Archive for June, 2011

“The River Neman, not far from its mouth on the Baltic Sea, is fed by several smaller tributaries flowing from the north, out of the very heart of the peninsula. It was on the banks of one of these tributaries, the Niewiaża, that all my adventures began…”

Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz (6/30/1911-8/14/2004), Native Realm

I had the great good fortune in May to visit Czesław Miłosz's birthplace in the rural Lithuanian village of Šeteniai. And yes, it is as idyllic as he said it was. I took this photo with my Droid on the former family estate, overlooking the river. The fishers called out to ask if we had permission to photograph them. Yes, one of us shouted back, there was a journalist in the group. They laughed, thinking it was a joke.

Help!

Steve Silberman just signed a book contract.  That’s the good news.  The bad news:  “It’s one thing to work up a 4000-word magazine feature and another to sit down and write a 100,000-word book,” he wrote.

Silberman said he was “scared out of my wits that the two decades of journalism that have led up to this project have not prepared me to write a good book. I wake up at 3 a.m. staring into the darkness, wondering if I’ll have the skills, discipline, and inner resources to pull it off.”

The obvious answer:  write another article.  And he’s done it, on PLoS Blogs here.

He asked 23 fellow writers a question: “What do you wish you’d known about the process of writing a book that you didn’t know before you did it?”

From John Tarrant:  “Ideas don’t come from anywhere identifiable, so I’ve come to trust that they will be given. This is along the lines of not whipping the donkey.”

Seth Mnookin wrote:  “I tried, not always successfully, to start each day with some discrete goal I wanted to accomplish: write 200 words, or get through a certain amount of research, or conduct two interviews, or whatever. If I set out to spend a day “writing,” that would be so overwhelming I’d end up just farting around online all day instead of starting the climb the mountain.”

I liked three from Cory Doctorow:

·  “Write when the book sucks and it isn’t going anywhere. Just keep writing. It doesn’t suck. Your conscious is having a panic attack because it doesn’t believe your subconscious knows what it’s doing.”

·  “Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the next day — that way, you can write three or five words without being “creative” and before you know it, you’re writing.”

· “Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.”

Basil Wasik offered praised outlines:  “This is a basic piece of advice, but it can’t be overstated when you’re trying to go from magazine-length to book-length writing: hone your outline and then cling to it as a lifeline. You can adjust it in mid-stream, but don’t try to just write your way into a better structure: think about the right structure and then write to it. Your outline will get you through those periods when you can’t possibly imagining ever finishing the damn thing — at those times, your outline will let you see it as a sequence of manageable 1,000 word sections.”

And this one, from Paula Span, is actually true: “You already know what you need to know to do this.  The fact is, my 60,000-plus-word book was pretty much like writing 8 to 10 long-form pieces.  I didn’t do it differently, in terms of research or writing or rewriting.  My existing skills were perfectly adequate to the task; yours will be too.  It took me 2.5 years but then, I was teaching and freelancing at the same time; had I focused solely on the book, it probably would’ve taken 18 months.  So you will make your deadline, even if your book is longer and more complex.

Finally, from August Kleinzahler:  “When my self-disgust reaches critical mass I seem to be ready to go.”

Read the rest here.

And if any of you authors have some thoughts to add, I’d love to hear them.

Reading at St. Catherine's Church, Kraków (Photo: Droid)

In an early poem, Bei Dao wrote, “freedom is nothing but the distance/between the hunter and the hunted.”

All too true, as he soon found out.

Protesters once shouted his poems in Tiananmen Square, and after his exile (he had been in Berlin during the 1989 uprising), he continued to write in Scandinavia, the U.S., and France.  He now teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, since the government allowed his return to the PRC a few years ago.

At last month’s Czesław Miłosz Festival in Kraków, he participated in a panel called “Place of Birth” with Lithuanian Egidijus Aleksandravičius, English Timothy Garton Ash, and Polish Irena Grudzińska Gross, hosted by Italian Francesco Cataluccio.  Although some of the estrangements from native realms were more voluntary than others, the team discussed their sense of displacement from homeland.

But the most haunting words of the evening belonged to Bei Dao:  “It’s mysterious. Why do we think about birthplace, mother tongue, the origin of life?” he asked.  And then he gave his answer.

“Each language keeps the secret code of a culture,” he said.

“China is unified by a written language,” he said.  “The local accent keeps their secret, keeps their code.”  That’s what he cherishes, and that is what the world is most at risk of losing.

His words returned to me today as I read an unusually eloquent McClatchy Newspapers article, “Silenced Voices,” by Tim Johnson:

Some linguists say that languages are disappearing at the rate of two a month. Half of the world’s remaining 7,000 or so languages may be gone by the end of this century, pushed into disuse by English, Spanish and other dominating languages.The die-off has parallels to the extinction of animals. The death of a language, linguists say, robs humanity of ideas, belief systems and knowledge of the natural world. Languages are repositories of human experience that have evolved over centuries, even millennia.

“Languages are definitely more endangered than species, and are going extinct at a faster rate,” said K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of the book When Languages Die. “There are many hundreds of languages that have fewer than 50 speakers.”

Language is an invisible triumph of humanity, and its disappearance brings only silence.”It’s not as flashy as a pyramid, but it represents enormous human achievement in terms of the thought and effort that went into it,” said Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist at Indiana University…

Miłosz knew this:  This is why Miłosz wrote in Polish throughout his 40 years of exile in California, said the Chinese poet.

In 1999 at Stanford (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Bei Dao was born in 1949 in Beijing.  “As Chairman Mao declared the birth of the People’s Republic of China from the rostrum in Tiananmen Square, I was lying in my cradle no more than a housand yards away. My fate seems to have been intertwined with China ever since,” he wrote in the festival’s 100-page companion book. “I received a privileged, but brief, education. I was a student at the best high school in Beijing, until the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966.  All the schools were closed, and three years later I was assigned to work in the state-run construction industry.”

In those harsh circumstances, at the age of 20, the young construction worker began to write at a site in the mountains more than 200 miles from Beijing.

During the conference session, he recalled visiting his dying father in a brief respite from exile, but Beijing was a disappointment:  “It was not my city anymore.”

“The Chinese people do not know how to rebuild,” he said, praising the preservation of Venice and Florence.  The Chinese, by contrast, “build like Las Vegas – very, very ugly buildings.”

Left to right: Francesco Cataluccio, Bei Dao, Timothy Garton Ash, Egidijus Aleksandravičius, Irena Grudzińska Gross (Photo: my Droid)

“We were drawn by the concept of progress from the West and from Marxism.  Progress became the canon for Chinese people. There was more attention on GDP and new buildings.  Materialism and consumption destroyed Chinese culture.”

At Stanford over a decade ago, he remarked, “I don’t have a motherland now.”

“Someone recently said to me that I am like a man to whom the whole world has become a foreign country, and I like that.”

But things change, in our heads as well as in the world.

Detroit, the notorious city of my birth, is now as much a gutted ruin if it had been destroyed by enemy mayhem – which in a sense it had been.  And as some of the speakers mourned their lost homes, I wondered if they were actually mourning the passage of time as much as they were exile and upheaval.

Political exile is poignant, but disguises a more inexorable reality: We are exiles in time as well as in space.  Both are excruciatingly transient.

I’ve only met the eminent Irish poet Eavan Boland a handful of times, but we have one unexpected thing in common:  both our books – her A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet and my  An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz – were named in Publisher’s Weekly top ten books for the spring, in the “Belles Lettres and Reflections” category.  (You can read my euphoria here.)

I was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement in May, and on June 10, so was she.  High praise from Abigail Deutsch:

“Delightfully surprising critiques spring from her analysis. The bland poet Speranza, Boland writes, subjected her poems to a ‘word-bath of acid, in which details and subtleties are dissolved”. Of Charlotte Mew, Boland notes: ‘There is a sort of salt and spray about reading Mew for the first time: her poems are not like anything else’. This formulation conveys the reader’s proximity to something at once thrilling and perhaps threatening. Boland has a rare gift for providing critical evaluations so compressed and illustrative that they approach poetry themselves.

That control sometimes slips. Boland takes a roundabout route through this volume; before introducing her ideas, she will often explain why we might dismiss them and point out why we shouldn’t. Her terms can be vague, and her organization tortuous. She loops about the concept of the ‘domestic poem’, for instance, several times. But when she finally homes in – using the concept of the sublime to explain the disparagement of the domestic – her brilliance justifies the journey.”

A Poetry Foundation interview with Eavan, “Of Antibiotics and iPods,” is here.

Working on an edited volume is a lonely business.  One’s “relationships” with contributors are often no more than characters on a screen, as you work through the cycles of cyber-fights and cyber-calms, editing and proofreading back and forth in what passes for “together” online.

Inevitably, I developed imaginary pictures of the objects of my ether-relationships while working on An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz.  For example, I imagined my Hungarian contributor, George Gömöri of Cambridge, as a slightly crotchety curmudgeon, set in his ways and writing on an antique Mac with an enlarged screen for the sight-impaired (with a thick Hungarian accent). Nothing in his writing style or our correspondence suggested such a portrait, it was cut out of whole cloth, probably based on something as random as someone from my distant past with a similar name.

Travel always brings surprises, and one of mine on my trip to Kraków in May was meeting contributor George, the author of many books on Polish and Hungarian literature (Miłosz maintained there is a particular affinity between the two peoples), at the Jagiellonian University conference where we both spoke.  He was hardly a creaky recluse. He was charming, good looking, and cosmopolitan (with a pronounced English accent).  And he had a lovely wife, Mari, by his side – she is the dedicatee, it turns out, of many of his poems.

He also had a letter in the most recent Times Literary Supplement, which now I read through his wit and affability:

A Hungarian traveller

Sir, – Julian Evans mentions a Hungarian traveller, in his review of three books about travel (June 3), whose “erudition” according to him “is not to be trusted”, for he mixed up Cambridge (Cantabrigia in Latin) with Canterbury (Cantuaria). This error was made by Márton Szepsi Csombor, the author of the first great Hungarian travelogue, Europica varietas, who visited London in May 1618 and whose description of most foreign lands is usually accurate and rich in verifiable detail. Mixing up the Latin names of two towns in England does not mean that Szepsi Csombor was not erudite. He had certainly wanted to visit, as he puts it, “the famous academy where Whitaker and Perkins taught” and when, reaching Canterbury, he realized his mistake, the only reason why he did not make his way back to Cambridge was his lack of money – he found England too costly for his purse. Yet some weeks later, our Hungarian spent a whole day at the Sorbonne, listening to an immensely long academic discussion in Latin and enjoying it fully. Perhaps his erudition was after all in better shape than his finances.

GEORGE GÖMÖRI
Darwin College, Cambridge.

Anyway, one of the pleasures of An Invisible Rope was the chance to publish George’s (and Richard Berengarten‘s) translation of Miłosz’s “Antigone,”  that had not appeared in previous collections in English, but was published in The Hungarian Quarterly in 2001:

To accept what happens just as one accepts
Seasons piling pell-mell on one another,
And on our human world to cast the same
Indifference as on mute Nature’s transformations?
So long as I shall breathe I shall say—No.
Do you hear me, Ismene? I shall say—No.

That passage, as well as this one, are vintage Miłosz, touching on themes haunting his poetry:

Fools alone believe they can live easy
By relegating Memory to the past.
Fools alone believe one city falling
Will bring no judgement down on other cities.

Meanwhile, my clumsy Droid photos above right – they are among my first, taken in the the Miłosz Pavilion set up in Szczepanski Square. But you get an idea of the hustle and bustle of the setting – you can see better photos of it here.

“The internet is not destroying the language after all, then, but giving us new ways of shaming its most prominent practitioners into using it better. Let us set politicians a quiz. What are guarantees always made from? Cast iron. And with what are their bottoms made? Copper. And what are they not worth? The paper they are written on. (Or, alternatively, the paper that they are not written on.) For whom do politicians speak? The silent majority. Or hard-working families. Especially the ones who work hard and play by the rules.

Well, it turns out that the silent majority want to read and hear fresh, clear and original language. So go to independent.co.uk/bannedlist and nominate your suggestions for inclusion. I’d say we should crowd-source this project, but I’ve put crowd-source and project on the Banned List.”

A man after my own heart (whoops! another one!)

These are the … dare I say it? … fighting words from John Rentoul of the Independent, and I’ve just discovered his cliché column.

The phrases that make him grind his teeth don’t necessarily make me grind mine – apparently, “any time soon” is the one kicked him over the edge – but he’s fingered “progressive” as an empty bit of self-congratulation, a charge that earned me some brickbats when I wrote about it here.  But how did he miss “heads up”?  Or “take responsibility for” when referring to those who will do nothing of the kind (I wrote about that one here)?

From the top 100  (check them out for yourself here:

1. Celebrating diversity.
2. Inclusive.
3. Black hole (in a financial context).
4. The elephant in the room.
5. Perfect storm.
6. IMO, IMHO, LOL, ROFL and so on. I mean, whose opinion is it going to be? Genuinely witty abbreviations, however, are permitted, for example, QTWTAIN, YYSSW, IICRS (Questions to Which the Answer is No; Yeah, Yeah, Sure, Sure, Whatever; Iraq Inquiry Coverage Rebuttal Service).  [Shall we add WTF? – Ed.]
7. Vibrant (when used to mean lots of non-English people).
8. It’s in his/her/their DNA.
9. Let’s be clear.
10. “The truth is…” before the peddling of an opinion.
11. Any journey not describing travel from A to B.
12. A no-brainer.
13. What’s not to like?
14. Max out (in relation to credit cards only).
15. Coffee, the waking up and smelling thereof.
16. Out of the box (especially thinking).
17. Radar, to be on someone’s, or to be under the.
18. “All the evidence tells us” to mean “I’ve read something about this somewhere that confirms my prejudices”.
19. Stakeholder.
20. Who knew?
21. “And yet, and yet …”
22. The suffix -gate added to any news theme supposedly embarrassing to a government.

I shudder to think how many of these I have used – and not in the distant past, but recently. Sometimes hourly.

Also banned this month:

“What a difference a day makes”, which was used on Newsnight to mean: “Yesterday we reported something and today the Government has done something about it.” It is a bit like “a week is a long time in politics”, which is as hard to eradicate as cockroaches.

Rentoul ends with George Orwell‘s six rules from “Politics and the English Language.”  Great comments section, too.  What’s not to like?

Postscript on 6/25: Some interesting feedback from Jeff Sypeck in the comments section:

I’d like to see pundits, commentators, etc., stop saying “You want fries with that?” when they talk about college kids majoring in unmarketable subjects. Not only is it unoriginal–Google News shows 27 news outlets using the phrase this month alone–but no one at a fast food joint has even asked a customer this question since the late 1980s! For 25 years, we’ve been ordering complete fast-food meals, with fries, by number. (I also question whatever truth supposedly underlies this cliche, because class distinctions generally mean that the recent college grad with an English or Sociology degree is more likely to be doing filing or photocopying in an office or perhaps working in retail. He’s not the most common sight in the fast-food biz.)

Go to the comments section for the rest of his remarks (about the use of “urban” to mean “black”) and also, Dave Lull directs you to the clichés of love.