Bolton and Young

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

Colbert in Columbia

Stephen Colbert brought his fledgling presidential campaign to Columbia this morning at 9 a.m. He was greated by a spirited crowd of supporters on the University of South Carolina Horseshoe, many of them holding signs proclaiming, "Colbert '08--and so can you," a spin on the title of his current book, I Am America--and So Can You. Mayor Bob Coble introduced him, gave him a key to the city, and proclaimed this "Stephen Colbert Day." A native of Charleston and the 11th and final kid in his family, Colbert proclaimed, "I love South Carolina almost as much as South Carolina loves me!" and "I've travelled all over this state, from Charleston to Columbia!" and "I have a new state slogan for you: South Carolina--first to secede, first to succeed!" He heaped praise on S.C. peaches and shrimp and promised to crush Georgia if elected. He got plenty of laughs in his brief 10-minute speech before mingling in the crowd. I'd estimate there were 1000 people there.

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Colbert on his campaign

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Recent news on the campaign

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Colbertocrat.com

Kwesi Brew, Ghanaian Poet

As a recent college graduate and Peace Corps trainee at Teacher's College-Columbia University, I discovered the world of West African literature as I prepared to teach secondary school English in Ghana. I had never heard of Ghana before I received my Peace Corps invitation the spring of my senior year at Davidson College in 1967. Nor was I able to name a single West African writer despite my degree in English Literature. I had not heard of dramatist Wole Soyinka, novelist Chinua Achebe, or poet Leopold Sedar Senghor. With the help of anthologies such as Langston Hughes' An African Treasury (1960), I began to learn about the outpouring of writing from Africa, especially the work that came in the wake of the independence movement that was sweeping the continent. Among the Ghanaian poets I discovered was Kwesi Brew, who--like Senghor in Senegal--was a politician and diplomat as well as a literary man. Brew, born in 1928, died the other day in Cape Coast, his home town.

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Obituary for Ghanaian poet Kwesi Brew from The Guardian Unlimited

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John Kufuor, the Ghanaian president, mourns Kwesi Brew
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"The Slums of Nima" by Kwesi Brew

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Other poems by Kwesi Brew

Annie Dillard's THE MAYTREES

Since my in-laws gave me a copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek shortly after its publication in 1974, I have been a fan of Annie Dillard, especially her nonfiction, including An American Childhood and The Writing Life. I've just finished the book she claims will be her last, The Maytrees, a novel. Set mainly in Provincetown, it is the story of Toby Maytree, his wife Lou, and the free spirited architect Deary Hightoe who sleeps in the dunes. Toby falls in love with Deary (though I'm not sure his motivation for this sudden turn of events is adequately shown), and they retreat to Maine, leaving behind Lou and the son, Petey. Twenty years later they both return to Provincetown in dire straights, in need of help from none other than the painter Lou, who has made a life on her own in their absence. The book is a meditation on love, its inscrutability, how it can clash with the individual's urge for independence and space. But it's also about Cape Cod and the distinctive, isolated culture that peculiar geography has spawned--the dune shacks, the weather, the sand, the protection of the bay versus the more tempestuous ocean side. Given Dillard's metaphoric flair, it's hard not to see in these two sides of the slender finger of Cape Cod some reflection of two opposing human tendencies--the enclosure and safely of the protected water and its staid houses vs. the ravages of the Atlantic, the shifting dunes, the tenuousness of the now-protected beach shacks. Dillard's writing here is as usual suffused with observation about the natural world. The book brings to mind Henry Beston's classic memoir of his season alone on the Cape in The Outermost House (also a book my in-laws Jack and Jane Debes introduced me to).

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Reviews of The Maytrees from Digital Emunction/News

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By Diane Leach, a review I agree with in January Magazine

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Dillard's website

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing wins the Nobel Prize

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Tony Hoagland on what American poetry lacks

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Newsweek "A Life in Books" Archive

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National Book Award Nominees for 2007

Lola Haskins

Lola Haskins from Adirondack Review

Poems on the web by Lola Haskins
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The Adirondack Review "Featured Poets Page"

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Kerouac again, by Louis Menand

The Poet's Bookshelf

Paul Muldoon, from The New York Times

Paul Muldoon tapped to replace Alice Quinn as The New Yorker poetry editor

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Muldoon's home page

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Muldoon's band, Rackett

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My colleague Bill Ramsey recommended this article by Douglas Goetsch from The American Scholar on "The Poetry Stand"--a booth operated by poetry students who write poems on demand for passersby
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In that same issue of The American Scholar are four superb poems by Louise Gluck from a forthcoming collection. The little cluster of poems is introduced by Langdon Hammer, who writes, "Gluck is creating an Italy of the mind, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place...." He notes that the poems are "a departure" for Gluck, taking her away from first-person lyricism. Although I've not been a big Gluck fan (though she won a Pulitzer for The Wild Iris and got a National Book Award nomination for Averno), I found these four poems immediately engaging, making me eager to see her next collection. They bear some similarity to "A Village Life" published in the April 13, 2007 New Yorker.
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I just got Poet's Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art, by Peter Davis, published by Barnwood. Davis asked a bunch of poets to list 5-10 books that have been most "essential" to their art and to comment on the list. He includes the responses of about 80 poets--a very diverse group including Rae Armantrout, Wanda Coleman, B.H. Fairchild, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, Ron Silliman, Richard Wilbur, Dean Young, and so on, though most are well known. There were only a few I didn't recognize: Annie Finch, Peter Johnson, Charles Potts, Juliana Spahr, and Paul Violi. As a whole the lists strike me as conservative, white male dominated, even among some of the edgier contributors. The comments range from Charles Wright's 6-line gloss on his 11-item list to Clayton Eshleman's 12-page dissertation on his culturally varied but all-male list of 9, including Bud Powell's piano version of "Tea for Two," Wilhelm Reich's The Function of the Orgasm, and Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World. As an appendix, Davis includes a list of authors mentioned three or more times. The winners: William Carlos Williams (17), Emily Dickinson (16), Walt Whitman (16), Frank O'Hara (12), William Butler Yeats (11), William Shakespeare (11), Wallace Stevens (10), John Ashbery (9), Rainer Maria Rilke (9), Elizabeth Bishop (8), Sylvia Plath (8), Garcia Lorca (8), Hart Crane (7), Allen Ginsberg (7). Specific works mentioned frequently were The Bible, Donald Allen's New American Poetry, and The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry, ed. Paul Auster.

Akane's Web Site

Akane Igarashi's photo/video web site
(See video link for a film about Janne and her work as a nurse midwife.)
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ditch--alternative Canadian poetry

Going Undercover

Graham

Yesterday in my Literary Nonfiction class we discussed truth-telling in nonfiction and how it relates to authors going undercover in order to get a story. For class, we read a series of journal entries by Lawrence Otis Graham (Graham's blog) he called "Invisible Man," originally published in New York (excerpt) , in which he describes temporarily giving up his life as a wealthy New York lawyer in order to sign on as a busboy at an exclusive country club in Connecticut, one that at the time banned blacks and Jews. Graham, who is black, tells a series of predictably appalling stories about overheard conversations and his own treatment at the hands of country club members.

Ehrenreich and Conover

This led us to a talk about Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed, in which she takes on a succession of blue collar and pink collar jobs and reports on her struggle to make ends meet in the process. Going back to the sixties, there is also John Howard Griffin's controversial Black Like Me in which he, a white man, colors his skin and passes as black in order to ride a bus through the south and then write about the experience. One of my favorite undercover stories is that of Ted Conover, for whom going undercover is his usual modus operandi, and who for one book, Newjack, became a guard at Sing Sing Prison.

A widely publicized case that takes the matter of "going undercover" to an unethical extreme is the story of the British pianist Joyce Hatto, whose husband passed off a hundred or more exquisite recordings by other pianists as her own. Well after her death by cancer, he went on concocting for her an elaborate fictitious life of concerts and recordings, which he sold on his own label. Mark Singer tells the tale in the current New Yorker in his article, "Fantasia for Piano."

9/11

Planned 9/11 Memorial at World Trade Center Site

Planned Construction at World Trade Center Site

During a brief visit to New York with our daughter Nell around 1994, Janne and I asked Nell what she'd like to do with the several hours we had before meeting our friend Deirdre on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then driving north to the Adirondacks. Nell wanted to visit the World Trade Center. So after driving through the Holland Tunnel (or was it the Lincoln Tunnel?) we parked in an expensive lot near the twin towers, rode the South Tower escalator up to the elevator, and then zoomed to the top for the exhilerating view. We saw clouds gathering to the southwest over New Jersey, and just as we came down from the open deck, we watched a storm blow in across the Hudson. It was beautiful. Before long, rain was pelting the huge building. By the time we reached the ground, the rain had gone, and we heard music in the plaza between the two towers. It turned out to be what was left of The Mamas and the Papas, singing "California Dreamin'" and other old favorites. Mama Cass was long gone by that time, having died in 1974. Michelle Phillips had long since split with John and started an acting career. So on that day at the base of the towers it was apparently just John Phillips and Denny Doherty with two other female singers. John died in March 2001, only months before the towers came down. Doherty hung on until January this year. I'm glad we made that visit to the WTC.

Popular Names

Maxwell Autrey Driggers - born August 7 - photo by Trey Driggers

"Maxwell" ranked 149th in popularity among names of males in the U.S. in 2006. When I was named "Kenneth Maxwell Autrey" back in 1945, it was 856th in popularity. Here's the Social Security Administration web site where you can see the most popular names used in social security number applications by year. You can go back to check any year. You can also determine the popularity of aparticular name over time. I found that "Kenneth" was in the top 20 the yearI was born but has steadily dropped in popularity since then (Hmmm. Should I take this personally?). "Katrina" plummeted in popularity in 2006.

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/
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Another view of Kerouac's On the Road--as "a manifesto for psychobabble"
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William James in the Adirondacks

Dante, Walcott, Ellison, Bishop

Joan Acocella reviews the new Hollander translation of The Inferno.
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V.S. Naipaul on Derek Walcott
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Wil Hagood on a posthumous Ralph Ellison novel
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Steve Wasserman on book reviewing (from Columbia Journalism Review)
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1979 radio Elizabeth Bishop reading and interview on PennSound

Kerouac's On the Road 50 Years Later

Kerouac's On the Road 50 Years Later:

• Gilbert Millstein's original New York Times review
• David Gates in Newsweek
• Alicia Rebensdorf in AlterNet
• Sean O'Hagan in The Observer
• Various articles on Kerouac from The New York Times

When Kerouac's scroll went on the road

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2004 NPR story on the scroll

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Photo of the scroll from Christie's

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David Havird Essay on James Dickey in Spring 2000 Virginia Quarterly Review

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Charles Murray in The American on why the SAT should be abolished (Murray is a libertarian who works for the American Enterprise Institute and co-authored the controversial book, The Bell Curve

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Site for the very cool Found Magazine

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Brad Land's Goat as the summer "Big Read" at Coastal Carolina University:

• Selection of book announced
• Book selection "shelved"
• Editorial on censorship of Goat

Brad Land's Pilgrims Upon the Earth

I just finished former student Brad Land's first novel, Pilgrims Upon the Earth. This one follows by three years his wildly successful memoir, Goat, which we used in fall 2005 as a common text for our freshman classes at Francis Marion University, his alma mater. Students (and critics) raved about that book, and I was proud of the fact that Brad made a start on it as a final project for my Literary Nonfiction class. He went on to UNC-Wilmington, where his MFA was in nonfiction, and the harrowing story that became Goat was his thesis.

From the get-go and to an astonishing extent, Brad had a distinctive but unaffected style. He would say, I know, that this voice, veering between the florid and the clipped, has been honed and tempered by the likes of novelist Cormac McCarthy and poet Jack Gilbert, also affected by the lyric essay as exemplified by John D'Agata plus many others. But Brad's language is distinctive and only occasionally tips over into the precious.

Pilgrims tells what is on the surface a pretty basic story. Terry Webber, whose mother commits suicide shortly after his birth, lives with a sympathetic but ineffective millworker father in South Carolina. Terry is a dopehead and a slacker but is rendered endearing by his off-kilter, sensitive take on the world around him. He falls for Alice Washington, the two embark on a journey to visit her sister, and Alice has a fatal accident. This rocks Terry's world and seems all the more wrenching for the flat, matter-of-fact indiscriminate approach he seems to adopt toward this and other events, both minor and major, in his life. He engages in petty crimes with his mates, gets kicked off the soccer team, intermittently reconnects with his dad, and finally lights out for the territories, in this case Colorado and Alice's sister, the destination they had in mind when it all came apart.

There is an enigmatic sort of redemption or hope or something kindled by the novel's end. But what emerges best of all and keeps the story rolling is Brad's sometimes zany and always inventive language, a diction and kick that reveals an entire world-view, albeit a sometimes jaded, maddeningly passive-aggressive one.

Searching "Brad Land" on the web still gives you a ton of Goat references and only a few for this novel. But presumably that ratio will alter this fall when his book tour kicks off. I could see hordes of young people getting into this one, just as they did Goat, even if the subject matter is not as vivid and immediate.

Reviews of Pilgrims Upon the Earth:

David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times

Craig Brandhorst in the Charleston Post and Courier

Brief Review in Publishers' Weekly

Charles McNair in Paste Magazine

Matt Wake story on Land from UpstateToday.com

Maxwell Autrey Driggers

My grandson Maxwell Autrey Driggers was born at 1:13 a.m. August 7. He weighed in at 8 lb. 10 oz., large enough but smaller than his 6-year-old sister Amelia (9 lb. 6 oz.) and 3-year-old Boyd (10 lb. 6 oz.). Nell was induced and labored for some 16 hours. Max and Nell will be home today. Janne and I are here in Ocean Springs for several days trying to help with the transition.

R.I.P. Bergman and Antonioni

Dana Stevens obit on Ingmar Bergman in Slate



Rick Lyman obit on Michaleangelo Antonioni in The New York Times

A Poem a Day

No Certain Claim
(villanelle, poem for July 31, 2007)

The restless waiting holds me like a spell.
My daughter’s son will take my father’s name.
Which door will open? None of us can tell.

The summer’s long demise, its ghostly knell
sounds out, and nothing stays the same.
The eager waiting holds me like a spell.

Some days I pass like heaven’s infidel,
a lonely wanderer, no certain claim.
Which door will open? None of us can tell.

I hear my mother’s voice, clear as a bell,
call out to me, her world a shrinking frame.
The awful waiting holds me like a spell.

Grandchild and parent, each within a cell,
will find the key to this confining game.
Which door will open? None of us can tell.

These lonely vigils: who can stand them well?
I keep my peace and feed the earthly flame.
The endless waiting holds me like a spell
Which door will open? None of us can tell.

I've written a poem a day since July 1. This perhaps crazy and compulsive mass production started as a mutual challenge with my colleague Beckie Flannagan to write a daily poem, start to finish, for a month. Now, we're well into August, and the poems keep coming. Naturally, some of them are pretty bad, while others show some promise. No doubt some will remain buried in the depths of my poetry drawer. Others, though, I will certainly revise and send out. Among the 34 poems produced to date are three sonnets (July 13 and 20, August 2), a sestina (July 28), and a villanelle (July 31).

I'm not sure how long this will continue. At some point, certainly once I get into the thick of fall semester, I'm sure I'll want to spend more time evaluating and revising what I've done. Still, the past month's work reinforces what I've long known about the habit of writing and the importance of regular, if not daily, word work. William Stafford started each day with poetry writing, and many others have done the same. It's difficult to write strong, publishable poems, but it's not hard to write daily, especially once you've designated a time and place to do so. It's a lesson I try to teach all my students. The often-quoted Latin phrase for this is "nulla dies sine linea" (never a day without lines).

Ilija Melentijević, a Serbian who maintains a blog called "Nulla dies sine linea", applies this slogan to his art: "Never a day without a drawing." The writer and writing teacher Don Murray wrote and sketched daily (see my blog entry on Murray for 4 January 2007).

See the flickr page that attributes this dictum to Pliny, the Elder.
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Ron Silliman's blog , 3 August 2007, contains a good discussion of rhythm and change in poets' work, esp. as applied to John Ashbery

Charles Simic

Photo: Sara Barrett

Charles Simic named poet laureate

Cortland Review interview with Simic

Simic at the Academy of American Poets site

Recordings of several Simic poems

Artful Dodge interview with Simic

Lady Bird and Woody

Lady Bird Johnson and Woody Guthrie, both born in 1912

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Here's the Washington Post editorial on Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007), who died July 11. Much has been said about her attention to the environment, her campaign for beautification and the planting of wild flowers along interstates, not to mention her charm and firm grace as First Lady. But perhaps her most lasting contribution to history will prove to be the superb and detailed diary she kept of her years in the White House. Here's the moving, wonderfully written entry for March 31, 1968, the day President Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election. I wrote a considerably less articulate diary entry on that topic myself the next day. I was in the Peace Corps in Asamankese, Ghana and I recall lying in bed when I heard the news over our scratchy little Phillips radio.

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Woody Guthrie would have been 95 (about the same age as Lady Bird Johnson) on July 14. Here's the WG website with links to all his lyrics, as well as special WG events and a photo of Guthrie with his guitar labeled "This machine kills Fascists."

A sample of Guthrie's great lyrics from "Grand Coulee Dam":

In the misty crystal glitter

Of the wild and windward spray,

Men have fought the pounding waters

And met a watery grave.

Why, she tore their boats to splinters,

But she gave men dreams to dream

Of the day the Coulee Dam

Would cross that wild and wasted stream.

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Yale professor William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar on depictions of English teachers in film

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Terry Eagleton in The Guardian: "For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life."

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Alan Gilbert reviews Tracy K. Smith's Duende in The Village Voice

(SEE also 3/5/07 blog)

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Joseph Joffe on John Lukacs biography of George Kennan

(SEE also 5/5/07 blog)

R.I.P Marlette

Photo by Tom Gilbert - AP

Obit for cartoonist Doug Marlette

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Review of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur

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Web site for Chip Heath and Dan Heath's engaging book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Cheney, Booth, Ondaatje

7 "New" Wonders of the World

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"Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency" - a series in The Washington Post

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N.Y. Times Obit for Philip Booth

Reviews of Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero:

San Francisco Chronicle (Marcela Valdes)

Straight.com

Christian Science Monitor (Yvonne Zipp)

International Herald Tribune (Janet Maslin)

AARP Magazine (Ellen Kanner)

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Background on Ondaatje's Previous Work

Last Night in Rome

Last Night in Rome

Thinking to tire ourselves out
and sleep like the Caesars
before tomorrow’s long flight,
we put on our walking shoes
and go down in our hotel’s elevator,
sturdy cage with an accordion-type
inner door and on every floor
heavy outer grillwork
that clanks pleasingly when closed.
We pass the café on the corner,
where white-capped guys yell
“Macchiato!” or “Cappucino!”
and bang the old grounds
out of the espresso scoop
before adding fresh coffee.
We hike down the hill, skirting
the coliseum once more
and wander the ghostly Forum
past where Julius Caesar was stabbed,
past Marmertine Prison where
St. Peter was held, and then
west across the Tiber to Travastere.
The African traders are out
for the dinner crowds, peddling
purses arrayed on bright cloths.
Arcing back to Centro Storico,
we find the Pantheon,
and our feet ache, but we push on
to Trevi Fountain, then the Spanish Steps
teeming with loungers, and by then
we’re ready for the long
trek back down Via Corso
to our hotel near the terminal.

Pisa

Pisa

It is impossible for me
to see the leaning tower
without imagining it
as a pile of pizzas
about to topple
onto the greensward.
The photos never show
the huge cathedral beside it,
majestic and serious,
or its ornate baptistery.
Instead we see only
the tower and its funny tilt,
as though it stands alone
on the Field of Miracles,
a prop for photos showing
tourists pretending to hold it up
or trying to match its angle.
Walking back to the train
through congested streets,
I buy a triangle of pizza
with round mushrooms,
oblong anchovies,
and squares of mozzarella.
As the slice leans toward
my mouth, the waitress
smiles like Mona Lisa.

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Terry Eagleton on a new book about Bakhtin

"Language for Bakhtin is a cockpit of warring forces, as each utterance finds itself occupied from within by alien significations. Every sign glances sideways at other signs, bears the traces of them within its body, and faces simultaneously towards speaker, object, context and addressee."

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Visual Journal Sites

1000 Journals

Dan Eldon

Zettiology (Tracy V. Moore)

Sabrina Harrison

Manarola

Manarola

One evening before the gulls
flew to bed we saw a boat
hanging from the sky.
A giant crane snatched it
from the tiny harbor
and cranked it to the street
that drapes over the hill.
With no cars in town,
the fishing boats parallel
park in front of the shops.
Houses rise like a wall
of colored blocks.
Alleys and stairways thread
the town, fissures in bedrock.
Above it all, vineyards grip
the sky to catch the first
and last sun of the day.

Vatican

Vatican

21 May 1972 Laszlo Toth, an unemployed geologist, walked into Saint Peter's Basilica, strode up to the front altar and climbed onto Michelangelo's Pietà. While standing to the side of the work, Toth produced a hammer from underneath his coat. With the hammer Toth struck the Pietà while shouting, "I am Jesus Christ!" He hit the work 15 times before being pulled away from it by an Italian fireman and several plainclothes guards.

From “A Partial Guide to the Tools of Art Vandalism” by Steven Goss

Without knife or hammer, pistol or blow torch,
I join the early arrivals at St. Peter’s,
heading straight for the Pieta, encased
behind bullet-proof glass just inside
the door exactly thirty-five years
from the day Laszlo Toth took
a sledge hammer to Mother Mary.
She and Jesus glisten like new
behind the protective shield
near the sealed jubilee door
that opens every twenty-five years.
Morning light enters the basilica
like a heavenly revelation.
The cavernous space swallows
my footsteps. It’s large enough
to hold 95,000, old enough
to erase the memory of Laszlo Toth,
who was confined in a mental hospital
for two years before being deported
to Australia and disappearing from view.

Later I climb the 400 steps
to the top of the dome, a winding
travail as cramped as the path
to heaven itself. Then, stepping
out onto the narrow encircling balcony,
I look down on the giant keyhole
of Bernini’s piazza swarming with people.
Beyond the encircling colonnade,
the Via della Conciliazione stretches
toward the Tiber. I am as high as anyone
in Rome. I wind back down
to the souvenir shop, buy Vatican stamps
and espresso. On the crowded street
I scan the Roman faces for Laszlo.

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Reviews of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach

Jonathan Lethem in The New York Times

Jennifer Reese in Entertainment Weekly

Natasha Walter in Guardian Unlimited

Colm Toibin in The London Review of Books

Venice

Venice

And suddenly the train dumps you on the lip
of the Grand Canal and you catch the vaporetto
that follows the watery “s” to the San Giglio stop,
and you cross three bridges on your way
to the albergo, and within an hour
you see that Venice is filled with saints,
and the black gondolas glide like sleek carriages
beneath the bridges, and the gondoliers
really do wear striped shirts and sing
as they skull along, and it’s all an act,
but the city itself seems a theatrical maze,
and you’re going to get lost on your way
to St. Mark’s Square where you’ll visit
the Doge’s Palace and walk through
one of Europe’s largest rooms
and cross the Bridge of Sighs
to the cramped dungeons and scrawled-on walls
that only hint at the anguish that remains
as solid as anything in the city built on water.

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Interview with Charles Bernstein about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry

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Wall Street Journal video about Guantanamo prison poetry

Florence

Duomo and Bell Tower
Ponte Vecchio

Florence

When the train takes us toward Bologna,
when we leave behind Brunelleschi’s Duomo
and the sienna-tiled roofs of Florence,
after we close the door on the albergo
run by Allesio and Asumi, each day
the shopkeepers will sell diamonds
on the Ponte Vecchio, the sun will set
over Santa Trinita, and the marble
of Michelangelo’s David will glow
like new skin. His massive hand
will cradle the killing stone,
waiting for Goliath, as though
any afternoon the giant, as tall
as the cathedral bell tower,
will stride past Dante’s stone house,
moving north through narrow streets,
past pizzerias and souvenir shops,
the army of the Philistines at his back.

Bologna

Bologna

In Bologna, too early in the day
for tourists, a man and his son
hold accordions under a colonnade.
The man’s fingers skim the keys
like butterflies on “Roll Out the Barrel.”
His brow-wrinkled son grips
his too-large instrument, battered
and gray, trying to play along.
He’s got the moves, the in and out
of the bellows, the erratic foot-tap.
But his notes punch the air at random,
go off in directions all their own.
They lean toward one another
like the old towers down the street.
I toss a euro into their cup and walk
two blocks to the piazza
where Neptune’s Fountain
murmurs day and night. A constellation
of coins glistens beneath the water.
In the nearby palazzo is a stairway
wide enough for a team of horses.

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David Shumway on Rock Stars and Hip Hop
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Keeping Old Italian violins in shape

DeLillo's New Novel

Reviews of Don DeLillo's new novel, Falling Man:

New York Times

Literary Review

Newsweek

New York Sun

Guardian Unlimited

Kirkus Reviews

###

The Don DeLillo Society Website

Baggage

Baggage

My mother, now bedridden, helpless, a moored vessel,
sees travel as mere skittering across the surface of culture.
She wanted only to set up housekeeping in another country.

Wherever she went--Colombia, Brazil--she packed along
her settled way, her ease in baking rolls or chicken.
Now she cannot walk, much less venture onto the llanos.

Her stories have been cast off—or locked inside.
Now I have the power of the word. She needs me.
Occasionally her good right hand reaches

across her placid body to the left arm, inert
on its pillow, to rub or reposition it, coax it
back into action. It’s the most she can do.

Early on, we harbor the fear that someone listens,
and then, the fear that no one does. As I pack for Italy,
my mother says she’s glad she doesn’t have to go.

The great dark outside blankets all of us, outlasts
even the ravages of sunlight, said to be stunning

in Rome. Her voice grows faint over the phone.

Lawrence Halprin

Lawrence Halprin, born in 1916 and presumably now 90, made his mark as a landscape and urbanscape architect, designing for such spaces as Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. He is a traveler who records his observations visually and verbally in a pleasing combination. I first learned about him through his Notebooks: 1959-1971. Like many innovators, he is hard to categorize neatly. Best know for his urban designs, his notebooks demonstrate his interest in a variety of natural and manmade phenomena. His wife Anna is a dancer/choreographer, and he apparently has spent a lot of time exploring connections between his architectural perspectives and her craft. In my travels, I'd like to learn to slow down and take the time that it must require to do observational sketches and notations like this one from a town in Norway (click on it for a closeup):

Smailovic and Graduation

Who is Vedran Smailovic?

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Robert Fulghum on Smailovic
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Bill Moran, formerly provost at Francis Marion College/University, gave yesterday's commencement address and received an honorary degree for his past service to FMU and to the cause of higher education in South Carolina. He left our campus to become President of Lander University and retired from there several years ago. He spoke to the graduates about the cellist Vedran Smailovic, who persisted in playing his cello in Sarajevo surrounded by destruction and danger--the one small thing he could do to pay tribute to the innocent dead and to bring some light to the living. He used his talent in the best way he could. Moran's message to the graduates was to take Smailovic's courage and dedication to heart. Make the best possible use of your own abilities, however modest. Bill is an absolutely admirable man. He was fair and firm as a provost, and he never forgot his roots in the English Department. He taught a course each semester, sometimes a freshman comp. course. He has returned to FMU frequently on various occasions. In 2005 and 2006, he attended the lecture series given his name: the Moran Lectures--an annual spring opportunity for one retiring or recently retired member of the faculty to address students and colleagues.

George Kennan and Travel Notebooks

I've been planning for our trip to Italy, which begins in a week, in various ways. I've made reservations for each night of our trip except the final few days in Rome. I figure we can take care of that when we get to Rome at first. I've also ordered train passes good for any 7 days of first class train travel in Italy. We get a slight break for traveling together. Cost: about $300 each. Also, I've been reading the guidebooks, esp. Lonely Planet. And I've been boning up on Italian history--now, Robert Payne's Horizon Guide to Ancient Rome.

For a couple months, I've been listening in the car to Italian tapes--a conversational series specifically designed for use in the car, so there's no need to refer constantly to a printed book, though there is a text for each lesson. I'm not sure how much I'm absorbing, but it's helpful that there are so many cognates with French, of which I have a fair working knowledge, and Spanish, of which I know a smattering. For the word "but," for example, you can say "ma"(like the French "mais") or "pero" (as in Spanish).

I also prepare for any extended trip by reading accounts of trips taken by others. I have my favorites, such as John Steinbeck's amiable Travels with Charley and Henry Miller's wonderfully biting 1939 The Air Conditioned Nightmare. I'll read anything Bruce Chatwin wrote about his travels, especially The Songlines. But my favorite traveling journal-keeper is George Kennan, whose Sketches from a Life is a selections from journals he kept during his travels as a statesman from 1927-1988. Unlike his many other brilliant books, which are mostly about diplomacy, this one recounts his observations as a traveler. Most of his observations center on Russia, Germany, and other northern European countries--not locations that I feel the strongest attraction to. But he brings the places he visits to life with a sharp eye and a scrupulous curiosity, a constant probing beneath the seemingly ordinary events of everyday life. Here, he's writing in 1984 about Ischia, an Italian island:

I thought, on the way back, of the qualities of this very Italian place: the incongruous mixture of tolerance, naivete, overcrowding, sociability, family solidarity, localism, acceptance of modernism in its most hideous forms and yet with some sort of an inner self-defense against it--life led, in short, in the small dimension, full of pettiness, no doubt, and not without its small cruelties and injustices, but borne along by the broad, wise, disillusioned charity of the Catholic Church, by the comforting familiarities of family life, and by the unvarying, reassuring support of the Christian sacraments. (327)

Often, he begins his entries with a matter-of-fact statement telling where he is or has been, with maybe a quick note on the weather thrown in. But then, he effortlessly takes us deeper. Here, he begins an account of a 1940 walk in The Hague with a startling juxtaposition.

I took another long walk this morning, only to hear a German military band playing on a square to a sizable audience of placid, politely applauding Dutchmen, and to see a place, only a block or two from the legation, where bombs had wiped out most of the inside of a city block.

When you read Kennan, you know he's a thoughtful traveler, not just a close observer, but also a ponderer, a thinker about what he sees. It's the attitude I'd like to bring to my own travels.

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Review of Kennan's Sketches from a Life by Stefan Kanfer in TIME (1989)

Yaghjian and Johnson

Yesterday Janne and I went to the Edward Yaghjian retrospective exhibit at The State Museum. It includes over 100 of his paintings and drawings over his career from the 1930's in New York to the 50's-80's in Columbia. He was born in Armenia in 1905, but moved to the U.S. at an early age. After painting with the "Ash Can School" in New York under the guidance of John Sloan and others, he moved to Columbia to become chair of the art department, a position he held until retirement. He died in 1997. His early work realistically depicts life in New York, often panoramic scenes of buildings and harbors. His later work took on brighter, almost Fauve-like colors and became rather stylized, almost primitive in nature. He maintained his emphasis on architecture and cityscapes, often ramshackle.

Columbia scenes by Yaghjian

Interestingly, paintings of the the South Carolina painter William Johnson, born in 1901 in Florence, only a few years earlier than Yaghjian, also show a marked shift from realism to primitivism, as seen in the early self portrait above in contrast to the bright painting next to it, "Blind Singer." Johnson, like Yaghjian, worked for a while in New York. In 1926 he moved to Paris and was influenced by Gaugin, Soutine, and the Expressionists. He married a Danish woman and lived several years in Scandinavia. He achieved only spotty critical success during his life. He became mentally ill and spent most of his last two decades in mental institutions, dying in 1970.

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Robert Pinsky on Difficult Poetry

Ralph Ellison

Recent American Scholar essay on Ralph Ellison by Phyllis Rose

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Ellison Bio

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Ellison's Works/Articles About Him

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Barbara Foley on Ellison's Relationship to the Left

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Irving Howe's 1952 Review of Invisible Man

Janisse Ray

Jannisse Ray Speaking at FMU

Janisse Ray's visit to FMU was a hit with students and faculty alike. She spoke twice on March 28, afternoon and evening. Many classes have been reading her Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Her visit was jointly sponsored by the Biology and English faculties. She arrived late the night before. Early in the morning she met several biologists for a field trip to a local longleaf pine forest. Her passion is the salvation of our environment in general and the revival of the longleaf forests in particular. Both the afternoon session (when she focused on the memoir) and evening session (when she talked more generally and passionately about writing and the environment) were well-attended. In between, for dinner, the biologists organized a Thai meal at The Brass Lantern. Later on, a reception at The Cottage, which I missed because of my trip back to Columbia. Ray was personable, engaging, and especially good with students. Her radical ecological message might have been a bit much for some to swallow, but so be it. She doesn't hold back. She is a masterful reader of her own work--often seeming to have passages memorized.

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Origin of "publish or perish" and other university catch phrases
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100 Best Novels and Nonfiction Books in English since 1900
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Guardian Unlimited 100 Top Works of Fiction/Drama Ever

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Technorati State of the Blogosphere

Bellows

Drawing by Nathaniel Bellows

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Nathaniel Bellows Website: Art and Writing

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Bellows Interview with Robert Birnbaum