Tag: Todd Walton Under the Table Books

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Dear Healing

As reported here not long ago, Todd has a new book out entitled Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub. Paperback copies, e-book editions, and audio book versions are available from various purveyors of such.

Todd has had several positive responses to the book from readers he knows and readers he doesn’t know. He has yet to get many reviews posted on book sites by readers, but he is hopeful such reviews will eventually begin to manifest and help spread the word.

Today Todd got an email from his old friend Colin addressed to me, Healing Weintraub, asking for advice about his dog. Todd contacted me on Colin’s behalf and I dictated my reply to Todd to forward to Colin. Here is that correspondence for your reading pleasure.

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Dear Healing,

I was referred to you by my oldest and dearest friend, Todd Walton, who said you are the only one who can help me with a problem my wife, Karen, and I have been experiencing with our now 10 year-old mini Aussie, Lexi, and offered to forward this to you.

First of all let me state, unequivocally, that she is a wonderful and exceptionally bright member of our family. She is friendly with visitors and with other animals she encounters on her walks around the neighborhood, and on hikes with us and our friend’s dogs, but she barks uncontrollably whenever a dog or a horse, for some reason, appears on our television screen. I don’t know how much television you watch, as I know you have much better ways to spend your time, but dogs have become extremely popular supporting players on both shows and commercials over the past few years.

At first, it was very cute to observe our little Lexi watching a show along with us, and then barking and approaching the set whenever she spotted a dog. But it’s getting old and, being old ourselves, her inopportune barking often causes us to miss essential plot elements. Any help or advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

I am including a recent photo, with the hope it might help you find a solution to our problem.

Thank you, in advance, for taking your most valuable time to help us. Please give our best to Jahera, Tova, and all of your animals.

Sincerely,

Colin

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Dear Colin,

Todd read your letter to me over the phone. I don’t have email. I dictated my response to him to send to you. Here it is.

So your brilliant dog thinks the animals on television are things to respond to. How wonderful. The most drastic solution, which I don’t recommend, is electro-shock with a small cattle prod every time she behaves this way. This would render her an emotional wreck for the rest of her life. Another possibility, also not recommended, would be vision-altering glasses for her to wear when she’s watching the telly with you. However, she might throw up during, and be seriously disoriented for hours after.

The simplest solution is to stop watching television. Assuming you don’t want to do this, I think the best thing to do would be to sequester her in another room when you know the programs you’re going to watch have horses and/or dogs in them. In the event a dog or horse appears unexpectedly in a program you’re watching with her, cover your ears when she starts barking and sing There’s No Business Like Show Business with great gusto.

I hope this helps. By the way, Todd is nearing completion of the sequel to the first volume of my memoirs, and it’s a doozy. Thanks so much for writing. I will give your regards to the other members of the collective.

Sending best wishes to you and Karen and Lexi,

Healing Weintraub, advocate for the four-legged

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Here are hot links to help you secure copies and/or write five-star reviews of Good With Dogs and Cats.

Goodreads

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Audible

Apple Books

Bookshop

Alibris

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D.R. Wagner

The poet and artist D.R. Wagner died on the Winter Solstice 2023. I just got word from his neighbor in Locke on the Sacramento delta. I cried and cried when I got the news. D.R. was my good friend and a constant in my life from 1980 until I moved from Sacramento to Berkeley in 1995, after which I saw him occasionally over the years until 2010. From then on he sent me announcements of his newest books of poems, and I would send him word of my new books and albums of songs.

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In 2009 I self-published my novel Under the Table Books and Marcia and I went on a road trip from Mendocino to the San Juan Islands and back giving performances of our music along with readings from my books. We read in friends’ living rooms, libraries, and bookstores, our final performance taking place in Time Tested Books in Sacramento.

For this ultimate performance I prevailed on my three favorite Sacramento poets – Ann Menebroker, Quinton Duval, and D.R. Wagner – to read their poems that appear in Under the Table Books, a novel of stories set in a fantastical anarchist bookstore. The finale of the novel is my favorite D.R. Wagner poem The Milky Way, which I will append at the end of this remembrance of D.R. That evening when all three of those marvelous poets read their poems to enhance the evening was an apex moment in my life.

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I met D.R. shortly after I moved to Sacramento in 1980. Because of the recent success of my novel Inside Moves, the Sacramento Poetry Center asked me to read with another writer to benefit the poetry center, which I did. Quinton Duval hosted the gathering after the reading, and that is when D.R. and I first collided.

We liked each other immediately and not long after I was asked to join D.R., Bari Kennedy, and Pat Grizzell for what would become the annual Sacramento Kerouac reading. D.R. and I enjoyed performing together so much we decided to put together a two-man show combining poetry, stories, music, projections of D.R.’s fantastical petit point creations, and various combinations thereof. We eventually performed as a duo seven times, and always had a great revelatory time together much to the delight of our audiences.

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D.R. was the most prolific poet I’ve ever known. I’ve only read a tiny fraction of the poems he wrote in his life, yet I’ve read several hundred of his poems. I have many favorites stored on my computer for easy call up. The moment I begin to read one of his poems he is here with me, an ebullient spirit glad to be sharing what arose from his mysterious artesian source.

His petit point creations are in many private collections and art museums, and one of them is the cover art for my novel Night Train in which a fictional version of D.R. appears.

 D.R. was a true cat, and by that I mean every word he wrote and every stitch he stitched came straight from his heart and soul.

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The Milky Way by D.R. Wagner

We live in a spiral arm of a spinning

Field of stars. We whirl around, a carnival

Ride, full of birds, loves, emotions, endless

Varieties of things unfolding in seasons;

Full of bells and an endless weaving of hearts.

These connections ride upon our consciousness,

Demanding constant performance from us.

Each of us, most royal and majestic as night,

Vile, vindictive and spoiled even before we speak;

Sorrow and joy, the way we sound our name.

We endure all of this, our lips kissing each moment,

Crushed, elated, misunderstood, praised for things

We do as part of ourselves, damned for these same things.

There is no road, there is no plan. Only love

Survives. Everything is forgiven, finally.

Understanding limps behind the parade,

Always late, always burdened with qualifications,

Always abandoning every opinion and argument,

Leaving each of us our place only, describing

This place, the swirling arms, the myriad ways

We twist ourselves to achieve

This weaving, this carnival of love.

fin

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Bucky and Karma

I am the owner of my own karma. My happiness and unhappiness are determined by my actions.

That is part of a Buddhist prayer expressing the brahmaviharas: Loving-kindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, and Equanimity. This line is important to me as a reminder that I’m responsible for how I experience life, and as an elucidation of how most people define karma: our actions determine what happens to us.

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There is short-term karma and long-term karma. Short-term karma is easily experienced. If you open the post office door for someone who has their arms full of packages, chances are that person will be grateful to you and you will feel their gratitude as a psychic boost.

The proofs of long-term karma are more difficult to be sure about. Some people believe how we behaved during our previous lives (if you believe in such things) determines much of what happens to us in this life. That’s a tough one to prove for those of us who can’t remember what happened two weeks ago, let alone what went on before we were born.

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When I lived in Berkeley I had a friend who claimed to have excellent parking-space karma. She thought her good luck finding parking spaces had to do with her frequent use of public transportation and owning the same little car for twenty years.

When I pointed out that her theory suggests unseen forces are rewarding or punishing people for their lifestyle choices, she said she believed the universe favors those with small carbon footprints.

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Buckminster Fuller (Bucky) wrote in his book Critical Path: I assumed that nature would “evaluate” my work as I went along. If I was doing what nature wanted done, and if I was doing it in promising ways, permitted by nature’s principles, I would find my work being economically sustained.

Bucky would later reiterate his belief that nature constantly responds to what we are doing, and not to what we have done in the past. Our behavior in the present moment, according to Bucky, is our karma.

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Many Buddhist teachers believe that thinking is a form of action. Thus our thoughts directly influence the course of our lives.

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I am the owner of my own karma. My happiness and unhappiness are determined by my actions.

fin

Todd’s novel Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub is his latest publishing action and is available in paperback, e-book, and audio book.

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Reason and Rhyme

When I was a young writer, I wrote hundreds of poems and even managed to publish a few. The first writing I ever published was a poem in the legendary Santa Cruz free weekly SUNDAZ, circa 1972, when I was twenty-three, for which the editor treated me to lunch, a burrito as I recall.

I remember I was noodling around on the piano in the commune where I lived with seven other young people when someone knocked on the door and one of my housemates admitted a bearded fellow a few years older than I, none other than the Editor-in-Chief of SUNDAZ.

Having located me from the return address on my submission, he fervently shook my hand and said, “I love your poem that clicking sound! More. More. Bring me more.”

I was in a state of joyful amazement for weeks and did eventually publish another poem and two short stories in SUNDAZ, my first published poem also appearing in an anthology of Santa Cruz poets entitled The The. Here is that clicking sound?

that clicking sound?

we have a hundred men downstairs

each employed

in some

part of the process;

breaking

the backs

of crickets

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When I was thirty, having accrued hundreds of rejection slips and a few handwritten rejection letters for my poetry, I got out my file containing the several hundred poems I’d written, read the lot, and decided all but a dozen were failed attempts at writing the same poem, a humorously ironic (sort of) complaint. I was so dismayed by this discovery I burned all but a few of the poems and felt hugely relieved to be shed of that psychic weight.

From that day on poems rarely came to me, and over the ensuing decades I only wrote a handful of poems I felt were worth keeping. Then a curious thing happened. About ten years ago, I wrote a novel in which four of the characters are cracking good poets. These men and women write poems with ease, so I thought I’d try writing poems again. However, poems would not come to me, only to characters in my novels and stories.

In the several books I’ve written since, poets appear now and then, and I’m ever amazed by the marvelous (to me) poems they write. In the novel I’m currently rewriting, the sequel to Good With Dogs and Cats, the main character Healing Weintraub takes up writing poems, and his words flow artesian.

Most recently I reworked a chapter in which Healing quotes lines from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind

 and therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.

Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste;

wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste:

And therefore is love said to be a child,

because in choice he is so oft beguiled.

Later on in that same chapter, Healing writes a bit of rhyming doggerel inspired by his sister’s renaissance.

 The attic is full of things

we’ve fooled ourselves into keeping.

Food for ghosts who came to stay

and haunt us while we’re sleeping.

Through God’s good grace one lucky day

that useless junk gets thrown away,

and ghosts depart, and now we hear

for joy the angels weeping!

fin

Todd’s books and music are available from Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Alibris, Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, Bookshop.

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Life Story

I am small and helpless. People carry me and feed me.

I learn to walk and follow those people until I am grown.

One day we come to a fork in the path. A strong feeling

makes me choose the way no one else chooses. I am sad

and afraid, but I don’t go back.

Years pass and my fear and sorrow disappear.

I come to a raging river. Many people live here.

They never try to cross the torrent. I stay here until

I grow restless and try to cross. I am swept downstream

and can’t get out until the waters slow and leave me

on the far shore where there is no path.

I wander through a dark forest until I find a faint path,

but I cannot decide which way to go, so I build a hut

and live next to the path for many years.

One morning you come along and we like each other

and we decide to go on together.

We come to a village on a river. The villagers

 welcome us and help us build a boat.

We row across the river and go on. But we miss those

people who helped us build our boat, so we row back

to them and build a house in the village.

This is where we are now.

fin

Tood’s new book Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub and many of his other books are available from Apple and Amazon and other online book merchants.

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Sing Along

Ricky and Kathy were lovers in high school, then Ricky went away to war

I recently heard from three people (unbeknownst to each other) who told me they really like my song The Way Things Go from my album Lounge Act In Heaven, and could I provide them with the lyrics?

Happily I could. Their interest inspired me to listen to the song for the first time in quite a while. What a neato song!

Here are the lyrics followed by links to the recording of the song should you want to listen as you read the lyrics

The Way Things Go

Ricky and Kathy were lovers in high school

Then Ricky went away to war

Kathy fell in love with a used car salesman

Five kids by 24

Ricky came back from Afghanistan

He didn’t know how to be,

So he wandered down to Hollywood

Landed in a situation comedy

I’m not making this up

Chorus: That’s the way things go

The way things start is never how they finish

I thought you’d like to know

That’s the way things go

Now Ricky played the part of Larry Dorfman

A guy with a checkered past

Larry’s wife Camille a stewardess,

teenagers Lisa and Chaz

And as long as he was Larry Dorfman

Ricky knew how to be

But away from the set of the sit-com

He was all at sea

This is all completely true

Chorus

Well the show ran for seven seasons

And Ricky became a big star

Mansion in Malibu, New York penthouse

Million-dollar car

Then they made him a super hero

in a billion-dollar flick

He fell madly in love with his co-star Vicky

Otherwise known as Vick

This is all completely true

Chorus

Now Vicky as it happened was a mystical master

with a bent for Psychology

And she knew from the minute she met him

Ricky didn’t know how to be

But she loved the size and the color of his aura,

loved the way they clicked in the sack

So she made it her life’s work to heal him, yeah

To bring old Ricky back

This is all the truth

Chorus

Now the irony of Vicky healing Ricky

Was that once Ricky knew how to be

He quit making movies and bought a farm

And started planting trees

He and Vicky had a baby named Venus,

They adopted another three

Tino, Gina, and Esmeralda

And they all learned how to be

from their mom and dad,

some pretty good ways, such as

Be loving and kind to each other,

share what you have to spend,

make love not war, use solar power,

treat the earth as your mother and friend.

Yeah that’s the way to go. Yeah that’s the way to go.

Start things right, you’ll have a good finish,

At least I hope that’s so

But you never know

Links to The Way Things Go on YouTube and Spotify and Pandora.

You can also stream the song on Apple, Amazon, etc.

Happy Holidays!

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Brief History of Audio Books

Todd with the third draft of Volume Two of the Healing Weintraub Adventures, several more drafts to go

As I gleefully reported in my previous post, the audio book of Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub has debuted along with the handsome paperback. Hurray!

Several readers have inquired about downloading the audio book without having to join Audible. You can! The audio book is also available through Apple Books.

These inquiries got me thinking about the history of audio books.

In the beginning there were no audio books or any books for that matter, or even much paper. People told stories to each other for thousands of years. That was the state of the technology until someone, possibly a woman named Myra, came up with the idea of memorizing stories. Humans had memorized songs, some of them really long songs about hunting antelopes, for thousands of years, so why not stories?

Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were preserved for generations as memorized texts until some brilliant person, possibly a man named Demetrius, got the idea of writing those scintillating adventures down, in ancient Greek no less.

Fast forward to the invention of LPs, otherwise known as long-playing records. Plays by Shakespeare came out on vinyl and were used ineffectively in public schools. And, of course, many of us grew up listening to the multi-record rendition of Winnie-the-Pooh with an accompanying illustrated book. We knew to turn the page when Winnie sang Rum-tum-tiddle-liddle, rum-tum-tum.

Then came the invention of cassette tape players. A few hundred mega-bestselling books came out in multi-cassette audio book editions. This development ushered in the era of people listening to audio books while driving.

Then came CDs. It still required several CDs to hold several hours of someone narrating a book, and only hugely popular books became audio books. People, while driving, would search desperately through piles of CDs for the one with the best sex scene in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, causing accidents and needless deaths.

Now we are in The Age of Digital Audio Books. At the outset of this age there were several audio book companies. Soon thereafter Amazon/Audible bought all the other audio book companies (except for Apple) and became the primary source for audio books and requires people to join Audible to download audio books. Not so Apple Books.

In related news: E-book editions of Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub are coming out even as I post this.

Happy Holidaze!

todd

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Healing Speaks!

Joyful news! The audio book of Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub is now available from Audible and Apple Books and other audio book purveyors.

I’m especially excited about this audio book because it is my first narration of one of my books in thirteen years and I had SO much fun playing all the characters in the Healing Saga.

When Peter Temple and I listened to my first rendering of Chapter One in Peter’s studio, the dialogue sounded good to me, but the narration felt wrong. So I read the chapter again with a little more gusto, we listened again, and the narrator’s voice still wasn’t quite right.

And then it struck me that the voice I was using for the narrator was not the voice I’d heard speaking the words when I wrote them down to create the book. That voice had a mild British accent. It took hearing Todd reading the story, after working on the opus for fourteen months, before I realized that the Third Person narrator of The Adventures of Healing Weintraub is none other than Healing Weintraub himself!

So I read the first chapter again in Healing’s voice, we listened again, and voila, there was the voice from whence the story sprang.

You can listen to an enticing five-minute sample from the first chapter of the audio book on the book’s Audible page and see if you want to hear more.

Handsome paperback copies of the opus are orderable from your favorite actual bookstores, and available online from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and Amazon.

Now back to rewriting Volume Two of the saga.

Cheerio!

Todd

P.S. E-book editions coming soon.

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There Comes A Moment

there comes a moment when our strength departs

and we can no longer walk against the ferocious wind.

So we change direction and our nemesis becomes our

loving friend, the great obstacle now a source of joy.

Everything we fought so hard against turns out to be

what we wanted all along.

todd walton December 2023

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The Healing Novel

Dear Friends

I have wonderful news for those of you who enjoy the Healing Weintraub stories. The first twenty-six stories have been transformed into the novel Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub.

The goodly tome is now orderable from your favorite actual bookstores and gettable online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Bookshop. Alibris, and Powell’s will soon have the book, too. In a few weeks, the various E-book editions will debut, as well as the audio book narrated by yours truly.

I thought you might like to hear a little about the process of creating the novel and making the audio edition, endeavors that took the better part of a year while I was simultaneously writing the next twenty-six chapters of the Healing saga, those twenty-six chapters to appear in 2024 as Volume Two of the saga.

The first thing I did was to assemble the stories into a single document and eliminate the many re-introductions of characters and place that were written when the stories were intended to stand alone.

I then printed out the manuscript and thoroughly rewrote the book, entered my changes, printed out the manuscript again, and rewrote it again.

Marcia then carefully read each chapter and made notes about anything she found problematic. We discussed her notes at length, and I did two more drafts of the novel.

I then printed out the manuscript and waited three months for Peter Temple to have studio time for me to narrate the book. I wanted to narrate the audio book before I published the book because in the process of narrating four other books of mine that were already published works, I would inevitably find sentences and names and words I wished were otherwise. So this time I decided to use the narration process as a final editing step.

What fun it was to play all those different characters with the myriad accents and personalities! And what a great help Peter was in getting things just right, including the piano snippets I improvised for the end of each chapter.

I hope you’ll get the book in one form or another and enjoy the reading and/or listening experience.

Blessings and Thanks

Todd