Here's a Jeff Scher experimental animated film from paintings evoking that end-of-summer-feeling from the NY Times.

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Jeff Scher is a painter who makes experimental films and an experimental filmmaker who paints. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum, and has been screened at the Guggenheim Museum, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and at many film festivals around the world, including opening night at the New York Film Festival. Mr. Scher has also had two solo shows of his paintings, which have also been included in many group shows in New York galleries. Additionally, he has created commissioned work for HBO, HBO Family, PBS, the Sundance Channel and more. Mr. Scher teaches graduate courses at the School of Visual Arts and at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Kanbar Institute of Film & Television's Animation program. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons.

“Black Americans think there is a black America,” Ms. O’Brien said in the interview. “It’s a metaphor for a chunk of experiences. Every black person will tell you that white people need to understand black people: they don’t know our players, but we have to know their players.”

Here's some downhome wisdom from the Big Apple. Check out today's bits of village wisdom in the NY Times. Breaking news: country goes city!

DINING

Video: What to Do With Leftovers
Mark Bittman makes an American classic, hash, from leftovers.

BANKING ON GARDENING

"One organic cucumber is $3 and I can produce it for pennies."
CASSANDRA FEELEY, who planted vegetables in her yard to save money.

Now, that's what I call commonsense cents.

Here's a quoted excerpt I particularly liked, because it articulates how I feel inside library walls...sort of cloistered, as if I've taken holy orders:

"The library became my hangout, my private club, my sanctuary, the place of my salvation; during the many months I was at Duke, I felt that when I was reading in the library I was sheltered from the world and from the evil winds of the future; no harm could come to me there.”--from Havanas in Camelot

Kakutani comments:

"This love of books, this veneration of the printed word as a source of wisdom, redemption and refuge animates many of Styron’s essays in this volume, conjuring that era in which the author came of age, when young, aspiring artists regarded novel-writing as an almost holy profession...."

I loved this article by A. O. Scott so much that I called up Daniel in Northern California at an unseemly earlly hour to read it to him and to discuss it with him.

Here's a passage I like, now that I'm back in the Midwest and surrounded by Midwestern speech and action:

But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer. ---A. O. Scott

Film critics on T. V. changed our culture. Before, folks just went to the movies, and came out and had a cup of coffee. Now, everyone is a film critic. Aren't you?

Login to the NY Times online to read the rest of A. O. Scott's fine essay on the filmic panarama of human migration.

I'm in love this morning with Janny Scott's NY Times profile "A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path" which so delicately traces the "unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama".

A Mother’s Influence is part of a series of articles about the life and careers of contenders for the 2008 Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.

But, set that aside. Yes, we want to know about this woman because of her influence on a key figure in American politics. But, even if there were no insights to be gained in how their relationship as mother and son shaped him. Even if there were no ripples of reflection to trace between her courage and big world view...between mother and son. Even then, we'd want to know about this woman, about this life, about this way of seeing the world and being in it.

I find the article extremely moving. Janny Scott has written a nuanced portrait worthy of its subject...the subject being not only the mother, the seeker, the doer...but the subject being women in the world...the subject being a human way of relating in the world...the subject being a woman who was an arc across cultures and ways of being. She just stepped across the barriers.

A friend says of her: "She had a world view, even as a young girl. It was embracing the different, rather than that ethnocentric thing of shunning the different. That was where her mind took her.”

May our minds take us there. May we embrace the different. May our centers shift, without wobbling, to embrace continents and peoples.

Tracking the Fallout of (Another) Literary Fraud By MOTOKO RICH

Click here to read about the author of “Love and Consequences” who confessed she "made up the memoir about her supposed life as a foster child in gang-infested South-Central Los Angeles, the focus turned to her publisher and the news organizations that helped publicize what appeared to be a searing autobiography."

Seltzer is following in the steps of the likes of James Frey and Laura Albert (aka J.T. Leroy---who turns out to be more of a drama troupe)...and too many others to name here.
See Slate's round-up by clicking here.

Memorist might like to consult Guardian columnist Levi Asher published guidance for authors about how to avoid memoir scandals by clicking here.

What I forsee, since there have been such a rush of these memoir hoaxes accreting over the past two years is that the field is ripe for a book on this subject, bringing them all together. It's not my book, but the book is out there, and we'll be seeing it sometime soon.

The big question most memoir writers and readers ask, is "why?" Is it a marketing issue that writers think their work will sell more as memoir rather than positioning it as fiction straight-up first time around?

Is it linked-in to the reality show craze? Is there something in the American water supply? What's happening to us as a culture that's leading writers to take these desperado courses of action?

A sensible book explaining and defining genre categories and many other issues serious memoirist fret over is Judith Barrington's Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. I cannot recommend it strongly enough:

WRITING THE MEMOIR: From Truth to Art
By Judith Barrington
Published by The Eighth Mountain Press
ISBN 0-933377-50-9, trade paperback, $14.95
The bestselling book on writing memoir, now in its second edition with over 100,000 copies sold.

This is by far the best book on memoir writing I've ever read in that it is the most sensible.

Memoirist will find great advice on all manner issues we fret about in these pages. It's such a classic it's likely to be in your local library, so check there first, but you may well want it in your personal library and it's not very expensive.