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Solar de Samaniego ha puesto en marcha un concurso de microrrelatos literarios para celebrar el lanzamiento de su nueva colección de vinos 7Cepas. Con esta acción proponen a los escritores la redacción de un pequeño relato de un máximo de 650 caracteres que, como novedad, ha de presentarse a través de la plataforma accesible al final de este artículo, incentivando la creación literaria a través de redes sociales. La participación en el Concurso Literario de Microrrelatos 7 Cepas estará abierta durante las próximas cuatro semanas hasta el día 27 de mayo, durante las cuales cada semana saldrá como ganador el relato que más votos consiga y será premiado con una caja de vinos 7Cepas Reserva 2015 DOCa Rioja. Estas botellas han sido ilustradas por la artista Elena Odriozola, Premio Nacional de Ilustración de 2015, con dibujos que evocan la inaccesibilidad del vino a partir de textos de diferentes escritores ilustres que han sido magistralmente interpretados. Finalmente el jurado seleccionará el ganador definitivo entre los cuatro ganadores semanales que será anunciado el día 4 de junio, logrando como premio la colección completa de 12 botellas de 7Cepas junto con un curso de Escritura Creativa Online de tres meses de duración. Todos los ganadores serán anunciados a través de la página de Facebook de Solar de Samaniego, la web del concurso y el boletín informativo online semanal de la bodega. Podrán participar todas aquellas personas mayores de 18 años que publiquen su propio relato a través de la app. Todos los textos presentados a concurso deberán comenzar con la siguiente frase: “Y todo comenzó con una copa de vino…”. La lectura de los microrrelatos presentados será accesible para los participantes y usuarios que acceden a la aplicación. Podrás encontrar más información en la página web del certamen. Solar de Samaniego busca con esta iniciativa la fusión de vino y literatura, y con iniciativas como esta lo consiguen acercando más que nunca la pasión por la escritura a todos aquellos enamorados también del mundo vinícola. ¿A qué esperas para participar? Es una ocasión única para dejarte llevar por la magia de las palabras y el aroma de los viñedos: descarga la app, imagina tu mejor relato y consigue cualquiera de los excelentes premios para disfrutarlos en tu copa y labrarte una carrera como escritor. (Las Palmas, 1986) Consumado lector de tebeos de Tintín durante su infancia y apasionado de la historia. Siempre hay tiempo para explorar en los clásicos y dejar volar la imaginación a través de la ciencia ficción. The post Solar de Samaniego presenta el concurso de microrrelatos 7Cepas appeared first on Guaripete Magazine. via Guaripete Magazine https://ift.tt/2yK0B4c
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Los seguidores de la escritora española Elísabet Benavent tienen una cita ineludible con la pequeña pantalla y es el próximo 8 de mayo, día del estreno de la serie Valeria, basada en la saga de libros En los zapatos de Valeria. Fue un 3 de enero de 2013 cuando su autora, más conocida como Beta Coqueta gracias a sus redes sociales, editó y lanzó su primer libro, y punto de partida de la saga, a través de una plataforma digital. A esta novela del género romántico y protagonizada por Valeria, una escritora que atraviesa la conocida como crisis de los treinta, le siguieron una serie de tres libros, de los que se han vendido millones de ejemplares en todo el mundo. Fue tal el éxito de las cuatro novelas bestseller de la autora, En los zapatos de Valeria, Valeria en el espejo, Valeria en blanco y negro y Valeria al desnudo, que la plataforma audiovisual y de entretenimiento Netflix no dudó en proponer a su creadora la oportunidad de dar vida propia a sus personajes en formato serie. La trama, al igual que el libro aunque salvando las distancias de su adaptación, gira alrededor de Valeria, una joven escritora de treinta años que se encuentra sumida en un bloqueo de creatividad mientras atraviesa una crisis de pareja. Siempre asesorada por sus tres amigas, Lola, Nerea y Carmen, tratará de lidiar con sus problemas amorosos mientras intenta encontrarse a sí misma en la ciudad de Madrid. Lo que sabemos de la serie es que, hasta el momento, está compuesta por una primera temporada de ocho capítulos y 50 minutos de duración cada uno, que podría extenderse si su éxito acompaña. En cuanto al reparto se refiere, la actriz Diana Gómez ha sido la encargada de ponerse en los zapatos de Valeria, personaje que describe como una persona valiente, luchadora y persistente. Por su parte, el actor Ibrahim Al Shami ha interpretado a Adrián, el marido de la protagonista, y el actor Maxi Iglesias ha sido el elegido para cerrar este triángulo amoroso en el papel de Víctor. Los tres rostros restantes que nos faltan por descubrirte son los de Lola, Nerea y Carmen, las mejores amigas de Valeria, al más puro estilo Sexo en Nueva York pero en versión española. Lola, interpretada por Silma López, representa al perfil de amiga que habla sin tabúes y que no siente vergüenza ante nada. En segundo lugar, Nerea; la amiga reservada, de familia conservadora y siempre impecable, a quien interpreta la actriz Teresa Riot. En último lugar, Carmen, una chica con complejos e inseguridades dispuesta a darlo todo por sus amigas, a quien la actriz Paula Malia se ha encargado de dar vida. Este grupo de cuatro amigas se verá envuelto en todo tipo de situaciones alrededor de la amistad, el amor, los celos, la infidelidad, los sueños y la recurrente preocupación por el futuro. Por supuesto, el triángulo amoroso entre Adrián, Valeria y Victor ocupará la trama principal que da sentido a muchas de las aventuras y desventuras en las que se verán inmersas Valeria y sus amigas. La producción de la serie ha corrido de la mano de la productora Plano a Plano y sus directoras han sido Inma Torrente y Nely Reguera. Además, la propia autora de la saga ha tomado parte como consultora creativa para su adaptación, que promete ser un éxito, especialmente entre el público juvenil. Tanto si has leído los libros como si no, esta serie es perfecta para iniciarte en el universo coqueto, como su autora ha bautizado al conjunto de sus obras, y disfrutar de un perfecto maratón de Netflix.
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Elísabet Benavent
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En los zapatos de Valeria (Valencia, 1995) Periodista, amante de las letras y de la tecnología. Siempre hay tiempo para perderse entre las páginas de un buen libro. Sueña con escribir el suyo propio. The post Netflix estrena la serie “Valeria” basada en los libros de Elísabet Benavent appeared first on Guaripete Magazine. via Guaripete Magazine https://ift.tt/3dxM7TU In 1692, a small group of adolescent girls dominated Salem politics, accusing local women and men of witchcraft. The condemned women were often misfits, unfairly deemed dangerous by their kin. The young accusers themselves—their active imaginations stifled by puritanical life—quickly became the main players in the Salem witch trials. In her second novel, We Ride Upon Sticks (Pantheon, 2020), author Quan Barry reexamines this notorious history with a new question in mind. Who would these women and girls be had they lived three hundred years later? Her answer: the 1989 Danvers High varsity field hockey team. We Ride Upon Sticks is a feminist bildungsroman set in a township just outside of Salem in the eighties. The field hockey team is on a losing streak, so they employ a dark strategy, using witchcraft to turn the season around. Forming an unlikely coven, each player signs her name in a makeshift devil’s book—a diary with a picture of Emilio Estevez on the cover. The losing streak becomes a winning streak, but victory on the field leads to debauchery off. A Ouija board urges human sacrifice, cars are smashed by field hockey sticks, a tarot reader is consulted, and potions are brewed. The team gathers for bonfires as regular and ritualistic as the games, where Janet Jackson blares on full volume and Bartles & Jaymes flows freely. Partaking in this pagan revelry, the girls dance stark naked in the clear light of the New England moon. Barry’s novel is a love letter to her hometown of Danvers. In artful prose that recalls Barry’s long career in poetry, she depicts her local landscape in detail, unveiling the communal memories imbued in each turn of Route 1 and each corridor of Danvers High. But her narrative is as universal as it is regional. The field hockey coach, Coach Butler, is recognizable to any woman who partook in high school sports. She was modeled on Barry’s real-life coach, Barb Damon, and so vividly recalls my own, Miss Monahan, who would stand on the sidelines waving her stick like a baton as I tore through crowds of players twice my size. Barry and I spoke over the phone in mid-March, just after she had concluded a book tour in New York and along Boston’s North Shore. She had appeared at Danvers High not a week before. Though COVID-19 loomed, we lingered on unrelated topics, such as hair, feminism, and D.I.Y. witchcraft. Our conversation took place, quite aptly, on Friday the thirteenth. INTERVIEWER In We Ride Upon Sticks, you play with the aesthetics and tropes of movies from the eighties, especially horror movies. Why did you choose the eighties as the backdrop for the novel? BARRY I’m from the town of Danvers, Massachusetts. I graduated from high school in 1990, which means I played on the field hockey team in 1989, the year in which the novel is set. But unlike in the book, it was never a rags-to-riches story. We were good all along. I knew the eighties. I knew the town. I knew the history of the Salem witch trials. That’s why all of those elements are in the book. I didn’t realize it when I was going into the project, but I like the fact that we can look back on that decade with a wiser eye. Oftentimes when people think of the eighties, they just recall the funny clothes and the hair. But, as is discussed in the book, the eighties definitely had their issues. It’s post-Reagan, you have the Central Park Five, you have the AIDS crisis. There was a lot going on, and I was interested in rethinking that time through a more complicated lens. It’s a time that was dear to my heart, because that was when I came of age. INTERVIEWER In the book, witchcraft is a practice through which women can express and act on otherwise forbidden urges, and of course, this book takes place on the grounds of the Salem witch trials. The recent #MeToo movement is often referred to as a “witch hunt.” How were you thinking through the connections between witchcraft and feminism? BARRY I’ve always thought of witchcraft in terms of female empowerment, because many of the women who were hung historically did not fit into society in traditional ways. They weren’t mothers, or they were old, or they were seen as too powerful. One of the first women who was hung in Salem was Bridget Bishop. A couple of the things were held against her—she was a tavern owner and she supposedly liked to wear red. I’ve always thought of witchcraft as a tool of female empowerment, even going back to paganism and Wiccan practices. Witchcraft is very Mother Nature–centric, and it just made sense that it would be braided into the book. I also wanted to write a story about teen sports, but one that looked at teen sports played by girls, which we don’t see much of in books and movies, even now. Think, too, about women’s soccer—the fight for equal pay and the difficulty that they’re having with that today. INTERVIEWER The spirit of the U.S. women’s soccer team reminds me of the Danvers field hockey team, in a way. I love that moment when they realize they are the first female team at Danvers High to be thrown a pep rally. BARRY Yes, they’re the first ones through the hoop. And when it comes to sports mascots, they are usually all male or even ambiguously gendered. Right now, in 2020, the Salem High School football team is called the Witches, which I just love. When was the last time you heard about a sports team that had a distinctly female mascot? INTERVIEWER The eighties were also a moment when possibilities for women were changing, as was our understanding of gender. This tension plays out between the two characters named Cory. Girl Cory, the ultrafeminine “it girl” of Danvers, and Boy Cory, the only adolescent male in a women’s league, play opposite positions on the team. And yet, in some ways, they seem like doubles of each other. How were you thinking through gender and queerness in the novel? BARRY I was thinking about it in terms of silence—that, unfortunately in the eighties, in Danvers, there wasn’t even a language for LGBTQ people. Not in a lot of places, and particularly not in high schools. How could people who were LGBTQ discover who they were in a world in which there was no language for what you might be? There was no vocabulary. If you don’t see yourself in the culture, how do you make sense of who you are? I was very much thinking about that with respect to Boy Cory and trying very hard to be sensitive to their arc. Now that you mention it, I hadn’t thought of the Corys as being parallel in certain ways. But somebody who I very briefly dated—among his friend pool there was another couple, a boy Cory and a girl Cory. I just thought that was so funny then. We were children of the eighties, before there were as many unisex names. INTERVIEWER We Ride Upon Sticks is narrated by an anonymous yet omniscient first-person plural, “we.” Why did you choose this type of narration for a story about young women? BARRY I always knew that I wanted to write it in a “we” voice. But I just didn’t know who the voice belonged to. At first, I thought that the voice belonged to the school. And then, for a very short period of time, I thought that the voice belonged to the freshman team. When I was on the freshman team, the varsity girls just seemed so adult to us. I was talking to my friends about it, and we all agreed that we knew everything about the senior girls. We idolized them. But then I realized pretty quickly that that didn’t work either. I realized that it’s the team that tells the story. They develop a hive mind, able to communicate silently as a collective, and that is one witchy element in the book. Even though they cast spells, too, there’s never any evidence that it really works. I kept wondering—is this just them being teens and believing in themselves? Or is it actually witchcraft? Maybe their hive mind is just their strong connection to each other. But the “we” voice did add this element of witchy-ness. INTERVIEWER By contrast, other coming-of-age novels are often single-minded and individualistic, focusing on the consciousness of one adolescent. The communal narration plays with that trope and even breaks it apart quite radically. BARRY There’s a way in which friendships among teen girls are more emotional than those among teen boys. And I do not mean that women are more emotional. But you don’t often get the sense that teen boys could necessarily finish each other’s sentences. Women can become very close. And our society sanctions that—it’s okay for women to be close in ways which aren’t allowed for men, which is too bad. I think that the “we” voice is reflective of a sisterhood, a sisterhood that allows the team to have that particular closeness and that group-thought mentality. INTERVIEWER Your first novel, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, is set in Vietnam. But in We Ride Upon Sticks, you write quite intimately about your hometown. What was it like to revisit Danvers in fiction? BARRY When you write your first book, nobody, by and large, is waiting for it. You have all the time in the world to write it. So, I traveled to Vietnam for research. When revisiting Danvers, on the other hand, I already knew it all. As a kid here, we were taken on field trips around various local historical sites. We went, from time to time, to Salem, which is basically the town next door. I just imbibed the history of the place. You’d pass the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in the car on the way to the mall. I played soccer by the Danvers Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial. It’s where the Salem Village Meeting House used to be. There are these markers around town that I have always known about. So, I wrote this book very quickly. It took me only a year to have a solid draft done. Thinking about Danvers—it was just fun. It was just fun to write about my hometown. INTERVIEWER As the women of the Danvers field hockey team research dark magic, they encounter religions that white American communities may often think of as witchcraft, such as voodoo and Santeria. Could you speak to the tension in the novel between this largely white community in Massachusetts and its experience of difference, other, and race? BARRY There are three characters of color in the book. There’s A.J. Johnson, and there’s Sue Yoon, first-generation Korean, and there’s the adopted Julie Kaling. It’s through these three characters that I talk about what it’s like to be a member of a minority community in predominantly white spaces. They each present different ways of being in a predominantly white space. In many ways, A.J. feels it the most acutely as an African American student. Take, for example, her experience reading Huckleberry Finn at school. For Sue Yoon, who is first generation, it’s about assimilation. Sue Yoon’s story takes place during Halloween. She has a tarot reading and gets a piece of advice. The reader—this woman who’s maybe a Wiccan—tells Sue Yoon, “Fuck ’em. Don’t pay any mind to what people think or say.” That’s the message at the end of the day. Be yourself. Be true to who you are. Empower yourself, and you’ll go a long way. Julie Kaling is different, too, because she’s adopted, and her family is white. I didn’t want the team to be homogeneous. I wanted there to be difference among them. To not address race would not create an accurate picture of this particular place and time. I hope that it complicates the reading of the book in a good way. And it maybe makes readers rethink their own experience of the eighties. INTERVIEWER I loved A.J.’s campaign to have Huckleberry Finn removed from the syllabus, which culminates in a book burning. What role did literature play in your own childhood, and when did you first find fiction that spoke to you? BARRY I was a weird kid. I’m the youngest of five, and I always wanted to be like my siblings. When I first started to really read—I would say, fourth grade—I would read the high school books that my sisters were reading. I remember reading The Crucible. I remember reading The Old Man and the Sea. How much did I get out of it? I could physically read them, but did I understand them? Probably not. But I have this memory of reading adult literature as a kid. And in elementary school, there used to be book sales. My brother and I are both adopted, and we were basically the only children of color in the school. There were maybe five of us at a school of two or three hundred. I remember Mrs. Atwood, our librarian, saying at the book sale, Oh, here’s a book that I think you’d like. I still remember that book--Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe. It was about an African American girl living in the South. It was about her adventures, and what she was up to. It became my favorite book. I couldn’t tell you what happens in it. But I still remember that book, because I don’t have memories of seeing many African American characters elsewhere. INTERVIEWER Hair is a recurrent theme in We Ride Upon Sticks. I’m thinking, of course, of Jen Fiorenza’s “Claw”—her classic eighties ’do that is personified as its own character. Julie also defies her mother’s rules by washing her hair with egg whites, and A.J. comes into her own when she gets braids. Why is hair an important or useful image to you? BARRY For girls and women, appearance is so much a part of our identities, fortunately or unfortunately. In the eighties, hair was everything. It was a mode of expression. You could tell things about people by their hair. It signaled something about them. And it made sense to me that the hair would be an important part of the book. I think of the Claw as Jen Fiorenza’s id. It’s maybe even the team’s id. The Claw literally says the things that they’re all thinking and voices what they all want to do. It was a lot of fun to think about that character. I don’t remember at which point I knew that the Claw would be a character. I think if I had sat down and planned it, it would have sounded nuts to me. INTERVIEWER Most of the characters have one physical feature that’s monstrously exaggerated, such as the Splotch on Mel Boucher’s neck, the Claw for Jen Fiorenza, and the Chin for Nicky Higgins. This stylistic move again recalls popular movies of the eighties. Many are set in high schools, where that might already be the predominant way of categorizing and differentiating between people—by their most defining traits. Which eighties actors would you cast to play your characters? BARRY Well, unfortunately, there weren’t that many young African American actors in the eighties. For A.J. Johnson, because she is an actress, I’m thinking a young Janet Jackson. Which is funny because the team listens to Janet Jackson. Or Lark Voorhies from Saved by the Bell. Similarly, there aren’t many Asian actresses who I could even name from the eighties. There’s always Margaret Cho—but she’s older than that, much older. If we were filming it now, I would cast Lana Condor, who’s in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. She could be Julie Kaling. Even though he’s supposed to be blond, the real Emilio Estevez could be the football captain. The only character who’s based on an actual person is the field hockey coach. She is modeled after our coach, who passed away last year. People are saying online that Meryl Streep could play her. INTERVIEWER Is there one character or player on the Danvers varsity field hockey team with whom you connect the most? BARRY They’re all a combination of me. There’s something about Abby Putnam that I like. I see her as being fearless. She’s fearless but she’s also authentic. Even though she’s an optimist and a go-getter, it’s not in a fake way. If you think about the movie Election, Tracy Flick seems a little delusional. Abby’s a go-getter, too, but she’s not one-minded like Tracy Flick. She is genuine, and real, and reliable, and her friends turn to her and she’s a rock for them, and she’s pretty happy. She’s the character that I most aspire to be. Elinor Hitt is a writer living in Manhattan. She is an editorial intern at The Paris Review. The post Rethinking the Eighties: An Interview with Quan Barry appeared first on Guaripete Magazine. via Guaripete Magazine https://ift.tt/2YQ2lUr 5/10/2020 0 Comments Staff Picks: Mums Moms and MothersIn a paper gesture to the fistfuls of wilting dandelions offered by children, and beloved—surely!—by mothers all over the dandelion-growing world, I offer my mother Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. I can remember Mom saying about certain plants, They grow where they are planted; in her tone, gratitude and admiration for the least fussy members of the garden. Were they wildflowers, which, as Dolly Parton sings, “don’t care where they grow”? Weren’t all flowers wild, at some point? Perhaps some are closer to their primal selves than others. At any rate, Mom—a Manhattanite transplanted to New England, with a few trying stops along the way—admires a plant that can make itself at home, and I’m grateful to her for encouraging, in conversation and by example, a weed-like adaptability in her children. In his guidebook, Lawrence Newcomb lets us get to know actual wildflowers with a neat key based on simple distinctions of flower shape, number of parts, and the shape and arrangement of leaves; detailed illustrations; and, important for my word-loving mother, a fine glossary of excellent botanical words: calyx, spadix, corymb; bulblet, axil, umbel. Today I identified a backyard flower as a celandine poppy: four symmetrical petals, deeply lobed leaves in opposite pairs. Newcomb describes this flower as “juice yellow.” He also notes its growing zone, which lies between western Pennsylvania and southern Wisconsin. Someone must have planted it in my scrubby little New York yard, where it now flourishes. I wish that I could keep a cutting from wilting and bring my mother a juice-yellow nosegay. —Jane Breakell I haven’t read anything lately that reminds me specifically of my mother or even moms in general, so for Mother’s Day, I thought I’d ask my mom about the book she’s been reading: On Lighthouses, by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. My mother has a healthy appetite for exploration, and it’s a shame that Mother’s Day this year will go by without some sort of adventure. When I moved to the city, I bought her the guidebook 111 Places in New York You Must Not Miss, which has taken us to locales as varied as the Merchant House Museum and the SeaGlass Carousel in Battery Park. On Lighthouses, based on what she tells me, is the history of six lighthouses in America. Some chapters start with a story; another chapter is the diary of a lighthouse keeper. Lighthouses, the “frontier between civilization and nature,” are places of solitude. But they are also signals of shore and home. This book is a light at the end of the tunnel, showing us places we’ll see and things we’ll do when we can go out again; my mom tends the lighthouse. —Lauren Kane As my first Mother’s Day at home in years approaches, I’ve turned to Margaret Brown Kilik’s posthumous novel The Duchess of Angus, which tells the autobiographical story of Jane Davis, an English major who returns home to San Antonio to live in her mother’s run-down hotel. My own mother, with whom I am sheltering now, taught me to recognize good literature. Her lessons: Joan Didion’s Slouching towards Bethlehem, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and, more recently, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Kilik deserves a place in this canon, but her midcentury novel was only just published in March. Jenny Davidson—Kilik’s step-granddaughter and my professor at Columbia—prepared the manuscript for publication after acquiring it in 2017. Davidson’s introduction is as intelligent as the novel itself. She explores the history of Kilik’s eccentric mother, Agnes, also writing that the author’s voice contains “the flat affect and disturbing candor found in the fiction of J. D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath.” Kilik’s blunt sense of humor could even be compared to that of Dorothy Parker, though her protagonist is able to generate witty comebacks or aphorisms only after the moment has passed. In Jane’s own words: “I was furious. Senselessly furious. At that time I had not yet learned to bone up on the answers in anticipation of the questions. I lacked the presence of mind to retort, and it was useless to depend upon the depth of my emotions to see me through, for like domestic champagne, they never quite bubbled up to their potential but were more often lost in the yellow liquid. I groped about in my silent prison while the moment passed.” Jane vacillates between youthful euphoria and self-hatred. And her inarticulateness in real time draws a sharp contrast to the cruel judgments she makes of herself and others in thought. The Duchess of Agnes, a joint feat by Kilik and Davidson, is the perfect starter for book clubs among mothers and daughters who now find themselves living together again. —Elinor Hitt Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other was the first of my quarantine reads, but seven weeks and twelve books later, it is still the one I think of most, particularly as Mother’s Day approaches. Here is a multigenerational, multifocal narrative about strong women, motherhood, and networks of female friendship in the contemporary UK (though Evaristo admirably stretches those narratives back most of a century). I don’t need to speak of its merits—the book won the Booker; enough said—but it did inspire me to appreciate all the women in my life anew, their narratives, how our paths approach one another and split apart again, and how, with good luck, those paths sometimes intersect in ways that make each thread stronger. Right now those intersections are virtual—talking Chekhov with my mom as she shelters in Maine, sending my best friend a video message for her first Mother’s Day, reading Yum Yum Dim Sum to a friend’s kids in Queens (which will have to do until we can get together in Flushing again—I can taste the shumai). Nothing is as good as being able to show up on my mom’s doorstep and surprise the snot out of her—but for now, I’m grateful for literature that helps us appreciate mothers, and technology that lets us tell them so. —Emily Nemens I hated nature, Mum, which looked better in photographs; Britain was sodden, as advertised, the countryside tasteless and passé in its browns and greens and grays, and everywhere the warbles and shrieks of birds pealed, telling nothing. I wanted it all gilded and wrought and Romantic. Still, not to be alone, I trudged along, preferring the sounds I gleaned from your patient taxonomy: whimbrel, kittiwake, chiffchaff, dunnock, nightjar. Eventually, among other things, I learned from you to tell a brambling from a chaffinch, and that no, the glint in the distance was not a goldfinch. I read R. F. Langley’s (1938–2011) poems with you because I could make no sense of them. I was astounded by their strange, off-kilter rhythms, their dense rhymes and unspooled syllables, and how lines shaped the mouth in recitation. Langley writes: “Talk to mother. Speak in a natural / easy voice, cruising the words. Cirrus and / thisles. Thiskin. Largesse. Debonair. Then / oaks and hornbeams and forever.” But as he speaks, the words break and meld: “Say that mother is out there, / and she is thiswise, thissen, thiskin, which / is thistles, cirrus cruising de bonne aire.” The meaning remained remote until you explained the terms--Callophrys, Grimmia—that granted access and denoted clearly what was there. The more we read, the more they unfurled; too often, what seemed to be a private obscurity just demanded attention. As he writes of a beetle: “Detail is so sharp / and so minute that the total form suggests / infinity.” Like you, Langley showed me how to see. His Complete Poems, comprising just forty-eight written over nearly four decades, is my most treasured book, even as it still eludes me. The last poem, his most transparent, “To a Nightingale,” begins from “Nothing”—there is a poet paused in the countryside, then birdsong. “I am / empty, stopped at nothing, as / I wait for this song to shoot.” Yet the poem slowly fills in the small particulars that shape the whole: “Red mites bowling / about on the baked lichen”; “Darkwing. The / flutter. Doubles and blurs the / margin”; a voice like “a soft cuckle of / wet pebbles.” You tell me about the visitors in isolation: the barn owl watching Poldark with you through the undrawn window, the jostling of squirrels who lost their nuts, and a local cat’s Jacobean slaughter of sparrows. With a leaf between the fingers, Langley writes: “There seems // to be no limit to / the amount of life it / would be good to have.” I long for the loam, for the puddle-furrowed paths to Grantchester, to see an arrow of geese above the fens, or to wait for a kingfisher, hushed in a hide with you. Sitting by my window, as I think of you, Mum, I sound the names of the birds that pass: pigeon, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon. —Chris Littlewood The post Staff Picks: Mums, Moms, and Mothers appeared first on Guaripete Magazine. via Guaripete Magazine https://ift.tt/2YODW1t 5/10/2020 0 Comments My MotherWhen my mother first arrived in Washington, D.C., she stepped out of Union Station, entranced by the cherry blossoms. Those pink-and-white flowers blooming from the trees must have looked like a technicolor Oz, far from the green moss and brown bayous of small-town Louisiana she’d just left behind. She was nineteen then and had never been farther than Texas; well-wishers advised her to not reveal that she was from out of town so she wouldn’t get scammed. So she and her sister Liz jostled together in the back seat of a cab and acted unimpressed by all the sights--Oh, just the White House? The Capitol? We’ve seen it all before. But it must have been hardest for my mother to pretend to ignore the cherry blossoms. She told me this story once, years ago, and I like to think about my mother then, long before she was a mother, a woman I will never know. I like imagining her in the back seat of that cab, in awe of the world. Brit Bennett is the author of The Mothers. Excerpt from the new book Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them (Abrams Image), collected and edited by Edan Lepucki. © Brit Bennett and Edan Lepucki. The post My Mother appeared first on Guaripete Magazine. via Guaripete Magazine https://ift.tt/2YQG0G4 5/9/2020 0 Comments SELF DEFENSEI Has A Hotdog ChannelsCheezburger ChannelsUpvoted]]> The post SELF DEFENSE appeared first on Guaripete Magazine. via Guaripete Magazine https://ift.tt/2SSkMnt 5/9/2020 0 Comments WIN SOME LOSE SOMEI Has A Hotdog ChannelsCheezburger ChannelsUpvoted]]> The post WIN SOME, LOSE SOME appeared first on Guaripete Magazine. via Guaripete Magazine https://ift.tt/35MyE8f Photo: Katya Kallsen/President and Fellows of Harvard College Suzuki Kiitsu: Cranes, circa 1820–1825 The majority of the world’s museums are currently shuttered indefinitely due to the Covid-19 pandemic. What is there to say about an art exhibition that is closed to the public? We can wrestle theoretically with whether art requires a physical viewer to be fully realized, but there is nothing abstract about art going unseen that is still resolutely there: just as carefully preserved, hung with the same meticulous precision, thoughtfully interpreted by unread wall text, and in the dark, behind locked doors. And yet, “Painting Edo,” the ambitious jewel of an exhibition currently on view for no one at the Harvard Art Museum, is perhaps arguably experiencing its most historically authentic moment in the strangeness of ours. Because to fully understand the significance of the Edo Period in Japan, which lasted from around 1600 to 1868, is to place yourself in a country that flourished even as it was closed off to the rest of the world. Japan was famously isolated during this period, save for some Dutch trade, and the most enduring legacy of this seclusion is a diverse and elegant body of art that evolved as a result of this fervid inward gaze. Edo—named for the capital city of Edo (now Tokyo), which was, by 1800, the largest city in the world—was both a place and a time, as the exhibition’s co-curator, Rachel Saunders, says. Japan’s early modern period of urbanization and intellectual cultivation was a period of relative peace and prosperity, which lead, in turn, to the rich and vibrant art world that illustrated a culture’s song of itself. You will have seen art from the Edo Period—its most recognizable images are the ukiyo-e prints: mass-produced woodblock scenes of popular entertainment and Japanese landscapes, the most world-famous of which is Katushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa from 1829. These prints were ubiquitous, disseminated through the city’s pleasure quarters, and sold, it’s colloquially said, as cheaply as a second helping of noodles. And before Edo Japan opened up to the world and these inexpensive prints were splashed all over Europe, they were bought almost exclusively as souvenirs by a growing Japanese middle class, a pictorial keepsake of insular pride. The Great Wave is itself an amalgam of some of Japan’s most distinctive characteristics, illustrating its relationship with the spiritual anchor of Mount Fuji, and with the sea itself, which is embodied in both the quotidian economics of the fishing industry, and in the Buddhist philosophy of a wave’s impermanence. Yet these small-scale, delicate, disposable prints comprise only a fraction of the art from the period and what is on offer at “Painting Edo,” which speaks to the scale and scope of this exhibition. It is the largest special exhibition ever mounted at the Harvard Art Museum, and the one hundred and twenty objects presented span multiple painting schools that thrived during the Edo Period: from the deliberately amateur style of the Literati School, to the sumptuous golds of the patronized Kano School, to the subtly layered breaths of cloud and mountain landscape painting, to the whole condensed narratives revealed in the arc of a fan. These almost endlessly unfurling galleries might feel daunting if the objects and their presentation didn’t create such intimacy, the ample wall space and generous cases allowing scrolls and screens to fully display exquisite details that invite you to stay close.
Photo: John Tsantes and Neil Greentree/Robert Feinberg
Maruyama Ōkyo: Peacock and Peonies, 1768
Photo: Mary Kocol/President and Fellows of Harvard College
Ki Baitei: Lanting Pavilion, 1805
Photo: John Tsantes and Neil Greentree/Robert Feinberg
Soga Shōhaku: Race at Uji River, circa 1764
Harvard Art Museums
Installation view from “Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection,” Harvard Art Museums, 2020 It’s a meditative pleasure—appropriate, given their Buddhist origins—to get lost in these details. Japanese art evolved, in Saunders’s words, “from a distinctive alchemy of silk, soot, gold, fire, and fur,” from a playful and curious fascination with the subject matter and tools provided by the natural world. This fascination was given an additional technological boost as Edo progressed, and the development of the microscope enabled a much deeper, even surreal visual intricacy in the wings of a beetle, the barbs of a peacock feather. And yet, remarkably, as the decades passed, the technique relaxed. Just as the camera’s prominence in France in the early nineteenth century, and its newfound command of exactness, led to Impressionism’s liberated brushstroke, a similar trajectory occurred in Edo: alongside scrolls depicting highly detailed bouquets of courtly flowers, we also see loose watercolors of one or two blossoms. These blossoms encompass an epoch’s worth of prodigious skill, and yet require exceptionally little pigment to make their point. Whole recessed fields are implied with a few gentle pecks of a brush; backgrounds are left nearly empty, showcasing the magnified blooms. The ink that darkens almost imperceptibly as it bleeds from one petal to the next, pulled by pooling water, is so distinctively Japanese, as though only an artist living in this nation of small islands, who at no point is further than ninety-three miles from the sea, could truly understand the extent to which water can and cannot be contained.
Photo: John Tsantes and Neil Greentree/Robert Feinberg
Hishikawa Moronobu: Early Evening at a Yoshiwara Inn, late seventeenth century
Photo: Katya Kallsen/President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Tawaraya Sōri: Autumn Maple Trees, second half of the eighteenth century
Photo: Katya Kallsen/President and Fellows of Harvard College
Tōensai Kanshi: Harvesting Bamboo Shoots in Winter, mid-1760s
Harvard Art Museums
Installation view from “Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection,” Harvard Art Museums, 2020 Yet there is also a keen eye toward Western convention. Dutch traders sneaked European plates into Edo, and the integration of depth of field, perspectival nuance—represented by a lower horizon line—and human anatomy championed by Western art since the Renaissance, is recognizably layered into Japanese painting as it evolved throughout the Edo Period. We begin to see an interplay of depth and flatness, two-dimensional planes to create the illusion of depth, particularly in the ukiyo-e prints, which were often composed to look like a series of theatrical backdrops, one behind the next, or like flat cutouts stacked on top of each other. It’s perhaps what made the art of this period so appealing to Westerners after Japan opened its borders, and what makes them so accessible today: this juxtaposition of the accurate and the illustrative, the real and the imagined, “a playful riff,” Saunders says, “on the idea that paintings create worlds, as well as reflect them.” These objects that keenly observe, create, and reflect their world comprise an exhibition about isolation that can’t help but gain new meaning in our current world. Perhaps we can take some solace by imagining what’s taking place inside those darkened galleries—scrolls stretching, fans in conversation, butterflies dancing between buds, flourishing even in our absence. Photo: Natalja Kent/President and Fellows of Harvard College Unidentified artist: Horse Racing at Kamo Shrine, early to mid-seventeenth century “Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection” was scheduled to be on view at Harvard Art Museums through July 26. A collection of videos related to the exhibition are available here. The post Art in Isolation: The Delicate Paintings of Edo Japan appeared first on Guaripete Magazine. via Guaripete Magazine https://ift.tt/2LavFNc Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images Day laborers waiting in a parking lot during the week the US unemployment rate hit nearly 20 percent, Arlington, Virginia, May 6, 2020 On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published harrowing data on the labor-market consequences of the shutdown, based on survey data on households and firms taken in the calendar week that included April 12. This, though, is by no means the end of the bad news. On June 5, the BLS will publish data for May that we know is going to be even worse—not least because we know that claims for unemployment insurance are continuing. In the state of Texas, for example, initial claims were 274,000 for that second week of April, and averaged more than 260,000 a week in the three weeks since then. The data are hard to interpret because any idea of “normal” has gone out of the window. A labor economist is what you need to pick your way through this new statistical landscape where everything has changed. Let’s start with data from firms and establishments. First, there was a big decline in the numbers of jobs reported by firms (the so-called non-farm payrolls) of 20.5 million. Employment declines were especially high in the retail trade and health care: each fell by around 2 million; in food and drink services, which includes restaurants, bars, and cafés, things were even worse, down 5.5 million. Even government jobs were down by nearly a million. Amid this extraordinary turbulence, there were a few quirks—including a rise in the average number of hours worked from 34.1 to 34.2, even though total hours worked fell by 15 percent, and hourly earnings were up more than 7 percent. The reason for these apparent anomalies was that the low-paid and those on fewer hours are the workers most adversely and disproportionately affected by the shutdowns. The household account gave us gruesome detail about who has felt the worst impact. And it’s important to note that the household account captures a broader picture than the firms’ data does, since it covers the self-employed and household workers who are especially affected as the economy turns downward. Employment according to that account fell by 22.4 million. Those at the lower end of the wage scale who, in aggregate terms, can benefit most from a boom are the hardest hit in the slump. The first number that hit the headlines during this pandemic crisis was the rise in total unemployment of 15.9 million to 22.5 million, which resulted in a rise in the unemployment rate from 3.5 percent in February, to 4.4 percent in March, to 14.7 percent in April. In reality, the unemployment rate has been even higher. The BLS explained in its release with Friday’s figures that in fact an additional 7.5 million workers “wrongly” reported that they were employed but absent from work. (The BLS had given special instructions to household survey interviewers for all employed people absent from work due to coronavirus-related business closures should have been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff. But the BLS didn’t correct the numbers and simply reported what people said.) Adding those 7.5 million to the 22.5 million actually reported, to get a total of 30 million jobless, and then dividing by a labor force of 155.8 million results in a true unemployment rate of 19.3 percent. Such a number is unprecedented in most people’s lifetimes. In the crash of 2007–2008, it took nearly two years for the unemployment rate to double from 5 percent in December 2007 to 10 percent in October 2009. This time, the rate has quintupled in eight weeks. The only comparable numbers were in the Great Depression, but even then, the increase took much longer. The annual unemployment rate in the US was 3 percent in 1929, 9 percent in 1930, 16 percent in 1931, 24 percent in 1932, and 25 percent in 1933. By 1941, just before the US entered World War II, it stood at 10 percent. So we may be facing a very long haul out of this abyss. The concern is that the most vulnerable are the worst affected—much as they are in terms of the death rates from the Covid-19 virus—and this is indeed what we are seeing. The unemployment rate of those with less than a high-school diploma jumped from 6.8 percent on the month to 21.2 percent; and for high-school graduates, it went from 4.4 percent to 17.3 percent. For those with some college education, the numbers rose from 3.7 percent to 15 percent; and for college graduates, from 2.5 percent to 8.4 percent. The Hispanic unemployment rate rose particularly steeply, from 6 percent to 18.9 percent. There is a special concern about young people, who are going to struggle to make the transition from school to work. We know that a long spell of unemployment when you are young creates a permanent scar—reducing earnings for decades and increasing the risk of adverse life events. Even for those with college education, the graduating class of 2020 from universities is going to have a tough time. But minority youngsters with less education are going to be especially hard-hit. For many, in the past, one response to a bad labor market is to go back to school—but that doesn’t look that attractive right now. This graph charts how bad the situation is. It plots the monthly unemployment rate for those aged sixteen to twenty-four from when records were first kept, in 1948. In April, the rate for this cohort rose to 27.4 percent, and it is hard to see it doing anything other than rising further for the foreseeable future. The class of 2020 does not even show up in the data yet. It is hard to describe what we are seeing in these data as anything other than an unfolding disaster. The young are my greatest worry. The post The Pandemic Jobless Youthquake appeared first on Guaripete Magazine. via Guaripete Magazine https://ift.tt/3cl9D6n 5/9/2020 0 Comments Fun for OneTaste wood. Taste stone. Taste glass. Leave the shape of your face Listen to the sirens outside rising and falling. Sit at first light on a bench in the square Lie down for a while on the grass At 4:25 pm make sure you face southwest. In your kitchen the function of the objects Watch the ant crossing the tundra Choose a new name for yourself. Draw the sound of the siren rising outside Ink a face on the palm of each hand If you find the ant ascending the bread-bin Try to look the ant in the eye. Hold your breath: first in air, then in the bath. Try to sleep sitting up. Try to sleep standing. Insert the biro like a rose into the buttonhole At 4:25 AM make sure you face southwest. Listen to the sirens rising and falling Stand beside your desk and touch wood If the drain glugs in the sink imitate it. If a dog barks on the street bark back. If the siren rises and falls, turn on The post Fun for One appeared first on Guaripete Magazine. via Guaripete Magazine https://ift.tt/2xOjfYr |
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