Movies for Austen Lovers

Jane Austen has inspired millions of writers around the world, and those include screen writers. In addition to all the Austen-prequels and sequels, not to mention the whole "Regency" genre, there are some remarkably entertaining movie spin-offs. Here are some of the best:

1. Bride and Prejudice
Austen goes Bollywood! This seems a perfect match, considering most Bollywood movies are centered around family life and marriage. Mr. Collins becomes Mr. Kohli, the Americanized business man, and while Elizabeth/Lalita (played by Aishwarya Rai) has one less sister, the details are quite true to the novel.



2. The Jane Austen Book Club
For each of the women in the Jane Austen Book Club, there is a parallel in one of Austen's books. The fun part is figuring out which character is which. And for a film dealing with the modern problems of relationships, it has a true Austenesque happy ending, so stick with it! Also the screenplay contains numerous pieces of Austen trivia which fans will enjoy. Based on the book by Karen Joy Fowler


3. Scents and Sensibility
The Dashwood sisters must survive after their father is arrested and they lose their family money. Flowers are the answer!



4. Bridget Jones's Diary
Misunderstandings abound in this hilarious version of Pride and Prejudice. Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is a modern-day Elizabeth Bennett with both silly parents and friends, and while she desperately seeks female empowerment in her life, she still manages to fall for a her Wickham-like boss, Hugh Grant. Meanwhile, her Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth, in a hat-tip to his role in the BBC version of P&P) is left wondering why she doesn't like him. A treat for all Austen-lovers. Based on the book by Helen Fielding.



5. Austenland
A woman obsessed with all-things Austen visits and English resort where she can immerse herself in her fantasy world while longing for her Mr. Darcy.



6. You've Got Mail
Writer Norah Ephron penned the script as an homage to Pride and Prejudice, as well as honoring previous movies dealing with the theme, such as "The Shop Around the Corner" and the remake "In the Good Old Summertime" (see below). Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks and a great cast of character actors bring the story to life, as well as the literary life of New York City. And while the movie is already dated - AOL's "you've got mail" with cyber-honking is a thing of the past, and ebooks are replacing actual bookstores - we are still in the digital age of online matchmaking, where misunderstandings (or understandings) abound.



7-8. In the Good Old Summertime is the 1949 musical version of the earlier black-and-white 1940 movie The Shop Around the Corner. And while not specific adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, they both have the same theme of bad first impressions being resolved through growth and love letters.

Harper Lee Announces Mockingbird Prequel "Go Set a Watchman"

The publisher of Harper Lee has announced that they will publish an earlier version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Called Go Set a Watchman: A Novel the book was written from the viewpoint of an older and wiser Scout Finch looking back at her childhood experiences in Alabama. Lee's editor decided to change the focus of the novel to highlight just the childhood memories, and thus the original premise was set aside. While the move to publish the original manuscript was controversial, and many question whether the elderly author actually approved the publication, there is no doubt the announcement caused a major stir in publishing circles and among readers.

From Alabama.com

"Go Set a Watchman," a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the 1950s and put aside, will be released July 14. Rediscovered last fall, "Go Set a Watchman" is essentially a sequel to "To Kill a Mockingbird," although it was finished earlier. The 304-page book will be Lee's second, and the first new work in more than 50 years.
The publisher plans a first printing of 2 million copies.
"In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called 'Go Set a Watchman,'" the 88-year-old Lee said in a statement issued by Harper. "It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout's childhood, persuaded me to write a novel (what became 'To Kill a Mockingbird') from the point of view of the young Scout.
"I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn't realized it (the original book) had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years."

On the meaning of the Biblical Title:

From AL.com

The phrase in the title comes from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, in the King James Bible:

"For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth." - Isaiah 21:6

It makes sense that Lee's choice of a title for her novel was a King James biblical quote.

"That's what she loved - the elegance of the language of the King James Version," said historian Wayne Flynt, a longtime friend of Lee and also a Baptist minister. "She grew up in a Bible-reading family. She was imprinted with it as a child."

Isaiah was a prophet in the Kingdom of Judah, probably between about 740 B.C. and 698 B.C. In this verse, he is prophesying about the fall of Babylon. "Nelle (Harper Lee) probably likened Monroeville to Babylon," Flynt said. "The Babylon of immoral voices, the hypocrisy. Somebody needs to be set as the watchman to identify what we need to do to get out of the mess."

NYU Local

... In a rare interview, the author told Oprah that, while some assume Scout is based on a young Lee, “I am really Boo Radley.” Her behavior in the public has mimicked this. Best childhood friends with fame-hungry Truman Capote (the inspiration for Dill in Mockingbird), Lee conducted herself with as much discretion as he did extravagance. This is not a woman who wanted fame, and she has maintained her convictions throughout her life.
Until recently, Lee lived with her older sister Alice, who handled her public affairs. Shortly after Alice died, HarperCollins announced the publication of Go Set A Watchman. They have not had contact with Lee, instead communicating through her lawyer, Tonja Carter.
Though many are quick to suggest that Lee is being swindled, it is important to remember that last July, she vehemently protected her own privacy. Her statement was direct and clear. Can someone with such conviction be so seriously exploited?
Perhaps Alice was overprotective and did not want her sister to publish another book. If that sounds ludicrous, it could be because there are no facts to back it up.

.@Amazon is classifying Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman" under "Classics"—but not even published! http://t.co/4FhINyGvjn #instantclassic

— Jesse Zink (@jazink) February 20, 2015

🆕 The @washingtonpost: "To shill a mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s ‘new’ novel." http://t.co/zwYB85htIQ

— ✍ Bibliophilia (@Libroantiguo) February 20, 2015

A small Alabama town's braced for another literary frenzy thanks to Harper Lee's second book http://t.co/5C6nBrIDFh pic.twitter.com/9d8ZaS4siU

— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 18, 2015

In the Library of Jorge Luis Borges

An excerpt from The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas by Paul Theroux, upon visiting the famous South American writer Jorge Luis Borges in his library in Venezuela.

The brass plaque on the landing of the sixth floor said Borges. I rang the bell and was admitted by a child of about seven. When he saw me he sucked his finger in embarrassment. He was the maid's child. The maid was Paraguayan, a well-fleshed Indian, who invited me in, then left me in the foyer with a large white cat. There was one dim light burning in the foyer, but the rest of the apartment was dark. The darkness reminded me that Borges was blind.

Curiosity and unease led me into a small parlor. Though the curtains were drawn and the shutters closed, I could make out a candelabra, the family silver Borges mentions in one of his stories, some paintings, old photographs, and books. There was little furniture--a sofa and two chairs by the window, a dining table pushed against one wall, and a wall and a half of bookcases. Something brushed my legs. I switched on a lamp: the cat had followed me here.

There was no carpet on the floor to trip the blind man, no intrusive furniture he could barge into. The parquet floor gleamed; there was not a speck of dust anywhere. The paintings were amorphous, but the three steel engravings were precise. I recognized them as Piranesi's Views of Rome. The most Borges-like one was The Pyramid of Cestius and could have been an illustration from Borges's own Ficciones. Piranesi's biographer, Bianconi, called him "the Rembrandt of the ruins." "I need to produce great ideas," said Piranesi. "I believe that were I given the planning of a new universe I would be mad enough to undertake it." It was something Borges himself might have said.

The books were a mixed lot. One corner was mostly Everyman editions, the classics in English translation--Homer, Dante, Virgil. There were shelves of poetry in no particular order--Tennyson and e.e. cummings, Byron, Poe, Wordsworth, Hardy. There were reference books, Harvey's English Literature, The Oxford Book of Quotations, various dictionaries--including Doctor Johnson's--and an old leatherbound encyclopedia. They were not fine editions; the spines were worn, the cloth had faded; but they had the look of having been read. They were well-thumbed, they sprouted paper page markers. Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

There was a sound of scuffing in the corridor, and a distinct grunt. Borges emerged from the dimly lighted foyer, feeling his way along the wall. He was dressed formally, in a dark blue suit and dark tie; his black shoes were loosely tied, and a watch chain depended from his pocket. He was taller than I had expected, and there was an English cast to his face, a pale seriousness in his jaw and forehead. His eyes were swollen, staring, and sightless. But for his faltering, and the slight tremble in his hands, he was in excellent health. He had the fussy precision of a chemist. His skin was clear--there were no age blotches on his hands--and there was a firmness in his face. People had told me he was "about eighty." He was then in his seventy-ninth year, but he looked ten years younger. "When you get to my age," he tells his double in the story "The Other," "you will have lost your eyesight almost completely. You'll still make out the color yellow and lights and shadows. Don't worry. Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It's like a slow summer dusk."

"Yes, " he said, groping for my hand. Squeezing it, he guided me to a chair. "Please sit down. There's a chair here somewhere. Please make yourself at home."

He spoke so rapidly that I was not aware of an accent until he had finished speaking. He seemed breathless. He spoke in bursts, but without hesitation, except when starting a new subject. Then, stuttering, he raised his trembling hands and seemed to claw the subject out of the air and shake ideas from it as he went on.

"You're from New England," he said. "That's wonderful. That's the best place to be from. It all began there--Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Longfellow. They started it. If it weren't for them there would be nothing. I was there--it was beautiful."

"I've read your poem about it," I said. Borges's "New England 1967" begins, They have changed the shapes of my dream. . . .

"Yes, yes," he said. He moved his hands impatiently, like a man shaking dice. He would not talk about his work; he was almost dismissive. "I was lecturing at Harvard. I hate lecturing--I love teaching. I enjoyed the states--New England. And Texas is something special. I was there with my mother. She was old, over eighty. We went to see the Alamo." Borges's mother had died not long before, at the great age of ninety-nine. Her room is as she left it in death. "Do you know Austin?"

I said I had taken the train from Boston to Fort Worth and that I had not thought much of Fort Worth.

"You should have gone to Austin," said Borges. "The rest of it is nothing to me--the Midwest, Ohio, Chicago. Sandburg is the poet of Chicago, but what is he?" He's just noisy--he got it all from Whitman. Whitman was great, Sandburg is nothing. And the rest of it," he said, shaking his fingers at an imaginary map of North America. "Canada? Tell me, what has Canada produced? Nothing. But the South is interesting. What a pity they lost the Civil War--don't you think it is a pity, eh?"

. . . "I much prefer the English. After I lost my sight in 1955 I decided to do something altogether new. So I learned Anglo-Saxon. Listen. . ."

He recited the entire Lord's Prayer in Anglo-Saxon.

"That was the Lord's Player. Now this--do you know this?"

He recited the opening lines of The Seafarer.

"The Seafarer," he said. Isn't it beautiful? I am partly English. My grandmother came from Northumberland, and there are other relatives from Staffordshire. 'Saxon and Celt and Dane'--isn't that how it goes? We always spoke English at home. My father spoke to me in English. Perhaps I'm party Norwegian--the Vikings were from Northumberland. And York--York is a beautiful city, eh? My ancestors were there, too."

"Robinson Crusoe was from York," I said.

"Was he?"

"'I was born in the year something-something, in the city of York, of a good family. . .'"

"Yes, yes, I had forgotten that."

I said there were Norse names all over the north of England, and gave as an example the name Thorpe. It was a place name and a surname.

Borges said, "Like the German Dorf."

"Or Dutch dorp."

"This is strange. I will tell you something. I am writing a story in which the main character's name is Thorpe."

"That's your Northumberland ancestry stirring."

"Perhaps. The English are wonderful people. But timid. They didn't want an empire. It was forced upon them by the French and the Spanish. And so they had their empire. It was a great thing, eh? They left so much behind. Look what they gave India--Kipling! One of the greatest writers."

I said that sometimes a Kipling story was only a plot, or an exercise in Irish dialect, or a howling gaffe, like the climax of "At the End of the Passage," where a man photographs the bogeyman on a dead man's retina and then burns the pictures because they are so frightening. But how did the bogeyman get there?

"It doesn't matter--he's always good. My favorite is "The Church That Was at Antioch.' What a marvelous story that is. And what a great poet. I know you agree with me--I read your piece in The New York Times. What I want you to do is read me some of Kipling's poems. Come with me," he said, getting to his feet and leading me to a bookshelf. "On that shelf--you see all the Kipling books? Now on the left is the The Collected Poems. It's a big book."

He was conjuring with his hands as I ran my eye across the Elephant Head Edition of Kipling. I found the book and carried it back to the sofa.

Borges said, "Read me 'The Harp Song of the Dane Women.'"

I did as I was told.

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

"'The old grey Widow-maker,'" he said. "That is so good. You can't say things like that in Spanish. But I'm interrupting go on."

I began again, but at the third stanza he stopped me. "'. . .the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you'--how beautiful!" I went on reading this reproach to a traveler--just the reading of it made me feel homesick--and every few stanzas Borges exclaimed how perfect a particular phrase was. He was quite in awe of these English compounds. Such locutions were impossible in Spanish. A simple poetic phrase such as "world-weary flesh" must be rendered in Spanish as "this flesh made weary by the world." The ambiguity and delicacy is lost in Spanish, and Borges was infuriated that he could not attempt lines like Kipling's.

Borges said, "Now for my next favorite, 'The Ballad of East and West.'"

There proved to be even more interruption fodder in this ballad than there had been in "The Harp Song," but though it had never been one of my favorites, Borges drew my attention to the good lines, chimed in on several couplets, and continued to say, "You can't do that in Spanish."

"Read me another one," he said.

"How about 'The Way Through the Woods'?" I said, and read it and got goose pimples.

Borges said, "It's like Hardy. Hardy was a great poet, but I can't read his novels. He should have stuck to poetry."

"He did, in the end. He gave up writing novels."

"He should never have started," said Borges. "Want to see something interesting?" He took me back to the shelves and showed me his Encyclopedia Britannica. It was the rare eleventh edition, not a book of facts but a work of literature. He told me to look at "India" and to examine the signature on the illustrated plates. It was that of Lockwood Kipling. "Rudyard Kipling's father--you see?"

We went on a tour through his bookshelves. He was especially proud of his copy of Johnson's Dictionary ("It was sent to me from Sing-Sing Prison, by an anonymous person"), his Moby Dick, his translation by Sir Richard Burton of The Thousand and One Nights. He scrabbled at the shelves and pulled out more books; he led me to his study and showed me his set of Thomas DeQuincey, his Beowulf--touching it, he began to quote--his Icelandic sagas.

"This is the best collection of Anglo-Saxon books in Buenos Aires," he said.

"If not in South America."

"Yes, I suppose so."

We went back to the parlor library. He had forgotten to show me his edition of Poe. I said that I recently read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

"I was talking about Pym just last night to Bioy Casares," said Borges. Bioy Casares had been a collaborator on a sequence of stories. "The ending of that book is so strange--the dark and the light."

"And the ship with the corpses on it."

"Yes," said Borges a bit uncertainly. "I read it so long ago, before I lost my sight. It is Poe's greatest book."

"I'd be glad to read it to you."

"Come tomorrow night," said Borges. "Come at seven-thirty. You can read me some chapters of Pym and then we'll have dinner."

I got my jacket from the chair. The white cat had been chewing the sleeve. The sleeve was wet, but now the cat was asleep. It slept on its back, as if it wanted its belly scratched. Its eyes were tightly shut.

Fiction Readers Have More Empathy, According to Science

Scientists have confirmed what many of us already know: fiction readers are a special group. And there's more - those who read literary fiction in particular tend to have the gift of empathy, awareness of the feelings of others. That's because we spend so much time in the heads of literary characters, taking a walk in their shoes, so to speak.

From Guardian UK

Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York, have proved that reading literary fiction enhances the ability to detect and understand other people's emotions, a crucial skill in navigating complex social relationships.

In a series of five experiments, 1,000 participants were randomly assigned texts to read, either extracts of popular fiction such as bestseller Danielle Steel's The Sins of the Mother and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, or more literary texts, such as Orange-winner The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht, Don DeLillo's "The Runner", from his collection The Angel Esmeralda, or work by Anton Chekhov.

The pair then used a variety of Theory of Mind techniques to measure how accurately the participants could identify emotions in others. Scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.

"What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others," said Kidd.

And there's more:

Via ArtsMic

A 2013 Emory University study looked at the brains of fiction readers. Researchers compared the brains of people after they read to the brains of people who didn't read. The brains of the readers — they read Robert Harris' Pompeii over a nine-day period at night — showed more activity in certain areas than those who didn't read.

Specifically, researchers found heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex, part of the brain typically associated with understanding language. The researchers also found increased connectivity in the central sulcus of the brain, the primary sensory region, which helps the brain visualize movement. When you visualize yourself scoring a touchdown while playing football, you can actually somewhat feel yourself in the action. A similar process happens when you envision yourself as a character in a book: You can take on the emotions they are feeling.

Poetry Passion: The Legacy of Maya Angelou

RIP to a "Phenomenal Woman" - and one of the great poets of the 20th Century!

NPR Obituary of Maya Angelou, May 28, 2014

Poet, performer and political activist Maya Angelou has died after a long illness at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86. Born in St. Louis in 1928, Angelou grew up in a segregated society that she worked to change during the civil rights era. Angelou, who refused to speak for much of her childhood, revealed the scars of her past in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of a series of memoirs.
Growing up in St. Louis, Mo., and Stamps, Ark., she was Marguerite Johnson. It was her brother who first called her Maya, and the name stuck. Later she added the Angelou, a version of her first husband's name.

. . . Joanne Braxton, a professor at the College of William and Mary, says Angelou's willingness to reveal the sexual abuse she suffered as a child in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was unprecedented at the time. The critical acclaim and popularity of the book opened doors for both African-American and female writers.
"Maya Angelou brought about a paradigm shift in American literature and culture," Braxton says, "so that the works, the gifts, the talents of women writers, including women writers of color, could be brought to the foreground and appreciated. She created an audience by her stunning example."

Michelle Obama's tribute to Maya Angelou http://t.co/96QxtG4UMy pic.twitter.com/AOrrpwE03U

— Chicago Sun-Times (@Suntimes) June 8, 2014

Reading the Inaugural Poem for President Bill Clinton
"On the Pulse of Morning"

Remembering the life of Dr. Maya Angelou, an American icon: http://t.co/joBeDqcapg pic.twitter.com/EDrPIkHrhP
— ABC News (@ABC) May 29, 2014

From the New York Times Obituary

In a statement, President Obama said, “Today, Michelle and I join millions around the world in remembering one of the brightest lights of our time — a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman,” adding, “She inspired my own mother to name my sister Maya.”

. . . she had already been a dancer, calypso singer, streetcar conductor, single mother, magazine editor in Cairo, administrative assistant in Ghana, official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and friend or associate of some of the most eminent black Americans of the mid-20th century, including James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Afterward (her six-volume memoir takes her only to age 40), Ms. Angelou was a Tony-nominated stage actress; college professor (she was for many years the Reynolds professor of American studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem); ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit; frequent guest on television shows from “Oprah” to “Sesame Street”; and subject of a string of scholarly studies.

In February 2011, Mr. Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.

I'm speechless with awe and amazement: 15 other jobs of Maya Angleou http://t.co/X6gwR17bWH
— Chernynkaya (@Chernynkaya) May 28, 2014

The most poetic interview in history:



On Sesame Street with Elmo:



With Oprah Going Down Memory Lane:

Yesterday, the caged bird sang the blues. RIP #MayaAngelou.
— Paul Lander (@paul_lander) May 29, 2014

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

The free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wings
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
~ Maya Angelou

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may tread me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops.

Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame

I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

~ Maya Angelou

When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,

the air around us becomes

light, rare, sterile.

We breathe, briefly.

Our eyes, briefly,

see with

a hurtful clarity.

Our memory, suddenly sharpened,

examines,

gnaws on kind words

unsaid,

promised walks

never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

~ Maya Angelou


Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size

But when I start to tell them,

They think I’m telling lies.

I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,

The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.

Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.

I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand

Just why my head’s not bowed.

I don’t shout or jump about

Or have to talk real loud.

When you see me passing,

It ought to make you proud.

I say,

It’s in the click of my heels,

The bend of my hair,

the palm of my hand,

The need for my care.

’Cause I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

 ~ Maya Angelou

Bookish Pics ~ Summer Reading

Happy Summer Reading!

Guardian UK says the "Novel Is Dead"

A gloomy writer in the Guardian UK says the Novel is essentially dead, thanks to digital media and the fact that writers and readers would rather chase squirrels on the internet than consider serious literature.

I think people have been saying the "Novel is Dead" for hundreds of years. So let's just say I'm skeptical. Jane Austen is as popular as ever. But as in her day, perhaps we are on the cusp of the new age of Poetry, for instance. Would that be so bad? There is new poetry on Twitter and Tumblr, and people are reading and posting just as many quotes from great writers as ever.

Or maybe this is the age of great screenwriters? Look at what TV is doing with shows like True Detective, combining literary symbols with visual art and performance. Would that be so bad? So I think the written word is alive and well, and if the novel suffers for a while, it is perhaps to let the light shine elsewhere. After all, Shakespeare wasn't a novelist - just a great poet and playwright. Beowulf was written in verse. The Bible is part narrative with lots of symbolism and poetry.

Just saying. I think Literature will survive in some form, or perhaps new forms.

And while I share this author's skepticism about the value of Creative Writing Programs, having been enrolled in one myself many years ago, I do recall people getting published on a regular basis. And for the vast majority of writers throughout history, there has never been one clear path to a writing life. Most writers in this world do something else to earn money, and any sweet moolah they get from their words is icing on the cake. It may be thin icing without sprinkles, but putting the cake on the table is the important thing.

See, I thought Children's Literature was "dead" until I discovered Harry Potter, written by an unknown author who was on welfare at the time, and look what happened with that. In fact, gloomy writer Will Self has to slam Harry Potter to make his diatribe possible. *eyeroll* Well, just as many adults read Harry Potter, and the form is the novel. So yeah, if you dismiss the most popular novels of our time, then yeah ~ death to the novel. Or not.

Will Self in Guardian UK

The literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes. Let me refine my terms: I do not mean narrative prose fiction tout court is dying – the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude good health. And nor do I mean that serious novels will either cease to be written or read. But what is already no longer the case is the situation that obtained when I was a young man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour.

. . . the novel, I think, has led a very American sort of life: swaggering, confident, brash even – and ever aware of its world-conquering manifest destiny. But unlike Ernest Hemingway or F Scott Fitzgerald, the novel has also had a second life. The form should have been laid to rest at about the time of Finnegans Wake, but in fact it has continued to stalk the corridors of our minds for a further three-quarters of a century. Many fine novels have been written during this period, but I would contend that these were, taking the long view, zombie novels, instances of an undead art form that yet wouldn't lie down.

. . . I've no doubt that a revenue stream for digitised factual text will be established: information in this form is simply too useful for it not to be assigned monetary value. It is novels that will be the victims of the loss of effective copyright (a system of licensing and revenue collection that depended both on the objective form of the text, and defined national legal jurisdictions); novels and the people who write them. Fortunately, institutions are already in existence to look after us. The creative writing programmes burgeoning throughout our universities are exactly this; another way of looking at them is that they're a self-perpetuating and self-financing literary set-aside scheme purpose built to accommodate writers who can no longer make a living from their work. In these care homes, erstwhile novelists induct still more and younger writers into their own reflexive career paths, so that in time they too can become novelists who cannot make a living from their work and so become teachers of creative writing.

. . . As I said at the outset: I believe the serious novel will continue to be written and read, but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse. The current resistance of a lot of the literate public to difficulty in the form is only a subconscious response to having a moribund message pushed at them. As a practising novelist, do I feel depressed about this? No, not particularly, except on those occasions when I breathe in too deeply and choke on my own decadence.

Today is World Book Day

Today is "World Book Day," and it shows my age that I immediately thought of our shelf of old encyclopedias from 1975. That's not it.

From Wikipedia

World Book Day or World Book and Copyright Day (also known as International Day of the Book or World Book Days) is a yearly event on 23 April, organized by UNESCO to promote reading, publishing and copyright. In the United Kingdom, the day is instead recognised on the first Thursday in March.

World Book Day was celebrated for the first time on 23 April 1995.

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare!

April 23rd is the birthday of the Bard, William Shakespeare!

Happy 450th birthday, William Shakespeare! Join the celebration: http://t.co/VKocR6ETO5 pic.twitter.com/rpqqHi4l4d

— CNN (@CNN) April 23, 2014

Happy 450th birthday William Shakespeare! Here are 50 of his phrases we still use everyday http://t.co/C1CqPRTrC8 pic.twitter.com/nY2UAvBjuH

— IndyArts (@IndyArts) April 23, 2014

Happy 450th Birthday, William Shakespeare! (Infographic provided by @cbcbooks) pic.twitter.com/a8AYHwXu0w

— Robert Mitchell (@RLM_3) April 23, 2014

#Shakespeare450th pic.twitter.com/kyNJZi0Ohc

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 23, 2014

Next time you're in a war of words, why not throw in some Shakespeare? You mouldy rogues! #HappyBirthdayShakespeare pic.twitter.com/g6vQTA1lHh

— VisitBritain (@VisitBritain) April 23, 2014

R.I.P. Peter Matthiessen

And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.”
― Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

The most "Zen" of authors has left this world for a new adventure: Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard, Far Tortugas, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and many more. His love of the earth and his philosophical musings on our place here had a major influence on all of us growing up in the 70s and 80s.

Obituary in the LA Times

Matthiessen, the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, was both an elegant novelist and a rugged naturalist, a traveler known for his graceful yet spare descriptions of the wildest places on Earth.
Over six decades, he produced acclaimed volumes of natural history based on his treks through East Africa, New Guinea and the Amazon. He chronicled the plight of disappearing tribes. He wrote books about Cesar Chavez and Native American activist Leonard Peltier. He became a Zen devotee and wrote of a painful spiritual journey as he hiked through the Himalayas in "The Snow Leopard." At the same time, he wrote fiction; four of his novels centered on a respected and reviled sugar-cane planter who was killed by his neighbors in the Everglades.
He also helped found the Paris Review, the renowned literary magazine, which he used as a cover during his brief career as a spy for the CIA.

. . . Matthiessen traveled to remote corners of Alaska, Siberia, Peru, East Africa, Nepal and elsewhere. In central New Guinea, he was part of the 1961 Harvard-Peabody expedition that chronicled a Stone Age tribe, the Kurelu. Michael Rockefeller, the son of then-New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared on the same expedition.
Matthiessen's most controversial work was "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," a critical look at the conviction of Leonard Peltier in the 1975 murders of two FBI agents. Lawsuits filed by an FBI agent and South Dakota's former governor, Bill Janklow, were dismissed in 1990.

Rowling Revisits Cormoran Strike

J.K. Rowling's next Cormoran Strike book is called The Silkworm
and is due out in June.

Readers may recall that the first Strike novel The Cuckoo's Calling was released under the pen name Robert Galbraith but she was outed by a publisher. Apparently she is still using the pen name!

Via Snitchseeker

Private investigator Cormoran Strike returns in a new mystery from Robert Galbraith, author of the #1 international bestseller The Cuckoo's Calling.

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days--as he has done before--and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.
But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives--meaning that there are a lot of people who might want him silenced.

When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before...
A compulsively readable crime novel with twists at every turn, THE SILKWORM is the second in the highly acclaimed series featuring Cormoran Strike and his determined young assistant, Robin Ellacott.

Carcosa and The King in Yellow ~ True Detective and American Literature

I loved the HBO Series "True Detective" because it was as darkly Southern Gothic as it could be, and you could write several books just on the use of religious symbolism in the plot. They really went all the way with every character, especially the flawed and misunderstood Rust Cohle who is becomes identical to Jesus by the end, scarred by a knife wound (like a Roman sword) and resurrected after the battle against the evil killer Childress in the Coliseum-like Carcosa, sitting up in bed like the figure from the Shroud of Turin with a large computer tablet beside him that resembles a Bible on a pulpit, Rust transforms into the Light of the World. And of course in the end he explains to his friend Marty that he really did die and go to heaven where he felt the love of his daughter (and his Father) but was sent back to earth again again for reasons he didn't understand. But I totally understood and enjoyed all the religious symbolism, having grown up a Southern Baptist.



However, the English Major in me kept wondering who the "Yellow King" was, and where did the name "Carcosa"  come from? I racked my brain from William Faulkner to Shakespeare, but could remember nothing on those two references.

Well, it turns out there is a long literary tradition about both the Yellow King and Carcosa, and it goes back to two American writers: Ambrose Bierce and Robert Chambers.

Ambrose Bierce wrote the story called "An Inhabitant of Carcosa."
Read it Here

The King in Yellow Wikia Site has a snippet about the Ambrose Bierce connection:

Ambrose Bierce's tale An Inhabitant of Carcosa is arguably the wellspring of the whole Yellow Mythos. It employs an exoticism of setting unusual for the author, and sprang from the alienation that dogged Bierce all his life. The story's genesis came from a terrible dream he had in his youth, in which he wandered through a blasted landscape and entered a colossal, deserted castle. The castle's dusty, echoing corriders filled him with the feeling that the entire universe was long extinct:

Man is long ages dead in every zone
The angels all are gone to graves unknown
The devils, too, are cold enough at last
And God lies dead before the great white throne.

In this cosmic tomb, young Ambrose found a bed on which lay a horribly decayed corpse. The cadaver's eyes opened, and Bierce saw, to his horror, that they were his own: "That hateful and abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient after the death of God and his angels, was I!"

That story by Bierce inspired Robert Chambers, who in 1895 wrote a collection of short stories that mention a play called "The King in Yellow." The place-name "Carcosa" is mentioned in the epigraph to the story collection as an excerpt from the fictional play.

Free eBook Here on Project Gutenberg

THE KING IN YELLOW
BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Original publication date: 1895

THE KING IN YELLOW
IS DEDICATED
TO
MY BROTHER

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

Cassilda's Song in "The King in Yellow," Act i, Scene 2.

Rust Enters the Ruins of Carcosa


More from the University of Texas

Journalist and short-story writer Ambrose Bierce wrote the horror story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” in 1886. The story explores death, light, and darkness and is about a man who awakens from a sickness-induced sleep to find himself lost in an unfamiliar wilderness. Sound familiar?
. . . Writer Robert W. Chambers borrows the name of Ambrose’s ancient city, Carcosa, and builds it into a mysterious and cursed city in his collection of short stories The King in Yellow. The stories in the book are linked by a fictional play of the same name, which induces despair and insanity in those who read it or see it performed. Considered “weird fiction” under the subgenre of speculative fiction, Chamber’s The King in Yellow has inspired many writers, including H. P. Lovecraft.

In "The Call of the Cthulu" by Lovecraft there's even a Louisiana connection in this passage about an Inspector Legrasse out of New Orleans who goes out in the Bayou to investigate some type of Voodoo worship of the First Evil Cthulu (which is something like the "Green Spaghetti Monster" mentioned in True Detective):

On 1 November 1907, there had come to New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.

So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch towards the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypus thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.

. . . In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ringshaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

And if there's still any doubt that True Detective has deep literary roots, the screenwriter of True Detective himself has mentioned that Chambers/Bierce were indeed his sources, although not his favorite writers. Instead, he was merely inspired by the American mythos of the names involved. And he also suggests checking out Faulkner and Joseph Conrad ("Heart of Darkness" to be sure), plus the Holy Bible, too, so my own analysis was pretty close to what he intended. :)

From HitFix

. . . you wrote this entire thing in a vacuum, as someone relatively new to television, not knowing how it was received. And the show comes on, and people go nuts about it, they are penning raves, coming up with elaborate theories about the Yellow King and Lovecraft and everything else. How did it feel to see your creation being received in all of these ways?

Nic Pizzolatto: I felt like, look, it's all good, and I really mean that. To me, that is what it means to connect and resonate with people. It means that they are going to project onto the work. There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because to some degree, I projected upon it. That said, I think I've made clear that my only interest in the Chambers stuff (Robert W. Chambers wrote "The King in Yellow") is as a story that has a place in American myth. And it's a story about a story that drives people into madness. That was mainly it. Beyond that, I'm interested in the atmosphere of cosmic horror, but that's about all I have to say about weird fiction. I did feel the perception was tilted more towards weird fiction than perhaps it should have been. For instance, if someone needs a book to read along with season 1 of "True Detective," I would recommend the King James Old Testament. I wouldn't tell anyone to go buy Robert Chambers. It's not that great a book. Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner I think are in there far more than Chambers or Lovecraft. But again, I guess I hope that these 8 chapters, once the totality of it is evident, it might provoke a re-evaluation. But if it doesn't, I'm very happy with the reaction we've had. It couldn't have been better. I'm just surprised by it. I remember talking to you three months ago and having to convince you: "This just sounds like every other show," "I know, I know." And now my wife read a comment the other day that said I live out in the desert, and I run some kind of cult. (laughs) I don't know what I can say about that. I think this show answers everything it told you to ask. The questions it didn't tell you to ask are questions best left to one's self.

Poetry Passion ~ Hope for Survival

The Laughing Heart 


your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

~ Charles Bukowski





Sayings from the Northern Ice

It is people at the edge who say
Things at the edge.: winter is towards knowing.
Sled runners before they meet have long talk apart.
There is a pup in every litter the wolves will have.
Rocks in the wind know their place: down low.

Over your shoulder is God; the dying deer sees him.
At the mouth of the long sack we fall in forever
Storms brighten the spikes of the stars.
Wind that buried bear skulls north of here
And beats moth wings for help outside the door
Is bringing bear skull wisdom, but do not ask the skull
Too large a question till summer.
Something too dark was held in that strong bone.
Better to end with a lucky saying:
Sled runners cannot decide to join or to part.
When they decide, it is a bad day.

~ William Stafford




The Wild Geese


You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~ Mary Oliver



Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte.
One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.



Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?





Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

~ Richard Hugo