Key West Literary Seminar

Menhaden fishing. From the NOAA Fisheries Library. Photo by Robert K. Brigham

As we resumed our course toward Yet Another World, we set out the equipment. It’s quite a haul:

  •  If you’re not reviewing James Gleick’s THE INFORMATION, you’re not a major paper. See The New York Review of Books, The New York Times (and again in the Magazine), the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times.

  •  Jennifer Egan’s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD wins the National Book Critics Circle Award

  •  Janna Levin lectured at TED on the sound the universe makes

  •  Margaret Atwood talked tech & publishing at O’Reilly

  •  Robert Krulwich on the tragic crashing cosmonaut

  •  Margaret Atwood, Douglas Coupland, William Gibson, James Gleick, William Gibson, and Charles Yu are all on Twitter. Are you?.

Turtle excluder used in the Gulf shrimp fishery. NOAA Fisheries Collection.

Today’s fresh catch from around the web:

•  Ruth Reichl’s salt-crusted chickens and roast pig – “the most magical night of my life.”

•  Frank Bruni’s guide to midrange eating in out-of-the-way Rome. Plus, drinking while taking a little off the top.

•  Jonathan Gold, tastemaker: “If the dilution is correct and it has the proper chill, it almost doesn’t matter what’s in it.”

•  John T. Edge eats canvasback ducks with Mark Twain and tracks Lowcountry cuisine’s working-class roots in North Charleston.

•  Sugar Cane and Shortstops – the Times on Mark Kurlansky’s new book about that other American pastime.

•  Martha Stewart, meet David Mas Masumoto. Mr. Mas Masumoto, meet Martha.

Join all of the above (sans Ms. Stewart) in Key West this January for The Hungry Muse: An Exploration of Food in Literature.

Men with Jewfish, Key West, ca. 1935. From the Dale McDonald Collection, via the Monroe County Public Library on Flickr

Today’s haul from the deep:

• Jewfish, Amberjack, or Black Drum? Carol Frost takes a look at Elizabeth Bishop’s Key West notebooks and tries to determine which Keys fish was the basis for her poem “The Fish.”

• ”The Symbol,” a new poem by Billy Collins, is in Slate.

• Richard Wilbur reading at the 92nd Street Y

• Tod Marshal interviews Yusef Komunyakaa for Poetry

• Kay Ryan is named to a second term as United States Poet Laureate

• BOMB on KWLS ’09 speaker John Wray: “The Lowdown on Lowboy.” Wray also joined PaperCuts’s Living With Music series.

• Alan Cheuse’s new book, a collection of travel writings, is on shelves now: A Trance After Breakfast.

Purse seine boats fishing for menhaden. Photo by Robert K. Brigham, courtesy NOAA's Fisheries Collection.

On our way to the sill of the world, we’ve been trolling. Here’s what we’re catching:

• KWLS 28 will feature six past U.S. Poets Laureate as well as the current Laureate, Kay Ryan. The Library of Congress Poetry Home page is a wonderful resource for learning about the office and the many projects past Laureates have undertaken.

• Their $100 million’s lost some value, no doubt, but The Poetry Foundation was wise to invest it in their website, which is far and away the most comprehensive resource to American poetry, poets, and poems in existence.

• Two standout blogs for all things poetry are Ron Silliman’s and Edward Byrne’s, aka One Poet’s Notes, aka the Valparaiso Poetry Review.

• The Paris Review’s 1977 interview with Richard Wilbur and the 2008 one with Kay Ryan.

• And don’t forget the audio recordings in the poetry archives of our good friends at PennSound, including Yusef Komunyakaa and Harvey Shapiro, or these readings from our own archives: James Tate, Charles Simic, Richard Wilbur, and Billy Collins.

Photo by Jose Cort; from NOAA's Fisheries Collection.

This week’s catch from around the web:

• The Paris Review interview with Marilynne Robinson:

INTERVIEWER
How do you write historical figures in your novels?
ROBINSON
My unvarying approach to anything is to read the most primary and proximate material that I can find. I try to be discreet in my use of historical figures. My John Brown is only a voice heard in the darkness.
 

• Robinson’s new novel, Home, reviewed by A.O. Scott in The New York Times: “a wild, eccentric, radical work of literature.”

• Their father was a spy, after all: Robert and Michael Meeropol discuss the latest evidence in the 55-year old case against their executed parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

• Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore’s novel Blindspot makes the Fall 2008 Editors’ Picks list in Library Journal and receives a starred review.

• Junot Díaz’s lecture at our 2008 Seminar was a brilliant and unexpectable investigation of the dangers inherent in authorial voice. They’re still talking about it in the Silicon Valley, too.

• Robert Stone reviews Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War

Photo by Arthur Rothstein, 1915

Fresh catch from around the web:

• Julia Child was a spy. George Orwell has a blog. The notebooks of Thomas Jefferson record the dates on which his flowers bloomed. All this and maps, maps, and more maps on the blog of the American Historical Association.

• 2009 speaker Allan Gurganus takes on Thomas Eakins’s portrait of Walt Whitman in an essay for The American Scholar.

• 2009 speaker Francisco Goldman wins the inaugural WOLA-Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

• Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York chronicles the two essential moments of Babar’s creation: when Jean de Brunhoff and, years later, his son Laurent, set down their initial thoughts on paper.

• The flickr page of the Monroe County Public Library incudes newly added tracings of Key West gingerbread, and a fascinating collection of nearly 600 military passes issued to civilian workers in Key West during WWI.

Today’s catch from around the web:

•2008 Seminar speakers Junot Díaz and Meghan O’Rourke back together for a video interview on SlateV

•Junot Díaz on the Colbert Report

•Ruth Greenglass, a key witness in the 1950s treason case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, is dead, court papers reveal. Her testimony led to the execution of her sister-in-law, Ethel Rosenberg, which orphaned the Rosenberg’s young sons. One of these sons, Michael Meeropol, joins us this January with daughter Ivy.

•Geraldine Brooks wins the Australian Book of the Year award and the Literary Fiction Book of the Year award for her recent People of the Book. Brooks will be a keynote speaker at our 2009 Seminar. You can read her interview with Littoral here.

This week’s catch from around the web:

2009 KWLS panelist Gore Vidal talks to Melvyn Bragg of the UK Times Online about the ongoing, going, going Democratic primary season. Of Hillary Clinton’s endgame, Vidal says: "I think her strategy is more or less insane.”

Samantha Hunt, ’09 panelist and author of a new novel about inventor Nikola Tesla, talks with Bloomberg.com about Tesla’s eccentricities. For instance, "He had plans to build a ring around the equator so that just by staying stationary, you would be able to travel around the world in 24 hours."

And, from the online Wall Street Journal back in February– Barbara Chai published interviews from our 2008 Seminar with panelist Junot Díaz, keynote speaker Lee Smith, and program chair Robert Richardson. There’s also a collection of several short conversations with ’08 speakers Billy Collins, Kevin Young, Elisabeth Scharlatt, Jake Silverstein, and Silas House.

Thomas Mallon reviews Joshua Kendall’s new biography of the eccentric Peter Mark Roget, creator of the Thesaurus, in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review. The review is Obsessed (Agog, Beset, Consumed, Driven, etc.) and contains the wonderful Thesaurus-aided comment “the Thesaurus entry for ‘uncleanness’ is a lollapalooza.” Mallon’s essay History, Fiction, and the Burden of Truth is nigh required reading for our 2009 Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth, which will feature Mallon along with other world-renowned writers of historical fiction and noted historians.

The first episode of Janna Levin Reports from the Cosmos
is up. We were pretty piqued by Janna’s blend of intellect and cool
this January, and have been waiting ever since for the podcasts she
promised. It’s a quick primer on Relativity and Curved Spacetime, aka
“Warren Malone asks me why, when he break dances on the C-train, does
he land in the same spot?” This is cosmology!? That snappy musical intro
and sweet outro is the work of that same Warren Malone, who we think might be Janna’s husband.

And, in another sign that Junot Díaz is completely blowing up, a post-Spitzer-scandal Times
feature on three high-priced NY call-girls describes one as “a hipster
with entrancing blue eyes who carries an NPR tote bag and might offer
up a few pleasantries in the Whole Foods checkout line before turning
back to her Junot Díaz novel.” Go, Junot.