John Baker’s Blog

A panel at the PEN World Voices session came up with the following titles:

Antonio Muñoz Molina: Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Catherine Millet: The Lily of the Valley by Honoré de Balzac
Yousef al-Mohaimeed: first the Arabian Nights, then poetry (including haikus), and then, of all things Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek
Olivier Rolin: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Annie Proulx: Before Adam by Jack London

The surrounding circumstances and reasons for the choices were, of course, as interesting as the selections: Proulx discovering the obscure London as a seven-year-old child, or Yousef al-Mohaimeed listening to his sister read from the Arabian Nights (which seems almost too clichéd—but when he follows that with Zorba the Greek it all sounds almost bizarrely believable again), or Millet drawn to Balzac after coming to recognize his style from readings on the radio.

Thanks to the Literary Saloon

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Mario Balzic is the Police Chief of Rocksburg, a town in Pennsylvania where the mills have closed and the mines shut down. In this 1974 novel, as in other novels in the series, the Chief lives with his wife Ruth, their two daughters, and Balzic’s elderly mother.

It had taken years for the hedges to grow as thick as they had, but it had only been in the last few years that Balzic felt he could loaf in peace without hearing later on from God knew who about how he stood around with his hands in his pockets when he should have been out rounding up the beasties and nasties and things that went bump.
The neighbours, Balzic snorted thoughtfully. He had to ask himsdelf what their names were. He couldn’t think of it. Yurkowski, Yurhoska, something like that. Good solid squares, scared shitless of niggers, dope heads, commies, rabid dogs, girls who went without brassieres, and people who made love with the lights on. His mother told him that about them. They were always complaining to his mother, and every once in a while, when she couldn’t think up something new to put them off, she came to him and complained about them. The last time, a couple of months ago, he’d told his mother. ‘Ma, if I lock up everybody they’re scared of, who’s left? I’d have to lock up the world’ To which his mother had replied impishly, ‘You big man, you no can do that?’
He turned away from the window and was startled to see his mother standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She was in her flannel gown, barefoot, her swollen ankles showing under the hem, her fingers over her mouth. She looked like she’d been standing there for some moments.
‘Hey, kiddo, you still up. You sick?’ Her voice was husky with sleep.
‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘What’re you doing up?’
‘I ask you first.’
‘I said I’m okay. Just didn’t feel like sleeping. What about you?’
‘Aah, same thing. Ankles hurt like crazy. Back, too. I think I sleep on floor from now on. You want light?’
‘Yeah. Go ahead, turn it on.’
She flipped the switch by her shoulder and the overhead flourescent hummed and then slowly filled the room with its bluish light. His mother sat at the kitchen table and rubbed one ankle with the other.

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American poet, Gary Snyder was recently awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize - a $100,000 lifetime achievement award.
This is one of his poems:

For a Stone Girl at Sanchi

half asleep on the cold grass
night rain flicking the maples
under a black bowl upside-down
on a flat land
on a wobbling speck
smaller than stars,
space,
the size of a seed,
hollow as bird skulls.
light flies across it
–never is seen.

a big rock weatherd funny,
old tree trunks turnd stone,
split rocks and find clams.
all that time
loving;
two flesh persons changing,
clung to, doorframes
notions, spear-hafts
in a rubble of years.
touching,
this dream pops. it was real:
and it lasted forever.

Gary Snyder

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Marlon James at the PEN American Center writes about the Mean Streets panel at New York’s World Voices Festival, with Jo Nesbo (Norway), Roberto Saviano (Italy), Christian Jungersen (Denmark) and Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Colombia).

Funnily enough it was Saviano, the only writer dealing explicitly with non-fiction, who reminded us that the very notion of the hero or villain depend on a number of things, not the least of which, who is telling the story. Growing up in Naples it was the Mafia that were the heroes, the men who by their glamour, wealth and bravado embodied the heroic ideal. Or at least the ideal man to look up to. It was bound to appear in a panel dominated by men, the confession that heroism and masculinity seemed too tightly intertwined, that the hero himself is the very masculine archetype. Saviano was quick to support and dispel this theory at once, pointing out how these very mafia types drew for exaggerated fictional types on which to model themselves—a mafia man who built his house in an exact replica of Tony Montana’s in Scarface, or made men, practicing lines from The Godfather; uncanny cases of real people drawing from fiction to appear more real.

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