A happy Thanksgiving Day to all, and I wish the best to all J's Theater readers. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, try to take time out to consider what you have to be thankful for, as tiny or tremendous as it is, and also consider how you might help someone else out there who might be struggling in some aspect of life.
For those who are preparing holiday meals, if you want a thorough and easy-to-read guide to holiday cooking with a soulful edge, consider C's Holiday Kitchen, which is now available as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook and iTunes stores.
I can attest to the deliciousness of every dish in this book. But don't just take my admittedly biased advice: as Maggie Da Silva writes in her Examiner.comreview, the author
is no snob and helps us out with painless instructions for turkey
roasting, “one of the easiest meals to prepare,” he writes. “Try it!” He also provides simple recipes for dishes I had assumed were beyond my
reach – like lemon curd! Who knew it was a snap? In fact, most of the
recipes in this delectable ebook reveal what all experienced cooks know:
food doesn’t have to be complicated to be great.
So true!
I am going to make an apple pie, so if it turns out okay, I'll post a photo of it!
Update: The apple pie! It turned out well, and everything about it, from the crust to the filling, is homemade!
With immeasurable thanks to my partner C and his company CAC Digital Arts, I can now invite J's Theater readers who want to dip into the site on their iPhones or iPads to download the new, freeJ's Theater iPhone/iPad app!
Everything you'll find on here is now available on the app version, along with direct links to the J's Theater Twitter feeds and easy-to-use sharing options for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GoogleReader, Instapaper, and other social networking sites. On the iPhone or iPad, you can view the articles in article view or full-page view, which simulates the view you see on the laptop. By double clicking on my J's Theater banner, you can also scroll through recent entries in full-page view too!
And did I say, it's free? Of course the app version means I'll need to post with a frequency closer to that of my first and second years as a blogger (2005-6, cf. the links on the right), but the spur is a good one! If you have an iPhone or iPad, please be among the first to download the app, and please urge others to do so as well! Also do check out CAC Digital Arts' other apps and its first e-book,Maggie da Silva's The Real Family Camping Cookbook, and enjoy!
Whither publishing today, in this era of e-books and apps, and whither especially poetry publishing, which facesits own setof genre-specific issues? As Reggie H. (naturally) alerted me this morning by sending along the Guardian UK I cite below, the venerable British publishing firm Faber & Faber, in conjunction with Touch Press, an app development/publishing company, suggests through its extraordinary new offering one likely direction for the future, with its Waste Land app. I kid not.
Touch Press takes one of the landmark works of 20th century Anglo-American and world literature, T. S. Eliot's (1880-1964) 1922 long poem, The Waste Land, and, using apps' multiple electronic and digital resources and the iPad's display capabilities, brings Eliot's poem to life in a strikingly refreshing and enthralling way. It's no gimmick, I assure you. Here's the Guardian UK's video report on it, which describes how the app came about.
Not long after Reggie sent me the link to the Guardian piece, I came across Laura Miller's Slatearticle on the new app, "The Waste Land": T.S. Eliot takes the app store," which walks readers through the app and argues that it represents the best example of how to make a "digital book." So what does the app comprise?
You get, in very easy-to-navigate format
The poem, in full published text version, laid out as it would be in codex book form;
The poem, read by Eliot himself, in 2 different versions (1931, 1947), as well as by Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, Viggo Mortenson (?), and the remarkable Irish performer Fiona Shaw;
The poem performed by Fiona Shaw, in a Dublin house--I have watched this several times now, and I don't think I've ever heard Eliot's language enlivened, embodied, like this;
Videotaped perspectives, by Seamus Heaney (who needs no intro), Paul Keegan (Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber since 1999), Jim McCue (a leading Eliot expert and publisher), Craig Raine (the poet and critic), Fiona Shaw, Frank Turner (a musician heavily influenced by Eliot), and Jeanette Winterson (the fiction writer and critic), which play alongside selected sections of The Waste Land;
A facsimile of Eliot's original manuscript, edited by Ezra Pound, which you can view page by page, or, by sliding the screen in one direction, interspersed with the final version;
Annotations and other notes explicating the text, in addition to the ones Eliot (in)famous provided;
A gallery of photographs and images linked directly or indirectly to the text; these range from a photo of Eliot's native Saint Louis in the early 20th century to Pablo Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignonto a photo of Vivien Eliot, the writer's tragic first wife, to two (why?) photos of Bob Dylan (one would have sufficed).
Eliot, Corbis
This list barely captures the true interactivity of the app, which allows you even with all the gewgaws to, if you please, read the text straight through, as you would in book form, but also, you can, as I've done, read along as Fiona Shaw performs it or even just watch Shaw do her thing. As I said, the text, considered to this day a forbidding work of Modernism, comes alive in ways I'd not considered before. What Faber & Faber and Touch Press have created is perfect for the classroom, but also for anyone interested in poetry, especially Anglo-American poetry. What also makes it work is the depth of Eliot's masterpiece; it can stand up to all the digital treatment and doesn't suffer from nor is overshadowed by it. The poem has many layers, as scholars have shown since it first appeared and as Eliot's peers quickly recognized, to peel away, savor, mull, return to. A lesser work might not hold up so well, and a work written directly for this sort of publication would probably come off differently, but Eliot's text suggests that masterworks of this kind--I think immediately of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, or Herman Melville's Moby Dick, or Jean Toomer's Cane, or, going further back, any of William Shakespeare's plays, or Dante's Divine Comedy, as being possible options, and see this as the leading edge for the future. (Imagine Erich Auerbach's famous discussion of the Divine Comedy,for example, alongside a number of others being woven into an edition of that book.) Another option might be Abraham Lincoln's or Frederick Douglass's speeches, if those don't already exist, or a work constellating a range of texts--like The New York Times's Disunion seriesaround the US Civil War. For an enterprising publisher with the resources and interest to work with a work in the public domain, there's no limit. It also suggests to me--as I'm sure it will to others--another and exciting possibility in terms of scholarly editing and publication. This might be what scholarly editions look like, at least to some extent, down the road.
As I mentioned to Reggie, after watching the Guardian piece and reading Miller's report, I had to purchase the app, which is $15 (not cheap, of course, especially given the usual app range of .99-$10), and I'm glad I did. Here are some screenshots of it.
A screenshot of the facsimile pages
A screenshot of one of the most famous of Pound's emended pages of Eliot's text (note the "B_ll_s")
A screenshot of Shaw performing alongside the scrolling text (the lines she speaks and performs automatically highlight in blue)
A screenshot of the app with the notes/annotations at left
A screenshot of Fiona Shaw performing the poem
This is not the first time someone has adapted The Waste Land for new technologies. An older example is this hyperlinked version, which would have been pretty advanced 15 years ago, and which still represents a heightened and very useful option for exploring Eliot's poem. My own introduction to The Waste Land after high school--and I admit to having been somewhat obsessed with Eliot as a teenager--came in my freshman year, when I conned my way into Joel Porte's "American Modernist Thought," most of which went over my head, at least the theoretical parts, but I do vividly remember the marvelous facsimile version of The Waste Land that we read, and I was shocked by all of Pound's excisions. He was, as Eliot rightly noted, at least in this effort, il miglior fabbro, the dedication he added in 1925. I will be returning to this app again and again, I think, and hope that other publishers, along with Touch, keep producing works of this sort.
It just might get more people reading and thinking about not just poetry, but literature and the arts and humanities in general.
Back in July I'd written that C had created and debuted his first app, the fashion-forward, informative MBF TrendTalk, for the MBF consulting company and its site. (The next New York Fashion Week is coming up in a little over a month, so it's an app to have if you want to be on top of things.) Since then he's been working steadily on new apps, and his company, CAC-IT has since introduced several new free or very affordable apps that are either available or will soon be via the iTunes store.
The second was C's Holiday Kitchen, a holiday cookbook for the iPad, featuring some of his delicious, failsafe holiday recipes, ranging from the staples like roast turkey, apple and sausage stuffing, collard greens, and homemade cranberry sauce, to desserts like coconut cake and sweet potato pie, to dinner rolls you cannot mess up nor stop adding to your plate. He has since updated this app and introduced an iPhone version, C's Holiday iKitchen, which is now also available on iTunes. I recommend trying out the cranberry sauce if you've never made it before; it's so simple it will shock you and you'll never want to go back to canned cranberry sauce again.
Two of his newer apps are in the Apple pipeline: the first is my favorite of all, the Soundbox Celebrator, which is a virtual iPhone sound machine for the holidays, sporting events, and anytime you want to punctuate your thoughts and comments with loud audio accompaniment. It includes a variety of sounds, including an air horn, church bells, and my favorite, the vuvuzela, as well as a stately version of "For Auld Lang Syne," with the lyrics in case you're too blitzed to remember them. I hate to admit it but had this been available when I was in high school, I very well might have been expelled as a result of it! (As it was, we had to make do with Bic pens, spitballs, and a laughing machine, which nearly sent my elderly German language teacher into apoplexy, but that's another story....)
The second is a lifestyle and travel app for Monaga, covering the the full range of LGBTQ life and activities in the Dominican Republic and more. The app will feature links to Monaga's main page; the legendary Monaga blog; and a Monaga-designed map showing gay and tourist highlights for Santo Domingo-area travelers. As Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest might say, it will ensure travelers know where to find "the booze, beaches, and boys!" As I said, it's in the Apple pipeline as well, and should debut quite soon.
Since I don't have the skills to program more than simple html these days, I'm very impressed by all of this, and I urge you to check these out if you're interested, and check with iTunes or CAC-IT's site to see what apps C is devising down the road, or to inquire about getting your own.
I finally can announce it: Congratulations to my partner C (CAC-IT!), whose first official iPhone/iPad/iPadTouch app, for MBF TrendTalk, is now available for free download at Apple's iTunes store!
This customized project required a tremendous amount of work, but C accomplished it, and now everyone with access to iTunes and three of Apple's best-selling products will be able to stay on top of the worlds of green fashion and design, by following one of the world's leaders in this area, MBF Trend Consulting!
Here's what the TrendTalk app looks like on the iTunes store:
And here's the link for you to download the app for free:
Click on the link to download and urge everyone you know to download it as well!
It's Bloomsday! "STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air..." and you know, or know of, the rest. (If not, you can find the entire, remarkable novel, Ulysses, one of the greatest ever written in the English or any other language, here.) You can hear Joyce himself reading from it here, at Bedeutung Blog.
I haven't seen this app, but given how the entire novel ends, I wonder if that was bowdlerized too. To Apple's credit, they also reinstated a graphic novel version of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, which features a strip of a male couple kissing, after having heavily censored it. Something tells me neither Joyce nor Wilde would have been surprised.
^^^
The university's graduation doesn't officially occur until this weekend, but final grades are posted, so I think I can post without caution:
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THIS YEAR'S GRADUATES IN THE UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE CLASSES OF 2010!
Some of the seniors (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and lit scholars writers all) at the annual Bowling challenge (fiction won, creative nonfiction finished second, and I bowled with poetry this year). Congratulations to all the graduating senior major and minors, and to the other undergraduate students finishing up this week that I taught (including those in the Conceptual Art/Writing class--you were great!), advised or worked with over the last few years!
Congratulations also to one of my graduate fiction thesis advisees, Roya Khatiblou, whose magnificent manuscript received a 2009-10 Distinguished Thesis Award! It was exciting to work with Roya, and with the other graduating fiction students I advised this year, whom I'd also taught in the past, Jennifer Companik and Wendy Schoua Musto.
Lastly, to all the students in the novella class (The Theory and Practice of Fiction, Winter-Spring), congratulations on finishing your novellas! It was a huge, speeded up, often stressful undertaking, and you accomplished in 4 1/2 months what it takes many writers a year or more do but you've all completed your little books, and deserve praise for having done so!
Spring break came, I left the grid for a bit (including, amazingly for me, Twitter), but now the new quarter is set to begin. I am teaching two classes: one is a continuation of the advanced fiction writing-novella class (Theory and Practice of Fiction), and the other is a brand new experiment, an advanced creative writing class, Concepts of Conceptual Art. I'm charged up about both; the novella class's first half-quarter went pretty well, I thought, and all of the students produced what approximated the beginning of a long work (long short story/novella) by the end of the quarter, so now they'll be refining these and extending this work to create something that is or approaches a novella. Our final reading is Don DeLillo's curious, powerful novella, Pafko at the Wall, which he originally published as a folio in Harpers in 1992, but which he later incorporated as the prologue to his greatest novel (in my opinion), Underworld (1997). After DeLillo, it's on to their work exclusively.
With the Conceptual Art class, there isn't enough time to explore all the theorists, artists, and movements I'd hoped to, so we'll start with a bit of background, moving from Idealism (Plato) to Formalism (Aristotle, Kant), then look at Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, Marcel Duchamp (+ Dada and Surrealism), and Clement Greenberg, one of the chief formalists against whom many of the American conceptualists were reacting, and then explore conceptual music (Cage, Finer, Reynols), conceptual art and performance (Situationists, George Brecht, Alan Kaprow, Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, Sol LeWitt, etc.), and finally conclude with conceptual writing (Warhol, Stephens/Nathanaël, Philip, Goldsmith, Mesmer, and Lewis Obadike + Obadike). Things aren't as schematic as this appears, and I will be including some theorists like Lucy Lippard, Rob Fitterman, perhaps Benjamin Buchloh, etc. I also am going to have them create a number of projects, ranging from event scores to a durational project. I hope it'll be as fun for them as it's been for me to conceive the class. Tomorrow, too, I hope to perform Cage's 4'33" for them as part of our opening discussion.
===
Just a glimpse of something really cool: C, who's doing development projects with his new company, created a prototype iPhone app of this blog, pictured below. It's not available for downloading yet, but I've been playing with and testing it since he created it, and it works really well. Doesn't it look cool? I'm looking forward to him creating many more.
Prototype app of my blog on my iPhone
Screenshot, from my iPhone (JTs is the prototype app)
