I still haven't finished the George Sand bio, partially because I keep misplacing it (ha), partially because I tend to read nonfiction in bursts with pauses for fiction and poetry in between. The last fiction book that intruded on this bio was Lost: A Novel by Gregory Maguire. You may have read his Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West? Both of these books have made me want to read more of Maguire. The review below is of "Lost".
From Publishers Weekly
Before he broke onto the adult bestseller lists with his irreverent interpretations of the Cinderella story (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister) and the Wizard of Oz (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West), Maguire wrote children's books with titles like Six Haunted Hairdos, Seven Spiders Spinning and Four Stupid Cupids. His latest is a virtual literary paella of adult and children's fantasies: Jack the Ripper, A Christmas Carol, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Exorcist even a wafting glimpse of Dracula. The result is a deftly written, compulsively readable modern-day ghost story that easily elicits suspension of disbelief. American writer Winifred Rudge, whose mass market book about astrology has been far more successful than her fiction, is in London to research a novel linking Jack the Ripper to the house in Hampstead where her own great-great-grandfather rumored to be the model for Ebenezer Scrooge lived. But as Winifred discovers, there is no evidence that the Ripper ever visited Hampstead, let alone buried one of his victims inside the chimney of a house there, and his presence in the story is a red herring. Much more interesting is the mysterious disappearance of Winnie's cousin, John Comestor, the latest resident of the family house. Moreover, something is making an infernal racket inside the chimney, and soon there are other bizarre manifestations of some unseen force. A Dickensian assortment of neighbors (one dotty lady is called Mrs. Maddingly) variously obfuscate and hint at strange events. Maguire's prose is both jaunty and scary; he knows how to mix spooky ingredients with contemporary situations. By the time a spirit called Gervasa begins to speak through Winnie, readers will be hooked.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Current read - George Sand bio
Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand
From Publishers Weekly
For all her notorious affairs with men, Sand's passionate and unrequited attachment to her mother is the real love story of her life," writes noted literary biographer Eisler (Chopin's Funeral) in her bustling study of the great French Romantic writer's love life. Capturing the complexity of George Sand's relationship with her adored but largely absent working-class mother, Eisler analyzes the writer's various attitudes to class in light of her childhood, as she rapidly narrates Sand's remarkable transformation from rebellious young wife and mother to cross-dressing, controversial Parisian literary star. Treating Sand's autobiography with skepticism, Eisler emphasizes how Sand (1804–1876) also caused strife for others in her turbulent emotional life. Eisler authoritatively sketches the themes and philosophical preoccupations of Sand's novels in an age of revolutionary ferment, but places Sand's affairs center stage: from Alfred de Musset's "romantic passion run amok" to her political education by radical lawyer Michel de Bourges, and her long relationship with Chopin. Eisler's Sand is doomed to act out the insecurities of her childhood in an ugly, punitive relationship with her own daughter, Solange. As Eisler comments, referring to Sand by her real name, "It was Aurore, the motherless child, who was both the cause and victim of much of George's confusion and suffering." (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
LL Bean summer concert series
Alan Doyle, Great Big Sea, Freeport, ME 8/11/07
The last two Saturday nights, I've enjoyed free music at LL Bean - Great Big Sea, the 11th and Brandy Carlisle and the Indigo Girls on the 18th. Brandy's part of the concert is archived here, as are others such as Robert Cray (which I missed, but will certainly listen to).
If you ever get a chance to see The Great Big Sea, do! Those boys have a sense of humor, boundless energy and sing damn good harmony. Check out their myspace for some sample songs.
Coming up - John Hiatt and Shawn Colvin, 8/25 and Bela Fleck & the Flecktones on 9/1.
Monday, August 13, 2007
The Darwin Awards
Friday, August 3, 2007
Wislawa Szymborska
Poems New and Collected
If you read poetry at all, read this. I've fallen in love...
"All poets, according to Wislawa Szymborska, are in a perpetual dialogue with the phrase I don't know. "Each poem," she writes in her 1996 Nobel Lecture, "marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift, absolutely inadequate." As a self-portrait, at least, this is fairly accurate. From the beginning, Szymborska has indeed wrestled with the demon of epistemology. Yet even in her earliest poems, such as "Atlantis," she delivered her speculations with a human--which is to say, a gently ironic--face:
They were or they weren't.
On an island or not.
An ocean or not an ocean
Swallowed them up or it didn't.
Fifteen years later, when her 1972 collection, Could Have, appeared, Szymborska seemed to have made some major inroads into her notorious ignorance. Now she confessed to at least a shred of comprehension, stressing, however, that such knowledge has come at a terrible price: "We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods, / but gods, nonetheless, since we know the dates that follow. / We know which debts will never be repaid. / Which widows will remarry with the corpse still warm." And even in her most recent work, the poet continues to gravitate toward the admirable emptiness of, say, the clouds: "Unburdened by memory of any kind, / they float easily over the facts." Ultimately, though, the joke is on Szymborska, whose poems have grown more witty, more humane, and more tender--in other words, more knowing--with each passing year."
If you read poetry at all, read this. I've fallen in love...
"All poets, according to Wislawa Szymborska, are in a perpetual dialogue with the phrase I don't know. "Each poem," she writes in her 1996 Nobel Lecture, "marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift, absolutely inadequate." As a self-portrait, at least, this is fairly accurate. From the beginning, Szymborska has indeed wrestled with the demon of epistemology. Yet even in her earliest poems, such as "Atlantis," she delivered her speculations with a human--which is to say, a gently ironic--face:
They were or they weren't.
On an island or not.
An ocean or not an ocean
Swallowed them up or it didn't.
Fifteen years later, when her 1972 collection, Could Have, appeared, Szymborska seemed to have made some major inroads into her notorious ignorance. Now she confessed to at least a shred of comprehension, stressing, however, that such knowledge has come at a terrible price: "We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods, / but gods, nonetheless, since we know the dates that follow. / We know which debts will never be repaid. / Which widows will remarry with the corpse still warm." And even in her most recent work, the poet continues to gravitate toward the admirable emptiness of, say, the clouds: "Unburdened by memory of any kind, / they float easily over the facts." Ultimately, though, the joke is on Szymborska, whose poems have grown more witty, more humane, and more tender--in other words, more knowing--with each passing year."
Charles Simic is nation's new poet laureate!
Banner day for outstanding poet Charles Simic. He was named the 15th poet laureate of the United States and then won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
"Now I just have to break a leg. It's just too much luck,'' the 69-year-old Simic said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. "I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of good luck, being a superstitious person.''
Luck might account for 0.999999% of the recognition he's received over the years. The Belgrade-born bard won the Pulitzer Prize (1990 for The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems) and most every other major poetry prize. Simic, who emigrated to the United States with his family in 1954, also received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius'' grant for 1984-1989.
You can read some of his work at PoemHunter. Here's what one reviewer has to say about his collection Jackstraws.
The Washington Post and New York Times have filed profiles of the poet the Times calls a "surrealist with a dark view." He succeeds Donald Hall.
~Michael Winter, USA Today
~~~~~~~~~~~
In addition to Jackstraws, mentioned above, I'd also recommend Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt.
Here are some audios of Simic reading.
I'm rather excited about Simic being poet laureate - the past few choices haven't been ones I read much (I know, I know - how could I not like Billy Collins, lol). He can be surreal, dark, humorous and above all, writes beyond the ordinary. And how great to choose an immigrant poet who didn't speak English until he was 15!
Errata
~Charles Simic
Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police-whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant's bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name
"Now I just have to break a leg. It's just too much luck,'' the 69-year-old Simic said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. "I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of good luck, being a superstitious person.''
Luck might account for 0.999999% of the recognition he's received over the years. The Belgrade-born bard won the Pulitzer Prize (1990 for The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems) and most every other major poetry prize. Simic, who emigrated to the United States with his family in 1954, also received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius'' grant for 1984-1989.
You can read some of his work at PoemHunter. Here's what one reviewer has to say about his collection Jackstraws.
The Washington Post and New York Times have filed profiles of the poet the Times calls a "surrealist with a dark view." He succeeds Donald Hall.
~Michael Winter, USA Today
~~~~~~~~~~~
In addition to Jackstraws, mentioned above, I'd also recommend Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt.
Here are some audios of Simic reading.
I'm rather excited about Simic being poet laureate - the past few choices haven't been ones I read much (I know, I know - how could I not like Billy Collins, lol). He can be surreal, dark, humorous and above all, writes beyond the ordinary. And how great to choose an immigrant poet who didn't speak English until he was 15!
Errata
~Charles Simic
Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police-whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant's bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name
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