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On Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, the world's largest outdoor bookcase was constructed this week and filled with thousands of books. It was a promotional act for the thirtieth anniversary of IKEA's Billy bookcase. Visitors were invited to swap one of their own books for one on the shelves, or to make a donation for one of the books. All donations went to the Australian Literacy & Numerancy Foundation.
Image Credit: The Guardian
The Literary Saloon alerts me to a fascinating bit of literary history: Karen Blixen (who wrote as "Isak Dinesen" and is this website's namesake) was a hair's breath away from winning the 1959 Nobel Prize for Literature--but she was foiled by her Danish roots.
From The Copenhagen Post, drawing from newly-opened Nobel archives:
The author best known for her work ‘Out of Africa’ was in the final four for the 1957 prize, but was the favourite two years later in 1959. However, according to documents from the Nobel Archive in Stockholm, Blixen was not awarded the prize in 1959 – despite having the committee’s majority support.
... In 1959, Blixen was in the running against 55 other authors from around the world, including Graham Greene, André Malraux and John Steinbeck. When the Committee whittled down the list to just four, Blixen’s name was the top choice.
‘I would stress, that if the prize should go to the now 74-year-old author, it should happen without delay,’ wrote then Committee member Anders Österling, nominating Blixen as his first choice.
Other Committee members Sigfrid Siwertz and Hermann Gullberg followed suit.
But the Committee’s final member, Eyvind Johnson, lobbied for Italian candidate and eventual winner Salvatore Quasimodo to take the prize, saying that Scandinavian authors had won the literature award four times as many times as those of other nationalities.
The pitch hit home with members of the voting Academy and Quasimodo was chosen as the recipient. According to Espmark, Johnson’s proposal played on the guilty conscience of members.
While there was a large showing of Scandinavians among laureates, Blixen, who died in 1962, would've been only the fifth woman to have the honor if she'd won the Nobel Prize in 1959. She never did win the award. (Steinbeck got the Nobel in 1962, though Greene and Malraux never won either.) But as The Literary Saloon points out, Mr. Eyvind Johnson eventually got his--he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974 (sharing it with Harry Martinson) with, presumably, nary a word about the award's over-indulgence of Scandinavian writers.
Besides Out of Africa (and the companion volume, Shadows of the Grass) Blixen also wrote Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard, and Last Tales. Other writing of hers was posthumously collected as Daguerreotypes and Other Essays and Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales.
The Nation published one of my favorite recent re-visitations of the strange and intoxicating work of Karen Blixen: "In the Theater of Isak Dinesen."
I first discovered Anne Trubek's marvelous exploration of writers' homes-turned-museums through her piece the Oxford American on Thomas Wolfe's former Asheville residence. More than a summation or overview, Trubek takes as her starting place the way that Wolfe's memory is and isn't conveyed, and goes on to an especially nuanced questioning of the significance of Wolfe's work (genius? indulgent? both? something else?).
That article is part of an ongoing trek: she is the author of A Skeptic's Guide To Writers' Houses, a book coming soon from the University of Pennsylvania Press. (Does the publication of it indicate an invitation to come tour Trubek's own house? This is yet to be seen.) Today, we're privy to another part of her journey: she visits Langston Hughes' Cleveland home, which may or may not become a tourist destination.
She writes:
It is tempting to cheer the potential Langston Hughes museum in Fairfax as a development that would honor a writer, preserve the cultural legacy of the neighborhood, and bring in tourist dollars. But investing in writers' former homes is not a development tactic with a great track record. There are about 55 writers' houses open to the public in America. Most are owned by civic organizations, and many lose money. ...
Even thriving cities and neighborhoods have a hard time turning writers' homes into sustainable tourist draws. ... And the past few years have taught us all the fundamental irrationality of real estate. Just as a literary classic can become pulp, a penthouse can become a vacant foreclosure. There are no sure bets.
... So although it seems churlish, even as a Cleveland civic booster and English professor I cannot get behind a fundraising campaign for the Hughes museum. ... What if we redirected our energy, I wondered, to reading Hughes rather than restoring his house? His books are plentiful and inexpensive. How much would it cost to give every resident of Fairfax a book or every classroom a set of, say, Poetry for Young People? Not as much as the deferred maintenance on the house where Hughes briefly boarded.
... It may be time to stop thinking of restoring houses as the answer to depopulating cities and to start thinking about the advantages of less costly forms of development, like reading books. ...
Huddled in that attic room eating rice and hot dogs, I suspect Hughes knew, too, that the world of the imagination offers more than property, more than the city.
I see Trubek's point, and I'm tempted to agree with her wholly. But I feel a reluctance simmering in me too. I like writers' houses. I like to visit them. I like the material celebration of the life of the imagination, of creating spaces for people to move through rooms and imagine the imagining that happened there.
Whether or not writers' homes are money-makers with legions of people streaming through the doors day after day (and they unquestionably are not) is not necessarily the only measure of their worth. As Trubek notes, many homes survive on donations and trusts. That seems fine to me. I realize, though, that developers might have irrational ideas on the tourism benefits of fixing up Hughes' Cleveland home and opening it to the public ... but if they do open it up, if it serves as a point of pride in a neighborhood and city, if it leads more people to Hughes' writing, if it broadcasts a message that 'this, too, is where artists create,' then I am thrilled it is there. And I'll no doubt day-trip on over there to check it out for myself.
About the Image: Theodore Roethke Home Museum in Saginaw, Michigan. It offers community programs and tours.
JD Salinger has died. He was 91 years old and living quietly in New Hampshire.
<exhales>
Salinger is, of course, the author of The Catcher in the Rye. Of Franny and Zooey (my favorite). Of Nine Stories and the novellas Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. And also "Hapworth 16, 1928," his last published story, from 1965.
He caught the hearts of an uncountable number of people. You, probably, are one of them, or once were. I count myself among those who feel that his writing opened the door to their own writing. (After reading Catcher, I went on an extended run of using italics everywhere.)
Salinger's life as a recluse is legend and many have been wondering, wondering, wondering, if upon his death we will find reams of transcendent stories tucked in his desk.
From The Washington Post:
In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.
"I love to write and I assure you I write regularly," Salinger said in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980. "But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it."
Just this last summer, incidentally, Salinger won his federal lawsuit against a Swedish writer who wanted to publish a book about an older version of Holden Caulfield. Salinger had sued several times over his life to protect his creations, stopping the publication of his personal letters and a college theatrical production of Catcher in the Rye. He has refused movie adaptation requests for the same book, including by offers likes of Steven Spielberg.
For my part, I'm certainly interested in anything Salinger has written. But I don't really care if there are more stories or not. He's already done it. What he's published is in itself sufficient; through fiction, he has expanded so many lives. As I've navigated my own life, leaving and arriving in so many different places, I have thought often of the ending of Catcher in the Rye:
If you want to know the truth, I don't know what I think about it. I'm sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I talk about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
Thanks to Beth B. for being the first to alert me to the news.
Related:
I'm in no state right now to fully process this and write about it. But in an evening after re-connecting with a dear friend and former community-mate from Haley House in Boston (swelling my heart with love) and shortly before leaving to watch President Obama's State of the Union with my community of friends in Detroit, I'm really shocked to hear that historian Howard Zinn has died at age 87. The former Boston University professor had a heart attack while traveling in Santa Monica, California.
I grieve the news.
This is huge, and perhaps shouldn't surprise me as much as it does. (Again, the man was 87.) But this is a writer, a powerful voice, who has done more to transform the narrative of our nation than nearly any other.
From The Boston Globe's obituary:
“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”
... Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.
... Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal” (1967) and “Disobedience and Democracy” (1968). He had previously published “LaGuardia in Congress” (1959), which had won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Prize; “SNCC: The New Abolitionists” (1964); “The Southern Mystique” (1964); and “New Deal Thought” (1966). Dr. Zinn was also the author of “The Politics of History” (1970); “Postwar America” (1973); “Justice in Everyday Life” (1974); and “Declarations of Independence” (1990).
As Matt Damon's character says in "Good Will Hunting": "Read People's History of the United States; that book will fucking blow your mind."
It's the truth. It. Is. The. Truth.
An adaptation of the book is called "The People Speak," featuring dramatic readings of real people's words and musical performances. Zinn narrates the film of social change, of struggles for equality, of passion for justice--the difficult, grubby work that creates our country. Consider:
Zinn leaves a powerful legacy of truth. Every American is indebted for him for his powerful work in restoring our own multi-voiced, many-sided history.
I anticipate writing more about this.
Image Credit: The Boston Globe
UPDATE: An article Zinn wrote for The Nation in 1960 was reprinted just a few weeks ago: "Finishing School for Pickets," about the civil rights engagement of the students at Spelman College, the prestigious historically black college for women. The tagline for the article reads: "The good ladies of Spelman set aside decades of gentility and moderation to wade into the civil rights battle."
An especially impressive string of good fortune has come in the mail lately-- books, magazines, and literary journals that I cannot wait to read and cannot resist giving shout-outs to before I even begin them. Among the loot that has best caught my attention:
Best European Fiction 2010. Edited by Aleksandar Hemon; introduction by Zadie Smith (Dalkey Archive)
From the press materials:
Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe. Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur “Genius-Award” winner Aleksandar Hemon, and with dozens of editorial, media, and programming partners in the U.S., UK, and Europe, the Best European Fiction series will be a window onto what’s happening right now in literary scenes throughout Europe, where the next Kafka, Flaubert, or Mann is waiting to be discovered.
For all the editorial chaos in the magazine's office, they are still putting out a beautiful literary journal, full of art, photography, and a lot of outstanding voices on the pages.
Gorgeous, as always, and includes writing by Tatjana Soli, Linda Hogan, Laura Pritchett, and an interview with Susan Steingarber on the environment and health. Readers Write section focuses on "Narrow Escapes."
If There is Something to Desire: 100 Poems, by Vera Pavlova; trans. by Steven Seymour (Knopf)
This is the first full-length collection in English of one of Russia's bestselling poets. Her work has so far been translated into nineteen languages; the English versions come courtesy of her husband, Steven Seymour. Pavlova's poems have appeared in The New Yorker and Tin House, as well as New York City's "Poetry in Motion" initiative.
I have an interview with Pavlova forthcoming for The Women's International Perspective.
The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer (Other Press)
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mawer's book is described by The Guardian as "a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry... a novel of ideas, yet
strongly propelled by plot and characterised by an almost dreamlike
simplicity of telling."
Meanwhile, The Washington Post review says that the novel works "so effectively because Mawer embeds...provocative aesthetic and moral issues in a war-torn adventure story that’s eerily erotic and tremendously exciting....[a] gorgeous novel.”
So that all sounds good ...
The Old Garden, by Hwang Sok-Yong (Seven Stories)
From the press materials:
Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopianist dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house in Kalmoe, where he and Yoon Hee once stole a few fleeting months of happiness while fleeing the authorities. In the company of her diaries, he relives and reviews his life, trying to find meaning in the revolutionary struggle that consumed their youth—a youth of great energy and optimism, victim to implacable history.
Hyun Woo weighs the worth of his own life, spent in prison, and that of the strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, whose involvement in rebel groups took her to Berlin and the fall of the wall. With great poignancy, Hwang Sok-Yong grapples with the immortal questions—the endurance of love, the price of a commitment to causes—while depicting a generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life, for the dream of a better tomorrow.
I'll be reviewing this book for an upcoming issue of The Collagist.
CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric was honored last week with the Alfred I. duPont award for her much-discussed interviews with Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign. At the time the interviews aired, I was absolutely hyped up about them; I monologued to many a friend about how impressed I was with Couric. She knew just when to push and when to pull back; she didn't revel in a "gotcha" moment, but rather, she gave Palin space to reveal herself. She was fair, polite, and never pandering. I remember telling a friend of mine that I learned how to be a better interviewer just by watching her. And indeed, as Gwen Ifill noted at the awards ceremony, Couric provoked some of the most revealing remarks of the presidential election.
So I'm thrilled to see Couric honored for how she handled her conversations with the then-vice presidential candidate. What's more, the moment cues an opportunity for Couric to speak plainly about the craft of the journalist.
From her remarks upon accepting the award:
... The much derided MSM -- main stream media -- clearly still has a role in these increasingly partisan times. Had I been a journalist who unabashedly expresses his or her political point of view, be it on the left or the right, I believe the impact of these interviews would have been seriously diminished.
In a time when people are taking the trend of new media as an excuse to replace commentary with straight reporting, this is a fascinating point. Because Couric's right: if Palin had been interviewed by, say, Amy Goodman or Glenn Beck, even if the transcript were identical, the conversation really wouldn't have been as significant. This, despite whatever human subjectivity that influences media organizations that fight against the current these days in attempting to present objective journalism. This, despite whatever biases that people of all political stripes apply to the mainstream media.
The point is, the effort behind straight reporting, sans commentary or apparent political affiliation, still has worth. In fact, it has no equal. And I fear that in our rapid, chaotic media paradigm shift, we will lose it. Unless we start valuing its unique impact and purpose. Unless we name it, as Couric has.
Couric further discusses the interviews with Mallary Jean Tenore at the Poynter Institute. She returns to the point about objective journalism:
Increasingly people want coverage that has a POV. They want to go to a Web site like Huffington Post or they may want to go to "The Corner," the National Review blog. I think people do want to hear from like-minded individuals who may share their point of view.
On the other hand, I think that it's really important that there's a place for really objective journalism that's not necessarily advocacy journalism. Because I think the way you learn, the way I learn about all different sides is by going to different Web sites that have different viewpoints. And if you only go to those who you agree with, then your own views are reflected back at you, and you don't have a chance to even understand the other point of view and engage in an intelligent dialogue that's civil.
In some ways, people become more firmly entrenched when they just watch media that reflects their points of view. But I do think people want that. I hope they balance it out with other things and they see what other people may be saying about an issue because otherwise it makes civil discourse an oxymoron.
She also discusses the journalism craft that went into the Palin interviews. I continue to learn from her; her remarks are worth quoting at length:
I think the things that were validated for me included the importance of massive preparation. When you're interviewing someone, particularly who hasn't done a lot of interviews, I think it's really critical that you have a clear understanding of his or her record. ...
I also relearned the importance of follow-up questions, which I think were critical in this setting but are really critical in any interview. And I'm often frustrated when I watch interviews and I feel as if (a) the person didn't listen to the answer or (b) didn't pick up on something or (c) moved on even though they were given a non-answer answer.
I think that that's something that is really an important practice that journalists need to be mindful of today, because oftentimes you're dealing with a lot of things. You've got time constraints, and you may need to get to a lot of different areas but sometimes it's worth really diving in when someone is trying to avoid answering a question.
I would say preparation and follow-up were key components of that interview, and I also think tone. When I started in television and really started doing interviews in earnest, I remember Jeff Zucker and I used to talk a lot about tone. And I think it's really important because it has a major impact on how an interview is received.If you're too confrontational, and there are times when you need to be confrontational, sometimes the attention is then focused on you rather than the interview subject. Ideally, in 100 percent of the situations it really is about the person you're interviewing, or should be.
Sometimes journalists make the mistake of having a certain tone or conducting the interview in a certain way that it draws attention away from the subject and on to the interviewer herself or himself.
My tone was really important because I think it was respectful but politely persistent. And that's really what you want to do when you're interviewing someone, unless it's someone like David Duke whose views are so abhorrent to the vast majority of American people.
And I change my tone if I'm interviewing somebody who obviously is an accident victim. I do more political figures in my current job but I always try to have the right tone from the get-go of the interview. And I think that is a really important quality when you're doing this kind of work.
Image Credit: CBS Evening News
A lovely feature by Philip Bump at Mediate celebrates the glory days of newspaper comics--before artists were squinched up into tiny four-box windows.
He writes:
"Cartoons have been in newspapers since the late 1800s. Before television, before radio, people explored fantasy, crime, humor and romance on newsprint. It’s hard to imagine the world that opened up for a kid in the nineteen-teens, opening the Sunday paper and seeing, for example, a full, color page of Little Nemo in Slumberland. For just a few cents."
For all the current chatter about the future of newspapering, I have heard nary a word about how the medium of comics intersects with the broadly-accessible print product.
Like Bump, the comics pages were the first part of a newspaper that invited me in; as a kid, I had reason to handle to same material as, for example, my newsy and attentive father. He would pass me a section of the paper while we sat on the porch together in the late afternoon. This was an empowering thing.
The invitation of the comics pages made this kid feel comfortable with a publication devoted to news, so that after a few years, it felt natural for my eye to shift over to the editorial page, to skim the cultural feature, and finally to pore over the political stories.
Thanks to being embedded in newspapers, comics were my first invitation to become a participant in the broader world. It was a wonderfully accessible invitation: available for a few cents, and delivered to your doorstep each day. Wonderfully, this was a very self-referential turn: by becoming more aware of politics and news, the comics got funnier ("Calvin & Hobbes," anyone? "The Far Side?")
There is a flourishing world of online comics; a lot of great work remains as accessible as a keystroke. But I appreciate why Bump is compelled to honor newspaper comics--as both a particular work of art, and, at least for me, a ticket to the world.
Do explore his whole piece, which presents a gallery of gorgeous comics pages from throughout the twentieth century (and from where I plucked these images).
Joe Kelly: I Kill Giants
Here it is: a compilation comic of striking artwork and an unnerving story of fantasy, monsters, and disaster. Barbara Thorson is the eccentric and geeky young girl of great confidence who guides us through the pages. I Kill Giants is a work of beauty. Read my brief review here.
Louise Stern: Chattering
Louise Stern is a first-time author and long-time artist, an American living in London, and fourth-generation deaf. Chattering is a collection of short stories. See my video review here.
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex
I empathize with Cal's search for a sexual partner with whom he can share joy and vulnerability. But setting this up as the endpoint of all that came before -- not just in his own life but in the lives of his grandparents and parents -- feels narcissistic and off-note. Read the full review here.
John Knowles: A Separate Peace
The textual chatter works from the edges in, dissolving the story's substance. It has all the subtlety of a stubbed toe. Read the full review here.
Adam Thirlwell: The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by ... Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes
This nonfiction book of blinding brilliance and rare pleasures -- one that I will easily name as a favorite -- orients itself on questions of literature in translation. How does style translate, or not translate, across not only language, but also time and country, politics and personality? How does the map of the imagination match up with the map(s) of our literal world? Read the full review here.
Cormac McCarthy: No Country for Old Men
This is not my usual kind of book; I both love it and feel detached from it. I find it intriguing and provoking, and I'm impressed by the potency of this rather brief tale that beautifully merges language and story. Read the full review here.
Melissa V. Harris-Perry: Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
Harris-Perry's unconventional book wobbles as it straddles academic rigor and mainstream accessibility, intimacy and analysis, but its ideas have worth, interest, and urgency. Read the full review here.
