We’ve been favored with several excellent accounts of the PEN World Voices event in New York, featuring more great writers from around the world than I could list here. Among the reports:

• Chad Post, offering some Day 1 tidbits.
• Maud Newton and Michael Orthofer on Faith & Reason: Writer’s Speak.
• James Marcus on Orhan Pamuk and Amis vs. McGrath.
• Michael O and Chad on Salvayre vs. Moody.
• Chad offering some Day 3 tidbits.

It’s almost like being there.

Addition 4/28:

• Levi Asher offers some word-pictures from Day 1 and 2.
• FZ and Verbal Privilege report on Orhan Pamuk.

Addition 5/1:

• Bud Parr on Lahiri vs. Mazzucco and Truth and the Internet.
• Michael O on Idols and Insults.
• Arnon Grunberg on Dual Citizenship.
• Levi on Day 3 and Day 4.
• Chad on Day 4.

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My stroll to the newsstand this morning was rewarded by the discovery of Terry Teachout’s wonderful essay about Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller in the latest issue of Commentary.  I agree wholeheartedly: why cry about what Waller, dead at 39, might have accomplished, when he left us with so much?

I must confess that my appreciation of Waller has been greatly enhanced lately by the fact that my Michigan refuge is within the broadcast range of Waller’s chief appreciator.

This latest from Terry is almost enough for me to forgive him his blindness to the incomparable beauty of Sarah Vaughan.  Re the latter, I would simply point the Dr. Johnson-loving Teachout to “I’m Glad There Is You,” and say, “I refute it thus.”

Speaking of jazz recordings, there’s no recording over the last year that has given me more pleasure than the soundtrack to “Good Night and Good Luck,” featuring the underestimated Dianne Reeves.  Too bad she doesn’t do clubs.  I think she’s the only living singer I’d put on par with Mel, Sarah, and Nat in their prime.

Finally, to transition back to literature, did you know that hometown girl Dawn Upshaw recently debuted a new work by John Harbison that sets poems of Czeslaw Milosz to music?  There’s a good piece on Night After Night about it.  Check out Maury D’Annato in the comment thread, who says Upshaw sings “one of the best notes anyone ever sang” in her recording of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.”  I know nothing about music (haven’t I made that sufficiently clear?), but I’ve listened to that note hundreds of times, and I agree.  The piece is called “No Word from Tom,” and it’s available on a great Upshaw collection as well as in the full opera.  If you get it, listen to the nice way Auden/Kallman weave Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 into the libretto.  Great stuff!

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As I learned from my visit last week, There are a lot of bargains in Beijing.  For example, two people can have one of the best meals of their entire lives here, here, or here, with drinks, for $20.

However, the best bargain in Beijing, as least for me, was here:

It’s the Old Beijing Folk Custom Books Present Special Camp Shop.  (I love that name.  Maybe they call it the OBFCBPSCS for short.)  It’s located right behind (and accessible via) the former residence of novelist and playwright Lao She. (”She” is pronounced like the “shou” in “should.”)

Anyhow, shame on me for settling for just one book instead of loading up on Chinese classics.  I bought the Selected Stories of Lao She in this nice, 329-page bilingual edition for ¥12.90.  That’s about $1.60.

So what did I do when I got home?  Ordered a bunch of stuff from China Books.

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Three days of events devoted to Polish poet Adam Zagajewski start this afternoon with a lecture by the poet down in Hyde Park:

The Committee on Social Thought announces a public lecture in its John U. Nef Lecture Series by Adam Zagajewski: “What did Poetry do in the XXth Century?”, Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 4:30 PM, Social Science, 122 1126 E. 59th Street.

Zagajewski and translator Clare Cavanagh read tomorrow night at the Newberry Library. On Friday down in Hyde Park, there’s an international conference on Zagajewski’s poetry.

You know how I feel about Zagajewski. Needless to say, any loyal GRJ reader who doesn’t attend the reading tomorrow should show up here at 0700 hours on Friday so I can rip the stripes off your shoulder.

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This week on the Litblog Co-op site you’ll find me in dialogue with Mark Sarvas in the subject of Sheila Heti’s wonderful novel, Ticknor.  I just put up my first post this morning …

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Dragged my tired, noodle-stuffed self back from China last night, so irregular posting should recommence as soon as I’ve brought my events list up to date.

In the meantime, check out the Litblog Co-op web site.  My co-op colleagues just announced our Spring selection and the other four nominees.  GRJ favorite Jean-Philippe Toussaint got the nod this time, although the voting was so close it was almost a shame to have to pick just one book.  Local girl Gina Frangello’s My Sister’s Continent was among the books we read.  Gina’s going to join in on our discussion of her book during the week of May 8.

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Zizek, that nut, has changed the time, place, and topic of his lecture. I can’t get enough, and I haven’t even gone yet!

SLAVOJ ZIZEK,
The Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor for 2006
will deliver his lecture this Wednesday at

**a new time and place!**

“The Uses and Misuses of Violence”

Will now be at 4:00 PM this Wednesday, April 19th
in Max Palevsky Cinema, Ida Noyes Hall
1212 E. 59th St.
This lecture is free and open to the public.
Reception to follow.

For information or assitance for persons with disabilities,
contact anat@uchicago.edu.

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Related to my recent meanderings on the topic of the lyric:  From Charles Bernstein, “Composing Herself: Barbara Guest (1920-2006),” in the Apr/May issue of Bookforum:

Guest, who was born in 1920, died in Berkeley, California, on the day after Valentine’s Day, 2006; she was a poet at all times close to, yet decisively out of sync with, the rites of lyric voicing.  Indeed, her work, more than that of any other poet of her generation, enacted a “lyric negation,” as critic Robert Kaufman has noted, singularly inhabiting and disavowing poetry’s ability to mime personal utterance.  Guest’s unsparing aesthetizing created a new horizon for alyric verse in which saying cedes seeing, composition concatenates contexts, and palette elides figuration.  For these reason, she’s the direct heir to Hopkins sprung rhythm and to the idea of the imagination that she found in Coleridge and Stevens.

Incidentally, there are still several events to come in the University of Chicago’s “History and Forms of Lyric” lecture series.  See the Poetry and Poetics events list for more info.

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Some interesting comments from J.M. Coetzee in the Australian about today’s creative writing programs (via Maud):

“Should we be worried that the graduating students are equipped to write novels and stories and plays for today’s literary market but not well informed about the history of these forms or about what has been achieved in the forms in the past?” Coetzee asked.

“If I asked the corresponding question in the realms of science and technology, a reasonable answer would probably be, no, it is nothing to be worried about, that someone could get a degree in astronomy without knowing about Ptolemy or a degree in engineering without knowing about Archimedes.”

Thinking about this in an American context, I was reminded of something Charles Newman wrote in 1966:

There are very few promising and/or young American writers today who have not been more influenced by ‘foreign’ writing than by any of their immediate predecessors. And the genuine merit of ‘national discoveries’, such as those of the new French novelists, have only become ascertainable as writers of other cultures have adapted them to their own experience, without being committed to a programmatic defense of la methode.

Writing on the “death of the British novel” in Granta in 1980, Bill Buford speculated that the vitality of American fiction “is largely the consequence of participating in an international dialogue” as Newman describes. 

I feel tempted to say, yes, young American writers today are not engaged in a larger dialogue, either international or historical – they are simply in dialogue with one another.  But is it really true? 

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So Mrs. Jones and I are having dinner last night and the conversation turns to the subject of fireplace screens. At our old place in Evanston, the fireplace screen was one of those metal curtains that parts in the middle. Unlike most screens, however, this screen worked in such a way that when you pulled open one side of the curtain, the other side opened automatically.  In some ingenious and hidden way the sides were hooked together so that they moved in unison.

Not a big deal, but kind of nice.  When our local chimney sweep came by the first time, he opened the screen, smiled, and said, “Somebody put a little thought into that.”

“Just like,” said Mrs. Jones last night, “the flower pot at the filling station.” 

What?

She found the book and read me the poem:

Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!
–this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color–
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO–SO–SO–SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

(This is what an Elizabeth Bishop poem looks like.  Accept no substitutes.)

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