My first tulip of the year.

Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes is complex though its simple language and slimness might suggest otherwise. Told through scenes centered around the tea ceremony, the novel examines many triangles. Below, I will try to tease them apart:

Husband-Wife-Lover #1
Husband-Lover-Son
Husband-Lover #1-Lover #2
Husband-Lover #2-Daughter of Lover #2
Son-Father’s Lover #1- Father’s Lover #2
Son- Father’s Lover #1-potential fiancé
Son-Father’s- Father’s Lover #2-Daughter of Lover #2
Son-Daughter of Lover #2-potential fiancé
Etc
Etc

The list is potentially endless but shows us how just like the pottery that is passed down from person to person to be used in the tea ceremony, so too are our entanglements passed down. And the outcome is often that like the fragile pottery we are either made present and live through our history or are shattered to pieces, broken and unused. The scene between the protagonist, Kikuji and the daughter of his father’s lover (who then became his lover), Fumiko, plays this out:

Kikuji could not bring himself to say that the Shino bowl was like her mother. But the two bowls before them were like the souls of his father and her mother.

The tea bowls, three or four hundred years old, were sound and healthy, and they called up no morbid thoughts. Life seemed to stretch taut over them, however, in a way that was almost sensual.

Seeing his father and Fumiko’s mother in the bowls, Kikuji felt that they had raised two beautiful ghosts and placed them side by side.

The tea bowls were here, present, and the present reality of Kikuji and Fumiko, facing across the bowls, seemed immaculate too.

Evenutally, Fumiko shatters one of the bowls which had belonged to her mother and the spell is broken but not soon enough for Fumiko. Instead, the follows the only path which is certain to her and that is the path that leads to her death, leaving behind the two who began the novel Kikuji and his nemesis, the asexual Kurimoto, his father’s first mistress.

Nature Lessons is a novel of self-discovery and healing old wounds. Set in Ohio and South Africa, the narrative unfolds as Kate Jensen struggles to understand why she is incapable of putting down roots. After she receives a desperate letter from her mother, Kate travels back to her homeland of South Africa to try to unravel a 30-year mystery and find the mother she lost long ago.

Slipping back and forth in time, we move easily from past to present and back again as we follow Kate and her mother through their lives together and apart. As readers we learn along with Kate what drove her mother to her overwhelming paranoia and we learn why Kate herself fears commitment. It is a touching and intriguing story, layering the personal and the political as both Kate and the nation of South Africa search for truth and reconciliation.

Well, so in love with Tell Me am I, that it is hard for me to write about this collection without sounding over the top but I do fully believe that Mary Robison’s stories should be required reading for all human beings inhabiting the planet Earth. Robison typically begins in media res and ends abruptly—yet the reader never feels cheated or left without meaning. Instead, the reader feels as though a slice of the world has been illuminated.

The key to her brilliant writing is subtle characterization and dialogue so real it is as if one is hearing it over the fence instead of reading it on the page. Her characters do not exist as specters in a book, rather they live in this world and are given real words to express themselves.

Though one often feels heartbroken at the end of one of these stories, it is not because Robison is pushing sentimentality. Rather it is that something has been experienced—a catharsis.

There was not one of these 30 stories that I did not love but the one I loved the most was the very last one, “Yours,” which left me breathless, gasping, really, when as his young wife lies dying, Clark stumbles on the truth he would like to share with her:

At the telephone, Clark had a clear view out back and down to the porch. He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.

New work this week: Denial in Triangle by the hugely talented Jordan E. Rosenfeld

My pal Alia Yunis has a reading at the LA Festival of Books this weekend. If you are nearby, please go and check it out. You will not be disappointed. She is an amazingly gifted writer. I wish I could go!

here are the details:

Emerging Voices Fellows Reading at LA Times Festival of Books

Sunday, April 24 @ 3:45
Etc. Stage
LA Times Festival of Books
UCLA campus
Los Angeles, CA
Free admission, open to the public

PEN USA’s 2005 Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellows will take the stage for their first public reading at the LA Times Festival of Books. Designed in 1995 for talented writers at the beginning stages of their careers, the Emerging Voices program pairs each Fellow with an established literary mentor, creating a unique and invaluable one-on-one relationship. This mentorship is augmented by courses at the Writers Program at UCLA Extension, PEN USA’s own writing workshops and master classes, and meetings with agents, publishers and authors.

“Over the years, Emerging Voices has produced published authors at a rate equal to or exceeding the most selective college MFA programs,” says Program Director Eitan Kadosh. “It’s a remarkably successful program.”

In addition to having seven books published, including critically acclaimed best-selling novels, EV alumni have been featured in scores of journals, newspapers, and anthologies nationwide and garnered a prestigious Stegner Fellowship, a Stonewall book award, and several Sundance Writing Fellowships.

This year’s Emerging Voices group is one of PEN’s most promising ever. Educator Cynthia Bond is editing her first novel, Ruby, which explores the effects of tyranny and racism in a Texas town. Juwanza Dumisani is Director of the Anansi Poetry Workshop at the World Stage and is working on his first novel, Nails, Flowers, Blood, and Stone, a tale set in the Motown of the 1960s. Robbie Frandsen, a community re-emntry specialist is writing, Loving Thin These Walls, the real-time memoir of her experience as the mother of a boy accused of murder. Teacher Qevin Oji is halfway through Moving Days, an Angel City coming of age. Lan Tran is a versatile performance artist whose tragic-comic Lone Stars explores the upbringing of a Vietnamese Texan girl. Screenwriter Alia Yunis’ book, The Key To My House, tells the remarkable story of an elderly Arab-American woman, her nightly visits by Scheherazade, and her efforts to determine who should get the family home when she passes away.

Emerging Voices is made possible by the generous support of the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation, the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program, and the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.

A new record! Catherine Ndereba of Kenya is the first woman to ever win the Boston Marathon four times. Hailu Negussie, an Ethiopian, won the man’s race.

We finally have daffodils.

I love him.

Darby burying his bone.

If you are not Canadian, it’s possible that you have never heard of Terry Fox and that is a shame. He lost a leg to cancer when he was 18 and in an attempt to raise money for cancer research, 25 years ago he began a run across Canada which he called the Marathon of Hope. He ran for 3,339 miles when the cancer resurfaced in his lungs and he had to stop. He died several months later at the age of 22. Now, Douglas Coupland has written a book about Terry Fox; it is called, simply, Terry:

A visual artist as well as a writer, Coupland has produced a polished scrapbook, filled with photos and Fox family memorabilia. Coupland also re-shot Fox’s fraying running clothes, his one tattered sock, his prosthetic limb, transforming ordinary items into icons. The unattached artificial leg, in particular, looks like part of a knight’s armour.

It sounds like a fitting testament to an inspiring young man. Coupland is donating his royalties to The Terry Fox Foundation.

Well, I just think the news about the cancer-fighting drug, Avastin, is outstanding and I hope it continues to show more success–Wider success claimed for rising cancer drug:

A new study shows Genentech’s cancer-fighting drug, Avastin, enables women with advanced breast cancer to live four months longer without their cancer getting worse, an advantage likely to prompt widespread interest in the medicine among cancer patients.

The study’s release prompted the National Cancer Institute to issue a statement Friday. “This is an important step in our journey to ultimately eliminate the suffering and death due to cancer,” said NCI director Andrew von Eschenbach