Literary Safari

Happy Leap Year to you! I’ll pay forward bookish desi’s wish to me: Hope you’re getting to leap into fabulous endeavors today, new and old!

A little haiku today, from a haiku a day, by Gimble:

February’s haste
to usher in an early
March slowed by one day.

And, here is a compedium of trivia, for your leap year reading pleasure:

> Origins of the use of the word leap to describe a year made of 366 days, courtesy of word origins.org :

“The use of leap to denote calendrical shifts like this dates to Old English, c.993 to be more exact. It appears in AElfric’s De Temporibus Anni. AElfric of Eynsham was a Benedictine monk who is probably the chief prose stylist of the late Old English period. De Temporibus Anni is his attempt to provide monks and priests with a text on astronomy and the calendar that they could use in the education of themselves and the laity and in combating superstition and myth. AElfric wrote in reference to the moon (which needs a leap day added to its orbit of the earth about every 19 years):

se dæg is gehâten Saltus lune • þæt is ðæs monan hlyp
(the day is called Saltus lune, that is the leap of the moon)

At the New York Times, Chris Turney, a professor of geography at the University of Exeter, asks the question: “Now that we’re in the 21st century, and time is measured according to oscillations of vaporized atoms, why do we still need something as oddly quaint as leap year?”

BBC News points out that those of us who receive an annual salary are working an extra day without extra pay today. (Should today have been a holiday then?)

And, my favorite: Magnum Photos presents images of great leaps and jumps at Slate’s Today in Pictures. (You can also click on the image above to go there.)

Today’s Poetry Friday roundup is at Big A little a.

I’ve raved elsewhere and on many occasions about Kids Can Press’s Visions in Poetry series, which features classic poems illustrated by contemporary artists – poems such as The Raven, Casey at the Bat, The Highwayman, and Jabberwocky! This week, I was supremely excited when I discovered another admirable effort to bring great poetry to life with amazing illustrations.

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is host to an ongoing series called “The Poem as Comic Strip”:

Heightened language—one possible or partial definition of poetry—isn’t the first thing one associates with comics. Yet comic book artists take into account the way words appear on the page to a degree poets will find familiar. How many lines should accompany each image? How high should the dialogue balloon float? The ratio of printed words to blank space plays a role in whether a poem or strip succeeds.

The best of the daily humor strips (think Peanuts) have produced thousands of word-and-picture episodes that occupy about the same thought-space as a good short poem; the terseness can resemble haiku. As a way to help readers discover (or rediscover) our archive, poetryfoundation.org has invited some of today’s most vital graphic novelists to interpret a poem of their choice from the more than 4,500 poems in our archive, reaching from Beowulf to the present.

This month’s poem is “Recitative” by A.E. Stalling, illustrated by the Brooklyn-based Hawaii-raised illustrator Kikuo Johnson.

Every night, we couldn’t sleep.
Our upstairs neighbors had to keep
Dropping something down the hall—
A barbell or a bowling ball,

And from the window by the bed,
Alley cats expended breath
In arias of love and death.

Dawn again, across the street,
Jackhammers began to beat
Like hangovers, and you would frown—
That well-built house, why tear it down?

[read the complete poem]

More Poems as Comic Strips:

#1: David Heatley and Diane Wakoski
#2: Gabrielle Bell and Emily Dickinson
#3: Jeffrey Brown and Russell Edson
#4: Ron Regé, Jr. and Kenneth Patchen
#5: Paul Hornschemeier and Ted Kooser

I’m completely taken by this ad from Doctors Without Borders.

Human Ball is a dark animation (claymation) for an AIDS treatment campaign in Africa. It was the recipient of a 2006 Epica Award – Europe’s premier creative awards – as well as recognized at Cannes. As Doctors Without Borders explains, this ad “draws attention to the continuing ravages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in resource-poor countries around the world. More than 40 million people are infected with HIV today. Only 15 per cent of them have access to life-prolonging medicines readily available in wealthy countries.”

I’m embedding the ad here, but you might also want to watch it here for the higher resolution.

No Valentine’s Day is complete without a love story. My pick for this Valentine’s Day is The Professor’s Daughter, a witty, action-packed, and gorgeously composed graphic novel by the French illustrator/writer duo Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert. It was just awarded a CYBIL award for best graphic novel for young adults too!

From the Cyblis site:

In late Victorian London, the frustrated daughter of an archaeologist and the repressed son of an Egyptian pharaoh fall in love. That he’s been dead for many centuries is the least of their problems. The twisting, fast-paced story that follows takes readers to many landmarks of classic English adventure tales, from the British Museum and Scotland Yard and into the private study of Queen Victoria herself. While the panel layout is the same on nearly every page, the scenes inside those boxes jump from slapstick action to tender reminiscences to deadly danger.

There you have it: A 3,000 year old mummy, the beautiful daughter of an Egyptologist, and 19th century London all come together with water color illustrations in cool and dark palettes that at once moved me and made me laugh.

This here is one of my favorite panels, but you can read a longer excerpt at First Second Books.

No, this is not a trick question. If I were asked this question, my first answer would be that a documentary editor, err, edits documentary films. However, I was quite enlightened after reading this Slate article “How to decipher authors’ handwriting” to learn of the existence of another type of documentary editor:

“the people who prepare historical and literary documents for the press. .. To catch inevitable errors, documentary editors arrange to have as many fresh readings of their transcriptions against the original documents as possible, a process that no doubt would have alarmed the very writers who hastily scribbled their private musings into so many cheap notebooks in the first place. Editors, who sometimes employ graduate students to help with the laborious task, train themselves and their assistants in the idiosyncrasies of a writer’s hand, his common phrasings, and the “gestalt” of the era—likely references to people and places, world events and literary allusions, that must be annotated for today’s readers.”

I love the idea of spending my days surrounded by the diaries and manuscripts of famous authors … but then I wonder, do I even remotely have the talent required to decipher the handwriting of even a single one?

Take Henry David Thoreau’s manuscript, pictured above. What ever would I do with it? Probably shed tears in frustration (and thereby mess up the manuscript!) Which is why I’m grateful to documentary editors like Elizabeth Witherell who:

… describes the process of reading Thoreau’s journals for the press as “like driving over a deeply potholed road—you read along and when you come to a word you can’t understand you back up and run at it again with the force of what you do understand as momentum.” Drawing on her knowledge of Thoreau’s usual subjects and vocabulary, the context of the passage, and the range of word choices in mid-19^th-century American English, Witherell finds the passage eventually “resolves into something recognizable.”

I’m truly impressed … and grateful.

I stumbled upon this yesterday and was both moved by the content and delighted by the format. At the United States Holocaust Museum website, the exhibit “Anne Frank the Writer: An Unfinished Story” showcases the Anne’s writings, beyond the Diary that we all know so well.

From the exhibit’s introduction:

Anne’s legacy, however, extends beyond her diary. Between the ages of 13 and 15, Anne wrote short stories, fairy tales, essays, and the beginnings of a novel. Five notebooks and more than 300 loose pages, meticulously handwritten during her two years in hiding, survived the war.

While the entire exhibit of Anne’s found writings is well worth a visit, what stood out to me was Anne Frank’s essay “Give!” — one of her many writings which she copied into a notebook titled Stories and Events from the Annex, starting on September 2, 1943.

The depth of emotion and empathy in the piece, and its message of social justice is one that has not lost its impact with time:

Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness. If we were to start by adding to that goodness instead of stifling it, by giving poor people the feeling that they too are human beings, we wouldn’t necessarily have to give money or material things, since not everyone has them to give.

Everything starts in small ways, so in this case you can begin in small ways too. On streetcars, for example, don’t just offer your seat to rich mothers, think of the poor ones too. And say “excuse me” when you step on a poor person’s toe, just as you say it to a rich one.

Anne’s essay may have been drafted earlier, but she transferred it to her Stories and Events from the Annex on March 26, 1944. You can view the original manuscript and watch/listen a very cool animated version (with sound) right here.

Two of my friends who live in the Bay area are leading writing workshops in the upcoming months. If you have been thinking about taking a class, honing your skills, or simply being part of a writing community, these two women are phenomenal writers and great teachers.

Bushra Rehman performs her poetry regularly in theaters and colleges around the country. Lately, she’s been spending her time flying through the streets of Oakland and Brooklyn, writing an on the road adventure novel for Muslim girls. Bushra is co-editor of the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Seal Press, 2002) which has been adopted as essential reading material in women’s studies and ethnic studies classes around the United States. She has been featured in The New York Times and NY Newsday and her work has appeared in ColorLines, Mizna, Curve, SAMAR, and Bottomfish.

Bushra and I used to work and teach ESL workshops together at The College of New Rochelle, and have been friends and occasional writing buddies ever since. Her upcoming workshop:

Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Creative Non-Fiction
a 10-week writing workshop with Bushra Rehman
Mondays, February 19 – April 28, 2008, 7-9 PM

Laura Deutsch is a writer, editor, and teacher based in Mill Valley, California. Her personal essays, features, travel, and humor pieces have appeared in the New York Times, More magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Mademoiselle, and more. Her personal essays and travel pieces have been anthologized in three books and her commentary has aired on public radio.

Laura and I first met at a writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg in New Mexico back in 2000, and were cross-country telephone and email writing buddies for quite some time. A few years ago, I attended and co-facilitated a couple of sessions at one of her weekend workshops out in Petaluma, Ca., and can definitely say that it was a most refreshing experience that filled up my creative well. Her upcoming workshops:

Writing as a Spiritual Practice
A weekend workshop with Laura Deutsch and Edward Espe Brown at the Tassajara Monastery.
May 4 – 9, 2008

Writing Retreat in the South of France
May 17 – 24, 2008, with Laura Deutsch

(more…)

It’s snowing in NYC this morning. Big, fat, wet flakes that make the sky look as though somebody shook it fast and hard. This is my favorite kind of snow. Makes me want to open my mouth and catch the miniature white clouds; feel them melt on my tongue.

As I watched all the people pull out their umbrellas this morning, I was reminded of Jocko Weyland’s little essay in the New York Times “Urban Studies” column some months ago: The Mystery of the Umbrellas.

In his essay, Weyland, a newcomer to New York, aptly observes:

THE first time it happens, the neophyte will probably think it’s an aberration, maybe one oddball’s bizarre pathology. Then there will be another, and another, and it turns out everyone’s doing it. What a funny bunch, these New Yorkers.

Autumn has faded, the cold has descended, and then the first snowfall of the year arrives. The flakes start falling, and to the transplant from the snowy provinces, they will be a nostalgic reminder of home. Ah, the snow! So lovely, and what a hush and lulling contrast to the usual hustle and bustle.

Then the transplant sees that first person walking down the street nonchalantly holding an umbrella overhead … [read the complete essay]

As for me, I never carry an umbrella in the snow. Even if it’s coming down hard and strong, I’d rather get wet than keep it from turning my black coat into a polka dotted blanket.

I’ve started calling them the Literary Brat Pack of the early 21st century – Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nick Hornby, and the other authors that Eggers regularly manages to recruit for his fantastically creative projects that benefit his nonprofit organization 826. The latest addition to that lineup is The Book of Other People, an intriguing short story collection edited by Zadie Smith, a writer who has such a lucid style that even her introduction stays with you for days to come.

In this case, the beneficiary of The Book of Other People is the Brooklyn-based 826nyc which helps students aged 6-18 with their creative and expository writing skills. It’s nice to know that you could be furthering an admirable cause while engaged in a good read.

There were very few rules that the contributors were given in the call for submissions, Smith tells us. In fact, the instructions were simple: “Make somebody up and name your story after your character.” That’s it. Since this is a charitable project, each of the 23 contributors to this volume also wrote his or her short story gratis. As Zadie Smith writes in her introduction, “It is liberating to write a piece that has no connection to anything else you write, that needn’t be squished into a novel, or styled to fit the taste of a certain magazine, or designed in such a way as to please the kind of people who pay your rent. ”

The result of this creative freedom is an eclectic, magnetic collection that celebrates the place of character in fiction and that pays tribute to the short story. Character is so central to the vision of this book that Smith even chose to arrange the stories in alphabetical order (by character). Thus, the reader is given the creative choice to read them in the order he or she wishes. (Of course, because I am a good girl who always begins at the beginning, I started my journey into this world of characters by reading the first story first!)

When I say this is an eclectic collection, I really mean eclectic. Here are just a few examples of what you will find in this book:

David Mitchell’s “Judith Castle,” the first story, introduces us to a middle-aged woman in England who receives a phone call informing her that her lover with whom she is about to “consumate” her long distance relationship has been killed in a hit and run. Mitchell writes in the first-person and is generous with the dialogue, a technique that yields a memorable personality who stands up to William Faulkner’s reasoning that “It beings with character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does. ”

In Nick Hornby’s illustrated “study” of a writer’s life, “J. Johnson,” we are presented with the varying back of the book bio blurbs of a single author. If you have ever had to write an author bio, you will want to frame this gem of a piece and hang it above your desk for it is a delightful and humorous reminder of how we, as writers, are called upon to constantly reinvent ourselves for our audiences, depending on the nature of the published work.

Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell Snr” is a well-paced rumination on the nature of a father-son relationship, in this case a father who pops in and out of his abandoned son’s life “like a comet, at long intervals.” Though the story is about sons and fathers, it is told by a daughter, a choice that adds additional layers to this already textured story … therefore making a reader want to go back and read it all over again.

As usual, Jonathan Safran Foer’s ability to capture a nuanced voice (and thereby illuminate character) shines through in “Rhoda,” a monologue (you can imagine a tape recorded conversation a la StoryCorps between an elderly NYC Jewish man and his college-age grandson). Reading this story is like a treasure hunt – it invites readers to look for clues in dialect and intonation … all of which bring us face to face with a Holocaust survivor in the winter of his life.

My favorite, however, was Edwidge Danticat’s “Lélé,” a lyrical tale about dying frogs and two sisters living in their family home as adults. The story is written in the first person, from the point of view of the younger sister, a judicial witness following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather. Her sister, Lélé, is a pregnant late 30s-early 40 something who learns that her child has a terminal birth defect. Here is a piece in which the house – a wooden gingerbread house  in Leogane, Haiti, filled with leather bound notebooks -  is as much a character as the people who live in it.

There are enough short stories in this anthology to make readers of all persuasions happy. Truly, if all short stories were written with as much grace and heart as these, Stephen King would have no reason to say that many short stories he read while editing The Best American Short Stories 2007 felt “show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.” In fact, I came away from the book feeling that this collection is an antidote to King’s observation … and a statement to attest that indeed, the short story is alive and well today.

Related:
What Ails the Short Story, by Stephen King (The New York Times)
100 Best Characters in Fiction per Book magazine(NPR story, from )