Literature

Our Viking-Cowboy YouTube Star

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Our Viking-Cowboy YouTube Star Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/01/2019 - 00:00

Ula Chrobak

Jackson Crawford, director of ��’s Nordic Studies program, studies and translates Old Norse, a language spoken by medieval Scandinavians. Here the native Coloradan talks Vikings, videos and his contribution to the Disney animated film Frozen.

What is the context of the literature you study?

The stuff that I'm looking at is roughly 1,000 years old. The poems of The Poetic Edda, about the Norse gods and heroes, were probably composed around the 900s and passed down orally. Then in Iceland in the 1200s, there was a big antiquarian interest and a lot of their oral poetry and sagas were written down.

Tell me about Vikings.

During the Viking age, about AD 800 to 1100, Scandinavians were making a killing off of raiding and pillaging the richer lands south of them. It’s a hyper martial society with a family-based morality, so you can rob and kill people you’re not related to. As far as physical image goes, Vikings didn’t really wear horned helmets. But they did fight with axes. Also, they were actually quite clean. In the Scandinavian days of the week, Saturday is called bath day. A bath a week doesn't sound fantastic to us, but by medieval standards they were very clean.

Why did you translate The Poetic Edda and The Saga of the Volsungs?

The other translations were so hard to read. Previous translators were too fixed on the word order in Old Norse, which makes really awkward sentences in English. They also wanted it to sound old — it’s like “thou art.” Very Shakespearean. In my translations, I’m willing to mix around the word order and put it in normal English. Apparently it struck a chord. For two years in a row, my translation of The Poetic Edda is pretty often the number-one best seller in European literature on Amazon. It sold 10,000 copies in 2017.

What led you to launch your YouTube channel?

In 2016, I was an adjunct professor in California making $1,600 a month while paying $1,200 a month in rent. I had to do something else to make ends meet. When I started the videos, I was just sitting in my office, but I noticed that when I went back home to Wyoming and Colorado and made videos outdoors those were a lot more popular. So I decided to make all of them outdoors. It’s become my brand. I’m the guy who talks about Norse mythology in the mountains with a cowboy hat on.

How much time goes into your videos?

�� six hours per video, and I try to put out two videos a week.

Have you always dressed in cowboy/Western style?

Yes. I grew up in Clear Creek Canyon. My grandfather was old-school Western, and I just picked up his style.

What do you hope your impact will be with the YouTube videos?

There’s a lot of information about Norse mythology and Norse language on the web, but most of it is terrible. There are people with three or four times more followers than me who are basically making stuff up. What I’m trying to do is say ‘This is what we actually see in ink and calfskin.’ The community around my videos has been overwhelmingly positive and appreciative of the fact that I tell them what we know and I don’t start making up things to fill in the holes.

Do you see parallels in American Western and medieval Scandinavian cultures?

Old Norse sagas always have a frontier edge to them. They’re so much like Westerns. People were living far apart, relying on themselves and their small family. It’s the same attitude, like ‘Back when men were men and the wilderness was still untamed.’ If someone challenges your honor, you fight them with an axe in the sagas, with a gun in the Westerns.

I heard you were a consultant for the Disney movie Frozen.

The creative team wanted to give Frozen that old Scandinavian feel. I wrote the runes [ancient alphabet letters] in a book you see at the beginning. There’s also a scene with spoken Old Norse — that voice is the actor imitating me.

In our print edition, this story appears under the title "Our Viking Cowboy." Condensed and edited.

Photo by Glenn Asakawa

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Campus News Briefs — Spring 2018

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 07:00:00 +0000

Campus News Briefs — Spring 2018 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/01/2018 - 00:00

Varsity Lake

2.1

Million gallons of water, at capacity

1888

First bridge built; replaced 1935

Thousand square feet surface area

4/1

Date irrigation ditch starts feeding lake, a manmade water source for campus irrigation systems

11/1

Date ditch supply is shut off for season, lowering water levels

Resident red-eared slider turtles (approx.)

John Grisham Liked It

Bestselling novelist John Grisham found an article by Colorado Law professor Paul Campos so compelling, he calls it the inspiration for his latest book, The Rooster Bar.

As Grisham — author of the The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client and other huge bestsellers — publicized the new book late last year, he repeatedly cited Campos’ 2014 nonfiction article in The Atlantic, telling CBS This Morning that it “really opened my eyes. It was a great piece. The novel was quickly born from that.”

Campos’ article, “The Law School Scam,” is about the perils for students and society of expensive for-profit law schools with questionable admissions standards.

Three students attending a fictional for-profit law school are at the center of The Rooster Bar.

After the book came out, Grisham sent Campos a copy and a note.

“It was nice, needless to say, to have a story like that featured in a John Grisham novel,” Campos told the Boulder Daily Camera.

Let’s say you see a great white shark and you are scared and your brain wants to form a memory of what’s going on. You have to make new proteins to encode that memory ”

— �� Boulder scientist Charles Hoeffer, on his recent research about the role of the protein AKT.

Soft Robots

�� Boulder engineers are developing a new breed of “soft” robot that can handle fragile objects, such as fruit, yet also lift heavy ones, such as a jug of water. Made of various elastic materials and liquids and powered by electricity, the versatile, self-healing robots depend on something like artificial muscle to generate “the adaptability of an octopus arm, the speed of a hummingbird and the strength of an elephant,” said Christoph Keplinger, the mechanical engineering professor whose research group leads the work.

For more details, see �� Boulder Today online.

Read about Varsity Lake, John Grisham, a memory protein and soft robots.

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Literary Theory: The Complete Guide

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 22:48:14 +0000

Literary Theory: The Complete Guide Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/27/2017 - 16:48

Literary Theory: The Complete Guide (2017, Bloomsbury Publishing) By Mary Klages, professor of English

By Mary Klages

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Enter the Biography

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 19:44:00 +0000

Enter the Biography Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/01/2017 - 13:44

Eric Gershon

In Bruce Lee, ��'s Daryl Maeda sees a symbol of the modern world — and the subject of his next book.

Somehow it had escaped Maeda’s notice: The Museum of Modern Art in New York was hosting a retrospective of Bruce Lee’s films.

This was in January.

As luck would have it, a New York Times reporter reached out to ask the �� professor about Lee, tipping him off to the show.

“I cleared my schedule and jumped on a plane,” said Maeda, who teaches a course called “Bruce Lee and the Trans-Pacific” and is at work on a book about the martial arts star.

Lee died in 1973 at age 32. He’d made just a handful of major films, of which three reached U.S. theaters during his lifetime.

But, as with James Dean, Janice Joplin and Jim Morrison, early death seems only to have amplified Lee’s fame. Mazda made him a central figure in a Super Bowl ad as recently as 2014.

Maeda thinks Lee, already the subject of several documentaries and biographies, is overdue for a deeper analysis than he’s received.

“Studying Bruce Lee is actually a way of exploring how we come to occupy a globalized world,” he said.

Born in San Francisco in 1940 while his Chinese father was singing opera there, Lee grew up in Hong Kong, where he trained in martial arts and dance and appeared in about 20 minor film roles.

Later he studied philosophy and drama at the University of Washington and opened a martial arts school in Seattle. In the mid-1960s he made his way to Hollywood and found work in television, on The Green Hornet.

Between 1971 and his death, he starred in four films that quickly made him a celebrity in Asia. The most famous of these in the U.S., Enter the Dragon, reached theaters about a month after his death, in Hong Kong, following a bad reaction to medicine.

Maeda, an ethnic studies professor, said he’ll focus on Lee as an early, extraordinary example of a person who forged a new type of truly cross-cultural identity at a time of accelerating global movements of people, information and ideas.

The defining synthesis of Lee’s cross-cultural existence was the hybrid form of martial arts fighting on display in his films. He mixed elements of karate, taekwondo and escrima (or kali) and incorporated aspects of Western boxing, fencing and dance also.

Typically cast as an avenger — physically small, but tough, brave, skilled and finely chiseled — Lee basically invented the Asian American tough guy, conquering generations of unflattering stereotypes about Asian men and becoming a symbol of pride for Asians and other racial minorities.

His films, which appeared in the twilight between the civil rights and black power movements, were hugely popular among American blacks, according to Maeda, who aims to publish his book within two years.

“Bruce Lee is a kind of a multifarious figure who can mean different things to different audiences,” he said. “He contains a multitude within himself, and as a result of that people are able to identify with various parts of his image and his being.”

And yet Lee was one of a kind — making him an appealing subject for an ambitious book.

Said Maeda: “There’s no Bruce Lee before Bruce Lee.”

Photo by ©Bettmann/Getty Images

In Bruce Lee, ��'s Daryl Maeda sees a symbol of the modern world — and the subject of his next book.

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10 Rare Works in Norlin Library

Anonymous — Sat, 29 Apr 2017 16:49:09 +0000

10 Rare Works in Norlin Library Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 04/29/2017 - 10:49

Lauren Price

10 of the Rarest Works in Norlin Library's Special Collections & Archives

A leaf from a Latin Bible, "The Dragon Leaf," 1240 CE
A leaf from a Gutenberg Bible, 1450-1455 CE
A collection of works by Katibi of Nishapur, c. 1600 CE
Handwritten Latin Bible from Paris, 1210-1220 CE
North African handwritten collection of devotions, with chapters of the Quran
Collection of astronomical tables by scholars working under Alfonso X of Castile
The Mercator Atlas, 10^th edition, published in 1630 CE
Darwin's On the Origin of Species, 1859 CE
Deed from the Court of Augmentations, Edward VI (son of Henry VIII), 1547 CE
Legal account book of anti-slavery lawyer, Caleb Sipple Layton, in Georgetown, Delaware, 1846-1882 CE

Learn interesting facts about each of these items.

To see these items yourself, visit the Norlin Library Special Collections & Archives. Get hours of operation or schedule an appointment here.

Photo by Lauren Price

10 of the rarest works in Norlin Library's Special Collections & Archives exhibit.

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Drummer Has a PhD

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 12:08:00 +0000

Drummer Has a PhD Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/01/2017 - 05:08

Andrew Daigle

Inquiry: Steve Lamos

Steve Lamos, who teaches English, writing and rhetoric at �� Boulder, is also the drummer for American Football, a late-’90s rock band that Rolling Stone ranks among the “Top 10 All Time” emo bands. The group recently reunited after 15 years and released a second album, American Football (LP2). Watch Steve play. (Video)

American Football returned to the stage in October with three sold-out shows at Webster Hall in New York. Were you expecting this reception?

I thought we were playing the basement. The venue said, “We’re going to book you upstairs and see what happens.” Within one minute of tickets going on sale, all 1,500 were gone.

How was it?

I had never played anything the size of Webster Hall. People kept introducing themselves and telling us they flew in from Europe or Malaysia or Scandinavia or Australia. People were taking pictures with us and showing us their band tattoos.

Were you aware of how popular American Football has become since it disbanded, in 1999?

I was almost completely oblivious. When murmurs of this reunion began and we started getting offers for more money than we had ever thought about, it started to sink in. It’s interesting to watch history revise itself. People did not like the first album when it came out, and reviews were lukewarm at best. Fifteen years later, though, we’re in “Top 10 All Time” lists for the “emo” genre in Spin and Rolling Stone. But at the time, nobody cared. The biggest crowd we ever drew was maybe 100 people, and they were completely bored.

Do your students know you’re part of one of the “most influential” and beloved ’90s emo rock bands?

Some grad students in English were teasing me about it a while ago. As cool as the whole band thing is, it’s a tiny piece of life. On campus, I’m here to do a different job entirely.

Did you always know there was more in store for American Football?

I always did feel like the band ended prematurely. That said, I never thought it would all come back together. I had to earn tenure, and music was very much on the back burner. Not that this has changed. I still love doing my job.

You play drums and trumpet?

I’ve played the trumpet since I was six. My dad had this dance polka band and he would bring me on stage when I was little. It came about with American Football because there were a couple melodies that it went well with.

Did you also start playing drums at an early age?

I didn’t start playing drums until I was 21. I was ready for a break from the trumpet, and I wanted to be in rock bands.

What was it like meeting up with your college buddies to practice again?

I was in Chicago giving a keynote speech and had the opportunity to play with the guys for the first time in 15 years. After four hours of practicing, my wife called. She was eight months pregnant. She tells me, frantically: “Our daughter is coming!” After playing with the guys for the first time in forever, I rushed to O’Hare, jumped on a plane, and drove to the hospital. My daughter was born an hour later.

How did American Football (LP2) come about?

After about 30 shows back together, we started asking, “Do we want to think about new music?” We did, and evidently Polyvinyl Records agreed.

What do you love about the new album?

I’m awfully proud of this one, especially the slow-burning tracks like “Born to Lose” and “Give Me the Gun.” Mike [Kinsella] did a nice job imagining what the characters of the first album would be thinking about 15 years later. There was no attempt to sound like the first record.

What’s next for American Football?

We’ve got some weekend gigs in the spring and a few longer trips for the summer. Part of the goal is to try to get new fans without making the old fans mad. As long as I can balance it with my life here at �� Boulder, I’ll keep doing it.

Read a longer version of this story.

Condensed and edited by Andrew Daigle (PhDEngl’16).

Photo by Daniel Inskeep/Rachel Gulotta

Steve Lamos, who teaches English, writing and rhetoric at �� Boulder, is also the drummer for American Football, a late-’90s rock band.

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Wolfing Out

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 17:45:00 +0000

Wolfing Out Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/01/2016 - 10:45

Eric Gershon

Inquiry: Stephen Graham Jones

�� English professor Stephen Graham Jones got hooked on werewolves as a boy in West Texas. Now he’s made them the stars of his latest novel, Mongrels (William Morrow 2016).

How would you describe the classic werewolf?

The classic werewolf is pretty much straight from [the film] The Wolf Man, 1941. Silver was the thing that killed the wolf. The bite was what infected the wolf. Even the mark of the beast that’s in The Wolf Man became part of the legend for a while. But in the 20th century it’s been furry hands, furry head, furry feet in clothes.

So, part human, part wolf?

It is, it’s a hybrid.

What are the special powers or abilities that a werewolf has?

It’s violent, strong, it can smell well, has a bite. It’s a predator. An ambush predator specifically.

Is there a canonical attitude or way of life for these werewolves?

They’ve been seen for decades as in contrast to the vampire, largely. The vampire is usually this high-society monster. And so the werewolf will often be the opposite — low-income, struggling to get by, can’t control their temper.

How do the werewolves in Mongrels fit into the werewolf literary tradition and how are they different?

You have to either take into account all the werewolves that have come before or you have to pretend they didn’t exist. And I thought it was kind of insulting or prideful for me to just make it up as if from nothing. I went and looked back at every wolf text I could. And, of course, the most important one is The Wolf Man. So I studied and studied that movie.

Are they predators, your werewolves?

That’s their instinct. But they’re trying to make it under the radar, and so predation is for many of them the last resort. They try to work low-paying, cash-under-the-table jobs such [that] they can go to the grocery store and buy food.

Are there moments or phases for them when they would be conventional, law-abiding members of human society?

They’ve been kicked by society so many times that they have a hard time being law-abiding. They’re proud of being werewolves, but they don’t want to get caught being werewolves, so they try to not wolf-out unless they have to.

Why do you think humans are drawn to monsters?

For different reasons. The werewolf — I think the reason that that’s still a vital story for us is that more and more we’re characterizing ourselves as kind of thinking machines, as the bipedal version of our smartphone. We always feel as a culture that we’re just a half-step away from being able to download ourselves into a server somewhere. What a werewolf story tells us is that we’re animal and we’re human. We have base instincts. And if we don’t let those instincts out periodically, then they’re going to rise on their own in a bad way.

What draws you to monster stories and werewolves in particular?

If seven out of 10 werewolf stories I read are a failure, nevertheless I’m still going to have seen a cool werewolf, and so it’s not a total failure. It’s just a better gamble. If a werewolf isn’t a phenomenon in nature, how can we talk about its having biology? The monster you can believe in is a scarier monster.

Tell me a little bit about being 12 and discovering the werewolf and its meaning for you.

I used to try to become a werewolf when I was that age. Trying to drink after wolves. Rolling in the moonlight in the sand. Eating raw meat. None of it seemed to be making me into a werewolf. Finally, 30 years later, I just decided the way I was going to see werewolves was to write a novel about werewolves.

What’s in the works?

I just wrote a novel called Texas Is Burning, it’s a cop novel out of West Texas. It’s with the publisher now. Also I pitched Mongrels 2 and 3 to them as well. Aside from that, I’ve got three other finished novels already.

Are there any werewolves in Texas Burning?

There are not. Just cops and bad guys.

Condensed and edited by Eric Gershon.

Photo by Anthony Camera

�� English professor Stephen Graham Jones got hooked on werewolves as a boy in West Texas. Now he’s made them the stars of his latest novel, Mongrels.

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Second Acts

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 20:56:00 +0000

Second Acts Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/01/2016 - 14:56

Lauren Price

The year Mariko Tatsumoto Layton (Psych’74; Law’77) graduated from Colorado Law, she made history in the state’s legal community as the first Asian woman admitted to the Colorado Bar. But she prefers to be known as a storyteller.

“Writing was like a pebble in my shoe and I just couldn’t ignore it,” said Layton, who last year published the prize-winning children’s book Ayumi’s Violin, her debut work of fiction.

The book — honored by judges of the 2016 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People and winner of the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Gold Award — tells the story of a young, biracial girl from Japan, a violin prodigy striving for acceptance by her white American father’s new family.

Layton, who lives with husband Allen in Pagosa Springs and writes under her maiden name, Tatsumoto, has since published a second children’s book, Accidental Samurai Spy. A third, Kenji’s Power, is in progress.

All three center on the adventures of young Japanese characters and explore themes of family, culture, loyalty and betrayal.

“All my books involve some cross-cultural aspects,” said Layton, who at age 8 moved from Japan to the U.S., where her father worked as a geochemist. “I like to show the differences in culture through the characters, but ultimately like to show that kids should not prejudge people, and
show the good in every culture and every ethnicity whenever I write.”

In her first career, Layton worked as a deputy district attorney in Adams County, then practiced business law. She’d always wanted to be a writer, though, and in the mid-1980s started taking writing classes at Colorado Mountain College, attending writing conferences and participating in critique groups.

She published a travel guide to Colorado bed-and-breakfasts in 1990 and kept plugging away at fiction. One day a professor suggested she spin a story she’d aimed at adults into a children’s book.

At first Layton resisted: She thought she’d feel like a lesser writer by writing for children. But she gave it a try and found writing for children, typically for ages 8-12, a satisfying challenge.

“A good children’s novel entertains,” she said, “but it also teaches children to live ethically.”

There may be lessons in Layton’s personal story as well as in her books — about persistence, perhaps, or patience, or both.

“I wanted writing to be my first career, but it turned out to be my second,” she said. “I published my first book at the age of 63 and I don’t think I’m too old for a second career. The way I look at it is I now have a richer understanding of life and more materials to work with when I write.”

Photos courtesy Mariko Tatsumoto Layton

Mariko Tatsumoto Layton, the first Asian woman admitted to the Colorado Bar, finds her true calling: Children's books.

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The Book of Shakespeare

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 19:45:41 +0000

The Book of Shakespeare Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/01/2016 - 13:45

Eric Gershon

On April 23 literature lovers around the planet celebrated the 452^nd birthday of William Shakespeare. The date also happened to mark the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s 1616 death, an epic milestone that has prompted a riot of celebration that will continue all year.

A conference in Denmark unfolded in the real-life castle where Shakespeare set Hamlet. In Singapore, actors performed the play in Vietnamese. In London the playwright’s last will and testament is on public display, allowing visitors to eyeball the bequest to his wife of his “second-best bed.” Countless public readings, performances and exhibitions are yet to come.

In Colorado August will be an especially heady time for Bard enthusiasts: Early in the month, a 393-year-old copy of the first printed collection of Shakespeare's plays is expected to arrive at ��-Boulder for a three-week public exhibition.

On loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, the book, known as the First Folio, will be on view at the �� Art Museum Aug. 9-31, part of a 50-state tour called "First Folio: The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare.” A copy will also travel to Puerto Rico.

�� is the only Colorado stop on the circuit, which began in Oklahoma in January and ends in Tennessee in early 2017. Admission will be free with tickets available at the door.

“The important thing about old books is they’re not really museum objects alone; they’re a way of touching the past,” said Katherine Eggert, the ��-Boulder English professor who directs the university’s Center for British and Irish Studies. “So we have this marvelous book from 1623 and it was made by Shakespeare’s associates…It’s like shaking the hand of the guy who shook Shakespeare’s hand.”

Prepared in 1623 by two actors who worked with Shakespeare, the First Folio includes nearly all of his plays, 18 of which had never before been published in any form, including “Macbeth,” “Julius Caesar” and “The Tempest.” Without the First Folio, these plays might have been lost, giving the book an almost mystical status among Shakespeare aficionados.

“The survival of great literature,” Eggert said, “is a chancy and wondrous business.”

Worldwide there are 234 known copies of the First Folio; the most recent addition — a specimen in the library of a Scottish estate — was authenticated in April. The Folger owns 82 of them, by far the world’s largest collection. Individual copies have sold at auction for more than $5 million.

No institution or private collector in the Rocky Mountain region owns a First Folio, according to experts, making the campus exhibition a unique opportunity to behold one without traveling far. While the book is at ��, it will be the only First Folio touring the continental United States. (A copy will also be in Alaska then.)

A folio is a book with pages folded once, yielding two double-sided leaves, or four pages. Made up of many smaller folios, First Folio copies weigh about five pounds on average.

The idea that �� might host a Folger First Folio began circulating in 2012. The university submitted a formal bid in 2014 and learned in February it had been picked. Since then, a campus cast of dozens has been organizing the exhibition and a series of related activities.

Fiske Planetarium will host “Shakespeare and the Stars,” for example, in which actors and astronomers will explore Shakespeare’s celestial references with the planetarium dome as a backdrop. On Norlin Quadrangle, The Book Arts League will demonstrate the use of Elizabethan printing presses. In September �� hosts a day-long academic conference for September about Shakespeare and science. The annual Colorado Shakespeare Festival will have just lowered the curtain on its final performance at Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater.

Several ��-owned treasures will be on display with the First Folio, including a Fourth Folio of 1685, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1577 and John Gerarde’s The Herbal, or General Historie of Plantes from 1636, plus a Mercator Atlas from 1630 and an atlas of human anatomy on loan from ��-Anshutz.

The Folger’s folio will be hand-delivered by Folger personnel and displayed in a special glass case equipped to monitor interior temperature and relative humidity.

As at all other stops on the tour, the book will be open to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.”

Eggert happens to prefer Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. But the choice of “To be or not to be” is hard to argue against, she said: “It’s hands down the most famous speech from Shakespeare.”

Illustration by Anita Kunz; photo courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library

Without the First Folio of 1623, the world might lack half of Shakespeare’s plays. A rare original copy comes to ��-Boulder in August, the only Colorado stop on a national tour.

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The Resurrection of Lucia Berlin

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 08:45:15 +0000

The Resurrection of Lucia Berlin Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/01/2016 - 02:45

Andrew Daigle

A fresh collection of stories by former �� English professor Lucia Berlin became a best-seller last year, more than a decade after her death.

The man who lit Lucia Berlin’s first cigarette happened to be a prince, but Berlin’s life would seem mostly foreign to real-life royalty.

When the fiction writer joined the ��-Boulder faculty in 1994, she had made ends meet as a cleaning lady, nurse, switchboard operator and substitute teacher. She’d married and divorced three times and raised four sons mostly on her own. She’d subdued alcoholism.

At the time of her death, 10 years later, Berlin had also published 76 short stories and six story collections, several of them highly regarded. But none sold especially well, and none of her bestknown works were in print.

And yet literary celebrity may be upon Lucia Berlin.

Following the 2015 publication of a posthumous story collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Berlin has received full-throated praise from critics. They’ve called her “an important American writer” and “one of America’s best kept secrets.” They’ve compared her to Raymond Carver and Noble Prize-winner Alice Munro.

Within a week of the book’s debut, it became a New York Times best-seller. Within a month, it had outsold all Berlin’s previous work combined. The New York Times Book Review ultimately named Cleaning Women one of the “10 Best Books of 2015.”

“Berlin is one of our finest writers and here she is at the height of her powers,” Molly Giles wrote of Cleaning Women in the San Francisco Chronicle. Berlin’s literary career began with promise: She was first published at age 24 in Saul Bellow’s journal, The Noble Savage. Then came the marriages and children, and the long but successful struggle with drink. Along the way she wrote her stories, while piecing together a living from humbler work. Her first story collection, Angels Laundromat, appeared in 1981, during a long period in Northern California.

Two of her biggest successes came in the early 1990s, with the publication of Homesick (1991) and So Long (1993). Homesick won an American Book Award, and in 1994 poet Edward Dorn, an old friend who taught at ��-Boulder, lured her to campus as a writer-in-residence for the English department’s creative writing program.

At a time when the program was known for “experimental fiction,” Berlin was notable for writing social realism with lively characters and a blend of autobiography and fiction.

Having a colorful life didn’t hurt. Born in Alaska in 1936, the daughter of a mining engineer, Berlin grew up among working people in a series of mining camps.

She later tasted society life in Santiago, Chile, where her family moved after World War II; it was there that Prince Aly Khan, an international playboy and one-time husband of actress Rita Heyworth, lit her first cigarette, according to a life sketch accompanying Cleaning Woman. She married two Harvard graduates in sequence and lived among intellectual bohemians in New York and New Mexico.

But in her writing Berlin embraced the gritty minutia of everyday life, often the hard life. She dealt with vulnerabilities and vices — restlessness, poverty, scattered friends and family, divorce, addiction. She was familiar with detox centers, Medicaid clinics, self-destruction.

In all, Berlin was at �� for six years. She’d been hired for her literary talent, but she excelled in the classroom as much because of her warm, empathetic and nonjudgmental approach to teaching.

“Lucia had her own style, but she never tried to create clones of herself,” said Martin Bickman, a �� English professor who knew her. “She liked to hear students’ stories, not what they thought they should write for her class.”

This bred loyalty, said Peter Michelson, an emeritus professor of creative writing: “She never ended class with a judgment. Lucia wanted her students to keep writing.”

Within two years, Berlin received the university-wide “Excellence in Teaching” award and was promoted to associate professor. Near the end of her �� career, in 1999, she published the third of her best-known story collections, Where I Live Now.

By then her health was poor, an oxygen tank her constant companion. She left the university in 2000 but lingered in Boulder a while, living on Mapleton Hill and in an East Boulder mobile home park.

When she died in California in 2004, near her sons, it was on Nov. 12, her 68th birthday — a tidy ending to an untidy life that begat stories to remember.

A fresh collection of stories by former �� English professor Lucia Berlin became a best-seller last year, more than a decade after her death.

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Literature

Our Viking-Cowboy YouTube Star

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Campus News Briefs — Spring 2018

Varsity Lake

John Grisham Liked It

Soft Robots

Related Articles

Literary Theory: The Complete Guide

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Enter the Biography

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10 Rare Works in Norlin Library

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Drummer Has a PhD

Inquiry: Steve Lamos

American Football returned to the stage in October with three sold-out shows at Webster Hall in New York. Were you expecting this reception?

How was it?

Were you aware of how popular American Football has become since it disbanded, in 1999?

Do your students know you’re part of one of the “most influential” and beloved ’90s emo rock bands?

Did you always know there was more in store for American Football?

You play drums and trumpet?

Did you also start playing drums at an early age?

What was it like meeting up with your college buddies to practice again?

How did American Football (LP2) come about?

What do you love about the new album?

What’s next for American Football?

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Wolfing Out

Inquiry: Stephen Graham Jones

How would you describe the classic werewolf?

So, part human, part wolf?

What are the special powers or abilities that a werewolf has?

Is there a canonical attitude or way of life for these werewolves?

How do the werewolves in Mongrels fit into the werewolf literary tradition and how are they different?

Are they predators, your werewolves?

Are there moments or phases for them when they would be conventional, law-abiding members of human society?

Why do you think humans are drawn to monsters?

What draws you to monster stories and werewolves in particular?

Tell me a little bit about being 12 and discovering the werewolf and its meaning for you.

What’s in the works?

Are there any werewolves in Texas Burning?

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Second Acts

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The Book of Shakespeare

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The Resurrection of Lucia Berlin

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