Leni Zumas

Galleys are here.

2011-11-21T13:49:00.007-05:00

Advance reader's copies of The Listeners now exist! Thank you to Diane Chonette and Janet Parker of Tin House for the design. This won't be the exact final cover, but the octopus direction—yes.

Art as twisted hymn

2011-09-29T00:06:00.002-04:00

McNair Evans of The Black Harbor has made a great short film about the uncanny and splendrous inventions of Luca Dipierro:

My novel has a house!

2011-05-18T22:42:00.023-04:00

Entrance to Tin House's main office, in Portland

I'm thrilled that the fantastic Tin House Books is going to publish my first novel, The Listeners, in 2012.

They say on their blog:

"Leni Zumas is no stranger to lovers of short fiction–her debut collection, Farewell Navigator, garnered praise from Joy Williams, Karen Russell, and Miranda July, and gushing reviews from the LA Times, Paste, and The New York Observer, among others. If she’s not a household name now, it shouldn’t be long (if there’s any justice in the world). We couldn’t be more excited to publish her debut novel..."

I couldn't be more excited, either.

Little bones, fenugreek, gray gowns

2011-03-23T11:03:00.004-04:00

The great C.A. Conrad, author of The Book of Frank, invited me to read on his video journal, Jupiter 88. Luca Dipierro and I declaim two versions of the same story here. The doubled story has been published in the Summer 2011 issue of JMWW.

Check out The Book of Frank (a new expanded edition of which was recently published by Wave Books) and other work by Conrad. He's an incredible poet.

C.A. Conrad

If you are in need of a (soma)tic poetry exercise or two, he offers plenty right here.

Flannery O'Connor, getting started

2011-01-18T10:43:00.000-05:00

From the sleepy west of the wooded east

2010-09-01T11:52:00.004-04:00

The UMass MFA program has launched a new online literary journal, Route 9, featuring work by some great writers (Heather Christle, Matthew Zapruder, Emily Rae, and more). I have a short piece in this issue called "Your spelling book has fallen into my hands."

"I hide in the velvet booth of a clear-seer..."

2010-08-23T19:55:00.001-04:00

A new chapter of Until I Find It, the illustrated novel I'm making with Luca Dipierro, is up at Gigantic. This episode involves fortune-telling and decapitation. Some acrobats are also glimpsed.

New fiction up at Matchbook

2010-06-21T14:18:00.002-04:00

The story is called "An Account of My Death in the Mountains," is very short, and is here.

"The coffins galloped out of the factories..."

2010-06-15T10:31:00.003-04:00

The June edition of Gigantic Online features Chapter Three of Until I Find It, the picture-novel I am making with Luca Dipierro. Some birds, tongues, and civil wars: this may be my favorite installment yet.

Tonight at Malaprop's

2010-05-29T10:42:00.004-04:00

I'll be reading with the fantastic Travis Nichols, whose novel Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder just came out from Coffeehouse Press. He's the real deal--you shouldn't miss him!

May 29 @ 7PM
Malaprop's Bookstore, Asheville, NC

A postcard at Everyday Genius

2010-05-28T12:17:00.001-04:00

This is my contribution to Rozalia Jovanovic's "Manual for a Productive Everyday Life" project at Everyday Genius, which features postcards by the likes of Deb Olin Unferth, Tao Lin, Giancarlo Ditrapano, Shane Jones, and Zibuokle Martinaityte. My assignment: "Describe in (extreme) detail one minor activity you did today."

"I was followed by a red bird..."

2010-05-10T10:06:00.002-04:00

A new installment of Until I Find It, my collaboration with Luca Dipierro, is up at Gigantic Online.

Paper Circus

2010-04-27T12:45:00.002-04:00

"Circo Di Carta," an exhibit of new art and animation by Luca Dipierro, goes up this weekend at Hip Replacements in Asheville. Opening and screening Friday, April 30, 7-10PM. It will definitely be awesome. The show is up until May 29.

This weekend,

2010-04-12T11:28:00.004-04:00

I'm reading at Asheville's much-loved Malaprop's Bookstore & Cafe, with the memoirist and fiction writer Margaret Abruzzi. Sunday, April 18 at 3PM. More details here.

Until I Find It (Part 1)

2010-04-04T22:36:00.001-04:00

The April issue of Gigantic Online features an illustrated story by Luca Dipierro and Leni Zumas called "Until I Find It."

This is the first chapter of an illustrated book of the same name, loosely based on a full-length animation film we are making. Art by Luca, words by me. It is a tale of coffins, brides, nuns, ghosts, and a search that takes centuries.

Every other month, Gigantic Online will publish a new installment of Until I Find It. I love this project and am honored to have it serialized in such a fantastic magazine.

Emerging Writers Festival

2010-03-26T12:02:00.003-04:00

Next week I go to San Francisco for the Emerging Writers Festival at USF.

I'll be reading on Wednesday, March 31, 7:30PM, with Jennifer L. Knox and Ryan Boudinot, in Fromm Hall.

I look forward to trading (temporarily) the eastern mountains for the western hills.

Harp & Altar Anthology

2010-03-17T11:46:00.006-04:00

I am happy to have a story ("Leopard Arms") in The Harp and Altar Anthology, edited by Keith Newton and Eugene Lim, available soon from Ellipsis Press. Many great writers are in these pages. Founded in Brooklyn in 2006, Harp and Altar is an online journal featuring the best in innovative poetry and fiction.

Its declaration of principles:

My favorite review of Farewell Navigator

2010-03-11T11:05:00.003-05:00

... is up at Fiction Writers Review. It is my favorite not because it's favorable (though that helps) but because John Madera, its author, is so smart and wide-ranging and perceptive in what he says about fiction, reading, and language itself. The review (which includes a James Agee photograph and a Neil Young video) showcases the zealous intelligence of Madera, who is something of a literary jack-of-all-trades, managing to conduct from Queens, NY a staggering volume of in-depth reviewing, fiction writing, publishing, and blogging. He is the force behind The Chapbook Review, edits fiction at Identity Theory, writes a monthly column at The Nervous Breakdown, and has launched a lit–art forum (Big Other) that has fast become a thriving community of writers and thinkers. I thank him for his brainy energies.

Le pomme de terre / The Potato

2010-03-02T22:03:00.004-05:00

Francis Ponge says:

   To peel a boiled potato of good quality is a rare treat.
     Between the cushion of the thumb and the point of the knife held by the other fingers, one seizes -- after piercing -- one of those lips of rough, thin parchment and pulls it towards one to detach it from the appetizing flesh of the tuber.
     This easy operation, when one has succeeded without too many false starts, leaves an impression of indescribable satisfaction.
   The rustle the tissues make as they detach themselves is sweet to hear, and the discovery of the edible pulp delightful.
     It seems, recognising the perfection of the naked fruit, its difference, its resemblance, its surprise -- and the ease of the operation -- that one has accomplished something right, long foreseen and sought by nature, that one has had nonetheless the merit of fulfilling.
     That is why I shall not say more, at the risk of appearing satisfied with too simple a task. I only needed -- in a few effortless phrases -- to strip my subject, working strictly around its form: leaving it intact but polished, shining and all ready to endure as well as procure the delights of consumption. [...]

From Ponge's Selected Poems, edited by Margaret Guiton, Wake Forest UP, 2003.

Gigantic America One-Sentence Preview

2010-02-28T09:30:00.006-05:00

The handsome and highly anticipated new Gigantic is out. My short-short "Diligent Blows" is within. Read one random sentence from each of the stories in Issue 2 here.

Saturn vs. Mercury

2010-02-24T20:24:00.002-05:00

From a lecture Italo Calvino was preparing to deliver at the time of his death:

"... [T]he temperament influenced by Mercury, inclined toward exchanges and commerce and dexterity, was contrasted with the temperament influenced by Saturn, seen as melancholy, contemplative, and solitary. Ever since antiquity it has been thought that the saturnine temperament is the one proper to artists, poets, and thinkers, and that seems true enough. Certainly literature would never have existed if some human beings had not been strongly inclined to introversion, discontented with the world as it is, inclined to forget themselves for hours and days on end and to fix their gaze on the immobility of silent words. Certainly my own character corresponds to the traditional features of the guild to which I belong. I too have always been saturnine, whatever other masks I have attempted to wear. My cult of Mercury is perhaps merely an aspiration, what I would like to be. I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses."

"Quickness," Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988)

My book on The Nervous Breakdown

2010-02-15T09:58:00.004-05:00

In her new column at The Nervous Breakdown, Angela Stubbs posted a great review of Farewell Navigator. A portion:

Many of these stories tend to take on a Saunders-esque type of humor, while others go to darker places where hard truths and ugliness are often reflected in images that mirror us. Zumas's stories stand out from the traditional and mundane. The writing is replete with poetic and fantastical ingredients as well as work that demands attention from a more discerning eye. [...]

She also takes a look at debut books by Deb Olin Unferth and Caty Sporleder.

I can't wait to see this!

2010-02-10T08:40:00.005-05:00

the film's website

From the filmmakers...

Dear Supporters:

Thank you for recognizing the need to present Grace Paley’s life on film. Grace Paley’s family is establishing specific Legacy scholarships and internships in her name. We hope this film will insure Grace Paley’s legacy into the future and introduce her to those who never knew of her. Contact us at: gpaley.doc@gmail.com

Women Make Movies (WMM), a 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization, will accept donations or grants on behalf of Ms. Rivlin and is responsible for administering the funds in support of the development and completion of this production. To learn more about Women Make Movies, visit www.wmm.com.

Blizzard, books

2010-02-09T19:12:00.003-05:00

There was a lot of snow in Washington, DC this weekend—far more than my swampland hometown is accustomed to getting. Weather forced such sad facts as a postponed film screening, a postponed flight, and a breakfast of two coffees and two thumb-sized croissants that cost $20.35.

Luckily, the bookstores were open. Among my purchases: Tillie Olsen's Silences and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, from Second Story; and Ioanna Karystiani's Swell and Frank Stanford's Conditions Uncertain and Likely to Pass Away, from Bridge Street Books.

Friday night in Baltimore SNOWED OUT but rescheduled

2010-02-04T11:50:00.007-05:00

Two films by Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball will screen ~~tomorrow night~~ on Sunday, February 21 in Maryland's finest metropolis.

I WILL SMASH YOU + 60 WRITERS / 60 PLACES
Sunday, February 21, 7PM, Creative Alliance, Baltimore

Read a great profile of 60 WRITERS / 60 PLACES in Baltimore's City Paper.

World's best lighthouse?

2010-02-02T09:00:00.003-05:00

Knarrarós lighthouse, built in 1939, is
the tallest building in southern Iceland.

From Dexter to Sinister

2010-02-01T09:00:00.003-05:00

The Brooklyn-based artist Sarah G. Sharp has launched a cool project that re-imagines the links between heraldry, class, and power. Her collaborative series, “From Dexter to Sinister: Exquisite Blazonry for the Disenfranchised,” pairs visual artists (crest-makers) with writers (blazon-makers). A blazon is a formal description of a coat of arms that enables any artisan to recreate its image. Each of Sarah's crests will be blazoned by a writer, then newly constructed from the blazon—as an object, video, etc.—by a different artist.

Here is Crest VII and the blazon I wrote for it:

Quarterly nut and striped of nut and argent, in the first a toothed mountain sable, in the fourth an owl’s wing teardropped purpure on sable, in the second and third the slanta rays of a night-day sun.

“From Dexter to Sinister” will be included in the exhibition Here, There and Everywhere, part of the next Transcultural Exchange Conference (Boston, April 8-10, 2011).

Opening of the Coffins

2010-01-30T12:04:00.013-05:00

Luca Dipierro's fantastic solo show "The Art of Coffins" opened last night at the Madison County Arts Council.

A black room was hung with skewed beauties of cut paper, acrylic paint, and marker on discarded book covers or boards;

and a white wall was lit with hypnotic reels of cut-out stop animation, including this book trailer for Dawn Raffel's forthcoming story collection:

and I was meravigliata, as usual, by his talent.

Salt Hill

2010-01-26T09:14:00.003-05:00

My story “Mirror and Wall” is in the new issue of Salt Hill, alongside work by Steve Almond, Donald Breckenridge, Edwidge Danticat, Michael Filimowicz, Kate Greenstreet, Jonathan Hartshorn, John Haskell, Jane Hirshfield, Perry Janes, Luisa Kazanas, Dore Kiesselbach, Brenna W. Lemieux, John Robert Lennon, Robert Lopez, Gregg Louis, Sou MacMillan, Ander Monson, Travis Mossetti, Andrew Mount, David Ohle, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Tomaz Salamun, Charles Simic, Sarah Vap, and G.C. Waldrep.

Jay Reatard, I am sorry to see you go

2010-01-15T18:05:00.006-05:00

Jimmy Lee Lindsey, Jr.

May 1, 1980 – January 13, 2010

The Importance of Being Iceland

2010-01-13T18:42:00.008-05:00

Imagine a room with dozens of doors, and behind each door is Eileen Myles, ready to tell you something interesting about art, movies, menopause, libraries, American dialects, sobriety, epic poetry, lesbian brains, water, activism, silence, and much more. To read The Importance of Being Iceland—a collection of travel writing, art criticism, and lyric essays by one of America’s sharpest public thinkers—is to stand happily in such a room.

“The best poetry keeps moving at all costs,” Myles observes. The same could be said for essays: in Iceland, the rowdy motion of these pieces is key to their power. Myles’s mind careens and plucks and dips and gnaws, always restless, alert to the next glittering question. I was reminded sometimes of W. G. Sebald’s work, particularly The Rings of Saturn; but whereas Sebald’s roving is veined with melancholy, Myles’s is often exuberant, even antic. She's a flâneuse with a sense of humor. In deceptively conversational prose she zigzags ahead of the reader, beckoning and craning, pointing out a curiosity here, a fucked-up marvel there. “Travel is not transcendence,” she says. “It's immanence. It's trying to be here.”

Juniper Summer Writing Institute

2010-01-10T13:52:00.014-05:00

For anyone looking for a summer writing conference, the Juniper Institute at the University of Massachusetts is the best around. (I'm a little biased, of course, having been the program's associate director for several years and now serving as one of its writers in residence.) It's an incredible June week in lovely Amherst, packed with workshops, craft seminars, readings, and the company of dozens of fellow writers—young and old, famous and unknown, traditional and experimental, cranky and cheerful. (Mostly cheerful.)

The lineup of faculty and writers in residence for 2010: James Tate, Joy Williams, Mark Doty, Charles D'Ambrosio, Dara Wier, Stephen Graham Jones, Noy Holland, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Paul Lisicky, Lisa Olstein, Matthew Zapruder, Chris Bachelder, Leni Zumas, Alex Phillips, and Heather Christle.

See what former Juniper participants have to say about the program here.

The Passport

2010-01-07T13:06:00.008-05:00

Herta Müller’s 1986 novella went back into print soon after she won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. A modular sketch of a Romanian village during Ceauşescu’s regime, its grim and dreamy vignettes loop around the quest of Windisch, a miller, to obtain passports for his family so they can emigrate. Passports don’t come cheap in a country whose president starves his people, kills political protesters, recruits children to spy on their parents, and makes it illegal to own a typewriter without a license.

Müller’s curt sentences enact the flatness, disconnection, and repetitiveness of the world they describe: “The mouth ate its sixth apple. The mayor ran to the tree. He struck the mouth with his axe. The wealthy peasants raised their pitchforks in the air. … The apple tree closed its mouth.” By the end of this short book, their bony staccato had made me impatient. The bleakness of The Passport is unrelieved, its desolation too uniform to be very moving.

The best thing about the prose is its surrealism, always rattling just beneath the surface and sometimes, as in this passage, showing its teeth:

The floor washes colours to the edge of the room. The time from the other room beats waves. The black spots float along. The light bulb flickers. The light is torn. The two windows swim into one another. The two floors push the walls in front of them. … The floors lift themselves. They come closer, touch. They sink down into the crack. They will be heavy, and the earth will break.

Animated floors, swimming windows, torn light: this is The Passport at its best, skewing the world just enough to let us finger its texture newly (“Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees”—Paul Valéry). Müller’s terse, odd, flickery images help the reader forget what she already knows.

The Art of Coffins

2010-01-04T09:00:00.009-05:00

The deliriously talented Luca Dipierro will have a solo exhibition of paintings and films at the Madison County Arts Council, opening Friday, January 29. His work is gorgeous and unnerving, an electric feast for the eyes and brain. See more at Black Biscotti.

New year reading

2009-12-26T22:40:00.019-05:00

To counter Best of 2009 fatigue, I've been thinking about books whose 2010 publication I am looking forward to:

Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories
     Tadeusz Borowski, trans. Madeline G. Levine (Yale UP)
Old Men in Love: John Tunnock's Posthumous Papers
   Alasdair Gray (Small Beer)
Best European Fiction 2010
     ed. Aleksandar Hemon (Dalkey Archive)
Raptus
     Joanna Klink (Penguin)
The Ask
     Sam Lipsyte (FSG)
Iowa
     Travis Nichols (Letter Machine)
Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder
     Travis Nichols (Coffee House)
Further Adventures in the Restless Universe
   Dawn Raffel (Dzanc)
Pirate Talk
     Terese Svoboda (Dzanc)
Come On All You Ghosts
     Matthew Zapruder (Copper Canyon)

Grittibanz

2009-12-24T11:05:00.018-05:00

This Christmas doll-bread from Switzerland (a.k.a. Grittibänz, Grittibaenz) takes the shape of little men, women, saints, santas, or other creatures of the baker's choosing. We have been making Grittibanz in my family for years. Flecked with cardamom and orange peel, buttoned by raisins and almonds, it is a delicious, sweet, spicy bread.

2 envelopes dry yeast (2 tablespoons)
1/2 cup lukewarm water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon flour

1 1/4 cups scalded milk
1 cup (1/2 pound) unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
Grated rind of 1 orange; OR 1 teaspoon vanilla; OR 1 1/2 teaspoon mixed powdered spices to taste; OR 1 teaspoon crushed anise: OR 1/2 teaspoon powdered cardamom [OR all of the above!]
6 to 7 cups flour

1 egg yolk beaten with 1 tablespoon milk for glaze
1 egg white, beaten
Raisins or currants

Sprinkle yeast into LUKEWARM water, add 1 tablespoons sugar and 1 tablespoon flour stir, cover loosely and set aside in a warm place for 5 to 10 minutes, or until foamy. If it does not foam your yeast might be stale. Get some fresh yeast and start again.
SCALD milk, add butter and stir over low heat until butter melts. Remove from heat and stir in sugar and salt. COOL to lukewarm. ADD to yeast mixture with eggs, flavoring and HALF the flour. Mix well until free of lumps. Gradually beat in as much remaining flour as necessary to make a dough that is smooth enough to begin to leave the sides of the bowl, but one that is still VERY SOFT AND PLIABLE.

Place dough in a clean bowl, cover loosely with waxed paper and chill in refrigerator 5 to 6 hours, or overnight. Punch dough down the first two or three times it rises.

Punch dough down, knead 2 or 3 minutes and divide into portions large enough to make the size dolls you want. Shape into dolls or faces. Remember that this dough will swell, so make ARMS and LEGS THIN enough. Pat or roll into shapes with your hands. Attach heads, arms, legs, etc., with milk so they will stick.

Place on BUTTERED baking sheets, cover loosely and set to rise in a draft-free corner until not quite doubled in bulk--about 30 minutes.

Brush with hot water and bake in preheated 350 degrees F. oven for 1 hour, or until golden brown and done. Sprinkle with hot water once or twice during baking. Five minutes before end of baking time, brush dolls with egg yolk glaze and continue baking until done. Stick raisins or currant eyes, nose, mouth and buttons on with beaten egg white while dolls are hot.

A spell from the Ebers Papyrus

2009-12-22T20:21:00.006-05:00

Mix brain-of-tortoise with honey. Place on the eye and say:

There is a shouting in the southern sky in darkness, There is an uproar in the northern sky, The Hall of Pillars falls into the waters. The crew of the sun god bent their oars so that the heads at his side fall into the water, Who leads hither what he finds? I lead forth what I find. I lead forth your heads. I lift up your necks. I fasten what has been cut from you in its place. I lead you forth to drive away the god of Fevers and all possible deadly arts.

The Ebers Papyrus, a massive scroll from ancient Egypt (circa 1550 BC), contains remedies for a variety of medical ailments. The spell above is for the treatment of cataracts.

Snow and Power

2009-12-20T12:14:00.011-05:00

Big snow has fallen—is falling—across much of the East. On Friday evening, our power went out and stayed out for 27 hours. The following things disappeared: heat, light, hot water, hot food, coffee, computer.

No light = no reading. No light, coffee, or computer = no writing.
It was alarming to realize how dependent I am on these activities and on the electricity that makes them possible. Alarming, too, to eat nothing all day but clammy English muffins and cold butter. But it was also interesting to be without so many things I consider necessary.

L. and I tromped through knee-high snow past neighbors with chainsaws (fallen trees) and a fire burning unattended (fried power line) to a supermarket that wasn't open. It felt like being in a horror movie, in that tense expectant quiet before the killing begins.

Our little road is blocked by more than a dozen wrecked trees and will not be plowed any time soon, so our destinations are limited to those we can walk to, which in a tiny mountain town are few. But we have light and heat. We can write and read and eat. I feel lucky.

Wolf Hall

2009-12-16T17:47:00.007-05:00

This novel recently won the Man Booker, Britain's swank(i)est literary prize, but don't let that stop you. I knew almost zero about Thomas Cromwell before starting it, and I'm happy to be learning quite a bit about Henry VIII's right-hand man. More bewitching than Cromwell, however, is the prose: grim, funny, astringent, built of sentences crackly and muscular both. Mantel's amazing Beyond Black made me her fan, and after being disappointed by An Experiment in Love and Giving Up the Ghost, it's a pleasure to sink into the totally satisfying Wolf Hall.

Tonight in New York!

2009-12-12T09:00:00.006-05:00

Come see the Manhattan premiere of 60 WRITERS / 60 PLACES. It starts at 6:30PM and is free and will be more than worth the trip to 10th Avenue. It got a nice write-up in Time Out New York, too.

P.P.O.W. Gallery
511 West 25th St., Room 301
New York, NY 10001
212-647-1044

River. Courthouse. Writing.

2009-12-03T11:36:00.003-05:00

The town of Marshall, NC has a fantastic Arts Council that hosts exhibits, performances, and classes. I will teach a six-week fiction workshop here, starting in mid-January. All are welcome! Contact the Arts Council for more details.

60 WRITERS / 60 PLACES

2009-11-30T11:16:00.001-05:00

This amazing new film by Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball will be screened on Saturday, December 12 at PPOW Gallery in New York City. I am one of the 60, shot in a lighthouse reading three sentences from my novel in progress. I'm honored to be in the company of Kate Blackwell, Jennifer Firestone, Gary Lutz, Eileen Myles, Rick Moody, and many other great writers.

More collaborations by Dipierro and Kimball at Little Burn Films.

Mountains. Writing.

2009-11-21T10:19:00.003-05:00

I will teach a fiction workshop called "Story Lab" in Asheville, NC, starting in mid-February. Emphasis on experiments, invention, risk-taking. Writers of all stripes, camps, schools, and persuasions welcome. Details at the Great Smokies Writing Program website.

Of praise and disdain

2009-11-17T17:56:00.000-05:00

From Thomas Mann's memoir The Story of a Novel (1961):

We all bear wounds; praise is a soothing if not necessarily healing balm for them. Nevertheless, if I may judge by my own experience, our receptivity for praise stands in no relationship to our vulnerability to mean disdain and spiteful abuse. No matter how stupid such abuse is, no matter how plainly impelled by private rancors, as an expression of hostility it occupies us far more deeply and lastingly than the opposite. Which is very foolish, since enemies are, of course, the necessary concomitant of any robust life, the very proof of its strength. On the other hand, praise is a food that swiftly satiates, swiftly excites repugnance; the erecting of inner defenses against it is soon completed, and probably it would be best therefore if we heard neither good nor evil concerning our affairs.

The Difficult Farm

2009-11-14T20:01:00.009-05:00

Heather Christle is a killer poet. Her first collection, The Difficult Farm, is out from Octopus Books. It is not in my hands yet, but it soon will be.

The cayenne

2009-11-12T19:01:00.007-05:00

The powder form of chili pepper has been used for centuries to treat chronic pain, earache, fever, gangrene, headache, heart disease, nausea, nosebleed, poor circulation, sore throat, and toothache. Ayurvedic and Chinese-medicine practitioners prescribe it for digestive ailments.

Europeans once believed it could cure the skin disease scrofula, known as “the King's evil.”

In 1832, an herbalist named Samuel Thompson wrote of the cayenne: “It is no doubt the most powerful stimulant known; its power is entirely congenial to nature, being powerful in raising and maintaining heat, on which life depends ... I consider it essentially a benefit, for its effects on the glands causes the saliva to flow freely and leaves the mouth clean and moist.”

The wild heat in this fruit of the Capsicum annuum plant comes from a substance called capsaicin, which is an irritant to humans, producing a burning sensation in any tissue it touches. Capsaicin blocks or depletes substance P, a chemical involved in transmitting pain impulses to the brain.

A Beleaguered "Best of"

2009-11-09T13:46:00.006-05:00

Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Books of 2009 includes no female authors. Does the list show gender bias, or is its all-male roster simply a fluke? And what about PW's Top 100, which honors 71 titles by men and 29 by women?

From Susan Steinberg's "On Disturbance" at The Rumpus:

One could argue (and several have) that perhaps the editors just liked these books best. Or that, perhaps, one could argue (and too many have), it was yet another “bad year” for women writers. Though perhaps it was something else entirely. The PW editor explains in her short accompanying text that the deciders of the Best 10 list “ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.” Which is kind of brilliant in a way. Because everyone knows if you ignore things—like how I sometimes try to ignore the homeless guy who blocks my path when I’m walking to work, because it’s just too much to deal with in the morning—you can maybe make those things go away.

From Laura Miller's "A 10-best books list without women?" at Salon.com:

Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that's ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That's a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

On the other hand, few things are more subjective than judgments about how "great" any given book is. Those real, long-standing cultural biases mentioned above live in the heart of every critic to one degree or another, and we'd be shirking our duty if we didn't try to account for them. Writing off such qualms as mere "political correctness" is, in its own way, just as dishonest as exaggerating your admiration for a book simply because its author is female, or dark-skinned, or from a far-off nation. I don't doubt that P.W.'s editors are entirely sincere when they say their list reflects their unvarnished preferences. Still, the fact that those preferences can't encompass one woman author among 10 books (fiction or nonfiction) picked from the 50,000-plus titles they claim to have sifted through suggests that their horizons might need a bit of deliberate widening.

From Lizzie Skurnick's "Same Old Story: Best-Books Lists Snub Women Writers" at Politics Daily:

But that's the problem with sexism. It doesn't happen because people—male or female—think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man's wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he'd be a better manager. It's not that women shouldn't be up for the big awards. It's just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don't know . . . deserve them.

The just-launched organization WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) has set up a wiki inventory of great books published by women in 2009. Anyone can add a title to the roll-call.

"How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags?"

2009-10-31T18:09:00.004-04:00

In honor of Samhain, look at some eerie and beautiful shots of modern-day witches (self-identified) taken by the wickedly talented photographer Anne Hall.

Shadowplay and The Mothering Coven

2009-10-28T12:00:00.012-04:00

Two new arrivals from the fantastic Ellipsis Press...

Shadowplay by Norman Lock

The Mothering Coven by Joanna Ruocco

Ancient Egyptian remedies

2009-10-26T20:46:00.008-04:00

Baldness: Anoint head with mixture of fat of lion, fat of hippo, fat of cat, fat of crocodile, fat of ibex, and fat of serpent. Blindness: (1) bat blood; (2) two pigs’ eyes with the humor removed, yellow ochre, and fermented honey—inject into the ear of the patient. Embedded splinters: Apply worm blood and donkey dung. Sore eyes: Apply the urine of a faithful wife.

Mountain Halloween

2009-10-21T00:04:00.001-04:00

Big Other

2009-10-18T00:02:00.005-04:00

The tenacious John Madera has just launched Big Other, a round-table forum on books, art, music, and film. Read a beautiful mini-festo on Edward Dahlberg's America; a case for reviving The Castle of Otranto; or yours truly's post about Nabokov's deathbed request, recently denied.

Treatments for juvenile whooping cough, 19th c.

2009-10-16T00:32:00.020-04:00

Putting a whole trout’s head into the mouth of the sufferer and letting the trout breathe into the child’s mouth; making porridge over a stream running north to south; or tying round the child’s neck a hairy caterpillar in a small bag. (As the insect dies, the cough vanishes.)

From Notes on the folk-lore of the north counties of England and the borders, William Henderson, 1866

Kitty Snacks #2 is out.

2009-10-12T12:44:00.007-04:00

An excerpt from my story "On Water" is posted on their blog.

Marshall, NC has only one coffeeshop, and I like its name.

2009-10-11T23:55:00.010-04:00