Saturday Morning, Olympics Day 2

August 9, 2008 at 7:33 pm (Home, Opportunities, Other Sites of Interest, Publishers, Quotes, Surprises)
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Hubby and self slept past 1 a.m. last night, giddy from watching the Olympic opening ceremonies which, in self’s humble opinion, were the most spectacularly beautiful opening ceremonies self had ever seen, worthy of a Chinese costume epic by Zhang Yimou. She didn’t recognize Li Ning, her crush of 24 years ago, (pardon for sounding a bit hyperbolic, dear blog readers) and the Philippine delegation looked cool in their sky-blue barongs (but why no women athletes?), and it was fun to see Rafael Nadal grinning like a schoolboy, and ditto for Jason Kidd and all the other highly paid athletes who seemed thrilled, simply thrilled to be part of the parade. George Bush looked relaxed; Putin did not crack a smile when the U.S. delegation marched past him. Sarkozy did not have gorgeous Carla by his side, and when self saw the Russian delegation she couldn’t help thinking about Georgia, and about her Georgian student at xxxx community college, Joe D, who’d written so eloquently about the bloody decade he’d just lived through and which he hoped (Alas!) would be the last violent decade for his country.

This morning, self keeps glancing at her watch. Realizes she is keeping time, wondering when son and Sean will arrive at the Hotel Domus Aurelia. The hotel staff were so nice, they e-mailed son detailed instructions how to get there from Ciampino Airport. (Estimated time from Termini to the hotel: around 75 minutes)

Then, self picks up a copy of Calyx to relax, and she remembers another student, Gillian, who self would meet for coffee about every other month, right here in Peet’s on Broadway. When they last met, Gillian imparted the sad news that she was shortly to go home to Oregon. Her parents wouldn’t continue to fund her living in San Francisco unless she got a job or enrolled in a regular four-year college. Self had one of those brainstorms that occur to her oh, about once every six months.

“Work for Calyx!” self told Gillian.

Gillian’s eyes lit up.

That same day, self e-mailed Beverly McFarland. The next day, Beverly e-mailed Gillian. And, last week, self received a happy e-mail from Gillian: it was all settled, she’d be interning for Calyx for the rest of the summer. Super!!! Self wrote Gillian: “You and Calyx are a good fit.”

Now, starting from the back of the Calyx journal (which is a habit self started years, perhaps even decades, ago), she sees a most interesting ad for:

CELEBRATION RECORDINGS

invites you to visit the website

celebration1.org

for beautiful Classical piano CDs

including exquisite music
by women composers
to accompany
your reading of
Calyx

lovely as gifts with conscience

your check is written
directly to
grass-roots
not-for-profit organizations
addressing global issues

Self must investigate! Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Congratulations to Aimee, Wins Pushcart

July 6, 2008 at 3:31 pm (Publishers, Voices, Writing)
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Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poem, “Love in the Orangery,” will be published in the 2009 edition of the Pushcart Prize anthology. The poem was first published in the Fall 2006 issue of Third Coast.

Here’s her bio from the Third Coast website:

  • Nezhukumatathil is the author of At the Drive-In Volcano (2007). Her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized and have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Third Coast, FIELD, Mid-American Review, and Tin House. She is an associate professor of English at State University of New York-Fredonia.
All hail, Aimee !!!

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Call for Submissions: “Finding God” Anthology (Updated 19 March 2008)

March 14, 2008 at 9:11 pm (Opportunities, Publishers, Quotes, Voices, Writing)

This is the updated call for submissions of creative nonfiction for an anthology tentatively titled, FINDING GOD. The book will be co-edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard and Marily Ysip Orosa and published in the Philippines by Anvil. Contributors will receive copies of the book as compensation for the use of their work.

The manuscript should be approximately 10 pages long, typed, double-spaced (approximately 2,500 words) and should include your contact information on the first page. This can be emailed to cbrainard@gmail.com or to marilyo@yahoo.com.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Nine Weeks To Read “The Big Wave”

March 9, 2008 at 6:17 am (Books, Home, Places, Publishers, Quotes, Son, Surprises, Writing)

When self was a little girl, one of her favorite books was Pearl S. Buck’s The Big Wave.

Last Christmas, when son gave her the book of Hokusai prints illustrating the classic Japanese anthology, The One Hundred Poets, she remembered, first, the Hokusai print (which is not in the anthology, but she could picture it very clearly), and then the story.

Soon after the start of the New Year, self went to her local library and looked up the book. She found that there was one copy available, but it had to be requested from another library. Self put in a request, and sometime after the first week of January, the book came. Self checked it out on January 9.

Since January 9, self has read one or two paragraphs at a time. It’s a strange experience: she doesn’t remember anything about the story! And the language seems so simple. And, when she was small, she didn’t know the author was an American woman. Now, she knows that the author is Pearl S. Buck. Now that self knows this, she reads the story differently.

So, nine weeks have flown by. The book is now due on Monday. She can’t renew it one more time, as she’s reached the two-renewal limit. But, luckily, the book is quite short. So, this evening, self sits down at her son’s desk (his room is becoming her study now, instead of the little closet space she had before) and decides to try to read it in its entirety.

The story is simple, very simple. But there is always this threat, underlying the simplicity of the language. On p. 22, self reads:

On days when the sky was bright and the winds mild, the ocean lay so calm and blue that it was hard to believe that it could be cruel and angry. Yet even Kino never quite forgot that under the warm blue surface the water was cold and green. When the sun shone the deep water was still. But when the deep water moved and heaved and stirred, ah, then Kino was glad that his father was a farmer and not a fisherman.

And yet, one day, it was the earth that brought the big wave. Deep under the deepest part of the ocean, miles under the still green waters, fires raged in the heart of the earth. The icy cold of the water could not chill those fires. Rocks were melted and boiled under the crust of the ocean’s bed, under the weight of the water, but they could not break through. At last the steam grew so strong that it forced its way through to the mouth of the volcano. That day, as he helped his father plant turnips, Kino saw the sky overcast halfway to the zenith.

“Look, Father!” he cried. “The volcano is burning again!”

Here, finally, is the story self remembers, dear blog readers! Stay tuned.

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Philippine Speculative Fiction, v. III: Story # 1

March 1, 2008 at 4:50 pm (Books, Places, Publishers, Quotes, Surprises, Voices, Writing)

Below is an excerpt from a story by Apol Lejano-Massebieu (What an exceedingly cool name — !!): “Pedro Diyego’s Homecoming.” It’s the first story in Philippine Speculative Fiction III, edited by Dean Alfar and Nikki Alfar :

Pedro Diyego was born with wings on his feet. They grew from the bones in his ankles and spread out in a fan past his heel, plumes of brown flecked with white that made it impossible for him to don footwear.

His mother Mereditha tried to remove the feathers when Pedro was still a child. They were a family of some means, owning a decent-sized tract of land and their own rice mill, so that she didn’t think it was proper to have her only son going around barefoot like the farmers’ children. But how little Pedro shrieked and cried, as with eyebrow tweezers his mother yanked! And he did it for so long and so loudly that the chickens in their wooden coop in the backyard stopped laying eggs for at least a week.

Now perhaps in keeping with popular ideas of fairies and angels, you would expect that a child born with wings be delicate. Then you would be disappointed looking at Pedro. He was what was euphemistically called a big-boned child.

Part of it had to do with genes, as Pedro did have a fair amount of resemblance to his father, a beefy Batangueño; but it has to be admitted that much of the fat that rolled around his belly got there by way of his mouth.

You see, delicate did not also apply to Pedro’s nature. He wasn’t a quiet, introspective kind of child. On the contrary, he had such zest for life! He played rough and tumble. He sang with gusto even if he rarely knew the lyrics and was often out of tune. He laughed in that head-thrown-back, openmouthed manner you only ever see in the very confident.

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Coming Soon To a Bookstore Near You

March 1, 2008 at 6:09 am (Books, Places, Publishers, Quotes, Voices)

Emily Lawsin (contributor to Going Home to a Landscape) sent self this info a few days ago (My bad, Emily, for only posting now. Wishing you and your husband the best success with the book!):

Subject: The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black & Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles

by Scott Kurashige

Professor Kurashige teaches U.S. history, Asian American studies, & African American studies at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an alumnus of the UCLA Department of History PhD program & Asian American Studies Master of Arts program.

In The Shifting Grounds of Race, Scott Kurashige highlights the role African Americans and Japanese Americans played in the social and political struggles that remade twentieth-century Los Angeles. Linking paradigmatic events like Japanese American internment and the Black civil rights movement, Kurashige explores the multiethnic dimensions of segregation and integration. Racism and sprawl shaped the dominant image of Los Angeles as a “white city.” But they simultaneously fostered a shared oppositional consciousness among Black and Japanese Americans living as neighbors within diverse urban communities.

Kurashige demonstrates why African Americans and Japanese Americans joined forces in the battle against discrimination and why the trajectories of the two groups diverged. Connecting local developments to national and international concerns, he reveals how critical shifts in postwar politics were shaped by a multiracial discourse that promoted the acceptance of Japanese Americans as a “model minority” while binding African Americans to the social ills underlying the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Multicultural Los Angeles ultimately encompassed both the new prosperity arising from transpacific commerce and the enduring problem of race and class divisions. This book adds new depth and complexity to our understanding of the “urban crisis” and offers a window into America’s multiethnic future.

* * * *

Dear Pamilya/Family & Kaibigans/Friends,

Scott’s book is finally out! We will be in Southern California for our “Spring” Break and his book signings, so if you’re in the area, we hope to see you:

Saturday, March 1, 2PM @ Southern California Library
6120 S. Vermont Avenue (near Slauson)
http://www.socallib.org/

Please tell anyone else who might be interested too.

Here’s a link to Scott’s book on the Princeton Press website, where you can download the Introduction:

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8525.html

Maraming Salamat/Doomo Arigato/Mahalo/Many Thanks
for all your support in making this happen.

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End of February (2008) Status Report

February 29, 2008 at 3:23 pm (Books, Dogs, Movies, Pleasures of Travel, Publishers, Quotes, Writing)

Today is the 29th of February. Which means it is a Leap Year. Which means — oh, never mind what it means, self! What matters is that today you are happy because:

    Apparently, you are no longer sick.
    You were able to end February by finally watching a movie in a theatre, as opposed to on the couch at home: “Definitely, Maybe.” (And the movie was even good! And Ryan Reynolds was cute!)
    You watched Tilda Swinton win an Oscar (for “Michael Clayton”).
    You were able to close out the month by consuming a Beard Papa chocolate eclair (yesterday).
    This week you mailed out an application for a fellowship (which, if you are successful, will allow you to attend a writing conference in the deep south, a place you’ve always felt the utmost affinity for, since that is the birthplace of Flannery O’Connor)
    Winter quarter at xxxx community college will be over in less than a month.

Yesterday, too, self returned to library Birth of the Chess Queen, an exceedingly interesting book that she was able to breeze through in less than a day (while cooking, gardening, chasing Gracie, watching TV, reading The Economist, grading student papers, etc etc) Now, self is reading a book called The Mapmaker’s Wife, about a real woman, Isabel Grameson, who in 1769 decided to cross the Andes (She lived in Peru) and traverse the Amazon in order to re-join her husband, a Frenchman from whom she had been separated for 20 years. Not only was this woman about to embark on a journey of more than 3,000 miles, a trip that most people estimated would take her at least six months, but she had determined to do it in style: that is, she had included in her luggage “fancy dresses, skirts, shawls, gold-buckled shoes, and lace-trimmed underwear,” all of which (in addition to food and other supplies) required the services of 31 porters and almost as many mules.

Can anyone say “Werner Herzog”? Stay tuned, dear blog reader, stay tuned.

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Finished Krakauer’s Mormon History; Now for the Chess Queen

February 27, 2008 at 1:17 am (Books, Places, Publishers, Surprises, Writers and Others)

Spent the afternoon running errands around Redwood City. Weather: gorgeous (if only self could get rid of that pesky cough).

Self went to the library and discovered that the book she was looking for, The Bookseller of Kabul — book by a Norwegian writer who lived with a kindly bookseller for four months, then wrote a book that showed that the bookseller was actually a petty tyrant at home, which led the bookseller to cry foul — was only available in the libraries of Burlingame and Belmont, both several miles to the north. Self made a mental note to wend down there this weekend.

Self arrives home and switches on the TV (to A & E’s “American Justice”) just in time to hear the following:

“Mr. xxxxx was convicted of the murder of his wife, which was of small comfort to his sons.” Then, one of the sons is shown being interviewed. “The point is,” the boy is saying, “Nothing’s going to bring my mom back. So I’m not going to waste my time trying to figure out whether my dad killed her or not. He’s still my father and, guilty or not, I’m still going to love him.”

Which quote just about broke self’s heart.

Self finished reading Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven a few hours ago. She was surprised when she realized that it had taken her just five days to read the entire book (about 340 pages). For it seemed to her that she lived each moment with such intensity. What a strange and bloody history the Mormons had! They were persecuted, jeered at, abused, and they in turn persecuted, jeered at, and abused others.

Self learned that there is a thriving Mormon community in Corvallis, Oregon, which also happens to be the home of the nation’s oldest feminist press and the publisher of self’s first book, Calyx.

Self learned much about the Mormons she had never known before, such as the strictures against smoking, drinking, etc etc; the belief in the golden tablets revealed to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni, and other fascinating topics. No one could write a novel that was as fascinating as the truth of the visions, the plural marriages, the betrayals, the endurance, the eventual triumphs.

Now self is starting Marilyn Yalom’s Birth of the Chess Queen. (First she was on a novel kick; now she’s on a non-fiction kick). Yalom, a Stanford feminist scholar, is the wife of Irwin Yalom, whose tales of psychiatry, Love’s Executioner, self lugged all the way to Palawan in 2006, and finished reading there, in a tiny hotel in Puerto Prinsesa (across the street from famed seafood restaurant Ka Louie’s) whose airconditioned rooms cost — are you ready for this, dear blog readers? — exactly $12/night.

Self is amazed to discover from the Acknowledgements that Ms. Yalom has the same agent as Amy Tan: Sandra Dijkstra. And it is indeed very heartwarming to learn that the Yaloms’ son was instrumental in “the developmental stages of the book,” as well as during the careful editing of the final version. Self dreams of the day when she can write, in an Acknowledgement to one of her own books: “A was extremely helpful in providing material for the stories herein. In fact, all of them are taken from his life. Many thanks, son, for being alive and for providing your mother with so much material for her literary work.” Something like that.

Among Ms. Yalom’s other books are the following exceedingly interesting titles:

    A History of the Wife
    A History of the Breast
    Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory
    Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness

And now, self is extremely desirous to begin Marilyn Yalom’s book. Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Brain Cloud, Saturday, 23 February 08: Waiting for the Rain, Coughing Up a Storm, Condé Nast Traveler on American Food

February 23, 2008 at 4:45 pm (Brain Cloud, Food and Drink, Home, Insomnia, Publishers, Quotes, Some Interesting Articles, Surprises)

Ah, the rain, the rain, the rain. Weather reports say to expect it at any moment (in fact, it was supposed to have arrived already, while we slept). All day yesterday, TV weathermen directed viewers’ attention to an ominous green glob, moving inexorably toward the coast of California. Self, an extremely light sleeper, expected to be awakened in the middle of the night with the first drops.

But, no! Sometimes the heavens are merciful! Self was awakened, not by rain, but by sound of Gracie whimpering piteously to be fed, at 7 a.m. Which meant that self probably had approximately five hours sleep (in spite of staying up late listening to hubby converse with his mother on his new toy, webcam) — HALLELUJAH!

Self still coughing up a storm, however, which is extremely detrimental to her equanimity, not to mention her vanity (nose is as red as Rudolph’s) Still, self is determined to head to Costco at some point, to pick up a box of Duraflame logs (for if there’s no power tonight, at least she will have a fire)

In the meantime, self multi-tasking by watching “Dog Whisperer” and reading an extremely interesting article by Alan Richman in November 2007 Condé Nast Traveler, an article entitled “The Great American Food Odyssey.” Here is how it begins:

Before we were able to pay attention to food, Americans had to perfect democracy, settle the West, free the slaves, crush the Nazis, and fight the commies. Meanwhile, we ate whatever was at hand. We stewed squirrels. We turned turtles into soup. Food was secondary. Oh, we had raw materials aplenty: fields of waving grain, herds of juicy protein, oceans of non-farmed fish. We just didn’t know what to do with it all.

Our first uniquely American restaurants appeared in the fifties and sixties. We called them Polynesian, even though none of us knew where Polynesia was or what Polynesians ate. We concocted Sesame Chicken Aku-Aku and Shrimp Bongo-Bongo. It was our first date food. In the seventies, food started to change, courtesy of a place called California — home to Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck, fresh vegetables and wood-grilled meats.

Once we discovered how much fun it was to eat, there was no stopping us. We freed chickens from their pens — and ate them! We let pasta get cold — on purpose! We shunned preservatives that prevented spoilage — and called it health food!

Soon we had a culinary tradition all our own. We named it New American cuisine (although to be honest, there never was an Old American cuisine).

Mr. Richman then proceeds to list all the dishes that make up this new, elevated American cuisine, such dishes as Chez Panisse’s famous Baked Sonoma Goat Cheese with Garden Lettuces (When was the last time self dropped by Chez Panisse? Probably over a decade ago); Barbecue Pork Sandwich from North Carolina (Self would love to try); Beef Cheek Ravioli (admittedly, sounds rather eeeeuuw) courtesy of Mario Batali’s Babbo; Blackened Redfish courtesy of K-Paul Prudhomme; Breast of Pork courtesy of Daniel Boulud; and Baltimore crab cakes.

And here is a list of desserts that Richman classifies as typically American:

Apple Brown Betty — “a triumph of colonial American cooking”
Devil’s Food Cake — “Chocolate. Need we say more?”
Hot Fudge Sundae — “Perfection in a tulip-shaped glass”
Pecan Pie — Hubby’s favorite, but self never could get into the “Karo syrup, nuts, and way too much whipped cream” thing
Strawberry Shortcake — “The beauty queen of desserts”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Friday Afternoon, Home at Last!

February 22, 2008 at 11:13 pm (Conversations, Opportunities, Places, Publishers, Surprises, Voices)

Self has had quite an eventful day, dear blog readers.

First, the breakfast meeting she was supposed to have last Wednesday with Alka the film-maker got postponed to this morning, so at 8:45 AM, self hurried out of the house, giving hubby a brief wave (He was in his car, warming up his engine, but was too busy looking at his odometer or something to notice self hurtling by in her pink tweed coat), and met Alka at Chocolate Mousse. Read the rest of this entry »

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