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March 2, 2003
Articles: Poets against war
AS the prospect of war looms ahead, few people have other things on their mind. Picking up on the mood of the moment, over 100 English-language poets banded together to produce an electronic book of poems that spoke out against the prospect of war on Iraq.
Relying on a network of poets from around the world, Montreal poet Todd Swift, 36, requested 75 poets to submit a poem within the week. He received over 400 entries from which he selected and edited those that would be included in the book. The poems were published in an electronic anthology that was released the day the UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix submitted his report to the Security Council.
Simply titled 100 Poets against the War, the 95-page electronic book can be downloaded for free from www.nthposition.com.
Swift says he was motivated to compile the anthology by the desire to do something ‘more dynamic’ than signing anti-war petitions. American poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell, who opposed the war in Vietnam during the 1960s, were the inspiration behind the project.
Homer was right
Scholars have been debating Homer’s account for centuries. His Iliad describes the geography and events in the ancient city of Troy and researchers have been drilling the sediments from the river’s flood plain to chart the changes in the landscape. They have analyzed the sediments and using maps of geological changes have confirmed the location of the ancient city of Troy as given by Starbo, a classicist who studied Homer’s work many centuries ago. Archeologists are now saying that the city that matches Ancient Troy’s age was located in Hissarlik, in western Turkey, and was built around 3,000 BC.
A researcher on the project said, “The reality of Homer’s description of place, event, and topography correlated with geologic investigation helps show that the Iliad is not just a legend, but regularly consistent with paleographic reconstructions.”
Share in the millions
Paul Blake the 54-year-old nephew of Beat writer Jack Kerouac has started legal action that could gain him millions of dollars from his uncle’s estate.
His uncle Kerouac, who died in 1969, wrote the seminal 1957 novel On the Road. “We played basketball together and went for walks in the woods and had trees we sat under. He used to go out there and write. He told me that when you grow up, don’t be tied down to one thing, just enjoy life as it comes,” recalls Blake who now lives in a trailer park and who also inspired some of the characters in Kerouac’s work. While no one disputes Blake’s relationship with Kerouac, the issue of whether the homeless former alcoholic should receive a portion of his uncle’s wealth is a complicated family issue.
Blake began legal proceeding after Jan Kerouac, the writer’s only child, died in 1996. His case is strengthened by a note from Kerouac explaining that he wanted to leave his estate to “someone with the last remaining drop of my direct blood line.”
Meanwhile Blake says that he earns no more than $100 a month and he believes Kerouac, had he been alive, would have sympathized with his situation.
Angering Woolf’s real fans
The movie version of Mrs Dalloway, titled “The Hours”, has come in for flack from fans of the real Virginia Woolf. Fans have been particularly scathing about the film, critiquing everything from the imitation of Woolf’s writing to the nose that Nicole Kidman donned for the lead role.
Jane Marcus, an English professor at the City University of New York Graduate Centre and the author of three volumes of essays on Woolf, said, “Imagine the great brilliance of Virginia Woolf to be turned into this absolutely maimed fool with a really ugly nose.” Other fans are upset and are saying that their idol has been turned into a pathetic, suicide-obsessed creature, her politics ignored, and her personality distorted. Judges at the Academy Awards have kept well away from the debate by nominating both the movie and actress Nicole Kidman for the Oscars.
On the other hand interest in Woolf thus sparked by the film and customers are snapping up copies of Mrs Dalloway propelling it into the # 1 position on Amazon’s paperback sale list.
Honouring children’s literature
The highest award for writing and illustrating in children’s literature went to a mediaeval coming-of-age story and a lighthearted animal romp. Avi, author of Crispin: The Cross of Lead, received the Newbery Medal for writing, while illustrator Eric Rohmann received the Caldecott Medal for My Friend Rabbit.
Other awards were announced in several categories, including the Coretta Scott King Awards, which honoured African American authors and illustrators of children’s books. The winners included author Nikki Grimes for Bronx Masquerade and illustrator E.B. Lewis for Talkin’ About Bessie: The Story of Aviator Elizabeth Coleman, which was also written by Grimes.
Shortest short story
The man who wrote the world’s shortest short story is dead. Augusto Monterroso, a Guatemalan author, died aged 81 at his Mexico City home on February 9, 2003.
Born in, Honduras, Monterroso was a Guatemalan. He left Guatemala in 1944 and lived in self-imposed exile in Mexico until 1996, when he returned to Guatemala to receive its National Literature Award.
His works include The Black Sheep and Other Fables, Perpetual Movement, All the Rest is Silence,The letter E: Fragments of a Diary; and The Magic Word. He also wrote The Dinosaur, which became the world’s shortest short story. The story in its entirety reads “When it woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”
Monterroso taught literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and received the Juan Rulfo award for Latin American Literature in 1996. He also received the highest honour the Mexican government can bestow on foreign dignitaries, the Aguila Azteca. He actively opposed the Guatemalan government and the U.S.- owned United Fruit Co., which operated banana plantations across Central America.
Unfit poems
As husband George W. Bush defies the world through belligerent war mongering, wife Laura planned more peaceful events such as a poetry reading at the White House. With war around the corner, unfortunately the timing was all wrong. Poet Sam Hamill, who was to attend the event, responded to the invitation by soliciting anti-war poems which he planned on presenting to the more dignified Bush. Bush responded by postponing the event. The poets went ahead anyway and held their own poetry reading titled Poems Not Fit for the White House. With that agenda a few dozen poets landed at Avery Fisher Hall to read poems and express their opposition to an attack on Iraq.
One book, one city
The new book all of Philadelphia will be reading is The Price of a Child as part of the One Book, One City reading campaign taking place all around the US. The tale of a young woman from the South who escapes slavery in pre-Civil War Philadelphia is expected to start debates on American attitudes toward race, as well as Philadelphia’s pre-Civil War ambivalence about slavery. The Price of a Child was published in 1995 and was based on an actual event revolving around a slave.
Similar reading campaigns have been successfully launched in several cities in the US most notable amongst which was in Chicago, where residents read To Kill a Mockingbird.
Two leaders and an actress
The last leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the former US President, Bill Clinton, are helping to narrate a new recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. The two have come together to record a performance of the work by the Russian National Opera under the Grammy-winning conductor, Kent Nagano. Defending his choice of voices Nagano said, “We chose former politicians who have a great ability to communicate.”
Actress Sophia Loren will help the two narrate the musical tale, that has become the simple way to introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra. The actress and the leaders will also perform The Wolf and Peter, which tells the tale from the wolf’s point of view.
Elaborating on this twist Nagano said “We thought it would be interesting to see the story from the point of view of the wolf. He’s in the forest but the forest is disappearing, urbanization is cutting the trees away... and we see why the wolf is so desperate.”
Gorbachev who is pleased with the environmental aspect of the piece will donate the money he earns for his performance to Green Cross International. Clinton on the other hand is expected to donate his fee to the International AIDS Trust, whose advisory committee he chairs.
British Book of the Year
Booker winner Yann Martel is riding high on the wave of success as his Life of Pi was shortlisted for the British Book of the Year Award. Life of Pi tells the story of a boy stranded at sea in a lifeboat with a host of animals including a Bengal tiger. Martel is the second Canadian author to make the shortlist after Margaret Atwood who was nominated in 1996.
The prize also honours the best author, biography, children’s book, audio book, new author, illustrated book and film and TV book but carries no cash reward. Other nominees for the Book of the Year are Michael Moore for Stupid White Men, Antony Beevor for Berlin: The Downfall, 1945, Jean M Auel for The Shelters of Stone and Ian McEwan for Atonement.
Michael Moore emerged the winner when the awards were announced after British readers had voted by phone.
Resorting to verses
Protesting the film dramatization of her mother’s life and suicide it was rather apt that the daughter of poet Sylvia Plath resorted to verse to vent her anger. Frieda Hughes, daughter of Plath and fellow poet Ted Hughes, expressed contempt for the plan in a poem titled “My Mother”. “My buried mother / Is dug up for repeat performances,” she writes in the poem, which will appear in the March edition of a British lifestyle magazine.
Plath committed suicide in 1963 by gassing herself. The planned BBC film called “Ted and Sylvia”, has a budget of $11 million and will feature Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath. Dreading the mass viewing of what was a harrowing private event, the poet’s daughter writes, “The peanut eaters, entertained / At my mother’s death, will go home... Maybe they’ll buy the video /...All they have to do / Is press ‘pause’ / If they want to boil a kettle, / While my mother holds her breath on screen / To finish dying after tea.”
The Corleones will be back
The saga of Mario Puzo’s fictional crime family, the Corleone, will continue with a sequel to The Godfather written by a new author. Mark Winegardner, 41, a fiction writer won the writing assignment after a search for Puzo’s successor was launched. In the past, Winegardner, who is the director of the creative writing programme at Florida State University, has written about subjects as diverse as baseball, Cleveland and organized crime. The decision to hand over the project to Winegardner was made jointly by publishers Random House and the Puzo Literary Estate.
The sequel The Godfather Returns is tentatively scheduled for release in the fall of 2004. Other characters such as James Bond and Scarlett O’Hara, have continued to live through sequels after the author’s death. Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett was a commercial success, but was hardly worthy of the original.
Released in 1969 The Godfather, has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and led to two classic American films that collected nine Academy Awards. Puzo collaborated on the screenplays of the two films and won two Oscars.
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