Around the World + Helping Prison Libraries in MD + Death of Fiction/Lit Mags + Translation Errors

The other day, in the midst of more hairpulling over the current US political paralysis and continuous series of bad choices that the administration and Congress keep making, as if they're trying to crash through a 2010 looking-glass version of 1994 but with potentially far more disastrous outcomes, I asked myself: what else is going on in the rest of the world, in addition to the terrible post-quake situation in Haiti, which has gotten a great deal of attention.I began to catalogue some of the things I was somewhat aware of, just off the top of my head, and am listing them here. What am I missing?

• Angola continued on as the host of the African Cup of Nations, after the deadly attack on the Togolese team in the restive Cabinda province
• Argentinian leader Cristina Fernández de Kirchner fires central banker, battles other government officials, economy faltering

• Australia has recently witnessed repeated violent attacks, including murder, on South Asian residents, many of them students (the cartoon at right has sparked outrage)
  
• Bolivians reelected Socialist president Evo Morales
• British ruling party facing likely defeat in upcoming elections
• Canada prepares for winter Olympics in Vancouver (someday I'll actually see this supposedly very beautiful city and region)
• Chile elects right-wing billionaire president, first rightist in half a century
• China and Google in tiff over hackers, Net control, censorship
• Colombia moves forward with extension of presidential terms for conservative, pro-US president Álvaro Uribe
• France's government considers ban on burqas/face covering garments
• Honduras' ex-president, Manuel Zelaya, overthrown in coup, will go into exile in Dominican Republic
• Iraq in turmoil in lead-up to January 30, 2010 governmental elections, multiple bombings over last 3 days, former Saddam-era official executed
• Japanese city elects anti-US military base mayor, negotiation over Okinawa installation likely
• Nigerian President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua out of country since late fall, feared dead, sparking a political crisis, recently issued a tape saying he's okay; sectarian riots in central Nigerian city of Kos have led to the death of hundreds of people
• Northern Ireland government teetering after sex scandal revelations involving conservative leader's anti-gay wife, Iris (Mrs.) Robinson, crisis talks underway
• Portugal legalizes same-sex marriage
• Somalia remains wracked by civil war
• Sri Lanka's civil war is over, but a battle brews between the president who won it and his top general
• Turkey and Israel in a tiff over Israeli ambassador's public humiliation of Turkish ambassador, Israel apologizes
• Venezuela's leader, Hugo Chávez, devalues currency, bolivar, begins reelection push
• Yemen is the site of increased US military and intelligence activity

These were the first few news factlets that came to mind, and the situations in Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, one of the US's major sources of oil, and the one from which the alleged recent airline bomb-plot participant came; and in Iraq, which the US is currently occupying and which the news media have all but disappeared, both really deserve far greater scrutiny. But then what's happening across the globe, including both in the US's front yards and far away, should receive far greater media and public exploration and discussion. What else am I missing?

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From Reggie H, I received this appeal from a Maryland librarian who coordinates a program involving bringing books and other reading materials to incarcerated people. Their funding has just been slashed, so the library, Glennor Shirley, writes:

From: "Glennor Shirley" Sent: Tue 26/01/10 12:19 PM Subject:GED books and dictionariesCorrectional Education Libraries lost all their funding due to the state budget crisis. That has affected our ability to purchase materials for inmates who read a lot and who we are preparing to returning to society to be productive citizens. We will accept:

• Reference materials no older than 2 years.
• Current Non Fiction ( psychology, self help, self improvement, relationships, starting your own business, business plans, career, English language dictionaries, health information
• Anything on the NYT and Washington Post Bestseller Lists
• Popular authors, like Grisham, Ludlum, Patterson, Stephen King,
• Alice Walker, Patricia Cornwell, Grafton, etc.
• Mysteries, horror, romance, books by African-American writers.
• GED Books,
• English language dictionaries

Call or email me if you have any good offers. Read my vignette at: ALA: "Vignettes from a Prison Librarian"Glennor Shirley http://prisonlibrarian.blogspot.comLibrary CoordinatorCorrectional Education LibrariesBaltimore MD 21201email: gshirley@dllr.state.md.ushttp://www.dllr.state.md.us/ce/lib/

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Someone is always figuratively announcing, proclaiming or predicting the death of one of the arts, or a sub-genre within them. Painting was dead 10 years ago, long live painting. The novel's utility long ago vanished, here come the novels. Video art was just a passing fad, but biennials can't get enough of video art. Etc. What is sometimes true is that the delivery systems by which we access certain types of art do change, thereby changing our experiences with and relationship to them. Drive-ins, those relics of an older, suburbanizing, car-focused culture, which were still around in my youth, are all but gone these days. But the arts aren't going away. Ted Genoways, editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, however, expounds in Mother Jones not only that American fiction is kaput and American poetry doesn't deal with the "big issues," but that literary journals are disappearing. Going, going, gone. Of course he extrapolates from a few anecdotes (one of them incorrect), providing no statistical data to back up his projections, nor does he seem to be aware of the increasing number of online journals, or the countless ones that have replaced the older formats (newspapers, general interest magazines, etc.) that he's citing. He isn't the first to bemoan the parochialism of American literature, and won't be the last, but to leap from that critique to the death of lit mags is, to put it simply, pushing it. The story about the former Yale Review editor becoming a US Senator from Connecticut Senator is, if nothing else, inspiring, though, and I could even see a university--Yale?--adding this to its marketing materials: Students, there are many more things you can do with creative writing and literary and cultural studies than you might have imagined, including replacing those sorry excuses for legislators Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman!

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Did you see the translation of the Aimé Césaire (a Martinican and one of the great poets of the Caribbean and Francophone literature) poem in the recent issue of The New Yorker? You know, the issue with the paean to writer Neil Gaiman; the insightful as always discussion of memoir-writing, authenticity and truthfulness by Daniel Mendelsohn; and the "short story" by evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson? It was titled "Earthquake," and was translated by Paul Muldoon. A friend forwarded it and, for several different reasons, it rubbed me the wrong way. (Why not a poem by a Haitian or Haitian-American poet, like Frankétienne, Phébus Étienne, Paul Laraque, Georges Castera, Jean-Euphèle Milcé, Patrick Sylvain, Jacqueline Scott, René Philoctète, Danielle LeGros-Georges, Carlo Paul, Ella Turenne, or Gina Dorcely, just to name a few? When was the last time any Haitian or Haitian-American poets appeared in the pages of The New Yorker?) Little did I know.... (H/t Reggie H, Randall H)

End of Semester + Writer's Strike Over + Bolaño's "The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys"

Last Friday I taught my final Theory and Practice of Fiction class of the semester (or quarter-and-a-half; this and its poetry and creative nonfiction analogues are the only such course in the university's undergraduate college). TPF is the advanced, intensive, first half of a yearlong sequence that all the majors and minors take, and among the requirements, the students must read stories by a number of authors over the summer, and then be ready to discuss and analyze them once school starts in September. This time we read stories by the following 7 authors: Anton Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Junot Díaz, Z. Z. Packer, Haruki Murakami, and Aimee Bender, with a final glance at James Joyce's "The Dead"). The students also wrote three short stories, two of which they had to revise, before switching over this week to a new professor for another semester (quarter-and-a-half), during which they'll complete a novella. The course is exhausting in terms of the workload, but one of the most fulfilling I get an opportunity to teach, because I get to see all 15 of these amazing young writers develop their distinctive voice (or voices) and styles, and see demonstrable growth not only in their skills as writers, but as critics of each others' work, the pieces by the established writers, and their own stories. This particular group was very lively, had a great collective sense of humor, possessed a penchant for speculative fiction and fantasy texts, and included some hardcore TV and movie fans who got all of Junot Díaz's references during his visit (I kid not), and most of mine. (The film repertoire of the 1970s remains an unexplored trove.) We had a farewell dinner this weekend, and I managed not to get verklempt. But I already miss them. I know they'll be in excellent hands, though, and busier than they ever imagined writing their novellas. I can't wait till our end-of-year senior readings to hear what some of them have come up with, though they'll also have stories they'd be proud to submit anywhere.

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The 3 1/2 month Screen Writers Guild's strike over internet residuals and fair compensation is over. Here's a primer on the deal the writers and producers struck. I gather the deal is perfect but it does address some of the chief concerns the writers had, and it can be considered a significant union victory in this new century. On a practical level it'll mean the return of popular series and fewer "reality" shows, though I don't think cable or non-cable channels had yet reached the true abyss of mediated reality awfulness just yet. But they have been on their way.

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Speaking of writers and fiction, here's "The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys," a Bookforum excerpt from Chris Andrews's new translation of Roberto Bolaño's early (1996) literary encyclopedia-as-novel, Nazi Literature in the Americas. A section of the novel became the important early novella Distant Star (1996), which I have been recommending, along with one of Bolaño's masterpieces, By Night In Chile (2000), and his award-winning novel, The Savage Detectives (1998) since I picked them up. The highly autobiographical, exquisitely pitched stories in Last Evenings on Earth (a 2006 English combo of selections from two of his earlier volumes) are also worth reading, though perhaps more of an acquired taste.

I plan on picking up the new New Directions volume soon, but I'm eagerly waiting on the translation, supposedly forthcoming from Farrar Straus and Giroux (is that right?), of his last and magnum opus, the (nearly finished) mammoth (1,100 pages) novel 2666 (2004) which has been widely acclaimed as one of the major Spanish language works of the last 20 years.

From the online story, a salty sliver:

He began the year 1974 by publishing the collection Iron Youth (fifty mimeographed copies): dense, militaristic poems with march-like rhythms, which, if nothing else, obliged Schiaffino to venture beyond the bounds of his natural thematic domains: soccer and humor. He followed up with a play, The Presidential Summit, or What Can We Do to Turn This Around? In this five-act farce, heads of state and diplomats from various Latin American nations meet in a hotel room somewhere in Germany to discuss options for restoring the natural and traditional supremacy of Latin American soccer, which is under threat from the European total-football approach. The play, which is extremely long, recalls a certain strain of avant-garde theatre, from Adamov, Genet, and Grotowski to Copi and Savary, although it is unlikely (though not impossible) that Fatso ever set foot in the sort of establishment given to the production of such plays. The following are only a few of the scenes: (1) A monologue about the etymologies of the words peace and art delivered by the Venezuelan cultural attaché. (2) The rape of the Nicaraguan ambassador in one of the hotel bathrooms by the presidents of Nicaragua, Colombia, and Haiti. (3) A tango danced by the presidents of Argentina and Chile. (4) The Uruguayan ambassador’s peculiar interpretation of the prophecies of Nostradamus. (5) A masturbation contest organized by the presidents, with three categories: thickness (won by the Ecuadoran ambassador); length (won by the Brazilian ambassador); and, most important, distance covered by semen (won by the Argentine ambassador). (6) The president of Costa Rica’s subsequent irritation and condemnation of such contests as “scatology in the poorest taste.” (7) The arrival of the German whores. (8) All-out brawling, chaos, and exhaustion. (9) The arrival of the dawn, a “pink dawn that intensifies the fatigue of the bigwigs who finally come to understand their defeat.” (10) The president of Argentina’s solitary breakfast (having let off a series of resounding farts, he climbs into bed and falls asleep).