Thimblewicket

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

2012-01-25T11:18:00.000-06:00

Via TriQuarterly and Poets & Writers: Lovely little animated short, Oscar-nominated if you care about that kind of thing:

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

In the Oxford American: Barry Hannah's mixtape

2011-11-29T12:42:00.005-06:00

Friends & neighbors, I am pleased and humbled to be in the company of Peter Guralnick & William Gay & Elijah Wald & others in this Oxford American music issue devoted to Mississippi, birthplace and cradle of both blues and rock and roll. My piece is about a mixtape Barry Hannah made for me in the early 90's when I stalled out a bit writing my first novel, The Wonder Book of the Air.

If you want to hear most of what's on the mixtape, see my Spotify, Songs That Got Us Through WWII, or order this cd here.

Dallas and Fort Worth folk, find this issue at your Barnes & Noble, because it will be accompanied by cds of the music everybody's writing about, and these cds are always amazing. I hold Marc Smirnoff and this magazine personally responsible for the "Americana" music phenom. Consider subscribing to this magazine that turns 20 years old soon. If you're looking for a holiday gift for someone who like music and literature, this is it.

You can read my essay here.

Jim Dickinson's "O How She Dances"

2011-10-22T17:37:00.002-05:00

via Joe Nick Patoski

Never Forget the Amish

2011-09-11T11:28:00.000-05:00

Today I am remembering the stories about the Amish, how even after a madman had murdered a number of their children in school, they comforted the wife of the murderer, attended his funeral, grieved with her. There is a story also that one Amish man held the murderer's father for over an hour while he wept.

So I'm holding the Amish in my mind today.

Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope

2011-09-02T09:45:00.004-05:00

What work it is, to ferret out and purchase the works of fiction that are actually worth reading, the ones that bob like corks in the annual deluge of new novels, most indistinguishable due to the careful muzak that is bookjacket-ese. So many "luminous" books that you glance around for the Geiger counter. So many men apparently consent to be labeled "heir to Cormac McCarthy" that you marvel there is not some huge paternity suit between publishing houses. It can make you tired. These novels can make you tired, and dispirited, suspicious that the clones of Cormac have their baseball bats poised, at the ready to crack the knees of your lot, who wonder if there is life after grit lit.

Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope is the best novel I've read in a while, and I suspect it's because he seems uninterested in being anyone's literary heir. I would like to take this occasion to publicly thank Schaffert for that obstinacy, and for leaving this novel like a trail of breadcrumbs for the weary to follow. I don't know Schaffert's earlier works, but I will soon.

What's this book about? An old lady writes obituaries. A newspaper goes down. American folk still have the propensity to band together over just about any issue, just like de Crevecouer said Americans were wont to do, only now they do it via serially published bad books, or case histories of missing girls. Loss can become something akin to religion, if you let it. Family ties somehow hold, even as the flood of happenstance flows through them.

But that's not what the book is about; it's about the wealth of life that accompanies any human moment. I think. I'm still scratching my head over this, and how Schaffert did this.

Aside from that, Schaffert's playful but wise writing makes this one a keeper. It's good to read in the presence of an intelligence not satisfied with surface cleverness, one that knows nuance in human currents.

Here's a snip:
What will you most remember? It's a question I've asked of the grieving hundreds and hundreds of times. The people I ask almost always take a deep breath and exhale. "What will I most remember?" they most always say, looking up and off as they're thinking back. Their first responses, which come too quickly simply to fill the silence in the room are unexceptional: her infectious smile, his playful wink, her bubbly laugh, his gruff demeanor, which disguise his sweet, soft heart. But here's what I do: I write nothing down. I give them absolutely nothing, as if they've not yet said a word. I sit my skinny legs crossed beneath my long skirt, my steno pad atop my knee, the point of my pen pressed on the paper but not moving, not even to doodle. They know that I know they can do better than that. To please me then, they see past their grief and breathe vivid the life back into their beloveds, in idiosyncratic detail.

What I will most remember about this book: the way it made me believe in novels again.

Portrait of Horton Foote as a Young Man

2011-08-12T16:43:00.001-05:00

Horton and Lillian Foote, unspecified beach, unnamed photographer. In the wonderful archives of Foote's photos and papers in the DeGolyer Library at SMU. (For my students, Foote wrote, among other things, the screenplays for To Kill A Mockingbird, Tender Mercies, The Trip to Bountiful.)

Ceviche Weather: Recipe from San Antonio

2011-08-08T15:46:00.003-05:00

Ok, we are into something like the millionty-leventh day of weather over 110 degrees, and I can't remember the last time we turned on the stove at our house. The thought of adding any more ambient heat to ones existential plight would make a body insane. I have no interest in turning on the stove in the near future. The thought of it makes me feel like some bedraggled doomed character in a Sam Peckinpah landscape. And yet, we must eat.

Quite possibly, the wonderful Tex-Mex versions of gazpacho and ceviche, both served very cold, were devised in seasons like this. Here's a ceviche recipe from Bon Appetit that comes from someone whose nombre de familia is Hernandez, from San Antonio, so you know it's legit. I plan to try it very soon, but I am not a ceviche purist who insists, at great length and volume, that you have to let the lime juice cook the fish, that it's cheating if you turn on a stove, etc. I plan to use scallops with the fish, and will probably flash-grill them in a panini press, because we like the slightly charred and salmonella-thwarting approach to our ceviche. To Johnny Hernandez: muchas gracias, compadre, por eso ceviche muy excellente. Hace mucho calor in Fort Worse, Tejas.

Ceviche Verde

By Johnny Hernandez
La Gloria
San Antonio, TX

• 1 pound fresh Pacific halibut or other firm-fleshed fish
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
• 2 ripe avocados, peeled and pitted
• 3/4 cup green olives, sliced
• 1/2 cup tomatillos, diced
• 1/4 cup onion, very finely chopped
• 1/4 cup fresh cilantro leaves
• 1 jalapeño, stemmed, seeded, and minced (optional)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• Tostadas or tortilla chips

• Ingredient info: To ripen avocados more quickly, place them in a sealed paper bag with an apple or a banana for 24 hours.

• Preparation
• Chop fish into 1/2" cubes; place in medium bowl. Add kosher salt; toss to coat. Add lime juice; toss to coat. Marinate until the edges of the cubes begin to turn opaque, tossing occasionally, about 30 minutes.
• Dice avocados; add to bowl along with green olives, tomatillos, onion, cilantro, and jalapeño Add olive oil and season to taste with salt.
• Serve over tostadas or with tortilla chips for dipping.

(Photo credit: Zach DeSart / Bon Appetit

Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude

2011-08-02T14:18:00.008-05:00

The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster is a deft, enigmatic memoir of his father, first published in 1982. In the course of writing it, Auster learned that his grandmother had murdered his grandfather during his father's childhood, and so his father's personality was shaped by that terrible secret. Auster's father as an adult was aloof, inaccessible to his own children and had the compartmentalized life and the seemingly soulless affect that we today associate with clinically diagnosed narcissism, believed to originate from childhood trauma.

Auster wrote:
For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no mare than this surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself -- and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself to examine your own depths. When the door is open there is never any problem: you can always escape. You can avoid unwanted confrontation, either with yourself or with another, simply by walking away.

My father's capacity for evasion was almost limitless. Because the domain of the other was unreal to him, his incursions into that domain were made with a part of himself he considered to be equally unreal, another self he had trained as an actor to represent him in the empty comedy of the world-at-large. This surrogate self was essentially a tease, a hyperactive child, a fabricator of tall tales. It could not take anything seriously...the principle was to say as little as possible. If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him later. The lie was a way of buying protection. What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could manipulate in order to manipulate others. He himself remained invisible, a puppeteer working the strings of his alter-ego from a dark, solitary place behind the curtain.

For the last ten or twelve years of his life he had one steady lady friend, and this was the woman who went out with him in public, who played the role of official companion. Every now and then there was some vague talk of marriage (at her insistence), and everyone assumed that this was the only woman he had anything to do with. After his death, however, other women began to step forward. This one had loved him, that one had worshiped him, another one was going to marry him. The principal girlfriend was shocked to learn about these other women: my father had never breathed a word about them to her. Each one had been fed a different line, and each one though she had possessed him entirely. As it turned out, none of them knew the slightest things about him. He had managed to elude them all.

"That Little Sob in the Spine"

2011-08-01T10:14:00.001-05:00

He says he got the inspiration for Humbert Humbert when he heard a story about a baboon that knew how to draw the bars of its former cage. Prodded by Lionel Trilling, he says "I don't wish to 'touch hearts'...I don't even want to affect minds much; what I want to produce is that little sob in the spine of the artist-reader..." His body language is really uptight here, the way he keeps his knees pursed together and he makes some of the classic moves that bad liars make...

I came by this via the wonderful online digest Berfrois.

Secret (Illegal) Bookstore, Sort Of: NYC's Brazenhead Books

2011-07-13T09:07:00.001-05:00

This link came to me via Mary Hood.

Eudora Welty's Onion Pie

2011-06-06T12:43:00.004-05:00

Appearing now in a thrift store near you, an old cookbook from the Junior League of Jackson, Mississippi, now that a whole generation of women who signed their names Mrs. John So-and-so and Mrs. George V. Somebody IV are beginning to pass out of earthly inhabitance. These women will be known for the public parks they fought for, the education for the poor, their charity to the sick, and for their recipes contributed here. But among them is a recipe by one Eudora Welty, described as a "sustaining member."

"This is from a recipe Katherine Anne Porter gave me, which she got in France," she wrote. "These little pies are served hot at the wine festivals along with the bottle of wine." In her kitchen it became something betwixt tarte tatin and quiche, but you didn't use such words then; to do so would have been pretentious in Jackson. So she called it "onion pie" in native plain language, and the recipe works somewhat on the same level as her fiction, with the magic wholly produced out of whatever simplicities happen to be at hand. She signed it "Eudora Welty," and it's the only contributor's name in the entire cookbook that is not masked by the armor of a wealthy man's name, Mrs. Jack Who's Who, or Mrs. Tom Gotmoney.

Eudora Welty's Onion Pie

Crust
Lump of butter the size of an egg
Rounded teaspoon lard
Heaping teaspoon baking powder
Salt
Fairly heaping cup of flour
Cold sweet milk
egg yolk (optional)

Filling
3 large sweet Spanish onions
1 large Tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon flour
Salt and pepper
2 eggs
1 cup whipping cream

CRUST: Work together the softened butter, lard, baking powder, salt and flour. Add enough cold sweet milk to make a good firm dough. Well-beaten yolk of an egg may be added if desired. Line an 8-inch pie plate with rolled pastry. FILLING: Shave onions fine; fry in butter to a nice brown, really brown and much reduced. Add flour. Stir well; salt and pepper to taste. Beat the eggs till pretty light; mix with cupful cream; fold them into the fried onions gently till perfectly mixed. Pour into the crust and bake about 30 minutes or till brown and puffy at about 400 degrees Farenheit. Serve at once. Serves 4.

Miss Eudora Welty

Postcard to the Future Mayor of Fort Worth, Tejas

2011-05-20T09:26:00.000-05:00

via ProPublica

How to Write a Story

2011-04-14T15:17:00.004-05:00

1. Think of some story you have needed to tell for a long time now.
2. If it’s time, tell it without lying to us, or to yourself.
3. Take us into the place only you know about.
4. Violate a taboo or two along the way.
5. Destroy the deserving. Leave the innocents intact.
6. Insist that we retrieve our childhood awe and wonder.
7. Bring us to our knees with gratitude.
8. Raise us from the dead.
9. Repeat, as often as necessary.
10. Forgive us, if we fail to notice you have done this.

Art credit: Minnie Evans, self-taught, South Carolina

Paperwicket: Indie Animated Shorts for Independent Animated Short Ppl

2011-03-15T09:10:00.005-05:00

Whereas every television on earth seems to be spooling images of carnage and catastrophe, I became conscious of all those with little children. I have memories of seeing Johannesburg riots on television when I was little, and it fueled my nightmares for years to come.

So I started PAPERWICKET, a Tumblr of mostly construction paper animation culled from the best of Vimeo.

These look great on an IPad and can be viewed in the car even, on an iPhone in little hands.

Nothin' but the 'toons made by artists with no particular commercial or political agenda in mind. Some are rock music videos; some are student projects from animation classes. More to come.

My criteria for selection? To be included, films must celebrate the human imagination, and must not offer stupid idiotic aggression and cheap po-mo existential angsty-pants paranoia. Must not be tied into some Orwellian corporate lockstep of the obedient purchase of little plastic objects that end up in landfills. Suggestions for more additions to Paperwicket are welcome.

Here's are samples: "Bubblegum" and "Cellegratonia"

Clinic- Bubblegum from trunk animation on Vimeo.

Cellegratonia from NEWWORDS on Vimeo.

Decemberists, "Down By the River"

2011-03-14T15:25:00.001-05:00

Down By The Water from Miky Wolf on Vimeo.

A Hundred Thousand Starlings:

2011-02-23T22:33:00.003-06:00

100,000 starlings fill the skies in Poole - 1 Minute: a Vimeo Project from Mark Rigler on Vimeo.

"Approval Is Like Heroin" --Nina Paley

2011-01-07T13:59:00.004-06:00

From Nina Paley's Mimi and Eunice cartoon strip.

Some of Nina's short "minute memes" here, a series of one-minute films about copyright.

Nina Paley's most excellent Sita Sings the Blues is here. And here.

Vernon Fisher. Dreaming Wikileaks Since Before You Were Born.

2010-12-22T10:48:00.008-06:00

If you understand the concept of Wikileaks, you will understand the conceptualism of Fort Worth artist Vernon Fisher. Fisher seems to have been dreaming Wikileaks since decades ago.
You still have time to see this exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth before it comes down January 2.
Anthony Mariani gets Vernon Fisher. If you want to get Vernon Fisher, you can see his smart review that appeared in the Fort Worth Weekly.

If you want to write your own short story to accompany this exhibition, go here, to the Modern's website.

Fiction Workshop in Linked Short Stories

2010-12-21T15:15:00.007-06:00

Here's the flyer for the advanced fiction workshop I'm teaching at my u. this spring semester:

“A group of linked narratives can create an effect you can’t get from a novel or from one story alone. It’s like a series of snapshots taken over time. Part of the pleasure is turning to them again and again. The interest lies in what has happened in the interstices.” --Michael Chabon

“Linked” short story collections are a perennially popular genre for first-book publication, since they allow the beginning writer to assemble early short compositions into an impressionist whole. You could make the argument that a set of linked short stories, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, midwifed the movement that came to be known as American modernism; the linked story collection has thrived ever since. Most major authors have published at least one work of linked stories, including Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Carlos Fuentes, Munro, John Updike, John Cheever, Louise Erdrich, Robert Olen Butler, and a surprising number of others.

In this advanced creative writing workshop, students will study seven works published as linked narratives or “novels told in stories” and write four linked short stories of their own, using a balance of variables and constants within a short story sequence such as:
-a unifying perspective or narrator,
-a unifying locale or setting, with multiple perspectives
-a common object over various time periods
-multiple narrators with a common bond
-a repeated form, such as letters, documents, official statements, oral histories
-a singular era or event, narrated from various perspectives.

In addition to the collections below, students will read and report on one other linked short story collection of their own choosing, and compose one 3-minute narrative silent film or photo-essay illustrating a particular perspective of “unity” that interests them.

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (online, public domain)
Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner ISBN-13: 978-0307389640
Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff ISBN-13: 9780767928304
Patricia Highsmith, Little Tales of Misogyny ISBN 0-393-32337-4
Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain ISBN-13: 9780140176643
Julie Hecht, Do the Windows Open? ISBN-13: 9780140271454
Ursula LeGuin, Changing Planes ISBN-13: 9780151009718

Note: The list is not meant to be offered as models of "correctness;" the list is meant to be random. The only ones of these I've read so far are Winesburg and Good Scent. The rest I chose because I want to read them. So please don't be spammin' me w/ yr fascist aesthetic emails about what should be on the list because of its superiority, etc., plz.

Vintage Pilgrim Jubilees

2010-12-03T12:30:00.006-06:00

Orginally they hailed from Horse Nation, Mississippi, back in the day. Then they went to Chicago and got very, very famous. This is trance music, Mississippi style.

When humanity begins to scare me, as it does on a regular basis these days, I go back to this music from Mississippi, and it's a direct pipeline back, into a place where I remember how to keep believing in the potential for goodness in our human tribe.

I heard a more recent incarnation of this group in a school auditorium in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1999 or 2000, somewhere in there, and I will never forget it. Here's a book about them from University of Mississippi Press. You can purchase their work at Malaco Records.

I'm not a Christian believer, but I believe in the spirit these men bring to this music.

West Texas Contretemps: Waylon Jenning's "Big Mamou" (1964)

2010-10-22T14:50:00.013-05:00

If you chance to be driving across the beautiful barrens that is West Texas, listen to some Waylon Jennings, because this was his neck of the woods. If you know his music, it will feel like a just homage to a worthy ancestor. If you don't know his music, it will feel like a ticket into the afterlife of somebody who survived more than you ever will.

I heard "Big Mamou" for the first time last weekend, and wondered how I could have missed it before. Apparently Buddy Holly had the idea that Jennings should do some songs in Cajun patois, even if he had to fake it, and so he did "Jolie Blon" and "Big Mamou." The linguistic results sound a bit more like Melungeon truck-stop patois to me. But, cher, the odd contretemps when he decides to pick his Fender Telecaster like it is a mandolin, in the place where the accordion would normally go. . . Ima tellin' you....no matter what you order, you will be served.

Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World

2010-10-21T14:22:00.015-05:00

Wendell Berry is known to most of us as a man whose boots are often heavy with worry about what in the name of God is going to become of our tribe, in all its evermore civilized savagery. Berry has demanded, and got, a higher standard of living than the rest of us have, partly from an insistence on due diligence about human connection and habitat. We enter his books and we remember, what it was like when it was possible to be more human, before the world had blown us off-course, off-center, off-path.

And though the majority of Berry's published words are addressed to the grownups, his boots get lighter when he speaks directly to children, and we can eavesdrop on those conversations in little treasures such as the book Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World, now out in paperback from Counterpoint, illustrated by Davis Te Selle.

From long habit, Berry addresses children as honored company, as intellectual equals deserving equal access to Linnaean taxonomy and the sum total of what we know about living. This is why the book is stunning. Berry knows, from long habit, the secret to a good story for a kid: sometimes the story we are hungriest for is one that is quietly told, without any gimcrack trickery. This story is the kind that you'd make up as you tell it in the dark to a child, praying for that child to sleep, only that child would listen intently as if being fed something most magnificent and satisfying, and then insist that you tell it again, the same exact way, every night thereafter, no deviations.

Her name was Peromyscus leucopus but she did not know it. I think it had been a long time since the mice around Port William spoke English, let alone Latin. Her language was a dialect of Mouse, a tongue for which we humans have never developed a vocabulary or grammar. Because I don't know her name in Mouse, I will call her Whitefoot.

The name fits because her four small feet and all the underside of her were a pure, clean white. Her coat, above, was a reddish brindly tan. She had a graceful tail, a set of long elegant whiskers, perfect ever-listening ears, a fastidious nose, and black profound eyes shining with sight. She took a small feminine pleasure in being beautiful.

Wherever she was, she was at the center of the world. Put that line in the wrong hands of the wrong writer, and it'd be worthless, an invitation to tribal trouble many decades out. Put that line in Berry's hands, to describe the situation of a certain little gray mouse, and you've got a quiet little line that can situate a mouse (or a child. . . not to mention all us older eavesdroppers) adequately in this world without requiring them to wear the same damn angsty existentialist boots we are all so weary of, so de riguer once, and so passe now.

Davis Te Selle's unsentimentalized charcoal illustrations have a taxonomist's accuracy to them, capturing both the whimsy of mouse genetics and the scale of mouse life in the vicinity of rivers prone to flood. What's stunning about this as a children's book is the degree to which Berry and Te Selle can evoke the mouse's world without remaking her in our human image. We see her separate world as she experiences it, broken glass, floodtide, uncertainty and all; we learn from her, but she is not a stand-in for us. A child could come away from this story seeing a mouse as having about as legitimate a claim of "dominion" on this earth as a human has.

This is a wily book, meant to send a child out into the world with a sense of proportion, staring back at fate and chance with a certain equanimity. There is no purer writerly impulse than that, to set down a useful, quiet story that a child will always carry with her, long after all us eavesdroppers are returned to dust.

The Quebe Sisters Are Coming. . .

2010-10-17T11:49:00.007-05:00

Red Steagall, you've buried the lede in your website about your Fort Worth event coming up next weekend: the Quebe Sisters Band is coming to town. They've opened for Merle Haggard, they've jammed with Warren Buffett, they sound like sweethearts of the rodeo by way Rosie the Riveter's bomber plant in Fort Worth, circa 1940. You can have your cowboy poetry in iambic pentameter and your what-have-you. Me, I'm coming to hear the Quebe Sisters sing "Across the Alley from the Alamo."

J.E. Pitts, Literary Man

2010-09-17T10:35:00.016-05:00

I knew who Pitts was long before I found out who he was.
Let me explain.
Once upon a rainy time in Oxford, Missisippi, early 90's, I was walking across the town square to get to Square Books, and I saw a young man about two blocks down, gaunt of cheekbones and serious of mien, lost in his thoughts, hands sunk into a retro thrift-store chic black coat of the sort deemed appropriate for young college men about thirty years prior. It was an overcoat that could have been a relic from the Eisenhower era, but he wore it like it was an accidental thing available. I saluted this young guy in my mind, not only for the sheer unselfconscious effrontery of that old coat, but for the expression on his face, quiet anguish, the sort we wear when we feel invisible. I knew immediately what he was doing in Oxford; he was one of those hardy perennials, a young literary man. He was in Oxford for the same reason many others were. He had some story sleeping within; Oxford was a place to utter things other villages would burn you at the stake for saying.

"That Pitts," Barry Hannah said one time, shaking his head and smiling. "He takes more abuse from Gordon Lish than I ever did." Pitts would mail pieces of his work to Lish, then editor of The Quarterly, and Lish would mail them back, with perhaps two sentences surviving the Lishly axe. By that time I'd had an early piece published in The Quarterly, but only after the Procrustean revision of the sort where Lish hacked off the limbs and tampered with its heart's rhythm until it was as harmless as a bicycle seat in a Dada exhibition. Can't remember if Pitts was in Hannah's classes with me, or if we just struck up a conversation, but he was deeply aggrieved because Lish hadn't taken anything of his. I didn't understand his grief or his persistence. I would have gladly given him the space devoted to my piece; it meant more to him than to me. Years passed. He finally got something in The Quarterly I think, some ghostly Lishified revenant of himself that I hope somewhat resembled Pitts' original intent. I hope it still mattered to him by then.

But in the meantime, other currents swept him along into the river of his life.

He began to paint, like a cooler Howard Finster without the vindictiveness. After his first gallery show, Cynthia Gerlach hung a painting of his in Bottletree Bakery: a lone male overlooking a blue village, his geeky separateness adorning him like a crown of thorny light. It was like a self-portrait of early Pitts, like that kid I saw walking down the sidewalk, already understanding something the rest of us did not.

Adopted as a child, Pitts discovered he had grown up not too far from his natural sister, who contacted him: hello. I am your sister you never met before. He told me about this in an awed, hushed tone, at the counter in Bottletree Bakery, beneath that figure in that thorny light. You have to write about this, I said. You have to.

He fell in love and married in a quiet, spectacular way. He was loved, not only by his wife, but by us all in that little blue village of literary Oxford. His new brother-in-law was a real live zen master. His new mother-in-law thought enough of him to donate a kidney to him when he needed it very badly, and it saved his life. The separateness Pitts wore like a thorny crown when he was a sad young literary man gave way to something larger, like a mantle of light that showed where all connection was possible. He positioned himself in a way that he intersected all the Venn diagrams of art in North Missisippi: fiction, poetry, painting, music.

He understood new things the rest of us never would. He knew what he knew about the way the human world spins, and he was still glad to be here.

And so it's hard, sitting here writing these words, to agree to the news that he has died. I'm going to adhere to my tradition of not saying goodbye to the literary men of Oxford, Mississippi; I am going to decline to do so. But I can tell you that I do not, do not like this, the undertow of Time with a capital "T" taking people away from us, Larry Brown, Jim Higgins, Barry Hannah, and now Pitts.

When I can trust myself to talk to my students about him without weeping, I will. We'll start with that image of him, walking in the rain in his black coat, feeling alone. I'll show them the photo of the man with the thorny crown, looking at the village. "Lookit how this guy is yearning for connection," I'll say. "Guess what? He doesn't know it yet, but somewhere down there is the sister he hasn't met yet, who is going to phone him someday. Somewhere down there is the wife he hasn't met yet, whose mother is going to give him a kidney. And then there's the village. I know from personal observation that this fellow is going to be very, very loved by that village."

photo credit: Square Books?

Apollinaire's "Annie"

2010-09-07T16:39:00.007-05:00

Everytime I run across this funny, lovely poem, I wonder how Apollinaire had heard of Galveston, Texas, and if he had the Galveston hurricane of 1900 somewhat in mind when he wrote it.

Annie

Sur la côte du Texas
Entre Mobile et Galveston il y a
Un grand jardin tout plein de roses
Il contient aussi une villa
Qui est une grande rose

Une femme se promène souvent
Dans le jardin toute seule
Et quand je passe sur la route bordée de tilleuls
Nous nous regardons

Comme cette femme est mennonite
Ses rosiers et ses vêtements n'ont pas de boutons
Il en manque deux à mon veston
La dame et moi suivons presque le même rite

-- Guillaume Apollinaire
(from Alcools, 1913; first published Sept. 1912)

Annie
(tr. Oliver Bernard)

On the coast of Texas
Between Mobile and Galveston there is
A great big garden overgrown with roses
It also contains a villa
Which is one great rose

Often a woman walks
In the garden all alone
And when I pass on the lime-tree-bordered road
We look at each other

Since this woman belongs to the Mennonite sect
Her rose trees have no buds and her clothes no buttons
There are two missing from my jacket
This lady and I are almost of the same religion.

Steve Almond's "Now Let Us Raze Famous Men"

2010-09-01T14:54:00.006-05:00

Whether you've followed, or care to follow, the various degrees of sadness surround Virginia Quarterly Review lately, you should read this. Over at The Rumpus, Steve Almond separates the wheat from the chaff:

We’re going to destroy ourselves as a species if we lose the capacity to imagine the suffering of others. One way to do this – the best way – is via our imaginations, via storytelling. It’s our job to help spread that particular virus, in our work and our lives. The point isn’t to take sides. There are no sides. There’s just the one side. And we’re all on it.

To read the entire piece, go here: "Let Us Now Raze Famous Men"

Books Nobody Can Afford: Reo Fortune's The Mind in Sleep (1927)

2010-08-25T14:43:00.012-05:00

I'm always interested in the blue highways of human intellect, in the also-rans and the almost-weres. Sometimes some interesting ideas get lost, in that Darwinian shuffle that goes on in academia. This week, I've been thumbing electronically through an old book, The Mind in Sleep, (Routledge, $225.00) written by the New Zealand psychologist Reo Fortune, also Margaret Mead's second husband of three, a man known to get a little combative about what academics claimed they knew. Fortune would no doubt have some pithy remarks about the price of this book, which virtually guarantees that nobody much will read his life's work. Some of it's interesting stuff:

The Dream of an Advanced Woman

The dreamer is walking with Z to whom she is engaged. Suddenly she seizes the end of a sheet hanging down from a telegraph wire. Instantly the sheet travels away with her with great rapidity. Soon she is far off, leaving Z far back in the distance. The dreamer had decided to attend a University extension class in literature. Mrs. A., her prospective mother-in-law, thought fit to object to this arrangement. Her future daughter-in-law would get far ahead of her son and look down on him in consequence. Advanced women made bad wives for ordinary husbands. The dreamer, who was a young lady with a fund of common sense, told Mrs. A that she though her fears foolish, and that she did not intend to yield to them. She would not get far ahead of Z.
In the dream Mrs. A’ suggestion is given full effect despite the dreamer’s waking dismissal of it.

The Dream of the Library Vandalism

I have secretly let into the college library certain students that I thought I could trust. But they remove several window panes and smash the stained and frosted glass in other places. Then they set ladders up to the gaps and climb out through them to the roof. After locking up the doors I meet in the passage two ladies, Professor K’s daughter and Professor T’s wife. As I pass down the stairs, Professor K, seated at the foot remarks loudly: ‘What’s F been doing in the library at this time of night?”

"KNITTING MIDGET SOUGHT FOR BALLET"

2010-08-19T14:37:00.003-05:00

From the Dallas Morning News, 2-9-1940:

A well-formed male midget, not more than three feet tall, is being sought by Mrs. John F. Lyons, local manager for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, for an appearance in Bacchanale here on the night of Feb. 20. The midget must also be able to knit. In this surrealist ballet, one of the four numbers on the program for the performance, Salvador Dali has included as one of the pantomime characters, a midget who sits on the stage and plies a pair of needles, two feet long. Small children will not be considered for the part.

Sallie Tisdale's Letter to Atlantic

2010-08-17T10:32:00.010-05:00

Sallie Tisdale, frequent contributor to Salon and Harper's, author of a 1993 (?) book on pornography Talk Dirty To Me, now an ordained Buddhist monk, takes the editors of Atlantic to task in the current issue:

I was interested in the July/August cover story on “The End of Men” and the notion that women are “taking control of everything.” Fascinating. I note that 26 men contributed prose and poetry to the issue, compared with six women (two of whom wrote the story and sidebar about women taking over everything).

This would be funny, if it wasn’t historically and abundantly typical of The Atlantic and most other major magazines.

Sallie Tisdale
Portland, Ore.

"Dallas After Dark" July 1963

2010-08-16T11:41:00.006-05:00

From the Dallas Morning News, July 7, 1963:

JACK RUBY says he has a winner in Jada, the torrid red-haired strip-tootsie who opened at Club Carousel Monday night. Called the "Toast of the Coast," Jada did bit parts in Hollywood before she turned exotic dancer. She did ballet and modern jazz dancing and was a Copa chorine before signing a film contract. Ruby says her act is the most exciting since Lili Christine, the famed New Orleans Cat Girl, played Pappy's Showland.

The Way She Names Rivers: Jane Vandenburgh's The Architecture of the Novel

2010-08-12T09:32:00.011-05:00

Jane Vandenburgh
The Architecture of the Novel (Counterpoint, $15.95)

What we have here is a quiet manifesto about the literary writer's innate need to tamper with, or thumb her nose at, all the cheap hack's truisms, or the ceaseless, perennially awful carpentry advice about novel-writing.

Half this new book from Jane Vandenburgh is a wise and whimsical glossary of terms useful to novelists, or to anyone who wants to read novels like novelists do. Just when I thought nobody could say anything else interesting about writing novels, here's one that reads like a glorious jailbreak.

"A" is for "anecdote;" "B" is for ""broken symmetries."
"D" is for "destiny," and "E" is for "earning in" but also for "evil."
"Earning in" is not to be confused with a novel's "earning out" its advance, for it refers to something even more elusive, such as a novel's having a right to exist.

These are heady words, here in the epoch of a steroid-fed chicken in every pot and an MFA under every roof.

"Equality between writer and reader" includes this: "We do not write down to our readers, because we are not better than they are. This pertains especially when we're writing for young people; we are not better than children and don't even necessarily know more than they do. We are merely older."

If there is an "architectural" requirement for the novel, Vandenburgh seems to be requiring that it be situated well, with a full view of the river of Time. Much of the sheer grace of this book comes from her steady reminder to the reader that even wood and architecture are fluid. She acknowledges her own influences: not only James Wood and Anne Lamott, but also Welty, Forster, Gardner. At the same time, she admires the work of filmmakers such as James Cameron's painstaking linguistic preparations for the making of Avatar, and quotes Judy Collins on the merits of listening to liturgical choir music.

My favorite glossary entry is "The Way We Name Rivers," under "W." Citing Welty's use of a favorite 1945 geography text, George R. Stewart's Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, Vandenburgh likens the accrual of novelist's truths to the linguistic confluence of Dutch, Indian, and English in the New World. Every "new" place was, in fact, ancient:

In order to write our scenes, we go to a specific place in the story which can be any place at all. We accurately name the river there by describing its action as carefully as possible. We don't worry at all about its tributaries or headwaters or where the river (which is our story) is going to spill into the sea.

We write one piece of the river and call it Big Rock, then we write the one called Little Bend.

We enter the time of our story and look around. It may seem as wild and as strange as the New World did to the first European explorers. We look around, entering it respectfully, listening to the voice of those who already live there to find out what the story's things want to call themselves.

We enter our story as we would a foreign country.

The Architecture of the Novel is a valuable tool for fiction writers not only for what it offers on the subject of novelistic carpentry but also for what it offers on the subject of originality. In Vandenburgh's new world, you can file "American fiction" also under "P," which stands for "perennially renewable."

Jane Vandenburgh's other books are Failure to ZigZag, The Physics of Sunset, and A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century.

New Place to Write, New View

2010-08-04T12:14:00.003-05:00

Here's the view from my new office on the top floor of Reed Hall, facing University Avenue, the university library, and its divinity school. This is one of the more inspiring work spaces I've ever encountered, the latest in a series of renovations of venerable old buildings here at Texas Construction University. In the afternoons, punctually, a red-tailed hawk roosts on the weathervane atop the church steeple, which causes a bit of hubbub in the bird kingdom over there in all these trees.

Wallace Stegner on The Perils of Writing About Place

2010-08-03T15:42:00.008-05:00

Interviewer: Is it possible for a writer to protect the places he or she loves by writing about them?

Stegner: It doesn't help to write about them in celebratory ways because all you do is stimulate the tourist industry.

(From Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner. U of New Mexico Press, 2009)
Art credit: Colin Brant, "Lake View."

Truth Is Stranger Than. . . Parody

2010-07-30T15:34:00.002-05:00

Is it Dada art? Is it theatre-of-the-absurd-meets-Broadway-musical, suitable only for tacky turistas? No. It is Texas politics. Photo from the New York Times.

Postcard to BP's Suttles: "The Land Owns Us"

2010-06-04T10:06:00.004-05:00

Whereas the concept of land stewardship is not rocket-science, here is a concise tutorial on who owns what on this earth, offered by an aboriginal Australian:

Mighty Fine: Wendell Berry on Jane Kenyon

2010-06-03T09:47:00.007-05:00

Wendell Berry's Imagination in Place (Counterpoint, 196 pp., $24.00) is a book of quiet essays about the writing life, written by somebody who understands the value of writing at a steadfast remove from what most of the literati would deem to be "the writing life," which is why you should read it. There are wonderfully nourishing things here, often about other contrarians and outliers, such as Wallace Stegner, Hayden Carruth, James Still, and a few folk you've never heard of, like Kathleen Raine. My favorite in this collection is from a talk Berry gave on Jane Kenyon in 2000."Sweetness Preserved" first appeared in "Bright Unequivocal Eye": Poems, Papers, and Remembrances from the first Jane Kenyon Conference, ed. Bert G. Hornbeck and Peter Lang (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Group) 2000.

Berry writes that he came to the understanding that Kenyon was a first-rate poet long after he'd known her a while as his friend Donald Hall's wife; that he was prepared to say something "nice" about her work, but then he heard her read her work and understood that she was the real deal and mere niceties were not required.

Finally, late in the day, somebody, --I don't remember who; it wasn't me --said, "Jane, why don't you read us a poem?" Jane, who had been sitting almost outside the room, saying little, perhaps nothing at all, during the conversation, fished up from somewhere a page that she had brought with her and spread it open to read. For me, this was the only uncomfortable moment of that day. I don't remember what I thought, but it would have been like me to have started trying to think of some ambiguous compliment to make in case I thought the poem waws bad --something like "Well, Jane, you certainly do write poetry." And then that quiet woman read beautifully her poem "Twilight: After Haying."

Berry goes on to say that he realized in that moment that though he recognized the moment she described, the sublime and sweet exhaustion at the end of a day of meaningful farm work, he would never need to write a poem like that, because she had done it better than he could have done himself. So on this recommendation, I am going to probably read all of Jane Kenyon, sort of like the summer I read all of Louise Gluck because some guy poets I loved, loved her.

Charlotte Wood

2010-05-18T20:54:00.013-05:00

One of my favorite discoveries on Twitter is the Australian novelist Charlotte Wood, about whose books I have blogged previously. As @charlotteozwrit on Twitter, she has a distinctive voice that is funny and brainy at once, as if her coordinates in the digital universe are where the latitude of humor intersects the longitude of intellect. Here is a series of comments from her today, which I treasure. This is the use of Twitter at its finest, short, staccato communiques from an amazing mind:

Waiting room of urban bulk billing medical centre is another world. Note to self: return whenever tempted to whinge about yr cushy life.

In medical centre waiting room, shambling old homeless man came to me & said my name. Turns out he's the doctor.

Then he is a delight and we swap Voltaire stories.

Dr.'s Voltaire story: V. sends MS to publisher goes on hols. Then writes to publisher with single character: "?" Soon comes the reply: "!"

My Voltaire story for doctor: V on deathbed, urged by carers to renounce Satan. Voltaire: "This is no time to be making enemies."

Letter from Richard Ford to the Provost of SMU

2010-05-17T08:06:00.004-05:00

The following letter to SMU Provost Paul Ludden comes via email from SMU Press. Ludden recently made an abrupt announcement that SMU Press would close its doors in June, touching off a raft of letters from writers who know and value the press's reputation for publishing excellent literary fiction. Among those who have voiced protest to Ludden is Richard Ford:

To Provost Ludden,
You know the argument: the arts and humanities are always the last in the lifeboat, and the first to be kicked out in a crunch. And no one argues there's no crunch in the society, in the culture, in the budget of your university. But the decision to close the SMU press is not an abstracted headline, it's not a line-item, it's not an acceptable loss, and the University (which has time and facility and support-budget for a new Presidential Library) simply ought not do it, if it wishes to maintain its status as a great University. Put most poignantly, how much is it costing SMU to support the Press? This, versus what the University achieves in prestige by giving a home to a vibrant press whose important cultural mission is be the publisher of new creative work -- the life-blood of the nation's imagination -- at a time when larger New York-based trade publishers are more and more reneging on their responsibilities. The answer is -- and you know this -- that you don't win back much money, in contrast to what the University, the larger university community, and the reading public unrescuably lose. When you look around your university, as you do, I wonder what forces are acting on you that cause a decsion to close the SMU Press to seem wise? Does it seem like a smart reallocation of your resources? Or is it just an easy one, a no-brainer, that'll cause you little strife in the doing? I think I know, and I think you know. The arts and the humanities -- which is what the SMU Press is all about -- are the soft tissue of any great Republic's, any great State's vitality. It's easy to overlook it, easy to think there's a never-ending storage of it, easy to think it'll replenish itself no matter what bad circumstances it endures. But that simply isn't true. Once it's gone -- and SMU is a University that prides itself on its staunch traditions -- it's gone for good. And gone with it is that crucial vitality, that grace note, that non-essential-seeming institution that asks important questions, the stirs lively debate, the gives new voices a chance, that supports Texas's claim as a place where literature and the arts can flourish. I fervently ask that you keep the SMU Press alive at SMU. It's worth it to everybody.

Richard Ford

photo credit: Crain

Tiffany Window & Civil War Hootch Recipe

2010-05-10T20:56:00.021-05:00

This jewely old window, possibly Tiffany, is what you see when you step onto the landing of the staircase in the Fort Worth Women's Club, which is housed in an old cattlebaron-era residence now sandwiched in between the jackhammers attendant upon the perpetual hospital expansions of downtown, and the Dannon yogurt factory. It's an elegant little fenced compound of mansion and submansions laced together with covered galleries, and a maze of little gardens sheltered within. I had lunch there last week as the guest of a friend, and it was like stepping through a rabbit-hole into a different world. There's a collection of objets d' art or affection donated by members, like carved ivory in a mirrored glass case, and some baroque old silver serving collections, Bavarian china, beloved pianos. There is one tiny well-appointed empty mansion devoted to daily bridge games.

But in the main manse, built in 1911 or thereabouts and donated by a woman named Margaret Meacham, we were two of four guests in a high-ceilinged dining room with Palladian windows and thick carpets. The pre-war restaurant china was the kind you only see in antique shops now. The powder room was the most amazing one I've ever seen in my lifetime, complete with Louis IV silk damask-covered chaiselonges (sp?), a seemingly sound- and time-proof refuge within a stubborn fortress resistant to the encroachments of urban futurity. The day I was there, I kept imagining that I was walking through the ghosts of a few several thousand quiet confidences and secrets and unrecorded history of Texas. Some of the most powerful women in Fort Worth have been members; some were simply married to the most powerful men. Upstairs, a little library of over a thousand volumes, each one a kind of official history about their beloved Texas. Altogether an amazing place, a designated haven for women who wanted, in the middle of the rough West, someplace to hold meetings about paintings and books and charities such as the Jewel Ball.

Here is a recipe from a cookbook published by one of these ladies who was married to the mayor of Fort Worth around the time of the Kennedy assassination. Jane Justin, aka "Mrs. John Justin," was married of CEO of the Justin Boot Company. Though it had impeccable credentials to Mrs. Justin, since it came from the Alabama wing of the Daughters of the Confederacy,she never made the hootch, so she says in the cookbook she published in 1968, Mother Jane's Prescriptions for Hunger. Her husband joked that she'd need to get a permit "from the government" to make it.

Hootch Cocktail

Ingredients: 1 1/2 lb. RAISINS with seeds in, 1/2 doz ORANGES, 1/2 doz LEMONS, 8 lbs GRANULATED SUGAR, 2 1/2 lbs. CORNMEAL, 2 ordinary cakes of YEAST

Wash oranges, lemons, and raisins to remove dust.
Cut lemons and oranges up with peelings or in chunks.
Mix oranges and lemons with sugar, and let stand while you are stemming and cutting raisins.
Break up yeast.
Place in a 4-gallon crock with 8 quarts of water.
Stir every 3 days with a wooden spoon. Four weeks required.
Then strain through woolen flannel cloth. Bottle tight and serve as a mild cocktail. Fine!

An Appeal For Help From SMU Press

2010-05-06T11:42:00.006-05:00

This came via email yesterday from Kathie Lang, longtime fiction editor at SMU Press. What you need to understand here is that this press is one of the last of the big-time refuges for the writer of short story collections, and that it has a higher rate of gettings its work reviewed in national papers than some more well-known small presses. I first knew about this press when it published an excellent collection of stories by Jane Mullen; I've seen a lot of good fiction come from this press. You have to wonder what the bean-counters at SMU are thinking. Actually, you have to wonder IF they are thinking.

Dear friend of SMU Press:
Last Thursday Keith Gregory, director; George Ann Ratchford, production and marketing manager; and I, acquisitions and developmental editor, were summoned to a meeting with the SMU Provost, at which we were told that the operations of the SMU Press would be closed down on June 1, 2010. We had no hint or prior warning that this was coming. We have fifteen stranded new projects under contract and 130 other titles in print, effectively unsupported if this should come to pass.
Would you please e-mail me a statement in support of the Press ASAP (today, if possible, for us to take to our editorial board meeting—and later this week, if not)??

Many thanks,
Kathryn Lang
Senior Editor
Southern Methodist University Press
PO Box 750415
Dallas, TX 75275-0415
Telephone: 214/768-1433
FAX: 214/786-1428
E-address: klang@smu.edu

Jury's Still Out on Evolution, Folks

2010-05-04T21:32:00.003-05:00

On the day that oil-soaked birds can tar and feather money-soaked oil executives who violate their, and our, right to life, then I will entertain the possibility of evolution.

Sunday Popovers, For Kate

2010-05-02T21:02:00.014-05:00

Dear Kate,

Now that you have found yourself a man worth cooking for on Sundays, I'll give you this recipe for popovers, and my wishes for you and your beloved to have many years of Sunday brunches together.

The first real popover I tasted was in San Francisco at the Cliff House, Sunday brunch, overlooking the Pacific, couple of three decades ago. People made reservations for Sunday brunch months in advance, then queued up for their chance to have eggs Benedict, mimosas, offered by snooty waiters at exorbitant prices that no doubt helped cover the insurance for this precarious place that always seemed to me like one of the outermost edges of the continental U.S. It is a place of great prospect, like you can see all the way past Hawaii to some silver shimmer that most likely is the coast of Japan, if you squint a little.

Just one of those accidental associations, popovers always give me that sense of wide open possibilities, and an unlimited view.

Now, say it's a Sunday morning, and you are not in San Francisco, and you are not in the mood to drive to Dallas, or even to queue up with all the teeming masses of humanity who throng out on Sunday mornings looking for meaning in life, a choice parking spot, and good popovers.

Here's the big secret. Popovers are some of the most elegant food you'll ever put in your, or your loved one's, mouth, yet you can make them, almost ex nihilo, for under $1.50:

2 big brown eggs
1 cup of milk
1 cup of flour
a bit of salt

Whisk the eggs, then add milk, then flour, salt, put in muffin pans with a little melted butter in the bottom, bake in a really hot oven until they rise like an elementary school science experiment run amok, until they tilt over and get brown and crispy. This whole enterprise takes about 30 minutes, about the time it would take the beloved to run down the street and fetch a Sunday New York Times.

(We won't go into the epistemological debate that wages between cooks about the whole temp thing and the cold-oven start vs the hot-oven start. It's your life, and your oven. Avoid the cooking experts who can make you feel edgy, like you are a total failure if you don't purchase ______ (fill in the blank with some ritualized expensive hootie) Ignore them; these are the Isadora Duncans of dances with mops, or they are men who have elves and boughten sycophants to prep everything and clean up after them.)

The only "correctness" about cooking is that you make it the way you and the beloved like it.

So on these hypothetical Sunday mornings, play some music that approximates the expensive Cliff House view of wide open prospect. Brandenburg Concertos, or Kate Bush, or Carrie Rodriguez. Let it be playing loud when the beloved comes back in the door with the New York Times, so that it feels like he is coming home to a life of wide open possibilities and unlimited view.

You don't need an expensive popover pan; you don't need a designer copper bowl. If memory serves, I'm still using the muffin pan that's about 15 or so years old, now with a lovely patina, all the Sundays of our lives baked into it. The new one replaced the equally inexpensive one that ended up rusting away in the sandpile one rainy summer when the child was borrowing it to make dirt cupcakes. The child probably owes a bit of her existence to the fact that I knew how to make the popovers for her future father on many Sunday mornings before she came along. And when she did come along, the Sunday popovers were always good for cheap amazement and special effects when she was little and we were sometimes broke. She brunches in Brooklyn now; I still make popovers and her father and I read the Times on our respective Iphones.

As for bowls: I use a vintage Bauer mixing bowl that once belonged to my great-Aunt Kate. It was in a house we moved into in 1965; my mother ignored it, so I carried it off to college in the 1970's, right about the time that radical feminists were throwing out such old relics. So many birthday cakes and Sunday popovers have now issued from this bowl, it now has very powerful baking mojo.

Whither I goest, Aunt Kate's bowl goes. The recipe, too. It's the only baking recipe I can remember.

big love,
c.

The Do-It-Yourself Final Exam

2010-04-28T21:10:00.019-05:00

One of the best things a teacher can do (especially if many students are taking a literature class for the last time in their lives) is to let the students make up the questions they would most like to answer in an essay or two. I showed them Everything Is Illuminated, because they are all working on researching their own family histories, working backwards until they come to the immigration, the slavery, the diasporas, the wars, the Big History that displaces little people. (More on that in a future post.)

They also read Idoru, by William Gibson, which fairly well predicted in 1996 the electromagnetized, digitized present that we inhabit now.

Can I tell you a secret? This is really an exam they are giving ME, to see if I taught them to get comfortable with looking at where a writer situates himself in time, not to memorize all those old mothball AP English-type things. I'm crossing my fingers that I didn't fail them as a teacher.

Here are the very interesting questions that my literature students devised this morning. "Magical realism" seems a bit of stretch for these works, but I'm open to discussion about it. They have about a week to write their answers.

Exam IV
Introduction to Fiction
Spring 2010

Option A: Answer two (2) of the questions below, using your knowledge of the film novel based on Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and William Gibson's novel Idoru, in a well-contemplated, well-supported answer of about two (2) pages for a total of four (4) pages. Use at least five (5) terms we covered in the course. (Avoid the obvious: realism and modernism, unless you are prepared to go beyond the ordinary definition.) To support your statements, you will need at least three (3) examples for proof.

Option B: Answer one of the following questions, using your knowledge of the film Everything is Illuminated and the novel Idoru, in a well-contemplated, well-supported answer of about four (4) pages. Use at least five terms we covered in the course. (Avoid the obvious: realism and modernism, unless you are prepared to go beyond the ordinary definition.) To support your statements, you will need at least three (3) examples from the film and three (3) from the book for proof.

-Discuss the elements of Prospect-Refuge Theory (prospect, refuge, and hazard) as they appear in Everything Is Illuminated and Idoru.

-Discuss symbolism in Everything Is Illuminated and Idoru. Which ones are private, which ones are incidental?

-Analyze the film and the book according to Sherwood Anderson’s "Theory of the Grotesque."

-Discuss any elements of magical realism in the film and the book.

-Discuss the notion of “futurity” in the film and in the book.

-Discuss the film and the book with regard to fatalism. Are any of the characters fatalistic? The authors?

-Is fatalism the opposite of futurity? Discuss, using the film and the novel as examples.

-How is “futurity” like the element of “prospect” in the film and in the novel?

-Discuss the elements of post-modernism in the film and the book. How do they differ?

-Compare elements of “local” color in Everything Is Illuminated and Idoru. How do they differ?

-Discuss the use of multiple denouement in Everything Is Illuminated and Idoru.

-Discuss the use of “epiphany” in Everything Is Illuminated and Idoru. How does each author use them differently?

-Analyze how the concept of time and “futurity” are important to both Everything Is Illuminated and Idoru. How do the authors resemble and differ from each other in the way they write about time?

-Analyze the element of literary ambiguity in Everything Is Illuminated and compare it to Idoru.

-Analyze the use of reliable or unreliable narrators in Everything Is Illuminated and Idoru.

-Can one generation’s ‘magical realism” become another generation’s realism? Explain, using film & novel.

-Discuss the use of revolving point of view in Everything Is Illuminated and in Idoru. Similarities?

How does “revolving point of view” enhance fiction or make it more realistic?

-Compare the use of family ties or connections in Everything Is Illuminated with Idoru. Big differences! Why?

"Dinner With Henry Miller" (1979)

2010-04-14T13:45:00.010-05:00

Young filmmakers take note: If you want to get superior documentary footage from some of the silverbacks of literary culture, get a young and beautiful dancer to help you ask the questions. From Ubu-web, an astounding half-hour documentary, Dinner With Henry Miller (1979) filmed by Richard Young. Miller is charming, effervescent, animated in the presence of young dancer Brenda Venus. He fusses about the osso bucco, discourses on Blaise Cendrars, and beguiles both dancer and filmmaker. He also pulls back the curtain on some of the mid-century jockeying for the Nobel Prize, revealing the inside dope as told to him by Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet).

Richard Howorth Muses on Book Futures, Writerly Politics, and Capitalism

2010-04-13T10:33:00.007-05:00

Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, former president of American Booksellers' Association, and friend to wayward writers everywhere, has a refreshingly frank column in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

New Fiction from Ole Miss MFA's

2010-04-13T10:01:00.005-05:00

Two University of Mississippi MFA alumni have new books just out. The Name of the Nearest River is a story collection by the distinguished Sarabande Books (16.95),by Alex Taylor, who will be at Square Books to read June 17. Tom Franklin said that Taylor is "a young writer who writes like he's been around forever."

M. O. Walsh's book, The Prospect of Magic, also a story collection, is published by Livingston Press (16.95), is winner of the TarttsFirst Fiction Award and has strong endorsements from Michael Knight, Brad Watson, Lewis Nordan, and the late Barry Hannah. As Square Books says, "Not too shabby."

To follow these and other Oxford-connected writers, subscribe to Square Books newsletter.

"Senior Writer" ad, Southern Poverty Law Center

2010-04-09T14:02:00.004-05:00

Senior Writer

Salary: negotiable based upon experience
Education: Bachelor (BA, BS, etc.)
Location: Montgomery, Alabama, 36104, United States
Posted by: The Southern Poverty Law Center

Job Category: Editing & Writing
Sector: Nonprofit
Last day to apply: April 25, 2010
Last updated: February 25, 2010
Type: Full time
Language(s): English
Job posted on: February 24, 2010
Area of Focus: Human Rights and Civil Liberties

Description:
The Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leading civil rights organization (see www.splcenter.org), is seeking an experienced writer with proven research, investigative and analytical skills. This individual will cover extremism, terrorism and hate groups for the Center's quarterly Intelligence Report, website and blog. Strong journalistic skills are essential and magazine writing experience is a plus. This is a regular full-time position that requires relocating to Montgomery, Alabama. Send a resumé, writing samples, two references and a letter outlining your qualifications to Human Resources, Southern Poverty Law Center, 400 Washington Ave., Montgomery, AL, 36104, or e-mail to humanresources@splcenter.org. The Southern Poverty Law Center is an equal opportunity employer.
Additional Qualifications:
Strong journalistic skills are essential and magazine writing experience is a plus.
How to Apply:
Send cover letter, resume, writing samples, and two references to humanresources@splcenter.org or mail to:

Southern Poverty Law Center
ATTN: Human Resources
400 Washington Ave.
Montgomery, AL 36104

Alash On the Road

2010-04-03T17:05:00.020-05:00

Some hours ago at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, some visitors were surprised to look up and see Asian men in colored velvet tunics crossing the lawn through the trees, carrying instrument cases. Under the tree of their choice, they set up metal folding chairs, and took their instruments out and began to tune them, slicing homemade bows across the strings of old handmade wooden instruments called igils, following each other. Tentative palm-thuds on a goat-skin covered drum. The tuning seemed to morph into a song, and they closed their eyes, accessing someplace we have never been.

A small crowd had seated itself at their feet by then, some who knew in advance this was going to happen, some who didn't. This was The Alash Ensemble, a goup of Tuvan throat-singers who've been making the rounds in Texas this week. They played around Dallas the last couple of days. This was their one Fort Worth stop. You couldn't exactly call it busking; a lot of us knew via local music channels that they were coming through. When they began singing, the listeners fell stone-quiet, no doubt wondering how four human voices can seem to split into an infinite number of them like that. Then we realized the concert was already in progress, that we had been waiting for it to begin in a formal Western way, with definable boundaries between performers and auditors, but it had already surrounded us.

This is some very old, but very cool, music.

A little wood, a few strings, some animal skins, and the human voice, un-amped by electricity or pharmaceuaticals. It's not about how loud you are, it's about how you can make your listeners feel. The man in the blue tunic put his hands on his knees like he was maybe sitting for a portrait of Genghis Khan, and demonstrated the singing technique, how to get abysses and mountain peaks out of one human voice at the same time.

When there is no stage, this means the noises off are mostly going to be birds and babies. If you think a bird won't try to answer human beings, think again. A mockingbird landed in the tree above them, got his two cents worth in. He was visibly impressed. Boat-tailed grackles who always travel in these wonderfully sardonic-sounding posses, perched in a neighboring tree and let loose with their ripply tin sounds, only it sounded a little respectful. An infant behind me in one of those plastic seat-bucket things began to sigh along, loudly: aaaaahhhhhhh aaaaahhhhhh. The only malcontent among us was a dachsund who grumbled a bit. Well, there was that one Texan who looked like he'd be more comfortable on a golf green, who stalked off towards safety, the Rodins and Matisses that have been through the American art laundr-- uh, branding process.

When it was over, we were sorry. Somebody passed around a black cowboy hat, and we threw twenties into it. The Alash Ensemble walked back across the lawn and through the trees to their car, where they shucked their velvet tunics, stowed their instruments, and headed on to the next town.

Heads up, Austin. Shamans in blue jeans coming your way.

The Sunday Pot-roast Seance

2010-03-28T16:34:00.014-05:00

Little exercise to see if I can write some honest sentences.

Sundays so much lend themselves to slow and soulful cooking, they are my favorites.
When I miss my mother, who died about this time of year in 1984, I start to cook the way she did, as if I can raise her from the dead that way. I really wish we could have some conversations, now that I am not so dumb and driven as I was the last time I saw her.

My mother didn't really learn to cook until her four children were grown and flown from her; in her early married life she always had "help" so when she became the first woman in the state of Georgia to have essentially a no-fault divorce in 1958 or 59, we went through what I remember as the "goulash" phase (mac, tomatoes, hamburger, predates the boxed industrialized version) before we went through the TV dinner phase (for a long time I could not eat anything identified as roast beef because of the gelatinous sauce and grainy "potates" I associated with those alumimun-topped "meals.) This is partly why I have a sense of wellbeing to this day when you take me to a truckstop and let me order something to eat where somebody competent is in charge, and George Jones is on the jukebox.

Then there was the Burger Chef phase, wherein we drove 18 miles two ways on weeknights, to feast on industrialized fast food, circa 1969 or so, the very latest most progressive way to eat in those days. I remember doing my homework in the car. One of the rare days she actually cooked: Sunday afternoons, pot roast with potatoes, green beans. The only thing we had that was like a dessert tradition was the lemon chiffon pie she made on special occasions, at which time we had to hear, for the 3,000th time, how my oldest brother Mark got into poison ivy when they lived in Bermuda, and how she made a lemon pie to take to him in the hospital, and how anxious he was that he was going to have to share it with the nurses, who were Catholic nuns.

I started cooking at a very young age, mostly because my mother had no interest in it after she had taught school all day. I started cooking as vicarious travel, as self-education. I started cooking in self-defense. By the time I was in college, I was photocopying recipes in the Ole Miss library out of Bon Appetit and the Williams-Sonoma catalog, and I soon learned to lay aside Southern cooking.

I was the youngest of four, and when I went off to college, my mother mysteriously became a superb cook when we came home. I have no idea what she at on her many, many nights alone, but when we came home it was always an assault of the latest 1970's recipes out of Redbook magazine or Southern Living, until she divined what we really liked, and those became the holidays "traditions" until she passed away. Towards the end of her life, she had endless patience in the kitchen, stuffing onions with herby, lovely fillings, grinding cranberries, baking things weeks before we were supposed to arrive.

Today I'm roasting a good cut of beef in cider and onions, slowly, and I just took a cinnamony, buttery apple pie out of the oven, made from the recipe in this old favorite cookbook of mine, John T. Edge's first book, I think. If you want to eat Southern food before the Epoch of Industrialized Eating, and before Southern food got so pimped out and Tuscanized, this is a good cookbook, valuable as a historic work now because it captures so well the interracial quality of cooking in the South.

But there is a basic rightness to roast beef and potatoes and green beens on Sunday, and it always feels like a return to some old well of necessary remembering. The apple pie is my own doing, the return to the deepest part of the well., This cookbook harbors all the old arcane secrets, like barbecue sauce, Brunswick stew, gumbo, most of which is native plain food, simple and inexpensive and sustainable, not dependent upon the hourly arrival of flights from every known cuisine pool on earth, which is the way we live today.

I love my old cookpots my husband gave me the first Christmas in our Mississippi house by that pond. They came out of the Williams-Sonoma catalog. They are over twenty years old now, and showing it, but durable enough to last until the day I die. I can contemplate the eventual cessation of my life with equanimity most of the time, and ambivalence some of the time, from long habit and years of studying Buddhism. But the eventual dissolution of the constellation of objects and books that are my kitchen: my cookpots and casseroles and cookbooks and whisks and chopsticks and my mother's old bowls and cakeplates and silver! This is disturbing, and I cannot get my mind to grasp it.

But They Do Know 1 + 1 is 2: "Twisting Texas History"

2010-03-25T10:27:00.009-05:00

Oh, what a mistake it is, to let the Alamo ladies decide what goes and what stays in history textbooks in Texas public schools. Dunno much about history as it will be in the newly revisionist Alamo-ized versions of Texas textbooks? Historian Eric Foner has a great take on the Texas schoolbook massacre in The Nation:

"More interesting is what the new standards tell us about conservatives' overall vision of American history and society and how they hope to instill that vision in the young. The standards run from kindergarten through high school, and certain themes obsessively recur. Judging from the updated social studies curriculum, conservatives want students to come away from a Texas education with a favorable impression of: women who adhere to traditional gender roles, the Confederacy, some parts of the Constitution, capitalism, the military and religion. They do not think students should learn about women who demanded greater equality; other parts of the Constitution; slavery, Reconstruction and the unequal treatment of nonwhites generally; environmentalists; labor unions; federal economic regulation; or foreigners."

For Foner's entire, concise essay in The Nation , go here.

For All Your Incantation Needs: Papa Jim's Herbal Magic Workbook

2010-03-23T10:25:00.014-05:00

The name for Bebe Marie, a character in Celestial Jukebox, comes from this Joseph Cornell work, Bebe Marie. She is an outsider artist, someone who relies heavily on the more incantatory power of language to get her through the day. Another character in the book, a Latino lady named Consuela, is more of a materialist who believes in the power of certain herbs and substances to game the universe a bit.

Can't speak for the authenticity of either herb or incantation, but I can tell you that the language alone in the Papa Jim herb books is almost all the incantation you will ever need. I first encountered one of them in the voodoo section of Schwab's Drugstore in Memphis, about ten years ago. Soon thereafter I pilfered it freely for material for the Bebe Marie and Consuela characters in the book.

San Antonio is the long-time home of the Papa Jim Botanica on Flores Street, from whence issues periodically little DIY books on how to put genuine voodoo hexes on your friends and enemies. Papa Jim supposedly is the issue of a Maumee Indian and a German woman; he is reputed to be famous healer, root doctor, and card reader: "at one time he was the most famous of all card readers in the Southwest, but doesn't see people anymore (only on a limited schedule)."

These go into new editions faster than most "literary" books do. Need to keep that spouse faithful? Try some rattlesnake root or rosemary sewn into the pillow. Need to cause your neighbor problems? Throw some African bird pepper in his yard. Bingo night or hedge funds not going your way? Queen of the Meadows is "excellent for winning at bingo and other types of gambling."

If you're into derivatives and banking deregulation, you could supplement that with willow bark, which is what you use to invoke the aid of Satan. One of my favorites: blue cohosh is the fix when somebody has "jinxed your car." You wash the car in blue cohosh.

These books are cheap encyclopedic compendia of mumbled protections and harms: the collective paranoia and hostility of the old herbalists of London, African witch-doctors, the shamans of the New World, the Bingo grannies of old Santa Fe. Adam & Eve roots, adder's tongue powder, agrimony powder, John the Conqueror root, star anise, twitch grass, unicorn root, coffee bean husk, chicory, chamomile, yerba santa, woodruff, witch grass, wahoo bark.

Here are some excerpts from the "Q" section, which sounds like assured MAYHEM:

Quassia: Mix with hair of your beloved, and burn to ashes. The ashes are then put in a small jar and mixed with controlling powder and cinnamon oil. This is to keep your beloved under your power and control.

Queen's Delight: Add to four thieves vinegar to encourage harmony in the home.

Quina Roja: A most famous herb from Mexico, use in love baths. It is believed it will make mens heads turn and make their nature run rapid. Only use when sex is desired. Use with extreme caution. Used by prostitutes.

Even Kazakhs Get the Blues

2010-03-20T21:47:00.001-05:00

This Goes Out to the Believers and the Grievers

2010-03-19T22:47:00.003-05:00

A little conjunto is a good thing when you are feeling the loss of a musician to death. A little conjunto is just the thing sometimes. Here is the great Mingo Saldivar, keeping Johnny Cash alive.

The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, July 23-25, 2010

2010-03-19T16:23:00.001-05:00

From Mitch Land's office, announcement for this summer's Mayborn:

Last year Ira Glass, Paul Theroux and Alma Guillermoprieto entertained and enlightened us at The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. In 2010 we are offering another incredible lineup with keynote speakers Mary Karr, Mark Bowden, and Gary Smith. It is our hope that the sixth annual gathering of the tribe will be another amazing experience.

Our format remains the same. Lectures by accomplished writers will be offered Friday night, Saturday and Saturday evening and Sunday morning. A writing competition offers cash prizes and a workshop with peers and judges on Friday. Optional sessions include one-on-one meetings with a literary agent on Friday or Saturday and a bus trip to Archer City on Friday. Costs vary for these sessions. Students, educators, journalists, authors, aspiring writers and fans of nonfiction are all welcome.

The conference will be held in the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center, in Grapevine, Texas. Grapevine is halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth and just a few minutes north of the DFW International Airport.

For details on the conference check out our Web site. You can also see past speakers, topics and photos at this same site. Registration is now open for The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference 2010.

Please make time to join us in the Lone Star State this summer!

Mitch Land, Ph.D.
Director
The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference
Sponsored by the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism
University of North Texas
Denton, Texas

Where Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center
1800 Highway 26 East, Grapevine, TX 76051

Deberry and Grant Do Dallas

2010-03-13T18:01:00.022-06:00

One of the more interesting phenoms in publishing to me is the long-running business and creative partnership of writers Virginia Deberry and Donna Grant, who now have so many novels to their credit, their readers show up with stacks of well-thumbed, beloved books for them to sign when they tour. I met them for the first time today at Jokae's Books, a little jewel of an African-American independent bookstore nestled in the gritty edge of Oak Cliff, Dallas. Elegant, urbane, and soft-spoken, they are currently touring for their new "urban lit" novel, Uptown (Touchstone/Simon&Schuster, $14.99).

A small crowd of about 25 or 30 women came to see them; four Dallas-area African-American women's book clubs were represented, most wearing blue jeans, some with pink t-shirts denoting that they were chapters of national clubs. Most seemed to be working women between the ages of 25 and 45; a couple brought their teenaged daughters. Deberry and Grant were seated at a small table covered with gold-threaded kente cloth in the store's front window, and they graciously addressed the issue of the African-American book publishing niche in the current economy. "Things are not what they used to be," Deberry said gently, before praising the Jokae's store for its continued survival in the age of Amazon and big-box bookstores.

"It's not about the books anymore," Grant said. "It's all about product."

The pair have sales clout; they stopped the presses on a book after the galleys had been printed, which involved changing three sentences. They once switched publishers to avoid the "Toni-Terry" problem, to avoid having their work torqued to resembled Toni Morrison's or Terry McMillan's. They have written a book a year for three years; one of their titles has gone through eleven hardcover printings. They have formed their own film production company for the express intent to bring one of their works to the big screen, without having to relinquish control. "We don't want men in dresses," Deberry quipped, and the women nodded knowingly. A younger writer present, Tiffany Warren, shared the story of how her publisher hesitated to publish anything that wasn't "'hood enough," and that she often felt torn between "trying to write what's on my heart and remaining published."

The two women were generous with their fans, but humble and part of them at the same time. They read a brief passage from Uptown, in which two young black freshmen are introduced to party life at Brown, conscious of that institution's backstory vis a vis slave-trading. "Virginia's more broad strokes," Grant said of their work style."I'm more detail." Deberry added, "Even our minor characters get a background; they're not just there to walk through the room and cause trouble." They read contrapuntally, reader's theater-style.

Here I was, rapt, on the edge of the proverbial 'hood in Dallas, and I was hearing one of the most intelligent, thoughtful discussions about publishing between writers and readers that I'd ever witnessed. The book club women knew what they wanted, and it was not necessarily what white publishing executives and demographers thought: they wanted stories not necessarily about overcoming the 'hood, but about surviving the complications of middle-class life. As this talk took place, three black women passed on the sidewalk outside, three generations of Texas, the oldest with a shock of white hair and the cheekbones and complexion reminiscent of Comanches. I became a little conscious that I was sitting on a little folding chair in the middle of some big history that has not quite come into view, and I just hope to God that history includes indie bookstores like Jokae's.

The part of history that Deberry and Grant are writing is pretty riveting: two African-American women who were once English majors, then fashion models, then writers smart enough to take themselves in the direction of their own choosing.

I was wondering if perhaps I wasn't witnessing some new literary equivalent of "race-records," which proved to be one of the richest cultural veins in American history. If mainstream American letters could be informed by the tradition that Deberry and Grant write from, the way mainstream American music is now informed by the truths that came from that niche of "race-records," then let that history come.

A.A. Bondy's "The Mightiest of Guns"

2010-03-12T12:52:00.003-06:00

This song by A.A. Bondy is one of the best I have heard in a decade or so, and it comes so spookily close to capturing the essence of what it was probably like to be Barry Hannah that it now sounds to my ear like a short biography of him. But it isn't. Instead, it is a biography of any great artist. Listen and learn, mes enfants. This album is available via Fat Possum Records.

THE GREAT MYSTERY: From "Surrealist Games"

2010-03-11T09:15:00.006-06:00

DIRECTIONS:
For Middle-Aged or Young Novices

With the addition of platitudes, apply THE GREAT MYSTERY,
ensuring the spirit is well steeped in it, and store away in a dark place.

Leave the novice for at least twenty or thirty years to dry out, or until all his opinions are fully blackened. His spirit should then be a mottled grey colour. If whitish marks appear, due to an excess of salt, is possible to remove them by rubbing lightly with whtever comes to mind. If lumps appear, brush to revive and make a second local application.

The novice is then in a position to begin speechifying, employing all the words customarily used for external purposes. Instead of speaking directly he can use a protective screen. Our screen (colourless or black) may be used indefinitely.

WARNING: Stains from THE GREAT MYSTERY coming into contact with daily life must be removed immediately with running water.

For elderly novices a preliminary scrub with the wire brush of cynicism is necessary to remove scales and as many prejudices as possible.

From A Book of Surrealist Games, compiled by Alastair Brotchie, Shamabala Books, 1995

Xavier Chassaing's experimental short, "Scintillations"

2010-03-08T21:53:00.003-06:00

This comes via film students at Hofstra:

So Long, Barry

2010-03-01T21:41:00.009-06:00

Barry Hannah
1942-2010

So long, B-man. See you on the other side. You would not believe the grief here, now that you've given us the slip. It makes me wont to inflict some old mothballed quote from E. Dickinson, how does it go? Something about how death is not conclusion?

Big love,
c

What's Next: Next by James Hynes

2010-03-01T11:14:00.021-06:00

The word on the virtual book-streets that I frequent these days is that James Hynes has just published his best novel yet. It's called Next, and it takes place in the span of eight hours, amidst travel between environs north and south, give or take some terrorism incidents. Its protagonist is a white male, but it sounds like this book is somewhat about that turbulent, rough passage we all had from the free-wheelin' self-absorption of our former selves, into the place where we are now. This is one of those happy occasions when what writers say off the record actually matches what reviewers are saying on the record, so I'm buying this one.

Hynes has long been known for intelligent, innovative fiction that takes what it needs from whatever "genres," and people use words like "trenchant" and "mordant" to describe his style. Cathleen Schine once wrote in the New York Times that Hynes knows how to write genre fiction "for those who don't really like genre books." Hynes will be reading and signing at Book People in Austin on March 12, at 7 pm. (If you are not from Texas, just understand that Book People is el jefe of independents here.)

A Texas Monthly review says of the protagonist of Next: "...his self-absorption leaves him all the more vulnerable to the wake-up call he gets from big R Reality. Hynes is a scrupulous writer; the Austinite nails the city’s vibe as a magical land whose residents stay up late getting stoopid and wake up early feeling smart."

Of Hynes, Michael Schaub wrote recently in a review of Next at Bookslut "...But it would be a shame, and an extreme rookie mistake, to dismiss Hynes's novel as another navel-gazing (well, maybe not "navel") story about a white dude who thinks about doing things with younger women. For one thing, with Next, Hynes has proved that he doesn't take a back seat to any of those three (Updike, Roth, Mailer)."

You can buy Next via Indiebound

You can hear Hynes give a radio talk on Wednesday, March 3 at 3:00 pm, on Austin's KOOP radio.

If you want to scope out James Hynes's previous acclaim-worthy books look at his excellent website for links to these:
*The Wild Colonial Boy, (Atheneum 1990)
*Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Horror, (Picador 1997).
*The Lecturer's Tale, (Picador 2001)
*Kings of Infinite Space, (St. Martin's 2004).

There are also some excellent pieces on his blog, especially the appreciation of Robert Stone.

If you'd like to follow James Hynes on Twitter: @jameshynes

Refusal to Mourn the Passing of the Haka Into Its Next Incarnation

2010-02-23T16:18:00.026-06:00

Here's an amazing and haunting piece of video, "Haka for Maori Queen,(2006)" very raw and clumsy, therefore authoritative, of the river processional of the funeral in 2006 of the Maori Queen, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu. In the background you can hear the chanting of a haka, an ancient Maori war chant/dance. You can also hear helicopters overhead.

Keep your twenty-one gun salutes, your Air Force flyovers, your cannonfire. I think the haka is a grand thing; at a funeral it sounds like a fierce protective benediction. If I live to be as old as this queen did, somebody get together a haka for my funeral, please. It will make me brave.

Purists always try to stop time; they always try to hold onto something without understanding that it's already gone, already passed into its next incarnation. The Tongans are now warriors in Iraq, some fresh from the football fields of Texas. They took their haka with them when they left, and it is passing, right before your very eyes, into American culture.

Here's a clip of the Royal Tongan Marines, New Zealanders, performing a haka in Al Faw Palace, Iraq. Here's one of a less formal Tongan dance, also in Iraq in May 2009, with American marines, some Tongan, some Anglo, some whatever. I can't tear myself away; I can't watch. How did this come to pass, that we "deploy" these Tongans in the service of this old quarrel between ourselves and enemies we cannot even identify? I have a kind of grief seeing this, basically peaceable men who support the war without questioning its necessity. But the haka serves its purpose; it makes brave even the pallid-skinned smaller descendants of Scotsmen and Irish men and German men who have been trying to slaughter some group or other for quite a few centuries now. It makes them brave.

Here in Texas, so many Tongans have emigrated to live near DFW airport to work, that some of the high school football programs now feature significant numbers of Tongans, whose names have so many vowels that they take up a lot of room on the backs of their jerseys. Euless-Trinty high school begins each of its games with a terrifying haka, sometimes led by red-haired descendants of Scotsmen. One of the Tongan football players in this video clip from a CBS, Henry Niutei, is now in my literature class. This is the new Texas: Tongan football players, haka, reported on national news by a Hindu man from Dallas. It's a good overview if you don't know anything about haka; it includes footage of New Zealand's All Blacks rugby team's rather ominous haka.

But I'm not going to mourn the passing of the haka into the American tribe; that would be like grieving for the future, so I'm not going to do it. It's not the end of the haka, it's not the end of anything. It's just an infusion of new life into this old creaking, leaky democracy once again. It makes us brave.

Three Questions for Carleen Brice

2010-02-15T15:45:00.034-06:00

Once upon a time not so very long ago, in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, a young black woman named Carleen Brice made the decision to live modestly and sensibly to give herself time to write, the result of which was a debut novel published in 2008 to reviews that nudged her into the "critically acclaimed" category quickly. A onetime employee of The Tattered Cover, Denver's venerable independent bookstore, Brice has seen her book Orange Mint and Honey,optioned & transformed into a made-for-television film, Sins of the Mother. It will air this Sunday night, February 21 on cable's Lifetime Channel, at 8 pm (Eastern)

Publisher's Weekly had praise for the novel, calling it an "accomplished debut." It's about a burnt-out grad student who returns home to Denver to right herself, but this involves moving in, after a seven-year absence, with the mother she remembers mostly as an alcoholic who neglected her profoundly. Here mother has become sober, and keeps herself together via the local A.A. network and various "self-help" books, but more importantly, an ability to grow beautiful flowers and herbs in her own backyard. PW didn't do justice to the distinctive voice that Brice created in this book's narrator: sharp, funny, smart, resilient, and unlike any other young woman ever set down in fictional realms. Accolades soon followed from Essence, and a host of influential authors.

The narrator, fresh from that deep ditch of the human spirit known as "grad school," slowly rejoins the human race, nudged along by the benevolent spirit of Nina Simone who upbraids her when she's being too cynical or bitter about the hand life dealt her. All Brice's characters lived immersed in music, and the story is a straight trajectory out of human suffering. Brice seems to have created a fresh angel and a new niche for herself with this book: black characters more rooted in Denver than in the frustrations of life in the American South or the killing floors of the great northern cities. Brice seems to find a kind of creative liberty in the Denver setting, a freedom to get her readers deeply absorbed in the potential that the next couple of hundred years of black American history will hold. Brice distills this story down to its only essentials: a mother and a daughter, and their willful determination to share a better future than the past afforded them.

Orange Mint and Honey gets marketed and sold in big-chain stores as "urban" fiction, which I fear is a euphemism for "black" fiction, but Brice has a lot to say to any reader who enjoys sharp wit and an ability to home in on the essential human stories that can sustain us through hard, confusing times. I'm guessing that once the film airs, new readers will find their way to this fine novel, and to this fine writer.

I posed three questions to Carleen Brice recently, and she graciously offered some great answers.

Here’s a question on my mind right now because I have a really promising young writing student from Wichita Falls, Texas, who just happens to be black. When I talk to her about publishing I tell her “NEVER let any publisher box you into being ‘an African American writer’ because you are an American writer. Tap into the African American community for support, and understand that your identity as a black woman is going to make your writing more powerful for that reason.” Am I giving her bad advice?

Brice: Wow. This is a very complicated one. You're not giving her bad advice. However, I just heard an African American editor at a publishing house make the case to a room full of black women writers that rather than trying to embrace a wider audience we should be seeking higher black readerships. She went on and on about saturating the black market and forgetting about all the other types of readers until we do that.

There's definitely pros and cons to being labeled a black writer. Do the pros outweigh the cons? That's debatable and everyone has a different opinion.

My advice would be to do what comes naturally to her. If she bristles at being labeled that way, then she should listen to that. If she's comfortable writing fiction FUBU-style, then she should do that. Truth be told, I think the FUBU folks probably sell more books. The "wider audience" writers may win more awards and get more respect. That's my nonscientific totally suspicious suspicion.

When you wrote the novel, did you make structural or narrative choices that would make the book more “filmable,” or did you have much awareness of what kind of narrative translates well into film?
Brice: I didn't write the book with any thoughts of film in mind. I tried to write visually and touch on all the senses (smell, touch, and sound, as well). However, I think because I watch so many movies my storytelling style has been affected by how film works. Many people tell me my books read like movies. But that was not a conscious choice on my part. Except that consciously I write much the same way I've heard actors talk about getting into the heads of the characters they play.
After I wrote many drafts of Orange Mint and Honey I learned about "the hero's journey" and how much of Hollywood movies are based on this structure. Not too surprisingly, a lot of that was in my book. And I have since studied filmmaking storytelling to help me with plotting, which was not my strength.

What’s your philosophy on the position fiction writers should take on filming of their work: hands on? Hands off?
Brice: Hands off, unless you want to become a filmmaker. They are two different forms. I wouldn't mind writing a script one day, but I think there's much more involved with translating a book to film than many novelists know. Also, most of us won't get invited to do the adaptation. So in that case, as was my case, it's important to know that when you sign over the rights and accept the check, you're done. A lot of people worry about the adaptation "ruining" their novel, but I went into the situation knowing my book would always be my book. If Lifetime made a bad movie, that was their problem. They could never ruin my book.

You can follow Carleen Brice online at her lively blog devoted to bridging the gap between white readers and black authors, Welcome White Folks. Her gardening bog is
The Pajama Gardener. Her well-connected Twitter feed is @carleenbrice . You can view the trailer for Sins of the Mother here. Her books are here.

Be Our Valentine, Tank Man

2010-02-14T19:29:00.003-06:00

The Wikipedia entry on Tank Man is sort of an international virtual water cooler where at any given moment, anonymous and seemingly insomniac ones strive to be encyclopedic and objective, but everyone basically loves him, except perhaps a few old Chinese bureaucrats. Even the men driving these tanks loved him. Nobody quite knows who he was, but he was the subject of his own PBS special.

Be our valentine, Tank Man.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's The Householder (1963)

2010-02-13T14:35:00.029-06:00

I've watched eight Merchant-Ivory films in two weeks, most recently The Householder (1963) which screenplay Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote based on her own novel of the same name. I was astonished to see, embedded in this film about an arranged marriage, a Kerouac-esque beat-generation minor figure whose dreamy peregrinations have led him to India. He is part of a little band of precursors to the counterculture, rendered (in all senses of the word) by Jhabvala with savage prophetic accuracy. In the film, their orientalism is all the more grotesque for its assumption that only a Westerner can accurately describe the Hindis to themselves, or to assume the burden of instructing them on their own culture, with the beat generation's answer to missionary zeal. The Householder is a smart, funny,lovely film.

It would have taken a singular kind of writerly fortitude, in those particular days, for Jhabvala to do this, and to do it in the context of a film about an arranged marriage that thumbs its nose at Betty Friedan. This tempestuous marriage is still intact at the end of the film, and miraculously without the Americanized creaking Hollywood machinery ending. It also would have taken the same kind of fortitude to do Shakespeare Wallah, to show the tag-end of the British empire straggling around India as a band of Shakespearean actors subsisting in a manner a few cuts above beggars, but it's as brilliant today as it was forty years ago. This was before the big budgets, the expensive orchestration, before Merchant-Ivory were the darlings of the critics, before they went a little Hollywood.

I am really taken with this little quiet woman who wrote so many of these stubborn, elegant "Merchant-Ivory" films, yet seems perfectly happy not to get a word in edgeways in filmed interviews with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.

Say "Merchant-Ivory" and most envision lush scenery and opulent productions, sweeping epics of the big human picture captured in the minutiae of both the conquerors and the conquered. Not that many moveigoers can even name the quiet little woman who wrote the scripts. These films are not empty orientalism; Jhabvala has this quiet little way of drawing blood when she strikes, but always in a way that foregrounds what is durable or good in this world.

Heat and Dust(1984), for example, also based on Jhabvala's novel of the same title, captures well the grotesqueries of the English occupiers in India, when maintaining the empire had become as banal, cumbersome, and routine as a privatized "security" op in Afghanistan today or other parts of the ever-alluring East. Jhabvala's always been able to weave stories in such a way that you leave the theater with your head full of history that just happens to be the very thing you need to know about right now, whether she's adapting a (heretofore largely inaccessible to the masses) Henry James work or her own work.

In the most recent Merchant-Ivory production, The White Countess, the screenwriting credit went to Kazuo Ishiguro, but there is the same sense of a very powerful intelligence at work, observing Americans from a distant vantage point. In White Countess, an American diplomatist-naif, a dreamer who works for something called "The Company" (the CIA's nickname for itself, get it?) Because his faith in his own all-American ideals is unshakeable, he is unwittingly used by the Japanese to gain a firmer toe-hold in the city before they invade. This character's dialogue is like what you'd get if Jimmy Stewart worked for the CIA, a cross of "aw shucks" Americana and cold, calculating Carlyle Group. Oh --he is also stone blind for the duration of the plot. Ishiguro shares Jhabvala's outsider's taste for blood when capturing certain aspects of American character on film. There's no better homage to Jhabvala than that.

What Happens in Wife-Beaters' Club Doesn't Stay in Wife-Beaters' Club: Chris Bohjalian's Secrets of Eden

2010-01-31T19:36:00.025-06:00

On any given night in America, the country seems to run its collective brain through the same Hollywood rat-maze over and over via books, films, television shows: A beautiful woman is dead. Who killed her? Cue ___, (fill in the blank with highly paid actor talented at pretending to give a rat's ass that the beautiful woman is dead).

In his new novel Secrets of Eden (Shaye Areheart,362pp, $25.00) Vermont writer Chris Bohjalian seems to invite us to live a little more creatively than this, to venture out of the sick monotony of the endless American of iteration of Poe's "death of a beautiful woman." You witness, in splintered narratives, the death of a beautiful woman, but you also see the death of an evil man. Perhaps more importantly to Bohjalian, you get the death of an illusion or two.

In his work Bohjalian often focuses on a contemporary idee fixe,such as the one that midwifery is any more "natural" or less brutal than the obstetric-industrial complex, and tests its limits. In Secrets of Eden, he takes on domestic violence and the notion that it is the woman's life that is most imperiled, statistically speaking, in the moments she attempts to leave a man. This is a novel about, (to quote one character)"the myriad ways love seems to go bad."

To George Hayward,the dead man, heaven on earth was a kind of paradise of alcohol and entrepreneurship, of petty and local power, in which he could beat his beautiful wife with impunity. This character seems only able to regulate his "entreprenurial metabolism" through the private humiliation of a beautiful woman. He is able to do this because of a strange little cultural quirk: what happens in wife-beaters' club often stays in wife-beaters' club. Bohjalian nails the banality of this man's evil in a chilling way. His wife Alice can recognize when the abuse is about to begin because he adopts a paternalistic tone to exert control over even the menial aspects of female life: "Did you think you were being helpful doing a load of darks without checking with me to see if I had something --a turtleneck, maybe, a pair of jeans --I might want laundered?"

The beautiful woman is dead by page one, but so is her husband. His death does not seem to be by his own choice. Bohjalian's novel fractures the death of the beautiful woman and the death of her tormentor into four competing truths.

On the day Alice Hayward is murdered by her husband, she had been baptized by her minister, Stephen Drew, who knows that she has been beaten badly enough to "pee blood." We glean these factlets about her life from Drew, a narrator of the unreliable variety only because he is sitting on a secret that he is not going to give up, not even to you, the hypocrite lecteur. Does he sit on this secret because he has failed the abused woman? Does he sit on the secret because of love for the abused woman? "Believe no one," this man of the cloth advises. "Trust no one. All our stories are suspect."

Another "truth" comes from Catherine Benincasa, the local seasoned prosecutor who has seen her share of human moral turpitude, whose forensics crew and by-the-book criminological hunches lead her to identify a suspect. Even so, she can't marshal enough "truth" to prosecute anyone.

Yet another perspective comes from Heather Laurent, a neo-spiritualist whose parents perished similarly, leaving her with a belief in "auras" and a talent for commodifying her pain into blockbuster books about "angels." She even refers to her New York loft as "the house that angels built, reminiscent of Aimee Semple McPherson's "house that God built." Not only does this specialist in "healing" misread the "aura" of the minister accurately, she passes on an opportunity to behave like the angels she has made a fortune describing. This character has an invisible sign on her back everyone else can see, and it says #epicfail.

A fourth perspective comes from Katie, the Hayward daughter, rendered by Bohjalian with tough vulnerability and resilience, and a devastatingly accurate mixture of veiled innocence and hard-won compassion in a teenage girl.

This is a novel of quiet integrity. It never once falters in its intelligent questioning of whether we as a tribe will ever get beyond the deaths of beautiful women as the only story worth hearing. To Bohjalian, it's worth it to listen to the peripheral stories surrounding that one. There is a fine bit of sorcery in the resolution of the plot: a better scenario than Poe ever mustered. In Bohjalian's universe, we are all closest to danger when a beautiful woman decides to leave an abusive man, but we are also closer to an understanding of that other old human idee fixe, angels. When the murderer of the entreprenurial abuser is revealed, we get a glimpse of a prospect much bigger than Poe and all his duplicates ever envisioned.

It's almost enough to make cynics like me get the whole "angel" thing.

Vintage Bollywood's "Chin-Chin Choo"

2010-01-30T17:41:00.008-06:00

I first encountered this clip in a 1973 Merchant-Ivory documentary, Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls. This is vintage Bollywood, Howrah Bridge,(1958): Indian actors, most notably, Helen pretetending to be a Chinese girl pretending to jitterbug like Americans. Crazy, crazy.

Kate Rusby, "Fare Thee Well"

2010-01-29T14:30:00.000-06:00

First Novels: James Bradley's Wrack (1998)

2010-01-20T11:37:00.026-06:00

In the end, nothing is true, save that which we feel. Nothing we remember, nothing we believe, all are just stories and echoes. The past is a shifting sea where nothing is certain and where the things we seek cannot be found, a place where we seek lands that rise from the mist into the glare of the sun and then vanish again, as quickly as they arrived. A shifting sea with nothing at its center, except illusions, and loss.
--James Bradley, Wrack, 1998

"Ambitious," the reviewers said at the time James Bradley published Wrack in 1998. That alone makes Bradley a good study for the aspiring novelist. You want to look at the writers who really insisted on a big reach, from the beginning. Bradley insisted on situating his map-crossed lovers in the midst of the star-crossed history of cartography, and he declined to dumb the narrative down.

For any young writer now at work on a first novel, or contemplating a first novel, this one's worth a look. Much to learn from here, not just because it's about obsessions and deceit, but because Bradley took so many risks with it structurally. It's that risk-taking you want to study.

Most first novels have a single linear narrative; many are semi-autobiographical, cribbed from life and memory. Bradley's first novel is not linear, unless you argue that a helix twisting in history is "linear." Three threads spin and twist: the story about a contemporary archaeologist obsessed with locating a shipwreck, another plot line that details a similar obsession of a 1930's era archaelogist, and a third storyline of obsessions and deception in which the only characters are ancient explorers armed with maps that are part true, part wishful thinking.

This is not mere "revolving point of view;" there's something more impressionistic and craftier going on. Bradley seemed to know early on that the personal is always somewhat political, always somewhat at the mercy of forces set into motion centuries before. The third strand of storytelling that goes on in this helix, much like the whaling chapters in Moby Dick, relate the checkered history of human intellect. Personal, tribal, political are concentric circles: There are many kinds of betrayal. The betrayal of a lover, a parent, a child. Of a friend. There are the intimate betrayals, of those whom we love, and there are larger betrayals, the betrayals of politicians and priests who use their position for ill, or turn a blind eye to harm that is done. But these scales of betrayal are not clear divisions: the betrayal of a people by a politician is itself a web of smaller, more personal betrayals, and personal betrayal has a capacity to spread, to grow outward, like a malignant cell. Beneath a clear surface things shift and pull. And burn.

Big, tantric sense of time for a first novel, for a young man to have written.

Bradley's subsequent books were The Deep Field, a near-future novel, and The Resurrectionist. Bradley's website and blog is City of Tongues. For more on the genesis of Wrack, short piece on writing Wrack in which he likens the intensity of writing first novels to the intensity of first loves.

Arcade Fire, "Haiti" (2007)

2010-01-15T15:12:00.004-06:00

via @GreatDismal

Haiti

Haïti, mon pays,
wounded mother I'll never see.
Ma famille set me free.
Throw my ashes into the sea.

Mes cousins jamais nés
hantent les nuits de Duvalier.
Rien n'arrete nos esprits.
Guns can't kill what soldiers can't see.

In the forest we lie hiding,
unmarked graves where flowers grow.
Hear the soldiers angry yelling,
in the river we will go.

Tous les morts-nés forment une armée,
soon we will reclaim the earth.
All the tears and all the bodies
bring about our second birth.

Haïti, never free,
n'aie pas peur de sonner l'alarme.
Tes enfants sont partis,
In those days their blood was still warm

(You can help: Partners In Health)

Manifesto: Jaron Lanier's "The Serfdom of Crowds" in Harper's

2010-01-15T11:12:00.013-06:00

"The Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order. In each case, human creativity and understanding, especially one's own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd, in the algorithms tha remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand... the whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the cloud lords to lure hypothetical advertisers --we might call them messianic advertisers --who could some day show up."
-Jaron Lanier, 2010

The current Harper's arrived yesterday, and in it, Jaron Lanier's "The Serfdom of Crowds," which is a brief excerpt of his newly released book, You Are Not a Gadget. Some sentences leapt off the page into my psyche because I've been thinking a lot about how Twitter and blogging always feel too filtered to be a really honest medium to me, and how to a certain kind of writer, like me, too much social media feels like a kind of death. I've been feeling nostalgic for the old hermitage of my youth, the grand isolation from other writers that drove me to write well enough to communicate with them across the ether, before the ethernet. Talk to the oldtimers, kids. There was a time when writing was not "process" described publically as perfunctorily as bowel moments. In the old days (*wobbles on her cane, peers into wedding guest's face*) writing was like throwing fire up into the air to see if anyone else could see the same chimerical things that haunted you. If you've been feeling lately that you cannot write well creatively and be "successful" at social media at the same time, there's probably a valid reason. Me, I miss the old Hobbit-like hermitages of solitude. Please don't take it as a personal affront, ok? It's just that it was much easier to think one was a Cloud Lord when one didn't have eight lanes of the information highway coursing through one's soul at random intervals via email, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube.

See also "A Rebel in Cyberspace: Fighting Collectivism" Michiko Kakutani's review of You Are Not a Gadget in New York Times.

Postcard to Ian: Remembering Junior Kimbrough

2010-01-13T14:54:00.017-06:00

I was formally introduced to Junior Kimbrough only once, briefly, at his jukejoint in Chulahoma, Mississippi, during what some call the shank of the evening when he was getting ready to play. Whoever introduced me told him I was a writer and pointed towards Oxford, and Junior had the most delightful expression of fiendish, distracted annoyance at that news, that I bonded with him instantly. So I was down with whatever Junior was up for, from the get-go.

In North Mississippi in the 1990's, he and R.L. Burnside were the business. In those days, you could see Marshall County sharecroppers in overalls dancing with denizens of the Chelsea Hotel on cool-hunting sorties down South, paying homage at a squalid little establishment situated under a starry night in what looked like open pasture land.

Junior operated his little juke joint business inside a tiny cinderblock place that always looked like it had once been a barn, and he would set his band up inside what looked like it had been an animal stall, enclosed on three sides by walls, players very close, stair-step children of indeterminate kin always milling about, even into wee hours, even on Sunday nights. I have a vague memory of either a woodburning stove or a gas space heater, pool table, a big cooler for beer. All the amenities.

The “dance floor” was the open common area down the center, and there were homemade murals of folk like Jimi Hendrix and MLK, I think, on the wall. Homemade bar, also, w/ homemade clear whisky which I never tried. The Memphis tourism board started using Junior’s photo to promote the direct flights between Amsterdam and Memphis, so around the mid-1990’s, his place was overrun with Europeans with cameras, but he never received any financial assistance like other tourist outlets there did, just the price of admission. You paid three (five?) dollars, and his wife made a black x on your hand with a magic marker. There was one past-its-prime toilet in an enclosure that sometimes did not enclose properly. I have no idea how Junior managed it, but I'm told his was the one juke joint/roadhouse left in Marshall County that had not become a dangerous crack house.

The first time I ever saw him, I had taken the poets Charles Simic and Daniel Halpern there, famous dudes, and they were very respectful to him, and totally honored to be there in that filthy place, and listened as music devotees do, anonymously, incognito, humbly. I will never forget the looks on their faces when he began to play: very much like when my daughter Leah got her first taste of whipped cream as a baby, like: this is good stuff; this is God. The first song he played was "Do the Romp" with its vintage speakeasy-sounding 1930’s roadhouse percussive chords, and both poets closed their eyes momentarily, like they knew this was something that did not exist anywhere else in the world as we know it. At that point I knew I would have to read all Simic's work, just from having seen him encounter Junior Kimbrough and know what he was in the presence of. “Meet Me in the City” has always seemed like an oddly “new” song compared to the rest of what he did.

My knowledge of Junior outside his music is limited, and came through the anecdotes related to me by some of the white guys around Oxford who hung out with him. He was a little crabby, partly from the diabetes, and possibly partly from having his patience worn thin by celebrity, that he was not as friendly and accessible as R.L. Burnside was. You always had the feeling that you were getting on his nerves, that everybody present was getting on his nerves. It was as if his only recourse was to play so beautifully he could get away from you that way. This instantly commanded your respect.

A colleague at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture who is now director of documentary studies at Duke, Tom Rankin, told me once about the time he took Junior to Parchman Prison to film a documentary of him playing a concert for the prisoners, and I really hope to get to see that footage someday, someway. I remember that Tom said the song “You Better Run” had a powerful effect on the prisoners, as did the whole concert, and I remember being a bit envious of Tom that as a man and photographer, he had entree to a world that I didn't.

David Nelson, who was editor of Living Blues magazine when I lived in Oxford, told me one time that some of the magazine guys took some African music to play for Junior, Ali Farka Toure, (another farmer, except from Mali) to see what he would make of the similarities between himself and Toure (who was influenced a bit by John Lee Hooker). David said that Junior heard them out, then shrugged a bit, like “Hah. So?”

For somebody who does not play any instrument other than the English language, I “studied” Junior’s guitar work a lot, listening to the differences between the earlier recordings of him by David Evans, and the later Fat Possum releases, listening to the same songs recorded decades apart by him, the way the younger braggadocio fades and the older wisdom kicks in.

I’m not sure that Junior could read or write, music or English. It’s never come up in my conversations with others about him, or if anyone ever told me, I've forgotten. But when he died, the funeral was at Rust College in Holly Springs, and the chapel was overflowing with the invisible, the famous, the humbled, the bereaved. He had lived a life that was at times brutal, but his leavetaking caused people he never met to grieve his loss deeply. There were some times when it felt to me that the loss of this human being was like some deep profound tributary of the Mississippi river itself had suddenly ceased. That the sub-river was there one day, and then it was gone. If you knew him only via the music, like me, he took on the properties of a force of nature rather than a mortal human being. Where I grew up in Georgia, black people would say of the dead, “he passed,” or “he ceased.” What I know now is that Junior did not “cease,” he passed.

He passed into another realm of being.

Sometimes it feels like he’s always around, even if its just when I hear some new “indie” band (Black Keys, etc?) borrowing some of those long, rolling chords that sound wide-open(to me) like what Yeats called an artifice of eternity.

China's Top Ten Hits, circa January 1985

2010-01-11T11:12:00.008-06:00

Sometimes I give writing students this assignment: research the top ten pop music hits during the week you were born, or the week you might have been conceived. Then write something about the word "zeitgeist" and its meaning, based on the songs.

Last year I had a really brilliant Chinese student, Jie Yuan, who is now at Julliard when he is not globe-hopping as a concert pianist. I always love it when there are artists from other countries among my students, because then they see how the creative life is a kind of disciplined freedom that is portable to any culture. A musician is a special gift to a writing class; music is a kind of shorthand sometimes to show writing students something in three minutes what might otherwise take 300+ pages of a novel to show.

As there was no such thing as a Top Ten countdown in China in 1985, Jie had to scour out the information for the assignment from old newspapers and magazines, and to devise his own list. Reassuring me that China has moved on from the Chairman Mao thing since he was born, here's what he came up with:

#1. Go Through Every Challenge With Chairman Mao Forever
#2. Our Country Was Saved By Communist Party
#3. Our Heart Will Always Belong To The Dear Leader
#4. Ode to Our Lovely Country
#5. The Love We Have
#6. Happy Life
#7. Where You Go, Go With Your Belief
#8. March of the PLA
#9. How Much I Love You
#10. The Forgotten Love

It was an honor to be his teacher, and to finally "get" Prokofiev because of Jie's mastery, to be taught something by a student. If you get the chance to attend one of his concerts or his Julliard recitals, go.

C.W. Stoneking, "Don't Go Dancin' in the Darktown Strutters' Ball"

2010-01-10T21:37:00.003-06:00

Here's an Australian, C.W. Stoneking, who does vintage 1920 hokum blues:

Unnamed Artist in New York Port Authority Bus Terminal

2010-01-07T16:40:00.003-06:00

These cupcakes were photographed by Librado Romero in New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, and showed up in a slideshow of images from there in the New York Times a couple of days ago.

A writing exercise: write four paragraphs from the "voice" of the person who decorated them, as the person was performing the act. They can be four sequential paragraphs, or the sequence can be jump cuts forward or backwards in time. The catch? You must also reveal to us the inner state and the personality of the subject. How does this person feel about the job? What's going on around him or her? Are there time pressures? How does this voice respond to all those factors? No 3rd person exposition. Has to be pure voice. Want to steal someone else's voice? That's ok. We'll see if we can guess. And, can you make us awestruck by your choice of voice and circumstance? Surprise us. Surprise yourself, while you're at it.

Merry Crip-mah, Steve Yarbrough

2009-12-23T10:49:00.006-06:00

During the year that Steve Yarbrough held the Grisham Chair of Creative Writing at Ole Miss, our daughters were schoolmates, which meant they were in one of those middle school Christmas pageants together in the school cafeteria, with parents sitting at the lunch tables. One child who was singing a solo had a slight speech impediment, and he sang that song that goes, "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire," I think. Only some parts of it came out "Merry Crip-mah," at which point my husband Dan and Steve put their heads down on the lunchroom tables, like little boys at nap time, absolutely silent, only their shoulders were heaving mightily with the politeness of squelched giggles.

Since then, our families have, during most years, fired off fast emails to each other on Christmas Eve with the subject heading, "Merry Crip-mah." I'm going to be offline a few days, so I'm sending this now.

Merry Crip-mah, Steve Yarbrough, and everyone else on this earth.

Take the Quiz: Wendell Berry's "Questionnaire"

2009-12-21T13:39:00.010-06:00

Questionnaire

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

from Leavings by Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky.

Felix The Cat Doubles for Darwin (1923)

2009-12-21T11:49:00.004-06:00

From www.archive.org, this little film. The music sounds like Fletcher Henderson, not sure:

Postcard to Annie Proulx: Vida Nueva Ranch

2009-12-16T12:58:00.022-06:00

This is a picture of two real little cowgirls that I snapped some months ago in Fort Worth at an event that drew thousands of ranch people from all across Texas to the Will Rogers Memorial Center, the lovely old vintage rodeo facility, a FDR-New Deal public works project that enabled more than a few Westerners to pull themselves out of poverty by evading the hook of a bull's horns or by being patient enough to care for an animal until it's big enough to truck to Fort Worth.

The little girl on the right here is Miss Miriam Grace Faske, of Vida Nueva Ranch in Somervell. She is a real stand-up little girl. When I snapped her picture with the new friend she'd just made, she managed to assert her right to editorial approval; she decided that one picture did not do justice to her friend, so she saw to it that I deleted it.

The real walking-around world always finds a way to trump our stories: this little cowgirl was born in Calcutta in 2001. She has quite a few adopted brothers and sisters with new names straight out of the Old Testment. They were born in places like Russia, Kazakhstan, India, Ethopia, and Colombia. They all live together now on the Vida Nueva with their parents, Jay and Suzanne Faske, and they are apparently pretty savvy with longhorns and paint horses.

There was a time when Miriam lived in an orphanage and some other American family was deliberating whether or not she was worth taking in. During that time the Faskes put her picture on their refrigerator and prayed that they would get her. To fully appreciate the sheer force of this simple act of faith in what we can't fathom, consider the alternative operable force in Texas. Dallas draws thousands of heavily made-up women each year, cosmetic salesladies, who pin pictures of pink Cadillacs to their refrigerators in the hopes they will get pink Cadillacs. But it all worked out, and the Faskes got their wish. They flew home with this child in those confused weeks in late 2001, when we were all, every man jack, trying to figure out this vida nueva we'd all entered into. A self-sufficient baby from the get-go, Miriam cried if they held her too much; she was more accustomed to being left alone.

If you want to know just how well the whole story of this girl's new life turned out, you can read her biography on the ranch's website, as well as the story of each of her new siblings. But the way to get the straight story is to see how well this little girl, and her brothers and sisters know their way around a sale barn. The Faskes regularly snag ribbons that say things like "Grand Champion" and "Reserve Champion" there in the gold print.

James Bradley on Literary Bloodsport

2009-12-07T10:54:00.007-06:00

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, here's James Bradley's philosophy on book-reviewing, from a June 2009 post on his very excellent blog, City of Tongues. Equally interesting are his statements, and the volume of comments that issued from other Australian writers.

Here's a snippet:

For what it’s worth, I think the brutal review is usually a young person’s vice. In my early days as a reviewer I wrote more than one review I still wake in the night feeling sick about (Victor Kelleher and Justin D’Ath, wherever you are, I’m sorry). And I’m not alone in this view. Martin Amis, who in his early years as a writer carved out a career as one of the most terrifying literary hitmen of all time, has observed, “[e]njoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember”.

Also see Bradley's thoughtful review in The Australian of Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America, in which he comments on Carey's long absence from Australia, and how it informs his fiction.

Photo credit: Creative Commons

How to Review a Book You Don't Necessarily Dig

2009-12-06T14:08:00.012-06:00

The other night on Twitter, Australian novelist James Bradley wondered aloud, "Why isn't it ok to say 'This book made me want to hammer nails into my head?'" This James Bradley, not to be confused with the American author of the same name who writes war fiction, is the author of Wrack, The Deep Field, and The Resurrectionist; his excellent blog is City of Tongues. He's also a consummate reviewer of books; that's why the anguished question on Twitter was so funny.

I'm the absolute last person on earth to try to answer that question, but I'm always grateful when someone else will just say what he thinks about a book. I've noticed that the older I get, the less likely I am to do that myself. In the presence of a book that annoys or disappoints me, I tend to default to a sort of Cub Scout den mother false glazed-eyed cheerleaderliness and speak in a tone that suggests every kid will get a trophy, probably "Most Likely To Succeed." I tend to also default to a Buddhist silence in the presence of a bad or destructive or pointless or stupid book, or I just decline to review it.

The best reviewers confront problematic books, I think, with a kind, jovial bonhomie. Every kid does not get a trophy, but the reviewer's allegiance remains to the common task we share in Literature with a capital "L." They find a way to speak truth without compromising their standards. Here are three reviews in which pros pan books.

Darcey Steinke's intelligent, funny Village Voice review of Lily Burana's stripper memoir, Strip City. To fully appreciate this novel, you need also to know that the beautiful nude blonde on the first-edition cover of Steinke's novel Suicide Blonde is Steinke herself, which lends a kind of peerless street cred to this review. This is probably one of my favorite book reviews, ever. "But if I'm going to read a whole book about exhibitionism (separate stripping from its faux glamour and economic advantages and that's what you get)," writes Steinke, "You gotta be honest about the paradoxes, about the human fragility and longing at the center of all sexuality. You can't just tell me, like Lily Burana does over and over, that it feels really cool."

Chris Bohjalian's Washington Post review of Pat Conroy's most recent novel South of Broad. After noting by page number the trail of tears the characters have plod-, uh, trod, Bohjalian says, "I should note that even though I felt stage-managed by Conroy's heavy hand, I still turned the pages with relish. Conroy is an immensely gifted stylist, and there are passages in the novel that are lush and beautiful and precise. No one can describe a tide or a sunset with his lyricism and exactitude. My sense is that the millions of readers who cherish Conroy's work won't be at all disappointed -- and nor will anyone who owns stock in Kleenex."

Dwight Garner's New York Times review of Clarence Clemon's ghostwritten memoir. This one's interesting because Garner reviews the book with somewhat lower expectations than he normally brings to literary reviews. "The best sentences in this miserable book come from Mr. Springsteen," Garner writes, pinning the blame squarely on the ghostwriter while retaining his affection for Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Clemons.

Mark Kingwell on Capitalism in Fiction

2009-12-04T13:02:00.008-06:00

In the November issue of Harper's, Mark Kingwell of the University of Toronto reviewed Deyan Sudjic's book on design, The Language of things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects (W.W. Norton, $24.95) In this review, Kingwell puts forth a literally novel idea about extrapolating the "stages" of capitalism a country is in, based on its novels. He uses three American novels to illustrate his point>

Classical capitalism, exemplified in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country: "Accumulated capital --in its most basic form, primitive hoarding --is spent on conspicuous demonstrations of waste in the form of leisure."

Late capitalism, exemplified F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night: "..the shadowy shills of the culture industry want us to spend our way to wealth and happiness. Down on the ground, the individual experiences fractured selves, or multiple consumption identities, even while yearning for wholeness."

Postmodern capitalism: exemplified in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, "Consumption is both intimate and relentless: brand-conscious consumers cannibalize themselves, feeding on their jumble of layered identities."

It's a really good, provocative essay on how design manipulates consumerism...but safely protected from being read by a wider audience by the Harper's paywall.

(photo credit: New York Times, "New Czars of Conspicuous Consumption,"

Holiday Shopping Tip #1 : "Sita Sings the Blues" (2009)

2009-11-25T11:47:00.013-06:00

This weekend, when all the desperadoes and combatants are slugging it out in the malls in that odd orgy of piety and overspending we call holidays, close your eyes, and think of resistance. Stay home, make yourself a cup of tea and download this free film. Then order this dvd for some deserving person: Sita Sings the Blues, one of the most interesting case histories yet in open-source media and creative commons licensing, and Guggenheim award recipient Nina Paley's first feature-length animated film. Basically, it's what happens when highly intelligent chick lit meets the Hindu myth, the Ramayana. If you are broke, or a student, or both, download it to disk, wrap it in the Sunday comics and those blue rubber bands that come with your broccoli, and you've got a memorable, meaningful gift. And it's okay with Nina Paley if you do this.

Paley's film is available for your viewing pleasure at the Internet Archive website. It's also available on Youtube, in several installations. I just bought the dvd here and I keep perusing all the other merch, tempted. To get the story of how this great film came to be offered only via a creative commons license rather than in theaters, go here for a good New York Times piece on the subject. To find out more about this intriguing artist go to her blog.

Meet Your Australian 'Brothers and Sisters'

2009-11-24T09:15:00.018-06:00

I've always had a secret vice: rummaging in all bookstores for Australian books, and I've found some good ones here...why are they often so hard to find? It's as if America has settled on Carey and Flanagan and White and Malouf, and justifiably so, but whose reviews tend to suck all the oxygen out of the ever-thinning critical air in the conventional channels of book news. This means there is a whole world of Australian fiction writers waiting for you to discover them. Here in the states, it's sometimes hard to hear beyond the ground noise and static of book launches of every little volume that rolls off the American assembly li- uh, presses, swathed in adjectives like "luminous" and "radiant," but it's very worthwhile to venture beyond the lock-step of American book marketing. The rewards are great, great.

This winter I'm going to be reading Australian writers,particularly James Bradley, whose blog City of Tongues is formidable, but I started with this new anthology, Brothers and Sisters, masterfully edited by novelist Charlotte Wood. I believe this is the first time I've sent off all the way to Australia for a book; it arrived in two days, from Allen & Unwin. This little book is a keeper; it's also a potential teaching anthology. I now have a whole list of names of writers whose books I want to read: Tegan Bennett Daylight, Tony Birch, Robert Drewe, Ashley Hay, Cate Kennedy, Nam Le, Roger McDonald, Paddy O'Reilly, Virginia Peters, Michael Sala, Christos Tsiolkas, and Charlotte Wood herself.

There is this odd half-sibling-like thing that happens when writers from the American South meet up with Australians: similar genetics, similar variations on what some consider the Queen's English, similar attention to the whole big contretemps of human diaspora as it played out when those with Scots-Irish surnames encountered those with darker skins in what we so quaintly refer to as the New World. Even so, I really value Australian short stories for their frank otherness, ever since the time I happened upon an old scuffed Penguin edition of Marjorie Barnard's short stories in some long-ago bargain bin in Square Books. The world creaks open in a new way when that happens. Where have these writers been all your life? Right there.

Australian writers will tell you the truth straight, most of the time, and without that weird undertow of American angst that has driven so many readers into the barrens of formula fiction. Sometimes American writers strut and fret onstage as if no one's tragedies can possibly ever equal our own. Here's a volume of human stories, told in language as clear as stream water.

In her preface, Wood writes, "The writers in the collection are as obstinately different from one another as your brothers and sisters are from you. They have written in surprising ways about the deep bonds --bad, beautiful or broken --between brothers and sisters, and, in one piece, about our abiding suspicion of that happy, foreign creature, the only child. Twelve stories speaking of love and fear, separation and tenderness, confusion and --sometimes --reunion. When Patrick White's sister Suzanne died, he wrote that he and she had nothing in common 'beyond blood and a childhood.' But for so many, of course, blood and childhood is what haunts us, and always will. This book is for you."

Maurice Gee's "Going West," From the New Zealand Book Council

2009-11-23T11:23:00.002-06:00

Visions of Nagasaki, Before

2009-11-19T13:14:00.011-06:00

In the 19th century, Americans may have been aware of Nagasaki as the little harbor as rendered by Hermann J. Meyer in this engraving for inclusion in the Meyer Universum, a pre-photography effort to document the known visual world.

In the early 20th century, Americans may have been aware of Nagasaki as a little port of call alluded to in a racy song written in 1929 by the same guys who collaborated on many a shallow, stupid flapper song, Harry Warren & Mort Dixon. Or they might have known it as Django Reinhardt performed it in the mid-thirties. If you listen to a lot of these early songs about other cultures, you get the idea that Americans were only interested in cultural exchange that involved those body fluids we heard so much about in Dr. Strangelove. Ugly, ugly songs.

Nagasaki
Hot ginger and dynamite
There's nothing but that at night.
Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo.
The way they can entertain
Would hurry a hurricane.
Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo.
In Fujiyama you get a mommer
And your troubles increase.
In some pagoda she orders soda
The earth shakes milk shakes ten cents a piece.
They kissee and huggee nice
By jingo it's worth the price.
Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo.

There are differing thoughts about why Nagasaki became a military forcefield that would seal its fate in 1945. Maybe when one culture writes one too many ugly songs about fornicating with your women, maybe that's when the paranoiac's need for more armaments arises.

The song "Nagasaki" is probably a precursor to "Fujiyama Mama," a song recorded by Wanda Jackson which came along in the 1950's, long after America had come to hold a different image of Nagasaki indeed. That song was so mean and ugly that I took it as a chapter title in a novel.

We still hold that image of the razed city, today, a place destroyed. As the decades pass, and other nations respond to their own terrors of what we did in Nagasaki, building their own arsenals to match ours, you start to wonder if terror itself should be measured in the same units of how long it sticks around, like the half-lives of radioactive elements are calculated. So the price we seem to have paid is an increasing, fractalized terror, the fabled "paranoid style" of American foreign policy. We hear our own guilty heartbeat under the floor in the nuclear efforts of others:that someone else will someday do unto us as we did unto others. Elsewhere in the world, this spectre of destruction and charred humanity is so ingrained as a meme in the minds of non-Americans; it is often cited as justification for new violence against Americans, and a new meme about us is growing: that we are the true terrorists, in their minds.

This is a clear and present danger to us insular Americans, this meme growing like a big rubber-band ball of hate. What will we do about it?

I was not particularly bothered at all by President Obama's deep bow in Japan. There is a great commentary on that here by Robert Brady, an American living in Kyoto. There is convincing evidence that it has produced good results in Japan. In zen, we bow when someone else is more informed about something than we are, we bow for a lot of reasons that are difficult to name. I'd say that fits the bill here. The Japanese are more informed about weapons of mass destruction than any among us on this planet.

It was a starting place, that bow. My fellow inhabitants of Texas, as a human being, I reserve the right to apologize to any other human being I wish, for any act committed by any other human being. That is the only country to whom my soul grants diplomatic recognition: the tribe of human beings.

Peter Meinke's "Atomic Pantoum"

2009-11-18T14:57:00.006-06:00

ATOMIC PANTOUM

In a chain reaction
the neutrons released
split other nuclei
which release more neutrons

The neutrons released
blow open some others
which release more neutrons
and start this all over

Blow open some others
and choirs will crumble
and start this all over
with eyes burned to ashes

And choirs will crumble
the fish catch on fire
with eyes burned to ashes
in a chain reaction

The fish catch on fire
because the sun’s force
in a chain reaction
has blazed in our minds

Because the sun’s force
with plutonium trigger
has blazed in our minds
we are dying to use it

With plutonium trigger
curled and tightened
we are dying to use it
torching our enemies

Curled and tightened
blind to the end
torching our enemies
we sing to Jesus

Blind to the end
split up like nuclei
we sing to Jesus
in a chain reaction
Peter Meinke

Get Your Apocalypse On: Gav Duggan and Luis Medina's "Great Atomic Power"

2009-11-17T12:40:00.002-06:00

Susan Bauer Lee's "The Bridge"

2009-11-16T15:14:00.010-06:00

Last summer after I wrote about missing Larry Brown, I began to hear from old friends we had in common once upon another lifetime in Oxford, Mississippi. One of those was Susan Bauer Lee, graphic designer now in Knoxville, who is one significant third in the three-piece Tim Lee 3 band. She said that she had written a song inspired by part of my last novel, so I said, "which part?"

"You'll know when you hear it," she replied. Not long after, two cd's arrived in the mail, and a song called "The Bridge" is on both. It appears on good2b3, which is their album with Paisley Pop, as well as one produced by her husband Tim, Just One More, (Bloodshot Records) a tribute to Larry Brown that also has cuts by some musicians Larry loved dearly, such as Alejandro Escovedo and many others from Mississippi and all parts beyond. I really treasure these cd's, not just from the flattery aspects, but because they are like well-crafted prisms that make me remember the past and believe in a future.

Susan was right. When I heard the song, I knew where it came from, a section of The Celestial Jukebox called "Nocturne With Black Escalade." In the scene, a Latino labor union organizer meets with a terrible fate, when some Memphis gangbangers are sub-contracted to dispense with him to make life easier for traffickers in the Delta who are anti-union. What's interesting to me about the song is how Susan chose to write it as if from down inside the mind, in "1st person" of someone I had described from the outside, in "3rd person." Here's my version:

Not far from the bridge that carried cars to Helena, Arkansas, the black Escalade parked on a sandy side road that seemed to lead vaguely towards the river. Parked under the bridge was the taxi-colored Chevrolet Caprice, its doors open and music pouring out. Three men in jeweled black leather jackets handed over a stumbling Hispanic man to Haile Selassie Pegues, dressed as if on holiday in a Hawaiian shirt. His friends wore their Disciples jackets, and they knew what they were supposed to do, to clear the debt with Rashad. They waited until they could no longer hear the black Escalade.

It was like a holiday, the way they piled out of the Caprice and beat him. The sequinned crowns on the backs of their jackets glinted obscenely with their movements. They took turns with ball bearings wrapped in white tube socks, waiting courteously for one to finish before another made his contribution to the effort. They beat the man for his unspecified transgressions, and then they beat him for being unable to stand on his own feet. Then they beat him for being unable to speak.

The music was amniotic, absorbing the man's screams. It was nothing personal. Tomas Tulia would pay Rashad a fee for their work. It was what they had to do to work off their indebtedness. It was business.

When the man was unable to cry out any longer, or to see them, they took the towel from his head and dragged his body to the Helena bridge and threw him over the side. To the jewel-jacketed Disciples, it was a disturbing sight, the way the man's arms opened witout hestitation, as if embracing a mirage, and their eyes studied for a moment the empty air he had looked at, but they could not see what he had seen.

As he fell from the bridge into the river, Hector Dominguez could still hear the snarled music from the taxi-painted car. His eyes could see mostly his own blood, the color of carnations. So he mistook the whiteness of the full moon beyond for the face of God, and he opened his hands palms up, salat, as if someone beloved had come to greet him after a very long separation.

Here is Susan's version of the event, which I think captures very well the emotional valence that I was aiming for in that passage.

"Honour Wedding" (2008)

2009-11-16T11:53:00.002-06:00

"Honour Wedding" is a short film released by the currently offline
International Campaign Against Honour Killings
PO Box 62651
LONDON EC1P 1JP UK

Auntie Vicarious Strikes Again

2009-11-11T08:00:00.011-06:00

Dear Auntie Vicarious,
I'm writing to you about a friend of mine who wants to be a writer. Loads of talent, works at a shit retail job in Trophy Club where he is vastly underappreciated. He has 600 pages of really detailed notes for a book, mostly his downloaded old emails with this woman he used to date, but with great potential. It's a little bit Dan Brown with some Tom Clancy on the side. This dude could Go All The Way: film deals, merch. Anyways.

He saw in the paper that a buddy of his from college was coming through Dallas to promote his first book, and he hadn't seen him in fifteen years so he went to the place where the guy was reading, some university. Old people, fruit punch, stale cookies. After the reading was over, my friend stood up to ask him if he'd help him publish his book, but before he could get it out, the guy said, "Norville, is that you?" So my friend reconnected, and offered to take him out for a drink. The guy seemed glad to see him, and so my friend took him to this really expensive place downtown. Everything was cool, though come to think of it, the buddy did seem fidgety about how far it was to get there, and how he had a very narrow margin of time for getting to Denver for his next event.

They were talking about old girlfriends back in the day, and then my friend excused himself to go to the men's room, but went back out to his car, got his book manuscript and said, as he put it up on the bar between them, "I have a surprise for you." The old buddy seemed to be listening as my friend described his plans, the movie deal, the merch, maybe legal change of name after screening by a marketing focus group. So then the high school buddy says "Be right back, and we'll talk," and got up to go to the men's room himself. I, uh, my friend, waited and waited. An hour. Re-reading the best parts of the book again.

Finally my friend asked the barkeep if he'd seen him, and he says, "You talkin about the dude what needed the cab to the airport?" The old buddy left nothing but a phone number scribbled on a cocktail napkin, which turned out to be the name of a plastic surgeon. What should I tell my friend? He's out fifty for the drinks and thirty for the guy's novel at the reading, though it might be worth something someday because he signed it.
Clancy Brown

Dear Clancy,
Ah, the old book-tour ambush trick. May I call you Clance? Don't tell your friend anything. Ask him stuff. Ask him if he'd randomly show up on the sidelines of an NFL game and insist on immediate starter status, despite the fact he's never played. Ask him if he'd go up to Michael Phelps at a meet after not seeing him for fifteen years, and insist on immediate inclusion, synchronized swimming privileges, a berth in the photo-op. Or better yet, ask him if he'd show up at any swim meet and insist on standing, holding 600 lbs of weights, on the shoulders of a beginner, at the precise moment that beginner is figuring out how not to drown.

Peter Murphy's John The Revelator

2009-11-10T12:49:00.008-06:00

If you buy but one novel this season, let it be this one. Peter Murphy's John the Revelator is a fleet, deft first novel that was a long time coming, five years, but it was well worth the wait. It's all that the blurbs promise, and more. It begins like a riff on the old weird American standard gospel song, "John the Revelator," but takes flight on its own. Possibly this is the perfect rock and roll novel, because it has the lyric compression of a powerful song, only it's sustained for the duration of a novel. Not an easy feat. At the same time, the book seems offered with few illusions left about rock, and totally free of the tiresome, excruciating correctnesses of both music journalism or fiction writing. No bitterness about the failed romanticisms of our known world and the ways we never fail to disappoint each other --an epic feat in itself. Believe the flap copy on this one, a coming-of-age story about a boy growing up in Ireland. But don't read it out in the open, in some airport, unless you want witnesses in the moments the prose humbles you to your knees. Murphy writes like somebody closely acquainted with both the everyday "real" world of worms, predation, and death, and the more elusive, mystical harbor we crave in images, rhythms of language, and poetry, the phenoms we try to call "god" or "love" or "music." Murphy's sense of time is sometimes hallucinatory, tantric, (in the way the best music is) and so this little volume is a valuable contribution to the tribe of novelists. Can't say enough good things about this book.

Murphy is known for his music journalism; for the best collection of interviews (Irish Times, Irish Independent) with Murphy and reviews of the book, see last summer's post on John the Revelator at Largehearted Boy.

Belle Boggs: Mattaponi Queen

2009-11-04T10:02:00.016-06:00

Mattaponi Queen, a debut collection of short stories by Belle Boggs, will be published by Graywolf next June, but in the meantime, if you'd like a sneak preview, download her "Homecoming" in At Length magazine, which specializes in "long-form" fiction.

It's a good story, almost a novella by today's metrics, about a teenage boy with a lot of human potential, sent South to Virginia from Brooklyn to live with his grandmother when his grownups do prison time for cocaine. The hitch: he finds he has parachuted down into the Southern high-school football doping milieu. I've only read this one story by her, but it has a spare, simple integrity to it that promises great things to come in the collected volume. Boggs has also published work in Glimmertrain and The Oxford American.

The collection was selected by Percival Everett to be awarded the 2009 Breadloaf Writers Conference's Bakeless Prize, so the reviews of it are going to say things like "much anticipated" and "long-awaited." Boggs discussed this collection as it was progressing in 2005 in an interview for UC-Irvine, where she got her MFA, noting that the short story genre was a good fit with her limited time to write:

The stories inhabit your mind in a different way, and the experience of writing, is, for me, a little more intense because I see the arc of the story happen in a much shorter period of time. The fact of writing a short story collection grew out of my limited time, but I'm finding that I'm really happy to be writing these stories. They take place in King William County, Virginia, where I grew up, and have been a helpful way for me to address some unresolved feelings, good and bad, about it.

Boggs made some interesting comments about the evolution of the book's cover, which you can read on her blog. She was an admirer of the reliquary-like work of artist Frances Pelzman Liscio, and Graywolf took her suggestion to use Liscia's work for the cover of Mattaponi Queen, which contains a story about a reliquary-maker. Boggs collected odds and ends to send to the artist:

My mother, however, has lots of relics and odd collections found in and around my parents’ two-hundred-year-old house (many of them dug up by our family dog, Griffin). She packed a big fishing toolbox full of them–flower stems, beaver skulls, Civil War bullets and buckles, buttons, toothbrushes, bottles, spoons, a “diamond” ring–and we sent it to Fran, who graciously sifted through four levels of stuff. She even asked for and read a few stories that I sent her.

The happy result is this great cover you see here.

The Right Place, The Right People

2009-11-02T10:27:00.019-06:00

Back in the day, when I was growing up in South Georgia and the Klan was having its little renascence brought on by the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, my white, goy, agnostic schoolteacher mother would sometimes say, quietly and inexplicably, "Thank God for the Jews of New York." I had no clue what she was talking about. As years passed and came to know her better and to know America better, I arrived at a theory about this statement. My mother had a resolute faith in distant moral forces which she perceived in such entities as the ACLU and the U.S. Department of Justice. So one of the ways my mother lives on, immortal, is that I steal that line when appropriate: "Thank God for the Jews of New York." I thought of the line a couple of weekends ago when I mainlined, in about two sittings, Donald Clarke's 2002 Da Capo bio, Billie Holiday: Wishing On the Moon.

I was particularly struck by Clarke's description of Billie Holiday's appearances at Cafe Society in the 1940's, a club on 58th between Park and Lexington, whose motto was "The Wrong Place for the Right People." Barney Josephson ran the club, providing a new venue for many black musicians who were not unacquainted with the odd autisms of American Jim Crow laws. In that capacity, it was Josephson who put the song in Billie Holiday's path that most Americans would remember her by most clearly. Holiday was not formally educated, and read mostly comic books, but when "Allan Lewis" whose birth name was Abe Meeropol, brought "Strange Fruit" to her in 1939, someone had to explain to her what "pastoral" meant. Danny Mendelsohn and Arthur Herzog scored the lyrics. She decided to sing the song. Barney Josephson apparently saw Holiday's potential to be an artist of her own moment, and had no problem departing from some of the antiquated blues others expected Holiday to sing. Here's Josephson's memory of her performances in his club, which brought TIME magazine round to photograph her, as documented by Donald Clarke:

At first I felt Billie didn't know what the hell the song meant. . . when Allan played it for her she just listened. Billie was very quick on learning lyrics. . . it was the night she sang it and tears came. The audience responded immediately. When the tears rolled down, it was such an impact from the audience at the time, that I knew Billie knew. . . every time she sang that song it was unforgettable. I listened to it three times a night; she sang it every set. I made her do it as her last number, and no matter how thunderous the applause, she had orders from me not to return for even a bow. I wanted the song to sink in, especially since it closed every show. The room was completely blacked out, service stopped --at the bar, everywhere. The waiters were not permitted to take a glass to the table or even take an order. So everything stopped --and everything was dark except for a little pin spot on her face. That was it. When she sang "Strange Fruit" she never even moved. Her hands were down. She didn't even touch the mike. With the little light on her face. The tears never interfered with her voice, but the tears would come and just knock everybody in that house out. The audience would shout for "Strange Fruit." Those who'd never been down before and didn't know her sets closed with it would shout for it when they felt her set was coming to a close.

Today I discover: the University of Illinois Press has issued a book on Josephson, Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People.

For a quick overview of Barney Josephson's life and Cafe Society days, see his New York Times obituary,

If you've never heard Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," here's some footage:

The Rough South of Larry Brown (2002)

2009-10-29T14:26:00.008-05:00

Via the Square Books Twitter feed, (@SquareBooks) a link to a snippet of a 2002 documentary on my old friend Larry Brown, available at the store along with his many books, such as Dirty Work, Father and Son, and Fay. It's called The Rough South of Larry Brown, by Gary Hawkins. Larry Brown is an important writer to know about for anyone who is coming at it from outside the academy. Brown was a fireman who taught himself how to write, and was much loved by everyone, from Eastern publishing elitist-types to ordinary alleycats. We loved this man, and we still love his wife Mary Annie, or M.A. as he called her. For my previous post on Larry Brown, go here.

Cargo Cult: The Age of Beige*

2009-10-23T12:31:00.004-05:00

There is this style of interior decor that I have not seen much anywhere outside Texas, and this cover of a magazine pretty much illustrates the general underlying principle: we are living in the Age of Beige. This basic tableau is replicated endlessly in advertisements and here in this glossy insert to the Startlegram that arrives periodically. It was the basic principle of the merchandise offered by the now-extinct Bombay Company, a formerly Fort-Worth-based corporation that filed for Chapter 11 and shuttered all its North American operations in 2007. Now Bombay Company is being rebranded by a Canadian group that uses an old sepia photograph of one of Queen Victoria's expeditions in its promotional material, along with the caption "The adventure continues."

I still see the same basic groupings of Victorian memes over and over around Fort Worth, and I see these same memes in real estate stagings and in department and furniture store stagings. Houses up for sale are sometimes emptied of real life contents and filled with these empty stagings. It's all meant to connote prosperity, security, quietude, plenitude, safety. But if you walk into one of these stagings, fresh from a consideration of Henri Bergson or the tantric aspects of time, as I have been trained to do as a writer of fiction, then there is a silent little cacophany of noise that accompanies these neo-Victorian tableaus. If you look closely at the odd assemblings of memes, the green palm fronds, the damask drapery, the monkey motif, the antimacassars, the fringed ottomans, the lap robes made from slaughtered wildlife, the silver chocolate samovars, the birdcages, the Persian rugs woven by captive children, and if you let your mind go loose a bit, the creepiness factor kicks in, and by the time you leave, you hear the howling of the monkeys all the way back to the 1880's, the crying of coerced children before there were child labor laws, the caws of parrots before they were caught, the swing of machetes on the sugar plantations in the Gilded Age, when Britannia barely still ruled the waves. And you begin to see that the common denominator with most of these memes is empire, empire, empire. And when you consider that this is Texas,baby, where more than a few wars and corporate overreaches have been birthed and executed with ill results, wellsir, that's when the creepiness factor kicks in, and you move on, out into the Texas afternoon, trying to reassure yourself that the collective human tribe did learn something, hopefully, from that failed English attempt at unchecked, untrammeled commercial growth and expansion.

Didn't it?

(This is a repeat of a post that pre-dated the Oxford American feed. No time to blog today, so I'm declaring it "Cargo Cult" week.)

@thimblewicket

Postcard to Kate Sheppard: Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science"

2009-10-21T07:59:00.014-05:00

When Richard Feynman gave a commencement address in 1973, people no doubt squinted and pondered WTF he meant by "cargo cult" science and why he was talking about nicotine and cooking oil...and he could not have known that we would one day find ourselves reading in the New York Times that Big Pharma hired ghostwriters to make up fictitious "meta" analyses to promote the sale of certain pharmaceuticals, or that perception management masters such as Rick Berman would churn out pseudoscience websites to fool the gullible in the name of the profitable, or that some politicians would become the paid whores of corporations. But if you read that old speech now, it looks very, very prescient:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science,but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be
a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

*********************
.... If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.

I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're
being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish it at all. That's not giving scientific advice.

I'm posting this here today because Feynman's speech would be my vote for reading suggestions as solicited by Kate Sheppard, (@kate_sheppard) one of my favorite science journalists who now writes for Mother Jones. She posed the question this morning on Twitter: what's good to get ready to talk to college students.

Feynman's speech says though science has to coexist with business, it does not necessarily have to be the paid whore of business. When my students read this great old mothballed speech, they see how very old this struggle is that we still find ourselves in today. But you have to tell them that the man had a movie made about him, so he can make it past their coolness filter.

Cargo Cult: Thrifting in B-52 Country

2009-10-19T14:15:00.008-05:00

Here's another one of my messy,rickety little primitive "films," really a rolling slideshow of notes to myself to use in teaching, or to show something to students faster than I can talk to them about it. This one is to get my students to explore the relationship between rock and rollers and the mystical cargo-cult respect that so many have for "vintage" items. The music is African, to help the students "see" these things like a foreigner might. You may recognize the song; it's a Wolof translation of an old Talking Heads classic, "Once in a Lifetime," which I found one morning on my way to work in a Starbucks compilation cd, washed up on my shore like a marvelous little coke bottle with a message in it. For a related post on coolness and cargo cults, see here.

National Day on Writing

2009-10-19T09:01:00.007-05:00

Blessed are the good English teachers of our tribe, for theirs is the kingdom of teaching the young how to inherit the earth.

Tomorrow is a big deal to NCTE, the National Council of Teachers of English. It's the National Day of Writing, which means that people all over the country have scheduled various activities to emphasize the importance of writing as expression. Whether anything's schedule for your particular postage stamp of native soil or not, you can contribute online, to the National Gallery of Writing, which will be available online thereafter. This is a really interesting project, and I think a lot of good is going to come from this.

(Don't say you can't seem to get published, mes enfants. Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can contribute to your country's gallery of writing. Someday in a distant epoch the Andromedan archaeologist life-forms might be studying this big thing, trying to figure us out. If nothing else, someday you will look back at this archive, and remember that it started here, when someone published what you had to say, and you found yourself hooked on the English language.)

At my university, we are having events and exhibits all day, culminating in a reading by Glen Pourciau, an up-and-coming Plano writer whose short story collection INVITE won the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. He’s published his work in such places as the Paris Review, Antioch Review, Barcelona Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, and Best of the Web 2009. His stories have won Ontario Review's Carter V. Cooper Memorial Fiction Prize and the Brazos Bookstore Award for Best Short Story from the Texas Institute of Letters. He will read with some of our creative writing students in the student union from 7:00 pm to 8:30.

Honk If You Still Want To Believe

2009-10-16T12:25:00.009-05:00

One minute we were watching the Obama speech in New Orleans, and then BAM, the whole North American media apparatus was hijacked by the non-toxic airborne event, and we were snatched into it as surely as if the tether-cords to the homemade flyin' saucer had been slipknotted around our ankles. We paused, in a rare state of arrested ironic detachment. We searched a televised sky. Politics resumed its rightful proportions: minutia. The homemade flyin' saucer was clipping along as surely as if Dr. Strangelove had given it his blessing back in the days of old, in the days of gold, in the days of UFOs. The AP filed, Reuters filed, CNN, MSNBC. Old media hands as well as helium-balloon specialists piped in via affiliates for color commentary, uttered soft statements like, "I know how I would feel if that were my kid up there." Millions of folks faceless as phosphorous particles gravitated to the internets as surely as iron shards to a charged attractor.

We knew the drill: shit happens. It was like a Jane Hamilton story in which the parents' future life is going to be everafter tragically informed by an ordinary human morning, the indecision and decisions which a moment did reverse. It was like a Spielberg movie in which the imagination of a little boy contains multitudes. It was like Theroux's Mosquito Coast in which "father" is a synonym for "fate." It was like the Eudora Welty story "The Wide Net" only the little community searching included a few million voyeurs, electronic ambulance chasers. It was the Little Prince, it was David Bowie, it was Up. We probably could not tell you our next-door neighbor's names, but we could tell you about the little boy imagined to be inside the homemade flyin' saucer, Falcone, only everybody spelled it like the bird, Falcon, as we sent it bouncing upward to satellites and back, the commentary no doubt passing him in space as if he were irrelevant. It was all very Don DeLillo, it was all very Pixar. It was like we were finally granted admission to live inside a movie, inside fictional realms vaster than mere daily life is ever going to permit.

Even the NOAA kept trying to frame the story, frame the story, and it always ended the same: boy, untethered, ascending into the firmament formerly known as the heavens. And in that terrifying moment when the homemade flyin'saucer suddenly seemed to achieve escape velocity and vanished out of sight of the pursuit cameras, we encountered the kind of terror that induces belief. That he could somehow breathe. That he could somehow survive and tell us everything he saw on his terrible horrible no good excellent adventure. CNN ran commercials for Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. Hashtags became little portals through which you could witness the whole human susurrus: #savefalcon, #balloonboy. If we had little kids, we accounted for them immediately. Fathers announced via the internet, to strangers whose names they will never know, that they had hugged their little sons. Old ladies prayed in Portuguese, hipsters paused and sought for adequate epithets and irony.

And the little boy, when found, threw up.

Ursula Le Guin on Cruel Shoes

2009-10-13T08:36:00.006-05:00

...And fashion is a great power, a great social force, to which men may be even more enslaved than the women who try to please them by obeying it. I have worn some really stupid shoes myself in the attempt to be desirable, the attempt to be conventional, the attempt to follow fashion. . .I don't find shod feet erotic. Or shoes, either. Not my fetish, thanks. It's the sense of what dancers' shoes are doing to the dancer's feet that fascinates me. The fascination is not erotic, but it is physical. It is bodily, it is social, ethical. It is painful It troubles me. And I can't get rid of the trouble, becaue my society denies that it is troubling. My society says it's all right, nothing is wrong, women's feet are there to be tortured and deformed for the sake of fashion and convention, for the sake of eroticism, for the sake of marriageability, for the sake of money. And we all say yes, certainly, all right, that is all right. Only something in me, some little nerves down in my toes that got bent awry by the stupid shoes I wore when I was young, some muscles in my instep, some tendon in my heel, all those bits of my body say No no no no. It isn't all right.It's all wrong.

Ursula Le Guin, "About Feet," in The Wave in the Mind, 2004.

Photo credits: New York Times