Sorry, friends. The plans to launch my new memoir on Saurday, June 9th became totally confused by an information breakdown between Black Bear Books and me. As a result, we started from scratch, and:

I will launch "The Whirligig of Time" on Saturday June 9th at 10 a.m. to 12 noon at the Watauga County Library. All other facts are unchanged, and I hope you will come and help me celebrate what has now become a Trilogy of Memoirs. 

Art as communication

Today I have been meditating on art, especially on art as communication. As usual as such moments, when communication fails me, I fall back on my Dictionary of Quotations, and find bits of treasure.

Shall I share them with my friends who share so much with me? Here are a few delicious thoughts by some great communicators:

Somerset Maaugham in 'The Summing Up,' sums it up: "There is nothing but art. Art is living. . ."
"Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass." writes Walter Pater.

H. L. Mencken provides one of my favorites: "The true function of art is to . . . edit nature and so make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-penciling the bad spelling of God."

I love Al Capp's comment on abstract art: "A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."

Enjoy!

Book Launch! 3rd memoir is being officially presented to an eager public on June 9th

     I am excited! My local Boone bookstore Black Bear Books is hosting a book launch for "The Whirligig of Time" on Saturday June 9th, 1-4 pm.  I plan to answer questions, sign your books, share a few stories and read a passage or two, like:

......."That winter my life was quite disorganized and unsatisfactory.  My job was boring and unrewarding...
     Then in April Julie told me about her new job as Assistant Head Counselor at a huge defense plant.  The country was reeling from a terrible year of enemy advances, and I felt a growing urgency to get involved in the war effort in some meaningful way. -- "The Whirligig of Time," page 76

......."The Sperry Gyroscope Company had invented a bombsight for warplanes and the Army Air Corps was ordering it in enormous quantities for the first major air war in history...thousands of the workers were female, filling the jobs that in peacetime would have gone to men.  Most of these workers were new to factory work -- housewives, clerks, saleswomen, teachers, even a few debutantes - who had never before seen the inside of a factory.  Both the workers and the Counselors found themselves in a new world -- page 78

Despite having lived for nearly a century, I feel like a first grader in my new world of wireless browsing.
I'm stumbling to find the right button to push, the tiny square that will connect me
with the new billion-hit game -- a game that will bring me readers for my books.
It's the smart young browsers  I'm looking for,
the ones who need to  learn about the long-gone events which made the world they live in
and want to conquer,
Once they would have heard these stories from grandparents living next door.
But now most of those are living down in Florida or maybe even Tahiti . . .
It's just we few  -- we lucky few -- who are still around to tell what it was like when the Great Depression battered our teen years . . . when WW II played havoc with the hopes and dreams of our twenties . . .
Those times are what changed the world into the dangerous age we're now living through.
My own life was turned upside down much earlier still by the Russian Revolution, which broke up my family in my childhood, and made us move halfway around the world.
That was the first story I knew I had to tell, though I was in my '80s when I finally got to publish it.
Since then many many readers have thanked me:
"My grandmother would never talk about her life in Poland," or "I've always wanted to know how my grandfather lived before he came to America."
Maybe it's this need to tell my stories that's the reason I'm still around, getting near my 98th birthday this fall.

Getting used to writing a daily blog, as my several mentors insist is important, is still a battle. But each day I can go a bit farther before having to call for help. So I have hopes of a future where I smoothly wend my way through the process and send my words into the air to Facebook and its companion programs with little clicks of my cursor -- my magic wand. In the meantime, greetings for another day to all my friends  -- known and soon-to-be-known.     Pax, Nora

It's been a busy winter. I spent three months on the West Coast, mostly with my youngest daughter, also Nora Percival, but with a middle initial -- J for her father, James, who said she was our sign-off!

Now my focus is in establishing my books on the internet, since my body is getting too unstable for me to keep going to sell them at fairs, book clubs a;nd stores as I did until last year.

I'm looking for blogs or websites where I could join others of my generation who are still active and creative. I'd love to hear from them.