Alex Kudera's Blog, page 82

In Paris, then. . .

"In Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries."

~~ from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

we can't stop

What most people don’t realize about writers is that we can’t stop.— Steve Edwards (@The_Big_Quiet) April 11, 2019

on dumpster diving

This recent New York Times article on dumpster diving in San Francisco reminds me of Lars Eighner's classic on the topic.

Isabel Allende On Chilean Pessimism

"Among us Chileans, pessimism is considered good form; it is assumed that only idiots go around happy." ~~ Isabel Allende
My Invented Country#FridayReads— Alex Kudera (@kudera) April 5, 2019

Isabel Allende on Writing

“Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to understand one's own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence, including insecurities that do not torment normal people, only chronic nonconformists, many of whom end up as writers after having failed in other undertakings.”

 ~~ from My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile by Isabel Allende

more positive vibrations from Gabino the transnational success (at least on twitter)

Yesterday I emailed my French publisher, read some submissions, received news of a contract, and emailed someone about translation rights in another country. I felt like a fucking pro. Keep checking those emails, fellow writers, because the email you're waiting for will come.— Gabino Iglesias (@Gabino_Iglesias) April 3, 2019

According to Allende, Cholesterol in Chile

"I never heard the word cholesterol mentioned. My parents, who are over eighty, consume ninety eggs, a quart of cream, a pound of butter, and four pounds of cheese per week. They're healthy and lively as little kids."

~~ from My Invented Country by Isabel Allende

Kundera's birthday, not mine

I'm very grateful to honor Kundera's 90th birthday by appearing as Kundera in several online locations. Happy birthday, Milan!

An Artist's Archeology of the Mind

From Joshua Rothman's "An Artists Archeology of the Mind" published in The New Yorker:

When Sacks was young, his family moved to Durban, a port city on the Indian Ocean. He walked to school wearing a safari suit and sandals. In the street, he passed Zulu men carrying shields and walking sticks; bare-chested African women with loads on their heads; Europeans in Western dress; Indian women in saris; black men in prison garb, laboring at the roadside with pickaxes. Sacks was on the “white” side of the color line; his ancestors, Lithuanian Jews, had come to South Africa toward the end of the nineteenth century. Still, the government included Nazi sympathizers, and, at his segregated school, bullies called him “Jew boy,” while his own lapses were met with strokes of a cane. The human world was inhuman. Meanwhile, a vast landscape surrounded him: long, deserted beaches echoing with rolling surf; grassy hills creased by ancient mountain shadows. At Durban’s port, he watched ships arrive from India, France, Japan—emissaries from an unfathomable world.

Sacks’s parents sought to resist apartheid: his father, an obstetrician, taught at a black medical school. Still, there was no escaping a sense of complicity. “I was waking up always too late in a ravishingly beautiful garden mostly run by thugs, and guess what, I was one of them,” Sacks has said. It was a relief for him, as a teen-ager, to become a competitive swimmer. His four daily hours in the pool were a ritual of solitude, discipline, exertion. Sacks went for training runs or daylong walks on the edges of towns. He was running along one of Durban’s beaches when a line unfurled in his head: “If they capture me, I have not learned to speak.” Decades later, he incorporated it into a prose poem. The line was a plea: don’t make me account for a life I don’t wish to have.

When Sacks was sixteen, he enrolled in an exchange program that would take him to America. He dreamed of California—by then he’d become a surfer—but the program placed him with a family on the west side of Detroit. It was 1967. Smoke from the race riots hung over the city; armored cars idled in the streets. Sacks read James Baldwin and Stokely Carmichael—writers who had been censored at home—and, when he returned, he transferred from medical school to the political-science program at the University of Natal, a center of anti-apartheid activism. He became friends with Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, and studied with Richard Turner, an intellectual leader of the South African left. At nineteen, Sacks gave speeches and organized anti-apartheid demonstrations.

It will be AWP without me. . .

I'm such a wild-and-crazy, life-of-the-party kind of guy, I feel a need to profusely apologize every time I miss another #AWP conference, yet I also recognize the #reading and raging will go on without me. #AWP19 #AWP2019 #comic #adjunct #crime #novel #offthesauce #thewritinglife— Alex Kudera (@kudera) March 27, 2019