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?

Strong’s pet squirrel

Of all the people who know something about George Templeton Strong, I wonder how many know he had a pet squirrel when he was a young man? It was a black squirrel, and he first mentioned it on January 31, 1847, when he was 27 years old:

Going to be sick, I think, so specially wretched have I been today with every sort of horrid dyspeptic sensation. My little black friend Teufelchen—or whatever is his proper style and title—I mean my black squirrel, is an invalid too, and has been sitting grunting on my lap all the afternoon in great affliction.

The next thing we hear of him is on October 10 of the same year, when Teufelchen has passed away.

My poor little black squirrel expired after a tedious illness Friday night, poor little thing; he was so weak and unable to move that he couldn’t have enjoyed life much. Wonder what the matter with him could have been. It’s very unpleasant to see a pet animal sick, especially when he’s quite tame and gentle and seems to appeal to one for help and comfort.

I seem to see more black or melanistic squirrels in New York City than I used to in Cambridge, and I imagined that the griminess of New York, especially in the past, might have favored darker squirrels, just as soot in England led to the development of the peppered moth.* But there seems to be no basis to this theory.

*Quick digression: Margaret Drabble is one of my favorite authors, but her novel The Peppered Moth, based on the life of her mother, is excruciatingly depressing. If you haven’t read Drabble before, don’t start with The Peppered Moth. Start with The Realms of Gold, The Ice Age, or The Radiant Way, the first volume of a trilogy that continues with A Natural Curiosity and concludes with The Gates of Ivory.

Strong reviews a fire

George Templeton Strong was known as a fine music reviewer, and his writings on music have been collected and published. But as the editors of his diary noted in 1952, he was also an accomplished reviewer of the fires that broke out frequently in 19th century Manhattan.

Though they found the 15-year-old Strong’s description of the Great Fire of 1835 (pictured) disappointing, they went to say, “He soon became an enthusiastic fire-goer and in time developed a real connoisseurship, disdaining mean and uninteresting fires and taking a great interest in the really spectacular ones.” As later entries show, he would get irritated when members of the “loaferage” blocked his view of a good fire.

This is the best of Strong’s fire reviews I’ve found so far, from December 29, 1842:

It was snowing when I got out at eleven and there was a great fire burning downtown, and never was anything more splendid than the effect it produced. The whole sky was lit up with a bright soft crimson glow, almost of uniform brilliancy. The snow reflected it back—streets and roofs were all tinted with the same color. It had a most magnificent and unearthly appearance. I was told the fire was in Wall Street, and started off on a run, expecting to find the office on fire and the old gentleman wringing his hands in front of it. The snow was deep and my run soon subsided into a trot, and then I took the first cab I could find and came downtown. Found that the fire was on Water Street, five or six stores blazing, and a fine sight it was. It was the worst fire we’ve had for a long time. The wind was very strong at N.E. The engines were retarded by the snow—the hydrants were many of them frozen—and at one time the fire crossed both Maiden Lane and Water Street, but it was checked in that direction. The walls kept each other up for some time but at last one gave way, and then four or five large stores came thundering down with a prolonged roar that seemed to shake the ground, and the change from the blaze and brightness of active conflagration to smothering smoke and comparative darkness, only lit up by a perfect hailstorm of sparks and cinders, and then to see great masses of thick smoke light up as the flames rose again among the ruins and eddy round and sweep off before the northeast wind till the glare of the burning buildings was fully displayed again, was very fine....

Strong on the panic of 1837

The more things change… Here is George Templeton Strong on the Wall Street panic of 1837, when he was 17 years old. He is writing on May 4.

Terrible news in Wall Street. [John] Fleming, late president of the Mechanics Bank, found dead in his bed this morning. Some say prussic acid; others (and the coroner’s jury) say “mental excitement” and apoplexy. Anyhow there’s a run on the bank—street crowded—more feeling of alarm and despondency in Wall Street than has appeared yet. The bank is to be kept open till five o’clock; politic move, that. Fears entertained that tomorrow the attack will be general on all the banks; if so they’ll go down and then all the banks from Maine to Louisiana must follow—universal ruin. People talk ominously about rebellions and revolutions on this side of the Atlantic, and if they come on this side, political disturbances will soon break out on the other.

There are matters of no little weight depending on the doings of Wall Street for the next four or five days. I wish I were ten or fifteen years older.