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Category: literature (Page 2 of 7)

Literarily related articles. Book reviews. Poetry. Literary references

Julie/Julia Project’s Julie in Durham – Friday

Julie Powell

Blooker Prize winner, Julie Powell, will be reading and signing the paper (and I presume hardback) copies of her book, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, this Friday, September 29, 2006 7:00 PM at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham.

It was a delight to be a Blooker judge and to get to read Julie’s book after having followed her adventures on her blog at Salon. This year Julie will be one of the Blooker judges herself.

If you like cooking, eating or being alive, you will love Julie and Julia.

Radio Wally!

Elizabeth Brownrigg writes to all graduates of the Warren Wilson to let us know that she and Writing Program Director Peter Turchi will be on WUNC State of Things today at 12:40 pm (and will be rerun this evening at 9 pm and on Saturday upcoming at 6 am). Elizabeth and Peter will be talking about:

Swannanoa Writers: The master’s of fine arts program for writers at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa celebrates its 25th anniversary this summer. Program director Peter Turchi reflects on the program’s famous
names, its traditions and its future.

Required Poems (for 3rd and 4th grade)

I have in my hand a book. Unable to type with it in my hand, I set it down. It is called “Required Poems” subtitle “For Reading and Memorizing” “Third and Fourth Grades.” It runs about 200 pages and the more recent poems are copyright in the late 1890s. The book itself shows no print date nor copyright. Among the poems are works by RL Stevenson, Kipling, Riley, Longfellow, Whittier and de la Mare. Along with such giants as Bliss Carman, Phoebe Cary, Lucy Larcom and Oliver Herford.

Just a quick quiz, who remembers the poem “I Remember, I Remember”? Who wrote it? (No fair Googling quite yet).

Seasonal poems, poems with birds in them and heavily cadenced poems like sections of Hiawatha are often “Required.”

A personal note: My grandmother, bless her soul, often terrorized me by reciting with great drama Riley’s Little Orphant Annie. Each time she came to the nearly stuttered halting stanza ending lines:
Er the Gobble-uns’ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

She would make a ghastly face and reach for me. My not yet luxuriant not yet flowing hair would stand on in. That is one poem lodged in my memory, tied to my deepest self by the barbed wires of fear.

Questions – literary and other

Rereading Major Barbara and wondering how heroic and right Shaw thought Undershaft should be considered? Is Undershaft’s commitment to the previous Undershaft’s dreams and obligations a kind of trueness? And what of Cusins? Is his Greek a goodness or a dressing?

A friend asks for the “Auden poem with lines “We must love each other or die.” A line readers grew to love and a line that Auden grew to hate. First he changed “or” to “and” then he dropped the whole stanza. Then he dropped the poem from his Collected and completely disavowed it as untrue. Later after Auden’s death, the original poem, “September, 1939” was restored. How good was Auden’s sense of his own poetry?

Were we all goovier in the swinging 60s or only those Swinging Londoners like the Zombies?

Official Blooker 2007 Announcement

This just in from the Lulus:

The 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize is now open for business.

Judges (more about us here):

Three categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Webcomic

The prize money:

The Overall Winner will receive $10,000 (US)
The two category winners will receive $2,500 (US)

The entry deadline – Monday, January 15, 2007

The contest is open to any book published before the entry deadline that is based on a website (and meets all other eligibility criteria) – this includes blooks that are self-published as well as those published via traditional means.

New Books on My Shelf

I’ve been reading good literary novels up til lately. Now I’ve picked up the first two “Read Or Die” manga and Vernor Vinge‘s new “Rainbows End.” Any manga that has as its hero, a librarian with special powers over paper is fine by me. And Vinge’s new book, dedicated to Wikipedia, Google and eBay is described, in part, this way on the flap:

As Robert becomes more deeply involved in the conspiracy, he is shocked to learn if a radical change planned for the UCSD Geisel Library; all the books there, and worldwide, would cease to physically exist.

James Joyce, Copyright, Destruction and the Scholarly Pursuit

New Yorker is carrying a long and, as one might expect from New Yorker, complex and detailed article about Stephen Joyce, grandson of James, and his war with scholars. Copyright extension has aided him in his battle against scholarship, but also his battle for his family’s privacy as well as for their profits. On the side of the scholars: Larry Lessig. Lessig’s blog is silent on the topic at the moment. But entries from February 2004 and earlier (buried in comments) show that Larry’s been miffed by Stephen for some years now.

Also on BoingBoing, where I was alerted to the New Yorker article.

UPDATE: Lessig’s blog now has a post on Schloss v Joyce.

Stanley Kunitz dies at 100

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you have to think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgement of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. It is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.

Stanley Kunitz
1905-2006
from The Wild Braid, W.W. Norton, 2005

Note to Chapel Hill Magazine: It’s Carrboro

Issue Number 1 of Chapel Hill Magazine showed up in the mailbox uninvited but not unappreciated today.

I was immediately confused. The cover is not of Chapel Hill but of Carrboro (“Where it is always 1 degree cooler” says Ron Stutz who is profiled in the magazine). Those who have lived here and those who have only heard “It’s Carrboro” will identify the Weave and the hula hoopers right away.
Flipping to the cover article “15 Ways to Love Your Summer” or “A Summer Place: It’s hot, but it’s cool” — the article is not sure of its own title — the confusion continues. Of the 15 wonders, only 5 and a half are in Chapel Hill. The rest are in Carrboro and in Hillsborough. All of the special days are shared by those two towns — no special summer days are in Chapel Hill it seems.

Note to Chapel Hill Magazine: the Carrboro Poetry Festival has been cancelled this year according to the link you provided and the Festival site.

No wonder people are confused about where they live if even the town magazine isn’t sure what is what. It is possible to have a Chapel Hill mailing address, have kids in Chapel Hill High School, and to live not in Chapel Hill or in Carrboro but in the planning area for Carrboro (meaning you will be annexed by Carrboro one day but for the moment you pay no Chapel Hill or Carrboro taxes).

The Magazine is published in Chapel Hill. Its offices are on Market St in Southern Village where Weaver Street Market, a Carrboro company, has an outpost which we call Market Street Weaver. When Carrboro High opens in 2007, the kids in Southern Village will go there. The Southern Village homeowners are paying Chapel Hill taxes. The tower for WCOM, Carrboro’s community radio station, is there not far from the Magazine’s offices. In fact, you get better reception in Southern Village than in parts of Carrboro. Market Street is just about as close to Carrboro Town Hall (3.4 mi or about 6 mins) as it is to Chapel Hill Town Hall (3.1 mi or about 6 mins) according to Google Maps.

Luckily for the Magazine, confusing Hillsborough is much more difficult.

The Watcher Returns in Marvel’s Civil War

Whose Side Are You On
The Marvel world is split in two. Billionaire industralist Tony Stark aka Iron Man is pushing for strong security to the point of putting other superheroes in Gitmo-like prison. Captain America is all about defending civil liberties and freedom for the heroes. What brought this Civil War, as the new Marvel series is called, on?

According to Wikipedia:

“The story opens with a reckless fight between the New Warriors, filming a reality television show, and a cadre of villains in Stamford, Connecticut. The battle goes awry for the heroes, resulting in villain Nitro creating an explosion that takes out a local school, the surrounding neighborhood, and all but one of the New Warriors. This event crystallizes a government movement to register all super-powered beings as living weapons of mass destruction.”

The most interesting reappearance to me is that of the Watcher. The Globe and Mail reports that Dr. Strange will explain: “He [The Watcher] only appears to record moments of great change and enormous upheaval. His presence now does not bode well.”

Slate Eds on Arts Online – April 26

The J-School sends this alert (I’ll be in Granada — Have I said that enough? — but it should be very good):

What: How the Internet is Shaping Culture: What’s different about the arts in the online age?
When: Wednesday, April 26, 6 p.m.
Where: Carroll Hall 11 (in the “Garden” level)
Who:
Meghan O’Rourke, Slate’s culture editor.
Bryan Curtis, who writes Slate’s “Middlebrow” column and is Slate’s deputy culture editor.
Seth Stevenson, who writes Slate’s “Ad Report Card.”
Tim Wu, who writes on culture and legal issues for Slate and is a law professor at Columbia University.

The Laurel Hell – A novel in weekly installments

Warren Wilson alum Hillary Nelson has started publishing “The Laurel Hell” on her blog at the rate of one chapter per week. Do we have a blook and a Blooker cooking here?

The rain won’t come yet, not for a while, but Michael can smell it and can see it, miles away, a ragged shadow suspended from a blue thunderhead mounding so high it looks as though it reaches heaven. He thinks of a picture he once saw of a man opening a little door in the sky and sticking his head through. Michael can’t remember what was on the other side of that door.

Talking Japanese (Blooker)

J-WAVE Morning Logo
Just off the phone with Jon Kabira of J-WAVE‘s morning show in Tokyo about the Blooker, blogs and publishing. It was more than a bit odd to hear the Japanese translation and recap each time I paused. I should have learned from my experiences giving talks in Siberia and in Taiwan that very short answers with long pauses help the translator, but on the phone without physical cues that’s harder to pull off. I hope the listeners weren’t too distracted on their drives into work by my unusual, for them, accent.
There was a lot of fascination about the newness of the blook and of the Blooker. Listening I could hear how the very words, blook and Blooker, are difficult for non-English speakers even if they are extremely clear talking radio professionals.
There was enthusiasm for Julie and Julia and the story told there beyond the cooking and for the interactive nature of blogs and blooks. As near as I can tell, this part was of great interest.
I wish I could speak/understand Japanese; Jon was one of the better interviewers I’ve worked with (in part because of the good advance work by Kanae Hasegawa).

Which Famous Modern Poet Are You?

I have to agree with my poet-twinning by the little quiz:


Which Famous Modern American Poet Are You?


You are Wallace Stevens. You love everything, especially the sound of things. Too bad you are so obscure that at times even you don’t understand what the hell you have written.
Take this quiz!


Quizilla |
Join

| Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Not a rich array of choices tho as about 28% of the folks who took the test also were linked to Stevens.

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