David Cooper

Robert Alter on Jewish literary fiction in general and on Flaubert's influence on Agnon in particular:

Episode 241 - Second Interview with Robert Alter (Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Comparative Literature - University of California, Berkeley) Originally Recorded July 31st, 2023 About Professor Robert Alter: https://jewishstudies.berkeley.edu/people/robert-alter/ Check out Professor Alter’s essay on Liberties, titled What Flaubert Taught Agnon: https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/what-flaubert-taught-agnon/

JFK: Lines of Fire is a sequence of dramatic documentary vignettes culled from the literature concerning the assassination of President Kennedy. Many of these found poems are dramatic monologues in the voices of people who had information about the assassination and either failed to prevent it or lacked a context to understand such information until it was too late. These accounts share certain emotional undercurrents, the need to act balanced by a sense of resignation, the shock of recognition balanced by a callous bravado. Whether or not Oswald acted alone or was nuts, there was (is) a wider insane acceptance of violence that (through these dramatic voices) provides an emotional context to this event. In this sense the real subject of this book is our American vernacular and the ways these themes are expressed in our speech.

(PDF) JFK: Lines of Fire: A Verse Docu-drama PDF | JFK: Lines of Fire is a sequence of dramatic documentary vignettes culled from the literature concerning the assassination of President Kennedy.... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

Since there are so many books and so little time I will not devote my reading time to living authors who actively defame Israel on social media. See Chana's Substack column "DARVO & Anti-Zionist BookTok & Bookstagram": https://parshawithchana.substack.com/?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web&r=3cmx2&fbclid=IwAR2UJMdHutv9k1yOjvS8EE-OYKJXSRCNzwNf-MyRAzpDvw2J8iM-lb_mmsI

Parsha with Chana | Substack Unexpected connections between diverse ideas- featuring the Parsha of the week. Click to read Parsha with Chana, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

For those of you interested in books and publishing or know of people who want to learn more about the publishing industry:

My cousin, Arthur A. Levine is an internationally famous editor of books for young people. He's known for editing the Harry Potter series, but has also published books that have won every major award in the industry, from the Caldecott to the Newbery, from the National Book Award to awards for books by and about Jewish, African-American, Latinx, LGBTQ+, Asian, and Indigenous people, as well as people with disabilities.

He founded a company called Levine Querido (www.levinequerido.com) which, despite winning an incredible number of awards and accolades since its beginning in 2019, has now taken hits from the historically high levels of book banning, the lingering effects of the pandemic, and all the challenges facing even the large corporate publishers.

To help LQ overcome the financial gap, a group of authors has put together a fantastic auction of goods and services, along with an option to donate.

If you look at the auction items, there are many experiences and consultation opportunities to talk with authors or agents.

The auction is open from September 3 through 13th.

See below for links:
Publisher website: www.levinequerido.com
LINKS
To donate: bit.ly/LQ2023donate
To bid: http://bit.ly/LQ2023auction
https://www.32auctions.com/organizations/111358/auctions/147971?fbclid=IwAR26HUF0QqnQODwXg3ctPYpRTKtRVph_tS-86sdgRQ6c9HTxrbl1DhyPm7Q

Friends For Levine Querido Silent auction 'Friends For Levine Querido' hosted online at 32auctions.

"When the choice of first-time book authors is more often than ever before the memoir, when one can curate and chart one’s life so vividly on social media, when we expect aspiring politicians to tell us about themselves as well as their policy positions, it is wholly predictable that our music will embrace the celebration and interrogation of self.

"So when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, we don’t merely celebrate the invention of a new musical form. We celebrate the one that made America — regardless of whether we recognize it — mad for poetry all over again." -- John McWhorter

Opinion | How Hip-Hop Became America’s Poetry (Gift Article) Taking stock after 50 years.

A lovely poem by Mariana Spada, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers:

“Estival, ida y vuelta”/ “Summer, There and Back,” a Poem by Mariana Spada, translated by Robin Myers Nada hay como remar de noche por un río negro y conocido tan negro que la luna reverbera sobre el perfil tornasolado de los peces cruzando el caudal antiguo mil cuchillos arrojados desde el fondo p…

I've read two of these: Old God's Time and If I Survive You.

I gave Old God's Time 5/5 stars on goodreads and wrote "Very sad story beautifully conveyed in Joycean lyrical stream-of-consciousness prose. Kudos to audiobook narrator Stephen Hogan."

I gave If I Survive You 4/5 stars on goodreads and wrote "Worth reading for the theme of the lapses in judgement that poverty will lead to, though the treatment of that theme felt cumulatively repetitive and heavy handed, and some plot elements were predictable."

One of my favorite reads of last year:

link.lithub.com From the winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award comes an astonishing debut novel about family, sexuality, and capitalist systems of control, following three adopted brothers who live above a mosque in Staten Island with their imam father

Maya Bodnick on how AI will end take home exams and possibly kill the liberal arts:

ChatGPT goes to Harvard And does better than you might think!

John McWhorter on Federalist era spoken American English (for fellow language nerds):

Report of the Trial of Levi Weeks Listen now (29 min) | On an indictment for the murder of Gulielma Sands, on Monday the thirty-first day of April, 1800.

Molly Crabapple Has Posted an Open Letter by 1,000 Cultural Luminaries Urging Publishers to Restrict the Use of 'Vampirical' A.I.-Generated Images | Artnet News Journalists, artists and writers have signed an open letter imploring publishers to avoid using "vampirical" AI-generated images.

'Writers, if there is any chance at all you might one day become sick or poor, make sure you have friends other than writers.

'Also, writers have independent personalities. They might be “community”-oriented in terms of being part of a writing “community,” even activist on behalf of a community based in identity, but not always community-oriented in terms of actual other people who are needy, frail, and irritating. They can be thorny, eccentric, prickly, bitingly irreverent, alienating, self-absorbed, what we sometimes call “fiercely” independent. Not necessarily practical. They can be proud. And, when sick or poor, ashamed. Not unlike the rest of humanity, but maybe a bit more so.

'Writers, if there is any chance at all you might one day become sick or poor, make sure you have people in your life before whom you will never be ashamed.

'Writers, those of you who have won the lottery of great success, please consider, instead of prizes and fellowships to feed the hopes of more writers, a vast fund to aid those who have slipped off the literary map. (Not the pittance of short-term assistance that PEN offers a small number of members.)

'Or if you wish to commit to young talent, commit for life. (You have a responsibility when you tell people they can and should be writers!) Establish group homes for writers who can no longer live on their own. If the Church can support group homes for elderly clerics; why shouldn’t the literary world support group homes for writers, who have likewise devoted their lives to a higher calling? What about a mutual aid organization in which young writers would visit, read and talk to, and learn from their comrades in nursing homes—those they hope never to see as peers?

'Writers are sensitive; writers are afraid. Those among you who have not yet struck the golden bell, keep the day job. Take care of your health insurance. Loner or not, be generous with your family and friends and hold them tight, as many of them as you can. Are we, or are we not, All in This Together?' -- Alane Salierno Mason

Illness is Not a Metaphor: How the Writing Community Needs to Do Better Taking Care of Its Own Writers write about illness. Of course they do, as they should. Usually their own, sometimes that of others, often their mothers’. They write about poverty—usually that of others, rarely their own,…

https://www.timesofisrael.com/meir-shalev-beloved-writer-of-fiction-and-complicated-israeli-lives-dies-at-74/

Meir Shalev, beloved writer of fiction and complicated Israeli lives, dies at 74 The renowned author of fiction, non-fiction and children's books, whose works melded Biblical narratives with modern Israeli life, succumbs to cancer

For the third consecutive year I am one of a couple of dozen judges of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize for a first book in any genre. I have already read five of the seven finalists and will read the two remaining books soon. Last month as a NBCC member I was able to nominate five first books from a long list, and only one of my Leonard nominees is a finalist, so we’ll see if either of the two finalists I have yet to read can overtake that one as the one to get my vote, or whether my fellow judges can enhance my appreciation of a title that initially did not leave as strong an impression. I look forward to those on-line discussions with my fellow judges; being a Leonard Prize judge is like participating in a book group whose members are especially smart and well read.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE ANNOUNCES FINALISTS FOR PUBLISHING YEAR 2022 - National Book Critics Circle NBCC launches Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize and NBCC Service Award; Joy Harjo, City Lights receive lifetime achievement awards New York, NY (January 31, 2023)—Tonight, in a virtual event

"16 (December 1910) I will no longer abandon the diary. Here I must hold on, for only here can I.

"I would like to explain the feeling of happiness that I have within me from time to time as I do right now. It’s really something effervescent that fills me completely with a slight pleasant tremor and that persuades me of abilities of whose nonexistence I can convince myself with abso­lute certainty at any moment even now." -- Excerpted from The Diaries of Franz Kafka, by Franz Kafka; Translated by Ross Benjamin.

“What Excuse Do I Have for Having Written Nothing Yet Today? None.” Glimpses Into Kafka’s Workshop Franz Kafka so enthralled the twentieth-century literary imagination that he came to be seen as the representative genius of the modern age. To this day an ever-expanding cosmos of secondary litera…

'The discoveries that every writer can hope to arrive at, which can’t possibly be reached by any other, are mappings of any part of the known or imagined world as it appears to their own alien self. In other words, an arrival on the page—through focused attention on “as I alone see it,” “as it looks to me,” “as I’m compelled to construct it”—of the contours of their world, a world refracted through an inner quirk so obvious to the bearer that it can be hard to notice and then choose to value and preserve.

'… A writer, journeying, arrives repeatedly at themselves, but not necessarily by looking inward; instead, by looking at—or for—their “material,” hewing to what activates them, and working through and past cliché to a rawer truth, past the received phrasings and reactions that we all carry inside us to a piece of writing that’s profoundly personal, no matter the subject, theme, or genre.' — William Pierce

What Makes Writing Valuable? The list of words coopted by business grows all the time. I was thinking how much has changed for those who study or hail from the Amazon, or are named Alexa. As critics have pointed out, even a no…

Russell Banks, Novelist Steeped in the Working Class, Dies at 82 He brought his own sometimes painful blue-collar experiences to bear in acclaimed stories exploring issues of race, class and power in American life.

Song (“The world is full of loss ... ”)

BY MURIEL RUKEYSER (1913-1980)

The world is full of loss; bring, wind, my love,
my home is where we make our meeting-place,
and love whatever I shall touch and read
within that face.

Lift, wind, my exile from my eyes;
peace to look, life to listen and confess,
freedom to find to find to find
that nakedness.

Song (“The world is full of loss ... ”) by Muriel… | Poetry Magazine The world is full of loss; bring, wind, my love,

This imminent declassification and release of documents will interest JFK assassination buffs and readers of my book of dramatic poems JFK: Lines of Fire

The National Archives Is About to Release More JFK Files. Here’s What to Expect. Fifty-nine years after JFK's death, more information is about to come to light — but not everything.

Books I read so far in 2022 (does not include books I reread):

David’s Year in Books

"The unfathomable excitement is the most dangerous." -- Alina Stefanescu on the poetic eros of rapt attention:

Eros, Attention, Acceptance: A Writer’s Arsenal… | Poetry Foundation Then, again, one day, the one who was once young will learn that somewhere at the other end of this very earth the older one has died. At first she...

Poetry from the war in Ukraine:

"Such problematic, such frightful poems

Full of anger

So politically incorrect

No beauty in these poems

No aesthetic at all

The metaphors withered and fell to pieces

Before they could bloom

The metaphors buried

In children’s playgrounds

Under hastily raised crosses

Dead

In unnatural poses

By the gates of houses

Covered in dust

They prepared meals over an open fire

They did try to survive

It was of dehydration that they perished

Under the rubble

Shot in a car

Under a white flag

Made from a sheet

With colorful backpacks over their shoulder

They lie on the asphalt

Face down

Next to the cats and dogs

I'm sorry to say so, but such verses

Are all we have for you today

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen

Spectators

Of the theater of war"

-- Julia Musakovska (March 2022) translated from the Ukrainian by Timothy Snyder

"Such problematic, such frightful poems..." A translation of an early Ukrainian war poem, a comment, and an invitation

I'm fond of poems with historical personae such as these by Elisa Díaz Castelo (translated by Robin Myers):

Two Poems by Elisa Díaz Castelo Translated by Robin Myers Through a series of interconnected monologues, Proyecto Manhattan sets a polyphonic scene, populated by the voices of different women associated with the creation of the a…

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

—Joy Harjo

Read the full poem here: https://poets.org/poem/perhaps-world-ends-here

'And yet throughout his life, Mr. Kriegel’s rage provided ballast against despair. Even the onset of his illness, he recalled in an essay in “Flying Solo,” was not entirely devoid of hope. As he recounted it, his father, on learning that Leonard had contracted polio, raced upstate from his delicatessen job without stopping to change his clothes.

'“He sat alongside my bed in the small hospital in Cold Spring, imploring me to live and feeding me vanilla ice cream,” Mr. Kriegel wrote. “What remains as vivid in memory today as it was more than 50 years ago is the odor that clung to my father’s hand as he fed me that ice cream. I could smell the dry-sweat prospect of my death on that hand. Yet beyond that, overwhelming death, was the smell of pickle brine and smoked salmon and chopped herring that mixed with the rich creamy taste of the vanilla ice cream. For whatever incomprehensible reason, the mixing of smells was a father’s promise to a son that he would live.”'

Leonard Kriegel was the second reader of my creative writing masters thesis and a family friend who exemplified courage under adversity. May his memory be for a blessing.

Leonard Kriegel, 89, Dies; Wrote Unflinchingly About His Disability He was known for his scholarly and popular writings about historical phenomena. But he was best known for writing about losing the use of his legs.

" I like to think that my interior is populated by the exterior and that even the characters in my dreams come from the outside world—that my dream life reflects an attempt to rearrange the external world. That’s perhaps granting poetry power to make things happen, which is not poetry’s true provenance. But I would say that the aim of a trance poetics is certainly not solipsism or escape from the material but a re-embrace of the material through a more tactile and sonically driven relation to the corpuscles of language. That is, through a trance poetics, the closer I came to language unmediated by sense the closer I felt I was coming to reality." -- Wayne Koestenbaum https://harvardreview.org/content/i-have-a-crush-on-the-world-to-some-extent-an-interview-with-wayne-koestenbaum/

I enjoy reading about writers' mental/creative processes, such as the above example from my step-cousin WK (my late maternal uncle was his mother's second husband).

“I have a crush on the world to some extent”: An Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum Wayne Koestenbaum is an essayist, professor, public intellectual, and poet. (His poem, “,” was just featured in Harvard Review 59.) In an interview with Patrick Davis, he discusses his recently completed trilogy of “trance notebooks”: The Pink Trance Notebooks, Camp Marmalade, and, this Febr...

https://poems.com/todays-poem/?fbclid=IwAR3GotCgcukNCXFthq35Tqq51BYrfBkd7i1hZqRlDRNZKV9Dlxlr3vk6o34

Hide Under the Blanket and Pull It Over Your Head
Lyudmyla Khersonsky
Translated from the Russian by Olga Livshin & Andrew Janco

Did you know that if you hide under a blanket and pull it over your head,
then, for sure, World War II won't happen? Instead,
lie there don't breathe, don't let your feet stick out,
or, if you do, stick one out bit by bit.
Or try this helpful trick to stop a war:
first, carefully stick out one foot, then the other, now touch the floor,
lay back down, turn to one side, facing the wall,
turn your back to the war:
now that it's behind your back, it can thrash and shred,
you just close your eyes, pull the blanket over your head, stock up on bread,
and when you just can't deal with caring for peace anymore,
tear off some chunks, and when the night comes, eat what you've stored.



***

На самом же деле, если укрыться одеялом вот так, с головой,
тогда сто процентов не будет второй мировой,
главное, лежать не дышать, не высовывать из-под одеяла ногу,
или высовывать, но понемногу.
Иногда можно вот так остановить войну -
осторожно высунуть ногу, потом еще одну,
потом повернуться на бок, лицом к стене,
спиной развернуться к войне -
пусть за спиной делает что попало,
нужно только зажмурить глаза, на голову натянуть одеяло,
запастись хлебом, и когда мир сторожить станет совсем невмочь,
отламывать его по кусочку и есть всю ночь.


“Hide Under the Blanket and Pull It Over Your Head” from THE COUNTRY WHERE EVERYONE’S NAME IS FEAR: by Boris and Lyudmyla Khersonsky.
Published by Lost Horse Press in April 2022.
English Copyright © 2022 by Olga Livshin and Andrew Janco.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

“In his 2012 memoir – Joseph Anton – Rushdie wrote about the fatwa years. The book is a detailed chronicle of all the people who let him down: the MPs who promised support and then whipped up mobs; the political figures of left and right who said that while the Ayatollah may have caused an offence so had the novelist; the authorities who allowed Muslims in Bradford and others on television to call for a British subject´s murder with impunity.

“But it is also a chronicle of the people who supported him, the friends who stood by him and the public figures who stood up for him. One of them was the American writer Susan Sontag, who helped organise a public reading of Rushdie´s work in New York. As Sontag said, the moment called for some basic ‘civic courage’. It is striking how much of that civic courage has evaporated in recent years. Today no one would be able to write – much less get published – a novel like The Satanic Verses. Perhaps nobody has tried. From novels to cartoons a de facto Islamic blasphemy law settled across the West in the wake of the Rushdie affair. The attack today will doubtless exacerbate that.

“So apart from willing, wishing or praying for Rushdie´s recovery, the only other thing that can be done now is to display that civic courage that Sontag called for three decades ago. The Satanic Verses is a complex but brilliant novel. It includes an hilarious and devastating reimagining of the origins of the Quran. I hope that people will read it, and read from it, more than ever. Because what happened in New York today cannot be allowed to win. The illiterate cannot be allowed to dictate the rules of literature. The enemies of free expression cannot be allowed to quash it. The attacker should get exactly the opposite of the response he will have hoped for. Not just hopefully a failure to silence Rushdie, but a failure to limit what the rest of us are allowed to think, read, hear and say.” — Douglas Murray

On the Rushdie attack: “The illiterate cannot be allowed to dictate the rules of literature.” The enemies of free expression cannot be allowed to quash it. The attacker should get exactly the opposite of the response he will have hoped for. Not just hopefully a failure to silence Rushdie, but a failure to limit what the rest of us are allowed to think, read, hear and say.

National Book Critics Circle STATEMENT ON REPRESSION IN BURMA https://mailchi.mp/bookcritics.org/barrios-prize-longlist-selection-committee-15039193?e=b55d806d41

"Writers have long played a central role in the Burmese struggle for freedom including the 8888 Uprising of 1998 and the liberalization that preceded the 2021 military coup. Now Burma’s literary community faces exile or imprisonment and state-sanctioned violence. At least three prominent poets—Khet Thi, Kyi Lin Aye and K Za Win—have been murdered extrajudicially by the ruling junta. Many of the nation’s foremost writers, such as Maung Thar Cho and Htin Lin Oo, remain incarcerated. The recent ex*****on of best-selling author, Kyaw Min Yu, along with three other pro-democracy activists, marked a horrific low point in the current regime’s systemic and brutal suppression of Burma’s distinctive literary and artistic culture. The NBCC commits itself to highlighting these atrocities and to keeping the world’s focus upon the people of Burma and the courageous Burmese authors who continue to endure great sacrifices in their fight for liberty."

Repression in Burma NBCC STATEMENT ON REPRESSION IN BURMA   The National Book Critics Circle stands deeply committed to the values of free expression, democratic engagement and rule of law that are essential for both civil society and book culture to flourish. Our bylaws pledge that the organization will advocate on ...

“Then my mother begins to dance, re-arranging
this dream. Her love

"is difficult; loving her is simple as putting raspberries
in my mouth.

"On my brother’s head: not a single
gray hair, he is singing to his twelve-month-old son.

"And my father is singing
to his six-year-old silence.

"This is how we live on earth, a flock of sparrows.
The darkness, a magician, finds quarters

"behind our ears. We don't know what life is,
who makes it, the reality is thick

"with longing. We put it up to our lips
and drink.”

― Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11308182-then-my-mother-begins-to-dance-re-arranging-this-dream-her

A quote from Dancing in Odessa Then my mother begins to dance, re-arranging this dream. Her love is difficult; loving her is simple as putting raspberries in my mouth. ...

Strongly recommended to fellow writers and other creative artists. Each essay considers the full arc of an artist's career, the highs, lows, and plateaus within the context of a complex life. Most of the subjects had careers in some way related to cinema, but literary writers and one rock musician are also included. It also has a distinct sense of place (the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area).

David's review of Always Crashing in the Same Car 5/5: Strongly recommended to fellow writers and other creative artists. Each essay considers the full arc of an artist's career, the highs, lows, and plateaus within the context of a complex life. Most of the subjects had careers in some way related to cinema, but literary writers and one rock music...

I'm sharing Noah Millman's substack post mainly for his appreciation of Joyce's Ulysses, but his refutation of the paternalistic defense of slavery is also worth reading: https://gideons.substack.com/p/juneteenthfathers-day-double-wrap

‘“Publishing has always, at the margins, had arguments about what is and isn’t acceptable to publish,” [Swift Press publisher Mark] Richards says. “But there was always a general understanding that our job as publishers was to enable debates, not to take sides. That’s the biggest change: it now feels to me that on a number of complex and difficult issues, very large parts of publishing have decided to only publish one side of the argument.”

‘The point of publishing, Richards says, is to “help and allow conversations that a society is having with itself.” He tells me the story of John Murray III, who published Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Murray disagreed with the book so much that he wrote a book under a pseudonym critiquing it; yet he still published Darwin’s classic.’

‘There remain many race, gender and class inequalities in our society. It is noble that publishing wants to fix its diversity issue, but there is a risk that publishers confuse this mission with sacrificing pluralism. Their role is not to tell us what or how to think, but to give society access to the best books to allow us to come to our own conclusions.’” — Tomiwa Owolade

The most pressing diversity issue in publishing? Groupthink - Prospect Magazine The industry has a responsibility to platform all kinds of views—not just politically fashionable ones

"Yehoshua’s work was structurally innovative and narratively traditional. There were no chapter-long sentences in his novels and no preposterous quests sapped of all plot. Instead, one was likely to meet a raw exploration of a flawed but likable protagonist, a patient, humor-laden style, and a dark storyline that deftly held the reader to the page. The sentences were long and complex, nested with meaning, and the heart of the stories could often be found in dialogue. He spoke frequently and adoringly of William Faulkner as an example of an author he admired." -- Mitch Ginsburg

A.B. Yehoshua, Israeli literary giant and ardent humanist, dies aged 85 Influential author, recipient of the Israel Prize and dozens of other awards, was also known as a sharp-tongued polemicist and staunch Zionist