Archive for Literature
Federman Frenzy
Federman Frenzy, available as an open source web publication.
The volume presents four scholarly articles, and as indicated on the poster (make sure to enlarge it so that you can see the table of contents to begin with), it also offers readers a special treat in the form of unpublished texts by Federman. The book Federman Frenzy: the ‘cult’ in culture, the ‘me’ in memory, the ‘he’ in history - encounters with Raymond Federman is published as a web publication by Research News, Dept. of Language and Culture, Aalborg University.
America
“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
H/T the Literary Outpost.
This is Ginsberg reciting his poem but I don’t know why the word order is changed from the original. I’m sure Bent could help us with this.
I think this re-mix is fantastic. I’ve emailed the creator of the video to ask her/him about the music and video that was chosen. I love how Ginsberg is adopted and recreated as contemporary political and social commentary.
UPDATE: Here’s the reply I received from the video’s author.
The project had more to do with American history (1932-62) than Ginsberg himself or the Beat movement. It accompanied an essay about how we got from the New Deal to the Communist witch hunts and Cuban Missile Crisis.The music is from Angelo Badalamenti and the Prague Philharmonic. The reading is from a Library of Congress recording from San Fransisco in 1959. The video is public footage from news reels from the above period and my own archive of family home movies from the Fifties and early Sixties.
I suppose the intention is to project how the population’s own divided feelings about the national identity reflect Ginsberg’s confused feelings about his own identity as American.
Madeleine L’Engle, Author of "A Wrinkle in Time," Dies at 88
“A Wrinkle in Time” was one of my favorite books as a young boy. It’s been years since I’ve thought about the book, almost forgoten it completely until L’Engle’s death comes through the news wires. I’m ordering a copy now for my son. Check out the NY Times piece above. NPR has an entertaining interview with astronaut Janice Voss about the impact of L’Engle’s book here.
Dreaming in Cuban
Dreaming in Cuban: An Historical Perspective
by Dorte Rasmussen
In Christina García’s Dreaming in Cuban from 1992, we learn about and experience the history and culture of Cuba from both inside and outside the Caribbean island. Three generations of women dominate this magically told story of a family divided by the political, social and geographical split, caused by the communist revolution in Cuba. García brilliantly intertwines the factual and historical aspect of Cuba with her own fictional and magical story of the woman, making Cuba an active and important character in the story, by using the history events as time reference to tell the story of the women.
The US Muslim Punk Scene
The Taqwacores - a novel about a fictitious Muslim punk scene in the US - has spawned an actual movement that is being driven forward by young Muslims worldwide.
Richard Powers tribute to Melville
“This whale is pain, and searing cold. Bursts of fact his skin tells him. Planted in this flat prairie, dumped by a wave that went out too fast. Great jaws bigger than a garage flap on the ground, sounding. Every cry from the cavern throat shakes walls and breaks windows. Far away, blocks down – the stranded beast’s tail flaps. Hemmed in by houses, pinned by this instant low tide.
Miles of air above press down so hard the whale can’t breathe. Can’t lift his own lungs. Dying in dried ocean, smothered underneath the thing it now must inhale. Largest living thing, almost God, stretched out flat, muscles beaten. Only his heart, as big as the courthouse, keeps pounding.
He wants death, if he wants anything. But death rolls away with the retreating water. His breathing is an earthquake. The whale gasps and rolls, crushing lives underneath it, as it is crushed by air. Storms rage in its head. Spears and cables drape down his sides. His skin peels off in sheets of blubber.”
~ from The Echo Maker
Making Echos
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
by the false azure of the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff — and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!”
~ from Pale Fire
Here is the Fresh Air interview I mentioned on Monday in which Powers discusses among other things, creating the Echo Maker via computer aided voice recognition software and spending a one year self-imposed exile from speaking.
These are the links Theresa provided for the Richard Power interviews here and here, and the NY Times’ review here.
Here are the links to the books Fabian recommended for those interested in neurology, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology.
~António Damásio, Descartes’ Error
~Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Took His Wife for a Hat
Also, the BBC has a fairly decent article on synaesthesia, “Why some see colours in numbers.”
This is a video segment from 60 Minutes about Daniel Tammet, known as the Brain Man, whose extraordinary memory is related to the way he “sees” numbers as colors, shapes, and textures. He says he “sees” landscapes. In this sense, we might say his brain creates a mental map using symbols much like the cranes map out their flight plans.
I seem to always search out multiple mediums as a means of adding texture to my own experiences in our literary discussions. Perhaps I myself am just a post-modern product like the characters in our stories. “Memento” is a sort of neo film noir psychological thriller in which the main character suffers from acute short-term memory loss. If film can be post-structural, this one surely is.
And finally, Jean Baudrillard, the philosopher and sociologist most famous for his theories on the hyper-reality(the simulated realm that is “more real than the real”) of which we are all products, died on March 6th.
“How is this better than real Ping-Pong?” he asked tiny Jess. He genuinely wanted to know her answer. The same question haunted his work. What was it about the species that would save the symbol and discard the thing it stood for? His seven-year-old sighed. “Dad,” she told him, with that first hint of contempt for adulthood and all its trouble with the obvious. “It’s just cleaner.” The Echo Maker
“What I am, I don’t know. I am the simulacrum of myself.” Jean Baudrillard