Marie Howe's Mary Magdalene Poem

Here's one of the best loved poems by official New York State Poet Marie Howe, who visits this coming Tuesday, 9/17. Like many of Howe's poems, it is inspired by Christian tradition and Catholic experience:

MAGDALENE–THE SEVEN DEVILS

by Marie Howe

“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out” —Luke 8:2.

The first was that I was very busy.
The second — I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.
The third — I worried.
The fourth – envy, disguised as compassion.
The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,
The aphid disgusted me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The mosquito too – its face. And the ant – its bifurcated body.

Poem continues on the eclectic spirituality website, Patheos, which Newsweek in 2011 called one of "21 Ways To Be Smarter in 2011". Read the rest of the poem:  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/michaboyett/2012/04/poem-a-day-friday-marie-howe/

Read more about Marie Howe's upcoming visit to UAlbany here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/howe_lea13.html

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Major Crime Fiction Convention in Albany, Sept. 19-22

This year's Bouchercon (the Anthony Boucher Memorial World Mystery Convention), the world's largest crime fiction convention, will be held at Empire State Plaza in Albany, September 19-22.

Celebrity mystery writers in attendance will include Sue Grafton, Anne Perry, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Hamilton, and others.

Crime fiction fans and writers from all over the world will gather in downtown Albany to celebrate their genre.

The Bouchercon website:  http://bcon2013.com/

There is a fee to register.

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New Sci-Fi Mystery Set in Albany in 2019

The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza will host a book launch party for a new futuristic mystery by Frankie Bailey, Professor in the School of Criminal Justice and frequent Writers Institute programming co-conspirator,  Saturday, September 14, 2013, 3 – 5:30 PM (you're invited!).

Here's the Booklist review by Michele Leber, "In 2019, a serial killer is on the loose in Albany, New York. Two women in their twenties have been murdered by having phenol injected into their hearts, and when Broadway actress Vivian Jessup, known as the Red Queen for her role in Alice in Wonderland, is killed in the same manner, Albany PD detective Hannah McCabe and partner Mike Baxter struggle to connect the dots in what has become an even higher-profile case. In the near future, everyone has an ORB (smartphone successor?), a drug named Lullaby can erase memories of crime victims (but causes a problem when used by a witness), and a threader (blogger successor?) with inside knowledge plagues the police. What has not changed is that crime solving requires hard work and good instincts. McCabe shows she has what it takes to succeed at her work and to win readers. University of Albany criminal justice professor Bailey, author of the Lizzie Stuart mysteries, leaves some intriguing questions unanswered in this strong start to a projected series."

There’ll be food, drink, a door prize, and volunteers who have agreed to read scenes from the book.

Book House event link: http://bookhouse.indiebound.com/event/bh-frankie-failey-signs-her-newest-book-red-queen-dies

Frankie Bailey's website: http://www.frankieybailey.com/

Professor Bailey cooked up our Food, Crime, and Justice Film Series which features "The Garden" on October 11th, and Exterminating Angel on November 1, followed by a Q&A with William Kennedy and Donald Faulkner.  More:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html

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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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The Booker Prize Shortlist!

Two of the six finalists for the Booker Prize are past visitors to the New York State Writers Institute, Ruth Ozeki and Colm Toibin.

The finalists are announced here:  http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/man-booker-shortlist-2013

More on Ruth Ozeki's 2004 visit to Albany:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ozeki_ruth.html

More on Colm Toibin's 2001 visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/toibincolm.html

Toibin came in part to research The Master, his novel about the life of literary giant Henry James who grew up partly in Albany. He visited Lincoln Park, where James's grandparents owned a mill house that straddled a now-buried stream.

Also on the list is Jhumpa Lahiri, who (we promise) will visit us one of these days. Her uncle, Kajal Lahiri, is Distinguished Professor of Economics, and Health Policy, Management & Behavior at the University at Albany.

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The Joys of Plagiarism

Jonathan Lethem, who visits tomorrow, is the author of a widely circulated essay, published originally in Harper's, and subsequently in The Best American Essays 2008, edited by the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, that justifies the act of plagiarism:

"Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator — marked by her forever — remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita."

"The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory?"

More:  http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/

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Jonathan Lethem on Fresh Air with Terry Gross

Jonathan Lethem who visits the Writers Institute tomorrow, was on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross yesterday.

For Novelist Jonathan Lethem, Radicalism Runs In The Family

On why he decided to write a book about his family
"I knew that I had a kind of legacy: I grew up in a family of protesters. I never really had gone there. I wanted to touch it; I wanted to think about it. ... I was ready to think about my grandmother's weird, lonely, imperial existence in Sunnyside, Queens. And so those urges and those interests led me into the thicket."

More:  http://www.npr.org/2013/09/09/220660674/for-novelist-jonathan-lethem-radicalism-runs-in-the-family

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

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