Random Photos

A sampling of photos from April and May, two incredibly busy months!

"1612 Dots," a participatory, conceptual
 sculpture in Brookfield Place,
World Trade Center

Geese and goslings, Jersey City

The flyer for A Stray, a superb film
by one of my Rutgers-Newark MFA
advisees, filmmaker and fiction writer
Musa Syeed

Musa introducing his film, A Stray

At the Montclair Literary Festival (l-r: Sam Lipsyte
Garth Risk Hallberg & Nicholas Delbanco),
with our host introducing the event, The Sanctuary at First 

Elena Delbanco at the Montclair Literary Festival

Cleaning the pedestrian walkway,
mall in downtown Jersey City

One of my brilliant honors undergraduate
students, Madani Sheikh, presenting his
work at the Rutgers-Newark Student Research Fair

My other honors undergraduate
student, Secilia Flores, presenting her
work at the Rutgers-Newark Student Research Fair

A mural underway, Jersey City

Colm Toibín, and my colleagues MFA program
director Jayne Anne Phillips and Brenda
Shaughnessy, Writers @ Newark reading series

The packed house for the Writers @ Newark reading

David Hyde Pierce signing autographs
outside Hello, Dolly! on Broadway

Lower Manhattan, infogged (befogged?)

Newark doorway

My brilliant former student Serena Lin,
reading at her farewell event (before moving
back West), in Brooklyn

Pondering pigeon

A truly gifted author, poet and fiction writer
Jeffery Renard Allen, with whom I read
this year's MELUS conference, at a panel
organized by Keith Byerman

MIT's postmodern and avant-garde
Stata Center

A discarded twist brush, which was sitting
right in front of my building at
Rutgers-Newark

Lincoln, Illinois

"Rivers" in VICE + "The Lions" (& Interview) in The Offing

Brazos (de) Santiago, Texas, where
the final battle of the US Civil War occurred

One of the stories in Counternarratives, "Rivers," is also one of the riskiest. Not because of its form or style, but because it takes up the thread of--and takes on, it's fair to say--one of the greatest writers and books in American literature, Mark Twain's 1885 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or, more precisely, it revisits one of that novel's central characters, the enslaved man Jim, without whose presence the novel could not exist, but whose perspective throughout it remains mostly on the periphery, except in rare glimpses that are played for comedy.

My goal with the story was not so much to revise Twain's novel, whose main story stays mostly offstage in "Rivers," but rather to imagine Jim's life, particularly after freedom, his freedom, both the convenient legal version given by Twain and whatever subsequent freedom(s) Jim earned himself. Before the novel appears next week, thanks to VICE magazine and its editors, and New Directions, you can read "Rivers" in The VICE Reader and see where the character of Jim, as well as Huckleberry, led me, discover the significance of the story's title, and find out what it was like to participate in the final battle of the U.S. Civil War. Accompanying the story are photographer Alec Magnum's stunning, stirring photos from his series "Sleeping by the Mississippi."

***

In another fascinating coincidence, another story in Counternarratives, "The Lions," appeared this week in The Offing, the new literary publication of the Los Angeles Review of Books. About "The Lions" I'll say only that it is the last story in the collection and deeply disturbing. There are many inspirations for each of the characters, which is one reason neither is named, and you can take your pick about who seems to fit which role. (It is set in contemporary Africa, but could take place, with some adjustments, all over the globe.) Many thanks to the editors at The Offing and at New Directions.

Accompanying the story is a brief online interview, "No Whitewash," on The Offing's Tumblr that Bix Gabriel conducted with me, about the new collection and this collection, so please do check it out. (Thank you, Bix!)

A snippet:

Other stories or aspects of the book you’d like to readers to know about?
Spirituality and religion, in their multiple manifestations, flow throughout many of the stories, and some, like “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon,” turn in part on the clash between spiritual systems, which are also systems of knowledge. What does it mean to know, and can knowledge lead to freedom? Liberty and fugitivity are throughlines in the text. How might freedom be lived, embodied? Also, queerness in the many senses of that term is another current throughout all of these stories. Lastly, I hope it’s clear that I had a lot of fun creating and then following the stories of many of these characters.

Poem: Steve Halle

I'd never met Steve Halle nor had I encountered his work before we read together tonight, at the invitation of Larry Sawyer, at Myopic Books in Chicago.  Steve is 30 years old, lives and is a doctoral student in southern Illinois, and is very active as a poet (he has several books and chapbooks), blogger (I count 4 blogs he runs or is part of), and all-around person of mind and letters. One of his blogs, Fluid/Exchange, has lots of interesting material on it, including critiques of ongoing online discussions in the blogosphere, links to his reviews and poems in print and audio form, readings of various essays and ideas, and much more.  The poems he read tonight were often funny, wrestled successfully with their influences, offered rich sonorities and polysemous pleasures, and, at the start, were decidedly scatalogical, though he ended with a poem that, in addition to being positively Platonic in its engagement with the body and its fluids also, I mentioned to him afterwards, struck me as embodying many of the ideas currently animating the conversations in the now-trendy cognitive neuroscience and studies/evolutionary biology wings of English and American literary studies. It was one of those seemingly simple, but actually quite complex productions that poets--artists--can pull off that anticipate, by years, decades, centuries, what scholars will finally come up with. Such is art, and such was Steve Halle. I'm looking forward to reading more of his work soon.

Illinois: Can't Touch This + Some Lit Links

(Updated with YouTube video below)

One of the big non-Super Bowl buzzes yesterday was the suggestion that New York governor David Paterson was going to resign, because of a sex-related scandal, which the New York Times was set to reveal today, only Paterson denied he was resigning, he met with the NY state Democratic caucus in a closed-door session to tell them he wasn't resigning or something like that, and no Times article appeared. My thought was, if the man did not commit a crime and his actions involved his private life, why should anyone care? Evidently some in the media are still hot and bothered by, as the British wonderfully call them, "sex romps" and
"sex rows," but given all the other crises this country faces, and the Woods/Sanford/Ensign/Spitzer/Craig, etc. scandals, does anyone really care about Paterson's love life or who he shtups, especially if his wife doesn't? At least for now, no, it seems, and so Love Gov #2 will remain in office, until he loses his primary to Andrew Cuomo, and heads off for fun and assignations in the sunset.

But--New York has nothing on Illinois. As I told C today, yesterday, political theater unfolded in a Chicago bar during the Super Bowl half-time when Illinois's newly elected Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor, Scott Lee Cohen offered his "resignation"--let me stop there, and repeat, "nominee" for Lt. Gov.--by which I mean, he was dropping out of the race, leaving his slot open for the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, current governor Pat Quinn, to replace him. Quinn had replaced the impeached Rod Blagojevich, aka Blago, who tried to sell Barack Obama's former Senate seat to the highest bidder. Blago, remember, was elected twice after the departure of George Ryan, who is now in jail on multiple corruption charges.

Now, you may ask, why did Scott Lee Cohen, who was only selected for his candidate slot by voters over several different party-annointed hacks a few weeks ago, decide to "resign"? Why was he in tears, at the Hop Haus bar, with his family around him and son lying in his lap, announcing in the midst of the 44th Super Bowl, that for the good of the "people of Illinois" and the "Democratic Party," that he was stepping down? Why did most of the Congressional Democrats, and many other party brokers, want this millionaire pawnbroker (I'm not making this up), to remove himself so as not to sink Quinn's chances in the general election (against who knows which Republican, since that race has still not been declared)?

Illinois votes + Amazon vs. Macmillan + Tissue as commodity + Golden Girls grow gays

Today's Primary Election Day in Illinois, and a number of key posts are on the ballot, from the US Senate seat, formerly occupied by President Barack Obama and now by his notorious successor, Roland Burris, to the Governors' seat, whose previous recent occupants include a convicted felon (George Ryan) and a man (Rod Blagojevich) who tried to sell the just-mentioned Senate seat to the highest bidder, was impeached by the state legislature, and will soon appear on a TV reality show, to various municipal and local positions, including one that almost no one outside of the state knows about but which has been a rag of contention for years, the powerful Cook County Board President's office. That seat is currently occupied by Todd Stroger, whose father suffered a massive stroke, thereby handing the gig to his son.

Since I vote in New Jersey, I'm a spectator in all of this, but I have to say that while I was somewhat frustrated with the lackluster options in the New Jersey elections that put Rovian Republican Chris Christie in office, I would feel even more disillusioned if I had to choose from the rogues' and hacks' gallery vying for these various Illinois seats. Let's just take the US Senate seat. On the GOP side, the leader is Mark Kirk, a sometimes moderate (by Midwestern standards), sometimes right-wing Congressman representing Chicago's wealth North Shore. Kirk was outed as gay, via a really sleazy media-leaked rumor, by one of his GOP opponents, a very nasty operator named Andy Martin, who has zero chance of winning. Facing almost no real competition Kirk, who ha moved politically to the right to secure the nomination, will very likely win the GOP nomination, where he'll face young, fairly progressive Democratic projected-winner Alexi Giannoulis, the current State Treasurer. (David Hoffmann, the state Inspector General, a former Federal prosecutor, and a truly progressive candidate with a clean (including anti-Daley) record, probably doesn't have a chance, but if he did, he would make the best Senator out of all the candidates.) Ironically enough, Giannoulis's family mint and former employer, Broadway Bank, is in serious financial trouble as a result of its lending policies over the last 8 years. During Giannoulis's tenure as Chief Loan Officer from 2002 to 2006, Broadway Bank jumped heavily into the subprime lending business and other risky banking activities. While Giannoulis has argued that he wasn't really involved in the problems that now place Broadway Bank on the brink, a review of the record belies this. As Treasurer he's done a decent job, particularly in the midst of the current economic calamities, which have hit Illinois, the nation's 6th most populous state, very hard, but his banking tenure, and his refusal to be explicit about his role in it, are troublesome.