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"title": "The End of the World: Musings from Notable Writers",
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"content": "\u003cp>Every few years the question of the end of the world rises up to plague us. It always seems to begin with a foreseen glitch, sometimes a tie-in to a myth, and then articles crop up everywhere, passionately asserting and debunking the end of the world. To poet \u003ca href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/eavan-boland\">Eavan Boland\u003c/a> our recurrent fantasy of the end of the world is tied to our myth-making minds. In her writing for this collection, she asks, “Why do we conceive of the world’s end when so many of us begin every day hoping for a new beginning?” I asked a slew of notable writers to take up this question of finality, our desire for finality, and their vision of apocalypse, be it Mayan or otherwise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca id=\"muse.top\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/194\">Robert Hass\u003c/a> recommends his favorite walk, followed by his favorite wine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The end of the world will be eerily comfortable. Or so \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Tea\">Michelle Tea\u003c/a> imagines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Screw 2012. \u003ca href=\"http://www.teddywayne.com/\">Teddy Wayne\u003c/a> has other, more ominous numerical alignments in mind. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To Eavan Boland poetry and apocalypse go well together. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.eloisekleinhealy.com/\">Eloise Klein\u003c/a> spends some of her time reading death poems, which provide all she needs to know about apocalypse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Felipe_Herrera\">Juan Felipe Herrera\u003c/a> says the end will be like the beginning — endless, formless, infinite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those seeking an apocalyptically appropriate book, \u003ca href=\"http://www.robinekiss.com/\">Robin Ekiss\u003c/a> obliges. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Pittsburgh, \u003ca href=\"http://adiele.com/\">Faith Adiele\u003c/a> fondly remembers, you can train to survive a Zombie apocalypse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Murgu%C3%ADa\">Alejandro Murguía\u003c/a> sides with the Aztecs; Dec. 21st is not an apocalypse, but the beginning of the \u003cem>Sixth Sun\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Hass\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“I do think the best way to get over the disappointment of the world notending is either (a) a long walk on a west-facing hillside of MountTamalpais, say the Matt Davis trail, on a cold mid-morning with the sunburning through the fog or (b) an afternoon glass of Stag’s Leapcabernet with a couple of slices of a nutty cheese — maybe Jarlsberg,not expensive, and a sesame cracker or two. After which people shouldstart calling their friends and planning to get to LA to protest theAcademy Awards if they nominate a movie that glorifies the torture ofprisoners. First a gentle farewell to the possibilities of apocalypse, andthen the world’s work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Robert Hass is a former U.S. Poet Laureate. The movie he is referencing is Kathryn Bigelow’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.zerodarkthirty-movie.com/\">\u003ci>Zero Dark Thirty\u003c/i>\u003c/a>. He was recently \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201208221000\">in conversation\u003c/a> with KQED’s Michael Krasny discussing his new book of essays, \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780061923920\">What Light Can Do\u003c/a>\u003c/i>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michelle Tea\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“The end of the world is weirdly comforting, I guess because we all die together. The thing about death that sucks is you have to leave the party while it’s still happening. The only way I have found to console myself about it is that it’s going to happen to everyone. There are so many people I don’t want to die, but the fact that they will makes it easier for me. Some friend. Now, if we were all to go out together, a big sha-bam, like global suicide pact, it would be sad, sure, but not too tragic. I could cuddle up on the couch with my beloved and our little dog and watch some End-of-the-World programming on the flat screen and just sort of — I don’t know, wait for whatever happens. A weird blip into nothingness, like switching off the television? Some sort of wrenching gust, do we get slammed by an asteroid, how is the world supposed to end, exactly?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember being a kid, seeing something somewhere that the world was meant to end later that week. I ran home with it. “Ma, Ma, the world is ending Wednesday! Did you know that?” It seemed like big news. My mother laughed. “The world is always ending,” she said. “And don’t worry, it never does.” I wasn’t exactly worried. It was too much to comprehend and still is. I’ll be at home, working, just like I am now. When my person comes home I’ll make us dinner and we’ll eat it on the couch, where we will likely fall asleep. We’ll come to, confused and cramped, at some point, and stumble into our proper bed, and in the morning we’ll wake up, not dead.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Michelle Tea is the director of the popular RADAR reading series. She is the author of five novels. She recently edited \u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780872865662\">\u003ci>Sister Spit\u003c/i>\u003c/a>.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Teddy Wayne\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“I’m less concerned about 12/21/12 and more worried about 13/31/13. Thirteen, as we all know is, unlucky, and the thirteenth month mathematically translates to the first month of the next year, so it’s actually 1/31/14. Therefore, we’re really fine for about another thirteen months — except that thirteen-month intersection is itself unlucky. So the next stretch until 1/31/14 will be terrible, and 12/21/12 will just be like any other day within it: bad.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/teddy-waynes-unpopular-proverbs\">Teddy Wayne’s Unpopular Proverbs\u003c/a> are a regular thing over at McSweeney’s. He is the author of the novels Kapitoil and most recently of \u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781476705859\">The Love Song of Jonny Valentine\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2012/12/20/boland2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Eavan Boland\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“From the very beginning the word apocalypse has bemused me. Four horsemen don’t seem nearly as convincing as the slow apocalypse Ireland endured for centuries — the blighted crops, the coffin ships. That was real. Beside that, the four horsemen have always looked to me like movie extras. And yet they have their source in a different reality. They belong to the myth-making which comes into play when we face disaster. And poetry has a place in that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Poetry and apocalypse go well together. Certainly, if I ever found myself in the second I would reach for the first. And the reason apocalypse and poetry combine is that the first is a temporal event and the second is a fugitive art. The lines, cadences, remembered images, and perfect syntax of poetry can wind around disaster, can fill up the spaces of disbelief, can give a language to terror.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I look at the past, I sometimes think our sense of apocalypse is not nearly as powerful or long-lived as the myths we make to meet it. Big poems, wildly colored movies, haunting songs. They outlive the occasions of terror they were fashioned to meet. In his \u003ca href=\"http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19195\">“A Song on the End of the World”\u003c/a> Czeslaw Milosz paints the apocalypse as a humdrum scene, where the bees continue in the clover, the fishermen go on mending their nets and “those who expected lightning and thunder/Are disappointed./And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps/Do not believe it is happening now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So why do we do this? Why do we conceive of the world’s end when so many of us begin every day hoping for a new beginning? Do we need the terror to make the myth? Or is this just one of our human quirks — a profound need from time to time to renew our love for the planet by imagining circumstances in which neither of us will survive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>For reading before, after, or during an apocalypse Eavan Boland recommends Yeats’s \u003ca>“The Stare’s Nest By My Window”\u003c/a> from his sequence Meditations in Time of Civil War. “This is a poem about a mind in its own apocalypse, disoriented by violence, trying to make a small myth of renewal.” Eavan Boland is an Irish poet. She has published ten volumes of poetry, the most recent being \u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780393337303\">New Collected Poems\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Eloise Klein\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“I often read Japanese death poems, the small poems written by monks near the moment of their death. Writing ‘death poems’ became such a popular practice that monks started writing them regardless of health or lack of it. I have written two ‘death poems.’ One of them chooses a scene I would like to visualize at the time of my death — the final photograph I would hope to hold in my mind. Like those monks, I know I’m not going to limit myself to one ‘last look’ poem. It’s probably better to have a few good images to be able to call upon in that extreme finality of the body. I don’t pay much attention to the many predictions about the world ending on a certain date. I don’t hold to the idea that it is worthwhile worrying about it. The world is always ending for someone. That holds more weight for me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Eloise Klein is the author of six collections of poetry and founder of Arktoi Books. Her most recent book is \u003ca href=\"http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=3B90F2D1-5336-33FD-A491-F46512D666CF\">A Wild Surmise\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2012/12/20/herrera2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Juan Felipe Herrera\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“The Mayan End is the Beginning El Principio”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The end will be like the beginning formless trembling infinite \u003cbr>Infinito abierto where all walk hand in hand outside of violence \u003cbr>It is violence that separates us \u003cbr>It is violence that tears the sky threads into weeping \u003cbr>It happened at the orange-red soaked stones of Tikal \u003cbr>It happened at the multi-voiced roots of the ancient Ceiba \u003cbr>So we dance with the whirlwind named Kukulkan \u003cbr>We bow at the split pyramids at the foot of our house \u003cbr>In its low-obsidian knife song \u003cbr>It does not matter what the prophecy says \u003cbr>We rise up when we rise up \u003cbr>Our plumed heart pours compassion \u003cbr>And all is restored\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Juan Felipe Herrera is the author of over twenty books. His most recent is \u003ca href=\"http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=3B90F2D1-5336-33FD-A491-F46512D666CF\">SkateFate\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Ekiss\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“I can’t help thinking the upside of the apocalypse is not having to read about it on Facebook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For apocalyptically appropriate reading: try prose poems from Charles Simic’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780156983501\">The World Doesn’t End\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>‘He held the Beast of the Apocalypse by its tail, the stupid kid! Oh beards on fire, our doom appeared sealed. The buildings were tottering; the computer screens were as dark as our grandmother’s cupboards. We were too frightened to plead. Another century gone to hell — and for what? Just because some people don’t know how to bring their children up!'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Robin Ekiss lives in San Francisco. She is the author of \u003ca href=\"http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=3B90F2D1-5336-33FD-A491-F46512D666CF\">The Mansion of Happiness\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2012/12/20/adiele2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Faith Adiele\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“Before coming to the Bay Area I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is all about zombies. You can train to survive a Zombie Apocalypse. You can re-enact \u003ci>Dawn of the Dead\u003c/i> at the Monroeville Mall. One of my students used to dog-sit for director George Romero, and we held class in his mansion, which is filled with movie props I was terrified they’d touch! That might come back to haunt me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic movies. Maybe because I grew up in the semi-desert of eastern Washington, and my grandfather worked at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Maybe because I saw \u003ci>Road Warrior\u003c/i> as a teenager, and it topped anything I could see through the barbed war at Hanford. Of course, that was long before we knew Mel Gibson was nuts. But he is responsible for the celluloid Mayan bloodbath, \u003ci>Apocalypto\u003c/i>, and I am excited about the prospect of a Mayan Apocalypse — mainly for the chocolate and spices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A nice last evening might be curling up with Charles C. Mann’s riveting mélange of archeology, literature, anthropology, science, and history: \u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781400032051\">\u003ci>1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus\u003c/i>\u003c/a> (which I just bought my mom for Christmas and which, at 541 pages, won’t end until long after the world does, whether or not the Maya got it right). And doing shots of Flaming B-52s (since it’s the end of the world, screw calories).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“1/3 shot Kahlua \u003cbr>1/3 shot Irish Cream \u003cbr>1/3 shot Grand Marnier or Cointreau \u003cbr>Couple drops of 151 Rum \u003cbr>Mexican cinnamon \u003cbr>Fill a shot glass 1/3 full of Kahlua. Layer the Irish Cream on top by pouring it onto the back of the spoon held against the rim of the shot glass. Layer the Grand Marnier the same way. Add a drop or two of 151 and light it! For even more drama, sprinkle cinnamon on the flame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If necessary, shot can be used as a Molotov Cocktail (invented by my mother’s people, the Finns) and hurled at approaching zombies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Faith Adiele is the author of \u003ca href=\"http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=3B90F2D1-5336-33FD-A491-F46512D666CF\">Meeting Faith; The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun\u003c/a>. She is currently working on a memoir about growing up Nigerian/Nordic/American. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alejandro Murguía \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Bay Area knows Alejandro Murguía as the new San Francisco poet laureate, professor of Latino Studies at SFSU, and founder of the Mission Cultural Center. I talked with him on December 16th on the telephone. We discussed the misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar, the apocalyptic lens of the Bible, and the coming of the Sixth Sun. Below is an excerpt of that conversation.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Have you ever considered the possibility of a Mayan apocalypse?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Well, if we were to go back into the Christian past, it’s the Christians, really, who are obsessed with the end of the world. Christians have always been paranoid about some pending end of the world. All you have to do is read the scriptures. I think the misinterpretation of the Mayan cycle comes from this Western belief. But the Bible does not apply to the Mayan world, because, if you notice, there are no Mayans in the Bible. The other thing that is important to realize about the Maya is that time for them is cyclical. Time never ends for the Mayans. The earth never ends. Civilization does not end. But it keeps going in a cycle and it keeps repeating itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But here’s the important thing — the Mayan calendar spread to other Mesoamerican communities a little bit North to the Maya (what we would call the Aztecs, but they called themselves the Mexica) and here’s how we should interpret this — this is why we don’t hear about it, because this is perhaps the most correct interpretation — and it is this: The cycle that is ending now in the Aztec nahuatl would be the end of the Fifth Sun. The end of the Fifth Sun, which is the sun we are living in, is characterized by violence, by earthquakes, turmoil. But the new sun, the one that begins Dec. 21st, is the Sixth Sun and that is characterized by compassion, community, cooperation, solidarity, brotherhood, sisterhood. And that’s why, for example, the society in the United States does not want to truly reflect on what the cycles mean. Because, as you see, in today’s morning news, and this incredible massacre of children in Connecticut, we prefer in this society in the United States a world of chaos and violence, fear, paranoia, and prejudice. So why would we welcome a cycle that would be the opposite of that?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Are you doing anything special to welcome the Sixth Sun?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Yes. I’ll be attending ceremonies here in the Mission, but also on January 3rd at the Focus Gallery in North Beach. I will be hosting a poetry reading of Latino poets to celebrate and welcome the Sexto Sol. It’s also part of a celebration and exhibit by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Join Alejandro Murguía in welcoming the Sixth Sun at 6:30pm on January 3, 2013, at Focus Gallery. For \u003ca href=\"www.focusgallerysf.org\">more information\u003c/a>, visit at focusgallerysf.org. You can also catch Alejandro Murguía at the San Francisco Library on Jan 27, 2013 for his inaugural address as San Francisco’s new Poet Laureate. \u003ca href=\"http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=1011658701\">More information\u003c/a> at sfpl.org.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Illustrations by Jeremiah Barber.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Every few years the question of the end of the world rises up to plague us. It always seems to begin with a foreseen glitch, sometimes a tie-in to a myth, and then articles crop up everywhere, passionately asserting and debunking the end of the world. To poet \u003ca href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/eavan-boland\">Eavan Boland\u003c/a> our recurrent fantasy of the end of the world is tied to our myth-making minds. In her writing for this collection, she asks, “Why do we conceive of the world’s end when so many of us begin every day hoping for a new beginning?” I asked a slew of notable writers to take up this question of finality, our desire for finality, and their vision of apocalypse, be it Mayan or otherwise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca id=\"muse.top\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/194\">Robert Hass\u003c/a> recommends his favorite walk, followed by his favorite wine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The end of the world will be eerily comfortable. Or so \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Tea\">Michelle Tea\u003c/a> imagines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Screw 2012. \u003ca href=\"http://www.teddywayne.com/\">Teddy Wayne\u003c/a> has other, more ominous numerical alignments in mind. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To Eavan Boland poetry and apocalypse go well together. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.eloisekleinhealy.com/\">Eloise Klein\u003c/a> spends some of her time reading death poems, which provide all she needs to know about apocalypse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Felipe_Herrera\">Juan Felipe Herrera\u003c/a> says the end will be like the beginning — endless, formless, infinite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those seeking an apocalyptically appropriate book, \u003ca href=\"http://www.robinekiss.com/\">Robin Ekiss\u003c/a> obliges. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Pittsburgh, \u003ca href=\"http://adiele.com/\">Faith Adiele\u003c/a> fondly remembers, you can train to survive a Zombie apocalypse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Murgu%C3%ADa\">Alejandro Murguía\u003c/a> sides with the Aztecs; Dec. 21st is not an apocalypse, but the beginning of the \u003cem>Sixth Sun\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Hass\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“I do think the best way to get over the disappointment of the world notending is either (a) a long walk on a west-facing hillside of MountTamalpais, say the Matt Davis trail, on a cold mid-morning with the sunburning through the fog or (b) an afternoon glass of Stag’s Leapcabernet with a couple of slices of a nutty cheese — maybe Jarlsberg,not expensive, and a sesame cracker or two. After which people shouldstart calling their friends and planning to get to LA to protest theAcademy Awards if they nominate a movie that glorifies the torture ofprisoners. First a gentle farewell to the possibilities of apocalypse, andthen the world’s work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Robert Hass is a former U.S. Poet Laureate. The movie he is referencing is Kathryn Bigelow’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.zerodarkthirty-movie.com/\">\u003ci>Zero Dark Thirty\u003c/i>\u003c/a>. He was recently \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201208221000\">in conversation\u003c/a> with KQED’s Michael Krasny discussing his new book of essays, \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780061923920\">What Light Can Do\u003c/a>\u003c/i>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Michelle Tea\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“The end of the world is weirdly comforting, I guess because we all die together. The thing about death that sucks is you have to leave the party while it’s still happening. The only way I have found to console myself about it is that it’s going to happen to everyone. There are so many people I don’t want to die, but the fact that they will makes it easier for me. Some friend. Now, if we were all to go out together, a big sha-bam, like global suicide pact, it would be sad, sure, but not too tragic. I could cuddle up on the couch with my beloved and our little dog and watch some End-of-the-World programming on the flat screen and just sort of — I don’t know, wait for whatever happens. A weird blip into nothingness, like switching off the television? Some sort of wrenching gust, do we get slammed by an asteroid, how is the world supposed to end, exactly?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember being a kid, seeing something somewhere that the world was meant to end later that week. I ran home with it. “Ma, Ma, the world is ending Wednesday! Did you know that?” It seemed like big news. My mother laughed. “The world is always ending,” she said. “And don’t worry, it never does.” I wasn’t exactly worried. It was too much to comprehend and still is. I’ll be at home, working, just like I am now. When my person comes home I’ll make us dinner and we’ll eat it on the couch, where we will likely fall asleep. We’ll come to, confused and cramped, at some point, and stumble into our proper bed, and in the morning we’ll wake up, not dead.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Michelle Tea is the director of the popular RADAR reading series. She is the author of five novels. She recently edited \u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780872865662\">\u003ci>Sister Spit\u003c/i>\u003c/a>.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Teddy Wayne\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“I’m less concerned about 12/21/12 and more worried about 13/31/13. Thirteen, as we all know is, unlucky, and the thirteenth month mathematically translates to the first month of the next year, so it’s actually 1/31/14. Therefore, we’re really fine for about another thirteen months — except that thirteen-month intersection is itself unlucky. So the next stretch until 1/31/14 will be terrible, and 12/21/12 will just be like any other day within it: bad.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/teddy-waynes-unpopular-proverbs\">Teddy Wayne’s Unpopular Proverbs\u003c/a> are a regular thing over at McSweeney’s. He is the author of the novels Kapitoil and most recently of \u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781476705859\">The Love Song of Jonny Valentine\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2012/12/20/boland2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Eavan Boland\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“From the very beginning the word apocalypse has bemused me. Four horsemen don’t seem nearly as convincing as the slow apocalypse Ireland endured for centuries — the blighted crops, the coffin ships. That was real. Beside that, the four horsemen have always looked to me like movie extras. And yet they have their source in a different reality. They belong to the myth-making which comes into play when we face disaster. And poetry has a place in that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Poetry and apocalypse go well together. Certainly, if I ever found myself in the second I would reach for the first. And the reason apocalypse and poetry combine is that the first is a temporal event and the second is a fugitive art. The lines, cadences, remembered images, and perfect syntax of poetry can wind around disaster, can fill up the spaces of disbelief, can give a language to terror.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I look at the past, I sometimes think our sense of apocalypse is not nearly as powerful or long-lived as the myths we make to meet it. Big poems, wildly colored movies, haunting songs. They outlive the occasions of terror they were fashioned to meet. In his \u003ca href=\"http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19195\">“A Song on the End of the World”\u003c/a> Czeslaw Milosz paints the apocalypse as a humdrum scene, where the bees continue in the clover, the fishermen go on mending their nets and “those who expected lightning and thunder/Are disappointed./And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps/Do not believe it is happening now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So why do we do this? Why do we conceive of the world’s end when so many of us begin every day hoping for a new beginning? Do we need the terror to make the myth? Or is this just one of our human quirks — a profound need from time to time to renew our love for the planet by imagining circumstances in which neither of us will survive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>For reading before, after, or during an apocalypse Eavan Boland recommends Yeats’s \u003ca>“The Stare’s Nest By My Window”\u003c/a> from his sequence Meditations in Time of Civil War. “This is a poem about a mind in its own apocalypse, disoriented by violence, trying to make a small myth of renewal.” Eavan Boland is an Irish poet. She has published ten volumes of poetry, the most recent being \u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780393337303\">New Collected Poems\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Eloise Klein\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“I often read Japanese death poems, the small poems written by monks near the moment of their death. Writing ‘death poems’ became such a popular practice that monks started writing them regardless of health or lack of it. I have written two ‘death poems.’ One of them chooses a scene I would like to visualize at the time of my death — the final photograph I would hope to hold in my mind. Like those monks, I know I’m not going to limit myself to one ‘last look’ poem. It’s probably better to have a few good images to be able to call upon in that extreme finality of the body. I don’t pay much attention to the many predictions about the world ending on a certain date. I don’t hold to the idea that it is worthwhile worrying about it. The world is always ending for someone. That holds more weight for me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Eloise Klein is the author of six collections of poetry and founder of Arktoi Books. Her most recent book is \u003ca href=\"http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=3B90F2D1-5336-33FD-A491-F46512D666CF\">A Wild Surmise\u003c/a>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2012/12/20/herrera2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Juan Felipe Herrera\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“The Mayan End is the Beginning El Principio”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The end will be like the beginning formless trembling infinite \u003cbr>Infinito abierto where all walk hand in hand outside of violence \u003cbr>It is violence that separates us \u003cbr>It is violence that tears the sky threads into weeping \u003cbr>It happened at the orange-red soaked stones of Tikal \u003cbr>It happened at the multi-voiced roots of the ancient Ceiba \u003cbr>So we dance with the whirlwind named Kukulkan \u003cbr>We bow at the split pyramids at the foot of our house \u003cbr>In its low-obsidian knife song \u003cbr>It does not matter what the prophecy says \u003cbr>We rise up when we rise up \u003cbr>Our plumed heart pours compassion \u003cbr>And all is restored\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Juan Felipe Herrera is the author of over twenty books. His most recent is \u003ca href=\"http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=3B90F2D1-5336-33FD-A491-F46512D666CF\">SkateFate\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Ekiss\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“I can’t help thinking the upside of the apocalypse is not having to read about it on Facebook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For apocalyptically appropriate reading: try prose poems from Charles Simic’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780156983501\">The World Doesn’t End\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>‘He held the Beast of the Apocalypse by its tail, the stupid kid! Oh beards on fire, our doom appeared sealed. The buildings were tottering; the computer screens were as dark as our grandmother’s cupboards. We were too frightened to plead. Another century gone to hell — and for what? Just because some people don’t know how to bring their children up!'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Robin Ekiss lives in San Francisco. She is the author of \u003ca href=\"http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=3B90F2D1-5336-33FD-A491-F46512D666CF\">The Mansion of Happiness\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://u.s.kqed.net/2012/12/20/adiele2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Faith Adiele\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>“Before coming to the Bay Area I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is all about zombies. You can train to survive a Zombie Apocalypse. You can re-enact \u003ci>Dawn of the Dead\u003c/i> at the Monroeville Mall. One of my students used to dog-sit for director George Romero, and we held class in his mansion, which is filled with movie props I was terrified they’d touch! That might come back to haunt me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic movies. Maybe because I grew up in the semi-desert of eastern Washington, and my grandfather worked at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Maybe because I saw \u003ci>Road Warrior\u003c/i> as a teenager, and it topped anything I could see through the barbed war at Hanford. Of course, that was long before we knew Mel Gibson was nuts. But he is responsible for the celluloid Mayan bloodbath, \u003ci>Apocalypto\u003c/i>, and I am excited about the prospect of a Mayan Apocalypse — mainly for the chocolate and spices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A nice last evening might be curling up with Charles C. Mann’s riveting mélange of archeology, literature, anthropology, science, and history: \u003ca href=\"http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781400032051\">\u003ci>1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus\u003c/i>\u003c/a> (which I just bought my mom for Christmas and which, at 541 pages, won’t end until long after the world does, whether or not the Maya got it right). And doing shots of Flaming B-52s (since it’s the end of the world, screw calories).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“1/3 shot Kahlua \u003cbr>1/3 shot Irish Cream \u003cbr>1/3 shot Grand Marnier or Cointreau \u003cbr>Couple drops of 151 Rum \u003cbr>Mexican cinnamon \u003cbr>Fill a shot glass 1/3 full of Kahlua. Layer the Irish Cream on top by pouring it onto the back of the spoon held against the rim of the shot glass. Layer the Grand Marnier the same way. Add a drop or two of 151 and light it! For even more drama, sprinkle cinnamon on the flame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If necessary, shot can be used as a Molotov Cocktail (invented by my mother’s people, the Finns) and hurled at approaching zombies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Faith Adiele is the author of \u003ca href=\"http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=3B90F2D1-5336-33FD-A491-F46512D666CF\">Meeting Faith; The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun\u003c/a>. She is currently working on a memoir about growing up Nigerian/Nordic/American. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alejandro Murguía \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Bay Area knows Alejandro Murguía as the new San Francisco poet laureate, professor of Latino Studies at SFSU, and founder of the Mission Cultural Center. I talked with him on December 16th on the telephone. We discussed the misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar, the apocalyptic lens of the Bible, and the coming of the Sixth Sun. Below is an excerpt of that conversation.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Have you ever considered the possibility of a Mayan apocalypse?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Well, if we were to go back into the Christian past, it’s the Christians, really, who are obsessed with the end of the world. Christians have always been paranoid about some pending end of the world. All you have to do is read the scriptures. I think the misinterpretation of the Mayan cycle comes from this Western belief. But the Bible does not apply to the Mayan world, because, if you notice, there are no Mayans in the Bible. The other thing that is important to realize about the Maya is that time for them is cyclical. Time never ends for the Mayans. The earth never ends. Civilization does not end. But it keeps going in a cycle and it keeps repeating itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But here’s the important thing — the Mayan calendar spread to other Mesoamerican communities a little bit North to the Maya (what we would call the Aztecs, but they called themselves the Mexica) and here’s how we should interpret this — this is why we don’t hear about it, because this is perhaps the most correct interpretation — and it is this: The cycle that is ending now in the Aztec nahuatl would be the end of the Fifth Sun. The end of the Fifth Sun, which is the sun we are living in, is characterized by violence, by earthquakes, turmoil. But the new sun, the one that begins Dec. 21st, is the Sixth Sun and that is characterized by compassion, community, cooperation, solidarity, brotherhood, sisterhood. And that’s why, for example, the society in the United States does not want to truly reflect on what the cycles mean. Because, as you see, in today’s morning news, and this incredible massacre of children in Connecticut, we prefer in this society in the United States a world of chaos and violence, fear, paranoia, and prejudice. So why would we welcome a cycle that would be the opposite of that?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Are you doing anything special to welcome the Sixth Sun?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Yes. I’ll be attending ceremonies here in the Mission, but also on January 3rd at the Focus Gallery in North Beach. I will be hosting a poetry reading of Latino poets to celebrate and welcome the Sexto Sol. It’s also part of a celebration and exhibit by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Join Alejandro Murguía in welcoming the Sixth Sun at 6:30pm on January 3, 2013, at Focus Gallery. For \u003ca href=\"www.focusgallerysf.org\">more information\u003c/a>, visit at focusgallerysf.org. You can also catch Alejandro Murguía at the San Francisco Library on Jan 27, 2013 for his inaugural address as San Francisco’s new Poet Laureate. \u003ca href=\"http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=1011658701\">More information\u003c/a> at sfpl.org.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life — mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone — and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead “checking out” impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he’s embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behavior and roped his friends into helping to figure out just what’s going on. But once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With irresistible brio and dazzling intelligence, Robin Sloan has crafted a literary adventure story for the twenty-first century, evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or a young Umberto Eco, but with a unique and feisty sensibility that’s rare to the world of literary fiction. \u003ci>Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore\u003c/i> is exactly what it sounds like: an establishment you have to enter and will never want to leave, a modern-day cabinet of wonders ready to give a jolt of energy to every curious reader, no matter the time of day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Ben Fountain's newest book,\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003cem>Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk,\u003c/em> takes place over the course of a single day in the life of Spc. William Lynn. Author Jonathan Evison writes that this is a book so vivid he felt like he lived it. Have you ever read a book that felt real? Tell us in the comments.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Jonathan Evison’s latest novel is \u003cem>The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every two or three years, if I’m lucky, I get my hands on a novel that I simply can’t shut up about, a novel I shout from my humble mountaintop to anyone who will listen, a novel that I hand-sell any time I have a literate audience of one or more. In many cases, I’ll purchase this novel, over and over and over, and put it in the hands of readers. The last novel that knocked me for this kind of a whammy was Hesh Kestin’s criminally underappreciated \u003cem>The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats\u003c/em>, which left me breathless with its mastery of character and suspense.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>2012 has been a banner year for literary fiction. I’ve been crowing about a number of novels this year, from Jess Walter’s \u003cem>Beautiful Ruins\u003c/em>, to Maria Semple’s \u003cem>Where’d You Go, Bernadette\u003c/em>, both brilliant and inventive. But one novel this year blew the top of my head off like no other, and that was \u003cem>Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk \u003c/em>by Ben Fountain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When 19-year-old Spc. Billy Lynn, one of eight surviving members of the celebrated Bravo Squad, returns stateside from Iraq for an eight-day victory tour, he finds himself a national hero. Bravo’s dog-and-pony show and its attendant media blitz culminates on Thanksgiving Day, during the halftime celebration of a Dallas Cowboys football game in Billy’s native Texas. As Thanksgiving unfolds, amid an almost overwhelming flurry of activity, Billy confronts a barrage of questions about family, nation, patriotism, celebrity and love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many of my favorite novels, the synopsis sounds rather uneventful — it’s not. Though its scope may not be epic — a single afternoon — the novel has a profound thematic reach. Without ever hitting a false note, Fountain tackles the unwieldy subjects of Iraq, the war on terrorism, class, consumerism and politics. What’s even more impressive is that he accomplishes all of this employing a tiny aperture, a lone point of view, a single location and does it in real time: No brow-beating, no navel gazing and no ranting. Just great storytelling, fully realized characters and sentences that crackle. In short, Fountain makes it look easy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To read \u003cem>Billy Lynn\u003c/em> is to engage in a pure, tactile state of sensory overload. You feel this story with your whole body — all the adrenaline, tension and nausea. The novel is a veritable decoupage of physical sensation — from the sodium glare of stadium lights, to the acid sting of bitterness in the throat; from the woozy disequilibrium of a Jack Daniels hangover, to the galloping heartbeat of unfettered carnality. Fountain achieves that rare level of evocation that makes readers feel as though they lived it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5432412\">You Must Read This\u003c/a>\u003cem> is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Rose Friedman with production assistance from Annalisa Quinn.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+Warrior%27s+Welcome+In+%27Billy+Lynn%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister — all battling tuberculosis — walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba. Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in Goteborg, Sweden. It was there that Marcus’s new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature roast chicken. From a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Yes, Chef\u003c/i> chronicles Marcus Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from Helga’s humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four. But Samuelsson’s career of “chasing flavors,” as he calls it, had only just begun — in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs and, most important, the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fulfilled his dream of creating a truly diverse, multiracial dining room—a place where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, bus drivers, and nurses. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With disarming honesty and intimacy, Samuelsson also opens up about his failures — the price of ambition, in human terms — and recounts his emotional journey, as a grown man, to meet the father he never knew. Yes, Chef is a tale of personal discovery, unshakable determination, and the passionate, playful pursuit of flavors — one man’s struggle to find a place for himself in the kitchen, and in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cp>Ian McEwan’s \u003cem>Sweet Tooth\u003c/em> is that oddest of literary achievements: an ingenious novel that I compulsively read, intellectually admired and increasingly hated. By the time I got to McEwan’s last sneer of a plot twist, I felt that reading\u003cem> Sweet Tooth\u003c/em> is the closest I ever want to come to the experience of watching a snuff film. Think that’s harsh? Open up \u003cem>Sweet Tooth\u003c/em> and find out what McEwan thinks of you, Dear Reader, particularly if you’re a woman, as most readers of fiction are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our heroine here is a young woman named Serena Frome who devours 19th and 20th century fiction — everything from Jane Austen to Jacqueline Susann to Muriel Spark. Several times in \u003cem>Sweet Tooth,\u003c/em> Serena discusses her reading tastes, much to the exasperation of her brainy novelist boyfriend. Serena says, “I wanted characters I could believe in and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love. … It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say ‘Marry me’ by the end.” Later on, Serena adds, “I didn’t like tricks.” Oh, what fun McEwan has squirting acid over everything simple Serena — clearly, the Common (Female) Reader — enjoys in a novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McEwan deploys his great gifts of storytelling to draw readers into an intricate plot about Serena’s career during the 1970s, working as a low-level operative for MI5, the British internal intelligence service. Then, by novel’s end, McEwan ridicules us readers for ever believing in Serena and the fictional world he’s blown breath into.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McEwan’s title\u003cem>, Sweet Tooth,\u003c/em> refers to both a clandestine operation Serena carries out and to the mind-candy lure of fiction itself. Certainly, as much as it is a suspense tale, a novel of ideas and a political meditation on the decline of Britain in the 1970s, \u003cem>Sweet Tooth\u003c/em> is also a cynical novel about the art of fiction and its pointlessness in the larger scheme of things.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the story goes, beautiful Serena is recruited into MI5 by her lover at Cambridge, a history professor who is one of the many brilliant, narcissistic and essentially mean men whom she falls for. After graduation, Serena moves into a damp bed-sit in London and enters the intelligence service at a time when the glass ceiling for women was ankle-high. She diligently files and smiles until the day that her expertise as a novel reader is called upon for a mission dubbed “Sweet Tooth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MI5 wants to secretly fund fledgling writers and artists whose work it deems anti-communist in sympathy. Serena is dispatched to entice a fiction writer named Tom Haley into the operation, and, as preparation, she reads the short stories he’s written, which McEwan himself, of course, concocts and scatters throughout this novel. Violating one of the cardinal rules of tradecraft, Serena falls in love with Tom, even as she’s tormented by the fact that she’s concealing her true identity as a secret agent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As he has in previous novels, like \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/138055611/atonement\">Atonement\u003c/a>, McEwan revels here in breaking the “fourth wall” between his fictional world and our own: For instance, real-life Brit writers, living and dead, like Martin Amis and Ian Hamilton turn up in scenes and schmooze with Tom and Serena. Tom’s short stories all revolve around the themes of love, betrayal and fakery and, so, they explicitly comment on the larger tale this novel tells. Betrayal certainly dooms the relationship between Serena and Tom, as well the relationship — built on an illusion, after all — between the reader and this novel itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What sets \u003cem>Sweet Tooth\u003c/em> apart from McEwan’s other work, however, is the tone. There’s a degree of nastiness here — particularly in that genderized disdain for female readers as well as in McEwan’s cool dismissal of the products of his own imagination. Postmodernist writing can have humor and heart, but, in \u003cem>Sweet Tooth,\u003c/em> McEwan’s postmodernist narrative “tricks” simply serve as weapons of mass destruction. The novel is exposed as little more than a mental game, and Serena, whom we’ve grown attached to, is brutally silenced. All that remains is a reader’s grudging recognition that McEwan, our Author-God, is awfully clever. Call me sentimental, but that’s not enough. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. 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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Ian McEwan’s \u003cem>Sweet Tooth\u003c/em> is that oddest of literary achievements: an ingenious novel that I compulsively read, intellectually admired and increasingly hated. By the time I got to McEwan’s last sneer of a plot twist, I felt that reading\u003cem> Sweet Tooth\u003c/em> is the closest I ever want to come to the experience of watching a snuff film. Think that’s harsh? Open up \u003cem>Sweet Tooth\u003c/em> and find out what McEwan thinks of you, Dear Reader, particularly if you’re a woman, as most readers of fiction are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our heroine here is a young woman named Serena Frome who devours 19th and 20th century fiction — everything from Jane Austen to Jacqueline Susann to Muriel Spark. Several times in \u003cem>Sweet Tooth,\u003c/em> Serena discusses her reading tastes, much to the exasperation of her brainy novelist boyfriend. Serena says, “I wanted characters I could believe in and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love. … It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say ‘Marry me’ by the end.” Later on, Serena adds, “I didn’t like tricks.” Oh, what fun McEwan has squirting acid over everything simple Serena — clearly, the Common (Female) Reader — enjoys in a novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McEwan deploys his great gifts of storytelling to draw readers into an intricate plot about Serena’s career during the 1970s, working as a low-level operative for MI5, the British internal intelligence service. Then, by novel’s end, McEwan ridicules us readers for ever believing in Serena and the fictional world he’s blown breath into.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McEwan’s title\u003cem>, Sweet Tooth,\u003c/em> refers to both a clandestine operation Serena carries out and to the mind-candy lure of fiction itself. Certainly, as much as it is a suspense tale, a novel of ideas and a political meditation on the decline of Britain in the 1970s, \u003cem>Sweet Tooth\u003c/em> is also a cynical novel about the art of fiction and its pointlessness in the larger scheme of things.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the story goes, beautiful Serena is recruited into MI5 by her lover at Cambridge, a history professor who is one of the many brilliant, narcissistic and essentially mean men whom she falls for. After graduation, Serena moves into a damp bed-sit in London and enters the intelligence service at a time when the glass ceiling for women was ankle-high. She diligently files and smiles until the day that her expertise as a novel reader is called upon for a mission dubbed “Sweet Tooth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MI5 wants to secretly fund fledgling writers and artists whose work it deems anti-communist in sympathy. Serena is dispatched to entice a fiction writer named Tom Haley into the operation, and, as preparation, she reads the short stories he’s written, which McEwan himself, of course, concocts and scatters throughout this novel. Violating one of the cardinal rules of tradecraft, Serena falls in love with Tom, even as she’s tormented by the fact that she’s concealing her true identity as a secret agent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As he has in previous novels, like \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/138055611/atonement\">Atonement\u003c/a>, McEwan revels here in breaking the “fourth wall” between his fictional world and our own: For instance, real-life Brit writers, living and dead, like Martin Amis and Ian Hamilton turn up in scenes and schmooze with Tom and Serena. Tom’s short stories all revolve around the themes of love, betrayal and fakery and, so, they explicitly comment on the larger tale this novel tells. Betrayal certainly dooms the relationship between Serena and Tom, as well the relationship — built on an illusion, after all — between the reader and this novel itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What sets \u003cem>Sweet Tooth\u003c/em> apart from McEwan’s other work, however, is the tone. There’s a degree of nastiness here — particularly in that genderized disdain for female readers as well as in McEwan’s cool dismissal of the products of his own imagination. Postmodernist writing can have humor and heart, but, in \u003cem>Sweet Tooth,\u003c/em> McEwan’s postmodernist narrative “tricks” simply serve as weapons of mass destruction. The novel is exposed as little more than a mental game, and Serena, whom we’ve grown attached to, is brutally silenced. All that remains is a reader’s grudging recognition that McEwan, our Author-God, is awfully clever. Call me sentimental, but that’s not enough. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Ian+McEwan%27s+%27Sweet+Tooth%27+Leaves+A+Sour+Taste&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Marbles\u003c/em>, cartoonist Ellen Forney’s excellent graphic memoir about being bipolar, opens with her in the middle of a 5 1/2-hour session in a tattoo parlor. Every time the needle traces a line, Forney writes, she can “see the sensation — a bright white light, an electrical charge.” Those opening words are a perfect description of her book. From the very first page, Forney allows us to see sensation — to inhabit, as closely as possible, her bipolar world, from its manic, exhilarating highs to its oceanic, debilitating lows. Bipolar disorder defies easy treatment; each individual patient must become their own guinea pig to discover the balance of medication and lifestyle therapies that will allow him or her to achieve long-term stability. For Forney, this was an intense four-year process that she chronicles with her deceptively simple drawing style, an emotive line that matches her expressive prose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is it weird to call a memoir about bipolar disorder entertaining? Well, this one is, thanks to the ease with which Forney translates her vivacious, fearless personality to the page. This is easiest when she’s getting that tattoo, planning a massive book party or orchestrating a steamy photo shoot in one of her manic phases, but her unfailing sense of humor, honesty and engagement with the world sustains us through the low phases as well. After receiving her diagnosis, Forney plans future projects to occupy herself when she becomes depressed, but as the cycle inevitably shifts, she writes, “I sensed that I had landed, a familiar feeling I’d forgotten. … I had a tickle in my throat and there was pressure in my nasal passages. I’d forgotten this part, too. During a manic episode, depression seems entirely impossible. At the end of a high, though, I’d get sick. I had a sinking feeling … I’d been so sure that I could manage without meds, that I could take care of myself. That conviction disappeared all at once.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From a distance, it can be tempting to romanticize the bipolar artist, as Forney herself points out, providing a list of celebrated painters, writers and composers who shared her diagnosis. But by alternating comics with pages from the sketchbook she kept during her lows, we see what depression looks like through her eyes, and any romantic notions are quickly dispelled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Forney has a virtuosic understanding of what words and images can do in congress, playing them off one another in ways that allow her pages to be more than the sum of their parts. A wildly branching flow chart mimics the frenetic geometries of manic associative thinking; drops of water on a wall morph into a woodland scene to show the process of visual creativity at work; on one page, gray cloudlike forms press down on a small figure to evoke the claustrophobic anxiety that oppresses Forney during her lows. No matter what she’s experiencing, Forney wants you to be there with her. Chances are, if you have even a passing interest in nonfiction comics, psychology or what it means to be creative, you’ll want to be there, too. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Going+%27Marbles%27%3A+From+Manic+Highs+To+Oceanic+Lows&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cp>In his introduction to \u003cem>Kurt Vonnegut: Letters,\u003c/em> Dan Wakefield, the book’s editor and a longtime Vonnegut \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokononism\">karass\u003c/a> member, writes of the late author’s aspiration to be a “cultivated eccentric.” Over the course of six decades of letters to family, friends, admirers, detractors and fellow writers, Vonnegut shows himself to be so much more, both in terms of ambition and accomplishment. In fact, viewed in its totality, the collection — by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and mundane — is striking in just how uneccentric it shows the author to be. Vonnegut himself is a near-perfect example of the same flawed, wonderful humanity that he loved and despaired over his entire life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Letters\u003c/em> should be read as a necessary companion piece to Charles J. Shields’ evenhanded 2011 Vonnegut biography, \u003cem>And So It Goes\u003c/em>. The Shields book reveals a successful but mostly unhappy man, one with a penchant for professional betrayals (he nixed an agreement with longtime friend and editor Knox Burger); an anti-war, liberal champion who had no problem investing in napalm manufacturer Dow Chemical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The singular, iconic author was certainly complicated — and at times vain and quick to anger. Those critics who pigeonholed him as a sci-fi hack promptly felt the wrath of his epistolary ripostes. For example, six years after achieving lasting fame for his classic, \u003cem>Slaughterhouse-Five,\u003c/em> a miffed Vonnegut felt compelled to write to Osborn Elliott, the editor of \u003cem>Newsweek,\u003c/em> concerning a piece on science fiction written by Peter Prescott. Prescott’s offending lines went like this: “Few sf [science fiction] writers aim higher than what a teen-age intelligence can grasp, and the smart ones, like Kurt Vonnegut, carefully satirize targets — racism, pollution, teachers — that teen-agers are conditioned to dislike.” To which Vonnegut tersely replied, “I have never written with teen-agers in mind, nor are teen-agers the chief readers of my books. I am the first sf writer to win a Guggenheim, the first to become a member of the National Institute for Arts and Letters, the first to have a book become a finalist for a National Book Award.” He goes on to list his undeniably impressive accomplishments and titles for several more lines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This fierce pride in his work and resistance to the shallow critical dismissals that would label him a one-trick genre pony were tempered by a constant and playful deprecatory air. In 1959, Vonnegut wrote a short missive to a writer acquaintance named Norman Mailer: “I have just finished reading your \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertisements_for_Myself\">ad for yourself\u003c/a> — a lot of it twice, at your suggestion. Since my reputation is worthless, my comments on the book would be worthless, so f – – – them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His note to Mailer continues with an anecdote about a time, about 10 years prior, when the two of them socialized with Vonnegut’s drunk mother-in-law: “[She] was about two feet away from you, indoors, separated from you by a window shade drawn over an open window. She said to me in a loud, indignant squawk, ‘Well — I think you’re cuter than he is …’ It’s a fact, incidentally — I \u003cem>am\u003c/em> cuter than you are. Respectfully, Somebody named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vonnegut saved some of his harshest criticisms for censors who would ban and sometimes burn his novels without having read a single page, and there are no shortage of these scathing attacks in the collection. But it’s the letters to his children that reveal the private figure. In the early ’70s, soon after he took a teaching position at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he mentored the likes of John Irving and Gail Godwin), Vonnegut split from his wife, Jane. Though the breakup was mostly amicable, its quiet fallout underlies much of the subsequent correspondence with his daughters Nanette and Edith. In an unintentionally amusing letter dating from 1973, Vonnegut refers to Geraldo Rivera, Edie’s then-husband — and current Fox News reporter — as “a fierce Democrat and closet Marxist.” So it goes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Toward the end of his life, the correspondence gets a bit sadder and more self-reflective, as is to be expected. In a few late letters, Vonnegut refers to himself as one of “Melville’s whalers, who didn’t talk anymore because they’d said all they had to say.” By the time he died, in 2007, the writer had outlived his first wife and many friends. In many of the letters, you get the sense that he is just killing time — making silkscreen paintings, writing tributes and blurbs — while waiting for the end.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If that seems unpleasant, consider it in light of his unsuccessful 1984 suicide attempt. After that booze-and-pill cocktail, he found reason to keep going — and even to impart some wisdom. \u003cem>Kurt Vonnegut: Letters \u003c/em>ends, appropriately, with the last words of advice he wrote for an audience: “And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one … I’m out of here.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Vonnegut+%27Letters%27+Hilarious+And+Heartbreaking&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"description": "Kurt Vonnegut aspired to be a sort of "cultivated eccentric." Reviewer Drew Toal says a new collection of Vonnegut's letters — by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and mundane — reveals just how uneccentric the writer actually was.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In his introduction to \u003cem>Kurt Vonnegut: Letters,\u003c/em> Dan Wakefield, the book’s editor and a longtime Vonnegut \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokononism\">karass\u003c/a> member, writes of the late author’s aspiration to be a “cultivated eccentric.” Over the course of six decades of letters to family, friends, admirers, detractors and fellow writers, Vonnegut shows himself to be so much more, both in terms of ambition and accomplishment. In fact, viewed in its totality, the collection — by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and mundane — is striking in just how uneccentric it shows the author to be. Vonnegut himself is a near-perfect example of the same flawed, wonderful humanity that he loved and despaired over his entire life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Letters\u003c/em> should be read as a necessary companion piece to Charles J. Shields’ evenhanded 2011 Vonnegut biography, \u003cem>And So It Goes\u003c/em>. The Shields book reveals a successful but mostly unhappy man, one with a penchant for professional betrayals (he nixed an agreement with longtime friend and editor Knox Burger); an anti-war, liberal champion who had no problem investing in napalm manufacturer Dow Chemical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The singular, iconic author was certainly complicated — and at times vain and quick to anger. Those critics who pigeonholed him as a sci-fi hack promptly felt the wrath of his epistolary ripostes. For example, six years after achieving lasting fame for his classic, \u003cem>Slaughterhouse-Five,\u003c/em> a miffed Vonnegut felt compelled to write to Osborn Elliott, the editor of \u003cem>Newsweek,\u003c/em> concerning a piece on science fiction written by Peter Prescott. Prescott’s offending lines went like this: “Few sf [science fiction] writers aim higher than what a teen-age intelligence can grasp, and the smart ones, like Kurt Vonnegut, carefully satirize targets — racism, pollution, teachers — that teen-agers are conditioned to dislike.” To which Vonnegut tersely replied, “I have never written with teen-agers in mind, nor are teen-agers the chief readers of my books. I am the first sf writer to win a Guggenheim, the first to become a member of the National Institute for Arts and Letters, the first to have a book become a finalist for a National Book Award.” He goes on to list his undeniably impressive accomplishments and titles for several more lines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This fierce pride in his work and resistance to the shallow critical dismissals that would label him a one-trick genre pony were tempered by a constant and playful deprecatory air. In 1959, Vonnegut wrote a short missive to a writer acquaintance named Norman Mailer: “I have just finished reading your \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertisements_for_Myself\">ad for yourself\u003c/a> — a lot of it twice, at your suggestion. Since my reputation is worthless, my comments on the book would be worthless, so f – – – them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His note to Mailer continues with an anecdote about a time, about 10 years prior, when the two of them socialized with Vonnegut’s drunk mother-in-law: “[She] was about two feet away from you, indoors, separated from you by a window shade drawn over an open window. She said to me in a loud, indignant squawk, ‘Well — I think you’re cuter than he is …’ It’s a fact, incidentally — I \u003cem>am\u003c/em> cuter than you are. Respectfully, Somebody named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vonnegut saved some of his harshest criticisms for censors who would ban and sometimes burn his novels without having read a single page, and there are no shortage of these scathing attacks in the collection. But it’s the letters to his children that reveal the private figure. In the early ’70s, soon after he took a teaching position at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he mentored the likes of John Irving and Gail Godwin), Vonnegut split from his wife, Jane. Though the breakup was mostly amicable, its quiet fallout underlies much of the subsequent correspondence with his daughters Nanette and Edith. In an unintentionally amusing letter dating from 1973, Vonnegut refers to Geraldo Rivera, Edie’s then-husband — and current Fox News reporter — as “a fierce Democrat and closet Marxist.” So it goes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Toward the end of his life, the correspondence gets a bit sadder and more self-reflective, as is to be expected. In a few late letters, Vonnegut refers to himself as one of “Melville’s whalers, who didn’t talk anymore because they’d said all they had to say.” By the time he died, in 2007, the writer had outlived his first wife and many friends. In many of the letters, you get the sense that he is just killing time — making silkscreen paintings, writing tributes and blurbs — while waiting for the end.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If that seems unpleasant, consider it in light of his unsuccessful 1984 suicide attempt. After that booze-and-pill cocktail, he found reason to keep going — and even to impart some wisdom. \u003cem>Kurt Vonnegut: Letters \u003c/em>ends, appropriately, with the last words of advice he wrote for an audience: “And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one … I’m out of here.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/\">http://www.npr.org/\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Vonnegut+%27Letters%27+Hilarious+And+Heartbreaking&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAzOTIwODA0MDEyNTA4MTM1OTcyMGJmMA001)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
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"possible": {
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"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"pri-the-world": {
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"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"radiolab": {
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"reveal": {
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},
"rightnowish": {
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"title": "Rightnowish",
"tagline": "Art is where you find it",
"info": "Rightnowish digs into life in the Bay Area right now… ish. Journalist Pendarvis Harshaw takes us to galleries painted on the sides of liquor stores in West Oakland. We'll dance in warehouses in the Bayview, make smoothies with kids in South Berkeley, and listen to classical music in a 1984 Cutlass Supreme in Richmond. Every week, Pen talks to movers and shakers about how the Bay Area shapes what they create, and how they shape the place we call home.",
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"info": "Science Friday is a weekly science talk show, broadcast live over public radio stations nationwide. Each week, the show focuses on science topics that are in the news and tries to bring an educated, balanced discussion to bear on the scientific issues at hand. Panels of expert guests join host Ira Flatow, a veteran science journalist, to discuss science and to take questions from listeners during the call-in portion of the program.",
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"snap-judgment": {
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"tagline": "Real stories with killer beats",
"info": "The Snap Judgment radio show and podcast mixes real stories with killer beats to produce cinematic, dramatic radio. Snap's musical brand of storytelling dares listeners to see the world through the eyes of another. This is storytelling... with a BEAT!! Snap first aired on public radio stations nationwide in July 2010. Today, Snap Judgment airs on over 450 public radio stations and is brought to the airwaves by KQED & PRX.",
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