Baltimore Burns!

Since my last post I've been busy with our annual Robert Burns supper. We held it last Saturday (January 27) for about 30 people, down from a high of 42. It was the twelfth annual supper held by the Baltimore Burns Club, which my husband, Simon Walton, founded with his friend Stephen Cullen. No piper this year, and no flutes or guitars either. But we had an emotional, almost operatic rendition of Ca The Yowes by my friend Tammy, and much admired recitings of the Burns poem, To A Mouse, in Scots, Hebrew and Spanish. Of course there were the other usual performances, some better than others, and books of poetry handed out to new recruits with Scottish roots.

This year's theme was Robert Burns the Pirate. I designed the graphic (above, at right), and we ironed it onto black tshirts, which everyone received. I also gave the Immortal Memory Speech. It was my second year delivering this speech. If someone else had wanted to do it, I wouldn't have interfered. I meant my speech to be shorter, but it went on far too long yet again. It was about privateers, piracy, and plagiarism. The virtues of artistic theft, as well as the nasty side. I was heckled.

It doesn't matter who delivers the Immortal Memory--there is always heckling. Several people came up to me afterwards and asked for a copy of my remarks. So there.

No one remembers what time we finally toddled off to bed. We had six overnight guests. The party resumed in a more sedate fashion on Sunday. It was noon when we started moving again. We whipped up and consumed a huge pile of waffles. There were omelets made with leftover haggis and cheddar cheese. In the afternoon more guests from the night before arrived, to help move heavy tables and chairs back to the rooms (and floors) they came from, and to reassemble our living room. We also packed away the dishes and glassware and silver. For this latter crowd I reheated some of the previous night's boeuf bourguignon with barley risotto. In the evening, I mixed leftover strips of grilled chicken (we'd used only a fraction of that chicken in the cock-a-leekie soup) into a pound of ziti and a tipped it into a bowl of butter, oil, and chopped parsley that we'd forgotten to use the night before. I added hefty slivers of parmesan with a vegetable peeler, and served it all up with oily garlic toast made from stale bread.

Always feed the workers, that's our motto. Along with, never let leftovers go to waste.

On Burns night my ten-year-old daughter and her friends also got into the act. They wore kilts. They ate pizza. One of them helped her mother read To A Mouse in Hebrew. They stayed up all night. I vaguely remember going into my daughter's room around 3 am because they were complaining, loudly, that they had lost their internet connection in the midst of some game they were playing against each other. One team was on the floor using a laptop, another at my daughter' desktop PC. They seemed surprised that in the middle of the night they could find no one except each other to play against. They're into Webkinz.

Eight days later, there is still a huge pile of table linens in my laundry room. I've washed it all, but it's still waiting to be ironed, folded, and put away. That's because immediately after Burns night weekend, we had to print and send out invitations for a memorial to my mother that we're holding next weekend, put together auction baskets for my daughter's school's Winter Gala (held last night), arrange a trip to the Labyrinth Museum for my daughter's after-school girls' club, write and revise a magazine piece (it's not finished), improve a Powerpoint presentation about our vacation home in France, and plan a family trip to Williamsburg (using a timeshare week we had banked) around a cousin's wedding next June.

Meanwhile, we are still consuming leftover haggis. Recently, I used it to fill quesadillas. I was the only one who wanted to eat that. But I say, "Live on, fusion cuisine!"

p.s. Last month we also went to Gov. Martin O'Malley's inaugural ball. We were in a great spot when he came onstage with his band and played The Times They Are A Changin'. Ran into a bunch of old friends. Had a blast.

Story Published!

I've been busy! Working on a screenplay and writing a bunch of nonfiction essays for a workshop. So it's been a while since I've posted anything here. I promise to come back soon and post something more substantive than the reading list which follows. But I do have news. A flash fiction story of mine has been published by Vestal Review. Whoo hoo! Here's the link:

The Man from the Train

And here's a list of what I have been reading since I posted my summer reading list here on September 4, 2006 (in no particular order):

Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
Intimacy, by Hanif Kureishi
The Celtic Realms: The History and Culture of the Celtic Peoples from Pre-history to the Norman Invasion, by Myles Dillon and Nora Chadwick
The Handyman, by Carolyn See
The Woman I Left Behind, by Kim Jensen
Child of My Heart, by Alice McDermott
Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill
Lisey's Story, by Stephen King
The Memory-Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards
The Sea, by John Banville
Only Revolutions, by Mark Z. Danielewsky
Narrative Design, by Madison Smartt Bell
The Great Fire, by Shirley Hazzard
Incompleteness, by Rebecca Goldstein
New Monologues for Women, I and II, ed. by Tori Haring-Smith and Liz Engleman
Man's Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl

I gobbled up Reading Lolita in Tehran. It was more valuable than I thought it would be. As Nafisi tells the story of her secret meetings with a female students under an increasingly repressionist regime, the reader learns just how much one's sense of self can be threatened by living in such an environment. One must work hard to preserve the spirit, and one way is to expand oneself by studying and sharing great literature.

The preservation of spirit under difficult circumstances led me to Frankl, which I am still reading. Frankl is an important thinker, and I'd like to comment more thoughtfully at a later time.

Intimacy was a short one, and the title describes the narrator's relationship with the reader as much as it does the messy crisis of his character's life. Kureishi is one of those writers who accomplishes huge things with few words. You can see the insides and the outsides of his narrator all at once. John Banville does that well, too (see below).

The Celtic Realms was an impulse purchase. The history gets a bit tedious, but I am enjoying the parts about the female Celtic heroic figures and deities. Also it's fascinating to think how many of the customs we've inherited from the Celts appparently came from the early peoples who migrated westward out of ancient India. (I already have Antonia Fraser's Boadicea's Chariot on the shelf and hope to read it as a follow up.)

I think Carolyn See's books are a hoot. Quirky characters, unusual plots, fun and quick to read. I have another one in the wings. Every now and then I send her an email, and she writes back!

The Woman I Left Behind is written by a local author, Kim Jensen. I met her at the 2006 City Lit Festival in Mt. Vernon, where she did a reading and drew me into her seductive narrative. It was towards the end of the day, and did not have a check or enough cash left to buy her book. Later I ordered it on Amazon (they're pestering me to review it; perhaps I will). Jensen teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County. I was pleasantly surprised to find -- it has to be! -- Kathy Acker as a pivotal character in this novel! One day I will ask Jensen if I am right. I had only recently discovered The Essential Kathy Acker when I read Jensen's book. Suddenly it hit me. The Woman I Left Behind is as much about Acker is it is about the wife that the Palestinian emigre, Khalid, leaves behind when he finds Irene, the woman he really loves. Somehow Jenson reminds me a bit of Mary Gaitskill -- maybe because her characters hover on the fractal margin between connectedness and oblivion.

Mary Gaitskill's Veronica. Wow. This is the best novel I have read in ages. I would give my front teeth to write as well as that. What courage. Like fingernails scraping on a blackboard, and you can't stop listening. I want to write with the same sense of destructive abandon! I've scoured the internet and scooped up copies of everything else Gaitskill has published.

The Alice McDermott book was pure pleasure. I love the way she writes. Quirky story, magical even. Interesting parallel here with the story in Veronica, a quirky, erotic even, coming of age story revolving around a relationship between two female characters, one of whom is doomed and the other survives to tell the tale.

Only Revolutions is the new hot trendy literary masterpiece, or so various critics were saying. I decided I had to have it. Went to B&N and paid retail. I found it unreadable. It gave me a headache. Give me a break. This is not literature, it's new age bullshit. The production values are good, though, and there are cute little tricks built into the book itself, which is supposedly an object d'art. I read bits of it from both ends, and the chronology stuff in the margins. I did the flip thing to see the page numbers rotate along the edge. This book does absolutely nothing for me. I can't believe I bought it -- what was I thinking? And ha! The New Yorker agrees with me.

Shirley Hazzard is a wonderful writer. Her characters are so well crafted, so well definined and so distinct from one another. And her sense of time and place, and pacing, and mood, and story. I confess I am not quite finished with The Great Fire but I am loving it. I am enjoying it so much I keep forgetting to read it as a writer. I also have Hazzard's earlier book, The Transit of Venus, and hope to read it soon.

I read Madison Smartt Bell's textbook cover to cover, including all of the tedious but essential footnotes. I hear it is possible to attend Bell's classes at Goucher as a non-degree student, but only at significant expense and loads of rigamarole. You get to sign up for him only after the degree students are accommodated, and his classes are always full. Oh well.

After finishing Bell's textbook I read the new Stephen King novel solely to analyze its structure. Perhaps my time would have been better spent reading something else.

I need a new craft book to read. I like to always have one on the go. I haven't read John Gardner's The Art of Fiction yet. I have an old paperback edition snarfed at a flea market. It probably deserves to be read next, but I ought to get a better copy. Or maybe Janet Burroway's text, Writing Fiction, should be next.

New Monologues for Women (I&II) collects short to longish pieces, and they are outrageous, some of them, and a pleasure to read. You have to recite these pieces out loud if you want the full effect. My friend Margo loaned these slim volumes to me, and she probably wants them back. She was careful to write her name with a big black Sharpie pen in the front of both of them as she was handing them to me.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter and The Sea were book club reads. I was not fond of the former, as I found the characters hopelessly one dimensional and unrealistic. It was decidedly unliterary, too formulaic. I could not believe the author graduated from a serious writing program. Although I have suspicions -- perhaps writing programs drain all the creativity and originality and courage out of you. The Sea was my choice, however, and I fell in love with Banville. A painterly writer, and this story with its three intermingling currents is well constructed. The book is brief, and the story is tidal, like the sea itself. A haunting masterpiece. It won the Booker prize but Banville said in one of his interviews that The Sea is not his best book! Eventually I will read one or more of his others, perhaps The Book of Evidence.

I'm fascinated with Kurt Gödel and have three books about him. I'm well into Rebecca Goldstein's book, Incompleteness, and up next is Janna Levin's novel (faction?) about Gödel and Alan Turing, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. I had long had in my library the third book, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-Winner, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Unhappily, I found it tough going and eventually quit the first two times I tried to read it. I guess I did not understand Gödel, but Goldstein explains him well, and her book is much easier to read. I've heard Janna Levin lecture on mathematical physics, and she's been interviewed a bunch of times on various podcasts that I have enjoyed. So after Goldstein, it'll be Levin, and then I'll go back and try Hofstadter again. Perhaps I will have better success.

I Stand Here iPodding - Part Three

What you needn't have and what you must--a favorites list.

There is one more program that is a must if you want to convert streaming media into mp3s for your iPod. Audacity is great for recording the audio from all kinds of streaming media. All you do is select "Stereo Mix" as your input source to take your computer's audio output and channel it back through as input. Then you can easily chop off the beginnings and the endings to get a clear track without unnecessary silence or jabber. Export the resulting project files to mp3 format and you are done! However, you are recording in real time, which means you don't want to be doing anything that could interfere with the media stream or compete with the sound you are trying to record. That means, for example, no web surfing or downloading of email while you record.

Now for my list of favorites:

Municipal and Other Public Libraries

The Library of Congress maintains an index of poets, novelists and other writers whose work is broadcast on the web.

The San Francisco Public Library has over 1200 downloadable audio books (free account needed) and the New York Public Library also permits download of audio material.

Universities

University webcasts are ubiquitous these days but here are some I favor:
The University of Pennsylvania's archive of literary webcasts, Penn's larger list of media links, and Penn's digital poetry archive.

UC Berkeley, mentioned in Part Two, has an archive of downloadable media in various formats. Also check out the webcast.berkeley Courses Schedule.

Similarly, MIT has OpenCourseWare and video lectures. There are Princeton event videos. There are Stanford free lectures. Purdue has complete lectures of select classes.

Columbia University's Fathom Archive offers access to a wide range of free content, including lectures, articles, interviews, exhibits and free seminars. You can also find some great lectures about literature here: http://ci.columbia.edu/ci/subjects/literature.html.

Stores and Publishers

Barnes & Noble's Meet the Writers Podcast features many hours of video and audio interviews. Also check out the Amazon Wire. The Tattered Cover, a splendid independent bookstore, features a podcast I mentioned previously, called Authors on Tour. As for publishers, there is The Penguin Podcast. Simon & Shuster's got one, too. Also check out the one by Canada's Raincoast Books.

TV, Radio, and Newspapers

Booknotes, on CSPAN, has 15 years of televised book interviews. NPR has a host of audio material relative to books. Also check out the wealth of downloadable material on writing, poetry and books from the BBC. ABC Radio National in Australia has a daily book show that's very good, The Book Show. Michael Silverblatt is a terrific literary interviewer, and there is a podcast of his KCRW show, Bookworm, here.

Another worthy archive features Don Swaim's conversations with prominent writers. His show, Book Beat, aired on CBS radio (AM stations) from 1982 to 1993. Short segments can be downloaded from the Dom Swain website, while full-length, unedited recordings can be downloaded from Ohio University's Wired for Books.

For an exhaustive list of public radio (and TV) stations that feature live web broadcasts and podcasts, including literature and drama programs, see Public Radio Fan.

As for newspapers, there's the New York Times' Books podcast, and from the UK, there's the Times Online Books Podcast.

Authors and Publicists

Bill Thompson maintains a growing list of author websites on his podcast's website here, and many of these authors post readings and interviews or links to them that can be downloaded. Publicists are getting in on the podcast act also. TriCom Publicity, Inc. has one featuring its clients, called Authors in Your Pocket, and it's an excellent model.

Foundations/Nonprofits/Journals

The Lannan Foundation podcasts are superb. Also check out Lannan.org for more downloadable audio, and video, too, including archived interviews conducted by Michael Silverblatt.

The Academy of American Poets hosts a podcast as well as an audio archive. You can find them both here.

Also check out Nextbook , which was established to be a gateway to Jewish literature, and features a podcast and lots of downloads.

Not many literary reviews publish podcasts. I mentioned PodLit previously, and now I've found The Chattahoochee Review podcast. The Chattahoochee Review is a literary quartly published by Georgia Perimeter College. Their podcast is a mixture of interviews, readings and lectures, of varying lengths. There are also audio downloads at The Paris Review, but no official podcast.

Additional Goodies

This isn't a podcast but I found it while looking for one at The Paris Review. Thanks to an NEA grant and other support, The Paris Review now has an archive called The DNA of literature, containing over 50 years of their "Writers at Work" interviews, and they are all available online, for free. What a tremendous resource.

This isn't a podcast either but I want to mention it here anyway: LibraryThing. It's an online service that helps you catalog your books. You can access your own catalog from anywhere, even a web-enabled phone. LibraryThing connects people who own the same books, and comes up with suggested reading. You can have a free account and catalog your first 200 books for free. After that there is a modest fee. Just enter the book's ISBN or a keyword and up pops the rest of the indexing data. LibraryThing fills in the blanks from public sources like Amazon and the Library of Congress. Then just click on the book to add it to your catalog. You can even create notes -- such as links to relevant digital media. It's extremely cool. You'll find it a lot easier than using Excel or home library software -- and now you know what I was referring to when I said what you needn't have in the title of this piece.