Autrey

Boxes

2011-07-03T09:03:00.008-05:00

I've collected a number of small well-made boxes, mostly wooden, from my travels over the years. Some of them serve practical purposes. Others I just keep around on window sills, shelves, or dressers. This month, though, my preoccupation is with cardboard boxes, specifically boxes that we can pack in for our move. Moving companies sell overpriced boxes in several sizes, while Lowe's and other high-volume stores carry more reasonably priced moving containers. But liquor stores are the best source of free, sturdy packing boxes. I especially like liquor crates because they're just the right size for books. Our moving company estimates that we'll have 94 boxes of books, and we're well on our way to that number. The shelves in my study are now lined with boxes rather than books, and filled containers are stacked in various locations around the house. I find that Smirnoff vodka and cranberry boxes are ideal. The original contents wouldn't be of much interest to me, but the boxes are perfect. When I'm driving around I keep my eyes open for discarded boxes that I can use--such as the large toilet crate that was left beside the road down the street; that one will be perfect for large, lighter items that need ample padding, such as mirrors or lamps.

What makes a best seller? Ruth Franklin in Bookforum explains.

Moving

2011-06-26T18:26:00.004-05:00

It's been just over a year since I last posted to this blog. The death of J.D. Salinger still resonates, but it is admittedly old news. I'll remedy this long-term neglect with a photo and an update. Herewith, a shot of our newly renovated living room. No, actually we plan to move within a month, and the ph0to shows part of the chaos that has ensued since we got a contract on our house and an agreement to close the deal sometime after July 15, no doubt before the 1st of August. We'll move into the house where I grew up in Auburn, AL. My sister will be vacating the house just before we arrive accompanied by an Allied van. Janne and I have both recently retired, a new life break that gives us this sudden mobility.

~~~

“When I became a writer my desk became home; there was no need for another. Every story is a foreign territory, which, in the process of writing, is to my work, to my characters, and in order to create new ones I leave the old ones behind. My prents’ refusal to let go or to belong fully to either place is at the heart of what I, in a less literal way, try to accomplish in writing. Born of my inability to belong, it is my refusal to let go.”

Jhumpa Lahiri, “Trading Stories,” The New Yorker, 06/13 and 20/11, 83.

“When I got off in Florence , I was immediately surprised by the heat and the sun, and the gaiety of the shadows—like what one feels upon reaching the Riviera from Paris.”

Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife (Oct. 2-3, 1942) about a trip to do a lecture at Coker College in Hartsville, SC., The New Yorker, 06/13 and 20/11, 100.

~~~

British artist David Hockney does a drawing on his iPad every day, often flowers or interiors. This week's New Yorker features one of them as the cover art. They are impressive. An example:

Academic Research

2010-06-24T07:54:00.003-05:00

A recent Chronicle article questions the flood of research now being published. The authors focus primarily on scientific research in arguing that there is an excess of mediocre research being published, which makes it hard for scholars to keep up in their fields, places a burden on established scholars to referee papers submitted, and reflects a "quantity over quality" basis for judging professional advancement. They makes several recommendations to stem the tide of marginal research.

My field of written composition has seen a huge growth in the extent of publication over the past 20 years or so. But much of this reflects the growth of the discipline itself. When I entered the profession around 1980, there was only a handful of journals: College English, College Composition and Communication, Research in the Teaching of English, maybe several more. It was possible to read nearly every significant piece of research in the field. Similarly, the number of books on composition was manageable. Now that's not the case. The current situation forces us all to sort of cruise through the available research or to specialize, focusing on only what pertains to our narrow interests. I've chosen the former tack, picking and choosing what interests me or what is authored by writers I know of and admire. This is not necessarily bad. It just means that I no longer feel as though I have a handle on the profession in the way that I did in the early days. Also, nowadays I seldom come across gripping, ground-breaking articles, whereas I remember years ago reading offerings by Robert Connors, Don Murray, Nancy Sommers, Steve Witte, Stephen North, Patricia Bizzell, or Janet Emig that excited me. Part of this feeling may be that I'm more jaded now. Or that retirement is just ahead.

Kingsolver and Junger

2010-06-21T07:21:00.003-05:00

Photograph by Eamonn McCabe

Barbara Kingsolver: "I don't see how any art could fail to be political."
A review of Kingsolver's fiction, including her most recent, The Lacuna
~~~
Geoff Dyer in The Guardian on recent war reportage, esp. David Finkel's The Good Soldiers (Iraq) and Sebastian Junger's War (Afghanistan)

R.I.P. J.D. Salinger

2010-01-29T08:14:00.004-05:00

J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)

Tributes/Obituaries

Stephen King
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Associated Press
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Verlyn Klinkenborg (N.Y. Times)
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London Times
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Rick Moody
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Elaine Woo (L.A. Times)
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Mark Feeney (Boston Globe)

Gum Surgery

2010-01-16T20:24:00.002-05:00

A week ago a surgeon

peeled my lower gums

and slid in paper thin

grafts gleaned from

cadavers, slices of skin

stitched in and lashed

around my teeth, alien

tissue, purged of DNA,

anonymous and plain.

When my mouth feels

itself again, we’ll see

if my whistle’s still

shrill enough to rattle

glasses off the shelf,

soft enough to coax

a shadow off the wall.

The Year's Best

2009-12-29T09:14:00.004-05:00

David Brooks' annual Sidney Awards for outstanding journalism, and Sidney Awards, part II
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Annual List of Banished Words from Lake Superior State University
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The Kindle is the most "gifted" item ever on Amazon.com. On Christmas Day, there were more Kindle downloads than print book purchases. I was one of the downloaders, choosing Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers at $9.99.
~~~
Roger Ebert's Best Films of 2009
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The New Yorker's David Denby: Best Films of 2009
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Paste Magazine: 50 Best Films of the Decade
~~~
BEST MOVIES I'VE SEEN THIS YEAR
(in the order I saw them)
1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2. Slumdog Millionaire
3. Secrets and Lies
4. Revolutionary Road
5. The Reader
6. Frozen River
7. Milk
8. Frost/Nixon
9. Doubt
10. Julie and Julia

Honorable Mention
11. The Informant!
12. Gran Torino

Pilgrims - Expected in March

2009-12-13T07:18:00.003-05:00

Pilgrims by Ken Autrey

Published by: Main Street Rag Publishing Company

ISBN: 978-1-59948-230-9, 40 pages, $10 (cover price)

Ken Autrey’s collection of poems, Pilgrims, is scheduled for release in March 2010 and is available for discount advance order now. The cover price will be $10, but advance orders from the publisher's website are $7 plus shipping ($1 for one book).

The book can be ordered from the COMING SOON page of the MSR Online Bookstore:

http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/

For those who would rather not order online, Pilgrims may be ordered by check or credit card directly from the publisher at a lesser discount ($9/book, postage included).

Send checks to:

Main Street Rag, PO BOX 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001.

For credit card orders, call 704-573-2516 (M-F 9am-5pm EST).

Best Books of the Year

2009-12-13T06:59:00.002-05:00

Publisher's Weekly Top 10 and Top 100

The New York Times Top 10

Amazon.com - Best So Far

Guardian.uk.com - Best Books of 2009 Chosen by Writers, Journalists, etc.
~~~
My List of the Ten Best Books of Fiction/Nonfiction Read (not necesssarily published) in 2009--in no particular order

1. Dalton Conley, Honky
2. Joseph O-Neill, Netherland
3. Fareed Zacharia, The Post-American World
4. Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
5. Toni Morrison, A Mercy
6. Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury
7. Ethan Canin, America, America
8. Valerie Martin, The Confessions of Edward Day
9. Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic
10. David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

One Book I'll Never Forget

2009-09-06T16:14:00.006-05:00

Captain William Bligh

This semester I'm teaching two sections of Advanced Writing, a course required for Elementary Education and Middle School Education majors. Because most of the forty students taking the class will before long be teaching reading and writing to young people, I had each of them write a paragraph beginning, "One book I will never forget is ____."

Here's my own paragraph:

One book I'll never forget is MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. This novel, based on true events, tells the story of an actual mutiny against Captain Bligh, on a British ship. It was one of the first long books I read on my own when I was young, the first book that captivated me so much that I didn't want to put it down. Nor did I want it to end. I was elated to discover that the authors, Nordhoff and Hall, had written two additional books that continued the story, so I immediately checked those out of the library and read them with equal enthusiasm.

Their choices, not surprisingly, range from children's books to adolescent novels to popular novels, mostly recent ones. The only work of nonfiction on the list is The Water is Wide. We'll be reading that memoir as a text this semester; the student who chose it sat right down and read it after purchasing it and "couldn't put it down." That bodes well for our use of the book as a text. Most of the students in these classes are women; perhaps that's evident from this sampling of their selections:

The Island of the Blue Dolphin, Scott O'Dell
The Land, Mildred Taylor
The Twilight Series, Stephanie Meyer
The Kissing Hand, Audrey Penn
The Great Santini, Pat Conroy
Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Patterson

Searching for David's Heart, Cherie Bennett
Deception Point, Dan Brown

The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ntozake Shange
Flyy Girl, Omar Tyree
The Water is Wide, Pat Conroy
Act Like a Lady; Think Like a Man, Steve Harvey
The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss
Gone with the Wind, Margart Mitchell
Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
Someone Like You, Sarah Dessen
My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Wedding, Nicholas Sparks
Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult
Forged by Fire, Sharon Draper
If I Was Your Girl, Toi McKnight
Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
Pleasure, Eric Jerome Dickey
Blood and Chocolate, Annette Curtis Klause

Matthew Crawford and Soulcraft

2009-08-23T10:26:00.004-05:00

I've been reading Matthew B. Crawford's recently published book, Shop Craft as Soulcraft. Crawford holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago and currently is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He also owns and runs Shockoe Moto, a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. His academic work (and sometimes mindless "white collar" jobs) coupled with his background as an electrician and mechanic have lead him to write this fascinating commentary on the nature of work, craft, and value in our society. Essentially, he argues that we've gone wrong in devaluing skilled manual work in favor of a "knowledge culture" in which young people are encouraged to educate themselves for jobs that will not require them to fix things or dirty their hands. Early in the book, Crawford lays out his intention:

In this book I would like to speak up for an idea that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hardheaded: the hardheaded economist will point out the "opportunity costs" of spending one's time making what can be bought, and the hardheaded educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades....

Crawford deplores the fact that cars we drive, the machines that sustain us, and the stuff we use is increasingly impervious to the understanding of a curious, mechanically competent ordinary person. Instead, they surpass our basic understanding and when broken must be repaired only by experts who have expensive equipment--or worse, must simply be replaced. Furthermore, as shop classes become rarer in schools, fewer and fewer people cultivate basic skills that would enable them to fix things. Crawford (like Mike Rose in The Mind at Work), argues that far from being mindless or merely mechanical, jobs requiring manual labor often require considerable intelligence, creativity, and ingenuity. There's a moral dimension to this too, which brings to mind Robert Pirsig's classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

My own ideal day consists of a balance between what I think of as "head work" and "hand work." Having spent much of the morning reading, writing, and puttering at my computer, I look forward to this afternoon when I'll start a new woodworking project, building an easel. Particularly given my amateurish approach to such projects, it will challenge me with problems that I'll have to think hard about solving. I'll cut some pieces badly and drill holes in the wrong places and miscalculate some of my measurements. Still, I look forward to the challenge. For a while, I'll gladly immerse myself in the labor and the uncertainty that comes with it, knowing I'd never be able to make my living doing such work. I'll always be an amateur (from the Latin amator for "lover") in the original sense of one who loves the work even if he's in no way an expert.
~~~
New York Times review of Shop Class as Soulcraft
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An Appreciation of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book
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On Zora Neale Hurston

Like a Complete Unknown

2009-08-16T07:41:00.006-05:00

Gates and Dylan

In a recent incident that swept across U.S. newspapers, media outlets, and T.V. screens, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested at his own home when a Cambridge neighbor called 911 and reported that he appeared to be breaking in. The subsequent confrontation, handcuffing, and the fallout with powerful racial overtones wound up involving President Obama, who invited Gates and Officer James Crowley to have a beer at the White House in order to smooth things out.

In a far less contentious but equally baffling incident, Bob Dylan was stopped by a police officer a couple days ago while the singer was wandering in a New Jersey neighborhood prior to a concert with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. Admittedly, Dylan can look pretty scruffy, but the 22-yr-old cop didn't recognize the rock icon even when he showed her his i.d., so she insisted that he return with her to his hotel, where others readily vouched for him. To his credit, Dylan seemed to take this all pretty calmly. This gives a new ironic meaning to the phrase, "like a complete unknown," from the song that many (including me) consider the greatest rock song ever written:

"Like a Rolling Stone" on YouTube

Alicia Sully, Filmmaker

2009-08-13T09:51:00.005-05:00

Alicia Sully in Ghana

As editor of the quarterly newsletter for Friends of Ghana, The Talking Drum, I regularly interview and then write about former Peace Corps volunteers who have served in Ghana, telling about their background, volunteer experiences, and current whereabouts. I've been doing this for over ten years, and the interactions I've had with these Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, few of whom I've met personally, have invariably been interesting.

Several years ago I interviewed Stephanie Arnold, whose small eastern Ghana town was so pleased with the three-year latrine contruction project she organized that they built a statue to her and had Jerry Rawlings, then Ghana's President, visit to unveil it. I've met and talked with several members of Ghana I, the first Peace Corps group ever, including Bob Klein, whom some refer to as "the original Peace Corps Volunteer" because he was the senior member of that initial group and stays in touch with most of them, helping to organize regular group reunions. Bob has been the moving force behind the Peace Corps Archival Project, housed at the JFK Library in Boston. He has traveled the country conducting and taping interviews with many volunteers, whose recollections have been stored there for posterity.

Normally, I talk with these profile subjects by phone, and our conversations typically stretch on for over an hour, as was the case when I spoke last April with photographer Peter DiCampo, whose profile appeared in the summer issue. My most recent write-up is on Alicia Sully, whom I was unable to talk to by phone because of her travel schedule in Africa. Instead, we communicated in several extensive e-mails. She got a university degree in filmmaking and then went to Ghana as part of a Peace Corps water/sanitation group. Before long, she began making short films about health issues, including Guinea worm infestation and HIV/AIDS. Some of her Peace Corps experiences are documented in her blog.

One of her films, available on YouTube, was produced in close cooperation with citizens of the small northern Ghana town where she was posted. This two-part film in Dagbani, subtitled in English, concerns "kayayo"--young women from poverty-stricken northern Ghana who travel to cities to work and earn money to send home. In some cases, these women become prostitutes and experience the multiple health problems associated with that lifestyle. Peter DiCampo, who has himself done photography and research on this issue, will soon be working alongside Sully, doing a series of presentations in northern Ghanaian towns.

Sully Film, Part I
Sully Film, Part II

Since May, Sully has been working with What Took You So Long (WTYSL), a small multinational group of volunteers committed to publicizing the work of successful Non-Governmental Organizations in Africa. She learned of this group through Sebastian Lindstrom, one of its leaders, because of Lindstrom’s affiliation with a project in Kumasi, Ghana.

The group is now in the middle of an ambitiously long journey using local transportation which started in Morocco and will proceed down the western coast of Africa to South Africa. Thus far, the team has traveled through Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Togo and is headed south for stops in Nigeria, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sully’s responsibility along the way has been to shoot and edit video spots on the various NGOs visited. These are available on the WTYSL website.

New Words in 2009

2009-08-12T07:36:00.002-05:00

"Frenemy," "locavore," "vlog," and other new words in the 2009 Merriam-Webster's Dictionary
~~~
Jonathan Yardley on Austen's Pride and Prejudice
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Review of Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
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Two poems by Heaney from Poetry Ireland Review, reprinted on POETRY DAILY
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Creative Writing MFA Rankings by Seth Abramson
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Poet Craig Arnold went missing.
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Craig Arnold was never found.
~~~
Several of Arnold's poems

Jane Jacobs

2009-08-11T05:21:00.006-05:00

In the summer of 1965, the summer after my sophomore year in college, I worked as a community organizer and youth activity director at Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. I was one of about 15 students living at Hope House (just behind the church) and doing similar work. This was my first extended experience of life in the city. During that summer, I discovered Jane Jacobs' book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, an argument--at the time radical--for maintaining the integrity of city neighborhoods with mixed uses: housing, restaurants, stores, businesses, etc. She argued that the enemy of vital neighborhoods was specialization and pointed to certain areas, such as her own Hudson Street neighborhood in Greenwich Village, that had maintained their vitality and interest and safety.

Here's a review of two recent books on Jacobs that pit her theories against those of Robert Moses, who transformed parts of New York with his large-scale, impersonal developments--huge housing projects and highways that often destroyed the character of local neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs, who died in 2006, remains one of my urban heroes, and thanks to what I recall of her influential writing, wherever I travel (San Francisco, Rome, Berlin) I look for the sort of mixed-use city areas she lauded and celebrated. They are seldom the most glamorous neighborhoods but are the places you want to hang out in and explore, imagining yourself to be a local.

Reading and Rapture

2009-08-10T08:18:00.005-05:00

From David Ulin, "The Lost Art of Reading," in The Los Angeles Times:

We live in time; we understand ourselves in relation to it, but in our culture, time collapses into an ever-present now. How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?

This is where real reading comes in -- because it demands that space, because by drawing us back from the present, it restores time to us in a fundamental way. There is the present-tense experience of reading, but also the chronology of the narrative, as well as of the characters and author, all of whom bear their own relationships to time. There is the fixity of the text, which doesn't change whether written yesterday or a thousand years ago. St. Augustine composed his "Confessions" in AD 397, but when he details his spiritual upheaval, his attempts to find meaning in the face of transient existence, the immediacy of his longing obliterates the temporal divide. "I cannot seem to feel alive unless I am alert," Charles Bowden writes in his recent book, "Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 244 pp., $24), "and I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control." That is what reading has to offer: a way to eclipse the boundaries, which is a form of giving up control.

Ulin evokes Winifred Gallagher's recent book, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, an argument that we are what we focus on and that today's world is constantly pulling us in so many directions that we are in danger of losing the value of rapt attention and the depth of thought and involvement that can come of that.

While in the Adirondacks recently, I devoted my rapt attention to Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury, a study of the interacting lives of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. I had not realized that so much of America's literary heritage originated from a specific neighborhood in Concord. Among the other writers who lived there or were somehow associated with the group are Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, H.W. Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. As Cheever notes, "From their collaborations with each other and the Concord landscape came almost every nineteenth-century American masterpiece--Walden, The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and Little Women, to name a few--as well as the ideas about men and women, nature, education, marriage, and writing that shape our world today."

I had previously read Susan Cheever's memoirs, Home Before Dark and Treetops, because of my interest in her brilliant and troubled father, John Cheever. Her fascinating study of this community of Concord writers and their interactions would be a great supplement to a course on early American literature.

Once More to the Lake

2009-08-09T04:59:00.007-05:00

Curtis Camp from Lakefront and Backwoods

French Camp and Eagle Crag Lake from the Curtis dock

Last Tuesday J and I returned from our annual sojourn on Eagle Crag Lake, ten miles from the town of Tupper Lake in New York's Adirondack Mountains. We stay at a two-cabin compound that has been in her family for three (going on four) generations. The original "camp" (which is how folks up there refer to these places) was built in 1922-23 by Joseph Oster, stepfather of Lillian French, who with her husband Walter were the original owners of the property. At the time this was the second structure on the mile-long lake.

There was no road access, so all building materials were carried in from the raiload tracks a couple hundred yards away. One write-up on the camp's history states, "The well house behind the camp contains a 15' deep cement encasement for a wire cage to hold food for cooling. The year the hole for the cement was dug it was left incomplete until spring, and when work resumed in may, a dead bear cub was found at the bottom of the hole."

Around 1983, the family bought the adjacent camp (built in 1932) from its original owner, Steve Curtis. This expansion allowed J's parents to stay there through the summer, with the French Camp available for the succession of more temporary family vacationers.

Our annual visit provides respite from the South Carolina heat and an opportunity to reconnect with J's brothers and sister, along with their families, who come and go while we're there. When we're lucky, one or both of our daughters are able to visit with their kids--as T did their year with our two granddaughters. We've also developed friends around the lake whom we look forward to seeing each year.

E.B. White's essay, "Once More to the Lake," originally published in 1941, tells how when he was young his family spent each August at a lake in Maine. When he had a son of his own, he decided to recapture the experience, taking him to the same lake. White's recollection is filled with hardwon nostalgia. He writes, "We had a good week at the camp. The bass were biting well and the sun shone endlessly, day after day. We would be tired at night and lie down in the accumulated heat of the little bedrooms after the long hot day and the breeze would stir almost imperceptibly outside and the smell of the swampt drift in through the rusty screens."

He concludes with a memorable paragraph that I think of each time I make my initial entry into the frigid Eagle Crag Lake water, cold enough to take my breath away:

When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower, and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.

The back of cover of One Man's Meat, where the essay was collected, pictures E.B. White walking along balancing on a rail line. It looks much like the now unused line that runs near the family camps, a reminder of a time when it was the only access to that remote location.

Dexter Filkins, Afghanistan, and Iraq

2009-07-10T10:28:00.004-05:00

Dexter Filkins

I've just finished reading The Forever War, Dexter Filkins' superb account of his work as a journalist in Afghanistan and Iraq. He worked for the Los Angeles Times and then The New York Times. All told, he spent at least three years each of the two countries--plenty of time to get to know people and plumb the depths of each conflict. Most of the book concerns Iraq, taking us up through 2007, when matters still seemed pretty dismal. Since then the situation has by most accounts improved. American troops have now supposedly moved out of the cities. Yet there's been a recent surge in suicide bomb attacks on city streets. The length of time Filkins was "on the ground," as they say, means that he's able to provide a genuine feel for Iraqi culture, introducing us to a number of Iraqis of all stripes. His descriptions of the action--mostly in cities--is often harrowing because of his proximity. It's astonishing that he avoids getting injured or killed.

This book has at times been compared to Michael Herr's Vietnam reportage, Dispatches. Filkins is less flamboyant and ironic than Herr and relies less on the sort of dark humor that was so typical of Herr. The uncertainty and guesswork involved in fighting Iraqi insurgents is in many ways comparable to the sort of conflict Herr reports in Vietnam, though that conflict was less city-based. Herr's writing catches the tone of the futile war in Southeast Asia. But his limited time in-country (in contrast to Filkins' long visits) leads him to focus more exclusively on American soldiers than the broader tableau of individuals found in Filkins' book.

Destruction and Creativity

2009-07-03T07:46:00.004-05:00

I've just discovered The Best American Poetry web site, which includes a blog featuring a different writer each week. The June 28 - July 4 blogger is fiction writer Tess Callahan. I especially like her entries on "The Perfect Day" and "The Creative Process: Painting, Writing, and the Case for Ruthlessness." The second one mentions Kali, the Hindu god of creativity and destruction. Also, Callahan evokes the film, The Mystery of Picasso:

Picasso starts with broad geometric shapes that immediately take possession of the entire page. Then come shading, color and depth. The most striking thing about the film is Picasso’s spontaneity, the dexterity with which he changes course. In one breath he has drawn an intricate fish. Just when you think it is perfect, he dives back in and transfigures it into a rooster. His changes are ruthless. He has no hesitation about obliterating what he has just done in order to transform it into something else. Just when you want to scream out, “Stop! You are destroying a Picasso!” he leaps in again to vaporize the rooster into a demon’s head. As an artist, it’s hard to watch this film without gasping. Many of us know the anguish of realizing we have to cut the very line we thought was brilliant. With Picasso, there is no anguish. His mercilessness is stunning. He may have been an arrogant SOB in life, but in art he was without egoic attachment. The film illustrates his total surrender to form. By prior agreement, when Clouzot finished shooting The Mystery of Picasso, all of the paintings were destroyed

.
Writers and artists, then, must be masters of destruction as well as creation.

James Salter

2009-06-21T09:44:00.003-05:00

I’ve been an admirer of James Salter’s writing since discovering A Sport and a Pastime several years ago. I’ve had his memoir, Burning the Days, around for a while and even dipped into it after reading the short erotically-charged novel about a torrid affair in France. But the memoir didn’t grab me, and I moved on to something else. The other day, I picked it up again. This time I was hardly able to put it down. Why is it that we are receptive to certain books at one time but not another?

In this case, my rapt attention to Salter’s impeccable prose has not so much to do with the admittedly gripping story of his life as a fighter pilot, writer and confidante of countless famous individuals, not to mention his string of affairs with beautiful women (one of which is fictionalized in A Sport and a Pastime). Instead, my interest relates to the balance it strikes between vividly evoked memories and the unavoidable reality that even the sharpest writing cannot capture what is essential about the past. Richness and loss and a groping for what we may have missed. Here is part of an excerpt Salter once read in an interview with Charlie Rose soon after the book came out. It comes at the end of the book’s first 200 pages, which relate to Salter’s life as a pilot:

Once at a dinner party I was asked by a woman what on earth I had ever seen in military life. I couldn’t answer her, of course. I couldn’t summon it all, the distant places, the comradeship, the idealism, the youth. I couldn’t tell about flying over the islands long ago, seeing them rise in the blue distance wreathed in legend, the ring of white surf around them. Or the cities, Shanghai and Tokyo, Amsterdam and Venice, gunnery camps in North Africa and forgotten colonies of Rome along the shore.

Salter goes on to list other sensations and memories he could not capture and concludes, “Money meant nothing and in a way neither did fame. I couldn’t tell any of that or of the roads along the sea in Honolulu, the dances, the last drinks at the bar, or who Harry Thyng was, or Kasler, or the captain’s wife.”

Pondering Mom’s death two weeks ago, I keep trying to hang onto the good memories, of which there are many. But unavoidably, I think of what has been lost, incidents and stories that suddenly fade into two-dimensionality just because Mom is not available to give them life. Granted, it’s been a while since she was able to hold forth glibly about the past, as she so readily and eagerly did for many years. But her death removes any chance of reclaiming that past. Salter’s book is subtitled “Recollection.” And that is what we all struggle to do (to “re-collect”) as time takes its toll on us and our memories. The days burn out, giving way to other days, just as lives fade and give way to successive lives.

Remembering Mom

2009-06-13T13:32:00.003-05:00

Vera Harrison Autrey (May 4, 1918 - June 7, 2009)

Point Reyes

2009-05-30T17:46:00.010-05:00

Before the recent trip to California and points northward, I had never heard of Point Reyes. Or, maybe I had heard of it but didn't know how to pronounce it or whether it was in Maine or Swaziland. I'm still not sure how to pronounce it (Ray's?), but I know exactly where it is. On the map it seems near San Francisco, so it fit with our plan to stay just north of the city so as to have time to make our plane the next day without rushing. We did some research en route, and the Point looked worthwhile.

To get out to Point Reyes, you drive through a series of ranches, all them dating from the mid 1800's and identified by letters: Ranch A, B, C and on to M. Lots of beef and dairy cows on rolling, heath-like hills with very few trees. The animal life on the point includes seals, sea lions, falcons, and numerous water birds such as murres, which nest on the rocks just off the coast. Earlier in the year, people flock to the area to see whales migrating. The geological formations are contorted and interesting, and the May wild flowers are profuse. The lighthouse, which has been there about a century and a half, is down almost at the base of the outermost point--low so as to be visible below the frequent fog. You climb down about 300 feet to get there. The fog horn blows constantly at regular intervals.

To drive from there to the airport, south of the city, it took a couple hours, longer than anticipated. It's a slow trip. For some thirty miles, the route winds along steep cliffs with the surging ocean far below--gorgeous but time-consuming. Fortunately, we allowed some leeway, so we had plenty to time to make our flight home.

Mount St. Helens

2009-05-29T10:10:00.004-05:00

The northernmost destination in our West Coast trip was Mount St. Helens. We happened to visit on the 29th anniversary of the eruption. Entry fees were waived for the occasion. Along the winding highway leading from I-5 into the park, there are several visitor centers, as well as numerous vista points offering views of the ravaged mountain from afar. The main observation point, Johnson Visitor's Center (named after David Johnson, who died in the eruption) offers an impressive unimpeded view of the volcano's cratered northern side, as well as the lava dome that is gradually building in the opening, constantly emitting a plume of smoke. Even the view of the incredible vista of destruction (still largely a gray wasteland) does not make it any easier to grasp the dimensions of the eruption, the accompanying avalanche of lava and debris, and the blast that was the equivalent of 21,000 atom bombs. It killed 57 people, destroying 15 miles of road and 230 square miles of forest. Much of the land will still not support plant life because of layers of infertile ash, and where trees have come back or been replanted, they look strangely uniform in size. It is an unforgettable monument to nature's power.

Yosemite

2009-05-28T10:51:00.008-05:00

The Upper Falls

Half Dome

El Capitan

One of the highlights of our California sojourn was a day spent at Yosemite National Park. Given the sparse crowds at Sequoia and Kings Canyon early in the season, we were unprepared for the mob scene we found at Yosemite. The place was swarming with tourists. Once we caught our first glimpse of the gorgeous setting with its backdrop of falls and stark rock outcroppings (especially El Capitan and Half Dome) and then followed the steep winding road down into the valley, we could see what drew the crowd: the unmatched vistas along with the ready accessibility of the park's delights and the fact that the park is geared to acommodate large numbers.

After our pleasantly remote hikes elsewhere, we felt a bit overwhelmed, but the numbers of other visitors didn't dampen our spirits nearly as much as our t-shirts were dampened by the refreshing spray from the lower falls, which you can walk to on a paved trail. We climbed above it all on a steep trail with 60 switchbacks that took us to Columbia Rock and an overview of the whole scene.

Big Sur and Sequoia

2009-05-27T08:11:00.009-05:00

Carmel

Big Sur

As we drove south from San Francisco, our travels took us through Carmel (where Clint Eastwood served as mayor 1986-88) and along Big Sur. According to Wikipedia, the name "Big Sur" comes from the Spanish "el sur grande," meaning "the big south." We made stops at Andrew Molera and Julia Pfieffer Burns State Parks, camping at San Simeon, just north of Cambria, the next day cutting east to Sequoia National Park.

At Sequoia National Park, we made the obligatory visit to the unfortunately named "General Sherman," billed as the largest tree in the world in volume if not in girth or height. Most of the sequoias show evidence of past lightning or fire, not surprising for trees that have been around over 3000 years. Despite the scars, their thick bark and durable constitution makes them impervious to fire damage. John Muir, who named many of these trees, wrote the following in his journal in 1875:

The sequoias are the most venerable-looking of all the Sierra giants, standing erect and true, in poise so perfect they seem to make no effort--their strength so perfect it is invisible. Trees weighing one thousand tons are yet to all appearance imponderable as clouds, as the light which clothes them, so fine is their beauty.... They are antediluvian monuments, through which we gaze in contemplation as through windows into the deeps of primeval time.

Muir was given to hyperbolic statements about natural phenomena, but the sequoias deserve all the hyperbole they get.

For additional trip photos see my Flickr page.

San Francisco and Ferlinghetti

2009-05-25T08:14:00.011-05:00

San Francisco was the first stop on our recent two-week trip to the West Coast, most of which was spent in various National Parks and Monuments. J and I stayed a couple nights in the modest but neat and centrally located Mosser Hotel, just off Market St. a few blocks south of Union Square. One memorable, bright morning we walked along the bay from Fort Mason and the Marina over to the Golden Gate Bridge. Then we hiked onto the bridge out to the first tower for a stunning view of the Bay, Alcatraz, and the city's skyline.

During our walk to Union Square, up Grant St., and onto Columbus Ave. toward Fisherman's Wharf, we stopped at City Lights Bookstore, one of my four favorites (the others being Gotham Books in New York, Prairie Light Books in Iowa City, and Powell's Books in Portland). Upstairs in the poetry section, I ran into Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the store's founder, the city's poet laureate, pal of the beats, and a relentless campaigner for the arts--and for the integrity of San Francisco itself. I bought his book, San Francisco Poems, and had him sign it. He sat at a table for a brief chat as sounds from a jazz combo in Kerouac Alley wafted through the window. He wore his trademark scruffy beard and a baseball cap.
~~~
Daily Routines web site: How creative people organize their days.

The Story of a Poem

2009-05-08T18:07:00.003-05:00

Mexican poet Octavio Paz, once said the following:

In general, Americans have not looked for Mexico in Mexico; they have looked for their obsessions, enthusiasms, phobias, hopes, interests--and these are what they have found.

In 1998, just after Paz died, I wrote a poem called "Looking for Mexico," using that quote as my epigraph. My poem began,

To honor your life, Octavio Paz,
I will no longer look for myself
in your country.

And my poem ended,

In my domestic dreams I'll discover
the rattle of Pancho Villa's
bandoleros, the sleepy strumming
of a guitar behind an adobe wall,
the whisper of distant sands
in Cuernevaca, Morelia,
Oaxaca, Guadalahara.

I've always thought it was a pretty good poem, but over the ten years I've been sending it out, hoping for publication, 24 magazines have rejected it. Finally today I received notice that at last a nice little magazine has taken it. I was about to give up on it; poets must have tough skins, but 25 rejections is about my limit. I am delighted that the orphan has found a permanent home. Now it can rest in Paz. The poem has, after a lot of wandering, located its best reader, and that's all any poet, including Octavio Paz, can ask for.
~~~
A link between creativity and mental illness
~~~

Ihab Hassan -“Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization”

~~~
Malcolm Gladwell on the full-court press
~~~
This is the season of the commencement speech. An excerpt from Barbara Kingsolver's 2008 speech at Duke:

Wisdom is like frequent-flyer miles and scar tissue; if it does accumulate, that happens by accident while you’re trying to do something else. And wisdom is what people will start wanting from you, after your last exam. I know it’s true for writers -– when people love a book, whatever they say about it, what they really mean is: it was wise. It helped explain their pickle. My favorites are the canny old codgers: Neruda, Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing. Honestly, it is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.

The late David Foster Wallace's 2008 commencement speech at Kenyon

Conan O’Brien’s 2000 Commencement Speech at Harvard

The top ten graduation speeches

England's New Poet Laureate

2009-05-02T19:10:00.003-05:00

Carol Ann Duffy has just been appointed the first woman Poet Laureate of England.
~~~
One of her poems:

Valentine

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

~~~
Why Don't Students Like School? Daniel T. Willingham examines the issue in a new book, review in The Wall Street Journal.
~~~
Ten Literary One-Hit Wonders from The Times Online
~~~
Excerpt from a Paris Review interview with Annie Proulx:

This is a country where awards are invented every day because that’s how readers and publishers and others keep a list of what one should and shouldn’t read. People don’t choose books by covers, they choose them by the gold thing that says, winner of the Blue Shark Award, or whatever. So the awards did a great deal, especially the PEN/Faulkner, because I was the first woman to get a PEN/Faulkner. And then I guess the thrill of awards, like the thrill of traveling, sort of fell away. I’ve moved into a different category of people who have won awards but don’t necessarily have to win one now. Which is all right with me.

A Week of Food

2009-04-30T18:27:00.003-05:00

The Aboubakar family of Darfur province, Sudan

Our friend Joe sent an e-mail dispatch showing families from various cultures around the world along with the array of food that each family eats in one week. These photos, it turns out, are from the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, by photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D'Aluisio.

NPR's Michele Norris reported on the book. The NPR website provides that broadcast, along with photos of some of the families . Also, the site lists exactly what each eats in an average week. The contrasts are stunning. The four-person family that spends the most is German (375 Euros or $500), whereas the Aboubakar family pictured above in a refugee camp in Chad spends $1.23. The total local value of their food is about $24. Presumably much of it is provided by relief agencies.

Certainly, most German families don't spend $25,000 a year on food; nor does the average Chadian or Sudanese family survive on such a subsistence diet. Still, the point is made with the fascinating photo illustrations.

Yesterday I went out and bought a low-end ACER laptop computer so that we can check e-mail and access the internet during our summer travels. Though it is a reasonably-priced model, what I paid for it would provide food for the Aboubakars for five or six months.

Senegalese Poet Amadou Lamine Sall

2009-04-11T08:06:00.009-05:00

Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, Paris

Amadou Lamine Sall

A recent Newsweek article asks, "Is poetry dying?" Perhaps not in Paris. Our final night in Paris, March 20, while four members of our travel group took a boat trip on the Seine, five of us attended a reading at Shakespeare and Company Bookstore by Senegalese poet Amadou Lamine Sall. His English translator Jim Haenlin was there to read the translation first, followed by Sall's subsequent reading in the original French. Given that this historic bookstore sells books only in English, the audience consisted largely of English speakers. The reading was held in a small, crowded upstairs room. I was seated next to a window which offered me a gorgeous view across the Seine of the illuminated Notre Dame Cathedral. After the reading there was a Q and A session, followed by wine, cheese, and crackers. I spoke to the writer briefly, telling him that his mentor, the Leopold Sedar Senghor (a former president of Senegal and its most famous poet, who died in 2001) was a great favorite of mine when I discovered West African poetry in the sixties. From the reading, we proceeded to our final French dinner together as a group. It was a fine way to conclude our nine days in France.

~~~
"Wild Veins," a sample of the poet's work, translated by Jim Haenlin
~~~
My colleague and fellow traveler Pamela showed me a recent article on the bookstore and its distinguished history.

Paris

2009-04-10T18:36:00.009-05:00

Our group and Notre Dame

Sacre Coeur through the Musee d'Orsay Clock

Luxembourg Palace

At the Opera Garnier

The "overseas trip" mentioned in the previous entry occupied the better part of March. I accompanied a group of four students, three faculty members and one Board of Trustees member to France (Paris and Normandy) for nine days. Then on March 21 while the others flew home, I grabbed a flight to Berlin and spent the remainder of the month familiarizing myself with Germany, or as much of it as I could manage: Berlin, Dresden, Nuremberg, Rothenburg, Munich--even a brief foray across the Austrian border to Salzburg.

It was a pleasure to introduce the students to Paris in the off-season, when there were no crowds of tourists waiting to get into the major sites. We breezed right into Sainte-Chapelle, Notre Dame, the Musee d'Orsay, and the Louvre, where I remember long lines when my wife and I were there in May a few years back. We all spent one memorable evening at the gorgeous Paris Opera House at a chamber music concert while sitting in opera boxes surrounded by velvet and staring up at the 12-ton chandelier and the bold Chagall painting on the ceiling.

For more pictures, see My Flickr Photos.

George Kennan

2009-03-08T02:49:00.003-05:00

I've been maintaining this blog long enough (albeit erratically) that certain subjects and motifs have begun to repeat themselves. Yesterday was the second time I've offered up something about John Monro, and today I turn back to George Kennan, whom I wrote about back in 2007. Each time I plan an overseas trip I read from Kennan's incomparably honest and astute Sketches from a Life, a selection from the journals he accrued over his 50 years as a diplomat. In the "Preface," he explains,

The pieces were written, for the most part, only when traveling. For this there was good reason. At home, in the performance of daily professional and personal duties, there was normally no time for this sort of thing; beyond which, this sort of writing required, as mentioned aabove, the novelty and treshness of first impression. You would not write this way about things you saw or experienced every day. Familiarity deprived such scenes, as it did people, of their mystery and their magic. (xi)

Kennan's musings about people and places are worth reading in their own right; I also hope that his descriptions and insights, while far more lucid than mine could be, will prompt me to be a more observant and engaged traveler--not someone who scurries hurriedly from museum to cathedral to monument, brushing across the surface of it all without pausing to think about it. Here is a typical passage, written in 1978:

In Stockholm, throughout the evening, I was being made conscious of touches in the scene--in the light sky; in the ponderous Germanic apartment building that housed W.'s office downtown; in the milling-about of the crowds on the paths of the Tivoli, making the most of the brief northern summer; in the vegetation; in the coolness of the night breezes--touches that reminded me that I was separated only by a relatively small body of water of Riga and Reval and the scenes of my youth. And I was prodded from inside with jabs of nostalgia which no one else could ever understand--nostalgia for that bleak Baltic landscape, for its long dark winters and for the wonder of its brief fleeting summers, for the mystery of the white nights, the sense of proximity of something intensely beautiful and marvelous, the thirst for it, and the awareness that it was not to be.

John U. Monro

2009-03-07T04:53:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I had lunch with Toni-Lee, a friend from Boston who is working on a biography of John U. Monro, who died in 2002 at age 89 and was one of the most remarkable men I've ever known. John and I were colleagues for five years at Tougaloo College, 1978-83. Following his service as a WWII navel officer on the carrier "Enterprise," John held various high-level administrative positions at Harvard before leaving Boston to begin working in historically black colleges, Miles (in Birmingham) and then Tougaloo (in Jackson). His extensive New York Times obituary indicates his prominence and the unanimous respect accorded him by all who knew of his work. Last October, a portrait of Monro was unveiled at the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.

Toni-Lee has been working on the biography for several years and has traveled around the country interviewing his fellow naval officers, university colleagues, and friends. She has conducted research and interviews at Harvard, Tougaloo, and Miles and has spent days in California poring over papers and memorabilia with John's daughter, who coincidentally was a classmate of my wife at Mount Holyoke in the 1960's and has been a big help in the bio project. Toni-Lee brought along a batch of papers and photos to show me. Today she's scheduled to interview a former Tougaloo colleague and friend (now living in Columbia) who also worked closely with John. I wish Toni-Lee the best and am eager to see this project come to fruition.

I wrote one previous blog entry on John .

John Cheever

2009-03-04T06:44:00.003-05:00

A review of a new collection of John Cheever stories and a new bio by Blake Bailey has sent me back to the troubled suburbanite, my favorite American short story writer. Some of his stories, such as "The Country Husband," I can read again and again. Likewise, his journals and letters fascinate me for their brutal honesty and craftsmanship. His novels have never interested me as much, though I liked Falconer pretty well.

~~~

Birthday calculator, providing extensive information on your date of birth

~~~

Germaine Greer on why men are funnier than women

Debra A. Daniel

2009-03-01T08:10:00.005-05:00

Every other Thursday evening, when I can make it to Doc's Gumbo Grille down in Columbia's Vista across the street from the State Capitol, I take my guitar and harmonicas and join the miscellaneous group of musicians who gather for what is dubbed a "bluegrass jam," though the songs often range far afield from bluegrass. Some of the playing tests my musical limits; on occasion, I struggle to keep up. But I always have a good time, even if the jammers packed onto the cramped stage often outnumber the folks in the audience dining on Doc's delicious creole fare.

Two of the mainstays in the group are Jack McGregor and Debra Daniel, who are members of a band that plays regularly around town. I've know Debra at least since 1994, the year we were both on the South Carolina Readers Circuit--a group of 8 poets and fiction writers chosen by the Arts Commission to be available for readings around the state. Last year, we invited Debra to visit the University as a guest writer. Her work (both fiction and poetry) is terrific. She's recently had a chapbook (As Is) published by Main Street Rag. See sample poems and author bio here.

The collection is filled with references to young love, old love, parents, and the rural south in which the poet grew up. Good poets must skirt sentimentality without falling victim to it, and Debra does that well, aided by humor and razor-sharp irony, as seen in this excerpt from "Hymn of Invitation:"

When the lights dimmed for the sermon,
he pulled a pen from his pocket, leaned forward,
drew on the length and meat of his thumb,
a hula girl; and as his knuckles bent and swiveled,
she danced a crimson sway.

His gaze angled at me, brown eyes
so humid, I wanted to lift my hair, let air cool
the nape of my neck. He straightened, crossed
his arms so that his hands were hidden. We sat
not quite touching, the service edging to invitation.

And then his index dinger slow and sure as sin
found and grazed my sleeveless skin,
tracing a line down and up, down and up;
while the girl he had drawn lay folded
and curled tight against his palm.
~~~
Profile of Debra on Southern Artistry site, including excerpts from her writing
~~~
"Impressionists" (flash fiction from Smoke Long Quarterly) and an interview with Debra

Preparing for Travel

2009-02-28T08:39:00.004-05:00

On March 12, I leave for France with a group from the University--several faculty members, a board member, and four honors students. Over Spring Break week, we'll spend three days in Paris, three in Normandy, and then two more in Paris. While in the north, we'll visit The University of Normandy in Caen, where we have an exchange program. We'll also rent two cars and drive to Mont St. Michel, which I've wanted to see since my high school French teacher Mrs. Otis recommended it--and raved about the traditional omelets sold on the tiny island.

Besides brushing up on my French, I've been studying French food in the perhaps futile hope that I'll actually be able to read and interpret a menu. Although there are more words in English than in French, the French gastronomic vocabulary is vast. For bread alone, the French have more words than Eskimos have for snow: baguette, ficelle, flute, batard, pain boulot, pain polka, couronne, pain rond, fougasse, pain campagne, jockey pavot, pistolet, Napoleon, pave de campagne, miche blanche, pain lemaire, epi, souswek, and so on. I hope to sample as many of them as possible in a couple weeks.

On March 21, while the rest of the group returns to the U.S., I'll fly to Berlin to spend ten days in Germany: Berlin, Dresden, Nuremburg, Munich, perhaps Salzburg, Austria. Home on March 31.

Writer's Blog

2009-02-22T06:58:00.004-05:00

A couple weeks ago, my colleague Ted told me that my blog was badly out of date. This surprised me; I hadn't realized anyone ever noticed. I told him I'd been suffering from writer's blog. Poet William Stafford said there's no such thing as writer's block. All you have to do is lower your standards. Good advice for any writer--or blogger.
~~~
I was in Iowa City last week for several days. The weather was warmer than it often is in February, with temps reaching a balmy 38 degrees one day. The most severe weather-related problem that university town faced over the past year came when the Iowa River flooded in June. A number of university buildings along the river were affected; some are still unusable. Apparently, the university has rented out buildings elsewhere in the area to accomodate art and music programs. The university's wonderful art collection was saved, but for insurance reasons, it will have to be housed elsewhere in the future. The art museum building (located right on the river) will be renovated and used for something else. The huge performing arts center is out of commission and may have to be replaced. My Iowa City friend Cile told me about an essay on the flood written by her friend Joe Blair and published in the New York Times.

The nights were busy in Iowa City. Wednesday I heard the Burlington Street Bluegrass Band play at The Mill Restaurant. The next night, I attended Stephen Lovely's reading from his novel, Irreplaceable, at Prairie Lights Bookstore. Friday evening in Wild Bill's used bookstore on the south side of town, I heard Dave Morice read from his quirky The Great American Fortune Cookie Novel, a book consisting only of Chinese fortunes from cookies. Finally, Saturday night took me to the restored Englert Theatre downtown to hear the national Hindi A Cappella Championship. Hindi groups from 6 universities around the country competed. The UC-Berkeley group won. Beautiful music start to finish. Most groups dressed in traditional Indian garb.

John Updike

2009-01-28T13:27:00.005-05:00

John Updike, 1932 - 2009

John Updike died of lung cancer on January 27. I remember reading about the young Updike in Time Magazine back in the 1960's. I was struck by his distinctive facial profile and the fact that he had studied art before turning to writing. I read my first Updike novel when I was in the Peace Corps. His novel Of the Farm was included in my Peace Corps book locker--a varied collection of about 40 fiction and nonfiction books given to each volunteer. There were two or three versions of the booklocker, so I sometimes swapped good books with other volunteers when we met. I was hooked on Updike and read him intermittently from then on, especially savoring each of the four Rabbit books when they came out, decade by decade. I always thought his poetry was underrated partly because it was eclipsed by his fiction (and criticism) but also because he mostly wrote light verse, though it was very good light verse. Some scenes and images from his work have stayed with me. Somewhere, he describes a flock of birds as "a drunken fingerprint in the sky" or something like that. I saw Updike at the University of South Carolina several years ago when USC's Don Greiner, a longtime Updike collector, honored the writer with a large display in the library Rare Books Room. I have the poster commemorating that occasion.

John Updike page at Poetry Foundation Site

Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem

2009-01-23T09:31:00.008-05:00

Here is the original poem Elizabeth Alexander read at Obama's inauguration, downloaded from the Academy of American Poets website (http://www.poets.org/):

Praise Song for the Day
A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.
~~~
Alexander's poem conveys a cluster of admirable sentiments: that even people performing ordinary tasks are worthy, that some have died doing their jobs, that love of others--even those unlike us--is praiseworthy, and that the day holds many possibilities. The poem ends on praise for "walking forward," but I'm afraid the poem is pedestrian in other ways as well. Despite several crisp, effective snapshots, the poem tries to be too encompassing, too inclusive--the perennial trap of commemorative verse.

None of the previous four inaugural poems have been especially memorable. At Kennedy's inauguration, Robert Frost intended to read "Dedication" but fortuitously couldn't see the text because of the sun's glare. So he recited from memory the far superior and appropriate poem, "The Gift Outright." "The Strength of Fields," James Dickey's poem for Jimmy Carter (read at the "inaugural gala" at Lincoln Center rather than at the inauguration itself) was not bad, though by no means one of his best. The contorted syntax and occasional obscurity of the language must have left the audience puzzled--though at his best, Dickey was a strong reader and might have brought it off by sheer force of personality.

Obamania

2009-01-21T09:43:00.002-05:00

Two Films: Special Effects

2009-01-11T08:52:00.008-05:00

I've recently seen The Dark Knight and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. While I'm not generally a fan of superhero movies (related to my lack of interest in comic books?), I found The Dark Knight thoroughly entertaining--much moreso than, say, Iron Man, which seemed to me primarily a showpiece for explosions and special effects, none of which seemed so special in today's "anything is possible" cinema. While the supporting cast (Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart) is strong, the diabolical Heath Ledger makes the whole thing work for me. He's a shoo-in for an Oscar, and not just because of the posthumour sympathy vote.

I found the special effects in Benjamin Button much more astonishing than the pyrotechnic, gravity-defying visuals in any superhero movie. The morphing of Brad Pitt from old man newborn to mature adult to young heartthrob and on to ancient baby was more marvelous to me than anything in The Dark Knight or Iron Man. I like any film that has an air of realism and an utterly impossible premise but makes us believe it to be possible. This is what happens in Benjamin Button. I began by wondering how you could possibly make such a concept work. But the filmmakers succeed--again largely because of a strong supporting cast, notably the always intriguing Cate Blanchett and the surprise of Tariji P. Henson (deservedly nominated for best supporting actress).
~~~
In his Harvard photography course, Robin Kelsey views photography as a “hybrid medium” that is both a simple, automatic trace of reality and an intentional composition that fits the Western pictorial tradition.
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Coldfront Magazine: The year's best poetry
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Rave review of Jackson Bate's new book about Shakespeare
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What's happening to reading?
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Hua Hsu in The Atlantic: "The End of White America"

Flight Patterns and Best Poetry

2008-12-29T08:12:00.003-05:00

YouTube - world flight patterns simulation
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From Whimsyland: Interesting stats on Best American Poetry series, 1988-2008
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Steven Fama's list of 20 outstanding (non-mainstream) poetry books of 2008

Best Books of 2008

2008-12-11T10:15:00.007-05:00

Ron Rash, author of Serena

St. Louis Today: Best Books of 2008
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Amazon.com: Best Books of 2008
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Publisher's Weekly: Best Books of 2008
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NPR: Best Books of 2008
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Washington Post: Best Books of 2008
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NYTimes: Best Books of 2008
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The Ten Best Books I've Read in 2008 (not necessary published this year)

1. Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle - an astonishing memoir of her upbringing by rootless, utterly unorthodox, and finally homeless parents
2. Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine - a fascinating account of the current Supreme Court justices
3. Anthony Swofford, Jarhead - an honest, searching memoir of a marine in the Gulf War
4. Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains - an admiring profile of the amazing Dr. Paul Farmer
5. Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us - life stories/careers of Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Carly Simon

6. Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone - a harrowing memoir by a former boy soldier in war-torn Sierra Leone
7. Jennifer Finney Boylan, She's Not There - a memoir by an English prof. who underwent a sex-change operation
8. Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard - poems elegizing her mother and the Louisiana "Native Guard," a group of black soldiers during the Civil War
9. Philip Roth, Exit Ghost - apparently his final Nathan Zuckerman novel
10. Ron Rash, Serena - another masterful novel chronicling events in Western North Carolina

Christmas Card Collage

2008-12-08T07:52:00.004-05:00

Holiday Greetings

(or, Have a Plaid Christmas)

from our family to yours

Odetta

2008-12-03T05:37:00.004-05:00

Odetta, 1930 - 2008

~~~

2007 interview with Odetta

Robert Service

2008-12-02T08:34:00.003-05:00

Given the unseasonably cold weather we've had for the past week, I turn to Robert Hass and his December 7, 1997 commentary on Wallace Steven's 'The Snowman"--the first item in Now and Then, the great collection of poetry columns Hass wrote for The Washington Post 1997-98. Hass begins this column with an unlikely source: Joni Mitchell's "River" from her album, Blue. Hass contrasts Mitchell's impulse to skate away on a river (thereby escaping the Christmas blues) with Steven's perpetual call for immersion in the immediacy of the moment, bleak though it may be.

My favorite poet of snow and cold is Robert Service, whose poems my dad enjoyed and read while in the Navy in 1945, the year of my birth. I discovered Service's The Spell of the Yukon on Dad's bookshelf--the only volume of poetry to be found there other than A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad. I knew even then that Service was not a great poet, but I couldn't get enough of "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" or "The Cremation of Sam McGee," which begins with these haunting lines:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Legarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

I loved the word "moil," which sounded so much more desperate than "toil"--and the word "marge" as a kind of combination between "margin" and "verge." Mostly, I just liked the grimness of story set against the rollicking rhythm and pitch-perfect rhyme. Doggerel, perhaps, but not bad. When I took a poetry course with James Dickey, I was pleased when he mentioned Service as one of his favorite "bad poets."

My first wife once gave me a first edition of The Spell of the Yukon (1907), which I still cherish. I see online that booksellers are getting upwards of $150 for those now. When my sister-in-law writes from Fairbanks that the temperature is 30 below, I'm glad I'm not there. I'll take my sub-zero weather in the form of Robert Service's verse.

Recent Sketches

2008-11-26T07:13:00.014-05:00

Rauschenberg, Charles, Betancourt, Foote, Wilson, Cheever, Merwin, Snyder, Wrigley, Gladwell

(Click on sketch to enlarge)
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Landscapes made out of food

Fire, High Wire

2008-11-23T21:53:00.007-05:00

First Fire of the Season

Sunflower Seeds

Peppers, Persimmon

I look forward to all the "Year's Best" lists that come around each December. Mid-November seems a little early to start in on that, but today's New York Times Magazine in "The Screens Issue," featured 12 writers, directors, and bloggers, each commenting on the most memorable visual moment of the year (clip, scene, show, movie, computer graphic, etc.). Ann Patchett chose Man on Wire, the superb documentary about Philippe Petit, who evaded authorities to string a cable between the twin towers and walk between them one memorable morning in 1974, shortly after they were completed. Having seen the film recently and marvelled at its quality--not to mention Petit's stunning, audacious high wire act itself--I would agree with Patchett's choice. She writes,

His art was exhilaration, fearlessness, a wild grab at life. The wire he and his friends strung at night between the two towers formed the intersection of recklessness and precision. And those buildings, those silent supporting actors, you can’t help marveling at how young they are. In August 1974, when Petit took his morning stroll, they were still raw on their upper floors, not completely finished. I would wish for those buildings that they could someday be remembered for how they began — with the felonious act of a young man who was madly in love with them, their height, their audacity, their doubled beauty — instead of how they ended. “Man on Wire” gives those towers back to us, at least for a little while. It also reminds us of all that art is capable of when what is risked is everything.

Richard Ford

2008-11-22T10:21:00.006-05:00

Recently, I heard novelist Richard Ford speak at the University of South Carolina in the "Caught in the Creative Act" series organized by Janette Turner Hospital. Ford read an excerpt from The Lay of the Land and then spoke about the origins of that scene in a news item he once read. From there he launched into a pitch-perfect talk on the writer's life. In a self-deprecating note, he evoked Henry James, who said that for a writer to talk about himself is "to serve up the feast that starves the guests."

Ford admiringly drew from F. R. Leavis's essay on D.H. Lawrence, asserting that literature is "the supreme means by which we undergo a renewal of sensuous and emotional life, and learn a new awareness." He said that literature provides a commentary on what convention has no response for. He also quoted Thoreau: "A wrtier is one who, having nothing to do, finds something."

Ford said a writer must honor the skeptical view hinted at by Thoreau and at the same time the Leavis contention that the word is magical/mysterious/enlightening. Good writers hold those opposites in mind, something that a liberal education should teach us to do. In the end, he said a novelist must believe that "life is worth the notice the novel gives it."

~~~

From an interview with poet Dana Levin in The Kenyon Review:

G.C. Waldrep: What, then, is the relationship between autobiography and imagination in your work?

Dana Levin: The interesting question here is: what constitutes autobiography? I think of the Prologue to Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Carl Jung’s autobiography (undertaken when he was 83 and a fascinating read, particularly in terms of autobiography as form). In it he says,

In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which I include my dreams and visions. These form the prima materia of my scientific work. They were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to be worked was crystallized.

For “scientific” let’s say “poetic.” And for autobiography’s “childhood” let’s say “psychic development.” And I mean psychic, which is not only psychological because it includes notions of soul, or whatever you want to call the non-egoic inhabiting spirit in each of us. The suspicion in which I held Confessionalism while in grad school was well-founded in terms of aesthetic concerns, but it was absurd in terms of being a student of the psyche. How can one advance one’s study of human experience without plumbing the depths of one’s memories, deepest feelings and dreams?

~~~

Other Kenyon Review Interviews with Writers: Ted Kooser, Rebecca McClanahan, Stanley Plumly, many others

Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival

2008-11-21T20:43:00.012-05:00

Our annual campus Fiction and Poetry Festival unfolded on a beautiful fall weekend, November 6-8. Tom Perrotta kicked things off on Thursday with a colloquium in the afternoon during which he discussed his novel, Election, an appropriate choice for this year and a book that a number of classes had read. Several classes, including my own composition sections, had read his story collection, Bad Haircut. Perrotta's work went over well, and students turned out in force for his reading and commentary. That night, he read from Little Children and talked about the writing life.

Over the next couple days, Ethan Canin, Valerie Martin, Sara Gran, Robert Wrigley, and Dorianne Laux held sway. Each did a reading/presentation, and each took part in at least one panel discussion or informal session. We combined the two poetry classes for a meeting with Wrigley and Laux, whose work we had read and who were captivating for students. They're good friends, and this was evident in their easy back and forth discussion. A great bonus for the weekend was the presence of Joe Millar, Laux's husband and a wonderful poet in his own right.

Tom Perrotta --- Ethan Canin

Valerie Martin --- Sara Gran

Robert Wrigley --- Dorianne Laux

Wrigley, Laux, and Millar
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Obama's Acceptance Speech

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Top Ten Endangered Languages

and 280 Other Top Ten Lists

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Poet Donald Finkel dies at 79

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Finkel Poems from The Cortland Review

Three Writers

2008-11-16T09:39:00.006-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell: a profile and review of his new book, Outliers

Remembering Matthew Bruccoli

Camille Paglia: How she selected the poems for Break, Blow, Burn

Obama

2008-11-05T08:18:00.009-05:00

Yes, we can!

Election Speakers on Campus (2007-2008)
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Commentaries on Obama's Election:

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. , Sara Hebel, Lawrence Tribe, Anne Applebaum, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Shelby Steele

Back to the Blog

2008-10-27T06:31:00.008-05:00

It's been 3.5 months since my last blog entry, over 100 days. I took a break because I was busy reading other blogs, because other projects intervened, and because of blogger's angst: not so much the lack of anything to write as an excess, the need to be selective--that and the sense that no one looks at this compendium of miscellany anyway. Not that I'm addressing an audience here. Some blogs seem calculated to start or perpetuate a conversation, but I've never quite seen this one in this way, though I welcome the few readers I have.

I've been pondering the value of a blog, in the same way that for years of on-and-off journal keeping I've weighed the worth of notebooks, diaries, commonplace books, daybooks, whatever you call them. Do they energize the writer, furnish a stockpile of ideas, consitute a valuable record, provide a low-risk blank canvas to fill? Or do they sap the writer's energies, draw away from other more worthwhile projects, become self-indulgent?

Poet Marvin Bell writes, "Why a journal? Well, I like writing that spills over. I want to live as much as possible at the ends of my fingertips rather than, say, in the capillaries of the brain. I like it when the soup simmers, the kettle hisses. I want it, I require it, I trust it." Yusef Komunyakaa says, "For me, there has to be an absolute flexibility in maintaining a notebook. My notebooks are really scrapbooks--pieced together with fragments, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, long and short passages, magazine and newspaper clippings, postcards, etc. Thus, I attempt to avoid any kind of rote structure." And, according to Heather McHugh (also a poet), "The notebook is a site of insecurable premises: it's where a writer can turn and return to the unprefixed. The notes entered in a writer's notebook--unlike headnotes and footnotes--are not appendage; they depend from no foregone body of work." Writers give multiple reasons for keeping track of words and ideas in notebooks, and those reasons no doubt change from page to page.

But blogs are different. The are composed by computer, so the format gives them a facade of polish and formality, even if the writing is rough and tumble. There's the pretense of a public audience, which notebooks or journals don't have. Blogs allow more readily for smoothly interfaced visuals, esp. photos. And there's the public permanence of blogs. They're out there in the blogosphere until the writer eliminates them. They're both more permanent and more evanescent/more compact than bulky written notebooks or journals. They don't take up much space and memory, but they can expand to great dimensions.

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Kate Ryan as the new poet laureate (from Slate)

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Emily Dickinson in the Wall Street Journal

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Emily Dickinson's Lover

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Yves Rossy Flies Across the English Channel

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Auburn University professor popularizes philosophy

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Jonathan Haidt: The Real Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives

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Jonathan Haidt's Homepage

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Andrew Sullivan on “Why I Blog”

Tracy Kidder's MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS

2008-07-13T18:48:00.004-05:00

Tracy Kidder and Paul Farmer

For the past month, driving on the road and in town, I've been listening to the CD version of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's an extended profile of the incredible Paul Farmer, a Harvard M.D. who specializes in infectious diseases and has made a career out of combatting MDR (Multiple-Drug Resistant) TB and AIDS, problems that often co-exist, especially in the developing world. He spends much of his time at a clinic he founded on Haiti's central plateau, but Partners in Health (PIH), the organization he helped start up, has outposts in Peru, Siberia, Rwanda and other locations. Farmer's background in anthropology (an undergrad degree from Duke) and his abiding interest in the cultural roots of medical issues gives him a unique perspective on some of the world's most intractable health problems. It helps too that he has seemingly unlimited energy and a mind like a steel trap. It's hard to overstate the impact his ideas and practices have had on the world health scene. For the book, Kidder follows his usual modus operandi, shadowing his subject and engaging in what is often called "immersion research." This includes flying all over the world with Farmer, observing him in action in almost every conceivable venue, which takes in a lot; Farmer is in great demand as a consultant and speaker.

I've read every book Kidder has written since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Soul of a New Machine (1981), a fascinating account of the seemingly boring process of building a new computer. My favorite is House (1985), a detailed account of the contruction of a house in Massachusetts, with an emphasis on the builders, the owners, and the architect. Kidder's work, like that of John McPhee, suggests that nearly anything can be made interesting when it's given painstaking and creative attention. In the case of Mountains Beyond Mountains he was dealing with an inherently interesting subject, the amazing Paul Farmer, as well as others in his circle like Ophelia Dahl and Jim Yong Kim.

One difference between this and Kidder's previous journalsm is the author's stance. Kidder makes himself a character, something he avoided in previous books, so that we are aware of his struggle to keep up with the tireless Farmer as he treks up a mountain to visit a patient. Kidder followed this 2003 book with a memoir, My Detachment, an account of his service in Vietnam--and there too he obviously revealed much of himself. According to this recent interview, Kidder is still in touch with Farmer and is pleased that his book has played a role in publicizing the doctor's work.

Ishmael Beah's A LONG WAY GONE

2008-07-08T06:20:00.007-05:00

Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is a gripping, harrowing account of the author's coming of age as a teenage military recruit in war-torn Sierra Leone. He tells about how he and several friends left home at age 12 to visit the village of Mattru Jong 16 miles away. While there, word comes that Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels have attacked their hometown, killing many people. When they attempt to return, they see people fleeing the area and are first exposed to the brutality directed toward civilians. Beah never again sees his family members, and this marks the beginning of a long ordeal. Eventually, he and his friends are forced to fight with the Sierra Leone army. They go through a grueling whirlwind training and are issued AK-47s. A couple of the boys aren't even strong enough to hold their weapons up to fire them. Beah is lucky enough to survive in the catastrophic environment, and he reports his own implication in acts of extreme violence and cruelty. The soldiers are given drugs to desensitize them and are in other ways enured to the brutality that surrounds them. Finally, he is fortunate enough to be saved by a United Nations group that is in Sierra Leone trying to prevent the recruitment of underaged fighters. He is flown to New York to speak at the UN about his life, and ultimately he's able to return to the U.S. where he eventually attends Oberlin College. He now lives in New York and speaks on behalf of children affected by war.

His book (begun under the guidance of Oberlin professor Dan Chaon) is engagingly written, containing an astonishing amount of detail about events in Sierra Leone. Occasionally, there is a sort of sophomoric naivete in the language, which actually seems to fit the voice of the former boy soldier. Here's a typical passage:

The villages that we captured and turned into our bases as we went along and the forests that we slept in became my home. My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector, and my rule was to kill or be killed. The extent of my thoughts didn't go much beyond that. We had been fighting for over two years, and killing had become a daily activity. I felt no pity for anyone. My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.

The leanness, even bluntness, of the writing serves well to convey the life he lived, despite the cliches ("as if my heart had frozen") that sometimes creep in. The language suggests a tension between boyish wonder or matter-of-factness and the horrors that he experiences.

There were certain passages, such as when he is shot three times in the same foot, that raise for me some questions about credibility. So I was not surprised to find that others have questioned various elements of his story. No one doubts that he was a boy soldier and experienced extreme horrors. But a group of reporters from The Australian (a Rupert Murdoch publication) have called into question some aspects of his tale, as Gabriel Sherman reports in SLATE. There is some evidence that he was a soldier only two months, not the two years that he mentions above. The factual questions have created a vitriolic debate between the publisher (Farrar Strauss and Giroux) and the reporters. Even Beah's English prof from Oberlin has entered the fray. None of this is to minimize the impact of his story. There is no doubt that he directly experienced war in a way that few can imagine. And at least the book doesn't raise the more severe sorts of credibility issues that have come up with James Frey's A Million Little Pieces or, more recently Margaret Seltzer's concocted "memoir" of gang life in L.A.

A Long Way Gone comes out in paperback in August, so I'm tempted to make it a last-minute choice for my Literary Nonfiction class in the fall.

~~~

Judith Thurman writes in The New Yorker about prehistoric cave art

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L.A. Times review of Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation

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On Poetry Daily, two poems by David Wagoner that make me want to buy his latest book

Achebe, teaching, violinists, poetry, music

2008-07-04T09:05:00.005-05:00

Chinua Achebe, winner of the 2007 Man Booker International Prize

~~~

Beginning to think about and plan for my fall courses, I returned the other day to Ken Bain's study of outstanding college and university teachers, What the Best College Teachers Do, published by Harvard University Press. In a nutshell, the best teachers maintain an intellectual interest in their subjects and convey that interest to their students, inviting them to join a professional conversation. They plan their courses based upon what student outcomes they want to produce, so in a sense they begin at the imagined end of the course. Whatever method they use in teaching (lecture, discussion, workshop, etc.), they establish a "natural critical learning environment", urging students to continuously ask questions and construct meaning for themselves, rather than being handed knowledge on a platter to be digested and forgotten. Good teachers assess student mental models and preconceptions and attempt to improve on those models, making them more accurate. They convey facts, but always in relation to problems, issues, larger concerns. They engender instrinsic motivation for learning, not extrinsic. They observe and think carefully about student learning types/modes and try to accomodate to those. Finally, they maintain high, though not unreasonable, expectations for students. Much of this is good common sense, but it's easy to lose track of these principles.

Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Claudia, former newspaperwoman and now an English/journalism teacher at a local college. I gave her a copy of Bain's book--a meager repayment for all the review copies of books she's given me over the years.

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Gene Weingarten on two violinists, 77 years apart

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Jay Parini on “Why Poetry Matters”

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Steve Vineberg on the art of surprise in movies

Two Movies

2008-06-02T17:55:00.007-05:00

A week or so ago, J and I went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The lukewarm reviews didn't deter us. We were just eager to see Harrison Ford with whip and fedora after a long layoff. Our critical antennae are cranked way down for the likes of such fare. Just as the critics pointed out, the plot is puzzling and sometimes seems a set of events to build a few good chase scenes around. The blatant anti-Russian stereotyping was a throwback to the anti-Nazism of the very first Indiana Jones romp. Cate Blanchett's cartoonish accent and demeanor were playfully wicked or wickedly playful. And the young fellow who comes on like Brando in The Wild Ones and then latches onto Indie like a wise-ass barnacle is himself a caricature, but worth watching, if for no other reason than the surprise that he embodies. There's a bunch of trap doors, water-filled caves, corny special skull effects and mystical hocus-pocus. And a very sweet ending. Good guys and bad guys. A bunch of killing, but nobody really gets hurt. As a summer action movie, it's not bad.

Then, Saturday night we joined a handful of middle-agers and oldsters in the theatre to see The Visitor. This one isn't exactly a blockbuster, but for my money it was much more engaging than the histrionics of Indiana Jones. A burnt-out, apparently depressed college economics professor (Richard Jenkins) has to travel from his Connecticut home to his little-used apartment in Greenwich Village to deliver a boring paper at a conference. He discovers a couple has moved into his apartment; someone has rented it to them in a scam, knowing it was seldom-used. They are unmarried and in the U.S. illegally, he from Syria and she from Senegal. In the unlikeliest turn in the movie, the introverted prof befriends them, neglecting his teaching to take up the cause of the young Syrian interloper when he is arrested and jailed as an illegal alien. This relationship, and his introduction to drumming (taught by the Syrian), bring the widower to life. The plot becomes more interesting when the young man's mother suddenly arrives from Michigan. The whole story is restrained, understated, and achingly human, with a strong political message thrown in. Excellent.

Was Stonehenge a cemetery?

~~~

Obit for writer George Garrett, 78, who taught for a time at the University of South Carolina

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1001 books to read before you die

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Laura Fendrich on the late Robert Rauschenberg

Island Cemetery

2008-05-31T08:55:00.022-05:00

Daufuskie Island Cemetery

In moss-draped oaks

near the marina

souls hover

above sand

and sawgrass,

then return

on the wind

to Africa.

The stones

rest lightly

on the dead,

drowned in cotton and indigo.

K.A.

Daufuskie Island

2008-05-29T19:07:00.008-05:00

Hilton Head - Daufuskie Island Ferry
One of many gorgeous live oaks on Daufuskie Island

First Union African Baptist Church - 1882

Mary Fields Elementary School (1930) , where Pat Conroy taught

I've spent the past three days in and around Hilton Head. The occasion was the annual meeting of representatives from the 11 universities in the Peach Belt Athletic Conference. It took place at the Crowne Plaza Resort. I was one of four reps from my fine institution. I had little expertise to bring to the discussions of athletic scheduling, conference expansion, annual budget, and so on. But I found the deliberations interesting and early next week will pass my notes along to our president (whom I was sitting in for). Plus, the food and accomodations weren't bad.

Because the fun didn't really commence until the Wednesday evening reception and dinner, I decided to leave home early that day and make time for an afternoon excursion to Daufuskie Island, just across Calibogue Sound from Hilton Head's Harbor Town. I've been interested in the island and its history since reading Pat Conroy's first book, The Water is Wide, shortly after it came out in 1972. It tells the story of the year he spent as a teacher in the two-room schoolhouse on the island (which for some reason he calls "Yamacraw"). It's a fine book that yielded a mediocre movie, Conrack, starring Jon Voight. For years it was nearly impossible to get to Daufuskie without a private boat. (There's no bridge to the island.) But now there's a regular boat service for $23 round trip aboard the Captain Eulice. It takes an hour, and the ride over and back alone is worth the fare.

Upon arrival at the marina, most visitors rent gas-powered golf carts to motor around to the 13 points of interest shown on the laminated map available at the general store. I chose to rent a thick-tired bicycle, which provided me with a superb three-hour workout as I pedaled over the partly paved, partly dirt (or sand) roads winding around the island. The dimensions are about 5 miles by two miles, although parts of the island are private and off-limits. Of greatest interest to me was the old schoolhouse where Conroy taught at about the same time I was teaching in even more primitive conditions as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana. Also worth the pedaling were the various cemeteries, the beautiful old Baptist Church, the pristine, almost-empty beach, the miniscule Silver Dew Winery, and a massive eagle's nest (with no eagles in sight).

The island has far fewer year-round inhabitants than back in the 19th century when slaves worked the plantations to produce fine quality Sea Island Cotton. After the boll weevil did in the cotton, and indigo and lumber were no longer big crops, the population dwindled even more. Now, there are only a few hundred residents, some of them Gullah descendants of slaves. But upscale resorts, condominiums, and houses are now encroaching on the now-undeveloped expanses of palmetto/live oak/pine woodlands and the attractive island beaches. No doubt, it's just a matter of time before Daufuskie, like Hilton Head itself, will become essentially a densely populated gated community where only the well-heeled are welcome. It would be a shame and a disgrace to lose the wild acreage and the reminders of the rich history (sometimes violent and often oppressive) that give the island its character.

Writers' Obsessions

2008-05-27T06:41:00.005-05:00

I've been reading Li-Young Lee's Book of My Nights (See also my March 30 entry). These poems, published in 2001 by Boa Editions, mine a relatively narrow range of elemental topics, though their forms and effects vary widely. Again and again these poems refer to mother, father, the seasons, night, the sky, death, and birds. A selection of opening lines suggests these concerns:

Who lay down at evening
and woke at night
a stranger to himself?
-
In the dark, a child might ask,
-
I never claimed night father me.
-
Say night is a house you inherit,
and in the room in which you hear the sea
declare its countless and successive deaths,
tolling the dimensions of your dying.
-
Another word for father is worry.
-
The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it.
-
Someone's thinking about his mother tonight.

The effect of this uniformity of interlocking themes and motifs is powerful and cumulative (even obsessive if not excessive) through the book. Lee's other work shows that he ranges far beyond these concerns, but the concentration here makes the the volume read almost like one continuous poem. I'd like to get that sort of intensity into my own work, which to me seems sprawling, unfocused, all over the map. Maybe others could see in my poems a uniformity that isn't evident to me. Certainly, I've found that others' comments and suggestions can be startlingly perceptive, teasing out threads or problems I don't initially see.

Some writers seem to return to a set of obsessions repeatedly, in work after work. I think of Ron Rash's frequent returning to Lake Jocasee and how when it was formed it covered over a number of rural communities and forced the disruption of a culture. His first novel, One Foot in Eden, addresses this in part, as do some of his poems and stories. Most recently, in Chemistry, his stories nominated for Pen Faulkner Award, the story "Not Waving but Drowning" returns to that theme. To sustain a novel or even to cultivate a successful body of work in any genre, a writer needs to confront and make use of obsessions.
~~~
Today, Kathleen Parker's column addresses the issue of a "boys' crisis" or a "girls' crisis" in schools
~~~
In the May 26 New Yorker, Ian Frazier writes about his experiences teaching writing once a week at the biggest soup kitchen in New York, located in the Church of the Holy Apostles, at the corner of 28th St. and 9th Ave. He writes, "... I am one of the teachers of a writers' workshop that meets there after lunch on Wednesdays in the spring. I started the workshop fourteen years ago, with the help of a grant. I wanted to do something with the soup kitchen because I admired the people there and the way it is run and the whole idea of it. There are so many hungers out there; the soup kitchen deals, efficiently and satisfyingly, with the most basic kind. I consider it, in its own fashion, a work of art." Frazier discusses this work in a 14-minute on-line interview.

Mom's Birthday

2008-05-25T09:08:00.003-05:00

Max, Nell, Trey, Mom

My Mother’s 90th Birthday

She never gets out of bed.
Her lifeless left side
keeps her there at the mercy
of her daughter and her nurse,
providers of food, drink,
cleanliness, fresh bedclothes.

But this one afternoon
she stirs and seems to hover
in the air, suspended,
as a parade of visitors
comes bearing cards
and good wishes: for comfort?
a long life? the year ahead?
She asks, “Aren’t we lucky?”

I photograph the guests
entering in clusters. She never tires
of posing with them,
her good right side smiling
to spite her passive left.
For once, her appetite is enormous.

~~~

South Carolina Poetry Initiative Online Chapbooks

Dargan's Pond

2008-05-05T13:51:00.007-05:00

To celebrate the almost-end of the semester, Lynn (also a native of Auburn, AL), and I went kayaking on Dargan's Pond, about 15 minutes from campus. As shown in the above photo taken by Lynn, one end of the pond contains a maze of tupelo and cypress trees. Paddling among them was like gliding soundlessly in an old forest. One section was noisy with the calls of nesting great blue herons. It was a bit windy but otherwise idyllic, balmy but too early for mosquitoes. In addition to the herons, we saw nesting ospreys who wheeled and cried out shrilly when we approached. Best of all, Lynn directed my attention to two bald eagles perched in a tall tree. One of them pushed off and glided for several minutes over our heads. No alligators.

News photo of the week from Newsweek: a man stacking rice bags, illustrating an article on rising food prices

~~~
Katrina Vandenberg's Mix Tape on Organizing a Poetry Collection

~~~

Alice Walker’s estrangement from daughter Rebecca
~~~
Gary Wolf in Wired on Developing a Good Memory

New Orleans

2008-04-08T07:38:00.007-05:00

I was in New Orleans Wednesday-Sunday for a conference, staying at the Hilton on the river and across the street from a Harrah's casino that seemingly occupies several city blocks and dominates the neighborhood grotesquesly. In the wake of the economic, political, and social disaster that was Katrina, perhaps the city needs every penny it can squeeze from such establishments. New Orleans is also bringing in some entertainment money. Throughout the conference, Canal Street was swarming with folks filming a movie to be called "12 Rounds." The median of the street was littered with torn up cars, streetcars packed with extras, and a strange little Mardi-Gras-like carnival scene in which actors in skeleton get-ups wandered. The French Quarter was just as elegantly shabby as ever, Bourbon Street even more audacious and in-your-face, and the food, right down to the beignets at Cafe du Monde, still unparalleled. I did not get out to the Ninth Ward to witness the devastation rom the flood--and I'm not sure I wanted to.
There was plenty of talk about Katrina at the conference. I particularly liked the talk by Jed Horne, who wrote Breach of Faith, by many accounts the best book about the hurricane, the flood, and the disastrous response from the government.
~~~
In other news, my chance to win the huge campus NCAA basketball pool were dashed last night when Memphis choked in the final minute of the game, missed 4 out of 5 foul shots, and allowed Mario Chalmers of Kansas to sink a 3-pointer with 2 seconds on the clock to send the game into overtime and give the Jayhawks enough momentum to get the win. It was a superb game with a heartbreaking outcome for Memphis. But if you can't hit your clutch foul shots down the stretch, I guess you don't deserve to prevail. That Chalmers clutch shot deprived me of a handsome return on my $10 investment.

Li-Young Lee

2008-03-30T08:30:00.004-05:00

Yesterday at 6 p.m., J and I went to hear Li-Young Lee, who spoke at the University of South Carolina in connection with Asian Arts Week. He conducted a master class the day before (which I now wish I had attended). This evening session was supposed to be a sort of preliminary to the later Gamilan Concert, and he had been asked to talk about connections between music and poetry. Fortunately, he didn't adhere to that charge too closely. Instead, he talked about synchonicity and its relation to poetry.

He told a couple good stories of synchronous events and then built a connection between that sort of happening (which we all experience on occasion) and what happens or should happen in a poem. He described the best poems as striking a balance between probability and randomness. That is, a successful poem relies on the reader's perception of the probability of certain patterns or forms or themes--some regularity. But the poet must introduce some random, or seemingly random, elements that violate the regularity. A poem can't be too regular (too reliant on probability) or too random. It's the balance that we seek. A good poem gives the feeling of synchronicity, sort of like what we experience when two complementary events come together surprisingly in our lives.

When, after his 30-minute talk he asked for questions, I asked him to read one or two poems and talk about how those principles were evident in the poem(s). He read "The Hammock," from his collection, Book of My Nights. The poem begins:

When I lay my head in my mother’s lap
I think how day hides the stars,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside may mother’s singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and the kindergarten,
once each morning and once each afternoon.

He speaks genuinely and thoughtfully in a quiet voice, and his assertions about poetry are utterly convincing. I only wish there had been time for him to read more poems. We bought two books, including his newest, Behind My Eyes. I heard him read several years ago in Daytona Beach, and yesterday's session was equally as rewarding, though much briefer because of the constraints of the schedule.

~~~

Dith Pran, Killing Fields photographer, dies

Davidson Advances

2008-03-28T06:33:00.012-05:00

My alma mater, Davidson College, has defeated Wisconsin decisively (73-56) and advanced to the Elite Eight in the NCAA basketball tournament. Davidson's star, Stephen Curry (above), has scored over 30 points in each of the first three NCAA wins so far--a feat accomplished by only 3 players previously. Davidson was seeded 10th in the region and has become the Cinderella at The Big Dance. Let's hope the basketball doesn't turn into a pumpkin.

~~~

Eric Alterman on the fate of journalism

~~~

Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences 25 years later

~~~

Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth, a novel in free verse

~~~

Hank Williams: 11 number one hits and a lot of back pain

~~~

An inspiring story of a mugger and muggee on NPR's Story Corps

~~~

Penn Faulkner Award Winner and Finalists

Book Choices

2008-03-22T08:01:00.004-05:00

This week's intense 3-day campus visit from our SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) reaccreditation team produced a happy outcome: only several minor recommendations in response to our massive self-study and our so-called Quality Enhancement Plan for improving instruction in the future. Because this process takes place only every ten years, I won't have to go through it again.

Now I can focus my attention on selecting textbooks for the fall. This process is made more interesting and complex because of the lineup of writers we'll bring in for the November Fiction and Poetry Festival: Tom Perotta, Ethan Canin, Valerie Martin, Sara Gran, Robert Wrigley, and Dorianne Laux. That's 4 novelists, 2 poets. I'm trying to decide which books by which authors I want to use for my 2 freshman composition courses. Some of my colleagues are planning to use Perotta's Election, tying it to the fall election season, although the book concerns a high school and not a national election. Maybe I'll order Ethan Canin's stories, The Emperor of the Air--or maybe something by Valerie Martin. She's written a biography of St. Francis that I may use for my literary nonfiction class. I've ordered it and will give it a look. Currently, I'm rereading Canin's stories, which are superb; I just can't decide how freshmen would respond to them.
~~~
I usually avoid political proselytizing on this blog, but today I can't resist exclaiming about Barack Obama's incredible speech on racism delivered March 18 in Philadelphia, largely in response to recent negative publicity about inflammatory and highly controversial statements made recently by his minister, Jeremiah Wright (from whom Obama borrowed the title of his book, The Audacity of Hope). This one is bound to be remembered as one of the greatest campaign speeches ever. Film and text of the speech are available here.
~~~
Are English Departments Dying?

Interview with Janne Debes, Midwife

2008-03-16T20:02:00.001-05:00

Brief film by Akane Igarashi: Janne Debes, Midwife

Wendell Berry and Pete Seeger

2008-03-16T07:29:00.009-05:00

Interviewed in Shenandoah magazine, Wendell Berry says, "The poet is a wilderness looking out at the wild." He also says, "The music in a song or in a poem is its continuity, what keeps it coherent and alive. It then becomes a sort of metaphor for whatever it is that keeps us alive in the world, all of us creatures together. But what you’re trying to do in any kind of writing is to keep the thing continuous from end to end. You can interrupt a continuity for certain effects, if you want to — you can put a caesura somewhere in the middle of a line — but if the continuity isn’t strong enough to accept the interruption and carry through it, then you’ve lost more than you’ve gained."

Janne and I happened to catch parts of a program on Pete Seeger this morning while eating our Sunday waffles. This was one in a series of extended musical features on PBS to compliment their semi-annual fundraising drive. As I watched footage of Seeger, now 84 and still singing in Carnegie Hall, I felt renewed admiration for him, his life, his music. He was banned from TV for 15 years for his politics but went ahead with his performing anyway. Finally, the Smothers Brothers invited him onto their show, where he sang his anti-Vietnam War song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy." The studio cut that song out of the program, a decision that was met with a huge outcry. It was awhile before that song was aired. Along with his dogged commitment to Civil Rights and anti-war activism (through his songwriting and personal performances), he took on the issue of the pollution of the Hudson River and almost singlehandedly mobilized public support for cleaning it up. He never does a performance without having the audience participate. And he continues to favor audiences of children. His life is a manifestation of the credo, "Think globally; act locally." Here is Seeger singing "Guantanamero." And singing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy."

I admire Wendell Berry and Pete Seeger for similar reasons. Both are consummate artists who have devoted their work to good causes. Berry's causes are conservation, peace, and respect for the work of hands and the virtues of basic farming. His essay, "The Failure of War," is a thoughtful manifesto for peace.

The Man Born to Farming
by Wendell Berry
The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?

Locavores

2008-03-10T08:10:00.004-05:00

Book jacket photo of Kingsolver/Hopp family by Hank Daniel

I've just finished Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family's move from Arizona to Virginia coupled with their decision to spend a year eating only local produce (or as close to that ideal as they could get). The account unfolds chronologically from one March to the next and details the year's gardening, turkey and chicken raising, and questing for local food sources. The family's motivation was mainly ecological--the desire to minimize their dependence on food shipped from overseas or trucked from afar at immense cost in energy. But Kingsolver also convincingly asserts the old macrobiological principle that it's healthier to eat locally. Kingsolver proceeds with a light touch that leavens the serious principles she espouses and helps avoid any self-righteousness. The family is methodical about their "locavore" experiment but not obsessive. They buy coffee, spices, and occasional chocolate from distant sources, splurge on cranberries for Thanksgiving, and never succeed in finding a good local source for wheat flour. Topical sidebars by Kingsolver's husband Steven Hopp (a biologist) and her older daugher Camille (a Duke student) complement the narrative.

Although I recently read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (a nice companion piece to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), I don't remember previously reading an entire book so exclusively about food, covering everything from the problems with agribusiness to a recipe for pumpkin soup. I guess I was pulled in by the scope of it, coupled with the intimacy of family life (e.g., the younger daughter Lucy's establishment of an egg business or decisions about exactly what to serve dinner guests in mid February). We have always eaten conscientiously in our house and have even previously had substantial gardens (something that our fully shaded yard now sadly precludes). But I've never been "into" food--unlike my mom who in her day could pore for hours over recipes (to delicious effect) and--until we started weeding them out--had hundreds of cookbooks in her collection. I admit that I didn't digest every recipe in this book, but I read with fascination about the family's dogged and ingenious back-to-the-land lifestyle.

Obviously, most families could not do this because of the demands of jobs and family, as well as limitations of space. Most of us would encounter far more crop failures and botched plantings than Kingsolver admits to. But she's not trying to convert us all into complete locavores, only to urge us to think more carefully about our food sources and act accordingly.

Spring is the perfect time to read this book. It leaves me longing to dig in the soil and plant something, even if it's just a few herbs or a tomato in a bucket. I do look forward to a future when I'll have time, space, and sunlight for an ample garden--one that might move us a little closer to the ideal of eating locally.

~~~

Claire Tomalin on the greatness of Milton

~~~

MTV "Think" page on current issues

~~~

Poetry videos

Tattoo

2008-03-09T08:50:00.004-05:00

I have earned a mention on a web site devoted to "Tribal Butterfly Tattoo Designs." It seems the author somehow tracked down my poem, "The Butterfly Tattoo," and decided it would fit nicely onto this page. You never know when and where your poetry will reach an audience. At least I'm given credit for the poem.

~~~

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists . . . and Winners

~~~

L.A. Times Book Award Finalists

~~~

"Poetry, Philip Larkin once said, is a machine made of words: The reader puts the penny of her attention into the slot and pulls the handle; out comes a feeling. Which is true of any art form, no?

"But for my money, only a poem can be replicated in toto, no piece missing. We remember overall novel plots or isolated sentences. A movie character or balletic leap haunts you. A tune may stick in your head. These are fragments. Only a lyric poem -- committed to memory in language we all use -- can be activated anytime, anywhere, yielding an artistic experience in its entirety. Pinned in a subway car with arms at your sides, you can call up a poem and enter a cathedral of words that anoints you again in your singular passions. And great poems keep moving in us forever, time and again."

Mary Karr, introducing a poem by Archilochos in the Washington Post "Poet's Choice" column.

Steve and Eric

2008-03-07T19:57:00.007-05:00

Several years ago, when my friend Steve moved from Upstate New York to Sicily, he sent me four big boxes of poetry books. We have talked about and corresponded about poetry on various occasions since 1969-70, when we both taught at Roosevelt Junior High School in Syracuse. Steve's impressive collection contains a number of long-out-of-print pamphlets, chapbooks, and heftier volumes, many of them from the beats and other counter-culturists from the sixties and seventies. It contains numerous originals from City Lights Books, such as Ginsberg's Howl and Kaddish. Steve had collected much of the work of A.R. Ammons, his poetry teacher at Cornell. I keep this special collection on a couple shelves in my office, readily available from my rocking chair. I refer to it often and sometimes loan the books to student poets.

The other day I received an envelope from Steve containing Eric Unger's limited edition Just as Form, from House Press, June 2007. This is typical of the stuff Steve sometimes introduces me to and that I would never discover on my own. This 5.5 in. by 7.5 in. thread-bound chapbook consists of 27 untitled poems, few of them over 11 lines, each spare and fragmentary. The blunt stanzas most commonly run 2 to 4 lines. Lots of white space. The collection is filled with elemental words and phrases: tree, moon, sun, eye, wood, water, ice, black, white, star. Here is one poem:

In a black night
sleep deepens
further.

The star out
the window
is the North Star.

Its distant burning
is the only light
in the dream.

The concentration of these 26 mostly monosyllabic words forces the ear toward the repeated "ee" sound, the echo of "night" and "light," the doubling up on "star." The mostly terse lines contrast with the longest and slowest line, "Its distant burning." The repeated sounds and motifs through the book urge us to see the small collection as all of a piece. When occasionally we come across a word like "circus" or "apogee," so out of keeping with the pervasive organic, naturalistic diction, the word stands out, drawing energy to itself. I'm glad Steve introduced me to this Chicago poet.

A Poet Cop

2008-03-06T08:50:00.005-05:00

Not long ago, Scott English appeared at my office door. He graduated from FMU last spring and had taken my Introductory Poetry Workshop. He was wearing a neatly pressed shirt and tie. He had a handgun and a badge on his belt. It seems he's now a policeman in Charleston and was on campus to speak to classes about law enforcement. Something of a whiz with computers, Scott started his own computer business while an undergrad and while still working at a local grocery store. He says he continues to do computer work to supplement his cop's salary. It pleases me to know that there's at least one patrolman on the beat who is not only a computer geek but also a poet--and not a bad one at that.
~~~
Roof

The roofing contractor
shows me a bird’s eye
sketch of my house
with its peaks, troughs,
angles, and vents.
The abstract planes
ripple with white
three-tabbed shingles,
giant fish scales
deflecting water.

Twenty years ago
my father and I
did the work.
Now I’m too old
to replace a roof.
When the men begin
peeling off the old,
that will be one more
wide, flat remnant
of my father gone.

K.A.

Debra Daniel

2008-03-02T09:01:00.007-05:00

Poetry and fiction writer Debra Daniel paid us a visit at Francis Marion University last week. She visited classes, including my poetry workshop, and read from her work Wednesday night. I've know Debbie at least since 1994, when we were among the eight writers selected that year for the South Carolina Readers Circuit. A Blythewood resident, she taught fifth grade for many years until her recent retirement. Now she's apparently writing more than ever. Also, she and her husband Jack play in a band and every other Wednesday take part in a jam session at Doc's Gumbo Grill in Columbia. I went down and played with them once last fall. Debra Daniel's website provides samples of her work.

~~~

Old Towns

In towns of my past
the streets uncoil
like ropes frayed
with use, scarred with
small slights, past corners
burnished with habit.

I walk them over time,
almost there, whistling
with pedestrian sadness.
I pass hardware stores,
the grills, the pizzerias,
one per town, silent.

K.A.
~~~

Review of Richard Cook's biography of Alfred Kazin

~~~

Obits for William F. Buckley, Jr.: AP, New York Times, Washington Post

~~~

Why do writers drink?

~~~

Russell Jacoby on "the cult of complication"

Eclipse

2008-02-21T08:17:00.006-05:00

Viewing conditions were perfect for last night's full lunar eclipse, and the moon hung unobscured above the trees. I set up our Meade mini-telescope, which was about the right power for the viewing. I was watching the Coen Brothers' movie, "Miller's Crossing," on DVD but stopped it intermittently to step out into the driveway and check the eclipse. When it was fully shadowed, though still dimly visible from refracted light, it looked more like an actual three-dimensional ball than it normally does, burnt orange in color. The proximity of Saturn and a couple bright stars added to the strange effect.

The last eclipse I remember clearly was an eclipse of the sun shortly after we moved to Columbia. Janne and I took the girls with us to Greenville, where the view was supposed to be better. A list of eclipse dates tells me there was a solar eclipse visible in the Eastern U.S. on May 30, 1984. That must have been it. Here's a poem I wrote, roughly based on that memory:

Eclipse

Remember how we drove six hours
to see the moon's shadow
forge across the sun and leave
a black hole in our daily light?
Our earthbound bodies
were in transit as we rigged
our telescope and camera
to record the crossing over.

Nothing lasts: our career
among the stars made us reel
with the earth and spin
from the moon's umbra quick
as we felt cool midday twilight,
that hint of how the sun
may go. No way to make
the moon or sun stand still.

We knew the danger
in such darkening:
the corona round the moon's
black disk could seem
a harmless wreath of fire,
while one short glimpse
would ruin eyes
as blue as yours.

~~~

One woman's blog: 200 books in a year

Iowa City

2008-02-18T16:42:00.010-05:00

University of Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories - designed by Frank Gehry
Staircase in the Old Capitol - University of Iowa

I've just returned from several days in Iowa City, where I was consulting with ACT (American College Testing) for the English portion of the college admission test. While in the Cedar Rapids Airport, I saw a wall-sized poster ad for Maharishi University of Management, which is located in Fairfield, Iowa. Its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, recently died. The poster was a reminder that the guru, who has lived in the Netherlands in recent years, was a entrepreneur as well as a spiritual guide. Back in 1971, Janne and I paid the student rate to undergo training in Transcendental Meditation, which was led by a TM disciple traveling through Auburn, Alabama, where we lived at the time. The trainer,actually wound up staying with us at the farm house for a night or two. He wore a neat sports jacket and tie and brought with him a bag of grapefruit. We meditated for several years, and I still think that I'd probably benefit from twice-daily meditation. My mantra--assigned to me during the training and supposedly a secret--surfaces in my consciousness from time to time, and I still chant it to myself when I need to relax.

~~~
David Orr on poet Mathea Harvey
~~~
A reading by Naomi Shihab Nye, who says "We are all born poets. Some of us just keep it up."
~~~
"A writer is a person who would not have written what he wrote if he hadn’t started out to write it." William Stafford

~~~

My essay, "Radiation," is finally available in Drunken Boat

Flannery Tucker Bosher (Annie)

2008-02-11T20:34:00.000-05:00

Annie Bosher

Born Wednesday, February 6 at 2:42 p.m.

Weight: 6 lb. 11 oz.

Richmond, Virginia

Parents: Tess Autrey Bosher and Matthew Paul Bosher

Grandparents: Ken and Janne, Bill and JoAnne

Jasper Johns

2008-02-02T06:32:00.001-05:00

Update on painter Jasper Johns
~~~
Keep your brain fit.
~~~
Iraq in relation to previous U.S. military blunders

51 Birch Street

2008-01-31T07:50:00.000-05:00

51 Birch Street (see web site) is a documentary by New York filmmaker Doug Block about his parents. I rented it from Netflix thinking it sounded interesting, and within minutes of sliding it into the DVD player was hooked. At first it's simply a documentary of an ordinary Long Island family. For posterity, the son decides to record some footage of his parents, who are in their seventies, his mom decidedly better preserved than Mike, his dad. At first, the camera is mostly on Mina, the mom. The son has always felt closer to her, and she has an engaging, voluble manner, as opposed to his dad who was "another story." A cirumspect, introspective engineer who escaped to his cluttered basement shop and seldom interacted with his kids, the father (a "fifties dad") has always been hard to get close to. The filmmaker and his two sisters, who are frequently on camera, agree on the remoteness of their father.
The camera freqently flashes back to photos and film footage of earlier days. It's obviously a well-documented family. And then, rather suddenly, his mom develops pneumonia and within three weeks is dead. This sends him into a tailspin which is complicated not long afterward when his dad becomes engaged to a former secretary who has been living in Florida. Immediately, there are suspicions that his dad has had an ongoing affair with Kitty, who comes to Long Island to help Mike pack up, sell the family house, and move to Florida.
When the family comes across Mina's voluminous diaries and Doug, after some hesitation, begins to read through them, he and his sisters have to revise their assumptions about their parents' marriage. And the the unexpected result is an unprecedented closeness to his dad, who ultimately does move to Florida with Kitty. It's a gripping film, though it's about ordinary middle-class people who spent most of their lives in an ordinary middle-class community. It's finally a commentary on the hidden lives some (perhaps all of us to some extent) live while trying to make everything work out right. This film made several lists of the ten best films of the year.
~~~

K. Silem Mohammed's useful discussion of School of Quietude vs. Post-Avantism
~~~
Song

She was born into music,
and now her disheveled hair
hovers above a keyboard
in a room lit by a computer
screen’s glow, jagged
horizontal lines sounding
out six parts: voice,
background guitar, bass,
lead guitar, snare, high hat.
It comes together
in the phones that cup
her ears like muffs.
She nods to the pounding
beat of the road,
its ravages and bliss.

K.A.

Two 4-Letter Films

2008-01-26T08:59:00.000-05:00

Marketa Irglova and Glenn Hansard in Once

I ordered Once from Netflix and watched it last night. It's a wonderful Irish movie about a street busker (Glen Hansard) who works in his father's Hoover repair shop and meets a young Czech woman (Marketa Irglova) who peddles flowers and lives in a crummy apartment with her mother and her child. He discovers that she too is a musician, a pianist, and they agree to write songs together. The two of them actually did happen to meet in life and wrote the wonderful and unusual songs that form the movie's soundtrack. One of them,"Falling Slowly," has been deservedly nominated for an Academy Award. The acting is so unassuming and natural, their attraction for one another so gradual, convincing, and understated, the ending so perfect, that I could easily have watched it through again.

Tonight, Janne and I went out to see Juno, also a pitch-perfect movie with a great soundtrack--not exactly a love story, but something close to it. Ellen Page is phenomenal as a 16-year-old kid who gets pregnant, is never at a loss for words, and from start to finish embraces her own immaturity while proving herself at least as ready for life as the adults around her. J.T. Simmons and Allison Janney are great as her working class dad and dog-loving step-mom. Michael Sera is convincingly gawky as the clueless but surprisingly sensitive father of her kid. The youthful patter comes thick and fast, usually from the smart-ass mouth of Juno herself. As with Once, I just didn't see any false moves. There's some real tension and angst toward the end, and then the outcome feels just right. I'm tempted to buy the soundtracks for both of these gem-like films.

Chelsea Again

2008-01-24T07:07:00.000-05:00

Chelsea Clinton, backed by America Ferrara, Amber Tamblyn, and Keyshawn Johnson

The Grille, a student eatery on our campus, was packed with students, faculty members, and a few townies, including the mayor, when Chelsea Clinton and her entourage arrived a little before 10 a.m. Tuesday for a surprisingly long session for Hillary. The supporting cast included actors America Ferrara (Ugly Betty), Amber Tamblyn (Joan of Arcadia), and Keyshawn Johnson (NFL veteran). Chelsea held the floor longest, asking for questions following brief introductory remarks. She was poised and articulate, thoroughly briefed on her mother's positions. When someone asked about an issue (such as health benefits for illegal immigrants) she wasn't intimately familiar with, she went ahead and said, "We haven't discussed that, but I think what my mom would say is...."--and she proceeded with a perfectly reasonable response. The most interesting comments came after personal questions: "What did the three of you talk about at the White House dinner table?" or "What secret can you tell us about your mother?" Her response to the latter was to tell how obsessed with "Gray's Anatomy" both of her parents are. They never want to miss it. I was surprised at Chelsea's wisdom and maturity, but then I remind myself that she's now (like her father) a graduate of Oxford University and is a 27-year-old financial analyst in New York. So she's not exactly a shy and gawky first daughter any more. My colleague, political scientist Alissa Warters, has written about presidential children and so was especially interested in meeting Chelsea. Alissa sat on the front row for the rally, but I don't know whether she broached the idea of an interview. An hour or so after the Clinton rally, Chris Tucker was on campus speaking for Barack Obama; I had to miss his lively talk because of a class. It's a shame when teaching stands in the way of our education at Francis Marion University. The South Carolina Democratic primary is Saturday, so this season's string of visiting politicians and surrogates now ends, and the candidates (those few still in the race) move on to Florida or to the states holding primaries on Super Tuesday (Feb. 5).

~~~

"One Laptop Per Child" extends to the U.S.

~~~

The pollution of academic travel

South Carolina Primary Season

2008-01-18T17:17:00.001-05:00

Chelsea to stump for Hillary on campus next week

As my previous post on Michelle Obama suggests, the state of South Carolina is crawling with presidential hopefuls in anticipation of tomorrow's Republican primary and, a week later, the Democratic contest. I have yet to see a credible argument for why the primaries are held on separate dates. Voters may cast ballots in one or the other but not both.

In an effort to plunge my English 112 composition class into the fray, I'm requiring my students to take the candidate quiz sponsored by Minnesota Public Radio, determining which candidate's views best match their own. (Of course, over half of the original candidates are no longer contenders.) Then, I ask students to select one issue mentioned in the quiz and write a position paper in which they explain and document two candidates' positions and then go on to clarify their own view, whether or not it matches that of either candidate.

So far, class discussion indicates that immigration is drawing the most interest (just as it is in among state legislators this term), with health care, education, and social security also attracting some students. Interestingly, only one or two plan to write on Iraq. This seems to reflect the waning of this as a campaign issue in recent weeks. The relative success of the "surge" has, at least for now, quieted critics of the war and taken suicide bombings out of the headlines.

I'm not requiring my students to divulge their presidential choices, but as we continue to talk about the issues in class, I imagine some of their loyalties will surface. Mainly, I just want to urge them to inform themselves, engage in dialogue, and vote in the primary races. Too few college students register and vote.

Rumor has it that Chelsea Clinton and America Ferrara will be on our campus Tuesday on behalf of Hillary.

~~~

The strange life and obscure death of Bobby Fischer

~~~

The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945

~~~

Should Vladimir Nabokov's son publish the author's unfinished manuscript?

Michelle Obama

2008-01-14T19:25:00.000-05:00

Through some odd blogging convergence, Barak Obama's sketch was the final one uploaded in my last posting (Jan. 5), and now I turn to his wife Michelle, who happened to visit our campus this morning, speaking in the commons area of the Student Center. Pretty close to the announced hour of 10 a.m. one of my former students, a soft-spoken but articulate Katrina refugee from New Orleans named Nadiyah, introduced Obama, and she came striding out like a statuesque fashion model in a shimmering cerulean blue blouse and dark skirt. She introduced her brother (visible above to her left in a lavender shirt) and Barak's sister (to his left) and then spoke with passion and power for about 30 minutes. She didn't miss a beat. I had the impression she was focusing carefully on this audience, half students and faculty, half adults from the community. The crowd was probably at least half African-American. She had much to say about education, the rising cost of college and how not so long ago she and her husband had just finished paying off their loans. She was highly critical of No Child Left Behind, a theme that had a lot of audience support.

She laid out the Obama position on the war, noting that despite the sacrifice of our soldiers and many Iraqis, most of us in the the U.S. haven't been asked to sacrifice a thing. Instead, we've been urged to "keep on shopping." She said that her husband's call for change means not only that government should change but that the thinking of all of us (toward the world, toward the economy, toward the environment) should change. She emphasized her husband's background, his decision to turn away from lucrative job possibilities after graduating from Harvard law and instead to work for social causes in Chicago, his adherence to his principles from the outset. Several times she called up the phrase: "To whom much is given, much is expected." She said, "True, my husband is cute. But his ideas are even cuter."

She makes a terrific spokesman for her husband. Michelle Obama is relaxed, firm, self-assured, and gracious. I can't help but think what a wonderful first lady she'd be. In fact, after her talk, I'm about ready to vote for her. A presidential spouse/attorney with her own drive and ambition? Imagine that.

Mitt Romney will be on campus Wednesday, and John McCain will make a return visit before long. (See McCain on my posting for March 2, 2007.) We're working up to the Republican primary Saturday and the Democratic primary a week afterward. It's a good time to be a political junkie in South Carolina.

Recent Sketches

2008-01-05T06:54:00.000-05:00

Recent Sketches (Point and click for enlargements.)

~~~

"Subprime" is linguists' word of the year. But I like "googleganger." (See my blog for 11/12/06.)

~~~

I've just discovered slide.com, a site for organizing photo slide shows and creatively presenting them to others. Here's a brief show featuring family Christmas shots: Christmas 2007. First watch the 7 slides, the click on "original view" to get the "gallery view," an "old movie" version of the slides. Numerous other presentation styles are available.

~~~

Challenge: Write a poem in which each word starts with the final two letters of the previous word. The poem’s final word must return to the poem’s opening word.

Take kettle’s essence cents
Tsavo votive vessel elbow
owner errata table lease see
eel elevate terribly lying
Nguyen entreat at Attila’s
aspirin intake keep epiphonic
ice center errata.

Ashes

2008-01-04T06:57:00.000-05:00

A couple days ago the local newspaper carried a story about the growing interest in "green burial," where a body is buried in a simple cardboard or wooden box that will decompose quickly. The grave markers are very simple, such as a stone flush with the ground. But even green burials take up space. Although cremation uses energy, that is my preferred final end, and I've already told my daughters Nell and Tess that I don't want to be stashed in a columbarium or kept on someone's mantle in an urn. I want my ashes scattered somewhere in the open, free and unconfined. This seems the most ecological, it relieves my survivors of paying for or maintaining any sort of burial site, and it suggests that my family can best remember me as I was in life and through whatever useful or attractive artifacts I've left behind.

Ever since Janne and I traveled in France a few years ago, exploring Autrey-les-Gray, the rural town near Dijon where the Autrey family originated (and left, cast out as Huguenots), I've said that I wanted my ashes scattered beneath the Eiffel Tower. Recently Nell asked me why I kept insisting on this, and I responded with 10 reasons:

1. The Eiffel Tower is near the Autrey ancestral homeland.

2. I prefer a gray instead of a green burial.

3. It's so crowded there that no one would notice you scattering ashes.

4. Every time you see the tower, you'll think of me.

5. We can't afford a plot in Pere La Chaise Cemetery in Paris (where Jim Morrison and Balzac and other notables are buried).

6. No one else has claimed the Eiffel Tower as a memorial. It might as well be me.

7. It will still be there long after anyone who has ever heard of me is dead and gone.

8. It's a beautiful monument, and you can climb to the top of it and get a great view. I can't think of any other burial monument you can say that about.

9. Scattering my ashes there will provide at least you and Tess (and any other family members who care to go along) with a chance to have a good time while mourning my passing.

10. The burial plot won't cost a thing, but I plan to set aside $10,000 to defray travel expenses at least for you girls.

Ultimately, though, I told Nell that such a trans-Atlantic ceremony wouldn't be necessary. I agree with her that it would be preferable for us all to travel to Paris before, rather than after, I die. So, we'll have to plan for that. And my ashes can just be dumped in a nice field somewhere.

~~~

World Hum (online travel writing): most popular stories of 2007

~~~

"Zen and the Art of Poetry," an interview with Jane Hirschfield in Agni

~~~

164 scientists answer the question, "What have you changed your mind about?"--from Edge

~~~

10 weirdest news stories of the year

Entry #100

2008-01-03T08:56:00.000-05:00

This is my 100th entry in this experiment in blogging which I began 14 months ago with the intention of focusing loosely on my reading, writing, and teaching and how those three endeavors interact. As the presidential election year of 2008 starts up, I'm thinking about how this process of intermittent online journaling is going, what I've learned, and how I might want to proceed differently in the future. First, although the site meter tells me that I get occasional hits from around the country and the globe, most of those visitors linger only a few minutes at most and are directed to my blog through a search for some topic I've addressed. I have no regular readers as far as I can tell, and I get only occasional online comments--so far all of these from friends who know I'm blogging. So, this project only makes sense if it serves a good purpose for me. Certainly it has helped me keep track of online items that interest me and that I may want to return to.

Also, my work has prompted me to pay more attention to what other bloggers, especially those interested in poetry, are doing. Some, such as Bill Knott, use their sites as (among other functions) a way of making their work available online. Others, such as my former colleague Matt Schmeer in "The Great American Pinup" use the blog primarily to write about contemporary poetry. The most comprehensive blog I'm aware of is maintained by the incredible Ron Silliman; little wonder that he gets a half million or so hits per year. I've come to rely on Silliman's insights and his compendium of web links about writing and film. I'm responsible for a good number of those half million hits. I like being able to maintain an online list of blogs and web sites that I want to regularly check out.

I continue to grapple with how tightly thematic I want my blog to be. Although I generally focus on my professional concern with writing and reading, sometimes family observations and photos intervene, and I'm sure that will continue. Occasionally I like to write about film, visual arts, and other fields indirectly allied to my teaching, research, and writing interests. The blog does require time, which I could spend writing poetry, planning lessons, working on an article. But this regular commitment (an average of a couple entries per week) doesn't seem too onerous, and it is consistent with my longstanding interest in diaries, journals, daybooks, notebooks, sketchbooks--all of these forms of exploratory personal record-keeping and idea-gathering. In addition to this blog, I keep a more personal journal, as well as a sketchbook. When I'm traveling the journal and sketchbook run together, a single book serving dual purposes.

~~~

Poets face the necessity "of reinventing a voice, the possibility of a voice, beginning with one's own solitude, one's own isolation, one's own difficulty. And with marginality, too: one's own and that of peotry and poetic language."
--Fabio Pusterla, translated by Geoffry Brock in Poetry (12/07) special section on contemporary Italian poetry

~~~

The Turning

To the drumbeat of dropping leaves,
I stash my savings
in the bank of December.

What difference does water make
when the trees have shed
their best hues in darkness?

Under turbulent fish
I swim the techtonic gale
breathing in winter rhythms..

The orchestra’s coral rhapsody
hastens my oak desire,
spins the world into hope.

--K.A.

Carver, Orleans, and others

2008-01-02T09:50:00.000-05:00

Raymond Carver's collaboration with Gordon Lish from The New Yorker
~~~
The New York Times Carver archives
~~~
Interview with Susan Orlean from Writing on the Edge
~~~
Kahlil Gibran, third best-selling poet after Shakespeare and Lao tzu
~~~
Index to Poets and Writers profiles
~~~
136 Vietnamese Proverbs

Merry Christmas

2007-12-25T06:34:00.000-05:00

This Year's Tree

(with oak table made for Jane Clare)

This Year's Family Photo

(taken at Thanksgiving)

This Year's Christmas Card Photo
(taken last May in Burano, Italy)

"Are you willing ... to own, that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness ... to make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings ...? Then you can keep Christmas.” (Henry van Dyke)

The Year's Best

2007-12-24T07:04:00.000-05:00

The Year's Best Baby: Max Driggers

N.Y. Times notable op-ed pieces of 2007 (See esp. the one by Dick Cavett.)
~~~
Top 10 visual illusions of the year
~~~
Best book cover designs of 2007
~~~
A.O. Scott (N.Y. Times) on the year's best movies
~~~
John Pareles (N.Y. Times) on the year's best pop CDs
~~~
NPR Critics on the year's best books
~~~
Roger Ebert on the year's best movies
~~~
Fimoculous: all the "best of 2007" lists, hundreds of them
~~~

The best books I've read this year

Ron Carlson, Five Skies
Annie Dillard, The Maytrees
B.H. Fairchild, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat
Robert Haas, Time and Materials
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma
Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs
John Williams, Stoner
~~~
The best movies I've seen this year

Babel
Charlie Wilson's War
The Children of Men
The Last King of Scotland
Letters from Iwo Jima
Michael Clayton
The Three Burials of Melchiades Estrada
The Valley of Elah
Volver
Venus

"A Little Struggle," Tomkiw, Beasley

2007-12-20T07:32:00.000-05:00

A Little Struggle

The older I get,
the slower words come.
I spend my time
making spaces
for the good ones,
sending runners
to bring them back
unharmed, still left
with a little struggle
and a strong heartbeat.

-- K.A.

~~~

A poem by Lydia Tomkiw in which each line is a palindrome, quoted by Paul Hoover in his blog:

Six of Ox Is

O, no iron, o Rio, no
red rum murder;
in moon: no omni
devil-lived
derision; no I sired
Otto,
a
drab bard,
Bob,
but no repaid diaper on tub.
O grab me, ala embargo
emit time,
Re-Wop me, empower
Eros' Sore
sinus and DNA sun is
fine, drags as garden if
sad as samara, ruff of fur, a ram; as sad as
Warsaw was raw.

~~~

Raymond Federman on writer's diaries:

I think all writers who keep a diary are insincere. They are aware that their diary will be part of their archives and that what they write will become public after they die.Therefore they invent things - they make up stories. One should almost read thediary of a writer as as work of fiction -- Andre Gide says that much in his Journal.Also it is possible that writers who keep diaries may censure themselves knowing thatwhat they write may injure their posterity -- or on the contrary they may write certain things to make people think they were better or smarter or more original or whatever than they were. They improve themselves in their diary. (from Federman's blog, December 13, 2007)

~~~

"The World War Speaks," a poem by Sandra Beasley in Slate

~~~

5 poets on the best poetry of 2007

~~~

The book scene in 2007

~~~

Caleb Crain on the demise of reading

Arbus and Others

2007-12-17T06:38:00.000-05:00

The New York Times reports that the Met recently acquired the Diane Arbus archives. 32 years ago, for Christmas 1975, Janne gave me a collection of Diane Arbus photos. That was four years after Arbus committed suicide at age 48. Since then, I've been fascinated by her work, the conscience and persistence she brought to her craft. More than any other photographer, she developed a consistent and rigorous philosophy about her art. She once said, "Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize." In the introduction to the photos, which must have been written shortly before her death, she writes,

... a photograph has to be specific. I remember a long time ago when I first began to photography I thought, There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them, so if I photograph some kind of generalized human bein, everybody'll recognize it. It'll be like what they used to call the common man or something. It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it'll be. You really have to face that thing. And there are certain evasions, certain nicenesses that I think you have to get out of.

This point about specificity reminds me of an anecdote from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an account of how a student in his class struggled to write an essay about her hometown until he convinced her that describing a building is easier than describing a town and that describing an individual brick is easier than describing a building. I try to remember that when I teach writing. The power of the close-up.

In 2005 the Arbus archives were on display at the Met. We happened to visit the museum the first day the exhibit opened, and I was delighted to discover it. But then we found that on that day admission to the exhibit was limited to those with special tickets. I had to see it though, so I snuck in through the exit and was able to see it all.

~~~

Don Aucoin profiles poet Afaa Michael Weaver

~~~

In Shenandoah, an interview with Wendell Berry

~~~

Sociologists are using Facebook for research into such topics as "triadic closure"

~~~

"Locavore" named "word of the year" by the New Oxford American Dictionary

~~~

"W00t" named "word of the year" by Merriam-Webster

~~~

As Oprah gets more political, a look back at her life and career by Lee Siegel

~~~

Poems from Guantanamo prisoners

Two Films

2007-12-12T06:12:00.000-05:00

Edith Piaf------------------- Marion Cotillard as Piaf
I've recently watched two films from Netflix: La Vie en Rose and The Namesake. La Vie, direced by Olivier Dahan, is a biopic about Edith Piaf, documenting her tempestuous life--raised as a child in a house of prostitution, discovered as a singer in the bars of Paris, gripped at the peak of her powers by drug addiction, finally rediscovered after rehabilitation but doomed to die young in her mid-forties. Marion Cotillard's Piaf is full of life, humor, and nerve, though deeply anguished in her darker moments--no doubt a true recasting of Piaf's actual character. But in the end I remain more moved by Piaf's songs than the plot of the movie itself. It just seemed to slip too readily into cliche--the talented, charming, sometimes self-centered wastrel ultimately done in by her excesses.
The Namesake, directed by Mira Nair, on the other hand, I find moving and effective. It seems pretty true to what I recall of the novel. It's a gutsy film in the sense that it initially focuses on Asoke and Ashima Ganguli, their arranged marriage, their move from India to the U.S., and tensions in this cultural dislocation, but then moves ahead quickly to their years when their son and daughter are teens and then young adults. So the story line shifts from the parents to the son, Gogol, and his attempts to negotiate between his American tastes and his at first tenuous ties to his Indian culture. Kal Penn is endearing and convincing in this role. And his parents are effectively played by Irfan Khan and Tabu. Visually wonderful, accentuating the heat, clutter, and family chaos of Calcutta as opposed to the frigidity of winter in New York.
~~~
My original blog with Xanga.com is still available here. There's not much to it other than some poetry experimentation, which I did along with the poetry class I required to keep blogs.

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize Speech

2007-12-10T07:52:00.000-05:00

Doris Lessing, by Scanpix/Ulrich Perrey

~~~

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Excerpt: Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration." If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

~~~
Braille tattoos, minimal chairs, and other new ideas and inventions in 2007

~~~

Scathing review of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke

OLPC XO-1

2007-12-09T19:43:00.000-05:00

The current issue of WORLDVIEW, the magazine of the National Peace Corps Association contains a message from President Kevin Quigley concerning "More Peace Corps," a plan to exert influence on presidential candidates--and other elected officials--to allocate more resources to the Peace Corps, desperately needed now at a time when the U.S. has alienated itself so widely. Quigley reminds us that JFK's plan for the Peace Corps quixotically envisioned a million volunteers per decade. To date, close to 200,000 volunteers have served. That's quite a few, but there could be far more, judging from the number clamoring to join and the number of countries requesting more help.

The same issue contains several articles on how technology is slowly changing the developing world. Cell phones are helping Indian fishermen market their catch and Maasai herdsmen sell their cattle. Sam Goldman, a former PC volunteer in Benin, is working on an LED light that could replace the potentially dangerous and expensive kerosene lamps used so universally in the developing world. And Wayan Vota provides an update on the lagging "One Child, One Computer" movement, Nicholas Negroponte's scheme to get cheap computers in the hands of students in developing countries. Here are answers to frequently asked question about the project.

Negroponte is facing several problems with this ambitious scheme. The cost of the computer is roughly twice what he was hoping for; thus, the "Buy one, give one" plan, which encourages people to spend $400 to own one and donate one. The problem there is that these computers are specifically designed for children who can work with others owning the same hardware and software. There's likely to be little demand for them in homes with enough money to make such a donation. Another issue is that while some countries (Peru, Brazil) have expressed an interest in purchasing at least some, the idea hasn't caught on in a cost-effective way. Educators need to be convinced that the "constructed learning" that the computers are designed for is a viable approach because it poses a radical change from a more traditional teacher-centered classroom.

One way to interest schools and communities in the so-called XO-1 is to give them to Peace Corps volunteers to distribute and use in their classrooms. That would be a way to both make the technology available and to ensure that it is used well.

Digitizing Books

2007-12-08T09:46:00.000-05:00

My Office Wall

An article from The Weekly Standard announces Google's plan to digitize 32 million books. This is one of a growing number of developments that are taking the printed word increasingly to the computer screen. Amazon.com has recently announced Kindle, a compact handheld computerized reading device with a large storage capacity (over 200 books, newspapers, or blogs). The screen mimics black ink on paper, easy on the eyes. There are currently over 80,000 books available to buy, most of them 9.99. You can also subscribe to newspapers, magazines, and blogs. The cost for Kindle: $399. Another online reading service is WorldCat, short for "World Catalog," which allows you to search thousands of libraries for books, beginning with libraries closest to you. Some books are available digitally. One response to Google's ambitious online text scheme is the Open Content Alliance, a group of libraries that resist having commercial interests take over the online publication of books. The Universal Digital Library at Carnegie Mellon University is up and running with a number of books currently available. When I tried accessing it, I was denied access because of heavy traffic, but interestingly, I was given the option of trying one of 3 sites in India or sites in China or Egypt. I chose one in India and was able to get to Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. For a while, I've been aware of Bartleby.com, which makes available a list of free online books. The basic issue faced by Google, as well as its competitors is the obvious one of copyright violation for books still falling within the 28-year limit (extendable by 60 or so additional years). Apparently, they're seeking permission to digitize books where the copyright is still in effect. Interestingly, book publishers are beginning to face some of the same proprietary issues that have stirred up the music industry in recent years.

Kids and Photography

2007-12-01T05:47:00.000-05:00

Photo by Zana Briski--the kids from Born into Brothels

Tonight Janne and I watched Born into Brothels, which won the 2005 Academy Award as the Best Documentary. Photographer Zana Briski went to Calcutta to take photographs in the red light district. When she saw the kids' fascination with cameras, she began giving them cameras and film and developing their photos. She talked with them about their work and about photographic principles, and some of the results are stunning. Briski arranges field trips to the zoo and ocean for these incredibly impoverished girls and boys.

Given their cramped existence in brothels where their mothers turn tricks on the other side of a thin curtain and where they come under constant verbal, sometimes physical abuse, it's astonishing that they are so full of life and so open to Briski's guidance. They are charming and in their own language (subtitled with English) can be very articulate in explaining visual effects. The most gifted is 11-year-old Avijit, already an award-winning artist. Briski works for weeks through agonizing bureaucracy to get him a passport so that he can represent India in a youth photography conference in Amsterdam. Incredibly, he's able to go. And later, like several of the others, he is admitted to a good boarding school where he has some hope for the future.

Most of the group, however, seem destined to remain in the brothels of Calcutta. The girls who remain will surely wind up on "the line" like their mothers. The film is visually intense, catching the teeming masses in Calcutta and the maze-like ghetto where the prositutes ply their trade illegally. The website for the film contains photos and descriptions of the kids, as well as samples of their work.

Similar to Briski's "Kids with Cameras" project is California photographer Jamie Lloyd's Ghana Youth Photography Project. Jamie served an internship with a newspaper in Accra, Ghana and got the idea of putting cameras in the hands of kids in Nima, a poor, predominantly Muslim district. I profiled Jamie in the Summer 2006 issue of Talking Drum, newsletter of Friends of Ghana. Jamie posted a YouTube clip on the project which has had nearly 250,000 hits. She sent in an update on the project, which may be found in the Spring 2007 Friends of Ghana newsletter. Jamie's own photos, documenting her extensive world travel, are found here.

~~~

R.I.P. Evil Knievel
~~~
Christina Nehring on the fate of the essay
~~~
Review of John Richardson's new volume on Picasso
~~~
What some poets are reading now--from Third Factory

Auburn University Rural Studio

2007-11-27T07:15:00.000-05:00

When poet Naomi Nye visited FMU three weeks ago, she found out that I was from Auburn, Alabama, so she asked if I were familiar with the Auburn University Rural Studio, a project run by the School of Architecture that designs and provides innovative housing and public buildings for poor communities.

It was originated by Samuel Mockbee in 1991 when he accepted a faculty position at Auburn. Although Mockbee died in 2001 of leukemia when he was still in his late 50s, his work goes on. Naomi and her photographer husband have long been interested in the project, and she is willing to do a free reading at Auburn in exchange for a tour of the Rural Studio. I'm working on setting that up, perhaps for the spring.

Lucy House, designed by Rural Studio student architects

~~~

NEA Report: To Read or Not to Read, a study of the decline in reading in the U.S.
~~~
College slogans
~~~
Wordsworth's ego
~~~
NCTE Orwell and Doublespeak Awards

Simic, Collage, Dada

2007-11-26T20:12:00.000-05:00

Little Theatre, 11/25/07

For today's class, I had my English 360 (Literary Nonfiction) class read poet laureate Charles Simic's "The Necessity of Poetry" from his 1995 book The Unemployed Fortune Teller. It's a series of anecdotes, apparently disconnected--an example of what is often called "segmented writing." Common motifs in the 35 or so segments are war, parents, clothing, food/drink, reading/writing, male/female relationships. Most of them convey a little mystery or unknown element. It's a verbal collage. Here he's writing about how his violin teacher would sometimes feed him: "'Poor child,' she'd say, and I thought it had to do with my not practicing enough, my being dim-witted when she tried to explain something to me, but today I'm not sure that's what she meant. In fact, I suspect she had something else entirely in mind. That's why I'm writing this, to find out what it was." It's as though Simic writes poetry to make sense of these enigmatic scenes, to explore and elucidate them.

In the August 10, 2006 New York Review of Books, Simic reviewed an exhibition on Dada at the Museum of Modern Art. Simic reviews the origins of Dada in 1916 Zurich--the art/music/poetry/dance exhibitions of Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. He writes, "All forms of imitation, the Italian Futurists had already announced, must be despised; all forms of originality glorified. The idea was to make something no one had ever seen or experienced before."

As Simic notes, Kurt Schwitters figures prominently in the Dada movement, which lasted into the early 1920s. Schwitters' openness to all artistic materials, which he called "Merz," is an attitude I find attractive, and his experimentation with various media and endeavors (painting, collage, poetry, architecture, sculpture, music) is reminiscent of William Morris, another artist and writer I admire who also developed a life philosophy that motivated his art.

Recently, I've gotten back into collage and often find myself turning to Schwitters as well as painter/collagist Estaban Vicente though they work in entirely different ways, Schwitters with orginary, often drab, cramped bits of detritus from everyday life, Vicente with bold swatches of color arranged in dynamic ways.

~~~

NY Times Notable Books 2007 and Previous Years

Robert Service

2007-11-21T07:31:00.000-05:00

Robert Service, 1874-1958

On September 21, I mentioned the collection edited by Peter Davis, Poet's Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets On Books That Shaped Their Art. Having met Naomi Shihab Nye, I'm now more interested in her list of influential works, which includes Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, Thoreau's Walden Pond, three by William Stafford, and all of W.S. Merwin, as well as several others. Here is my own brief list of poets and books, sometime specific poems, that shaped my art--or at least motivated me to write poetry:

John Donne (The Songs and Sonnets)
John Keats ("Ode on a Grecian Urn")
Emily Dickinson
William Butler Yeats ("Sailing to Byzantium")
William Carlos Williams ("The Yachts")
W.H. Auden ("In Memory of W.B. Yeats")
Robert Service (The Spell of the Yukon)
Dylan Thomas ("Fern Hill")
Richard Wilbur ("Merlin Enthralled")
James Dickey (Poems 1957-1967)
Seamus Heaney (Death of a Naturalist)
Linda Pastan (PM/AM)
B.H. Fairchild (The Art of the Lathe)
Yusef Komunyakaa (Neon Vernacular)

I'm afraid it's a pretty traditional list, mostly white males. These are poems and poets that I'm presumptuous enough to call influences, though there are many others I admire, enjoy, look up to, emulate. Maybe the most unorthodox choice here is Robert Service, the best bad poet I know of. Dad liked him and introduced me to poems like "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" that appeared in a collection Dad had with him in the Navy--along with A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad the only book of poetry Dad owned as far as I recall. In college I had some friends who also liked Service, and one evening we staged a program we called "The Robert Service Service."

~~~

One high school teacher's response to 9/11

~~~

A Muslim English teacher on global literature

Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival

2007-11-15T06:42:00.000-05:00

Tobias Wolff and Naomi Shihab Nye

Terrance Hayes and Sharyn McCrumb

The second annual Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival took place last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at Francis Marion University. Featured writers were Tobias Wolff, Naomi Shihab Nye, Terrance Hayes, and Sharyn McCrumb. Wolff and Nye arrived on the same flight from Atlanta Wednesday night. Ed Eleazer, Beckie Flannagan, and I met them and took them to Victor's for dinner. We talked about field trips, succotash, Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life, Nye's essay collection Never in a Hurry, Geoffrey Wolff, Francis Marion, music, and airports. The service was slow, but the talk was fast. There was a buffet breakfast in The Cottage for the two of them, as well as 8 or 10 English faculty members. Wolff's two presentations--an afternoon colloquium on This Boy's Life (which many comp. classes have been reading) and his evening reading--both pretty much filled Lowrimore Auditorium. Among the most interesting questions put to him was "What do you need or want to write about that you haven't yet written about?" His answer was "friendship."

After the reading (at which Wolff read a chapter from TBL that was not included in the movie version) and the book signing, there was a reception at The Cottage. As things wound down, we got guitars out and sang with the two guest writers. Woolf has a good voice and knows plenty of songs, as does Nye, who is a songwriter and agreed to play a couple of her own.

Friday there were two sessions featuring Nye and Terrance Hayes. The poets made a good pair, first talking about inspiration in poetry and later discussing nonfiction. Both were captivating. I especially admired Hayes' participation in the nonfiction session because he has not published much nonfiction; he told a wonderful story about his stepfather and real father and talked about how he's written 50 pages on it. It was sort of a process report on his thinking about the piece and its difficulties and satisfactions. Nye's reading that night was pitch-perfect, a nice combination of poetry and nonfiction with good stories and comments about writing sprinkled throughout. She ended with a wonderful lullaby using my guitar. Afterwards, another reception. I was pleased that all my nonfiction students had a chance to meet her, given that we've been reading her essays.

Saturday the featured speakers were Hayes and Sharyn McCrumb. Hayes gave an outstanding poetry reading to an audience containing his mother and stepfather, as well as 50-60 well-behaved middle school students. McCrumb gave an articulate and feisty lecture on connections between Appalachia and her writing. Her afternoon reading, the festival's final event, featured a reading of one of her NASCAR stories--the spirit of Dale Earnhardt as the object of a pilgrimage.

Norman Mailer dead at 84
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Tribute to Mailer by NY Review of Books

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National Book Award Winners: Hass, Johnson, Alexie, Weiner
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Beloit College Mindset List
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Optional Admissions Essay at Tufts
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Malcolm Gladwell on criminal profiling
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Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker archives

Bolton and Young

2007-10-29T08:20:00.000-05:00

Former U.N. Ambassadors Andrew Young and John Bolton were on campus last week (on United Nations Day) for a U.N. Symposium. They were the featured speakers Wednesday night and were followed Thursday by a panel of former ambassadors mostly to African countries, as well as David Wilkins, a South Carolinian currently the Ambassador to Canada. Friday there were several panels made up of U.N. Scholars. It was Young and Bolton that drew the big crowd at the ticketed event. Bolton lead off, his methodical and admittedly interesting talk belying his zany, quizzical appearance, accentuated by his shaggy mane of a hairdo and his walrus-like mustache. His theme was the perpetual political gridlock that pervades the U.N., keeping it from acting. Also, he emphasized the inequity in payment for the U.N., with a handful of countries joining the U.S. in nearly singlehandedly supporting it, with most of the other countries essentially on the dole--but with an equal vote. He wound up proposing that countries contribute to the U.N. voluntarily. Bolton served only a year and was never confirmed by Congress.

Young, in contrast, told stories about how despite the politically difficult atmosphere (during the Carter administration), he managed to accomplish some things by working informally around the system. He told a great story of how at a boring reception a Chinese diplomat asked Young's wife where he could get good "Georgia food." She said, "At our apartment." So they invited the entire delegation over in a couple weeks. Meanwhile, Mrs. Young had her mother drive up to New York, bringing a bunch of food and cooking the rest in the Waldorf Astoria kitchen. The party was a great success, right down to the mint juleps provided by the Waldorf. This helped smoothed the way with the Chinese. Young's account was one of people-to-people contacts, whereas Bolton's was the report of a disaffected ideologue.

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A new theory about Edgar Allan Poe's death
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Joseph Lelyveld on Arthus Schlesinger's Journals