I’ve always found it somewhat ironic, if that’s the word, that two of the best novels I’ve ever read about America—Dvorak in Love and The Bride of Texas—were written by a Czech expatriate author who lived in Toronto. In fact, they’re two of the best novels I’ve ever read, period. Skvorecky, who died this past week at 87, had what one might call an interesting life—he grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (experiences which formed a substantial focus for much of his fiction), got into constant trouble in Communist Czechoslovakia for his writings, and was banned repeatedly. He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1968, and he spent the rest of his life writing excellent novels and short stories, teaching literature, and publishing other Czech expatriates through his publishing house. Lots more details can be found in the NY Times obituary, or in the Telegraph obituary. A fuller literary appreciation will undoubtedly show up in the NY Review of Books soon.
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As I rifled through the poetry section at the Barnes & Noble in Binghamton, NY at the start of the semester, I came across Annie Boyle’s Age of Miracles. The cover featured a woman draped in what looked to be a white gauze toga holding a drama mask. The white “skin” of the mask was translucent enough to show subcutaneous circuitry criss-crossing underneath like high-tech veins.

“Technology is a vehicle for our humanity,” declared the first poem, “Muse/Manifesto.” “It is the face of humanity, its functions reveal our designs, desires, deficiencies, deifications, discontents.”

I flipped through the book. Science fiction poetry. I’d never seen such a thing before. It was good stuff. So, after reading Age of Miracles, I called up Annie Boyle to ask her about it. Full story »

In conjunction with our  interview with poet Annie Boyle, S&R is pleased to feature an exclusive look at a couple of her poems: “The Gears are Gods” and “Crisis Engine.” Full story »

I’m late to the Mary Oliver party, I realize. Her first book of poems came out in 1963. By 1984, she was getting love from the Pulitzer committee. In 1992, the National Book Award committee gave her the nod. She’s won a slew of awards, and The New York Times has called her “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.”

I found her, just this autumn, because of some owls.

In my attempt to feed my head full of poetry this semester, I picked up one of Mary Oliver’s many volumes from the bookstore shelf because the title caught my eye: Owls and Other Fantasies. Just the idea that a writer would look at an owl as a fantasy held promise.

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With cover adornments like “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry” and “Poet Laureate of the United States,” Ted Kooser’s Delights & Shadows (2004) lured me in like a will-o-wisp. Hell, there was even a single white streetlight—maybe a faerie light—in the painting used as cover art. I’m a sucker for that stuff.

But the book’s first poem, “Walking on Tiptoe,” offers a promise of seeing in the dark. In fact, through the whole book, Kooser seems very much concerned with what we see and how.

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Teresa Milbrodt is earning a good bit of acclaim lately, and her new short story collection, Bearded Women: Stories, should only amplify her reputation. Fiction Editor Dr. Jim Booth will have a review of the book in the coming days, and in the meantime we were able to persuade the gracious but extremely busy Milbrodt to field a few questions.

Scholars & Rogues: Bearded Women presents the reader with such a wonderful menagerie of freaks – there’s a gorgon, a set of conjoined twins, a giantess, a three-legged man, a woman with a parasitic twin, a woman with four ears, a Cyclops, women with beards, and the list goes on. I know this is a wide-open question, but can you explain for our readers where all these characters came from?

Milbrodt: I have always been fascinated by people who look different or those who don’t fit in. Full story »

I suspect Frank Miller’s new graphic novel, Holy Terror, is supposed to be gritty and profound meditation on the evils of terrorism, set in a superhero milieu. “Holy Terror chronicles [the] desperate and brutal quest of a hero as he is forced to run down an army of murderous zealots in order to stop a crime against humanity,” the back cover says.

But coming ten years after 9/11, the book lacks any urgency and offers nothing new to ponder. Terrorist commit terrorism and, weeks later, people are still terrified. At the end, a wide-eyed character realizes one middle-of-the-sleepless-night, “No wonder we call it terror.”

It’s not the faux profundity that bothered me so much, though. No, it’s that Miller, one of the godfathers of the modern comic book, has cobbled together what might be the most derivative thing he has ever created.

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Charles Wright’s book-length poem Littlefoot declares in its second line:

You can’t go back,
you can’t repeat the unrepeatable.

You can look back, though. In Littlefoot, written in 2007, the year he turned seventy, Wright stands on the ridgeline between past and future, moving forward with an elegiac awareness of everything behind him.

I’m starting to feel like an old man
alone in a small boat
In a snowfall of blossoms….
Voices from long ago floating across the water. Full story »

Vermont’s vaunted maples have begun to flush crimson, but the oaks stubbornly cling to their sturdy green. By Robert Frost’s hillside grave, in Bennington’s Old First Churchyard, the birch trees have breathed in autumn and exhaled it as goldenrod.

These calico mountains, having abandoned most of the “Green” of their namesake, could not make a more picturesque Frostian site. He was the poet of rock fences, spring pools, and wood piles, of snowy evenings and roads not taken, of small-town New England life and simpler times. “I am an ordinary man, I guess,” he once told the New York Times Review of Books.

Frost has been on my mind since a Saturday trip last week to an apple orchard in North Chester, Maine. Al LeBrun balanced each Courtland, each McCoun, between his fingertips like a snowglobe, showing off its delicate beauty. Full story »

Once upon a time, marketing music must have been so simple: in the ’50s you just bribed a local DJ and off you went. By the ’80s it was a little more complicated – in addition to cash you needed to bring coke and hookers, but still, it was a straightforward process and everybody understood the rules.

Maybe that’s understating the difficulty of getting discovered back in the Good Old Days^®, but there’s no arguing that things are a lot trickier here in the 21st Century, as nichification, genrefication, segmentation, fragmentation, the consolidation of major labels, the profusion of new media and the ascendancy of coolmongering has so dramatically complexified the challenge facing new bands that it’s a wonder anybody even tries anymore. (And if you’re naïve enough to think that hard work and talent will ultimately win out, well, welcome to math class.)

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by Andrea Frantz

And so for you, I came this far across the tracks,
ten miles above the limit, and with no seatbelt,
and I’d do it again,
For tonight I went running through the screen doors of discretion,
For I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see,
You were a-wandering out on the hills of Iowa and you were not thinking of me.

–Dar Williams, “Iowa”

Driving Interstate 80 from Pennsylvania to Iowa seems endless when I hit Gary, Indiana. Full story »

Here’s a preview of this week’s ArtSunday feature, with some comments from the editor at the end.

King Subway (Tokyo Station)—October, 1988▲ Full story »

If there’s a rock and roll heaven, you know they’ve got a hell of a band. – Alan O’Day and Johnny Stevenson

British neo-soul superstar Amy Winehouse joined The 27 Club yesterday. If you haven’t heard of this select group, the term refers to all the musicians who have died at the age of 27. It’s a pretty famous crowd.

• Janis Joplin, dead of a heroin overdose in 1970, was regarded as perhaps the preeminent female rock vocalist of her generation.
• Jimi Hendrix, still regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in history, had died less than a month earlier.
• Brian Jones, the brilliant and multi-talented co-founder of the Rolling Stones, died under suspicious circumstances in 1969. Full story »

Rockingham County, North Carolina

November 1962

“Go call your daddy and Uncle Kenneth,” Papa says, taking his big thermometer from the scalding trough.  “This water’s near hot enough.  We need to get to killing these hogs.”

He gestures toward the pen some thirty feet away.  The hogs grunt and start away as if they understand him.

“Yes sir.”  I rise from my crouch.  I have been tending the fire, making the water hot enough for scalding the hair off the hogs after they are slaughtered.  I trot up the hill to the house and stick my head in the back door.

“Water hot?” asks my uncle.  I nod.  He gets to his feet and pulls on his jacket.  Daddy puts down his coffee mug and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Full story »

Today is Father’s Day, and S&R would like to wish a happy one to America’s dads.

At the same time, and in the contrary spirit that often typifies what we do around here, I’d like to be the one who acknowledges that our relationships with our fathers are often less than we’d hope for. Frankly, some dads are complete bastards, and in many cases they’re probably at least a complex mixed bag. And why not – being a parent is hard, I’m told. This basic reality makes the guys who get it right even more worthy of our love and respect.

It’s no worse than fair to say that my own father lived his life out between Mixed Bagville and the untamed Bastardlands, and truth be told I have a hard time remembering him as more good than bad. Full story »

At the start of the second chapter of his autobiography, Life, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones writes, “For many years I slept, on average, twice a week. That means that I have been conscious for three lifetimes.”

That means three lives’ worth of Richards’ memories from the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll, right? Well, kind of. It seems Richards spent one of those extra lives as a heroin addict and most of another one feuding with Stones front man Mick Jagger. He spares no ink on those topics, so Life actually works about to about a life and a half. Having said that, it still lends itself to being read in big chunks. Fans of classic rock will devour it.

The book begins by establishing a main theme: It’s always been the Stones vs. the Establishment (read: police), and the Stones make a fool of The Man every time. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

If writing a 50,000-word novel in a month sounds like a crackpot idea, it is. So admits Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month and author of No Plot? No Problem! But Baty’s book also makes the idea sound like a total lark—and totally doable, too.

Baty and twenty of his friends, living in the shadow of Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com boom, launched NaNoWriMo as nothing more than something to do to kill time. “My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this,” he writes: “Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailers worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what’s possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in out mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.”

No Plot? No Problem! is not the book he set out to write that week. Full story »

Monday, November 22 is the forty-seventh anniversary of JFK’s assassination.

The weather in Dallas that afternoon could not have been more beautiful. President Kennedy, with the top down in his limousine, took full advantage of the sunshine and warm temperatures, waving to the throngs of people lining the motorcade’s route and flashing his winning smile. Camelot had come to central Texas.

Farther down the route, overlooking Dealey Plaza, Lee Harvey Oswald waited, rifle at the ready. The scope on the gun was a little wobbly, the lens in the scope a little blurry, Oswald’s marksmanship skills a little questionable—but Oswald had his mission. Full story »

So I’m in Boston visiting a new granddaughter, born three and a half weeks ago but unseen by me until this past Thursday when I flew in from London, and boy, is she a peach. I’m getting some quality grandfather time in with her, and also getting to read to the older ones. Well, just the one who’s three and a half—the one in the middle, who is not quite two, doesn’t quite sit still long enough. But the oldest one will sit still for books now, and will let me read to her for quite a while—just like my own kids did. And this brings back one of the main pleasures of parenthood—reading to my children. And now I get to read to my grandchildren.

When my kids were growing up, my schedule was always a bit uncertain, at least when they were very young. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

Week Two usually takes a heavy toll on the writers participating in National Novel Writing Month, but for Lindsey Grant, the week has offered a little bit of a reprieve. NaNoWriMo’s program director has been fighting off a cold—a gift everyone in the office has been passing back and forth for days.

“Usually everyone’s sick in December, once we all crash from the adrenaline of this month,” Grant says. “This year, I guess it just came a little early.”

During Week One, she lost her voice and had to offer to do interviews by e-mail. But by the middle of Week Two, the 28-year-old Grant was back up to speed. “I’m surrounded by soup and tissues,” she laughs.

Grant is one of five full-time employees, assisted by another two part-time tech supporters and a team of contractors and interns, who run The Office of Letters and Light (OLL), the nonprofit organization in charge of NaNoWriMo. The event also depends on some 590 volunteers who act as liaisons in more than 528 different regions around the world; an additional 350 volunteers assist in various other capacities.

“We eat, sleep, breath this,” Grant says. Full story »