Thanks to the shoddy service of my DSL provider, I haven’t been able to post new reports for you. This is sad because I have many great books to tell you all about. But now it is too late since I am off to Europe this afternoon and I have far too much to do before I leave. If the facilities are adequate and I have the time, I will try to update from Europe. If not, please check back in two weeks when I will pick up right where I left off. Bye bye everyone!
To My Devoted Fans
Man Down
Ed Rants and his Return of the Reluctant blog - a favorite of mine - is down because, in his efforts to publicize the wrongdoings of some racist local DJs, his site was bombarded by visitors looking for the attendant mp3s of the offending DJs. It appears as though some uncharitable linking by the India Times used up all his bandwidth and then some. Here's hoping that Ed can get things up and running some time soon.
Querying the New Yorker
If you're a New Yorker obsessive like I am, then you'll love the new feature at Emdashes. Emily has lined up a pair of librarians who work at the New Yorker to answer questions about the magazine, and as one might expect, they are very thorough in their responses. The first installment covers A.J. Liebling's start at the magazine, spot illustrations, typewriters, Calvin Trillin's food writing, movie reviews, and fact-checking cartoons. There will be more installments to come, so send in your questions.
Drifting Away
Okay, here's the thing: I'm not usually this inattentive. As a matter of fact, I've often prided myself on being a focused, interested listener. So it was with astonishment that I found myself lost in a memory of my own, not five minutes after author Clare Morrall began to read. Don't blame her. She's a fine reader, and indeed, from the part of the reading that I paid attention to, a fine writer as well. But it's scarcely my fault either.She was introducing us to the principal characters of Natural Flights of the Human Mind whose lives would intersect along the Devon coast when suddenly, in the narrative, she drew our attention to a dinghy in the water. And then she mentioned the dinghy again. That's all it took - and I was gone. I was suddenly ten years old, on holiday with my mother and father in Virginia Beach. My mother and I had taken our inflatable dinghy out for the afternoon and we were a fair distance away from the shore when we realized that the current was getting stronger and no amount of frantic paddling would right the course. Small and rather lopsided, I wasn't the most accomplished oarsman. Then, adrift for what seemed like ages, we saw my father walking all the way out to our wayward craft, his head never once submerging, and then pulling it back to the shore, shaking his head while his human cargo was alternately sheepish and dumbfounded.So this is what played out in my head while Ms. Morrall progressed with her own dinghy-related narrative. If I were reading her story, I would simply have flipped back the requisite number of pages and resumed her tale beginning from where my attention was diverted. But I couldn't very well interrupt her public reading and ask her to repeat.I was jolted back into her world, or at least to the no-man's land of the auditorium, but I was hopelessly lost. I looked around and saw dozens of people, their eyes glued to the stage and their emotions being maneuvered this way and that - a chuckle, a gasp. I could've been one of them. I can chuckle and gasp with the best of them, but I simply couldn't re-connect with her tale. It had passed me by. My own memory-narrative, however, was right there, within reach, and I had been paying full attention to that, so once again, while the reading progressed in that strange world around me, I resumed my own narrative - thinking about how each summer from when we immigrated to Canada when I was two, up until my mid-teens, we'd pack up the car and begin exploring our new continent, first tentatively throughout Ontario and then gradually, over several summers, Quebec, the Maritime provinces, and then down along the eastern seaboard from Maine to the Carolinas and points inland. Over several years we claimed dozens of cities and towns as our own.Even the most conscientious listener (and again, by that I mean me) must have an assortment of trigger words which will stop him dead in his tracks and spirit him away to some memory - a narrative itself, and one no less rich than one committed to the printed page. Tough competition for any author giving a reading. The worst thing would be for Ms. Morrall to take my negligence personally. Short of not using the word "dinghy" there's nothing she could really have done to prevent this. The trigger was just too strong; and the memory powerful enough to trample on even the best public reader. It's surprising, really, that with all the memories floating around in my head, each with its own set of trigger words, that I'm not spirited away more often.The funny thing is that with other art forms, this "spiriting away" would be acceptable, even encouraged. It's high praise when a painting or a piece of music transports you somewhere else. But the printed word, especially when recited, is a fickle mistress. It tempts you with it's suggestive powers, but then as soon as you succumb to the temptation, as soon as you're transported somewhere else, it leaves you behind, lost and adrift.
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Adding voices to the unfolding story of New Orleans
Chin Music Press has put together a nice-looking blog to chronicle the long, lingering aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans:After Katrina and its horrible aftermath, Chin Music Press felt compelled to shine its wobbly flashlight on New Orleans. This effort resulted in our second book, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? Along the way, we met a community of passionate, eloquent writers who care deeply about what happens to the Big Easy. This blog became a natural extension of the book. It's our way of adding voices to the unfolding story of New Orleans.
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Mrs. Millions Has Been Reading
The lovely Mrs. Millions decided that she really ought to be keeping better track of what she reads, especially since she reads so much these days. Hamstrung by various reading obligations and by my harebrained scheme for selecting what to read next, I don't always get to read the books I want to read right away. Instead I hand them over to Mrs. Millions. Unlike me, she didn't burden herself with literature classes in college, nor has she tried to make a career out of writing and reading, so she reads purely for fun, a fact that makes me a little jealous sometimes. Perhaps she'll share her thoughts on some of the books she reads, as she has done here on one or two occasions, but probably not as that would take some of the fun out of the reading. Mrs. Millions' reading list will live way down near the bottom of the far right column, but so you don't have to go to the trouble of scrolling down, here's what she's been reading lately:English Passengers by Matthew KnealeLooking for a Ship by John McPheeThe Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullersThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le CarreWhite Earth by Andrew McGahanCrossing California by Adam Langer
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Windmill News
Wow, the Venezuelan government has printed one million free copies of Don Quixote to celebrate the book's 400th anniversary. That sure beats the "one book one city" thing we have in the states. Read about it at the BBC. (via bookglutton). Also, anyone who has endured the long wait for the Edith Grossman edition of Quixote to come out in paperback, take heart, it arrives on May 1. See also 400 Windmills.
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A Treat for Mutis Fans: The Diary of Lecumberri
In my recent review of Alvaro Mutis' The Mansion, I noted the paucity of Mutis' writing available in English. Basically, there is Maqroll and not much else. From what I understand, much of what would remain of Mutis' writing to be published in an English-language edition would be his poetry, much of it featuring "Maqroll the Gaviero."But there is also Mutis' account of his time in Lecumberri, a Mexico City prison, after being accused of fraud by his employer Standard Oil in Columbia. Mutis would write, "I never would have managed to write a single line about Maqroll el Gaviero, who has accompanied me here and there in my poetry, had I not lived those fifteen months in the place they call, with singular precision, 'the Black Palace.'"Mutis' account, The Diary of Lecumberri, was published in 1959 by the Universidad Veracruzana and reprinted by Alfaguara in 1997.In 1999, a journal called Hopscotch translated and published a substantial excerpt of The Diary of Lecumberri, which is available as a PDF. Also included are a petition to the President for Mutis' release penned by Octavio Paz and several letters that Mutis wrote to the journalist Elena Poniatowska from prison.When things go bad in jail, when someone or something manages to break the closed procession of days and shuffles and tumbles them in a disorder coming from outside, when this happens, there are certain infallible symptoms, certain preliminary signs that announce the imminence of bad days. In the morning, at the first roll, a thick taste of rag dries the mouth and keeps us from saying hello to our cellmates. Everyone sits himself as well as he can, waiting for the sergeant to come and sign the report. Then comes the food. The cooks don't yell their usual "Anyone who takes bread!" to announce their arrival, or their "Anyone who wants atole," with which they break the mild spell left over from the dreams of those staggering around, never able to quite convince themselves that they are prisoners, that they are in jail. The meal arrives in silence and everyone approaches with his plate and his bowl to receive his allotted ration, and nobody protests, or asks for more, or says a word.