Exhibition Catalogue, SFMOMA: Jim Goldberg’s “Raised By Wolves,” Photographs of Seattle’s Street Children (1995)
A Parent of a Runaway, Quoted in the “Raised by Wolves” Exhibition Catalogue
#amreading: Sunday, 2 July 2017
July 2, 2017 at 5:05 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sundays, Traveling)
Tags: art, California, causes, exhibits, history, Literary Magazines, memoir, nonfiction, photography, reading lists, San Francisco
#amreading: Saturday, 1 July 2017
July 2, 2017 at 3:34 am (Books, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Plays, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: indulgences, memoir, reading lists, Saturday, Shakespeare, summer
FAMILY: by Anna Moi for Air France Magazine
May 22, 2017 at 8:14 am (Books, Family, Memoirs, Women Writers)
Tags: history, memoir, memories, Mondays, South-East Asia, Vietnam, Vietnam War
Early 1960s. The “war” was the Vietnam War, which pitted the North, where Moi’s parents were from, against the South, to where they fled:
How long does it take for a mother to read Alone in the World and The Story of Perrine to her child? My mother read to me almost every evening, because my parents went out only three or four times a year, and never had guests. It was wartime, but that doesn’t explain it — war had only just begun and nobody imagined at the time that it would last some 15 years and that we’d face shortages of everything, especially freedom, the basic freedom to move around as we chose.
This sense of frugality was something my parents were born with, just as others live with a heart murmur or an irregular heartbeat. It was the region of their birth, the North, that had triggered this simmering anxiety.
At bedtime, my mother would decide on a number of pages, but I would beg her to carry on, and she was always happy to continue the story of Rémi the abandoned child or of Perrine Paindavoine, an orphan searching for her family . . . From one episode to the next, in those days before TV series, I traveled from one family to another, and from town to town, in the comfort of knowing I would fall asleep sated with emotions.
IN COLD BLOOD, p. 150
December 25, 2016 at 7:55 am (Books, Conversations, Recommended, Sundays)
Tags: crime, memoir, nonfiction, reading lists, Sundays, Truman Capote
Self is full speed ahead on this book.
The excerpt below is about Alvin Dewey, lead detective on the Clutter murders.
He’s stepped into a coffee shop and gets heckled:
“I got a houseful of women who won’t go to the bathroom alone.”
Dewey had become accustomed to this brand of abuse; it was a routine part of his existence. He swallowed the second cup of coffee, smiled.
“Hell, I’m not cracking jokes. I mean it. Why don’t you arrest somebody? That’s what you ‘re paid for.”
“Hush your meanness,” said Mrs. Hartman. “We’re all in the same boat. Alvin’s doing as good as he can.”
The ranch hand waited until his quarry had reached the door, then fired a farewell volley: “If you ever run for sheriff again, just forget my vote, because you ain’t gonna get it.”
Self teaches memoir writing. The trickiest part of it is that remembered dialogue is far from accurate.
But, in this case, the “remembered dialogue” is by a third party who wasn’t even there.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Mourning for Isotope, edited by Christopher Cokinos
September 13, 2016 at 7:52 am (Artists and Writers, Links, Philippine History, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: essay, experimental, Literary Magazines, memoir, The Philippines, TransGenre
Filipinos once had an ancient written language. If I were to show you what the marks look like on a piece of paper,they would look like a series of waves. Like the eye of the Pharaoh I saw in my old high school history books.
— from self’s hybrid essay/memoir/short story The Lost Language, published in Isotope
Isotope was a literary journal based in Utah State. When that university began to make steep budget cuts, the magazine lost the heart of its funding. In 2009, editor Chris Cokinos issued an appeal for support. Terrain.org posted it.
Alas, Isotope lost the fight. Self mourned. It was the only literary journal of its kind, combining science writing and creative writing, a place that joined physicists and playwrights, biologists and memoir writers, and created an exciting new kind of community.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Sentence of the Day: Basho
August 12, 2016 at 3:11 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Recommended, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: Japan, Japanese writers, memoir, poetry, reading lists, summer, travel, travel books
You’re floating in a sea of tranquil words. You’re lost in reading Basho:
In their ecstasy of a single night
Under the moon of summer.
Nothing can be more tranquil than a Basho haiku.
And then:
- That rugged mountain in the village of Sarashina is where the villagers in the remote past used to abandon their ageing mothers among the rocks.
Bam! It’s like a sudden blow to the head. You never see it coming.
“A Visit to Sarashina Village” is in Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which self started reading about a week ago and which is going to be — self can feel it — the defining reading experience of the summer, if not of the entire 2016. It is a very, very thin book, but self advances about a page a day.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
August 8, 2016 at 5:58 am (Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Places, Recommended, Sundays, Traveling)
Tags: Japan, Japanese writers, memoir, nonfiction, poetry, reading lists, travel
Basho left Edo in the spring of 1689 and travelled the great arc of the northern routes (Oshukaido and Hokurikudo) in six months, arriving in Ogaki in the autumn of 1689.
He got to the River Oi and wanted to cross but it had rained all day and the river was too swollen to allow it. He continued without crossing the river until he got to the “steep precipice of Sayo-no-nakayama”:
Half-asleep on horseback
I saw as if in a dream
A distant moon and a line of smoke
For the morning tea.
Self was mistaken about the entire work being written in haiku. Here’s a prose passage:
My head is clean shaven, and I have a string of beads in my hand. I am indeed dressed like a priest but priest I am not, for the dust of the world still clings to me.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers.
Stay tuned.
THE LONELY CITY: Another Chapter
August 4, 2016 at 3:33 am (Books, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: essay, memoir, New York, nonfiction, reading lists
I didn’t stay in Brooklyn long. The friend whose apartment I was staying in came back from L.A. and I moved to the green walk-up in the East Village. The change in habitat marked another phase of loneliness; a period in which speech became an increasingly perilous endeavour.
— Olivia Laing, “My Heart Opens to Your Voice,” Essay # 3 of The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
This is really a lovely book.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
WIP: Memoir-ish
June 24, 2016 at 5:08 am (Artists and Writers, Dearest Mum, Family, Pianos, Relatives, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: memoir
This is what I know of her past: She played in Carnegie Hall when she was just 14. I have the picture. It’s black and white, and in it my mother is round-faced, and her thick, curly black hair is held back by a hairband. Behind her, there is an orchestra.
To hear my dear departed aunt Terry tell it, my mother’s family took the train all the way across the country, starting in San Francisco. They wound up in Flushing. Self’s mother went to Curtis. She became classmates with the pianist Gary Graffman.
Honestly, self should do more with this story.
Stay tuned.
