Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Wolfgang Hampel, Betty MacDonald and great personality

Linde Lund shared Dreamworld's photo.
Sunrise by Ewa Nilsson
Betty MacDonald in the living room at Vashon on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.

Wolfgang Hampel - and Betty MacDonald fan club fans, 


Betty MacDonald fan club newsletter February is available.

You'll receive very interesting info on our unique Betty MacDonald fan club honor members Monica Sone, Darsie Beck, Gwen Grant, Letizia Mancino, Perry Woodfin, Mary Holmes, Bernd Kunze, Tracy Tyne Hilton, Tatjana Geßler,  Thomas Bödigheimer and one and only Betty MacDonald fan club honor member Mr. Tigerli.

More info on Betty MacDonald fan club birthday card contest will come soon.

Bengt asked for some for more info on this mysterious couple.

Maybe you can see some of Betty MacDonald's relatives........

It isn't difficult at all!

Send us the names please and maybe you'll be our next Betty MacDonald fan club contest winner. 



Wolfgang Hampel's Betty MacDonald and Ma and Pa Kettle biography and Betty MacDonald interviews have fans in 40 countries. I'm one of their many devoted fans. 


Many Betty MacDonald  - and Wolfgang Hampel fans are very interested in a Wolfgang Hampel CD and DVD with his very funny poems and stories. 

We hope to hear from Betty MacDonald fan club honor member Mr. Tigerli very soon.


Betty MacDonald fan club honor members will be included in Wolfgang Hampel's new project Vita Magica.


Enjoy a new breakfast at the bookstore with Brad and Nick, please.

Betty MacDonald's Vashon Island is really a paradise. 

May I introduce my favourite ESC 2016 song?

Take care,


 

Brigitte



Vita Magica

Betty MacDonald fan club

Betty MacDonald forum  

Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English ) 

Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( German )

Wolfgang Hampel - Monica Sone - Wikipedia ( English )

Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( English ) 

Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( French )

Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University 

Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel 

Betty MacDonald fan club interviews on CD/DVD
  
Betty MacDonald fan club items 

Betty MacDonald fan club items  - comments

Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I 

Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund

From The Seattle Review of Books



Meet Brad Craft, University Book Store’s used book buyer

 


Brad Craft, the used book buyer at University Book Store, says he “didn’t grow up in a bookish atmosphere” — he didn’t have access to a good library, and none of his teachers introduced him to the joys of literature. Where did he learn to love books? “Yard sales,” he says. He was especially drawn to a certain type of book: “I’ve read more gothic romance novels than most men my age,” Craft explains. He assumed the bodice-rippers that he bought from his neighbors were classics of literature. “They looked like classics to me,” he says. The women on the covers “were in historical costumes,” after all, just maybe with a little more cleavage than you’d find on the cover of your typical Bronte book. For a long time, Craft says, “I couldn’t tell you the difference between a novelization of Airport ’77 and a Jane Austen novel.” 
But he did eventually move on from the smut to the real classics: “I didn’t read Austen until I was in my late thirties, and then she was a revelation.” Now he’s obsessed, calling himself “a big set person.” At his home, he has matching sets of works by Fielding, Kipling, a 24-volume Balzac collection and “four sets of Dickens, I’m afraid.” What’s his favorite Dickens? “David Copperfield is close to my heart. I’ve read that more than all the others, including The Pickwick Papers. And I’m a big fan of The Old Curiosity Shop. I don’t even like allegory, but I think it’s a really exquisitely achieved allegory.” Craft has heard the quote attributed to Oscar Wilde that a reader “would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of [Curiosity Shop’s] little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter,“ but he disagrees: “I actually think it’s beautifully done.”
Craft worked at the late, lamented Stacey’s Books in San Francisco for 12 years. He’s done time at other used bookstores, and he even worked a handful of months in a corporate bookstore — “I had no emotional attachment to the place, but it did give me insights into the sale of things that happened to be books.” He can’t recall exactly how long he’s been at University Book Store — 12 or 13 years, give or take — but he knows that he helped convince management to add used books to the bookstore’s stock about a decade ago. He’s been behind the counter ever since.
Craft has been drawing since even before he could read. “My mother tells me that I drew before I talked. If she wanted me to be quiet and content, she just put a drawing implement in my hand and put me in the corner and I kept myself busy.” He started out copying John R. Neill’s illustrations from the Oz books, and even today he posts his bookish illustrations on his blog, Usedbuyer 2.0. A collection of his illustrations is for sale at University Book Store, and he sells author caricature calendars every December.
With all the talk about classics and used books, some might be surprised to learn that Craft is an avid podcaster. He’s been recording his Breakfast at the Bookstore show with Nick DiMartino for over a year now. “I’m a relatively late adopter of technology,” he admits, “but then I can become very enthusiastic.” Craft got into literary podcasts as a fan, but then he discovered that most of them were “over-specialized,” focusing only on specific subgenres of mystery, say, or certain types of science fiction. Instead, he wanted to do something a little broader, talking about all kinds of book-related topics with all kinds of guests.
Craft also headlines events at University Book Store on a regular basis. He reads Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” every year at the holidays — this last year was his eighth performance — and he’s also celebrated the birthdays of Dickens and Thackeray with readings, as well as a celebration of the poems of William Cowper. (“That was a barn-burner, right there,” he laughs.) “It allows me to serve ham three or four times a year,” Craft says, and it provides a rare opportunity for adults to sit and be read to, which is a pleasure that too many people give up after childhood. “I just think literature is meant to be read aloud,” Craft says. “The greatest literature needs to be put into the air now and again.”
What does Craft love most about University Book Store? “Perhaps its age more than anything else,” he says. “There’s a tradition here of respect both for the customers and the employees. They really want their booksellers to have things like health insurance and a livable wage. The values clearly are from an earlier era in a lot of ways — in a lot of good ways.”


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Dearest Brad thanks a million for your outstanding work. 

U.N. Says Aid Delivery Near in Syria for 5 Towns

By SOMINI SENGUPTA and CEYLAN YEGINSU


The Turkish Army, stationed on Tuesday near Kilis, in south central Turkey, fired toward the Syria border as Turkish officials called on Western allies to join for a ground war against Syria. Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

UNITED NATIONS — Five days after world powers announced that aid would soon reach starving Syrians trapped behind front lines, the United Nations was still negotiating with the government in Damascus on Tuesday over lifting blockades to humanitarian convoys, announcing by day’s end that it hoped to start sending 80 trucks to deliver food and lifesaving medicines on Wednesday.
The United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said in an email that the government had agreed to lift its sieges on five towns, so as to allow aid convoys that have not been permitted to enter for months.
“It is clear it is the duty of the government of Syria to want to reach every Syrian person wherever they are and allow the U.N. to bring humanitarian aid,” Mr. de Mistura said earlier in a statement sent from Damascus, after his meeting with the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem. “Tomorrow we test this.”


The full impact of Russian airstrikes on the Syrian war has yet to be realized, but some shifts have occurred in recent weeks.
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The Syrian government’s most senior diplomat at the United Nations, Bashar al-Jaafari, signaled his own disregard for humanitarian agencies when he suggested on Tuesday that the medical aid group, Doctors Without Borders, had brought airstrikes on itself by helping to establish a hospital in rebel-held northern Syria without any authorization from the Syrian government.
The hospital was one of four in northern Syria hit Monday by deadly airstrikes, which were condemned by international relief officials and called a war crime by supporters of the Syrian insurgents, including France.
“They assume full consequences of the act because they did not consult with the Syrian government and they did not operate with the Syrian government permission,” Mr. Jaafari told reporters.
Doctors Without Borders said the death toll from the attack on its hospital alone had climbed to 11 on Tuesday. All told, the United Nations said the strikes on the four hospitals and a school harboring civilians in rebel-held territory left 50 dead, including children. None of the combatants have taken responsibility for the airstrikes, but the targets were in areas under increased attack by Syrian and Russian forces.
Mr. Jaafari described the Paris-based wing of Doctors Without Borders as an arm of French intelligence. “They didn’t cooperate with the Syrian government,” Mr. Jaafari added.
He spoke after the Security Council held a meeting, at Russia’s insistence, to discuss Turkey’s military actions inside Syria. Russia said that Turkey had breached a Security Council resolution by carrying out military action without the Syrian government’s consent. The Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, Rafael Ramírez Carreño, who presides over the Council this month, asserted that “all members of the Security Council are agreed” to asking for Turkey to comply with international law.
The French ambassador, François Delattre, attributed the latest violence to “the military escalation led by the regime and its allies.”
Turkey began shelling positions inside Syria this past weekend, aiming at Kurdish militants regarded by the Turks as terrorists affiliated with the long-running Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. The Turkish government has expressed anger and frustration over what it calls Kurdish militants’ exploitation of the fighting in northern Syria to seize more territory bordering Turkey.
In Turkey on Tuesday, the government sought to raise the pressure on foreign allies, including the United States, for a ground operation in northern Syria.
A Turkish official who spoke to reporters in Istanbul about the Syrian situation said it was now impossible to halt the war without such an operation.
“We are asking coalition partners that there should be a ground operation,” said the official, who was authorized to speak on the condition that he not be identified by name.
In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Mark C. Toner, said a ground operation “is not on the table.” He also said the American view that Turkey’s shelling of Kurdish positions in Syria should cease and efforts should be made to de-escalate hostilities between the Turks and Kurds.


Somini Sengupta reported from the United Nations, and Ceylan Yeginsu from Istanbul. Anne Barnard contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on February 17, 2016, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Aid Delivery Near in Syria for 5 Towns, U.N. Says. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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