writing literature essay Martin Luther King Letter Birmingham Jail George Orwell Shooting Elephant Ted Conover Arthur Miller Death Salesman Malcolm X Ernest Hemingway Sherman Alexie David Sedaris John Updike Nancy Mairs Gabriel García Márquez Raymond Carver Anton Chekhov Charles Bukowski T C Boyle Gerald Locklin Ralph Ellison James Baldwin Joyce Carol Oates Bob Dylan Kafka Metamorphosis Jeff Wall Dorothea Lange Tillie Olsen Flannery O'Connor Junot Diaz James Joyce Tim O'Brien Andre Kertesz
Once a week (not really) I'll put up a brief description of a magazine of interest, usually a literary magazine. One that takes submissions from people not their uncle. Update: February 16, 2015 Zyzzyva has the clever tag line, "The Last Word: West Coast Writers and Artists." Based in San Francisco, they aim to publish "mostly West Coast writers," Oscar Villalon of the magazine says. I just happened upon this article, "San Francisco’s Zyzzyva Turns 30 with Literary Aplomb," from KQED, January 9, 2015. The Washington Post also reported "Zyzzyva Reaches No. 100," April 21, 2014.
Update: February 8, 2015 I posted Every Writers Resource a couple of weeks ago, but it deserves one more post. It provides a new listing for a literary magazine at least every week. On February 7th they provided information about The Bleeding Lion: A Journal of Arts and Letters. At both sites you can learn about the magazine's interests and submission guidelines. When you're at Every Writers Resource subscribe to their email updates. It's helpful to readers and potential contributors.
Update: January, 31, 2015 Rolling Stone, January 30, 2015, announces: "For the first time ever,Rolling Stoneis opening up [their] vast archive of award-winning music, political and cultural reporting — dating back five decades, to our 1967 launch — online for free. In collaboration with Google Play, articles by notable writers including Hunter S. Thompson, Cameron Crowe and Matt Taibbi are now available to read on Android and iOS phones and tablets via the Google Play Newsstand, Google's news reader app optimized for phones and tablets. Additionally,Rolling Stone's daily coverage of music, politics, movies, TV, sports and culture is available on the Play Newsstand.
"What Work Is" by poet Philip Levine, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2011-12, is worth reading. At this page an audio version captures Levine introducing the poem. No matter what class you're in, you might like to read it and listen to it. You can also watch him reading it to AFL-CIO members. Here is an interview Levine did with Bill Moyers about the American worker. Good sites with Levine biographical information and examples of his poetry: American Academy of Poets, Poetry Foundation, U.S. Poet Laureate program, and the Bill Moyers programwith poems about work. Here is a profile of Levine, below, from the PBS NewsHour.
When curious about the authors you are reading always check the Paris Review to see if they had ever taken questions from the magazine. Philip Levine did. Here's an excerpt from the interview that appeared in the Paris Review, Summer 1988: INTERVIEWER: In Twentieth Century Pleasures, Robert Hass says that rhythm in poetry provides revolutionary ground through its direct access to the unconscious . . . PHILIP LEVINE: We all agree with that. Rhythm is deep and it touches us in ways that we don’t understand. We know that language used rhythmically has some kind of power to delight, to upset, to exalt, and it was that kind of rhythmic language that first excited me. But I didn’t encounter it first in poetry . . . perhaps simply in speech, in prayer, preaching. That made me want to create it. My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself. I spoke them and I memorized them. I constantly changed them. I would go out and work on my rain poem and improve it. INTERVIEWER: Rain was always a favorite theme? LEVINE: Rain was my first, and I guess, a constant theme. But things like wind in the winter, the trees, and my sense of relationship with them. You could actually see the stars, we were on the outskirts of Detroit, there were no factories around. So you could see the stars and, oh the world is, you know, a cosmos, is immense. INTERVIEWER: When did you start writing? LEVINE: Writing was something I did in school with some enjoyment because I did it well. And then, you know, I put it aside, the way you do—I guess I started getting interested in girls, what have you. I don’t remember doing any writing at the ages of say, sixteen or seventeen. I rediscovered poetry at the age of eighteen. INTERVIEWER: Do you know a lot of poetry by heart? LEVINE: My memory has faded badly. I used to know dozens of poems by heart. I memorized them when I worked in factories and recited them to myself. INTERVIEWER: Did you work in an auto factory? LEVINE: Yes. I worked for Cadillac, in their transmission factory, and for Chevrolet. You could recite poems aloud in there. The noise was so stupendous. Some people singing, some people talking to themselves, a lot of communication going on with nothing, no one to hear. INTERVIEWER: How long did you work in the factories? LEVINE: I started doing factory work at about the age of fourteen. When I turned college age I had to make a decision about what I was going to do about my life. My high-school teachers encouraged me to go to college. I stood in line at Wayne State University to enroll, and when I got up to the head of the line, this woman said, “Can I help you?” I said, “I’d like to go to college.” She said, “Do you want a bachelor’s?” I said, “I already have a place to live.” Because to me a bachelor’s was a small apartment. I had no idea that there was such a thing as a bachelor’s degree. The people at Wayne were incredibly savvy. Instead of laughing at me, she explained what my options were and what bachelor’s meant. They were used to us shlumps out of the city of Detroit. There, at college, I encountered modern poetry. And I loved it. Loved it.
Levine at Wayne State University, Detroit,
in 1950, the year he graduated from the college.
INTERVIEWER: Where does a poem begin for you? Do you take notes for poems? Do you get up in the middle of the night? LEVINE: They begin in different ways, and over the course of my writing life the process has changed. When I was a kid speaking poetry I never wrote it down; those poems began with a phrase and then I would try to employ the vocabulary and the structure of the phrase to create a fabric of repetitions. When I started writing poetry at eighteen, the poems seemed to spring outward from a visual image. It was that precise visual image I was out to capture, that’s what excited me; the poem became the means for pushing forward the images I wanted the reader to devour. Then Yeats set me on fire. I mean the language is exalted, yet it sounds like somebody talking and singing at the same time. I thought, This is it. And I still kind of feel this is it. This is the perfection of form. It’s got speech, song, it’s high rhetoric and yet it doesn’t sound remote or false. A poem like [Yeats's] “Easter, 1916.” I said, Jesus Christ, this is so much what I want. It doesn’t matter about his stupid attitudes. He wrote one poem about his daughter, such a sexist poem. But it’s so beautifully done. I remember telling a woman friend of mine, “Isn’t this an incredible poem?” And she got very angry with me; “It’s so sexist,” she said, “look at this!” I said, sure, it’s like Eliot’s anti-Semitic stuff, “the Jew squats on the windowsill”; fuck you, Eliot, but the poem is exquisite. Then somewhere in my forties I hit a kind of phase of automatic writing. I would really be taken, sort of seized, and just write the stuff! It would just come pouring out, hundreds of lines. Then the process of making a poem became quite different: it became seeing what was inside this great blast of language and imagery, and finding the core. INTERVIEWER How did you then revise? What was your process of shaping? LEVINE The process was reducing this, say, 500 lines to 150, tailoring and shaping it, finding the central imagery and throwing away what seemed excess or what was just part of the road to getting there. Then putting it together in some kind of dramatic, coherent, or narrative structure. That was fun, too.
INTERVIEWER: You treat some of the great novelistic themes—war and peace, power and class struggle and oppression in society, the shifts of luck and fortune with time—in your poems, particularly in your long poems. LEVINE: What I regard as novelistic about my work is the telling of tales, which is utterly natural to me, and so is the presentation of characters. The other day when I was testifying in court in a civil disobedience case, the district attorney objected to my presentation because, he said, it was narrative. The judge sustained the objection; I tried to ask him what was wrong with a narrative, but he wouldn’t answer. I was deeply wounded. How can a poet or fiction writer tell the truth in court if he or she can’t present the events in a meaningful sequence, which is what a story is? The message is: Stay out of court. One of the aspects of my own poetry I like best is the presence of people who don’t seem to make it into other people’s poems. Much of our recent poetry seems totally without people. Except for the speaker, no one is there. There’s a lot of snow, a moose walks across the field, the trees darken, the sun begins to set, and a window opens. Maybe from a great distance you can see an old woman in a dark shawl carrying an unrecognizable bundle into the gathering gloom. That’s one familiar poem. In others you get people you’d sooner not meet. They live in the suburbs of a large city, have two children, own a Volvo stationwagon; they love their psychiatrists but are having an affair with someone else. Their greatest terror is that they’ll become like their parents and maybe do something dreadful, like furnish the house in knotty pine. You read twenty of those poems and you’re yearning for snow fields and moose tracks. INTERVIEWER: Do you feel a split between your life as a political person and your life as a poet? LEVINE: I’m cowardly. I should stop paying my taxes. I know that the government in Washington is full of terrible people with terrible plans. They will murder people here and abroad to gain more power. Those who have dominated our country most of my adult life are interested in maintaining an empire, subjugating other people, enslaving them if need be, and finally killing those who protest so that wealthy and powerful Americans can go on enjoying their advantages over others. I’m not doing a thing about it. I’m not a man of action; It finally comes down to that. I’m not so profoundly moral that I can often overcome my fears of prison or torture or exile or poverty. I’m a contemplative person who goes in the corner and writes. What can we do? I guess we can hang on and encourage each other, dig in, protest in every peaceful way possible, and hope that people are better than they seem. We can describe ourselves as horribly racist people, which we are, as imperialists, which we have been and are, but we can also see ourselves as bountiful, gracious, full of wit, courage, resourcefulness. I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry. INTERVIEWER: The location and the tone of “They Feed They Lion” indicates a shift in your versification and in the intensity of your voice. How did the poem come about? LEVINE: I had been to Detroit after the riots in 1968 and I was struck by a number of things. One was how scared I was. The riots took place in exactly the same neighborhood I grew up in. I went back with a set of rather standard emotions, or standard for me anyway, about how wonderful it was that black people were letting white Americans know what this place was all about. But when I got there I was scared. People were looking at me like I was exactly what I was—middle class, middle-aged, white. There was a kind of boiling up of different emotions that I hadn’t expected, and it was that complexity of emotions that really produced the poem—my own rage toward America, my own anger. I mean, this was the America of the Vietnam War, and to me it was as though we were fighting two racist wars, one in Vietnam and one in the cities of America. We didn’t have Asians, we had blacks to persecute and kill and firebomb, or morally, mentally, and emotionally firebomb. So a lot of those emotions just boiled up. I wrote the poem very quickly. I went to a party, a wedding party, and I got very drunk, and smoked a lot of dope, which is something I rarely do (I find it bad for my memory), and I had a good time. There was a lot of dancing at this party, and I danced and danced. It was a time of crazy dance parties. I went home and in the middle of the night I woke up with the idea for the poem. But I was still a wreck. I didn’t try to write it, and in fact I waited perhaps two or three days with the notion that there was this poem, it was going to look this way, the line was going to be influenced by Christopher Smart’s line in “Jubilate Agno.” I waited about three days, and then I felt really quite sane, fit, smart, and I wrote the poem, probably in an hour, hour and a half.
Photograph of Levine for his poetry collection The Mercy (1999).
The book was dedicated to his mother and the photo was taken by his wife.
INTERVIEWER: You’ve written a great deal about family life. LEVINE: Yes, about both my families, the one I was born into and the one my wife and I have created. To me they truly feel like two different entities. One exists mainly in memory, for most of those people have died. I’m very powerfully tied to the one we’ve created, to my kids, and now to the families they’re creating. INTERVIEWER: It’s very hard to have a clear sense of the family you come from because you seem to fictionalize it in your poems. It’s not consistent. For example, did your father leave your family when you were a small child? LEVINE: My father died when I was very young. But often the speaker in my poems is not me; when it’s me, he died, and when the speaker is someone else the father could have done anything. As a child of five his dying was leaving; I didn’t understand death. You’re absolutely right, that family is often fictionalized, partly to protect the innocent or the guilty, however you see those people. I’ve invented relatives I never had so I could talk about the ones I did have without the fear of insulting people I love. I have one relative I love a great deal who did a variety of things the world might call awful. I don’t see his or her behavior that way at all; I’m deeply moved by his or her rebelliousness and audacity. INTERVIEWER: Let’s talk about the Tom Jefferson poem, your most recent. LEVINE: I went back to Detroit last October. I discovered in some of the areas that had been burned out back in ’67 or torn down for an urban renewal that never took place, people had moved back in, leading what was almost a semi-rural life. Much of what’s in the city was absent; there were no stores around, very few houses, no large buildings. Lots of empty spaces, vacant lots, almost like the Detroit I knew during the war. And people were farming, too, gardening on a scale. They had truck gardens, kept animals, what have you. It was right near the ballpark, so at night when the Tigers were playing there would be thousands of people there. Then they would get in their cars and leave; the place would be almost empty. I met a guy who lived in one of these houses. He didn’t own it or rent it, and in fact he didn’t even know who owned it. He described his life there, and the poem rose out of the conversation we had. It also came out of the hope that the city might be reborn inside itself, out of its own ruins, phoenix-like, rising out of its own ashes. Except I don’t see it in heroic terms. The triumphs are small, personal, daily. Nothing grandly heroic is taking place; just animals and men and flowers and plants asserting their right to be, even in this most devastated of American cities. INTERVIEWER: Nothing heroic is happening in Detroit. LEVINE: Nothing epic. Just the small heroics of getting through the day when the day doesn’t give a shit, getting through the world with as much dignity as you can pull together from the tiny resources left to you. It’s the truly heroic. The poem is a tribute to all these people who survived in the face of so much discouragement. They’ve survived everything America can dish out. No, nothing grandly heroic is happening in Detroit. I guess nothing grandly heroic ever took place there; it was always automobiles, automobiles, hard work, and low pay." Too often we take poets and poetry too seriously. Maybe this blog post about Levine will help us change our mind: "For the Poet Laureate the Joy of Tennis is in the Effort," that ran in The New York Times, September 10, 2011.
Philip and Fran Levine at the U.S. Open tennis championship in New York in September 2011.
English 9 Creative Nonfiction Students: This will be of special interest to you. Ira Glass is the host of This American Life, broadcast on NPR. He discusses the engagement between the writer and the subject and the conflict that emerges. Part IV should be of special interest to English 9 students as they do profiles of a person.
When we discuss The Runner by David Samuels we will we will turn to specific examples from the book. Here are some questions we might consider. Those underlined and in bold would be good ones to study in preparation for the in-class essay.
1. Consider the book's title and the first paragraph of the narrative and note that James Hogue's story is not told in chronological order. Why do you think Samuels opened his book (with that first paragraph and) with that scene?
2. We think of liars as the ones telling the lie, but Samuels says Hogue preferred to let "other people do the talking" (4). Why would this be an important feature of his persona? Later, Samuels claims, "Hogue didn't care much for telling stories about himself" (36). What is beginning to emerge regarding Hogue or liars, at least from the point of view of Samuels?
3. David Eckley says that "[Hogue] was a sweetheart, but dangerous in his own way. . . .He just can't seem to come to reality" (5) Do you agree with Eckley or not?
4. Samuels says that "[Hogue] only fooled people who wanted to be fooled" (6). This sounds like something Ricky Jay might have said when he was speaking with Errol Morris. (Find where Jay says this.) How might Jay's remarks help us understand someone like Hogue? You may also want to see Samuels's remarks about Dr. Alaia as "a sucker" (24).
5. I am trying to find the reason that Samuels wrote The Runner. What is his purpose? See what Samuels says on page 9: "Hogue also did what all liars do, which is to diminish the universal store of truthfulness . . . and establish meaningful connections to others" (9). Do you think that this is the book's heart, or is it something else? Explain.
6. "Cindy's habit of telling tall tales is familiar," Samuels writes (13). Why does he tell us this?
7. Samuels wonders "Perhaps one reason that James Hogue has held my interest the past ten years is that I still can't figure out exactly what he was up to, at the same time as he reminded me strongly of myself." (14). Do you see a connection, or a similarity, between the two men? Explain.
8. Let's look at Hogue's family life. What was his relationship with his sister? What were his mother's habits? How do all of these things tell us about Hogue--if anything?
9. Let's stop and take some time with Chapter V. "The Escape Artist." I think of this as Samuels's "big idea" for the book. Do you think he is overreaching? Or does he hit the right note and successfully make his story about Hogue serve a larger purpose? Explain.
10.What is the theme of The Runner? Offer several examples from the book in support of your position.
11. Is The Runner a story of class consciousness? Would someone from the upper class engage in the same conduct as Hogue did? Or to look at this question from another angle: would Hogue have lived his life as he did--falsifying his academic record, his name, and stealing--if he was wealthy? Explain.
12. Was Hogue's greatest crime against himself or others? Or his harm was equal to both? Explain.
13. Samuels identifies with Hogue. (See question #7, above.) Does this cause him to lose his objectivity in telling Hogue's story? Or does it allow him to better explain who Hogue is?
14. Is The Runner principally a story about one man, that is, Hogue, or is it about the American characteristic of remaking or redefining or self-invention? Explain.
15. Come up with three questions of your own--not one raised above--about The Runner. Then, each group must come up with three questions that they will put on the board for further discussion. 16. Samuels claims, "In a meritocratic society, acceptance to a university like Princeton is not simply a validation of the person you were when you applied. Rather, it means that you are free to become someone new. In turn, the university will testify to the social legitimacy of your actions by putting its name on your diploma. Your troubled or unworthy old self can be safely discarded in favor of the aura conferred by the institution and by the collective achievements of its well-placed graduates around the globe. Later on, if you wish, you can reveal yourself as you were, and share the embarrassing details of your origins and upbringing." (128) Has Samuels made a successful argument in The Runner for this claim? Explain with specific examples from the book.
17. Do you trust Samuels reporting of Hogue's penchant to lie? Explain with specific examples from the book.
18. What does Errol Morris have to say about the nature of lying? Are his observations pertinent to the story of James Hogue? Explain with evidence from Morris's columns and The Runner.
And here's the trailer for Con Man, a film about Hogue. Maybe we should watch it. What do you think? (An earlier viewer, Gerardo of English 1C, spots news reader Kent Manahan. A tip of the hat to Gerardo for his careful observation.)
And the trailer for Catch Me if You Can, the film about Frank Abagnale, Jr.:
Can't leave out the opening credits for it:
Anyone find other stories like James Hogue's orFrank Abagnale, Jr.'s out there? Yes, I did. I have been following the Christian Karl "Clark Rockefeller" Gerhartsreiter story, a tale much darker than either Hogue's or Abagnale's. Gerhartsreiter, pictured below, lived in a guest house behind a large home in San Marino and convicted in August 2013 of murdering his landlord, and then burying the body in the backyard. The whereabouts of the victim's wife is unknown. [***]1C STUDENTS: Read, Listen & Watch links marked with [***] re: CLARK ROCKEFELLER
"From left: Christian Gerhartsreiter, high-school student, late 70s; Christopher Chichester, U.S.C.-campus denizen, mid-80s; Christopher Crowe, Wall Street executive, late 80s or early 90s; Clark Rockefeller, divorcé and father, 2008. Left, from TZ Munich; second from right, courtesy of Cosgrove/Meurer Productions, Inc.; right, by Essdras M. Suarez/The Boston Globe." -- from Vanity Fair, January 2009
If you know of other con artists, please post in comments section. From semesters past, students have learned that Hogue-like stories are not all that unusual. Ivette Gonzalez kept her eyes on the news with Twitter. She got news of a story that she wanted us to see. I'm glad she did. Sounds like the illustrious James "The Runner" Hogue. This time it is a basketball player. Here's the story:
Angela Liu found a similar story about a man who . . . well, just go to this link and find out. [link broken] Look what Laura Noonan found: "A 33-year-old woman is charged with stealing her daughter's identity to attend high school and join the cheerleading team." Want to learn more? Click here.
Mike Tuano wonders, "Now imagine if Hogue was a little more clever, and decided to use his smarts and con-artist specialty to lean towards a more 'financial' gain . . . . He would probably end up being like this guy [Victor Lustig]." Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower--twice. Yes, you read that right. Twice. To learn more go to Wikipedia's site on Lustig and Biography's profile of him. In December 2014 I read about a teenager who said he made $72 million in stock trades.Not true, it turns out. Anyone want to find more James Hogue wannabees or types or poseurs extraordinaires? Let the games begin. Post links in comments.
"Gabriel José García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, a town in Northern Colombia, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents in a house filled with countless aunts and the rumors of ghosts. But in order to get a better grasp on García Márquez's life, it helps to understand something first about both the history of Colombia and the unusual background of his family."-- from the website Macondo
The death of the great Colombian novelist Gabriel José García Márquez was reported by The New York Times on April 17, 2014. He was 87.
For more information about García Márquez visit Macondo, an excellent website on Garcia Marquez; Macondo is also the name of the writer's fictional town in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a seminal novel work in Magical Realism and world literature. Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 for his body of work. Go to his Nobel Prize page to learn more about him. Here is aninterviewthat the Paris Review conducted with Garcia Marquez in 1981. In an excerpt from it, he talks about his literary education; INTERVIEWER
How did you start writing?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
By drawing. By drawing cartoons. Before I could read or write I used to draw comics at school and at home. The funny thing is that I now realize that when I was in high school I had the reputation of being a writer, though I never in fact wrote anything. If there was a pamphlet to be written or a letter of petition, I was the one to do it because I was supposedly the writer. When I entered college I happened to have a very good literary background in general, considerably above the average of my friends. At the university in Bogotá, I started making new friends and acquaintances, who introduced me to contemporary writers. One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories. They are totally intellectual short stories because I was writing them on the basis of my literary experience and had not yet found the link between literature and life. The stories were published in the literary supplement of the newspaperEl Espectadorin Bogotá and they did have a certain success at the time—probably because nobody in Colombia was writing intellectual short stories. What was being written then was mostly about life in the countryside and social life. When I wrote my first short stories I was told they had Joycean influences.
INTERVIEWER
Had you read Joyce at that time?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
I had never read Joyce, so I started reading Ulysses. I read it in the only Spanish edition available. Since then, after having read Ulysses in English as well as a very good French translation, I can see that the original Spanish translation was very bad. But I did learn something that was to be very useful to me in my future writing—the technique of the interior monologue. I later found this in Virginia Woolf, and I like the way she uses it better than Joyce. Although I later realized that the person who invented this interior monologue was the anonymous writer of the Lazarillo de Tormes.
INTERVIEWER
Can you name some of your early influences?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
The people who really helped me to get rid of my intellectual attitude towards the short story were the writers of the American Lost Generation. I realized that their literature had a relationship with life that my short stories didn’t. And then an event took place which was very important with respect to this attitude. It was the Bogotazo, on the ninth of April, 1948, when a political leader, Gaitan, was shot and the people of Bogotá went raving mad in the streets. I was in my pension ready to have lunch when I heard the news. I ran towards the place, but Gaitan had just been put into a taxi and was being taken to a hospital. On my way back to the pension, the people had already taken to the streets and they were demonstrating, looting stores and burning buildings. I joined them. That afternoon and evening, I became aware of the kind of country I was living in, and how little my short stories had to do with any of that. When I was later forced to go back to Barranquilla on the Caribbean, where I had spent my childhood, I realized that that was the type of life I had lived, knew, and wanted to write about.
Around 1950 or ’51 another event happened that influenced my literary tendencies. My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories. I’m not sure whether I had already read Faulkner or not, but I know now that only a technique like Faulkner’s could have enabled me to write down what I was seeing. The atmosphere, the decadence, the heat in the village were roughly the same as what I had felt in Faulkner. It was a banana-plantation region inhabited by a lot of Americans from the fruit companies which gave it the same sort of atmosphere I had found in the writers of the Deep South. Critics have spoken of the literary influence of Faulkner, but I see it as a coincidence: I had simply found material that had to be dealt with in the same way that Faulkner had treated similar material.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ and Magical RealismFor information re: magical realism, see J. Kip Wheeler's webpage of literary terms; if this link does not work I have a link to Wheeler's webpage under the On Writing section on the right side of the blog; look for Literary Terms by Dr. L. Kip Wheeler, and follow the links to magical realism. Also, I invite you to read about narrator, epiphany and motif at Wheeler's site. Salman Rushdie's Magic in the Service of Truth: Gabriel García Márquez’s Work Was Rooted in the Realappeared in The New York Times, April 21, 2014. Rushdie argues that writers like García Márquez show how "imagination is used to enrich reality, not to escape from it." He is concerned that "[t]he trouble with the term 'magic realism,' el realismo mágico, is that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, 'magic,' without paying attention to the other half, 'realism.' But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works."
"The book that spoke to me [when Boyle was probably in his early 20s] was imagined by my enduring hero, Gabriel García Márquez, and it is One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many before me have spoken of its magisterial blend of magic, humor, and history, so I will let all that slide and address one of García Márquez's short stories that appeared around that time in the New American Review, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." This is the story of a decrepit angel coming for a sick child in a storm on the Caribbean coast of Cólombia. The storm drives him down out of the sky to land in a very unangelic heap in the backyard of the child's parents, where he is confined in a chicken house, amongst the other winged and feathered creatures. The story is a sly (and yes, wicked) satire of the forms and strictures of the Catholic church, and it places the miraculous in the context of the ordinary--again, just as in real life. And oh yes, when I think of that story and that book, I can't help recalling the doggy smell of the stone gatehouse--we had three magnificent and magnificently stinking dogs at the time--and of the great leaping blazes we would build nightly in the old fireplace to keep the frost at bay." (from an Amazon.com page republished on Reinhard Dhonat's site devoted to Boyle.)
The house in Aracataca, Colombia where Garcia Marquez, aka Gabo, was born in 1928. (El Espectador; with thanks to Sean Dolan)
. . . . Around 1950 or ’51 another event happened that influenced my literary tendencies. My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories. I’m not sure whether I had already read Faulkner or not, but I know now that only a technique like Faulkner’s could have enabled me to write down what I was seeing. The atmosphere, the decadence, the heat in the village were roughly the same as what I had felt in Faulkner. It was a banana-plantation region inhabited by a lot of Americans from the fruit companies which gave it the same sort of atmosphere I had found in the writers of the Deep South. Critics have spoken of the literary influence of Faulkner, but I see it as a coincidence: I had simply found material that had to be dealt with in the same way that Faulkner had treated similar material.
From that trip to the village I came back to write Leaf Storm, my first novel. What really happened to me in that trip to Aracataca was that I realized that everything that had occurred in my childhood had a literary value that I was only now appreciating. From the moment I wrote Leaf Storm I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world. That was in 1953, but it wasn’t until 1967 that I got my first royalties after having written five of my eight books.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that it’s common for young writers to deny the worth of their own childhoods and experiences and to intellectualize as you did initially?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
No, the process usually takes place the other way around, but if I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it’s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says “God help me from inventing when I sing.” It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.
From that trip to the village I came back to write Leaf Storm, my first novel. What really happened to me in that trip to Aracataca was that I realized that everything that had occurred in my childhood had a literary value that I was only now appreciating.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ in The New Yorker The New Yorker has published numerous stories by García Márquez and a profile of him. Here is the magazine's post with links. GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ Interview William Kennedy's interview with García Márquez. It appeared in The Atlantic, January 1973 under the title, "The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona, and Other Visions." GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ Obituaries
The New York Times, April 17, 2014has an extensive report on his life and death. Many other news outlets around the world, including the Los Angeles Times,CNN, Time,The Guardian, andThe New Yorker declare his importance. GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ Farewell Letter The infamous "farewell letter" attributed to García Márquez is a fake. He didn't write it. It was reprinted many times. If you wish to read it, click on this link.
Taken in 1982, Paris. Gabriel García Márquez with his son Gonzalo and wife Mercedes a short time prior to winning the Nobel Prize. (Gamma-Liaison)
One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into nearly 40 languages. Here is a small selection of book covers for the novel.
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