see photo) and the personal reasons I will hang onto them for the rest of my life. And that got me wondering about other people's multiples and reasons for holding them. So I asked.

Boy, are we loyal to books we love. We cherish them like family members. My friend Maureen Phillips who writes delightful stories and poems about fairies calls her multiples "a little family of weirdos who all sit on the shelves together." (Madame Bovary, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Shipping News, A Confederacy of Dunces, the stories and poems of Edgar Allen Poe.)  Read More 

After publishing The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, a funny novel about a 4'11", 237 pound woman with a habit of lying, burgling, and incinerating houses--a woman desperate to be seen and accepted for her talent and inner beauty--I became a little desperate to read funny novels about other difficult women. There are not a lot of them. But here's what I found.  Read More 

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About a year ago I attended a Jeffrey Euginedes lecture on the subject of writer's voice (Columbia University School of the Arts, Heyman Center for the Humanities Creative Writing Lecture series). If you have about an hour, by all means listen; it's rich. [He stops reading and turns loose, funny, and charming during the Q&A which starts around 40:00. (My questions are at 52:58—about the nature of the personal "starter yeast" that brought him to commit years of life to researching Middlesex. His wonderful answers involve Latin class, Ovid's Metamorphosis, whether men or women enjoy sex more, and having a hopeless existence.)]{POSTSCRIPT: THIS VIDEO HAS BEEN PRIVATIZED. I'M SO SORRY. BELIEVE ME, IT IS WONDERFUL}

I start reading a lot of books and nothing makes me abandon them faster than a generic voice; to my eyes and inner ear, it's like fingers with no fingerprints. Not only is something off, but there is no feeling of surprise for me when I hit that kind of writing; no pulse. And the majority of books fall into this category. Why? Probably for the same reason so few of us generally and regularly express who we really are from our deepest essence. Which makes me all the more grateful when I land on a writer with a voice like no other—as unique as their fingerprints, so resonant with pulse that the words vibrate off the page and throughout my physical/spiritual system. I recently discovered two such writers: Amanda Filipacchi and Bradley Somer. Here are my reviews of their magnificent new novels: Read More 

It all started at BookExpo America (BEA) 2013, arguably the largest book publishing convention in the U.S., so it seemed fitting that I asked my mother, Edna Robinson, whose debut novel, The Trouble with the Truth, found a copacetic agent there, to accompany me to BEA 2015. The fact that she has been dead since 1990 is inconsequential.

"Mom," I said, "things have changed since 1958 when you wrote your coming-of-age book about a lost but funny girl named Lucresse in the 1930s, (called by Booklist, 'a gem of a book') [No, of course I didn’t really say all this, but I’m trying to make this conversation both comprehensible and appealing!] You thought getting a word processor in 1989, a year before you skedaddled, was wild. Just wait till you see what’s going on now!"

Edna Robinson: "I can hardly contain myself. Are you really going to wear those shoes?"  Read More 

For a nine-pound Maltese, Rosie had a big life. For her first two years, it was her job to keep my sick mother company and refuse to be paper trained.

"You have to say 'No!' like a bark," I’d tell my mother. "Use a deep, sharp voice."

"No!" barked my mother, but still Rosie urinated on the carpet.

She learned to sit for a treat and to run under the bed on command whenever the visiting nurses came. "Heel" and "stay" where not really relevant.

"She's not happy," my mother would say when she phoned. "Can you bring Daisy over to play?"

Rosie lived for our visits, and she and Daisy would play for ten hours straight, and, although she adored my mother, Rosie would beg to go with us when Daisy and I left.

When my mother died, it was Rosie’s job to take care of me. "I can't," I'd moan at the whole mess of life and death, and, cuddled in my lap, Rosie would lick away my tears.
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It was February 2013. I’d been freelance book editing since losing my magazine job—on a day christened “Bloody Wednesday” in New York publishing—just before Christmas in 2008. Freelancing is a feast-or-famine deal, and I’d had close to a month of famine when a little voice in my head whispered, “It’s time. Pull Mom’s manuscript out of the closet.”

In 1957, when I was six, my mother, Edna Robinson, had written a short story called “The Trouble with the Truth.” After it was published in the 1959 edition of the New World Writing book series, selected as one of the “most exciting and original” stories of its time by editors who had previously introduced the work of Samuel Beckett and Jack Kerouac, Edna’s intensity became impenetrable. I remember watching her burrowed in her study typing. Why was she so mad, I wondered.

She wasn’t mad. As a writer, I now understand the intensity. She was working her story into a novel of the same title. And when that novel was optioned by Harper & Row—and then dropped simply because it was about a single father with two peculiar children in the 1920s and ’30s, and To Kill a Mockingbird had occupied that territory, I believe something in my mother died.  Read More