Letting Go.

The shelves are constantly overflowing. I almost never get rid of books, although I probably should more often. When I do, however, I usually leave them behind at Stadsmissionen Hornsgatan - they're quite good at displaying, especially their paperbacks. Seems to be such a sweet place for the small ones to hang out with some like minded before being transferred to their new homes. 

There's been one pile lying around, though, that I haven't had the heart to bring with me: hardcover editions of a few of my favourite novels. Took them to the flea market yesterday and after having just two old men even looking their way, I decided to give them away for free while packing up the car. Was pleased to see two teenage girls grab a few (Burroughs? Shakespeare?), and then a lady in her fifties reading the back cover of Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries with a curious expression. I told her to please read it as it's really dear to me, and then pointed to an old Sun Axelsson I once loved and that I imagined she might like. She seemed truly happy and said she never would have chosen those if I hadn't talked so warmly about them. 

Open recycling will be my next big thing.

The End.

The other day Anders Nilsen announced that the last issue of Big Questions will be out this fall. A mere fact that makes me want to cry. But supposedly one can expect a forthcoming collection of all 15 issues from Drawn & Quarterly in the future? After all, the first two BQ's are since long out of print. And I need - 

Endings, beginnings; since spring I've mostly been boxing, swimming and reading academic papers. It shows, I know. This fall will, however, be all about Literature, with a focus on gender perspectives. 

Anticipation: N.B.

Robert Crawford on T.S. Eliot's "Marina"

Just found my favourite lecture at last year's T.S. Eliot International Summer School online: T.S. Eliot's Daughter, held by poet and professor of Scottish literature Robert Crawford. Not only is Marina one of the poems I keep the closest, but Crawford seemed to have a certain (poet's) understanding that really shone through in his lecture, something which I perhaps felt other lectures lacked.


There was a quite special moment afterwards, when Seamus Heaney, to end a rather excited discussion on the meaning of the poem's epigraph Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? (*) in relation to the rest of the poem's recalling the recognition scene in Shakespeare's Pericles (**), suddenly said that it must be understood as a tuning fork for the rest of the poem, and nothing else. Some of us sighed out of gratitude for that on point remark.


TSE reading Marina.


(*) "What place is this, what kingdom, what shores of the world?" Taken from Seneca the Younger's tragedy Hercules Furens, where these words are uttered by Hercules himself as he recovers from the insanity during which he has murdered his wife and children. 


(**) Pericles, in mourning for his wife and for Marina, the daughter who is for long thought to be dead, has left his kingdom for the sea. To hopefully rouse him from his despair, a young woman is put before him to sing. As she tells him her life story they both realize that they are in fact father and daughter.

2009

36 titles

53% in English, 3% in French, rest Swedish

61% by female authors

36% by Scandinavian authors (mostly female graphic novelists)

14% by authors of Asian descent

25% on feminist issues

10%+ by/on Susan Sontag

Best reading experience: Little Gidding on the way to Little Gidding during T.S. Eliot International Summer School, London University. 

Guidelines for 2010: more, harder.

Lady in Waiting: A New Nina Bouraoui

The novel is called Nos Baisers sont des adieux and will be out on Éditions Stock on March 24. I shall be holding my breath until then.

Based on a Choreopoem?

The poetic work of my youth, ntozake shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, will be made into a movie. That's about the craziest thing I've ever heard. I mean, it's a choreopoem. Or, no: it's the choreopoem. And talks of casting Halle Berry, Beyoncé and Oprah Winfrey? Please.

The play was filmed in 1982 (released on dvd in 2002), with shange in it. I for one will never need any other adaptation.

Shooting is said to start in November. 

Erykah Badu used the characters from for colored girls in her Bag Lady video (which shange didn't approve of).

News via The Root.

Shallow Stuff: Choosing Covers

Passed by the great (yeah well, the best) Stockholm book/mag/music/dvd store Papercut the other day and found that Penguin has published Susan Sontag's On Photography recently. A small paperback, minimalist design, a nice matte cover. However: rather tightly bound/excessively glued (would most probably result in a cracked back shorly after opening it).

My bookshelf already carries some Sontags in Picador's larger paperback format, and it seems like most of her writings can be found in that series. The print is not great, in fact sometimes quite wobbly and uneven from one line to the other; the paper quality gives the books a feel of being at least 30 years old - they seem floppy and cheap, like a soft pack of cigarettes that's been in your back pocket for a few days (nights). And yes, the paper is yellowed, as if by a persistent nicotine intake in and around these thingies.

So what's more important? Looking cool while reading in the Subway (i.e. challenging one's fellow passengers with that piercing look) vs. sporting an unshapely but neat, NE-like collection of Sontags in the shelves of the near future?

The thought of something like this will, I suppose, always win in the end. In my dreams, all my shelves look like something from a librairie consisting of solely Èditions de Minuit.

Café Edenborg R.I.P.

In my late teens, during the years when hip hop was my life and I got to travel to NYC for the first time, I found a poetry collection called Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Café that was to become my close companion for quite some time. It is an extensive collection of 500 pages or so, by more than 100 poets related to the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York - including ntozake shange, Maggie Estep, Lois Griffith, Reg E. Gaines, Dana Bryant and Sapphire among all, poets who were to become my idols for years to come. (*)

In the wonderful introduction by Miguel Algarín, The Scattering of the Ashes: The Burial of a Poet, one finds his personal account of how all their friends walked in procession upon poet Miguel Piñero's death, to scatter his ashes:

thru the Lower East Side

as he had wanted, and as he had written in a poem many years prior to that day.

Earlier today I vividly remembered cherishing that foreword, as the Nuyorican came to symbolize for me a place where everyone and everything was possible, disregarding of (for example) race and gender. The kind of place that I never got to be part of then, but that I actually would find in Café Edenborg some ten years later.

Since 2004, Edenborg has been my second home, the place where I've read, worked, hung out when I had nothing better to do. And I have gotten to know an extraordinary bunch of people, both the ones working and other regulars. People who I've wanted to share my world with, while everyone outside the café seemed biased, racist, homophobic or just plain out of their minds.

This evening at 7, when Mr. Edenborg made everyone leave the café so he could close the door and symbolically lock up for the last time, there were many with me who couldn't stop crying, scattered and shattered out on Stora Nygatan. An inconsolable group who have spent hours and hours together in that room.

This is the end of an era, and I have no clue what to do now, except for thanking everyone for all these years, and for the honourable award of Best Regular. Thank you Shenge, Evis, Siri, Sofia, Danne, Sara, Elias, Amanda, Carl-Michael, Caroline, Viktor, Chia, Aurora, Frida, Jessica, Elli and Hanna. For everything.

I love you more than.



(The award prize)

.
.
.

(*) A book that I happened to find in my beloved friend Patrik's bookshelf many years after, to my great surprise (considering the fact that we were living in Sweden and that it came out in 1994). Sadly, Patrik is no longer with us, but I somehow know that we had a special bond that came out of owning that exact book; like we were from the same block philosophically, or had similarly coloured dreams or something.

Les Librairies of My Life: Les Mots à la bouche

Les Mots à la bouche is my favourite bookstore in the Whole. Wide. World. It is on my favourite street corner in Paris: rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie and rue Vieille du Temple, in Le Marais, 4:ème arr.

Les Mots is packed with books, LBGT-themed and others, and they always seem to carry the top 5 books I've been looking for lately; classics as well as new stuff; everything neatly organized. They have a great wall of magazines, too. And a basement.

At the moment all I want is for that wonderfully nice staff to start selling tote bags with their logo, in the appropriate blue colour. It would be perfect in my collection, and I would carry it everywhere with me, showing it off.

By the way, on that same extraordinary corner is:

Amorino (the best ice cream in Europe),
Saveurs de pains (a boulangerie that does fantastic baguettes with gruyère & ham and a mean café crème)
L'étoile manquante (a great hangout café/bar with an otherworldly salad of fresh fruits and cheeses with mustard dressing - Salade d'Ètoile).

(All pics old and googled)

The Next Anders Nilsen!

It's coming! Soon!

And Mr. Nilsen says there are three more issues of Big Questions to go, I thought this would be the last. Fantastic!

T.S. Eliot International Summer School

I spent my whole birthday writing the bursary application, and yesterday I found out I'm going!

In Between

My mind is messy. I've been working non-stop and tending to family issues. And I've been a lousy reader. But I quit smoking January 2, holy cow!

At the moment I'm trying to focus on reading Watchmen for the first time (and I'm calling myself a graphic novel geek, what a joke), the second Maggie & Hopey volume, that ol' Allen Carr smoking cessation book, the latest issue of my favourite Swedish feminist magazine Bang and some important psychology stuff. Plus a few novels that I can't choose between, as usual.

Jeanette Winterson on T.S. Eliot

"A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is."

Found a great article on the poetry of T.S. Eliot by the very wonderful Jeanette Winterson today, Shafts of Sunlight (originally from The Guardian).

A Propos 2008

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.

T.S. Eliot. From Little Gidding, Four Quartets.

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I was dissatisfied reading through last year's list of books. Bored, even. Too little, too all over the place; a lack of fiction. The other day H. said I ought to keep a separate list of all the books I don't finish. With that in mind, I did read a lot that I loved last year, especially poetry. However, this year should be more about challenges.

Not Finishing #3 - Winter Plans

I am not going to be too specific with my reading list this time. Think of it more like some titles I randomly throw out from my bookshelves to why not-maybe read this winter:

Ulrika Lorentzi - Något bara kvinnor kan?
Tobias Hübinette & Carina Tigervall - Adoption med förhinder
Tove Jansson - Mumin: Tove Janssons Samlade Serier del 1
Christian Catomeris - Det ohyggliga arvet
Liv Strömquist - Einsteins fru
Rebecca Walker - Baby Love
Fanny Ambjörnsson - Vad är queer
Elisabeth Hjorth - Kärnfamiljen
Michał Witkowski - Lubiewo
Chandra Prasad (editor) - Mixed

Mostly Swedish this time. Probably because our smaller (greater) publishers had a really great X-mas market sale the other day. And the day before some of my fave Swe comicbook artists signed my copies of their books.

Questionnaire on Reading

Found this at Bokhora:

1. Your worst reading experience?
I seldom finish the ones I don't like. But I've only returned one book to the store, that was Claire Castillon's Insecte. The theme seemed quite interesting but the writing really turned me off.

2. Which book has affected you the most?
a) ntozake shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf .
b) Elektra: Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz.
c) Nina Bouraoui's Poupée Bella.

3. Have you read something that made you really scared?
When I was twelve, I was reading Fantastic Four comics for two days in a row until I started seeing fire and devils coming out of the pages. I was sh*t scared, but it didn't put me off reading comics. I also had an incident with a Dean R. Koontz book about insomnia that seemed to enter my brain, driving me into madness while in bed late one night. I quit reading my beloved Kings and Koontz after that.

4. What do you use for bookmarks?
Flyers, invitations, little drawings or other pieces of paper that I find around that go well with the book in question.

5. When do you read?
When on buses, trains and planes. In bed at night. In certain cafés during the day.

6. Which was the first book you ever read?
A Pixi book or my stepfather's first text book? I was 4.

7. Hardback or paperback?
Always paperback.

8. What are you reading at the moment?
a) Mixed - an Anthology of Short Stories Fiction on the Multiracial Experience. Edited by Chandra Prasad.
b) Black White and Jewish by Rebecca Walker.
c) Det är bara lite AIDS by Sara Granér.

9. What page are you on?
I won't bother to look.

10. Do you leave 'marks' in your books?
'Dogears' in fiction and poetry, but never in comics or books with photos inside.

11. Does the cover affect your buying/not buying a certain book?
Very much. And the font used. I also really like the Japanese way, the beautiful brown paper cover they give you with your purchase. Every store has its own.

12. Number of pages?
I prefer short. After all I am a poet.

13. Do you browse through to see the end?
No.

14. Is there any book you've read more than once?
All the ones I really like I re-read.

15. Were you ever in an accident caused by a book?
No.

16. Do you keep all your books, even the ones you don't like?
Lately I've tried to get rid of the really really bad ones.

17. Do you bring books to the bathroom?
No.

18. Do you read in the bathroom?
Magazines only.

19. Do you keep any systems for your books? Reading/buying lists? Do you keep a reading diary?
I keep a purchase list at Adlibris, it's really really long. A shorter list for the library visits. And I have this reading blog.

Just Arrived

I can't wait, I don't know where to start, I want to know everything. I am truly overwhelmed this kinda literature is available in our time. Vive the betweenship!

While I'm reading, have a look at Rebecca Walker's site.

Currently Reading: July

Trying to stay awake on the way to K.L.

"This is the best costume for today."

The Pie

2008 so far. I've been a lousy reader this summer. Wha'happened to my list? Out of all of those, I read one. That's horriba.

Make your own pies over at Mycrocosm.