In Good Company

From the Publishers Weekly article on Fall Hardcovers, Part One:

"Maybe it’s fall signaling the end of another year, or the prospect of yet another difficult year—politically, economically—looming ahead. In any case, nostalgia seems to be key among the season’s forthcoming titles, with publishers focusing on a number of iconic people, items and events. Biographies recall such memorable figures as R.F.K, John Lennon and Ronald Reagan, while other titles celebrate pop culture institutions Dilbert, Sesame Street and Macy’s. Musicians can read about Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead. The Titanic still fascinates after nearly a century, and movie stars—from Douglas Fairbanks to Tony Curtis to Lana Turner—still stir the public’s imagination. Finally, what can be bad about a season that includes social histories of the doughnut and the potato chip? Taste matters."

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You'll find this notice under "Biography and Memoir" about three-quarters down the page.

UNIV. OF IOWA PRESS
Seven Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio (Sept., $24.95) by Gary Presley. The author, who at 17 contracted the disease after taking the Salk injections, recalls 50 years of rediscovering his independence.

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Family Obligations, Red Shoes, and Huge Portraits

The father-in-law marks a milestone birthday, and he says "I want to have some formal portraits taken."

He decides upon Glamour Shots for reasons I don't question. Pictures are taken. Prints are purchased. A month passes, and my wife receives a call from the company representative, "We would like your permission to use your family portrait as a display item in our local store. There's one particularly we think will attract extraordinary notice."

I think: money.

The company offers to give us the (very!) large framed print after it is displayed for two or three months.

There is some speculation among those who know us that our family portrait was chosen because it displays a family wherein one member is a wheelchair user.

Personally, I think it is because of my red shoes.

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Anticipation

I don't know why this one small step in the process of publishing a book has caught my imagination, but I've been anticipating the posting of The University of Iowa Press' Fall 2008 catalog on the Internet. In fact, I have checked the website once or twice a week since receiving the printed version of the catalog.

Today Google Alerts told me that Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio is on the web.

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Now Appearing in BREVITY's Blog

Dinty Moore at BREVITY Magazine is always open to thoughtful posts about the genre, and upon occasion, young Mr. Moore even runs a few thoughts from me. This time he posted a short thought I had after participating in a discussion of Eliot Sloan's The Green Room from CREATIVE NONFICTION Magazine.

Always one to have an opinion first and then to worry about validating it later, I wondered about the idea of narcissism in creative nonfiction characterize as
dripping with narcissism, I wrote a post for BREVITY's blog, which you can read here.

On the other hand, and if you happen to subscribe to THE MISSOURI REVIEW, there's another take on the issue.

As I wrote a friend I sometimes think (as the Eagles and Don Henley sing) "Get over
it!" But then again, what did I write (the memoir) but a life-is-tough-sometimes story. On the other hand, and this is my fervent hope, I tried to show that people with disabilities are people -- sometimes ignorant, sometimes okay, sometimes doin' the right thing -- and so should be accepted as people. That's what I want. That's why I prefer to think (okay, crown myself with the thought) that I wrote a bit of mid-20th century social history from the first person point of view.

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Cats, Comfort, and Writing

I received my copy of Cup of Comfort for Cat Lovers a day or two or three ago, wherein an old story of mine -- "Silky and the Woman Whose Hair Smelled Nice" -- is the featured essay opening the book.

Silky, were she still with us, would be 19 years old this fall.

We are presently cat-less, and I suspect we'll remain so until Belinda spots a kitten and says "Oh, how cute!"

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An Appreciation of the Social Impact of Harriet McBryde Johnson

From the Wall Street Journal Online ...

A Life Worth Living
Christine Rosen.
senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society

• "The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist," she wrote. "My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me and me to the world." Yet, despite the lip service we pay to "accommodation" (and the genuine good that comes from legislation such as the Americans With Disabilities Act), we now find ourselves in a disturbing situation: As our scientific powers to eliminate disability grow, our acceptance of disability wanes.

• A Harvard medical student who surveyed 1,000 women who were pregnant with Down Syndrome babies reported that many were urged by their doctors to terminate their pregnancies; one woman's physician told her that her child would "never be able to read, write or count change." This at a time when new developments in medicine have nearly doubled the average life span of people who have the condition to 49 from 25 years. As a culture, we have made what Amy Laura Hall of Duke University Divinity School calls a "democratic calculus of worth" regarding Down Syndrome. And that calculus has resulted in a society hostile to people who refuse to make the culturally acceptable choice of ridding themselves of a disabled child before she is born.

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• Read the complete article here.

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Will a Copy of SEVEN WHEELCHAIRS be Worth a Half-Million Dollars?

A professor I know via a disability-in-the-media discussion list wrote me over the weekend regarding an advanced review copy of Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio that ended up at the Review of Disability Studies.

A copy intended for David Pfeiffer where my acquaintance is the Reviews Editor. Professor Pfeiffer, he noted, is deceased. He went on, "If you do know that, Iowa doesn't because they sent the advance copy of your book to him. And I wanted to read it -- but, the text for the entire book, is upside down! I'm not sure if I got a unique copy, but thought you'd want to know there's at least 1 out there -- and if
only 1 you might want it!"

So? Why a half-a-million? Read this, and you'll find the source of my fantasy.

Botched stamp fetches record price
Upside-down plane sells for $525,000 at auction

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