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Love is the language of poets. It lends itself to figures of speech and flowery language. How do I love thee?

I love thee with similes. I love thee with hyperbole, and I love thee with metaphors. My favorite simile about love the answer to a riddle I learned when I was a very little girl: Love is like a hole.

Q: What gets bigger, the more you give it away?

Happy Valentine's Day, to you, to yours. I hope your day is filled with chocolates, doilies, and delight. And I hope you share the love: leave your favorite book in a coffee shop for the next java junkie, carry someone else's burden for a while, throw out the trash without grinching, be nice when you're feeling crabby. Ask yourself: could I go so far as to let my sister have the caramel-filled chocolate from the Godiva box?

However you answer that question, keep digging at the hole; keep throwing good seeds in. Good things will sprout.

Not just a rose, but a whole rose garden.

That's the dirt on love.

Love is a rose but you better not pick it
Only grows when it's on the vine
Handful of thorns and you'll know you've missed it
Lose your love when you say the word mine

I wanna see what's never been seen
I wanna live that age-old dream
Come on boy let's go together
Let's take the best right now

I wanna go to an old hoedown
Long ago in a western town
Pick me up 'cause my feet are dragging
Give me a lift and I'll hay your wagon

Love is a rose but you better not pick it
Only grows when it's on the vine
Handful of thorns and you'll know you've missed it
Lose your love when you say the word mine
~Neil Young

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Everyone has a favorite place to read. Mine is a large, overstuffed chintz arm chair in my office. I was looking at a lovely shelter magazine not too long ago that featured style saving tips about how to fix your furniture faux pas, presented in the classic buy/keep/toss format. The most egregious upholstery sin in this article was tacky '80s black chintz. Toss it! With tongs!

Horrors. What not to sit in. Right in my own home. But here's where I'm drawing the line with well meaning decorators: I am not tossing my chair. Although it's faded considerably--not so much that a well placed throw doesn't hide the gray--it is my throne, my prime reading spot. I'm not even reupholstering it. It's a happy chair, a reading chair, an editing chair, a napping chair. If my chair could talk, it would tell tales of books, manuscripts, magazines and dreams from as far back as the '80s, when it's chintz still had a bright sheen, and it was a definite "Buy."

Everyone has a different reading throne. Some people like to read in bed. Others like a park bench on a spring day.  I have one daughter who particularly likes to read at the dinner table, a habit that we are trying to discourage without throwing the baby out. 

I have one friend who admitted to book club one night that she only read when she was drying her hair-- the only time she got to herself. Of course we were curious. Here's the trick: She shut the toilet seat and opened the book on it. She dried her hair upside down, so she used one hand for the hairdryer and one for fluffing and page turning. Fluff, turn. Fluff, turn. Good volume. Before you criticize her methodology, let me just say: this was one well read woman. Her hair was perfect.

I'd venture to guess that were the Pew folks to take a random sampling of where people read, a high percentage would admit that even if they don't publicly celebrate National Bathroom Reading Week, they have a magazine, a mystery, or some self-help book or another tucked away in their bathroom, for that peaceful moment when they might actually get to read. Or dry their hair.

But who's asking? The written word has the power to transport us to another world. When we return we bring souvenirs, picture postcards and, most importantly, memories of our adventures. Setting off on a mind trip, it doesn't matter if we're sitting on white porcelain or black chintz when we depart.

The reading throne deserves respect.

I once saw a piece of lavatory graffiti I think I'll spend the rest of life pondering. "There are no metaphors," some malcontent had written. Carried to it's ultimate reduction, that assertion means that no word or act can represent anything more than itself. A world without metaphor is a hermetic nightmare, utterly incomprehensible, without possibility of humor or insight. Everything would happen once. No individual or event could be interpreted in the light of another.

There are metaphors, though. language exists, though its connection to reality is an ongoing open question. Literature exists. We are able to entertain narratives about other people's lives, even imaginary people's lives, and recognize elements familiar tot us from our own hopes, fears and dreams. Past ives, imaginary lives, are seen to contain messages for us, metaphorically speaking. Our understanding may draw upon them. This is the importance of fiction, that it offers meaning.

~Robert Stone
from "The Reconquest of Reality" in Writers Workshop in a Book: the Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction, edited by Alan Cheuse and Lisa Alvarez (Chronicle Books, 2007)

Reading requires task lighting that comes from behind the reader's shoulder. This can be accomplished by placing a floor lamp either at the right or the left of the reading chair. The bottom of the shade should be located at eye level to avoid glare.

You have to draw the line somewhere.

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When I was a little girl, my brother told me I couldn't carry a tune in a U-Haul. So I hit him.

When I was in my twenties, a good friend told me I was not allowed to sing in front of his child, in case she caught my tune.

When I was a Girl Scout leader in Harlem, I invited some friends to come to my girls' "fly up ceremony." Before these girls became scouts, they had never had the opportunity to swim, to do organized craft projects, or to sing Kum-bay-yah. I taught them every song that had ever moved me in the North Carolina mountains when I was a camper. After the ceremony my friends said, "We can tell you were the one who taught them the songs."

Guess what? I still love to sing. Unapologetically.

When I sing, I get endorphins.  If there were a Richter scale of endorphins, and you measured the seismic affect of various things--sex, drugs, rock and roll--it's a no brainer: the music tops the list. There is something about singing your heart out, never mind the tune, that just makes you wiggle and jiggle and tickle inside. It's cathartic: it's spiritual: it's fun.

The good news for me is that I'm not trying to make living from my singing. I'd be pretty thin. I'm a book person. I should still be pretty thin, all things considered, but carbo-lading and Whole Foods' truffled walnuts will get you through the worst of times.

I have an ongoing discussion with a few important people in my life: music or lyrics? Of course, I am a card-carrying member of the lyrics camp. But I think I'm adulterated.  I think the music influences my vote more than I'd like to admit.

Sunday was the anniversary of the day the music died. In honor of that, and in honor of all the times I said goodbye to Miss American Pie at my wild French cousins' house and sang along in my notable voice, I just want to say "Let's hear it for the band." It's never just about the lyrics. It's a synergy.

Synergy, synchronicity, serendipity, singing. "S"es abounding in my personal dictionary these days. And the beautiful thing about a dictionary is: you sing it to your own tune. There's no soundtrack. No one's done an orchestration of it. No glee clubs sing it. The words in my heart have a score that only I know.

I keep my tune in a U-Haul. Some--many--have been critical of it. But it keeps my toes tapping.

The beat goes on.

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.
~A wise person who forgot to get a good IP lawyer

And, two more thoughts on music: if you are a friend of Bright Sky and you know Patrick, you have to check out his band, the Journey Agents. If you are at all funk based. And, if you have your own band and need to book some gigs in Texas, check out Matthew Wettergreen's free ebook. And if you need anyone to edit your songs, remember that there are lots of lyrics people who go both ways.

Words. Music. Wow. La dee da de dee. La dee da de da.

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I've been contemplating the concept of the edge. The leading edge, the bleeding edge, the edge of darkness. And there's always the possibility of going over the edge--being pushed, losing my grip or aligning too closely with the crowd and rushing off terra firma into the abyss. Like the Gadarene swine.

I'm captivated with the idea of using those doomed piggies as an adjective or a morality metaphor, rather than just as a biblical tale. Ever since I started looking into that trough of meaning, I have found so many circumstances where it fits. "No, you may not have an iphone just because all of your friends have one." 

I've been editing our Zen book. It touches on the idea that as cultures spin and change faster and faster, our inner equilibrium--our strong grip on what has value and what matters--is upset. That disequilibrium leads to all kinds of negativity and unrest--personally and culturally. Of course the Abbott explains these concepts far more profoundly than I can, but the book will be out this fall, so no worries; no one will have to rely on me to be their Zen master.

The books I am currently working on create a lens through which I see my own life--shades of meaning. Sometimes I see through a barbecue lens, sometimes a motherhood lens, and sometimes Sam Houston's spectacles. So right now, I'm looking at cultural change through a Zen lens--not just the aspects of change that suggest I need to be social media savvy or get all of our books digitized or answer emails 24/7 from one device or another, but also the ones that make it apparent that I need to master some new definitions about how the world works. 

There is rich vocabulary associated with this new world order: explorer, pioneer, settler, squatter,  claim-jumper, guru, shaman, messiah, Luddite, philistine, early adapter, hold-out...the list goes on, sounding suspiciously similar to the language in every history text I ever read about  any revolution, any era of change.

For so long, cultural change was accompanied by the cry, "Go west!." Once we smacked up against that shining sea that crashes so majestically against the California coast, that cry diverged; with some people looking up, and others looking further in. And whether people identified with the NASA types saying "Go to the Moon!",  the psychologists saying ""Go to the couch!" or the Lit majors saying "Look Homeward, Angel!" it was pretty much agreed that there were still new frontiers to conquer and to settle.

Now there's a new cry.  I'm not sure just what it is: "Go Digital?" "Go 2.0?" I'm trying to make sense of this new world that has evolved around my ink on paper self, doing a little exploring and trying to figure out what my role is in it. I don't have the full answer yet, but I know it's based on helping people bring their stories into the world; I know it's based on words.

I also know that I'm not on the bleeding edge or even the leading edge of this revolution. But I want to be a part of it. I'm ready to move beyond the inland amber waves of grain and the old gray factories further east, towards an energetic coastline, with a great unknown sea in front of it.

Where am I now on my digital journey? Not in the water, not even on the rocky beach with the crashing waves. I'm still up on the cliffs overlooking this sea change. The powerful possibilities look beautiful from up here. Through my various lenses I can watch the brave explorers map the territory ahead. I have so much respect for them, but explorer is not the best role for me. Watching and learning, I'm preparing for the next leg of the adventure. And as soon as I figure out my best course into this unknown, I'll set out.

In the meantime, I'll try not to get so close to the edge that I lose my balance.

Passionate Living
 
"Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion."  Hegel
 
by Dwight Edwards
 
Passion normally arises from two separate but united fronts. One is being on the edge. The other is being in the center. Today we will look at being on the edge. What I mean by this is the high adventure of being on the cutting edge of a new endeavor. Or it can be the excitement of infusing an old endeavor with brand new possibilities.
 
There is something innately exhilarating about going where no man has gone before, of blazing a brand new path, or risking reputation for the sake of a radically new venture. Ask Galileo, Michelangelo, Edison, Einstein, Gates, and a host of lesser lights about the internal ignition of "on the edge" living. Certainly it will be frightening, certainly it will be risky; but it will also be exhilarating. As Mark Twain put it, "To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else - these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other cheap and trivial." How true!
 
It is on the edge that life upgrades to the point of true exhilaration. And this exhilaration helps fuel the passion to make something extraordinary of our lives. Hegel is exactly right - "Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion." And passion normally blossoms most bountifully along the ridges of innovation.
Flashpoint: Passion is often found at the edges.
Visit us at HighOctanefortheMind.com
Copyright © 2010 High Octane for the Mind. All Rights Reserved.

FYI: If you like that magical picture of the California coast, you can get a poster of it at All Posters. I might just do that myself.

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syn·chro·nic·i·ty : \ˌsiŋ-krə-ˈni-sə-tē, ˌsin-\ noun : circa 1889
1 : the quality or fact of being synchronous
2 : the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung
ser·en·dip·i·ty: \-ˈdi-pə-tē\ : noun
Etymology: from its possession by the heroes of the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip: Date: 1754
: the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; also : an instance of this

My life is filled with lovely words. These two seem particularly pertinent. Every day it seems some  occasion arises--I meet a certain author, or I find a meaningful manuscript--that could not have manifested without one of these magical nouns.

And these happy accidents all seem to be woven together in a larger web of intention. Not like a spider's sticky web trying to trap unsuspecting insects, but like a reassuring net under an acrobat. Or an elaborate rope ladder reaching to unknown places in the clouds.

Here's an example, a tale of three sisters: Years ago on a volunteer project I met Lizzie, a notably  intelligent, creative and kind young woman. I loved her energy and her ideas, and we became friends. She eventually went off to law school; our opportunities to get together and really visit became rare, but always a pleasure. Then I met her sister, Katherine, who was getting ready to publish her first novel. Katherine was just as wonderful as Lizzie, only different. Both were gifts from the universe.

But there was a third sister.  In any fairy tale, things happen in important numbers, three, of course, being one of the biggies. When Shelley, sister #3, moved back to Houston, 1 and 2 asked me if I would talk to her about editing. I wondered if she would be like Lizzie, or like Katherine, and if it would be possible for me to enjoy her as much.

Silly worries, quite unfounded. Number 3--actually the oldest-- is equally delightful, equally unique. A writer, an editor, a linguist and a mom, she was the perfect person to edit a book that had just come in through another serendipitous connection in New Orleans.  I was quite excited about the manuscript, but it needed an editor with a certain combination of skills to transform it from an amazing curriculum to an amazing book.

That book, now published as Oobleck, Slime, and Dancing Spaghetti, is filled with at home science experiments based on children's literature. The author, Jennifer Williams, has won the Presidential Award for teaching.  It's an inspired, cross-curricular approach to getting children interested in science through literature and Shelley's sensibilities were just what was needed to take it from the academic realm to the bookshelf in the family room.  Synchronicity. Serendipity. Or the next logical step in the path. Whatever you call it, the book won a NAPPA award, and we are quite proud of it.

Last weekend, I had an old song on my mind, the theme from the Thomas Crowne Affair.  Every time it spun through my head, it took me somewhere: the first time I saw the original movie with my parents; the album I played endlessly, picking up the needle at the end of the song and carefully moving it back to the starting groove; battalions of men in bowlers;  Renee Russo and Pierce Brosnan strolling Lexington Avenue. And through it all, russet leaves swirling, back and forth, from endings to beginnings.

Humming that tune, I went to a party where I ran into my old friend Lizzie. I came out of my reverie to realize that she had an autumn leaf tucked in her ponytail, and it was just the color of her hair. A tiny thing, but it spoke volumes. Coincidence. Synchronicity. Serendipity.

Lovely.

Round, like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel.
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning
Running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it's own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream.

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Keys that jingle in your pocket
Words that jangle your head
Why did summer go so quickly
Was it something that I said
Lovers walking along the shore,
Leave their footprints in the sand
Was the sound of distant drumming
Just the fingers of your hand

Pictures hanging in a hallway
And a fragment of this song
Half remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong
When you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of her hair

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
As the images unwind
Like the circle that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Pictures hanging in a hallway
And the fragment of this song
Half remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong
When you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of her hair

The Windmills of Your Mind
~Alan Bergman

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Some days I feel so at peace with the world, and other days every last thing seems to make me want to put up my dukes against Unfairness, Injustice, or General Wrongheadedness.  And once I get riled up, it's amazing how the most random things become evidence of the current conspiracy.

This time, it was aprons that set me off. Aprons seem pretty non-confrontational.  In fact, aprons--be they the June Cleaver type or even the racier French maid style-- are the picture of submissive femininity. Not confrontation. 

It was the Chronicle Style Section that got me worked up. They did a nice story, dateline Shiner, Texas, about aprons. How they are so simultaneously retro-nouveau-oh-so-chic these days. And they went on to talk about Virginia Helweg, a lovely lady with a  large collection. A collection that she just started because she likes aprons, not because anyone else told her that they were cool. Then they brought in the big guns--the Apron Expert, EllynAnne.

What entitles the Apron Expert to her capital letters? Her collection and knowledge, of course, and her published book. This is when my hackles started rising up, like hungry villi after a home-cooked meal. Because experience has predisposed me to think that when the Houston paper mentions a book, quotes an expert, or has something they feel is worth mentioning either above the fold or in the back 40, chances are it's something or somebody from somewhere else.

H'town rocks. My favorite tune to sing or dance to is that this town has got  an open, can-do, creative, no-brow, deep-in-the-heart spirit that can't be found anywhere else.  It really chaps me when people who say they love this place feel they need to start out with the disclaimer: "well, its so ugly, but..."; or, "well, it's not Aspen, or the East Coast, or Paris/London/Biarritz, but...."  

But nothing. It is enough for it to be Houston. And those of us who claim to love it need to embrace it for how it is, not in spite of what it is not. We can admire other towns' windswept beaches, miracle miles and neon lights and remain non-apologetically enthusiastic about what we have right here, right now, in this fun, funky, funny, fab Bayou City.

I'm by no means advocating provincialism, jingoism, or even Houstonism. I'm patently anti-ism. I just think it's time for this awesome town to stop with the Marx Brothers "I'd never be in a club that would have me" attitude. It is time for Houston to say it rocks--in a completely straightforward, unaffected, but powerful way that would be so appropriate to its unique charm.  It is time for the Houston paper to stop thinking that all the culture news that's fit to print--be it about aprons or art shows, books or bands--comes from Somewhere Else. We're in the throes of an eat/pray/love/buy local movement, and it's not just a Central Market marketing campaign: Houston is totally worth it.

So why did an innocent, and actually interesting apron article get me up on my Houston soapbox? I felt left out, of course. We have a perfectly darling cookbook author, Marie Hejl, who happens to make beautiful aprons.  In fact, Marie  was making and selling them on little backwater shows like Martha Stewart long before aprons went mainstream chic. And there was no mention of her beautiful cookbook or her aprons in this article. And it would have been such a good fit. So local. So 2010.

If you build it, they will come. I believe that. If you publish books in Houston--instead of in standard places like New York or Boston or California--they will come. And, they have: the reception our homegrown books have received has been exciting and rewarding, for us at Bright Sky and for our wonderful authors.

But like the girl next door waiting for the phone to ring, I keep opening the hometown news, waiting for them to be excited about the books being published right here--Texas voices, H'town voices, local voices. And every time, it's the book from somewhere else that turns their eye. It's such a Taylor Swift song.

So the apron article just hit a nerve. You want aprons? Cutting edge social media? Nationally renown wellness experts? Baseball heroes? More barbecue than you ever dreamed of? Look no further. It's all in H'town. Right here, right now.

And chances are, if it's here, we're publishing a book about it. We'd be happy to tell you about it, or introduce you to the author, or send you a review copy.

Just give us a call.

Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.
~Malcolm Forbes

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I'm desperately trying to manage all my communications resources. When to email, when to call, when to meet, when to tweet, when to blog and when to throw my hands up and sob. And then there's Facebook.  Not to mention submissions. I want to be accessible, but I also want to be productive.

Friends have offered lots of well meaning advice: keep your responses short, use different mailboxes, have multiple accounts, have one account, face west and stand on one foot when you are answering emails. Of course, I also have a book about how to handle this quintessentially modern problem. And, of course, I haven't had time to read it yet.

But even when I am in danger of being overwhelmed by emails, I still like them. It's like a Go Fish game. Clicking on that little stamp at the bottom of my screen still conjures faint feelings of this-could-be-the-lottery-winner excitement. Something really wonderful could be just one click away.

I've improved my odds a little on having a happy surprise in my inbox.  Our author, Dwight Edwards, who wrote A Tale of Three Ships, a concise and useful parable about charting your course through life, has an email blast. Every so often--and it seems to always be just when I need it most--a short inspirational story pops up in my mail. Here is today's, just when I am tearing my hair out over time-management questions.

                                                        Spending Time Well
"Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for it is the stuff life is made of."  Benjamin Franklin

Time. It is the one of the few things we all share in common. And we all do something with it - for better or worse. It strikes me that one of the great difficulties in using our time most effectively is maintaining a proper perspective on its market value. In the push and shove of our daily lives, it becomes desperately easy to lose sight of the preciousness of these things called minutes, hours, and days. Arnold Bennett puts it well,

Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions... No one can take it from you. It is not something that can be stolen. And no one receives either more or less than you receive. Moreover, you cannot draw on its future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.

Franklin is right. Time is indeed "the stuff life is made of". We all are entrusted with the same amount. The only question is where and how we will spend it.                   ~Dwight Edwards

Flashpoint: Well-spent lives are the result of well-utilized time.
Visit Dwight  at HighOctanefortheMind.com
Copyright © 2010 High Octane for the Mind. All Rights Reserved.

And with that much needed perspective, I think I'll get off-line and go back to editing.

The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.
~Tillie Olsen

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I just love holidays. I love any reason to celebrate. One of my all-time favorite books is a children's book by Byrd Baylor called I'm in Charge of Celebrations. It's basically a call to note and celebrate the rich variety of moments that life brings us. It's a testament to both mindfulness and thankfulness, two nesses that make everything better.

So, today is a holiday, and after a quick turn around the lake in Hermann Park, a stroll through the Japanese Garden, and a truly scrumptious picnic, I turned it into a busman's holiday and headed straight for the bookstore. With coffee in hand, I got so lost in the stacks that my family had to call me on the phone to find me. It was heavenly.

But not to get sappy on you: it wasn't perfect. The fly in the ointment of my perfectly lovely holiday is that I wasn't at the bookstore I really wanted to visit. The deep satisfaction of my day was really a classic case of love the one you're with.

The one I really love is in Denver. And I didn't have a plane ticket today. If I could have gone anywhere this afternoon to drink my coffee and get lost in the stacks, I would have gone to The Tattered Cover. If you've been there, you get it. If you haven't, go as soon as you can. And if you, like me, have no plane tickets in your immediate future, check out their blog. You'll get lots of great ideas for things to read, if you're not busy reading manuscripts all the time. Or if you're on holidays.

When it comes to bookstores, I'm a Big Love kind of girl. I'll tell you about the one I've got tucked away in Asheville another time. And there's another I fancy in Austin.  But for today, my heart belongs to the Tattered Cover.

Don't worry. I know how people in Colorado feel about Texans, and that's OK. Love conquers all.

I come here with no expectations, only to profess, now I am at the liberty to do so, that my heart is and will always be yours.
~Jane Austen

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I went to a marathon watching party this weekend, and I ran into my friend Katherine Center.  Not literally, because I was eating donuts, not running.  She wasn't running either, she was returning home from a literary event in Dallas, something that sounded sort of like an Iron Chefs for writers, although as she said, "Writers are so sensitive, they couldn't really judge us too harshly." Picture writers in the hands of Simon Cowell.

She said the people who put the event on thought that readings could be a little iffy sometimes, and they wanted to spice up the medium.  They had Nerf footballs and stuff. They had a ball, literary-ly.

Katherine's main job is writing books and doing literary stuff. My main job is editing books and doing publishing stuff. Net net, she goes to infinitely more readings than I do, so I hadn't exactly gotten the news that readings could be iffy.  I still put them in the category of the word from Mt. Sinai

Here in H'town we have a wonderful reading series put on by Inprint called The Margarett Root Brown Reading series. It brings amazing authors to town. Between my responsibilities at Bright Sky and my responsibilities at home, I don't get to go to these readings as often as my fancy Editorial Director title might insinuate, but when I do go, I am always transported.

I read with great delight in the New York Times that Zadie Smith has a new collection of essays just published. Stop everything and google Amazon. Like Katherine, maybe a little more famous, Zadie Smith is an amazing author.  I was first introduced to her at an Inprint reading. She is beautiful--in a completely Beauty of Different way--and smart, and as clever with words as any writer I have ever admired or analyzed for a grade.

Having stumbled into the reading that night at the invitation of a friend, I hadn't done any due diligence on who Zadie Smith was or what she wrote about. I vaguely remembered an unread copy of White Teeth on my shelf. As I listened to her in the velvet-seated darkness of the Wortham, I was blown away by her eloquence and her story's similarity to one of my all-time favorites, E.M. Forster.

Well, go figure. On Beauty, the book from which she read that night, was a reworking of Howard's End. Only so modern and so insightful it made me think that there was no time or space between me and not only Forster, but any great writer I have read. Hearing her read in her sexy Anglo tones from her gorgeous prose was an experience far beyond iffy, by anybody's definition. I've never been able to think of glee clubs the same way since.

So today, when my old friend Zadie popped up on my screen-saving NYT. I was delighted.  Her essays sound so fine to me, although of course our Overtly Intellectual Friends to the North had to rake them over the coals. In them, she talks about David Foster Wallace, and Zora Neale Hurston, of course Forster, and so many other people who have given us gifts of prose beyond panel--or New York Times-- judging.

I can't wait to get the book. And when I read it, I'll hear her beautiful voice in my mind. Just like I hear Katherine's lovely voice when we eat donuts and cheer for runners or when I read her books. It will be like Zadie is my friend, too.

Thanks to that iffy, old-school reading.

This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness. That it should be so is a tribute to Hurston's skill. She makes "culture" — that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance — seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise. She allows me to indulge in what Philip Roth once called "the romance of oneself," a literary value I dislike and yet, confronted with this beguiling book, cannot resist. She makes "black woman-ness" appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals across centuries and continents and languages and religions...
Almost — but not quite. That is to say, when I'm reading this book, I believe it, with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn't normally. Things like "She is my sister and I love her."

~Zadie Smith on Their Eyes Were Watching God

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
~E. M. Forster

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