MEMBER BLOG TAG: ford
| Saturday, May 1, 2010 11:30AM | | | | A Conversation In Excelsis | Tags: Shirley Hazzard, Richard Ford, Annabel Davis-Goff, writing, editing, William Maxwell, The New Yorker, novels, poetry, Bernard Schwartz, Unterberg Poetry Center
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At the 92nd Street YM-YWHA on Friday, the novelist and essayist Shirley Hazzard engaged the novelist Richard Ford in a conversation about reading and writing that was so warm, and literate, and amusing, and inspiring that it provoked something I don’t often encounter at literary events: a standing ovation. At her entrance, Ms Hazzard supported herself with a cane, but as she limped nobly to her chair, she brought us into her fold. “Excuse me,” she said, turning our way before she was even seated. “I’ve got a game leg.” That is, she was bonding with her audience at 60 m.p.h., even before Mr. Ford—who walked out with the assured gait of Clint Eastwood—could get a word in edgewise. Now, Mr. Ford is... | | | | | | | Saturday, May 1, 2010 8:46AM | | | | The Big Poetry Reading at the BPC | Tags: Nadja Marie Aidt, Barry Gifford, Pavel Nastin, walter hugo mãe
| | | The exhilarating reading Friday night brought together four accomplished poets, three of whose works are difficult to find in English. Nadja Marie Aidt, of Denmark and Greenland, joined valter hugo mãe from Portugal, the American Barry Gifford and Pavel Nastin, from Russia. In the classic venue of the Bowery Poetry Club - brick walls, scarred black-painted stage, club banner - and surrounded by coffee house ambiance, we could have been in Copenhagen, San Francisco, Moscow or Lisbon.
After the bossy announcer (also classic) forced a few cheers from the audience, Nadja Aidt took the stage. We were instantly carried into the world of people who care about poetry. Intimate and vulnerable, Aidt is a poet of exile, with far-ranging interests. A poem taking us... | | | | | | | Friday, April 30, 2010 7:12AM | | | | PEN World Voices Adaptation | Tags: PEN World Voices, Adaptation, Film, Prose, Djian, Toussaint, Gifford, Price
| | | | When you write a book, says Francine Prose, and you get a review, there's always that second or third paragraph where they give the plot summary. And you read it and say, How did anyone ever think this is what the book was about? So when a movie is made from your novel, it's like seeing that paragraph blown up really big.
There are five novelists on the stage, all with experience of having books turned into films.
When I wrote the book that became "Betty Blue," says Philippe Djian, I wanted to write about a kid who scribbles away in his corner, who fills notebook after notebook wityh his writing, and who feels no need to take it any further. Writing is enough for him. But... | | | | | | | Tuesday, May 5, 2009 7:38PM | | | | Richard Ford, Nam Le Conversation | Tags: Richard Ford, Nam Le, Bomb Magazine, World Voices Festival, PEN/Faulkner Award, PEN/Bernard Malamud Award, Pulitzer, National Book Critics Circle
| | | | Sooner or later, a guy writing short stories in English is going to have to come up against Richard Ford, whose work from Rock Springs to A Multitude of Sins has proven him to be a master of the form, hence his 2001 PEN/Malamud award for excellence in short fiction. (Not to mention Ford’s novel Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner award, and his novel The Lay of the Land, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction.) For Nam Le, who was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia and completed Iowa’s notorious MFA program, that moment came Sunday afternoon at the | | | | | | | Friday, October 12, 2007 6:16PM | | | | Re-thinking Vietnam | Tags: Vietnam, died in vain, War Atrocity Museum, Saigon, Berlin Airlift, Eisenhower, Truman, US, UN, Korean War, Kennedy, Laos, southeast asia, SEATO. ASEAN, nuclear war, communists, communism, Kruschev, Westmoreland, Nixon, China, Brezhnev, Cold War, Ford, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, CIA, Team B, Soviets, Arms Control, Reagan, Iran/Contra, arms race, Iron Curtain, San Antonio Express-News
| | | | April is the pucker factor for Vietnam Veterans. Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army on April 30. Every anniversary Vietnam vets are told again that their service, suffering and sacrifice was for nothing, that their comrades died in vain.
In 1989, the War Atrocity Museum in the city still called Saigon displayed the photograph of the arch war criminal, Dwight Eisenhower. The Vietnamese consider him the primary villain because he did not sign the Peace Accord between France and Vietnam but signed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) agreement committing the US to defend South Vietnam. More foreign troops, other than US, fought in Vietnam under the SEATO Treaty than fought in Korea under the UN flag or in the Coalition... | | | | | |
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