Cherry blossoms

Since Jenn and I became members, we’ve been spending a lot more time at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. A couple of weeks ago, the trees on the Cherry Esplanade were bare. Last weekend, the branches were covered with tight red buds, while several cherry trees near the Japanese pond were already blossoming. And now, the BBG’s nifty CherryWatch Blossom Status Map indicates that the esplanade should be pretty spectacular.

The Sakura Matsuri cherry blossom festival is this coming weekend. But take note that the grass police won’t let you sit on the grass anywhere but on the Cherry Esplanade—and they won’t let you spread out a towel or blanket even there. (Does sitting on a towel or blanket hurt the grass any more than sitting on it without? Seems doubtful.)

Margaret Drabble quits fiction

I was troubled to find out recently that Margaret Drabble has decided to stop writing novels, claiming that she is afraid of repeating herself as she grows older. The story was reported in the Guardian and in somewhat snarkier form in the Telegraph.

Margaret Drabble has been one of my favorite writers for many years, and I borrowed the title of one of her novels for this blog. Though I haven’t enjoyed her later novels as much as I did The Ice Age, The Realms of Gold, and the Radiant Way trilogy, it still bothers me to think that there won’t be any more. Maybe because all good things come to an end, and I don’t like to be reminded of it. Or maybe because it seems an illustration of how life—advancing age, her husband’s illness, the long unpleasantness between Drabble and her sister A.S. Byatt—triumphs over art. The undercurrent of melancholy has always been pretty strong in Drabble’s work, but she created some beautiful art from it.

At least there’s still her memoir The Pattern in the Carpet to read, as soon as it’s available in the States. 

Interviewed by Laura

A few days ago I was pleased to hear from Laura Cococcia, who blogs at Laura Reviews, that she had enjoyed my book A Basket of Leaves. She is using it to help prepare for a trip to Ghana—one of the purposes I had hoped it would be used for. (I’d rather have bookstores shelve it in Travel than in Literary Criticism, which I think better suits the spirit if not the letter of the project.)

I was even more pleased to be asked for an online interview in Laura’s Awesome Authors series, which appeared today. Many thanks! (And have a great time in Ghana.)

PEN World Voices Festival

I’ve been going to the PEN World Voices Festival in New York for several years, and blogged about it quite a lot last year. But despite the scale of the event (160 writers this year, from 41 countries) I’m surprised how many serious readers and writers haven’t heard about it.

So this is to let you know that this year’s PEN World Voices Festival is taking place from April 27 to May 3. The full program is available online and many of the events are free.

I’ll be covering some of the festival for the Words Without Borders blog, although this year’s schedule doesn’t include much African literature in translation, which is my usual beat for WWB. Here are some of the events that look intriguing to me:

Cod, Orange Groves, and Olives with Mark Kurlansky (free)
The Work of Andrey Platonov with Michael Ondaajte et al. (free)
Kafka in America with Louis Begley, Colm Toibin, et al. (free)
Tribute to Harold Pinter (free)
Mark Z. Danielewski and Rick Moody ($10)
Krik? Krak! (Haitian storytelling, free)
Is Nonfiction Literature? with Philip Gourevitch, Colum McCann, et al. ($15)

Thoreau and the toads

As a sort of follow-up to my post on Camus and the toads, today we have Thoreau and the Toads: a poem by David Wagoner that’s featured on Garrison Keillor’s site The Writer’s Almanac.

The poem ends with Thoreau tying his rawhide shoelaces into a square knot. From this we can conclude that Thoreau was at least 36 years old at the time the poem takes place, as it took him that long to learn the difference between a granny knot and a square knot. On July 25, 1853, he wrote a lengthy entry on the troubles he has had with shoelaces coming untied.

I thought of strings with recurved prickles and various other remedies myself. At last the other day it occurred to me that I would try an experiment, and, instead of tying two simple knots over the other the same way, putting the end which fell to the right over each time, that I would reverse the process, and put it under the other. Greatly to my satisfaction, the experiment was perfectly successful, and from that time my shoe-strings have given me no trouble, except sometimes in untying them at night.

On telling this to others I learned that I had been all the while tying what is called a granny’s knot, for I had never been taught to tie any other, as sailors’ children are; but now I had blundered into a square knot, I think they called it, or two running slip-nooses. Should not all children be taught this accomplishment, and an hour, perchance, of their childhood be devoted to instruction in tying knots?