A West-Coastish Salon

I had the pleasure of attending a literary salon this past weekend at the home of the lovely Rashaan Alexis Meneses, where I met all sorts of new writers and reconnected with others whom I hadn't yet seen since returning to this side of the Atlantic. 

Jason Bayani read from his new book of poetry, Amulet. I've gotten about halfway through the copy on my desk, and if you like poetry at all, you really should check it out. And you should go watch him read on his own website.

Melissa R. Sipin recently won the Glimmer Train short story contest, and her list of publications is truly one to envy. I'm not a short story writer; I love listening to those who can pull it off, and Melissa's got it down. She read to us from both stories and poetry, most notably her untitled response to Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan, which you can find on her website.

Gretchen Schrafft has maybe the best author picture I've ever seen. She writes about New England, toils at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, and read us a piece of a short story with one of the most gorgeous images I've heard in a long time involving a child, a coat, a closet, and the sea.

Since I'm not teaching these days, I don't get to talk about reading and writing nearly as much as I'd like. And even when I WAS teaching, I didn't always get to talk about it with people who were completely willing to be a part of the conversation. Events like these are lifeblood.

Tracking a Tale's Migration

Tehrani's analysis determined that "The Wolf and the Kids" probably originated in the first century, and that the version featuring Little Red Riding Hood branched off about 1,000 years later. "This is rather like a biologist showing that humans and other apes share a common ancestor but have evolved into separate species," Tehrani said.

Love this kind of thing. Makes total sense to me that stories could be traced via their retellings and reproductions and the strange genetic mutations that happen along the way. I'd love to see some sort of visualization juxtaposing linguistic changes, genetic changes, and folktale changes along the Silk Road. I'd put money on some interesting correlations.

The actual study is here. Check it out.

A Manifesto, Reposted

“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.”

From Blue Pastures, by Mary Oliver

My college professor, perhaps my favorite, one who led me to write in such a way that my own writings, unbeknownst to me until far later, dovetailed uncomfortably with her own life, assigned her students this passage from Blue Pastures. Mary Oliver is never a bad way to begin a course on writing, but I can’t help wondering now, ten years later, whether she was intentionally frontloading us, giving us tools and information that would not come to fruition until, aptly, just now.

Let me explain: we were good writers, all of us, in a freshman year non-fiction writing class. We knew how to put together a sentence; we knew how to construct a line that would knock the socks off of our high school English teachers. And this knowledge had brought us to where we were, curled up awkwardly in stiff wooden chairs around an enormous wooden seminar table, deep in the bowels of institutional intellectual history--not far, in fact, from where the brave new psychologists of the 1950s had found that people not unlike us would shock others until the point of near-death if the man in white coat said so. That happened just around the corner, down a flight of stairs, back when the building had been the psych department.

But now it was the English department; the psych people had moved over, appropriately, to the base of Science Hill (always aspiring to be taken seriously by the hard scientists running down towards Commons from the nuclear labs), and we were there, at least twice a week, with our essays printed out and phrases turned and barely tamped-down egos. (The tamping would come, more fully, later on, after the towers crashed down and took the economy with them.) And we sat there, discussing Mary Oliver, as though we knew what we were talking about. My professor read her favorite passages as though the words had a taste to them, and we listened, nodding, professing awe at how she had gotten it right, just right.

Except. We had no fucking clue.

Click to read more ...

Simplicity in the Valley

I'm a little late on this one, but it's not an issue that will resolve itself in a few weeks. Via an SFGate article by Andrew S. Ross, the words of Mark Zuckerberg:

"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," Facebook's CEO (now 28) told a Y Combinator Startup event at Stanford University in 2007. "Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30? I don't know. Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what's important."

There's some truth to this, I suppose, if you define "family" as spouse-and-children and "simpler lives" as work-is-all. And I'm not the first to point out the strange juxtaposition of work at a company that claims to be about relationships as the implied "what's important" in this statement, not the relationships themselves. (Not to mention a twenty-something weighing in on life from a very specific, limited vantage point, however nice it may be.)

But the rest of the article focuses on the need for experienced older workers to downplay that experience in order to get a foothold in what's often portrayed as an employee's job market. Part of what I liked so much about moving down to Silicon Valley from San Francisco was the presence of children and elderly people, of the sense of a life greater than that of your mid-twenties, but whether that is replicated on campuses valley-wide is another question. This is an industry town, and the industry is young, but it will age--and I'm very curious to see whether it will happen gracefully.

Recent/Current/On Deck Reading Lists

Recently Read:

The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm

Stag's Leap, Sharon Olds

Bubble Girl, Kathryn Banakis

Currently Reading:

Lives Like Loaded Guns, Lyndall Gordon

Fatherland, Robert Harris

On Deck:

Letters from a Lost Generation, Ed. Bishop and Bostridge 

Savage Continent, Keith Lowe

In the Kitchen, Monica Ali