Paul Auster in an interview for Believer Magazine (talking with the author, Jonatham Lethem) about writing:

PA: You try to surprise yourself. You want to go against what you've done before. You want to burn up and destroy all your previous work; you want to reinvent yourself with every project.Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you've done in the past. Just say, that's done, now I'm tackling something else. It's certain that the world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.

JL: Anyway, your voice is going to be helplessly your own. And so the books will be united despite your attempts to ignore your own earlier work.

PA: Exactly, because all your attempts to flee from yourself are useless. All you discover is yourself and your old obsessions. All the maniacal repetitions of how you think. But you try. And I think there's some dignity in that attempt.

JL: I'm laughing, because now, as I'm about to begin a new novel at last, the only thing I'm certain of are the exclusions, the things I'll refuse to do again.

...

PA: Well, that's good. When you become aware of what your limits have been so far, then you;re able to expand them. And every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible. What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page you turn out chaos. Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

and a little later
:

PA: "I think the glory of the novel is that you're open to everything and anything that exists or has existed in the world. I don't have any proscriptions. I don't say: "This is not allowed because..."

What is said about the process of writing above is true of the way we ought to lead our lives in general too, I think.

I read the above interview with Auster and many other great interviews with writers in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. I am reading interviews with Paul Auster, John Banville, Haruki Murakami, Grace Paley, George Saunders, Marilynne Robinson, Ian McEwan, Tobias Wolff, & maybe Joan Didion but there are 24 such interviews. A book worth buying! (I am a big fan of Paris Review's collections of interviews with authors and poets and I'd put this collection right up there with those books.)

Found this rather haunting picture in a series of photographs by blind photographers.. part of a spectacular new exhibit at the University of California, Riverside which "raises extraordinary questions about the nature of sight."

Kurt Weston, Mask

(c) by the artist, courtesy of UCR/California Museum of Photography

A gay man who lost his sight to AIDS in 1996, Weston's work explores the stigma of disease and decay. His daily battle to stay alive is transformed into an unflinching look at his (and our) mortality: "These photographs are about the realization of loss," he says. "About losing your facade. They say, 'This is your new reality. This is your strange new flesh. Let's take a look." 

Reminds me of this excerpt from a poem (Embrace) by Mark Doty:

You weren't well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.  

Here's another great one from the series..

Gerardo Nigenda, Entre lo invisible y lo tangible, llegando a la homeostasis emocional

 (c) by the artist, courtesy of UCR/California Museum of Photography

Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, the 42-year-old Nigenda calls his images "Fotos cruzados," or "intersecting photographs." As he shoots, he stays aware of sounds, memories, and other sensations. Then he uses a Braille writer to punch texts expressing those the things he felt directly into the photo. The work invokes an elegant double blindness: Nigenda needs a sighted person to describe the photo, but the sighted rely on him to read the Braille. The title of this work translates roughly to: "Between the invisible and the tangible, reaching an emotional homeostasis."

Lots more gems at the link. Do go and enjoy the visions of these blind people. Like one of them (Pete Eckert) says: 'If you can't see, it's because your vision is getting in the way."

If it's Britain's Got Talent, expect the unexpected! Especially this year...first Susan Boyle, then Shaheen Jafargholi, then Jamie Pugh, and now Greg Pritchard... quite a year at the BGT!



Simon: "Like a dog meowing - it just shouldn't do that" :)

I thought of starting a series of tweets with a haiku (and accompanied link) by a leading haiku master on Twitter but I think given the beauty and prolific output of many of the haiku experts, perhaps an occasional blog post with a collection of 17 haikus (5-7-5; get it? ;)) is better to help the reader enjoy a haiku moment from from time to time.

I could wax poetic about haikus a lot but will write - hopefully in simple terse terms - some other time. For now, let us start at pretty much the beginning and let me set you ...

...On the Poet’s Trail

Footsteps fall softly
Following the path
Of Japan’s haiku master.

National Geographic article by Howard Norman

Photograph © by Michael Yamashita

Of the hundreds of haikus by haiku master, Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694), I have chosen 17 to give us a sampling this morning...

Winter solitude --
in a world of one color
the sound of wind

Early fall --
the sea and the rice field
all one green

Not this human sadness,
cuckoo,
but your solitary cry

Even in Kyoto --
hearing the cuckoo's cry
I long for Kyoto

The crane's legs
have gotten shorter
in the spring rain

A solitary
crow on a bare branch-
autumn evening

A flash of lightning:
Into the gloom
Goes the heron's cry.

Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die 

A bucket of azaleas
in its shadow
the woman tearing codfish

Wrapping the rice cakes
with one hand
she fingers back her hair

By the old temple
peach blossoms,
a man hulling rice

Spring rain
leaking through the roof,
drippling from the wasp's nest

Now I see her face,
the old woman, abandoned,
the moon her only companion

Many nights on the road
and not dead yet --
the end of autumn

How admirable!
to see lightning and not thing
life is fleeting

Another year gone --
hat in my hand,
sandals on my feet

1st day of spring
I keep thinking about
the end of autumn

Lots more here.

Of course, I should add that a lot is perhaps lost or changed in translation from Japanese to English; not only in terms of syllable-count but also actual depth and serenity.

For example read these 31 translations & discussion of Basho's most famous haiku.

The old pond;
A frog jumps in —
The sound of the water.

Also another example of differing translations by 3 leading English language haiku specialists of 8 of Basho's haikus.

Neil Gaiman's Advice to Writer: "Read a lot and live..... Go do stuff. Go get your heart broken and then come back and write some more"



Go listen to the sentence about "like bricks onto a wall" too... pretty basic stuff but so tough to do, no?

Also, listen to this 2006 speech he gave in Berkeley on a book tour for Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders....

..and his recent interview on Colbert Nation:

Neil Gaiman

Incidentally, I have not read any of Gaiman's work though I have heard many friends rave. Maybe one of these days, I'll start.

Also, see this lovely short clip for Blueberry Girl, written and read by Neil Gaiman.
 

Lovely! He apparently wrote this for or Tash, Tori Amos's daughter (who is also Gaiman's god-daughter).

Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald singing Dream a Little Dream of Me (Also here: ♫ http://blip.fm/~5o9mw)

Also this version from 1967 by Mama Cass Eliot.

Leave you with two more gems from Louis & Ella


and this featuring Ella alone - singing Gershwins "Summertime" at a concert in Berlin/Germany

Also this Billie Holiday version of Summertime.

This morning, I was reading Kevin Brockmeir's short story, The Year of Silence in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and I found these lines interesting.

The silence siphoned out of the city and into our ears, spilling from there into our dreams and beliefs, our memories and expectations. In the wake of each fresh episode a new feeling flowed through us, full of warmth and a lazy equanimity. It took us a while to recognize the feeling for what it was: contentment.

Aah...so, methinks my verbosity & prolificity at my blog, on facebook, and lately on Twitter, is perhaps merely a sign of discontentment? The year of my discontentment. (It's been more than a season; else I'd have put the title as "the winter of our discontent" ;))

And unlike the silence of the story, this one is not "plain and rich and deep."

The silence was plain and rich and deep. It seemed infinitely delicate, yet strangely irresistible, as though any one of us could have broken it with a single word if we had not been so enraptured.

And so it goes.... to paraphrase from another line from the story: "In the abundant silence we proceed into ourselves." (The line in the story is exactly the same except it uses "proceeded")

Update: Just finished the story. Lovely! The last paragraph of the story reads:

Every day the silence that had engulfed the city receded further into the past. It was plain that in time we would forget it had ever happened. The year that had gone by would leave only a few scattered signs behidn, like the imprints of vanished shells in the curst of a dried lake bed: the exemplary hush of our elevators, the tangles of useless wire in our walls, and the advanced design of our subway lines, fading slowly into antiquation.

Some day, hopefully all this discontent also recedes "further into the past" and "fades slowly into antiquation"!

--

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - last line of The Great Gatsby nu F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the greatest American novel ever written!

As those following my music blog posts may know, I am a big fan of music from Mali. And it seems two Malian singers - Rokia Traore (see my blog post for some videos) and the blind husband-wife pair Amadou-Mariam (youtube video) have won major awards at the inaugural Songlines World Music Awards (which I ran into on Twitter). 

More details here. Seems ..

The Songlines Music Awards were established to continue the tradition of the now-defunct BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music, recognizing outstanding talent in world music.

Also, note the "newcomer" award winner -- an Indian musician, who I had not heard of before today.

Best Artist - Rokia Traoré   

Best Group - Amadou & Mariam  

Cross-cultural Collaboration - Jah Wobble & The Chinese Dub Orchestra 

Newcomer - Kiran Ahluwalia

To listen to Kiran's songs, go to her website. It starts streaming few of her songs, in full. On Twitter, she mentions recent collaborations for fusion with Italian aria and Hip-Hop. Interesting!!

Impressive project. Emphasis mine.

Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved, probably near the South Africa-Namibia border.   The largest study of African genetics ever undertaken also found that nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa. The new analysis published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.  "Given the fact that modern humans arose in Africa, they have had time to accumulate dramatic changes" in their genes, explained lead researcher Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.  People have been adapting to very diverse environmental niches in Africa, she explained in a briefing.  Over 10 years, Tishkoff and an international team of researchers trekked across Africa collecting samples to compare the genes of various peoples. Often working in primitive conditions, the researchers sometimes had to resort to using a car battery to power their equipment, Tishkoff explained. 

More at the link above. Also this kinda related study from the Scripps Research Institute. Variety, thy name is life!

A group of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has set up the microscopic equivalent of the Galapagos Islands—an artificial ecosystem inside a test tube where molecules evolve to exploit distinct ecological niches, similar to the finches that Charles Darwin famously described in The Origin of the Species 150 years ago. As described in an article published in an advance, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the work demonstrates some of the classic principles of evolution. For instance, research shows that when different species directly compete for the same finite resource, only the fittest will survive. The work also demonstrates how, when given a variety of resources, the different species will evolve to become increasingly specialized, each filling different niches within their common ecosystem.

Uber-cool! Again, More at the link above.

--

“In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite variety and mystery of it.” - William Saraoyan

In researching a poet every day for my tweets on Twitter in celebration of National Poetry Month, I read some of Langston Hughes' poetry over the last two days. In comparison to those poems, the struggles of the African American people have manifest itself in such a different voice through the poems of Amiri Baraka, (formerly known as Leroi Jones). The rhetoric (of the 1960s civil rights movement) of anger, political rebellion, and angst over the African American identity is captured well in his poetry.

I ran into Amiri Baraka's poetry when I started reading poet Adrienne Rich's book A Human Eye, day before yesterday night. It is a collection of essays on Art in Society (1997-2008) and includes a wonderful essay (originally published in the Boston Review) about the poetry of  Amiri Baraka. Writing about Baraka's poems in The Dead Lecturer (out of print; most of the poems can be read in this collection), she writes:

It is the book of an artist contending first of all with himself, his sense of emotional dead ends, the limits of poetic community, the contradictions of his assimilation by that community, his embrace and rejection of it: searching what possible listening, what possible love or solidarity might exist out beyond those contradictions. It is the book of a young artist doing what some few manage or dare to do: question the foundations of the neighborhood in which he or she has come of age and received affirmation.

To further expand on that, here are some words from Baraka himself from the preface to the Baraka Reader:

My writing reflects my own growth and expansion, and at the same time the society in which I have existed throughout this confrontation. Whether it is politics, music, literature, or the origins of language, there is always a historical and time/place/condition reference that will always try to explain why I was saying both how and for what.

To quote from the Adrienne Rich essay again:

And it is a book, not an assemblage of occasional poems: a soul-journey borne in conflictual music, faultless phrasing. Music, phrasing of human flesh longing for touch, mind fiercely working to decipher its predicament. Titles of poems are set sometimes in bold, sometimes italics, implying structures within the larger structure. Drawing both on black music and the technical innovations of American Modernism, Jones moves deeper into a new poetics, what the poet June Jordan would name “the intimate face of universal struggle.”

But intimacy is never simple, least of all in poems like these where “inept tenderness” (“A Poem for Neutrals”) searches for an ever-escaping mutuality. 

And identity is never simple either. In contrast to Hughes' poems, which incorporated into poetry the aesthetics of the blues as the experience of a race, Amari writes in his poem, Notes For a Speech:

African blues
does not know me. Their steps, in sands
of their own
land.

..

My own
dead souls, my, so called
people. Africa
is a foreign place. You are
as any other sad man here
american.

Like Adrienne Rich writes about his poem, An Agony. As Now., which deals with existential anguish but in a "surround of social hatred":

Here is self-wrestling of a politicized human being, an artist/intellectual, writing among the white majority avant-garde at a moment when African revolutions and black American militance seemed to be converging in the electric field of possible liberations. Experiencing the American color line—that deceptively, murderously, ever-shifting, ever-intransigent construct—as neither “theme” nor abstraction, but as disfiguring all life, and in a time when “revolution” was still a political, not a merchandising term, Jones’s poems both compress and stretch the boundaries of the case. “

Also this poem, which is included in Rich's essay:

  / the society
                           the image, of
                           common utopia.
                               / The perversity
                               of separation, isolation,
after so many years of trying to enter
     their kingdoms,
now they suffer in tears, these others,
     saxophones whining
through the wooden doors of their less
     than gracious homes.
The poor have become our creators. The
     black. The thoroughly
ignorant.

               Let the combination of morality
and inhumanity
begin.

Like Rich writes:

The poem’s structure spirals like a staircase, where “the society / the image, of / common utopia” turns sharply into “The perversity / of separation, isolation,” this turn signified by a full-stop and capital letter. And, since the poet is located between worlds, there is a necessary ambiguity to the pronouns, the “they” and the “our.” 

There is much more to read and enjoy, not only in Baraka's poetry but also in Rich's essay. I leave you to go read it in its entirety.

Related Reading: Essay in Dissent magazine on Amari Baraka's life and poetry.

Tripping on some interview excerpts at the Paris Review archives, I ran into an interview with the "confessional" poet, Anne Sexton, from the Summer of 1971. They are talking about Sylvia Plath, whose life and suicide has been much discussed in the decades since her death in 1965. (Unfortunately, the Paris Review interview, is among the few that are not part of the wonderful archive online.)

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it.

Anne wrote about Sylvia's death:

Thief --
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,
the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?

Sadly, Anne Sexton herself was to commit suicide three years later.

On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to review Sexton's most recent book, The Awful Rowing Toward God. Upon returning home, she put on her mother's old fur coat, locked herself in her garage, started the engine of her car and committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Also see this fourteen-minute video (2 parts) where we see Anne Sexton at home reading, talking about poetry and about her family.

I myself will die without baptism,

a third daughter they didn't bother.

My death will come on my name day.

What's wrong with the name day?

It's only an angel of the Sun.

Woman,

weaving a web over your own,

a thin and tangled poison.

Scorpio,

bad spider ?

die!

Also, you can read some of her poems here and here and read more about Anne Sexton's life and career. Or better still read about her life, in her own words (some great pics too at the link.)

--
“That ragged Christ, that sufferer, performed the greatest act of confession, and I mean with his body. I try to do that with words” - Anne Sexton

Found via kottke.org

Love and hate are the same thing

Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button."

That's Marshall McLuhan. (via submitted for your perusal)

In my previous post, I wrote about a Paris Review interview with the current US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. In the same interview, she is asked about her partner of 30 years, Carol and how the two are coping with Carol's cancer.

Here are some excerpts which I found particularly moving.

KR: When I first met Carol, I was so glad to find somebody I could really talk to. There were people who I could drop a stone down and hear it go plunk really fast. But I could drop a stone down Carol and never hear it hit the bottom.


I: How are you two coping with Carol's illnes?
KR: I was just down at the store this morning, and a man was talking on his cell phone and he was saying, It wasn't just a camping trip; it was a survival class. And I was thinking how funny that was, because I'm having a survival class at my house. You don't have to go out and get it. It will come to you. We're all having a suvival class; you just have to wait.

(Emphasis mine.)

Unfortunately, Carol lost her battle with cancer and passed away  in January this year. RIP, Carol Adair. Peace and strength to Kay Ryan as she deals with the loss.

P.S. Loved this line that Kay Ryan says later in another context about living an ordinary life. "I think extravagance in your life takes the energy from possible extravagances in your mind." Even if its just a 1 line post, I think that almost deserves its own post!

Loved these lines about poetry by Kay Ryan, who was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2008, in an interview in Paris Review.

Interviewer: Do you feel that part of the laureate job is to convince the reading public that poetry is useful?

KR: It's poetry's uselessness that excites me. Its hopelessness. All this tal of usefulness makes me feel I've suddenly been shanghaied into the helping professions. Prose is practical language. Conversation is practical language. Let them handle the usefulness jobs. But of course, poetry has its balms. It makes us less lonely by one. It makes us have more room inside ourselves. But it's paralyzing to think of usefulness and poetry in the same breath.

And so it goes. My daily poetry tweets over on twitter are anything but useful but now I know they serve a purpose - they are a balm which help me make room within myself. 

From later in the interview, this lovely excerpt:

I: Why do you think writing attracted you?

KR: It's a way of thinking unlike any other. Brodsky considers poetry a great accelerator of the mind and I agree. Thinking takes place in language, and it's hard to say whether the language is creating the thinking or the thinkng is creating the language. If I don't write poetry, in the profoundest way I have no way to think.

I: How do you find the subject in a poem

KR: I don't know if I'm interested in combating an idea or just loosening it up. You have to make some room for your mind. You have to open something up. And you can't just slam it from the other side. You can't say, That's not right. This is right. You start fluffing it. You open up the picture, so you can know two things at once.

I love reading interviews with writers and poets! Love the way they think. Love the way they phrase answers. Delectable bits abound! (I flitted between "Poetry has its balms" to "poetry a great accelerator of the mind" to "know two things at once" for this post title!) 

Go pick up the Winter 2008 Paris Review issue and read the interview. Or, if you cannot get your hands on that issue, go to the Paris Review Interview Archive Index and enjoy interviews with the masters of the past. (Past interviews are archived for free as pdf files. (Thank you, Paris Review, for sharing these gems for free.)

Am tweeting about Wallace Stevens today and in addition to his wonderful poetry, I am finding so many great quotes by this esteemed Modernist poet. Here is one that I liked:

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time;   nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. Since we have always shared all things with them and have always had a part of their strength and, certainly, all of their knowledge, we shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure, we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness. What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been a part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left it for him to resolve life and the world in his own terms.

The passage is from Stevens' essay "Two or three ideas" (from Opus Posthumous; NYT Review). Though written in prose, it is supposed to be "a great hymn to absence and to the heroically human self."