A BLOCK IN TIME: Christiane Bird's latest

My friend Christiane Bird, a wonderful writer and intrepid traveler, has authored several classics, beginning with The Jazz and Blues Lover's Guide to the U.S. (first published in 1991, now in its third edition).

Next came Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran (2001) which begins thus:

"I went to Iran to flirt with my childhood. I went to Iran to court the unknown. I went to Iran to see the effects of the Islamic Revolution for myself."

She followed with another book on the Middle East, based on her travels in Kurdistan and research into the history and culture of the Kurdish people: A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistian (2004).

 Next, in 2010, came a fascinating popular history, The Sultan's Shadow: One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West.

 

I can't wait to read her latest, A Block in Time, which, in Chris's words, "tells the story of NYC through the prism of a single block and the lives of people who once lived and worked there. Among them: a freed slave, who was the first owner of the block; a Dutch family with ties to the pirate Captain Kidd; an abortionist rumored to have had an affair with a high-society man; and an arriviste who dared breach the social hierarchy of the Gilded Age."

 

The block in question is next to Madison Square Park: 23rd Street to 24th Street between Broadway/Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue. Tomorrow, Monday, March 21, she'll be reading close to that block: at Rizzoli's Bookstore, 1133 Broadway.  (I'll be there.)

 

Then on March 23, at 12:35 pm, she'll be doing a radio interview with Alison Stewart on WNYC. I'll try to catch that, too.

 

Yes, Karen Finley's back!

But then, she never left.

Brilliant, fearless, and deep, Karen Finley will forever be associated with a 1989 performance, We Keep Our Victims Ready, in which she applied chocolate to her bare torso, while speaking disturbing truths about sexual abuse and the claims of love that accompany it.

Outraged conservatives spearheaded the passage of a law mandating that NEA grants comply with "general standards of decency and respect for all the diverse beliefs and values of the American public," thereby leading the NEA to veto Finley's latest grant application, along with those of three other artists. The NEA Four, as they were called, sued the agency on the grounds that their First Amendment rights were being violated, won in the lower courts, but in 1998--after the Clinton administration elected to continue the appeal--lost in the Supreme Court.

Through the years since, Finley has continued speaking truth to power in performance and in print.
 
Her latest, Grabbing Pussy, is as timely and provocative as the title suggests.

You can catch her Sunday, August 5 and 12, at the Laurie Beechman Theatre at the West Bank Cafe, in New York City, an intimate space that's well-suited for her.

And on September 12, she'll be at the ISSUE Project Room, as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival.

She tours, too.

The wit and wisdom of George Eliot

Despite my best intentions, I've never got around to rereading Middlemarch, and I haven't read anything else by George Eliot in a very long time.  But at last, years after a former roommate raved about it, I'm deep into Daniel Deronda, her brilliant last novel.  Besides a gripping story and vivid characters, she supplies, on virtually every page, deep insights into the human condition, as relevant as ever to our times.

Here's how she begins Chapter 21:

"It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance?  Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.  Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations.  Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days' work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy 'Let there not be'--and the many-coloured creation is shriveled up in blackness.  Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon."


We must not let those about to run the show in our government this term "wax unbound."

Obsolete Weapons - a short story

One of my more experimental short stories, "Obsolete Weapons,"  has recently been published online and in a free e-book by Jet Fuel Review.  

It begins thus:

"How often has she wakened with just this sense of impending disaster, of needing to leave but not knowing how to go?"

To read more, visit:

http://www.jetfuelreview.com/previous-issues/issue-8-fall-2014/fiction/

Next on my list. . . .

It's taken a mere decade, but Norman Spinrad's He Walked Among Us, first published in France, is finally available in an English hardcover from Tor (for a while Spinrad offered it on his website as a download). Jim just finished it, and I've got it--can't wait.

For reviews and other information (including Spinrad's forthcoming work), see

http://www.sff.net/people/normanspinrad/

Disturbing words

From The Immortalization Commission (p. 235) by John Gray:

The end-result of scientific inquiry is to return humankind to its own intractable existence. Instead of enabling humans to improve their lot, science degrades the natural environment in which humans must live. Instead of enabling death to be overcome, it produces ever more powerful technologies of mass destruction. None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.

A Life-changing Panel

Over the years, I've felt that certain books, plays, movies, poems, works of art had changed my life. And it goes without saying that many people and places have.

But never would I have expected that a panel entitled EBooks: New Trend for a New Decade would have that power.

I'd learned about the panel some weeks earlier. In a list of its spring programs, the Center for Communication emailed this description:

As more readers turn to digital books, a variety platforms are emerging and with them, a new wave of opportunities. Find out how writers and publishers are embracing multimedia and repurposing content to create "enhanced reading" experiences - and learn about the skills you'll need to enter this brave new world of publishing.

I was ambivalent. As a writer needing to market her work, I'd been to a lot of panels on the brave new digital publishing world, addressing issues like whether self-published works are taken seriously, online marketing resources, and how much html writers need to know. Did I really need another one?

But this turned out to be not just another "how to" panel--but "why to"--not just about how publishing is changing but how our world changing--a truly visionary panel, which I wish my sci fi loving boyfriend could have witnessed.

I'm still thinking about what I heard there, and have finally resolved to join the Twittering throngs. And when I do, these are folks I will follow.

Here are a few quotes and paraphrases transcribed from my illegible notes that may at least convey the sense of what got said.

Richard Eoin Nash:

"The individual is a construct."

"The industrial revolution style model of production is over."

"If you get to choose to be an intermediary, you can choose what kind of intermediary you will be."

Reading more intimate than sex: Someone whispering in your ear for 15 hours.

Re: libraries: "Power is in the hands of those who can orchestrate demand."

Embracing community as a way of understanding the future of content.

"In a sense, books brought about the kind of society we have now."

How writers will make a living in the future: "The creation of unhackable experiences."

“minimal viable product” For many people the cell phone is the effective credit card.

"The genius of Twitter is that it allows you to see what people are talking about."

Bob Stein:

"The core competency of future publishing is the core competency of gaming now."

"World of Warcraft is fiction."

Individuals are going to be in groups based on collaborating. If we don't get there, it'll just be because we've done ourselves in.

“Everything we know about our daily life is about to change”

"We're too far ahead too make any money, but it's an interesting place."

"You can't move from a society based on the individual to a society based on groups without ditching capitalism."

"Writers are going to learn what musicians have learned: they're going to get paid to show up."

Matt Shatz:

"Download a 4-square app."

For further information about the useful free programs offered by the Center for Communication, see www.cencom.org

Next book by a friend I don't want to read

I don't expect Ron Rosenbaum's latest, How the End Begins, to be a fun read, though the author's brilliant wit will no doubt be in evidence now and again.

I do expect it to be profoundly, stomach churningly scary--given that it's an account by one of our finest journalists of the likely road to a nuclear war.

Not a book I want to read, but one I need to. Just hoping it leaves the reader not in total despair but with some insight into what we might do to get off the nuclear road before the end.

authors.simonandschuster.ca/Ron-Rosenbaum/47903494

Reading now. . .

It's taken a mere decade, but Norman Spinrad's He Walked Among Us, first published in France, is finally available in an English hardcover from Tor (for a while Spinrad offered it on his website as a download).

It's vivid and gripping, and keeping me awake way too many nights, and will likely haunt my dreams when I'm done with it.




For reviews and other information (including Spinrad's forthcoming work), see

http://www.sff.net/people/normanspinrad/

Can't Wait to Read . . .

The Sultan's Shadow, by Christiane Bird, the story of Sultan Said of Oman and his daughter Princess Salme, who would write the first known autobiography of an Arab woman--and of the nineteenth century East African slave trade.

For more information about the book, see the Salon review:

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/06/27/shadow_of_the_sultan

or the author's website:

http://christianebird.com/

The Blessing Next to the Wound . . .

. . . a memoir by Hector Aristizabal, co-authored by my friend Diane Lefer, is aptly subtitled "a Story of Art, Activision, and Transformation."

Exiled from his native Colombia, where he survived torture, Aristizabal now lives in this country. Trained as an actor, he works for social justice, often in collaboration with Lefer, who will be discussing their book this Wednesday at the radical bookstore and cafe Bluestockings, 172 Allen St., at 7 pm.

Lefer also writes wonderful plays and short stories. For information about her work, see

http://www.dianelefer.weebly.com

And for more information about The Blessing Next to the Wound, go to

http://www.lanternbooks.com/detail.html?session=f79da872f32a1be8f6672dd7f974c43a&id=9781590561713

Janet Bode

Janet Bode's been gone for nearly 10 years, but she's alive as ever in my heart. I can still hear her voice on the phone, which would lift my spirits whatever either of us was going through. Janet went through a lot, including a losing struggle with breast cancer and, long before I knew her, surviving a brutal gang rape.

Besides her influence on friends, Janet left an extraordinary body of work--at least 14 nonfiction books for young adults on some difficult subjects, like teen pregnancy, romantic troubles, divorce, eating disorders, and teens in prison. The heart of each book is direct quotes from the hundreds of teens she interviewed all over the country.

Though she had no children herself, Janet had enormous empathy for teenagers and connected with them deeply. I'm guessing that her books may have helped save some of their readers' lives.

Here are the titles of Janet's books for young adults that I know about: Beating the Odds: Stories of Unexpected Achievers; The Colors of Freedom: Immigrant Stories; Food Fight: A Guide to Eating Disorders; For Better or Worse: a Guide to Surviving Divorce; Hard Time: a Real Life Look at Juvenile Crime and Violence; Heartbreak and Roses: Real Life Stories of Troubled Love; Kids Having Kids; Kids Still Having Kids; New Kids in Town: Oral Histories of Immigrant Teens; New Kids in Town: Oral Histories of Immigrant Teens; Rape: Preventing It; Coping with the Legal, Medical and Emotional Aftermath; Truce: Ending the Sibling War; Trust & Betrayal; The Voices of Rape. Some of them are illustrated with cartoons by her partner, Stan Mack.

For adults, Janet wrote Fighting Back: How to Cope with the Medical, Emotional, and Legal Consequences of Rape; and View from Another Closet: Exploring Bisexuality in Women.

Today, Bastille Day, was Janet's birthday.

A Must Read (and Must See to be?)

After finishing Patricia Volk's delightful novel "To My Dearest Friends" late last night, I'm still basking in the afterglow, and wondering if a film version is in the works. Volk's vivid and memorable characters would provide meaty roles for some great actresses--Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Stockard Channing, perhaps. If Volk doesn't want to do the adaptation herself, I'd be glad to take it on.