Puget Sound alum Alethea Daniels reports that the Naval Air Base in Atsugi, Japan, has a teaching position open. She writes, “Atsugi NAF is looking for someone with a BA who has experience in working with middle/high school students. They are looking for somene to run their teen center.” If you are interested, you may email Alethea at alethea41@gmail.com or contact the air base directly via its web site. Alethea teaches at an American high school in Japan.
June 24, 2009
June 23, 2009
Theater-Festival In Tacoma–Now!
(Pantages Theater, Tacoma)
As the Tacoma New Tribune noted yesterday, Tacoma’s Broadway Center for the Performing Arts is this year’s site for the American Association of Community Theaters Festival, June 24-27. Theater companies from New York, Indiana, California, Oklahoma, Mississipi, Washington (state)–and Belgium!–will perform a wide spectrum of plays at the Pantages Theater, 901 Broadway in Tacoma. For more information, you may go to the following sites:
You may also call 253-591-5894, and check out Rosemary Ponnekanti’s article on page C-1 of the News Tribune for Monday, June 22.
June 22, 2009
Elizabeth George’s New Mystery Is In Paperback
Elizabeth George‘s new novel in the Inspector Lynley series is out now in paperback. It is Careless in Red, published by Harper.
Some readers new to the Lynley series may be surprised to learn that George is an American, as Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley is British, the novels are set in England (the recent one in Cornwall), and Lynley is also from an aristocratic family. George grew up in San Francisco and earned degrees in psychology before becoming a novelist. She now lives in Seattle.
Her Lynley novels have been adapted to television on the BBC and may be viewed on PBS.
Elizabeth George has also supported writers’ fellowships at the Hedgebrook Writers’ retreat on Whidbey Island. Here is a link to her web site, which includes video of a recent interview with her:
Some Books On Fathers
(photo: Ivan Turgenev)
Some good books concerning fathers, fatherhood, etc.:
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Fae Myenne Ng, Bone
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
V.S. Pritchett, Mr. Beluncle
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamozov
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
June 20, 2009
PEN Issue Devoted to Fear
The current issue of PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers (#10) is devoted to the topic of fear. It includes fiction, drama, poetry, interviews, and a recorded forum on fear with Edward Albee, Marie Arana, T. Cooper, Edwidge Danticat (pictured at left), Joshua Furst, Patricia Spears Jones, Edmund Keeley, Paul LaFarge, Hooman Majd, M. Mark, Maggie Nelson, Irina Reyn, and Nawal El Saadawi.
Interviews include those with Annie Proulx, A.B. Yehoshua, Umberto Ecco, and Michael Ondaatje.
The editor of the issue is M. Mark, and the ISBN is 0-934638-28-4.
Books About Iran
Recent books related to and about Iran include A History of Modern Iran, by Ervand Abrahamian (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Belonging: New Poetry From Iranians Around the World, edited with an introduction by Niloufar Talebi (North Atlantic Books, 2008–photo of cover at left).
Images From Iran
(photo: from http://www.boston.com, courtesy of Associated Press)
In connection with the previous post, “Puget Sound Student In Tehran,” you might be interested in recent photos from Iran that appear on the site, www.boston.com, including the one at left. The link to the photos is . . .
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/irans_disputed_election.html
June 19, 2009
Puget Sound Student in Tehran
The Stranger is reporting there is a Puget Sound student in Tehran??!
Masterpieces That Deliver the Goods
(image: Gregory Peck, acting as Captain Ahab, in John Huston’s 1956 adaptation of you know what, and clearly Spielberg’s shark is an offspring of Huston’s whale)
A recent post concerned “the Shelf of Shame,” on which sit highly recommended and/or widely revered books that we haven’t gotten around to reading and, thus, about which we may feel reader’s guilt:
https://upsenglish.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/masterpieces-unread/
On my Shelf of Shame sit David Cannadine’s big biography of Andrew Mellon; The Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz (but I’ve read and liked other books by him, including The Beggar); Christopher Wolfe’s biography of Johann Sebastian Bach; and the relatively new Penguin translation of The Sagas of the Icelanders. Enthusiastically, I purchased all of these books, intending in good faith to read them. Not yet! Shame!
Nearby is the Shelf of Satisfaction, on which sit ostensible masterpieces that have, in my opinion, lived up to the cultural advertisement. In my case, on that shelf sits Moby Dick. As Samuel Johnson said of Paradise Lost, “No one wished it longer,” and the descriptions of ships are bit tedious. Otherwise: oh my, what a great story, what a fine narrative voice, what a great cast of characters, and what a mischievous whale, for which, for whom, I find myself rooting. Also on that shelf (again, only in my [book] case): King Lear; The Fire Next Time (Baldwin); Bleak House (more so than Great Expectations and David Copperfield, in my opinion); War and Peace; The Brothers Karamozov (more so than Crime and Punishment, in my opinion); Middlemarch; Beloved; Utopia (Thomas More); Pensees (Pascal); and Tristram Shandy–to name a few.
Of course, where one gets into deep trouble quickly is the point at which one confesses one’s lack of enthusiasm for an alleged classic. One is likely to be scolded or ostracized by other readers for being unable to recognize greatness or unwilling to join in what is supposed to be universal applause.
In my case, on that precarious shelf sit the following works: Hamlet (Great? Of course, but I don’t read it with anything approaching the satisfaction with which I read Lear); the Aenied; Clarissa (Pamela, I like); novels by Thomas Wolfe (such as You Can’t Go Home Again); The Prelude; the Cantos (Ezra Pound); The Charterhouse at Parma (Stendahl); The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe); The Republic (I’m biased in favor of Aristotle and prejudiced against Master P); The Golden Bowl (Henry James); Absalom, Absalom (I much prefer The Sound and the Fury and Light in August); The Savage Detectives (Roberto Balano)–a recent Big Hit (this is no doubt heresy, but the writing reminded me of Kerouac’s).
Before all sorts of virtual skirmishes about “the” Canon, ” define ‘masterpiece’,” and “you don’t like the Cantos–are you out of your mind?” break out, let me simplify things: Mea culpa. The fault lies in this reader, not in the stars, or however that goes. More colloquially: “My bad.” Moreover, and this will come as shocking news, I suspect the Aedied will somehow withstand my lack of enthusiasm for it.
At any rate, what’s on your shelf of “Uh, Not So Much”–books (works) you feel you’re supposed to like but for which you can’t quite generate a reader’s adrenaline-rush?
Cartoons and Comedians In New York City
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Friday, July 3, 2009 at 10:45am
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| Location: |
Peoples Improv Theater
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| Street: |
154 West 29th Street, 2nd Floor
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| City/Town: |
New York, NY
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Puget Sound English Department 