I can hear the sounds of the Hudson River behind me as I jot down my thoughts in my bright red spiral notebook. I purposely picked red because the color symbolizes passion and power – two emotions I hope to feel as I start putting my thoughts onto paper (and screen). The warm summer air lingers, and there are moments where the wind feels like a faint whisper, gently encouraging me to continue to write.

I look around and breathe in the greenery. The bench is uncomfortable beneath me, but I don’t mind. Joggers pass by with ease; dogs bark and play while their “parents” chat about their most recent adventures.

When I was young, and so much younger than today, I used to make notes about all the books I read. Mainly that was because I was an English major, and it was kind of required. Now, however, I'm almost sixty-four (that's enough Beatles references, ed.), and I can't remember anything. Which is why I've decided to put my thoughts about each published book I read from now on on-line, so I won't forget. You're welcome to check in if you want, and subscribe and all that malarkey. It's Martin's Random Reviews, and I begin with The Bridge.

Check out our ad in the latest issue of VegNews. Pick up your copy today and be sure to check out the latest titles from Lantern Books or visit our catalog. It's a great time to get started on your summer reading!

Our web guru is growing up! Everyone at Lantern Books would like to wish Laura Leslie a very Happy Birthday! Kara baked beautiful blueberry muffins and Martin supplied the fresh fruit smoothies! Happy Birthday Laura!

Back in Britain in the late-1980s, I was a supporter of an organization called Charter 88, which advocated for institutional and constitutional changes in the U.K., such as an independent judiciary, proportional representation, and a written Bill of Rights. The organization took its inspiration from Vaclav Havel's Charter 77, which had called for a free and democratic Czechoslovakia.

Like Charter 77, Charter 88 felt that overhauling the institutions of state would at once guarantee basic rights and freedoms, and in turn encourage more liberty. It felt that the oppressions of the state and the dead hand of tradition and custom had to be done away with, and institutional power restrained. Perhaps not surprisingly, given my inclination toward restraining government and enshrining individual freedom in written form, I ended up in the United States.

The people of the United Kingdom will go to the polls on May 6th to elect a new parliament, and until a week ago, the opinion among the bien pensants was that the Conservative Party would win, albeit with a very small majority. However, in the wake of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg's performance in the first ever debate between the leaders of the three main political parties, the Liberal Democrats have shot up in the polls, whereby they now either lead or come second to the Tories. In one, they even push the ruling Labour Party into third place.

Nick Clegg casts something of an exotic figure in British politics. His mother is Dutch, his father is half-Russian, his wife is Spanish and his children all have Spanish names. He speaks numerous foreign languages. Not surprisingly, the right-wing press is now painting him as some kind of fifth column interloper for the European social order. The left, however, see him as a Barack Obama, upending the old order of the two statist parties by promising a different kind of politics from the one practiced by the two parties that have swapped power over the last seventy years.

Because of the vagaries of the British "first past the post voting system, it is very hard for any third party—which is what the Liberal Democrats (and their predecessors the Liberals) have been for a century—to win the election outright. What the Lib Dems can do, however, is cause a hung parliament, with no party gaining an absolute majority. Depending on which party has the largest number of seats, the Queen will invite either Labour or the Conservatives to form a government. Should the largest party be the Conservatives, they will probably try to rule as a minority government, an inherently unstable position that was last tried in the U.K. in 1974.

As you walk on third street toward or from Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, across the Gowanus Canal (see previous blog), you pass a huge, abandoned red-brick building, a memento of the Canal's now faded industrial past. I've always thought it a beautiful, if delapidated, structure, with wonderful arched windows. I had fantasies of buying the property and turning it into a green building, with small businesses and creative ventures, and providing a park for the community's kids. The artists who were squatting in the building would provide their labor for rent.

Of course, as this blog points out, the building's provenance is complicated and the land on which it stands and the surrounds are deeply polluted. But there's still a romance to the shell that's hard to shake. One day, perhaps, someone with very deep pockets will rise to the occasion and redeem this magnificent structure.

You may have read about my efforts at running the New York City marathon (here, here, and here), and how humbling it was to be overtaken by people considerably older than yours truly. Well, I just found out that Ginette Bedard, aged 76, completed the 2009 New York City marathon in 4:09:57, which is just over 9:33 minutes a mile. Not surprisingly, she placed first in her age group for her sex.

All this would be remarkable enough, but there's more. Running nerds have developed a program that analyzes your age, sex, and performance against all other runners' age, sex, and performance, so you can gauge just how "good" you are against other runners in other age groups. If you are in the 50 to 60 percent range, you're pretty average. In the 60 to 70 percent range, you're locally competitive (this is where I am at the moment). If you're in the 70 to 80 percent range, you're regionally competitive; the 80 to 90 percent range makes you nationally competitive; and above 90 means that you're internationally competitive.

Ginette Bedard's age-graded performance placed her at 101 percent, which means that—given her time and age—she effectively broke a world record, and did so with time to spare. That's just a remarkable testament to senior fitness.

Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I had the good fortune (I think) to watch again the British TV docudrama Threads the other day, a show I hadn't seen for 25 years. The program uses the conventions of family drama to describe what might happen if a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States over the former's incursion into Iran leads to an all-out nuclear war and the dropping of a huge nuclear bomb on Sheffield in the north of England. Threads not only dramatizes the lead up to the fatal decisions, and then traumas that occur to the various families depicted, but it shows the supposed actions that local government are meant to take in the event of a nuclear war, and then speculates how society might cope for thirteen years following.

We went to war with each other, and are separated by continents and oceans. And yet, somehow, it seems we're more similar than we care to admit. And so, in a lighthearted vein, here are ten similarities between the English and the Japanese.

1. We are island nations in close proximity to large, continental civilizations to which we unaccountably feel superior. As a result . . .
2. Throughout our histories, we've believed that we're so much more refined than other civilizations that we invaded them, and called it liberation.
3. Unfortunately, since we've become democracies and no longer military powers, we've quite lost our way.
4. We're ruled by an ancient royal lineage that we've no idea what to do with.
5. We resent the Americans and yet have deeply absorbed their culture and depend on them for our safety.
6. Thankfully, we can turn to our love of elaborate ritual and formality, both of which serve to keep everyone in their place.
7. We have turned making tea and arranging flowers into fine arts.
8. We enjoy cultivating our gardens as part of our commitment to manage nature and remove all traces of wildness from it.
9. We are wonderfully polite, especially when we're deliberately not saying what we really mean.
10. And finally, the men seem to be incapable of loosening up without becoming drunk.

An article in today's New York Times asks the question whether marathons are worthy of the name and the mystique surrounding the effort required to complete them when a substantial number of people don't run them fast, quite a few barely run them at all, and one or two people have (reportedly) stopped for lunch on the way round the course! "That's not racing," lament the elite runners who've trained all year, "that's just going out for a stroll."

As someone who's run four marathons, all between 3:30 and 4:00 hours, I'm hardly elite. I'm squarely in the middle of local class. However, I'm regularly in the top 10 to 15 percent of runners—if only because there are lots of runners slower than I am. So I rely on the slower runners to make me feel "elite"! I only get miffed when I find myself in the early stages of a race having to weave around runners who've overestimated their speed, and the corral system based on time has generally weeded out this problem.

In the end, I can't really see what the fuss is about. I may enjoy setting goals to be better than people in my age group, but in reality I'm only in competition with myself. I've had enough 75- and 80-year-olds beating my time to know that I've got plenty of room for improvement, irrespective of what I might think about those who come in at five- or six-hour pace. You run your race, not anybody else's. As long as you don't get in anyone's way, who cares what time you do it in?

Most of our videos are worthy documentations of our authors' ideas and highlights from Lantern's publishing and web programs. But, every now again, we try to make a shameless effort to rack up YouTube hits. This is Lula and she's a rescue from our block. She's already been adopted out, as were all five of the litter. We're just looking after her for a bit.

A Practical Peacemaker Ponders . . .

Record-breaking cold temperatures and icy, treacherous roads along Colorado's Front Range this past weekend did not deter 140 people, myself included, from gathering for a writers' conference--it just took us longer to get there. Somehow I had managed to choose among the ten or so irresistible offerings for each of the workshop slots, and all proved informative: "The Author as Speaker" and "Turning Regular Life into Extraordinary Stories," to name just two. Considering that writing is such a solitary pursuit, I was surprised to discover how many talented and enthusiastic folks all around the region spend large chunks of time hunkered down in front of their computers, courting the muse. What's more, they encourage all who will listen to submit themselves to similar self-punishment!

I'd like to share with you a bit of the closing keynote speech. It's been quite awhile since I have been so inspired, as well as entertained, about the calling of being a writer. The speaker was Todd Mitchell, Director of the Beginning Creative Writing Teaching Program at Colorado State University and author of The Traitor King and other teen fiction. Here are some of his points:

• Don't compare yourself to other writers; we each have our individual pace and path.


• Perseverance matters more than talent or genius.


• Every writer doubts; wrestling with doubt is an essential part of the creative process.


• Learn to love failure and embrace revision. These make you a better writer.


• Writer's block most often arises from either perfectionism or a lack of information--don't let them stop you.


• Set aside the traditional advice to write what you know, and instead write what you want to read, what you want to discover. Native medicine man Black Elk said: "No vision is real until you enact it on the earth for people to see." Writers enact visions, map the realm of human possibility so that others can grasp it and live it.

Writing is a response to a deep thirst in the world for healing, and can be transformative for both writers and readers. The work we do as writers--and as publishers like Lantern, I might add--is incredibly important, even if sometimes incredibly difficult.

Call me Mr. Sentimental, but I was so heartened to hear that Dame Vera Lynn, the iconic singer whose "White Cliffs of Dover" and "We'll Meet Again" were literally the signature tunes for British troops during the Second World War as they fought the Germans and Japanese overseas, has achieved a number one record in the United Kingdom at the ripe old age of ninety-two, a full seventy years after she first recorded some of the album's songs. She even managed to prevent those upstarts The Beatles, from getting the number one spot.

I think part of the great good cheer that has erupted around Britain at the news is that it's a walking stick in the shins for the youth-at-all-costs culture that demands that the only consumers that matter are under thirty, and that their needs are the only ones that must be satisfied. It turns out, mirabile dictu, that there are other people in the U.K. who might be worthy of consideration. Now, if only Hollywood would start making films that spoke to that audience. . . .

In this age of the infinite and immediate self-expression of Twitter, texting, and blogging, the urge to be heard above the din of numerous other people all demanding to be heard seems to becoming greater and greater. How else to explain the outburst of Republican representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina, Serena Williams's unapologized-for meltdown at the U.S. Open, the tea-baggers and other disaffected citizens gathered on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, and Kanye West snatching the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV awards—all in under a week?

I mean, I understand the logic: Why accept the right of another person to make an argument or accept an award when you can rain on their parade, grab the headlines, and otherwise raise your profile or money, or both? Why engage in reasoned argument when neither reason nor argument matters when you can yell or rant and get on television at the same time, and extend your brand? What's the point of discipline, grace, and consideration when, well, silence is for suckers?