A Natural Curiosity - Geoff Wisner's Blog
Monday, July 07, 2008

Realism in retirement planning

Investment companies and financial journalists often seem to assume that planning for one’s retirement is so simple that only the thoughtless or the reckless will get it wrong. Start saving as early as possible, they say. Save at least 10% of your pre-tax income. Invest in low-cost stock funds, and consider shifting a percentage of your nest egg to bonds as you get closer to retirement.

The economic devastation of the past few years has given this approach an air of unreality. Except for the very richest among us, real wages have been stagnant for years. Housing prices have plummeted to the point where many people owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Credit card debts are climbing and savings are almost nonexistent. The old advice is still good, as far as it goes, but ordinary people are having to scramble just to get from one month to the next.

The New York Times, to its credit, is starting to get this. A recent article on borrowing from your 401(k) plan doesn’t try to argue that it’s a good idea, just that it might sometimes be preferable to the alternatives. “These are tricky times,” the paper says. “Banks are frantically reducing the credit lines on existing home equity loans. Credit card issuers are deploying similar tactics. That makes 401(k) loans a more attractive option, or sometimes the only remaining one, for people who need money.”

The Times article lays out the rules governing 401(k) loans, the pros and cons, and links to a helpful calculator that tells you what your loan will cost you in the long run.

Posted by geoff on 07/07 at 12:45 PM
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Category: Money

A Natural Curiosity - Geoff Wisner's Blog
Thursday, July 03, 2008

A Basket of Leaves is now available!

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I mentioned it already in passing, but I don’t mind saying it again. My first book, A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books That Capture the Spirit of Africa, is now available for sale from booksellers including Amazon, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK, Powell’s, Alibris, and AbeBooks. Journey through the 54 countries of Africa through novels, memoirs, travel books, and even some poetry.

Posted by geoff on 07/03 at 10:19 AM
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A Natural Curiosity - Geoff Wisner's Blog

A wonderful new home

My partner Jenn has created this wonderful new 21st century version of my website, which now includes my blog. If you’ve been reading my work at Blogspot, please start coming here to view new posts.

Posted by geoff on 07/03 at 10:16 AM
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A Natural Curiosity - Geoff Wisner's Blog
Friday, June 27, 2008

Heinemann’s African Writers Series

Around the time I finished writing A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books That Capture the Spirit of Africa (now available at Amazon, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK, Powell’s, Alibris, AbeBooks, and elsewhere!) I was saddened to read about the demise of Heinemann’s African Writers Series, which began with Things Fall Apart and went on to publish many important African writers.

I reviewed more Heinemann titles in my own book than those of any other publisher, including Things Fall Apart, Efuru, When Rain Clouds Gather, Mission to Kala, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, The Purple Violet of Oshaantu, Voices Made Night, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison, Mayombe, Season of Migration to the North, A Cowrie of Hope, The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez, A Grain of Wheat, and The Gunny Sack.

Now I’ve learned from Laila Lalami’s blog that the African Writers Series is back! Good news for fans of diversity in literature.

Posted by geoff on 06/27 at 01:24 PM
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A Natural Curiosity - Geoff Wisner's Blog
Thursday, June 26, 2008

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

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Maybe it’s not advisable to read about the death of a father when your own father has just died. But Alison Bechdel writes about her father with such understanding — and her father was so different from mine — that reading it was a bittersweet but not too painful experience.

Fun Home is a graphic memoir by the author of the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. I first discovered Dykes to Watch Out For in the Boston Phoenix, and found that you don’t have to be gay to appreciate good writing and sharp humor. When Jenn and I were running our bookstore in Fort Greene, we featured the Dykes collections in our small but carefully selected gay and lesbian section. (Some customers were tickled to discover that Jenn, like the bookstore owner in Dykes, is a black woman with dreads — though the fictional owner is bigger and grumpier than Jenn.)

I knew from Dykes to Watch Out For that Alison Bechdel was smart, but I didn’t realize how literary she is until I read Fun Home. She comes from a literary family, to be sure: In Fun Home we see her father reading Proust and her mother acting in plays based on Henry James and reading Margaret Drabble (a favorite of mine) for fun. Bechdel herself begins writing a diary at the age of ten, and excerpts from that diary appear throughout Fun Home.

Fun Home is primarily about Bechdel and her father Bruce. Her mother is distinctly a secondary character, and even the names and number of her brothers are left pretty vague. (A boy in one panel is labeled “one of my brothers.”) But we see what seems like every flagstone, silk flower, and square of gold leaf in Bruce’s painstaking restoration of the family’s Gothic Revival house, and Bechdel is a tireless investigator of her parents’ troubled marriage and her father’s hidden life.

Bruce Bechdel was struck and killed by a Sunbeam Bread truck while crossing the highway near another house that he was restoring. Bechdel returns again and again to this scene. She is convinced that her father killed himself (“There’s no mystery!” she imagines telling someone at the funeral. “He killed himself because he was a manic-depressive, closeted fag and he couldn’t face living in this small-minded small town one more second.”) But readers may have more doubts. How likely is it that someone would kill himself in the middle of a working day, without a note or other warning, by jumping backward into the path of a truck?

But whatever happened that day, Fun Home is an subtle, moving memoir of an odd, gifted, troubled family.

Posted by geoff on 06/26 at 03:25 PM
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Category: Books

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