Isak

Final--And Darker--Anne of Green Gables Book To Be Published

If you thought Lucy Maud Montgomery had told the story of Anne Shirley in its entirety over the course of eight books (including Anne of Green Gables), the you are wrong. It turns out that The Blythes Are Quoted was authored by Montgomery and intended as the ninth volume in the series. It will be published by Penguin Canada in October 2009.

And it is a decidedly different turn:

Featuring 15 short stories about Anne as an adult and her family, it also includes a series of vignettes between the stories – poems "by" Anne and her son Walter, who dies during the first world war – and sketches of Anne and Gilbert Blythe discussing the poems.

The book is divided into two sections, set before and after the first world war, and according to Penguin sees Montgomery "experimenting with storytelling methods in ways she had never attempted before" as she moves between prose, dialogue and poetry.

An abridged version of the book, which omitted most of the 100-odd pages of vignettes and poems and shortened the stories, was published in 1974, but the Penguin Canada edition ... will be the first time it is published as Montgomery intended.

The book looks set to reveal a darker side to the author, with its publisher promising themes of "adultery, illegitimacy, misogyny, revenge, murder, despair, bitterness, hatred, and death – usually not the first terms associated with LM Montgomery". It was completed shortly before her death in 1942 ...

Via @drmarbuse.

Art City: Spiegelman Coming to MOCAD

 

Art Spiegelman is coming to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit next week to talk it up about his work. It's a must-see. From his charged underground comix of the 1960s/70s to his category-less Pulitzer Prize for Maus (which I wrote about here), from his New Yorker covers that startled to the large-scale In the Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman's earned his acclaim.

It's going down at 7 pm on Wednesday, July 15. The event is part of the museum's current exhibition, "Art Spiegelman: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!" Tickets are $7 and available at MOCAD's store. I've got mine in my wallet. So I will see you there.

BOOK REVIEW (in brief): Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating

While healing from a broken foot, relying on friends to bring me the basics of groceries, reading this book inspired wonderful dreams of my revived kitchen. From my couch I made a wish list for my future return trip to the market. It was a long list.

After reading quite a lot about food and food systems/communities, I believe that Jervis' "manuelfesto" fills a needed niche that marries kitchen technique and mindset. Cook Food is a hybrid of a cookbook and collection of essay...more While healing from a broken foot, relying on friends to bring me the basics of groceries, reading Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating by Lisa Jervis inspired wonderful dreams of my revived kitchen. From my couch I made a wish list for my future return trip to the market. It was a long list.

After reading quite a lot about food and food systems/communities, I believe that Jervis' "manualfesto" fills a needed niche that marries kitchen technique and mindset. Cook Food is a hybrid of a cookbook and collection of essays; a slim book that's perfectly portable and wonderfully narrated; a guidebook for folks who love food and care about its preparation and its provenance.

As well: Cook Food is published by PM Press, an independent press that's still quite new, but is bold in its strategy. They seem to have built up an impressive collection of book, audio, and video resources.

Quick Hit: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Steals My Heart, Again

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg, who doubles as one of my greatest heroes, is featured in conversation with New York Times journalist Emily Bazelon, who doubles as target of my greatest envy.

The topics? They range from Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor, Ginsburg's own journey to the top bench, and how law and gender intersect and evolve. As per usual, Ginsburg's brains, candor, and humor shine like stars.

And the most amazing facts emerge from Ginsburg's offhand anecdotes: look for the jaw-dropping revelation involving the case of Captain Struck, whom Ginsburg was representing as lawyer in 1971 ...

Then come back over to Isak and join me in a collective gasp.

Image Credit: The New York Times

Critical Flame

A new online journal of literature and culture, The Critical Flame is now boasting its second issue, featuring reviews of fiction (J.M.G. Le Clézio, Monica Ali, Karen Joy Fowler), poetry (D.A. Powell), and nonfiction (Mark McGurl). Points go to the Critical Flame team for a nicely designed website and an ambition to "keep the conversation alive" about literature, creating more and more spaces for it to happen.

"We go forward with the great hope that open and articulate discussion is as easily spread as wildfire, that CF will be a spark in arid kindling," they write.

I hope too.

Poetry/Politics

It was a whim to pick up Adrienne Rich's book, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics during my last visit to Shaman Drum. While I've enjoyed it, I'm only casually know her poetry; I'm probably most familiar with Rich via Audre Lorde.

But, oh, I'm in love with What is Found There, this curious collection of journals, letters, close readings of poetry and sharp-sighted, concise meditations on her contemporary political moment (my copy is a 2003 re-issue, with a couple new pieces, of a 1993 original).

This is the sort of book that has me looking up repeatedly, trying to make eye contact with someone who will let me read aloud to them the parts that startle and awe.

Like so:

I know that "capitalism" is an unfashionable word. "Democracy," "free enterprise," "market economy" are the banners now floating above our economic system. Still, as a poet, I choose to sieve up old, sunken words, heave them, dripping with silt, turn them over, and bring them into the air of the present. Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions--not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire.

And like so:

You will remember the pictorial names (of birds) as you won't the Latin, which, however, is more specific as to genus and species. Human eyes gazed at each of all these forms of life and saw resemblance in difference--the core of metaphor, that which lies close to the core of poetry itself, the only hope for a humane civil life. The eye for likeness in the midst of contrast, the appeal to recognition, the association of thing to thing, spiritual fact with embodied form, begins here.

And we're only up to page six, son.

A Living Wake

"The silence is deafening."

So says Lisa Ling in her first interview since Current TV journalists Laura Ling, Lisa's sister, and Euna Lee were sentenced to twelve years in a North Korean labor camp after a closed-door trial for vague "grave crimes."

The U.S. has considered an envoy to help free Ling and Lee. There have been regular vigils around the country, pressing this humanitarian issue back into the spotlight (including one tonight at the Changing Hands Bookstore for those of you in the Tempe area). But for now, the families of Ling and Lee are compelled to wait and wait.

Baba Yaga Meets Dubravka Ugresic

In her new novel, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (which I'd love to get my hands on), Dubravka Ugresic wrestles with the slippery witch of Russian and East European myth, taking her to contemporary times. On the BBC, Ugresic speaks "about her novel and leaving her homeland of the former Yugoslavia and moving to Amsterdam after being proclaimed a ‘traitor’, a ‘public enemy’ and a ‘witch'."

Middlesex To Be Developed for HBO

It looks like Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer-winning epic, set largely in Detroit of the 1920s and 1990s, is in development with HBO as a one-hour series. Rita Wilson is slated as the executive producer, alongside playwright Donald Magulies.

It's probably about time I read this one, eh?

Via Maud Newton's Twitter feed.

DETROIT STORIES:Biking in the Motor City

Fact: Detroit was the original American bike town. Almost 80% of the population used them around town in the 1890s. America's first paved roads in Detroit was not for the ease of car owners, but for the ease of cyclists.

Fact: "Detroit has the potential to become a new bicycle utopia. It’s a town just waiting to be taken." That's the word from Toby Barlow's op-ed in the New York Times. And it is the truth. Barlow points to the flourishing communities around local bikes shops, Wheelhouse and The Hub; to the uncommon network of (flat) roads and open space; and to a city that is preternaturally suited to the alternative-minded entrepreneur.

From Barlow's op-ed:

Despite the press, survival here isn’t so hard. Businesses like the Wheelhouse and the Hub have already shown how well Detroit can work as a new business hothouse. With the legendarily affordable real estate and without needing to pay for car payments, gas or insurance, bicyclists could rebuild Detroit into a model of a two-wheeled economy. They could pass laws promoting bikes over cars and designate entire avenues motor-free zones, which, given the state of many of them now, wouldn’t be so much of a stretch.

Maybe it sounds far-fetched, but then again maybe it’s just destiny. Look at a map and you’ll see that Detroit is designed in the shape of a wheel, with streets emanating like spokes from the downtown hub. It looks like a premonition, a city uniquely designed to alter transportation forever.

 
Above: My homemade bike, immediately after its first ride.

I want it to be so. I got inculcated into this mindset last summer when I started frequenting The Hub, where the good people there guided me in helping me build my bike from scratch, mostly from spare and found parts. (See the final beloved result in the picture above). Over a series of Sunday afternoons, I heard a lot about bikes as the transit model that is truly "auto-mobile." I got well-coached in the value of knowing my bike well, of having the tools to mend basic problems, of wearing a helmet, of everything that's possible on a bike (one fellow moved to a new apartment by taking several cycling trips with his belongings on a small trailer that was attached to his bike).

And the joy of riding and exploring was contagious.

The bike community in Detroit is ecstatic and serious and wide open. The 40-mile Tour de Troit ride draws thousands. The Dequindre Cut Greenway, a newly opened pathway connecting the RiverEalk and Eastern Market, is adored. Attention is being paid to other Detroit bike trails and bike accessibility. AlleyCats is--I hear--well-suited for those who have a need for speed. More and more casual community rides are happening all over the city and metro area (to say nothing of local bike blogs - the best of which is m-bike).

I like to think of it as more than a hobby. It's damn near revolutionary for bikers to override the Motor City. It is one step on the way for Detroit to manifest an alternative vision of what a "successful city" looks like.

Illustration Credit: The New York Times

Marjane Satrapi:"I Must Go Home to Iran Again"

As the news out of Iran spirals horrifically, graphic novelist and film director Marjane Satrapi continues to use her talents as a storyteller to reveal what's true and beautiful--this time in an op-ed headlined "I Must Go Home to Iran Again."

Today I read somewhere that “the velvet revolution” of Iran became the “velvet coup,” with a little note of irony, but let me tell you something: This generation, with its hopes, dreams, anger and revolt, has forever changed the course of history. Nothing is going to be the same.

From now on, nobody will judge Iranians by their so-called elected president.

From now on, Iranians are fearless. They have regained their self-confidence. ...

... And I’m convinced this is just the beginning.

From now on, I will always say: Once you leave your homeland, you can live anywhere. But I refuse to only die in Iran. I will one day live in Iran...or else my life will have had no meaning.

Satrapi, you recall, partnered with filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf in presenting a document to Green Party MPS in the European Parliament that they contended was proof that Mir Hossein Mousavi won the most votes in the Iranian presidential election.

Birthing Chains

My new article is out with RH Reality Check. As I talked to people about the shackling of pregnant women in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers, as I researched and caught up with amazing recent news, my jaw was permanently dropped.

From my article:

Shackling usually happens when pregnant women are transported from one facility to another-when a woman is transferred to a new prison, for example, or when she's taken to a hospital for medical care. Reynolds herself was shackled around the waist during labor. She knows others who were subjected to a black box placed between their wrist and belly, which keeps the arms in front and facedown. Shackling also happens around ankles in transport vans and in wheelchairs, while breastfeeding, and while in neonatal nurseries, Reynolds said.

To date, 46 states have no legislation that restricts the shackling of pregnant women in prisons, jails, and detention centers, leaving the practice to the discretion of individual facilities. Illinois, California, Vermont, and New Mexico prohibit it entirely, though, as the Cook County case reveals, implementation of anti-shackling policy can be patchy.

Non-federal facilities are exempt from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons policy that, in October 2008, barred the shackling of pregnant women, "except in the most extreme circumstances." This policy is in alignment with the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. ratified.

This is a particularly timely issue. Right now, Texas and New York are waiting for word from their governors on legislative bills that bar shackling. There are newly-filed lawsuits against the Cook County (Chicago) jail and Washington state from former inmates that charge for harm done while being shackled while pregnant and birthing; Cook County's case is particularly egregious because it's in one of the few states that restricts shackling. And we are awaiting word on the hearing on the shackling case of a woman in Arkansas before the 8th Circuit Court.

UPDATE: Hey New Yorkers! Your state is on the verge of being the fifth to ban shackling, thanks to a bill with nearly-unanimous legislative support. This Thursday, there's a rally to urge Governor Paterson to sign it into law. Go, learn, speak up, and then tell me all about how it went!

Summer Reading for Children(And, Um, For Me)

As a two-time auntie, I feel personally responsible to make sure that my nieces grow up with excellent books at their fingertips (as two of my aunts did for me, via a gorgeous Nancy Drew collection). But that's not the only reason I'm interested in The Telegraph's collection of children/YA book suggestions by a strong group of authors and critics; I love to read them myself. I mean, the last book that made me cry was The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson--that's one that'll knock your socks off.

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

The speech that Frederick Douglass gave on July 5, 1852, is mesmerizing--particularly in the turn about midway through when Douglass shifts from memorializing the founders of the nation (many whose direct descendants were in his audience) to a blunt look at his present day.

"I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!," Douglass exclaims, making no pretense to ignore his dark color, and then asks, "Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?"

And then:

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

This Independence Day--the first that the United States has celebrated with a black man as our elected (by a landslide) president, a president whose multi-ethnic heritage and White House leadership have swiftly normalized--let us be grateful for how far we've come. And, as Douglass challenges his listeners (which by extension includes us), let us not settle. Let us not use past triumphs and greatness as a mask for present smallness.

There are miles to go before we sleep.

UPDATE: Melissa Harris-Lacewell minds the modern moment of this Fourth of July in her article, "Celebrating the full narrative of America."

This Week in Blackness: BET Doesn't Care About Black People

Because this should be required viewing for every American. At least every American that likes laughter.

She Writes

This just discovered: She Writes, a new (beta) social network that "is where women writers working in every genre--in every part of the world and of all ages and backgrounds--can come together." I'm still new, but it looks like hundreds of terrific writers have already signed on in a space designed to make connections, offer professional advice, champion each others' work, spread news, and facilitate discussions. It all sounds good to me. If you decide to jump in yourself, come be my e-friend.