EXCERPT FROM IN THE FRAY MAGAZINE:

Cherry Blossoms In Twilight: Memories of a Japanese Girl
Written by, Yaeko Sugama Weldon and Linda E. Austin
Illustrated by, Yaeko Sugama
Publisher: Moonbridge Publications
Copyright © 2005 Linda E. Austin
84 pages of text
2 page appendix with two Japanese children’s songs
11 line pencil illustrations

Cherry Blossoms In Twilight: Memories of a Japanese Girl, written by Yaeko Sugama Weldon and her daughter Linda E. Austin is Published by Moonbridge Publications contains eighty-four pages of text, eleven pencil line drawings drawn by Weldon and a two page appendix consisting of two Japanese children’s songs, Shojogi (Song of the Tanuki) and Ame Ame (Rain, Rain). Cherry Blossoms in Twilight is a memoir of a woman who built her life on the words her father, the village shoemaker wrote in the back of her closet on her first day of school “Right, Straight, Honest and Cheerful.” These four principals Weldon continues to adhere to in the present and has passed the ideals onto her grandchildren
Weldon’s simple conversational style of writing has an awkwardness that does not detract from the story or the lyrical power of the prose. Instead, it adds to the story’s charm. It is a departure from slick glossy braggarts reminiscing about their ‘back-in-the-day’ achievements, exploits, and shenanigans. The simplicity of language lends a credibility to Weldon’s voice as if she is dictating her story in Japanese and broken English to her daughter Linda. There is a kindness that comes directly from her heart that shapes her words and exudes off the page. She has written her memories into a minute sized book that is a giant in feeling. Easily structured, anecdote to anecdote there is an underlined complexity built from the honesty of her emotions. She took joy in her life, throughout her childhood and as an adult. Exposed to brutal poverty, hardships, war, and failed relationships Weldon never loses her child-like wonder, “cheerfulness’ and belief in the good.
Her pencil line drawings are portraits of her past that come directly from experience. She has illustrated only chapters that deal with her childhood. Her last drawing illustrates the chapter called, World War II-The End of Childhood. The picture shows the rear silhouettes of young Yaeko and her father walking away into the distance towards the unknown. Here Weldon’s innocence ends and the density of World War II demands an increased gravitation and a harsher detailed picture that Weldon does not want to provide graphically. She realized that no artistic medium (except, maybe, the written word) regardless of intensity or color scheme can correctly represent the stark factuality and nightmarish vividness of being attacked by juggernaut killing machine as technologically superior as the United States of America’s Armed Forces. She writes, “We were young and had little fear. In the bomb shelter we would sing and some girls would dance. One day, as usual we ran to the bomb shelter. One of the girls ran back to the lunchroom to use the bathroom there. We told her not to go, but she said she had to. All of a sudden a war plane came down from the sky like a hawk to catch a rabbit. It made a terrible loud noise and shot her with its machine gun. She lay bleeding on the ground and we all started crying. She died at the hospital. She was just a young girl. After that we were just scared. No one sang songs anymore-we just listened for airplanes.” After this incident Weldon developed a hatred for Americans. Her father explained that her hatred was misplaced and unnecessary. Weldon writes, “I told my father I hated war and I hated the American military killing innocent civilian mothers and children. We did not ask for war. My father said to me, “‘Don’t hate anyone, it doesn’t do any good. They are only doing their duty. This is war.’”
Cherry Blossoms in Twilight is Weldon’s statement on the survival of the altruistic and humane during all the battles in life. One can only think of how pertinent her book and ideals are, “Right, Straight, Honest and Cheerful.” to today’s Afghanistan and Iraqi citizens and our military that get caught in the onrush of our so-called liberating foreign policies.

- 9-22-06 LEE GOODEN, PULSE DVD/BOOK REVIEWER FOR IN THE FRAY ONLINE MAGAZINE

Check me out!

The Official Guide to Office Wellness
By,William R. Vitanyi Jr.
Publisher: Bayla Publishing
Copyright © 2006 William R. Vitanyi Jr
Category: Humor
ISBN: 978-0-97856-002-7
ISBN: 0-9785600-2-7
108 Pages $17.95 available in hardcover October 2006


The Official Guide to Office Wellness by William R. Vitanyi Jr. has a disclaimer in the beginning of the book that states, “This book is a spoof. Do not actually use this book as part of an exercise program, real or imagined.” There should also be a disclaimer that reads, “Do not read this book if you’re prone to heart attacks from too much laughter, or if you have a weak bladder.”
In this fast paced world of uploading, upgrading, downloading, downsizing and networking, hardware, software, macromedia and micromanagement, conference calls, faxes and emails along the super information highway, we’re just too busy to exercise. Although we’re so busy our physical activity levels are at an all-time high level of being low. The human animal is such a contradiction of terms. A base primal part of us recognizes this when we laugh at movies like Office Space, the hit sit-com The Office and read Sally Forth and Dilbert comic strips. We’re really laughing at the absurdity of an animal wired to be a semi-naked polygamous hunter-gatherer dressed in restrictive garments and stuck in a cubicle with technology that is secretly sentient and hates us.
Vitanyi has taken photographs of people in offices and cubicles emulating different animal positions that a Sufi-Swami contortionist would have difficulty performing. Each exercise has three titles which describe: 1.Which ailment the exercise is supposed to alleviate, 2.Which animal is used as a model, 3.The Latin name of the animal and exercise. Beneath the titles is a photograph of a person (men and women) performing the exercise and beneath the photo is a brief humorous caption about the exercise. For example, page 31 is called the, 1. Glaciation Disorder. 2.Emperor Penguin Heel Stance 3. Salvelinus alpinus. The caption reads, “A frigid office environment quickly depletes enthusiasm, while the reason for interpersonal distance can vary, it almost always causes work place tension. Do not succumb to this pernicious force. Instead, when confronted by a frosty co-worker, immediately assume the Emperor Penguin Heel Stance. This noble artic survivor shows us that even the harshest climate can be endured. In anticipation of potential icy behavior, wear colors of the penguin and firmly brace your heels. Foot angle will vary by season.”
Vitanyi says that the best way to ‘do’ these exercises is to visualize doing them. The best and funniest way is to think about somebody else doing them, or even funnier watch somebody trying to do them. Vitanyi includes the photos for visual aids. The imagining he leaves to the readers.

-Lee Gooden 9-10-06

Something in Common
Written by, J.R. Lindermuth
J.R. Lindermuth ©2006
Published by Whiskey Creek Press
223Pages

Remember Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, mystery writer/amateur sleuth on the television show, Murder She Wrote? She made all of the highly trained professional law enforcement officers look like idiots by solving the crime. Luckily for her though the dumb Cabot Maine local-yokel Tom Bosley looking sheriff and his minions always seemed to come bursting in, guns drawn at the last minute, right before it looked like Fletcher was about to get a cap busted in her mousy little head. She was stupid enough to confront the bad guy and give a play-play commentary of the murder and the murderer’s mistakes without (What every cop knows he or she should have) back-up. Somebody shoot the old biddy already. Murder She Wrote aside, for some reason popular culture portrays average everyday officers of the law as half blind troglodytes afraid of facts and distracted by shiny objects. J.R. Lindermuth’s novel Something in Common is a much needed departure from that trend.
Something in Common begins on a non-portentous Saturday night in the rural town of Swatara Creek Pennslvania . A local woman Mrs. Taylor encounters on her front porch (actually her cat Tom-Tom does the preliminary encountering) an unknown woman’s severed head. Aaron Brubaker Swatara Creek Chief of police unofficially recruits the former Chief of police, retired Dan ‘Sticks’ Hetrick. Hetrick is shrewd and observant, a home town Columbo.
Lindermuth writes, “His eyes began their own examination of the body and, precision machine that it was, his mind shut down the emotional focus…and switched to another gear, compartmentalizing what he observed, sifting it logically in a manner that had become second nature through experience.”
Like a whittling and chambray shirt wearing Sherlock Holmes Sticks gleans the clues and cuts through the suspects, until two more people are killed and he has a final confrontation with a remorseless killer.
Lindermuth allows the reader to think they are smarter than the author. He opens the book with a murder and the reader thinks, ‘Yup, been there done that…Oh no, not the cat bit, lame, lame, lame.’ Then he introduces who you think is the hero, Chief Brubaker, only to find that he is more concerned about the P.R aspect of the murder. Finally, we meet the real hero Hetrick. He has a complicated relationship with Brubaker and they are at odds because Hetrick wants to redeem himself. ‘Okay, we’ve seen this before too.’
Suddenly, Lindermuth is introducing character after character, including the new young handsome pastor Jeffery Bascom, mail-order-bride to be Linda Krang and local nut-case eccentric artist George Oxenreider. All of these characters serve more than one specific function in Lindermuth’s narrative. His expert plotting proves how dumb we really are as readers. Each time, we get fished-in the hook spears right through our gray matter and he seems to attempt to pull us out of the water of our ignorance. We flail and swim blindly sinking the hook further into our gills. We exclaim “I know who did it! He did it! No, she did it! Um, no wait, ah, they did it! Heck, somebody did it!” We’re sucked into a maelstrom, a vortex, a whirlpool of false leads and clues. Like Dante had Virgil to guide him down into the inferno, Lindermuth gives us Sticks Hetrick to show the way.

-Lee Gooden 9-5-06

The Embroidered Corpse
(A Fun Yarn, Pun Definitely Intended)

Anthony Burgess claimed that as soon as he received a book to review he would climb into bed and stay there until he finished reading it and then jump out and write his 800-1000 word review. He said that he had to review books this way because he was prone to forget and have to read the book again if too much time had passed between the initial reading and writing of the review. Imagine Burgess trying to curl up in bed with a good e-book, sharing his sheets, pillows, blankets and cats with a computer keyboard monitor, tower and mouse. Some would argue that he’d be able to read the book on an
ipod, e-Book Reader/Viewer, or a small laptop. I don’t think he would have liked that. He probably would have said that something organic was lost in the translation. I agree. There is something about the glare of the screen and wavering images that makes a computer inferior to a book. After all, an image of a letter on a screen is intangible, a ghost-in-the-machine. A book has substance, it lives and breathes.
The Embroidered Corpse, by Brian Kavanaugh published by Bewrite Books 2006 (previously published in Australia by Jacobyte Books 2002) was sent to me on a pdf file. I hate them. So I immediately went to my nearest Staples office supply and copy center and ran off hard copy, printed on both sides of the paper to save me money. I sat on the couch during a humid Sunday night; the oscillating fan soothed my sweaty body and cooled my heated brain. I began to read The Embroidered Corpse. My wife and my eldest child came into the living room, turned on the television to the Disney channel and cranked the power switch of the fan up high. Pages of The Embroidered Corpse flew through space like confetti on Mardi gras. Frustrated, I gathered the manuscript pages and put them in my in-tray, where I promptly forgot them. A few days later after finishing another assignment I read the Embroidered Corpse straight through in one sitting.
The Embroidered Corpse begins when Australian native Belinda Lawrence, with the assistance of her friend and business partner Hazel Whitby accidentally comes into possession of a piece of tapestry that might be the final missing piece of the Bayeux Tapestry and the solution to an ancient puzzle. Suddenly, everyone seems interested in her piece of tapestry. The bodies pile up. Belinda attempts to find answers and looks for a connection between her fragment of tapestry and the murder of an antique dealer from whose shop she had first observed the tapestry fragment. Later, her local Vicar is killed. She had inquired from him the history of the Bayeux Tapestry. Hazel, and Belinda’s boy-friend Mark, at first consider Belinda is daft, thinking that she is being pursued by an order of murderous monks. They further resent Belinda having them running all over the English countryside chasing down clues to the actual meaning and authenticity of her piece of tapestry. A series of events occur that can’t be called coincidences; including Hazel’s mysterious disappearance, Mark begins to believe Belinda may have been right all along.
Before I discuss the Embroidered Corpse further I need to get something off my chest. Dan Brown is a predictable writer when it comes to plot lines and a bad example for other writers to follow. Yeah, I know Dan Brown and his novel The Da Vinci Code has nothing to do with The Embroidered Corpse. And I know that The Da Vinci Code is a monstrosity of best seller that has stayed at the top of The New York Times Best Seller List since the second coming of the Bush Dynasty. There are some similarities between The Da Vinci Code and The Embroidered Corpse. I want to mention three, the rest I’ll leave to the reader to discover for their pleasure. First, both Dan Brown and Brian Kavanaugh are great researchers. Their novels provide history lessons that make the reader curious about the past. (If as a reader you don’t find yourself googling and researching the Holy Grail or Bayeux Tapestry, then you’re probably curiosity-challenged.) The second similarity is how aptly they were able to blend history with fiction to make a compelling mystery. Anthony Burgess recognized the novelistic potential of Brown’s subject way back when he reviewed the book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Burgess writes, “It is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvelous theme for a novel. The third similarity is how they reverted to otiose writing to create two clichéd and predictable villains, Brown’s Sir Leigh Teabing and Kavanaugh’s Sir Gerald Taylor. Both are men of academia, obsessed and transparent characters and give a villainous ‘Goodbye Mr. Bond speech.’ For some reason, when a villain has the hero or heroine in his or her grasp they suddenly suffer from a case of pleonasm and over-explain their motives on how they will accomplish their dastardly deeds. This of course allows our hero or heroine extra-time to make a daring escape and save the day and allows the novelist to write a sequel. Brown has a prequel, Angels and Demons. One can only hope that Kavanaugh has one in the works. I’d like to see what Belinda, Mark and Hazel are doing in the future.

OALA Reviews
-Lee Gooden 8-27-06