January 1982 RAIN Page 19 Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande, 1981 (first published 1934), 196 pp. $4.95 from: Houghton Mifflin Co. 2 Park Street Boston, MA 02107 With very few obvious and specific modifications, Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer can serve non-writers as wholly as it does the rest of us. Her focus is not so much on the techniques of writing (i.e., grammer, spelling, plot, narrative, or character development) as on the taming and training of the unconscious mind to work in collaboration with the conscious. In 1934, long before gurus drove Rolls Royces and lived in castles (their modern-day reward for “teaching” us to sit still), Brande was offering simple techniques for inducing what she calls the “artistic coma," releasing “one's individual endowment of genius." Long before it cost $300 or more to purchase a mantra (a little word to help shut out all the other words) Brande proposed exercises for holding “mind as well as body in a kind of suspension while the higher, or deeper, faculty was at work." Her advice to “young writers" ranges from the particular (“rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can—and without talking, without reading the morning paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before—begin to write. . . . Write any sort of early morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically") to the seemingly general (“turn yourself into a stranger in your own streets"). Brande is the wise, encouraging friend needed when our confidence and our creativity wanes, but she is also the master commanding us to choose a time each day to write and "at the moment, on the dot of that moment, you are to be writing ... no excuse of any nature can be offered when the moment comes." I can't imagine why this book fell out of print and remained so till now, but I'm delighted at its reissue. —CC The Synonym Finder (revised edition), by J.I. Rodale, 1978,1361 pp., $19.95 hardcover from: Rodale Press 33 E. Minor Street Emmaus, PA 18049 RAINHOUSE MEMO TO: MR/CC/LS FROM: JF SUBJ: editing of new article on co-ops On second look, it seems clear that the author's use of the term “run smack in the face of" (para. 6) definitely doesn't work. You can "run smack into" and you can “fly in the face of," but you certainly can't "run smack in (or into) the face of" something unless you are incredibly careless or clumsy, it's a very dark night, and the face in question has somehow situated itself directly in your path. In other words, it's a mixed metaphor. Our new Rodale Synonym Finder (it's great, check it out!) shows we would do well to go with "fly in the face of." It means (among other things) defy, flout, ignore, disregard, slight, treat with contempt, scoff at, thumb one's nose at, oppose, go against, contradict, contravert, counter, and go contrary to. It would surely be difficult to run in the face of linguistic evidence like that— smack or otherwise I Home of Thomas Wolfe The Literary Guide to the United States, edited by Stewart Benedict, 1981,246 pp., $15.95 hardcover from: Facts on File 119 W. 57th St. New York, NY 10019 America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters. —Ralph Waldo Emerson This book takes us on a delightful guided tour of the United States, making frequent stops along the way to explore how a sense of place has influenced our literary artists—and how they, through their writings, have influenced ours. We visit the New York City of Edith Wharton and the San Francisco of Jack Kerouac. We stop in the small town Minnesota of Sinclair Lewis and the plantation Georgia of Margaret Mitchell. We view the puritan New England of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the frontier Southwest of Zane Grey. In all of our travels, we are made aware of the special challenges which America's "ample geography" has posed for her writers and we see the immense variety of literary responses elicited by America's diverse landscape, transformed repeatedly by successive waves of culturally diverse people in search of a better place to live. The Literary Guide to the United States is a cultural history. It is also a literary geography and a poetic travelogue. But perhaps it is best to forget all that and simply think of it as a book to be packed along on a vacation and enjoyed for its zest, its insights about America, and its memorable anecdotes. The spirit of the book is well captured in the story it relates about the least likely of all Wild West travelers, Oscar Wilde. Visiting a Colorado mining camp in 1882, Wilde noted a sign hanging in a local saloon which read, “rtease Do Not Shoot the Pianist. He is Doing The Best He Can." It was, said Wilde, “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across." —JF Kay Bradbury at his writing desk. From Writers in Residence From Writers in Residence
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