ams - commemoration - July 24- July 30, 2023

 

30623 - ams - commemoration digest - Life and Times of Czelaw Miloz

 

29623 - ams - commemoration digest - The man behind 'The Little Prince', Michael Madhusudhan Datta - The Polyglot, and the life and times of Vasko Popa.

 

24623 - ams - commemoration digests - Three Writers - Julia Kristeva, Anita Desai and Ernesto Sábato

 

22623 - ams - commemoration - Feel inspired by Octavia E Butler's life

Butler was raised by her mother who worked as a maid and her grandmother. Butler remembered accompanying her mother to work at wealthy homes in Pasadena and having to enter through the back door. Her mother, who only had three years of formal schooling, worked incredibly hard to make sure Butler had more opportunities and a better education than she had.  At school, she was a shy and  lonely student who struggled with dyslexia. The school library was her second home. She had an endless hunger for stories and frequently made up her own while sitting on her grandmother’s porch. By the age of ten she could be found carrying around a large notebook, writing down stories whenever she got a free moment. When she was 13 years, she submitted her first story for publication. She used to get up at two A.M. every morning to write and went on to do a series of odd jobs for livelihood. She once told PBS that her life motto was, “Do the thing that you love, and do it as well as you possibly can and be persistent about it.” Since 2008, Butler’s annotations, notes, research materials, and drafts of novels have been housed at the Huntington Library in California.  You may visit this link explore the world of Octavia Estelle Butler 

 

https://huntington.org/exhibition/octavia-e-butler-telling-my-stories

 

 

21623 - ams - Creativity and Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a lover of classical literature and her translations of classical writers such as Sappho and Euripides are popular. A high-school encounter with a Latin instructor, who agreed to teach her ancient Greek over the lunch hour, led to her passionate embrace of classical and Hellenic literature. Carson is a private person. She prefers to be alone. When her husband is traveling, Carson will call and tell him, “I miss you, but I’m having a great time.” Carson’s most popular book is the “Autobiography of Red,” which takes its cue from the legend of Hercules. The story is retold as a modern times and Carson makes some significant choices. In 2001, Carson published 'The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos' , a verse novel which was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize. Carson continues to be an important and exciting translator of classical writers. Carson considers herself as a visual, not a verbal, artist. It is interesting to note that a new comic-book version of Euripides’s classic 'The Trojan Women', is published which us collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson. It is a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare.

 

21623 - ams - Ian McEwan and Lessons

 'The Cockroach' by Ian McEwan borrows heavily from Kafka's 'Metamorphosis'. The opening lines of the novel is a testimony to this - “That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.” Ian McEwan is also inspired by the satirical tradition of Jonathan Swift when he compares politicians to cockroaches. It is a 'toxic metaphor' used to describe the British politics during the Brexit-era. Ian McEwan has been nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize six times, winning it in 1998 for 'Amsterdam'. McEwan’s new novel, 'Lessons' was published on September 13, 2022. The story is told through the experiences of a single man, and it covers a lengthy human timeline from post-WWII to the pandemic. The book explores memories of love and scars of childhood trauma. The publisher Jonathan Cape describes 'Lessons' as "a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man's lifetime". Ian McEwan denies that the book is autobiographical but says that he had 'raided bits of his own life'. He wrote it during the three lockdowns and the politics of the lockdown finds a place in the novel.

20623 - ams - commemoration - Lillian Hellman - The Socially Conscious Dramatist

 

Lillian Hellman was the first woman to be admitted to the club of American dramatists, writing a hit play when she was 29. She was a playwright, a screenwriter and a memoirist and a political activist. Her popularity is based on the two enormously successful plays from the 1930s: 'The Children's Hour' (1934) and 'The Little Foxes' (1939). 'The Children's Hour', was Hellman's first play. It is the story of two women running a school for girls whose lives are ruined by a malicious student spreading the lie that they are lovers. The play was banned in London, Chicago, and Boston. 'The Children's Hour' was considered too scandalous for the Pulitzer prize. It was an immense hit in Paris and New York running on Broadway for almost two years. Like many writers of her generation, Hellman was an outspoken leftist in the 1930s whose political convictions often landed her in trouble. Towards the end of the career, she began writing the four volumes of legendarily unreliable memoirs, 'An Unfinished Woman', 'Pentimento', 'Scoundrel Time' and 'Maybe'. All four were critical and commercial successes, 'An Unfinished Woman' winning the National Book award in 1969. Hellman's plays are still frequently staged around the world.

17623 - ams - commemoration - Sara Lidman - The True Voice of Swedish Literature

Sara Lidman as a child suffered from tuberculosis and spent some time in a sanatorium, where she read a lot and listened to the radio. She had worked working as a waitress and post office worker and as a theatre trainee in Stockholm. Her marriage and the publication of her first novel (The Tar Still) happened almost at the same time. In 1960-61, she spent some time in South Africa, where she got to know Nadine Gordimer. She was involved in politics during her stay in South Africa and was imprisoned. She was released on the condition that she will never return to South Africa. She took up other causes such as opposition to the Vietnam War and opposition to nuclear weapons. She wrote some twenty novels, often about her home region, as well as articles and plays. Lidman was interested in reporting social conditions rather than writing fiction. She was one of the first Swedes in the 1960s to promote solidarity with South Africa, for example with 'Jag och min son' (N), 1961, and with Vietnam in her travel book 'Samtal i Hanoi', 1966. Her works have been translated into several languages, and she was the recipient of several literary awards. Her last book was “The Root of Life” in 1996.

17623 - ams - commemorations - The life and times of Dorothy M Richardson

 

Almost a hundred a years ago, a publishing company brought out a little book about a student teacher in Germany. The name of the book was 'Pointed Roofs' and the author's name was Dorothy M Richardson. The story was narrated through the consciousness of the heroine. This new style made the readers perplexed. Critics found it difficult to convey the charm of the book. It was the first book to be labelled stream of consciousness, even though Richardson hated that phrase. But the stream of consciousness became a literary genre which was later found in the novels of Virginia Woolf especially Mrs Dalloway. Today, four authors are interlinked because of this literary genre - James Joyce, Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Dorothy M. Richardson. 'Pointed Roofs' was the first of a series called Pilgrimage, a gigantic 13- volume semi-autobiographical narrative. Her novels can also be treated as a slice of history. She always portrayed the struggles and the joys of a lonely female worker in London. H.G Wells was her friend, and it is presumed that they had an affair. Today we can witness a blue plaque at Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, where she lived, opposite Yeats, in 1905 and 1906. She has mentioned that across the alley from her flat, she could see W. B. Yeats writing by the light of "two immensely tall, thick white candles." She died on June 17, 1957, alone, greatly forgotten and in poverty.

after - the memory space - commemorations 23523