Writers Institute on Jeopardy! and C-SPAN

Two notable television events for the New York State Writers Institute are coming up that may be of interest:

Our graduate assistant Josh Bartlett will appear on Jeopardy! with Alex Trebek on Thanksgiving Day, 7:30 p.m. on News10.

“The waiting, which began with the tryout in January, extended through the taping in August and then through all the months Joshua Bartlett had to smile and say nothing, is over: The University at Albany graduate student will finally appear Thursday on Jeopardy!”

Read more in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Local-contestant-on-Jeopardy-4057184.php

A special program on the City of Albany, in which the Writers Institute, William Kennedy, Donald Faulkner and The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza are prominently featured, will air on C-SPAN2's Book TV and C-SPAN3's American History TV on the weekend of Dec. 8 and 9. The program is part of C-SPAN’s LCV (Local Content Vehicle) 2012 Cities Tour of all of America’s state capitals.

"The idea is to look at a city's rich history and unique literary life," said producer Debbie Lamb, whose three-member crew will fan out across the city all week. "We wanted to get outside Washington and highlight medium-sized cities that a national audience normally wouldn't get to see."

Read more in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/The-good-the-bad-the-colorful-4035365.php

Here’s a link to the C-SPAN Local Content page:  http://www.c-span.org/LocalContent/

Read More......

Cod for Thanksgiving

Mark Kurlansky, who visited in 2004, may have started a movement with his 1997 nonfiction book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World.

Perhaps we should all be eating cod with cranberry sauce.

Jennifer Kennedy of About.com Marine Life cites and paraphrases Kurlansky on a page devoted to cod and the Pilgrims (here):

"In a move that eventually led to their displacement, local Native Americans took pity on the starving Pilgrims and assisted them, believing they would 'receive blessings' for their generosity. They showed the Pilgrims how to catch cod and use the uneaten parts as fertilizer. They also introduced the Pilgrims to quahogs, 'steamers,' and lobster.

Read More......

Family Dysfunction: Literature for Thanksgiving

The literary magazine Ploughshares serves up a banquet of dysfunctional family literature for your Thanksgiving gathering in its November issue.

Lydia Davis, New York State Writers Institute Writing Fellow, provides one of the appetizers:

"If your taste for dysfunction veers toward the quietly lethal, I urge readers to pick up a copy of anything by Lydia Davis. 'Meat, My Husband,' which appears in her Collected Stories, and originally in Almost No Memory, is the ideal amuse-bouche for a family gathering." More.

Read More......

Thanksgiving Reading

Popular historian David O. Stewart, who visited the Writers Institute in 2007, and delivered the History Department's Fossieck Lecture, picked three books of American history for Thanksgiving reading on NPR's "All Things Considered" this evening:

"With Thanksgiving hard upon us, now is a good time to think about our past. History writers can tell the best stories from centuries of human achievement and folly, yet too often they produce recitations of one damned thing after another. A few, though, combine a respect for accuracy with a deep understanding of the longings, fears and triumphs of the people of our past. Such books make magic." More.

Read More......

A Spanish Thanksgiving in St. Augustine, Florida

"Spaniards also held a thanksgiving, 56 years before the Pilgrims, when they feasted near St. Augustine with Florida Indians, probably on stewed pork and garbanzo beans."

"The early history of Spanish North America is well documented, as is the extensive exploration by the 16th-century French and Portuguese. So why do Americans cling to a creation myth centered on one band of late-arriving English — Pilgrims who weren't even the first English to settle New England or the first Europeans to reach Plymouth Harbor? (There was a short-lived colony in Maine and the French reached Plymouth earlier.)"

In the New York Times in 2008, Tony Horwitz, who visits Thursday 11/17, discusses Thanksgiving in light of the current immigration debate, and in light of what we know of Spanish activity in the North America. More.

Read More......

A Thanksgiving Poem

"The First Thanksgiving" by former New York State Poet Sharon Olds (1998-2000):

When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object,
like a soul in a body. More

Read More......