How does globalization look from the other side of the globe? Find out from some of the most exciting literary voices you may never have heard before.
Starting in January, Boom-Books author Carol Verburg will lead a monthly tour of four nonWestern countries whose writers are weaving their own distinctive cultural heritages together with worldwide artistic techniques and political viewpoints.
What better way to brighten these long winter nights than with a tasting menu like this?
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by CJ Verburg
When the self-styled Islamic State (also known as Daesh) captured the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra earlier this year, destroyed its magnificent monuments, and beheaded their curator, we in the West were outraged and horrified. That must have pleased Daesh’s jihadis. but it didn’t satisfy them. To scare Westerners past horror into terror, yesterday they struck on our turf: Paris.
Our reflex is to strike back. Revenge! But isn’t that the impulse that motivates Daesh? From their point of view, they are not aggressors but defenders. Anyhow, what good is “bomb them back to the Stone Age” when that’s precisely their goal?–to wipe out what we in the West call civilization, and re-establish not just a pre-technological or pre-industrial but a pre-global, pre-rational state of purity?
The crowd that filled Paris’s Bataclan concert hall last night, many of whom were taken hostage and/or ruthlessly slaughtered there, had come to hear an American band called Eagles of Death Metal. Afterwards, Parisians showed their defiant solidarity by singing the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Some loosely translated excerpts: “Against us flies the bloody flag of tyranny. Hear the ferocious soldiers roar! They’re coming at us, to slaughter our sons and companions. To arms, citizens! Their filthy blood shall water our fields!”
Striking back is a default response for any creature threatened by attack. What option is there but “fight or flee”? To flee is cowardly; therefore we must fight.
On the other hand: the core tenet of Christianity is nonviolence. In the Bible, Jesus is quoted on this point in the Gospels of both Matthew and Luke:
But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,
Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.
And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. — Luke 6:27-29 (King James Version)
This tenet, morphed into Mohandas Ghandi’s technique of nonviolence, enabled India to win its independence from British colonial rule. Martin Luther King and others made it central to the American civil rights movement. Ghandi noted that nonviolence is very different from fleeing; it is a strategy of strength, not weakness, meant to “liquidate antagonisms but not the antagonists.”
Implied by nonviolence is a need to respect one’s opponents–that is, to understand that one’s enemies are not evil demons but fellow human beings, who (like us) make choices which, whether right or wrong from our standpoint, seem wise and desirable to them.
One approach to this need for understanding is outlined by Afghan-born author Tamim Ansary. In his view, any cohesive group of people (for instance, Muslims, Christians, or Jews) sees itself as part of a historical narrative. “You understand history best if you follow the arc of the narrative.” To make sense of the group’s actions, “you need to [understand] the place that the present has in the narrative that people think they’re living in.” Ansary sees the 21st-century Middle East less as a clash of civilizations than as a crossroads where coherent but distinctive narratives have intersected.
Pankaj Mishra, in his Introduction to Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s The Time Regulation Institute, treats Tanpinar’s story as a response to another such intersection a hundred years earlier. “In the 1920s the Muslim-majority Ottoman Empire was radically and forcibly reorganized into a secular republic by Mustafa Kemal (better known as Ataturk), and everything in its culture, from the alphabet to headwear and religion, hastily abandoned in an attempt to emulate European-style modernity.” The Western narrative seized upon by Ataturk included “the basic assumption…that societies must modernize and become more secular and rational, relegating their premodern past to museums or, in the case of religion, to private life.” Although Ataturk’s revolution was an outward success, it entailed hammering a round peg into a square hole. When Tanpinar’s central character agrees to wear a bureaucrat’s suit, he remarks,
I began to use terms like “modification,” “coordination,” “work structure,” “mind-set shift,” “metathought,” and “scientific mentality”; I took to associating such terms as “ineluctability” or “impossibility” with my lack of will. . . . I began to look at people with eyes that wondered, “Now what use could he be to us?” and to see life as dough that could be kneaded by my own two hands.
To Tanpinar’s characters, this Western attitude seems as alien and bizarre as the Ottoman attitude–“in which idleness, or wasting time, is a source of happiness”–seemed to Europeans. In the 21st century, Turkey’s old narrative has been reasserting itself.
Mishra quotes Dostoyevsky: “No nation on earth, no society with a certain measure of stability, has been developed to order, on the lines of a program imported from abroad.”
As we struggle for answers–How can any human beings do these things? How can we stop them?–we can start by learning more about the histories and self-concepts of groups that don’t share our assumptions about the past, the present, ethics, values, or even the nature of existence. Where to begin? I recommend Tamim Ansary’s book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes.
CJ Verburg’s books include the international anthologies Ourselves Among Others and Making Contact. Starting in January 2016, she will teach a four-session class at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute, “Windows on the World: Writing Beyond the West,” on contemporary writing from Turkey, Nigeria, South Africa, and Nigeria.
Our Boom-Books authors are busy!
From romance writer Charisse Howard: “After way too much foot-dragging, I’ve jumped on the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) bandwagon. Goal: finish a draft of my new Regency Rakes & Rebels romance, Lady Daphne’s Deception, by Nov. 30. Can I write 50,000 words (or even 30,000) in 30 days? Stay tuned!”
From mystery writer Carol (CJ) Verburg: “For the Halloween issue of Provincetown Magazine, I gave a long interview to reporter Steve Desroches about artist/author Edward Gorey’s involvement with the Provincetown Theatre Company and its Playwrights’ Workshop (now Lab). Back in 1990 I had the good luck to be the president of PTC’s board and a founding member of the Workshop, and grabbed the chance to invite my brilliant Yarmouth Port neighbor to stage an original play in Ptown. Edward enjoyed himself so much that he went on to join the Workshop and to write, design, and direct three summer “entertainments” in PTC’s waterfront HQ at the Provincetown Inn. The full story of that adventure is in my multimedia memoir Edward Gorey On Stage.
“I’ve had to put off working on my next book — the sequel to Silent Night Violent Night: a Cory Goodwin Mystery — until three current projects are in hand. First, the novel I just finished writing, Zapped: an Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery — the way-overdue sequel to Croaked — is finally on its way to publication. Second, so is the script for Edward Gorey’s third Provincetown entertainment, Crazed Teacups. More news on that front as it happens.
“In the meantime, I’m returning to my longtime involvement with international literature. Through all those years of late nights in Cape Cod theaters with Edward Gorey and our floating band of thespians, my day job was editing collections of cross-cultural readings for college writing courses. The urgency of listening to voices from unfamiliar parts of the world came back to me this year, with the news endlessly full of bombings, protests, battles, and refugees. Starting on January 21, 2016, I’ll be teaching a monthly four-session class at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute called Writing the World: Literature from Turkey, Nigeria, South Africa, and Iraq. While the class is rooted in my book Making Contact, it’s hugely enriched by the increased availability in English of stories, essays, and speeches by non-Western writers. And I as a Western writer am enriched by the dazzling diversity of storytelling traditions that’s produced the likes of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Es’kia Mphahlele, and Yashar Kemal.
“When I do get back to my own book, it will be with gratitude for these gifted artists who’ve persisted through unimaginable social, political, and economic challenges to send their messages out to the world.”
by CJ Verburg
Witches’ hats off to Provincetown Magazine writer Steve Desroches for adding Edward Gorey to the familiar Ptown playwrights’ pantheon. If they celebrate Halloween in Heaven, no doubt Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Tennessee Williams, et al. have already given him a warm welcome. (I hope they’re enjoying a fabulous ghost meal at the late Gallerani’s, once our favorite post-play dining spot — the Sardi’s of Ptown?) Here below, grab a copy of today’s issue — on paper if you’re on the Outer Cape, otherwise right here on your screen — for The ABCs of Edward Gorey in Provincetown.
But wait, there’s more! The Provincetown Theatre Company’s online archive has some wonderful souvenirs of Edward Gorey’s productions there, as does the New York Public Library. And if you’re really curious about the theatrical side of that most theatrical of artists, you’ll find full details in my book Edward Gorey On Stage: Playwright, Director, Designer, Performer: a Multimedia Memoir.
by CJ Verburg
I fell in love with Turkey–especially Istanbul–more than twenty years ago. A friend discovered a travel agency that would book our trip and then get out of our way. We stayed at a tiny, recently refurbished hotel between Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque; we walked everywhere. Each day started in the top-floor dining room overlooking the sea, and ended in a basement hammam with tiled walls, brass spigots, and a heated marble table to sluice off the day’s grime. I spent my birthday sailing up the Bosphorus to step for the first time into Asia.
This was long before the U.S. had heard of Recep Tayip Erdogan or Osama bin Laden. As we roamed fearlessly from mosques to restaurants to the Grand Bazaar, we were often asked (in halting English) where we came from and what we did in America. My friend was a nurse; everyone understood that. I was a writer; no one understood that, until I added, “Like Yashar Kemal.” Ah! Yashar Kemal! Yes! Wonderful!
What author’s name would be so widely recognized and hailed back home?
“Some books are so famous they need no introduction,” observed The Guardian. “But have you ever read Yashar Kemal? His first novel, Memed, My Hawk (NYRB Classics), set in the south-east of Turkey and about a young man at war with feudal authority, was published in the 1950s and brought him international fame. It is still greatly loved in Turkey, and with good reason.”
Yashar Kemal is the pen name chosen by after a series of clashes with (and imprisonments by) the Turkish authorities. I discovered his shorter pieces first, and was staggered by the brutal “A Dirty Story,” which I included in Ourselves Among Others, my international anthology for U.S. college students. Not until much later did I read (and love) Memed, My Hawk, which tempers the harshness of peasant life in Anatolia with rebellious cheer and compassion. Yashar Kemal lived into his 90s; I hope that when he died earlier this year, the appreciation he had won at home and worldwide outweighed his concerns about his government’s political backsliding.
Foreign literature–even Turkish literature–is no longer so hard to find in English. Many American readers are familiar with Orhan Pamuk, who in 2006 received the Nobel Prize which many (including Pamuk) believed Kemal should have won decades ago. The Culture Trip’s list of Ten Best Contemporary Turkish Writers notes: “Turkey has produced some of the most esteemed writers of the twentieth century, with literature varying from politically entrenched revolutionizing poetry, to fictional novels highlighting the exotic mysteries of Turkish country and culture.” Their list even includes a woman: Elif Shafak, born in 1971, is the author not only of several successful books but a TED talk, The Politics of Fiction.
From Yashar Kemal’s “A Dirty Story” (1967):
The three of them were sitting on the damp earth, their backs against the dung-daubed brush wall and their knees drawn up to their chests, when another man walked up and crouched beside them.
“Have you heard?” said one of them excitedly. “Broken-Nose Jabbar’s done it again! You know Jabbar, the fellow who brings all those women from the mountain villages and sells them in the plains? . . . The lads of Misdik have got together and bought one of them on the spot, and now they’re having fun and making her dance and all that . . .”
“He’s still got the other one,” said the newcomer, “and he’s ready to give her away for a hundred liras.”
“He’ll find a customer soon enough,” put in another man whose head was hunched between his shoulders. “A good woman’s worth more than a team of oxen, at least in the Chukurova plain she is. You can always put her to the plow and, come summer, she’ll bind and carry the sheaves, hoe, do anything. What’s a hundred liras? Why, a woman brings in that much in one single summer. In the fields, at home, in bed. There’s nothing like a woman. What’s a hundred liras?”
From Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul (2008):
As Zeliha rushed by, the street vendors selling umbrellas and raincoats and plastic scarves in glowing colors eyed her in amusement. She managed to ignore their gaze, just as she managed to ignore the gaze of all the men who stared at her body with hunger. The vendors looked disapprovingly at her shiny nose ring too, as if therein lay a clue as to her deviance from modesty, and therefore the sign of her lustfulness. . . . Be it the harassment of men or the reproach of other women . . . there was no power on earth that could prevent Zeliha, who was taller than most women in this city, from donning miniskirts of glaring colors, tight-fitting blouses that displayed her ample breasts, satiny nylon stockings, and yes, those towering high heels.
October in San Francisco just might be more action-packed than any other month. Summer’s throngs of tourists have gone, along with summer’s chilly fog. Time to enjoy a moveable feast of music, literature, tall ships, parades, aerial stunts, films, brides, chickens (?), and–as always–plenty of fine food and wine.
Kicking off the fall festivities was the 15th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. For a whole glorious weekend, free live music and happy listeners filled Golden Gate Park. Thanks to the Festival’s late founder and benefactor, banjo-playing investment banker Warren Hellman (and his generous family), almost 100 bands from bluegrass to soul to post-punk brought back the spirit of the 60s on a record six stages.
No tobacco smoking was allowed, but the traditional aroma of weed and wine, sun-drenched grass and eucalyptus trees, pizza and samosas wafted over techies, hoboes, long-skirted women, bandana-decked dogs, and naked toddlers. If you missed the Festival, you missed that iconic American ambience. You can still hear some of the music, though, which was live-streamed by Moonalice / Doobie Decimal System and is now in the archive.
Next: Fleet Week, now through Sunday, October 11. Click here for details about the Parade of Ships and fabulous Air Show, starting at 11 AM daily from Friday through Sunday. And don’t miss the spectacular Italian Heritage Parade, which will fill North Beach from 12:30 till midafternoon on Sunday as it trundles from Fisherman’s Wharf to Washington Square Park.
Also starting this week is San Francisco’s annual Litquake. For most of October, this feast of readings, lunches, panel discussions, parties, and the legendary Lit Crawl will shake, rattle, & roll through bars, libraries, theaters, bookstores, hotels, and every other venue you can think of.
From Boom-Books author Charisse Howard:
Can’t wait for that parade! Meanwhile, looking in the window of a bridal shop always tickles my romance-writer’s heart. Half of me is a 17-year old dreaming of the pinnacle of joy that is every girl’s wedding. The other half is pressing her nose against the glass like a hungry 10-year-old outside a bakery.
From Boom-Books author CJ Verburg:
If your budget doesn’t extend to $75 for lunch with author Paul Theroux, and your eardrums can’t handle the Blue Angels roaring over San Francisco Bay, here’s a unique alternative. As white and fluffy as a bride, or a wedding cake in a bakery window, is this cute little rooster. He’s waiting at 13-15 Columbus Ave. (a block from the Transamerica Pyramid) for some kind rescuer to give him a new home. Haven’t you secretly been yearning for an unusual new pet? and/or alarm clock? Stop by and adopt this fine feathered fellow for free, or phone 408-990-5981. Complete with leash.
This just in from Judy Irving of Pelican Media:
August 19th Benefit for Audubon Society of Portland
“Cormorants in the Crosshairs,” a 10-minute film I just finished, will premiere in Portland Oregon on August 19th at the Hollywood Theater, screening with “Pelican Dreams.” Please help spread the word:
http://audubonportland.org/about/events/cormorant-movie
Cormorants are beautiful, athletic, adaptable, intelligent birds who don’t deserve to die because of human-caused habitat destruction and overfishing. Yet that’s what’s happening, and the Audubon Society of Portland filed suit against the Army Corps of Engineers to stop it.
In 2009 Mark and I camped and filmed on East Sand Island in the Columbia River for “Pelican Dreams,” so I was familiar with the cormorant colony where the killing has begun (at night, with rifles, while the birds sleep on their nests). We’ll both be at the August 19th premiere in Portland.
Marie Travers, a wildlife rehabilitator who helped raise five young cormorants at International Bird Rescue, became my film collaborator, and many others donated video, still photos, sound effects, and film services to this pro bono project. The 10-minute movie is Pelican Media’s gift to Portland Audubon, in gratitude for their work and in support of their lawsuit. It will be up on vimeo after the premiere.
by CJ Verburg
Book of the Week: surgeon/author Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Have you read it? or heard of it? This is the only book I’ve ever seen with a 5-star rating at 3,000+ Amazon reviews (along with the slightly creepy distinction of #1 Best Seller in Death & Grief).
As a doctor who’s treated dozens, maybe hundreds of patients, Gawande was struck by their take on mortality. Like the old joke: I know everybody has to die; I just didn’t think that applied to me. People would come into his office who’d just been diagnosed with cancer, or some other terminal disease, & they were in shock: How can this happen to me? What they wanted Dr. Gawande to do was make it go away. Give me back my life. Whatever it takes–surgery, radiation, chemo–I want my life back.
Two realizations disturbed him. First, although most of his patients said they wouldn’t want to go on if they stopped being themselves, if they wound up helpless in a hospital or a nursing home, that was in fact how most of their lives ended.
Second, doctors collaborated in this outcome: “Medicine exists to fight death & disease. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually it wins.”
In Being Mortal, we follow Gawande as he explores the options for aging, the pros and cons of the many turning-point choices along life’s home stretch, and the urgency of recognizing and confronting those choices. Mortality is implausible, yet it is universal. This book is a helpful step out of the mindset I grew up with–“Hope I die before I get old!”–toward ending life with the most possible dignity and comfort.
Dignity and comfort are not options in many of the lives depicted by Anna Deveare Smith in her new theater piece Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education. It’s brilliant, and it’s playing at Berkeley Repertory Theatre through August 2, with live music by local jazz virtuoso Marcus Shelby.
Unlike most young actresses studying Shakespeare, Smith homed in on Hamlet’s observation that theater holds a mirror up to nature. Her subject is violent, headline-grabbing social conflicts in the United States; her technique is to interview diverse participants and observers and weave their testimony into a play. 
The first clash she investigated was the so-called Crown Heights incident in 1991, sparked by a New York rabbi’s entourage running over an African-American child. Smith talked to outraged people on both sides and depicted each of them verbatim–not just their words but their accents and body language–in Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities.
Anna Deveare Smith has transformed what theater can do by transforming herself into the people she interviews. 
She levels the playing field: we can’t make our usual (often unconscious) snap judgments about each speaker based on gender, race, age, and appearance, because they all look like Anna Deveare Smith. Instead we’re obliged to watch and listen. I’ve had the good fortune to see every piece she’s done, from Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, about the Rodney King fracas, up through her current investigation of the school-to-prison pipeline that dooms way too many American children.
Notes from the Field struck me as gentler, as well as more participatory, than Smith’s previous pieces. With so much anger in the media and the streets over discrimination at every level of the justice system against people (especially males) of color, Smith offers us some exceptionally articulate, insightful, and heartbreaking angles on a subject which–like mortality–we ignore at our peril.
by CJ Verburg
As previously posted (July 18), I was thrilled to get the very last $20 ticket to the National Theatre’s NT Live broadcast of Hamlet at San Francisco’s Sundance Kabuki Theatre in November. Who could resist this all-time all-star cast? — with Benedict Cumberbatch as the prince, Anastasia Hille as Gertrude, and Ciaran Hinds as Claudius. (And who knew that both Hinds and Hille have played Lady Macbeth?)
Turns out I was luckier than I realized.
Today’s online London Theatre News (#991) contains a SPECIAL OFFER:
Only £289 – pre-theatre two course dinner at Gaucho Smithfield and a £250 ticket to Hamlet
Valid Evening performances until 31 August 2015
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The Telegraph reported that this is “the most in-demand theatre production of all time” — and that was a YEAR before Shakespeare’s masterpiece opens at London’s Barbican Theatre on August 5 [2015]:
“Hamlet tickets went on sale at 10am on August 11 [2014] and within minutes fans were expressing frustration at finding themselves more than 20,000 places back in the queue.”
With 2 weeks to go until opening night, there are no reviews yet, but that hardly matters since the entire run of the play was sold out months ago. Here’s the terse listing in London Theatre Guide:
As a country arms itself for war, a family tears itself apart. Forced to revenge his father’s death but paralysed by the task ahead, Hamlet rages against the impossibility of his predicament, threatening both his sanity and the security of the state.
If I were director Lyndsey Turner I’d be quaking right now. All the way to the bank.
