Book Review: Romance for the Beach

How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

St Martins’s Press

By Jackie Atkins

Make no mistake about it, this is a Pantyhose Network book, a summertime-I’m-on-the-beach-don’t-kick-sand-in-my-face head turner. It is the hot book of the summer with a red cover, white type and a title reeking of duplicity. It will turn heads on a chair by the pool, or garner a second glance when left on a cubicle desk top. 

So much for the value of marketing. It is as close to fine literature as an QVC clothing special is to haute couture. If it weren’t for the endless chapters on hospital procedures and physical therapy methods, How to Walk Away would be a very nice read. Formula writing at its mediocre best, which is a shame because Katherine Center is a very talented scribe.

Her free flowing prose allows you to disregard the unethical story line and preposterousness of the young girl having everything (Maggie Jacobsen, defined by snagging a young up and coming fiancé and a job she is clearly unqualified to do) and loosing it all (courtesy of this man who walks on water) only to be swept away in the stoic arms of her physical therapist.

A Fairy Tale originally was defined as a story written for children. Now it is a saga, marked by seemingly unreal beauty, perfection, luck or happiness. 

This romance allows the Heroine to escape the domain of a me-sex- possessed-excessively-ambitious fiancé along with his meddlesome would be mother-in-law by clinging to a dreamboat moody Heathcliff of an aloof man with a Scottish brogue and possible Green Card problems. 

It has a happy and implausible ending. I am not here to wrap up the other plot line, which has to do with her runaway sister, except to say, this loony tale also is neatly wrapped up in a tidy package right about the time said Heroine flies to France to crash the wedding of her ex-fiancé to her ex-BFF.

 

When I read something like this I weep for my gender. This story line is as liberating to women and as smoking Virginia Slims.

 

First this modern lonesome tale of overcoming adversity is based on the old premise, “Some day my Prince will come.” True, this is a Romance but the hard cover does not mast the paper back Harlequin plot line. Worst the only thing which makes this modern is the apparent horniness of the heroine during courtship and the driving energy of her Type A, me-first fiancé to take charge. 

Although she clearly has a fear of flying (Erica Jong double entendre explained tediously in the first chapter) her doofus empathy free entitled man of her dreams insists she go with him on an evening flight even though he has no license to land in adverse conditions. And guess what happens next? Well, after he proposes, hands over his grandmother’s ring, bingo the winds pick up and he crash lands.  Right about here in real life on TV we should break for a commercial on glass smear proof dish washer pellets. Unfortunately if you are reading the book we are air lifted away to a hospital.

Where we have to scan monotonous medical procedures punctured by visits from family and Chip (yes that’s Mr. Dreamboat’s name) and Chip’s mother. Mommy is worried Chip’s has needs Maggie can no longer fulfill. She wants Maggie to call off the engagement. I this point, on cable, we would zip into a video on vaginal deodorant. In the book she throws the ring at her.

Now let’s cut to a liberated woman’s mentality, Harlequin readers. why, why, why can,t our heroine see the obvious handwriting on the wall?

 

The love of her life should be her lawyer. Throwing away a ring shouldn't end your relationship with Chip. It should tether him to your wheelchair pushing it with monthly checks from a structured settlement account on your winning law suit. That way he will always be a part of you and you to him and your attorney spouse, who is bound to you and your judgement payments. I know, just call me a romantic.

 

 

 

 

'Brine'

CAPE MAY ART SHOW

NO DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH



Danny Galieote

Bo Barlett

Kris Lewis

By Jackie Atkins

[WC News Service]

What would possess anyone in the Philadelphia/New York City areas to travel  hundreds of  miles down to the tip of South Jersey just to see a curated show of twelve artists? 

 

Cape May, New Jersey, attracts visitors for many reasons; principally because of its quiet ambience, Victorian architecture, and  laid back, decidedly non-“Jersey Shore” atmosphere. When people come, viewing internationally acclaimed art work may be the last thing that come to mind on a mild summer day.

But what’s a vacation without exploring something more than sea shell hunting and dolphin watching?

Clinton vs. Clinton

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

By Jackie Atkins

[WC News Service]

It was touted as the pivotal event of a lackluster political season for the former First Lady of Arkansas, the USA, Senator from New York,and Secretary of State. No longer would she have to exert enthusiasm to the masses in stump speeches before hand select interns at Town Hall Meetings on Junior College campuses in Iowa and New Hampshire.

 

The big cannon would be fired. Watch out Donald, you’ll meet your match now. 

 

The American people (those old enough) we were told looked forward to this. William Jefferson Clinton, forty second President of the United States would unleash his charismatic glance, known to have enticed twenty-one-year-old interns under the desk in the Oval Office, and legendary maestro at the podium, was to hit the campaign trail in support of his wife for President of the United States.

Jerry Lewis Move Over

Patricia MacDonald
Photo: Jackie Atkins/WritersClearinghouse News Service

FRANCE'S 'MYSTERY QUEEN'
BY JACKIE ATKINS
[WITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE/BIO]

Cape May, New Jersey

From noon to five, every day except Sundays and on holidays, mystery writer Patricia MacDonald works at her day job, writing a new novel once a year for the enjoyment of discerning Americans and the edification of her agent. And the French. They love her best-selling who-done-its in France. Who knew? 

 

She has never experienced what some have dubbed 'writers block.'

 

'To be truthful with you,' she tells me over a cup of coffee in her brightly-lit breakfast room in her 19th-century house here, full of antiques, knick knacks, and bookcases of French cookbooks, 'whenever someone mentions this term [writer's block], I have no know idea what they are talking about.'

 

On Paper By Nicholas A. Basbanes

The author, right, with Jackie, left

 ON THE PAPER TRAIL
BY JACKIE ATKINS
[WRITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE]

Our birth in the world is heralded officially by a small document proclaiming the date, our weight, sex, and parentage. Our death is on notice to the same world by a certificate which states date, more names, and sex. Each milestone in our lives, the graduations, marriages, divorces, driver’s licenses are decreed on other pieces we can hold, show, and offer as proof of our time on earth. Records may also be kept in vast caverns of data banks, but it is those which we can hold in our hands, which we store in our cabinets, and hold close to our hearts that trumpet our own special indenture, our enduring allegiance to paper.

 

Nicholas A. Basbanes, an investigative reporter, respected book critic, and renowned author of eight previous books on literary matters has decided to put a face on the pages of time, the immutable tablet of scribes, artists, and bean counters of our current and past civilizations.

Internet Rage





GREEN MANION

BY JACKIE ATKINS

[WRITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE]
There is nothing more exciting than getting in touch with your own ego and a keyboard. Think of this as an extension for self love through instant gratification.  

 Throw in a first rate mind, a talent for adverbial abstracts and a raging male hormones libido and you’ll have the thrill and exasperation behind reading Lance Manion’s Homo sayswhaticus. The author’s fifth book of essays, currently an Internet rage.

 

One approaches Manion’s first paragraph of the Introduction with sublime adulation (how else can you digest “Death by Viagra”?) and leaves 126 pages later with an itch to slap him in the face, proof positive that for erection lasting longer than twenty four hours a doctor should be consulted.

 

In between you are amused, bored, redeemed and frustrated. You yell out, “He’s got all this talent, give me a story for Christ's sake. Show me an honest critiques. Do something, Manion, besides playing with yourself!”

 

A Prince is Born

BOO HOO  

BY JACKIE ATKINS

[SPECIAL TO WRITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE]

What is a prince to do if he’s not a soldier?, opined Dr. Andrew Roberts, an NBC News British correspondent. What indeed. More important, why even ponder the new Prince of Cambridge's occupational potential? Like so many of his ancestors, and those of other European monarchies, he might even be one day wind up insane (think George III).

     NBC and it’s progressive cable news affiliate MSNBC have abandoned their endless banter about the one percenters and  talk about inequality, with so much power in the hands of just ta few, in order to present American viewers with laudatory blather about the birth of an ultimate .10 percenter, a  prince and  future king. 

     While CEO’s, captains of major industries and banks, most of whom worked for their wealth and position, are vilified on a non-stop basis,  apparently there can’t be enough adulation and praise about a kid who will inherit one day the Bank of England. Talk about entitlement!

Classy

 

LOW RENT, HIGH EXPECTATIONS

BY JACKIE ATKINS
[WRITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE]
CAPE MAY, NEW JERSEY

New Jersey's shore communities in Cape May County are class conscious. Ask someone their summer vacation town, and the response will likely reveal the respondent's perch on the economic social scale  and/or  that of his family's. Here's the run-down:

Ocean City has Old Guard Philadelphia professionals, to grandchildren of the doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs who settled in the this Methodist meeting ground in the 1920s.
Sea Isle, after 1962, drew heavily from the union officials and contractors who helped rebuild the place after the devastating nor'easter. Today, the island is wall to wall condo homes, staked sky high, an obvious tribute to crass consumerism and the ability of some people to rise above their station by living on credit. People there long to be considered established and those who live close to Townsend Inlet are fond of telling others they reside in Avalon which is a lot farther on the collective scale despite being just a short waterway away.

Cooler by a mile, Avalon is home to families from the inner regions of Pennsylvania, sons and daughters of Reading stockbrokers and Lancaster surgeons who now have homes on the outer edges of the Main Line while captains of major industries in the region build their mansions on the little available land left.

Nunsense

Beachy Keen

'... Stoned to Death by Popcorn'

 

By Jackie Atkins

[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

Cape May, New Jersey

 

 Nuns to the left of me.

 Nuns to the right

 Following after me

 Into the night

 

I was raised by nuns -- twelve years of education taught by them with a smattering of priests and religious in my last four. Though in my high school days, some tried to befriend me. I never took the invitations; they were not quite human. I had an external wall, a self-imposed barrier to nuns as people.

 

 Nuns were my teachers and, as every school kid knows, teachers are not real people. If you meet a teacher outside of a classroom, worlds collide.

 

Artist Carol King Hood though saw it differently as a child. Her parents use to invite her teachers to dinner. As a result she could see through the veils.

 

The end result for her is “Kumbayah” showing at SOMA NewArt Gallery until 9 June.

 

Jackie Atkins meanders

through Richard Carreño's life as a flâneur and never gets tired of the journey.

By Jackie S. Atkins
[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]
HOW does one read a third-person narrative of a first person memoir? Well, on a bus, in a cab, by the fireplace, in bed (either silently or aloud to a favorite friend). All of these will work, for that matter how about while standing upside down and glancing into a mirror? Such is the fate of rapture and bemusement which will befall the reader of Richard Carreño’s A Flâneur at Large: Cultured Shock (WritersClearinghousePress, 198 pp, $14.99).

Penn Museum

 

 

 

Penn Museum Gets Floored

The Lod Mosaic at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. www.penn.museum. February 10-May 12

 

By Jackie S. Akins

[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

In the year 300 A.D. in the Roman Empire colony of Diospolis in Palestine area of Judea, fifteen miles southeast of Tel Aviv, business was thriving. The colony stood on the former Jewish municipality of Lod and while the Roman citizens were primarily Christians, it being a day’s walk to Judea, the city after the fall of Jerusalem became famous as a seat of Jewish scholarship.

In the Pink

Neighbours
See Red Over
Pink House
By Jackie Atkins

[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

Cape May, New Jersey

When I attended Jeanne d'Arc Camp in Quebec Province, the last thing on my mind was feng shui.Even if I knew then what it was. Indeed adherence to a false and foreign philosophy was a sure way to get me into hell, that and cavorting with the boys across the lake at Camp Don Bosco.

At the age of ten neither prospect tempted me and the nuns made sure to keep me busy and not be lured down Satan’s path.

Besides horseback riding, learning crafts took up most of my time, that and feigning illness before daily vespers, I became adept at the arts of Indian beadings and story telling.

Actor Attacks...

... Junto Contributor

The following is an exchange between Dan Rottenberg, editor of BroadStreetReview.com, and the actor Anthony Lawton. At issue is a review (go to BroadStreetReview.com to see it) written by Jackie Atkins, who is also a Junto contributor. I've also written by BroadStreetReview.com. Funny thing. It's the only place where I've been a contributor where critics in letters frequently fling personal attacks at the writers they're critcizing. As is the case in this letter by Lawton, such mud-slinging mired in a total misunderstanding of a critic's role (a almost congenital problem among many of the most outspoken BroadStreetReview.com letter writers) undermines anything of value they might have to say.

Anthony,

Thanks for your letter below, which I'd like to post as part of our continuing dialogue.

As an admirer of your work, especially The Great Divorce, I'm dismayed that you seem unfamiliar with Broad Street's Review's mission. From our perspective, we're not arbiters of taste here; we're just trying to foster conversation among people who've attended a given performance— whether they're critics or customers, professionals or amateurs, wise or foolish. As far as I know, Jackie Akins isn't a professional critic, but whether she is or isn't makes no difference to me. I was intrigued by her idiosyncratic response to The Great Divorce, so I posted it in the hope that it would trigger further discussion, as indeed it has.

Best regards,

Dan

Feb 15, 2012

From Anthony Lawton 4:51pOnm Feb 15

Dear Dan:

I must respectfully dispute your claim that it ill behooves an actor to blame anyone for failing to grasp a play's intended message.Or, rather, I don't dispute you -- in well over 99% of cases. I have gotten at least one pan -- probably a lot more -- in each of my 20 years as a professional artist. More than 99% of the time, not only do I not blame a critic for not getting the point; more than 99% of the time, I think they're probably right. Much of the target of criticism is a question of taste -- there is room for difference of opinion, and the inherent ambiguity of some plays makes it impossible to judge them with a single, correct interpretation. Moreover, I have never imagined that any work I have generated is perfect. But 2 years ago, Wendy Rosenfield characterized my play, The Foocy, as an anti-Semitic work.Sorry, but I must object. First of all, she is wrong. In my subsequent correspondence with her, I got her to admit that 99 out of 100 audience members would probably never interpret my play in that way. So even she admits that she was wrong. Second, and more importantly, she owes it to me, in justice, to retract a statement that is so thoughtless and damaging. I owe it to myself to demand that retraction from her. Granted, as an artist, I make myself vulnerable, in public, to the brickbats of critics, and it's ungracious of me to whine if someone doesn't like my work. But this wasn't just a question of someone's disliking my work. It was a question of an admittedly wrong-headed misrepresentation of my work, so far outside of the realm of common sense that it gave the public a false and slanderous idea of me. You have seen The Great Divorce, and you must admit that Ms. Atkins understanding of the work is disastrously wrong. That I, or anyone, would argue that etiquette is the grounds for salvation is preposterous; the wealth of imagery in the piece supports her block-headed interpretation not at all. One might as well argue that Death of a Salesman is about gay rights, or that The Foreigner is about spelling reform.Ms. Atkins is, in effect, publicly accusing me of stupidity. And she is not one to talk. When I was in high school, I learned to write an essay that had a clear thesis, and which then presented clear argumentation and evidence in support of that thesis. Ms. Atkins would have flunked out of my high school in half a semester.I am content to let competent critics spew bile at me in public. But I should not have to suffer the published contempt of someone who can't spell the word "murderer," and who can't understand a simple literary theme or metaphor.It is not clear, on your website, that these reviews are unsolicited, and it is not clear what "unsolicited" means. Does that mean that anyone who has a mind to can submit a review? If that's the case, you must make it clearer on your home page. For all the public knows, Ms. Atkins is a qualified journalist. For all the public knows, she has an ounce of discernment. The public has no way of knowing that she is a hack and an amateur. One more argument: critics fire from a position of relative safety, and they have little to lose. They have all the capacity to hurt, and very little vulnerability to being hurt. As a result, many of them quickly acquire a taste for cruelty and contempt, because artists think it "ill behooves" them to respond. To my way of thinking, it can't hurt a critic to have someone return fire once in a while. Maybe -- maybe -- Ms. Atkins will put a little more thought into her next review if I (perish the thought) hurt her feelings a little. Ah, probably not.I concede that I can't be objective on this question. The Great Divorce is a piece that is near to my heart; I make myself very vulnerable, emotionally and intellectually, every time I present it in public. Many critics have disliked it, and I'm content to let them have their say. But I will not stand by idly while a dunce, masquerading as a professional journalist, tells the world that black is white. I guess there is no way for me to come off as unbiased or gracious if I choose to defend myself in this way, and, in that respect, perhaps it "ill behooves" me to do so. But gracious or biased or not, I still have a right to defend myself.

Newt-ron Bombs Again

Chump Oeil

Junto writer Jackie Atkins proclaims herself as 'an emotionally scarred woman in need of a public outlet' after an unnerving encounter with Newt Gingrich a dozen years ago when the randy former U.S. Speaker of House was on the lascivious prowl in Philadelphia.

Gloria Allred, Esq.
Allred, Moroko & Goldberg
Los Angeles, CA

Dear Gloria,
Please help me. I don’t know where else to turn. You are my last chance.

My nights have been restless: I suffer from sleeping leg syndrome and by head aches in a spinning motion ever time I think about what happened. I need closure. The world should know what this man has done to me.

Oh, it all started in the summer of 2000 when I was eager to be part of history. The Republicans had come to Philadelphia to nominate W. As a loyal Republican, I looked forward to meeting the stars of the Grand Old Party. G.O.P.

So naturally when I had a chance to attend a private cocktail party at the Rittenhouse hosted by U.S. Congressman James C. Greenwood my heart swooned. The invitation stated that the guest of honor would be no other than Newt Gingrich, who, at the time, was a correspondent for Fox TV. More important, I knew him as the one who single handed changed the course of history by wresting the U.S. House of Representatives from the grips of Democrats and pinning down the nation’s hopes for a Republican revival.