"Our Private Lives" (Ecco, $17) has just be revived in a sturdy paperback. Edited by Daniel Halpern, the collection features 39 authors, ranging wide over the landscape, encompassing talents from Thomas Berger to Mordecai Richler, from Norman Mailer to Ursula K. Le Guin, and William Matthews to President Clinton.
 IRISH EYES: as 9 April approaches, JOE O'NEILL offers a special editorial "DEADLINE FOR PEACE."
 POWERSBOOKS looks at the Dangerous Visions available from a number of books and "PRIVATE THOUGHTS."
VOX POPULI, YOUR E-mail alternative to the Message Board is updated! G21 WORDS DOUBLE FEATURE:  POETRY: NATHAN BLACK - "Rationalizations of The Hermit"
HYPER-FICTION: ROD AMIS - "Quiet Worlds"
 BARE KNUCKLES: JEFF WINBUSH kicks off the Dangerous Visions Issue with "REGGIE WHITE GOES DOWN."
 FLISS USSHER's G21 EUROPE column LONDON CALLING! has a Dangerous Vision of a generation in "PARABLE OF A GENERATION"
 G21 ASIA RAOUL TESLA reports from Angeles, the Philippines.
ANOTHER Great Joke of the Day in THE HOUSE OF CARDS! G21 ASIA has KIM CARTER back talking about another type of foolishness in "CANNIBAL ISLAND."
 JENNIFER BLUE's PLANETARY MADNESS looks at YOUR influences!
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Novelist Lawrence Durrell comes up with this enchanting line: "She did nothing with such felicity that she provoked senseless and frantic activity in those around her." Later, he observes, "The novel was invented for the ladies to kill time, and time was invested to kill the novelist."Mary Gordon, whose works of fiction have many fans, writes, "Everywhere I have been I have thought at least once a day of my dead father. He has been dead for over thirty years. In a book he transcribed for me are these words, in his handwriting, a translation of a line of Virgil: `Among the dead there are so many thousands of the beautiful.'"
One of my favorite poets, Donald Hall, writes, "When we think that our country was innocent in the past, we are thinking of latency when we were five years old. As ever, the personal is laundered into the historical." Later he notes that "the pleasure of writing is that the mind does not wander, any more than it does in orgasm--and writing takes longer than orgasm."
Of writing, Hall says that "Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more."
Says Edward Hoagland: "Old people seem wise because they have grown resigned and because they remember the axioms even if they've forgotten the data."
Joyce Carol Oates, one of the best novelists of our age, often criticized for "writing too much" (as if productivity is some sort of sin), writes that she puts faith in fiction "as the only honest activity of which I'm capable."
Daniel Halpern, in persuading these writers to allow their mostly private musings enter the world, has done a great service to readers everywhere.
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Dirty Deeds in Virginia
Despite having published ten novels and three collections of short stories, West Virginia native William Hoffman remains unknown to the average reader.
Now an effort is being made to lift him out of obscurity. Algonquin Books has just brought out a thriller, "Tidewater Blood," ($21.95) accompanied by a major publicity push. The first printing, unusual for Algonquin, is 20,000 copies.
Hoffman has been publishing since 1955, but this novel is his debut in the thriller genre. Unfortunately, it's a leisurely tale of a black-sheep son of a prominent Virginia family who finds himself falsely accused after an explosion wipes out most of his family.
One of the inspirations for the book, Hoffman says, was the first 18 years of his life spent in West Virginia. "Many West Virginians felt like red-headed stepchildren. When you'd mention to people that you were from West Virginia, you could see their faces sort of tighten up."
Hoffman sees being from West Virginia as a "double tribulation. Not only are you lampooned as an uncouth mountaineer with flea-scratching hounds, but then you're thought to be a double-dealer from the Civil War days. It's easy to feel oneself a lesser breed."
As a youngster he spent a lot of time in Virginia. His mother was a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy and Hoffman went off to camp every summer, in Virginia. While his family belonged to a country club, around them West Virginians struggled. During the Depression, Hoffman says beggars showed up daily at their back door.
Of course, the intrepid hero of "Tidewater Blood," is innocent and must spend nearly 300 pages tracking down the real killer. Reading like a pretentious literary tome uneasily meshed with the standard by-the-book pulsepounder, the novel achieves little success on either side of the track.
LeBlanc comes across as a cynical rotter with a long history of being misunderstood. When he becomes the target of a police investigation, he must roam through the South in a seemingly unending search for the actual culprit. When the devilish deed-doer is unveiled, few readers will shout out in astonishment. A cadre of standard characters crosses LeBlanc's path as the book meanders along a predictable path with nary a smidgen of suspense.
A man who lacks social graces despite having grown up with a family made rich by coal mines in West Virginia, LeBlanc lacks much in the way of being likable or convincing. It's damned difficult to care what happens, a fatal mistake in a novel whose every move demands the reader to admire the protagonist.
Hoffman shares the inner conflict by his protagonist Charles LeBlanc. "On one hand, I came from noble lineage, anglophiles . . . On the other hand, there was the fierceness of the craggy mountains of West Virginia, the self-sufficient people who made their lives there. I have a foot in each state."
Lemon Trees & Lemons
Of all the novels I consumed last year, the best was Patricia Duncker's engrossing "Hallucinating Foucault." Its mysteries were profound, its story mesmerizing. Challenging, difficult, yet demanding to be read, the novel did everything a great novel is supposed to do.
Duncker's new collection of short stories, "Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees" (Ecco Press, $22.95) arrives with great anticipation. Yet while it holds pleasures within its covers, it also contains a number of awkward duds. The four-page title story seems pointless. Other tales among the baker's dozen range from confounding to cute.
Best of all is the 78-page novella, "The Arrival Matters," which demonstrates the diamond-hard talent that gleamed so brightly in her novel.
If you like Bob Powers, and everyone should, and you want to read more of his incisive columns, check out Innerart/artbits; The Columbus Free Press; Mid-Ohio Valley Arts Window; or go to Suite 101 and click on "Today's Fiction."