Dar {Hosta} James is an artist in its broader sense: a painter, writer, illustrator, designer, creative coach, teacher and speaker on creativity. I came across her when I was looking for a suitable quote.
Born in the United States of America, Dar might be an 'unknown' artist but exceedingly worth mentioning. I, myself, stumbled over the designation: "Kazen-Muse Creativity Coach" - someone who "counsel[s] people from all walks of life in order to help them connect with their own creativity and live an authentic life in which they feel they are the best versions of them selves [sic]". An intriguing thought and I count myself lucky to have some practical knowlegde of the idea. It is astonishing how much we re-discover by using our very own creativity, no judgment or marks looming ahead.
Please take your time to check her website http://www.darsworld.com and additionally savour her rich and luscious paintings!
P.S.: Love it: Dar currently lives in New Hope, Pennsylvania! Nomen est omen, isn't it?!
Quote of the Month - December 2014
"'At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,' said the gentleman, taking up a pen, 'it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries, hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.
[...] a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?'"
from ?! by ?!
[...] a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?'"
from ?! by ?!
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins *1988
Many of you probably recognised the citation from Charles Dicken's novella A Christmas Carol with its main character Scrooge.
While rereading it - in the spirit of the season (!) - I thought of Adele and the row about her supposed decline of Bob Geldorf's request to participate in his project 'Band Aid 30'. I know, I know, Adele isn't really 'unheard' of and additionally, she isn't a writer in the book section - but she did something very remarkable lately. As the headlines called it: she 'snubbed Bob Geldorf and his project Band Aid 30'. Actually, she wasn't the only one and her reason is still under fierce discussion but it is interesting to see Bob Geldorf's reaction to criticism on his project. Criticism put forward to him by reporter Jayne Secker from SkyNews on YouTube: Interview with Bob Geldorf on Band Aid
Somehow it leaves me wondering...
Actually, the novella was published in 1843, more than 150 years earlier from today.
Has much changed in the meantime?
Has much changed since the original 'Band Aid' in 1984?
I am inclined to leave the questions pending and leave it up to you to decide to donate for whatever reason or cause "because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundances rejoices".
P.S.: Does this so-called 'festive season' also relate to Hindus, Buddhist, Muslims, Jews or members of any other religion? Oh, how much it makes me aware of its (limited) Christian background...
While rereading it - in the spirit of the season (!) - I thought of Adele and the row about her supposed decline of Bob Geldorf's request to participate in his project 'Band Aid 30'. I know, I know, Adele isn't really 'unheard' of and additionally, she isn't a writer in the book section - but she did something very remarkable lately. As the headlines called it: she 'snubbed Bob Geldorf and his project Band Aid 30'. Actually, she wasn't the only one and her reason is still under fierce discussion but it is interesting to see Bob Geldorf's reaction to criticism on his project. Criticism put forward to him by reporter Jayne Secker from SkyNews on YouTube: Interview with Bob Geldorf on Band Aid
Somehow it leaves me wondering...
**************************
Actually, the novella was published in 1843, more than 150 years earlier from today.
Has much changed in the meantime?
Has much changed since the original 'Band Aid' in 1984?
I am inclined to leave the questions pending and leave it up to you to decide to donate for whatever reason or cause "because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundances rejoices".
P.S.: Does this so-called 'festive season' also relate to Hindus, Buddhist, Muslims, Jews or members of any other religion? Oh, how much it makes me aware of its (limited) Christian background...
Quote of the Month - November 2014
"I hadn't done it, no. Hadn't lifted the gun. But Dick was right. I'd eaten the good food off the cedar table with the double damask cloth. Slept in the soft beds. Sat in the parlour, never known a day's hunger or cold, never asked where any of it come from.[...] I'd lived in a cosy place made out of secrets and lies. Now I was in another country, and its climate had no mercy. [...]
Shame would keep us silent, shame and the wishing that it was different. Dick and that woman who'd sent me down a johnny-cake, they'd tell their children the story. There was no shame in it for them, only grief. But who would listen to them?
The knowing was Pa's poisonous gift to me, and I was sick with it."
From Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville (2011)
Shame would keep us silent, shame and the wishing that it was different. Dick and that woman who'd sent me down a johnny-cake, they'd tell their children the story. There was no shame in it for them, only grief. But who would listen to them?
The knowing was Pa's poisonous gift to me, and I was sick with it."
From Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville (2011)
Kate Grenville *1950
Some years ago, a friend returning from Australia, presented me with Kate's book The Secret River. At first, I put it aside for I had judged it by its cover and its somewhat old fashioned language. And additionally, I had never heard of the author...But then I was looking for authors for The English Book Club who had once won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. And Kate was one of them! So finally, I started reading her book and couldn't stop. I took the book on my list and researched the author.
I have read her loose trilogy on the very beginning of Australia in the meantime: The Secret River, The Lieutenant and Sarah Thornhill and it triggered me so far as to do a reading on these three books at the Volkshochschule (adult education centre) in Aalen/Germany on 25 November. Now having researched so much more on the background it seems whatever I would write about Kate Grenville comes short of what she is and does as an author. Therefore, I decided to just give some quick information on the author and the wish to you to watch the video taped by the Sydney Writers' Centre where Kate reveals her idea of writing, gives ideas to aspiring writers and informs about the 'starting point' of her novels: Interview with Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville, born in Sydney, might be rather unknown in Europe but she is well known in Australia. After completing an Art's degree at Sydney University she worked as an editor in the film industry. In 1976 Kate moved to Europe, living for some years in Paris and London, writing fiction while doing film-editing and secretarial jobs. Inspired by American authors she had met in Paris she moved to America in 1980 to pursue a Master's degree in creative writing. In 1983 Kate returned to Australia and became sub-editor until she won a literary grant in 1986. From then on she focused on her writing and published nine novels, various collections of short stories and four books on writing itself.
Two of her books were made into major films, her book The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize of Fiction and The Secret River won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Book Prize in 2006. Especially her loose trilogy on the first settlements in Australia had a large influence on her readership: The Secret River, The Lieutenant and Sarah Thornhill. All cover the first years of colonisation in Australia using historical facts being fictionalised to focus on the way the indigenous people had been 'handled' and how it all influenced not only the people who took action but also those who weren't directly involved or came after. She even goes further and claims that contemporary Australia is still influenced by its 'secret' history, a history not being told. As she says in the interview, she is hopeful that eventually "a shared story about what is a shared history" will come of it. Take your time and watch the video!
Quote of the Month - October 2014
"I needed him so much, I couldn't really go into it very far, this need, nor could my mother and I talk about it. But her wearing his robe was a sign to me of how she had to have the comfort of his presence in a basic way that I now understood. That night, I asked her if she'd packed Dad an extra shirt, and she nodded when I asked if I could wear it. She gave it to me.
I still have many of his shirts, and his ties as well. He purchased everything he wore at Silverman's in Grand Forks. They carried the very best men's clothing, and he didn't buy much, but he was particular. I wore my father's ties to get me through law school at the University of Minnesota, and the bar exam after. For the time I was a public prosecutor, I wore his ties for the last week of every jury trial. I used to carry around his fountain pen, too, but I became afraid of losing it. I still have it, but I don't sign my tribal court opinions with it the way he did. The unfashionable ties are enough, the golden tassel in my drawer, and that I have always a dog named Pearl."
From The Round House by Louise Erdrich
I still have many of his shirts, and his ties as well. He purchased everything he wore at Silverman's in Grand Forks. They carried the very best men's clothing, and he didn't buy much, but he was particular. I wore my father's ties to get me through law school at the University of Minnesota, and the bar exam after. For the time I was a public prosecutor, I wore his ties for the last week of every jury trial. I used to carry around his fountain pen, too, but I became afraid of losing it. I still have it, but I don't sign my tribal court opinions with it the way he did. The unfashionable ties are enough, the golden tassel in my drawer, and that I have always a dog named Pearl."
From The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich *1954
There are sometimes interesting and surprising coincidences: While
leafing through a German magazine on latest book publications, I sort of
stumbled over an article on Louise Erdrich. Her book The Round
House had been translated into German and was presented in the
article (Das Haus des Windes, Aufbau Verlag). Obviously, it
was her name that caught my eye: Erdrich is a rather familiar surname
in the South of Germany. The more interesting to read that she is a
member of the Mikinaakwajiw-ininiwag or Turtle
Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a Native American
Tribe of the Ojibwa and Métis peoples based in North Dakota.  |
| Buchjournal 3/2014 |
Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls in the United States of America, eldest of seven children. Her father Ralph Erdrich is German-American (which explains the familiarity of the name) while her mother, Rita (née Gourneau), is part French-American and part Ojibwe. Rita's father Patrick Gourneau served for many years as tribal chairman of the above mentioned tribe and certainly had a strong influence on Louise's education. Probably as much as her father's educational measurement: while parents usually pay children for each book they've read, Louise's father paid a nickel for every story his children wrote! Eventually: while Louise is mainly writing novels, her sister Heidi publishes poetry under the name Heid E. Erdrich and her sister Lise writes children's books.
Consequently, Louise earned her MA in the Writing Seminars at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1979. The same year, she published her first short story "The World's Greatest Fisherman" which won the Nelson Algren Short Fiction prize. In 1984, after she had married Michael Dorris in 1981 and together raised three adopted and three biological children, she published her first novel, Love Medicine. While both her first short story and novel are placed in a fictional reservation her second book The Beet Queen, published in 1986, expanded its range. This lead to a fierce accusation that Louise was more concerned with her literary technique than the political struggle of Native peoples. A very common struggle: form vs. content, which reminded me of South African Literature under the Apartheid regime. If Louise compromised or just focused her point of view again on her fictional reservation universe, at least her many books are mainly placed within the circle of her familiar surroundings. Various conflicts concerning the tribal lives on religion, economics and tradition became part of the books Louise wrote until her divorce in 1995. With her book The Antelope Wife (1998) Erdrich left the fictional tribal surrounding for once but returnd to it afterwards. Nevertheless, this doesn't make her limited in her point of view. As the jury of the PEN/Bellow Award asserts:
"Some writers work a small piece of land: Louise Erdrich is not one of those writers. Her work has an awesome capaciousness – each person is a world. For Erdrich, the tale of the individual necessarily leads to the tale of the family, and families lead to nations, while the wound of a national injustice is passed down through the generations, expressing itself in intimate deformations, a heady intertwining of the national and the personal. Yet despite the often depressingly familiar, repetitive nature of so much human business, Erdrich’s eye is always fresh, her sentences never less than lyrical." (Read more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2014-pensaul-bellow-award-achievement-american-fiction)
This is also the case with Louise's story The Round House.
Though its main focus is on an very personal and intimate incident it reveals at
the same time this very complicated relationship between historical
developments and interpersonal composure. It's wonderful how she
creates a rich, colourful picture where there is no space for any
black or white, right or wrong. And again there is much more between heaven and earth we could think of that influences the human spirit. Made me certainly curious to read
more of her aside of all 15 awards she's won so far...
Quote of the Month - September 2014
"Very well, said Hans, finding himself in the awkward position of having to contest a solid argument, very well, Professor, let us go step by step. You maintain that to translate feeling is more difficult than to translate thought. I am not sure in what measures it is possible to conceive of an idea as being divorced from emotion, or emotion devoid of any ideas. This would be my first objection, that you seem to take for granted the existence of pure emotion as if it came from nowhere and were self-contained. In my humble understanding, emotions are not only generated by a specific language, they also arise from cultural exchanges, from prior exposure to other languages, from national and foreign connotations. This is the heterogeneous basis of our thoughts, feelings and writings. In order to avoid getting lost in metaphor and upsetting you, I shall try to give you a concrete example, Professor. Does Goethe feel in German on the one hand and on the other speak six languages? Or rather, as an individual who speaks and reads several different languages, does Goethe feel in a specific way that is peculiar to him and which in this case expresses itself in the German language? Isn't his broad cultural knowledge a current that is channelled, translated [sic] into his mother tongue? And by the same token, are the translations of Goethe's own poems into other languages not simply one more link in an infinite chain of interpretations? Who are we to decide which is the original, the first link?"
From Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman
From Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman
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