Read and write
Lying Under (another) Apple Tree....Dear Charlie,
It's going to be hard to choose which conference to go to next Saturday at the Alcazar.
Indeed, at 3:30, there's a conference on Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates and Louise Erdrich ( 3 fascinating American women/writers and their perspective/s on Us society.
For more details, click here
The conference and the passages the speakers will be choosing will (sadly) be in French, but I strongly recommend that you go back to the original texts at some point.
It's hard to sum up Toni Morrison in a few lines. She is a literary icon, winner of the 1993
Nobel Prize in Literature. To discover her bestsellers, click here
I would recommend any of her books, by you might want to start with her Trilogy,
Beloved, Jazz and Paradise
http://www.goodreads.com/series/109788-toni-morrison-trilogy
Btw, Beloved was adapted into a movie by Jonathan Demme featuring Oprah Winfrey and Dany Glover.
You can also go back to an article, I wrote about her on the blog
http://oibstcharles.blogspot.fr/2015/04/toni-morrison.html
As you know, "Big Mouth and Ugly Girl" by Joyce Carol Oates was one of the book club choices last year and some of her Young adult novels are on the summer reading list we provide our newest OIB members , so some of you are likely to have read some of her works.
She also wrote many bestsellers. Have you pick
A word of warning to the sensitive souls, the plot and atmosphere of her works are quite dark and depressing.
I would recommend Foxfire: the Confessions of a girl gang.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/books/outlaw-girls-on-the-rampage.html
The novel was also adapted into a 1996 American movie by Annette Haywood-Carter featuring Angelina Jolie.
And I know those of you who are great fans of Wilde, will be delighted to find out that she wrote an essay on one of his works. The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde’s Parable of the Fall
And to Finish, Louise Erdrich. Most of you must be less familiar with her but I doubly recommend her because she is a very gifted Native American writer and she is from Minnesota (;p)
To find out more about her, click here
To get to know her, here are two poems I particularly like.
I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move
We watched from the house
as the river grew, helpless
and terrible in its unfamiliar body.
Wrestling everything into it,
the water wrapped around trees
until their life-hold was broken.
They went down, one by one,
and the river dragged off their covering.
Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,
snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:
a whole forest pulled through the teeth
of the spillway. Trees surfacing
singly, where the river poured off
into arteries for fields below the reservation.
When at last it was over, the long removal,
they had all become the same dry wood.
We walked among them, the branches
whitening in the raw sun.
Above us drifted herons,
alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,
settling their beaks among the hollows.
Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people
moving among us, unable to take their rest.
Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.
Their long wings are bending the air
into circles through which they fall.
They rise again in shifting wheels.
How long must we live in the broken figures
their necks make, narrowing the sky.
Turtle Mountain Reservation
For Pat Gourneau, my grandfather
The heron makes a cross
flying low over the marsh.
Its heart is an old compass
pointing off in four directions.
It drags the world along,
the world it becomes.
My face surfaces in the green
beveled glass above the washstand.
My handprint in thick black powder
on the bedroom shade.
Home I could drink like thin fire
that gathers
like lead in my veins,
heart’s armor, the coffee stains.
In the dust of the double hollyhock,
Theresa, one frail flame eating wind.
One slim candle
that snaps in the dry grass.
Ascending tall ladders
that walk to the edge of dusk.
Riding a blue cricket
through the tumult of the falling dawn.
At dusk the gray owl walks the length of the roof,
sharpening its talons on the shingles.
Grandpa leans back
between spoonfuls of canned soup
and repeats to himself a word
that belongs to a world
no one else can remember.
The day has not come
when from sloughs, the great salamander
lumbers through snow, salt, and fire
to be with him, throws the hatchet
of its head through the door of the three-room house
and eats the blue roses that are peeling off the walls.
Uncle Ray, drunk for three days
behind the jagged window
of a new government box,
drapes himself in fallen curtains, and dreams that the odd
beast seen near Cannonball, North Dakota,
crouches moaning at the door to his body. The latch
is the small hook and eye.
of religion. Twenty nuns
fall through clouds to park their butts
on the metal hasp. Surely that
would be considered miraculous almost anyplace,
but here in the Turtle Mountains
it is no more than common fact.
Raymond wakes,
but he can’t shrug them off. He is looking up
dark tunnels of their sleeves,
and into their frozen armpits,
or is it heaven? He counts the points
of their hairs like stars.
One by one they blink out,
and Theresa comes forth
clothed in the lovely hair
she has been washing all day. She smells
like a hayfield, drifting pollen
of birch trees.
Her hair steals across her shoulders
like a postcard sunset.
All the boys tonight, goaded from below,
will approach her in The Blazer, The Tomahawk,
The White Roach Bar where everyone
gets up to cut the rug, wagging everything they got,
as the one bass drum of The Holy Greaseballs
lights a depth
charge through the smoke.
Grandpa leans closer to the bingo.
The small fortune his heart pumps for
is hidden in the stained, dancing numbers.
The Ping-Pong balls rise through colored lights,
brief as sparrows
God is in the sleight of the woman’s hand.
He walks from Saint Ann’s, limp and crazy
as the loon that calls its children
across the lake
in its broke, knowing laughter.
Hitchhiking home from the Mission, if he sings,
it is a loud, rasping wail
that saws through the spine
of Ira Comes Last, at the wheel.
Drawn up through the neck ropes,
drawn out of his stomach
by the spirit of the stones that line
the road and speak
to him only in their old agreement.
Ira knows the old man is nuts.
Lets him out at the road that leads up
over stars and the skulls of white cranes.
And through the soft explosions of cattail
and the scattering of seeds on still water,
walks Grandpa, all the time that there is in his hands
that have grown to be the twisted doubles
of the burrows of mole and badger,
that have come to be the absence
of birds in a nest.
Hands of earth, of this clay
I’m also made from.
As for her novels, I would recommend
Love Medicine
Tracks
the Antelope wife
the Painted Drum.
The plague of Doves
but I believe you may tempted to read any of her books.
To make a choice, go to a bookstore (you know which one Mr. Leah would recommend ;p) pick the book up, look at its cover and read a few pages or read a few reviews or let the author's feedback inspire you
For those of you who are interested in Native American culture and writing and enjoyed Sherman Alexie. (He was also a feature of our book club) you must definitely give Erdrich a try but you will find their voices are very different.
He resolutely follows the warrior song and path, while Louise Erdrich follows the slow, weaving and enthralling steps of the grass dancer
Enjoy and see you on Saturday!
Mrs. C.
Didn't know all of these authors... and honestly this is not really my cup of tea (I mean in term of litterature), but i got to admit that those poems are impressive.
ReplyDeleteI loves these poems! :) I did not know about it and I'll definitely try to go :)
ReplyDeleteSorry, *love ^^
DeleteSorry, *love ^^
DeleteI loves these poems! :) I did not know about it and I'll definitely try to go :)
ReplyDelete