To the blogroll!

Ok, stop the presses--Jimmy Beck takes the next step toward world domination: starting his own blog. Happiness is a vibrating egg (not just a singing one).

The Count joins the rank of champions of the book quest (which I would've spotted sooner if Technorati weren't so flakey--Dave, it's not just you), and shares info on someone else's fabulous project:

I propose to create, with the help of the Book Review's readers, a literary map of Manhattan -- not of its authors' haunts but those of their characters, a map of the literary stars' homes. [...]

Locating other houses requires close reading or at least alert looking. Bernard Waber places Lyle, Lyle Crocodile for us: ''This is the house. The house on East 88th Street.'' But where on East 88th Street? The clue comes in an illustration: the amiable reptile stands on his front stoop looking at a house to his left marked No. 234. That puts Lyle's own house at No. 236. Alas, a visit to the block shows not the charming brownstone where Lyle lolled but an ordinary tenement. Lyle's house, like Lyle, is a fiction. As it happens, Harriet the Spy lives in the same neighborhood, in a house on East 87th. You'd think someone as clever as she would have noticed a crocodile around the block.

Indeed.

I love wandering through my blogroll only to be sideswiped by the beauty I so easily forget...

Pisan Cantos, LXXXI

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee

~ Ezra Pound

(via wood s lot)

(All apologies for not yet figuring out how to indent individual lines in blogger.)

Book hunger

The sun is on its way into the sea, so it's time to pick up the Quixote. I've found that this cooler part of the day is the best time to read.

I'd been a little concerned about running out of books: Cervantes can only last for so long (although I haven't yet hit p. 300, so I really don't need to be worrying about this now). However, I spied some Murakami, de Bernieres, Okri, and Borges on a fellow teacher's shelf last week, and have felt more relaxed ever since.

The days follow each other in meek procession. Today one of my students exclaimed on the whiteness of my skin, pointing to a white piece of paper in comparison. I grinned and lifted the sleeve of my polo shirt: my tan is definitely improving. She smiled and actually agreed with me--a huge concession from the six-year-old who's always right!

At lunch, a co-worker asked if I missed any food from the States. I said no--that food tastes much better here. When I was in the States, I actually missed food from here more. I love plátano maduro, and it's very hard to find anything remotely decent up north. (Incidentally, I've got to agree with Maud: Cuban food is amazing--and we've got the same sorts of things here.) I'm going to have a feast tonight--I found some arepas (round flat cakes, thicker than tortillas) de choclo (a kind of sweet corn) at the grocery store tonight. I'll slice an avocado over one for dinner. (Yum!)

The wheat bread even tastes better. Somehow, it reminds me of reading Tolkien and the two Jacks (London and Lewis) as a child and loving the simple descriptions of makeshift meals of bread and cheese or boiled potatoes (or the apples the Pevensies found when they were stranded after being pulled back into Narnia for the second time). They always made me hungry.

Last week, after reading of Don Quixote and Sancho's respite with the goatherds, I got hungry and sliced some quesito (Colombian cheese, which comes in soft, sponge-like blocks) and folded sliced bread around it. Perfect. (I can sympathize, sir!) The fruit is better, too--especially pineapple and papaya...

Ok. Dinner time.

Good news, bad news

Yay, I´m not alone!

The Literary Saloon also loves Jasper Fforde, and has just received a galley of The Big Over Easy. (A new Fforde book, plus the HBP all in one month! Excitement abounds...)

In other news, Brian Cox is no longer slated to give voice to Aslan in the new film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

The big breaking news concerning this though is that Bryan Cox is NOT going to be the voice of Aslan. Got this straight from the head of Disney voice casting. Cox *was* cast, but then he came in to do the lines and, because he had recently lost 40 pounds, his girth was significantly reduced, and that has affected his famously brusque and burly tone. His pre-weight-loss voice was an ideal voice for Aslan; his post-diet voice is not.

What a shame.

So they're hunting for a new Aslan voice again. They talked about some strong possibilities, but Andrew Adamson hasn't approved anyone yet.

I was really looking forward to Cox´s treatment. We´ll just have to wait and see who else they come up with.

(Via Jeffrey Overstreet)


And this just in from the Teaching Assistant: A fantastic Harry Potter site in Spanish!!

UPDATE: As a result, I've learned that the film debut of Goblet of Fire will be 24 November in Argentina (15 Nov. for US and UK). Hopefully, the Colombian release date won't be too far behind...

Why I am not a writer

Give me minute, I'll explain.

Growing up as I did with such a huge reverence for books, I've always looked at writers with a kind of awe. The four-year-old-staring-at-a-woman-being-sawed-in-half sort of awe. To me, writers are people who either can't help doing it (i.e., the "born to do it" variety), or work ceaselessly at forging their craft (i.e., the "drive to do it" variety). In other words, they're a special breed. I don't take the word "writer" lightly.

These views were strengthed (read: branded into me) by my unfortunate experience of having taken Literary Writing I as an elective during my senior year of college (I was a lit major). The class was filled with not-so-earnest freshmen and sophomores who longed to see their names in print and had very little desire (this may be an overstatement) to read or study literature. Most days I would walk out of that class nearly trembling with rage. I still haven't gotten over it.

"Being a writer takes sacrifice! You have to love the written word! You have to love books!" I would rant to any friends who were foolish enough to ask me about it.

Until recently, if an acquaintance was simple enough to call me a writer, I would feel lost in the gaping void between the "real" meaning and the "fake" meaning of the few creative writing majors I had the misfortune to know. On the one hand, to deny the title would reek of false modesty and sound as if I were fishing for compliments. On the other hand, to say nothing would be to perpetuate a misapprehension of the nobility of the term. What to do? Had I been smarter, I would've smiled at the clueless being and said, "No--I just love books."

I think this is why blogging makes so much sense to me, and why I've found it such a conducive medium. I can be an "articulate appreciator" (my spin on something Anne Morrow Lindbergh once said) in a worthwhile practice, without having to resort to the "W" word.

Of course, my parents still swear I'll crank out a book one day. Who knows? Maybe in 20 years.

Happy discoveries

I spent a few minutes online early this morning before heading out the door, and found Bud Parr's post on prose poetry (which definitely helped out my Monday):

A prose poem exists on its own - it is not verse with a backspace. It is deliberate, even if it's a passage from a Ralph Ellison novel or a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. However, we are still left without any way of classifying it other than the 'I knows it when I sees it' rule. At its best, prose poetry gives us a progression where ideas flow seamlessly through the paragraph, the unifying form in its “anti-form,” and gives us a speech pattern, a voice like that of blank verse that can sound natural and musical at once. Breaks between paragraphs give us more pause than those between stanzas and allow for a more conscious shift of ideas and images, beyond which there are few signals. Like “normal” poetry the affect in the end is the same; the language sears our memory while the ideas seep in from conscious and subconscious re-readings.

It made me kick myself that I didn't stash Killarney Clary's Who Whispered Near Me in with all the other books I smuggled between my clothes. Although I can't quote from it just now (damn), here's a stray bit of hers from elsewhere:

The last sure thing that night was my patent leather shoe. Darkness lifted me in his warm shirt and cold jacket. Old voices. Lighted wheel rolling on the lake. The pulse of my day lost its measure; I could feel endlessness and belong there. The lights fell and touched themselves and rose up-by motions repeated, taken and complete.

There is definitely a "language strategy" at play--one that hones the work down to a fine splinter of thought that lodges itself in your heart, pinning emotion in place.


In other poetry news, ReadySteadyBlog mentions a new book on Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdome of Rilke by Ulrich Baer. Apparently, there's quite a bit of "previously untranslated material" to found within its pages.


Calling all Jane Austen fans! I'm sure you'll be as delighted as I by Laura's fascinating post at Sorrow at Sills Bend: the story of a discovery of a "new" allusion in Mansfield Park. It's a wonderful peek into the world of literary annotation and intertextual theory. (Via Amardeep at The Valve)

Sunday by the sea

If there's anything better than sitting by an open window, sipping Colombian chocolate (Sol, of course) while catching up on litblog reading, I don't know what it is. (Funny how I don't even miss certain fixtures of my old life: microwave and tv.)

Many thanks to Chris at Splinters for furthering the cause of the book quest! Your kindness will not be forgotten.

Yesterday, Barcelona celebrated St. Jordi's Day and over at 400 Windmills, I posted a few thoughts on Cervantes by three Latin American authors: Mempo Giardinelli, Hernán Lara Zavala, and Noé Jitrik.

Singer-songwriter Denison Witmer has a new album coming out in July, partially inspired by the poetry of Li-Young Lee:

"The lyrics to 'Everything But Sleep' are largely inspired by a Li Young-Lee poem titled 'Pillow,' which is found in his 'Book Of My Nights.' I have been carrying his book with me pretty much everywhere I've been going for the last few years. Thinking back, Lee's book is most likely what first put the idea of making a record about dreaming into my head."

(Via Heather at The Innocence Mission discussion list)


Michael Dirda reviews Gregory Rabassa's If This Be Treason:

While a young instructor at Columbia in the late 1940s and '50s, he started translating stories for a literary review called Odyssey. Then one day -- at the dawn of the '60s, with Rabassa by now a tenured professor -- he received a phone call from Sara Blackburn, an editor at Pantheon.Would he be interested in translating a novel by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar?

"It was Rayuela, which was to appear in English as Hopscotch. I had heard of Cortázar but hadn't read the book. This didn't prevent me from accepting the offer. Still without having read the book, I submitted the two sample chapters requested. Both Sara and Julio liked my version so I signed a contract to do my first translation of a long work for a commercial publisher. It was the start of a career I hadn't sought after and the beginning of a beautiful friendship with the incomparable Julio. True to my original instincts (or perhaps my inherent laziness and impatience) and to the subsequent amazement of those to whom I confessed my hubristic ploy, I translated the book as I read it for the first time. . . . This would become my usual technique with subsequent books. I used the excuse that it gave the translation the freshness that a first reading would have and which ought to make others' reading of the translation be endowed with that same feeling."

This sounds convincing until Rabassa goes on to add, with disarming candor, "I have put forth this explanation so many times that I have come to believe it, loath as I am to confess that I was just too lazy to read the book twice." If that seems a little shocking, there's more to come: "It's my notion, loose as it might be, that when I'm translating a book I'm simply reading it in English."

Rabassa's thoughts on "magic realism":

Though García Márquez's work made the term magic realism famous, Rabassa here points to Demetrio Aguilera-Malta as "the great master of the genre," especially in his "defining novel," Seven Serpents and Seven Moons. He also sings the praises of the structurally complex Avalovara by Osman Lins, of the swinging Macho Camacho's Beat of Luis Rafael Sánchez, and of the Proust-like A Meditation and Return to Región of the Spaniard Juan Benet. These are all very good books, as I can attest, since I assigned them for review in Book World, where they were duly lauded by respected novelists and critics. But do they still find the readers they merit? Among other matters, If This Be Treason reminds us of the many Latin American writers whom we sometimes overlook because of the looming prominence of García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

(Via The Page)


Although it took me *forever* to find my way in (indicative of the other three Pevensies' issue?), the new filmsite for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is worth visiting--if for nothing else than to see Richard Taylor in action again! (Via Jeffrey Overstreet)

Bright spots

A grateful smile and enthusiastic wave to wood s lot for spreading the word of the book quest. May you have amazing luck in finding ridiculously cheap copies of your own wished-for books!

For Earth Day, we planted a few trees. My class reached a compromise (with the boys lobbying for "Dash," although they were outnumbered) so we named our little mango tree "Armonía Dash Bureche." I'm sure she'll be very happy there.

I received an email from the indomitable Sarah Jane on Paste's visual arts issue. Apparently, they have a couple works by one of my most favorite people in the world: Joseph Arthur. Also, this brief piece of his:

Painting might be impossible to write about
It’s a place beyond words from where it comes
It’s nature showing strange flowers
It’s a drug that obliterates the self
It’s a mirror in the spirit world
It’s where the shadows come out to play
It’s a shared hallucination
It’s dream made materials set a blaze in the night
Maybe it goes beyond everything else
Like playing a guitar without strings
It’s a place man meets God and says
What the fuck
I love to paint
It’s where I go to church

Words fail when I try to describe the night Jane and I saw him on April Fool's Day (my last concert). Pure bliss. Aside from the powerful music, he also completed a painting on stage by working on it during certain songs throughout the evening. I'd never seen that done before--it was strangely moving (especially during "Invisible Hands"). His live arrangements vary quite markedly from the recorded versions--like ongoing explorations--and that night's performance of "All of Our Hands" was a poignant display of dire truth.

Yesterday's things

In a recent interview, Salman Rushdie gave his thoughts on "magical realism":

R: I think the problem with that phrase is that it's now used rather lazily as a label. And when people use it, they tend to mean magical and not realism. You know, what the phrase tends to mean is the use of fantasy rather than a different approach to the realistic novel. Which is what it really meant.

W: "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

R: Yeah, exactly. And I think magical realism means something in that South American context, in the sense that it describes the work of a certain group of writers at a certain period. French surrealism is really the same thing as South American magical realism, and surrealism has some meaning in that French context of that time. North American fabulism of the 1970s, of the kind of Pynchon/Coover kind, is essentially the same thing as magical realism as well. But it has a meaning in terms of a North American context. I think there's always been, in the history of literature from the "Arabian Nights" and "Don Quixote" to the present day, a tendency amongst writers to seek to encompass the real world without necessarily using only naturalistic techniques. And I think, I hope, that I am part of that tradition. But I also think that my books are also very different, one from each other. (Via Zayne at The Orchard)

Elsewhere, a delightful conversation with Álvaro Mutis finds him opining on that ubiquitous term:

What happens is that critics invent these words, if you know what I mean. Authentic magic realism is José Saramago's El memorial del convento, or the work of German Romantics like E. T. A. Hoffmann. But basically, magic realism is just an easy way for critics in the United States and Europe to think about Latin American literature. My books have been described this way and there's nothing magic realist about them. A book like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a work that presents an extraordinary universe made up of magic and truth and horror and sadness . . . one can just simplify all of that and call it magical realism.

Other Mutis snippets:

"[M]y life became a long trip and I met thousands of people, in all different kinds of situations. And this was like a continuation of what I had experienced as a child. In this way I lost the sense of belonging to a particular country. I know that I am Colombian and will be until I die, and there are landscapes in Colombia that I love and am fascinated by, and they appear in my poetry, but I don't feel a commitment to any one country because, after all, I'm just passing through."

"You know who is my greatest literary influence? Charles Dickens. Why? A real influence is an author who communicates an energy and a great desire to tell a story, and it isn't that you want to write like Dickens, but rather that when you read Dickens, you feel an imaginative energy that you use to your own ends. In other words, you're not going to write Oliver Twist. Dickens has an impressive imagination for situations, characters, places, corners. There are corners of his Dombey that I swear I've been to. I have read all of Conrad. I admire him enormously, and it has never occurred to me in the seven novels that I have written to do anything that bears any relation to Conrad. So people tell me, as if it went without saying, that The Snow of the Admiral is like Heart of Darkness, because a boat travels up a river. Well, I've traveled up that river, not in a beat-up boat, but in a nice one with engineers and such over the course of 15 or 20 days, and I know what it's like. So, I put Maqroll there, not thinking of Conrad, but of myself. If someone like Dickens, or someone completely different, such as Proust, who gives you an impression of the interior of life, helps you when you are sitting in front of the typewriter and gives you a kind of compass in your writing, then you can use that influence to write whatever you want to."

"As I don't follow politics, I have never voted, and the most recent political event that really preoccupies me and which I am still struggling to accept is the fall of Byzantium at the hand of the Turks in 1453."

"The amazing thing with Gabo is that Gabo, when I met him, was 21 or 22, but he was already a fully formed writer. Gabo has never lived an instant without his typewriter; writing is his destiny. What happened was that he would tell me about the book, and he would tell me about things that he was thinking about, but didn't end up in the book. I would tell our friends, 'Listen, Gabo is writing a novel in which a man does this, this, and this.' And then, when I read the book, it was a completely different book than the one we'd been talking about." (Via Golden Rule Jones in a comment at the Litblog Co-op)

Also, Maud points to Billy Collins' article on e.e. cummings. Is it really true that "he is not widely enjoyed these days"? Last month, I responded at length to another article that was similarly preoccupied with cummings' form at the expense of his content.

Syntax of Things reminded me of The Decemberists' very enjoyable appearance on Morning Becomes Eclectic. (Picaresque was the last album I bought before leaving the States.) The set included (among others) "Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect," "We Both Go Down Together," "Engine Driver" (my new favorite), and a madcap version of "The Mariner's Revenge Song" (which made me want to pick up Moby-Dick again!). Much fun was had by all.

Land of letters

Aw, shucks. Such warm encouragement is inspiring!

Although it feels perfectly normal to be living here (one of the quirks of being bi-cultural, more on that at some point), it is a bit surreal to see things like the aforementioned high-rise, as well as SUVs with license plates that say Aracataca (the real "Macondo," which is about an hour's drive away). Imagine a Yoknapatawpha Suite next to a Holiday Inn!

My issues are of your general former-lit-major-slash-proofreader-turned-elementary-educator variety. However, yesterday was great. Highlights included origami frogs we made in art and the appearance of a windmill in the phonics workbook (under the letter "w"). Yes, I had to explain that a windmill is a molina. I asked the class (of six-year-olds, mind) if they knew about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. One little boy looked up at me with a gap-toothed smile and said, "Vale" (subsequently stealing my heart). And for the benefit of the others, I...er...well...wound up semi-acting out Quixote's charge (and subsequent fall) on his noble steed Rocinante.

Needless to say, I think I need to tie in random items with stories more often. Pig? Charlotte's Web. Mop? Cinderella. Pin? Dancing angels.

Ok. Maybe not.

At any rate, I'm learning. Tomorrow we're celebrating "el Día del Idioma Español" (Spanish Language Day)--Cervantes and Shakespeare both died on 23 April 1616--and the school will display (homemade) literary exhibits, as well as hold a special assembly. I'm looking forward to it.

Also, between 20 April and 2 May, Bogotá is hosting its 18th annual "Feria Internacional del Libro" (International Book Fair: less spectacular and truncated English version here). With the participation of 95% of the Colombian publishing community, they're expecting about 400,000 people to attend. Events include a conference on the music in Don Quixote, a complete exhibit of all the first critical editions of "el Quijote," a photographic exposition of Quixote's geographical route through Spain by the Colombian photographer Rodrigo Moncada, as well as several panel discussions by Latin American and Spanish authors. Then there are the events commemorating the 200th anniversary of Hans Christian Andersen's birth, and a children's book drive.

The central theme of the fair is "In Praise of Reading: from the Quixote to Pinocchio," and the Colombian Ministry of Culture (with its recent reading and library initiative, under the administration of president Álvaro Uribe) is leading other organizations in support of the fair, which is a perfect place to "draw the attention of Colombians to the necessity of cultivating reading, to reflect on the culture of the book, to hear about national and international authors' experiences as readers, to discuss policies and processes of developing readers, among other activities" (roughly translated from the site).

Participating authors include: "Fernando Savater (España), Alberto Manguel (Argentina), Mempo Giardinelli (Argentina), Juan Villoro (México), Noé Jítrik (Argentina), Hernán Lara Zavala (México), Tununa Mercado (Argentina), Fernando Cruz Kronfly (Colombia)." There will also be additional activities such as a panel discussion on writing, which will include "Fernando del Paso (México) and R. H. Moreno Durán (Colombia)," and a discussion on Latin American literature with "Juan Villoro (México), Mempo Giardinelli (Argentina) y Santiago Gamboa (Colombia)."

It sounds amazing. Some of the author topics will be questions such as, "Who and What is a Reader? What Book Changed Your Life?" and "How are Your Personal Libraries Arranged?"

I'm not sure if I can swing a visit down to Bogotá in time to participate, but I'm definitely looking into it.

On translation

Here are a few good posts that fit nicely with Bud Parr's excellent coverage of PEN America's recent panel of Cervantes translators...

1) The perspective of the reader

So Many Books (third item) quotes from Stephen Greenblatt's article on translation:

I have never struggled through "Don Quixote" in my faltering Spanish, but I am convinced that I have read and admired not a novel by Edith Grossman but one by Cervantes. I cannot read a word of Russian, but I believe I have heard in "Anna Karenina" the voice of Tolstoy and not of the most recent translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Though I would surely be a better (or at least a better-educated) person if I could read ancient Greek, I console myself with the thought that blind Homer still sings for me in the English of Robert Fitzgerald, Stanley Lombardo or Robert Fagles.

2) The perspective of the translator

The Rake excerpts a review of (the *wonderful*) Gregory Rabassa's memoir If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents:

Traduttore traditore? Rabassa long ago transcended that cliched Italian notion of "translator as traitor," even if he accepts its truth in regard to many aspects of his art. The words that more commonly come to literary sorts who have read Rabassa's work are "magician" and "artist."

Hopscotch started Rabassa on the road to those accolades by winning him the first National Book Award for Translation (now, alas, a defunct prize). García Márquez, on Cortázar's advice, waited for Rabassa to finish other projects so the busy translator could turn to what became One Hundred Years of Solitude. Later, Gabo, as García Márquez is known to friends [as well as to pretty much all of Colombia--Ed.], famously remarked that he preferred Rabassa's translation to his own Spanish version. Mr. Translator, typically, responds with charm:

"I can only humbly assume that the credit lies with the English language, that the book should have been written in English and I was only trying to correct that mistake. My mystical feeling, however, is that Gabo already had the English words hiding behind the Spanish and all I had to do was tease them out."

3) The problem of language

Collected Miscellany offers an interesting contrast in quoting an article on biblical translation:

The problem isn't with Scripture, it's with language itself. In a recent essay in Harper's, Kitty Burns Florey remarks that trying to get English to conform to the rules of Latin grammar is "something like forcing a struggling cat into the carrier for a trip to the vet." Trying to get Hebrew (which is lusciously poetic) and Greek (which relies heavily on context for the meaning of words) to fit nicely into the parameters of English is similarly problematic.

From what I understand, arguments regarding translation basically boil down to questions of the "literal" or "loose," which lead to issues of the "purpose" of a text: to serve the author or the reader? And is the reader really better served if the author's view is simplified? (Funny how, in general, most literary translations are concerned with fidelity to the original, whereas in modern biblical translation the preoccupation is with the reader.)

Anyone remember that Lingua Franca article on Kundera's battles with his translators ("Infidelity" by Caleb Crain)? I seem to remember that he was more in favor of the literal slant...

Of course, the first two items are felicitous on both counts.

Always winter and never Christmas

Many thanks to The Happy Booker (just call her Ulysses) for passing along The Book Quiz. This is about as deeply personal as I'll get on this blog, but suffice it to say, it was right on the money:

You're The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe!
by C.S. Lewis

You were just looking for some decent clothes when everything changed quite dramatically. For the better or for the worse, it is still hard to tell. Now it seems like winter will never end and you feel cursed. Soon there will be an epic struggle between two forces in your life and you are very concerned about a betrayal that could turn the balance. If this makes it sound like you're re-enacting Christian theological events, that may or may not be coincidence. When in doubt, put your trust in zoo animals.

The subversive Cervantes

From a post by Jason Pettus over at 400 Windmills:

As my own life has transitioned over the last ten years, though, into one of writing for a living myself, I have of course found it more important to do go back and read more classic literature, which was the whole impetus behind asking Bud if I could join 400 Windmills in the first place. Which is great for a second reason as well, which I can't emphasize enough to the younger visitors to this site; namely, how much more appreciation I have for older books now, the older I get and the more world experiences I accumulate. Thinking about it yesterday, I realized that I probably wouldn't have liked DQ if it had been forced on me in high school, but now I'm astounded by what a savvy, jaded yet optimistic view of the world Cervantes posits in the novel. He mocks noble virtues on a page-by-page basis, even while quietly championing some of them as well; in doing so, he basically strips away the artifice of etiquette and fake moralizing, the fairytale of revisionism and radical politics, and basically says, "Look folks, here's how it is. The world is rough and complex and many times the lines authority figures hand you are complete BS. Yet there are certain little parts of it that are usually true, too, as long as you take the time and smarts to examine the situation yourself." [...]

It's a difficult worldview to maintain sometimes, and definitely one that a lot of people would rather not consider: that Republicans are actually right sometimes, that terrorists sometimes have good points to make about their anti-Americanism, that all those people in the world who piss you off also have nuggets with which you agree. In a nutshell, that the world exists as a series of grays, not in black and white, which 1) not only is a fairly modern idea; but 2) tends not to be a very popular one. Which I guess is the double surprise of reading DQ in 2005, that not only is it a thoroughly modern book that is highly entertaining on its own, but also that the book would remain this popular for 400 years in the first place. Cervantes, when all is said and done, is preaching a fairly subversive message in DQ, which is what led me to thinking of him in the modern world in terms of "The Simpsons" or McSweeney's; he's saying basically that everyone is a liar, that everyone makes mistakes, that even the craziest members of our society still sometimes have very good things to say, and things that they believe in that we should believe in ourselves. This usually is something the general populace seems to not want to hear, so it really surprises me that the book has been as popular as it has for as long as it has.

A bibliophile's quest

When I was about 10, I decided to organize all of my books into an "official" libary. I made little pockets for date-stamp slips and spent hours hand-writing each book's information on index cards to create a card catalogue (with protracted debates with myself as to whether I should include the Library of Congress blurbs from the insides or the text from the back covers).

Last week I arrived at the school in Santa Marta where I'll begin my two-year assignment. I brought an armful of books that I had picked up at a library sale, since I'd been told that they could use more books for the school's library.

They weren't kidding.

I owned more books at the age of 10 than they now have in their English section. Yet it's a wonderful room: the few English and Spanish shelves are side-by-side near the librarian's desk. There are games in the corner, resources for teachers on a far wall, and colorful puzzle-mats on the floor. It's a cool, quiet place where I watched my new class leaf through the books and whisper excitedly about what they found.

So I've decided to add a little book recycle bin to this blog. I can't offer remuneration, but if you happen to find a book or two (suitable for K-7th grade) you'd be willing to pass on to the southern hemisphere, feel free to get in touch. I can, however, promise a happy home and a long life to any lonely books.

I knew when I accepted this job that my main challenge would be the dearth of bookstores and libraries. So I brought what I could (what's a little extra baggage fee compared to modestly-filled shelves?) and determined to stoically face whatever came next. Here's to hazarding the wilds of a book-starved town!

At home in Santa Marta

Coming back to the blogosphere after nearly three weeks of transcontinental moving, I find that there have been deaths, births, a wedding, a rescued library, and an outed Foetry.

In other words, a lot of cybertime has zoomed by.

Plus, there have been some exciting developments: namely, The Valve and The Litblog Co-op.

The former is a group litblog headed by the redoubtable John Holbo and sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. Some of my favorite people are involved, and I'm looking forward to getting up to speed.

The latter is the game and grinning brainchild of Mark Sarvas, which is occupied with "Uniting the leading literary weblogs for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace." Four times a year, the 20 litbloggers involved will announce a "Read This!" recommendation to eager, thoughtful, intelligent, independent-minded readers everywhere. It was bound to happen, and I'm extremely pleased that it finally has. Dan Green answers some of Scott McLemee's questions regarding this worthy endeavor over at Inside Higher Ed.

I was also delighted to see that BookLust has officially smashed some sort of glass ceiling with her devilishly clever strip, "The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon." Here's to further installments of "Art Imitating Lit"!

Meanwhile, I've been busy playing catch-up with the Quixote and am thrilled by the intriguing discussions that have arisen. I feel very privileged to be part of such a vibrant group. (And it doesn't hurt that Cervantes cracks me up either!)

Incidentally, to add to the current thoughts on repetitive links, some of us have readers that don't really frequent other litblogs (i.e., various family members and friends), so sometimes a little linking goes a long way in spite of it being old news to the myriad pros.

I'll probably say this too often, but I'm extremely grateful for litblogs. I know that they'll continue to be a chief contributor to my sanity this year as I fumble through my days as a new teacher in my "fatherland."

The sea washes onto the beach far below my open window, and I smile at the sounds of the music coming from Carlos Vives' little dive next door ("Mi Ranchito"). I've had a rough week (two words: classroom management), but feel somehow optimistic. A fellow teacher that lives in the building has a view of the beach that widens on part of the town and includes a high-rise with "Macondo" in huge letters along the top. For after all, this is where García Márquez's mother went to school and where his parents later married. The heat can be heavy, but the rhythm of the ocean quiets troubled dreams.

Robert Creeley, 1926-2005

Amid the flurry of packing, sorting, buying, and throwing things away, I took the time to sit awhile and stopped by Maud’s. I was shocked to read that Robert Creeley passed away this morning.

I’m sure many more will write lovely tributes and fitting eulogies, but I wanted to share the few memories I had of his visit to the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville on 19 March. That afternoon he spoke on “Reflections on Whitman in Age,” the subject of his essay for The Virginia Quarterly Review.

I knew we were all witnessing something inexpressibly poignant: Creeley with his small, newly-acquired oxygen tank ruminating on death and Whitman’s final poems. He was anything but austere, smiling frequently in bemusement at the inevitable flight of time.

He spoke of D.H. Lawrence’s “Ship of Death” and Emily Dickinson’s “Certain Slant of Light” in terms of death as passage. He related the story of Proust wanting to rewrite the death scene while he was on his own deathbed.

In reading “Ship of Death,” his voice wavered. He said, “Unless we die, it will all have been a dream,” and spoke of Whitman. He said that death makes memory and recollection necessary and more real. He confessed that while reading Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” he felt closer to Whitman than he ever had before. Commonness exists in transparency when it enters the public consciousness. The Whitman we read is extremely individual. As Creeley said, “The reader of Whitman becomes Whitman.”

He spoke of Whitman as a poet contriving to enact the real: the act of writing becomes equally as real as doing what is written of.

Ending his brief talk with a moving reading of “Good-Bye My Fancy,” he interrupted himself in the middle of the poem to whimsically comment, “He reminds me of Ginsberg--‘What do I want? Particulars!’”...and read on.

I love words sometimes more than life itself...but they fail me when I remember Robert Creeley--all 78 years of him--reading with such compassion and effortless understanding: quiet bemusement at the existence of mortality.

His poetry reading that night (the first with his oxygen tank--he said in February he began having trouble breathing) continued in this vein. Such genial humor and tender understanding permeated his words. He told stories from his stint with the American Field Service in India and Burma during the latter part of WWII (incidentally, the same time and place where my grandfather served in the malaria-control branch of the Army Medical Corps). He read “Possibilities” and spoke of Helen Vendler and Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”--how impending death is elegant, but isolation imposes. One listener’s comment led him to read “Memory,” excusing any potential crudity with an impish smile.

In his VQR essay on Whitman he concludes,

Perhaps Whitman’s “fancy” was not only such a power but a person as well, even the memory of a person, that presence acknowledged over and over just as was his own being there too insistently emphasized always. In that world, perhaps one’s whole life is a dream, a practical, peculiarly material dream, whose persons become the same complex “music” which Keats’ nightingale evokes, a tenacious fabric of inexhaustible yearning. Is that the “world” which has to fall away in age? When one can no longer sustain it? Can it even matter, given—as the poet Edward Dorn made clear—the last thing a man says will be a word.

And so I leave a few words here, scattered across cyberspace and the 1s and 0s that have the capability of connecting us in unseen ways. And here is what he wrote. (God be with you, Robert Creeley.)

"Possibilities"

What do you wear?
How does it feel
to wear clothes?
What shows
what you were or where?

This accident, accidental, person,
feeling out, feelings out -
outside the box one's in -
skin's resonances, reticent romances,
the blotch of recognition, blush?

It's a place one's going,
going out to, could reach
out just so far to be at the edge
of it all, there, no longer inside,
waiting, expectant, a confused thing.

One wanted skin to walk in,
be in. One wanted each leg to stand,
both hands to have substance,
both eyes to look out, recognize,
all of it, closer and closer.

Put it somewhere, one says.
Put it down. But it's not a thing
simply. It's all of it here,
all of it near and dear,
everywhere one is, this and that.

Inside, it could have been included.
There was room for the world.
One could think of it, even be simple, ample.
But not "multitudes," not that way in -
It's out, out, one's going. Loosed.

Still - wistful in heaven, happy in hell?
Sky was an adamant wall,
earth a compact of dirty places,
faces of people one used to know.
Air - smell, sound and taste - was still wonderful.

One dreamed of a thoughtless moment,
the street rushing forward, heads up.
One willed almost a wave of silence
to hear the voices underneath.
Each layer, each particular, recalled.

But now to be here?
Putting my hand on the table,
I watch it turn into wood,
Fibrous, veins like wood's grain,
But not that way separated - all one.

I felt a peace come back.
No longer needed to say what it was,
nothing left somehow to name only -
still was each each, all all,
evident mass, bulky sum, a complex accumulation?

My mother dying sat up, ecstatic,
coming out of the anaesthetic, said,
It's all free! You don't have to pay
for any of it... It's there
if you can still get to it?

Come closer, closer. Come as near
as you can get. Let me know
each edge, each shelf of act,
all the myriad colors, all the shimmering presences,
each breath, finger of odor, echoed pin drop.

Adumbrate nature. Walk a given path.
You are as much its fact as any other.
You stand a scale far smaller than a tree's.
A mountain makes you literal as a pebble.
Look hard for what it is you want to see.

The sky seems in its heavens, laced with cloud.
The horizon's miles and miles within one's sight.
Cooling, earth gathers in for night.
Birds quiet, stars start out in the dark.
Wind drops. Thus life itself can settle.

Nothing's apart from all and seeing is
the obvious beginning of an act
can only bring one closer to the art
of being closer. So feeling all there is,
one's hands and heart grow full.

Birthdays: Flannery and Anne

We're about to hit the road, but I can't let this slip by...



Flannery O'Connor was born on this day in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. If "Southern Gothic" in literary style, O'Connor was orthodox Catholic in her religious views. She was in the middle of her fifteen-year battle with lupus — she died from it in 1964, aged 39 — when Ginsberg and the other Beats were beginning to get the headlines. [...]

In [a] letter to Robert Lowell, she took this attitude towards her affliction: "I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow. I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell myself."




Charlotte, Emily, and Anne

Anne Brontë was born on this day in 1820. Tourists started snooping round the Brontë home when Charlotte was alive, and just after her death the locals were complaining of crowds; now the Haworth Parsonage Museum, the house gets about 200,000 visitors a year.

...Restore to me that little spot,
With gray walls compassed round,
Where knotted grass neglected lies,
And weeds usurp the ground.

Though all around this mansion high
Invites the foot to roam,
And though its halls are fair within--
Oh, give me back my HOME!

(from Anne Brontë's "Home")

(Via Today in Literature)

Beautiful change

Dear Blogosphere,

I'm packing up and leaving the state tomorrow morning...and leaving the country on the 5th. I'm moving to South America and a new life teaching at a bilingual school.

Posting will be slow for a while, but I hope to get caught up with all your goings and comings soon. And I still plan on relating my experiences at the Festival of the Book and of the marvelous Robert Creeley.

It's not yet available online, but The Virginia Quarterly Review's new issue commemorating the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I hope to speak again soon!

Ever,
Ana Maria

One more reading

So last night I hung out at the office until it was time to head over to UVA's Chemistry building to see Michael Cunningham. I kind of got lost on the way by following a small crowd (never do that), ignorantly assuming that *of course* everyone was flocking to see him--but apparently, there was a performance of classical music going on as well.

Anyway, it turned out I wasn't late at all. As I started up the stairs to the auditorium, I heard a familiar voice and realized that he was three feet ahead of me. I sheepishly slowed down and found a seat.

After a lengthy introduction by one of the members of the English Department (and a personal friend of his), Cunningham announced that this would be his last reading from The Hours as his new novel, Specimen Days, will be out in June, and he will soon be obliged to move on to it in readings. He made a couple of brief introductory statements ranging from literature's powers of consolation to his surprise at Meryl Streep being cast in the film (he still seems slightly astonished at the whole thing).

He read the portion about Laura Brown baking the cake...Kitty's visit...and the night of her husband's birthday. He was expressive, but wry...and wears glasses to read.

After the applause died down, he left the podium. It was announced that there would be no Q&A, but that as he was "a most approachable man," we were free to go talk to him and get any books signed.

This really disappointed me. It was great listening to him read, but despite the inevitable appearance of "the Same Five Questions®", I really like Q&A sessions. I saw Salman Rushdie speak a couple years ago, and the Q&A was easily the best conversation on literature I'd heard in years. You can get a sense of the author...and anything can happen.

I don't know whose decision this was. If there had been some sort of emergency, I would've understood--and Cunningham seems like a very gracious person. As it is, I got the distinct impression that the offhand manner of the English prof was due to his over-familiarity with author readings. And then there were the college kids who were there just for the extra credit. They fled the room as soon as the reading was over.

People at large universities like this seem to be oblivious to what they have. It galls me that such things can be taken for granted so blithely, as if they were common occurrences that don't mean much.

Meanwhile, vagabond ex-lit majors like myself dive for the crumbs that fall from their well-supplied table...

Incidentally, "On this day in 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased a small, used handpress":

Virginia Woolf did not think much of her doctors and treatments. In July, 1910, after pounds of food and days of bed-rest, she wrote to her sister, "I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if its ripe; it will be exquisite by September". But she did not seem to think Freud much good either, or as good for her and her writing as her own "autoanalysis". In a 1920 essay on "Freudian Fiction" she mocks both "the new psychology" and the new tendency to turn "characters into cases" and life into happily-ever-after:

"A patient who has never heard a canary sing without falling down in a fit can now walk through an avenue of cages without a twinge of emotion since he has faced the fact that his mother kissed him in his cradle. The triumphs of science are beautifully positive."

Out the door

Maud weighs in on the Ayelet Waldman controversy, but steers discussion towards the question: Is blogging bad for fiction?

Dan points us to a fascinating endeavor.

Scott discusses Louis Menand's review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

Amardeep contemplates writers with beards.

And I'm off to see Michael Cunningham speak...!

Bibliophile heaven

It was wonderfully fitting that my last Saturday in Charlottesville was spent at events sponsored by the Virginia Quarterly Review for the Festival of the Book:

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
10am
“Walt Whitman, An American, One of the Roughs, a Kosmos”: Whitman’s Self-Invention
Presentations by David Kirby (The Ha-Ha), William Logan (Reputations of the Tongue, Desperate Measures), and Heather Morton (Walt Whitman Archive)

12 noon
Did the Modernists Get Rejection Slips?
Explore a journal’s historical, humorous correspondence with former editor of POETRY magazine, Joseph Parisi (Dear Editor: A History of POETRY in Letters).

2pm
“Do I Contradict Myself?” Who Is the Real Whitman?
Presentations by Robert Creeley (If I Were Writing This), Stephen Cushman (Cussing Lesson), and Ed Folsom (Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song).

8pm
Robert Creeley Reads His Poetry
Join poet Robert Creeley (If I Were Writing This, Life & Death) for a poetry reading.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I was also able to spend some time at their Whitman exhibit and the other new exhibit, American Journeys: Columbus to Kerouac (which knocked my socks off!).

I took copious notes, so I hope to post more later.

Meanwhile, Ron at Beatrice has four dispatches from author Pearl Abraham, who also spoke.

Faulkner's reading

J.M. Coetzee on Faulkner (via Arts & Letters Daily):

What the rather dreamy Billy Faulkner gave himself in place of schooling was a narrow but intense reading of fin-de-siècle English poetry, notably Swinburne and Housman, and of three novelists who had given birth to fictional worlds lively and coherent enough to supplant the real one: Balzac, Dickens, and Conrad. Add to this a familiarity with the cadences of the Old Testament, Shakespeare, and Moby-Dick, and, a few years later, a quick study of what his older contemporaries T.S. Eliot and James Joyce were up to, and he was ready armed.

And Cervantes, of course!

(More evidence for my undying belief that you are what you read.)

Distinctly American

Tomorrow I'm skipping JSF in favor of Robert Creeley. Excitement abounds!

Robert Creeley in Conversation with Alan Riach:

I remember British friends were saying, 'God! You Americans are endlessly talking theory and prosody and all this bullshit! Don't you have anything? Don't you have any tradition? I mean, don't you have any way of writing that at least locates you in the same way that you might, you know, locate ways of dressing or furniture for your house or something? But do you have to be so endlessly paranoid about what you're doing? I mean, who cares? If you like the poem isn't that the point? And there's theories and projects and I mean...'

'Well,' I said, 'It's probably we're defensive and we've got to have some means whereby to explain ourselves to some possible other who hasn't as yet come along but one day may show up.'

There weren't a great number of people asking about how do you write a poem but something like Williams's I Wanted to Write a Poem is poignant in that way...

[...]

AR: Does that mean that so much of this is essentially personal, lyrical, individual expression? That the poetry has to emerge from a kind of imagination that's worked from a charge that is personal, rather than something, let's say... Well, Pound, for example, one of the weights he bequeathes, is his position as a man speaking politically for people in a public way. He might be misguided, or horrible, or wrong, but he's engaged in a social language which isn't the language of a love lyric, or of a personal confession or expression of personal belief or faith or love. It's a different kind of address...

RC: It is and it isn't. [...] One can think of Faulkner, who might be proposed to such, but he really isn't doing that. These are very singular and isolating stories, although they propose to be a landscape of various social climate in fact they are, literally, they are the Snopes family, and they're very particular. Look, they're not the world by any imagination. And then you think of someone like Dos Passos. No. The authority in Dos Passos is Dos Passos, not the world that he's... It's like the photographer, he's taking those pictures. By and large the American genius such as it is and I think it is has to do with the singular lyric.

You know, I think it's Walt Whitman, 'Song of Myself' -- I think that's the prototypical American gesture, poetically and imaginatively and artistically, and I think it's as true of Emily Dickinson as it is of Pound as it is of Poe as it is of Melville. I think Melville again could be that, certainly, could be an epic possibility, and yet its resolution is Ahab and the white whale and that's not a collective enterprise no matter whether it takes whaling to get there. So that I think what defines American art is (quote) whatever it is we call 'lyric' and the singular.

And I think, for example, I remember years ago as a kid, my dear friend Rainer Gerhardt, and we were talking about just this fact of things, and he said, 'You know, even during the worst moments of Hitler's regime,' he said, 'when I wrote or said anything it never occurred to me I wasn't writing for all of Germany. Not writing to it, but as a person of it. Never thought of myself as separated. No matter how obviously shattered the country was, I was always all Germany.'

And I said, 'Well, you know, in America, I can't think of a single person I know who would ever presume or think that he or she was all America.' You know, 'I hear America singing' -- and that's as close as you'd get to it. It wouldn't be: 'I am America singing' -- it would be: 'I hear...

AR: That's a very important point.

RC: I thought so. I've never forgotten it.

"Little House in the Big Words"

Old Hag (who already does a fantastic job as it is) lets loose a well-deserved rant at the situation in which many bloggers find themselves:

"Did prehistoric man torture himself about the Elk hunt he just didn’t have time to etch in red clay onto the cave wall that month? Were nineteenth century gentlewomen all, How could I have chosen the calling card with the lily, it will take me eight months to use them up, perhaps nine, and then FLOWERS WILL BE OUT WHAT WAS I THINKING???."

I was reminded of sunlight, of all things. In An American Childhood, Annie Dillard vents her young grief at the inevitable loss of moments:

Some days I felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sunporch windows. Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain. That it is impossible never entered my reckoning. For work, for a task, I had never heard the word.

It's a terrible pressure, whatever form it takes (information or memories). Yet just yesterday it occurred to me that blogs can also work like a muggle version of the pensieve--a place for excess thoughts and fragments to be shored against ruin. It may be possible for this medium to contribute to our sanity, not take away from it. Maybe. (Oh, and Scott's reasons are pretty good too.)

Meanwhile, I can't get enough of it either. This morning I found The Count of Monty Cristo speaking about an exhibit that

includes such entertaining anecdotes as the way Wittgenstein used to berate himself in front of his students at Cambridge, slapping and shouting epithets at himself ("You have a stupid professor! Do not listen to anything he says! Ist eine dummkopf!") and whatnot. I'm perhaps most fond of the tidbit about his inimitable passion for American detective movies, and the way he would rush out after teaching class to sit in the very front row of the cinema, silently munching a hot cross bun, utterly rapt before the action unfolding on screen.

And my heart was filled with joy.

In memory of St. Patrick

"Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop"

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'

~ William Butler Yeats

Saint Exupery in the therapist's seat

A nice twist on the usual personality tests:


You are the fox.


Saint Exupery's 'The Little Prince' Quiz.
brought to you by Quizilla

Games litgeeks play

Blogger vanished into the black hole of nothingness for most of yesterday, refusing to speak to me. I'd better take advantage of this chink of lucidity while I can. (As if I needed one more rocky relationship!)

I've been meaning to post about Bookslut's highly informative review of the Book Lovers Trivial Pursuit. Several members of my family thought of giving it to me for Christmas, but changed their minds when they realized that I would probably just wind up playing against myself for hours on end.

Something more likely to provide hours of entertainment for all concerned is The Mystery of the Abbey, a board game based on Eco's The Name of the Rose. Think Clue on crack in a monastery involving singing monks. (Must get my hands on this forthwith.)

In addition, the following have worked wonders to take my mind off the horror, the horror!

By request, the dashing Edward Champion kindly reveals litblog shorthand:

DFW: Any author who has read too much Nabokov. Alternatively loved or hated by the litblog community, depending upon how personally they take footnotes.

E-----: He who shall not be named.

Hitch: Any Fleet Street blowhard who drinks and smokes too much.

The list continues to grow. Uninitiated newbies (such as myself) take note.

Also, Tingle Alley's rousing game of lit math equations (by way of I Love Books) is the perfect workday distraction.

Behold:

Ernest Hemingway x Charlie and The Chocolate Factory = Dave Eggers

Catcher in the Rye + (Pretty in Pink-vintage clothing) = Prep

Oprah - Franzen = Oprah

(Martin Amis - Nabokov) = (Ian McEwan + Hunter S. Thompson) X [Lester Bangs - (James Joyce + Thomsas Pynchon)] X Keith Richards

Fun for all! (My humble contribution? Dan Brown - Umberto Eco = Mary Higgins Clark.)

More fun:

Amardeep's discovery of the Uncyclopedia and Old Hag's crush on Meet the Author (which is incredibly cool).

Dream discussion

I'm not usually jealous of New Yorkers, but this is simply too much:

The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University presents An Evening of Talk on Bob Dylan

Greil Marcus, critic, "Masters of War: Lives of a Song" Christopher Ricks, Oxford Professor of Poetry, "Blonde on Blonde" Sean Wilentz, Professor of History, Princeton University, "Blam De Lam: On Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume One"

Monday, March 21, 2005 8 pm @ Miller Theater (Broadway at 116th) No tickets or reservations necessary. Co-sponsored by Miller Theater.

For more information, please contact Rebecca Hanger at (212) 854-4270, or mrh2101 at columbia.edu.

Meanwhile, Dylan's Visions of Sin is still topping my TBR list... I must've given out Jonathan Lethem's write-up in the NY Times to everyone in my known universe.

(Via Bob Dylan's mailing list)

Taking Oprah to task

From Max Gordon's incisive essay, "Watchers and Witnesses," a powerful critique of Oprah's interpretation of Their Eyes Were Watching God:

The omission of Tea Cake’s darker skin color and the effect that it has to have during that era on his relationship with Janie, a light-skinned woman of privilege is not just a careless oversight, but something much more sinister.

Anyone who has worked on a movie knows that filmmaking is a very deliberate act, especially a film like this that was in production for more than ten years. Because of the vast expense, every decision is considered and reconsidered, discussed at great length. It is extraordinary that with a black producer, black co-producer, Pulitzer-prize winning black writer and a woman-of-color director, Tea Cake isn’t written in the screenplay as dark-skinned. It is more than just an error of the casting director; the story-line has vanished without a trace. Hiring an actor this light with blue eyes to play Tea Cake, instead of an actor like Don Cheadle, harkens back to the days of Lena Horne’s scenes being cut out of Hollywood movies run in the South because she was too “dark” for their screens, only this time it’s a black producer at the projector. Hurston had to have known what her racial critique would mean to every black person who encountered her book, from country folks to the blacks on Sugar Hill, what it would mean to assimilationist blacks to have a dark-skinned hero, and one could argue that the subsequent criticism of her work by some black male writers of the Harlem Renaissance was formed based on this critique. Richard Wright in particular was impatient with Hurston for not writing what he deemed “protest” literature, unable to see that Janie’s expression of her sensuality was her protest, and that when you have been enslaved and your body owned by someone else, sometimes pleasure of the self, acknowledgement that a self even exists to give pleasure to is, of itself revolutionary. Whatever criticisms one has of Zora, and there may be many, the woman never played it safe, and it’s unfair to put her name on a movie this politically careful, this hackneyed, as it panders to mainstream audiences generic tastes.

(I really had a hard time figuring out what to excerpt--it's an excellent piece.)

400 Windmills

The Blog People are at it again...!

Scott at Conversational Reading alerts us to Bud Parr's new endeavor--a blog discussion of Don Quixote, in commemoration of its 400th anniverary:

How many times have you read “Don Quixote” in the past 400 years? None, you say. Once, twice, a dozen times? No matter. We want you to be a part of our latest endeavor to read and discuss this masterpiece with a blog at the center of the conversation.

So far, we have the Chekhov's Mistress gang (okay, so a gang of two), but I think our reading will be best served by having a group. So drop that book your reading, dust off your Quixote and join us. We hope to start our reading at the beginning of April.

Contact us at 400Windmills AT gmail.com or visit the site http://www.400Windmills.com.

I've just tossed my hat into the ring. This is going to be good.

P.S. Bud also recommends the new issue of PEN America's journal, which features tributes to Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda.

Resonant thoughts

Spurious nails it again:

[...] I am stranded in the office without being able to write anything for the book. What to do instead? write about what you cannot write, so at least you have some relationship to what needs to be done, even if it is only at one remove. Vicarious writing, writing by proxy: this is what blogging permits, as letter-writing used to do.

Once upon a time, I would have used this interval to have written to a friend. Such a writing seems very far away now. Remember the joy of criss-crossing letters: one sent to X and another received from X and so on, each with the two to three day wait which detached what was written from what was experienced in the moment of writing. But this is already naive, as if writing did not always demand such a detachment: as if to write and to write a letter was already to have lost what was experienced and to have regained it in a new way, as words on the page.

Now, instead, words on a screen. But this is happiness: the sense something was done, that I will have made something from these vacant minutes.

I have such admiration for those who transcend this.

Joad lives

The Grapes of Wrath was published on this day in 1939:

Steinbeck could not go slowly -- a 700-page novel written, revised and printed in 10 months -- but his story of the Joads got him his "big book," and "Carol's best title so far": "I like it because it is a march and this book is a kind of march -- because it is in our revolutionary tradition."

Steinbeck's hope was that a title drawn from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" would forestall "the fascist crowd" who, he knew, would attempt "to sabotage this book [and] try to give it the communist angle"; his fear was that the politics of his novel would prevent any wide popularity, and he tried to dissuade his publisher from a large first printing. He was wrong on both counts: The Grapes of Wrath was the best-seller of 1939, and the bannings, burnings, death threats and denouncements reached the House of Representatives, where an Oklahoma Congressman rose up to "say to you, and to every honest, square-minded reader in America, that the painting Steinbeck made in this book is a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind." Steinbeck's letters in the summer and early fall of '39 reflect his anxiety and ambivalence about both the fame and the furor:

"The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. . . . I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand – I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy. . . . It is far too far when Jack Benny mentions it in his program. Altogether may be some kind of new existence is opening up. I don't know. The last year has been a nightmare all in all. But now I'm ordering a lot of books to begin study. And I'll be in the laboratory. . . . One nice thing to think of is the speed of obscurity. Grapes is not first now. In a month it will be off the list and in six months I'll be forgotten."

Glimmer of hope

This week, Sanders, an independent, reintroduced his bill, which would exempt libraries and booksellers from the Patriot Act. If enacted, the bill would restore the traditional "probable cause" standard when law-enforcement officers seek warrants to examine which books a person checked out or purchased.

(Via Bookslut)

In other freedom of expression news:

Bookninja directs us to a recent blog post on textual tattoos. Very cool. If I were ever to do it (which isn't likely), I'd probably get that e.e. cummings line, "forever was never till now" (don't mean to be giving you more ideas, Mol!).

This one's my favorite.

Transgression

Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle" and Dostoevsky's "A Gentle Creature" are my very favorite works of short fiction, so I was delighted by Patrice Leconte's film, Intimate Strangers. His reference to the James story added another lovely layer of subtext to an already rich experience: William was able to cross a line that Marcher couldn't even comprehend.

Jeffrey Overstreet's illuminating interview with Leconte touches on the issue:

But what draws him to this theme again and again?, I ask. What draws him to heroes who transgress their routines to find freedom? Leconte pauses, deep in thought, and then speaks excitedly in French, turning to the translator so he can respond with enthusiasm rather than use his skilled but cautious English.

“There is something very curious and interesting in what you are saying. There is nothing more interesting than meeting someone who casts a new light on your work. I have never thought about it, but you’re absolutely right in what you say about the obsession in my movies’ main characters. It’s true that the situations revolve around the temptation of transgressing something that is forbidden.”

It's interesting to think that some of the most securely entrenched boundaries are those we ourselves construct. While watching the movie, I was reminded of various songs by The Innocence Mission, such as "The Girl On My Left":

Some days ring out into night
my failures with people right here.
The living room growing wide.
If I get near, what will I say?
Miles to fly over,
miles to the girl on my left.

In William's open gaze, we see his perplexity in being confronted with the revelation of his own confinement. Yet Anna is not set free by his decision, but by her own. One of the strengths of the film is how the characters are not led by the hand, but come to their own conclusions by the presence (not intervention) of the other. They must figure it out for themselves.

The interview concludes:

Sometimes, his empathy for his characters haunts him after his work on a picture is finished. “I find that very interesting … the question of what happens to the characters after the movies are over. At the end of Girl on the Bridge, I’m not worrying about the two of them. But at the end of The Hairdresser’s Husband, I’m very worried for Antoine (Jean Rochefort). Things will probably not go well.”

And what about Intimate Strangers’ Anna and William? He smiles. “They’re going to be all right.”

On that hopeful note, our time together is up. Before I can thank him, he actually jogs around the large table to shake my hand, generous to the last, as if he were not the special guest but the host. “Merci beaucoup,” he says. “Thanks for shedding some light on my work. So … now I know …” Beaming with pleasure, he exclaims, “I am a filmmaker of transgression!”

Dillard discovery

While wandering through Barnes & Noble this weekend, I came across In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (edited by Lee Gutkind), which was just published this past November. I had a bus to catch and so didn't have time to read the entirety of Annie Dillard's introduction, "Notes for Young Writers," but it looks excellent. Among her brief bits of advice are things like, If you can, live in a different part of the country every year...and...Never be in a situation where all you do is read and write. You need people. Now I don't consider myself a writer, but it was heartening to discover that I follow most of this advice already (i.e., I'm not as weird as I think I am).

Unfortunately, Amazon's excerpt skips the introduction and goes straight for the first essay. But I hope to nab my own copy and post more at some point.

I did a little background search this morning, and it seems that this essay (or an older version of it) was originally published in the Summer 1997 issue of Image. In her bibliography it's listed as "Advice for Young Writers," and she put "do not read this crap" by the entry. Gotta love her. (Of course, she also calls The Writing Life "an embarrassing nonfiction narrative" so this is not surprising.)

During the first week of January, she spoke on NPR about the tsunami: "She asks how can we remind ourselves that the thousands of victims were individuals with lives and loved ones and not just faceless statistics." (For the Time Being also addressed this.)

Una compañera

First off, I completely neglected to mention that last Sunday was Gabo's birthday. ¡Ojalá que tienes muchísimos más!



And to the intrepid Teaching Assistant (who offers another correction to Hitchens): Nope, you're certainly not! I've read Goblet of Fire in Spanish (it was the only one the library had at the time), but hope to read them all that way. I'd also love to get to El león, la bruja y el ropero and Una arruga en el tiempo. I think it's an excellent way to gain greater practice in the language. And if anyone gives you grief over it, just tell them, "Some call it obsession, I call it commitment"!

Someday soon I would love to read them aloud to kids. Can you imagine how much fun it would be to read Azkaban to a circle of schoolchildren?

Harry terminó de escribir sobre Wendelin la Hechicera e hizo una pausa para volver a escuchar. Sólo los ronquidos lejanos y ruidosos de su enorme primo Dudley rompían el silencio de la casa.

It all but rolls off the tongue!

On the other side of things, here's the site of the speech accent archive at George Mason University, which "demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech." There are 414 (and counting) collected accents from people around the world. I got all sentimental when I saw the IPA transcriptions. (As an undergrad, I practiced learning IPA for a class by copying out favorite poems and writing notes to friends in IPA.) The first one listed under "Colombian Spanish" reminds me of my aunts:


(Via Bookninja)

Charlotte on a different Jane

Yesterday, Maud posted about Charlotte Brontë's opinion of Jane Austen. Brontë's impatience with Austen has always made me smile. They're such different writers: the former with her passionate yet contained wildness, the latter with her sharp gaze and sly wit. I wonder what Austen would've thought of Jane Eyre?

Also...

On this day in 1853, stirred by a reading of Charlotte Brontë's latest novel, Villette, William Makepeace Thackeray recorded these thoughts in his diary:

"The poor little woman of genius! The fiery eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature! I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy her in her book, and see that rather than have fame, rather than any other earthly good or mayhap heavenly one she wants some Tomkins or another to love her and be in love with. But you see she is a little bit of a creature without a penny worth of good looks, …and no Tomkins will come. You girls with pretty faces… will get dozens of young fellows fluttering about you – whereas here is one genius, a noble heart longing to mate itself and destined to wither away into old maidenhood with no chance to fulfil the burning desire."

Thackeray had met Brontë, but he could not have known that she had rejected a marriage proposal from Arthur Bell Nicholls three months previously. When Nicholls proposed a second time, in April, 1854, he was accepted, though Brontë died within a year of their marriage.

Hmph. Although I know why she defended him, sometimes you gotta wonder. (Then again, that could be my chronological snobbery talking.)

(Via Today in Literature)

New best friend

Many thanks to Bookslut for pointing out Jesse Kornbluth's article, "Why I Steal":

I found myself teaching screenwriting to undergraduates at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Rather than ask my students to write the "what I did last summer" essay as a way of revealing themselves as students and writers, I suggested that they list their three favorite book and tell me why they chose them. "Take 15 minutes," I said.

Half the class looked stricken. I didn't understand why until I read their papers. For them, "reading" and "required" tended to find themselves in the same sentence. Books were, at best, objects that could be adapted into screenplays. Or, in a screenplay, books were things you put on shelves, with clues inside that were revealed when some dweeb in a tweed sport coat with elbow patches absentmindedly plucked out a volume. As for reading for pleasure, that wasn't happening. And never had, it seemed.

This was terrifying. Out of ignorance or laziness or a self-confidence so massive that it was beyond delusional, these kids seemed to think they were going to show up at their keyboards and crank out 125 pages of totally original material.

They weren't planning to steal at all.

This, as professional writers know, is madness.

Me? I had started writing for money at 16—and, from the beginning, I stole. I didn't need T.S. Eliot's endorsement of theft ("Minor poets imitate, great poets steal") to make me feel I was doing the right thing. Literary appropriation was in my DNA. And, I would argue, in the DNA of all writers who see this work more as a calling than as a career.

Writers--real writers--are formed by their reading. It can be vast, it can be selective. But at some moment, the process freezes. Heroes emerge. And then the writer sees himself/herself as an upholder and extender of the convictions and style of those heroes. For me, the gods are Johnson, Flaubert, Dickens, de Maupassant and Orwell. And the catalytic moment was when Orwell praised "prose like a windowpane"—right there I found a mantra.

Annie Dillard discusses this idea in The Writing Life (which I'll quote as soon as I'm within reach of my copy)...

Anyhow, discovering Kornbluth's Head Butler made my entire week.

Coming clean

Bookninja points us in the direction of Paul Wells, who helps us admit that we're all-too-often stuck on the same page:

It is a dark burden to bear, this business of not finishing books. You start out with all the goodwill in the world. You flip the pages diligently. Your circle of acquaintances expands by a dozen or more as this cast of made-up people enters your life. And before you even find out how it all turns out for them, you set them aside. What's your problem?

You feel ungrateful, somehow. The author put his life into these people, and I can't even stick around to see who lives or who dies? And yet, as I stare at the books in my library, I realize I have become a serial book-unfinisher. [...]

Blame or credit for my setting a book aside lies with nobody but me. Quality has nothing to do with it. I've cheerfully abandoned some of the great books of the English language. I read Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday and The Pearl by John Steinbeck. But The Grapes of Wrath? Abandoned at page 176. This time there was actually a reason. Steinbeck was starting too many sentences with "and." And it was getting on my nerves. And it was turning into a cheap gimmick. And I'd had enough of it. And I know that's a lame reason. And I don't care.

Heh.

Each of those books on my nightstand are excellent (although I feel the Ondaatje is rather sterile)--I'll finish them at some point. My excuses ("I just don't have the mental space right now" and its variants) basically boil down to good ol' fashioned procrastination: I either don't feel like it or I just don't want them to end. But to be perfectly honest, the past couple of weeks have found me on a Harry Potter kick--I've been rereading them all one after the other. Right now, I'm in the middle of Goblet of Fire. So many clues, so little time!

Aparecium!

See GalleyCat for the others.

Needless to say, I'm ridiculously excited. (I'm the girl who would reread them in Spanish!)

Under one roof

Part of the pleasure in reading Sherill Tippins' "February House" — a portrait of the Brooklyn Heights brownstone shared by poet W.H. Auden, novelist Carson McCullers, composer Benjamin Britten, tenor Peter Pears, writer-composer Paul Bowles, novelist Jane Bowles and burlesque artiste Gypsy Rose Lee in the early 1940s — is that it lets you enter a sort of Swiss Family Robinson fantasy. Instead of a tree house on a desert island where all the rules of living are reinvented, it's a dilapidated town house in a shabby-genteel New York neighborhood.

This has just shot straight to the top of my TBR list. (Full review here.)

With thanks to TEV...who has also posted a piquant conversation with his mom:

TEV: Hey did you ever finish Enduring Love?

MOTEV: (exasperated) No. I just can't.

TEV: Why not?

MOTEV: I just can't get into it... It annoys me and I don't enjoy reading it. And I said, you know what? I don't enjoy this. So I stopped. I got maybe one-third through.

TEV: What did you hate about it?

MOTEV: Everything.

UPDATE! MONDVACSINALT