News

I am in Berlin this week, to attend the International Literature festival that takes place here every October. The city looks absolutely beautiful. I am still struggling with a very bad cold, which was made even worse by the long flight, so I will have to postpone any sightseeing till tomorrow.

If any of you readers happen to be in the area, my reading is on Thursday:

October 2, 2008 – 6:00 PM
Reading from Secret Son
International Literature Festival Berlin
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Foyer
Berlin, Germany

Do come.

Luis Alfaro reviews Gustavo Arellano’s new book, a memoir called Orange County: A Personal History. Arellano is is the author of Ask A Mexican, based on his famed columns and radio interviews. This new book charts his family’s history, its travels from El Cargadero to Anaheim, and the challenges that come from living in this ultra-conservative, anti-immigrant enclave. Here’s a snippet from the review:

The opening pages of “Orange County” provide an assessment of the place today. It’s still affluent and politically powerful with a large conservative base. According to a recent census, however, the demographics are shifting; the population is now roughly 60% white, 30% Latino/Hispanic (a number that has nearly doubled in the last 15 years), with a rapidly growing Asian community. Thirty percent of its residents are foreign-born.

And yet, writes Arellano, it’s not just television that has failed to paint a realistic portrait of Orange County. Also to blame are the founding fathers and historians who “follow a tight OC Story, almost positivist in predetermined steps and outcome. . . . We don’t care for the facts — we print the legend.”

You can read the rest here.

Michael Chabon has an article in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books about Barack Obama’s candidacy.  This paragraph made me smile, which I really needed today, what with the news of bailouts and economic meltdowns and political stunts:

The problem was not Obama; the problem was that at the instant when Hillary Clinton at last conceded, the nature of the campaign changed. It was, I considered (…) like the change that might occur between the first and second volumes of some spectacular science fiction fantasy epic. At the end of the first volume, after bitter struggle, Obama had claimed the presumptive nomination. We Fremen had done the impossible, against Sardaukar and imperial shock troops alike. We had brought water to Arrakis. Now the gathered tribes of the Democratic Party—hacks, Teamsters, hat ladies, New Mexicans, residents of those states most nearly resembling Canada, Jews of South Florida, dreadlocks, crewcuts, elderlies and goths, a cowboy or two, sons and daughters of interned Japanese-Americans—had assembled on the plains of Denver to attempt to vanquish old Saruman McCain.

Here’s the article in full.  Meanwhile, what does it say about our political culture that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the nut job head of state of Iran, can travel to New York, give an open press conference, and face reporters in unscripted questions, while Sarah Palin, the VP candidate, still hasn’t?

I like Chris Offutt’s guide to literary terms, which Harper’s Magazine includes in its most recent issue.  Here’s a little sample:

nonfiction: Prose that is factual, except for newspapers.

creative nonfiction: Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir.

memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

novel: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir.

short story: An essay written to conceal the truth and protect the writer’s family.

novel-in-stories: A term invented solely to hoodwink the novel-reading public into inadvertently purchasing a collection of short fiction.

clandestine science fiction novel: A work set in the future that receives a strong reception from the literary world as long as no one mentions that it is, in fact, science fiction; for example, The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

plot: A device, the lack of which denotes seriousness on the part of writers.

Isn’t it great? More here. The piece was originally published in Seneca Review.

I enjoyed reading the essays in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, all on the theme of teaching.  David Gessner (Sick of Nature, Return of the Osprey) writes about giving up full-time writing for the safety–and health insurance–that come with a teaching job.  He touches on all the challenges that writers in academia face, I think.  Manil Suri has a nostalgic piece about teaching mathematics for twenty-five years (that’s fifty semesters.) And Mark Oppenheimer has an interesting article about how teaching evaluations are collected, what they might measure, and what they don’t.

I start teaching in four days.  I fully expect to have one of those dreams where I show up without my papers, without my notes, having forgotten what the day’s lecture was about.