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March 9, 2006Favorite poets...I've been reading poetry since I was a kid. My father was addicted to it, though he likes more dramatic verse than I ever did. (I'll never forget his impassioned rendering of the "The Highwayman.") My grandmother taught me a love of Dickinson and Millay, but it was really the discovery of the Norton Anthology of Modern English Poetry that converted me forever. This edition is, sadly, no longer available, but it was new and shiny in 1976 or 1977 and full of poets it was easy for a young woman to love, from Wallace Stevens to Etheridge Knight to Sonia Sanchez. I read the whole thing, page by page, and felt like I was discovering a new world. In those days I had a near photographic memory and a lot of those poems stay with me still, if I close my eyes and visualize the page.
Posted by kalital at 11:33 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack These days we all need to laugh... even if it hurtsSo here's my favorite selection of comic and graphic artists and cartoonists. Enjoy.
Posted by kalital at 8:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack Lester Spence on Octavia ButlerDon't miss Lester Spence's commentary on Octavia Butler: http://blacksmythe.com/m3u/OctaviaNPR.m3u. Posted by kalital at 7:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack March 5, 2006Spanish and Portuguese Literature in TranslationI've often called myself a woman made out of words: built out of books is perhaps more accurate, though I think a certain amount of foundational work was also laid by music and film. There's really no good place to start talking about what kinds of reading influenced the development of my thought and character. Chronology is far too boring, so I'll begin in the middle, in late 1970s and early 1980s when I was a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, still in its counter-culture heyday. Santa Cruz was full of bookstores, used and new, and I'd wander the aisles of all of them with eyes peeled for anything that looked interesting to read. One of my discoveries in college was a series of paperbacks with beautiful covers--the Bard Imprint of Avon Books, now long swallowed by Houghton-Mifflin and, like most fine literature, largely out of print. It was the covers that attracted me at first, and the mysteriously rich titles by authors with complex and unfamiliar names. The series introduced me to what we now call Latin American Magical Realism (or are we past calling it that, and on to calling it somethng else?) and I couldn't get enough of it. The list that follows (with pretty cover images from Amazon whenever I could find them) is largely what I read in that genre in those years. It's an odd and arbitrary collection, not all of it Latin American, some it Spanish, some of it Caribbean. The translators for Bard were astonishing and their names should be recorded: Harriet De Onis, Barbara Shelby Merello, Alfred MacAdam. Amazon.com should be slapped for not listing all the translators.
Posted by kalital at 9:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack Media Manager just didn't do the job...Downloading and installing the very attractive sounding Media Manager plug in resulted in half a day of lost time and headache. So instead I'm going back to what I usually do, and hand-tweaking Amazon.com's associate code so that I can create blog entries that have links to a specific list of books in a specific category of literature that I--and no one else--get to define. Yaro tells me that he'd write a script for it... and I bet he would. But I can't code worth a damn, and none of the plug-in stuff seems to work as promised out of the box, so I'll just try it my way. We'll see how it works... Posted by kalital at 8:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack March 3, 2006A Woman Made of Words and ImagesI've been threatening this for years, and I'm finally going to do it. I just added the very sweet Media Manager plug-in to MT and I've been making a list of the books that most influenced my life. My students have been pushing me to do this for a decade. These may be good reads for people who are interested in why I think the way I do, or who wish they could think the way I do, or who desperately want to avoid thinkiing the way I do. In the spirit of selling out, of course I've used my Amazon Affiliate ID, so perhaps I'll add another $3.50 per quarter to my income if my lists spur anyone to purchase an item. I'm starting with books because they're pretty much what started me, but I will eventually move to films and to music. I'll be sorting by subject area in a rather desultory fashion. I'm of course interested in hearing shout outs if I've mentioned your favorite (or least favorite) author or text. Posted by kalital at 7:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack March 1, 2006If I could sell out, I would...You'll notice, if you visit any of the archived pages of my blog, that I'm now running Google ads in a relatively discreet column on the right side of the browser. I admit that I've been an Amazon afffiliate for a long while, and over the past five years it's probably earned me about $65 bucks. I don't think the Google ads will pull in even close to as much, but I'm interested in how well-targeted I can make them and whether, if I keep careful watch over them, I can groom and trim them into something that might actually be useful to the people who take the time to read what I write. So take it as an experiment. If you hate them, write me. If enough people hate them, I'll take them down. Posted by kalital at 7:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack |
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