Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet, is the 2010 recipient of the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, and he’ll be contributing to the New York Times’ Home Fires blog as he travels. His first post is on deciding where–and why–to go. This will be one to follow!
September 2, 2009
When Aimee Liu emailed me the announcement for a Book Soup reading and conversation with Ellen Graf, author of the new memoir The Natural Laws of Good Luck, her brief description of the book reminded me immediately of the author’s Modern Love essay in the New York Times two years ago: “Our Joy Knows No Bounds, or Lanes.” Lonely after a midlife divorce, Graf accepted a friend’s offer to visit China and meet her brother. In short order they married and, after waiting 18 months for his visa, began life together in upstate New York.
Ellen Graf appears at Book Soup on September 15 at 7 pm. Here’s the full text of the jacket copy from the publisher, Trumpeter/Shambhala:
The quirky and funny story of a woman in upstate New York who marries a man from China whom she barely knows. They don’t share a language or a culture, but together they discover what matters most—a story of taking risks, culture clash, and the journey to real love.
Ellen was lonely and having no luck with personal ads when her Chinese girlfriend suggested that she meet Zhong-Hua, her brother in northern China. Ellen soon finds herself going to Beijing to meet him, and although they speak only a few words of each other’s language, they dec ide to get married.
Ellen and Zhong-Hua settle at Ellen’s farmhouse in upstate New York where they face a host of challenges, including the language barrier, financial problems, and profound cultural differences. When Ellen tries to teach Zhong-Hua to drive, explaining to him the concept of right-of-way and the meaning of a red light, he cheerfully replies, “I don’t think so,” and develops his own free-form, heart-stopping style of driving. A character worthy of first-rate fiction, Zhong-Hua rarely fails to surprise and entertain us, whether by his driving style, his culinary tastes (Ellen must learn to appreciate rock fungus, among other unusual delicacies), and his creative low-budget home maintenance solutions (who knew that concrete had so many uses?).
But Zhong-Hua is also a man with a complicated and painful past, which includes time spent in forced labor during Mao’s cultural revolution. He’s a survivor who has emerged from his struggles with remarkable optimism. Whenever things appear hopeless, his refrain to Ellen is, “Just try, maybe work.” Somehow, it usually does.
At its heart, The Natural Laws of Good Luck is a story of acceptance and of love beyond words. It is also a tale of finding renewal at midlife by taking a brave leap into the unknown.
The Natural Laws of Good Luck is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next List Notable, and a Borders Original Voices pick. And here is Aimee’s blurb:
In The Natural Laws of Good Luck, Ellen Graf and her husband, Lu Zhong-hua, take the realm of marriage and spin it on an irresistible new axis. Conventional notions of romance become riddles as these two quirky, endearing individuals fumble from delight to disaster and back again. Graf’s exquisite memoir is quite simply the greatest love story I’ve ever read.
August 28, 2009
Virtual Car Wash for Homeboy Industries
Posted by nancohen under life in L.A., literary magazinesLeave a Comment
Terribly hot in L.A. this week, fires, haze, high pressure system; the moon looks fuzzy tonight because there is so much particulate matter in the air. And Homeboy Industries, the now-venerable job training and services program for former gang members (they now publish a literary magazine, too; here’s the current issue), is holding a Virtual Carwash to raise money for its important programs, which are under strain in these difficult economic times. Better for the lungs, not too damaging to the pocketbook, and low-impact environmentally. You can direct your donation to honor someone’s birthday or other event, too. Thanks to my marvelous neighbor Mary for the link:
August 28, 2009
This is the kind of thing that delights a poet in the early twenty-first century: someone makes your poem part of a child’s first birthday celebration and writes about it on a blog.
August 24, 2009
Your Bright Future/Late Night Korea
Posted by nancohen under events, life in L.A., readingsLeave a Comment
Choi Jeong-Hwa, Welcome, 2009, colored fabric, dimensions vary, courtesy of the artist, © Choi Jeong-Hwa.
The Master of Professional Writing Program at USC is participating in one of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Late Night Art events, this one on Saturday, September 12, in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea.
MPW fiction student Sue Yon Kim will read in the galleries with Los Angeles fiction writer Leonard Chang. A $10 ticket gets you into LACMA from 8-11 pm and includes the exhibits and collections, music, dance performances, and readings.
MPW participated in one of these Late Night Art events last spring, in conjunction with the two exhibits Franz West: To Build a House You Start with the Roof and Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures. It was an evening of massive sensory overload–art, music, language, refreshments, and swirling mobs of people, nearly all of whom were much more thin, sexy, and ironic than I. Still, it was pretty wonderful, and I’m up for another go.
August 20, 2009
Retired Philadelphia Phillie Doug Glanville (who was the first African-American Ivy League grad* to play in the major leagues) has been writing a series of Op-Extra columns for the New York Times over the last couple of years. They combine inside glimpses of the game with insights that can only be gleaned from lived experience. I really admire Glanville’s cool, wry, thoughtful tone in these pieces. The current one, posted yesterday, is “Sleepwalking Through September,” a meditation on how to mentally approach the game when you know your team can’t make the playoffs, yet you still have six weeks to play.
And here’s a link to the entire series, which the Times is calling Heading Home.
*Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 1993.
August 18, 2009
Via Slog, the Stranger’s blog, a link to the online journal Linebreak’s aggregator, Swindle, which daily collects poetry published on the Net and archives the links for seven days. They’re looking for more feeds, so drop them a line to suggest a site that publishes or reprints poetry.
I’d already read and admired it in the Paris Review, but am glad to be able to provide a link, thanks to Swindle, to Craig Arnold’s poem “The Heart Under Your Heart,” from last week’s Poetry Daily.
August 16, 2009
Returning to L.A. from Utah on Saturday, I took a JetBlue flight from Las Vegas to Burbank. I’d finished everything I’d brought to read and entertained myself by watching other passengers board and file past my seat. I invented the following game, which I invite you to try: Imagine that each person passing by is a poet.
It was surprising to me how many of them looked as much like poets as your average poet does on an airplane. The short, Slavic-looking, fiftyish man with combed-back hair, wearing a rumpled business suit–poet. The middle-aged Latina with the severe ponytail and simple, copper-colored shift dress–poet. The young black man with the trimmed goatee and messenger bag crammed with books–poet.
I tried this again today, looking out the front window of the Starbucks in the Sherman Oaks Galleria. There, it didn’t work so well; not, I think, because everyone was so well dressed and glamorous, but because almost no one was alone. Nearly everyone was chatting and laughing with at least one other person, fully socially engaged, on the way to the movies at the Arclight or dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. It must be the slightly strained, solitary look of people filing down the aisle of a plane that makes them look like poets.
August 13, 2009
Back from Napa, and back to the Beehive State to visit Matt. Not a surprise, but the USF version of Comedy, directed by Kirk Boyd, is an excellent, swift-paced production. (Swift-paced is key, as this play, though short, can really drag if allowed.) Check out this two-minute promotional clip, which includes a glimpse of the scimitar-rubber chicken fight.
Last night we drove up to Cedar Breaks National Monument, over ten thousand feet above sea level, to watch the Perseid showers. There were few clouds, it was almost pitch-black except for a light in the ranger station restrooms, and visibility was amazing. Some of the meteors made long, bright streaks across the sky–much more striking than any I’ve ever seen before. We also saw a fox and lots of deer.
June 25, 2009
Once again, Matt is spending the summer at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. He’s playing Dromio of Ephesus in Comedy of Errors, which starts previews on Monday (the Festival has posted some photos; check out this one of the two Dromios, once again failing to see one another), and Ben Weatherstaff in the musical The Secret Garden. Miri and I are planning to go see the opening of Comedy and to return later, when both shows are open, to spend more time in Cedar City.
Comedy has never been a particular favorite of mine, though it’s one of the first Shakespeare plays I remember seeing, at the Essex (MD) Community College’s summer Cockpit in Court. I’m probably not alone in becoming impatient with drama, even Shakespeare, that hinges on a single piece of knowledge that the characters don’t know. We know that there are two Dromios and two Antipholi, but they don’t! Isn’t that a hoot? Oh, and Antipholus of Ephesus keeps beating up his Dromio–even more hilarity!
The best Comedy of Errors I have seen was at the Stratford (ON) Shakespeare Festival. It was cut by about a quarter, with a running time of an hour and a half, and it was on a double bill following a similarly abridged Titus Andronicus: Titus, intermission, Comedy.
However, I’ve never seen Comedy at Utah; I’ve never seen Matt in this play at all; and I’m not sure I’ve seen Comedy since the one at Stratford in 1989, so I’m looking forward to this.
