Literary Pick (**)

Beloved

-Toni Morrison

Honor Spotlight

Maya Angelou

Born April 4, 1928-present

Writer, dancer, African-American activist. Born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou spent her difficult formative years moving back and forth between her mother's and grandmother's. At age eight, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend, who was subsequently killed by her uncles. The event caused the young girl to go mute for nearly six years, and her teens and early twenties were spent as a dancer, filled with isolation and experimentation.

At 16 she gave birth to a son, Guy, after which she toured Europe and Africa in the musical Porgy and Bess. On returning to New York City in the 1960s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and became involved in black activism. She then spent several years in Ghana as editor of African Review, where she began to take her life, her activism and her writing more seriously.

Maya Angelou's five-volume autobiography commenced with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1970. The memoirs chronicle different eras of her life and were met with critical and popular success. Later books include All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) and My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken and Me (1994). She has published several volumes of verse, including And Still I Rise (1987) and Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1995). Her volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die (1971), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1993, Angelou read 'On the Pulse of Morning' at Bill Clinton's Presidential inauguration, a poem written at his request. It was only the second time a poet had been asked to read at an inauguration, the first being Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. In 2006, Angelou agreed to host a weekly radio show on XM Satellite Radio's Oprah & Friends channel. She also teaches at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where she has a lifetime position as the Reynolds professor of American studies.

Drawing from her own life experiences, Angelou published Letter to My Daughter in 2008. She wrote the work for the daughter she never had, sharing anecdotes and offering advice. Well received, the book earned several honors, including a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Non-Fiction.

 -Biography.com

Literary Pick (***)

Amulet

-Roberto Bolaño

I finally understand why I continue reading Bolano's works although I have not loved all of his novels. The reason being is that he is the only writer up to date, whom I've had the pleasure of reading who is so diverse in his ideas. Sure, there's an underlying "style" to his work, but it's so subtle and humble. There are many authors I have enjoyed reading, yet, I'm almost always hesitant to read all of their works because I know I will have similar experiences, read the same ideas with slightly different twists. Sure, Bolano has this theme about writers and poets and the underground of Latin America, but he gives you new material all the time, even if it's not 100% gratifying, you can walk away appreciative for his work and what you've experienced. Bolano was someone who was very thoughtful and profound. You can tell by reading a few of his books, like Savage Detectives, 2666, and Last Evenings on Earth. There's something about his mind that is the real deal. When you read his books, you know you're reading a writers writer. 
Amulet is the story of a woman, Auxilio Lacouture, (the mother of Mexican poetry) who for 12 days hides in the restroom of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico City (UNAM) during the army's 1968 invasion. During her ordeal she recounts stories of the underground world of poets in seedy bars and neighborhoods. Not much is offered in terms of details of the actual invasion itself. It's really about Auxilio depending on her memory of these events to survive. I liked when she encountered (hallucinated) her guardian angel, and offered a list of prophecies. I also liked the reference to the Chilean Rugby team survivors of the Andes, since I have been so deeply inspired by their story of survival for so many years. Although I only give this book 3 stars, I still look forward to reading more Bolano. He has a knack and style I am deeply attracted to.

Photograph of the Day

Jackson Pollock with his dogs with Gyp and Ahab.

Quote of the Day

The meaning of life is that it ends.

-Franz Kafka

Literary Pick (****)

The Little Prince 

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A sweet and gentle children's story even adults can enjoy.

Literary Pick (**)

Herzog

-Saul Bellow

In this book we read about an intellectual who is dealing with marital issues and friendship betrayal, a man, Herzog, who although seems oblivious to the trivialities of an average persons day to day life, is quite neurotic about his own, and tends to over-think of the wrongs and trespasses that have been committed against him. So much so, that he writes unsent letters to all the people who he hasn't had the pleasure of giving a piece of his mind.

I often wondered if Herzog's cerebral endowment is what negatively affected all of his personal relationships in life, or if the people surrounding him are insecure of their own place in the world of the intellectual elite.. or perhaps he's simply delusional? I mean, in this book, everyone, according to Herzog, had brain envy. When he finally decides to mentally move on from beautiful, captivating, breath-taking, almost equally as intelligent but psychotic wife Madeleine, who apparently was having an affair with his close friend, Gerbach, he declares, "Enjoy her- rejoice in her, you will not reach me through her, however. I know you sought me in her flesh, but I am no longer there". Sure, let it be said that we're all aware of Herzog's mensa-like mind, but that is an incredible amount of self-pomp, if you ask me.

As a read, the book is pretty much clear and straightforward. I could see how many readers might enjoy it more than I did. One thing I did find refreshing about the story is how Herzog, in the end, seems to find his way and comes to terms with accepting what has happened to him. Very Eat, Pray, Love. To be honest, I thought he was going to shoot his brains out in the Berkshire house. That would've been a very interesting ending.

Photograph of the Day

Kurt Cobain

RIP

Dorothea Tanning

The artist Dorothea Tanning has died in New York aged 101. She was the last living member of the surrealist movement, whose circle she joined in 1940s Paris. In 1946, she married Max Ernst in a double wedding with the photographic artist Man Ray and Juliet Browner. Their marriage lasted until Ernst's death in 1976.

From her first picture, aged 15, of a nude woman with leaves for hair, Tanning's paintings, sculptures and drawings almost always depicted the female human form, usually in strange, dreamlike scenarios. By the 50s she had abandoned surrealism in favour of more abstract "prism paintings".

In 2002 she told Salon: "I guess I'll be called a surrealist forever, like a tattoo: D. Loves S. But please don't say I'm carrying the surrealist banner. The movement ended in the 50s and my own work had moved on so far by the 60s that being a called a surrealist today makes me feel like a fossil!"

Her work is in the collections of many galleries around the world including the Tate and MoMA in New York, and influenced artists including Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois.

Tanning found further acclaim late in life through her writing. Her first novel was published when she was 94, while her poetry featured in such eminent publications as the New Republic and the Paris Review. In 2001 she published a memoir of her long and action-packed life.

Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois, moving to New York in 1936, where she saw the MoMA show Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which persuaded her that there was a place for her work. She went to Paris in 1940, where she met Ernst two years later. She said proudly that he never called her "wife", adding "I'm very much against the arrangement of procreation, at least for humans. If I could have designed it, it would be a toss-up who gets pregnant, the man or woman."

As well as painting and sculpture, she designed sets for the legendary choreographer George Balanchine, and a house in the south of France for her and Ernst. Their circle of friends included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marcel Duchamp, Truman Capote and Dylan Thomas.

Though she concentrated on her writing in later years, her work continued to be shown in galleries, and is currently featured in an exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art called In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States.

Tanning would not have enjoyed the title, once describing the term "woman artist" as "disgusting". She also said: "Art has always been the raft on to which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now."

A statement from MoMA said: "We are saddened by the loss of two great artists today: Dorothea Tanning and Mike Kelley."


-The Guardian UK

RIP

Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-Winning Polish Poet, Dies at 88

Wislawa Szymborska, a gentle and reclusive Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Wednesday in Krakow, Poland. She was 88.

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Soren Andersson/Associated Press

Wislawa Szymborska with her Nobel Prize medal in 1996.

The cause was lung cancer, said David A. Goldfarb, the curator of literature and humanities at the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, a diplomatic mission of the Polish Embassy.

Ms. Szymborska (pronounced VEES-mah-vah shim-BOR-ska) had a relatively small body of work when she received the Nobel, the fifth Polish or Polish-born writer to have done so since the prize was created in 1901. Only about 200 of her poems had been published in periodicals and thin volumes over a half-century, and her lifetime total was something less than 400.

The Nobel announcement surprised Ms. Szymborska, who had lived an intensely private life. “She was kind of paralyzed by it,” said Clare Cavanagh, who, with Stanislaw Baranczak, translated much of Ms. Szymborska’s work into English.

“Her friends called it the ‘Nobel tragedy,’ ” Dr. Cavanagh, a professor of literature at Northwestern University, said in an interview on Wednesday. “It was a few years before she wrote another poem.”

Ms. Szymborska lived most of her life in modest conditions in the old university city of Krakow, working for the magazine Zycie Literackie (Literary Life). She published a thin volume of her verse every few years.

She was popular in Poland, which tends to make romantic heroes of poets, but she was little known abroad. Her poems were clear in topic and language, but her playfulness and tendency to invent words made her work hard to translate.

Much of her verse was contemplative, but she also addressed death, torture, war and, strikingly, Hitler, whose attack on Poland in 1939 started World War II in Europe. She depicted him as an innocent — “this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe” — being photographed on his first birthday.

Ms. Szymborska began writing in the Socialist Realist style. The first collection of what some have called her Stalinist period, “That’s What We Live For,” appeared in 1952, followed two years later by another ideological collection, “Questions Put to Myself.”

Years later she told the poet and critic Edward Hirsch: “When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn’t work, but I’ve never pretended it didn’t happen to me.

“At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.”

By 1957, she had renounced both Communism and her early poetry. Decades later, she was active in the Solidarity movement’s struggle against Poland’s Communist government. During a period of martial law, imposed in 1981, she published poems under a pseudonym in the underground press.

She insisted that her poetry was personal rather than political. “Of course, life crosses politics,” she said in an interview with The New York Times after winning the Nobel in 1996. “But my poems are strictly not political. They are more about people and life.”

Ms. Szymborska “looks at things from an angle you would never think of looking at for yourself in a million years,” Dr. Cavanagh said on the day of the Nobel announcement. She pointed to “one stunning poem that’s a eulogy.”

“It’s about the death of someone close to her that’s done from the point of view of the person’s cat,” she said.

That poem, “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” as translated by Dr. Cavanagh and Mr. Baranczak, opens:

Die — You can’t do that to a cat.

Since what can a cat do

in an empty apartment?

Climb the walls?

Rub up against the furniture?

Nothing seems different here,

but nothing is the same.

Nothing has been moved,

but there’s more space.

And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,

but they’re new ones.

The hand that puts fish on the saucer

has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start

at its usual time.

Something doesn’t happen

as it should. Someone was always, always here,

then suddenly disappeared

and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Wislawa Szymborska was born on July 2, 1923, near Poznan, in western Poland. When she was 8, her family moved to Krakow. During the Nazi occupation, she went to a clandestine school, risking German punishment, and later studied literature and sociology at the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Her marriage to the poet Adam Wlodek ended in divorce. Her companion, the writer Kornel Filipowicz, died in 1990. She had no children, and no immediate family members survive.

Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish exile who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, said of Ms. Szymborska’s Nobel selection: “She’s a shy and modest person, and for her it will be a terrible burden, this prize. She is very reticent in her poetry also. This is not a poetry where she reveals her personal life.”

Her work did, however, reveal sympathy for others — even the biblical figure who looked back at Sodom and turned into a pillar of salt. Ms. Szymborska speculated in the opening lines of “Lot’s Wife” on why she looked back:

They say I looked back out of curiosity,

but I could have had other reasons.

I looked back mourning my silver bowl.

Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.

So I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the righteous nape

Of my husband Lot’s neck.

From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead

He wouldn’t so much as hesitate.

From the disobedience of the meek.

Checking for pursuers.

Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.

Her last book to be translated, “Here,” was published in the United States last year. Reviewing it for The New York Review of Books, the poet Charles Simic noted that Ms. Szymborska “often writes as if on an assigned subject,” examining it in depth. He added: “If this sounds like poetry’s equivalent of expository writing, it is. More than any poet I can think of, Szymborska not only wants to create a poetic state in her readers, but also to tell them things they didn’t know before or never got around to thinking about.”

In her Nobel lecture, Ms. Szymborska joked about the life of poets. Great films can be made of the lives of scientists and artists, she said, but poets offer far less promising material.

“Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic,” she said. “Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?”

Paul Vitello contributed reporting.
NYT