Monday, December 31, 2012

Excerpt from CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN GOD AND SATAN



“I think there’s a typo in the Bible,” said Satan. “Remember, right in the beginning, when I’m a snake and there’s this apple tree? I think that when you wrote ‘not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil’ that what you really meant was ‘now eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ I mean, if You’re going to let them evolve those big brains, maybe You should let them know what’s good and bad?” Satan sipped on her coffee and looked over at the next table where a college kid was eating a brownie. “I think I need a big cookie full of macadamia nuts,” she said; “I heard macadamia nuts are really high in calories and have lots of fat.”

The whole book is available as a paperback at www.createspace.com/3431482 or on Kindle and Nook.

Friday, December 28, 2012

Bohemian coffee cake recipe and demo

Bohemian coffee cake recipe and demo
See http://www.johnjanovy.com/bohem_cc.pdf for the recipe and a demonstration of how it's assembled once the dough has been allowed to rise (twice) in a warm place.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

An excerpt from DINKLE: A SPIRITUAL BIOGRAPHY



But LPD’s mind lay in the clouds. Storms come from the west. Thunderheads hide in the mountains. They live in the canyons, deep in caves, until cold winds make them angry. Then they grow, and take their revenge on the prairies. In their towering, boiling, anguish, their reds and orange reflections, they are emotions come into corporeal life. Their visage is anger; their lightning is excitement; their rain—tears; their stillness, yellow light, soft singing of tiny frogs, are all a kind of renewal. This rain is a persistent one. The wet raccoon becomes surly, with bared fangs, quick to bite and shake its fur, nervous as the tale goes on, almost as if he remembers only too well the dirt, heavy bones, the ancient dried skin, stringy black and brittle hair, the broken pots, baskets, all out of the grave. The grave. He scratches and yowls. From the woods north of campus comes the scream of a rabbit whose back is cut in two by a weasel’s stiletto teeth. Finally, at five in the morning, comes the calling of toads. With this last, Dinkle stops.
“The storm always brings them back together,” he says.

(DINKLE: A SPIRITUAL BIOGRAPHY is a ghost story for our times; it's available on smashwords, kindle, and nook.)

Friday, December 14, 2012

WHY GOD MADE TAPEWORMS - This theological masterpiece is available free; you are welcome to spread it around to friends who might love tapeworms.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Note to a superb student hassling a paper through reviewers



B______ -

By way of perspective:

(1) KEITH COUNTY JOURNAL - rejected 22 times (by 22 different publishers, one of whom wrote “Why do you waste your postage sending us things that don’t turn us on?”) before being picked up by St. Martin's Press; eventually sold thousands of copies, got my picture in TIME Magazine, and is still in print after 34 years.

(2) YELLOWLEGS - rejected several times (through my agent but not by my agent) before Norman Mailer's editor said, in essence, "throw away the crap and keep the story." After cutting the book in half, St. Martin's picked it up on a two-book deal. Later, a film deal on YELLOWLEGS paid for one of our children’s education at Berkeley, but ended in an out-of-court settlement, deposited in a University of Nebraska Foundation account, that paid for my research for several years.

(3) TEACHING IN EDEN: THE CEDAR POINT LESSONS – rejected, through my agent (but not by my agent), by the University of Nebraska Press, in fact by return mail. Eventually sold and published by RoutledgeFalmer, a Taylor and Francis company. The University of Nebraska Press editor who rejected it, without even reading the proposal or sample chapters, was the same editor who left UNP and convinced the John Neihardt heirs to transfer the rights to all Neihardt’s books to this editor’s new company. (The Neihardt property was a major income producer for UNP).

(4) VERMILION SEA – rejected, through my agent, by the University of Nebraska Press, without review. Eventually sold and published by Houghton-Mifflin. VS was a heavily, and I do mean heavily, edited book, both by the H-M senior editor and the copy editor, the former simply writing “rew!” (= “re-write”) on paragraph after paragraph, and the copy editor letting me get by with the most embarrassing mistake I’ve ever published (won’t tell you what it is.)

(5) TUSKERS – rejected 23 times, through my agent, by various publishers. After the 23rd rejection, my agent said “everybody in the agency loves this book but we simply cannot sell it. I’ll be happy to write the contract if you can sell it.” I tried a couple of more times, unsuccessfully, with Jena (the ESPN child) hassling me constantly to get it into print. Eventually, when CreateSpace.com and the e-book business got up and running, I did self-publish it.

(6) THE GINKGO – My agent rejected this one, declining to handle it, calling it “an evocative book about ideas, exactly the kind of thing the American book-buying public is getting increasingly impatient with.” (I re-wrote the prologue and added that quote, plus some narrative to put it into perspective.) It was subsequently rejected by about 40 different publishers. I eventually self-published it and still consider it my finest piece of creative work.

(7) ON BECOMING A BIOLOGIST – At the opposite end of the author-publisher-agent spectrum is OBAB, which my agent negotiated and sold, then told me I was going to write it. The editor at Harper and Row was gentleman named Rick Kot, one of the most professional people I’ve ever worked with. For two years I worked on both the manuscript and the outline; he edited the latter, which eventually got up to about 50 pages, at least a dozen times, until he finally took it to the H&R editorial board for approval. After that, I re-wrote the whole book at least three times, all as a result of his editing and commentary, after which he asked “are you now ready for me to edit it?” I answered “yes,” and ended up doing as much creative work in the next six months as I’d done in the previous 2-3 years. This book is still in print after nearly 30 years.

(8) The intro biology textbook project – As a result of KEITH COUNTY JOURNAL, an editor from one of the major textbook publishers showed up in my office to talk about a BIOS 101 textbook. I signed the contract. The manuscript eventually got to 1200 pages of typing and graphic design (all by me), reviewed and re-written three times, before we came to a mutual agreement that this project was not going to be successful. This all took place in the early 1980s.

(9) BERNICE AND JOHN: FINALLY MEETING YOUR PARENTS WHO DIED A LONG TIME AGO – a current book project, the so-called “Oklahoma book.” The University of Oklahoma Press rejected this one by return mail with a smart-ass crack something like “we get a manuscript once a week about Depression-era parents who made good.” They missed the whole point. University of Nebraska Press had it, or a version of it, three years ago, lost it, then contacted me about a year ago to ask if I was still interested in having them review it. I sent them a pdf (their preferred format) but have heard nothing from them in that past year. Once this parasit textbook project is finished, I’ll self-publish B&J.

(10) OUTWITTING COLLEGE PROFESSORS – I originally gave this one away as a pdf file to my BIOS 101 class, then self-published with www.createspace.com. That worked pretty well. Pearson picked up the book as a second edition but didn’t really make it part of their success in college package like I thought they would, so I got all the rights back from them and have since done the third and fourth editions, also through createspace, as well as kindle, nook, smashwords, etc. I’m not getting rich off it but it does sell copies fairly regularly.

I won’t even mention the many other book projects, fiction and otherwise, that have not come to fruition for several reasons. In my opinion, if that daily hour of creative writing over in the Union, and the writer-agent-publisher business that comes from it, have any value at all, it’s been to put the scientific manuscript publication experience into perspective.

Hang in there.

JJ

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

BioSci symposium notes


Found while cleaning my home office, a sheet of paper with the following:

BioSci Student Symposium notes:

(1) Does the reference to authority authenticate your work in a way that a good and conceptually strong idea doesn’t? (I think maybe so. ??Suggest a first slide with the idea/ref to authority and your test of authority’s assertion?) (What does this observation tell us about the structure of our science? Whatever the answer, it is unflattering, but ultimately perhaps something we need to take into account.)

(2) Is parasitism too complex for the average biologist to understand? For the average scientist? I think we should always be aware of this possibility and account for it in our presentations.

(3) In this same vein, are simple problems expressed within paradigmatic frameworks most easily understood by scientists?

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Chapters on sex from COMES THE MILLENNIUM


Here are links to a couple of chapters from COMES THE MILLENNIUM: A LOOK AT THE BURGEONING HYSTERIA, RELIGIOUS MANIA, AND ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AS THE MILLENNIUM APPROACHES. I do hold the copyright to this material and you can distribute it as far and wide as you want, but not for profit. You may have to copy the URL and paste it into your browser because I can’t figure out how to make a direct link using the new blogspot window. – JJ

http://www.johnjanovy.com/heteroCTM.pdf
http://www.johnjanovy.com/homosexCTM.pdf

Saturday, March 31, 2012

"Lido"--a chapter from BACK IN KEITH COUNTY (St. Martin's, 1981)

In celebration of my "new" boat, a Schock Lido 14, same class that I had for 30+ years but gave away to a pirate, here is that chapter from BACK IN KEITH COUNTY about the real purpose of a sailboat. - JJ

Monday, February 20, 2012

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Student-generated 250-word essays on evolution

The assignment was: Produce a deep, philosophical, creative, mysterious, ORIGINAL, 250-word essay on the subject “Evolution, and what it means to me and to humanity in general.” The results are attached. This assignment was given to a BIOS 101 class at UNL a few years ago; essays that are included are from students who gave permission for the material to be used to improve science education. - JJ