The Literary Life Where You Find

An article in the TU in association with tomorrow's event:

THE LITERARY LIFE WHERE YOU FIND IT: an evening with WILLIAM KENNEDY and ELISA ALBERT
Thursday, November 7th, at 6 pm, at the Stair Gallery, 549 Warren Street, Hudson. For more information, contact the Hudson Library at 518.828.1792.

The TU's Amy Griffin writes:

In 2010, Patti Smith gave some advice to young artists: "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."

These sentiments were echoed more recently when David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, wrote for Creative Time Reports that New York City is becoming increasingly inhospitable to creativity and that "the cultural part of the city — the mind — has been usurped by the top 1 percent."

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Lethem on Front Page of NY Times Book Review

Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem (who visits today) was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review last Sunday by Yiyun Li.

Longtime readers of Jonathan Lethem will not be surprised to learn that New York City is the setting of his new novel, “Dissident Gardens,” though center stage this time is not the author’s native Brooklyn or the Upper East Side but Queens — specifically, Sunnyside Gardens, the planned community complex built in the 1920s. Readers may, however, be either disappointed or relieved to find no superheroes, no aliens, not even a Tourette’s-afflicted self-appointed private detective. No genre-bending this time, the novel seems to say: spanning 80 years and three generations, it realistically portrays an enchanted — or disenchanted — garden of American revolutionaries.

More in the NYTBR:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/books/review/jonathan-lethems-dissident-gardens.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

More about Lethem's visit today:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html

Full series:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#lethem

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Director of Sci Journalism Program at Columbia Visits Today

One of the world's leading teachers and practitioners of science journalism will be visiting Albany today to talk about her new history of Manhattan's street grid.

Marguerite Holloway has been teaching at the Journalism School since 1997. She won a Presidential Teaching Award in 2009 and the Distinguished Teacher of the Year award in 2001. Holloway has been a long-time contributor to Scientific American, where she has covered many topics, particularly environmental issues, public health, neuroscience and women in science.

Holloway has a B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University and an M.S. from the Journalism School (class of 1988). Before she joined Scientific American in 1990, she worked as a reporter for the Medical Tribune and freelanced for publications including The Village Voice and Mother Jones. Her work has appeared in many other magazines and newspapers, among them Discover, The New York Times, Natural History and Wired. Her book, The Measure of Manhattan, has just been published by W.W. Norton.

More on her visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#holloway

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Disorderly Story of the Orderly NYC Street Grid

Marguerite Holloway, who will give a slide show presentation at the State Museum on Thursday, is the author of the new book, The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr.

Here's an excerpt from a review in Slate:

"Randel, who was born in Albany in 1787, grew up during “a surveying boom,” when a large portion of prominent American males—Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and later, Lincoln—served in the profession at some point. “His was the era of laying lines on the land,” Holloway declares. It was “a culture and a period in which reason and measured action were prized and dominion over the natural world—through exploration, experiment, science, cartography, and infrastructure—was celebrated.” Beginning in about 1804, Randel was hired to assist New York State surveyor-general Simeon Dewitt in his plan to grid upstate New York. Dewitt was influenced by the earlier plan to grid the entire United States, outlined in the 1785 “Ordinance for Ascertaining the Mode of Disposing of Lands in the Western Territory”—the reason why flyover country looks like a waffle iron."

Read more in Slate.

Read about Holloway's visit:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/holloway_marguerite13.html

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Sandy's Impact on NYC Publishing

From Publishers Weekly:

"The wind and rain may have died down in New York City, but the metropolis is far from recovered. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which has left thousands throughout the tri-state without power, many publishers are struggling to get their systems back online, and some are reporting issues at their warehouses, as well."

More:  http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/54560-new-york-publishing-struggling-to-get-back-online-post-sandy.html

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Sharing Little House on the Praire with a daughter

Marie Howe writes in Oprah's O. magazine about the pleasures of sharing Little House on the Prairie with her adopted Chinese daughter during their own hard economic times.

Marie Howe will be inaugurated as State Poet tonight in Page Hall.

The Hard-Times Companion

By Marie Howe, August 2009

Inspired by the trials and triumphs of a resilient pioneer family, Marie Howe and her daughter find the joyful rhythm in a pared-down life.

Last summer my 8-year-old daughter and I returned to New York City after I didn't get the very lucrative job I'd hoped for in another city. Let's go home, honey, I said, and downsize into simplicity. And so we came back to our tiny fifth-floor walk-up apartment in the West Village, gave away or stored a lot of our stuff, and resettled into a space the size of a very small houseboat. Within two months the economy began to wobble and then falter.

It seemed a good time to read the series I'd known as the Little House on the Prairie books, written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'd never read them as a child, had only glimpsed the TV series, and autumn was upon us. We sat on the couch under the lamplight, the book in my lap, my daughter leaning against me, warm and fresh from a shower. Through our two front windows: the worn red bricks of the 19th-century buildings across the street, and beyond them, the gleaming Empire State Building shining over the darkened city.

 

More in O. magazine:  http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Reading-Little-House-on-the-Prairie-With-My-Daughter-Marie-Howe

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