News & Updates 2021

News & Updates 2021

At the beginning of 2021 I initiated a feature for the Ninth Letter website: “A Book You May Have Missed.” This feature is designed to call attention to those books published at the height of 2020’s Covid surges that perhaps didn’t receive their due at the time (and how could they, being launched in the middle of a world health crisis?). The first book featured in this series is Michele Morano’s brilliant collection of essays, Like Love. Beside calling attention to Like Love, we reprinted Morano’s edgy essay from the book, “Crushed,” which we initially published in the magazine back in 2012.

My seventh music essay for 3 Quarks Daily, and the first for 2021, “My Fan Notes,” tells the story of my sometimes unusual displays of fandom for the 1960s rock group the Byrds (such as, at the age of 15 I called Columbia Records and pretended to be a record store owner so I could find out the release date of the group’s forthcoming album, Younger than Yesterday). Though the music of this group remains important to me to this day, I’ve never previously written in any detail about the Byrds. I write here about how the Byrds’ creating the genres of folk rock, psychedelia and country rock (in the heady span of four years) was an inspiration to me as a budding writer.

My eighth 3 Quarks Daily music essay, “Some Songs from a Fallen Empire,” chronicles another music I have long loved: the wide range of musical traditions created in the former colonies of the world-spanning Portuguese empire (an empire that lasted over 500 years).

In particular, the musical traditions of Brazil, Cape Verde and Angola were forged in the crucible of colonialism’s grip–such unlikely beauty rising from so much pain.

On March 10th, I gave a Zoom talk at the International House of Rhode Island about my curating and editing of the Ninth Letter 2020 pandemic anthology, “my heart, your soul,” an anthology that includes writers, artists and musicians from around the world. Somehow, in the talk I found myself discoursing about the Fuddles, a strange people made of puzzles pieces, from Frank L. Baum’s The Emerald City of Oz. The Fuddles take great pleasure in falling apart, so visitors can put them back together. The trick is to find a puzzle piece with a mouth, so you can get advice about where to find the other pieces–a good illustration, I think, of the creative process of revision (and of literary editing).

Also in March, my ninth music essay for 3 Quarks Daily launched, “Confessions of an Accordion Addict.” Luckily, my appreciation for the instrument wasn’t damaged by the schlock of the 1950 and 60s TV variety staple, the Lawrence Welk Show. The accordion is the backbone of so much excellent music across the globe, and my essay examines examples from Finland, Madagascar, Ivory Coast, Belgium and Tunisia.

In late March, Ninth Letter featured an essay by New Zealand writer Ingrid Horrocks, “Days Bay,” in support of the launch of her new book, Where We Swim. Horrock’s essay describes in loving detail a three-generation family gathering–such a rare gift to read about, in the midst of pandemic quarantines that have lasted over a year.

Next up on my music series of essays for 3 Quarks Daily was “In Praise of Anthologies,” which gives a shout-out to the eclectic French radio station FIP, and the online music service Bandcamp–both of which serve as musical anthologies for music lovers everywhere. In this essay, I delve into the work of some of my favorite finds from around the world, such as Michel Banabila, Spellling, Allysen Callery, Meszecsinka, and Kokoroko, to name a few.

In early April my wife Alma and I, fully vaccinated, ventured on an airplane in order to spend six weeks at our Santa Fe condo in New Mexico, in order to visit our son Nathaniel and his wife and two children, after an absence of 17 months (happily, we were also able to stop on the way to visit with our daughter Hannah in Brooklyn). Such joy to see, in three dimensions, one’s loved ones and to actually embrace in greeting!

In this photo I’m pausing during a walk along the Santa Fe River, and if I weren’t wearing that ubiquitous mask, you’d be able to see my great grin of pleasure and thankfulness.

The second entry in the Ninth Letter series “A Book You May Have Missed” is Sarah Minor’s superb Bright Archive, which combines nonfiction, art, architecture and mapmaking. In this feature we have reprinted Minor’s essay from the book, “Foul Chutes: On the Archive Downriver,” which we originally published in 2018.

My eleventh music essay for 3 Quarks Daily, “My Briefest of Musical Careers,” chronicles my six-second “triumph” singing in the middle of a performance of John Cage’s paean to silence, 4’33”, and the subsequent media attention. The long journey to my musical performance debut includes the minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, Talking Head’s “Burning Down the House,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

In June Ninth Letter published a first-rate essay by Annie Penfield, “The Rain Gauge,” about her coming-of-age year of hard living on a sheep ranch in Australia when she was young.

My last music essay for 3 Quarks Daily appeared in June, and marked the end of my twelve month gig. Titled “Hit Songs in the Radiation Room,” the essay describes what it was like listening to pop music hits piped into the sound system of the radiation room where I was being treated for cancer.

Though I was diagnosed in December of 2019, my primary treatment was delayed because of the pandemic (the hospital overwhelmed with Covid patients for months, as all hospitals were) until July of 2020. I received a month of radiation treatments in the middle of a heat wave in the middle of the continuing pandemic, and I’m happy to report that I am fully recovered and as grateful as I can be to a world-class team of doctors and technicians.

Each year for the past decade I have been the judge for the Nonfiction Prize of the Disquiet International Literary Program, and in July Ninth Letter was honored to publish the 2021 winner, Seth Fischer’s “Speaking of Chaos.” His essay takes place in the short time of a car drive to a waterfall in Hawaii, though he manages expertly to fold in a world of personal and family memories. Bravo!

This September, the Ninth Letter website published “Some Books You May Have Missed, 2000-2021.” In this feature, I call attention to nine books that appeared during our ongoing pandemic, books that might have gotten lost in the Covid shuffle.

These books, though written before the pandemic, uncannily seem to pack a lot of relevance in this new world we find ourselves in: Mary Cappello’s Lecture, Robin Hemley’s Borderline Citizen, Patrick Madden’s Disparates, Dinty W. Moore’s To Hell with It, Scholastique Mukasonga’s Igifu, Ben Okri’s Prayer for the Living, Yuri Rythkheu’s, When the Whales Leave, Mimi Schwartz’s Good Neighbors, Bad Times, and Red Dust, by Yoss.

Also this September, 3 Quarks Daily published my long conversation with Margot Livesey, about her superb novel The Boy in the Field in particular, and the writing process in general. In this novel Livesey, with typical originality, reframes the mystery genre by focusing mainly on the mysteries of the self and family that are set in motion when three young siblings discover in a field an unconscious boy who has been assaulted.

In October, my wife Alma Gottlieb and I spoke via Zoom to Stephanie West-Puckett’s professional writing panel for the University of Rhode Island’s Harrington School of Communication and Media. Excellent students, and a lively discussion on various aspects of writing (and revision) with our fellow panelists, Silas Pinto, Nancy Crowley, and William Nelson.

Another rewarding discussion took place this November, when I visited via Zoom (always via Zoom these days!) an editorial meeting of the Santa Fe Literary Review. Many thanks to Kate McCahill, the editor of this excellent literary journal, for the invitation.

The subject of the day was rejection slips, a fraught but necessary aspect of any literary journal, to be sure: how to deliver one that doesn’t crush a rejected writer, and one that best encourages those writers whose work shows promise? I called upon my nearly 50 years experience as a writer of receiving rejections (and in my defense, acceptances as well!), as well as my two decades of experience as an editor of Ninth Letter.

November also arrives with a new Ninth Letter website feature: an excerpt from an extraordinary novel by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans: A Guardian Angel Recalls. First published in 1971, it has finally been translated into English (and fluidly so by David Colmer), and published by Archipelago Books.

As I write in my brief intro,

Pity the poor guardian angel of Alberegt, a Dutch public prosecutor. It’s May 9, 1940, the eve of the fearsome Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, and Alberegt has just bid farewell to his German-Jewish lover, who sets sail for the safety of the US. On his drive to the courthouse, where he has to deliver closing arguments at a trial, Alberegt is so preoccupied—by his troubles as well as the impending troubles of the world—that at times his guardian angel has to secretly take the wheel and drive. The problem is, the guardian angel himself is distracted, by the flood of Alberegt’s conflicting thoughts, and the deliberately unhelpful advice of a devil who is also along for the ride. Under these circumstances, how can disaster be avoided?

Columbia University Press has recently published the anthology Being A Parent in the Field: Implications and Challenges of Accompanied Fieldwork (edited by Fabienne Braukman, Michaela Haug, Katja Metzmacher and Rosalie Stolz). Some of the essays in this collection cite an article my wife Alma Gottlieb and I wrote together (along with a contribution from our son Nathaniel), “Infants, Ancestors, and the Afterlife: Fieldwork’s Family Values in Rural West Africa,” which recounts our experiences in 1993 living among the Beng people in a small village in Côte d’Ivoire with our then six-year-old son (the article was originally published in 1998 in Anthropology and Humanism).

This December 3rd, I led a panel presentation at the 2021 Nonfiction Now conference, held in New Zealand (virtually). Oh, if only we had been able to actually travel to that lovely country! Still, writer Ingrid Horrocks, Tina Makereti and their crack team of organizers at Massey University in Wellington pulled off quite a technological feat, and all went smoothly except for a few glitches here and there.

The title of our panel was “A Traveler’s Guide to the Country of the Pandemic,” and the participants ranged across four continents and five time zones: Michele Morano in Chicago, myself in Rhode Island, Tabish Khair in Denmark, Rima Rantisi in Lebanon, and Jeanine Leane in Australia. Excellent writers all, and my many thanks.