If you’re in New York this weekend, join Belladonna* and Kundiman for a celebration of what would have been the 60th birthday of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (a full life cycle event in the Chinese/Korean lunar calendar). Nine poets, including Cathy Park Hong, Myung Mi Kim, Sina Queyras, and Anne Waldman, will perform a staged reading from Dictee, Cha’s best known work. There will be birthday cake, projected images, scholarly contextualization, and other surprises. Saturday March 5, at the Bowery Poetry Club, 2pm.
Belladonna* and Kundiman Celebrate Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
RIP Harry Crews
Dwight Garner, Maud Newton, and Jason Diamond are among the many to mourn the passing of Harry Crews this past week. “Few writers,” Garner writes of Crews, “could touch his authority and muscle.”
On Her 126th Birthday
“Her poems shimmer most when they reflect on the yearning to rebel against the constrained space granted to women’s voices in literature and life.” On her 126th birthday, The Guardian argues that Edna St. Vincent Millay‘s poetry — not her reputation — should be remembered and celebrated. Pair with: an essay on being an uneasy, untamed women writer.
Meditations on Meditations in Green
Recommended Reading: Nathaniel Rich discusses Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green, which he says is remarkable because “it convinces you that the war never ended.” Indeed, Rich writes, the author’s debut novel “suggests that Vietnam at some point transcended the Indochina peninsula and became a mental condition, a state of being not unlike certain forms of insanity, that has become encrypted in our genetic code.”
1Q84 Coming Fall 2011
According to Millions reader James who emailed Random House, the publisher has plans to put Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 out in fall 2011. Millions contributor Ben has covered much of the news surrounding Murakami’s mysterious new novel, which was recently published in Japan, including the recent revelation that there will be a third volume.
Long-form Godfather
Ernest Hemingway, “the godfather of long-form” nonfiction? Richard Brody argues so in the New Yorker, citing Hemingway’s autobiographical, and wildly ambitious, The Green Hills of Africa.
A Refuge for Reinventing the Real
“In my adolescence people spoke of ‘café intellectuals,’ not with the respect due to a sect that transmits ideas within the cramped space of a table but with the contempt reserved for those who turn their backs on reality and take refuge in vain speculation.” Juan Villoro on the writing life in Mexico City’s cafés as part of the “Writing Life Around the World” series for Electric Literature.
Carl Köhler in Toronto
An exhibition of the authorportraits of Swedish artist Carl Köhler, whose extraordinary portraits of artists and intellectuals we’ve displayed here at The Millions, opens in Toronto on January 11th at the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto, 130 St. George St. For more information call 416-971-3131.