Novelist Regina McBride, author of The Nature of Water and Air, The Land of Women, and The Marriage Bed, will offer a special one-day workshop in Park Slope on April 21 from 10:30 until 5 p.m.

Register now to reserve a place in this workshop that is designed for writers of all levels. The cost is $125.

NOTE FRM OTBKB: I have studied with Regina McBride
since 1998 and I recommend her classes to all writers wherever you are
in your process. Using relaxation and sense memory, her technique is
wonderful whether you are just beginning to write, embarking on a novel
or memoir, or very experienced and in the midst of a novel or short
story.

For inspiration, character development and incredible writing
exercises, Regina’s course has been vital to my development as a writer
as it always propels me to my  best writing. Especially great when your
work needs a little jump start.

If you are interested, please email nightsea21@nyc.rr.com

Inner Lives: Developing Characters

An Intensive Workshop with the Focus on the Fictional Character

With Regina McBride

Using relaxation, sense memory, and emotional memory (Stanislavski
acting techniques transformed for the writer) a variety of exercises
will be offered to enable the student to find a deeper, richer
connection to the character he or she is creating.

Exercises will be followed by writing periods, and opportunities for
people to read and share their work. The atmosphere will be safe, with
the focus on exploration. The class is designed to help the student
break into new territory with the character, and with the story itself.

This from New York 1, but Gowanus Lounge has the story and the PICTURES. What a protest! And here’s the slide show from GL.

Costumes and color lined the steps of City Hall Friday in protest of redevelopment plans for Coney Island.

Protesters marched in a "No Condos in Coney" demonstration, to
fight part of real estate developer Thor Equities’ $2 billion plan to
rezone the area for residential use — which they say will take away
from the park’s character.

"What we do not want to have happen is to have condominium
development for the well-to-do to have a great white-sound,
south-facing beach as their own playground,” said Richard Egan, the
co-host of the annual Mermaid Parade on Coney Island.

“It’s an amusement district, it’s for the community, it’s for
people to come to and visit,” said Miss Cyclone 2007 Angie Pontani.
“It’s not a place for luxury condominiums. It really speaks against its
history and I think the real promise of its future."

Thor Equities says the majority of the land they purchased will be
used for an indoor water park and other related entertainment uses

On Wednesday night we made a very good recording of the panel  
discussion, which can be downloaded at  
www.readingsonthefourthfloor.blogspot.com

The download is free, and entirely worth listening to.

If you can link your readers to the site, I would really appreciate  
it. We had a full house, but I think more can benefit from listening  
to what was said.

Thanks again for all your support.

David 

This week’s Brooklyn Paper is chock full of articles about religion in the borough of kings. I especailly enjoyed Gersh Kuntzman’s piece, GOD TO RATNER: DON’T BUILD SO BIG, highlighting Pastor Daniel Meeter’s thoughts on the Atlantic Yards. Check it out

As always, About Brooklyn’s Wendy Zarganis has the Brooklyn scoop. Here she is on the Botanic Garden’s Cherry Blossom festival.  Read more at ABOUT BROOKLYN.

The striking sakura (cherry blossom) is soon to make its appearance in Brooklyn, welcoming a beloved springtime tradition.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s 26th annual cherry blossom festival,
Sakura Matsuri, will celebrated April 28th and 29th. The Brooklyn
Botanic Garden boasts over 200 cherry trees 42 different varieties,
more than anywhere outside of Japan, and that grace the Garden grounds
and enchant guests. The beauty of the delicate sakura make the Cherry
Blossom Festival one of New York’s most anticipated spring events.

This from NY 1:

Big weekend disruptions are coming to the A and C lines in Brooklyn.

According to the MTA, for the next five weekends, A service between
Jay Street-Borough Hall and Utica Avenue will be replaced by free
shuttle bus service.

There will be no C service at all: A trains will be running local.

The MTA says there will be extra L train service on the weekend to help pick up the slack.   

The disruptions don’t include Easter weekend, when normal weekend service is scheduled.

For more information, go to www.mta.info.

This from the Old First Blog by Pastor Meeter.

The turtles are up. They have wakened from their winter slumber, and they are swimming in the Lake in Prospect Park.

I
don’t know this species yet. This is my first spring at this end of the
Park. They are smaller than our turtles at the lake in Ontario.

They
swim just under the surface. But they stick their heads out of the
water in that peculiar turtle way, shy and subdued, their eyes and
nostrils showing. Once you spot them you can make out their shells
behind them, right beneath the boundary of water and air.

I
wonder where these turtles lay their eggs. It’s wonderful to me that
they survive against the odds. Our Canadian turtles are larger than
these, and when they lay their eggs, they make their laborious journey
up hill to a patch of gravel behind our cottage, dig their holes with
their hind feet, and lay them their. More labor. Turtles in labor.

And
then every night, the raccoons come and dig out the eggs. How any
survive to hatch and return to the lake is a mystery to me. For a
couple weeks after laying their eggs, the turtles keep station just off
shore, swimming back and forth in front of the cottage. Are they
sending signals to their eggs? Are they willing them to hatch and find
their way to the lake? Don’t they know what the raccoons have done? Are
there any eggs still left? How is it possible that there still are
turtles in our lake?

There are turtles in Prospect Park. And
there are certainly raccoons. You can hear them at night, chuttering in
the trees just inside the fence. They feast on the garbage left in the
cans along Prospect Park Southwest. If I thought this food was enough,
and that they didn’t need to go after turtle eggs, I would be showing
an ignorance of raccoons.

And yet the turtles survive. They seem
to have worked out a plan that works for them, against our better
judgment. And they have stuck to it."

Just a thought. Food Coop-ers would be more than willing, I would think, to do without plastic bags. Seeing Green has a piece today abotu San Francisco’s decision to ban non-reclyclable plastic bags.

"At last, my ex-hometown, San Francisco has passed a bill to ban non-recyclable plastic bags.

The
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 this afternoon to make
the city the first in the nation to prohibit petroleum-based plastic
checkout bags in large markets and pharmacies.

On the first of two votes needed for final passage, supervisors
approved legislation sponsored by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi that would
mandate the use of biodegradable plastic bags or recyclable paper bags.
The legislation would take effect in about six months for some 50 large
markets in San Francisco and would apply in about 12 months to large
drugstore chains such as Walgreen’s and Rite-Aid.

"Hopefully, other cities and states will follow suit," said Mirkarimi."

This from 1010 Wins.

PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) — A leading mathematician who grew up in Brooklyn and won several of the world’s most prestigious math awards has died.

Paul Joseph Cohen died Friday of a rare lung disease, according to
Stanford University, where he taught for four decades. He was 72.

Cohen’s honors were astonishing feats, considering that two prizes were from completely different branches of mathematics.

In 1964 he won the American Mathematical Society’s Bocher Prize for
analysis, and in 1966 he won the Fields Medal, the math world’s
equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for logic. Cohen also won the 1967
National Medal of Science for his work in logic, and he was an honorary
foreign member of the London Mathematical Society.

Cohen’s passion was studying extremely difficult, long-standing
mathematical problems, such as the continuum hypothesis, which is
considered central to set theory, the idea that sets of items are the
fundamental objects defining all ideas in mathematics.

He shocked the math establishment by proving that the continuum
hypothesis could not be decided. The notion that conventional
mathematics couldn’t prove or disprove concrete and well-known
assertions caused an uproar among academics.

Cohen was born April 2, 1934, in Long Branch, N.J., the fourth and
youngest child of Jewish immigrants from Poland. His sister checked out
a library book on calculus for him when he was 9.

He grew up in New York and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in
1950. He attended Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1953 but left before
receiving a bachelor’s degree, going directly to graduate school at the
University of Chicago, where he received a master’s degree in 1954 and
a doctorate in 1958.

Cohen joined Stanford in 1961 as an assistant professor of
mathematics. He became a full professor in 1964. He retired in 2004 but
continued teaching until this quarter.

Cohen played piano and violin and sang in a Stanford chorus and
Swedish folk group. He spoke English, Swedish, French, Spanish, German
and Yiddish.

Walmart CEO spoke to editors and reporters at the New York Times.

Frustrated by a bruising, and so far unsuccessful battle to open its first discount store in the nation’s largest city, Wal-Mart’s chief executive said yesterday, “I don’t care if we are ever here.”

H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive of the nation’s largest retailer, said that trying to conduct business in New York was so expensive — and exasperating — that “I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”

Mr. Scott’s remarks, delivered at a meeting with editors and reporters of The New York Times, amounted to a surprising admission of defeat, given the company’s vigorous efforts to crack into urban markets and expand beyond its suburban base in much of the country. In recent years, Wal-Mart has encountered stout resistance to its plans to enter America’s bigger cities, which stand as its last domestic fronti

er.

Photoblogger, Brit in Brooklyn, was up last night shooting images of a big fire on Fifth Avenue at Baltic Street in Park Slope. No details on injuries, but it was a BIG ONE.

See a workshop performance of CHURCH, a theater piece developed at BAX that is having its world premiere at PS 122.

Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company

Friday & Saturday, March 30-31, 2007 at BAX. 421 Fifth Avenue, 718-832-0018

“Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest.” Singing, dancing, and preaching create a joyous and
breathtakingly beautiful experience in Young Jean Lee?s CHURCH. Lee is a Theater
Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. With CHURCH, her
signature unpredictability puts the religious and non-religious alike under
the spell in a way that defies and tests the beliefs of both. The
performance marshals the power of a religious service in order to shake up
complacent notions of what religion is and expose the roiling questions
and exhilarating possibilities underneath.

CHURCH is being developed through a residency at Park Slope’s BAX/Brooklyn Arts
Exchange with public funding from various sources.

The world premiere of CHURCH takes place at Performance Space 122, from April 26-May 13, 2007. For more information, visit www.ps122.org.

Because I like her writing and her choice of things to write about. Here she is on the family bed.

I don’t get it. In the Home section of the New York Times just recently, there was an article about children and parents sharing the same bed, otherwise known as the Family Bed. I thought we were so over that already. What is the big deal about the Family Bed? Why is it a deal at all?

I shared a bed with my parents until I was well into puberty, together with my brother who was born some years later. My parents didn’t have a king-size bed, only two twins put together.

There is nothing more comforting and secure than sleeping next to a human body, more so when there are two of them. Sleeping between my parents was simply sublime. I had no need for nightlights, I didn’t need to be read to, and I certainly didn’t need disgusting battery-operated music to put me to sleep. Instead, I was lulled by the sound of their voices in quiet conversation with each other or the pages of Newsweek and Life magazines being turned when they continued to read long after I had dozed off. I particularly loved falling asleep in my father’s armpit, my legs stretched across his in a diagonal line. I had no need for pillows or stuffed animals. I had my parents…READ MORE AT HER BLOG, MOM AFTER-HOURS