San Francisco and Ferlinghetti

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.
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Daily Routines web site: How creative people organize their days.

The Story of a Poem

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.
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A link between creativity and mental illness
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Ihab Hassan -“Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization”

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Malcolm Gladwell on the full-court press
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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

Carol Ann Duffy has just been appointed the first woman Poet Laureate of England.
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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.
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Ten Literary One-Hit Wonders from The Times Online
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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

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

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.

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

Paris

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

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

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

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.

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Birthday calculator, providing extensive information on your date of birth

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Germaine Greer on why men are funnier than women

Debra A. Daniel

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
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"Impressionists" (flash fiction from Smoke Long Quarterly) and an interview with Debra

Preparing for Travel

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

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.
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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

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

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

Two Films: Special Effects

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).
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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

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

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

Holiday Greetings

(or, Have a Plaid Christmas)

from our family to yours

Odetta

Odetta, 1930 - 2008

~~~

2007 interview with Odetta