Isak

The Lonely Planet Guide to Libya

Kate Grace Thomas is a writer that lived and worked in West Africa for five years, and who contributes to the Lonely Planet travel guide series. Thomas was working on the third edition of the tourist's guide to Libya when the revolution broke through this spring. In the new issue of Guernica, she tells of how her role as a storyteller in Libya took a striking turn.

The Libya guide wasn’t Lonely Planet’s most lucrative title, but for the last three editions it’s been a standalone book, with nearly 300 pages of reviews, recommendations, and information on ancient sites and desert safaris.

The guidebook I researched last winter was never published, put on hold when the Arab Spring surged into Libya that February. I was writing a guidebook to a country that no longer exists; a country where busloads of Italian tourists gathered around hotel buffets; where billboards advertised the Qaddafi brand—forty-one years, they sang, the leader’s face peering down at the cars on the highways like that of a god who thought he created them. The guidebook I researched was a guidebook to the past.

{...}

War is not my beat. I knew that. But Libya, somehow, was. I went in December to tell its stories—stories of nascent tourism and marvelous ruins, stories of deserted beaches and drinking sugary tea in the winter wind. And now, there were more stories to tell.

Thomas' looseform remembering of what stories she moved among this year is a different kind of guidebook. But if you, like me, are the curious sort, here is the most current rendition of Lonely Planet's introduction of Libya to tourists:

Libya is a crossroads of history, continents and ancient empires. Home to the Mediterranean’s richest store of Roman and Greek cities – Sabratha, Cyrene and, above all, Leptis Magna – each of which is overlaid by remnants of Byzantine splendour, it’s a place where history comes alive through the extraordinary monuments on its shores. Every corner of cosmopolitan Tripoli resonates with a different period of history. It’s where the Sahara meets the Mediterranean.

Libya is also home to Africa’s most exceptional and accessible desert scenery. The Sahara engulfs over 90% of the country, offering up vast sand seas the size of small European countries. Visit the enchanting oasis towns of Ghadames and Ghat, where the caravans once showcased the riches of Africa. Marvel at palm-fringed lakes surrounded by sand dunes in the desert’s heart. Be bewitched by extinct volcanoes, such as Waw al-Namus, where black sand encircles multicoloured lakes. Go deeper into the desert and experience Jebel Acacus, one of the world’s finest open-air galleries of prehistoric rock art.

Two Brilliant Poets Are Talking ...

... and you, my friend, should be listening. Justin Bigos interviews Rose McLarney in the American Literary Review, in what is becoming a series that that takes the Paris Review "Art of" model and hybridizes it with book reviewing, banter, and badassery. (In case you missed it, Justin interviewed Laurie Saurborn Young here.) I want to clasp the coattails of this pair and ride them high in the sky. Or at least to another night on the Warren Wilson porches during the MFA residencies. With the rocking chairs, of course. And the booze.

Rose's first collection, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, will be published by Four Way Books in 2012. She was awarded Alligator Juniper’s 2011 National Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Orion, and New England Review, among others. Justin is on his way to a Ph.D in creative writing at the University of North Texas. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Collagist, The Minnesota Review, Crazyhorse, and other publications.

In their conversation, look for Justin to bring up the goats, and to talk about why the phrase "emotional complexity in book reviews bugs him. Look for the advice of Rose's grandmother on social situations, and why it applies to poems. Read bravely.

Three Wishes
By Rose McLarney

To have two long-legged dogs
named Thither and Yon,
loyal to me. A man
who hears when I say, Let me alone,
and lifts me over fences and creeks

anyway. And an understanding
of the moss that lines paths
through the woods, if it
invites me onward, or
to lay down where I already am.

Special Isak Offer: Jeffrey Eugenides In Your Ear

 

By now, you should know that I just loved The Marriage Plot and that I think Jeffrey Eugenides is the bee's knees. (This is true even though I have a conflicted review of Middlesex brewing.) So I'm very happy to offer Isak readers a special chance to listen to an excerpt from the novel -- about eight minutes of it, beginning from the beginning.

Listen here.

In addition to the international publication of The Marriage Plot this month, the audio version of the book has been released. Actor David Pittu reads. This excerpt from it is offered to you in partnership between Macmillan Audio and, well, me.

 

Image credit: Ukiah Blog

(tap, tap ...)

That's me, poking at your shoulder to remind you to sign up for my November 5 workshop, "How to Get Picked Up: Getting Your Story into the News." If we want to keep the group a manageable size -- and we do -- we only have a handful of slots left!

Not in or around Ann Arbor next weekend? Still have stories that need to be told -- or told better -- in the media? Despair not! You can also sign up for one of the mentoring slots that day, which, thanks to a variety of blessed technology tools, means that we can have an individualized conversation about how to get coverage for your projects, issues, clients, artwork, or, well, you, from wherever in the world you happen to be located.

I'm looking forward to a wonderful conversation.

Boycotting The Huffington Post

This is just to say: I happily boycott the HuffPo as both a writer and a reader.

Here is why.

They claim that their model of not paying writers, not editing, and not fact-checking (paired with blatant linkbaiting, sexist content, and terrible design) is supposed to be a model for the "future of journalism." I have seen Arianna H. deride newspapers and other mainstream media for not being as "forward-thinking" as, presumably, the HuffPo is. In fact, their model results in a lot of terrible self-serving content and a culture that expects writers to work for free -- both of which takes the craft of journalism backwards while making the administration of the site a healthy, even shocking, profit (as we saw with their deal with AOL this year). Exploiting writers, and being satisfied with sloppy and sensationalistic journalism practices, isn't "new media": in fact, it's terribly old-fashioned. HuffPo's one mild effort to commit to actual journalism -- their Investigative Journalism Fund -- had a very brief life with them and is now absorbed in the Center for Public Integrity. So they washed their hands of that.

Writers who actually do have something to say, and can say it well, I will be pleased to follow in other media, new and traditional. In the meantime, I vote for ignoring the hell out of The Huffington Post, and putting our support instead to other media that pairs digital innovation with actual substance and editorial integrity.

Stories from Abroad

The University of Michigan International Institute put together a collection of writing and photos that come from my Fulbright time in Kenya, including writing that originally appeared in the Detroit Free Press, AlterNet, and Isak. This is part of II's nice new homepage, unveiled in celebration of the University of Michigan leading the nation in the number of Fulbright grantees this year.

They even made a video about today's news, in which appears yours truly. David Pappano, a scientist who worked in Ethiopia, is the other featured Fulbrighter here. I got to talk with him for awhile about his utterly fascinating work with gelada baboons in Simien Mountains National Park, though, alas, our videotaped walk though the leafy campus didn't make the video cut.

 

 

Speaking: Annie Dillard

 

"Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a power as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."

 

-- Annie Dillard, writing rather than speaking in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

 

Annie Dillard is a writer of nonfiction, novels, and poems. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1975. While literary acclaim beckoned, Dillard has remained largely out of the public eye. She moved about the country for awhile, though she has returned to a cabin in rural Virginia. And she's continued to write. The Maytrees is her novel set in post-war Massachusetts. An American Childhood is her account of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s. The Living is a about the last decades of the nineteenth century in the Pacific Northwest. Holy the Firm is a sort of extension of what is called Dillard's "ecotheology" grounded in the Puget Island sound she lived on in the 1980s. The Writing Life is her reflection of -- well, just that. And there are other tantalizing books as well. Dillard is a former contributing editor to Harper's Magazine and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

Related:

• Alexander Chee: "Annie Dillard and the Writing Life"
• Annie Dillard's writing for Harper's, 1973-2002
• Annie Dillard: "Write Till You Drop"
• Eudora Welty's ambivalent 1974 New York Times review of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

 

About the image: Drawing of Annie Dillard via DescriptedLines.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Motown, and The Marriage Plot

 

Pick up a Sunday edition of The Detroit Free Press today, and you'll see my profile of Pulitzer-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides and his thoughts on his native Detroit city, as well as my review of The Marriage Plot. Together, the package is the cover story of the Entertainment section, which means really big broadside photographs illustrate the articles -- I love it. (Both articles are also currently available online, though it's been my experience that they don't live forever there.)

Candid aside: this was a joyful assignment. Eugenides was interesting and engaging to talk with, and I could've gone on and on reading this immersive and wonderful novel. It seems to me to be the best thing he's done. My review for the Free Press got clipped for space, alas. Here is an excerpt of the review, including the original last paragraph in full:

In The Marriage Plot, we meet Madeline, Leonard, and Mitchell on the brink of their graduation from Brown University in 1982. A deceptively simple narrative voice keeps pace through a story that unfolds through three vantage points in cities around the world: an Arts and Crafts home in Portland, a Paris apartment, an American Express office in Athens, Mother Teresa’s hospice in Calcutta, a science lab on Cape Cod, a Manhattan subway, and a Greektown restaurant in Detroit patronized by former mayor Coleman Young and mobsters who enjoy tormenting waiters.

{...}

There’s a coaxing ease to the prose, which carries a doubleness of intellectual rigor and sheer storytelling verve. The novel’s humor disarms the reader, opening us to the novel’s serious accounting of the troubled human search for love and truth. To read The Marriage Plot is to simmer in that hot space between mind and heart. The novel’s center is at once conventional and radical: it interrogates our hunger to live a meaningful life of body, mind, spirit, and heart. It is a novel of desires.

Literary & Media Indulgences - 10/22/2011

 

 

-- Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who were Jewish American lesbians, chose to stay in France during World War II rather than return to the safety of America. Both of them survived without significant incident. Truthout has a profile of Stein's "Vichy years" -- and they are not altogether heroic.

-- Speaking of Stein: "When Gertrude Stein toured America." The Smithsonian looks at the journey of the modernist writer in 1934-35, a highly-publicised visit when she gave 74 lectures in 37 cities in 23 states before returning to France. The famously obscure writer became a celebrity and, according to the article, humanized the mystique surrounding the Modernist movement.

-- Lovers of the work of Dorothy Parker are trying to save her early childhood home in the Upper West Side of New York City. Related: "A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses."

-- "North American books I read in Castro's Cuba." José Manuel Prieto accounts for it in a blog post for The Paris Review.

-- Revisiting Bartleby, the story of perhaps the first disgruntled occupier of Wall Street.

-- "Reading Joan Didion on any subject is like tiptoeing across a just-frozen pond filled with beautiful sharks." From the New York Magazine profile of the writer and her new stricken book.

-- "The landscape of (Tomas) Tranströmer’s poetry has remained constant ... the jagged coastland of his native Sweden, with its dark spruce and pine forests, sudden light and sudden storm ...." Robin Robertson writes about our Nobel laureate.

-- An alarming number of charities and nonprofits became unlikely telecom consolidation lobbyists when organizations ranging from the NAACP to a Louisiana homeless shelter -- all receiving money from AT&T -- came out to swing on behalf of the AT&T merger with T-Mobile. The Center for Public Integrity tells the story.

-- The New Yorker profiles Jill Abramson, the new top chief of The New York Times and, in the newspaper's 160-year life, the first woman in the role.

-- "It would be hard to exaggerate the intellectual laziness of this book." ::whew:: This absolutely skewering book review by Evgeny Morozov in The New Republic shows how a lethal review can serve good purpose. In "The Internet Intellectual," Morozov not only calls to account the failings of the book, but he puts it in context of the greater conversation on publicness and privacy. I asked the very smart Deanna Zandt for her feedback on this provoking story, and she pointed me to another important perspective: Danah Boyd "making sense of privacy and publicity" at SouthxSouthwest.

-- Ben Okri sees a connection between the Internet and African spiritualism.

-- Vivian Gornick on "what Emma Goldman would do" in The Boston Review.

-- Salman Rushdie is interviewed by Haaretz about fear, writing, and activism.

-- Te-Nahisi Coates on "the great schism" between abolitionists and suffragists: "I don't need my personal pantheon to be clean. But I need it to be filled with warriors."

-- The redoubtable Dahlia Lithwick pieces out why the millennial generation cares more about gay marriage equality than about reproductive rights (oh, all right: specifically, the right to get an abortion).

-- Collective action is curbing the practice of female genital cutting in Senegal.

-- Glenna Gordon's beautiful photos capture voting day in Liberia.

-- "Do you think the ideal poetic voice is something polyphonous? Would you rather be the Ramones of poetry or the PJ Harvey of poetry?" Here are two great people in conversation: poet Justin Bigos interviews poet Laurie Saurborn Young in the American Literary Review.

-- Poet Marie Howe on "what the living do."

-- Here is how to make your own laundry soap detergent.

-- The ever-creative Tammy Strobel, a prominant minimalist blogger, is experimenting with letter-writing as a form of micropatronage. You can participate.

-- NPR has another look on Catch-22 turning 50.

-- ... and Joseph Heller's novel has company. John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me is also meeting the half-century mark.

-- Among the 1Q84 reviews and profiles pouring in, here is "The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami."

-- The current "Read This Next" is Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic, which I am hungry to read.

-- Comics creators discuss their medium's relationship with female super-hero characters and sex.

-- LaToya Peterson on diversity and ComicCon.

-- "How I learned to think like a cartoonist."

"Readability is no test for literature"

I don't do this often, so forgive me: but Jeannette Winterson writing in The Guardian, and spinning off all the Man Booker Prize conversations, is worth quoting at length:

Subject matter is not the point. It might be socially relevant, or it might not. It might be historical, science fiction, a love story, a crime novel, a meditation in fragments. There is no point judging a novel by its subject matter; what is in vogue now will be out of date soon. Nobody reads Jane Austen because we want her advice on marriage. And we don't care that she lived right through the Napoleonic wars and never mentioned them once. Who cares about the Napoleonic wars now?

Novels that last are language-based novels – the language is not simply a means of telling a story, it is the whole creation of the story. If the language has no power – forget it.

The problem is that a powerful language can be daunting. James Joyce is hard work. Virginia Woolf's The Waves is a very slow read. Schools teach language-friendly versions of Shakespeare.

Ali Smith's There But For The is a wonderful, word-playful novel, ignored by the judges this year because it doesn't fit their idea of "readable". It is better than anything on their list. Why? It expands what language can do and what fiction can do, and when a reader collides with that unruly exuberance, he or she has to shift perspective. That is what literature is supposed to do.

I don't see this row as one about dumbing down though. Rather, it is a misunderstanding about literature and its purpose. We are nervous about anything that seems elitist or inaccessible, and we apologise for the arts in a way that we never do for science.

Nobody blames maths for being difficult – and it isn't difficult – but it is different, and demands some time and effort. It is another kind of language. Literature is also another kind of language. I don't mean literature is obscure or rarefied or precious – that's no test of a book – rather it is operating on a different level to our everyday exchanges of information and conversation.

Via The Literary Saloon.

Love Your Body Day: Nine Good Reads

Today is Love Your Body Day, part of an annual campaign led by the National Organization for Women. From the official call-out:

Research show that the U.S. spends over $33 billion on weight-reduction programs, diet foods and beverages, and more than 50 percent of women say they would consider having plastic surgery. Statistics revealed in the new documentary "Miss Representation" are shocking: The number of cosmetic surgical procedures performed on patients 18 or younger more than tripled from 1997 to 2007. Among those 18 and younger, liposuctions nearly quadrupled between 1997 and 2007, and breast augmentations increased nearly six-fold in the same 10-year period.

It's worth noting that, among men, plastic surgery, eating disorders, and purchases of wildly expensive grooming products and services are also rising at staggering rates.

Loving your body -- and honoring the bodies of others -- is an active and ongoing process. (And, if I may add, a joyful one.) These nine reads can be part of the journey.

1. Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier. It's precise, hilarious, jubilant, visionary, and clever. Authored by the Pulitzer-winning biology writer for The New York Times, this book holds jaw-dropping amounts of bio-socio-psycho-cultural information, plus an astonishing amount of puns. It is a work of beauty.
2. Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective. Say you want revolution.
3. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts. This book traces how black bodies as objects of property in the American past lingers in contemporary policies and public conversations.
4. S.E.X: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College by Heather Corinna. A sort of Our Bodies, Ourselves for the younger set, all genders included, by the smart and deeply honest founder of Scarleteen.
5. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf. On the twin sweetnesses and horrors of the beauty business, with particular attention to how the beauty myth functions as a form of social control, inhibiting our day-to-day lives.
6. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. In 1941 Ohio, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove dreams that her eyes will turn blue so she can look like all the 'real' American kids pictured in her schoolbooks.
7. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. Satirizing the form of self-help books, Moore's classic collection of nine stories explores our personal worlds of longing, humor, and self-criticism.
8. The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein. A smart and hilarious play featuring an art historian who specializes in forgotten female painters and is trying to build her own image of womanhood during the "big chill" of the 1980s.
9. Loose Women by Sandra Cisneros. "Published in 1994, this slim collection of poetry is infused with sexuality, passion and a celebration of Mexican-American culture." See Monet Moutrie's review on Isak here.