Short story writers, you got until March 1 to submit your story or stories to this contest. (There’s a submission fee.) Details here.
The Adirondack Review is an independent on-line quarterly of literature and the arts published by Black Lawrence Press. It is dedicated to publishing quality poetry, fiction, artwork, and photography, as well as interviews, articles, book reviews, and film reviews. TAR was established in the spring of 2000, with its first issue appearing that summer.
Now that my stepson has read all of Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider books and must wait until November for the next one to come out, he is zooming through James Patterson’s Maximum Ride books.
This is from the James Patterson Web site:
STRAP YOURSELF IN for the thrill ride you’ll want to take again and again! From Death Valley, California, to the bowels of the New York City subway system, you’re about to take off on a heart-stopping adventure that will blow you away…
YOUR FAITHFUL COMPANIONS: Max, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, the Gasman, and Angel. Six kids who are pretty normal in most ways – except that they’re 98 percent human, 2 percent bird. They grew up in a lab, living like rats in cages, but now they’re free. Aside, of course, from the fact that they’re prime prey for Erasers – wicked wolflike creatures with a taste for flying humans.
THE MISSIONS: Rescue Angel from malicious mutants. Infiltrate a secret facility to track down the flock’s missing parents. Scavenge for sustenance. Get revenge on an evil traitor. And save the world. If there’s time.
There’s been two books so far: Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment; and Maximum Ride: School’s Out-Forever. Perhaps Patterson, who is already wildly popular with adults, is tapping into the Alex Rider readership, considering his books came out in 2005 and 2006, while Alex Rider first appeared in 2000.
But unlike the next Alex Ride, which won’t be out until next school year, Maximum Ride’s next tome is due in May.
And how do you know that Patterson is a publishing empire, he has a Web site like this.
Now, if I can only get my stepson to read “The Outsiders” that I gave him as a gift a while ago…
“What would happen if the thousands of book clubs across the country…
… paired up with the thousands of people in the trenches of literary warfare, the people who daily struggle to bring the power of books to those who need that power most?
Book Club Works gives book clubs and literacy activists a place to find each other, adopt each other, and make a difference.”
This image of Langston Hughes (1902 to 1967) was taken by Gordon Parks in 1943 and copied from the Library of Congress.
Langston Hughes was one of the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance. He was a poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer and newspaper columnist.
This is one of his most famous poems (from the Poetry Foundation Web site). It was first published in 1951:
Harlem
by Langston HughesWhat happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?
More information about Hughes is available:
Poet.org
Thompson Gale
Red Hot Jazz
Essays show baseball an international hit
Can’t wait for the baseball season to begin? Then it is the perfect time to read about baseball.
Union College anthropology professor George Gmelch returns to the game in his latest book, “Baseball Without Borders: The International Pastime” (University of Nebraska Press; 326 pages; $19.95).
The collection of essays Gmelch edited aims to expand Americans’ understanding of baseball by showing how it has been adopted in 14 countries, and not just the usual suspects like Japan and Cuba, but also unexpected places such as Holland, Italy and Australia.
“The essays are diverse not only in the cultures they describe,” Gmelch writes in the introduction, “but also in the perspectives adopted by their authors who range from anthropologists to historians, from journalists to English professors, with a few independent scholars as well.”
Julie Lomoe is a published poet and a regular at various open mike readings throughout the Capital Region. She’s also an accomplished artist, whose paintings were on exhibit at the original Woodstock Art and Music Fair at Bethel in 1969. (Yes, there really was an art exhibit held in conjunction with the massive rock festival).
On Wednesday, she’ll be the FEATURED POET AT CAFFE LENA! Text of the announcement from Caffe Lena follows:
Caffe Lena Poetry Open Mic
Wednesday, February 7
Doors open at 7, reading starts at 7:30
Featured Poet
Julie Lomoe!!
$2
hosted by Carol Graser
Caffe Lena, 47 Phila St. Saratoga Springs
583-0022
www.caffelena.org
If you are going to be in Lower Saxony before March 18, you can view what’s called the world’s most expensive book.
Many publications are examining Sen. Biden’s “compliments” of Sen. Obama, specifically his use of the word “articulate.” Though this isn’t about a book or author per se, it is about the use of language and worth taking a look at.
From Black Star News:
So, a cadre of leaders was called upon to prove that Blacks were sub-human. Pseudoscience mixed with assorted fallacies was used by prominent whites from all walks of American life to debase and dehumanize Blacks. Here are a few examples.
First, there is that of Francis Galton the so-called father of the eugenics movement. A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton in his 1869 work “Hereditary Genius” stated that “the number among the Negroes of whom we shall call half-witted men is very large—I was myself much impressed by this fact during my travels in Africa. The mistakes the Negroes made in there own matters were so childish, stupid and simpleton-like.” Galton also said that “the Negro race occasionally, but very rarely, produced men such as Toussaint L’ Ouverture.” Sound similar to Biden’s definition of “articulate” if you ask me.
The NYTimes:
When whites use the word in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment. It is similar to praising a female executive or politician by calling her “tough” or “a rational decision-maker.”
“When people say it, what they are really saying is that someone is articulate … for a black person,” Ms. Perez said.
Such a subtext is inherently offensive because it suggests that the recipient of the “compliment” is notably different from other black people.
“Historically, it was meant to signal the exceptional Negro,” Mr. Dyson said. “The implication is that most black people do not have the capacity to engage in articulate speech, when white people are automatically assumed to be articulate.”
Anna Perez is the former communications counselor for Ms. Rice when she was national security adviser.
Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.
From the Boston Herald:
An articulate African-American?
“That means sounds white,” says Ralph Martin, former Suffolk County district attorney, now chairman of the Board of Directors of Boston’s Chamber of Commerce.
“It drives we articulate black people crazy,” says local TV commentator Callie Crossley. “Some people are a little smarter now and they do, ‘well-spoken.’ It’s a whole code thing of, ‘You cleaned up nice and can put two sentences together.’ ”
“It’s an insult, because if the same exact person was sitting in my chair and was white, no one would say it,” says NECN sports anchor Chris Collins. “It’s almost like they’re surprised, and it shouldn’t be a surpise. I sit at my dinner table and hang out with my friends and I’m not shocked when I can understand them.”
The following post was sent in by Books Blog contributor Michael Hiser, no doubt celebrating the year of Vonnegut:
(This is the original book cover of the novel.)
It shames me to admit that I had not read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 -– or any of his other books –- until one week ago. That’s about 36 years too late. For someone who was 15 in 1970 when the book came out, and who has always most enjoyed a bleak-comic-absurdist brand of humor, this is an admission of some magnitude.
Fortunately, the place at the table for bleak-comic-absurdist brand of humor has never seemed more secure, especially since March of 2003. Maybe I was just lucky: while other people have had to look elsewhere for intellectual relief after these interesting 37 years — after Vietnam, Watergate, Ronald Reagan, the fall of the Wall, Monica, and the continuing tragic unfolding of W’s Mindless War of Hubris -– I, for the first time, got to read Vonnegut.
It’s the story of the life of Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist from Ilium, New York. We dip into Pilgrims life at different stages, chronologically. Pilgrim involuntarily time travels, or as Vonnegut writes in opening the book, “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time”. Pilgrim never knows when he is going to walk from one scene to another, say, when he’s a prisoner of war of the Germans in Dresden in early 1945, to the next when he’s getting married, then in a hospital recovering from an airplane crash, and thence even to another planet, Tralfamadore. He’s kept there, fairly happily, in a zoo. Mainly, though, we get his ground zero e view of living through the Dresden fire bombing of Feb. 1945.
What does the book tell the first time reader who should have read it when Nixon was still scheming to hide the tapes? First, it’s funny. And it’s sad. And it’s absurdist, with it’s description of the time travel of Billy Pilgrim, the actions of the aliens, the Tralfmadores, and the literary leavings of the underappreciated novelist Kilgore Trout. It’s got an air of resignation –- signified by the 214 times that the phrase, “So it goes” is intoned, generally connected with events related to death. But it’s almost a cheerful resignation.
I was directed to the book after all this time by my 17 year old son’s urging, and also by m recent reading of “Flyboys”, by James Bradley. “Flyboys” describes the air war in the Pacific in WWII. Bradley describes the evolution of the American war policy that at first strongly condemned the bombing of civilian targets, but by the end of the war, had wholeheartedly embraced it. The May 1945 incendiary attacks on Tokyo lead to the deaths overnight of some 100,000 people in huge firestorms. It was the same tactic used in February 1945 in Dresden, with the same grim effect.
Bradley’s descriptions lay out the facts of these attacks, and he is clear in his criticism of them, especially in noting the hypocrisy adopted by the US to describe the American intent and role. Vonnegut also describes the facts of the attacks, though he lets us come to our own conclusions about the American intent and role. These were events that, in retrospect, seem clear to have been at the intersection of technology gone awry, to the point where man has lost control of it.
This is not a new theme in human endeavors. A consistent analysis in evaluating the military tactics used in the American Civil War has been that the tactics tended to trail the equipment available. [The corollary is the “generals always fight the last war”]. Thus, even as late as July 1863, in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, 12,000 or so massed ranks of Confederates marched across an open field on which they were sitting ducks for rifled shot, artillery, etc. Those tactics of the Napoleonic era did not survive that last gallant effort.
That seems to be similar to where we are now. We have developed weapons to incinerate beautiful cities and centers of culture either over a period of hours [like at Dresden, or Tokyo] or immediately, as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since we had them in our arsenal, we used them. We still have them, and, from the saber rattling toward Iran coming out of Washington, their use is still contemplated . Like our forefathers, we haven’t yet come up with a new military strategy that encompasses the non-use of a military weapon that we’ve created. That next step would be called “peace”. We weren’t there in 1945, or 1968, or 2003, and we’re not there yet. So it goes.
