November 18, 2008
Milton Out Loud
Scenes from a marathon: My story about St. Olaf College's all-day reading of Paradise Lost is now up:
In between his reading stints, Chad Goodroad, a senior majoring in English and political science, hawked black "Milton Marathon" T-shirts at a card table. Someone asked him how sales were. "Crazy," he said. "Actually, kinda slow." A student in one of the shirts knitted her way through Book III. A professor's toddlers played nearby on a harvest display of pumpkins and sheaves.
...Participants fortified themselves with coffee and Subway sandwiches. Another English professor contributed a devil's-food cake and a pair of devil's horns. Somebody drew a picture of the archangel Michael on the chalkboard.
"It's cool," Mr. Goodroad observed midafternoon, when the group had made it to Book VI. "It's kind of like a purging."
Miraculously, nobody's energy flagged. It wasn't just the coffee and sandwiches; read out loud, Milton's blank verse can be propulsive, and the readers had caught the rhythm.
November 17, 2008
Stop Smiling, D.C.
The Chicago-based mag Stop Smiling has just put out a D.C. issue. I went to a party on Friday for some of the contributors and people Q&A'd in the issue (I'm neither) and got off to a good start by asking the editor who he was. At least I can't be accused of sucking up.
Anyway, it's a good-looking issue that's deliberately (I think/hope) all over the place: an analysis of presidential handwriting, a tribute to the Florida Avenue Grill, a cri de coeur about the plight of the Chesapeake Bay, a nifty look at campaign ephemera (buttons, posters, an elephant flyswatter allegedly from the 1964 Democratic convention) written by two Smithsonian curators who have spent 20 years collecting the stuff for the National Museum of American History. I talked with one of them--William L. Bird Jr.--at the party and was reminded that it's usually more fun to talk to historians than to other journos.
Profiles and interviews are the main engine of the D.C. issue, which is either a good or a bad thing depending on your appetite for profiles. Mine's limited, but I found some good stuff here as well as some head-scratchers and all-too-predictable choices. (Another profile of Christopher Buckley? I'm still regretting the time I wasted on that NYT piece about him a few weeks back.) Better bets, IMHO, include the pieces on George Pelecanos, actor and musician Big G a k a Anwan Glover, soon-to-be-ex-NEA chairman Dana Gioia, Chemical Brother Joe Reese, Frank Rich Sr., father of the NYT columnist and the last owner of Rich's Shoes, a D.C. landmark back in the day, and Ilir Zherka of DC Vote, a group dedicated to getting us capital denizens fully enfranchised at long last. (If only. Mr. Obama, are you listening?)
Here's Anwan Glover on why the homegrown go-go sound didn't catch on more outside the city:
It was so selfish here. We could have caught on. I hate to say it, but DC is a selfish city. We just try to keep so much stuff to ourselves. Really, there are a lot of haters. Crabs in a barrel. But the music is good. I performed with everybody, from Scarface to Onyx, Biggie, Pac, Busta Rhymes. Man,we done did it with everybody, and they loved the sound.
Spread the D.C. love.
November 13, 2008
His Dark Materials
In case it's not already on your calendar, Dec. 9 is Milton's 400th birthday. A couple of weeks ago I flew out to St. Olaf College, Minn. to take part in a marathon reading of "Paradise Lost" that some folks there staged in honor of the quatercentenary. I write about it in next week's Chronicle.
If you ever have a chance to read Paradise Lost out loud, I urge you to take it. It's more fun than you think. Among the joys? When you check back in with a classic like PL, you stumble on phrases that have taken on lives of their own outside the source material. Take this bit from Book II, which Philip Pullman mined for the trilogy "His Dark Materials":
...Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage...
Early this year, the Oxford University Press blog ran some of Pullman's thoughts on "Milton in 2008." (Pullman also wrote an introduction for a recent Oxford edition of PL.)
The quartercentenary fun is just beginning. The University of Cambridge, Milton's alma mater, has all kinds of festivities planned, and my sources at St. Olaf's tell me that there are dozens of PL marathons taking place this fall. Find one near you--or stage your own and make yourself popular with all your friends.
November 12, 2008
If You Have a Lit Prize to Announce...
Tell the winner before you send out the media alert. An editor friend of mine got this note on Monday:
New York-based writer Nam Le was tonight (10.11.08) named the winner of this year’s £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize for his debut collection of short stories, The Boat....
Nam Le will NOT be aware that he has won until 9.15pm BMT this evening (10.11.08), therefore, he will not be available for interview until after this time.
I guess not.
Operation Paperback
Founded in 1999, Operation Paperback collects gently used books and sends them to American troops deployed overseas.
Many of our troops are serving far from home and living in facilities that provide few of the comforts of home. At the end of the duty day, the opportunity to escape into a good book is welcomed.
I can only imagine. Whatever you think of the war(s), this seems like a damn good idea. (Via.)
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