Isak

Kenya's Reading Revolution

Weslie Onsando works in Nairobi with Storymoja, a literary collective that is, among other things, coordinating a Kenyan Reading Revolution campaign to "spark the imagination of our nation, and excite Kenyans about books, ideas and creativity." Part of this campaign includes an online 'Why I Read' series. Onsando asked me to contribute my own story about booklish love; it is published today and it begins like this:

I began reading because I liked it. That sounds simple, almost quaint, but it’s the truth. I am a lover of stories, and these books — amazing books — carried the stories. Also, reading was something I could do by myself; that is no small thing for a kid. While pretty much anything else I wanted to do depended on an adult (to help me, to take me someplace, to give me permission), picking up a book to read depended on no one but myself. It was probably my very first act of independence.

Also, you can look forward to my own interview with Onsando, coming soon to an Isak near you! Sneak preview: she is amazing.

A Thesis Statement for Gil Scott-Heron

 

In returning from the hush of the offline world for several days that I spent out and about in Kenya, I come to find out that Gil Scott-Heron has died at age 62. I am sure the internets are brimming with remembrances already, notching video and audio clips of a remarkable man who did remarkable things. I won't overlap with those voices. I want to only offer a personal note of gratitude for this great storyteller.

When I taught the required composition class at Henry Ford Community College, I made it my mission to detach the idea of "essays" as a boring exercise embedded in academic routine, a lifeless five-paragraph sort of writing that nobody reads outside a classroom. I wanted to create a space where the students could feel the potency of the art of telling the world what they thought: an art that can carry stories and rhythm and creative forms that call for our attention. In my lesson on thesis statements, I brought in "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." We listened to it together before the students had any idea why ... I remember their perplexed faces shining back at me. But the song spurred one of our most interesting discussions we had that semester: We talked about the use of refrain. We talked about how a thesis statement can work as the pin that holds big ideas together. We talked about how a thesis doesn't have to be a sort of building-block of literalism: there is room for metaphor so long as it ultimately brings clarity to the essay, rather than obscurity.

Gil Scott-Heron taught our class that essays can be interesting. That is, what you think matters. And if you are attentive and creative to how you share your ideas with the world, people will hear you. We hear you. I hear you.

Image Credit: NPR

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: The Winner

It's Red April (Atlantic Books), a novel by Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo, translated by Edith Grossman. It is the first time the IFFP has gone to an author from Peru, though Roncagliolo now lives in Barcelona. The author, at age 36, is also the youngest person to win the honor. Roncagliolo and Grossman will split the £10,000 award. I haven't read the book, but it is described as a political thriller that unfolds during Holy Week in 2000, drawing from the Shining Path insurgency that shook Peru. And its author is a man who "cites Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell as a major influence." I'm intrigued.

How to be an Environmentalist in a Developing Country

My new article over at AlterNet is a hybrid of a personal accounting and a look at how an American paradigm of environmentalism plays out in an utterly different environment. Here is an excerpt from the opening of the piece:

I arrived in Kenya in January on a Fulbright fellowship—my first extended stay in a developing country. I’m here to write. And along the way, I’m building a life in a place that forces me to let go of the conventions of Western environmentalism.

Kenya's particular context is an intriguing one for examining what it means to be an environmentalist in the developing world: this country is home to Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, honored for her environmentalism through the Green Belt Movement. Meanwhile, Kenya's showpiece natural landscape is championed worldwide; indeed, the national wildlife service is one of the strongest government sectors.

But that's on the macro-level. On the micro-level, environmentalism as an intentional set of individual choices is largely absent from Kenyan life; that is, choices made specifically because they are more ecologically sustainable. There is, of course, a class dynamic at play: as Maathai has pointed out, poorer people who must focus on their immediate needs are far less likely to consider choices where the environmental benefit is long-term. At the same time, many day-to-day Kenyan habits, like sharing clothing and buying seasonal food directly from the local market, are prevalent not because they are fashionable or because of any particular ecological concern, but because it is simply the most affordable and reasonable thing to do.

Still, from one who comes from an American sensibility of trying to integrate my eco-beliefs into my daily habits, adapting to life in Kenya means adapting to an environment where it is harder—for me, at least—to be "good.” There are, simply, different choices that are available.

Quick Hit: On Family Planning and Public Costs

Nearly half of all pregnancies in the U.S. each year are unplanned. Unintended pregnancies cost about $11 billion a year. That's the new information released in a joint report from the Guttmacher Institute and Brookings Institution, which goes on to provide amazing state-by-state data. My new article at AlterNet looks specifically at the information on pregnancy and public cost in the states where Planned Parenthood has already been, or may soon be, entirely defunded. Simply put, the numbers carry an amazing story.

UPDATE: I notice that some editorial rewrites of the piece that I didn't see before the article went up have added copywriting errors and a generalization that I don't agree with. I am working on getting this quickly corrected.

The Spanish Issue

The Hudson Review has released "The Spanish Issue" (by which we'll assume they mean "Spanish-language" issue, since its contributors are hardly limited to the geography of Spain). And the content looks promising, though it is much more classical than contemporary. Here, you can find essays by Bolaño and Borges, and "The Death Sonnets" by Gabriela Mistral, Latin America's first female Nobel Prize winner for literature. You can find poetry by Pablo Neruda and Luis de Góngora, memoir by Antonio Muñoz Molina, a review of Latin American anthologies, and a piece on "César Aira's magical surrealism."

Which sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, none of the content is available online, and it looks from the subscription page that you can't order the current issue on its own. This is one, folks, where you either find it on a nearby newsstand, or commit to a year's supply of the journal.

The Hudson Review is a quarterly magazine that's been published since 1947 and is distributed in twenty-five countries. (It would be distributed in more if it had content available online ...)

Brave New Sports Pages

Nieman Journalism Lab has a very interesting overview over how the internet is influencing sportswriting -- a genre of storytelling that passionately and peculiarly straddles the future, past, and present tenses. Of the innovations that writer Tim Carmody looks at, I'm especially enthused about SportsFeat, a spin-off sister site from the crew at Longform.org. As you might expect, SportsFeat curates longform sports journalism -- primarily contemporary pieces, but classic ones as well. Today on the front page, there are links to an essay on Magic Johnson, two decades after the basketball great announced he was HIV-positive; a profile on the competition to make the most prestigious drill team in Texas; and an obituary for wrestler Randy Savage. Interesting ... though I intend to make active use of the "suggest a story" feature.

The Nieman profile pulls out some ideas about how sportswriting is evolving, fed by multimedia phenomenons. Pointing to Quickish and Grantland, among other platforms, Carmody writes:

If there’s a common thread to all of these moves, it’s hybridization and metastasis. The tools that drive compelling sports journalism on the web aren’t limited to sports. Nor are they exclusively held by sportswriters working for independent media companies.

Meaning, the "sports pages" aren't the sole site for these kind of narratives. Okay. Hybridization seems to be what's happening to everything, everywhere, as a result of the web; it's certainly not unique to sportswriting. But there is an interesting implication here: as community-building as sports are (I wrote about that here and here), it can of course be cliquish. And these cliques aren't just divided by whose jerseys they wear or what leagues they follow, but also across tenuous lines on who a "real" fan is and isn't.

Don't know the names of the players? Can't for the life of you figure out what "offsides" means in soccer, but still enjoy watching people play a game once in awhile? A lot of stats-vomiting fans will not count you as a "real" lover of the games, with the same vehemence that indie music fans guard their territory. This is silly, of course, and I like to think that this "hybridization and metastasis" might have the effect of blurring the lines that currently surround the various cliques by providing more ways for more people to participate. That is, it might disintegrate any old-fashioned barriers ("What?! You don't know who Sonny Liston is?!") and create a more welcoming place for the casual or skeptical fan to engage with the potent, powerful, beautiful stories of sports. (I wrote about that too.)

More from Carmody:

And as hungry as fans are for quick takes and real-time updates, they’re equally hungry for history of the game and the stories that shaped how we see it. Longform/SportsFeat co-founder Aaron Lammer explains the hunger for old stories for a generation accustomed to tracking down and collecting the best of the past:

Everyone has that one standout piece that gets seared into their skull, so it was exciting, when someone mentioned one, to actually be able to track it down and pass it around. For me, the process echoed the early days of MP3s, when out of print and ultra-rare recordings that had been stuck in record industry purgatory all started making the rounds. Except with long-form stories, the whole thing is amplified, because most of these pieces have totally dropped off the map. [emphasis mine]

And with a hundred and one ways to get the day’s stats and highlights and deals and signings, including directly from the teams themselves, anywhere and everywhere, there’s a premium on well-curated, extended, critical profiles and analysis — especially when we have time to sit and read.

I love the counter-intuitiveness of this. Most folks think that a wired culture is lulling us into a satisfaction with stories with the depth of a tweet or text message ... and yet, here we are not only acknowledging a hunger for longer, contextual, dynamic stories, but we're acting on them. We're seeking them. And we're using that very wired-ness of our culture to do it. This isn't a theory: while I'm new to SportsFeat, I've watched with delight (and participation) in the simultaneous flourishing of Longform, Longreads, Read It Later, and Lady Journos, among other narrative journalism innovations. The audience for this stuff is huge. And even for a genre of storytelling that is unusually data-driven and present-tense -- sports pages are traditionally recognizable for their box scores; sports television by their ticker-tape updates -- this, too, is a natural progression of the way we tell, and read, and share, the stories of sports. Frankly, it's a good time to be a fan.

Literary & Media Indulgences - 5/23/2011

-- Scorching: Tom Lutz steps down as the chair of the creative writing department at the University of California-Riverside and leaves behind a powerful open letter behind that testifies to the stakes of dismantling our public education system. Could've done without the dig at Missouri and West Virginia, though ...

-- The Nation has released its Spring Books Issue.

-- "The charms of Eleanor Roosevelt." On the occasion of two new books about the uncommon First Lady.

-- Frank Bruni is the new op-ed columnist at the New York Times. An unsurprising insider choice. Noteworthy: he is the first openly gay op-ed columnist at the newspaper. And he began his career in Detroit, writing for the Detroit Free Press until 1995, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

-- Chicago is well on its way to preparing for the effects of a climate-changed Midwest.

-- Junot Díaz on apocalypse and disaster.

-- "Mauricio Funes became the first Salvadoran president to apologize for government death squads." Looking back at what happened in 1974, and how the US was tangled up in it.

-- What the science textbooks get wrong.

-- The last shuttle launch. Here's one way you can be there for it.

-- "The best street photographer you've never heard of."

-- The ones that got away -- book covers, that is.

-- A map of literary Britain and Northern Ireland. (Thanks to Chris M. for the link.)

-- The books that prisons ban.

-- Gertrude Stein and the Fitzgeralds (F. Scott and Zelda) appear in a new Woody Allen film. Stein is played by actress Kathy Bates.

-- Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project. The film.

-- These stories will rip your heart out. From a five-part multimedia series at the New York Times.

-- "The once and future Oprah's Book Club." It was like the Harry Potter phenomenon, but it went on for longer and the crowned books could've been anything from a William Faulkner triptych to a collection of stories by Uwem Akpan to that memoir we shall not speak of.

-- That surreal photo from Namibia that I posted recently? Here's the backstory from the photographer.

Tailed

It's a warm evening in the summer of 2010. I am leaving a cafe in the very center of Moscow when I notice my car is missing its license plate. I know what this means: I am being followed.

The opening of a spy novel? No: journalist Valery Panyushkin is writing in the New York Times about the precarity of free speech in Russia. This is no mere mind-game: journalist Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated, probably for her coverage of Chechnya, while journalist Oleg Kashin was savagely beaten. Panyushkin's terrifying essay, translated by Yevgeniya Traps, details his experience of discovering that the government is now tailing him -- and he doesn't even know what he's written that got their attention.

Was it my article about the shortage of medicine for people with H.I.V., or the one on how the police protect a studio that produces child pornography? Was it my report that the F.S.B. has forbidden the export of blood samples from Russia to protect the profits it makes from the market in donated bone marrow? Could it be because I once juxtaposed Barack Obama at his inauguration, striding through a crowd of supporters lining Pennsylvania Avenue, with Dmitri Medvedev, riding toward his swearing-in in a bulletproof car through streets emptied for the occasion?

Panyushkin's forthcoming book is 12 Who Don’t Agree: The Battle for Freedom in Putin’s Russia. It profiles twelve Russians of varied backgrounds and status that all participated in the highly illegal March of the Dissidents in 2007. It will be published in July by Europa Editions.

The Anatomy of Melancholy

One of the strangest and most fascinating books I've ever encountered is Robert Burton's tome from 1621. Its full title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up.

The book is something of an attempt to provide a medical picture of what we'd today call depression, authored by a priest and scholar who himself suffered from 'an imbalance of the four humors.' But this labyrinthine book ventures far beyond the bounds of genre: it is comic, imaginative, speculative, literary, spiritual, and an altogether breathtaking map of mind and emotion. It has no counterpart. Which of course makes it a treasure trove for discussion. The BBC show "In Our Time"  takes the bait, hosting a roundtable about The Anatomy of Melancholy. See also its interesting list of 'further reading.'

Poem: "The Suitor"

 

The Suitor
By Jane Kenyon

We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.

 

Poet and translator Jane Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor in 1947. She earned both her graduate and undergraduate degrees from the University of Michigan, where she met poet Donald Hall. The two writers married and moved to rural New Hampshire. Kenyon published four books of poetry: Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978), where "The Suitors" comes from. Her translated title is Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985). Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate when, in April 1995, she died of leukemia. Graywolf Press has published three posthumous books by Kenyon: Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1996), A Hundred White Daffodils (1999), and Collected Poems (2007). Donald Hall wrote two books about Kenyon: the poetry collection Without and the prose work titled The Best Day, The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon.