Isak

Debut: The Dzanc Sessions

 

I'm feeling chuffed today. That's because I get to announce the debut of the Dzanc Sessions, a hip new series of writing workshops that I'm coordinating with Dzanc Books. Our Session One line-up features amazing instructors leading eight- and ten-week online classes on flash fiction, essays, memoir, short-form writing, beginnings, and, in one case, a "reading to write" mentorship. The instructors are engaged, smart, talented literary artists who are committed to putting together a tremendous experience for the writers who step up to these classes and risk deepening their work.

The short story about the Dzanc Sessions: it kicks ass.

And you should be a part of it.

Weird Science and Why it Spreads

 

 

Speaking (fast) in Edinburgh, Ben Goldacre offers an excellent TED talk on not only bad science, but the popularization and pseudo-reporting of bad science. Goldacre, who is a doctor and an epidemiologist, is particularly attuned to the bastardization of health science in popular media -- from nutrition advice to pharmaceutical ads.

This talk also echoed the fascinating graphic novel I'm reading, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media. After diminishing the seeming demons of political bias in the news, Gladstone points to the biases we really should be worried about, one of them being narrative bias, or the itch for stories that feel like stories. Cartoon Brooke calls it her favorite bias.

Who doesn't love a good story? But stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Some news stories, science stories for instance, never really end. They're all middle. It's a narrative nightmare.

Try to fix the problem by tacking on a provisional ending and the reports appear more conclusive than they really are. So we see strings of stories like this ... "Fat makes you fat!" "Fat makes you thin!" "Chocolate gives you acne! "Chocolate won't give you acne!" "Chocolate helps your heart!" "Only the expensive kinds!"

Say You Want Revolution

Our Bodies, Ourselves is the women's health book that was groundbreaking when it was first published in 1972, and is still revolutionary today. Case in point: its regular presence on banned books lists. It is endlessly fascinating to me how dangerous women's bodies are perceived to be.

From a USA Today profile this week on OBOS:

It not only challenged the medical establishment and its assumptions about women, it also encouraged women to explore their own bodies and provided, in unexpurgated terms, information about sexuality and reproduction that went far beyond the birds and bees. ... It was denounced as "obscene trash" by Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell.

Four decades of the pioneering work of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective -- and the release of the new edition -- will be celebrated at a free public symposium on Saturday at Boston University, featuring Loretta Ross (SisterSong), Jaclyn Friedman (Women, Action & the Media), Bylle Avery (Black Women’s Health Imperative) and Judy Norsigan, a founding OBOS collective member. Panels will look at the global work of OBOS and its partners in twelve countries.

Happily, those of us living elsewhere can watch a live-stream starting at 9 am. It will also be Twitter-streamed under the hashtag #obos40, and there will be a post-event round-up at Our Bodies Our Blog.

 Incidentally, the cover of the new edition features photos of readers who submitted their images and reflections on what they've learned from OBOS. "I am shocked by how many women to this day still know so little about their bodies," says one reader who bought her first copy in Greenwich Village in 1992. "I am finally ready to let my body tell me what it needs." See more about the cover stories here. Also, a historian at the University of Cincinnati is surveying about the impact of this book: the survey and some of the responses are available online.

More than 4 million copies of the book have been sold, not including targeted adaptations of the book focusing on, for example, pregnancy, and it has been translated into 20 languages. Gamze Karadağ, age 29, speaks to the impact of the forthcoming Turkish edition here:

When “Bedenlerimiz Biziz” emerges, we believe many women will take steps to improve their lives. We also believe that this book’s arrival will create an opportunity for reform around the politics of women’s health and the feminist movement in Turkey.

OBOS refuses money from pharemecutical companies and any other interests that could compromise its integrity. OBOS also inspired a health guide published by the Gay Men's Health Collective, and the forthcoming Trans Bodies, Trans Selves.

A Bouquet of Brief Book Reviews: Part III

 

Moneyball: The Art of WInning an Unfair Game
Michael Lewis

About a month before the film adaptation was released and about eight years after the rest of the world finished up their water cooler conversations, I finally read Moneyball, Michael Lewis' investigation into the conflict between tradition and statistics in baseball. He famously follows the low-budget Oakland A's in his quest to discover how a poor team can be so consistently successful, violating the understanding that the rich teams who buy the best players can't lose.

This is sharp, clean, clear nonfiction that has been at once enormously influential and not influential at all (or enough) on the game. I was most interested in the history of baseball statistics, particularly in the story of Bill James, and particularly in the quoted writing of Bill James, which I should probably just read directly. Lewis' portrayal of the feisty mathematically-inclined minority tradition of baseball enthusiasts that created the world of sabermetrics had me staying awake past bedtime. Lewis is admirably unafraid to risk strong conclusions: at one point, he speculates that the traditional preference by scouts for high school players, in spite of reams of data showing that players recruited out of high school perform far less well than players recruited from college, is a manifestation of the American backlash against intellectualism.

Moneyball falls flat when trying to dramatize actual games in light of the unconventional strategy of the A's. Action felt stilted and slowed by explanations. And his characterizations of the people in this book felt a bit cumbersome, out-of-proportion: lots of visual detail on a guy we see for half a chapter, for example. In the end, though, I think Michael Lews is mostly right about how baseball, really, works. And I'm glad to be persuaded.

 

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie

This is Alexie's first foray into young adult fiction, and it promptly won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. It is one of the newer members to the Banned Books Club; it's apparently challenged for language, racism, violence, sexual explicitness, and for being "unsuited to age group." Echoing in my mind as I read it was Alexie's brilliant essay on why the best kids books are written in blood. Because this book is.

Junior is a teenage cartoonist and a self-proclaimed geek growing up on a Spokane reservation. He makes a lot of enemies when he decides to transfer to a high school off the reservation for his freshmen year -- to a school peopled by wealthy white farm kids who have an Indian as their mascot. Junior becomes a stranger in this new place twenty miles from his home, and he becomes a stranger -- rather, a traitor -- to those still living the life he was supposed to live: his angry best friend, his parents, his neighbors, and his sister who, also, reaches for a different kind of life. When the two schools play basketball in a home game for the Indian team, the crowd on the rez is ignited against Junior.

The story is bracing, funny, heart-rending, true. Ellen Forney's illustrations -- offered to us as Junior's art -- broaden and deepen the voice of the kid otherwise known as Arnold Spirit, Jr. Humorous asides are juxtaposed with one of the better renderings of both grief and poverty I've seen in any kind of fiction. “My parents came from poor people who came from poor people who came from poor people, all the way back to the very first poor people,” Junior says to us. This book spans a school year. It is a story of survival, and also of joy.

 

The Sexes
Dorothy Parker

Reading Dorothy Parker is like curling up under a warm, colorful blanket. Penguin put out an appealing "mini modern classics" series designed to make very good writing accessible and portable. I found a full slate of the series on a Nairobi bookshop and it made my heart beat erratically. While I was tempted to spend my shillings on Truman Capote and Italo Calvino and Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Donald Barthelme, I chose Dorothy Parker. I chose well.

In the five stories collected here, you will not be surprised to learn that Parker explores the relations between men and women in love ... or at least, in romance ... or at least, somehow in relationship to each other. The tautly-crafted stories are rich in dialogue and all its textures: distance, intimacy, humor, bad manners, longing, fear, defensiveness, the desire to explain and present ourselves. In one conversation, it feels as if whole lives are lived. The title story is my favorite: humor disarms the readers and opens us to the heartbreak.

I could've finished this little collection in about 45 minutes. I stretched it out over four days. Each story was a sweet good thing in my day.

An Extraordinary Passing: Wangari Maathai

 

 

Wangari Maathai - organizer, activist, professor, writer, and Nobel laureate -- died yesterday at the hospital in Nairobi where she was undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. It is a deep loss and an opportunity to fill our hearts with gladness for the profound impact Maathai had on her country and on the world. I'll admit that I secretly hoped to have had the chance to meet her, or interview her, or entice her to participate in our WAM-Nairobi event series. I wish it now more than ever. She has been a hero of mine for a long, long time.

She was born in Nyeri, at the foot of Mount Kenya, as a British subject in colonial Kenya. When she was twenty-three, Kenya became an independent nation. After becoming the first woman in east and central Africa to earn her Ph.D., Maathai returned to Kenya (she had studied in the U.S. and Germany) to became the first female professor at the University of Nairobi. She taught veterinary medicine. She founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977 as a strategy for women to enhance their self-sufficiency by increasing their access to natural resources -- clean water, firewood, crops. Women were also paid a small amount to plant trees. The Green Belt Movement has since transformed the Kenyan landscape by planting tens of millions of trees to date, all the while maintaining a sharp social analysis for how the condition of our natural world impacts patterns of poverty and inequality. This was particularly evident in Maathai's numerous arrests and beatings by the corrupt government of Daniel arap Moi, which she resisted for its land grabs and blatently cruel leadership. The Moi government labeled the Green Belt Movement "subversive." And it was -- it understands the intersection of democracy and place.

Maathai was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. (She is still the only woman not just from Kenya but from the entire continent to be so honored.) The Nobel committee cited Maathai's "contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace" in its awarding of the prize. When Maathai won, she was serving as assistant minister in the government of President Mwai Kibaki, but, as The Guardian puts it, "her refusal to keep silent on some issues saw her politically sidelined, and she lost her seat after a single term." That was in 2005. In 2008, "she was tear-gassed by the police during a protest against the excesses of Kenya’s well-entrenched political class," according to The New York Times.

Maathai drew heart from her own lived experience, as she described in her Nobel acceptance speech:

My inspiration partly comes from my childhood experiences and observations of Nature in rural Kenya. It has been influenced and nurtured by the formal education I was privileged to receive in Kenya, the United States and Germany. As I was growing up, I witnessed forests being cleared and replaced by commercial plantations, which destroyed local biodiversity and the capacity of the forests to conserve water.

She was a writer as well -- not a particularly beautiful writer, but one with a story to tell. In The Challenge for Africa, Maathai calls for an African-originated moral revolution. The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience was written long before Maathai became an international celebrity with her Nobel win. The 2003 edition expands on a 1985 publication. It details the practicalities and purpose of The Green Belt Movement, while serving as a treatise on environmental justice. Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World speaks to the intimate connection between person and planet, a connection enhanced through our physical engagement with the earth. Maathai draws from her Christian tradition, as well as Jewish and some Eastern religions for this book. In Unbowed, she tells the story of her life.

Wangari Maathai leaves behind three children, a grandchild, and a world that is better for her being in it.

 

Related:

• Nobel acceptance speech
• "Speaking: Wangari Maathai" - Isak
• Wangari Maathai's 2009 interview with Democracy Now!
• "World leaders mourn Wangari Maathai" - The Daily Nation
• Obituary: The Guardian
• Obituary: The New York Times
• The Green Belt Movement

 

Image credit: The New York Times

Literary & Media Indulgences - 9/25/2011

-- Witness the secret illustrated envelopes of Edward Gorey. (One is pictured above).

-- Larry McMurtry is succeeding Zadie Smith as the "New Books" columnist at Harper's. Smith only spent about six months in the role. I'll sorely miss Smith's voice on these pages. But to be honest, ever since that strange introductory interview with reviews editor Gemma Sieff, where Sieff fluctuated between Zadie-awe and compliment-fishing, I didn't expect Smith to endure here. (See also: Steve Donoghue's desolation at Smith's exit.) For her final column, Smith focuses on science fiction, particularly Ursula K. Le Guin. It's nice to see tiny PM Press' new LeGuin book, The Wild Girls, get high-profile attention. She also discusses Magnus Mills and Rimbaud.

-- 3rd of May is one of the best new blogs I've discovered in awhile. Its concept is to choose a work of art for each day and to match it with an item in the news. "This is a daily celebration of art’s presence and relevance to our lives. An On Kawara-free zone."

-- The strange journey of reading in America. Via The New Yorker.

-- How Vladmir Nabokov anticipated the rise of psychology.

-- On the literature of the 872-day siege of Leningrad -- which Oleg Yuriev says is a weirdly unknown crime against humanity, particularly given how frequently writers and artists turn to World War II. His profile is especially interesting in its overview of the siege's rationalizing contemporary literature.

-- Nuruddin Farah, the Somali fiction writer, gets attention from NPR for his new book, Crossbones. It is the final installment of a trilogy. "Farah says he hopes to wake up one day and hear that the International Criminal Court has opened an investigation of Somalia, as well as those who have contributed to its current condition."

-- "One must be careful about stories." K'Naan returns to Mogadishu, Somalia, twenty years after leaving it on the last commercial flight before war closed the airport. He has A Moveable Feast in his hand.

-- Beyond the Three Percent problem: Inside Higher Ed discusses literature in translation, the last decade in book culture, and Open Letter Books.

-- The Yale Review has turned 100 years young.

-- Meet the new kid on the block: The Toronto Review of Books.

-- Matthew Simmons on bookselling and why he hates a certain sign that has gone viral.

-- Dwight Garner thinks novelists should be more like Howard Cosell. I agree with him. And I delight in his description of the possible work method of James Patterson ...

-- Geoff Dyer on the etiquette of autographs.

-- "She sounds appalled. She has every right to be." Anna Holmes writes about disturbing gender disparities in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workforce for her column in The Washington Post. A longer version of this piece appears on Holmes' Tumblr. Related: Smithsonian thinks you should know who these ten female scientists are (and not one of them is Marie Curie).

-- A visual history of literary references in "The Simpsons." I personally am charmed by Lisa's engaged smile while reading The Bell Jar.

-- Amanda Palmer has collaborated with Jason Webley and Cynthia von Buhler for a new graphic novel called Evelyn, Evelyn, a story of conjoined twin sisters Eva and Lynn Neville who are born in an Airstream trailer in Kansas. (In fact, it is Palmer and Webley who perform as the musical duo Evelyn, Evelyn.) USA Today profiles the book.

-- Anne Elizabeth Moore and MariNaomi continue to document the graphic evidence.

-- I couldn't read the latest xkcd comic without being blinded by the memory of a comic I drew in the margins of my notes during a lecture about neutrinos in a college physics class. My version fashioned neutrinos as the next great breakfast cereal ("Neutrinos!!!")

-- "When a dictionary could outrage."

-- Chinua Achebe on literature and ethnicity.

-- The Neustadt Festival of International Literature and Culture is opening soon at the University of Oklahoma with a whole host of treasures on the schedule. For those of us resigned to looking on from afar, there are a variety of ways to follow the festival online, and subscription contests to World Literature Today that are available.

-- The September issue of Words Without Borders is themed "Homage," where writers channel their literary heros. Look for "Never Any End to Hemingway" by Spanish writer Eduardo Halfon (tr. Daniel Hahn) and "Bonsai" by Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel (tr. Rosalind Harvey). See also a special section of Polish poetry in this issue, as well as a review of Raymoud Roussel's Impressions of Africa (tr. Mark Polizzotti).

-- A strong voice from Syria: one of the protesters tells his story on American radio. It is unbelievable how long and how dangerous this particular battle in the Arab Spring is. Its stories deserve more attention.

-- Noam Chomsky revisits the responsibility of intellectuals along with The Boston Review.

-- The illustration competition of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is curated by the Folio Society. I. Can't. Wait.

See You Tonight

 

I hope I see you this evening at the Detroit Artists Market, where I'll be reading with three all-star writers who do amazing work. This is kicking off the new season of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project's reading series.

The details:

September 23, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Detroit Artists Market
4719 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, MI

The line-up:

Me
Peter Markus
John Rybicki
Norene Smith

The Detroit Artists Market, by the way, is a hip nonprofit art gallery in Midtown. It's pictured above: a captured moment of its ever-changing space. DAM was founded in 1932 (!) as a gallery specifically for artists under age 30; it is the oldest continuously running gallery in the Midwest. Check out the current exhibition here and make a point of stopping by not only tonight, by during Detroit Gallery Week: September 30 - October 8.

 

DAY-AFTER UPDATE: Thanks for those of you who made it downtown! I had a great time. If you missed it, check out Dan Wickett's review of the evening at the Emerging Writers Network in a post titled "Shit Just Keeps Coming and Coming."

"I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

 

It was a truly remarkable and vulnerable interview between Maurice Sendak and Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air" yesterday. I could prattle on about it, but just ... just listen.

Sendak's new book is Bumble-Ardy. It grew out of an animated segment for "Sesame Street." It is the first new book that he has both written and illustrated in thirty years.

 

Image Credit: NPR

Why I'm Not Finishing This Book

For awhile, I've had on my shelves a book by David Lindley called Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science. The back cover describes the book as a "riveting account" of "one of the most important scientific discoveries in history." I was enthusiastic to finally begin reading it last month: I love books about science, especially scientific history, and I'm all for a "riveting account."

I'm still undone with the book, but this week, I officially pulled my bookmark. Here's why I'm not finishing it:

1. Years ago, I operated under a kind of morality that compelled me to finish any book I began. This seemed essential to honor the integrity of the book, whether I loved it or hated it, and it also suited the optimist in me that believed that even if I wasn't into it now, the book could get more worthwhile as it moves forward. Well, I'm over that now. I've realized that there is no possible way for me to read all the books I will love before I die, and so I no longer feel the need to force myself through books that I don't like, or that I find middling, unless I have some kind of outward commitment to it -- a class, a book review. You may have noted that a disproportionate number of the book reviews on this site skew positive; this is why. I do still believe in giving books a fair go -- at least 50 pages seems like a good probation period -- and to question whether I've been fair to a book in terms of the time and attention and openness I give it. But I'm just not going to read it all out of a sense of misplaced chronological duty. There are too many other treasures out there.
2. Here's what put me off on Lindley's book in particular: he narrates scientific history with a sort of name-dropping gloss that crystallizes as a cross between academic gossip and a Wikipedia anecdote. Early in the book, he is moving through the series of scientific discoveries and theories that preceded the Uncertainty Principle. He has an admirable desire to give due honor to the contributions of a whole host of scientists, underscoring science as a collaborative act throughout time. But he doesn't fit these dozens and dozens of scientists into a well-told story. As a reader, when a name is introduced to me, I make note of him (it is nearly always a him). When that character is "dropped" two paragraphs on, never to be seen again in this text, and another character is introduced, I feel frustrated. I understand there is a lot of information to convey, and Lindley's moving quickly in the attempt to make this history a portable and accessible one. But his storytelling isn't strong enough to locate all the people he names and anecdotes he relays into compelling narration. 
3. Lindley often slides into a smug tone that I found wholly off-putting. I felt this when he expresses dry surprise in noting that Jesuit priests were among the key scientists of this story, particularly when it comes to trying to understand Brownian motion. He writes: "What's more, Jesuits and other churchmen had a surprisingly broad and rigorous education in philosophy, logic, and even mathematics." That language is condescending and embarrassingly unaware of a longtime intersection of intellectualism and religious orders. Lindley also exhibits a certain self-satisfied attitude when he continually, quietly, mocks scientists of earlier days who had not integrated high-level mathematics into their work. One scientist theorized that a certain fact might be ascribed to "the law of high numbers," a generalization that Lindley uses as a laughable refrain throughout the ensuing pages. There's an interesting conversation to be had about the historical relationship between the scientific and mathematical arts. But Lindley doesn't seem seriously interested in moving into it.
4. I have not found enough compelling information, narration, or story to overcome Reasons #2 and #3.

And so, I'm done. Uncertainty and I can leave on peaceful terms. I'm glad to have made its acquaintance, and I learned some things along the way, but it's time for me to move on. (.... and why is it just now that I'm hearing how putting down a book echoes the language of a relationship break-up?). I'll note, though, that Janet Maslin at the New York Times liked this book more than I did. It is "a useful précis of the mind-blowing progress of physics in the early 20th century," she writes. To each book, its reader.

High-Fives from the MacArthur Foundation

Once again, the MacArthur Foundation shows good taste in writers and journalists when it bestows a selection of its treasured "genius grants" of $500,000. Among those who received the surprise call:

Poet Kay Ryan is the former poet laureate who I've gone on and on about on this website. Her MacArthur citation describes her as an "inventive poet (who) has already created a distinguished body of work and will continue to compose deceptively simple verse of wisdom and elegance, surprising us with the possibilities of the medium."

A.E. Stallings, a poet and translator based in Athens, is another winner. "Trained in classical Latin and Greek and currently living in Athens, she brings a wide knowledge of Greco-Roman literature, art, and mythology to bear on her imaginative explorations of contemporary circumstances and concerns," says MacArthur.

Tiya Miles is a University of Michigan professor who specializes in the relationship between Cherokee and African people. She is the author of Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. MacArthur says this: "In prose that is reflective, precise, and insightful, Miles challenges folklore and mythology surrounding early Afro-Indian communities while also illustrating a broader tangle of intricate personal intimacies, sovereign allegiances, and ancestral tensions."

I love that Peter Hessler is noted as a "long-form journalist" by MacArthur. The former Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker now seems to be freelancing his work; he also wrote three books. "Drawing upon a decade-long immersion in Chinese culture as well as extensive travels and historical research, Hessler writes with a novelist's attention to detail and structures his stories around the compelling characters he encounters," says his citation.

Jad Abumrad is producer over at WNYC and co-host of the excellent show "Radiolab." His "engaging audio explorations of scientific and philosophical questions captivate listeners and bring to broadcast journalism a distinctive new aesthetic," says MacArthur. I agree.

What seems to be missing from the MacArthur picks this year? The Foundation has seemed to favor fiction writers and muckraking journalists in the recent past -- people like Deborah Eisenberg, Yiyun Li, and George Saunders, as well as Jerry Mitchell and Lynsey Adarrio. Also worth noting are the artists, musicians, and craftspeople in this year's line-up, including cellist Alisa Weilerstein (only 29 years old!), silversmith Ubaldo Vitali, and composer/conductor Francisco Núñez.

Aside: I wish I could be the person to make the MacArthur phone calls.

Speaking: Michelle Alexander

 

 

"Once we reach this coloblind nirvana, civil-rights leaders assure us, racial consciousness won't be necessary anymore.

"But, in my view, colorblindness has proved disastrous for African Americans. The concept has been interpreted to mean we should be indifferent to someone's race, when the goal of civil-rights advocates in the 1960s was to encourage citizens to care about people of other races, not to be blind or indifferent to them. Colorblindess has inspired callousness. ...

"Not caring about a person's race is presented as some kind of virtue, as if it will lead us to act in a fair and nondiscriminatory way. In fact, not caring can be a form of cruelty. I firmly believe that we should be encouraging people to see and appreciate racial differences, to celebrate the contributions made by those of other ethnicities, and to care about the suffering of groups who are defined by race. Racial-justice advocates need to change the language they use and abandon this quest for colorblindness.

{...}

"For conservatives colorblindness is linked to their commitment to individualism. In their view only individual perseverance and hard work determine whether someone succeeds or fails, so gross racial disparities in education and wealth shouldn't be of interest in our government, and racial identity should remain a private matter.

"For liberals the idea of colorblindness is linked to the hope that one day none of us will 'see' race anymore, because it will lose all social significance and won't correlate with education, wealth, health, and mortality rates. It's too difficult for us to imagine a society in which we are conscious of race yet still act toward one another in a positive and constructive way."

 

-- Michelle Alexander, in a 2011 interview with The Sun Magazine

 

Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She is a lawyer who once headed the Racial Justice Project of the northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford University. She was born in 1967 to an interracial couple in Stelle, Illinois, a three-hundred-person intentional community. She later grew up in San Francisco and now teaches cources on race, civil rights, and criminal justice at Ohio State University. She is a past recipient of an Open Society Fellowship from the Soros Institute, and a past clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun at the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

Related:

• Michelle Alexander's interview on Democracy Now!