Literary Safari

I’m getting addicted to my daily dose of Very Short List, a free, daily e-mail that points to excellent new (and sometimes vintage) entertainment and media that haven’t been hyped to within an inch of their lives.”

Each recommendation comes with this Venn Diagram that connects you to links related to the pick of the day. And, the email has one or two highlighted lines which makes for very easy and quick perusal of the text. I really like that.

Today’s VSL dose features a fun marketing tie-up to the upcoming release of Bob Dylan’s triple-CD greatest-hits release, Dylan.

One of the most memorable scenes from the 1967 D.A. Pennebaker film Dont Look Back is when a young, baby-faced Bob Dylan looks at the camera holding a stack of large cue cards. As his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” plays, Dylan drops the cards, each with handwritten lyrics scrawled across them, perfectly in time. …

Thanks to the extremely crafty folks promoting Dylan’s latest, you can create your own message on ten of the cue cards. When your recipient opens the e-mail and clicks on the link, the famous video clip is reborn with your personalized message, and with fairly staggering realism.

Of course, I had to create my own … and I’m sure you’ll want to as as well.

I love my new neighbor’s reading bin. It sits outside her door, and is a spot for everyone on our floor to share/drop off/exchange reading materials. It always makes me feel good to know that I’m able to pass on last week’s New Yorker, Economist, or that random paperback to someone else who might appreciate it.

I’m always on the lookout for places where I can donate books. For a while I did the Book Crossing thing, but it’s been a while. I usually end up taking stacks to the local library. So, when I read about The Book Thing of Baltimore in the CS Monitor [read full article], I got really excited.

Russell Wattenberg had a simple idea – to take books people don’t want and give them to people who do want them. Now 1,000 bibliophiles crowd ‘The Book Thing’ each weekend.

The rooms in the Book Thing warehouse are organized by theme, topic, and genre. Sort of reminds me of the paradise of Powell’s in Portland, Ore.

Speaking of books lining the walls, I read this interesting piece in this week’s New Yorker about Books-By-the-Foot set decoration and library building services provided by the Strand Bookstore [check it].

[The] set decorators for the forthcoming film “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”—recently engaged the Strand Bookstore’s Books-by-the-Foot service, which provides ready-made libraries for private homes, stores, and movie sets. … Since the program’s inception, in 1986, the Strand has built scores of imaginary reading rooms, from the prison library in “Oz” to the Barnes & Noble clone in “You’ve Got Mail.” Clients also include window dressers, commercial architects (the Strand furnished each floor in the Library Hotel with a different Dewey decimal category), and people with more shelf space than leisure time. Kelsey Grammer requested all hardback fiction in two of his homes, while Steven Spielberg, who, incidentally, is the director of the new Indiana Jones movie, allowed a wider range (cookbooks, children’s books, volumes on art and film) to penetrate his Hamptons estate.

Usually when we open up books, we expect to see words lining the pages and crisp or musty pages. I will wrap up today’s meandering post with a “wow – thanks for finding this” to Charlotte’s Library, where I learned about Brian Dettmer’s book autopsies.
Dettmer “carves into books revealing the artwork inside, creating complex layered three-dimensional sculptures.” I couldn’t find a webpage for him, but this wikipedia entry provides a huge amount of info about this Chicago-based artist.

Update: Read more poetry celebrations at the Poetry Friday round-up at Read Write Believe.

It was William Carlos Williams’s birthday on Monday, Sept. 17 [read more at Writer's Almanac]. I read many of his poems this week, trying to figure out which one I would post. Some of my favorites were To a Poor Old Woman (also about plums!), Dawn, and Daisy (about the last days of summer).

However, I will stick with the best-known and classic:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast …

Read the full poem here.

I had to pick this one when I found this website which allows you to write an instant WCW “This is Just to Say!”

Here’s mine!

This is just to say
I have read
the diaries
that were in
the trunk

and which
you were probably saving
for your grandchildren

forgive me
they were tempting
so inviting
and so readable

And, on a connected note: do check out Joyce Sidman’s book This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, which is a delightful collection of poems inspired by Williams. [Publishers Weekly review]

A group of sixth grade students are invited to write poems of apology to their classmates or teacher who they may have trampled, hurt, infringed upon. The result: sweet, funny, touching, witty poems. The second half of the book is comprised of response poems of forgiveness. I loved the premise and the content of this book. And, the illustrations by Pamela Zagarenski are super hip.

Happy Birthday William Carlos Williams!

Sometimes a day in New York City can really get to you. That’s when Allan Ishac’s book New York’s 50 Places to Find Peace and Quietcan come in handy. I have been flipping through this book for a couple of weeks now – chalk it up to my true belief that travel is possible through osmosis. The book is a permanent fixture on my nightstand, and as I’ve been reading it, I’ve discovered that a few of the places are actually within walking distance of my office. Score! This maybe the first in my series of explorations of quiet places in NYC.

So, today, I decided to go check one out: The NY Open Center’s meditation room.

I went during my lunch break. After picking up a sandwich from the corner deli whose name I will never learn, I walked over to the Open Center. You have to hit the buzzer to be let in (it only took a second for them to respond) and once I was in the lobby, I just walked over to the receptionist and told her I wanted to go to the meditation room. I signed the register, and got one of those shirt clips (like they give you at the Met) and was directed toward a long flight of stairs.

In India, some of the most popular pilgrimage spots are arrived at after a bit of a climb (Tirupati, Vaishno Devi; I’ve never been to either, but I’ve done the small temples in Mumbai and Pune), so I enjoyed the climb up. Made me feel like I was headed somewhere significant.

And, then – the meditation room welcomed me. High ceilings, adjustable light fixtures, paper lanterns, and carpeted floors. A trace of incense that soothed my nerves. Complete silence. Ahh. I could touch the peace and quiet. There are two hangings on the wall – one is a Tibetan mandala and the other some sort of depiction of Christian saints – the kind with gold halos around them that remind me of medieval art and the Cloisters museum (I could be way wrong on this). In the corner was a pile of cushions.

I grabbed one and placed it on the center of a rectangular woven rug in the middle of the room. Then, I just tried to sit for 15 minutes.

I’ve taken various meditation classes. There are so many approaches: focus on a light in the center of your forehead, stay with your breath, or just watch your thoughts come and go like a movie on a screen. Today, I chose the last technique.

This mind really is like a silver screen. Scenes play themselves out, ideas float around like bubbles, loved ones smile and frown, work calls. I remember a teacher saying, “Just send each one away and say ‘I am here now’ to yourself.” That’s what I did—or, at least, tried to do!

A little over 10 minutes later, my eyes opened. I was breathing so much easier now. The pile of stuff back at my desk didn’t seem so important anymore. It’s not so often that I can say that feeling takes over me.

I walked back down the stairs, and now all the sounds around me were crystal clear – the music playing in the bookstore, the click-clack of my shoes; outside, I expected to feel accosted by the din of construction and traffic, but I found … silence and a piece of peace instead.

I was ready to go back to life. And, all it took was a 15 minute retreat. Reaching into my lunch bag for my drink, I discovered a bag of potato chips. It must have come with my sandwich. A delight, a surprise. Crunch. I broke the silence  (and my week-long blogging fast!) with my first chip.

The Open Center Meditation Room
83 Spring Street bet. Broadway & Lafayette
NYC
212.219.2527
Open to public; free

Stay tuned: I’ll try to check out another peaceful destination next week.

On this day, the 6th anniversary of 9/11, I’ll keep adding links to articles and reflections on the event.

–> My day always begins with The Writer’s Almanac. Today, Garrison Keiller’s features a write up on Bruce Springsteen’s inspiration for his album The Rising, as well as National Book Award winner Don DeLillo’s new novel Falling Man.

As a history major, I really appreciated this quote from DeLillo:

When asked why he wanted to write about the attacks, DeLillo said, “They say that journalism is the first draft of history and maybe in a curious way fiction is the final draft. Not because it’s more truthful, but because it can enter unknown territory. A writer can work his way into the impact of history on interior lives. He can examine what a character sees, thinks, feels, hears, even what a character dreams.”

–> In William Safire’s weekly column in the NYT, he posited on how and why “9/11″ (versus “the attacks of the September 11, 2001″ has taken hold in our language. Read it here.

–> Last year, I interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning author and artists Art Spiegelman, author of of the beautiful graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers, as well as his wife Francoise Mouly and their daughter Nadja, about their memories of 9/11. All three are characters in what I consider a seminal work. Here is a PDF of that article which appeared in Writing magazine. “The Day Everything Changed: Remembering 9/11 with Art Spiegelman.”

–> Chicken Spaghetti has a short piece that resonated with me. She compares today’s gray and cloudy sky to the cloudless blue one of six years ago. Read here.

–> At School Library Journal is a short piece “Remembering 9/10,” Amy Bowllan of Bowllan’s Blog reflects on the symbolism of the time capsule her students created the day before 9/11.

–> USA Today looks at nonfiction and fiction titles about 9/11 (1,036 titles, in all). It concludes that “novels about 9/11 can’t stack up to nonfiction.” [Read the full story here.] The 9/11 Commission Report has sold most copies – but I wonder how many people know about the graphic novel adaptation? Somehow it made me uncomfortable to read it.

I’ll add more as the day goes on, but for now, I’ll post a poem I wrote the morning after 9/11/2001.

Island I Know

Once, twin rising giants scraped these clouds
Rising far above ground zero.
Once, shimmering glass windows sent reflections
of summer sky and Hudson waves
To eyes like mine,
Lending me their windows to the world.

I looked away for a moment
And came back to find that steel wings had slashed
the guardians of my island,
Burying its icon of indomitable strength
Under cloaks of crumbled plateaus
Blankets of concrete nothingness
Layers of still hearts.

Now all I smell is billowing smoke.
Now all I feel are burnt spirits.
Now all I see are black skies and bare heels flying
into the air
White ash smeared onto pale skin
Breathing bodies spilling out of windows.

This is not the island I know.

A volcano has erupted, leaving a vacuum behind.
And while souls fly high to look down on this flatbed
of their lost breath,
I can see doves and pigeons flapping their wings
Planning their escape routes,
Their screeches vying with the sirens and whirling
red signals.
Trying to fill the hollow spaces,
North they move
East they move
Away they move.

This is not the island they know either.

Madeleine L’Engle passed away today in Hartford, Conn. at age 88 [see full coverage]. She’s best known for A Wrinkle in Time, but she also wrote a great deal of poetry.In her memory …

To a Long-Loved Love

We, who have seen the new moon grow old together,
Who have seen winter rime the fields and stones
As though it would claim earth and water forever,
We who have known the touch of flesh and the shape of bones
Know the old moon stretching its shadows across a whitened field
More beautiful than spring with all its spate of blooms
What passions knowledge of tried flesh still yields,
What joy and comfort these familiar rooms. …

Read the complete poem here at Technomom’s site.

Update: There is much coverage in print and online about the loss of L’Engle. Among my favorite pieces are

Laurel Snyder’s essay “L’Engle’s Last Wrinkle” at Salon.com.

I got the news Friday morning, hunched over my laptop in a coffee shop, and it forced me out of myself, tossed me sharply back in my seat. I took a little breath. I said, “Oh!” a little too loudly. I disturbed the young man in an Atlanta Falcons T-shirt sitting quietly beside me.Madeleine L’Engle was dead.

Debbie Nevins’s eulogy at the Weekly Reader literary blog WORD, where she introduces middle school students to the magic of Engle:

In short, A Wrinkle In Time was the first book that really made me think. And what a wonderfully shivery feeling it gave me to ponder such thoughts! It was like jumping into dark but inviting waters of infinite depth. The sense of weightlessness it gave my mind was a new form of freedom, never before experienced. And I wanted more.

She also pointed me to L’Engle’s family’s wish that invites students to read a banned book in the author’s memory. What a wonderful idea, especially since Banned Books Week, sponsored by the ALA is coming up at the end of this month – September 29-October 6 [more].

Interesting piece at NPR.org: “Why Women Read More Than Men”

Among avid readers surveyed by the AP, the typical woman read nine books in a year, compared with only five for men. Women read more than men in all categories except for history and biography. …

When it comes to fiction, the gender gap is at its widest. Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain.

By this measure, “chick-lit” would have to include Hemingway and nearly every other novel, observes Lakshmi Chaudhry in the magazine In These Times. “Unlike the gods of the literary establishment who remain predominately male—both as writers and critics—their humble readers are overwhelmingly female.”

… Theories attempting to explain the “fiction gap” abound. Cognitive psychologists have found that women are more empathetic than men, and possess a greater emotional range—traits that make fiction more appealing to them. …

Of course, Harry Potter is the exception to all these theories. Read the complete article here.

Update: Home of the Brave was awarded the 2007 Golden Kite Award for fiction by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).

There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks about Shaun Tan’s wordless graphic novel Arrival. It “may be the most brilliant new book of the year,” according to Rick Margolis of School Library Journal [read his interview with Shaun Tan here.]. And, Elizabeth Bird of Fuse # 8 calls it “the most amazing thing I’ve had the pleasure to read in years” [read her full review here].

I’d have to say I agree. Having been an arrival to this country at age 12, I’ve always been interested in books that explore questions such as “What is home?” “What does it mean to be a stranger in a new land?” and “How does one begin to belong?” Last year, the book that moved me most in this regard was Marina Budhos’s Ask Me No Questions (which comes out in paperback on Sept. 11).

This year, I hadn’t been as excited about a book as I was about The Arrival … until last week when I read Katherine Applegate’s Home of the Brave. I’m always looking for books that I can read in pairs. Here are two books that just seem to want to hold each other’s hands. (Look: Don’t the two covers also go so well together?!)

A novel written in free verse, Home of the Brave is a poignant story about an African war refugee from Sudan named Kek who arrives in the US in the thick of winter in—of all places—Minnesota. His father and brother have been killed, his mother is missing, and he has lost everything about his life that he has ever known. Welcome to America.

Questions

We drive past buildings
everywhere buildings.
Everywhere cars.
Everywhere dead trees.
Who killed all the trees? I ask.

From a dry, hot land where he was part of a nomadic herding tribe, Kek has arrived in a freezing cold country where he must not only learn a new language, but also make friends and cultivate hope for his future. Usually the optimist, even Kek feels distraught upon his arrival at his new home.

I will be OK, I say,
using my best English words.
Soon I will make snowballs.

I make a big grin
so that my new friend Dave
will not worry.
I wonder if he can tell
it is a pretending smile. …

My aunt glances at Ganwar.
You’ll see, Dave.
Kek finds sun
when the sky is dark.
Ah, says Dave,
an optimist.
I look away.
I cannot find any sun today, I think.

In the course of this tender tale, Kek makes friends—with a neighbor living in foster care, with an old woman who owns a rundown farm, and with an aging cow named Gol (which means “family” in his native language). His relationship with Gol (like The Arrival’s main character’s relationship with his dog-like animal companion) is critical to his sense of belonging—and interestingly, it’s one where language is not important.

Sometimes I talk to her softly.
I tell her of my father’s great herd
and how they would graze each day,
walking for miles,
the sun in our bones,
the grass whispering its shy music.
I sing her one of my father’s songs
and listen for an echo of his voice in mine.
She nuzzles me and flicks her ears
and chews her cud.

When I bury my face in Gol’s old hide
I smell hay and dung and life.
She shelters me like a warm wall,
and that is enough for this day.

Through a combination of touching and humorous vignettes (my favorite being the time when he puts his aunt’s dishes in the “washing machine,” i.e. the laundry!), Applegate allows us to accompany Kek on his journey to find “home.” And, isn’t that something we all want to find?

Once in a while a children’s story comes along that carries you away with lyrical language, an authentic voice, and a story that allows you to make connections much larger than its plot. For me, Home of the Brave did all of the above–and somehow, some more.
More:
Read my interview with Katherine Applegate.

Update: Home of the Brave was awarded the 2007 Golden Kite Award for fiction by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).  

As I was reading Home of the Brave I kept hoping that there’d be an author’s note at the back of the book which would tell me more about how Katherine Applegate got the idea for these vivid characters and about her research and writing process. Since I didn’t find it, I thought that the next best thing would be to ask her all the questions that popped up in my mind.

Here’s our Q&A. [Oh, in case the name sounds familiar, Katherine Applegate is K.A. Applegate, the author of the bestselling Animorph book series which has sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Home of the Brave is her literary novel debut.]

How did the idea for this novel come about? What was your inspiration?
I was living in Minneapolis at the time, a city with which I had a definite love/hate thing going on (loved everything about it, except the brutal winters.) This was back in the late nineties, and the city was becoming home to a large immigrant population from sub-Saharan Africa. There’d be stories in the news of these brave, amazingly resilient refugee families who’d come straight from refugee camps in Kenya, only to step off a plane into the depths of a Minneapolis winter.

I kept wondering how a child from Sudan or Somalia would feel to be plunged into a world of strange customs and odd food and an utterly unfamiliar language. Would it be terrifying or thrilling? Isolating or liberating? Add to all that the constant threat of frostbite: talk about your steep learning curve!

What was your research process of the refugee experience?
I love doing research, and I spent a lot of time exploring the history and culture of the Nuer, a pastoral tribe from southern Sudan. There are many African refugees in Minnesota – Sudanese, Somalis, Eritreans, Ethiopians – and the Nuer population is a relatively small part of this group. But I was able to locate a great deal of information about their experience as refugees. I even found a Nuer-English dictionary – although, sadly, it’s more pamphlet than book. Still haven’t mastered a word, I must admit.

There is, unfortunately, no shortage of stories about the horrors of the Sudanese conflict, and about the plight of refugees. (See theirc.org or unhcr.org for a good starting point.)

The voice of a young African boy, I thought, was so … authentic. Can you tell me about how you found it?
It was a process of stripping away the non-essentials, I suppose. I started with a more traditional narrative structure, then moved to free verse. I kept chopping away to find the most basic emotional units. In the end, it wasn’t so much about being a boy, being African, being young . . . it was about being different, and afraid. That’s a voice we all can channel.

I was curious to know why you waited until halfway (if not more) through the book to tell us that Kek was from Sudan. Until then, readers only know that he’s from Africa.
Although I did very specific research, it seemed to me that many aspects of the refugee experience are universal. The loss and fear, the struggle to belong, the hopes for the future: that’s all part of the process, no matter where you’re from.

Why free verse?
I wasn’t committed to the form at first. I’d try a section in prose, rewrite it in free verse, then read both aloud to hear what “worked.” (Sometimes neither did!) Eventually, I realized that writing in free verse helped me experience Kek’s struggle with language: I’d traveled to a linguistic world where every word mattered, and finding the right one was an enormous struggle. As Kek says at one point:

I try to understand,
but all I hear is a river of words,
rushing and thundering and pushing me beneath the surface.
Now and then
a word I know
darts up like a sparkling fish,
but then it’s all dark
moving water again.

I read somewhere that the original title of the book was The Stars Remain. It seems to me that the emphasis of that title is hope and the emphasis of the current title is courage. I’d love to hear you speak about the role that both play in this story.
It did start out as The Stars Remain (titling has never been one of my strong points). The phrase comes from an African saying featured in the novel: “A sandstorm passes; the stars remain.” Jean Feiwel, who is the publisher at Feiwel & Friends, suggested “Home of the Brave.” I liked having the word “home” in the title, because this is, first and foremost, about finding a place to belong.

You said, “In Kek’s story, I hope readers will see the neighbor child with a strange accent, the new kid in class from some faraway land, the child in odd clothes who doesn’t belong. I hope they see themselves.” I loved that you extended the theme of this story to more than just immigration, and would love to know more about why you feel this way.
You don’t have to be an immigrant to know what it’s like to be different. We’ve all felt like outsiders, at some point in our lives (and if you haven’t yet, trust me: you will.) Confronted with someone unlike themselves, kids can be terribly cruel. They can also be immensely compassionate.

I would love to think that reading about a child like Kek will help someone, someday, channel that compassionate side, to smile and say “Need a hand?” when it could make all the difference in the world. Which reminds me of a wonderful quote from Jean Rhys:

“Reading makes immigrants of us all.
It takes us away from home, but more important,
It finds homes for us everywhere.”

More
Read my review of Home of the Brave.
Watch a video of Katherine Applegate discussing her book.