Critical Mass

Small Press Spotlight: I HEART Poetry Chapbooks

2009-11-09T16:01:52Z

A tradition of the Small Press Spotlight series is to call attention to the chapbook. They don’t take too much space on the shelf, their spines are easy to overlook, but these rare edition (and quite affordable) keepsakes are labors of love worth owning. Here are a few that have found a home in my ever-growing collection:

Little Spells, GOSS 183 Press

Publisher Didi Menendez has worked hard over the years to produce her popular print and online magazines OCHO & MiPoesias, which has featured special themed chapbooks on occasion. This stand-alone chapbook of poetry by the Cuban-American poet Emma Trelles marks yet another venture for the industrious poet/ artist/ editor based in Florida.

Disappears in the Rain, Parlor City Press

Winner of The Broome Review 2009 Chapbook competition (recently renamed The Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry), this is Matthew Thorburn’s gorgeous poetic response (loosely based on the renga) to a recent journey through Japan. For a more comprehensive list of poetry chapbook contests, click here.

Chamoru Childhood, Achiote Press

Edited by Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Victoria-Lola M. Leon Guerrero, and Craig Santos Perez, these writings by three generations of Chamoru people provide an important glimpse into the life and culture on the Mariana Islands and Guam.

Flood Year, Dancing Girl Press

Since 2004 (and with approximately 50 titles and counting), this independent press has worked hard to promote the work of emerging women writers. This recent chapbook authored by Sara Tracey, a poet based in Chicago, speaks to the pleasant discoveries to be found in the pages of these projects.

A Field Guide to the Intractable, Small Anchor Press

I love this phrase in the press’ mission statement: “By preserving handmade production, we hope our chapbooks will impart an "aura," whereby the reader handles the story or poem with extra care and attention.” This most recent art-object is in collaboration with award-winning poet Kimiko Hahn.

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small press spotlight

Elizabeth Taylor: The NBCC at 35

2009-11-08T21:17:30Z

NBCC board member Elizabeth Taylor, book review editor of the Chicago Tribune, reflects on the organization at its 35th anniversary celebration in September

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Guest video post from John Freeman: The NBCC at 35

2009-11-08T21:17:26Z

Former NBCC president John Freeman spoke at the ceremony marking the 35th anniversary in September.

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After Kapuscinski: The Art of Reportage, Part III

2009-11-08T20:51:34Z

Klara Glowczewska, Ted Conover, Breyten Breytenbach, Robert S. Boynton. Courtesy of Zygmunt Malinowski

The third panel of last month’s two-day symposium, After Kapuściński: The Art of Reportage, cosponsored by the National Book Critics Circle, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, the New York Institute for Humanities at NYU, and the Literary Reportage concentration of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU, in association with the Overseas Press Club and Worlds Without Borders, focused on Kapuscinski’s legacy in the 21st century. Read the report on the first two panels here, and listen to the podcasts.

Robert S. Boynton, director of NYU’s new Literary Reportage concentration and author of The New New Journalism, opened by saying that Kapuściński’s work was central in shaping the academic concentration, and that the students are excited and informed by his books. See video below.

The panelists:

Breyten Breytenbach teaches at the University of Cape Town, the Gorée  Institute in Dakar, Senegal, and NYU’s Creative Writing Program. A  South African writer and painter of French citizenship, he was a  committed opponent of the apartheid and served 7 years in prison for  high treason. He has published over 40 books of verse and prose,  including, recently, Intimate Stranger (Archipelago, August 2009).  

Ted Conover is the author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2001 NBCC Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist), Whiteout: Lost in Aspen,  Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes, and Coyotes:  A Journey Across Borders with America’s Illegal Migrants. He is a 2003  Guggenheim Fellow and Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU’s  Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.  

Klara Glowczewska is Editor in Chief of Condé Nast Traveler, the only  travel publication to be nominated for a National Magazine Award for  Best Essays and Criticism, and is a member of the Board of the  Overseas Press Club. Born in Warsaw and raised in the U.S. and Egypt,  she is the translator of three of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s books,  including Travels with Herodotus (2007).  

Wiktor Osiatynski is Professor at Central European University in  Budapest and a member of the Board of the Open Society Institute. A  close friend of Ryszard Kapuscinski, Osiatynski was a writer for the  Warsaw newsweekly Kultura until its banning in 1981, and is the author  of 25 books, including, in English, Contrasts and Rehab and Human  Rights and Their Limits (Cambridge UP, September 2009).  

David Samuels is the author of two books of reportage: Only Love Can  Break Your Heart (2008; paperback, 2009) and The Runner (2008). A  contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and longtime contributor to  The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, Samuels has been likened to  New Journalism predecessors like Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, as well as  to Kapuscinski himself.

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Mark the Date: Prison Writing Benefit Reading, This Monday

2009-11-05T22:16:21Z

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world; there are hundreds and hundreds of prisons across the country and, as of 2007, these institutions housed more than 2,300,000 inmates—70% of whom are non-white. Nearly 1 million of those in prison are serving time for committing non-violent crimes. Sadly, the situation is not improving.

The second-annual Prison Writing Benefit Reading will help to raise much-needed funds to enable this important program to continue into the future, but also to help the prisoners see themselves in a new way: as writers.

The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WNYC Presents

BREAKOUT: VOICES FROM INSIDE

A partnership between PEN’s Prison Writing Program and WNYC’s The Greene Space

Presented as part of “The NEXT New York Conversation” Series

John Turturro, Lemon Andersen, Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, Jamal Joseph, and Sean Wilsey among others to read works authored by participants of PEN’s Prison Writing Program

Monday, November 9^th, 2009 at 7pm

For more than 30 years, PEN’s Prison Writing Program has been dedicated to helping make the harsh realities of American imprisonment part of our social justice dialogue. PEN’s program has also been on the front-lines of prison reform, helping inmates in federal, state and local penitentiaries cope with life behind bars, gain skills and have a voice while they are there. The Prison Writing Program accomplishes all this through mentorships and an annual writing competition that receives between 20-30 entries per day from local, state and federal prisons—including from prisoners on death row.

On Monday, November 9, 2009 at 7pm, WNYC Radio’s The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space’s monthly dialogue series, “The NEXT New York Conversation” partners with PEN to present BREAKOUT: VOICES FROM THE INSIDE, a night of literature and conversation. Luminaries from the New York cultural landscape – writers Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian and Patricia Smith, along with actor John Turturro and writer/performer Lemon Andersen, among others–will read pieces chosen from the best of the winning manuscripts of the Prison Writing Contest, and from the extraordinarily moving diaries that men and women have written as part of PEN’s collaboration with the Anne Frank Center, USA.

Proceeds from the evening will benefit PEN’s Prison Writing Program. The event will be streamed live on the web at www.wnyc.org/thegreenespace

The NEXT New York Conversation, sponsored by HSBC, “The World’s Local Bank,” is WNYC’s The Greene Space’s multiplatform dialogue series featuring a collective of changemakers, newsmakers, tastemakers and New Yorkers, sharing their values about interesting topics that are reshaping, redefining, and re-imagining our world in the 21^st century.

Monday, November 9, 2009 at 07:00 PM
Duration: 2 hours

Tickets can be purchased at Ovation Tix (https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/7631135)

Collaborator: $75

Friend: $50

Collaborator ticket covers the expenses of one-on-one mentoring services between a PEN member and an incarcerated man or woman for one year. This premier ticket includes the best views and a reception following the program.

Friend ticket covers the postage and printing costs to provide eight incarcerated men and women with a free copy PEN’s Handbooks for Writers in Prison. This ticket includes a reception following the program.

WNYC Radio is New York's premier public radio station, comprising WNYC 93.9 FM, WNYC AM 820 and www.wnyc.org. As America's most listened-to AM/FM public radio stations, reaching more than one million listeners every week, WNYC extends New York City's cultural riches to the entire country on-air and online, and presents the best national offerings from networks National Public Radio, Public Radio International and American Public Media. WNYC 93.9 FM broadcasts a wide range of daily news, talk, cultural and classical music programming, while WNYC AM 820 maintains a stronger focus on breaking news and international news reporting. In addition, WNYC produces content for live, radio and web audiences from The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, the station’s street-level multipurpose, multiplatform broadcast studio and performance space. For more information about WNYC, visit www.wnyc.org.

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Reading and Wrestling in Seattle

2009-11-05T14:39:56Z

Books still rule in Seattle, and if you want to argue about it, these two guys with wrestling in their genes might just take you to the mat on the subject.

On Tuesday, November 3, I interviewed John Irving before a crowd of 500 people at Third Place Books in the Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park. That’s right; 500 people turned out on a weeknight to hear Irving, whose latest novel is Last Night in Twisted River, talk about writing, fate, and the importance of plot in novels.

Two hours earlier, Hulk Hogan had arrived to sign copies of his book, My Life Outside the Ring. Hulk autographed books as a line of his fans snaked up and down the aisles. He posed for an arm-wrestling photo with one delighted little boy.

Then John Irving (former wrestling coach) and Hulk (wrestler-reality show star) got together in the warm-up room at Third Place and posed for this picture. Thanks to Third Place staff capturing the moment.

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Guest Post by James Marcus: My Three Minutes for the NBCC

2009-11-04T17:57:56Z

NBCC board member James Marcus, who shepherds the "NBCC Reads" series and created the dance-floor Roth mashup, takes a look backward and forward in his remarks honoring the NBCC 35th anniversary..

According to tonight's program, I'm batting for the 21st century. In fact I was on the NBCC Board back in the storied Nineties. I left the board in 2001, spent some time in detox, and have now fallen off the wagon again. So here I am.

Anyway, I think this positions me nicely to note the sea change that has taken place here over the past decade. During my first tenure on the board, things had gotten a little sleepy. This is no criticism of my excellent and energetic colleagues of that era. But I think we all had a premonition that the old world of print and Sunday book supplements was about to go the way of the dodo. None of us knew exactly how fast that transformation would take place. Nobody operating a butter churn foresees the advent of margarine, either. Before we knew it, the Age of Margarine was upon us--not golden, but bright yellow, and full of suspicious adulterants.

Now, I know that sounds awfully negative. So I will change tack, retire the margarine metaphor, and argue that the NBCC is now a much more vibrant organization than it was ten years ago. The Internet, which was supposed to torpedo what was left of our trade and leave us on par with thimble makers, has given the conversation about books a massive shot in the arm.

Yes, the dust is still settling. The shrinkage or outright disappearance of the old reviewing outlets is painful to watch. The drastic redefinition of those cherished terms, professional and amateur, has given many a seasoned critic a bad case of the psychological bends. But the audience has multiplied, and gone global, and the barriers to entry for a young critic have fallen. So I'm going to look on the bright side, and argue that the best work still rise to the top--like cream, or margarine. I promise.

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Guest Post by Kevin Prufer: NBCC at 35

2009-11-04T02:02:58Z

NBCC board member Kevin Prufer offers these thoughts on his years on the board.

One of the satisfactions of having hung around the NBCC Board for seven years is that I’ve seen many of the same conversations played out over and over again. One of the most common goes something like this:

First, a board member points out that translated books often seem to get short shrift in our deliberations. (I’ll confess that this has often been me.)

Someone else then helpfully suggests that maybe we need a new category called “Books in Translation.”

A third Member of the Board inevitably counters that by asking how we’d ever judge such a category. Wouldn’t we be comparing translated books of poetry to translated books of nonfiction to translated biographies? How would that even work?

And are we expert enough to make these kinds of distinctions? another asks. I mean, we’ve got people here who speak Spanish, French, and German, but what about Latvian? What about Hungarian? Or Icelandic? We’re just not qualified to judge.

But, I say, we know a good book when we see one. Isn’t that the important thing? And if we need to, we can always seek outside counsel, too.

And furthermore (I say into the dead air) we’re not experts on the subjects of the various biographies, are we? But we make judgment calls there, too. Or we ask people who know.

(Here, someone whispers to his neighbor that he never feels very confident of his judgment of translated books, anyway.)

But, the woman on my right says, there’s still the question of comparing translated books of poetry to biographies and novels and memoirs.

And there we sit, until someone says, What we need is seven translation categories, one for each area.

Or, someone else suggests, we could give some kind of special award for a translated book now and then.

Heads nod.

Then I ask if that would mean excluding translations from the regular awards.

And everyone shrugs.

It’s getting kind of late, someone murmurs. So we move on to more pressing business.

The truth is, though, that I think we have a chronic translation problem on the NBCC Board. We opted, many years ago, to include translations because, as an organization of book critics, we’re in the business of rewarding the best books published each year, regardless of a writer’s nationality or native language. So long as the books are published in English in this country, they’re eligible.

And, sure, in recent memory we’ve given the fiction award to Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and now and then have translated books among the finalists, especially in poetry. But it’s also true that translated books raise all kinds of questions for the Board that books composed in English do not. And as a result, they have to overcome dissent and worry that others books skate past.

I fully expect to repeat this conversation at least once more before my seven years on the Board ends in March. Maybe it will revolve around Elena Fanailova’s marvelous THE RUSSIAN VERSION. Or maybe it will concern Mahmoud Darwish’s IF I WERE ANOTHER. Or Novica Tadic’s DARK THINGS. Who knows?

And maybe I’ll luck out and some reader will email me the perfect solution before that conversation begins again.

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Geoff Dyer on John Cheever

2009-11-02T17:03:22Z

Interesting review-essay online at the Guardian: Geoff Dyer, an NBCC finalist in Criticism in 1999 for his Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence and author of this year's Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, offers a lively take on The Journals of John Cheever and Blake Bailey's biography of the writer.

"Cheever, then, was wrong to talk about his talent being 'confined'; but it is entirely appropriate that this was a word to which he insistently returned. As he explained in 1976, the novel Falconer did not come from his experience of prison but from the myriad different kinds of confinement he had experienced 'as a man'. What he does not say – how could he? – was that the forms in which he gave dramatic expression to this sense could be enlarged manifestations of confinement, that the hard-won craftsmanship that stood him in good stead at the New Yorker worked against his being able to plumb the complex depths of his being. Only in the shapeless privacy of his journal could he do that. If he was 'writing narrative prose' Cheever believed that 'every line cannot be a cry from the heart'. So he stopped crying. In the journals, meanwhile, he wept 'gin tears, whiskey tears, tears of plain salt' and stopped worrying about narrative. The irony is that, while he was instinctively hostile to the splurging of 'the California poets', his own best writing would derive from a sustained 40-year word-binge with no thought of form or – at least until very near the end – of publication. A further irony follows: the consummate craftsman ended up being reliant on the posthumous intervention of an editor to turn this repetitive mass of bellyaching, 'booze-fighting' and self-lament into a book with immense narrative power."

Read the entire review here.

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blake bailey, geoff dyer, john cheever

NBCC Featured Review: Matthew Tiffany on Laird Hunt

2009-11-01T22:08:44Z

Each week Critical Mass highlights an exemplary review by a National Book Critics Circle member. Here, in a review that appeared at The Quarterly Conversation, Matthew Tiffany reviews Laird Hunt's Ray of the Star.

Ray of the Star opens with two nods in the direction of French writer Georges Perec. The first, a quotation from his 1967 novel A Man Asleep, serves as entry to the story: Now you must learn how to last. A man named Harry has suffered the unexpected deaths of some people, likely family members, about whom he cares very much. The narrative jumps ahead an unspecified amount of time to Harry abandoning his home, his job, everything. He's running away from everything with nowhere to go. Like the protagonist of A Man Asleep, this is a man realizing he no longer knows how to live -- all that is left now is learning how to last.

Harry -- seemingly at random, though of course it will turn out later that it isn't -- chooses to fly to a foreign city pictured on a postcard he received years ago, before the accident. He bounces between various encounters and digressions, finding himself drawn into a labyrinth of relationships and potential danger. Hunt reveals Harry as someone confused about his state of mind -- "as he continued his daily wanderings he realized 1) that given the level of sustained autoanalysis he was engaged in and no matter how much he might in his self-pitying, aspire to it, 'mad' was probably inaccurate and that 2) well, there was no 2) but there might be, and that was something" -- and only vaguely aware of his probable post-traumatic stress disorder.

Though the individual scenes of this book are written in a way that suggests a relevance to Harry's larger story, they also come across as digressions, one of those "wasn't that strange" moments that can come to an individual in a foreign environment and in times of extreme suggestibility. Hunt uses this style of extreme digression to give the reader a sense of the state of Harry's mind without resorting to more blunt descriptions. Thus the descriptions circle around their targets like a chalk outline at a crime scene: the reader is left with all the details around horrific acts and nearly unbearable emotions, leaving those blank spaces all the more stirring for not being pinned down by an attempt to quantify them. They are chalk outlines as Picasso might have drawn them.

As with Hunt's previous novel, The Exquisite, the story curves and winds through various fantastic scenes, with the reader's attention being drawn to oddities both for amusing and chilling effect. Life at this point clearly doesn't make a great deal of sense for Harry, and so the narrator is compelled to tell Harry's story as a fairy tale. Surprisingly, though, Hunt's approach often offers us realistic details and inner workings: for instance, while taking a stab at being a "living statue" street performer, Harry (who, suggestively, is posing as Don Quixote) strikes up a conversation with a centaur:

It was only when Alfonso, speaking over his own mug of coffee, said, "I have something to show you," that Harry remembered what it was he had planned to say as soon as he arrived -- "There are several things I'd like to ask you, Mr. Centaur," -- but instead he found himself murmuring, "It's very dark out," and following Alfonso to the far side of the room, and through a narrow blue door that gave onto what it took Harry a moment to realize was a garage of sorts, perhaps even -- the stone seemed weathered enough -- an old carriage house, in the center of which sat a large yellow submarine, more or less the one The Beatles had had their adventure in, the one that had been so useful in the struggle against the blue meanies, the one connected to the song, which he had never liked very much and which now raged very nearly out of control in his head before subsiding, slightly, then more fully, like someone had thrown a fade switch, "You can get inside it," Alfonso said,

"It's the yellow submarine," Harry said,

"A model, made of chicken wire and paper mache, but a good one,"

"The song..." Harry said.

"It goes away, I should know, I live with the thing,"

Each of the chapters continues with the same structure as above -- that is, each chapter is composed in the form of just one sentence. Hunt's technique is neither off-putting nor difficult; what it achieves is to propel the story forward in a way that gives Hunt unusual control over at what moments of the story the reader pauses.

In Ray of the Star Hunt presents lot of ideas at odds with each other. Some of the shifts of character pivot on these characters experiencing similar sentiments and emotions at the same time, and the limits of any shared experience lend the story emotional weight. It's a difficult trick, to write about the ways in which our traumas can overlap with each other without avoiding the maudlin or resorting to platitudes and remarkable coincidences. Stephen Dixon made it work in his novel Interstate; he took a similar starting point (the experiences that follow having your children die before you) and wrote multiple "takes" of the scenes that follow that moment -- ultimately, the reader gets to experiences a sort of nightmare version of the movie Groundhog Day.

By contrast Ray of the Star follows just one "telling" of the fallout from a great loss, but rather than throwing the shit at the fan and then diagramming where it splatters, Hunt wants us to inhabit the trauma. When you're watching a father's anguish, you're seeing the suffering; when you've got a narrative like this, where there's equal measure of uncertainty and "would that really happen?" moments, it hews closer to the chaos of living through that trauma. Rather than reading about Harry's journey, the reader feels a part of the story, like a ghost hovering around the proceedings.

It's not all tragedy repercussions. Harry and Solange -- the silver woman -- fall for each other while being pushed around the city together, lying down inside the yellow submarine. There's no question that Hunt is taking a risk; it's a narrow line between the bizarre and a quirky cleverness, but Hunt walks it well. The comedic asides and quirky moments work to leaven the sorrow in a way that both provides relief and simultaneously amplifies the sadness. Meanwhile, Hunt is insidiously upping the ante with a suspense that reaches a scene (no spoilers here) that provided this reader with a genuine, full-on shiver of alarm. The final third of the book moves from that scene into a level of suspense that can only come from a heartfelt investment in the characters; that this book brings the reader to that suspense covertly, in defiance of genre and stereotype, make Ray of the Star another strong work from one of our most creative writers.

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Guest Post by Margaret Atwood: To the Whiting Award Winners, 2009

2009-11-01T15:03:58Z

Margaret Atwood's new novel "The Year of the Flood," was published this fall. She is the author of more than 40 works of fiction, poetry, children's books and critical essays. Her novels include "The Handmaid's Tale," "Cat's Eye," shortlisted for the Booker Prize; "The Blind Assassin," winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, and "Surfacing." Her remarks below were presented October 28 to the ten 2009 winners of $50,000 Whiting Awards.

It’s a great honour to have been invited to speak to you this evening. The occasion is a happy one – it’s the moment when the Whiting Foundation recognizes and encourages brilliant upcoming writing talent. Congratulations to all! (I’ll put you on my blog.)

My role here is a secondary one. It’s what you might call the Duchess role – what Duchesses would be doing if America hadn’t thoughtlessly done away with them in 1776, thus inaugurating 213 years of Duchess Envy. All my life I’ve fled the idea of being a role model – for heaven’s sakes, don’t live as I’ve lived, I want to tell the young – but I appear to have turned into a sort of role model anyway.

On this occasion it seems that I’m to act as a kind of symbolic dignitary – writers can’t be actual dignitaries, as they are by nature too undignified – and wield a virtual wand of blessing, like the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio, or wave a banner from a casement window as the young troops ride out to do battle. Gird on your word-swords, I must say to them! Buckle up those adjectives! Make sure your plots are tight, your epigrams sharp and pointed, your lyrical intervals lacking in bathos. Be vigilant – there are ambushes everywhere. On one side lurk the critics, getting ready to sneer and denounce, or worse, to praise for the wrong reasons; on the other side your parent figures, who always wanted you to be doctors, and who have furnished themselves with a list of writers such as Checkhov who were writers, yes, but doctors too: why can’t YOU do that? This is not helpful.

And on the third side is a stack of bills – bills for things like the rent – that whisper in their papery voices about the impossibility of making a living doing what you most wish to do. Alas, there is no inevitable connection, positive or negative, between talent and money. A bad book can make piles of money, a good book none. Or else a lot. It does happen. But nothing can be foreseen, because writing is among other things a form of gambling. You can win in one throw. You can lose disastrously. Fortune is a notoriously cruel goddess.

This is the moment for a bracing quote from Tennyson: “Doubt Not, Go Forward – If thou doubt’st, The Beasts will tear thee piecemeal.” Fare well, I will say to the anointed ten – the fate of our language is in your hands, and it is a crucial fate – for if these the future guardians of it should falter or disappear, and if even our human language should fail us –should it become a rusty and untrustworthy tool – where will that leave us?

But perhaps I should climb down off the soapbox and give some more practical advice. Forget what used to be called “literature,” I might say. It’s too risky. Too hard to drop-kick it through the gateposts of the Bestseller lists, and the inability to do so – in a winner-take-all environment – can be fatal. Write cookbooks, or books about vampires – you’d do well with either. Or troll through the classics, adding monsters – Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the Body Snatchers, Jane Eyre and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, War and Peace and Heads that Grow Out of your Armpits – the possibilities are endless! Better still – mix and match even more, and do a Vampire Cookbook! On second thought, maybe not – limited menu. But a Miss Manners Guide to Monster Etiquette -- now that would sell! With a little ingenuity and no shame, you can do well. Then, under a different name – a very different name – you can dash off a few masterpieces.

Here’s another helpful hint: invent some critics, then have them say some laudatory things about your work. This has been done. A painter friend of mine in Toronto made up an art critic called Don Rouge Humber and quoted him in ads, saying things like “So stunning words fail me” and “An oasis of pure optical pleasure,” “Depilatory fine art with a consistently crispy crunch – delightfully deconstructionist!” My friend thought people would surely realize that Don was pretend, but not so. He sold a number of pieces to folks who turned up, ready for a serious art experience because the esteemed critic Don Rouge Humber thought so highly of his work.

But perhaps I should put on my seriousness hat, and offer some words of cheer, to young writers and to readers and to publishers, as well – to all who inhabit the republic of the written word, as all are essential to the survival of that noble republic. For it cannot have escaped you that we live in trying times. When interviewers start asking you about the state of publishing instead of the state of gender relations, you know we’re in trouble. Is poetry doomed? Is the novel doomed? Is the BOOK doomed? (Not so far as I can see, or not yet.)

Or – a different sort of question -- Do the young still read? A question that invokes some long-gone non-existent golden age in which all the young DID read, and nothing but praiseworthy classics. Not in my high school, I might tell them. Reading complex literary works in the century or so in which we’ve had something like universal literacy -- has been a minority taste. But a minority taste well worth acquiring, for it really can be transformative: it can change lives.

But stories -- just as stories -- are not a minority taste. They’re a universal. Dennis Dutton, in his book The Art Instinct, proposes that art – and especially narrative art – is an evolved adaptation that human beings developed during their 80,000 – generation-long sojourn in the Pleistocene – a time when the ability to tell your kids about the time Uncle Mort got eaten by a crocodile, right over there, would have given those kids a distinct evolutionary advantage over other kids who could only find out about the crocodile firsthand. The arts are no frill – they’re part of our essential toolkit as human beings. We’ll make music and compose poems and tell stories as long as we’re on the planet. What’s at issue is the kinds of songs we’ll sing and the kinds of stories we’ll tell. And that’s where you’ll come in.

It’s not a profession, this track you’re on. It’s a vocation – a calling. There’s no pension plan, there are no guarantees, and there’s no magic potion. What you’ve chosen to do is brave and risky, but it’s also necessary – increasingly necessary as we move into a future for which no one, right now, has a convincing blueprint. You’ll be taking the ancient, ancient human language and its songs and stories that have been passed down to you, changing as they go; and through inspiration and hard work, you’ll fashion them into new forms that will in turn be moulded by their time, as everything we’ve done is, and has been; and then you’ll pass these forms on in your turn, if we’re lucky. If we are all very lucky.

So that’s the real magic potion: luck. That’s what I should be saying as I wave my virtual wand: Good luck to all of you. Very good luck!

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After Kapuściński: The Art of Reportage, Part II

2009-10-29T19:36:29Z

The second panel of last week’s two-day symposium, After Kapuściński: The Art of Reportage, cosponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, the National Book Critics Circle, the New York Institute for Humanities at NYU, and the Literary Reportage concentration of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU, in association with the Overseas Press Club and Worlds Without Borders, focused on Literary Reportage Between Self and Other, Fact and Fiction. The panel was moderated by Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and featured Alastair Reid, Wojciech Jagielski (Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya,) and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx, finalist for a National book Critics Circle award in nonfiction in 2003.

The podcast will do the panelists more justice than I can, but among the highlights is Weschler’s introduction, in which he identified Kapuściński’s method as a “double kind of reporting.” Kapuściński filed daily wire service reports, then explored a personal dimension to his writing after “working” hours, occasionally returning to themes discovered while on assignment five or ten years before, culminating in a kind of “rhapsodic nonfiction.”

Also of note:

Reid sharing internal memos from former New Yorker editor William Shawn, who declared in 1979 that good writing humanizes facts, and that above all the magazine was looking for style, for “writers who don’t sound like [a] nobody.” Known for his translations of Borges and Neruda, Reid went on to discuss the “I,” distinguishing via Borges the lived reality versus the word reality. He found room in the brave librarian’s notion of all writing as fiction to define reportage as something that must be lived.

LeBlanc, mentioning that she doesn’t use the first person; she explained that she is clear on the POV in her work because of the time she spends in the field, developing relationships with her subjects. She hopes that they will recognize themselves in her books, and that general readers will be engaged and not feel betrayed by her privileged access to the world she reports on.

And Jagielski 's eloquent summary of the way that communism shaped the art of writing in Poland echoed Smolenski’s allusion to the totalitarian in both Baghdad and Poland. Writers learned to escape “between the lines,” writing about other places to make their commentary safer. This, he argued, is why Kapuściński became a far-flung correspondent.

After Kapuściński: The Art of Reportage, Part II

October 15, 2009, length: 1:47:03

After Kapuściński: The Art of Reportage, NYU’s Hemmerdinger Hall, October 6, 2009

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Why Translation Matters: An NBCC Reads Event at Prairie Lights in Iowa City

2009-10-28T04:38:12Z

November 9, 2009. 7 pm.

Panelists will read brief excerpts from works in translation that have influenced them, and discuss, as well as provide a list of worthy works in translation.

The reading will be streamed live through the Writing University website. Later, it will be archived on the Prairie Lights website.

Moderator:

Sarah Fay is an advisory editor at The Paris Review. Her work appears regularly in the New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Bookforum, and The American Scholar, among others. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Iowa.

Panelists:

Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages, his journalism appears in many publications, and he is the book critic for the daily radio news program, The World. He now directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.

Cole Swensen is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Ours (University of California Press, 2008). Her work has been short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Award and won the Iowa Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton Anthology American Hybrid and a professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Russell Scott Valentino is a translator and scholar based in Iowa City, Iowa. He has published eight books and numerous essays and short translations of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from Italian, Croatian, and Russian. He is the publisher of Autumn Hill Books and Editor of The Iowa Review.He teaches in Iowa’s Translation Workshop.

Robin Hemley is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Do-Over (Little, Brown). His work has been anthologized widely and he is the recipient of numerous awards including a 2008 Guggenheim, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, an Editor’s Choice Book Award for Nonfiction from The American Library Association, and two Pushcart Prizes. He currently directs UI’s Nonfiction Writing Program.

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Guest Post by Vikram Johri: NBCC at 35

2009-10-28T03:24:36Z

NBCC member Vikram Johri sends his 35th anniversary thoughts.

Heartiest congratulations to the NBCC on turning 35. As a rather recent member of this esteemed organization, I feel privileged to belong to a community whose membership has opened many doors for me.

As an Indian who has published reviews in a number of American dailies, I can vouch that American editors are welcoming of diversity. I have been given regular work so long as it was possible for editors to do so. But with the American journalistic landscape going steadily barren, I worry about my prospects for the future.

As a freelancer, I hope that the NBCC will do more to act as a facilitator for freelancers to get work. In this climate of layoffs and buyouts, one is never sure when the next possible assignment will stop coming. To tenured journalists, the shock of a job loss is painful, but there is at least a sweetener in the form of a buyout. That's not the case with freelancers.

A spate of online initiatives has come to the rescue, for sure, and some of them, such as the Barnes & Noble Review, match the best in the business in terms of content and styling. (I especially love their animated reviews by Ward Sutton.) But a model for sustainable online journalism is still in the works, so one feels restrained in making a qualified comment.

Besides this, I also worry for the future of the long review, space for which is shrinking by the day. How long, I wonder, before a New Yorker or Granta go under and the only place that we can still go to for a deep, insightful dip is the computer screen?

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Small Press Spotlight: Paul Martinez Pompa

2009-10-25T01:58:40Z

My Kill Adore Him, University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.

Paul Martínez Pompa is the author of Pepper Spray, a chapbook published by Momotombo Press in 2006. My Kill Adore Him, his first full-length collection, was selected for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize in 2008.

The city of Chicago has now become the largest urban city in the U.S. with the highest number of Latinos of Mexican descent. It’s no accident that Mexican/ Chicano culture is now part of every artistic fabric of the city. You work and live in Chicago--are you a native? How have you seen the Latino literary landscape change in the Windy City in recent years?

More Latin@s actually live in suburban Chicago than in Chicago proper. I don't think many people outside of the Chicago area realize that. I am a native of suburban Chicago, not Chicago. Readers unfamiliar with Chicagoland demographics may mistake my work as speaking exclusively to urban issues when in reality I’m writing about a suburban landscape as much as an urban one. As far as the literary scene goes, it wasn’t until very recently that I felt part of a recognized literary community in Chicagoland. Even though there are more opportunities for Latin@ writers now than even just a few years ago, Latin@s have been doing their thing in defiance of the literary status quo for decades in Chicago (e.g. Ana Castillo, Carlos Cumpián, Gregorio Gómez, and of course La Sandra). Current Latino-themed reading series like Palabra Pura and Proyecto Latina and public spaces like Irasema González’s Tianguis Books have been a big help in making our work more visible, but we’ve always been here. So I suppose the main change is one of recognition.

Who are some of the important Chicago and non-Chicago influences, Latino and non-Latino, in your work?

The first significant influence was Ana Castillo. I immediately connected to the underlying anger in her work. I understood that it stemmed from a deep love and desire for truth. I was also drawn to her ability to use a more communal diction to address complex social issues. Hers was a poetics that could hold its own on the streets and in the academy. Another big influence was Kevin Young, who was a professor of mine at Indiana University. He got me thinking more intensely about the line and its importance as an entity in its own right and how each line, enjambed or not, should attempt to evoke something meaningful, not just be a passive set up for a subsequent line or image.

Despite the cultural and economic wealth associated with Chicago, your poems inhabit the working class spaces and speak out about the injustices against its day laborers, sweatshop workers, Latino youth, the homeless, etc. And by the final section of the book the tone is all-out politics and poetic manifesto. Is the distance between the haves and have-nots a palpable rage in the city?

The difference between the haves and have-nots is a stark contrast that is found just about everywhere in Chicago. It’s difficult to grow up in the area without some degree of class consciousness. As an undergrad, I transferred from a community college to the University of Chicago, a top-tier, private university. Many of my U of C peers were from wealthy and/or educated families while I was not. It was an eye-opener to see how the haves lived and where they came from. It was there that I first started writing poetry. I used it as alternative space for resistance, a space where I could examine the differences in privilege that I watched play out on and off campus, a space where I could reflect on class and race-based childhood experiences, a space where I could do and say whatever the fuck I wanted. I grew up in a neighborhood that included section 8 families, but we were within walking distance of million dollar homes inhabited by 6-figure-salary families. You see similar contrasts now in the city, where pricy, pristine condos have been erected literally across the street from dilapidated projects. When I write about class, to some extent I’m writing from memories of inferiority, shame and disempowerment, but I attempt to reconcile such feelings by placing them in their proper historical and economic contexts.

How did you negotiate preserving the fury of the tone without slipping into propaganda or preachiness?

As much as I hated my U of C experience, I learned a lot from it. Regardless of your major, you had to write like crazy there. And you couldn’t bullshit. You had to come correct with your political posturing because there was always someone who had more information than you and who was just waiting to call you out on your inconsistencies and intellectual shortcomings. It was an extremely intense place where everyone—peers as well as professors—challenged your intellect. I felt constant pressure to stay on my toes for fear of being perceived as stupid or unworthy of attending that institution. Considering where I had come from, I was way out of my element there. I quickly realized that how you said something was just as important as what you were saying. I learned to keep my craft tight because that would be the first thing under attack as a means of dismissing my political stance or, worse, dismissing my very existence. Because of the context in which I started writing, my politics became an inseparable part of my poetics and craft. They’re one and the same for me. I don’t think you should write poetry if you don’t have anything meaningful to say, if you don’t write from a politically conscious place. I don’t care if you’re writing about petunias or police brutality; you better make conscientious choices throughout the entire writing process not only out of respect for the art but also out of respect for the political positionality you’re representing.

The lessons and heartaches of growing up a Latino male open the collection, and these poems illustrate that a number of the early encounters with oppression and violence take place in the school (the boys bathroom, sex ed class, etc.). And then come the streets, which are both dangerous and wondrous. Is it because childhood and adolescence is the crossroads of conflict and curiosity that you were able to mine the poetry? What do you see as distinctly Latino about these universal stages of human development?

I see my first book as largely an interrogation of masculinity. This interrogation is no more informed by my Chicano heritage than, say, an Irish or Italian American poet is informed by his heritage. That is, it is hard to say what is distinctively Latino about my treatment of maleness because I see the same anxieties about gender and sexuality play out in so many other cultures. American sociologist Michael S. Kimmel conceived of homophobia as being more than a fear of homosexuals; homophobia stems from men’s fear of other men, from a man’s fear of being emasculated in front of men. This fear manifests itself in all sorts of neurotic and sometimes violent behavior. I find the complexity and contradictions of masculinity to be both fascinating and horrifying. How men negotiate power and disempowerment certainly plays out differently along economic and racial lines, but, ultimately, the contradictory pressures placed upon the development of male sexuality are, I think, universal. It is the manner in which men conform to, resist, or reconcile those pressures that is perhaps culturally specific. Even then, the differences are rather small.