Books
Karmafornia by NC Weil
NC Weil, ©2011 ISBN 978-0-9834893-0-6, LCCN 2011930567
278 pages. Printed in USA, $16.95 US
"In 1978, two young lovers leave Boulder, Colo., and head to Berkeley, Calif., where they struggle with life's messy problems and intrusions in this capable, well-developed look back at an edgy, bygone time. Arriving at the University of California, Berkeley, Laura – with free-spirited boyfriend Walt in tow – begins graduate studies in biology. It isn't long before she meets fellow student Cob, an irresistible fruitarian from Nebraska with whom Laura eventually has a passionate affair replete with unbelievable orgasms. But the relationship with Cob – and the sex – lacks love, and Walt is summoned to the rescue. This love triangle plays out against the background of the political and social upheaval of the time, with Weil referencing everything from the controversial Proposition 13 – which rolled back property taxes – to the mass suicide by cult members of Jim Jones's People's Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Weil ably captures the period, while convincingly delineating her characters."
Publishers Weekly, Oct 17, 2011, p. 41 in the PW Select section.
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SUPERBALL is the second of two books trailing the life and loves of author NC Weil’s protagonist, Walt. In the first, which this reviewer has not read, the enlightened long-hair fell for and was broken on the California wheel by a certain Laura. With SUPERBALL, we find Walt on the rebound in Boulder where he’s working as a janitor and living in a Grateful Deadhead household of fellow social maladroits. He falls for a younger woman (22), Anna, who is on the rebound herself. This novel is the story of their attempts to unite, fighting psychic rearguard actions in the form of old and unvanquished lovers, grappling with their own inadequacies.
Literature reorganizes time and concentrates, reduces occurrences to monumental moments and basically amps up the drama. Here you’re getting the whole relationship. He likes her, she doesn’t like him (for the most part) and vice versa. The thing meanders, the way a real relationship does with its feints and forward movements…
The language flows and the story is easy to follow without being devoid of substance....
SUPERBALL is the reader on their roller-coaster ride, with the 1970s rushing by out the corner of your eye. Along the way you get subtexts involving the hippy house’s harassment by narcs, a peyote trip in the desert, a valuable review of 70s musical gems and a remembrance of life before smart phones and personal computers, when rock-and-roll was a religion with many followers.
~Stephen Siciliano for IndieReader
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"You cannot find more spirited verse. Stan jokes and exaggerates, but the reader always feels the love and compassion. He compares marriage to a bullboat, that multidirectional life vehicle, and justice to a melon. He compares a prosecutor's brain to entrap'd vapors in galaxies, himself to a sack of grain.
"At the same time, Stan has always been a listener, a person of great care and feel for people. READ HIM!"
- Jack Collom, from his Foreword to this anthology. Collom's 2012 book Second Nature earned the Colorado Book Award for Poetry.
"Meet Stan Boucher -- lifelong poet, raconteur, visionary bringing humanism to social work and mental health -- and pioneer in climbing cliffs and peaks. He was also my father."
- Jello Biafra
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