04.29.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 1:59 pm by Miracle ♪♫
An unexpected deluge of rain and off went our lights again. Blame it on the substandard materials of our electric company. The rain was welcome however, an oasis in these extremely warm days, and I am not here to curse ZANECO but speak of a most interesting, let’s put it this way, drink.
“But first - always first! - some coffee.”
- from The Various Flavours of Coffee, Anthony Capella
More than a week ago, instead of continuing my engagement with Dante, I picked up the book Franz gave me last January; The Various Flavours of Coffee. As anyone may have surmised, it is not in league with Dante, but I still went through this book’s aromas slowly. No, I did not devour it as I have done with most books but savoured it lazily as I would a cup of espresso during rainy days.
The Various Flavours of Coffee commences in 1896 and wafts through two decades enveloping England, Africa, Brazil, the dark history of coffee, slavery, women’s suffrage movements, politics, passion, poetry, and unexpected and unconventional love stories.
It all begins when the protagonist and poet Robert Wallis is hired by a coffee mogul to compose a ‘vocabulary of coffees’ which would serve as a guide for identifying the best coffees in the world. I went through chapter by chapter thinking I liked it, then liked it not, liked it again, and liked it not again, and so on, but finally I ended up liking it for a number of reasons. Among these reasons are the maturity and cultivation of a once immoral fool, the portrayed strength and weaknesses of women, and of course, the subject of coffee and its many different flavours that are analogous with life’s experiences. Even though this book may never go down through history among the greatest works of literature, Anthony Capella is an author who knows how to capture the reader uniquely and at some points, intoxicate.
What have I learned? I have learned what every man must learn, and no man can be taught – that despite what poets may tell you, there are different kinds of love… love itself consists not of one emotion, but many. Just as a good coffee might smell of – perhaps – leather and tobacco and honeysuckle, all at once, so love is a mixture of any number of feelings…
The laugh of a woman, the smell of a child, the making of coffee – these are the various flavours of love.
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Thank you for the book, Franz. Let’s have espresso soon! The Artist recently bought a six-cupper Bialetti as a present for his barista daughter. This book and the moka pot went along very well! ;-)
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Our home (also known as Café Romano) continues to welcome daily visitors this summer and we are constantly asked what makes our coffee special or what our so-called secret brew is. Mama sometimes indulges and nods toward my direction and says, “She has a secret ingredient. She makes it with love.”
…and that, I do. But shhh…
not everyone knows. ;-)
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04.26.09
Posted in 2009 Medley at 12:54 pm by Miracle ♪♫
The past several days have been dotted with brownouts. Without the constant availability of a computer for typing my daily cogitations, I returned to the art of handwriting. “Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart,” notes writing coach Natalie Goldberg.
Sad to say, I had forgotten how pleasurable it is to write lengthily with pen and paper and feel with my hand their emotionally charged bond, and of the pen making its way to the other side of a page and leaving blooming and winding paths for the eyes to follow.
Until last year, I never posted a blog entry without writing it down on paper first, but with the incomparable ease that technology provides, one easily forgets a beautiful aspect of the writing experience – the actual, literal writing. Of course, it can be frustrating when the mind flies faster than the pen, but we have to be reminded that sometimes it is more important to slowly peel away the layers of the heart than to chase after speeding thoughts. “Peeling away the layers of the heart” is what I think handwriting accomplishes.
It can get ugly, it can hurt, but gradually reaching the innermost core of your heart is a worthwhile experience. One cannot achieve this by typing on a laptop keyboard, I am led to believe. Typing brings to mind percussion. Handwriting reminds me of strings… sostenuti… mellifluous melodies… fugues…symphonies! I cannot even imagine the extent of how poetic and musical the whole process of handwriting is… the counterpoint between the hand and the heart.
Dearest ____, write me soon…
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04.18.09
Posted in 2009 Medley at 3:23 pm by Miracle ♪♫
~ For those who thought there was story… =) ~
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Every instrumentalist has dreams. To be able to perform in Carnegie Hall is normally one of those dreams. I am no exception.
When YouTube trumpeted a call to make music history through means of technology and classical music, I answered that call. The prize was too tempting – Carnegie Hall in New York.
It was last year when I heard of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Even though there is usually but a single position for a keyboardist in a symphony (and quite an unattainable spot if you are contending with a whole world of pianists), I wasted no time in reading the guidelines; what a surprise when I discovered that the required pieces were music I had already played several years ago! However, I was puzzled when I found out that they had already provided the music scores of Eroica: The Internet Symphony for the other instruments but none for the piano. I was left to believe that they did not require Eroica for the pianists.
A week before the January 28, 2009 cut-off date for all entries, I went to the YTSO page on YouTube and submitted what I had prepared thus far. To my chagrin, written blatantly on the front page was an announcement that might have been there weeks or months earlier stating something that went like “The Eroica piano score is now available”!I downloaded the music score with alarm, and panicked even more when a piece of ample difficulty appeared before my eyes. Right at that moment, I knew all hope for Carnegie Hall was lost.
Nevertheless, I was determined to finish what I had begun, and thus began a week of tinkering and hammering on the piano. I passed my video entry on time and a month later, they informed me that it would be included in the mash-up video. I did not make it to Carnegie Hall, but at least my video did. I am still thankful and glad to have been part of music history even in the most trivial way… and still, I remain a musician, dreaming.
The whole event reminds us that, whether as participant or witness, classical music and modern technology can coexist. In fact, in our technological era, one can hardly endure as successfully without the other.
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04.14.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 11:34 am by Miracle ♪♫
We interrupt the polybibliogamist’s “Nobel marathon” with a reading project brought about by Global Voices.
Before anything else, I would like to acknowledge the spearheader of this idea, for it has allowed me and others who have welcomed the opportunity, to embrace literary regions that were erst remote to us – it has even led to the discovery of a memoir that will remain to be one of my favorite books.
Howbeit it is ironic that I no longer aim to submit an entry to Global Voices. Why not? The answer to that would be an allegory that a friend furnished years ago. It is because I am at this moment, a duck on water, seemingly skimming smoothly along the surface, but kicking and thrashing almost frantically underwater for buoyance’s sake. The comfort is the truth that it is by Grace that I am kept afloat – not by my paddling, and it is the same Grace that is helping me contemplate and deal with discouraging circumstances in my life with “new eyes”. This straying from the topic is also proof that I am not very focused and therefore unfit to enter book challenges. It is enough that the books are also little instruments to keep me from drowning.
Before the unexpected emotional bomb mushroomed, I had every intention of joining the challenge and had stacked a small pile of books from countries whose literature I have never yet unraveled. But for me, stacking them and judging them by their front covers and back-cover summaries and selecting just one book from the assortment was not enough. I had to read them one by one, and even planned on choosing the book I liked best afterwards, and then pass it to Global Voices.
These are the books I have finished so far:
In The Country of Men by Hisham Matar (Libya)
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
Reading Lolita in Tehran (A Memoir in Books) by Azar Nafisi (Iran)
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In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar
“In a time of blood and tears, in a Libya full of bruise-checkered and urine-stained men, urgent with want and longing for relief, I was the ridiculous child craving concern.”
Granting that the above phrase extracted from the 168th page embodies the whole book, one has to really read it to experience its beautiful agony. It yanks your emotions from its comfort zone and transports it to nine-year-old Suleiman’s side as he bears the burden of comforting a troubled mother and witnesses the capture and public execution of his bestfriend’s father, preceding his own father’s arrest by the Revolutionary Army.
Having a nine-year-old brother, I cannot bring myself to imagine the horrors Suleiman witnessed; and these are horrors too terrifying even for adults, and these are horrors that are truly happening across the globe.
It is Hisham Matar’s first novel and yet it has already garnered awards all over the world, and after reading In the Country of Men, one does not have to wonder why.
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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Aware that I had in my hands what writers and readers labelled an important piece of literature, Achebe’s simple storybook narrative startled me a bit during the book’s earlier chapters.
Nevertheless, it was easier to come to terms with the style after having read J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Coetzee himself originally hailed from the same continent as Achebe and had inserted “lessons” pertaining African literature in Elizabeth Costello. Egudu, an author, and a passing character from Elizabeth Costello brought up the Senegalese writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane in his lecture:
Cheikh Hamidou was being questioned by an interviewer, a European. I am puzzled, said the interviewer, by your praise for certain writers for being truly African. In view of the fact that the writers in question write in a foreign language… can they be truly called African writers? Is language not a more important matrix than birth?
The following is Cheikh Hamidou’s reply: “The writers I speak of are truly African because they are born in Africa…their sensibility is African… What distinguishes them lies in life experiences, in sensitivities, in rhythm, in style. A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him… We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition.”
There is nothing mystical in Cheikh Hamidou’s response, nothing metaphysical, nothing racist. He merely gives proper weight to those intangibles of culture which, because they are not easily pinned down in words, are often passed over. The way that people live in their bodies. The way that they move their hands. The way they walk. The way they smile or frown. The lilt of their speech. The way they sing. The timbre of their voices.The way they dance. The way they touch each other; how the hand lingers; the feel of the fingers. The way they make love. The way they lie after they have made love. The way they think. The way they sleep.
We African novelists can embody these qualities in our writings – we African novelists cam embody these qualities as no one else can because we have not lost touch with the body. The African novel, the true African novel, is an oral novel.On the page it is inert, only half alive; it wakes up when the voice, from deep in the body, breathes into the words, speaks them aloud.
Things Fall Apart is more than just the story about a strong man named Okonkwo. The book’s simplicity in plot and narrative was what surprised me at first, but in the end, I realized that it was from these selfsame things that the book exacted its power and authority.
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Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Due to the habit of toying with words as though twirling strands of hair around my fingers, the title’s acronym kept reappearing on my mind: RLIT. Revolutionary or radical literature? It is, in many ways.
For a book that has had its share of criticisms and substantial fame, I was unsuspecting of the result that I would emerge from its pages feeling that I have had one of the profoundest literature lessons in my entire life.
It is a memoir of teaching literature in Iran from the dawn of the Islamic Revolution through its aftermaths. The reader follows Dr. Azar Nafisi through her ordeal as a woman with a progressive mind in a society where women are insignificant and progressive minds and views are forced to be obliterated.
From the classroom to her private literature lessons, the book revolves around the terrifying life and times of which she and her students lived.How Azar Nafisi incorporated these with Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen among others is what kept me agog.
“…I sit and reimagine myself and my students, my girls as I came to call them, reading Lolita in a deceptively sunny room in Tehran.But to steal the words from Humbert…I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn’t dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us.”
This is how I have come to obtain a book that would have been pertinent for the Global Voices Book Challenge because the memoir itself is a powerful voice that not only cries for women who are trapped in such a society, but it is also a voice that urges me to relish a celebration of my freedom as a reader.
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