http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/index.cfm?forumid=1 FuseTalk Enterprise Edition http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=75&threadid=220 2008-06-01T23:43:45 -05.00 Arlene Sanders 11
- Coco Chanel ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=75&threadid=219 2008-05-21T14:02:33 -05.00 Jerri Bell 8 New York Times Review of Books, the Washington Post, NPR and others are publishing their "summer reading" lists.

What's on your list for this summer? Why? -- What have you heard about the books on your list that made you want to read them? ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=75&threadid=215 2008-05-02T13:05:06 -05.00 Jerri Bell 3 is no help for some people.) But...a self-help book on creativity? With an ultra-modern, Madison Avenue kind of cover? Give. Me. A. Break. In a snarkier mood than usual, I picked up the book, thinking that it might provide amusing fodder for a refreshing afternoon sneering-session.

Boy, was I ever wrong.

The book is a keeper.

Twyla Tharp's prose is quietly elegant. She's thoughtful and well-read. She is uncompromising in her insistence that creativity must be nurtured with hard work, discipline, and consistency. Her conviction is convincing.

Almost every tip or exercise she offers is applicable to writing -- not just to choreography and dance. (Wonder what my office would look like if I followed her advice on file boxes, instead of creating and re-creating the Leaning Tower of Workshop Critique all over the floor?)

The parts of the book that are memoir-like -- a sort of retrospective on her own creative life -- are interesting even if you don't like her work. (I'm not a fan of modern dance at all; but she choreographed the dance sequences for the films Hair and Amadeus, both of which I love. She's also choreographed for classical ballet.)

I hope I can work as hard to be creative as she has worked, especially after I graduate and have no end-of-semester due dates to provide structure and adrenaline-rush. ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=75&threadid=209 2008-04-06T12:11:16 -05.00 Arlene Sanders 1 The Discontinuity of Small Things is a deeply moving and beautifully written novel,
one of the best I've read in a long time. A striking difference between Kevin Haworth's
book and other Holocaust literature is the degree of realism his work brings to readers
whose lives were never directly touched by the Holocaust.

When I read some of the other novels, I felt so numbed and shocked that I couldn't believe
what I "saw." It was horrifying, but didn't seem believable. I couldn't relate to it -- not only
because I'm not Jewish, but also because I've never experienced war firsthand.

The Discontinuity of Small Things, which focuses not on the unspeakable horrors
of the Holocaust, but on the hardships of daily life -- a preview of what was to come --
is different. What Haworth wrote seems real. This I can see happening. I can see it
happening here in the U. S., too, and if it does, our experience may be much like that of
the Danes during the 1940 German invasion and continuing occupation of their country.

Awareness dawns slowly for Bakman. Nazi propaganda pamphlets rain down from the
sky. And "Bakman has heard -- where he has heard he can't quite remember. . .it comes
like a change of weather -- that there are places in Europe where Jews clean the streets.
Dragged from their shops, scrubbing the pavement on their hands and knees. Not in
Denmark, of course. These things would never happen in Denmark."

Carl Jensen, a fisherman in the village of Gilleleje, facing economic ruin during the occupation,
feels desperate:


The sea smelled rich and hungry. If that plank sprung
a leak now, if the tar holding it melted or if he caught
his sweater in the net and got pulled over the sea would
swallow him and his body would not return to the shore.
He would disappear. . . . The salt water lapped against the
side of the boat. It called to him. It would be easy.


When Jette [pronounced Yetta], Carl's wife, can endure hardship no longer, she tells him
she will leave on the eleven a.m. train [to] Copenhagen:


[Carl] put down his bread and its stingy trace of butter and
said simply, No.

No?

No.

Jette looked at him and said, No, there is no eleven a.m.
[to Copenhagen] or No I will not be found on that train?

No, he repeated. . . .

She looked around her at their tiny house, at the small bedroom
where she had slept alone six nights a week for more than twenty
years while Carl was fishing in the Sound. She had tried to explain
to Carl that leaving for Copenhagen to visit her sister was not the
same as leaving him, but this was a distinction he had trouble
grasping even before trains began to explode all across Denmark. . . .

I am going, she said. It is time for you either to hit me until I am
unconscious or get out of the way.

They stood looking at each other, each of them searching for a
safe route down from the precipice of that last statement.


The "small things" began to pile up:


[Bakman] had never felt the war so presently as today.
Each moment of the war until this day had been only a
small adjustment: cold water instead of lukewarm in
his shower, ersatz coffee instead of real, and milk
only on occasion. A small stockpiling of incident. . . .
But today -- seeing the mound of small weaponry at a
fashionable square -- Bakman knows that something vital
has changed. . . . The dream of a simpler, purer Denmark,
lovely country by the sea, has passed him by.


The characters seem as real as your family and friends. They are ordinary people who
find within themselves extraordinary courage.

Professor Haworth is one of the very few authors I have met. He spent an evening with us
in Professor William Black's class (Contemporary American Writers), and we found him to be a
delightful, interesting speaker -- articulate, charming and pleasantly shy. He is married to a rabbi.

I wish we could place book covers and photos in our posts. The cover of
The Discontinuity of Small Things is an old photograph, strangely haunting, a city in
Denmark at dusk, trolley cars approaching a bend in the track, a gathering storm, and you
know there is no sound at all -- in breathtaking tones of sepia.




[Selections from these notes about Professor Haworth's book appear also on www.Amazon.com
and www.ArleneSanders.com.] ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=75&threadid=200 2008-03-12T09:20:09 -05.00 Jerri Bell 1 My Name Is Red in January. Have had to put it aside for a couple of months to focus on other things, but am looking forward to finishing it soon.

I'm enjoying the multiple narrators (some inanimate) -- I think there are something like 20 of them in all.

Biggest problem for me is that I have trouble sorting out characters. I need to find some sort of dictionary to try to figure out which names are Turkish proper names, and which are honorific titles. ]]> http://advanced.jhu.edu/ft/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=75&threadid=190 2008-02-09T20:52:47 -05.00 Jerri Bell 6 I have time to read anything new for the next 3 months (whimper), but I'd love to hear an idea for something interesting to read when I dig out from under my course work and two other writing projects.

My mother-in-law just gave me three beach paperbacks, but they look worse than the ones she usually passes down. I could use a recommendation for something GOOD to sink my teeth into.

As the teacher said in Ferris Buehler, "Anyone? Anyone?" ]]>