Intellectual Curiosities and Provocations

November 2002

Anais Nin

French,
La Boheme,
Transgressive,
Women
Anais Nin was born February 21, 1903 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, France and died January 14,1977 in Los Angeles, California. She moved to the United States in 1914 with her mother, singer Rosa Culmell and two brothers, Thorvald and Joaquin. Her father was Joaquin Nin, a Spanish pianist and composer, who abandoned the family after leaving his family at various intervals in his career to tour Europe and Cuba, when Nin was eleven.

London Fields

British,
Fiction,
Postmodernism,
Reviews
Samson Young is creating his own world to make up for the one he is slowly losing each day. He is the omniscient eavesdropper, the silent witness to his surroundings and the goings on of his characters, but the recorder of everyone's little dirty secrets. Sam has an obsessive need to make his presence known to his readers and his identity as solidified or even more so than the people around him he writes of with a sort of detached exhaustion. He is truly the only character in Martin Amis' London Fields who sits down and confesses his thoughts, fears, and suspicions.

Mikhail Bulgakov

Russian
Mikhail Bulgakov was born on May 15th, 1891, in Kiev, Ukraine. He was the son of a professor at the Kiev Theological Academy. He graduated as a doctor in 1916. After eighteen months in general practice in the depths of rural Russia (the subject matter of A Country Doctor's Notebook) he set up in Kiev as a venereologist. After another eighteen months or so, Bulgakov moved to the Caucasus, due to the upheavals of the civil war. In 1920 he gave up medicine to write. He settled in Moscow, earning a living as a freelance journalist.

Flannery O’Connor

American,
Fiction,
Southern,
Women
Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah Georgia in 1925 to Edward F. O'Connor, a real estate owner, and Regina L. O'Connor, who came from a prominent Georgian family. Her family moved from Savannah to Milledgeville, her mother's hometown, when Flannery was 12. Edward O'Connor died in 1941 from disseminated lupus (a rare, incurable disease), the illness which would later take Flannery's life as well.

Nasal Ethics: Midnight’s Children

Fiction,
Postmodernism,
Reviews
In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children the nose is used as a tool of psychological "mind-reading" through the acute sixth senses developed in Saleem's blocked nose that enables him to read not only the emotions of those around him, but also to communicate telepathically with those children born in the same hour and day as Saleem himself. Rushdie uses over again throughout the novel the "metaphor" of Saleem's nose as "sniffing out" the masked emotions mixed into food that exposes the cook's true colors to him alone.

An Interview With Diane DiPrima

Beat Generation,
Interviews,
Women
Since I was young I've admired beat literature and it's developers. My young mind was taken with the romantic image of Kerouac roaming the interior of the body politic, a mad sweating virus on the loose in the highwayvein of Amerika, Ginsberg holy maniac,chanting, praying, exorcising a generation ruined by madness, Burroughs and Gysin, pushing the envelope, rubbing out the word, and DiPrima, conjuring, stradling the magick/dream line, throwing us bits of tasty metamorsels and sumptuous subconcious feasts.

The Short Happy Death of Albert Camus

Biography,
Drama,
Existential,
French,
La Boheme


"I know nothing more stupid than to die in an automobile accident."--Albert Camus

The last thing in the world Albert Camus wanted was to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. "I'm castrated," the mortified Algerian-born French writer complained upon hearing that he'd won the greatest honor any writer could ever hope for. At that moment in his life, Camus was depressed, ill, and suffering from an enormous writer's block. Now he would be subject to the torture of public exposure, spectacle, and solemnities. Left-leaning Frenchmen led by Jean Paul Sartre had been publicly deriding Camus for being too conservative and for behaving as the high priest of Absolute Morality -- albeit one who carried his own portable pedestal. For conservative Frenchmen, Camus was no conservative at all but a militant radical at a time when the Arabs in Algeria were preparing for revolt. In the press Camus was treated more as a political than a literary figure and was often vilified as a mere writer of illusions. One critic dismissed his work as negative and jeered at the concept of the modern alienated outsider as nothing more than "the hero as vegetable." To his own regret, Camus could ill afford to turn down a Nobel Prize financially or morally, as Sartre later did. Trapped by fame, misunderstood even by his own admirers, and suffering the sting of his adversaries coolly mocking him in the press and in private, Camus wearily made the trip to Stockholm and accepted the award.

Beat Inc. and the Dignity of Richard Brautigan

Beat Generation,
Fiction,
Postmodernism,
Summer Of Love
Of all the literary movements of the 20th century the Beat Generation occupies the most untouchable position. They are still so hip that any criticism takes on the form of heresy. For fear of appearing square they are allowed to get away with murder.

The movement was never quite a movement to begin with; more a ragged group of hopeless romantics and scoundrels united by vague quasi-Buddhistic concepts, potent sexism, Rimbaud-esque spontaneity, intellectual snobbery and a jazz tinged bohemianism.

Chinua Achebe: My Spirit Come Fight for Me

Africa,
Fiction,
History
Christened Albert Achebe in homage to Prince Albert, husband of Great Britain's Queen Victoria, Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi, located in Eastern Nigeria, on November 16, 1930. Igbo, formerly called Ibo, is the language of Ogidi and serves as the cultural identifier to Igbo speakers. Achebe has become one of the most well-known contemporary authors from the African continent. His first novel placed Achebe in the literary spotlight immediately following its release. The novel was a departure from colonialist views of African lifestyles and customs.

J. G. Ballard

Postmodernism,
Science Fiction
"People within the science fiction world never regarded me as one of them in the first place. They saw me as the enemy. I was the one who wanted to subvert everything they believed. I wanted to kill outer space stone dead. I wanted to kill the far future and focus on inner space and the next five minutes. And sci-fi'ers to this day don't regard me as one of them. I'm some sort of virus who got aboard and penetrated the virtue of science fiction and began to pervert its DNA." - Ballard in a 1995 interview with Spike Magazine

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Fiction,
Latin,
Postmodernism
As with many writers, the seeds that bear the fruit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' fiction are found to have been planted in his childhood. Born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, a coastal town in northern Colombia, he was raised by his maternal grandparents. His grandparents were perhaps the most important people in his life. Garcia Marquez would write: "I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents." Both were excellent story tellers. His grandfather was a Colonel and helped found Arataca.

Harry Crosby

Biography,
Jazz Age
On December 7, 1929 Hart Crane threw a grand party in his Brooklyn home near the great bridge of his most famous (at the time, unpublished) work. It was a farewell party for his publishers-to-be, Harry & Caresse Crosby of the Black Sun Press. The Crosbys were due to sail back to France on the 13th and Crane wanted to send them off with a lively & memorable event. By all accounts it was a terrific party and in attendance were William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, e.e. cummings, and Walker Evans.