A tribute to Martin Scorcese from John S. Hall
John S. Hall in his King Missile guise, paying tribute to Martin Scorsese.
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John S. Hall in his King Missile guise, paying tribute to Martin Scorsese.
Well, whodathunkit. In this morning's e-mail:
From: "<_______@bronteprize.org> Date: February 25, 2007 3:12:43 PM EST To: publicity@softskull.com Subject: Bronte Prize Nod - Roger Alan Skipper Roger Alan Skipper's "Tear Down the Mountain" has been named as one of five finalists for the 2007 Bronte Prize, romantic fiction's biggest award.You can find more details at: www.bronteprize.org
Truly
Tally Dawson, Ph.D.
Chairwoman
The Bronte Prize
_________@bronteprize.org
I have to say though, that any romance book award that includes Nora Roberts, Sara Gruen, and Roger Alan Skipper, has one helluva open-minded jury. Kudos to them, I hope the award itself gets some good attention, I'd love to see that kind of spirit rewarded...
After much prodding, Derek McCormack tells of how his crush on a CSI investigator nearly destroyed his writing career
I was crashed out on the couch.“Why aren’t you writing?” Jason, my roommate, asked.
“I can’t concentrate,” I said. “All I think about is Eric Szmanda.”
“Eric who?” he said. Eric Szmanda, I told him, the star of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the TV series. “Is he the one with the spiky hair?”
“Yes,” I said. “I sent him a copy of The Haunted Hillbilly.” The Haunted Hillbilly was my last novel. It’s about a vampire tailor who rapes and terrorizes country singer Hank Williams. “Do you think he’ll write me back?”
One of the fun aspects of editing Lydia Millet is that I get e-mails that contain statements like this:
Yes, there's a whimsical colon use, certainly. I will check as you suggest. Society has moved, I feel, too far away from both the colon and the semi-colon. I do what I can to correct the trend. I did not use to feel this way. Writing culture teaches avoidance of both these days.
To whet your appetite for the next issue of TRANSITION Magazine...
The Avoidance Word Still Screams its Name
Half a century ago, the more optimistic poet-militants of decolonization imagined the world's races humanely detonated, then shuffled and reassembled into a hybrid creature of the universal. On one issue at least, today's African Union, Arab League, and U.N. have indeed become one: one monstrous chimera ready and willing to let Darfur be cleansed of Africa . Wole Soyinka has some words to say about this—well actually, just one.
Change will come, of that I am sure…
If there's a bright spot in Sudan , the East would be it. Sarah Abbas talks to Dr. Amna Dirar —Eastern Front politician, tribal leader, college professor, and, oh yes, woman.
Measuring Time
By Helon Habila. An excerpt from the novel.
Searching for Zion
They come from desert Ethiopia and mid-century America , and end up in the shadows of reggae clubs, reeducation courses, and the IDF. For the darker shades of Jew, settling in a harsh Promised Land is a dramatic leap of faith. Emily Raboteau goes hunting for black folks in Israel .
Poems from Paroles pour solder la mer
By Edouard Maunick, translated by Elizabeth Wilson.
Crossroads Republic
Lester, meet Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Fela, meet Lester Bowie. Lagos, Chicago. Chicago, Lagos. Brent Hayes Edwards reconstructs the handshake summer of 1977.
Camera Obscura
Who can forget the innocence of those fin-de-siècle days? That halcyon time when Michael Moore was still a cult figure, the Taliban still had offices in Queens, and Afghan medical students still recoiled at the thought that Monica Lewinski was not the most beautiful woman in America ? From Flushing to Kandahar , Harlem to Kabul, Alan Edelstein was there—and he has the tapes to prove it.
Salamanca
In downtown Khartoum , a mom-and-pop souvenir shop provides a lazy retreat for the local cosmopolitans. But who's that German crone trawling through the merchandise with a half-naked tribesman at her side? Jamal Mahjoub recalls a strange day in the family store.
The Heimat Maneuver
After World War II, Allied horse-trading left Poland 's treasured eastern borderlands in the hands of the Soviets. As compensation, Stalin gave the Poles Silesia , an ethnically mixed region to the west that happened to be a province of Germany . Forced German expulsion and “re-Polonization” ensued, but, as Chris Bebenek discovers, even in a unified Europe ancient blood feuds die hard.
So I see in next month's Poets & Writers, in which Mary Gannon has a great interview with/profile of Matt Sharpe, that Pocahontas has a MySpace page.
Whodathunkit...We learn her general interests are:
thinking in english, hanging out with my gal-pals, IM-ing, my wireless device, evenings in the cornfields, Johnny, my secrets. Definitely NOT violence or guns or macho men like my father (although I do love my father).
She's blogging too, this is the feed.
And here's some of what Ms. Gannon and Mr. Sharpe have to say about the book:
The speech patterns of the 1600s were something that he wanted to make reference to in Jamestown. "I wanted the book to bear the imprint or have the stain not only of contemporary speech patterns and diction, but also of Elizabethan and Jacobean speech patterns, so I turned to my favorite writer of that period, Shakespeare." The prose in Jamestown combines the rhythms of text-messaging patter with iambic meter, allusions to hip-hop culture and canonical poetry (Wallace Stevens's, in particular) strewn throughout.Language in general—its potential, limits, power, and failings—is a major concern in Sharpe's work. He sees the language barrier between the English and the Algonquians as a model for "the way in which each of us has our own private associations that inform every word that comes out of our mouths. Communication," Sharpe says, "is always an act of translation."
Michael McColly in the Chicago Sun-Times on his book The After-Death Room and what it took to write it:
But as Michael McColly well knows, more tangible perks are harder to come by. In The After-Death Room: Journey Into Spiritual Activism, he catalogs his trips through Asia, Africa, and the United States as he attempts to get a grip on the global AIDS crisis. It's a powerful, panoramic glimpse into the religious aspects of AIDS activism, the reality of the problem among poor sex workers, and the various bureaucratic bottlenecks that hamper better treatment. But struggling to get it published did McColly's bank book no favors.
McColly, an adjunct writing professor at Northwestern and Columbia College, took two unpaid leaves of absence in 2002 and 2004 to travel, research and write. "I'm not doing that well financially, frankly, because of the choice I made to do this book," he says. "It takes a lot of time to research. I took a second leave in 2004 because I realized that the book wasn't getting done fast enough. I sacrificed some financial security to get this done."
See also, Michael's essay on Beatrice;
this interview at The Publishing Spot; and
listen to his interview on Chicago Public radio...
Lynne Tillman was asked to apply the "p. 69" test to American Genius, A Comedy. Here's what she had to say (and what follows is a great round-up of what folks have had to say about AGAC, as we call it around the office...)
In a way, every page of American Genius, A Comedy is representative of it until the last third of the novel, when it changes significantly. On Page 69, the narrator refers to her skin condition -- dermatographia, or skin writing -- and speaks about the importance of skin. Skin is one of the connectors in AGAC, a theme in the book: skin as barrier to the world, or indicator of your own world, like blushing, or skin is permeable, also letting the outside in, skin tells others, exposes, something you may want hidden, it can betray you. Skin contracts and expands, which is what I wanted the novel to do: to move from small events and issues, like a facial or an annoying dinner partner, to great ones, like American history, democracy, sensitivity, sex, race and racism. Kafka and his ex-fiancee, Felice, also play their part in the novel, because they're the obsession of one of the characters the narrator meets -- Contesa, a mysterious and fascinating woman. The narrator meets many such people, all cloistered together for a time in an institution of some sort.
Scott McLemee has a great interview with Danny Postel, Senior Editor at openDemocracy.
“In hundreds of conversations I’ve had with Iranian intellectuals, journalists, and human rights activists in recent years, I invariably encounter exasperation,” writes Danny Postel in Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, a recent addition to the Prickly Paradigm pamphlet series distributed by the University of Chicago Press. “Why, they ask, is the American Left so indifferent to the struggle taking place in Iran? Why can’t the Iranian movement get the attention of so-called progressives and solidarity activists here? Why is it mainly neoconservatives who express interest in the Iranian struggle?”Postel, a senior editor of the online magazine openDemocracy, sees the Iranian situation as a crucial test of whether soi-disant American “progressives” can think outside the logic that treats solidarity as something one extends only to people being hurt by client-states of the U.S. government.
Danny Postel has been very helpful in promoting a book we published 15 months ago— We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. We got zero traction with the progressive radio and websites, but we did get calls from Fox News, Voice of America, and the American Enterprise Institute. It was deeply depressing for an avowedly progressive publisher like ourselves to find us in this situation...
Let me add also, that we've had about 5000 downloads of the sample chapter, orders of magnitude greater than any other sample chapter we've ever posted. Based on various links I've seen, a good deal of that downloading is happening within Iran.
It could just be an artifact of not growing up in the U.S.—I was born and spent for the first 18 years of my life in Ireland—and it may sound heretical coming from Soft Skull but I can't help but feel that the most valuable area in which progressives could practice self-criticism is in the arena of reflexive anti-Americanism. Progressives seem to practice a peculiar kind of American Exceptionalism wherein America is the exception to the rule that not everything a given country does is intrinsically awful. Or, alternatively, a sociological expression of that quasi-narcissistic psychological formation that D.W. Winnicott talked about where an infant fails to be able to distinguish between itself an the world and takes on a form of omnipotence that presumes that it is a hurting machine, that everything it does is wrong, a situation as likely to produce fucked-up behavior (on an individual or imperial level) as the omnipotence that thinks that everything it does is right.
Alright, enough out of me...
It's taken a little while, but folks are starting to realize how goddam brilliant this little book by David Griffith is. There's now an excerpt up at Utne, a profile in Pittsburgh City Paper, Sojourner's gets it, and Colleen Mondor is working in it.
Here's a bit of the bit that Utne picked up:
...One day I was walking down the hall at school and a kid passed me wearing the jacket. "That's my jacket," I said. "No, it's not," the kid sneered. One of the deans of the school was walking by and asked what the problem was. "Look in the sleeves," I told him, since my mother had written my name in black marker in each sleeve. Sure enough, when the dean looked, there was my name.Things were like that then. Open and shut. Yes it is. No it isn't. Everything seemed good, clean, and orderly. I learned that there was such a thing as justice-I had witnessed it.
At night, I was learning that war could be humane and just. Footage from the noses of smart bombs allowed me to see with my own eyes that American bombers weren't dumping their payloads indiscriminately over cities, like the Germans did to Britain and the Brits did to Germany and we did to the Japanese during World War II. These were "smart" bombs. This was a "smart" war in all the various connotations of "smart": intelligent; shrewd and calculating; amusingly clever; with a neat and well cared for appearance; fashionable and stylish; vigorous and brisk; causing a sharp stinging sensation.
Our history teacher didn't talk about the Gulf War. She didn't even pull down a map of the world and point to the Middle East. Then again, I suppose she had bigger problems to worry about-some kids in the class couldn't locate Illinois on a map.
Neither do I remember talking about the war with my friends, unless it was to ask whether we'd seen the latest awesome press conference footage-General Schwarzkopf standing in front of a television monitor narrating the flight of a bomb as it entered the chimney of a building or the window of a munitions depot.
I thought about the war the most when I was at band practice. That fall, the band director passed out the sheet music for Symphony No. 1 (In Memoriam, Dresden, 1945), a piece by Daniel Bukvich dedicated to the firebombing and subsequent obliteration of the German city of Dresden...
A United States military assault on Iran will fortify not undermine the mullahs' regime, says Nasrin Alavi (We Are Iran).
Here we go again. As Iran becomes increasingly isolated and under pressure from both western powers and its Arab neighbours in the region, the battle-lines are drawn.For many Iranians the signs are both ominous and all too familiar. On 22 September 1980, Iraq attacked western Iran, launching what would become the longest conventional war (1980-88) of the 20th century. Saddam's Iraq had the backing of many western powers during the war. Equally, several Arab monarchies - such as Kuwait - were fearful of their own potential demise in a domino-effect Iran-style revolution, and offered the Iraqi regime financial assistance.
More at OpenDemocracy.
...at the SOMA Review who are running a John S. Hall Daily Negation everyday this week...
So we're publishing, in May, this rather remarkable book called Typo: The Last American Typesetter, or, How I Made and Lost Four Million Dollars (An Entrepreneur's Education). Which details, inter alia, the author David Silverman's efforts to buy and save an American type-setting company Clarinda as that kind of work was in the process of being completely outsourced by American textbook publishers to the Philippines and India.
Said efforts were for naught—as the author writes on his blog:
I was so wrong, I decided to write a book...about what happened to me, Dan, and the 200 employees of Clarinda when we got squeezed out of business by market forces beyond our control...And so it is either delicious irony, cruel fate, or “My Name Is Earl” karma that just a few months before my book is due to come out, my publisher, Richard Nash at Soft Skull Press, pulled me aside before our first meeting with a PR firm to tell me, “I don’t want you to get too worried, but our distributor, PGW, has just filed bankruptcy.”
What?
Read more here.
Can't wait to read the article itself (and whatever Lisa's next manuscript will be) but for the moment:
...distributor going under. (via Bookslut.)
But, lest we forget, the IPA was actually losing money, unlike PGW, which was profitable.