MEMBER BLOG TAG: life
| Thursday, April 28, 2011 1:35AM | | | | DE-GENTRIFY NEW YORK/Fire! | Tags: Hmm how about Kundera, thanks to Schulman, & Jane Jacobs instead?
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, only because, and only when
| | | | People can become New Yorkers but NY can't become someplace else." - Sarah Schulman
On the way home to finish this piece, there were firemen in front of my apt bldg. I sniffed. Whew acrid. “Did someone do something stupid again?” I said.
1st fireman laughed, sarcastic, “Oh no, not something stupid, not the plethora [old NYC education] of a--- who constantly waste our time.” A few months ago, a resident of a loft (made from 3 apts, the cruelty of dislodging many for few was mentioned by our PEN panel) in back of my small strange apt, ran down a woman in her late 70s, getting out of the fire they ignored chasing after their (smarter) dog ; he was... | | | | | | | Tuesday, April 19, 2011 10:12AM | | | | War on Abortion is not about Life | Tags: abortion, infant mortality, EPA, Planned Parenthood, right to life, toxic chemicals, Sharia law
| | | | Like others who support Planned Parenthood, I am pro-life. I am pro-all life, even if it breathes. Thirty-three countries (including Cuba, China, El Salvador) hold life more sacred than America does. At least they have a lower infant mortality rate. Twenty-eight nations don’t believe a woman loses the sacredness of her life or her right to private property if she becomes pregnant. They have a lower maternal death rate. Yet, House Republicans want to cut funding for Women, Infants, and Children nutrition assistance program; Hunger Free Communities Grants, the Global Health and Child Survival Account, assuring that even more babies and mothers will die. No honest person dare call that “pro-life.”
It’s not even pro-selected life. American fetuses soak in chemicals, including mercury, according... | | | | | | | Monday, May 4, 2009 12:00AM | | | | Coming to Terms with Tatsumi, Manga | Tags: tatsumi, adrian tomine, gekiga, manga, pen america, hiroshima, a drifting life, shortcomings
| | | 60 million people can’t be nerds. If they are, they’ve probably come to terms with it.
The Japanese story form manga uses extended plotlines and a distinct pictorial style. It falls somewhere in between a graphic novel and a comic book. Widely read in Japan, where it is a $4 billion industry, Manga attracts a slightly more esoteric crowd in the U.S. Here such readers may be considered nerds. There, they are cool. But increased domestic sales suggest that manga may no longer be the stuff stashed in freshman lockers.
Manga depicts stories of everything from shogunate sword fights to the lives of ordinary salarymen. A typical issue may contain several shorter storylines and be between 200-400 pages in length. Most of... | | | | | | | Thursday, April 30, 2009 10:09AM | | | | Hey, Reading Should Actually Be Fun | Tags: Children's Books to Create a Lifeloving Love of Reading, Mary Ann Hoberman, Francine Prose, Vera B. Williams, Meir Shalev
| | | Using Children's Books to Create a Lifeloving Love of Reading was a great event. Why it attracted the oldest crowd in the history of World Voices, I have no idea, but maybe it's because we're all stuck in our youth. We can't get out but we can't go back either, so we have to turn to literature to save ourselves from the horror of being adults.
"I still live in my pre-school years," Mary Ann Hoberman said.
"I have total recall of my childhood." Vera B. Williams agreed. "But what I'm most concerned with is how we connect our stories with love ... how we make the words get up and dance."
The words did get up and dance this afternoon. Meir... | | | | | | | Saturday, April 25, 2009 12:00AM | | | | Le Clezio and Adam Gopnik | Tags: Le Clezio, Creolization, spam, New Mexico, landscape, language as life
| | | Pen pointed out that we are celebrating World Voices while the rest of the world is putting up its hands in defeat... So this is the celebration. Nice to hear Le Clezio speaking of looking out his window in Albuquerque and seeing tumbleweed: that's very delightful, since when we look out of OUR window we see other buildings. And just as nice to hear about where his family has settled, that "we are nearly everywhere."
Creolization, he says, is a great thing, since it means adaptation to new ways of life... He remembers begging the GI's for food, having subsisted on roots, and being given Spam, chewing gum, and white bread.
As for belonging... | | | | | | | Tuesday, February 24, 2009 7:52AM | | | | When There's No Sky Left | Tags: writing life, alcoholism
| | | On Saturday, I realized I'm going to have to restructure the novel I'm working on, which means a lot of long days for a while. So, I hope you won't mind if, for this post, I use an essay that was published a while back in THE LITERARY REVIEW (Farleigh Dickinson University), entitled When There's No Sky Left:
There is a moment of sweet tension as I hold the glass in my hand. The peat-rich fumes rise to my nose. The color is amber promise. I raise the glass to my lips. Molten honey in the gut. The switch flips. Sweet warmth begins to flow from my belly to my fingertips. The mind becomes soft and... | | | | | | | Wednesday, January 28, 2009 8:07PM | | | | Outline of a Writer's Day | Tags: writer's life, writer's rituals, writers' routines
| | | There's an interesting website that give a wee bit of insight into "how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days," called DAILY ROUTINES.
My friend, poet and novelist Lisa Pasold (who's first novel will be out this fall -- look for it!), told me recently that Philip Roth was downright monastic in his habits. This site confirms that, and in fact it was probably Lisa who told me about the site in the first place. Roth lives alone, apparently, gets up every morning at the same time, makes his way to the little writing cabin at the end of the garden, writes all day, totters back up to the house, eats and sleeps and... | | | | | | | Sunday, January 11, 2009 12:50PM | | | | The effects of landscape | Tags: Chet Raymo, city life, Innisfree, Jonah Lehrer, Thoreau, Walden, writing process, Yeats
| | | I read an interesting article recently in the Boston Globe by Jonah Lehrer, in which the author explores recent studies into how living in cities can hurt your brain. I forwarded it to my Best Beloved, with "I told you so" in the subject line.
In Lehrer's article, he acknowledges that cities have historically been viewed as "the engine of intellectual life," but goes on to say:
"Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers... | | | | | | | Friday, November 21, 2008 1:46PM | | | | How to Write a Novel - "Wood Craft" | Tags: writing process, writing life, writing advice
| | | Students and other emerging writers often ask me, "How, precisely, do you write a novel?"
I suspect they think, as perhaps I did myself once upon a time, that there exists somewhere a hermetically sealed room, guarded by hydras, in which Real Writers have placed, in a locked chest in turn submerged in a shark-infested tank of acid (which magically doesn't harm the sharks -- this is fiction, people!) the secrets to writing.
 The mythical hydra -- the heads are literary critics
Alas, the sad reality is that there's no such... | | | | | | | Thursday, July 31, 2008 8:39PM | | | | shine bright at Grand Central | Tags: grand central, nyc, grand central station, sadi ranson, tant mieux, shoeshine, a word, editorial, edit, inhabited lives, life stories, journalism, short-short, prose, sadi ranson-polizzotti,
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Michael has a stand of high chairs with foot-rests all built upon a sturdy oak wooden frame with arm-rests. He is a shoe-shine guy. He is standing under the shelter of the overhang of Grand Central Station on 42nd and Lex. in front of his shoe-shine booth. This makes sense - a good place for a booth - for it provides shelter for anyone who wants to get their shoes shined even while it's raining out, so the weather has no affect on Michael's business.
I'm standing outside of the Grand Central, waiting to meet my friend M. I have on a silk dress, flat ballerina flats (Michael notes that they are patent leather - "nice," he says. "Shiny."), and... | | | | | | | Monday, May 5, 2008 7:54PM | | | | No moral turpitude at Pen Cabaret | Tags: moral turpitude, yodels, spade, Bosnia, Hamlet, Bill T. Jones, Dylan Thomas, Webster Hall, debauched life, Dandy in the Underworld, ironic, avatar, duet.
| | | | Cabaret is coming back. Not only the Pen Cabaret, the highlight of the Pen World Voices Festival, but cabaret is coming back all over town. Cabaret is not pretentious, cabaret is fun, cabaret is sophisticated, and the line-up at this year Pen Cabaret was impressive – half of them had won McArthur genius grants! One of the participants, Sebastian Horsley couldn’t even make it to New York, as the US immigration services refused him a visa on ground of “moral turpitude” on account of his dandyish and debauched life. So we didn’t get to see and hear him “recount his personal crucifixion or other hilarious episodes from his new memoir Dandy in the Underworld.” The other European performers who did make it to Webster Hall... | | | | | | | Monday, April 14, 2008 9:39PM | | | | hay or hey | life in the city | Tags: writing, life, writer's life, dreaming, sadi ranson-polizzotti, pen america, tant mieux, blog, april, 2008,
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It's still too cold for me to wear one of my wife-of-a-chicken-farmer dresses. That is lost on you, no doubt, for what does the wife of a chicken farmer wear? Probably nothing at all like I imagine myself to be should I run away and start a chicken farm with the man that I love and yet I tell myself one day, one day, I will do this. We will simply take off and go to somewhere in Sicily and start a small no-kill chicken farm where the chickens can run around free-range and we will simply sell the eggs and live a poor but sated life. We will love. We will have time for our writing, our editing, our... | | | | | |
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