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Thursday, August 14, 2014

EILEEN TABIOS BOOK LAUNCH 

YOU ARE INVITED! Eileen R. Tabios' forthcoming Marsh Hawk Press book will be represented at:

http://versestyphoonyolanda.blogspot.com/2014/08/sonoma-california-book-launch.html



The Sitting Room - A Community Library based in Santa Rosa (near Sonoma State University) will present a book launch for Eileen R. Tabios' three 2014 books:

147 MILLION ORPHANS (MMXI-MML) (gradient books, Finland)
SUN STIGMATA (Sculpture Poems) (Marsh Hawk Press, New York)
and
as Editor, VERSES TYPHOON YOLANDA

The event is free to the public and will take place at 2 pm, Saturday, November 1, 2014.  Please click on The Sitting Room link for directions and other information.  The Sitting Room is at  2025 Curtis Drive, Penngrove, CA.

Depending on availability, other poets from VERSES TYPHOON YOLANDA, also will be present at the launch.  All book sales proceeds during this event -- not just from VTY but also Eileen Tabios' two other books -- will be donated for Haiyan relief.

Readings, discussions, Q&As -- you are invited to attend and participate!

For questions: email Ertabios@aol.com



Monday, August 11, 2014

PAUL PINES' ESSAY ON NUMERO CINQ 

Paul Pines has written a wonderfully in-depth look at "High Culture, Poetic Imagination and the Submerged Center" -- it is published at NUMERO CINQ.  Here's an excerpt:

The Great Depression confirmed for many that there was nothing of substance at the center. A few grieved the demise of High Culture. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West wailed in the 1930s Waste Land. West wrote Miss Lonelyhearts as a night clerk at the Hotel Albert in Greenwich Village, and then at the Hotel Kenmore on 23rd Street. From his desk at the latter, looking out on a second floor terrace, he watched bankrupt millionaires fall from the top floor, “lovers leap.”  He observed that in the absence of a center, pain can’t be addressed. The result was a culture of cruelty and disconnection. His novel follows a sports journalist reassigned by a sadistic editor to the Advice Desk where he answered letters from the heartbroken as “Miss. L”. His attempt to take on the burden of the suffering humanity fails. Miss L. experienced a psychotic breakdown rather than what at an earlier time might’ve been mystical union or a redemptive renewal of faith.
West never made a penny on his novels. He moved to Hollywood in 1935. He met F. Scott Fitzgerald on the lot of Republic Pictures, aka Repulsive Pictures, where the major stars were singing cowboys. Fitzgerald’s royalties plummeted to $50 in 1933 from an earlier high of $29,757.85. The author who once defined The Jazz Age, now analogized himself and the world in which he found himself to a cracked plate. It might be glued and used, but would always be a cracked plate, not suitable for company. In essays for Esquire published posthumously as the Crack Up in 1940 by Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald wrote about the death of High Culture. The novel, which he’d thought “the most powerful medium of conveying thought and feeling from one human being to another,” had become “subordinate to a mechanical and communal art…capable of only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion.” Poetic imagination had given way to Hollywood, a collaborative medium which fed on the obvious.

Go HERE for the whole essay!

*****

Also, there is also a podcast of Paul's reading at the Gloucester Writers Center:
http://gloucesterwriters.org/podcast/paul-pines/





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