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#tbt: Aimé Césaire, “ no race has a monopoly on beauty…”

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This week’s  Throwback Thursday selection is an excerpt from Aimé Césaire’s long poem Notebook of a Return to a Native Land (2001), edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Wesleyan University Press also published a bilingual edition of Césaire’s original 1939 Notebook in 2013, edited by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman.

 

cesaire TBT

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And we are standing now, my country and I, hair in the wind,
my hand puny in its enormous fist and now the strength is not
in us but above us, in a voice that drills the night and the
hearing like the penetrance of an apocalyptic wasp. And the
voice complains that for centuries Europe has force-fed us with
lies and bloated us with pestilence,
for it is not true that the work of man is done
that we have no business being on earth
that we parasite the world
that it is enough for us to heel to the world whereas the work
of man has only begun
and man still must overcome all the interdictions wedged in
the recesses of his fervor and no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on
strength
and there is room for everyone at the convocation of conquest
and we know now that the sun turns around our earth lighting
the parcel designated by our will alone and that every star falls
from sky to earth at our omnipotent command.

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AIMÉ CÉSAIRE (1913–2008) was best known as the co-creator of the concept of négritude. His long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, written at the end of World War II, became an anthem for Blacks around the world.

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University and the foremost American translator of Aimé Césaire. He is the author of The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader and translator of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo. He was also the editor of Sulfur.

ANNETTE SMITH is an Emeritus Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology. Besides publishing books and articles on various aspects of colonialism and racism, she has co-authored with Clayon Eshleman three previous translation of Aimé Césaire.

#tbt: James Dickey, “Circuit”

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This week’s selection for Throwback Thursday is “Circuit” from James Dickey’s Collection The Eagle’s Mile (1990). The poem was republished in
The Selected Poems (1998). Wesleyan also published Buckdancer’s Choice (1965), Poems: 1957–1967 (1967),
and The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992 (1992)

JDickey Blog Post

Circuit

Beaches, it is true: they go on       on
And on, but as they ram and pack, foreseeing

Around a curve, always    slow-going headlong

For the circle
                                        swerving from water
But not really, their minds on a perfect connection, no matter
How long it takes. You can’t be
On them without making the choice
To meet yourself no matter

How long. Don’t be afraid;
It will come     will hit you

Straight out of the wing, on wings or not,
Where you have blanked yourself

Still with your feet. It may be raining

In twilight, a sensitive stripping
Of arrow-feathers, a lost trajectory struck
Stocking-still through them,                                            
                              or where you cannot tell

If the earth is green or red,

Basically, or if the rock with your feet on it

Has floated over the water. As for where you are standing

Now, there are none of those things; there are only
In one shallow spray-pool      this one

Strong horses circling. Stretch and tell me, Lord;
Let the place talk.

                                                                                                            This may just be it.

 

JAMES DICKEY (1923–1997) was born in Atlanta and died in Columbia, South Carolina. He is most widely known as the author of the novel and screenplay Deliverance. He was also the author of several other novels and fifteen books of poetry. His many honors included the National Book Award and a Melville Cane Award for Buckdancer’s Choice (1965). He was invited to read at President Carter’s inauguration in 1977, and served as judge of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series. 

Anthology Film Archives (NYC) presents Robert Ryan

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“Robert Ryan: An Actor’s Actor”
Special screenings of films featuring Robert Ryan
Sept. 4–10 @ Anthology Film Archives 

 Jones comps.indd

A six-film Robert Ryan retrospective
in conjunction with The Lives of Robert Ryan (Wesleyan UP)

  • ACT OF VIOLENCE (Fred Zinnemann, 1948)
    September 4, 7:00 PM; September 6, 4:15 PM; September 8, 9:00 PM
  • ON DANGEROUS GROUND (Nicholas Ray, 1952)
    September 4, 9:00 PM; September 7, 7:00 PM; September 10, 7:00 PM
  • THE NAKED SPUR (Anthony Mann, 1953)
    September 5, 4:30 PM; September 7, 9:00 PM; September 9, 7:00 PM
  • BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (John Sturges, 1955)
    September 5, 9:15 PM; September 6, 9:00 PM; September 8, 7:00 PM

From September 4–10, Anthology Film Archives in New York will celebrate publication of The Lives of Robert Ryan with the retrospective series “Robert Ryan: An Actor’s Actor.” The series collects six of the most arresting screen performances by this gifted artist and activist, whom Martin Scorsese called “one of the greatest actors in the history of American film.” Select screenings will feature discussions with author J.R. Jones, film editor for the Chicago Reader, and Robert Ryan’s son, Cheyney Ryan, professor of law and philosophy at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at Oxford University.

The son of a Chicago construction executive with strong ties to the Democratic machine, Robert Ryan became a star after World War II on the strength of his menacing performance as an anti-Semitic murderer in the film noir Crossfire. Over the next quarter century he created a gallery of brooding, neurotic, and violent characters in such movies as Bad Day at Black Rock, Billy Budd, The Dirty Dozen, and The Wild Bunch. His riveting performances expose the darkest impulses of the American psyche during the Cold War.

At the same time, Ryan’s marriage to a liberal Quaker and his own sense of conscience launched him into a tireless career of peace and civil rights activism that stood in direct contrast to his screen persona. Drawing on unpublished writings and revealing interviews, Jones deftly explores the many contradictory facets of Ryan’s public and private lives, and how these lives intertwined in one of the most compelling actors of a generation.

Jones has recently spoken about The Lives of Robert Ryan at the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs and at the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. At the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, he presented a screening of Ryan’s boxing classic The Set-Up and took part in a discussion with Lisa Ryan, the actor’s daughter. The Lives of Robert Ryan is the featured book for July on Turner Classic Movies.

J.R. JONES is film editor for the Chicago Reader, where his work has appeared since 1996 and won multiple awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. A member of the National Society of Film Critics, Jones has also published work in the Chicago Sun-Times, New York Press, Kenyon Review, and Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000, edited by Peter Guralnick.

CHEYNEY RYAN is Human Rights Program Director at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at Oxford University, where he is engaged in a multi-year project exploring the relation of pacifism and nonviolence to contemporary just war theory. He has also taught at Harvard Law School, Northwestern University, and University of Oregon, where he is a professor emeritus. His most recent book is The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema. AFA maintains a reference library containing the world’s largest collection of books, periodicals, stills, and other paper materials related to avant-garde cinema. It screens more than 900 programs annually, preserves an average of 25 films per year, publishes books and DVDs, and hosts numerous scholars and researchers.

Praise for The Lives of Robert Ryan:

“A masterly biography that portrays an actor devoted to his craft and dedicated to his personal convictions.” –Richard Dickey, Library Journal

“J.R. Jones in his excellent biography shows what a fascinating career [Ryan’s] was—complicated, contradictory, accidental. . . . As Jones demonstrates at considerable length, [Ryan] was a man of liberal principle and moral courage.” –Philip French, Sight & Sound 

“J.R. Jones’s meticulous, revealing book on Robert Ryan places the actor’s life and career against the turbulent politics of the Cold War and the red scare in Hollywood. Jones is especially adept in moving between the life and the work, the films and their contexts. He introduces political history throughout, in ways that are both relevant and revelatory.” –Foster Hirsch, author of The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

“As self-effacing yet as solid and as ethically engaged as Robert Ryan himself, J.R. Jones offers a comprehensive and sensitive chronicle of one of the giants of American movie acting.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Movie Wars

#tbt: Heather McHugh, “One Moon in Binoculars”

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Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is “One Moon in Binoculars,” from Heather McHugh’s 1988 collection Shades.

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One Moon in Binoculars

How could this homely instrument
have power to pull
the whole moon closer,
hold ten textures in
the intimacy of a glance?
The silvers tremble severally
splashed and sanded,
spine-wise, spidery,
in sharp and shadowed
pocks upon the plain. The view

is black and white, but brighter than TV,
clearer than sand in a glass of vodka,
shivering, with each
detail distilled
down to the pebbles
of ocular grain. To cast an eye
across its wild serenities
is to be glad

you cannot see that otherworldly flag
(our worldly flag, that is). They stuck it
flat and stiff up there, because
there is no wind. They made
an outdoor ad, a small design
upon the grand. We might as well

have called the moon American, and raised
a dollar sign above the silver land.

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HEATHER MCHUGH is the author of many poetry collections, including Upgraded to Serious, Eyeshot (shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize), The Father of Predicaments, Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968–1993 (finalist for the National Book Award), Shades, To the Quick, and A World of Difference. She is also the author of a collection of literary essays and three books of translation. She edited the Academy of American Poets’ anthology New Voices: University and College Prizes, and served as the 2007 guest editor for the Best American Poetry series.

#WCW: Sophie Blanchard (1778–1819)

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“The higher we go, the more glorious our death will be!”

Everyone’s heard of Amelia Earheart, the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic. But have you heard of Sophie Blanchard, our Woman Crush Wednesday honoree?

 Sophie Blanchard

This French balloonist was the profession’s first female flyer, who carried off sixty-seven successful ascensions. Her daring contributions to ballooning did not go unnoticed—she was appreciated by Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis XVIII, and she was known throughout the country as a world-class aeronaut. Madame Blanchard was immortalized in Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in A Balloon, and she is rightfully included in the “Gallery of Heroes” found in Wesleyan University Press’s edition of the classic novel. In the book, her unfortunate death was described as follows: “her balloon caught on fire while she was setting of fireworks, but she didn’t fall out of the sky, and she probably wouldn’t have been killed if her gondola hadn’t banged into a chimney and thrown her to the ground.”

 Verne - Five-wRule-R-72-3

Five Weeks in a Balloon was Jules Verne’s first published novel, and is often praised as one of his best. It was among his most popular, bestselling books—cashing in on the French craze of ballooning and public interest in African exploration. Verne offers a fantastical story based on the realities of aeronautical technology and geographical exploration of his day. As one would imagine, Verne had a love for geography and exploration, and he was knowledgable about both subjects. He also worked contemporary politics into his stories. Issues of race and slavery are touched on in Five Weeks in a Balloon, set at the dawn of European imperialistic aggressions on the continent of Africa, as exploration shifted to violent colonization.

Verne’s weaving of scientific discovery, speculation, and adventure is what earned him the moniker “Father of Science Fiction.” In addition to touching on the technology and politics of the day, and thinking about the future, Verne also tells a good story. Five Weeks in a Balloon gives a fictional account early air-adventures, touching on some real events and people of the day, including Sophie Blanchard.

Enter a drawing to win a free copy of Five Weeks in a Balloon here!

Readercon Weekend–win a book!

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Readercon 26 is taking place this weekend, July9–12, in Burlington, Massachusetts. Returning conference-goers will be used to seeing Leslie Starr at our booth. Alas, Leslie is retiring! Our wonderful new marketing manager, Jaclyn Wilson, is on hand at our booth to answer questions. Please stop by to introduce yourself and check out our new books, including Five Weeks in a Balloon. You can watch a trailer about the book and enter to win a free copy here.

 readercon2015

This year, two of Readercon’s three Guests of Honor were published by Wesleyan: Gary K. Wolfe (who is sharing honors with Nicola Griffith) and Memorial Guest of Honor Joanna Russ.

Wolfe is the author of Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature and contributed the introduction to our forthcoming book, Reality by Other Means: The Best Short Fiction of James Morrow. Wesleyan reissued two of Russ’s novels in 2005: We Who Are About To… (with an introduction by Samuel R. Delany) and The Two of Them (with a foreword by Sarah LaFanu). In addition, we published the critical volume On Joanna Russ, edited by Farah Mendlesohn, with contributors Andrew M. Butler, Brian Charles Clark, Samuel R. Delany, Edward James , Sandra Lindow, Keridwen Luis, Paul March-Russell, Helen Merrick, Dianne Newell, Graham Sleight, Jenéa Tallentire, Jason Vest, Sherryl Vint, Pat Wheeler, Tess Williams, Gary K. Wolfe, and Lisa Yaszek.

ReaderCon is full of useful panels and presentations for writers, scholars, editors, and readers. Day passes are available. To read more, please be sure to visit their website, http://readercon.org/. Have a wonderful conference!

#tbt: James Tate, “Aunt Edna”

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This morning we woke to the sad news that James Tate has passed on. To honor Tate, this week’s Throwback Thursday selection is “Aunt Edna” from Selected Poems (1991), winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the William Carlos Williams award. In addition to Selected Poems, Wesleyan also published Tate’s 1990 volume, Distance from Loved Ones. Tate was a friend to Wesleyan University Press, and was a dedicated writing professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He will be greatly missed by the poetry community and his students. We send our condolences to Tate’s wife, fellow poet and professor, Dara Wier. 

 

Tate_TBT

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Aunt Edna

Aunt Edna of the hills
comes down to give
her sisters chills;

she wears the same
rags she wore
seven years ago,

she smells
the same; she tells
the same hell-

is-here stories.
She hates flowers,
she hates the glory

of the church she
abandoned for the
glory

of her Ozark cave.
She gave
her sons to the wolves.

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JAMES TATE was the author of fifteen books of poetry and three of prose, including Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994), which won the National Book Award. His other honors included an Academy of American Poets chancellorship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Sarah Blake & Motion Poems

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Sarah Blake’s poem “A Day at the Mall Reminds Me of America” from her debut poetic collection Mr. West has been featured in a short film by Ayşe Altinok. MotionPoems “catalyzes the remix of poetry with other forms to create compelling hybrid artworks,” and it is a beautiful creation at that.

 

Watch this amazing film adaptation of the poem here. Both Sarah Blake and Ayşe Altinok have been interviewed about their parts in this work, found here.

A Day at the Mall Reminds Me of America

Recently, my 14 year old sister was approached at the mall to see if she’d be interested in working at Hollister, or Abercrombie and Fitch, or American Eagle. I can’t remember.

She’s that beautiful. And with the mall’s lights all around her—I can only imagine.

Yet on Facebook, one of her friends calls her a loser. More write, “I hate you.”

I wonder if Kanye knows that these girls are experimenting. As with rum. As with skin, all the ways to touch it.

My day at the mall begins with a Wild Cherry ICEE and an Auntie Anne’s Original Pretzel. A craving.

I pass women who you can tell are pregnant, and I know we all might be carrying daughters.

The mall is so quiet. The outside of the Hollister looks like a tropical hut, like the teenage girls should be sweating inside.

No one’s holding doors for me yet, but they will as I take the shape of my child.

And if my child has a vicious tongue, it will take shape lapping at my breast.

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SARAH BLAKE is the founder of the online writing tool Submittrs, an editor at Saturnalia Books, and a recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Drunken Boat, FIELD, and The Threepenny Review. She lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Click here for author’s website.

 

#tbt: Old Leather Man

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Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is from our 2008 book The Old Leather Man.

I first learned about the Old Leather Man around 15 years ago, when I worked for Arcadia Publishing. One day, after joining the staff here at Wesleyan, I was pleasantly surprised to see a proposal for an entire book on the subject. That book, The Old Leather Man: Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend, has gone on to become one of our best-selling regional books. First published in 2008, it has maintained a steady stream of interest. The book and its author, Dan W. DeLuca, were recently the subject of a feature article, by Jon Campbell, in The Village Voice. It is wonderful to see Yann Legendre’s phantom-like interpretation of the mystery man gracing the cover of The Voice. It is not often that we see regional history and regional books receiving this kind of coverage!

 deluca_old-leather

The Old Leather Man, featured in The Village Voice. Our book, the newspaper, and some memorabilia are seen here.

Eddie Vedder, of Pearl Jam fame, happens to be a fan of the mystery man, and our book. Vedder wrote of our book on his band’s website. He said: “While this book offers up his life and times in the most complete manner possible, the mystery of Leather Man remains intact. It’s also interesting to note the parallels between the Leather Man and Chris McCandless who we got to know through Into the Wild.”

The spirit embodied by the Leather Man is universal. As Vedder pointed out, the desire to drop out of society and roam the world freely remains strong in our modern times. Who hasn’t day-dreamed about leaving it all behind and walking off into the woods?

from Connecticut Valley Advertiser, Saturday, December 27, 1873

The veritable “Old Leather Man” paid our village another visit last week. It has long been a query who he is, where he comes from, and where he stays nights. With the juveniles, the latter query is the most important, and for their gratification, more particularly we can inform them that his home is in a cave, in what is known as Elijah’s ledges, in the west part of the town of Westbrook. In this lonely place he makes a home when he wanders this way. The cave is small and does not compare very favorably, either in size or gorgeousness, with the famous “Cave of the Winds” at Moodus. This queer specimen of humanity, clothed in leather, is indeed a curiosity. He is very reticent, only conversing when necessity compels it in soliciting food. It is not known where he came from, but it is generally supposed that he escaped from some Dime Novel.

Not everyone was happy about visits from Old Leathery and his kind.

from Bristol Press, Thursday, August 26, 1875

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp

There would appear to be no immediate prospect of abatement of the tramp nuisance. Rather, the tramp seems to have become ubiquitous and the growth of his order is only equaled by its capacity for villainy and “general cussedness.” The few mild measures taken in some sections for the suppression of this dangerous class have proved wholly inoperative, thus far. How long the community at large will continue to bear the inflictions before resorting to a more vigorous and wholesome treatment is difficult to determine. From the way in which people permit themselves to be imposed upon and cowed into acquiescence with all that these rascals insolently demand, we should judge that this is a sort of tramps’ millennium and is to be of indefinite duration. At any rate the tramps are increasing and with their multiplication, robbery, incendiarism, intimidation, rape and murder in like ratio become more and more common.

This tramp nuisance will continue just so long as people submit to it and no longer. The remedy is within reach. It is a simple remedy, easily applied. It may appear to some to be harsh, but if people would be rid of the evil, they must first make up their minds that harsh measures are the only ones that can be made effective. In the first place, stop feeding tramps. Secondly, let every man, woman and youth learn how to use a revolver and have one or more of these useful articles in every house, especially if in an isolated situation. Then whenever a tramp appears, peremptorily refuse him food or shelter and escort him off the premises at the muzzle of a cocked revolver and if he isn’t easily scared and attempts force, shoot.

A trusty weapon in every house and a disposition to use it on very slight provocation, will do more to squelch this abomination than any other means possible to use. And when people drop their squeamishness and sickly philanthropy and all other classes of criminals with that promptness and fidelity which is possible only by taking the law into their own hands, the moral atmosphere will improve wonderfully and life, property and virtue will be properly respected.

Yet others took pity on this lost soul, and were happy to feed him.

from Connecticut Valley Advertiser, Saturday, December 4, 1875

The old veteran leather man passed through this place on Thursday last, and as usual, he stopped at the house of W. B. Starkey, on South Blood street, and partook of hot coffee, cake, pie, etc., as he has done for the past twenty years. He makes his trips every six weeks. He is always on time and never fails.

Sadly, the man who seemingly had no name died a rather painful death from cancer of the mouth.

from Evening News, Friday, January 25, 1889

The Leather Man in Redding

The Leather Man was in Redding and called early in the morning at the residence of Dr. J. H. Benedict, where he asked for a breakfast. He was readily recognized by Mrs. Benedict from his leather clothing, and she invited him into the kitchen. As Mrs. Benedict can speak French she soon learned his wants, which were simply coffee, and she furnished him with all he desired. He drank the full of two large bowls, into each of which he put a teacupful of sugar.

He explained that he was unable to partake of solid food on account of his cancer, which prevented chewing. He conversed for a short time with Mrs. Benedict in French, until she asked him of his antecedents and then he became suddenly and stubbornly silent and spoke in his broken English.

His cancer is rapidly eating away his life. The right cheek is entirely gone, including a portion of the lower lip. He would not allow Dr. Benedict to dress it or Mrs. Benedict to do anything for his comfort, save to give him the coffee and a bottle of milk.

He now seems very shaky and is evidently drawing near his end. It seems as if the Humane Society should look after him, and care for him, even if it was necessary to do so by force, or else some day he will be found a corpse in some out of the way place, the victim of a-craze, want, neglect and exposure.

 

In the end, the Leather Man died alone. His death was reported in the Hartford Times, on Monday evening, March 25, 1889. The headline read:

“The Old Leather Man” Gone
FOUND DEAD IN A CAVE
a great sufferer from cancer

 

OldLeatherManSmall  

 

 

 

At Left: The Old Leather Man, photographer and location unknown. Courtesy of the Plymouth Historical Soicety.