The Kitchen Daughter

"The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair." --Mary Heaton Vorse

I have the good fortune to be acquainted with and related to people who are writers. Friends are usually fascinated by the process of writing, particularly fiction writing and have one of two reactions. One, they think it must be kind of easy, because you can make it all up and you get to sit at your computer and keep your own schedule. Or two, it is incredibly hard and they can't imagine even thinking about writing a piece of fiction - it is overwhelmingly intimidating.

Just Some Poems: Du Fu in Translation

In translation, even Du Fu’s name is not a constant.  At the time Kenneth Rexroth translated him, the name in English of this Tang Dynasty poet was “Tu Fu.”  Or, as poet Charles Simic put it, “Du Fu, eh?  I knew him when he was Tu Fu.  A swell guy!”

Water, Water, Everywhere

“…Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink…”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We could find ourselves echoing the words of the Ancient Mariner if we don't pay close attention to our precious water supply. Unlike seabirds, human bodies lack the ability to desalinate sea water, and most of the water on our planet is in the oceans – a whopping 99 percent of it. Only the remaining 1 percent is usable by humans. And that tiny share is in peril.

Slouching Toward Lachenmann: Transfiguring the Night

The only person who can help poor Schoenberg now is a psychiatrist.

-Richard Strauss

"You're a slouch not to like it," he said to me one day.  "Studying ordered relationships is ultimately the best there is.  Order is everything."
-Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

When I was in high school, the curriculum included a mandatory music appreciation class.  In addition to being mandatory, the class marshaled all the worst features of classroom instruction to make its case:  a huge amphitheater of a classroom, an otherworldly teacher who wasn’t able to communicate his love of music to the class, and an approach of pure lecture with the odd bit of listening thrown in.

Listening to Penelope

Penelope "may be the best thing to happen to Homer since Joyce."
—George Wallace

It moves like a live thing in his hands
The story, his story
Bloody and sacred, truth and lie
—Ellen McLaughlin

A few years ago, a series of little novels started to appear, preceded by a book of introduction called A Short History of Myth.  The first novel in the series was The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood.  Atwood’s premise, “to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids,” was promising.

Sailing Alone From Song to Song

I was going wherever I happened to go,
giving myself over to whatever I met,
-Su Tung-P'o

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner;
cross my legs like his, and listen.
-Billy Collins

One evening, in the manner of Su Tung-P'o, I followed the path of composer Missy Mazzoli to New Amsterdam Records, where a new CD of her music was on offer.  From there I spotted a trio called janus, with a first CD just out.  The trio intrigued me because of its instrumentation:  flute, viola, and harp.

Scranton, PA: More Than Just ‘The Office’

If you know Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the setting of NBC’s The Office—the U.S. version of Slough, the depressed and depressing overcast English city in which the Wernham Hogg Paper Company was doomed to eternally, if comically, fail—then your impression of the city is sunnier than the one most Scranton area residents have held of their hometown for decades.

(Punk) Art and the City

I’m not an expert by any stretch, but I’ve been observing and writing about the productive relationship between cities and the arts since I moved to Baltimore in 2004.  In fact, my involvement with Pages & Places and its annual book festival stems from my awareness of reams of researching pointing over and over and over to the fact that cities heavily invested in a vibrant, diverse, street-level arts and culture scene are far more likely than their counterparts to thrive in the 21st century, and Liz Randol’s vision for the twin-themed Pages & Places Book Festival spoke directly to current best practices that cities like San Jose, Houston, Denver, and Memphis are struggling (some more successfully than others) to implement.

Listening to Ulysses

Before he was anybody special (well, at least before he had his own show), Stephen Colbert stood on the stage at Symphony Space in New York City and flexed his arms in preparation.  He was about to read two chapters from James Joyce’s Ulysses, Calypso and the Lotus Eaters.

Anne Carson's Nox

Anne Carson has credentials when it comes to fragments.  She’s a professor of classics and translator of ancient Greeks who says, of using brackets when translating Sappho, “Brackets are exciting.”

A Capitol Time

We only had 24 hours in Washington D.C. so we wanted to see much as possible. Getting to D.C. from most places on the east coast is easiest on Amtrak, in my opinion. We could relax and read while on the train instead of having to negotiate the traffic on the beltway. Trains arrive in the gorgeous Union Station, where you can catch a Metro subway, eat in any of a number of restaurants, or shop in a veritable mall of stores. Washington is a very walkable city, so we were able to stroll out of Union Station and over a couple of blocks to the Hotel George, a little boutique hotel on Capitol Hill where we had reservations.

Eyjafjallajokull - The Inconvenient Volcano

For 7 days I tracked its every move vicariously through BBC TV, SKY News and CNN in hotel rooms in London and Paris, waiting for the go-ahead to get back on an aeroplane bound for Atlanta, secretly hoping that it wouldn’t come too soon. Though I knew had to get back.

Sleeping in the Swamp: Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin

If you travel by canoe through the river swamps of Louisiana, you may very well grow uneasy as the sun is going down.  You look around for a site—a place to sleep, a place to cook.  There is no terra firma. . . . You study the dusk for some dark cap of uncovered ground.  Seeing one at last, you occupy it, limited though it may be. . . . You have established yourself in much the same manner that the French established New Orleans.  So what does it matter if your leg spends the night in the water.

--John McPhee, The Control of Nature

For more than eighteen miles, the columns holding up Interstate 10 in Louisiana rise out of a swamp.  Not just any swamp, mind you, but the Atchafalaya Basin Swamp—the largest swamp in the United States, covering a third of the total land mass of Louisiana.  The Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, as this portion of I-10 is known, is reputed to be the tenth longest bridge in the world.  Our goal was Butte La Rose, from which we would travel down back roads to find the houseboat where we were to stay, moored in the swamp, for four days.

Hope Is The Thing With Feathers

From the vantage point of Royal Street on a beautiful spring day, the resurgence of New Orleans was abundantly on display.  Choosing from the delectable fare at the New Orleans Roadfood Festival was nigh impossible:  roasted oysters, crawfish enchiladas, roast beef Po Boys, Texas barbecue, dark chocolate turtles, pecan pie, and more.

I Am Not Me, The Nose Is Not Mine

In the teeming collage of text that forms a backdrop for the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of The Nose are the words “spine," smashed,” and “beautiful, pitiful age.”  While in the thrall of the opera’s swirl of sound and image, I held tight to those words in hope of discovering where they came from and what they meant.

Wondrous Strange: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves at the Morgan Library

Horatio:  O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:  And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

--Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V

When contemplating the flaying of St. Bartholomew, one can be forgiven if pretzels don’t come immediately to mind.  Yet in the Morgan Library’s spectacular exhibit, “Demons and Devotion: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves,” the artist’s depiction of St. Bartholomew sports a border of interlinked pretzels with a line of crackers down one side.  We’ll never know why:  what the artist intended is lost to time.

Food For Thought

The latest book by Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food) is so simple, so concise, it could be read, indeed should be read, by elementary and middle school aged children. Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual is not much more than a pamphlet; Pollan designed this book to cut through the cacophony of food and nutrition noise that fills the virtual air of today’s media.

For He Was Welsh, You Know: Reading Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth

Fluellen:  And I do believe your majesty takes

no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day.

King Henry:  I wear it for a memorable honour,

For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.

As I listened to John Metcalf’s Mapping Wales, I conjured a sky thick with Welsh archers’ arrows.  The arrows weren’t the stuff of my imagination, but a scene from Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.  As one thing so often leads to another, I thought it time to give the film another look.

The Virtues of Difficulty

I had intended this, my first post here, to address the literary economy in some way. As co-director of the Pages & Places Book Festival in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and as we’re deep into the planning for the 2010 festival, our second, I'm now contending with all the expected difficulties regards, for example, convincing government officials and even grant-giving foundations to support a celebration of books. So I have plenty of opportunity, let’s call it, to realize to what degree lovers of books and reading are but a tiny minority.

Insurance-Defying Fitness: In Praise of Marilyn Moffat

Gina Kolata’s recent article, “Treat Me, but No Tricks Please,” in the New York Times, brought on a firestorm in response.  In the article, Kolata questioned whether there was “rigorous evidence” to show that physical therapy was effective and asked, “With all that voodoo physical therapy out there, though, how can you tell if what you are getting is helping or useless?”