Recipes & Reading Lists: Separated at Birth?

Winter in Des Moines is never easy, nothing like the gentle weather of Red Hen’s L.A. home, but this one has been a bear.   The blizzards have made headlines.  Now here we are at Valentine’s Day, and the snow that fell before Christmas remains on the ground.  We’re crushed under chilly white sediment.

What’s a guy to do?   Certainly I’ve got a desk heaped with projects.  This bleak midwinter saw me complete the edits for my forthcoming Red Hen title, The Sea-God’s Herb: Selected Work on the Postmodern Project.  Also I’ve got the usual stacks of grading.   Yeah yeah yeah — enough about work, already.  The real relief comes in the kitchen.  My wife and I know how to celebrate a Hallmark holiday, and lighten the winter gloom, pulling together a great meal.

For my final blog, I’ll talk recipes, not reading lists.  I’ll share, for starters, the mouth-watering possibilities in rare meat called guanciale.  A pungent near-bacon made from the cheek of the pig, fresh local guanciale can be found in just two places on earth: in around Rome, and in and around Des Moines.  La Quercia Meats of Iowa delivers unusual pork products (prosciutto would be another) so flavorful and traditional that they’ve won raves in the New York Times.

The dish that features guanciale is a hearty thing, with red sauce, red pepper, and onions.  What, no garlic?  Not if you ask the Romans, who make the meal a regular part of their menu from November through April.  This is America, though, and in my kitchen I draw up the ingredients.  I’ve got garlic cooking in the exceptional fat of the guanciale, and garlic amid the nuggets of the meat in the finished product.   That’s bucatini all’Amatriciana, and you’ll find it in many a foodie’s diary.   To prepare it well requires a skilled hand, and this winter I finally developed one.

But, look at that: talking about diaries, revisions, and skilled hand.  You’d think I was still talking about writing.  The very name of the dish takes us to the library, looking up bucatini (tubular pasta, its opening a hole or buca) and Amatriciana (in the hill-town of Amatrice, farmers and shepherds needed a bracing repast after their long, cold days in the fields).  Then there’s the whole problem of describing the dish, trying to generate anticipation as well as get across its unique qualities.  In my kitchen, anyway, I’m always a short step from my desk and its papers.

The poetry on Red Hen Press shares my sensibility.  The books could be culled for an anthology of fine food reconfigured as lines on a page.  Indeed, wasn’t the 2002 Saltman Award-winner State of Blessed Gluttony, by Susan Thomas?  The book’s link is below.  Thomas’s witty “Note” imagines the farewell letter left by Penelope of the The Odyssey, grown weary of waiting for Ulysses.  Where better for such a poem to start than letting the man know what the palace has got for oil, mutton, and wine?

Even the experimental poetry of Kimberly Burwick, in Has No Kinsmen, includes a scary meditation on preparing salad.   And Nickole Brown’s Sister samples classic Southern fare, and Camille Dungy makes significant menu distinctions:  What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison.   Really, the examples could go on a lot longer.   But I think you see the point: that poetry amounts to cold-weather sustenance as good as anything in a dish.  Besides, I’ve got lunch waiting.

http://www.redhen.org/RedHenPress.html#/catalog/catalogView/type=authors;authorUUID=02B398FC-0A4B-66F4-906C-89DB4A85D967

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Winning at Weekend Dreams

Even in cyberspace, today is Friday, and who doesn’t yearn for a weekend getaway?  Suddenly a beach studded with palm trees no longer assaults us like a cliché from a bad rom-com.  Instead, we imagine a role in that comedy, each of us playing screenwriter.  The getaway, I’m saying, goes hand in hand with the literary sensibility.  Emily Dickinson is far from the only writer to dwell in possibility.

In my own prosaic case, the dreaming I’ve done about Elsewhere has once or twice come true, and for this I’ve got to thank, in particular, Red Hen Press.  When books appear in print, sometimes the author gets a chance to travel.  After Talking Heads: 77, for instance, I received an invitation to exotic Valdosta, Georgia.

In fact, Valdosta was a great time, the students there wonderfully engaged.  Red Hen, however, has been instrumental in helping me cast a wider net.   Without them I’d never have been able to publish abroad, with Tullio Pironti Editore.  The press is based in my family’s native city of Naples, Italy, and I’ve attached the link below.

Talk about a dream come true.  My ’07 novel Earthquake I.D. came out over there last spring, ably translated by Stefano Manferlotti, under the title Terremoto Napoletano.  In October, it was runner-up for Italy’s Domenico Rea prize.  These events each occasioned a visit — I’ll refrain from getting into details of the meals — and none of it would’ve happened if not for the good judgment and flexible thinking of Red Hen Press.

Pironti too is flexible, a skilled improviser.  His press is mid-sized, for Italy.  They’ve got fine distribution, and the list includes best-sellers and books made into movies, but they’re still small enough to work outside the box of mainstream.  The Italian expression for what they can do would be fare arrangiarsi: “to arrange oneself.”

The editor and I had come to know each other when I’d visited Naples previously, and I’d read a number of the books on his house.   Among these was Pironti’s autobiography, the title of which I translate as Books & Rough Business.  Across Italy, the book received review after review, and I found it both an astonishing life story (not that I’ll give away its secrets here) and a portrait of the monumental changes in Italian culture over the last decades.  I believed that Books, etc., was a worthy accomplishment, and by ’07 I had Earthquake I.D. to share with him.

The novel went to Manferlotti, one of the judges he relied on for work in English, and in time Pironti saw a 40- or 50-page sample, what they call a prova.  Meanwhile I tried the same with the people at Red Hen, translating Pironti’s opening chapters and passing them along, with a thorough outline of the rest.   On both sides of the Atlantic, the response was enthusiastic.   Miracolo: both books appeared, and began to win good notice.  You can read about Pironti’s in Italian Americana and elsewhere.   As for my own, in Italy, let me just say it’s a lovely affirmation of what a small press and innovative thinking — or weekend dreaming — can accomplish.

http://www.tulliopironti.it/home.php

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The Writer’s Mail

Creative Writing, sure, I teach it.  Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, Poetry: I’ve headed up rewarding workshops in them all.  Naturally, too, I’ve heard the objections.   The argument goes this way: to teach writing interferes with genuine creation and natural growth.  A workshop sets up fake parameters for success and failure, prizing a limited classroom response over an earned readership by real people.

It’s a misanthropic tune, really — I mean, the complaints about Creative Writing warn people against working with others interested in the same thing.  Nuthouse.  But while I can’t buy the argument, I can borrow a bit of it to liven up my own workshops.  Ten or twelve years ago, I began to incorporate a small helping of the real world in my classes.  I began to come in, every now and again, with what I called “The Writer’s Mail.”

Writers generate print, right?  A lot of print.  So by logical extension, if our efforts make any headway at all, we’re bound to get a lot of mail.  John Updike, in a review, called it “lively, burdensome mail.” Not bad, for a thumbnail.   And the fact that the mail’s often electronic, these days, doesn’t change things.  Still lively, still burdensome, much of it demands to be printed out and mulled over.   More than a few of the pieces I’ve selected to bring into class have been electronic printouts.

Thus my students get a sense of success and failure beyond their weekly meetings.  They hear it thumping through the slot in the door and beeping into the Inbox.   Have I shared rejections?  Sure, if the editor’s response is in some way informative.  In the same way, I’ve shared unusual perspectives, illuminating perspectives, for instance from a reviewer over in Italy (my Earthquake I.D., originally on Red Hen, is now out in translation).  I’ve shown the students a magazine contract, a set of galleys, a request for an anthology contribution.  Also they learn about contributions of the other kind: pleas for financial aid, from literary non-profits.

The Writers’ Mail is all that and more — but its primary element, to be sure, is other books and publications.  When I first received The Believer out of New York, and L.A. Review from the other coast, I showed those to my apprentices.  Many a time, too, I’ve come to class with some Advance Readers Copy, some book that seemed worth calling attention too.   Today, in fact, brought me another of those.

If I wanted to, I could tack a dozen links onto the end of this blog, highlighting  a dozen significant new titles.  But I know better than to weigh a blog down with so long a tail.   Rather, I’ll mention just one, the sort of university-press publication you’d have trouble finding in Barnes & Noble.  That would be Joe Amato’s Once an Engineer.  A genre-bending but nerve-jolting memoir, with central figures dimly Italian and thoroughly no-account in icebound upstate New York, the book’s a heady and moving accomplishment, tickling a largely unseen corner of working America to life.  Once an Engineer has brought on long thoughts and abiding pleasure, and it reached me unbidden, thanks to The Writer’s Mail.

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4859-once-an-engineer.aspx

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Putting My Queer Shoulder to the Wheel

Does a blog like this get us anywhere?  Any of us?  The pronoun of course is vague — deliberately so.  I mean this first-person plural to extend outward across an entire community.  The question should be raised for every small, independent publisher and the creative folk who struggle with them: editors and writers doing the best they can, and wondering if anyone ever notices.

Why, after all, does Red Hen ask for volunteer bloggers from among its authors and supporters?   Those of us who agree to post our two cents’ worth online may have any number of private motives.  Also, however, we’re putting, as Alan Ginsberg said, our queer shoulder to the wheel.  We’re striving to nudge the press profile a bit higher.  We’re laboring to help our Red Hen stand out a bit more vividly, against the smoking dystopian landscape of American literary culture.

The exclusivity of that culture’s mandarins is what has done the most damage.  The gatekeepers at the Times Book Review, and at other major publications that give literature any attention, reserve the best and longest write-ups for a few big-press publications, well-moneyed and often long-established anyway.  It’s not that such publishers and authors don’t do good work, from time to time, but that there’s so much more, such rich variety, to be found outside the canyons of central Manhattan.

That variety, however, tends to flourish in darkness: ignored by the most prominent American critics and the most widely-distributed forums.  The problem’s one of smugness, really; the people who should show the most discernment instead fall back onto safe choices.   Michael Silverblatt, of the excellent radio program Bookworm, would be an exception — and indeed Silverblatt has often railed against the easy judgments of the country’s best-known arbiters of taste.

Other exceptions, willing to look beyond the few titles coming out from New York, can be found of course.  On my better days, I think of myself as such an open-minded critic.  Anyway I’ve made it a point to speak up for (that is, to review) a number of titles that might otherwise go overlooked, from Dewitt Henry’s Safe Suicide (on Red Hen) to the splendid initial publication of Zachary Mason’s Lost Books of the Odyssey (on Starcherone, two years before a big Manhattan house deigned to bring it out).

Indeed, my most recent work in this vein was an essay complaining about how the terrible misreading that most experimental, small-press fiction has received.  This was “Against the ‘Impossible to Explain:’ the Postmodern Novel & Society,” which appeared last month in The Quarterly Conversation.  The piece seems to have received a good deal of attention, or at least a lot of blog- and twitter-postings.  In any case the link is below, that its protest may reach a few more.

Because I wouldn’t be risking my queer shoulder against the wheel, if I didn’t believe it might get us somewhere.

http://quarterlyconversation.com/against-the-impossible-to-explain-the-postmodern-novel-and-society

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All Dressed Up – but Gone There Already

It’s no longer fashionable for a writer to gallivant around in formal threads, but I’m composing this blog in a full-dress dark pinstripe.  My shirt and tie make a nice blue-on-blue complement.  Is this appropriate?  Is it me, online, on a weekday morning?

For what it’s worth, I have reasons for this — preparing a face, as Prufrock says, to meet the faces that we meet.  It’s part of the profession, writing and teaching.  As today’s full-dress business goes on, though, I can be sure people are going to be discussing something about me that sojourns more or less naked in the world.  I mean that there’s going to be talk about my words on the page, my novels and stories and essays, in particular the work for Red Hen Press.

Public occasions such as today — indeed all the readings, symposia, you name it, that can place a writer behind the podium — tend to make us forget the essential solitude in which creative work is forged.  Anything from a poem of a few lines to a novel hundreds of pages long is composed during silent discussion between the self and imagined others.  In worthwhile cases, those discussions make it to print.  And after that point, however the author may have gussied up the rhetoric, the work begins a stately process of undressing again.  Not even the rags of the critics, praising the work or panning it, cling to a text for long.  Over time, those additional threads fall away too, and the piece finds its specific gravity and innate shape as another objet in the gallery.

So today when people begin asking about what I’ve published with Red Hen, the undressing goes on before my eyes.  I see the work in its core elements: how others have made space for its avoirdupois, and what they’ve selected from its essential ingredients.    My ’07 novel Earthquake I.D., for instance, has been described to me as a “globalized meditation on the Northern Hemisphere coming to terms with the Southern.”  One of the essays to appear in my forthcoming The Sea-God’s Herb was called “provocative literary peace-making.”  These assessments don’t displease me, of course; I’m glad that someone’s reading the work and thinking about it.   But I take them as part of the undressing, the way a piece of writing will be reduced, in inevitable summary, to the essence of its cultural contribution.

Given what happens after the work sees print, then, I’m terribly grateful for the time and space Red Hen gave me beforehand.  Few publishing houses would’ve been so patient, as I brought my work to full weight.  With Talking Heads: 77, I even requested a second set of galley proofs — and the press came through, at God knows what cost.  With Sea-God’s Herb, I took a good year to select the essays and reviews I wanted.  Then, making sure they cohered as whole, I had to write a new opening argument.  But the generous and independent Red Hen gave me that grace.

Kate Gale, in fact, has a poem about just this issue her current blog post.  Read “The Glass Orchestra Play for Immortality.”  The link for this poem is below, and you’ll see how Gale values the quiet of preparation as much as the blare before the public

As for me, today, my suit and tie will do their best for me.  But the real work, the real wallop, took place when no one was checking my outfit.

http://kategale.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/geffen-playhouse-and-the-glass-orchestra/

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The lyf so short…

Time always disappears on us, and instead of it slowing down as we get more of it under our belts…it gallops on ahead cruelly reminding us that the better we get an appreciation for whatever it is we’re here for, the quicker it slips away  – “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne…” Geoffrey Chaucer says. My reaction to this is a bizarre tendency to leave projects I feel most attached to, unfinished. For some reason I resist the idea of putting that poem or story into the stream of time which will make it real and vulnerable to all the things time does, including having it/us disappear…so the poem, story, creative ‘thing’, stays a fantasy I go back to, daydream about, and trick myself into believing that “one day…” …like the perfect love…what a trap! Since I think every time we do let the poem, story, essay, ‘perfect love’, become, it decides to be its own thing, turns into whatever time will make of it. Like the Acropolis in its stark grandeur, the white marble columns & friezes eaten by time (and several wars) — so different from the bold reds and blues and golds of its original incarnation that were pretty kitsch.

So here it is the end of my blogging week & I thought I’d continue what seems to be turning into a hen blog tradition of signing off with a prompt, Amy and Ching-In had great writing prompts I hope everyone got a chance to try. I’m going to connect this idea of abandoned projects (poetry lines or fragments…ruins) with an exercise. Are there (there must be!) things you’ve left unfinished…find them, or some parts of them, choose a favorite line from a poem that’s not the first line, a paragraph that’s not the first paragraph,  take a leap of faith — start “something” with it (not necessarily the poem/story/project you had in mind), and follow it through as it becomes whatever it chooses to be…the novella you were sure you would never write, convinced your beginning stanza was the start of an epic poem.

The Greek poet Yannis Ritsos tells us in “Mode of Acquisition”:

Whatever you hold in your hands

So carefully, with so much love,

Yours so totally, my companion,

You must give it away

In order for it to become yours

(from Ritsos in Parentheses, Trans. Edmund Keeley)

Here are some of my out of the context lines: “Can we forget what was stolen?”; “The sea so filled with August”; “I could write him a long letter of hurt”; “Everywhere you dig in Athens you find marble remains”

… all the best!

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Gendered Greek & other Expressions

Dearest guests I am really enjoying this conversation with the wider world, and thank you for visiting here. I was thinking about the resonances in some Greek expressions, and what language says about culture, how openly emotional it is or isn’t for example, or what nouns are male, or female — or neutral. Katerina said to me once that she could never have lived far from Greek because it’s her native language & the language she writes in, and Alexei, my Russian artist friend, says what he misses most is being able to curse in Russian because he just doesn’t feel the same kind of satisfaction cursing in, say, Greek. So I thought of some my favorite Greek expressions & how they change when I transliterate them: “psihi mou” (my soul – i.e. my dear); “latria mou” (my adored one –i.e. my love); “y zoe ine mia stavrosi” (life is a crucifixion  — i.e. life is a bitch, p.s. why isn’t it ‘life is a bastard’?); “to ehis kani thalassa” (you’ve made a sea of it – i.e. you’ve made a mess of it). This language of souls and seas and crucifixions…as Elina says “is so dramatic”, but that’s what I love about it. Elina is Greek and says she prefers the “pragmatism” of English. Of course poetry isn’t about pragmatism. But maybe for something like governments (who are not poetic) it makes sense to speak pragmatically (until they create some pretty dramatic messes…large as seas). Here’s the gender of some Greek words:

‘O’ = masculine; ‘Y’ = feminine; ‘To’ = neutral.

“O tromos” (terror); “Y agape” (love); “To lathos” (the mistake)

“O panikos” (panic); “Y irini” (peace); “To mialo” (the mind)

“O logos” (word); “Y trela” (madness); “To soma” (the body)

Walking through Exharia with Steve last night, I was reciting the above and he started to laugh, and said how binary I was being, and reminded me that “y ekdikisi” (revenge), “y orgi” (wrath…nothing to do w/ orgy), and “y hysteria” (hysteria) are all feminine, and of course I thought of Medea. But then “y zoe” (life) is also feminine as is “y dikiosi” (justice). While “o kalitechnis” (the artist), is masculine.

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Everyday Homeric, part 2

Athena

Public spaces, like the post office or the bank, are among the most theatrical sites in Athens, and sometimes among the most intimate; and I’m sure Aristophanes would be hanging out in them if he was alive in the 21st century…what often shocks (but also thrills) me, is the way people speak up & speak out in what I think of as “boundary-blur” moments that make for all kinds of drama…there’s a general chorus, a protagonist who may or not be heroic, and the gods, visible or invisible, always fickle and never understanding — so mere humans should therefore express their frustrations and desires, futile as that might be — as in yesterday’s post office scene when a woman kept repeating “I have other things to do today!” Several people nodded in commiseration, so she continued, “Do they think we have all day to stand here because they only have 3 people to take care of everyone?” someone chimed in, “It’s the same violin note every time…they take their time, we stand here like idiots, and no one says anything!” Someone else answers, “However much you say anything it’s not going to change the way it is…” Everyone’s staring at the digital #s that gradually start to climb. “We’re getting there,” someone else says, at least the numbers are moving….” Someone close by gives advice about where to buy furniture at a discount, what’s happening now with the economy. “Here we go again, collecting receipts for next year’s tax statements – remember when we did this in the 80s, with the first PASOK administration?” Someone else is starting an argument about a woman who has just given her protocol # to someone else because she can’t wait anymore. Someone tells her she has no right to give it because it’s messing up the sequence of people in line. She whips around, pissed, and says, “Is your problem that I didn’t give it to you?”

Even after (almost) 20 years in Athens, I am still amazed by these boundary-blur moments. Maybe part of this is that the other half of my cultural self belongs to a world where disregard for ‘private space’ is immediately read as trespass. A week ago an older man walked into the crowded post office with a curse because the woman who has the kiosk outside and sells stamps for a few more cents was still closed. “Rotten luck” he blurted. “Damn rotten luck,” he said again, more loudly. He pushed in front of some people, and then pulled a protocol number out of a woman’s hand; she was older and looked stunned, and about to say something, when he just as suddenly returned it to her. The number was higher than the one he had. He then edged over to one of the clerks behind the counter to see if he might squeeze in ahead. I asked what his ticket # was; he showed me # 159. I showed him mine was #143. He said, “Ok, you go first.” “I’m waiting my turn,” I answer. He shrugs, “Damn luck” repeating that it’s past 9 and the kiosk is still closed. “So here I am in line…” he goes on. “We’re all in line” someone says. “So why doesn’t anyone ask to be taken care of!” he demands. “For a stupid stamp we’re all here wasting our time!…Like I don’t have other things to do?” he practically yells. Someone gently tells him he has to wait his turn. Someone else, less kindly, says “We all have to wait our turns”. The man whips around. “What are you some kind of jurist?!” “I’m following the rules” the other man answers. He then looks outside, sees the kiosk lady opening up, and goes out to her like he’s recognized a lover.

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We’ve Moved!

There has been a change of scenery for the Red Hen staff as our office has relocated from Granada Hills to the wonderful city of Pasadena! The move is almost complete, though we’re still experiencing a few hiccups here and there.

We have not “officially” opened, though when we do, you may visit the office and purchase a book from the Red Hen library. Until then, however, we shall remain discretionary regarding our specific location. Adjacent landmarks (for those who are familiar with Pasadena area) include Rick’s Drive-In and the legendary Vroman’s Bookstore.

More info will follow in the coming days, so stay posted!

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Everyday Homeric

Eros

Hello, or as we’d say here Yasu! I thought I’d write a little today about why I am strangely attached to living in this mad city with its layers of antiquity just below the surface of chaotic streets and the post-modern mélange of characterless concrete (from buildings built mostly during the military Junta, 1967-74), renovated neoclassical buildings in Golden Age ochres or garish Minoan reds and the sometimes stunning graffiti over the walls in Exarchia (Athens’ Soho) where the anarchists’ various emblematic As (that oddly remind me of Hester Prynne’s  letter), decorate walls and windows along with their crazy ritual of spray painting statues with mustaches and nipples — and then, at night, the Acropolis, lit up, gorgeous and iconic, that floats above it all. Maybe “attached” is the wrong verb here, more like overwhelmed & by turns obsessed, despairing, protective, impatient, and almost always frustrated  –  I finally know why the Greeks ( I’m only  a hybrid) say that Greece, and Athens in particular, is mia erotiki skesi, an erotic relationship, not a stable, committed love or an unconditional family love, but a torturous, open love/hate eros  that takes nothing for granted, or as the saying goes leaves you feeling like you can’t be with or without “her”  — a place and country which like its roots in the epic hexameters of the Illiad and Odyssey, feels constantly in the midst of high drama, embattled, misunderstood, openly or reluctantly adored. As with Homer’s Odysseus (or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus for that matter), navigating the various Cyclops and Sirens has its moments of surprise and ritual pauses of “putting aside” the work of battle for “food and drink”; no pleasure is ever squandered no matter the challenges and there’s always time for the “prime cuts pulled…off the spits/…while ready stewards saw/to rounds of wine and kept the gold cups flowing…” (The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles). And I guess all this is to say that what I finally find most absorbing about this relationship is that it’s like an ongoing love you keep breaking up with but never entirely leave, because s/he is SO unpredictable… like life.

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