Author Archives: wcd2
Ruth Ozeki: Zen and Politics
December 18, 2013 Reading the papers for “American Literature in the World,” I’m struck by how few wrote on My Year of Meats. Did people think it was too political, with too much of an agenda, out to get … Continue reading
The Writer and the Politician
December 11, 2013 They had first met in Cairo, in 1961, when she was working for “The Arab Observer,” an English-language weekly, and married to Vusumzi Make. Make and Mandela were political enemies, as were their organizations — the Pan Africanist … Continue reading
A Scot and the New Yorker
December 4, 2014 A bad cold, and the last week of class — so this is how I’d be remembered by everyone: hoarse, stuffed up, inarticulate, incapable of complex thought. On a whim, I decided to see if there’s a … Continue reading
Equiano’s Turkey
November 28, 2013 Yes, according to Mark Forsyth, the Thanksgiving bird is named after a country 4429 miles away. But not the first to be so named. In fact, the original turkey was a guinea fowl from Madagascar, brought to … Continue reading
Faulkner’s Harlem Renaissance
November 20, 2013 This past week I was teaching Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing. I’d never assigned them before, but they couldn’t have been better — for my “Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner” class. How else to contextualize Light in August? Not … Continue reading
Writers getting old: Ashbery, Angelou, Morrison
November 13, 2013 I was standing at the very back, and saw only a wall of people in front. I’d also missed the introduction. For most of reading, all I got was the voice, surprisingly strong, vigorous, the voice … Continue reading
Animals in Chicago
November 6, 2013 It seems right that the theme this year for the Chicago Humanities Festival should be “Animals: What Makes us Human.” This city, after all, used to be called (and maybe is still called) hog butcher for … Continue reading
Iowa alums: Rita Dove, James McPherson, Ayanna Mathis
October 30, 2013 There would have been no marriage between Rita Dove and Fred Viebahn if it had not been for Iowa City. She was at the Writers’ Workshop, getting her MFA in 1977; he was from Germany, a Fulbright … Continue reading
Ilium, Iowa City: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
October 23, 2013 For someone interested in the twentieth-century epic, Slaughterhouse Five is a no-brainer. How else would one call a story set in Ilium, talking about war, about death and the counterfactual? But did I ever stop to think about … Continue reading
Oscar Hijuelos, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien
October 16, 2013 This week saw the passing of Oscar Hijuelos: guitar-playing, cake-loving (I suspect), also lover of bountiful, sometimes over-stuffed prose. His father was the morning-to-lunch shift cook at the Biltmore Hotel, so he definitely knew a thing or … Continue reading