Attention Translators—
Swedish novelist Jonas Hassen Khemiri published an open letter to Sweden’s Minister of Justice asking her to “trade skins” with him because of her views on racial profiling. Asymptote translated the letter into English and is now seeking others to help translate this piece into as many languages as possible. If you’re interested, here is the information on the project (I’m guessing, but not sure, that translations can be done off of the English translation):
“THE JHK TRANSLATION PROJECT:“Jonas’s inspiring message against racial profiling is currently the most tweeted document in Swedish history. It was first commissioned to be published in English in our current issue (http://tinyurl.com/b996ran), and was afterwards the subject of a viral op-ed (http://tinyurl.com/cvodv9n) in the New York Times.“To get the message out to even more people, we asked Jonas if he would authorize us to get his 2000-word letter re-translated from the English into as many languages as we can find volunteers for. We will also undertake to look for newspapers all around the world to carry his rousing letter. (Important note: If the newspaper pays a fee, the translator can take half of it.) Jonas has agreed.“We’re now looking for translators to step forward for this project. If you yourself translate or know a translator who might be interested in participating, please email us at editors@asymptotejournal.com with the header “JHK TRANSLATION PROJECT.” Translators working with any language (except Swedish, Chinese, German and Finnish) are welcome!”

Attention Translators—

Swedish novelist Jonas Hassen Khemiri published an open letter to Sweden’s Minister of Justice asking her to “trade skins” with him because of her views on racial profiling. Asymptote translated the letter into English and is now seeking others to help translate this piece into as many languages as possible. If you’re interested, here is the information on the project (I’m guessing, but not sure, that translations can be done off of the English translation):

“THE JHK TRANSLATION PROJECT:

“Jonas’s inspiring message against racial profiling is currently the most tweeted document in Swedish history. It was first commissioned to be published in English in our current issue (http://tinyurl.com/b996ran), and was afterwards the subject of a viral op-ed (http://tinyurl.com/cvodv9n) in the New York Times.

“To get the message out to even more people, we asked Jonas if he would authorize us to get his 2000-word letter re-translated from the English into as many languages as we can find volunteers for. We will also undertake to look for newspapers all around the world to carry his rousing letter. (Important note: If the newspaper pays a fee, the translator can take half of it.) Jonas has agreed.

“We’re now looking for translators to step forward for this project. If you yourself translate or know a translator who might be interested in participating, please email us at editors@asymptotejournal.com with the header “JHK TRANSLATION PROJECT.” Translators working with any language (except Swedish, Chinese, German and Finnish) are welcome!”

The soul in Moby Dick

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

“Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!” —Herman Melville

Notes on a Junot Diaz Talk, reblogged from Kevin

molarsmolars:

Almost two years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz spoke at Montgomery County Community College, where one of my younger brothers goes to school. I went and listened and made notes afterward. He was pretty incredible. Here are the notes I made (everything below is paraphrased from his talk):

Art shows us our best selves and helps us connect to others. We get to interact with another person’s nervous system when we read a book. The most important thing a young reader can do is read 1,000 books. Best advice he received: “Go out and get your heart broken on three continents.”

Four things he learned about writing:

Audience. Manipulate audiences, not words. You have to allow the reader to interpret a scene. Do not tell them how to interpret it with something built in. 

Characters exist because of relationships. You can’t observe a person in isolation. In Cast Away, they had to make the character of Wilson to allow Tom Hanks a relationship while he was on a desert island. One relationship is good, but two is better, the classic triangle of dramaturgy. Characters interact with each other. You could write a 500 page description of a character and it wouldn’t be as good as a one sentence description that involved the same character in a relationship.

The fictional world has to resist the character. See the first Matrix movie when Agent Smith explains why the first matrix world was rejected by humans, because there was no fear, or war, or hunger. The world did not resist. People might not know a lot about literature, but they are professors emiriti of reality, and every day the world resists them.

Point of telling: when, in relation to the events of the story, is the story being told. Six months later, six years later? A way to maintain consistency in the narrative and make sure the focus is correct, close or distant. What details are related: fine details, or the big picture. 

Thoughts on society: it teaches us to compete, to accumulate, to make hierarchies, and to be afraid. What art does is allow us to access what makes us most human: compassion, communion, the we-feeling. Developing these things is what allows you to make it through life. Those things will save your life. 

Reading takes us off the market. No one can sell you anything when you’re reading. You’re literally offline. Puts you in touch with yourself. People come out of college without being able to deliver an operational definition of compassion. That is the main ontological (purpose) of being human—compassion. 

Our business leaders have failed us, our political leaders have failed us, but our artists never have. That’s who we should be turning towards. 

Reblogged from my friend Kevin who tumblrs at molarsmolars. Go follow him and check out his music blog, Molars

Fiction writers CHAD SIMPSON & MARIE-HELENE BERTINO, are reading at Prairie Lights tonight at 7 PM. They both were honored with the Iowa Short Fiction Award for their collections, pictured above. I don’t know Bertino’s work, but I’ve read a few of Simpson’s stories and he’s good. And Bertino’s bio says she’s driven across the country four times, which means she’s seen a lot more of this land than most of us. 

Chad Simpson’s tumblr is sadchimpson. Marie-Helene Bertino’s tumblr is mariehelenebertino.com

Go see them read and/or follow their tumblrs

Iowa City Lit Crawl

Tonight there will be readings spread throughout many of Iowa City’s bars and shops. I don’t know who all is reading (there will be 3-10 readers at each stop) except Amelia Gray is reading at 5pm at the Dublin Underground and I think at 7pm at the Foxhead.

The full schedule of Lit Crawl stops is here: http://litcrawl.org/iowa-city/events/

Tomorrow at The Mill there will be a book fair with publishers large and small. And on Sunday afternoon a guy named Marty will be giving a presentation on identifying local mushrooms. That one isn’t Mission Creek lit related, but mushrooms are important.

“I recycle every word, every sentence, every fragment, and every juxtaposition. Because I recycle everything, I view writing as a large, long fabric in which I measure the lengths, widths, and dimensions of the sentences to make a dress or a shirt. These I turn into short stories or novellas, and the smaller pieces or end pieces of the fabric that can’t be used for a blouse, I turn them into small poems.” 

Vi Khi Nao

(Photo by Nina MacLaughlin.)
I asked Nina MacLaughlin to write about Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard for Monkfish Jowls. She left her job at an alt-weekly to become a carpenter. Her book about the experience forthcoming from WW Norton. She has a tumblr called Carpentrix.
Four years ago, I returned home from six weeks in Nepal and wanted to still be there instead of familiar and monochromatic Boston, so I read Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. Nepal opened me. I did not want to lose it. The Snow Leopard kept me open a little longer. 
Matthiessen writes of his journeys in the Himalayas, one on foot through the mountains, one more spiritual, both occurring at the same time. It is about seeking and finding and not finding. It’s an exploration of Buddhism and the religion in the mountains. It’s a description of the wild life in these remotest places, the wolves and sheep and falcons, the elusive snow leopard, the yeti. It’s about confronting death, “the roar of eternity” and “the great stillness.” 
   
Traveling alone to Nepal, I’d hired a guide through an organization that provides female guides for female trekkers, and I was paired with a tiny nineteen-year-old named Gita who was gruff-voiced and quick to giggle. She spoke some English, and was so fleet and sure of foot up and down the mountains. I carried my own pack, she hers. We followed the Annapurna Base Camp circuit, eight days. 
   
The first days were a misery, exhausting, cold. My muscles screamed. I feared my lungs might rip, my heart burst. Snot poured out of my face. My spirits were low. I ached for home, for the people I loved. I felt dismally far away from everything. 
   
On the fourth day, it opened up. Clouds cleared, the sun shown, I felt a lightness in my step, new energy. Optimism evolved into exhilaration as we reached Annapurna Base Camp at 4120 meters. Thoughts of home dissolved. There instead: the path, the peaks, the steps, one after the next. Sacred Machapuchare, the Fish Tail peak, off-limits to climbers, jutted jagged into the sky. Annapurna South cast a cold shadow down on the teahouse at camp. The mountains rose like tidal waves all around, frightening. “They appalled me with their ‘permanence,’ with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience,” Matthiessen wrote of the mountains.  
   
That night, despite the glory of the day, anxiety returned. The press of the thin air kept me awake and fretting. I thought about what my return home would bring. I had quit my job, put my books and bed and mugs and clothes in a storage unit in a Boston suburb, ended a romance. The life I’d known was done. I would return home to question marks. I lay bundled in my sleeping bag in the unheated room and worried about the future.
   
But I had to piss. I was furious as it meant exiting my bag and warmth, pushing into boots, and walking a distance to the squatters in another building. I squirmed out and wrapped my arms around myself and walked outside. 
   
I looked up and was halted by the sky. Machapuchare glowed blueish pink in the moonlight in front of me. There have never been so many stars. The air was the clearest cold. I put my hands on my head and took the air into my lungs and listened to the silence. So high up, so far away—but suddenly I didn’t feel far away at all. I felt taken up into it all; nothing mattered. I could be blown away and disappear into the sky. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t nihilism; it was ecstasy. I laughed and tears came to my eyes. I feel foolish telling you about it now. I feel shy at the risk of sounding fruity or cliché, at not being able to do it, that moment, that feeling, justice. Matthiessen knew “how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed.”
   
But in The Snow Leopard he makes the attempt and I’m glad he does: “The ground whirls with its own energy, not in an alarming way but in slow spiral, and at these altitudes, in this vast space and silence, that energy pours through me, joining my body with the sun until small silvers breaths of cold, clear air, no longer mine, are lost in the mineral breathing of the mountain.”
   
I took a piss and cold pushed me back towards my sleeping bag and I fell asleep feeling like my whole body was smiling. 

These feelings do not last, of course, as powerful as they are, or, as Matthiessen put it: “To strive for permanence in what I think I have perceived is to miss the point.”
—Nina MacLaughlin

(Photo by Nina MacLaughlin.)

I asked Nina MacLaughlin to write about Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard for Monkfish Jowls. She left her job at an alt-weekly to become a carpenter. Her book about the experience forthcoming from WW Norton. She has a tumblr called Carpentrix.

Four years ago, I returned home from six weeks in Nepal and wanted to still be there instead of familiar and monochromatic Boston, so I read Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. Nepal opened me. I did not want to lose it. The Snow Leopard kept me open a little longer.

Matthiessen writes of his journeys in the Himalayas, one on foot through the mountains, one more spiritual, both occurring at the same time. It is about seeking and finding and not finding. It’s an exploration of Buddhism and the religion in the mountains. It’s a description of the wild life in these remotest places, the wolves and sheep and falcons, the elusive snow leopard, the yeti. It’s about confronting death, “the roar of eternity” and “the great stillness.” 
   

Traveling alone to Nepal, I’d hired a guide through an organization that provides female guides for female trekkers, and I was paired with a tiny nineteen-year-old named Gita who was gruff-voiced and quick to giggle. She spoke some English, and was so fleet and sure of foot up and down the mountains. I carried my own pack, she hers. We followed the Annapurna Base Camp circuit, eight days. 
   

The first days were a misery, exhausting, cold. My muscles screamed. I feared my lungs might rip, my heart burst. Snot poured out of my face. My spirits were low. I ached for home, for the people I loved. I felt dismally far away from everything. 
   

On the fourth day, it opened up. Clouds cleared, the sun shown, I felt a lightness in my step, new energy. Optimism evolved into exhilaration as we reached Annapurna Base Camp at 4120 meters. Thoughts of home dissolved. There instead: the path, the peaks, the steps, one after the next. Sacred Machapuchare, the Fish Tail peak, off-limits to climbers, jutted jagged into the sky. Annapurna South cast a cold shadow down on the teahouse at camp. The mountains rose like tidal waves all around, frightening. “They appalled me with their ‘permanence,’ with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience,” Matthiessen wrote of the mountains.  
   

That night, despite the glory of the day, anxiety returned. The press of the thin air kept me awake and fretting. I thought about what my return home would bring. I had quit my job, put my books and bed and mugs and clothes in a storage unit in a Boston suburb, ended a romance. The life I’d known was done. I would return home to question marks. I lay bundled in my sleeping bag in the unheated room and worried about the future.
   

But I had to piss. I was furious as it meant exiting my bag and warmth, pushing into boots, and walking a distance to the squatters in another building. I squirmed out and wrapped my arms around myself and walked outside. 
   

I looked up and was halted by the sky. Machapuchare glowed blueish pink in the moonlight in front of me. There have never been so many stars. The air was the clearest cold. I put my hands on my head and took the air into my lungs and listened to the silence. So high up, so far away—but suddenly I didn’t feel far away at all. I felt taken up into it all; nothing mattered. I could be blown away and disappear into the sky. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t nihilism; it was ecstasy. I laughed and tears came to my eyes. I feel foolish telling you about it now. I feel shy at the risk of sounding fruity or cliché, at not being able to do it, that moment, that feeling, justice. Matthiessen knew “how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed.”
   

But in The Snow Leopard he makes the attempt and I’m glad he does: “The ground whirls with its own energy, not in an alarming way but in slow spiral, and at these altitudes, in this vast space and silence, that energy pours through me, joining my body with the sun until small silvers breaths of cold, clear air, no longer mine, are lost in the mineral breathing of the mountain.”
   

I took a piss and cold pushed me back towards my sleeping bag and I fell asleep feeling like my whole body was smiling. 


These feelings do not last, of course, as powerful as they are, or, as Matthiessen put it: “To strive for permanence in what I think I have perceived is to miss the point.”

—Nina MacLaughlin

“My grandfather was a minor Washington mystic who in 1911 prophesied the exact date when World War I would start: June 28, 1914, but it had been too much for him. He never got to enjoy the fruit of his labor because they had to put him away in 1913 and he spent seventeen years in the state insane asylum believing he was a child and it was actually May 3, 1872.

“He believed that he was six years old and it was a cloudy day about to rain and his mother was baking a chocolate cake. It stayed May 3, 1872 for my grandfather until he died in 1930. It took seventeen years for that chocolate cake to be baked.”

—Richard Brautigan, Revenge of the Lawn