You can catch the interview here. Scroll down to Sunday, August 28, find the line for "Maria Armoudian-The Insighters" and click away...podcast, play, or download options.
Our interview/the introduction begins at 28:30; I jump in at 40:08.
*
Thanks to David Altheide's suggestion--one of our fine contributors in Reframing 9/11: Film, Pop Culture and the "War on Terror" (co-edited with friends and colleagues, Anna Froula, East Carolina University, and Karen Randell, Southampton Solent University, UK; Continuum, 2010)--and Maria Armoudian's gracious invitation, I was part of the "Scholar's Circle" interview on her show The Insighters on KPFK 90.7 out of Los Angeles.
A real page-turner...
It was an honor to be among such esteemed scholars (also with Roger Petersen, MIT), and the half hour went too quickly. I was just getting warmed up.
The 10th anniversary is nigh...Where were you? Where are you? What's changed?
*
You can catch the interview here. Scroll down to Sunday, August 28, find the line for "Maria Armoudian-The Insighters" and click away...podcast, play, or download options.
Our interview/the introduction begins at 28:30; I jump in at 40:08.
Send 2 postcards this week to 2 people who matter to you.
Like so many conversations of merit (and not) these days, it started on facebook.
I posted a link, casually, throwing it out there like so many things that interest me, but with no idea what to do with it other than say, here, look at this shit I find interesting (because that's pretty much how facebook works). Who knows, I thought, maybe you'll find this same shit interesting, in passing if nothing else. Here, the particular shit of interest:
The Lost Art of Postcard Writing
(Note: The postcard used for this story is a 1909 beaut from my very own Orange Co., California.)
The author, Charles Simic, writes:
Here it is already August and I have received only one postcard this summer. It was sent to me by a European friend who was traveling in Mongolia (as far as I could deduce from the postage stamp) and who simply sent me his greetings and signed his name...Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you’re bound to get an email enclosing a photograph, or, if your grandchildren are the ones doing the traveling, a brief message telling you that their flight has been delayed or that they have arrived.
But this post intrigued Sharon, apparently even more than in passing. And she had an idea:
I say let's start a revolution - a postcard revolution! Just think, if each of us sent two postcards with the message to send two postcards, well hell, we could not only revive the fine art of writing postcards, we could save the US Postal Service!
Old, young friends and students Sui Fan and Yu Chen--they call me uncle--who came from Beijing to see me in Shanghai; atop the Pearl Tower, we wrote postcards.
Shanghai; Pearl Radio Tower on the left.
Ginny-Beth also chipped in, with two "awesome" postcard stories:
1. When I went to Europe a couple of summers ago, I decided to get all my favorite people's address (I even put an all-call out on FB) and made labels to take with me. Then instead of buying cheap souvenirs and hauling them around and back, I sent postcards to great acclaim. 2. I have family friends [whose] daughter's class (4th grade) was collecting postcards from different states. Since I travel a bunch, I decided to send her some. Now she's a few years older and I still send them to her when I travel and she loves getting them. POSTCARDS ARE AMAZING! That's my personal opinion. :)
That's also my personal opinion. I have been a stalwart postcard collector, defender, sender, and receiver my entire life, starting early when I would get postcards from grandparents from all over the world. I still have every one, and even Omi's collection of pre-WWII German postcards, arranged in a photo album, neat and orderly and giving no indication that soon thereafter just about every building and church in those postcards was to be destroyed.
And lest I need to further prove my postcard writing, receiving, and collection bona fides, Steve also posted:
In the past 10 years, I have received postcards from exactly one person...Jeff Birkenstein. Sad to say, I have sent none myself. Good post, Jeff.
Simic again:
Unlike letter writing, there never has been, and there never could be, an anthology of the best of postcard writing, because when people collect postcards, it’s usually for reasons other than their literary qualities.
So, a revolution it is!
Here's your task, should you choose to accept it: Send 2 postcards this week to 2 people who matter to you. You don't need to be on vacation in an exciting place like Shanghai. You can be in Lacey, WA. Or Fountain Valley, CA. Or, Beatty, NV. They sell postcards in just about every grocery store, believe it or not. Go. Send them.
And if you need a selfish and not a selfless (bringing joy to others) reason, then consider this: you're bound to come across that postcard again, under a magnet on a fridge in the home to which you sent it.
Good writing to ya...
You can be sure I'll have more posts on postcards.
Looking down from the glass floor in the Pearl Tower.
As some of you already know, I'm on sabbatical leave from my school, Saint Martin's University, in Lacey, WA. It's a rare opportunity and I want to take full advantage of it.
Though I know this will afford me no sympathy (more on this in another post), I have to be back in the classroom on January 17, 2011, a little less than 5 months.
And I'm feeling the heat...so back to work...
Friend and mentor Charles E. May (and my MA thesis adviser at Cal State Long Beach in 1996; here's his blog on the short story) has graciously asked me for an essay on Alice Munro for his upcoming collection on the excellent and prolific Canadian author. Charles knows I worked with Munro for my dissertation on short story and community; he also listened to me present a version of this paper at the Int'l Conference on the Short Story in English in Cork, Ireland (2008). Needless to say, I was thrilled to be asked.
Currently 80, this short video of Munro was uploaded by BookLounge to youtube in 2006:
I'm currently at one of my Northern California sabbatical HQs: my Mom and step-dad's house in Kings Beach, CA. The folks are in Hawaii visiting my brother, Jon, and his wife Megu, who live outside of Tokyo, in Mito (Ibareki Prefecture). Hawaii, then, is convenient middle ground. In any case, I have the Kings Beach house to myself, which means writing in the morning, a swim in Lake Tahoe around lunch, then reading and a nap, and more writing in the evening. Or, that's the theory anyway. It's a rare opportunity, and I need to take advantage of it.
Testing the clarity of Lake Tahoe
The deadline for this essay is September 15, no extensions possible, which has gotten my attention. But, finally, I have the fortune to have uninterrupted time to work, so very different than during the semester.
So, now, to work! But, you know, Virginia City, where Mark Twain got his newspaper start, is pretty close by...
My essay:
The Houses that Alice Munro Built: Community in
The Love of a Good Woman
Then I bought another notebook and started the whole process once more. The same cycle—excitement and despair, excitement and despair. It was like having a secret pregnancy and miscarriage every week.
—Alice Munro(1)
. . . [O]wing to the shape and the scope of Munro’s art—story following upon story, reconnecting, redefining—the critical monograph is not really up to Munro at all. Rather, individual articles on individual stories or connected groups of them now seem, to me at least, to offer the better critical course.
—Robert Thacker(2)
Taking up Thacker’s advice, I argue that reading Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman (1998) as what Sandra A. Zagarell terms a “narrative of community” illuminates the repetitive, stultifying demands which rural, middle class Canadian society makes of its women. From story to story, Munro’s women are ritually and repeatedly required to nurse the broken bodies and lives of the families around them, thus leaving them with a choice. They must decide between the community (in which they take on the role of nurse and nurturer) and the wilderness (wherein they might pursue their own desires of autonomy and self-knowledge, although usually at the expense of family). It is an ugly choice, made more difficult to negotiate because the terms of the decision are rarely explicit, mentionable, or even wholly knowable, though they underlie every action and every choice the characters make. Reading Munro’s book as a whole, wherein each story represents one space in a larger community, allows the reader to both celebrate the uniqueness and independence of each story and explore inter-story connections and themes that, because of their varied repetition, take on a greater, book-length significance. If each story in Good Woman represents what Frank O’Connor calls the “unearthly glow” of the light of the short story, then to approach the book as a narrative of community is to witness multiple lights amidst the darkness of the Canadian prairie. Thus, O’Connor’s “submerged population groups” emerge right before our eyes in the form of white, middle-of-the-road Canadian women, women who try to negotiate the difficult line between the claustrophobic sanctuary of the home and the possibility of the vast prairie.
___
1 In “Cortes Island,” The Love of a Good Woman (New York: Vintage): 124.
2 In “Alice Munro, Writing ‘Home’: ‘Seeing This Trickle in Time,’” Essays on Canadian Writing 66 (Winter 1998): 5.
