Isak

Coming Back

 

 

Today, I had an email exchange with a friend I met in Kenya, an American who spends a great deal of her life in central Africa. She wondered where I was, and I told her that I was back in the U.S., and she asked how the adjustment's going. "It's a big one, isn't it?" she wrote. Just a simple question, really, but I was struck. Yes. Yes. It is a big one. And it's really, really hard. Her saying that, given her own experiences with international life, woke me up. I feel like I haven't let myself admit how hard it has been since I've come back from Nairobi, as if this experience is not possible because my time abroad was far shorter and surely less intense than that of many other people. Who am I to be having a hard time about this? To admit that I am not Over It by now feels shameful, babyish. Like I can't handle it, or that I'm being melodramatic. Her saying what she did sort of gave me permission to feel what I feel.

I am not over it.

10 Books About (and From) Prison

While the fact of prisons simmers behind innumerable news stories – from the West Memphis 3 to the Lockerbie bomber to the Miami football scandal -- the enormity of the system remains weirdly invisible. Prison is framed as a sort of conclusion; it’s where the bad guys go before vanishing into the ether and allowing our attention to move onto the next story. But more than two million lives are lived in U.S. prisons these days. And not only is the day-to-day reality of that worthy of more attention, but so are the consequences of our economic and political dependence on a punitive system that incarcerates 25 percent of the entire world’s inmates. Five percent of the world population is locked up in U.S. prisons. Both inside and outside the walls, much is stake.

Here are ten of the best books – contemporary and classic, fiction and nonfiction – about prisons. They are listed in no particular order, as all of them deserve your attention. Because incarceration isn’t an end to our stories: it’s just another beginning.

I wrote an article for AlterNet on some of most interesting, astonishing, moving, and provoking books written about, and from, prisons. These titles span more than a century, and hinge on stories, confessions, spirituality, analysis, philosophy, and "literary investigation". I even snuck in a must-read list of fifteen additional titles at the end. This is really good stuff, people.

"Pull Over for the Emergency Manager"

A lot of eyes, punctuated with raised eyebrows, turned to Michigan when the state passed a law that gives emergency managers appointed by the state unprecedented authority over vulnerable communities and school districts. One of the communities is the small town that neighbors the one I grew up in, our supposed 'twin city.' Another is the school district of my adopted city. Unsurprisingly, the law was challenged by a lawsuit. Surprisingly -- to me, anyway -- Governor Rick Snyder is trying to move the lawsuit straight to the Michigan Supreme Court, bypassing the circuit and appeals court process. I wrote about the story in an article published today with The American Prospect. An excerpt:

Michigan’s emergency-manager law, enacted this spring, gives state appointees unprecedented power over local governments and school districts, including the power to strip elected officials of their authority and to amend and discard union contracts. Poor communities, then, are subject to an unelected person’s near-total authority on how they should manage their affairs, creating an exception to democratic systems of checks-and-balances and nullifying the effect of citizen voting. It is unsurprising that communities assigned emergency managers are largely African-American. The Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice in Detroit challenged the new law in circuit court in June, but Governor Rick Snyder asked this month for the case to be fast-tracked to the state’s Supreme Court—which leans strongly conservative—bypassing the circuit- and appeals-court process.

... The Sugar Law Center is representing a group of 28 citizen plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in Ingham County Circuit Court that challenges the law’s constitutionality. “We’re conditioning the ability to elect local government on financial matters,” says legal director John Philo.

I will add that I genuinely think Snyder is not malicious. I think he's a private-sector businessman who has never held elected office before, and he simply does not seem to understand the way public systems and accountability need to work. A lot of his business expertise is a boon for Michigan, but this is a case where it's given him misguided expectations.

Another bit of nuance to note here, that I didn't have room for in the article:

 

Anne Lamott and the Gold Coins

 

 

I sometimes teach classes on writing, during which I tell my students every single thing I know about the craft and habit. This takes approximately 45 minutes. I begin with my core belief—and the foundation of almost all wisdom traditions—that there is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder. But the good news is that creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.

Then I bring up the bad news: You have to make time to do this.

This means you have to grasp that your manic forms of connectivity—cell phone, email, text, Twitter—steal most chances of lasting connection or amazement. That multitasking can argue a wasted life. That a close friendship is worth more than material success.

Needless to say, this is very distressing for my writing students. They start to explain that they have two kids at home, or five, a stable of horses or a hive of bees, and 40-hour workweeks. Or, on the other hand, sometimes they are climbing the walls with boredom, own nearly nothing, and are looking for work full-time, which is why they can’t make time now to pursue their hearts’ desires. ...They are absolutely sincere, and they are delusional.

I often remember the story from India of a beggar who sat outside a temple, begging for just enough every day to keep body and soul alive, until the temple elders convinced him to move across the street and sit under a tree. Years of begging and bare subsistence followed until he died. The temple elders decided to bury him beneath his cherished tree, where, after shoveling away a couple of feet of earth, they found a stash of gold coins that he had unknowingly sat on, all those hand-to-mouth years.

You already have the gold coins beneath you, of presence, creativity, intimacy, time for wonder, and nature, and life.

That's Anne Lamott writing in an April 2010 issue of Sunset; you can read the second half of her essay here. It is liberating to remember our capacity for choices, that time is more than a thing to be passed or filled up, that we can be intentional about how we trade it in. I might choose to trade an hour I spend on the internet each week and give it instead to reading poetry. I might barter another hour of the week that I now spend reading the news and give it instead to riding my bike. What's interesting is that I usually think of negotiations like this in terms of money: I'm basically self-employed, supporting myself on an irregular income, and working very seriously to get out of debt. Day-to-day, I think a lot about what I spend and how it will or will not go toward living the kind of life I want to have -- independent of debt and all its disguised obligations, full of books and music and good food and beautiful yarns, circled among creative and intelligent people who will laugh with me and share what is both hard and good in our lives. And I want to live this life in a world where places that do meaningful work -- from bookshops to public radio to climate change advocacy -- exist and thrive. If I go to a restaurant with a friend instead of adding an extra $15 to my student loan payment this month, does that move me closer to or away from the life I want to live? If I pay extra on my loan instead of donating to, say, Planned Parenthood, how does that reconcile with my best good life? Is it more important for me to pay for a dentist appointment or an eye appointment when I am due for both and can only afford one?

That's the narration that runs through my mind a lot. There are no clear resolutions. What I like about Lamott's piece is its push to translate how I think about money with how I might think about time, which is of course a far more precious wealth. Time is where we live our lives, after all. We don't fill it; it fills us. I want it to come not with my manic habits, but with art and love.

 

About the Image: Anne Lamott, via Sunset.

Translation Real-Talk

Translation queen Edith Grossman is featured in a (translated) profile over at Publishing Perspectives, which strangely juxaposes a headline about her frowning with a photo of her smiling. But if we pull ourselves back into matters of substance, Grossman's real-talk is at once enlightening and depressing.

In her book (Why Translation Matters), Grossman mentions the well-known fact that only three percent of the books published in the United States, Great Britain and Australia are translations, while in Europe and Latin America this percentage number fluctuates between 25% and 40%. “We English-speakers are not interested in translations,” says Grossman. (An interviewer infected with translators’ jargon would have commented that Grossman said this “with a sigh”, or “shaking her head.“) “I don’t believe that this will change soon, since almost all publishers are part of large corporations and make their decisions under enormous pressure to be profitable.”

I mention then that a few small and medium US publishers have recently published translations of books by César Aria, Alejandro Zambra and Juan José Saer. “I love these publishers, and they have good people working there,” she says. “But they are too small, they have a lot of trouble getting adequate distribution and good publicity or reviews in the media.”

The writer of the article points out that Grossman's own translation of Don Quixote a few years back and Lydia Davis' translation of Madame Bovary are among the publications that were heralded as major literary events. Which is exciting ... but it is troubling in how a select few re-translations of acknowledged classics are set up as our due nod to World Literature. The fanfare around a couple titles from famed translators of famed novels, worthy though they may be, gives us an excuse to neglect more translations by living authors, or authors who aren't yet well-known in English, or by translators whose name won't appear in bold print on the cover. There is a lot that is maddening about this, but not the least of it is the revelation of a serious lack of curiosity among publishers, editors, distributors, media reps, and other stakeholders in our literary culture. Where is the willingness to discover something new? Where is the risk-taking? Where are the engaged and questioning minds willing to go beyond Gustave Flaubert for a deepened experience of the world's stories?

A Reading List for Late Summer, Early Autumn

These are the days I miss even before they are through. There is a sweet lightness to the sun, a briskness to my nighttime walks. This is the time that nets ease and leisure alongside notions of things to do, ways to be, how to become. There's an urgency to how I spend my time, there is tension in my joints, but I also catch myself staring into the sunlit dust motes for long, long moments - struck into stillness. I wander for the experience of rootlessness, and also for the feeling of having come from somewhere, having somewhere to go.

Here are a collection of books that meet this strange season of late summer and early autumn, and the ways it has with us.

• Too Much Happiness - Alice Munro
• Arcadia - Tom Stoppard
• Without An Alphabet, Without a Face - Saadi Youssef (tr. Khaled Mattawa)
• Apocalyptic Swing - Gabrielle Calvocoressi
• The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
• Illinois, My Apologies - Justin Hamm (see the Isak Interview here)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
• The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold - Francesca Lia Block
• Further Adventures in the Restless Universe - Dawn Raffel (see my review here)
• The Golden Apples - Eudora Welty
• The Bigness of the World - Lori Ostlund (see my video review here)
• Varieties of Disturbance - Lydia Davis
• A River Runs Through It and Other Stories - Norman MacLean
• Birds of America - Lorrie Moore
• Home - Marilynne Robinson
• The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley (specifically, the title novella)
• Franny and Zooey - JD Salinger
• Living by the Word - Alice Walker
• Awakening to the Sacred - Lama Surya Das
• In Search of Duende - Federico Garcia Lorca
• On the Origin of the Species - Charles Darwin
• Crazy Horse in Stillness - William Heyen
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
• Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen
• The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser - Muriel Rykeyser

 

(An aside: Lately, making reading lists is, for me, like making poems.)

Newspapers, On the Move

 

In a beautiful incarnation of flowing data, the Rural West Initiative at Stanford University put together an interactive visualization of newspapers in the United States. (Above: a still.) It spans the first paper in America -- published in Boston in 1690; shut down four days later -- through the 13,600+ papers of the last couple decades. There is also an animation of the data that I found surprisingly moving: those little beaming lights that reveal our excitement for information, our movement, our search for our world.

The partnering analysis from Geoff McGhee says that rural newspapers are doing better than their urban counterparts these days. He profiles the strategies and uses of these newspapers, and spends a lot of time discussing the ideas that Judy Muller lays out in  Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns.

So what are townsfolk waiting for so urgently? "I think the holy trinity of the small town paper is obituaries, the police blotter, and high school sports," says Muller. "That's what people care about. The police blotter is where you find out who's doing what to whom. The school superintendent beating his wife, from there it gets blown into a bigger story. The high school sports thing is so huge, I can't even explain it to a person who doesn't live in a small town. And births, not just obits, tend to dominate. If you leave town, and you subscribe online, those are the things, 'Oh my God, old Pete just died' — that might seem insignificant to someone outside of a small town, but every single birth and death means something."

But surely local journalism has to be about more than recording comings and goings, nighttime calls for help, and salutes to BearCat pride? Muller finds ample journalistic inspiration in the pages of small-town papers, what she calls "this wonderful crucible of telling the truth, weighing that against living with the people you're writing about."

As well, the visualization project considers the interplay between the rise of the West and of newspapers -- a particularly interesting consideration when the notion of what places were in the "West" changed over time.

A “real” town in the mid-19th century had at least one newspaper; the publications were “legitimizers,” and proof of “civilization” for their readers. They were also major forces in politics and sometimes that force was quite literal.  When the Free Staters were battling the Proslavery party in Kansas in 1856, a newspaper called the Herald of Freedom in Lawrence melted down its type to make cannon balls for the fight. Each time the cannon fired the printers called it a “new edition” of the paper.

Listen In: Robin and Natalie

Natalie Baszile interviews Robin Black for The Rumpus, which brings together two of my favorite Warren Wilson writers for a conversation that is as electric and brainy as both of these women are. Here, they're especially interested in discussing character. For example, Baszile notices how Black's stories "always contain some remarkable reversals, what I can only describe as crossed wires," which in turn reveals character tension in surprising ways. Black responds:

You know, to greater and lesser extents, fiction is about misbehavior. And one form of misbehavior that interests me a lot is inattention.  That question of where the gravitational center of one’s thoughts is at any given time – which is so very often not in the scene that’s unfolding and in which one is participating.  There’s just something kind of flat to me about characters who are always, in mind and body, fully engaged in a scene. It’s a delicate balance though because when you have a character perpetually preoccupied or whose memories are continually competing with the scene it can begin to make that character seem oddly hollow, just a vehicle for the author to dump out a lot of exposition or back story.

Black is the author of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, a brilliant collection of stories that just came out in paperback and should be in your hands right now. Baszile is the author of the forthcoming novel, Queen Sugar.

Related:

• "The Golden Girl Image" - my interview with Black for The American Prospect about fictional portrayals (and nonportrayals) of older women.

Reading Kenya

Ken N. Kamoche picks out three must-read books from Kenya for the current issue of World Literature Today. One is authored by the country's most famed author, written fifteen years after independence. One wrangles with AIDS while still managing to be a satire. One is a nonfiction thriller about a political whistleblower.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer profiles crime fiction coming out of Africa. Particular attention is paid to South African Roger Smith. Also, Kenyan-raised Mukoma wa Ngugi's novel Nairobi Heat is coming out in the U.S. next month from Melville House. It features an African American detective from Madison, Wisconsin, lured to Kenya on a case. From the newspaper profile:

Ngugi says writers in Kenya, which he visits yearly, are much freer than when he was coming up. But, he says, African fiction is hamstrung by lingering stereotypes.

"I don't know if there's a ready market for hard-core, violent, and hard-hitting African fiction," he says. "Ultimately, there's this idea that African literature has to be functional and deal with issues of colonialism. But we have to allow it to be many things - science fiction, detective fiction. We have to allow it to flourish and go in any direction."

Ngugi, who now lives in Cleveland, discussed Nairobi Heat at the Kwani LitFest in December and questioned the separation between ideas of what is "literary" and what is "popular." He said:

I wanted to write a book where—you know when you go to a good movie, then you clap at the end of the movie? I wanted, for my book, I wanted people to read it and clap at the end of it because they enjoyed.

Literary & Media Indulgences - 8/24/2011

 

-- Today is the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, that magical man. In honor of him and his creation, here is one of my favorite Borges stories: "Three Versions of Judas" from Ficciones. And here is his 1967 interview with The Paris Review, which is ... amazing.

-- The latest "Read This Next" pick is Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale.

-- The finalists for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize have been announced, and my TBR list just got larger. The fiction shortlist for the "first and only annual U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace" includes novels by Chang-rae Lee, Dinaw Mengestu, Maaza Mengiste, Mark Mustian, and Teddy Wayne. Nonfiction books by Kai Bird, Conor Grennan, Laura Hillenbrand, Mac McLelland, Wilbert Rideau, and Isabel Wilkerson. Soft Skull Press is the only indie publisher on the list.

-- The art of Lee Miller and Man Ray.

-- Perhaps in part because NASA has more time on its hands, it is turning its attention to other creative forays: literary publishing. NASA is partnering with the Tor/Forge imprint to help create a legacy of "science-based science fiction."

-- "Even as Hollywood transforms itself into a superhero-industrial complex, struggling to find 'gritty' and 'realistic' takes on flying Übermenschen in rubber suits, (Grant) Morrison revels in the glorious madness of these stories." From a Rolling Stone profile of the Scottish comics artist and writer.

-- Bless: the inimitable Lynda Barry has a Tumblr.

-- Here is the woman behind the Feminist Hulk.

-- If the characters of Super Mario Brothers swapped genders.

-- I feel like this news has been weirdly muted: "Climate Change Scientist Cleared in Closing of of U.S. Data-Altering Inquiry."

-- "Joy for orphan elephants." This National Geographic feature profiles one of the places I loved best in Kenya. One of the places I love best anywhere. I returned several times. I don't even know how to explain how much I love it there. Aside: the first-paragraph NatGeo reference to "some ancient tribal ritual" is pretty weird. As is the lead photo that cuts off the heads of the elephant caretakers -- especially given the 24-hour commitment that these caretakers make to the elephants, and the photo caption that cites the headless humans as "dedicated keepers."

-- "... most visions of the future are really less about the future and more about what’s happening now. Extrapolation tends toward exaggeration. Today, there are two basic cities-of-the-future themes competing in the collective imagination: the dazzling megacity of megastructures (Dubai’s steroid-induced construction) versus something I call Thanatopolis, the city of the dead (Blade Runner, Children of Men, The Book of Eli, etc.). All this said, it should be obvious that planning for the city of the future is tied into the urgent issues of our time—climate change, peak oil, ecological destruction, the crisis of banking and money, population overshoot, and war ... Add to this the virtual certainty of the nonlinear playing out of events, and you’re soon in the realm of pure conceit." From James Howard Kinstler's article in Orion.

-- Where is the working class in the op-ed pages?

-- The 2011 Rona Jaffe winners have been announced! New good books are coming!

-- My pal Robin Black, who wrote this amazing book, has a piece in Salon that questions what is, and is not, on President Obama's summer reading list.

-- I totally want one of these: The Literary Punch Card.

-- Sapphire: racism in the arts is very real.

-- Chike in the River is revived and reviewed in The Los Angeles Times.

-- There is lots to love in the new issue of World Literature Today. Consider: the "poetry untethered" cover feature, a Parisian ex-pat reading list, and a healthy review section that includes, for example, anthologies of both science fiction and African women writers. 

-- I was so sorry to learn that translator Anne Born died. I am so grateful to her for the sweet, quiet joy I felt reading Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses.

-- Teju Cole picks out the top novels about solitude. Out Stealing Horses should be on it.

-- Tatjiana Soli won the James Tait Black Memorial award for The Lotus Eaters, a novel about photojournalists during the Vietnam War that I've been hungry to read for ages.

-- I've been waiting for this news story for awhile: "Independent bookstores add a new chapter."

-- ... nonetheless, poets and writers are joining the fight to save and revive The Travel Bookshop, the Notting Hill store that played a part in the Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant movie.

-- From Chicago to Boston to Portland, Poets & Writers looks into the literary life of (some) cities.

-- Poet Laureate Philip Levine talks about working in the auto factories of Detroit.

-- Cycling lessons from Mark Twain.

-- And finally: "A poet and a sportswriter go on a macrophenomenal tour of everyday irrelevance." Of course.

 

Image Credit: Cameron Stewart, via.

Speaking: Jessamyn West

 

 

I was there! I was in Paris the summer of my twenty-sixth year. I had gone to Oxford to study. I met a young woman who told me I would get educated a lot faster if I went to Paris. The summer at Oxford was rather dull. So I did go to Paris. The first thing I wanted to find was a bookstore. But the lady I boarded with (she was an Oxford graduate and had been decorated during the war . . . Joyce’s daughter had stayed with her, I remember) was an avid botanist and I went with her by train out of Paris and walked for miles while she gathered botanical samples. She kept warning me not to drink the water. She wanted me to drink wine, but since I didn’t like the taste, all summer I drank something terrible manufactured by the British called lemon squash. Finally she told me about Shakespeare and Company and it was at that bookstore I bought a first edition of Ulysses . . . which I still have. It was against the law to bring it into the United States so I hid it in my trunk. It happened that I was enormously taken with marmalade in stone jars, so in the top layer of my trunk were stone jars of marmalade, and in the bottom was Joyce’s Ulysses. When the customs examined my stuff, they took one look at a tourist stupid enough to come home loaded with marmalade, and they didn’t go any lower than that.

-- Jessamyn West, speaking in her interview with The Paris Review, 1977.

 

From the 1940s through the 1970s, Jessamyn West wrote stories, novels, poetry, nonfiction, and film scripts. The Indiana native lived most of her life in California, where, just before she finished her doctorate degree at Berkeley, she had a tuberculosis hemorrhage and suffered several bedridden years. West was a Quaker, and her fiction often reflected the lives of Quaker characters. Her first collection of stories, The Friendly Persuasion, remains her most famous book. Its film adaptation was directed by William Wyler and nominated for Best Picture. Another fun fact: she was Richard Nixon's second cousin.

Image Credit: Library of Congress