Linda Spalding read tonight from her new book "Who Named the Knife: A Book of Murder and Memory". It focuses on a murder in Hawaii, where she was living at the time, but it also focuses on the murder's aftermath. Astonishingly.
So it was ironically appropriate that Caryl Phillips, known to us as Caz, read from his forthcoming book, Foreigners, a piece about a Nigerian homeless man in Leeds, a man who might well have been killed by the local police. Beyond that Caz read a terrifically moving piece of autobiography - in 10 chapters as he said - each about as long as the blink of an eye. But it was about as moving as a piece of work could be.
And all the way home we listened to Bruce Springsteen singing "I came for you."
Cheers to all.
Friday, July 6, 2007
A Nonfiction Night
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Independence Day
Frank Bidart, as Mary Gordon so aptly said, sets the bar high. The two read together last night, 4th of July, and to be purposely trite, they created their own fireworks. Mary Gordon's story about a divorced woman and the cleaning girl who becomes her personal assistant has a perfect roundness, the projections of the woman, a writer, on to the cipher of Dillie, the girl, mark the writer's own movement through loss to re-inventing her own life. In the process the very nature of writing is put into question in a most compelling way.
Something is happening with Frank Bidart's poetry. Known widely as a writer of long poems, dramatic poems, book-length poems, Frank Bidart has turned to lyric poetry, and the power of his work has become more concentrated, so that one feels the impact of his work like a body blow. In a brief piece on Marilyn Monroe, Bidart writes: "what you came from is craziness, what your/ mother and her mother came from is// craziness, panic of the animal/ smelling what you have in store for it."
More to come.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Independence Day Greetings
Tonight, Frank Bidart and Mary Gordon read - 8pm Palamountain Hall on the Skidmore Campus in Saratoga Springs. Wonderful day here, wonderful.
Help Us Get the Word Out
Happy Fourth!
Liz Benedict read with Katha Pollitt on the 3rd of July, and the two were dynamic. Liz, who has worked extensively with the Institute read new work and a fun piece about sex-blogging (of all things) that she published with fellow teacher James Miller in his edited Dedaelus.
We slipped away to hear Jason Moran and his post-jazz trio, who were playing in the Summer Jazz Institute.
Wow. His "Artist in Residence" on EMI is one of the best Cd's we've heard in a long while.
We've agreed that we should focus on fashion across the summer. Peg Boyers wears a beautiful Missoni shawl. Marry Gordon wears beautifully symmetrical shoes. Frank Bidart's classic black on black on black on black is well saluted, as is the fact that William Kennedy inherited his father's 200 ties.
Let us look ahead to our literary 4th of July.
Cheers to all!
Monday, July 2, 2007
New York State Summer Writers Institute opens
For all of us July brings a bounce in spirit and a sense of the magical. But at the Summer Writers Institute (AND the Summer Young Writers Institute this week at Lake George), there is a zany sense of possibility. Writers from all over gather, talk, share their work, and enjoy the pleasure of summer in Saratoga. We will try and blog through most of the time - tonight Lloyd Schwartz stood in for Richard Howard, our traditional opener.
Tomorrow, Liz Benedict and Katha Pollitt share the podium, and from there it's a week-long race with Mary Gordon, Caz Phillips, Linda Spalding, and Michael Ondaatje.
Join us for events at Palamountain Hall on the Skidmore Campus, or consider our retreats to the Parting Glass for darts, or the garden at the Adelphi Hotel after our receptions in Case Hall, but better, don't. Let us retreat in privacy and comfort and congeniality. We will demonstrate enough of that in our readings. Welcome to the glorious summer!
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The Game Ahead
As most of you know the Institute goes warp speed through July with the single most impressive run of authors that we're aware of.
But the fall season plans proceed apace and it seems worth mentioning a few highlights: Jane Hamilton, Richard Russo, Chimananda Adichi, Nate Mackey, Andrea Barrett, Chris Hedges, and Tom Perrotta among them. Follow our regular website, which is soon to undergo some exterior remodeling, to see what can be seen.
In the meanwhile the search for three new Institute faculty continues and will be soon done.
Along with our acquisition of Fence magazine this marks the largest single period of expansion in the Institute's recent history.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Greetings from Paris
One always expects to meet someone on the streets of Paris. On the Rue Daguerre in the 14th Arondissement in May one could run into anyone of note - Agnes Varda maintains her atelier on the street, and Irish poet John Montague used to live many years ago at #11. The Montparnasse cemetery, just a couple of blocks over has most of the people in Paris one would want to meet: Baudelaire, Robert Desnos, Julio Cortazar, Cesar Vallejo, Ionesco, new arrival Susan Sontag, and Samuel Beckett. And so, after a homage visit to Beckett's grave it was quite a fine surprise to run into one of Beckett's last late-life companions, John Montague, and his wife, novelist Elizabeth Wassel, about twenty steps from Montague's old address.
John Montague was writer-in-residence at the Writers Institute for nearly ten years and the the totally unanticipated chance of running into him and Elizabeth, who now live in Nice was, well, stunningly grand. One could do such things on Grafton Street in Dublin before Dublin became europeanized, but running into Montague in Paris on his home street after not seeing him for six years was cause for celebration, which was conducted in due time at the Cafe Prenet on Rue Daguerre. It doesn't get any better than that.
We will post some photos of Montague and Lizzie in due course and will tell more Paris stories.
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