A Woman Who'sWriting the Bible - Like, Right Now

San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum has been hosting an exhibit of a woman scribe (a soferet) who is writing out a Torah - the first five books of Moses, written on sheets of vellum (made from treated, scraped, softened cow-hide -- kosher of course -- and written with a quill pen and special black ink. Her name is Julie - yes, she's a J-Writer - and I met her today when I went down to view her exhibit. Julie is a well-spoken, slightly built young woman who is one of a very, very few women in the world who have trained to be a soferet. Her Torah, when it's finished (probably early next Spring), will be given to some lucky synagogue (reform or conservative, as orthodox congregations would not find a Torah inscribed by a woman to be acceptable) for their use in religious services. And, not only did I meet and speak with her, I gave her a copy of my "J" book - she almost gasped when she saw the cover, and said she couldn't wait to read it! I sure hope she likes it.

Anyone who's in the San Francisco Bay Area should definitely catch this exhibit - check their website (www.thecjm.org) for days and times - it's absolutely fascinating -- and there is a collection of old Torah scrolls and other beautiful, wonderful artifacts both new and historical to help present and explain the Jewish traditions.

Vietnam-Era Novel - Surprisingly Good

The Man from Saigon
by Marti Leimbach, Doubleday, 2010     

Here's another review I wrote for the May Historical Novel Society Review:

An absorbing, often gripping novel of a young woman reporter on tour in war-torn Vietnam in 1967, The Man from Saigon is gritty, realistic and poetically written. Leimbach is a master at describing the visceral: the humidity and heat of the jungle, the ache of hunger, the recoil of the body and the brain under fire, the insanity that comes from being surrounded by bombs falling for hours and bullets like hot rain.
    The protagonist, Susan, works for a woman’s magazine in Chicago and is sent to the war to gather human interest stories. She’s not supposed to leave Saigon, but of course she does. She gets drawn in to the addiction of war reporting, inching ever closer to the heavy action while putting light years of distance between her and the ‘normalcy’ of life back in the States—until life in the war zone becomes what’s normal. Two men, the Vietnamese photographer of the book’s title, and another reporter, an American, weave in and out of Susan’s mental, emotional and physical existence in a country too far from home.
    The images are often disturbing, but the insights into war and human frailty, love and courage are meaningful and intelligent. An excellent read.
-- Mary F. Burns

Evening's Empire -- A Look Back at Rock'n'Roll

I recently reviewed Evening's Empire by Bill Flanagan, for the Historical Novel Society (it's online and in their print publication for May 2010). Here's what I wrote:

With a title nod to Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, Flanagan’s 645-page epic about  rock music spans more than four decades in the life of the Ravons (Rave-ons), a fictional band that starts in London and careens like a pinball through the music universe that unhinged the popular consciousness with the arrival of the Beatles. The behind-the-scenes tales are told in the steady, likeable, first-person delivery of the band’s manager, Jack Flynn, who starts as a neophyte lawyer who shoulders the management of the Ravons’ tours and music contracts from his firm’s senior partners. The charismatic star—Emerson Cutler—is being sued for divorce and wants to catch his faithless wife in flagrante in a hotel in Spain (as leverage against his own adultery). Jack is dispatched to do the job because “you are young, Flynn. You are part of this…new vogue.”  The year is 1967 and Jack’s life is forever changed.

The band members have very distinct personalities, and it’s quite a ride as the group breaks up, reassembles, suffers reversals, betrayals, marriage, divorce, drugs, alcohol, wealth and poverty. Seen through the pragmatic eyes of Jack—the manager as confessor/father/nursemaid/fixer—the last four decades of the 20^th century come alive in small details that give rise to larger, context-setting philosophical musings about how humans respond to the changing culture with fear and love, wit and courage, greed and selfishness. Even if you weren’t there, it’s fun to revisit the times—except when it’s not. The crashes, the greed, the waste of talent and energy, the money-grubbing snobbishness—from Woodstock up to 9/11 and a few years beyond—the last four or five decades have a lot to answer for. The story drags here and there, but at the end, you don’t want to leave Jack and his friends behind.

What Music Goes with "My Book is Published!" ?

Today at Amazon.com, my debut novel finally is "in stock" and officially for sale! I have yet to see an actual printed copy of it -- but the box of twenty books I ordered a month ago is due to arrive tomorrow -- so exciting! Please visit www.jthewomanwhowrotethebible.com for more information about "J" and my Grand Book Tour, which starts in Chicago in August.

So I was wondering, what's the best background music that goes with such an event? I'm thinking "Fanfare for the Common Man." What do you think?

Springtime, Lilacs and Chopin

Two weeks ago I was in Poland, and the whole country was celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of their favored, most beloved musician, Fredyryk Chopin. Here’s what I wrote one day while there:

I’m riding in a Mercedes touring coach with twenty-eight lovely people from the SF Bay Area through the incredibly green and at this point sopping wet countryside on the way from Warsaw to Krakow. We stopped some way outside Warsaw to visit the grounds of a Chopin park, wherein is located the small house in which he was born. The landscaping of the park is in many places so recent the plants are barely six inches tall, but in other areas, there are lilac bushes waving overhead, dripping in the light rain, and exuding the heavenly fragrance that only fresh lilacs in the May rain can send forth. I was reminded of growing up in Illinois where lilacs were profuse—I so miss that smell in California, where it doesn’t get cold enough in the winter (at least along the coast) to grow lilacs properly.

We have been treated to three piano concerts of Chopin’s music in the last two days, one of them in a huge park with open air seating for Sunday concerts throughout the spring, summer and fall. The other two were private concerts arranged just for our tour group, the last one  in the living room of the Chopin family home where he was born. The pianists (all of them women, one very young) were excellent performers, award-winners of various Chopin competitions. What makes these performances particularly wonderful and poignant is the realization (as our guide told us) that under the Nazi regime for the five years of WWII, it was forbidden to play or even listen to Chopin – under pain of death or banishment to a camp! The Nazis held the Poles and their culture just half a notch above the utter disdain they felt for the Jews, and they spent a good deal of effort and dynamite destroying anything Polish that they could. Approximately 85% of the city of Warsaw was burned or dynamited by the German occupying force, including the murders of some 800,000 people of the 1.2 million who lived in Warsaw, about 10% of whom were Jews. When the Russians took over after the War, the Polish Communists in Warsaw insisted on raising money to restore the city to its former state “exactly”, using old photographs and paintings from the 19th century to re-create the centuries-old buildings, palaces and churches that had been reduced to rubble.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Music...

NetFlix has brought home the waning years of the Cold War, Smiley-style, to our house these past few days. Of course I'm referring to the seriously wonderful adaptation of John Le Carre's book, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that aired in 1979, starring the inimitable Alec Guinness as John Smiley. The pace is deliciously slow, the dialogue at times poetic, banal, philosophic, arch. Very British. Very late 1970's, dripping with cynicism and a sad kind of nostalgia for days when honour meant something, even among spies.

But the crowning glory, in a very real sense, is the music that plays over the ending credits of each episode (there are six). Sung in English by a Cathedral choirboy of twelve at the time (Paul Phoenix), the heart-rending words of Simeon, an aged prophet of the Jerusalem temple, float across the landscape of London as white clouds slowly drift in a deep blue sky. Simeon says these words (as recorded in Luke 2:29-32) after he has witnessed the "Presentation at the Temple" of the child Jesus by his parents, Joseph and Mary.  

Here is the text used for the song, originally scored by composer Geoffrey Burgon; it is part of the Evening Prayer in the Catholic Daily Office, said by all priests, religious, and many laypersons every day, and is a soft and beautiful prayer of resignation and grace received:

Lord, now let Thy servant depart in peace
According to Thy word.
For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation
Which Thou has prepared before the face of all peoples
To be a light to the Gentiles,
And the glory of Thy people, Israel.

Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son,
and to the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be,
world without end.
Amen.

If you want to hear this truly, deeply, spiritually enchanting song, go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFS6lO6WaaM .

On The Road with Jack Kerouac - and "Bop" Music

I can't believe I haven't read this book already! Way back in the early 1960's, I was reading Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, even William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, anyone? which brings to mind the great Simpsons take on that, when Nelson, the school bully, and his buddies are seen walking out of the movie theatre where the marquee reads "Naked Lunch" and he says, "I can think of two things that are wrong with that title!"). Anyway, so I never read "On The Road", and I'm reading it now. And liking it quite a bit, too. 

The story starts in 1947, quite a bit earlier than I had imagined it would, so that's interesting right off the bat. When Jack (or "Sal Paradise" as he is called in the edited version, more on that later) gets to Chicago, he says, "At this time, 1947, bop was going like mad all over America. The fellows at the Loop blew, but with a tired air, because bop was somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis. And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of all my friends..." It makes me want to learn more about how jazz started out being called "bop" (related to be-bop?) and when it started being known as jazz.

Kerouac's style is ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, plain talk stitched together with beauty and grace, like when he says that Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) "stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every word...." In the "pre-edited" edition, or the "scroll" edition, which a friend of mine bought when I got my own book, all the names are the real people Jack wrote about: Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Cassady - the whole Beat generation from New York to San Francisco (and yes, he calls it 'Frisco' - oh well). The word "beat" by the way, comes up a lot, but seems to mean different things. I've decided to track all the uses of the word "beat" in the book, and see how and if it changes - it may not, it's just an idea I want to follow.

I wish I were about to go across country on a long road trip, but for now I'll read Jack's story.