Summer Treats2

I will be spending some time this August at the Vermont Studio Center. I was thrilled to be accepted and am very much looking forward to having time to write away from daily distractions and among so much creative energy.

Summer Treats

Spring is in full force, in case you haven't noticed. All my windows are open. I can hear children screaming. Salsa blares; the rattles and chirps of birds make their way in too. My apartment smells like fresh laundry and various barbequed meats from yards down below. One of my students gave me a Japanese name. She translated the two syllables of my name, An-ka, into "Fragrance of Apricots." M. has informed me that cellphone radiation has killed 70% of the world's honeybees. Tomorrow I go to the Cherry Blossom Festival.

With that I bring you my ever-ambitious summer reading list! As I'll have a bit of extra time on my hands in July, I hope to actually write about some these books at that time. Also notice I will update the book lists in the sidebar to reflect what I've *actually* read recently (some of those books I finished long ago) and will perhaps finish some of the books that I've been chipping away at a glacial pace (is that a cliche now?).

Onward. The list over which I salivate:

My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk
Nana, par Emile Zola
Germinal, par Emile Zola
The Sound and the Fury, by William Falkner
The Decameron, by Boccaccio
Pierre et Jean, par Guy de Maupassant
Summer, by Edith Wharton
Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
Du cote de chez Swann, par Marcel Proust
The Golden Bowl, by Henry James
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos

I went on a shopping spree at Housing Works last month or so, and bought much of the above for $1 or 50 cents. Ah, I love that place.

Results

The results from Readers' Choice #3 are in! Fun!

Dream+

The concert was on a plane, for about 60 people. We were to take off from Central Park.

"Lagavulin?" The waitress nodded. I sat back in a red velvet chair. The pale man with a maroon-lipped grimace started up his accordian. He sang in a shrill falsetto, then a gravelly voice, absurdly low.

The plane took off; we flew over tree tops. Then, below us, the confetti of exploding buildings. The man sang higher, lower, louder over the noise below us. When all the buildings were gone, the man stopped singing and we had lost our voices. All we could do was whisper.

(When I was little, I used to have many bizarre nightmares. These seem to have dropped off as I became an adult--perhaps due to a drop in sensitivity. So I when I dream something like this, I have to take note. Usually I hold onto these scraps and see if the dream logic spins into a story. But since I can't or won't make use of exploding buildings, however gruesome some of the my stories have been, I've decided to post this here.)

Readers' Choice 3

Our third Readers' Choice contest is happening right now over at 55 Words. The stories are fabulous, so go take a look and send in your picks! Then, get inspired and send in your stories.

silly random memory

When I was in third or fourth grade, I started a writers' club and invited a bunch of my friends to join. We had our first meeting at my house and I was all in a kerfuffle about who would come and what kind of story they would bring. The first guest to arrive showed me her story about a beautiful black horse. At first I was impressed. Then it dawned on me that she had simply copied Black Beauty.

"You can't do that!" I scolded. Plagiarism wasn't in my vocabulary yet, but I was indignantly aware of the concept. Later, my mother scolded me. "Let her write what she wants," she said. "What do you care?"

A few more members arrived and I was giddy with power, having appointed myself president.

"Can't we say we're writing but just play?" asked one of the arrivals. I was furious but held my tongue. I gave in to the small troupe and we played with My Little Ponies and Barbie Dolls while I grumbled to myself and lamented the first and last meeting of my writers' club.

Nips & Bites

It's been a busy winter and I am slowly emerging from hibernation. I passed my Master's essay (yay!). While it is probably not worthy of an academic journal, I am proud of it nevertheless and will probably add it and maybe one other paper to the essays section of my website as a .pdf file. Its title is "Argument as a Relative Threat to Face" and it opens with a scene of monkeys nipping at each other as Gregory Bateson wonders: how do they know which is a friendly nip and which is a hostile bite? The monkeys know and usually (usually) so do we. But that depends on culture too.

changes & updates

A long while back, my friend Roohi asked me what the url for this blog was. When I told her, she said she thought it was a pretty clever play on words--"ancals--like annals, like the annals of anca"--and I smiled and nodded and pretended it was entirely intentional. I've decided to make "ancals" the official title. Thanks, Roohi!

Speaking of the unintentional, this month at 55 Words we've unintentionally put together an issue of animal-themed stories. In January we had a cluster of food-related stories, and in December we had some stories about sight and blindness. It's been interesting seeing these stories come together in clumps for no apparent reason.

Carciofes a la Malaise

Carciofes a la Malaise

Photo from my reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe, courtesy of Max Tzinman.

A Hint of Spring, A Touch of Phlegm

Well, it was my birthday today, and the weather was just as I like it: snow on the ground, spring in the air. Too bad I've got the last bits of bronchitis rattling around in me. Ah well.

Sunday night I read "A Meal" and "Lemon Tree Palace" at the Cornelia Street Cafe. As we were competing with Oscar night, and as one of the other readers was home with the plague, it was an intimate gathering, and very pleasant too. Chris Brandt read a series of poems on Thomas Jefferson, and another on Odysseus, and all were excellent. "Stars bouncing on waves" was a phrase from one of the latter that stayed with me.

After the reading, a few of us ate at the restaurant upstairs (delicious) and watched the snow come down on pretty Cornelia Street. A delightful night, with the only disconcerting bits in the fiction performed.

Telephone Bar

Last night I read "Go East" at the Library Lounge, a lovely performance space at Telephone Bar. It's an intimate room for about 30-40 people, lined with antique mirrors and candles, and there's a fireplace on the stage with more candles. My legs were trembling pretty hard (no one claimed to notice), and luckily, I didn't shake my way into the fireplace and die a firey death. I'd agonized all week over where to add he-said's and she-said's to make the dialogue more comprehensible to the ear (thanks to a seminar I'm taking on teaching listening!). In all, the reading was a fun time.

My next reading is coming up pretty soon! Very much looking forward to that too.

Upcoming Readings

Mark your calendars! I've got two readings coming up this month.

Monday, February 12, 8 pm- Telephone Bar- No Cover
149 2nd Ave (between 9th & 10th St.)

Sunday, Feburary 25, 6 pm- Cornelia Street Cafe- $6 (includes one drink)
29 Cornelia Street

Fun!

Tock Tick

My friend Tim's musical Tock Tick is opening at the Prospect Theater on February 5. The enticing blurb promises dragons, seagulls, and interstellar gondoliers, among other things. I am very much looking forward to this show.

Vancouver

M & I went to Seattle and Vancouver earlier this month. Here's a bit about Vancouver.

Vancouver is awash with construction cranes and gleaming green glass set before a ring of snowy mountains. The city is preparing for the 2010 Olympics, and it seems a city of pretty surfaces and fashionable people.

Our first day we wandered to touristy Gas Town (the closest approximation to an "old town" and hardly a central part of the city or dense mess of winding streets), and from there right into skid row. At the "steam clock", the major Gas Town landmark, a glassy-eyed man offered us a silver chain in exchange for food. As we moved along, there was a conflux of bearded hobos, gaunt prostitutes, men sleeping in the street; needle exchange and detox centers, shelters for women, and shelters for children . Payle$$ Meats sat beside Mission Possible. Balconies on a halfway house advertised nouns of encouragement: hope, faith, strength, courage.

This concentration of the needy struck us as odd, perhaps because the needy of New York are more diffuse and spread out, and perhaps more hidden. Here they seem to converge in one area, in stark contrast to the high-end gloss of the rest of downtown-- the joggers in Stanley Park, the highrises along Coal Harbour and in the West End, the yuppies of Yale Town. The rawness of skid row, I'm told, is older than the prospering sheen of the rest of the city. The institutions (the shelters, soup lines, etc.) are also relatively new.

We walked a good deal that first day, happy to end our wandering with martinis atop the Empire Landmark Hotel, slowly rotating over twinkling Vancouver. We admitted relief at not having been approached all afternoon. Later M. pondered the differences between the homeless in NYC subways and the homeless in Vancouver and other cities, hypothesizing that the relationship the homeless have with the subways here are unique and not present in other mass transit systems. We didn't take the Sky Train (though really it's more of a commuter rail) so we couldn't test the hypothesis.

The next day we were sore and achy and relied on the car. Abundant Granville Market (lunch: bratwurst and designer soda), foggy snow-crusted Kitsilano Beach (just lovely), and the UBC campus, separated from the city by a small forest. UBC was a bit of a disappointment; I enjoyed the small Belkin art gallery, warm and abuzz over a show opening, but we found the design of the campus odd-- parallel malls and apparently no welcoming central area. In the dark of the Thunderbird Arena, M. gave me my first driving lesson; I meant to go in circles and instead drove figure eights.

We finished our trip Saturday morning, with dim sum at Pink Pearl, touted as best dim sum in Vancouver. We were gluttonous fiends, feasting on all manner of shrimp, pork, taro, bean curd, and red bean paste-filled dumplings, in all manner of sticky and glutinous or crunchy wrappings. Two pots of tea and two bursting bellies later, were back on the road to Seattle, one last chance to gasp at cool snow-covered conifers, gauzy lakes, and violent mountain peaks.

Despite numerous comparisons to New York (Kitsilano=Park Slope; Mount Pleasant=Ditmas Park), the ecology and the landscape is wholly unique, and gives the place air of something fresh and vibrant. I can't imagine becoming complacent about those surroundings, but I suppose anything is possible.

Readers' Choice

The results from 55 Words' second Readers' Choice Awards are in!

Narcissus and Goldmund

A Reading Experience

I picked it off my parents' bookshelf. It was yellow and brittle, and the cover, designed by Milton Glaser, showed the blue profile of a shrewd-looking man, with red light falling on his nose and chin and where the whites of his eyes should have been. Someone had written "Ghost Motorcycle" on the title page, sideways.

I didn't know anything about the book-- the story, the setting, when Hesse had written it. Mostly I was intrigued by "ghost motorcycle" and what compelled some long ago reader to write those words on the inside of this book that now sat on my parents' shelf. It surely wasn't my mother or father--not their handwritings, not their idiosyncrasies.

I had only read one other book by Hesse, Siddhartha, but it didn't leave much of an impression on me. I was a distracted high school senior at the time, ready to leave the country. And the cover of this book gave away nothing-- the back copy was just piles of praise for Hesse. So I just dug in, as it should be.

I began reading Narcissus and Goldmund and was immediately engrossed by the medieval world and the innocent, young Goldmund. I enjoyed watching his internal evolution, though I found his teacher/friend Narcissus irritating (not that there is anything wrong with an unlikable character). Hesse writes philosophical novels and I bristled against his pitting art against philosophy, feeling against thought (can't art be logical? asked M when I told him about the book). The epiphanies at the end seemed to me forced, didactic, more rhetoric than human experience. But not entirely groundless, of course. Just needlessly simplified to make a point (methinks). I won't say whether art or philosophy wins, in case you plan on reading the book, but I don't think that would ruin the experience either way.

When I was in an early part of the novel, I asked my mother whether she had read it and she said once, in Romanian. A powerful book, she said, but she wouldn't read it again. At the time I hadn't reached the powerful parts (they are there)-- lust, love, and most important, the relationship we have with death and the creation of art. I would echo my mother's estimation. The book is most definitely worth a read, and not just for the sex and death, though they are the main players and the plague is one of the most haunting characters. But it is not going on my list of books to reread. I never found out what "ghost motorcycle" had to do with anything in the book (maybe nothing, maybe some odd mechanism for remembering a grocery list). Perhaps it was some connection only that reader and his or her experience could make with the book. That connection, that meeting of ideas between reader and writer, should be a relatively unique one. Perhaps that is what ultimately irritates me about didactic fiction, that I feel I'm being told what to think, what conclusions to make, rather than leading me to further thinking and my own conclusions. Ah well.

Focus

Whew! Things are getting pretty busy around here. I'm finishing my master's thesis. Vaguely and very broadly, it's related to politeness, but that's all I should say at this juncture. I'm applying for writers' residencies for the summer, and the deadlines are soon after the thesis deadline, so that should be interesting. As a result, I may not be able to post as frequently as before (which I know is not so often, but I prefer a little restraint anyhow).

M. & I are off to Seattle and Vancouver next week, for a much-needed change of scenery. Hope to give an update on that when I get back, as well as jot down some thoughts on Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, which I finished last week. I may go through fiction withdrawal next semester, as I'm moving into my last leg of grad school. But hopefully I'll continue to make room for everything!

Oh, oh, last update! I've got another reading bubbling up. Will post the details later this month. It's at a place that recently featured ukuleles, raunchy Flemish poetry, and Ovid on a Celtic harp. Wee!

Readers' Choice

We're running our second Readers' Choice Awards over at 55 Words. Voting opened December 22 and will close January 20, 2007. It's been fun watching the votes come in-- take a look at the stories and send in your picks! Hooray for reading!

Berlin

On the first night of Hannukah, the family Szilagyi saw Lou Reed's Berlin at St. Ann's Warehouse, which has been promoted as "an evening to press between the crumbling leaves of fall." Indeed, with DUMBO all foggy under the Manhattan Bridge, the slow polished melodies and gritty explosions seemed just right-- if only it hadn't been unseasonably warm. Members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus performed as well and I was mildly surprised to see a youngin' from Spoke the Hub up there, singing "Sad Song". I had to wonder what little Timmy thought of the occasionally lurid lyrics (bad pun, I know, but my grandmother did think we were going to see "Lurid's Berlin"--wee!). After the quasi-rock opera finished, the adult performers came back for an encore. Lou et al. sang "Sweet Jane" and "Rock Minuet" and Antony sang something divine in between.

I also received "Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes" which has been a fun read so far. I'm looking forward to Clafoutis Grandmere a la Virginia Woolf.

Cover Story

A 55-word story from 55 Words is on the cover of the January 2007 issue of The Writer, as it "nicely sums up the appeal of flash fiction." How nice!