Jerry Peterson's Blog

An Allen Ginsberg story

Two weeks ago, I posted a piece on Allen Ginsberg and the stories he wrote on the pictures he took. For Texas crime writer David Hansard, that brought back a memory:

I once spent three days escorting him around the University of Wyoming and surrounds. On our way to the Denver airport he signed my copy of Howl. It echos his photo stories in that he drew a picture and created a succinct narrative out of it– time, place and what was… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on July 9, 2010 at 12:25am — No Comments

Goodbye, Orphan Annie

Little Orphan Annie, a staple of newspaper comic pages for 86 year, is gone.

The last strip ran last month, ending with Annie kidnapped –again, she was kidnapped so, so many times – and lost in Guatemala.

You didn’t miss her departure, did you?

I didn’t.

I only learned about it while listening to a business story on NPR’s Morning Edition. Annie appeared in fewer than 20… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on July 6, 2010 at 7:42am — No Comments

Peter Sellers

My mention yesterday of the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb got me to wondering about Peter Sellers. Sellers played Strangelove and two other characters in that 1964 Stanley Kubrick film.

Was Sellers a writer? Did he write any books?

Sadly, no.

He did write his own material in his early days as a stand-up comedian and for his records. And he… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on July 3, 2010 at 12:09am — No Comments

Got a minute?

Then you can read War and Peace, The Great Gatsby, Fahrenheit 451, or just about any other book . . . as long as it’s on Book-A-Minute’s website.

Can’t believe it?

Here’s Book’s one-minute summary of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

Nurse Ratched: I destroy my patients… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on July 2, 2010 at 2:59am — 1 Comment

Next on television

Let’s be honest. We writers, we all want our books to be turned into movies or television series. A degree of celebrity and a lot of money come with it if the movie or the series is a hit.

It happens for few of us. Charlaine Harris a couple years ago with the True Blood series on HBO – vampires on the loose in Bon Temps, a fictional town in Louisiana. Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in a bar,… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on July 1, 2010 at 2:01am — No Comments

What makes a good read . . .

Scott Turow, that Chicago lawyer who has written nine superlative legal thrillers, was first an academic.

He studied creative writing at Stanford University. He and his fellow students were expected to come away writing literary novels.

“In the late 1960s and early 1970s,” Turow said in a recent essay for the NPR news program All Things Considered, “most English departments exalted modernism, modernism whose innovations and defiance… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 30, 2010 at 12:31am — 1 Comment

Lilies of the Field

Wow, what a response a couple weeks ago to my posting of pictures of flowers on Facebook.

The Asiatic lilies are blooming here in Marge’s garden in southern Wisconsin, so I shot a series of pictures and put them up in an album I titled “Lilies of the Field.” In the blurb, I said the album title came from the 1963 Sidney Poitier film of the same name.

Said Jean Dregne, “Love the film.”

Mary Ann Macomber: “That was a fantastic… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 29, 2010 at 9:09am — No Comments

Why there are no James Bonds in Alan Furst's books

After 10 books writer Alan Furst set in the 1933-1942 time period in Europe, he discovered he was writing spy novels.

But you won’t find a James Bond or a Jason Bourne in one of them.

Furst prefers characters who struggle with huge moral questions, just as his readers would if they were there in that period just as the Germans were about to invade their country, their city.

“Those are the people who are going to say, well,… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 26, 2010 at 3:26am — No Comments

A series that never moves on

Alan Furst has written 11 novels set in the beginning years of World War II.

Eleven novels.

Most of us who write series work a period for a couple years, a couple books, and move on. We let our characters age because either we’ve mined out the stories of that period or we’ve become bored with the period.

Says Furst he doesn’t write anything after 1942 because then the story becomes how can we survive until the end of this… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 25, 2010 at 1:40am — No Comments

A master of description

I admire craft.

A lot of books you and I have read are just not very good, and often the failure can be chalked up to the writer having failed to master the craft of writing.

So when we read a good one, we say, wow, this story sings . . . it’s a real page turner . . . I wish I could write like this, she/he makes it look so easy.

Gerry Spence is a master of our craft of writing. When he describes a character, whether… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 24, 2010 at 4:42am — No Comments

Where do book/movie/play titles come from?

I have no imagination when it comes to creating titles for the books I write. I titled my current one – out last year in hardback and now out as an e-book – Early’s Fall . . . Early, from the name of the principal character, James Early, and Fall, from the time of the year in which I had set the story.

The name Herman Melville gave the great white whale – Moby Dick – in his 1851 adventure novel became… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 23, 2010 at 3:10am — No Comments

Fly-in season

In Wisconsin this is fly-in season. Probably in your state, too.

Every Saturday and Sunday during summer some airport somewhere holds a fly-in breakfast. Okay, it’s a drive-in breakfast if you don’t have an airplane. Fact is more people drive in than fly in for these events.

A couple weeks ago, my brother and I drove down to the Beloit Airport for the local EAA chapter’s annual fly-in pancake feed. We had our eyes on the sky . . .… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 22, 2010 at 5:13am — No Comments

Why you should buy this month's Smithsonian -- Allen Ginsberg

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was a photographer. I didn’t know that.

He had an eye for what makes an interesting picture.

Now you and I may scribble a note on the backs of our pictures about when we took them and who we see, but Ginsberg wrote detailed narratives – captions – on the bottom margin on the front. He married image to text, claiming rightly each picture has a story to tell.

Seventy-two of Ginsberg’s photographs are… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 19, 2010 at 12:48am — No Comments

Why you should buy this month's Smithsonian -- the fake William Shakespeare

I’ve read Shakespeare, taught Shakespeare, even acted in and directed a number Shakespeare plays, but nobody ever told me there was a fake William Shakespeare out there, a forger so good he fooled just about everybody around.

I had to read it in Smithsonian Magazine.

Former book and magazine editor Doug Stewart wrote the book The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare – it came out four months ago from… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 18, 2010 at 1:30am — No Comments

Why you should buy this month's Smithsonian -- Harper Lee

Hard to believe that that enduring American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, was published 50 years ago. It’s a staple of high school lit classes. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been called in to sub for an English teacher who’s sick of having to teach the book one more time. No, the truth is they’re always out with the flu. That’s what they say, but I tell their students they are out playing golf and to be… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 17, 2010 at 2:03am — No Comments

Richard Wright in Chicago's Literary Hall of Fame

Ri

chard Wright has to be the most controversial selection for inclusion in Chicago’s Literary Hall of Fame, not for his work, but for his life.

His childhood and teen years in Mississippi and Tennessee were wretched as he was bounced from one family member to another to raise. He finally made his escape to Chicago in 1927, at age 19. Wright got on with the post office as a clerk only to have his job wiped out four years later by the… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 16, 2010 at 1:22am — No Comments

Studs Terkel in Chicago's Literary Hall of Fame

I was cheering for Studs Terkel to be inducted into Chicago’s Literary Hall of Fame as were all my friends who are current and former newspaper people. We considered him one of us, although he worked in radio. He interviewed people, people of note and people off the street. Did it for 45 years, a daily one-hour program on Chicago’s WFMT.

And because Terkel carried on conversations with his guests rather than fired questions at them, the… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 15, 2010 at 12:44pm — No Comments

Lorraine Hansberry in Chicago's Literary Hall of Fame

I knew the 1961 movie A Raisin in the Sun – starred Sidney Poitier – but I didn’t know until I read Poitier’s autobiography that there first had been a play and that he had starred in its 1959 Broadway production . . . that the play had been written by Lorraine Hansberry, a young black woman who had grown up in Chicago.

A decade ago, I was teaching a high school-level plays as literature course. I… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 12, 2010 at 6:01am — No Comments

Gwendolyn Brooks in Chicago's Literary Hall of Fame

Gwendolyn Brooks came from as humble a circumstance as one can get.

She was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, her father a janitor, his father a runaway slave who fought in the Civil War.

The family moved to Chicago when Brooks was six weeks old. Chicago would be home to her from that time until her death in 2000.

Poetry was in Brooks. A children’s magazine published her first poem when she was all of 13. By 16, she had 75… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 11, 2010 at 5:21am — No Comments

Saul Bellow in Chicago Literary Hall of Fame

No question, Saul Bellow deserves to be in the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

Among his credits, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1976), the Pulitzer Prize for Literature (1975 for Humboldt’s Gift), three National Book Awards (1954 for The Adventures of Augie March, 1964 for Herzog, 1970 for… Continue

Added by Jerry Peterson on June 10, 2010 at 12:00am — No Comments

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