Masters and Servants

---

A SOLEMN Anzac Day ceremony was to be held in the small township of Briagolong, in Victoria's east, to honour Private Jacob Kovco who died in Iraq. Hot War - Cold War - Nothing Fair in War ... (Nothing new under the sun ...)

Rushing Through Cold River: The Local Edge
Tolstoy claimed that all happy families are alike and that unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. That may be true of families, but if Tolstoy had looked at local communities, he might have concluded just the opposite ...
A thriving village atmospheres like the one experienced at Bondi are full of surprises. It may be one-of-a-kind shop, spontaneous meeting between neighbors, unique local products, or seasonal iceberg entertainment. Whatever the local mix includes, it sings out clearly that this seaside place is what it is and cannot be confused with any other.
A failed suburb is unrelievedly dreary. Boarded up stores, empty lots, a lack of basic services—everything to indicate that the life of the surburb has gone elsewhere. You can see hundreds of them, all alike, across the country. No one sets out to suck the life out of a suburb, but that’s often been the result of many local policies.
The advent of a typical Westfield (by way of comparison, Kemeny’s store) usually spells the end of the local shopkeepers as a vital economic force. Shopping giants with the promise of “national tenants” can also have a negative impact by siphoning off business from the malls until nothing is left but an endless series of escalators.
Until recently, the harm caused by wall to wall chain stores has been hard to calculate. It might bother you, but you can’t attach a dollar sign to your uneasiness. But now there is economic data to reinforce the idea that a steady diet of chain stores is bad for your local health.

Now you are officially a published author and your book is all set up with a route to market. Ultimately there is only one person who has all the power to make your book a nationwide hit or a local bust. That person is you. You have the power. It doesn't always have to be you. Sometimes you get lucky, and someone else loves your book so much that they sell thousands or millions for you. For example, there is a bookseller at Bondi who has hand-sold thousands upon thousands of copies of local writers. Rita Nash of Martin Smith loves local authors and she tells everyone about them:
3 Hall Street
Bondi 2026
Voice: 9365 1482

My best argument for why you should promote your cold war book on the Internet is the fact that you're reading this. Make sure that you learn how to make love to Google as it didn't cost me a cent to get s(ix) out of 10 ranking on Google. The only cost is perperation, sneaking something different on your blog and do not be afraid to make mistakes, link to risque articles, illogical structure, random picks, different headlines. One liners that bite. Be prepared to fail and fail better each time. Google loves failures - there are 30 million of us out there. Rule # 1 & 2 just do not mention the word - failure. Instead use success! However, it's much easier to sell your books offline than online, because folks will have an opportunity to leaf through the book and read as many quotes, ideas and poems as they like before purchasing. Books do not sell unless you really make some noise & bring attention to yourself. Even then, it's tough. So get ready.... Start with the local newspaper, the most likely place to write an article about your book

---

Repeat: Australia's fastest growing online bookstore Booktopia is making my book available Down Under for the first time. Tony Nash who tends to exceed every customer’s expectation is making sure that his company makes a mark in the retail part of the complex publishing world. Link to Cold River
Level 12,
157 Walker Street,
North Sydney, NSW 2060
Head Office: info@booktopia.com.au
Phone: +61 2 9954 1080
Fax: 61 2 9954 6
Booktopia: A book, like revolution, can change the world

---

If the world is destroyed in the course of this century, I think it will be because of nasty characters like the Lost Angel based Reviewer, Bob - spelled backwards ;-(
Most nights I go for a drive
To the highest place I can find.
I’m standing on a cliff with gooseflesh
Watching the wind rip the leaves from the trees.
Death defying
Every breath
Death defying.
Soon we will all be back in the yard
Behind the wall, living hard
Dreaming of cool rivers and tall grass.
Bob wanted to be a good man, but he failed. Each generation must be alert to the dangers that threaten democracy as directly as each human who wishes to be good must learn how to survive in the labyrinths of envy, greed, and the confusions of moral judgment River guard

To me, a novel is made up; it is a fiction. But it's the paradox of being unreal and real at the same time that interests me
Scott Fitzgerald talked about the importance of being able to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time. It's a very child-like way to be as well. Even as grown-ups we go to a magic show and we can be impressed by the illusion and we don't want to know how the trick is done. That's what novels are like:

The key word for me here is not 'Fun'. The concept of fun is well understood, I should think, after many years of games and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of releases. There are theories of fun, analyses of fun, examinations of the fun of one aspect of a game or another, and whole schema devoted to separating out different kinds of fun.
Meaning is an interesting concept, in both positive and negative, because it suggests purpose or exclusion. Saying that a product is meant to be a certain way can implicitly imply that it is not meant to be another way. Big Macs are meant to be tasty pleasures, they are not meant to be nutrition supplements, for example. They are designed with that intent.
There are four types of students (lit., among those who sit before the Sages) -- a sponge, a funnel, a strainer, and a sifter. The sponge absorbs everything. The funnel brings in on this [side] and brings out on the other. The strainer lets out the wine and retains the lees. The sieve lets out the flour dust and retains the fine flour.
Crushed Yet Conquering: A Story of Constance and Bohemia - Evangelical historical novel about Sage John Hus

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Dying for Water in Somalia's Drought
I'm not entirely sure that it's rational (actually, I'm pretty sure that it's not entirely rational), but nothing offends me more deeply than the idea of deliberately depriving someone of access to water.

Water binds us all together; it permeates us; it balances us; it is the solvent in which the world's biosystems and ecosystems and weather and geography have formed and thrived. It is the most elemental of substances, in chemical terms the simplest non-gas with which we have any regular contact.
Water is not property, at least not for long. It flows away, it evaporates, it passes through us. Too much is as bad as too little, but both are usually temporary. When it goes away, it comes back; when it overwhelms us, it drains away.

To be fluent in the language of The Singing Fish is to be confident in its folklore. In the collection’s bellwether piece, “What The River Told Us To Do,” we are provided exactly what we need in order to take on the anima mundi:
Us brothers said some words back to our father, words such as ‘moon’ and ‘mud’ and ‘river’ and ‘fish,’ but even these words, words that were the world to us brothers, these were sounds that our father did not hear.
Us brothers sometimes have this thing between us. Sometimes we say what it is the other brother is or has been thinking.”
Live & become and Water
• Cold War on Water [Fibonacci Poems Multiply on the Web After Blog's Invitation In balance with this life, this death ; I’ve run across a number of new (or previously unknown to me) bookseller blogs in the last few weeks. So I’ve put together a list. It is a truth universally acknowledged that books, kept for too long, become precious Out back to the back of our back yard ; The Believer compares the paradoxical obituaries of Susan Sontag]
• · Wendy Strothman did the damnedest thing a few years ago. She crossed the street from publisher to literary agent. She went from 250 employees to two. She traded a big office and expense account as head of the trade and reference division of Houghton Mifflin -- the one that puts everything from Curious George to Philip Roth into bookstores -- for a tiny nest near Faneuil Hall. A new chapter :Ex-executive takes title role in smaller venue ; a whiff of old books with your coffee Atmosphere and community are among the perks for the local novelists who use coffee shops as their personal literary salons Lattes and laptops ; The growth of the Internet presents challenges to knowledge transfer; such knowledge is formed contextually and dialogically, a negotiated discursive construct that is created between people. Performative social science
• · · Every time the Bush administration decides that they have the right to mistreat foreigners in certain ways, they eventually get around to claiming the right to treat American citizens that way. Thought for the day ; Why do writers take noms de plume? the Guardian muses on assumed writers and pen names What's in a pseudonym?
• · · · For reasons I cannot fathom, Cold River hasn't had any coverage in Australia. But its feet remain solidly planted on the Amazon River I’ll eat my Speedo cap if there is a single Cold River on any Australian bookshop shelves ;-) Tooting Our Own Horn Stranger and Stranger Still ; The myth of morning - The morning makes us The trouble is, when you’re not anything; You think you could be all kinds of things; And then you choose. And then you are one thing; And nothing else is you--the other things; You could have been aren’t yours to keep or say. The Other Side of Media Dragon: How Dry I Am: Not for nothing he's not called Jozef ; In the old days, the Voice used to write about important, political stuff—now it’s about spoiled, rich guys picking up girls. Bah One Review of Cold River for Those Who Have Read It; One Review For Those Who Haven't .... American literature however is Big in Australia
• · · · · Coming up with a great title sometimes means well-worn cliches Say that again? Books recycle titles; Recycled rejections: ohn Howard's children's book, The Key to Chintak, garnered so many of these identikit responses that he suspected the editors and agents weren't even bothering to turn the title page. So he sent in a new manuscript, The Tin Drum, not his own words this time but extracts from a washing-machine manual. After a delay the replies started to arrive. You've guessed it: 'Thank you for your submission, which I read and enjoyed. Unfortunately…' Believing Your Own Hype and Book Power List Fuckwittery Thank you for your submission, which I read and enjoyed. Unfortunately I don't feel it is quite right for us.' Coetzee throws book at unis
• · · · · · Television Sydney is the first permanent free-to-air television channel to launch in Sydney in more than 25 years. Books make a brief but welcome return to television on The Watershed, a six-part series … the half-hour programs feature inteviews and readings The first show is on TV Sydney - Channel 31 on most sets - at 8pm on Wednesday and repeated at 2pm next Sunday.” Television Sydney ; The One That Got Away: "Could a 300-page fish story, a sort of journalist's 'Moby-Dick,' engage a reviewer and enthusiast of other sports whose fishing life may have stopped at the cork-and-sinker stage? The answer is yes. Raines is a superb writer of narrative Raines' book: Few memoirs are so splendidly articulated