2010 archives

book group 47: September 20-30, 2010 (ten days)

: Myra Lotto

The two works we’ll read – “Frost at Midnight” by Coleridge and the famous “Tintern Abbey” poem by Wordsworth – wrestle with the transitions between childhood, youth, and adulthood. In each poem, there is a mute listener who hears all of the hopes and wishes of these poets. Through their one-sided dialogues, Wordsworth and Coleridge give us their version of self-discovery. Their poems are not packed with references to the great poems of the past, a complex national history, or the immediate political situation in England, which makes them simple in a way. They are about growing up, growing old, having children, finding religion, losing it, and all of the very human emotions we experience along that journey.

Wordsworth and Coleridge were not only like-minded friends, they were also collaborators. The wrote together, read for each other, disagreed and fought about their work, just as writing partners often do. In light of their contentious relationship, we will want to think creatively about how these poems form a kind of partnership, a collection of information for future generations in the face of a rapidly industrializing and modernizing world.

Myra Lotto is a proud Penn Quaker (CAS ’99) and has been a member of the Writers House community since its inception. She holds BA and AM degrees in English and is a PhD candidate. She has taught for the Critical Writing Program and English department at Penn, and is currently an adjunct lecturer teaching online courses for Penn’s College of Liberal and Professional Studies.

book group 48: October 4-14, 2010 (ten days)

: Chris Mustazza

“Give me the ability to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties.” – John Milton

Free speech, as ensured by the First Amendment and perhaps the most valued of rights, protects all methods of expression, even those considered to be crass or inflammatory. In interpreting the First Amendment, the Supreme Court has stated, in a kind of meta-poetic fashion, “one man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.” But what happens when we add the anonymity of the Internet to the free speech debate, when accountability for one’s words is diminished or removed altogther? Indeed, some modern software is specifically designed to conceal a person’s location and render him untraceable. The question then becomes, is this a good thing?

Anonymity on the Internet has yielded several positive outcomes – enabling free speech where it would not otherwise have been possible in the Iranian elections, and allowing Chinese dissidents to speak freely about the Tiananmen Square incident, for example. However, pernicious effects also come part and parcel with the privilege of anonymity; defamation of character, trading illicit content, and making terrorist threats are all facilitated when the speaker cannot be traced. Consider being in a position where the top Google results for your name returned a series of libelous posts written by untraceable authors, thus removing the possibility for you to defend yourself using the tort of defamation.

In this 10-day reading group, we’ll read a couple of chapters from Daniel Solove’s The Future of Reputation and discuss the value of anonymity on the Internet. By juxtaposing some modern news stories with Solove’s work, we will get a sense for how this debate has been progressing over time. You need not be a lawyer (I’m not!) or a tech geek (OK, I am that) to join the group. Anyone with an interest in the subject matter will find the discussion stimulating.

Chris Mustazza teaches a course, "Privacy in a Networked World," for the Critical Writing Program at Penn. Mustazza also oversees student technology systems for the School of Arts & Sciences at Penn and leads the SAS Student Technology Advisory Board. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (M.S., Computer and Information Technology) and Penn State University (B.S., Information Sciences and Technology), Chris's academic interests focus on the societal impacts of technology, specifically on privacy, intellectual property, and civil liberties.

book group 49: October 19-29, 2010 (ten days)

: Beth Kephart

In "Accident and Its Scene: Reflections on the Death of John Gardner," (Writing into the World), the exquisite essayist Terrence Des Pres reconstructs the death of John Gardner—a motorcycle accident, or was it an accident?—along a lonesome road (or was it lonesome?). In "Memory and Imagination" (I Could Tell You Stories), Patricia Hampl tells a story, several times, about learning to play the piano. The facts keep changing because Hampl's memory does, because memory is a tortuous bend; it is never, in Hampl's words, "just memory."

The past is loaded. Memory shifts. Yet we live in a world in which honesty matters. We want to believe the stories we tell ourselves. We want to believe one another. In this on-line discussion, we'll be exploring the perils of bearing witness with Des Pres and Hampl as our guide.

Beth Kephart is the author of twelve books, including the National Book Award finalist, A Slant of the Sun; the BookSense pick, Ghosts in the Garden; the autobiography of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, Flow; the IndieBound Pick The Heart is Not a Size, and the critically acclaimed novels for young adults, Undercover, House of Dance, and Nothing But Ghosts. Dangerous Neighbors, a novel about Centennial Philadelphia, will be released in August from Egmont USA. Beth Kephart’s acclaimed short story, “The Longest Distance,” appears in the May 2009 HarperTeen anthology, No Such Thing as the Real World. She is a winner of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fiction grant, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Leeway grant, a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant, and the Speakeasy Poetry Prize, among other honors. Kephart’s essays are frequently anthologized, she has judged numerous competitions, and she has taught workshops at many institutions, to all ages. Kephart teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania and served as the inaugural readergirlz author in residence. Please visit her blog at http://www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com/

book group 50: Nov 20-Dec 20, 2010 (one month)

: Al Filreis and Jamie-Lee Josselyn

Edward Albee has defined modern American theatre with four decades of provocative, brilliant plays. A three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, The New Yorker has called him “the greatest living playwright.” Albee is perhaps best known for his 1962 drama, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which won both the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards and is widely considered a classic of American contemporary theatre. Like much of Albee's work, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? grapples with the danger of complacency, as well as with the illusions we create for ourselves and each other to complicate our otherwise humdrum lives. Similarly, Albee's first play, The Zoo Story, is an examination of isolation and the modern condition, but unlike his later work, draws heavily from the Theatre of the Absurd popularized in Europe during the mid-20th century. During this month-long discussion, our group will explore these plays' themes and modes, as well as Albee's general role in American theater as a lauded, yet controversial writer. Edward Albee is one of our three 2011 Writers House Fellows.

Al Filreis, Kelly Professor and Faculty Director of the Writers House, has led many online book groups and has taught several all-online semester-long courses. He has won many teaching awards (Lindback, Ira Abrams) and was named the Pennsylvania Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. He produced and hosts several podcasts, writes several blogs, and maintains vast web sites on modern poetry, the cold-war culture of the 1950s, and the Holocaust. He has published four books including, most recently, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry. Here is Al's web site.

Jamie-Lee Josselyn works at the Kelly Writers House, where she has coordinated the Writers House Fellows Program and other projects since 2005. She has taught writing at Penn, in New Hampshire at St. Paul’s School’s Advanced Studies Program, and in the Philadelphia public school system. She has worked as a teaching assistant in many courses on contemporary literature at Penn. Her writing has been published in The Sun, LOST Magazine, in the six-word memoir anthology It All Changed in an Instant, and elsewhere. Jamie-Lee is a Penn alumna and is currently a candidate for an MFA in nonfiction writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

book group 51: January 17-February 17, 2011 (one month)

: Jim English

This month-long online book group will explore the strange world of Never Let Me Go, in which a young woman named Kathy H— recounts in a peculiarly passive, unassuming way the circumstances of her early life and friendships at a state-run boarding school in southern England called Hailsham. The more we read of Kathy’s narrative, the more appalling and tragic her life comes to appear. But who is responsible for that tragedy? A novel about unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible rage, Never Let Me Gogradually, skillfully arouses its readers’ anger. The question it won’t answer for us, however, is at whom that anger should be directed.

Drawing on the traditions of the boarding-school novel, the bildungsroman, and the science fiction story, part political allegory and part romantic melodrama, Never Let Me Gois notoriously difficult to categorize. Deceptively simple but deeply disturbing, it poses an enticing set of interpretive puzzles for the reader. It is a book that will haunt you long after you finish it, making you think differently about childhood, schooling, scientific advance, and the ethics of caregiving.

Published in 2005, Never Let Me Gois the sixth and most recent novel of Kazuo Ishiguro, one of Britain’s greatest living authors. Born in Nagasaki, Japan, Ishiguro moved to England with his family at age six and became a British citizen twelve years later, in 1982. A graduate of the University of East Anglia’s renowned Creative Writing Program, he became widely known with the publication of The Remains of the Day in 1989, and has since then become truly a global writer, whose novels can be found in main street bookstores as well as on college course syllabi in every country of the developed world. He is a major inheritor and one of the great exponents of the English novel tradition, and yet at the same time his work seems to disrupt and distort that tradition in unparalleled ways. A winner and four-time nominee of the Booker Prize, he has received nearly every major honor available to novelists of the English-speaking world. If you have never read Ishiguro, this online book group will be your chance to learn what all the fuss is about.

book group 52: March 15-25, 2011 (ten days)

: Emily Steiner

The bravest of knights, the most beautiful women on earth - this is the stuff that King Arthur's court is made of. But one day a Green Knight rides into Camelot with a challenge so frightening that no one, except Arthur's nephew, Gawain, is willing to take him up. Gawain's quest for the Green Knight forces him - and everyone in Arthur's court - to confront some uncomfortable questions about heroism: can anyone really be the person he or she claims to be? How do we square our desire to be the very best with the sure knowledge that we are doomed to die? How can the myths of our culture - even medieval myths - teach us how to be good?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of my very favorite medieval English poems, and I look forward to discussing Simon Armitage's new verse translation with you.

Emily Steiner received her BA from Brown University and her PhD from Yale. She is the author of Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and has co-edited a collection of essays called The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2002). She has also published essays in The Yearbook of Langland Studies, New Medieval Literatures, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and Representations. She is presently completing a book on the great alliterative poem, Piers Plowman, and editing a collection of essays on Middle English literature. She is also working on a new book on medieval historical writing, starring the fourteenth-century prose translator, John Trevisa, chaplain to Lord Thomas Berkeley. Her research interests extend to Lollard literature, medieval drama and ritual performance, and Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. Her teaching interests also include history of the English language, Old English literature, Chaucer, and poetry of all periods.

book group 53: April 4-14, 2011 (ten days)

: Janine Catalano

The rapidly expanding popular interest in all things culinary has prompted a re-evaluation of the genre of food writing. Long considered only from the perspective of restaurant reviews and cookbooks, these have been far from the only, or even the most interesting, examples of the subject. Together we will explore the writings of three influential women – M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Ruth Reichl – who have each had a major impact on contemporary food writing, and thinking, at different points over the past century. Using the culinary as a conduit, these three women explore their societies and themselves. As a group, we will concentrate on short non-fiction passages by all three writers to find both commonalities and distinctions in their navigations through food. How does each author use the lexicon of edibility to entice readers and serve broader purposes? What line is walked between the universal and the highly personal in relation to food? Must we try to, or should we avoid, reading these texts as the products of a feminine domesticity historically linked to the kitchen? These and other questions will form the basis of our discussion over the ten days.

Janine Catalano is a writer, researcher, event coordinator and tour guide based in London. She received her BA in English from Penn, focusing on twentieth-century literature and making the Writers House her second home, as well as being the Food & Drink editor of 34th Street Magazine. Afterward graduation, she moved to the UK and completed an MA in modern art, focusing on food in surrealism, at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she currently works. Janine is particularly interested in the intersection between the written word, the visual, and the edible in modern and contemporary culture. She has been published in the on-line journal In Visible Culture and was a speaker at the 2009 Oxford Symposium of Food & Cookery, and also leads gastronomic walks around London.

book group 54: May 15-25, 2011 (ten days)

Description TBA

David Roberts is a member of the Kelly Writers House Advisory Board, a denizen of the KWH book groups and when he is not reading, works in Manhattan in the investment business. He is a 1983 graduate of the University Of Pennsylvania.