Writer Friend Research Articles

"You're a Guaranteed Winner": Composing "You" in a Consumer Culture

This article explores the functional elegance of direct mail as it constructs its target audience. More specifically, it examines direct mailings included in a nationally publicized court case involving Publishers' Clearing House and articulates how the use of particulargenre-based, rhetorical and linguistic strategies in these mailings construct reader identity. It argues that the documents use you-attitude toconstruct the identity of the reader as winner, implied reader devicesto reinforce the reader's identity as winner and to establish thereader's identity as the writer's friend, and linguistic politeness strategies to build feelings of solidarity of the reader toward the writer. Itconcludes with the observation that the direct mail in our study, ratherthan being "junk," is really a skillfully written set of documents, successfully interweaving various discourse strategies and raising bothethical and professional issues in the process.

Alberto Giacometti in postwar Paris

Alberto Giacometti, one of the foremost artists of the 20th century, created sculptures and paintings of stark and haunting beauty. Published for the 100th anniversary of his birth, this volume is a celebration of his genius, tracing his development from the tiny sculptures he made during World War II to the characteristically emaciated figures of his mature style. Michael Peppiatt gives an account of the crucial moment when Giacometti returned from his wartime exile in Geneva to his beloved Paris, a city traumatized by the war but receptive to new movements and ideas. He describes how Giacometti's way of seeing life - and his way of working - underwent several dramatic transformations during this period. He sheds light on Giacometti's closest relationships at the time, not only with his lover, Isabel Delmer, his brother Diego and his young wife Annette, but also with his writer friends Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. Exploring the mainsprings of Giacometti's creativity, Peppiatt presents four key texts by the artist, translated into English, that poignantly describe and illuminate his deepest fears and obsessions. Using photographs, Peppiatt also discusses Giacometti's studio, which the artist regarded as a continual, indispensable source of stimulus. Illustrated with reproductions of Giacometti's sculptures, paintings and drawings, the volume seeks to shed new light on his singular style of expression.

The Unmanly Art

A few years ago, I went to hear Susan Sontag read from her work. Back then, I amassed autographed books and hoped for authors' insights. Desiring their status, I hoped contact with published authors, like scraps from a saint's hem, would fill me with inspiration. Writers must pass through this portal of illusion before they accomplish anything readable. This stage precedes the neophyte's eventual commitment to long hours, shades drawn to neighbors. Sontag read for an hour. Nothing moved me to scribble insights. I was daydreaming like a beach-goer, observing the crowd shifting in their collapsible chairs, until she started talking about baths - as part of her writing process. Sontag was a bath-taker! Ideas come to me in the tub, she confessed. Her creative impulses were induced by warm bath water. Finding them as difficult as soap to hold, she'd devised a strategy. force myself to write them down so I wouldn't lose them. Her revelation shocked me with its intimacy and familiarity. In my imagination, Sontag transmutated from the author onstage to the image of someone swatting bubbles to get at her pad. I can't help my free associations. I envisioned her antiquely ruminating, a full figure in a porcelain bath. She was clinging to an era when tubs stood on their feet. I recalled a photograph of a woman in a champagne bath during Prohibition. A throng of men pressed in to dip their glasses. Anne Boleyn, too, I remembered, carried on in a similar fashion. She'd irritated Henry VIII by inviting men to fill their goblets from her bath. Sontag had stumbled onto a brilliant connection, however. Water and inspiration, the ancient rite of ablution to achieve a spiritual connection, was well documented among the major religions. As a boy, I'd been sprinkled with enough holy water to understand the significance. Her routine made sense. Writing could be regarded as the outcome of a spiritual breakthrough - the writer shedding the commonplace, musing in a makeshift womb. It reminded me of a variation on the Jewish mikvah, the purification bath. But her public confession required courage, candor. How could anyone reveal this to a crowd of hundreds? Despite what shampoo advertising suggests, baths are personally sacred territory. The act is synonymous with locking doors. As far as I was concerned, no one was entitled to such personal data. I pictured the unwritten sign on my bathroom door: Let no therapist or in-law tear asunder the acts herein accomplished. This was a sore topic between my wife and me. I'm a bather, too. Secretly. I haven't figured out why, but I'm ashamed to admit that I like taking baths. It's illegitimate hygiene. Unless you're female, in bubbles and oil, scrubbing away at peanut butter and jelly or workplace innuendo. Twirling up your hair like Turkish towels. But men? Men shower. Diligently, with business-like efficiency, gregariously: in for as long as the job takes. In an age of microchips and faxes, we've no right to brood over steam. I bathe on weekend afternoons. I submerge myself for an hour, singing and gurgling like a blue whale. Once a writer friend phoned while I was under. My wife came into the bathroom to say, called...and I told her you'd call back when you got out of the tub. You told her I'm in the tub? I bullied. Why didn't you say I was in the shower? I slipped toward a towel, all tail and flippers, as though Katrina were coming right over to witness this. …

Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography.

Scott Fitzgerald, a romantic and tragic figure who embodied the decades between the two world wars, was a writer who took his material almost entirely from his life. Despite his early success with The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald battled against failure and disappointment. This book, by the acclaimed biographer of Hemingway, is the first to analyze frankly the meaning as well as the events of Fitzgerald's life and to illuminate the recurrent patterns that reveal his inner self. Meyers emphasizes Fitzgerald's alcoholism, Zelda's illnesses and her doctors, Fitzgerald's love affairs both before and after her breakdown, and his wide-ranging friendships, from the polo star Tommy Hitchcock to the Hollywood executive Irving Thalberg. His writer friends included Ring Lardner, John Dos Passos, James Joyce, Edith Wharton, and Dorothy Parker. His friend and lifelong hero, Ernest Hemingway, was a harsh critic of both his behavior and his novels, but Fitzgerald accepted this with remarkable humility. Meyers portrays the volatile connection between these two writers and Fitzgerald's marriage to the schizophrenic Zelda with insight and poignancy. Meyers also discusses Fitzgerald's fascinating relationship with his daughter, Scottie. Exercising a fine critical balance, he details Fitzgerald's weaknesses but ultimately reveals a man capable of fierce loyalty and great moral courage.

Rural America In the Information Age: Telecommunications Policy for Rural Development; and The Writer's Friend

Review of "Rural America In the Information Age: Telecommunications Policy for Rural Development" by Edwin B. Parker, Heather E. Hudson, Don A. Dillman, and Andrew D. Roscoe; and "The Writer's Friend," by Martin L. Gibson.

The Children's Literature Association Proudly Announces the Recipient of The 1986 Phoenix Award Queenie Peavy

Acceptance of Phoenix Award by Robert Burch Thank you very much. I'm grateful to all of you for this award and am deeply honored. In our age of disposable wares, including books that are timely one day and old-hat the next, anyone writing in the children's field is fortunate to have a book that "hangs in there," as it were, for any real length of time, but to have it win an award from so distinguished a group as yours is very special indeed. And I'm delighted to have this opportunity to be with you again. After the Charlotte conference, I felt that I had a number of new friends. By now, I consider you old friends. And, for giving me this splendid award, you are certainly my good friends. Did you know that the Phoenix is the symbol of Atlanta—which is home territory for me? I live in a country town just south of it. Of course, it wasn't until after Sherman burned down Atlanta that we needed this appropriate symbol! But the Phoenix has served as a reminder to all Georgians over the years that it is possible to rebuild from ashes. The Phoenix that you've given me will serve as a reminder that it's possible to produce work that lasts—twenty years, at least. Of course, a true phoenix, according to most of the Greek writers, lasted five hundred years or longer, but I'm glad you settled on twenty for the award. Incidentally, when I bragged to friends that I was to receive it, several of them said, in effect, "Isn't that a neat award?" The idea of recognizing something nowadays that isn't brand new seemed somehow revolutionary, and they felt that the members of the Children's Literature Association must be very astute and highly discerning people to have created the award. I explained to them that you were very astute and highly discerning in giving it to Queenie Peavy! That isn't really the way I feel. There are many other books deserving of this year's award, which makes me especially pleased that Queenie Peavy was chosen. I have to admit that I started writing the book for the wrong reason. After I'd written several of my earlier stories, a writer friend in New York dismissed them as uncreative efforts: "They're purely autobiographical," she insisted. "All those yarns about ragged-ass boys growing up during the Great Depression." I asked what I needed to do to prove that I was what she called a real writer, and she said, "Use a girl for a central character. Then I'll know it isn't your life story." I don't know now why it seemed important to convince her of anything—probably the motivation was less than honorable—but I started the story just to show her that I could write it. Of course, somewhere along the line I became genuinely concerned about Queenie. When I visited with you in '84, your conference theme was PRIDE OF PLACE: WELLSPRING FOR STORY, which I like very much as it summed up thoughts I'd been trying to put together about the rural South as inspiration for writing. this year's theme, FROM HANNIBAL TO OZ: JOURNEYS IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, appeals to me, also, as journeys of any sort have always interested me. Queenie Peavy' s "journey" was, without her realizing it—perhaps without my realizing it— an inward quest of the mind and spirit. At first, she's in a blind alley because of the fierce loyalty to her father and her need to believe that he cares about her. When she faces the truth as it is instead of as she wishes it to be, she heads in the right direction. In a final scene, when she deliberately tosses away the stone instead of aiming it, I hope that young readers are convinced that she has chosen the positive route and will stay on it. Incidentally, my working title for the book had been A STONE'S THROW as Queenie was literally a crack shot with a stone. Also, she was...

The Art of Spying

To my knowledge I've met only one true spy. He didn't disappoint me.Some years ago I was visiting a writer friend in Washington who lived in a large luxury apartment complex a mile or so northwest of the Watergate. Because it was close enough to evening to justify our consuming something stronger than tea, and because we felt that it would be more enjoyable to do so with company, we decided to visit a friend of the writer’s who lived in the same complex. The friend had been one of the CIA’s top people in Vietnam, but when I met him he was retired from the Agency—or so he said.He was a tall fellow, about fifty years old, fit, goodlooking, with a graying, aristrocratic mane of hair and a well-tanned face—the kind of man advertisers like to place at the helm of a sixty-foot sloop. And he was as witty, charming, and intelligent as he was good-looking. In fact, he was much fun to talk to—no simple cold war party line from him, you bet. Whatever line he followed was way beyond that.

Environment and Development

It is a tale simply told. How Maurice Strong, with the help of his golden group of economists and writer friends, enlisted the leaders of developing countries for his environment crusade. How they were recruited with sympathetic words about the problems of poverty in their own countries, and encouraged by the leaders of industrialized countries to believe that the crusade will bring them extra assistance in their primary struggle away from poverty. How, on the whole, they marched off in step with the white knights from the rich polluted lands under the Stockholm banners. So far is simple. But what happens next is uncertain. Will the rich lands make good their declarations at Stockholm and provide increased financial and technical assistance? If they don't, will the poor countries turn sour on this broken promise, break ranks with the crusaders, and return to their own lands to mess them up in the ancient name of progress? Does everyone, in fact, really believe with Barbara Ward that this is Only One Earth?

Booth Tarkington's Political Career

A LTHOUGH Booth Tarkington began and ended his political career in the Sixty-third General Assembly of Indiana, his one term of public office was a pivotal experience in his literary life. It provided laboratory conditions for the study of human nature in its less attractive moments and revealed the infinite possibilities of contemporary life as a subject for fiction. The result was a shift from his early interest in historical romance to a lifelong preoccupation with the novel of manners. When the legislature convened on January 8, I903, the spectacle of Tarkington in politics amused the veteran politicians and amazed the writer's friends. His previous activities in the decade after returning home to Indianapolis from Princeton had been poor preparation for politics. His fellow townsmen knew him as a writer of romance, though they thought him not so good as Charles Major or General Lew Wallace, and as an amiable youth who was fond of wearing loud vests, dashing about the city behind a pair of spirited horses, and giving suppers at the University Club. Yet back of a misleading outward appearance he was a serious young man on whom a single session in the state legislature had a profound effect.' After nine years of literary apprenticeship Tarkington in I902 temporarily had scraped the bottom of his literary barrel. Having a Hoosier's native zest for politics, he was persuaded to file for the legislature in the March primaries. He believed that the best people in the community ought to go in for politics, and he no doubt 1 Tarkington already had published The Gentleman from Indiana (I899), Monsieur Beaucaire (I900), The Two Vanrevels (I902). Cherry had been serialized in Harper's in January and February, I9OI, but was not brought out in book form until Oct., I903. The contemporary record of Tarkington's term in the Indiana legislature is much at variance with his memoir of that experience published thirty years later. See My Political Career; or When I Helped to Make the Laws, Saturday Evening Post, CCV, io-ii, 26-27, 29 (April 8, I933). In that article he treated his political venture as merely an amusing youthful aberration in an otherwise uninterrupted literary career and made no effort to recall his genuine accomplishments or his literary use of the legislative session.

Origines Celticæ (a Fragment), and other Contributions to the History of Britain

A MAN'S foes are indeed those of his own household. More than one literary or scientific reputation has been injured by the injudicious zeal of a writer's friends to publish after his death the fragments and papers he has left behind. It is natural to imagine that the work and suggestions of a scholar must all be equally valuable, and that by omitting to print any portion of it the world may be a loser. But it must be remembered on the other side that a good deal which a scientific worker commits to manuscript is never intended to see the light, and that in any case it is unfair to him to publish fragmentary remains which he has never had the chance of revising and correcting. Origines Celticae (a Fragment), and other Contributions to the History of Britain. By Edwin Guest. Two Vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883.)