The dragon is about to devour the princess. Enter St. George, who slays the dragon. From the beast's spilled blood a rose bush rises, prompting our knight in shining armor to pluck the most beautiful stem and present it to the princess.
Patronages of St. George include various cities, counties, countries, crafts, clubs and causes around the world. In England, St. George's Day is also Shakespeare Day. In world literature, this 23rd of April is a symbolic date, the date of birth or death of several prominent authors, most notably Cervantes, Shakespeare and El Inca who, incidentally, all died in 1616.
Catalonia has celebrated St. George since 1436, and roses have been a part and a symbol of this day since medieval times. Inspired by the legend and in memory of Cervantes, in 1923 a business-savvy bookseller started the custom of a man offering a woman a rose in exchange for a book. In Barcelona, La Diada de Sant Jordi is a love fest, flower fest and book fair all in one. Hundreds of flower stands and bookstalls pop up for the occasion all over the city. It's a popular release day and a good day for promoting your work, so authors hold book readings in cafés and book stores. And of course there's a marathon reading of Don Quixote. But you don't have to have a date or a passion for reading to enjoy the day. You can go see the sardana dancers in the Plaça Sant Juane, the rose displays in the Palau do Generalitat, or enjoy the performances of street musicians on just about every plaça in town.
Poor inundated 23rd of April, in 1995 this Catalan tradition officially became a worldwide one. UNESCO chose the date to pay tribute to books and authors and created the World Book and Copyright Day. Since 2012 also marks the 80th anniversary of the Index Translationum (an international bibliography of translation), this year's theme is Books and Translation.
I'm all for encouraging people to read, promoting love, literacy and literature, furthering cultural exchange and progress, and good translations. So I'm sorry, the 23rd of April, but you will just have to grin and bear it. St. George, Shakespeare, Cervantes, books, authors, roses, the UN, literature, copyrights...I know it's a lot. But we're here to share your burden, and have some fun while at it.
Dita Parker
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Monday, April 23, 2012
Monday, February 22, 2010
Out with the new, in with the old
I popped into the arts and ents section of The Sunday Times Online looking for an article. Noticed the first Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award instead, an article titled: "Erotica author in running for short story award." The caption beside the picture of said author tells us she is a former glamour model. Under the caption there is a link titled "A Terrible Story." By this time Dita is a) intrigued? b) disgruntled?, or c) both? I had never heard of writer Kay Sexton. If I've seen any glam shots of Ms. Sexton, I don't remember them. I fail to see a connection or the relevance.
She is one among twenty writers long-listed. But is she on an equal footing? If your past endeavors were highlighted, if the reader was reminded you also write genre fiction under pen names while running against well-established authors, if the image gallery contains prize winners, renowned interviewers, novelists and playwrights, and your caption read neither writer nor author but former this and that, wouldn't you be able to just feel the love? What does it matter what she used to do? If they're not showcasing the long-listed story, what else are they doing besides being obvious?
Somebody tell me I'm seeing things that aren't there. Tell me they aren't screaming "Are the pages of our publication to be thus polluted?" between the lines. "A Terrible Story?" (The link takes you to a short story by Hanif Kureishi. "A Terrible Story" had nothing to do with Ms. Sexton's piece. It was all in my mind, not in the interesting layout. If it's indeed a noteworthy theme in a writer's career, they failed to mention how much sex factors in Kureishi's books. Love Kureishi. Hate double standards.)
Tell me I'm paranoid and I'll forever hold my peace. Until you do, I'll be feeling uneasy, the way I do every time someone suggests I'll never be taken seriously if I keep up writing genre along with literary fiction, every time I'm informed I'm wasting my time on entertainment.
You know what? It's not my mission in life to fulfill someone else's expectations or ambitions. I need to read and write in both the art and the entertainment segment, if you must make a distinction, and obviously there still is one, a very loaded at that. Fine. Just don't hang your hang-ups on me. I'm a selfish being doing what I want to do most because doing otherwise would be self-deception. So is saying that one form of writing is not as self-indulgent as the next, that some are more right or righteous somehow. There is no objective meter for these things, but there is room for everyone. Give it a rest. I promise to when you do.
What was I looking for, before I got derailed? An article on the digitization of tens of thousands of nineteenth century works of fiction from the British Library. That means both the arts and the ents segment, my friends, everything from Victorian classics to the infamous serial stories, free of charge and segregation, hmm, provided you own a Kindle.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Shakespeare's sisters
Ladies, choose your weapons, Mars attacks! Not really, but trenches have been under construction here and there after Publishers Weekly announced their Best Books of 2009 list. What's wrong with the list? Nothing on first glance, but the Top 10 has been weighed, measured and found lacking in one notable segment of writers, i.e. women.
You probably wouldn't reject something solely on the basis it was written by a man or automatically like something because a woman wrote it. A good book is a good book. And taste is a subjective issue. So what does it matter what PW's list looks like? It's a list and for many that's all it is: just another list. But it's a list that gets coverage, sells books, helps define quality. And it's notably lacking in women.
How many women would have made it okay? One? Fifty-one percent? What if there had been no men on that list? Impossible, you say? If it's a coincidence, if gender has nothing to do with anything, how so? So women did write inferior books, is that it? Or do men have an automatic advantage women suspect/know is there but PW categorically denies exists?
See how easily and how fast discussions like this escalate into a Mars versus Venus battle of the sexes? Come on, they do. Many women, assertive women, competent and competitive women are shrugging their so whats thinking it's nothing because they have gone through life pretending sexual biases don't exist. Or it isn't pretending, per se, but rather a self-assuredness and forcefulness born out of all that competence and a sincere belief in equality which has taken many women far and even further.
But none of those women could say they didn't encounter at least once along the way someone who didn't share that belief, who couldn't get past the face or the figure, or who didn't carry a sexist grudge that tainted everything making it that much harder for them to get along and move on. This someone wasn't necessarily a man.
Then again maybe it was and you see where the story is headed since all women have been there at some point in their lives. Trivial or life-altering, we tend to remember the moments we turned invisible. Because we felt senseless shame. We felt rage. We felt indignation. No matter how stupid the remark, how idiotic or inconsequential the person or the situation, it raises that "Not-this-bs-again-Couldn't-think-of-anything-else-could-you-The-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same" feeling women hate hate hate. I'm sure I had a point before jumping into a trench myself...
No, that is my point. That is exactly the feeling lists like this raise. Because art isn't an exact science, it's a compilation of subjective choices without objective meters, none that they have disclosed in detail anyway, and it's therefore easy to take it as a personal affront no matter how hard you tell yourself it doesn't matter one way or the other.
"Really?" (SNL could take it from here.) "50,000 to choose from and not a single woman made the cut? Really?" I wouldn't want a pc consolation prize to be handed out, PW is free to choose whatever they want with whatever criteria they may or may not have, but ten men? Really? What are the odds? What is their ranking method anyway?
I've read two books from that list: Holmes' The Age of Wonder and Grann's Lost City of Z. I highly recommend them, but I could just as well recommend picking up Atwood's The Year of the Flood or Munro's Too Much Happiness: Stories. They made my list.
You probably wouldn't reject something solely on the basis it was written by a man or automatically like something because a woman wrote it. A good book is a good book. And taste is a subjective issue. So what does it matter what PW's list looks like? It's a list and for many that's all it is: just another list. But it's a list that gets coverage, sells books, helps define quality. And it's notably lacking in women.
How many women would have made it okay? One? Fifty-one percent? What if there had been no men on that list? Impossible, you say? If it's a coincidence, if gender has nothing to do with anything, how so? So women did write inferior books, is that it? Or do men have an automatic advantage women suspect/know is there but PW categorically denies exists?
See how easily and how fast discussions like this escalate into a Mars versus Venus battle of the sexes? Come on, they do. Many women, assertive women, competent and competitive women are shrugging their so whats thinking it's nothing because they have gone through life pretending sexual biases don't exist. Or it isn't pretending, per se, but rather a self-assuredness and forcefulness born out of all that competence and a sincere belief in equality which has taken many women far and even further.
But none of those women could say they didn't encounter at least once along the way someone who didn't share that belief, who couldn't get past the face or the figure, or who didn't carry a sexist grudge that tainted everything making it that much harder for them to get along and move on. This someone wasn't necessarily a man.
Then again maybe it was and you see where the story is headed since all women have been there at some point in their lives. Trivial or life-altering, we tend to remember the moments we turned invisible. Because we felt senseless shame. We felt rage. We felt indignation. No matter how stupid the remark, how idiotic or inconsequential the person or the situation, it raises that "Not-this-bs-again-Couldn't-think-of-anything-else-could-you-The-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same" feeling women hate hate hate. I'm sure I had a point before jumping into a trench myself...
No, that is my point. That is exactly the feeling lists like this raise. Because art isn't an exact science, it's a compilation of subjective choices without objective meters, none that they have disclosed in detail anyway, and it's therefore easy to take it as a personal affront no matter how hard you tell yourself it doesn't matter one way or the other.
"Really?" (SNL could take it from here.) "50,000 to choose from and not a single woman made the cut? Really?" I wouldn't want a pc consolation prize to be handed out, PW is free to choose whatever they want with whatever criteria they may or may not have, but ten men? Really? What are the odds? What is their ranking method anyway?
I've read two books from that list: Holmes' The Age of Wonder and Grann's Lost City of Z. I highly recommend them, but I could just as well recommend picking up Atwood's The Year of the Flood or Munro's Too Much Happiness: Stories. They made my list.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Thank you for the music
...the hypnotizing and the haunting, the cheesy and queasy, the infinitely memorable and the imminently forgettable (the latter amplifies the effect of the former, the former puts the latter to shame). Then again, taste is a subjective issue; my favorite band sucks, now so does yours.
Say what you want, think what you will, they're the best thing to hit a note (or graze it) while striking a chord within us since that first rhyme you ever beat into the ground and your family over the head with. You may have trouble remembering those all-important memos and messages, the birthdays of the near and dear, the text you'll be tested on tomorrow (and you've gone through that damned thing 27 times over the past 72 hours), but how many 80's (or, fill the blank) songs do you know by heart? Start counting... Uncanny, isn't it? Scary, actually. And only human.
Songs that make you happy to remember, tunes that make you wish you could forget. To dance, to play, to sing, even if only by yourself; think of it as a gift. It is a gift. Everyone on the planet does it different from you. Someone may even do it better than you (yeah, we really love to hate them). But no one in the universe does it exactly like you.
Thank you for the movies; the ones I watched only once and will never be able to watch again because I cried over whose brilliant script was tossed to make this mockery, or because they were so dead-on, true to life, painful and poignant I bawl my eyes out merely thinking about how they made me feel. And they made me Feel. Those I will carry with me always, like little jewels I found. You might look at those pebbles and shrug them off as fool's gold.
Thank you for the books; the disturbing and the inspiring, the uplifting and the mind boggling. So many beautiful languages and voices, some centuries old and indestructible, some young and formative and fragile. False friends, old friends, true blue friends. You wish you would have written them. You only wish no one would have come up with some of them. Where's a language policeman when you need one? But those that flow...they make your spirit sing.
Nature is perfunctory and evolution the ultimate in waste management. They are the final word and judgment on art: we need those chords, those images and words. They nourish us and console us. They bring us together just when we start to think it would be easier to let it all fall apart. They shake us up when we start to believe that maybe we won't get hurt if we sit tight and play dead.
They reach out and transcend all barriers. They remind us that we are not alone, that there is life out there. And that there is life and fight and laughter in us yet.
Say what you want, think what you will, they're the best thing to hit a note (or graze it) while striking a chord within us since that first rhyme you ever beat into the ground and your family over the head with. You may have trouble remembering those all-important memos and messages, the birthdays of the near and dear, the text you'll be tested on tomorrow (and you've gone through that damned thing 27 times over the past 72 hours), but how many 80's (or, fill the blank) songs do you know by heart? Start counting... Uncanny, isn't it? Scary, actually. And only human.
Songs that make you happy to remember, tunes that make you wish you could forget. To dance, to play, to sing, even if only by yourself; think of it as a gift. It is a gift. Everyone on the planet does it different from you. Someone may even do it better than you (yeah, we really love to hate them). But no one in the universe does it exactly like you.
Thank you for the movies; the ones I watched only once and will never be able to watch again because I cried over whose brilliant script was tossed to make this mockery, or because they were so dead-on, true to life, painful and poignant I bawl my eyes out merely thinking about how they made me feel. And they made me Feel. Those I will carry with me always, like little jewels I found. You might look at those pebbles and shrug them off as fool's gold.
Thank you for the books; the disturbing and the inspiring, the uplifting and the mind boggling. So many beautiful languages and voices, some centuries old and indestructible, some young and formative and fragile. False friends, old friends, true blue friends. You wish you would have written them. You only wish no one would have come up with some of them. Where's a language policeman when you need one? But those that flow...they make your spirit sing.
Nature is perfunctory and evolution the ultimate in waste management. They are the final word and judgment on art: we need those chords, those images and words. They nourish us and console us. They bring us together just when we start to think it would be easier to let it all fall apart. They shake us up when we start to believe that maybe we won't get hurt if we sit tight and play dead.
They reach out and transcend all barriers. They remind us that we are not alone, that there is life out there. And that there is life and fight and laughter in us yet.
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