Keith Miller

Ernest Hemingway in Midnight in Paris

2012-01-24T16:28:00.000-06:00

Marilyn Reading Ulysses

2012-01-08T12:41:00.000-06:00

Eve Arnold, who died last week at 99, took this photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses, one of the most erotic images ever. I'm guessing Marilyn's reading this:

"... and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Last year, after haunting eBay for months, I finally found an affordable copy of the Franklin Library Ulysses I'd coveted since spotting it in a used bookstore. It's so pretty I could munch it up, with gilt-edged pages and illustrations by Alan Cober:

I first discovered Cober in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising. This image of Herne the Hunter I found especially arresting:

Authors Card Game

2011-10-30T14:27:00.001-05:00

The other day we were at a potluck with some fellow Mennonites. We mentioned, for some reason, that we had started playing Authors with our kids. Authors, along with Dutch Blitz, is one of those tribal games that few outsiders seem to have heard of (I'm going to shrug off my congenital Mennonite humility for a moment and state here, for the record, that I kick major ass at Dutch Blitz, and have even, on occasion, toppled the mighty Pete "Fleetfingers" Dula and Steve "Quickhand" Weaver). Ordinary card games were frowned upon by conservative Mennonites. These tame alternatives weren't associated with gambling, drinking, or loose women.

Authors is basically Go Fish. The Authors set we use (it's at least thirty years old) has the following authors: Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, James Fenimore Cooper, and (the lone woman) Louisa May Alcott. When I was a kid, I naturally assumed that these were the giants of Western literature, and placed them on appropriate pedestals. The size of these pedestals I adjusted according to their appearance on the cards. Thus, I assumed that the dashing Hawthorne, with his flowing, strawberry-blond locks, was the pinnacle of literary greatness, while the wan and sickly Scott, with his thin damp hair (we used to call him "Fishface"), I relegated to a minion. Cooper's war-reporter looks and list of manly titles (The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer, The Spy, The Last of the Mohicans) suggested deeply compelling thrillers similar to The Eye of the Needle. Boy, how wrong I was! Cooper, when I finally got around to reading him in high school, turned out to be a dreadful writer. Hawthorne was similarly unreadable. But when, during one stay at my grandparents' Lancaster County, PA house, I ran out of Guideposts and Reader's Digests, I was forced to pick up the only novel on the shelves - Ivanhoe. It was wonderful!

From this distance, of course, Longfellow and Irving look a bit silly in that list. At the potluck, we were trying to decide who should inhabit an updated game. Here's my stab at it: Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ernest Hemingway, Yeats. Hmmm. Maybe Faulkner in place of someone . . . Frost? And what about Nabokov? Is he allowed in, even though he was born Russian?

Authors has undergone various metamorphoses. Sets have varied from eleven to fourteen authors, and have included Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, James Russell Lowell, Victor Hugo, Robert Burns, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Cornelia Meigs (WTF?). The picture below shows the strange inclusion of John Greenleaf Whittier, second row, second from right:

Here's another version, aimed at children (Hans Christian Andersen, A.A. Milne):

Here's an antique version:

These days, there are a number of Authors games on the market, including American Authors and Women Authors. The quality of the artwork, unfortunately, is shoddy.

Writers Who Were Artists

2011-10-29T06:23:00.001-05:00

In the last week, I came across articles on Tolkien's art for The Hobbit (above) and Sylvia Plath's ink drawings (below).

There is a deep connection between writing and visual art, just as there is between music and math. Here are some other writers who were artists:

Wyndham Lewis - Lewis, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti (see below), was perhaps better known for his painting than his writing. That's Ezra Pound in the painting above.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Rossetti's poetry has fared less well over time than his paintings.

D. H. Lawrence - Toward the end of his life, Lawrence started doing oil paintings.

Mervyn Peake - Peake, the author of the Gormenghast novels, was a wonderful illustrator. Above is an illustration for The Ancient Mariner.

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) - Dinesen trained as an artist. Her beautiful paintings have been used on the covers of several of her books.

William Blake - Blake's prints are hugely influential. More than any other writer, his art and writing are deeply entwined.

Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions is full of Vonnegut's lively drawings. He developed an interest in silkscreen printing, samples of which may be seen here. Note the flavicon!

Rudyard Kipling - Kipling's father was an artist, and Kipling did the illustrations for Just So Stories (Wikipedia says they're woodcuts, but they look like ink drawings to me).

William Makepeace Thackeray trained as an artist. His illustrations for Vanity Fair are wonderful.

Bruce Chatwin - Chatwin's astonishing photographs may be seen in Photographs and Notebooks, as well as on the covers of several of his books.

Hans Christian Andersen - Andersen made delightful paper cut-outs with which he entertained children and adults while telling his stories.

I can't find any examples online, but Lawrence Durrell did wonderful watercolors, reminiscent of Raoul Dufy. Annie Dillard studied art (the handsome little shrub on the frontispiece of Teaching a Stone to Talk is hers). John Updike attended art school before he switched to writing.

Tomas Transtromer

2011-10-06T06:15:00.003-05:00

Tomas Transtromer, the Swedish poet, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. Here's my favorite of his poems:

Breathing Space July

The man who lies on his back under huge trees

is also up in them. He branches out into thousands of tiny branches.

He sways back and forth,

he sits in a catapult that hurtles forward in slow motion.

The man who stands down at the dock screws up his eyes against the water.

Ocean docks get older faster than men.

They have silver-grey posts and boulders in their gut.

The dazzling light drives straight in.

The man who spends the whole day in an open boat

moving over the luminous bays

will fall asleep at last inside the shade of his blue lamp

as the islands crawl like huge moths over the globe.

Sofia Samatar blogs!

2011-10-02T13:34:00.004-05:00

My beautiful and hyper-talented wife, Sofia Samatar, has started blogging.

New Edition of The Book on Fire

2011-09-09T09:18:00.002-05:00

The second edition of my second novel, The Book on Fire, has been released by Immanion Press. It has a new cover, and includes a long bonus story, “City of Bones,” about a sojourner in a post-apocalyptic Alexandria. It is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as select brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Strange Gifts

2011-08-21T05:52:00.003-05:00

My mother (who's on a roll - see this post) has just put out a book of vignettes entitled Strange Gifts: Reflections on Aid in Africa. It is available for purchase on Amazon. I put together a little website for her, where you can see all the books and calendars she's produced, and read a few of the occasional papers she put out in her career as a music educator.

A Life on Paper Review

2011-08-20T08:33:00.003-05:00

My wife, Sofia Samatar (whose first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, recently sold to Small Beer Press - more about that later!), has written a nice review of French Borgesian-fantasy/slipstreamish writer Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's A Life on Paper.

I Am Because We Are

2011-08-10T06:06:00.006-05:00

For a number of years, my lovely mother, Annetta Miller, has collected proverbs from around Africa. She now has over a hundred thousand, neatly arranged by category on her desk. She has put the collection to use in interesting and creative ways. Her themed calendars, which are put together by street children at Don Bosco Press in Kenya, are perennial best sellers at Ten Thousand Villages. Proverbs also complement the vignettes in her book Sharing Boundaries.

My mother and her photographer friend Betty Press have put together a book entitled I Am Because We Are: African Wisdom in Image and Proverb, published in partnership with Books for Africa. You can learn about the book, and buy it, here.

Longonot and Naivasha

2011-08-04T06:25:00.024-05:00

photo: Kalense the Kid

My family and I spent the month of July in Kenya, where I grew up. One of the things I wanted to do (besides eat murg makhanwala and nyama choma!) was climb Mt. Longonot, a dormant volcano, with my kids.

I went to high school at Rift Valley Academy, which is on the side of the escarpment. Longonot dominated the landscape, and I used to draw it constantly. Its slumbering form has inhabited my dreams.

Longonot, which last erupted in 1863, is a classic caldera. It took about two hours to climb with the kids (aged five and eight). My son basically had to be dragged up the steeper sections, and a couple times I didn't think he was going to make it. But it was all worth it for the stunning experience of reaching the top and peering over the rim, which is only a couple paces across. The floor, several hundred meters below, is carpeted in bush. Sulfuric steam rises from a fissure in the wall. On the outer slopes, one can see very clearly where the lava spilled over the edge and pooled.

photo: Tambako the Jaguar

From the top of Longonot, we could look over at Lake Naivasha, which is just an hour and a half from Nairobi, and used to be a favorite vacation spot when I was a kid. The lake is now surrounded by huge greenhouse-type structures, where flowers are grown for export to Europe. Planeloads fly out daily. This generates a lot of cash, but growing flowers requires a huge amount of water, and the lake is rapidly shrinking. When I was young, we used to take boats to Crescent Island. As you can see in the satellite photos below, the island became a peninsula about ten years ago (though, amusingly, it's still called "Crescent Island").

But now the open end has almost closed up, creating another, smaller lake. One effect of this shrinking is that there is now about a mile of new, pristine parkland beside the lake, where giraffe, impala, zebra, and waterbuck gambol. It's lovely to stroll there in the late afternoons. But in a few years, unless some sort of action is taken, Lake Naivasha will be no more.

photo: mckaysavage

The Readers' Fruit

2011-07-25T09:57:00.004-05:00

Cherries are the perfect fruit for reading. Peaches and mangoes are too messy. Apples are fine (though they're better for walking: "Apples for walking, and a pipe for sitting . . ." as Sam Gamgee says). Apricots are excellent. But cherries! The handy little stem! The fun little seed!

I remember one vacation in Platres, up in the highlands of Cyprus (and incidentally the town where King Farouk invented the brandy sour: he needed an alcoholic drink that looked like iced tea, so he could drink while entertaining conservative Muslims!). My wife and I were the only guests at a cute little hotel. It had an enormous, sunny balcony, with a view down over the grapevines and tiled roofs. I bought a bag of cherries and put them in a big bowl, and we sat with our feet up, reading and eating cherries. I was reading Middlemarch, as I recall - my first experience with the extraordinary George Eliot, and somehow the cherries matched her sweet, tart, polished prose . . .

"Toto's 'Africa'" . . . by Hemingway

2011-07-19T05:57:00.007-05:00

My wife and I get our kicks from reciting the nonsensical lyrics to pop songs. Excellent examples include Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" and the Bee Gees' "Staying Alive." Our favorite, though, is certainly Toto's "Africa," which sounds like it should mean something, but is just ridiculous:

"It's gonna take a lot to take me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never have

The wild dogs cry out in the night
As they grow restless longing for some solitary company . . ."

The video is priceless.

I was therefore delighted to discover that Anthony Sams on McSweeney's has written up "Africa" as a short story by Hemingway. Here's a sample:

"The young man looked at the wristwatch again. His head spun from whiskey and soda. She was a damned nice woman. It would take a lot to drag him away from her. It was unlikely that a hundred men or more could ever do such a thing. The air, now thick and moist, seemed to carry rain again. He blessed the rains of Africa. They were the only thing left to bless in this forsaken place, he thought—at least until she set foot on the continent. They were going to take some time to do the things they never had."

Sebald's Last Interview

2011-07-17T06:21:00.004-05:00

Here is the last interview by W.G. Sebald, before he died in a car crash at the age of 57. He was author of Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz. All four books were published in the last decade of his life.

I liked his comments about writers and walking.

SQUEEEEEE!

2011-05-29T09:41:00.002-05:00

Catherynne M. Valente is in Madison for WisCon, and I got to hear her read yesterday afternoon (from Fairyland)! In person, she's taller and quite a bit more attractive than I'd imagined, with long witchy hair and smouldering eyes. She's a great reader, and had the audience in stitches. Fairyland is doing extremely well - it's on the NY Times best seller list at the moment. I started reading it aloud to my daughter last night, and she's loving it.

Churches on Fire

2011-05-08T08:20:00.004-05:00

I was disheartened to read this morning that a mob set a church on fire in Cairo. This is the latest in a series of violent inter-religious incidents that began on New Year's Day with the bombing of a church in Alexandria, in which twenty-three people died. I worry that the loosening of the political strictures has also freed people to express long-repressed emotions about the "other side." Christians form a substantial, prominent minority in Egypt (10-15%). Their religious practices and religious language (Coptic) are deeply connected to the ancient pharaonic religion.

Though many Egyptians, Muslim and Christian, are viscerally antagonistic toward each other, there are some outstanding exceptions. My wife and I spent three wonderful years working with Mennonite Central Committee in Beni Suef, where we were seconded to the Orthodox Church. Our supervisor, Father Youssef Andrawas, was one of the most saintly people I've encountered, with a passion for creating dialogue between Muslims and Christians. You can read a first-person account of his life and ministry, as well as a bit about our work, in this issue of A Common Place magazine (PDF file).

Beautifully, Christians met in their burned-out church on Sunday to celebrate mass (both images are from Storyful):

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland

2011-05-01T06:00:00.004-05:00

Catherynne M. Valente's latest novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (which started out as a novel mentioned in Palimpsest) is available as a free download till May 2 from here. This is actually the work that first got me interested in Valente, when she was putting it out chapter by chapter on her website.

Bad People

2011-04-14T05:54:00.002-05:00

BAD PEOPLE
Robert Bly

A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks - what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams - that's the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, "You."
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn't move on its own. It takes sometimes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless God - who refuses to let you
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge - can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

Ishi and Le Guin

2011-03-27T08:52:00.005-05:00

Wired magazine has an article about Ishi, the last of the Yahi tribe of American Indians, who died on March 25, 1916. He emerged from the wilderness in 1911, and was offered a place to stay at San Francisco's museum of anthropology. The anthropologists who took him in were T. T. Waterman and Alfred L. Kroeber. Kroeber's wife, Theodora Kroeber, later wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, based on Alfred's notes (she hadn't met Ishi).

Now, Alfred and Theodora Kroeber were, of course, the parents of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin. It is interesting to speculate on the impact the Kroebers' anthropological work had on her fiction. Always Coming Home and "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Home Tonight" certainly draw heavily on American Indian culture. "Ishi" actually means "man" in the Yana language - he refused to reveal his true name. The notion of secret, powerful "true names" is, of course, central to the Earthsea books. Ged, as described in her novels, might have looked something like Ishi. And the trope of the solitary carrier of information is present in works such as The Tombs of Atuan, "The Stars Below," and The Dispossessed.

Roald Dahl

2011-03-20T05:59:00.008-05:00

My wife got me Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl for my birthday. I've been a huge fan of Dahl's since I was about five. I love Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and, especially, the stories.

Here are some interesting tidbits:

It turns out that much of the received lore - that his Gloster Gladiator was shot down over Libya, that he wrote Charlie to pay for Patricia Neal's treatment after a stroke, that he had invented gremlins - was either fabricated or embellished.

The original Charlie was black, possibly based on Dahl's servant Mdisho in Tanzania. The Oompa Loompas were originally "African Pygmies," but had to be made blond after an outcry from the NAACP. (Irrelevant aside: my favorite cat, Mihwi, was eaten by pygmies in Burundi.)

After his first book of stories - the excellent Over to You - he struggled for years. His first novel, Sometime Never, was a complete failure, and is now out of print. No one would take his second, Fifty Thousand Frogskins. This was actually the most interesting information in the book to me. I have always felt that the four stories grouped under the title "Claud's Dog," as well as "Parson's Pleasure," in which Claud appears, were his best work. I'd even commented to my wife at one point that if he'd turned those into a book, it would have been an amazing work. Now, apparently the Claud stories were salvaged from Fifty Thousand Frogskins after it failed to find a publisher. So this means that the book I crave is actually out there! Will someone please, please publish it! Incidentally, Claud, and the father from Danny, the Champion of the World, were based on a neighbor, Claud Taylor, who was "a storyteller and a bit of a rogue," and was one of Dahl's favored companions.

Dahl was impossibly irascible. The book is worth reading just for some of his nasty exchanges with his publishers.

He spied for Britain, filing reports on politicians and socialites in Washington, D.C.

Ursula Le Guin disliked Charlie because it made her "usually amiable" daughter "quite nasty." I have noticed no such effect on my daughter.

As we're on the topic of Charlie, I have to end this post with my favorite lines:

"And cannibals crouching 'round the pot,
Stirring away at something hot.
(It smells so good, what can it be?
Good gracious, it's Penelope.)"

The Caresses

2011-03-09T07:48:00.006-06:00

The Caresses, by Belgian surrealist Fernand Khnopff. One of my favorite paintings. Click on the image for a full-screen version.

The Book of Flying on the Radio

2011-03-07T15:14:00.004-06:00

The Book of Flying was the "Book of the Week" on the sci-fi radio show DeFlip Side (hosted by Destinies - The Voice of Science Fiction):

"The Book of Flying is best characterized as an adult fairy tale, and as such, it’s poignant and moving and (dare I say it?) enchanting. If you’re a fan of fanciful prose, and feel (as I do) that beautiful writing can be an end unto itself, then The Book of Flying is the book for you."

Organizing the Bookcase

2011-02-24T04:29:00.001-06:00

Awful Poetry

2011-02-18T09:58:00.005-06:00

Some years ago, my friend Lionel Thompson turned me on to The Stuffed Owl, a wonderful collection of terrible writing, which has been reissued by New York Review Books. Here are some gems:

“Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes:
Into the tomb the Great Queen dashes.”

—an anonymous Indian poet

“So we leave her,
So we leave her,
Far from where her swarthy kinsfolk roam;
In the Scarlet Fever,
Scarlet Fever,
Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home.”

—Anonymous

“She sat with her guitar on her knee,
But she was not singing a note,
For someone had drawn (ah, who could it be?)
A knife across her throat.”

—Lord Lytton

“Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'
Undergoes the same as you.”

—Amanda McKittrick Ross (Possibly the worst writer who ever lived. The Inklings used to hold competitions to see who could read her poetry for the longest without laughing.)

“Of composts shall the Muse disdain to sing?
Then, planter, wouldst thou double thy estate,
Never, ah! Never, be ashamed to tread
Thy dung-heaps . . .”

—James Grainger

And here's my own addition, from A.S. Byatt's otherwise fabulous Possession:

“Others in a heavy Vase
Raise darkly scented Wine -
This warm and squirted White
In solid Pot - was mine . . .”

Hyper Hundred!

2011-02-09T04:34:00.007-06:00

The Book on Fire has been chosen as one of the hundred best sci-fi and fantasy novels of 2010 at the influential SF Crowsnest! I'm delighted.

Carved Books

2011-02-08T08:14:00.008-06:00

Julia Fields makes these extraordinary objects by cutting through books. See more here. Some are available for purchase here.

Lafcadio Hearn

2011-02-03T09:30:00.009-06:00

A reader recently queried me about the ghost story I purloined from Lafcadio Hearn and used in The Book of Flying. I'd forgotten which one it was, so had to order the book through inter-library loan. It was in an essay called "The Chief City of the Province of the Gods." Here it is:

"In Nakabaramachi there is an ameya, or little shop in which midzu-ame is sold,―the amber-tinted syrup, made of malt, which is given to children when milk cannot be obtained for them. Every night at a late hour there came to that shop a very pale woman, all in white, to buy one rin worth of midzu-ame. The ame-seller wondered that she was so thin and pale, and often questioned her kindly; but she answered nothing. At last one night he followed her, out of curiosity. She went to the cemetery; and he became afraid and returned.

"The next night the woman came again, but bought no midzu-ame, and only beckoned to the man to go with her. He followed her, with friends, into the cemetery. She walked to a certain tomb, and there disappeared; and they heard, under the ground, the crying of a child. Opening the tomb, they saw within it the corpse of the woman who nightly visited the ameya, with a living infant, laughing to see the lantern light, and beside the infant a little cup of midzu-ame. For the mother had been prematurely buried; the child was born in the tomb, and the ghost of the mother had thus provided for it,―love being stronger than death."

Hearn had an interesting life. His father was Irish, his mother Greek. He moved to the States at nineteen, and became a writer. He was apparently pretty odd-looking. He'd lost an eye in an accident, and the other was enlarged. He was also very short. Perhaps due to his "monstrous" appearance, he was fascinated by the macabre, reporting on crime, and interested in ghosts. He married (illegally at the time) a black woman, was forced from his position as a journalist when that was discovered, and then divorced her. He wrote about New Orleans and Martinique, but found his calling in Japan, where he married a Japanese woman, became a teacher, and settled down. His writings on Japan are just wonderful. They are in the public domain, and may be downloaded here.

UPDATE

After I posted this, another reader wondered if Shel Silverstein's lion was named after Hearne. I'm not sure if he was directly, but Hearne was apparently the first person to bear the name, which was taken from Lefkada, the Greek island where he was born.

Protecting the Bibliotheca Alexandrina

2011-02-03T04:14:00.003-06:00

People have formed a human chain around the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (the new Library of Alexandria) to protect it from looters. More pictures here.

Egypt on Fire

2011-02-01T05:34:00.004-06:00

via Reuters

As the momentous events continue to unfold in Egypt, I have been struck by the basically decent responses of most Egyptians. After days of trying to call, we finally managed to contact friends in Beni Suef, both Muslim and Christian. They have spent all their money on food and are barricaded in their houses. The young men of each block gather every morning to patrol their neighborhood, turning looters over to the army. I was heartened to read that citizens, on their own initiative, organized to protect the Egyptian Museum.

On the Bibliotheca Alexandrina website, director Ismail Serageldin writes:

"The young people organized themselves into groups that directed traffic, protected neighborhoods and guarded public buildings of value such as the Egyptian Museum and the Library of Alexandria. They are collaborating with the army. This makeshift arrangement is in place until full public order returns.

"The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth, whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters."

Libraries in Egypt, it seems, are always in danger. One could argue that cutting off the net, as Mubarak has done, is a modern form of book-burning.

Of course, I can't help but note that the scenes at the end of The Book on Fire, with Alexandria burning and running battles in the streets, seem to be coming to life. Those scenes were inspired partly by the events I witnessed in 2006, when Coptic Christians were stabbed in several churches and inter-religious tensions were running high. So far, in the current events, the religious element has been somewhat submerged under the general euphoria, but it will certainly play a huge role in the coming months.

I hope that the outcome of the present struggle is peaceful and results in greater freedom and stability, and that the libraries of Egypt, in whatever form, emerge from the fires with new wings . . .

Catherynne Valente on Persephone

2011-02-01T03:19:00.003-06:00

On Catherynne M. Valente's Livejournal blog, she has a lovely post on her obsession with and affinity for Persephone (Proserpine/Proserpina). As always, I'm struck by Valente's extraordinarily supple prose, and her deep intelligence. The Persephone myth has always resonated for me as well, and (skewed and co-opted), informs The Book on Fire. The picture above is one of my favorites: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpine.

Walton Ford

2011-01-15T14:02:00.005-06:00

Bula Matari

Chungado

Over at Biblioklept (a marvelous site), I discovered the work of Walton Ford. Extraordinary stuff!

Writers and Driving

2011-01-09T04:15:00.005-06:00

Martin Amis, in The Information, wrote: “Poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems . . .” When I first read that, I thought it was just Amis being hyperbolically amusing. But I recently discovered (on her marvelous new blog) that Ursula Le Guin doesn’t drive. Now, I also don’t drive, and neither does my wife. Part of my aversion to cars arises from a conscious decision to use less of the world’s resources, but there is also an innate dislike of the car as object. I love traveling by bicycle and train, but zipping around in a stinky little metal box is yucky. I knew that Nabokov never learned to drive, though he sometimes wrote in the car (that's him up there, with his index cards). His wife Vera drove him on his butterfly-catching expeditions. And Ray Bradbury has famously never learned to drive. Of course, there are also wonderful writers who celebrated driving – On the Road and the opening scene of All the King’s Men come to mind – but perhaps there is something behind Amis’s comment. It would be fun to compile a list of writers who don’t drive, and then see to what extent one can trust their poems.

Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology

2010-12-12T04:40:00.005-06:00

My friend Peter Dula’s book Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology has just been published by Oxford. Pete, who teaches religion at Eastern Mennonite University, is one of the smartest and best-read people I’ve met. His reading seems to have no borders: he is versed in philosophy, theology, poetry, and fiction, as well as environmental and bicycling texts. He’s one of the few people I know who can put Tolkien, Tolstoy, and Wittgenstein into the same sentence.

I got to know Pete while serving as a peace worker with Mennonite Central Committee in Burundi. He later went to Iraq, as MCC’s peace worker there (taking over from my brother, incidentally). He subsequently published a number of articles in various Christian periodicals. One, "The War in Iraq: How Catholic Conservatives Got It Wrong," refuted claims that the Iraq war was just, and generated a heated online debate.

Pete was drawn to Stanley Cavell, who is regarded as something of an oddball in philosophical circles, partly because of his interest in literature: Cavell has a deep reverence for Shakespeare, Austen, and Emerson, among other writers. Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology is the first text to bring Cavell’s ideas into the realm of theology. Pete’s book is deeply literary, discussing, among other writers, W. G. Sebald (and I believe I was the first person to suggest Pete read Sebald – after reading about him in a James Wood volume Pete had sent me!) and Nabokov (Speak, Memory), and poets from Auden to Coleridge to Heaney. The book is scintillatingly well-written, in an accessible style that manages to be both conversational and densely literary. My favorite line: “The good critic is the one most adept at giving reasons for Tolstoy’s superiority over Dostoevsky.” I suggest you buy the book.

The Quest for Readable Sci-fi

2010-10-31T08:40:00.006-05:00

I recently had a hankering for some sci-fi. Hadn’t read any for a while, so I thought I’d try Snow Crash, which everyone seemed to like. I got about ten pages into it, threw it away, then went back to it a week later. Got about a quarter of the way through it, and realized I was having a very bad time. I hated the chatty, colloquial tone, the “humorous” references to the present. I couldn’t stand a protagonist named Hiro Protagonist, who was a high-tech pizza-delivery boy. So I went on Goodreads, and found a list of best sci-fi. Going through the list, I was surprised to see how many of the books I’d read, and how many I’d given two or three stars. Now, I’m generally a five-star kinda guy, so it got me thinking: why is so much sci-fi so bad, and what do I want out of it?

I remember picking up Dune when I was about ten, at the house of my parents’ friends, and being unable to put it down. It seemed so grown-up, so densely created. The names (Muad’Dib, Bene Gesserit, Leto Atreides) seemed so organic; so right. It was the sci-fi equivalent of The Lord of the Rings. I read Dune over and over in my teens, before discovering Tolstoy and Hemingway. Sometime in my early thirties I went back and tried to read it again. But this time I saw through the tricks – I saw how Herbert had used Islamic history and Arabic to create his plot and names. The writing was at times dreadful (“Did Hawat talk to you about Salusa Secundus?” “The Emperor’s prison planet? No . . .”), and the characters seemed thinner than I remembered. Nevertheless, I can still taste the initial transport that Dune provided, and that I found in certain other novels – notably Nova by Samuel Delany and The Chrysalids by John Wyndham.

Recently, writers such as Catherynne M. Valente, Jeff VanderMeer, and Kelly Link have been doing new and interesting stuff with “fantasy.” So I got to thinking about what a satisfying sci-fi novel would look like in my present post-Tolstoy/Nabokov/Borges state. The only sci-fi novels that I can currently read are William Gibson’s Neuromancer (and in particular the first fifty pages or so, with that densely worked prose and unelaborated, compacted novelty) and Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. Doris Lessing’s Shikasta was good, but the “Rachel Sherban’s Diary” sections, which can hardly be termed sci-fi, were by far the best parts. Dhalgren has the language and texture I crave, but is too exasperatingly diffuse. Nothing I’ve found gives me an emotion similar to my initial reading of Dune. I want vast scope, the notion of distant worlds and spaceships spinning among the stars, poetry, ideas . . . and I also want characters as solid as Levin and Maggie Tulliver. Is this asking too much? Are there novels out there I’m missing? Any suggestions?

The Book on Fire on Fast Forward TV

2010-09-01T04:10:00.002-05:00

The Book on Fire has been nicely reviewed by Fast Forward, the television show devoted to speculative fiction:

"Balthazar is a thief of books, some to maintain his lifestyle, but some his heart seeks; “beautiful books: intricately textured, with music to break your heart, a typeface to sink your teeth into, a story that grips your throat.” In pursuit of this goal, he goes to Alexandria, which is not the city we know, but one where the lighthouse still exists and the Library is a secret place only few can enter. Alexandria is a center for books and is it not a safe place. Dark souls haunt the streets, and every sort of vice is available . . . As in his previous book, Miller has sculpted a work that is a story, poetry, humor and verbal beauty . . . A must read for any book lover, The Book on Fire is another masterpiece . . . and one that should be on your book shelf."

Palimpsest

2010-07-14T14:03:00.004-05:00

Palimpsest is not for everyone. It’s voluptuous, purple, and imaginative to the point of vertigo. Its logic is that of dreams or surrealism. It moves slowly, and for long stretches leaves the reader floundering. Advocates of realist, Iowa School, write-what-you-know novels will despise it.

But for those who love night trains and beekeepers, locksmiths and tattoos; for those who love the words palanquin and persimmon and bibliomancy, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. You might want to peruse the street names of Palimpsest first: Hieratica, Seraphim, Zarzaparrilla, Coriander, Quiescence, Inamorata . . . Are you a citizen of this city?

Some of Valente’s previous works – including the two-volume Orphan’s Tales – can feel too heavy. Her sensual descriptions, untrammeled, can be cloying. This is not to disparage her abilities. It is hard to think of a living writer who possesses Valente’s raw talent and intelligence. She’s the heir of Angela Carter and Isak Dinesen. And she’s barely thirty.

Palimpsest feels like a writer finding her shape. The book is carefully structured: there are five parts, bookended by a “Frontispiece” and a “Verso.” Each part rotates among four characters, Sei, a Japanese lover of trains; November, a Californian beekeeper; Oleg, a locksmith; and Ludovico, a bookbinder. The sections are spliced with mesmerizing forays into Palimpsest – a city adjacent to, or behind, or under our world, whose streets you can walk only if you sleep with someone who’s been there (and, in a sense, Valente is inviting us all to sleep with her as we read the book). The fare is a tattooed map of the city. If you’re lucky, on your hip; if unlucky, on your face.

A few books – The English Patient, Justine, Housekeeping, Lolita – are impossible to hurry through. You want to make a space for them. You sigh, and look out the window, and murmur sentences. Palimpsest joins this elite set. It makes you want to have sex and travel and eat exotic food and write – all the best things.

Arabic Words in English

2010-07-02T13:26:00.008-05:00

For a while, I’ve been collecting words that entered English via Arabic. I’ve pulled out some of the more interesting examples here. Check out the etymologies for adobe, apricot, assassin, cave (and alcove), chess (and checkmate), drub, and garble. Many nouns brought along with them the Arabic definite article al-, and in some cases (alcove, cave; alchemy, chemistry) English adopted the word twice; once with the article and once without. The photo above is from an early text of The Thousand and One Nights.

admiral - amr al-bihar, commander of the seas
adobe - al-tub, bricks
alchemy - al-kmiya, from Greek khemia, khemeia, art of transmuting metals
alcohol - in the literature of late European
alchemy - the quintessence of an earthly substance. See kohl in this list.
alcove - al-qubba, the vault. See also cave.
alfalfa - al-fisfisa, fresh fodder
algebra - al-jabr, the restoring of missing parts. This word is reported to have entered Middle English in the sense of “the setting of broken bones.” The modern mathematical sense comes from the title of a book, al-kitab al-mukhtasar f hisab al-jabr wa-l-muqabala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing) by the ninth-century Muslim mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizm.
algorithm or algorism - al-khwarizm, the Khwarizmian. From the name of the Persian scientist, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizm, who wrote the first book on algebra. See algebra in this list.
almanac - al-manakh, “the climate”
amalgam - al-malgham
amber - amber/anbar, yellow
apricot - al-birquq (Note that al-birquq now means ‘plum.’ In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare calls an apricot an “apricock.”)
arsenal - dar al-sinaa, house of manufacturing
artichoke - al-khurshuf
assassin - from al-hashshashn, those who use hashish (cannabis resin).
aubergine - from al-badhinjan, ultimately from Persian badinjan.
average - of disputed origin; possibly from awarya, damaged merchandise
azure - al-lazeward, from Persian lazhvard
caliber - qalib, “mold,” possibly from Greek
calico - Qaliqut “Calicut,” modern Calcutta, city in India
camel - gamal
candy - qandi
carafe – gharraf/gharafa “dip”
caraway - karawiya
carmine - ultimately from Sanskrit krmi-ja
carob - kharrub, (1) locust; (2) carob bean
cat - qotta, itself possibly derived from Latin
cave - al-qubba, the vault (see alcove in this list)
check - shah, “king” - from Persian
checkmate - shah mat, “the king is dead.”
chemistry - see alchemy in this list
chess - from Old French eschecs, plural of check (see above)
cipher - sifr, zero
coffee - qahwa, itself possibly from Kefa, Ethiopia, where the plant originated.
cork - qurq
cotton - qutun
crimson - qirmiz, of the dye kermes, from Persian ghermez, red.
date - possibly from Arabic daqal “date palm.”
drub - from adrub, to hit
elixir - al-iksr, (1) philosopher’s stone; (2) medicinal potion. From Greek xerion, powder for drying wounds
emir - amr (The names Elmer and Almira also derive from this word.)
gala - perhaps from Arabic khila, fine garment given as a presentation.
garble - gharbala, sift; ultimately from Latin cribellum, sieve
gauze - qazz, in turn from Persian kazh “raw silk.”
gazelle - ghazal
genie – jinni, spirit
ghoul - ghul
giraffe - zarafa
hashish - hashsh, grass
hazard - al-zahr, chance, name of the pieces used in the game of nard or tawola. It can also represent a type of flower.
jar - jarrah, large earthen vase
jasmine - from French jasmin, from Arabic yas(a)min
julep - julab “rosewater” - from Persian
lacquer - lakk
lemon - laymun and Persian leemo
lilac - from Arabic lilak, from Persian lilak, variant of nilak “bluish,” from nil “indigo”
lime - Arabic limah “citrus fruit,” a back-formation or a collective noun from limun “lemon”
loofah - from the Egyptian Arabic lufa.
lute - al-ud
macabre - possibly from maqbarah, cemetery
macramé - miqrama, embroidered veil
magazine - makhazin, storehouses
marzipan - mawthaban “coin featuring a seated figure”
mascara - uncertain origin; possibly from maskhara, ‘buffoon,’ or from an unknown language. In modern Arabic, maskhara means “to ridicule.”
mask - perhaps from maskhara “buffoon” – sakhira, ridicule
massage - from either Arabic massa, to stroke, or from Latin massa, dough
mattress - matrah, (1) spot where something is thrown down; (2) mat, cushion
mohair - mukhayyar, having the choice
mulatto - disputed etymology; either from Spanish or Arabic.
muslin - derived from the Iraqi city of Mosul, where cotton fabric was manufactured
nadir - nazr, parallel or counterpart
orange - from Arabic word naranj, from Sanskrit via Persian.
racket - rahah, palm of the hand
ream (quantity of sheets of paper) - rizma, bale, bundle
risk - possibly from Arabic rizq, but also argued to be from Greek.
rook - rukh - from Persian
safari - from Swahili safari, journey, in turn from Arabic safar
saffron - zafaran, species of crocus plant bearing orange stigmas and purple flowers.
sash - shash, turban of muslin
satin - probably from Arabic zaytun (referring to a city)
scarlet - siqillat, fine cloth
sequin - sikka, die, coin
sesame - from simsim
shabby - from shaabi, local, popular
sheikh - sheikh, old man; shakha, grow old
sherbet - sorbet, shrub, syrup - sharab, a drink
shufty - (take a look) from shuuf, see - (adopted by British soldiers in North Africa during World War II)
sine - Latin sinus, mistranslation of jayb “chord of an arc, sine,” through confusion with jayb “fold of a garment”
soda - perhaps from suwwada, suwayd, or suwayda, a species of plant
sofa - suffa, stone ledge
spinach - isfanakh
sugar - sukkar, sugar, ultimately from Sanskrit
sumac - summaq, from Aramaic
summit - al-sumut, the paths
tabby (fabric) - attab (attab), deriv. of (al-)attabiyya, quarter of Baghdad where watered silk was first made, named after a prince, Attab
talc - talq, from Persian
talisman- a blend of the Arabic loan from Greek and the Greek itself
tambourine - a small tambour, from tanbur - from Persian
tariff - tarfa, act of making known; notification
tarragon - tarkhun
tobacco - tabbaq
traffic - tafriq, distribution
typhoon - a blend of Arabic tufan (ultimately from Greek) and the completely independent Cantonese word taaifung
zenith - samt, see summit
zero - sifr

One final word: the Spanish cry, "Olé!" is from the Arabic, "Allah!"

Review of The Book on Fire

2010-06-18T06:03:00.005-05:00

Nice review of The Book on Fire from Ian Watson, celebrated British sci-fi author of The Embedding, and screenwriter for A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

What a gorgeous, sensual, and eloquent, though also economical, style! Such imagery. So many perfect sentences and observations. “Her laughter, like a crow fried on a tram wire …” “Coffee foxed with nutmeg …” If only Flaubert (who wanted to write a book sustained by the force of style alone) and Baudelaire could have read The Book on Fire. This Alexandria, not a city of memory but of imagination, is wonderful with its lighthouse and library still intact, the modern Egyptian streets and smells and foods so vividly evoked. It's a book of wonderful, consuming obsession, and reading it is a bit like a sacred (w)rite. “Occasionally a woman has snagged in my mind like a burr. Obsession does not make us monogamous, despite the fairy tales. Rather it turns the world into a woman.” How true. The Book on Fire is essential reading for anyone who loved Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare or Durrell's Quartet, yet also it's entirely its own book. “A book is a world,” says the book thief narrator. What a world Keith Miller's is, gritty, surreal, intoxicating, full of wisdoms and madnesses, and always a terrible beauty deranging the senses.

Writers on Henry James

2010-06-12T17:47:00.005-05:00

Lawrence Durrell: "Would you rather read Henry James or be crushed to death by a great weight?"

Oscar Wilde: "Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."

E. M. Forster: "So enormous is the sacrifice that many readers cannot get interested in James, although they can follow what he says (his difficulty has been much exaggerated), and can appreciate his effects. They cannot grant his premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel."

Arnold Bennett: "It took me years to ascertain that Henry James's work was giving me little pleasure . . . In each case I asked myself: 'What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it's going to?' Question unanswerable! I gave up. Today I have no recollection whatever of any characters or any events in either novel."

T. S. Eliot: "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it."

Vladimir Nabokov: "He writes with a very sharp nib and the ink is very pale and there is very little of it in his inkpot . . . The style is artistic but it is not the style of an artist . . . Henry James is definitely for non-smokers. He has charm (as the weak blond prose of Turgenev has), but that’s about all."

More from Nabokov: "I have read (or rather reread) 'What Maisie Knew.' It is terrible. Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting upon the wrong one?"

Virginia Woolf: "Please tell me what merit you find in Henry James . . . We have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?"

Jorge Luis Borges: "Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life."

Jonathan Franzen: "I tried to start Portrait of a Lady last night, which I had read only in college . . . maybe it was too late to read anything, but I became so impatient with the multiple redundancies in the first paragraph that I cast it aside in anger. The first paragraph alone! You really have to be in the mood for Henry James."

And finally, Mark Twain said he would rather "be damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than read Henry James's novel The Bostonians.

The Box of Delights

2010-05-22T05:25:00.008-05:00

John Masefield, poet laureate of the U.K. from 1930 till his death in 1967, is perhaps best known for his poem “Sea Fever” (“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky”). He was also, however, one of the finest and most influential writers of children’s books. I first read The Box of Delights in Kenya, when I was about ten. When I went to the States for college, I was horrified to find that no one had heard of it, and that the only available edition had been butchered by an abridger (who had somehow managed to trim out all the most marvelous and magical parts). Happily, New York Review Books recently came out with unabridged versions of both The Box of Delights and its precursor, The Midnight Folk. It now seems to be finding some sort of readership in the U.S.

The Box of Delights was first published in 1935, and achieved immediate success in Britain, where it is viewed with the same reverence as A Christmas Carol. It follows the adventures of Kay, who meets Cole Hawlings, a traveling Punch and Judy man, at a train station. Hawlings has a magical box that is coveted by a gang of criminals disguised as clergy. Knowing he’ll soon be “scrobbled” by the gang, Hawling gives the box to Kay, who gets into adventures.

Among the supporting cast of characters, Maria, Kay’s gun-toting cousin, stands out (“I shall shoot and I shall shock, as long as my name’s Maria”), as does Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, Kay’s former governess. The novel is delightfully illustrated by Masefield.

Three years after The Box of Delights came out, T.H. White published The Sword in the Stone, which was to become the foundation of The Once and Future King. Certain sections of White’s book owe much to Masefield’s, including the parts where the Wart turns into various animals. In 1948, C.S. Lewis published the first of the Narnia books. Lewis revered The Box of Delights – “The beauties, all the ‘delights’ that keep on emerging from the box – are so exquisite, and quite unlike anything I have seen elsewhere” – and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in particular, has a similar feel: snow, wolves, magic, Christmas. Two of the children are even named Peter and Susan. Several sections of The Magician’s Nephew, as noted here, are also indebted to The Box of Delights. But the book that pays the most overt homage is probably Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. The Christmas theme, a boy meeting strange people with bright eyes who wear unusual rings, and the scenes with Herne the Hunter are all heavily inspired by the earlier novel.

If the novels by White, Lewis, and Cooper had come out today, there would probably be a media furor and lawsuits once people realized the similarities with The Box of Delights. So the book is also a lovely reminder of a more innocent time, when writers were free to be inspired, and free to purloin scenes and characters and turn them to their own uses, in trying to recreate a bit of magic.

Bookshelves

2010-04-24T07:47:00.012-05:00

Tom Stoppard's portable bookshelf (via NYTimes)

This is how I want to get my exercise! (via dvice)

Nice! (via odee)

The Bibliochaise (via Switched On Set)

Tahir Bushra

2010-04-14T18:32:00.013-05:00

I met Tahir Bushra in Asmara in 1994. He was a Sudanese Nuban, and had moved to Asmara to be able to create his art in relative freedom. When I met him, he was making the most beautiful paintings I'd ever seen. Most were on wood. Some were the size of doors; others were barely a foot square. His materials were sand, shoe polish, white house paint, oil pastel, and ballpoint pen. Some of the symbols in his paintings are derived from Nuban body painting, scarification, and house decoration (see Leni Riefenstahl's The Last of the Nuba and People of Kau for wonderful examples). Others are taken from koujour, the Nuban shamanistic healing rituals.

Tahir was a strange, taciturn, wonderful person, prone to disappearing without warning. He either sold his paintings for exorbitant prices or gave them away. He was something of a legend among the artists in Sudan, and his style was enormously influential.

I later visited him in Addis Ababa, and traveled with him and an Australian friend to the Blue Nile Falls and Gondar. I heard rumors that he went to London, and then San Francisco. Unlike many of the other Sudanese artists I met, he seems to have little web presence. With the assistance of Ray Dirks, I have gathered here the four images I could find. I'm hoping that Google might bring Tahir aficionados to this post. If anyone out there knows anything about Tahir, please let me know . . .

UPDATE

According to the comments and emails I've received after posting this, Tahir is - or was until fairly recently - living in Iowa, and is still doing art (some of which incorporates chains!). You can see some blurry pictures here. Be sure to read the beautiful poem on Tahir by Abdulmuniem Rahmat Allah, and check out commenter Gassim Abdelkader's wonderful paintings on his website.

Egyptian Paperbacks

2010-04-11T17:52:00.014-05:00

I love Egyptian paperbacks. Even classics by Naguib Mahfouz and Taha Hussein get this romantic, film-poster treatment. Most have a woman in the foreground and a handsome chap or two (often in cool colors, and often wielding a weapon) in the background. Some are quite risque. The interiors often contain excellent black-and-white line drawings or prints.

Abnaa Abi Bakr al-Saddiq

from Karnak Cafe by Naguib Mahfouz

Al-Ustaaz (The Teacher)

Al-Zela al-Ula (The First Lapse)

On the Radio!

2010-04-03T14:10:00.003-05:00

You can hear me mumbling about The Book on Fire on NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge, hosted by the handsome Jim Fleming (in the photo above). I'm part of a show called "Writers on Writing," together with Nicholson Baker, Jane Hamilton, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Nick Cave. Show times are here. I'm in the first hour. The show will be available for streaming or podcast from April 5.

Remedios Varo

2010-04-03T09:35:00.007-05:00

Creacion de los Aves, Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo, whose painting Magic Flight is the cover image of The Book of Flying, was born in Spain in 1908. She fled to Paris during the Spanish Civil War, and then to Mexico City following the Nazi occupation of France. In Mexico, she met Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and honed her unsettling, dreamlike style. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in her work, and several major retrospectives have been held. More of her paintings can be seen here and here.

Some of her interiors remind me of Antonello de Messina's Saint Jerome in His Study (below), a painting I adore. I love the little platform he sits on, surrounded by his books, and the weird potted tree by his foot, and the hideous dwarf lion pacing the tiles to the right, and the wonderful landscape outside the windows. You can zoom around in the painting at the National Gallery website.

Durrell's Tower

2010-03-27T14:52:00.015-05:00

This tower is on the roof of the Ambron Villa in Alexandria. Aldo and Amelia Ambron were wealthy patrons of the arts. When they heard that Lawrence Durrell was looking for an apartment, they invited him to stay at the villa. He claimed this tower as his writing chamber. At that time, there were no apartment buildings surrounding the tower, and he could see Pompey's Pillar and Lake Mareotis from his perch. Here he wrote the sublime Pr ospero's Cell, and made the first notes toward Justine, which he called his "Book of the Dead." Eve Cohen, the young Alexandrian Jew who was the model for Justine and who became his first wife, was the only visitor allowed in the tower. There's a picture of her as a schoolgirl on Michael Haag's webs ite. David Gentleman's watercolor of the tower was used on one Faber & Faber paperback of The Alexandria Quartet (left).

Unfortunately the Ambron Villa is under threat. I wrote an article about it here.

Abushariaa

2010-03-22T06:21:00.019-05:00

Untitled

The Door

The Birth of the Light

I first met Abushariaa in Khartoum in 1993. He was working from a tiny room, most of which was filled with a desk. Abushariaa worked on one side; his friend worked on the other. On the floor beside him was a waist-high stack of papers, and he was adding to the stack at the rate of four or five paintings a day.

Khartoum under the authoritarian Bashir regime was not the most receptive environment for artists, and Abushariaa, with a number of other young artists, fled to Nairobi in 1995. He has since become rather well known, and has exhibited throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. I love the whimsy in his work, and the blend of happenstance and precision. You can see more of his work here and here.

al-Atlal

2010-03-20T15:10:00.008-05:00

Egyptian singer Oum Koulsoum was, in the Arab world, bigger than Elvis, the Beatles, and the Stones rolled together. This was her favorite song, from a poem by Ibrahim Nagi. "Al-Atlal" might translate as "The Ruins." It refers to a trope from the pre-Islamic qasida form, in which a desert traveler comes across the campsite of a former lover and uses the objects as steppingstones for his memory. Lines from the song are sprinkled throughout The Book on Fire.

Some Comments on Narnia

2010-03-16T10:12:00.007-05:00

Lucy first enters the wardrobe because "she likes nothing more than the touch of fur." Later, when she and Susan are walking beside Aslan as he goes to his death, he allows them to do what they'd always wanted: place their hands in his mane.

Prince Caspian is the worst of the seven books. One theme running through it is that of belief: the Narnians have forgotten about their heritage; Trumpkin doesn't believe in Aslan (or the Pevensies); only Lucy sees Aslan at first when he appears. It's as if Lewis is trying to regain the belief in his imagination that sustained The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was the book he needed to write to get to the sublime Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

In the opening chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, we are informed three times how dangerous it is to close a wardrobe door behind us (this struck me very strongly as a child). Lucy and Peter leave it open, but Edmund closes it. Lewis seems to be indicating that Edmund's trials within the wardrobe are somehow linked to closing the door. But this doesn't pan out.

In the forums at Into the Wardrobe, someone has posited a theory that the Pevensies are descended from the royal house of Charn. It goes something like this: Uncle Andrew's great-aunt Lefay had in her possession a box of dust from the Wood Between the Worlds. It is mentioned that one of the other people in England with fairy blood was a duchess. At the end of The Magician's Nephew, Digory's father inherits a large house in the country (from the duchess?). Thus, the Pevensies possibly have fairy blood from two sources, which the theorist suggests is really a link to Charn!

Nuggets of Narnian wisdom: Never shut yourself into a wardrobe. It is a serious business to invite a centaur over for a meal. Always remember to wipe your sword. Even the stars in our world are not what they appear to be made of. Most people are dead. If you fall overboard, kick off your shoes. No one is told what would have happened.

The Silver Chair is almost like a mirrored Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Many elements are the same, though reversed, or "upside-down": A boy (and the "bad" boy, Eustace) has been to Narnia first, and brings the girl in. Rather than entering the middle of Narnia, they enter beyond the end of the world, in Aslan's country. Their dour helper, Puddleglum, is the opposite of the cheery beavers and flute-playing Tumnus. Many scenes take place at night. The end of the book takes place underground. The piece of furniture in the title is a prison, rather than a means of liberation. The witch is not "white" but "green." When they emerge from the witch's underground domain, it is into a scene much like the one Lucy first saw in Narnia: faun, snow. At the end of the book, they watch Caspian become younger.

Extraordinary fruit: The berries the birds bring on Ramandu's Island, and that Lucy's cordial is made from, are fire-berries from the sun. Golg wants them to taste "living diamonds and rubies" in Bism. The fruit in Aslan's country would make "the most melting pear taste woody." The children live on apples when they first return to Narnia in Prince Caspian. Jadis eats of the apple in The Magician's Nephew, and it gives her eternal life. A "child" of one of these apples saves Digory's mother. And a seed from this "child" grows into the tree from whose wood the wardrobe will be made.

In Prince Caspian, Doctor Cornelius describes dwarfs "shaving off their beards and wearing high heels" in order to evade the Telmarines. Sounds like they might have had issues other than their height.

There are a number of differences between the older U.S. and British editions. These were made by Lewis when the first U.S. edition came out. For example, Maugrim becomes Fenris Ulf in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Jadis's world, Charn, has an older, colder sun than ours. Thus it makes sense that, when she ruled Narnia as the White Witch, she would be very pale-skinned and create a world where it was always winter.

Neil Gaiman has written a story, "The Problem of Susan," about a woman remembering her siblings who were killed in a train crash. It also examines the issue of centaur sex.

The sardines on toast Tumnus serves: who tins these? Is there a sardine-tinning factory run by dwarfs? Or are they imported from Calormen?

One can pass some amusing minutes imagining encounters of various Narnian inhabitants: Father Christmas meets Tash, Bacchus meets the Sea Serpent . . .

On the subject of Father Christmas: it is clear that Christmas, at least in Narnia, has nothing to do with the date. Does this mean that the Witch, in doing away with seasonal changes, also somehow froze time?

Wikipedia informs us that a "Narnian" is a moniker for a gay person who is deep in the closet.

The Narnia books draw on a vast number of sources, including Greek mythology, Plato, George Macdonald (an acknowledged influence), and others. A couple other interesting sources are E.M. Forster's short stories and John Masefield's wonderful, wonderful The Box of Delights. In Forster's "The Story of a Panic," a horrible, lazy boy named Eustace blows a whistle in an Italian landscape, and unwittingly summons Pan (a faun). By the end of the story, Eustace is transformed. The Box of Delights, which was also a major influence on T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone and Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, contains characters named Peter and Susan. At one point, a rhyme advises the protagonist, Kay, not to blow a hunting-horn. ("He that dares blow must blow me thrice/Or feed th'outrageous cockatrice.") Over Susan's protestations, he blows the horn, and "the beautiful people in the portraits stepped down into the room." The King of the Fairies says, "The long enchantment has been brought to an end." Very similar to the scene with the bell in Charn.

David Ho

2010-03-14T10:39:00.004-05:00

I've recently become obsessed with the art of David Ho. The image above is from a series called "Candice the Ghost." Check out his immaculate website.

Cairo Ink II

2010-03-11T15:43:00.002-06:00

Cairo Ink I

2010-03-11T15:41:00.001-06:00

The Library on the Wrong Side of Nairobi

2010-03-10T03:59:00.001-06:00

I just won a little contest called "Why I Write," hosted by Editor Unleashed and Smashwords. Here's my contribution:

I am a writer because somebody left a library at the end of a dirt track on the wrong side of Nairobi.

The right side of Nairobi was Parklands, where there were supermarkets and ice-cream parlors. That was where the other kids at my American school lived. But I lived on Jogoo Road, on the eastern outskirts of the city, the only white boy for miles.

Behind our house was a market, where women sold pineapples and dried fish from burlap sacks spread over the mud. To the left was a police station, from which, at night, I could hear the screams of prostitutes being whipped. To the right was the mosque that woke me every day at dawn. But if I walked along the dirt track, past the police station and around the corner, I came to a square cement-block building. It had once been painted white, but the outer walls were daubed orange with the prints of soccer balls. This was the city council library for our district, a relic of the colonial administration.

Inside, the only light came from the open door: the high windows were opaque with grime and the gray neon bulb hung vertically by a tendril. Happily, the children’s bookcase stood beside the door, so I was able to read the titles if the day was sunny. If I wanted to peruse the interior text, however, I had to lean with my back against the doorjamb, holding the pages to the light.

There were always two other people in the library: the librarian and her infant son. The librarian spent her time weaving kiondos and chewing sugar cane. Hanks of white pith in various stages of desiccation littered the floor around her desk and mingled a ripe, tangy odor with the mildew of the books. She would greet me with a grin, displaying nubbins of brown tooth, and say: “Bwana Keith! How many today?” Her son crawled around on the floor, variously chewing on the discarded sugar cane or on the books within his reach. This meant that many volumes on the lower shelves were missing pages, or had covers gnawed down to the spine.

The books were all written prior to 1963, which was when Kenya gained its independence, and were all by British authors. So for a few years, from when I started reading for myself at age six till we moved to Parklands when I was eleven, I subsisted entirely on a diet of E. Nesbit, C.S. Lewis, Enid Blyton, Mary Norton, and other writers from what I still consider to be the golden age of literature. Though an antique sign above the librarian’s head warned that I could not check out more than two books per fortnight, this was waived in my case, perhaps because I was the solitary patron. I usually checked out four books at a time, which was about a week’s worth of reading.

Check-out, an elaborate procedure, involved writing my name both on the library card and in the librarian’s enormous ledger. She would then page through the book with her sticky fingers and, having carefully changed the date on her stamp, would rock it in the purple ink of the pad and apply it in two places. Her sugar-cane fingerprints acted like glue wherever she touched, so at intervals, as I read, I would have to pry two pages apart. As the paper was softened by the climate, this left a wispy nap. At home, reading in my special armchair, I would sometimes touch my tongue to these sweetened corners.

Many years later, after my first novel had been published, I returned to the library, on a private pilgrimage to this shrine that had made me a writer. I was surprised at how tiny it was: the children’s shelves were only a couple paces long. The librarian had been replaced by a young man, but the books were still there. I opened one. The last name on the card, written carefully in pencil, was my own.

Art from The Book of Flying

2010-03-07T15:04:00.008-06:00

I recently discovered some ink drawings I'd made while I was writing The Book of Flying. I thought readers might be interested in my mental images of Pico and Balquo.

The Book on Fire

2010-03-03T15:03:00.004-06:00

My second novel, The Book on Fire, has been published by Immanion Press. You can read the first chapter here. The book is illustrated with black-and-white linocut prints, some of which you can see here.

The Book on Fire is available in paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell's, and as an ebook (in a variety of formats, including Kindle-compatible .mobi) from Smashwords.

The Illuminations

2010-03-03T14:54:00.003-06:00

My translation of Arthur Rimbaud's The Illuminations has been published by Quinx Books.

Three of the poems, as well as some musings, have been published here.

The Illuminations is available from Amazon.