Category Archives: News
Picture of the Day
Shuttle Enterprise being flown over Manhattan. See more photos here.
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Quote of the Day
“If you are to give us aid for men and men or for women and women to marry, leave it; we don’t need your aid because, as long as I am the President of The Gambia, you will never see that happen in this country. One thing we will never compromise, for whatever reason, is the integrity of our culture, our dignity and our sovereignty. As a member of the international community, we would abide by the international conventions that we have signed, but as a country, we will pass legislation that will preserve our culture, our humanity, our dignity and our identity as Africans, West Africans and Gambians.”
– Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, adding that no amount of foreign aid would compel him to “offend God” by endorsing what is “evil and unholy;” that is, accepting homosexuals as they are.
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PEN Relaunches Its “Atlas”
PEN International is an organization founded in 1921 to promote freedom of expression through literature. It has 140 affiliates in more than 100 countries and a gallery of more than 20,000 writers across the globe; some who are just starting out and others who are well-established and well-known. Their more notable members include:
Chinua Achebe; Margaret Atwood; Isabel Allende; Aung San Suu Kyi; Josef Brodsky; J. M. Coetzee; Joseph Conrad; Anatole France; Nadine Gordimer; Vaclav Havel; Hu Shih; Danilo Kiš; Halldor Laxness; Liu Xiaobo; Mario Vargas Llosa; Amin Maalouf; François Mauriac; Naguib Mahfouz; Thomas Mann; Arthur Miller; Czesław Miłosz; Alberto Moravia; Toni Morrison; Kenzaburo Oe; Harold Pinter; and Salman Rushdie.
They promote the freedom to write and the freedom to read. Recently, PEN International re-launched the PEN Atlas, “its portal for international news.”
“The PEN Atlas is your gateway to a world of literature. Every Thursday, we post literary dispatches from around the world, showcasing the very best international writers. We hope to bring new insights into the rich literary landscape that may be found beyond the English language. The amount of foreign literature published in English is far too low. We hope the PEN Atlas inspire literature lovers to sample new writing from other countries, and encourage publishers to bring that writing to the British market. The goals of the PEN Atlas:
- To promote literature as a means of intercultural understanding by providing a forum for writers (publishers, translators, booksellers, bloggers, critics) to share their appreciation of writing from a wide range of languages and cultures.
- To add to the internationalism of the UK literary arena by bringing world writing to an English-language audience.
- To overcome cultural boundaries within today’s diverse English society by creating a resource which supports English PEN’s programmes’ and values.
All content is commissioned and edited by Tasja Dorkofikis, who will be inviting a wide range of contributors from around the world about to give their views on contemporary and emerging literature.”
I’m so glad to have discovered this organization. As an avid reader and free speech advocate, I know nothing liberates people from political, religious and economic oppression like the freedom to speak out and read and write what they want. We take these basic human rights for granted in developed nations, but even just a cursory glance at such places like China and Syria will make anyone realize how significant free speech is.
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Pictures of the Day
Recently, photographs of an all-white, or albino killer whale taken in the far Northern Pacific, near the Aleutian Islands, have surfaced. Nicknamed “Iceberg,” researchers believe it may be the same whale spotted in 2000 and 2008, but they’re still not certain if it’s a single anomalous creature, or just one of many such animals that simply haven’t been seen before the advent of modern photography and more adventurous scientists. Regardless, it’s a fascinating mystery. Check out this story, which includes video of the whale.
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Quote of the Day
“It is my opinion that if you go to space in a big way – and people know that requires innovation, discovery and achievements that are writ large in the daily newspapers – it will influence the culture in such a way that even if you are not personally engaged in space exploration, you will still want to innovate. Big, grand visions have the power to trigger a wave of innovation. If you go into space in a big way, it creates a seductive dream for the educational pipeline. You won’t need programs to convince people that science is an interesting thing to do, they will be compelled to want to do it simply by reading the day’s headlines.”
– Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, on the future of space exploration.
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Women’s Worlds
Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish-born poet and playwright whose works often focus on gender-based oppression and violence. In 2009, she was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate, becoming the first woman and first openly gay or lesbian person to hold that position in its 300-year history. Even then, however, her male colleagues referred to her as a “poetess,” which I think is akin to a man calling his beloved spouse “wifey.” Duffy’s writings include Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize; The Other Country (1990); Selling Manhattan (1987), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; and her first collection, Standing Female Nude (1985), for which she received a Scottish Arts Council Award.
Dramatic characters and narratives, voiced with a sharp edge of wit and social critique, characterize Duffy’s early work, while her recent collections have wrestled more directly with dark and tangled themes of love. But, perhaps her most intriguing compilation of poems is the “The World’s Wife,” published in 2000, which examines some of history’s most famous events and myths strictly from the viewpoint of the women or female characters who dutifully stood off to the side. In many cases, she creates a female version of the male. The figures include Mrs. Faust, Mrs. Quasimodo and Mrs. Tiresias. A self-contained Penelope doesn’t wait for Odysseus; frustrated Mrs. Sisyphus is married to a workaholic; and Pygmalion’s statue, tired of being pestered by her groping suitor, “changed tack/ grew warm, like candle wax/ kissed back” – and after sex gets dumped. She provides twisted updates to Viagra, sheep cloning and Monica Lewinky. This material has been mined by feminist writers before. But, as women gain more economic and political power – even in such unlikely places such as Brazil and Egypt – it’s always refreshing to contemplate how historical events might have appeared if their creators had been filled with estrogen and not testosterone.
Quote of the Day
“Is this the best we could do?”
– Former Republican candidate Jon Huntsman, on the question that crossed his mind as he stood on the debate stage in Iowa last August with his fellow Republican presidential hopefuls.
No wonder he dropped out of the race – he has too much common sense!
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Chief Writing Wolf 