Alice in Wonderland 100

Espresso Book Machine, Muse and The Marketplace, Downward Facing Dog

2010-05-13T19:12:00.000-07:00

Long time, no blog – it’s been a frenetic semester, though my classes at Boston College were exceptionally rewarding – I had two super-talented sets of students. So super-talented, in fact, that I went and got an anthology of their work published through the Espresso Book Machine in the Harvard Bookstore. I asked each student to select 5 pages of their best work from the semester and compiled each class’ work into a PDF file, which I emailed to the Harvard Book Store. Poof! Like magic, the following day I picked up 15 copies of each file, hot off the press and looking like real paperback books. The vibrant covers were each designed by a student also.

Aside from teaching, I’ve been doing a few readings - at the terrific “Art to Art” monthly series at The Piano Factory in the South End, and at a “Fantastical Literary Salon” with the literary luminaries Ethan Gilsdorf, Chip Cheek, KL Pereira, Cam Terwilliger and Sue Williams. Last weekend I also moderated a panel at the Muse and the Marketplace Panel in the Park Plaza Hotel:
“Agents on the Hot Seat – Fiction Focus with Lisa Grubka, PJMark, Denise Shannon and Rachel Sussman.” Despite being hot shot New York agents, they were each incredibly warm and down to earth and the panel was a delight to chair. The weekend was a wonderful, inspirational whirlwind and my friend Gail Waldstein was also in town from Denver, and gave me a copy of her exquisite, brave gem of a memoir: “To Quit This Calling: Firsthand Tales of a Pediatric Pathologist”.

On a separate note, I’m seriously thinking of getting my yoga license, to teach in prisons. I’ve been taking yoga classes at Exhale Spa every day (my favorite teachers being Amy Leydon and David Magone) and I’ve been learning mindful meditation with Jennifer Wade. Both yoga and meditation are profoundly changing my life. Aside from making my healthier, they are giving me tools for controlling and changing unhelpful mind and behavioral patterns that have been hindering me my entire life. They are both so self-empowering and freeing and a wonderful compliment to writing which is empowering in its own way, but also very sedentary and ungrounding at times (especially if you focus on fantastical fiction, like I often do). I’ll be teaching a creative writing workshop at a correction center in the fall and I’d love to teach a yoga/meditation course to prisoners next year – Downward Facing Dog hits the spot even better than a double vodka.

p.s. Two fresh/funny articles on the writing life, if you haven't already read them: 1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one (from the series http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/rules-for-writers) 2) http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/02/23/readers_advice_to_writers

Fantasy Freaks... (as published in The Fiction Writers Review)

2009-09-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms by Ethan Gilsdorf

BY SOPHIE POWELL

Ethan Gilsdorf, a former Dungeons and Dragons addict and seasoned pop-culture and travel journalist, chronicles his international odyssey through the worlds ofHarry Potter bands, medieval reenactment societies, World of Warcraft guilds and massive fantasy conventions, to name only a few. In the process he learns to come to terms with his own attachment to the imaginary that has persisted into his forties. As a dedicated fairytale and myth fanatic myself, my curiosity was piqued by the title of the book which is at once a memoir, an insider’s guide to the world of gaming, and a quest that takes him all around the world to find answers not only to his own life, but to the larger question of why tens of millions of people turn away from reality and fully embrace fantastical other-existences.

What makes Fantasy Freaks And Gaming Geeks so arresting is not only the diverse, vibrant role-player communities which Gilsdorf introduces us to and provides insightful commentary on, but the hybrid nature of his text – both on a substantive and emotional level. Gilsdorf effortlessly bounces between fun, vivid-picture-painting journalistic narrative jam-packed with juicy facts and anecdotes of others, to deeply personal confessions about his own real life. The book opens with a heart-breaking scene from his early childhood in the aftermath of his mother’s brain aneurysm that completely altered her personality. This sudden and tragic metamorphosis, which left Gilsdorf and his two siblings to fend for themselves, is presented as the impetus for his retreat into Dungeons and Dragons and Tolkien, and a predilection for fantastical worlds that he is unable to shake off, even, to his anxiety, at forty.

Harry and the Potters / copyright: Ethan Gilsdorf

Indeed, most of the individuals whom Gilsdorf interviews and befriends express how fantasy, particularly fantasy role-playing, has empowered them in some way – to find a release in hard times, to learn lessons/skills that have enabled them to lead a richer real life. The way we really get to know so many of these individuals whom so many (including myself) had previously written off as weirdo geeks, forces a reassessment of our prejudices. There is Phyllis Priestly, who holds a PhD in Greek mythology and founded a primary school; she compared playing World of Warcraft to “breathing for the first time”. As Gilsdorf summarizes it, “After countless hours of playing, Priestly felt she had become a better person. The game leaked into her real world. All that rapid-fire picking off of wolves, quilboars, and troggs had sharpened her reflexes, quickened her reaction time, and heightened her senses. She claimed gaming had made her a better driver.” And, most movingly, there is Nissa Ludwig, a church music director who suffered from a debilitating muscular disorder that kept her at home most of the day. “The muscles in my body are slowly rotting,” she said, “but I type really well.” As Gilsdorf writes, “Online gaming created an alternate world where no one saw her crutches or wheelchair. And that was, in her words, ‘a beautiful thing.’”

Through Gilsdorf’s expeditions and interviews we see that there is no definitive answer to why so many of us embrace fantasy. Everyone has their different reasons, their different impulses–and even if for some, it is just straightforward escapist entertainment, we should certainly not dismiss all fantasy and gaming enthusiasts as geeks or freaks. As with most things, there are no simple, straight-forward answers, but by examining this genre more carefully (with open minds), our reading lives can only be richer and our journeys, if not always entirely successful, at least more fantastic.

Field Guide To Flash Fiction

2009-06-23T13:16:00.000-07:00

My review of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide To Flash Fiction, as published in The Fiction Writers Review:

“Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every short story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.” So Jane Smiley, a judge on the2009 Man Booker International Prize, told of its beloved Canadian winner last month. It was the first time a writer who exclusively produces short stories was awarded this prestigious prize. Times are turning and shorter forms of fiction are not only finally being given the eminence they deserve, but becoming increasingly more in vogue. It was therefore with keen interest that I picked up The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, an unprecedented gathering of 25 brief essays by experts in the field that includes a lively, comprehensive history of the hybrid genre by editor Tara L. Masih.

As a creative writing professor at Boston College, I frequently use collections of flash fiction, stories which usually run 1000 words or less. Given time limitations and the varying writing experience of my students, these versatile, word-limited pieces are a very approachable and satisfying form to work within. However, I always find myself floundering about when I try to explain and define this genre for the first time. As Pamelyn Casto, one of the thought-provoking, inspiring contributors, puts it: “Flash fiction is difficult if not impossible to define – and should be allowed to remain so – because this type of writing is protean… it takes on various shapes and uses different strategies to achieve its goals.” This is why this collection is so successful, and so essential, to anyone in the field of short fiction who teaches, writes, and is interested in its history and practice. These essays are probing and explorative rather than reductive and constrictive. A true ‘field guide’ in spirit, I came away thoroughly more equipped to teach and write short fiction in a richer, more illuminating way.

Tara L. Masih / Photo Credit: Elizabeth Sullivan

This book is an Aladdin’s cave of gems, a brilliantly versatile guide to invigorate any written piece, any writer’s working life. Flash fiction is the impetus for all these essays, and the fantastic prompts and exercises that each includes, yet most of the commentary and advice can be applied to stimulate and aid any creative writer. For example, Vanessa Gebbieencourages us to try writing freely and continuously, without pausing and censoring our words, in responses to certain prompts, telling us “I have seen whole stories written in this way in a very few minutes. And in my own case, I know that work produced like this has a liveliness that writing I agonize over for days just does not”. Jayne Anne Philips suggests using photos, in particular a photo of our parents’ wedding, to produce a one-page fiction piece. Randall Brown challenges us to begin with different types of “encounters – highly charged, interesting, rare.” Lex Williford, who sees flash fiction as “usually begin[ning] in image and end[ing] with something akin to the lyricism of poetry”, ingeniously instructs us to make an “inkblot”, to write down at least ten images from the pattern that it produces, and then to write a 15-minute fiction using as many of the images as we can. Pamelyn Casto invites us to dive into the kingdoms of myth. The book becomes a Field Guide To Stimulating The Imagination and I was thoroughly transformed by the many rainbows of inspiration on the ride.

It is a testament to the book’s impact that I am using it as a set text for my creative writing classes next year. Hopefully the day is not too far away when we will see a flash fiction collection win a prestigious literary prize like the Booker. The best things do often come in small packages.

A Fortunate Age

2009-04-24T13:14:00.000-07:00

My review of A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff, as published on The Rumpus.net:

“With their shining hair and bright, clear eyes, they, all of them, were the dewy flowers of the upper middle class…” writes Joanna Smith Rakoff in the first chapter of her superb, acutely insightful first novel, A Fortunate Age. “But this group, our group, wanted nothing to do with money, the whiff of which had, they thought, spoiled their brash bourgeois parents… [they] were interested in art, though they wouldn’t have put it like that.”

Rakoff, who has contributed her keen commentary on contemporary society to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vogue and The Oprah Magazine, has written a modern-day version of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, or an intellectual Sex and the City. Acknowledging her debts to Sylvia Plath, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy, Rakoff brilliantly captures and tracks the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates in New York around the turn of the 21^st century, as they pursue their dreams, marry, and start families, crossing the boundary into “the difficulties and practicalities of adulthood.”

The five protagonists are Lil, the pretty poet, whose wedding cheerfully opens the novel but later catapults into tragedy (“She was a perfect, devoted, obsessive friend, who always remembered birthdays and brought too many perfectly chosen gifts… The light of her affection shined too brightly for any one friend to bear”); Beth, a loveable academic who struggles between her love for a complicated Englishman and a narcissistic musician (“Beth had a nurturing personality and blossomed when she had someone to take care of; and yet, by the same token, she was also a fragile girl and needed someone to look out for her, to remind her to rest and take her vitamins”); Emily, a struggling actress who lives with her mentally ill sister, and whose life contrasts starkly with that of Tal, whose budding acting career takes him all over the world; and Sadie Peregrine, “with the aspect of a serious child—a child from a Dutch painting, prematurely aged by the rigors and politics of court.”

Joanna Smith Rakoff

Although ultimately Sadie’s story, Rakoff’s novel rotates through these viewpoints, making for intensely and vividly imagined character portraits. She is particularly skillful at illustrating the dilemma these women face between ambition and independence on the one hand, love and dependency on the other:

“But once you settled on someone—settled in with someone—you lost the contentment and confidence that attracted him in the first place. You began worrying abouthis happiness, and his goals and wants, so that you internalized them, and your own happiness and goals and wants were banished to some dark and musty part of yourself.”

The different ways the friends navigate these choices affect their relationships and generate tension as they compare themselves to one another:

“They were, [Emily] supposed, the Ghosts of Marriage Future, with their glib, superficial chatter; they seemed positively terrified that she might engage them in some sort of real conversation and pierce the fragile bubble of their unions. And yet—and yet—she was jealous, stupidly, embarrassingly jealous of their clichéd resentments and their domestic squabbles and even their boredom…”

Rakoff is also very funny, a gentle (or sometimes not-so-gentle) mocker of various bourgeois disguises. The vegan/wannabe-reactionary Caitlin Green inhabits an unnecessarily modest apartment with her trust-fund boyfriend, “subsisting on various grains and nuts and legumes.” In a similar vein is the “mommies group” Sadie encounters, “which met each Wednesday afternoon at various pet-free, peanut-free apartments, to drink watery decaf, debate the merits of Huggies versus Pampers (versus the sleeper, Seventh Generation), and compare notes about the various tradespeople they employed to renovate and clean their apartments.”

One of the achievements of A Fortunate Age is its ability to encompass so many different tones and moods. Like the lives it so compassionately describes, Rakoff’s story is deeply complex in its layering, twisting and unpredictable, beautiful and magical, as well as dark.

Ultimately, this is a novel about growing up, about a group of young people waking up to the realities of adult life. When they reunite for a funeral, Sadie reflects upon the six years that have past since Lil’s wedding. “How long ago it seemed, how impervious they’d thought themselves to the pedestrian dangers of adult life… How stupid they had been.” This is an important debut from a serious and accomplished new voice. A Fortunate Age will stay with you long after you’ve read the final, heart-wrenching page.

Listening Below The Noise

2009-04-01T14:16:00.000-07:00

My review of Anne LeClaire's magical new book "Listening Below The Noise: A Meditation On The Practice Of Silence", as published on http://www.therumpus.net, the new Harper's:

Anne LeClaire’s new book explores the many faces of silence

I have never felt comfortable with silence. Alone in the house, I insist on having the radio or television playing in the background. I write in cafés, not in libraries or log cabins in the middle of nowhere. If there is a gap in a conversation, I feel the need to quickly fill it, even with some dull observation about the weather.

It was therefore with much curiosity that I witnessed novelist and journalist Anne LeClaire practicing an entire day of silence. We were at a writing workshop in France in the summer of 2005; I had begun her latest novel, The Law of Bound Hearts, and wanted to tell her how much I was loving it. When I approached her, I was greeted by a placard that read, “I am having a day of silence.” LeClaire smiled serenely whilst I, perplexed and awkward, struggled to remember what I had come to say.

Listening below the Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence is LeClaire’s first book-length work of nonfiction. Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, it discusses her extraordinary decision seventeen years ago to spend two days a month in total silence. Each neatly themed chapter opens with an evocative photograph by her son, photographer Christopher D. LeClaire; the poetic and intimate prose that follows describes the rewards and the struggles of her practice, and the reactions of her family, friends, and strangers.

Woven into her own experiences and musings are engaging stories and quotations from history, literature, and religion that place her exploration in context. From Saint Arsenius: “I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent.” Herman Melville: “Silence is the one and only voice of God.” Confucius: “Silence is the friend who never betrays.”

Anne LeClaire

Listening below the Noise resists simple classification as it richly draws on this “history of silence” as much as it does LeClaire’s personal journey. Her keen self-awareness helps her see subtleties and make important distinctions. She is careful to emphasize the two-fold “Janus” face of silence, to place voluntary silence in sharp opposition to imposed silence: “To be silenced is crippling, constricting, disempowering. Chosen stillness can be healing, expansive, instructive.”

And silence, of course, enables other activities, helping one to develop important skills. There is a wonderful chapter on differentiating “the four kinds of listening”: “1) Listening but not hearing, 2) Listening and connecting with one’s own agenda, 3) Listening and hearing without a personal agenda, 4) Intuitive listening, meaning not only hearing what is being spoken but what is not being said. Deep listening.”

Other chapters explore different boundaries—between aloneness and loneliness, a busy life and a meaningful life, mindful and mindless living— and how silence can help us get, and stay, on the right side of the fence. “Silence, along with the attention it fosters, is our anchor to the present, to the here and now… I [found] in [the practice of silence] the meaning of commitment and attentiveness, the center of soul.” A writer by profession, LeClaire also has much to say about the relationship between silence and writing: “Creativity and imagination require space to flower, and I had long known the truth of Picasso’s statement, ‘Without great solitude no serious work is possible.’”

Listening below the Noise is a refreshing and important book for an age in which people increasingly tend to avoid silence, continually tuning in to noise and information: cell phones, iPods, the Internet. In this context, silence can seem strange, even magical—as it does in Kevin Brockmeier’s story “The Year of Silence,” featured in last year’s Best American Short Stories anthology. It is precisely this magic that LeClaire urges us to seek in her closing chapter, offering advice about how we can carve out time to devote to silence in the midst of our demanding modern lives.

There are many ways to sow the seeds. Listen and in the quiet you will hear the direction of your heart.
The garden of silence is always there.
Patiently waiting.
We only have to claim it.

Abroad Writers Conference Calcutta, new NEA study, Aisling O'Neill

2009-01-17T12:04:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! Economy aside, there are so many wonderful things happening this year, and with Obama in charge things can only get better.
As for me, I’m particularly excited about my role as Assistant Director of Abroad Writers Conferences (http://www.abroad-crwf.com). We have an incredible conference in Calcutta planned for September, with an outstanding array of Pulitzer/Booker/National Book Award winners. Currently on board are: Junot Diaz, Chris Abani, Amy Bloom, Robert Olen Butler, Ariel Dorfman, Laura Esquivel, Karen Joy Fowler, Jane Hamilton, Jane Harris, Russell Celyn Jones, Maxine Hong Kingston, Yiyum Li, Paul Muldoon, Richard Powers, Michele Roberts, Joan Silber, Gail Tsuikyama, Rebecca Walker.
We are working with Mr Anup Matilal, Chief Minister of West Bengal, to make this one of the year’s most exciting literary events.
I was also heartened by today’s Wall Street Journal article “The Triumph Of The Readers” by Ann Patchett: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123214794600191819.html
Here she refers to the recent report from the National Endowment For The Arts that for the first time in more than 25 years, the number of people reading fiction is on the rise:
http://www.nea.gov/news/news09/ReadingonRise.html
Interestingly, Patchett draws attention to how the most heartening rise is in the 18-24-year-old reading group “the ones who seem to have been born with IPod buds stuck in their ears.”
I am particularly struck with the explosion of popularity in fantasy fiction. Harry Potters seems to have set a steady trend. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series – about a girl who falls in love with a vampire, have met with outstanding success, and her latest, “Breaking Dawn”, sold more than 3.6 copies in hardcover. Vogue magazine also had a fantasy-themed January issue kicking off the year, and editor Alexandra Shulman notes in her letter how “In testing times, we all need to dream and to have an emotional escape route.” Fantasy seems to be the literary zeitgeist and as a fairy/myth enthusiast this is very good news for me. I am having lots of fun with my novel-in-progress The Poppy Queen, set in a superstitious village in the remote Brecon Beacons.
I also want to officially congratulate my phenomenally talented friend Aisling O’Neill who has seen two of her songs on two of the most popular shows in the US (her song ‘California’ aired on The Hills and Grey’s Anatomy). See http://www.myspace.com/aboneill. Ash is on the verge of superstardom and it’s very exciting to see her abundant talent being rewarded. Her voice and lyrics are truly magical and her songs are precious, dazzling gems.
p.s. Whilst in Abu Dhabi this Christmas, we drove to Dubai, to its Atlantis Hotel on The Palm, where we walked around the aquarium there. I thought the Moon Jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) were truly enchanting. From the pamphlet: “These graceful and beautiful drifters have neither eyes nor brains yet serve an important role in oceans. They are a major source of food for sea turtles, other jellyfish and even people.”

Emails from Colombia (as posted on the Words Without Borders website)

2008-07-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

The past few weeks I have been in a fascinating email dialogue with Hernan Torres, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Universidad del Cauca in Popayán, Colombia. Previously a Fulbright Scholar and Research Fellow at Washington University in St Louis, he is now in charge of editing Cuadernos de Antropologia y Poética, an interdisciplinary publication on poetics and interpretive anthropology. He also translates English, French and German poets into Spanish. He explained that his reasons for translating were rooted in his work as an interpretive anthropologist: “I have always been very interested in symbols and their multiple meanings. I have attempted to employ poetic translations—language into language—as a metaphor to better explain the various problems and complexities involved in the process of translating cultures.”

Torres is also the grandson of Guillermo Valenica (1873-1943), the significant Colombian poet and translator who was one of the leaders of modernismo. This experimental movement in Spanish literature was distinguished by its exotic imagery and its rejection of the materialist world of the day. It provoked a striking intellectual awaking in Latin America and its effects could be felt even in politics and economics. Notably, although Valencia’s poetry dealt predominantly with the fate of the poet in an indifferent world, he led an active political career as a statesman and diplomat and was twice a candidate for the presidency of Colombia. He is best known for his first volume of poetry, Ritos (1898, rev. ed. 1914), which contained both original poems and free translations from French, Italian and Portuguese. In his later years he abandoned original poetry almost entirely, concentrating on translations. Unfortunately his work has not been formally translated into English, although you can view some of his poems online in Spanish: http://www.los-poetas.com/e/vale.htm.

Torres also mentioned to me that he himself writes poetry and is putting together “a small text” which he plans possibly to name Homo Poeta (antología minima). His son-in-law, Andre Torres, who is friends with my husband, tells me that he is exceptionally talented. I look forward to reading it. I also hope to continue our email dialogue and further, to understand the merits and constraints of translation from an anthropological perspective.

A Yemeni poet: Muhammad al Sharafi (as posted on the Words Without Borders website)

2008-06-24T14:39:00.000-07:00

And here I am, behind my cloak
An ardent hope and a burning fever
I thirst for meeting with you,
My beloved
But there is my veil, my curse,
O my beloved.
—(M. al Sharafi, 1970, translation Carla Makhlouf)

A week ago, I came across the book “Changing Veils” (1979), an absorbing study of women and modernization in North Yemen (the former, pre-unification Republic Of Yemen). The author, Carla Makhlouf, is an anthropologist by training who currently works for the World Health Organization. Although the book was written nearly 30 years ago, Makhlouf’s study still has relevance today; moreover as one of her sources she draws on some of the provocative work of contemporary Yemeni poets, mainly the controversial Muhammad al Sharafi, who died five years ago. I read her book straight through in one afternoon; I could not put it down.

A detailed profile of Sharafi’s life and work can be viewed in his obituary in the Yemen Times. Firm in his belief in “the emancipation of the Yemeni individual—female as well as male,” Sharafi was a groundbreaking poet who courageously championed the female cause. Some of his poems address women directly, others are written from the point of view of the woman herself. His first book, Tears Of The Veil, generated a social and religious uproar and his later books, too, display a refreshing audacity as they explore the plight of the Yemeni female. Working in one of the most conservative and restrictive societies in the world, Sharafi opposed the traditions that limited the female voice and he subverts convention by using his work to shed light on the female experience. His brave convictions and powerful poetic talent combine to produce exceptionally striking and heart-breaking poems. I only wish that his work received more international exposure.

Indeed, there is a lack of international awareness of Yemeni poetry in general, despite its abundance and rich cultural heritage (an abundance at least of poetry written by Yemeni men). I was struck by Makhlouf’s statement in Changing Veils that “before the Revolution of 1962, education for the female was restricted to reading the Koran and did not include writing, except for a few upper-class women.” But she points out that since then things have slowly been changing. She forwarded me an article on a pilot project launched by a New York-based anthropologist, Najwa Adra, to combat illiteracy among Yemeni women. Adra’s program, Literacy Through Poetry, “seeks to teach rural and urban women literacy skills through writing and documenting their own poetry and that of other women in the community.” The project was initially supported by the World Bank and is now administered by the Social Fund for Development in Yemen. You can view the article here.

It was a treat to have been plunged into such a different world, after I stumbled upon Changing Veils. Makhlouf makes a convincing argument that the veil, and the lifestyle it is part of, empowers women as much as it might seem to restrict and circumscribe them. Her concluding chapter includes some wonderful translations of Sharafi’s most moving and controversial poetry. Sharafi is unafraid of expressing the frustration and intensity of suppressed female passion. His writing is fearless and arresting, raw and angry. Underneath their veils his women are not usually sweet or serene. Rather they are fiercely-feeling, complex individuals, bubbling cauldrons of intense emotions and sexual desires. No wonder his work didn’t sit easily in his homeland. Indeed it no doubt scared the life out of many Yemeni males who perhaps for the first time were exposed to the unveiling of their country’s enduring female hearts.

Let him see me without a veil
Smell my perfume and reap my fruits
I am a woman, in my blood is
A violent spring which fears autumn nights.

Pen World Voices 2008: Writing Sexuality (As posted on the Words Without Borders website)

2008-05-06T16:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve just returned from New York where I attended the panel discussion ‘Writing Sex and Sexuality’, one of the many and varied events hosted by PEN as part of their festival of international literature. I was particularly interested in this event since my novel The Mushroom Man included some sexually explicit scenes which provoked quite a few comments from readers, and recently I had an essay on sex forthcoming in the upcoming anthology Behind The Bedroom Door until I chickened out and withdrew it. I decided that some things were precious (my real life) and that whilst I was quite happy writing fictional sex scenes, writing autobiographical sex scenes was not something I felt entirely comfortable about airing in the open.

Catherine Millet, on the other hand, author of the shocking, bestselling memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M. does not seem to have any inhibitions about dishing the dirt. This Parisian founder and editor of the modern art magazine Art Press was one of the four panelists on the discussion, the other three being Amanda Michalopoulou, a prolific Greek author and journalist, Anja Sicking from Holland, author of The Silent Sin, and Yael Hedaya from Israel, author of the acclaimed novel Accidents. The event was skillfully moderated by Rakesh Satayl, an editor at HarperCollins and author of the forthcoming novel Blue Boy.

It was a very engaging and stimulating debate. Particularly noteworthy was to learn how significantly these authors’ ideas of sexuality as children had been influenced by books (Hedaya cited Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover and Lolita). This is in contrast, the panel agreed, with the way it is now with their own children who are rather absorbed by the internet and film. This led to the panelists articulating exactly what sex scenes in books can do that sex scenes in other media (eg film) cannot do. For example Michalopoulou mentioned the beauty of how the writer can communicate exactly what each person engaging in the sex scene is thinking, whereas in film these intimate cogitations can only be suggested. There was also some lively conversation about different nationalities’ attitude towards, and comfort about, talking about sex. Sicking made the amusing observation that cultures which were very happy speaking about it so freely and plastering it all over their media (eg Americans) were often more prudish and inhibited when it came to the actual practice of it (”if they speak about it so much they probably aren’t getting it so much”). Generally it was agreed that national stereotypes regarding sex were unhelpful. Millet mentioned that she expected her book to do really well in Italy (Italians stereotyped as being sexually uninhibited). However, the contrary proved true—it did much better in countries traditionally known to be more conservative. It was, perhaps, the panel agreed, more a generational issue, older generations being more reluctant to accept explicit language.

When the panel was opened to the floor, I asked the four writers about their experience of translation regarding sex in their works. Since they were all foreigners who were fluent in English and therefore could be decent judges, what did they make of the English translation of their writing? Had things been lost/gained in the translation of the sex scenes originally written in their native language? Hedaya gave a very encouraging answer. She said that she felt that it was actually in the English translation that she felt her sex scenes were properly expressed. She explained how modern Hebrew is a relatively new language and how the range of words to describe sex is very limited: “they are either too slutty or the vocabulary of a gynecologist.” She spoke of how it was a challenge to describe a sex scene in her native language but that in English what she meant to communicate became clear.

I left the discussion feeling that it was an hour and a half very well spent, and it also encouraged me not to shy away from explicit description of sex in my own writing—in my fiction at least. The uniqueness and beauty of fiction is its ability to enter deep into the individual’s interior world. To shy away from describing sex, which has a significance for most individuals, is to shy away from fully exploring a character. Fearless writing is the only interesting writing.

I’d just like to add a couple of thing before signing off. Two excellent articles caught my eye recently: A profile on the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany in the Sunday New York Times magazine (04.27.08), and a profile on the young Belarusian Poet Valzhyna Mort in Poets And Writers Magazine (May/June). Both are well worth a read.

Peter Island, The Bell Ringer, sea jellies, Mabinogi blog

2008-04-28T15:36:00.000-07:00

Finally, I’ve tumbled down the rabbit hole again. It’s been a bit of a grim past three months as I was sick, but I’m very much on the mend and I had many magical experiences on the way which makes me wonder whether this wasn’t such a horrid experience after all. My family have been a host of angels, and it confirmed that I do indeed have the most incredible, loving and wise mother in the world (not that I needed it confirming but…). Last week, my father was working in the British Virgin Islands and I went down to visit him and my mother for a week on Peter Island (a treat to help me get well – sunshine and maternal pampering being the best healing combo I discovered). My brother also took time off work to come for a few days. It was one of the most special, wonderful times of my life. The island was one of the most beautiful, tranquil places on earth and I will never forget the walks I took with my mother and brother when we talked about so many things.
To get down to the articles that caught my eye:
1. The Sunday NYTimes book review (4.6.08) of Benazir Bhutto’s ‘Reconciliation’ by Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International: “..Written while she was preparing to re-enter political life, it is a book of enormous intelligence, courage and clarity. It contains the best-written and most persuasive modern interpretation of Islam I have read.”
2. The Sunday NYimes book review (3.30.08) of Parag Khanna’s “The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order”: “Now a young..foreign-policy scholar, Parag Khann, suggests…that we are on the cusp of a new new world order – ‘a multipolar and multicivilizational world of three distinct superpowers competing on a planet of shrinking resources.’ The three are the US, the European Union and China. The contest now is primarily for the world’s limited resources and it will be waged in Khanna’s second world… And since each of the new empires has nuclear weapons, ‘economic power is more important than military power’.”
3. The Sunday NYTimes book review (4.6.08) of Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short stories “Unaccustomed Earth”: “The eight stories..expand upon Lahiri’s epigraph…by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which suggests that transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and more flourishing. Human fortunes may be improved, Hawthorne argues, if men and women ‘strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.’ ..But Lahiri does not so much accept Hawthorne’s notion as test it. Is it true that transplanting strengthens the plant? Or can such experiments produce mixed outcomes?”
4. The Sunday NYTimes book review (4.6.08) of Siri Hustvedt’s “The Sorrows of an American”. The character Erik in this novel says: “It’s odd that we’re all compelled to repeat pain…but I’ve come to regard this as a truth.”
5. "Soft Cell”, from the Sunday NYTimes Mag (4.6.08) – about a web site which creates (and profits from) a community for the family and friends of the incarcerated. (Gaia Online, Prison Talk)
6. “The Real Work: modern magic and the meaning of life” by the ever-prolific Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker (03.17.08).
7. “The Bell Ringer” by John Burnside from the New Yorker (03.17.08). I am often disappointed by the short stories in the New Yorker (they are often the lesser good stories of very well known writers), but this was one of the best pieces of fiction I have read in a while: “It was dark, out on the narrow lane that ran past the sawmills, dark and very green, the boundary wall a dim colony of moss and ferns, the shadows under the trees damp and still. To most people, it seemed gloomy, but for Eva it was as close to the landscape of home as she could imagine – especially now, with the new snow settling on the pines and on the ridges of the drystone wall, so that the land resembled nothing so much as a children’s-book illustration, the snow steady and insistent in a kingdom that had succumbed to the bad fairy’s spell and slept for a hundred years in a viridian web of gossamer and thorns.” (WOW)
8. “Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper” by Eric Alterman, the New Yorker (03.31.08).
9. “Ghost Writer: Pat Parker’s haunted imagination” by Kennedy Fraser from the New Yorker (03.17.08). (Pat Parker’s “Regeneration” trilogy won her the Booker Prize in the late 1990s). I like her words “As metaphor – and similes are trivial, but metaphors go to the heart of what human beings are – there is absolutely nothing wrong with the idea of ghosts haunting the living… It is simply a statement about our relationship to the past, and to the parts of the past we haven’t managed to cope with. I thank the Lord I grew up in a setting like that.”
10. “Can Cellphones Help End Global Poverty?” by Sara Corbett (The New York Times Mag 03.13.08)
I look forward to reading Kurt Vonnegut’s posthumous book of essays “Armageddon in Retrospect.” To quote from the collection (a rule for writing a short story, and advice he applied to non-fiction too): “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
Also, one of my students wrote about sea jellies in her essay on visiting the Boston Aquarium, which I marked today. Apparently they have no brains or bones… She said they reminded her of white blood cells (she’s a pre-med student). It was quite a wonderful essay. As she wrote, “Nature truly is amazing, and also our body.”
Valete, I better swim back up out of Wonderland to Boston now.

p.s. I paste below my first blog for Words Without Borders. I talk about the Mabinogi, a classic of Medieval Welsh literature.

Mabinogi
by Sophie Powell
10 March 2008

Wales has a vast and vibrant literary heritage, though among Americans this rich tradition remains a bit in the shadows. One of the most seminal Medieval Welsh texts is The Mabinogi, also a great classic of European literature. The Mabinogi, also known as The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, is a set of four tales written in Wales in the late eleventh century, by an unknown master of Welsh prose. John K. Bollard, an American, has recently produced a superb translation, published by Gomer Press, Wales’ largest independent publisher. He presents to the reader an accurate and close rendering, reflecting with elegance and energy the original Medieval Welsh text in a modern English idiom. My parents bought me Bollard’s new translation for Christmas. I was deeply impressed by the way Bollard managed to preserve the original storyteller’s voice in the Welsh original whilst still making the verses sound natural and accessible. Previous, older translations I had read sounded too archaic and stiff. In addition, Bollard’s translation is accompanied by evocative photographs of the places mentioned in it, allowing the reader a glimpse of the magical landscape of Wales where the tales are set. Bollard is an academic with a unique and diverse background. I emailed him out of the blue and he wrote back a very warm email, answering my questions with enthusiasm and patience. I’m sharing parts of our email exchange here:

SOPHIE: Why should people read The Mabinogi?

BOLLARD: The Mabinogi is the jewel in the crown of Welsh literature. It is a written work derived from traditional oral sources with their roots in Celtic myth, and it is a masterpiece of the storyteller’s art. It is also a work that explores the nature of our humanity, providing a moral view of life and human interaction without being dogmatic. While the origins of these tales lie in a mythic Celtic past, the tales and characters have been skillfully woven together to deal with such important questions as “What is friendship?”, “How should we respond to hostile or unfriendly words or actions?”, “What is the role of marriage as a social bond?”, “What is the role of women”, “How should women be treated?”, and perhaps most importantly — “How do we stop this seemingly endless round of feuds and wars, destruction and death?” Any work that addresses such themes with understanding is worth reading in any age.

SOPHIE: How did you, an American native, become interested in Medieval Welsh?

BOLLARD: I was an English major at the University of Rochester (some years ago), concentrating in medieval and especially Arthurian literature. Frequent references and footnotes to the Welsh sources suggested to me that it would be good to find out first hand what these sources were like in the original. Before I knew it I was setting out to do graduate work at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth. There I got increasingly fascinated with medieval Welsh language, literature and history and have remained so ever since.

SOPHIE: When translating The Mabinogi, did you look at previous translations? How did you want to make your translation different/unique?

BOLLARD:I didn’t set out to make my translation “different” or “unique;” I just started translating as best I could, staying as close to the meaning and intent of the Welsh as I could manage without becoming too stilted or archaic in my English, recognizing that the result would be distinct from other translations. I was, of course, familiar with other translations, and I was undoubtedly influenced by them through that long familiarity, but I made no particular attempt either to agree or to disagree with them. My greatest hope was to capture some of the author’s tone, some of the liveliness and spirit of the medieval storyteller’s art, so that the reader might hear at least an echo of his voice. Whether I have succeeded is up to the reader to judge.

SOPHIE: What is the linguistic origin of Medieval Welsh? How far does Medieval Welsh deviate from modern Welsh?

BOLLARD: Medieval Welsh is the descendant of the Brythonic language that was spoken in much of Britain before the Romans arrived in the 1st century BCE—and after they left in the fifth century. Thus, it is a Celtic language most closely related to Cornish, spoken in Cornwall into the 18th century, and to Breton, still spoken in Brittany / Bretagne in northwestern France, and somewhat more distantly related to Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, and Manx. The spelling of Medieval Welsh is different from that of Modern Welsh, but the language has not changed as much as English has in the past thousand years. To a native Welsh speaker, reading Middle Welsh (as it is called) might be analogous to an English speaker reading something between the language of Shakespeare (Early Modern English) and that of Chaucer (Middle English). Comprehensible, if somewhat archaic in vocabulary and structure.

SOPHIE: Are there any other books in the original Welsh that you think non-Welsh readers should be aware of?

BOLLARD: There are many Welsh books that should get a wide audience. For those interested in early literature, I recommend The Gododdin, a fascinating elegiac poem celebrating the heroes who fell in the battle of Catraeth around the year 600 CE. (I did say ‘early’, mind!) There is an excellent facing translation by A.O.H. Jarman. A bit later and on a lighter note, I highly recommend the poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym. Dafydd, an older contemporary of Chaucer, was the greatest Welsh poet and one of the greatest of European love poets from any age. His poetry ranges from the lyrical to the satirical, and his self-effacing persona is at times hilarious. There are several translations; I recommend those by Rachel Bromwich, with a facing Welsh text that will give a visual sense of the poetry of the language even if you can’t read it.

Among modern works I particularly recommend two important novels of Islwyn Ffowc Elis—Cysgod y Cryman “Shadow of the Sickle” and Yn Ol i Leifior “Return to Lleifior”—which have been translated by Meic Stephens. The stories of Kate Roberts are also available in English.

***

I'll be discussing the work of Islwyn Ffowc Elis and Kate Roberts in later blogs. For the next couple of months, I'd like to focus on modern Welsh authors writing in the original Welsh. Wales and its literature are much neglected despite its incredibly rich historical and cultural value.

Gomer has also issued a companion edition to The Mabinogi, Companion Tales To The Mabinogi, translated by Bollard which is equally engaging and beautifully presented with photographs. Bollard said he'd be pleased to send signed copies of his books to anyone who would like to get one from him directly, as stated on his book website: http://themabinogi.googlepages.com. For more information on Bollard also see the link http://jkbollard.googlepages.com.

Pop hwl! (Welsh for Ciao) for the time being,

Words Without Borders, John K Bollard, Polar Bears

2008-02-20T17:10:00.000-08:00

I’m very excited about the blog I’m writing for the online magazine Words Without Borders (http://www.wordswithoutborders.org). I met some of the editors (Dedi Felman, Rohan Kamicheril) earlier this month in New York and we decided I would focus on writers writing in Welsh to start with. My first blog will be about John K Bollard’s wonderful new translation of the Mabinogi that’s just come out, and later I will move to contemporary novelists and poets writing in Welsh.
Here’s a synopsis of things that caught my eye the past month:
i) The Jan/Feb edition of Poets And Writers had some great profiles of Susan Choi (American Woman, A Person of Interest), Manil Suri (a math professor turned writer whose second novel The Age of Shivra is out this month) and the London-based Tahmima Anam, whose first novel A Golden Age has just come out to huge attention in the US (it first came out in the UK a year ago). The book is “the first installment in an ambitious trilogy that will span the history of Bangladesh, from the sunset of colonial India to the present” (Nicole Pezold, PW). PW have also started a new series of interviews with “publishing’s heavy hitters” and the interview with agent Lynn Nesbit was very informative and candid.
ii) “Screams in Asia Echo in Hollywood” by Terrence Rafferty (Sunday NYTimes, Arts, Jan 27), about transplanting/remaking Japanese (and Korean to some extent) horror movies for a US audience. I liked Rafferty’s perception that “Horror is by its nature a good deal friendlier to a cross-cultural transplantation than most movie genres, because fear is universal in a way that, say, a sense of humor is not: what we dread is far less socially determined than what we laugh at. (If you had to choose between remaking a French romantic farce or a Japanese ghost story, the latter would be much the safer bet, as movie history pretty conclusively demonstrates.)”
iii) “Great Literature? Depends Whodunit” by Charles McGrath (Sunday NYTimes, Feb 3), about how genre writing is unfairly perceived as lower-brow than literary writing: “…is the assumption that genre fiction – mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories – is a form of literary slumming. These kinds of books are easier to read, we tend to think, and so they must be easier to write, and to the degree that they’re entertaining, they can’t possibly be serious. / The distinction between highbrow and lowbrow – between genre writing and literary writing – is actually fairly recent. Dickens…wrote mysteries and horror stories, only no one thought to call them that. Jane Austen wrote chick lit… What we look for in genre writing, [John] Updike suggested, is exactly what the critics sometimes complain about: the predictableness of a formula successfully executed. We know exactly what we’re going to get, and that’s a seductive part of the appeal…such books are reassuring in a way that some other novels are not./ Does that make them lesser, or just different? Probably both on occasion. But it doesn’t necessarily make them easier or less worthwhile to write.” I want to quote the whole article! It’s a very articulate piece.
iv) Penguin has just come out with a paperback edition of Robert Fagles’ translation of The Aeneid (with an introduction by Bernard Knox). Couldn’t resist slipping this news in as a Classicist. It’s a seriously brilliant, utterly magical text. Ever since I first started learning Latin at 11, I’ve been hooked.
Spring better be here soon. Otherwise the Polar Bears will be immigrating to Boston.

Oman, cellphone novels, Beyond the Burka, Carver and Lish, Gods Behaving Badly

2008-01-20T14:51:00.000-08:00

We just returned from a week in [the Sultanate of] Oman, a very civilized desert kingdom on the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula. Only recently opened up to tourism since the forward-looking Sultan Qaboos came to power in 1970, it has a fascinating history, striking, unspoilt landscapes and a remarkably modernized infrastructure. You can read more about our trip in the Spring edition of Town And Country Travel.
Here goes the articles which caught my eye the past month:
1.“Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular” - on the front page of today’s New York Times – about the super-burgeoning genre of 'cellphone novels', which are coming to dominate the best-seller list: “Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels [in Japan], five were originally cell-phone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.”
2.“Beyond the Burka. Muslim women are being heard. But which ones?” by Lorraine Adams in the excellent “Islam” edition of The New York Times Book Review (Jan 6) – about how perception of Muslim literature remains distorted since much of contemporary literature remains unpublished in English translation: “Literature in translation, regardless of origin, has trouble finding American publishers. The languages of Islam, unlike European languages… are not often spoken by American editors. “When you have a book proposal, you have to have at least two chapters and a synopsis in English,” explained Nahid Mozaffari, an Iranian historian… “But there’s no money to pay for translation…”” The piece concluded with a thought-provoking quote by Dedi Felman, a book editor in New York and an editor of Words Without Borders, an Internet magazine that publishes literature in translation (in fact I will be their guest blogger starting next month): “In essence, we are asking people to recognize the Other not for what they want it to be or anticipate it to be, but for what it is. And as with all attempts to negotiate divides, that is neither an easy not a simple place in which to put oneself.”
3. “Rough Crossing: Raymond Carver’s letters to Gordon Lish and unedited versions of Carver’s stories reveal an extraordinary battle of wills between an author and his editor.” by Paul Rudnick in The New Yorker ((Dec 24 and 31). This exposé was followed by the unedited version of Carver’s Story 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' (which Carver originally titled 'Beginners'). I drastically prefer Carver’s original version. I always thought 'What We Talk About' lacking in some way and Carver’s far longer, more developed version is so much richer and more moving. I particularly don’t understand why Lish chopped Carver’s original ending. It’s so wonderfully haunting and poignant: “…I stood at the window and waited. I knew I had to keep still a while longer, keep my eyes out there, outside the house, as long as there was something left to see.”
3. More briefly: “Guinea-Pigging: Healthy human subjects for drug-safety trials are in demand. But is it a living” by Carl Elliott in The New Yorker (Jan 7) – a disturbing chronicle of the risky tests many people subject their bodies too for the sake of quick and easy cash. “Gone Missing: ‘The Orphanage’” – Anthony Lane’s superbly-written review of the young Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona’s film. The review was a treat to read, with some wonderful similes eg “A team of paranormal inquirers come to the orphanage, led by a figure clad in black, as slender as a child’s stick drawing”, “Aurora’s pupils gleam hotly in the jungle-colored darkness, like those of a nocturnal leopard, caught by a naturalist’s camera as it slinks to a watering hole.” He also makes the astute point: “A scary movie...is meant to be infested with implausibilities, and what counts is whether we allow them to nip and needle us throughout or whether… we learn to relish their powers of suggestion”.
4. I’m keen to read Marie Phillips’ first novel 'Gods Behaving Badly', in which Greek Gods have taken up residence in modern-day London. It received a good review by Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times Book Review (Jan 13): “But for the most part her nonchalant transposition of the ancients into post-postmodern life is seamless, amusing and blessedly unpretentious. It may not be ambrosia, but it’s some pretty good trail mix.”
See you soon!

The Ghost of Christmas Past, Hilary Mantel, Aubrey Beardsley, Mince Pies

2007-12-23T09:10:00.000-08:00

London is as freezing as Boston but it's wonderful to be back home seeing family and friends. There's also a mist lurking outside which makes me think of Dickens' The Ghost Of Christmas Past.
Having just about finished my present-shopping, I snuggled up and dug into the papers. I forgot how much I missed my British supplements. The articles and columns are so much more irreverent than in the States which is so refreshing and makes me feel even more at home.
As always, I feel compelled to make note of a few of them.
A) In The Review section of The Guardian (Sat 22.12.07) there was a fantastic commentary by Hilary Mantel arguing that "Journalism is as fast as the turnover in Topshop, but fiction should be couture." She starts by quoting Martin Amis, "who was pondering the balance that writers seek between journalism and fiction. "I think of writing journalism and criticism as writing left-handed," Amis said, "where the connection isn't to the part of me that novels come from."" I particularly liked the last paragraph of Mantel's article: "Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It's about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled on to the page hesitantly, furtively, transgressively..."
B) In The Guardian Weekend magazine (22.12.07) there was a very moving, raw excerpt about old age by Diana Athill from her memoir Somewhere Towards The End, to be published by Granta next month. In this magazine there was also a profile of Tang Wei, the upcoming star of Ang Lee's acclaimed new erotic thriller, 'Lust, Caution' which I look forward to seeing. To quote the article: "Lee says the film is a companion piece to Brokeback Mountain. "That was about a lost paradise," he says, "and this is more like hell.""
C) In Times 2 (Nov 27 07), there was a fascinating article by Rachel Campbell-Johnston previewing The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their contemporaries at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. The subheading reads "A new exhibition reveals how the erotic images from the imagination of Aubrey Beardsley were soon diluted into the tamer fantasies of children's fairytales," and the article goes on to describe how "at their strongest, the works in this show draw you ever more deeply into a peculiar imaginative place...Some have an almost dizzying force... The balance shifts from the disturbing to the decorative, the perverse to the pretty, the erotic to the merely coquettish... And all we can do is look back slightly giddily at that wierd world we have just walked through, and wonder."
It's dark outside now. I'm off upstairs for some tea and mincepies.
Merry Christmas!

Mount Snowdon, Diaz, Enchanted, Gawande

2007-12-10T14:12:00.000-08:00

My study at home is like the Alps. I have so many white mountains of essays to look at that I might start needing a pair of skis. Still, the weather is so gloomy I don't mind being cosy inside sipping chamomile tea.
At least I cleared one mountain range in the living room. I had a Mount Snowdon of Sunday NYTimes newspapers and New Yorkers which I managed to munch through this week, procrastinating from marking. Articles of interest from the Sunday NYTimes were:
a) Movie Deals, an essay in the book review by Rachel Donadio highlighting how some publishers are partnering with film companies eg HarperCollins with Sharp Independent, Random House with Focus Features: "Now, Random House and HarperCollins will get a cut of the box office sales, as well as revenue from DVDs, cable TV and other media. And the authors involved will get more say in choosing screenwriters, actors and directors."
b) A Good Mystery: Why We Read, by Motoko Rich. I like the last paragraph: "But books have outlived many death knells, and are likely to keep doing so. 'I'm much more optimistic than I think most people are,' Mr [Junot] Diaz said. Reading suffers, he says, because it has to compete unfairly with movies, television shows and electronic gadgets whose marketing budgets far outstrip those of publishers. 'Books don't have billion-dollar publicity behind them,' Mr. Diaz said. 'Given the fact that books don't have that, they're not doing a bad job.'"
c) Friending, Ancient or Otherwise by Alex Wright describing how some academic researchers are "exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and 'friending', they see the resurgence of ancient patters of oral communication.... 'If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can't help but see it everywhere,' says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons..., 'Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.'"
d) The Line Between Homage and Parody by Brooks Barnes, about the Walt Disney Musical Comedy 'Enchanted' - which I look forward to seeing: "Projects like 'Enchanted' indicate that Mr. Iger's [chief executive of Disney] team is trying to take a route down the middle: resisting adding modern touches but referencing them in fresh settings and winking at their old-fashioned charismas. 'It's a very smart approach,' said Robert K. Passikoff, a.. brand consultant in New York. 'Losing a bit of the preciousness keeps these franchises relevant and alive.'"
The Dec 10 edition of The New Yorker had an exceptional array of essays. I particularly enjoyed Alexandra Styron's Reading My Father and Atul Gawande's The Checklist: Intensive care can harm as well as heal, but there's a simple way of improving the odds. My eyes always light up when I see that Gawande has a new article. A surgeon and professor at Harvard Med, he's an exceptional, insightful, compassionate writer. Also, I really enjoyed Louis Menand's essay Woke Up This Morning: Why do we read diaries? There were some very well-articulated observations here eg "The memorializing of the mundane is part of the flattening of foreground-background contrast that makes diaries different from memoirs and other forms of historical narrative. It's also a sign of the diary's absolute fidelity to the present...The just-the-facts elimination of perspective, discrimination, and reflection, and the sense of bathos and non sequitur that sometimes results, fits certain personality types beautifully...", "...And the superego theory [about why people write diaries], of course, is the theory that diaries are really written for the eyes of others. They are exercises in self-justification." This article got me thinking about why I keep a blog. For me, it is a means not only of recording all the wonderful articles I have come across, but also to impose a [however illusory] sense of organization on my life. My life seems more organized if I can write about it, however occasionally and cursorily, if I can put some of my thoughts into neat sentences.
Well, the Alps are staring at me. Better tuck into those portfolios of student essays. I've also got my last class tomorrow for Creative Non Fiction, and we're going to be discussing The Beat Generation.
Happily holidays.

Mabinogion, False Unicorn, Frankincense, Troy

2007-11-21T16:14:00.000-08:00

It’s been a misty, wet week but at least we’ve got a turkey in the fridge ready for Thanksgiving tomorrow, and I did manage to get a batch of writing and research done. My novel research took me from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass to the medieval Mabinogion to a revisitation of The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (which I studied at university). I also learnt all about The Akashic records and some super names of herbs of which I was only half familiar eg False Unicorn, Cat’s Foot, Shepherd’s Purse.
For a travel magazine assignment, I also looked into Omani Frankincense. Oman was at the center of Arabia’s famous frankincense trade. This aromatic resin is now mainly used in aromatherapy and perfumery, but in the ancient world it was more important than gold. Every major civilization bought frankincense from the region, Omani frankincense being the best in the world. It was among the three gifts the Magi bought the infant Jesus, as everyone knows.
Other notes: I’m eager to read Peter Ackroyd’s new novel The Fall of Troy, which was favorably reviewed in last week’s New York Times Book Review. The novel fictionalizes the story of the obsessive 19th-century archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann.
I also picked up the free women's magazine "Skirt" in Blockbusters, of all places, and was pleasantly surprised. It's published in a few cities around the US and it was packed full of uplifting pieces - many of them very thoughtful and surprising. Perfect for snuggling up with in bed on a weeknight, after a bubble bath. You can also read it online: http://www.skirt.com.
Happy Thanksgiving.

Eisteddfod NY 2007, Andrei Platonov

2007-11-12T19:51:00.000-08:00

If any of you are in New York this weekend, do check out the NY Eisteddfod - a showcase of folkmusic from around the world. Unlike the famous annual National Eisteddfod of Wales, there won't be a strong druidic flavor, but they've got an impressive scope of talented folk artists including the "Karelian Ensemble", a trio from the Russian-Finnish border that performs old shepherd melodies on wooden trumpet and local dance tunes on accordians. You can view the preview I wrote for Time Out NY here:
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/article/music/24196/eisteddfod-ny-2007
As for Andrei Platonov, I recently discovered him in the New Yorker. They published his recently translated story "Among Animals And Plants." I'm definitely going to read more of his work. I love the line in the opening paragraph: "At this time of year, a whiff of mist hung in the forest - from the warmth and moisture of the air, the breath of developing plants, and the decay of leaves that had perished long ago."

Hansel and Gretel/Dark Chocolate/Manga/Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

2007-11-09T08:16:00.000-08:00

Well, the gloves and scarfs are out. Winter definitely sharpened its claws in Boston this week. But the sun's shining, and the sky's a smooth swish of blue, so I'm not complaining - yet.
Last night I snuggled up on the sofa and munched through the pile of newspapers/magazines which I hadn't got around to reading properly the past fortnight. I particularly enjoyed Bill Buford's profile in the Oct 29 edition of The New Yorker: "Extreme Chocolate: Searching for the perfect bean, in Bahia", about Frederick Schilling who opened a chocolate factory and founded Dagoba Organic Chocolate. It's a great story, which includes a description of how Schilling was convinced he was visited by Xochiquetzal, the Aztec goddess of cacao. Other note-worthy articles I happened upon were "How Manga [comics/print cartoons] Conquered The US: A graphic guide to Japan's coolest export" by Jason Thompson in Wired magazine, and, in the Nov 5 edition of The New Yorker, a superb portfolio of evocative pictures inspired by the fairytale Hansel and Gretel: seventeen artists were asked by the Metropolitan Opera to offer their own interpretations of the story to mark the new production of Engelbert Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel" (the original artworks can be viewed at the Metropolitan Opera House's Gallery Met).
I've also discovered a new writer - Jason Brown. His short story collection "Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work" caught my eye in Barnes and Noble and when I started reading his story "Trees", I couldn't put it down. His voice is very distinct - haunting, raw, unexpected. One of his stories ends "He turned around and looked up, as if at a mountain peak or a descending plane, but there was nothing above except a line of high white clouds pulling up over the valley like a cold sheet."
Well, I'm off to write now. I've been a bit stuck on one section of the novel for a couple of days and I talked it over with Christian who came up with some magical ideas within seconds. I got incredibly excited. Anyway, I'm all set to go back to the lake and forest again now.

Welcome, and Mulberry Tree/Pyramus and Thisbe

2007-11-01T05:55:00.000-07:00

Hello! So you've tumbled down the rabbit hole and found yourself here. I can't promise a tea party, but hopefully you'll find something which will tickle your interest. Yikes, how to start a blog? Perhaps I'll begin by describing where I'm writing from, my study (or burrow as my husband likes to call it), surrounded by a treasure of magical books (favorites include The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr, How To Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, Completely Unexpected Tales by Roald Dahl, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake). On the wall in front of me are sketches of forests in Wales by my grandmother (a painter and cartoonist), all kinds of Post-Its which are supposed to remind me of a variety of things - like joining the Boston mycological society, that I want an owl and mist in the next section of my new novel, Into The Lake, that I should read the novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which has repeatedly been recommended to me.
Yesterday, in honor of Halloween, my husband and I ate ghost-shaped biscuits and watched the movie, A Dark Place, a very loose adaptation of The Turn Of The Screw, directed by Donato Rotunno. It was an interesting script, with some evocative shots and moments, and the children actors were fantastic - the way they kept smiling was distinctly creepy. Tara Fitzgerald also gave a stellar performance as the house-keeper. However, the plot conclusion was unsatisfying.
I'll leave it there for the moment - I haven't eaten breakfast yet and I'm off to make myself some oatmeal with chopped banana. Then I'll work on Into The Lake for an hour of so before heading to BC. My students are exceptionally bright this year, an absolute treat to teach. On Tuesday we discussed the essays "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me" by Sherman Alexie and "On Keeping A Notebook" by Joan Didion, and today we're workshopping some of their own pieces.
Sophie
p.s. I titled this post so because I fell asleep last night thinking of the mulberry tree which grew in a shadowy corner of our garden, growing up. My mother baked the most delicious cakes from its fat, succulent fruit but always dreaded the time when the mulberries ripened. We would inevitably stain our clothes whenever we climbed the old, gnarled tree to pick the deep-purple berries. But how exquisitely delicious they were... on a different level of scrumptiousness even to the best blackberries. You can check out Ovid's Metamorphoses (Bk 4) to learn the Classical myth about how the tree came to grow these blood-red berries.