weekend reads: asemics & politics & media & sexism & more

some weekend reads and links of this week. i can happily blame the moon for the range of themes. this morning, my horoscope announced: "Valid during many months: This influence will bring idealistic, spiritual and philosophical issues to the fore in your life. You will become concerned with the meaning of the world, and you will find new ways of investigating it."

so here goes. new ways, meaning, and all. the photo above is from the frankfurt book fair, china pavillon. such beautiful books, from a country that restricts freedom of speech.

new words... foffof - the journal of asemic writing: diagrams, no question, time piece and other wordless multilingual writing

layouts.. after working on layouts for a new website this week, i found this article interesting: On getting your name out there , which includes a link to "How to Change the World"...

media... Gratuitous: How Sexism Threatens to Undermine the Internet - which includes some interesting questions and notes: "Is a personal blog a public or a private communication? Is it meant for mass consumption by thousands or millions of people? Not typically, and yet it can be read, theoretically, by billions. This blurring of the two types of media is so difficult to grasp that it’s produced its own near-ubiquitous straw man argument, which blogger Jason Kottke calls “the breakfast question.” It comes up whenever anyone writes about social media: “Why would I care what you ate for breakfast that morning?” Shirky’s rebuttal to this is succinct: “It’s simple. They’re not talking to you. We misread these seemingly inane posts because we’re so unused to seeing written material in public that isn’t intended for us."

on the note of gender: ...Literature’s Gender Divide: Numbers About Old-Fashioned, Boring, Outrageous Sexism. following the theme, interesting to visit this year's nobel prize gender divide.

politics... a statistic of a different kind: geography of a recession. connected to that, i came across a general country forecast from a Harvard prof in one of the major german news magazines: "USA: Eine Gesellschaft zerfällt / USA: A Society Crumbles". strangely, or maybe not so strangely, no english version available. here's a rough translation of a key paragraph: "Today, America represents the paradox of a rich country, which crumbles, because its inner values disintegrate. The American productivity ranks among the highest in the world. The national average income per head is with approximately 46,000 dollar - enough to live on it. The country is troubled nevertheless by an ugly moral crisis. .. And what happens in America will probably be repeated in other places."

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3 links.

3 links. each moved me, today.

truth: current affairs: ethics

conditioning: musings on a life half-lived

humility: fielding love: the walk to remember
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frankfurt impressions

what a week. i'm still stunned by all the impressions from Frankfurt Book Fair. yesterday, i put a larger photo essay with links up in Daily s-Press:

Frankfurt Book Fair - themes, sights, links

i really enjoyed putting the post together, and it grew longer in steps. i guess it was both about sharing the place and the themes with all those who don't have a chance to visit the fair, and parallel to that, a way to digest the overload of impressions - after sending out the link, i received this note: "I can't imagine how you take in "authors and publishers from more than 100 countries"!

if you look at the photo above, you can see my approach to visiting the fair: on the left side, in the middle, there's a fair / hall plan, with some red marks: that was my rough plan - an itienary in dots of places i wanted to visit (for example: the hotspot "e-books", the Argentina pavillon, the art books, the storydrive convention). apart from that rough plan, i just went with the flow. which basically is the way i travel, too.

also, i don't try to see everything, and try to find a pace of browsing through a hall / focusing on some spots / browsing / focusing / and taking pictures, to get back to the impressions later.
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timeless simplicity / carousel swans

it's the last of the sunny september days. this evening, clouds will move in, and bring 5 days of rain. i am snowed under in work, but now took (spent? / gave? / worthwhiled? ) half an hour of time to enjoy the sun, while it is still there. the books that accompanied me were: Osiris 70 - a collection of multilingual contemporary poetry, which arrived with suprise mail (big thanks marcia!). and the other book is: Timeless Simplicity by John Lane.

i came across the book this week, when i stopped by at a new book shop, which is called “Book Carousel”, and has used books, a lot of them rather new, published in the last 1-3 years. they sell them at half price, and take them back at quarter prize after you read them, if you want to resell. it’s a friendly, airy place - they don’t have many english books, though. but i found this one, which feels like it waited there. it's from Green Books, and indie publisher in the UK. see, that's another thing that Daily s-Press brought: i now am as curious about the publishers as about the authors.

reading in Timeless Simplicity, i returned to a quote from Daniela Elza, from the recent daily author talk, on poetry and materialism: "I see freedom in poetry because we all own the materials it is made of, and it provides a spiritual self sufficiency which materialism does not like, since it wants you to be dependent on it. I think when we are emotionally in tact we need less stuff." (-link)

which now leads to the other moment i want to write about: today i learned that my poem "Society of Swans", which appeared in YB in May, is nominated for the Sundress Best of Net Award. there also is a commentary, with a line from Virgina Woolf on emptiness and rich apparel.

& more poetry and words: the BluePrintReview nominations for Sundress are up in the blueprint blog. again, this isn't about money. and even though awards are competetive by natur, for me this is more about revisiting, and appreciating. it also fits the season: celebrating the harvest that will bring us through the dark and cold of winter.

now, back to some complex work, and then on to some simple mowing of grass, before the rain starts to fall.

afterthought: i start to fall for this word: worthwhile. it's the perfect merging of "worth" + "while". hadn't noticed that before.

3 links: poetry without words, the real secret, and the problem of being innovative

- Bluebird by Charles Bukowski (a video poem without any words, via Moving Poems)

- an interview with The New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein (via Voices): "It’s not easy and that’s the real secret: it’s not easy for anyone. Once you know that, it’s easier to accept when you struggle for an idea. I know because I have lunch each week with the cartoonists of The New Yorker. Everyone has to come up with ten ideas to “audition” every Tuesday. It’s HARD work even for the best of them."

- and, from a poetry blog: a reflection on the fate of the comic film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (via Silliman's Blog): "If the filmmakers want to know why the picture tanked on its first weekend, all they have to do is to check the demographics of their receipts. ... it’s about a sensitive guy who has to learn to trust his feelings, with two strong female characters. But how are women viewers going to know that they may like this movie if they can’t tell what it’s about? This is where Edgar (Shaun of the Dead) Wright’s innovative direction creates problems instead of solutions..."

Mel Bosworth: When The Cats Razzed the Chickens

there is something immensely beautiful about words that have been written, then printed on pages that then got folded by hand, and made into a chapbook, which then got signed by the one who has written those words, and put in an envelope, and sent over the ocean, to be delivered by a postman right to the place i live, some thousand miles away from where those words came into being and into print.

and then, to open those pages, and to find this dedication -

To my family and friends
And to you, dear reader, for giving those words life.

- followed by a collection of stories that i try to make last longer by reading only 1 every second day.

thanks Mel, for these stories.
and thanks Folded Word, for putting them on paper.

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and here, the link to the joy:

Folded Word: Mel Bosworth / When the Cats Razzed the Chickens

& here a video that shows how Folded Word creates their books: "Constructing Atoms"
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David Foster Wallace + Alan Bennett

two sunday reads:

All That
a short story by David Foster Wallace, up in The New Yorker ,
with these lines:
"I no more knew their minds and motives than a pencil knows what it is being used for."
"..in the bored half-cruel way that adults sometimes do with small children, playfully telling them things that they pass off to themselves as “tall tales” or “childlike inventions,” unaware of the impact those tales may have (since magic is a serious reality for small children)."

The Habit of Art (quotes)
memorable quotes from Alan Bennett's new play, up in TammyHoLaiMing.com
here my favourites:
• "What I fear is that on Judgement Day one’s punishment will be to hear God reciting by heart the poems I would have written had my life been good."
• "Our passport is what we have written."
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sunday reads: a road story, a walk around the lake, a life essay

some december sunday reads:

a road story:
"Indianopolis (Highway 74)" by Sam Shepard
from: The New Yorker - fiction

a lake blog:
"A Walk Around the Lake" by Pam Heart
Pam Heart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art

a life essay:
"A Long, Melancholy Roar" by Olivia Judson
from: NYTimes - Happy Days Blog
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the possibility of an island

to come: a week of time-out. ocean walks and vulcano drives. some writing. and some reading.

here's a still life of the books i will take:

• Markus Zusa - The Book Thief
• Herta Müller - Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger ('Even Back Then, The Fox Was The Hunter')
• Amy L. Clark, Elizabeth Ellen, Kathy Fish, Claudia Smith - A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness
• Erik Orsenna - Inselsommer ('Islandsummer')
• and Michel Houllebecq - Die Möglichkeit einer Insel ('The Possibility of an Island'). which is set on the very island i'll be: Lanzarote.

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Joan Didion: Wir erzählen uns Geschichten, um zu überleben

Joan Didion. What a Joy.

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget”
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