Friday Favorites: Zine Scene – by Louise Tripp

It's been a zine-ful week, hasn't it? Wednesday I posted about my zine collection and my obsession with all things xeroxed-and-stapled. For this week's Friday Favorites, I thought I'd continue in that vein and tell you about a teeny little D.I.Y guide to making zines that I happen to love. It's Stolen Sharpie Revolution (#2, because it's in its second edition) by long-time zinester Alex Wrekk.

If you've ever wondered the best way to write, print, promote and distribute your zine, this book is full of the kind of information you will find invaluable. The author begins by offering suggestions on how to start planning your zine (for instance, she lists the materials you may need and discusses the importance of thinking about your audience), then offers up the skinny on everything from the most efficient and least expensive way to make tons of copies to how and where you can sell your masterpiece of zine-dom. She also includes listings of outside resources: distros (short for distribution sources), zine libraries and stores, online zine resources, places to read zine reviews and more.

a look inside Stolen Sharpie Revolution

As much as I love blogging, I know that the production of zines has decreased due to this faster and yeah, cheaper, method of getting your voice out to an audience. That makes me sad. But zines aren't dead (!) and reading Stolen Sharpie Revolution reminds me of this. It makes me want to throw caution to the wind in order to create something more tangible. You can get your own copy of Alex Wrekk's little red zine guide (as well as other merchandise of her creation: zines, buttons, etc.) at: http://smallworldbuttons.bigcartel.com/

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at: http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Book Cover of the Week - by Louise Tripp

The cover this week is not from a book exactly. It's not even one cover. It's a series of covers from a collection I've been periodically adding to since the early '90's. These are my zine covers. 

*only a small portion of my actual zine collection

The Zine World website defines zines as "a self-published, small circulation, non-commercial booklet or magazine, usually produced by one person or a few individuals" and goes on to say that "zines are publications done for the love of doing them, not to make a profit or a living." I couldn't have said it better myself. Zines can basically be about anything. They can be a collection of stories about your life or fiction stories. They can be about anything you're obsessed with: celebrities, books, music, knitting, poetry, taxidermy. Zines are sometimes cheaply made and filled with poor-quality writing, it's true. But more often, zines are true literary gems, the ultimate small press offering.

So where do you find zines? There are a ton of places online and off to find them; many big cities have zine libraries or bookstores that sell zines. Chicago, for instance, has Quimby's; you can use Google to find such stores, etc. in your area.

Online there are many sites where zine writers post to advertise and try to sell or trade/give away their zines. Here are just a few:

Zine Scene - Livejournal Community

We Make Zines - Social Network for Zinesters

Zines on Facebook

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Lit Links: Giveaways

Just a couple of giveaways to alert you about:

Want a free copy of the new Nancy Werlin (Impossible) book, Extraordinary? You can enter to win it here.

You can also enter for a chance to win The Hunger Games prizes - such as T-Shirts and pendants - by going to The Nerd's Wife (you'll increase your chances by adding the blog to your Twitter and Facebook, too).

More to come!

Friday Favorites: New Love - by Louise Tripp

Everyone has heard of “love at first sight.” But what about “love at first read?” My pick for Friday Favorites this week is a book that's still new to me. It's the book I am currently in the middle of: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Not having completed the book, it's hard to tell where I will end up in terms of my feelings for the book; but at this moment, it is fast becoming a favorite.

Initially my decision to read it was because the movie based on it is coming out this fall (see trailer below) and I have a slight crush on one of its stars, so I knew I would probably be seeing it. I like to read books before I see their film adaptations. At first, the narrator, Kathy, is incredibly clinical when she speaks of the strange boarding school, Hailsham, where she grew up: its emphasis on creativity, the mysterious “training” to become “carers” and “donors,” but never quite explaining in detail what this means. The assumption is that the reader knows; she keeps saying things like, “I don't know if it was the same in your school.” But as the story unfolds we learn of her bond with other students: most importantly, a boy named Tommy, at first ridiculed by his peers, and Ruth, Kathy's dearest friend.

Ruth is imaginative (when she and Kathy first begin playing together as children, it is Ruth that makes up games about invisible horses and secret guards and later, she seems to enjoy fibbing) but also a short fuse – when Kathy and Tommy try to comfort her at one point, she takes their remarks as insulting and explodes, sharing with them a bit of hurtful truth. Reading it, I get this feeling that what people like about Ruth is the moments where she is intimately inclusive: Kathy tells of nights where they sit up late, drinking tea and confiding their news of the day.

Tommy is Ruth's boyfriend, but it's clear by the way Kathy talks that she's had a crush on him herself. His attention to her shows that the feeling may be mutual.

At Hailsham, the students are supposed to create things – all sort of artwork, from sculptures to sketches to poems – and participate in “Exchanges,” where they exchange the things they have created for tokens that then buy them other students' work. An outsider, simply referred to as Madame, comes to the exchanges and selects especially nice work for something called The Gallery. No one ever sees this gallery, though. In the beginning, Tommy's problem is that he is not creative – or at least, not yet – and this leads to him being made fun of.

The book seems to be taking a turn towards tragedy – some foreboding scenes indicate this: Miss Lucy, one of their "guardians" or instuctors, gets upset about Hailsham and what it's not teaching its students and Madame cries when she witnesses Kathy slow-dancing to her favorite cassette, pressing an invisible body (Madame presumes a child or lover) to her chest. It's all very strange so far, but I love the almost sci-fi mystery of it. I also love how the three friends communicate and empathize with each other; their unspoken understandings are lovely, even if they do border on “love means never having to say you're sorry” territory. Kathy understands, without Ruth ever saying so, that Ruth is apologizing for a blow-up by the way Ruth treats Kathy with extreme kindness (she goes out of her way to explain the jokes she and her other friends are laughing over, etc.)

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Book review: The Appeal, by John Grisham - by Inverarity

It’s been a long time since I read a John Grisham novel. I used to be quite fond of his legal thrillers, even though they consist of lots of exposition and flat characters. In all of his novels, Grisham writes with a sense of righteous fury at injustice, and sympathy for the little people who are so easily ground beneath the wheels of the system. Unfortunately, as he became the sort of author whose books are routinely made into Hollywood movies, the scope of his plots became larger but the stories somehow became smaller. For me, his first novel, A Time to Kill, a courtroom drama set in a small Southern town in which a lawyer defends a black man who killed the white men who raped his daughter, is still probably his best. (In his author’s notes, Grisham writes about how he himself, as a practicing lawyer, has thrown up in the courthouse men’s room, just as the defense attorney in A Time to Kill does, and that tension was very evident in that book.)

Later he moved on to big criminal/industrial conspiracies, and while those make for good Tom Cruise vehicles, even the most sympathetic characters are overshadowed by the massive forces Grisham is trying to expose in his books.

Thus, I found the The Appeal to be a lackluster potboiler of a novel in which quite honestly, Grisham seems to be phoning it in. Especially since it’s basically a toned-down version of The Pelican Brief. Both books are about a wealthy industrialist who tries to stack the court with judges favorable to his interests in anticipation of a huge lawsuit that’s coming their way. In The Pelican Brief, it’s the U.S. Supreme Court, and the villains have two Supreme Court justices murdered; in The Appeal, it’s the Mississippi Supreme Court, and rather than assassinating the obstreperous judge, the villains remove her by mounting a massively-funded smear campaign, putting their chosen candidate in her place.

(For those not familiar with U.S. judicial politics: while federal Supreme Court justices are lifetime political appointments, some states require state supreme court justices to be elected, or periodically reelected even if appointed by the governor.)

The first part of the The Appeal gives us the background on the suit against Krane Chemical, which has been dumping carcinogenic chemicals in a small Mississippi town, resulting in skyrocketing cancer rates. The victims are represented by a plucky husband-and-wife law firm that’s teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and there’s no room for ambiguity in the reader’s mind as to whether or not Krane Chemical is guilty. But as if a chemical company poisoning a small town wasn’t black and white enough, Grisham gives us Carl Trudeau, the billionaire CEO of Krane Chemical, who all but twirls his mustache and throws puppies off the balcony of his New York penthouse balcony as he sneers his way through the book vowing that not one dime of compensation will ever be paid to “those ignorant rednecks." We get irrelevant glimpses of his family life (vapid, anorexic trophy wife, neglected lifestyle-accessory daughter), and then we move to Mississippi, where Trudeau hires a very special private firm to handpick someone to put on the Mississippi Supreme Court just in time for his corporation’s appeal to be heard there.

The next part of the book is about the election. Judge Sheila McCarthy, a moderate who’s made no waves but has a tendency to rule in favor of the underdog, is painted as a liberal judge who will destroy your family, take away your guns, and legalize gay marriage. (The private firm actually hires a gay couple from Chicago to move to Mississippi, establish legal residency, and apply for a marriage license, which of course is promptly rejected, leading to a lawsuit for the sole purpose of putting gay marriage on the radar during the election.) So the airwaves are full of guns, gays, abortion, and pornography, even though the chances of the state supreme court changing the status quo on any of those issues is zero. It’s all quite over-the-top, and yet frighteningly familiar.

While the book’s Wikipedia page points out the similarity of the plot to a real-life case in West Virginia, the attack on the unsuspecting Sheila McCarthy is in some ways reminiscent of the unseating of California Chief Justice Rose Bird in the 1980s. Rose Bird was the first California Supreme Court Justice to lose her seat in an election; while the campaign mounted against her was ostensibly because of her reluctance to enforce the death penalty, the money that went into defeating her came mostly from big businesses who found her rulings unfavorable to their interests. The fictional campaign against the fictional Sheila McCarthy, however, is a much more one-dimensional narrative.

Meanwhile, just in case you forgot what a villain Trudeau is, when he’s not engineering the bankruptcy of the plaintiff’s attorneys, he’s pushing his own company’s stock price downward with rumors of bankruptcy so he can buy it up at a discount, in anticipation of a dramatic leap in value when the lawsuit gets dismissed by the state supreme court. At one point, he literally cackles and rubs his hands together in glee after another successful round of villainous shenanigans.

After the election, Ron Fisk, the chump selected to be Krane’s boy on the bench, promptly rules against an elderly victim of nursing home abuse, just so the reader is clear on who the bad guys are, again. Several more cases of this nature are described: maimed children, medical malpractice, etc., all of them egregiously black and white, and all smacked down by the new court, with Fisk tipping the balance towards the dark side.

Justice Fisk is not actually a bad person, and is completely unaware of the fact that he’s been bought and paid for by a New York industrialist. He’s just a useful idiot who believed the mysterious backers who told him they wanted him on the bench because he’s such a good, conservative Christian. He’s shocked -- shocked! -- at the attack ads his people run against McCarthy, and the revelation of all the out-of-state money funding his campaign. Not shocked enough to really start asking hard questions, though.

We then see Fisk experience a crisis of conscience, brought about by the sort of bitter irony that only a heavy-handed author could inflict, and the conclusion of the book rests on whether or not Fisk will “see the light." And after all that buildup leading to this dramatic moment...

Spoiler:* 

Fisk waffles, then rules against the plaintiffs exactly as he was expected to do. The judgment is overturned, the victims go uncompensated, their lawyers go broke and lose everything, the bad guys win a crushing victory, and Trudeau sails off into the sunset on his mega-yacht.


Grisham is making a point, here. In fact, the entire book is driven by his agenda: a call against the dangers of judicial elections, corporate influence, and tort reform. As is usually the case with polemical novels, I found that it suffered despite the fact that I pretty much agreed with all of Grisham’s points. All the justices who vote against plaintiffs suing doctors and corporations are heartless ideologues, as made clear by narrative editorializing: “...as if he were capable of sympathy." Krane Chemicals is the sort of company you’re just certain would cheerfully sell nerve gas to Saddam Hussein, and Carl Trudeau is pure greed and ego.

Paraphrasing Tom Clancy’s not-very-original observation: the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable. I totally believe that corporations and people sometimes are that evil, but when I read about such cliched stereotypes in a novel, I cannot help but feel the author is being lazy.

Verdict: The Appeal is about as exciting as a state supreme court hearing on a class action lawsuit against a chemical company. Oh wait... Yeah, this book might make you pay a little more attention to the next judicial election, if that’s the sort of thing that gets your fires of righteous indignation burning, but this is not the sort of tense legal thriller that Grisham wrote earlier in his career, and all the characters are just names attached to designated roles.


This review was originally posted here.You can read more of Inverarity's reviews, etc. at inverarity.livejournal.com. 

*-highlight to read

Book Cover of the Week: Hiding The Hideous - by Louise Tripp

This week's book cover, that for the book Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace, was submitted by Alexandra and features a man with a paperbag on his head, which reminded me of the cover of Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors (see right). It's not a bad idea for an image, I think, to hide something when you are trying to attract the interest of a reader. I know I find myself drawn to books with veiled faces or cropped bodies on the covers and I have to wonder: Is it because it's interesting thinking that there is a secret to be found within the covers? That the author (or more likely, the book designer) is alluding to something hidden? I know that I am never thinking this consciously, but on some level, that must be part of it: Intrigue. Fascinating thought. 

Challenge: Recreate this cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week.

Got an idea for a Book Cover of the Week? Email: lulutripp@gmail.com

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Friday Favorites: Writers in the Movies – by Louise Tripp

The only thing I love as much as I love books is movies. I wish I had nothing but time to fit more of each into my crazy schedule. When considering what I might write about for this edition of Friday Favorites, I found myself stubbornly unable to get my mind off the movies. I thought: Why not post about movies centering around writers? The following list is my (much-boiled-down) offering of five wonderful movies that prove the pen is mightier than the sword.

1. 
   Wonder Boys – My favorite of the five, Wonder Boys is based on the Michael Chabon novel of the same name and takes place during an annual literary convention at a cushy university. The story centers around Professor Grady Tripp, a creative writing teacher and one-time lauded author who is experiencing the opposite of writer's block: he can't seem to finish his novel because he can't stop writing. That's the least of his problems, of course: his wife just left him, his boss's wife is pregnant with his child, one of his students keeps throwing herself at him and another of his students may or may not be suicidal. There are so many brilliant moments in this movie, I want to live inside of it.
   
   
2. 
   The Squid & The Whale – The Squid & The Whale is about the collapse of a marriage and its affect on the children. Joan takes up with a tennis instructor and her husband, Bernard begins a flirtation with one of his students (Anna Paquin). Both parents happen to be writers and oddly, the children, Walt and Frank, act out in ways involving literature and books. Walt, a sexually-frustrated teenager, writes psuedo-intellectual reports about books he's never read and gets caught plagiarizing a song by Pink Floyd. Frank, their younger child, jerks off in the library and smears his ejaculation on the books. It's all pretty disturbing, but the performances are inspired and the film does a great job of portraying the literary family (Bernard's snobbery, scoffing at “philistines” rang especially true). And its demise.

3. Deconstructing Harry - In this Woody Allen directed dark comedy, Allen himself plays the role of Harry, a novelist about to be honored for literary achievement while his personal life turns to chaos. He has a hardcore case of writer's block. Half the people he knows are angry at him for ways he portrayed them in his novels (one of his ex-lovers, played by Judy Davis, even threatens to kill him and fires shots to show she's not kidding). His latest young girlfriend has run off with his best friend, planning nuptials. And in order for his son to attend the ceremony where Harry is to be honored, he will have to kidnap the boy. The film uses Harry's stories, one of a journey into hell and another about a man whose life is so out-of-focus that he becomes a blur, literally, to give a peak into the psyche of a struggling writer.
   
   
4. 
   Quills – Even today, it's hard to imagine a writer more...shall we say, naughty, than Marquis de Sade. This movie, a fictionalized account of his last years incarcerated in an asylum, shows us the importance of an independent press: de Sade's erotic novels are being sold with the help of an asylum laundress, who smuggled his manuscripts out and into the hands of a publisher. While probably not the most truthful look at the notoriously sadistic scribe, Quills is nonetheless an achievement for its look at the banning of books and for outstanding performances by Geoffrey Rush (as Marquis de Sade) and Kate Winslet (as the laundress, Madeline).

5. Henry Fool – A garbage man named Simon Grim, apparently the target of neighborhood hoodlums and bullies, lives aimlessly with his pill-popping mother and whiny, chain-smoking sister. He meets a drifter named Henry Fool, who gives him a black-and-white-covered composition book and tells him “if you ever feel like you have something to say and you can't get it out, stop and write it down.” What Simon ends up writing is a poem; it's even in effortless iambic pentameter. Meanwhile, Henry's roguish wit is found to be a facade covering up a lack of talent and a load of lies: he's not “in” with a publisher, as he has said, and he is actually a convicted sex offender. While that's a sour look at heroes, what makes the movie wise is that Simon Grim becomes world-renowned as a poet anyway – despite the person inspiring him to do so being a dishonest character.
   
   
   Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com.