Posts Tagged ‘Cynthia Ozick’

From the Desk of Paulette

Friday, August 21st, 2009

August 21, 2009
Washington, DC

Inspired by veteran Big Read organizer (and Caldwell Public Library Director) Karen Kleppe Lembo’s July 31 article in The Recorder, here’s the library’s Big Read by the numbers . . .

 253: Number of Big Read activities offered by Caldwell Public Library in Caldwell, New Jersey, as part of their Big Read of Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl

$8,000: Amount of Caldwell Public Library’s Big Read grant

18: Number of organizational partners (not including schools, libraries, or museums) for The Big Read

2: Number of sponsors that donated matching grant funds for the library’s program (Rotary Club of the Caldwells and Kiwanis Club of Caldwell/West Essex

>$20,000: Amount of in-kind donations received for the library’s Big Read

1,000: Number of copies of The Shawl in circulation throughout Caldwell during The Big Read

33: Number of official book discussions around The Shawl

400: Number of Big Readers who were able to meet Cynthia Ozick during her visit to Caldwell

16: Number of schools—nursery school through college—that partcipated in Caldwell’s Big Read

1,000: Number of teens that attended teen-friendly panel discussons and participated in a collaborative art exhibit

15,500: # of crayons collected for The Crayon Project at 12 collection bins created by Boy Scout Troop 6. Created by Teh Fair Lawn Jewish Center, the project is a Fair Lawn community rpoject that is collecting one crayon for each child lost during the holocaust. Some of the crayons will be used by local artist Herb Stern to create a permanent memorial to the lsot children, while the rest of the crayons will be donated to underserved schools.

countless: Inspired by Rosa’s shawl, number of squares that have been knit, crocheted, and/or tied by Caldwell crafters to create blankets that are being donated to local domestic violence shelters, halfway homes, and Native American reservations

3: Number of Big Read grants received by Caldwell Public Library to date (You can count on—pun gleefully intended!—Caldwell’s Big Read of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to arrive in early 2010)

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Posted in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Shawl | 1 Comment »

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

August 20, 2009
Washington, DC

washingtonsquarenorthweb
“Washington Square North, nos. 121-125, Manhattan.”
Abbott, Berenice — Photographer. 1935-1938, printed 1935-ca. 1990
from The New York Public Library. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.
 

Most people have heard about the friendship between Edith Wharton and Henry James. But it turns out that Cynthia Ozick has also spent a great deal of time keeping company with our resident expat bachelor. From an interview with the NEA, here’s Ms. Ozick on “the marvels” of Washington Square.

[T]here’s not surprise in this novel, and that’s one of the surprises in this novel, that there’s no surprise.  That [Morris Townsend] comes on to begin with as somebody who has his eye on a dull but very rich girl, and it ends that way.  And nothing has changed in between the beginning and the end of the book, except the transformation of Catherine who, to begin with, has been transformed from dullness into a sense of her own worth, her own actual beauty, herself, really, as a work of art. . . . And later, she becomes transformed from a humble, obedient girl, into a hard, sarcastic, unkind simulacru and echo of her father.

So, although nothing changes, everything has changed, because if Catherine is the focal point of the novel, and the change takes place in her, then this novel, which is seemingly about no change, is about enormous change, but in one person only.  And that is one of the marvels of [Washington Square]. 

There [is also] the dialogue, which you can reread and reread and study and study, and see that every sentence in a passage is crucial to the next sentence.  Each sentence creates the succeeding sentence, and it’s always with extreme wit, extreme insight, and moving the story another notch forward. 

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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Friday, August 14th, 2009

theshawlbookcoverweb

Photo by Alan Zale courtesty of  Caldwell Public Library’s (New Jersey) Big Read of The Shawl

For the month of July, I set myself the challenge of writing a poem a day. While I didn’t manage to write each and every day, I did manage to at least start quite a few poems. There’s the old saying that writing is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. But there were a couple of times during my writing vigil when my pen seemed to be functioning on 100 percent inspiration, a feeling Cynthia Ozick describes rather fluently in this excerpt from an NEA interview in which she talks about beginning The Shawl.

We read now and again that a person sits down to write and there’s a sense that some mystical hand is guiding you and you’re not writing out of youself. I think reasonably, if you’re a rational person, you can’t accept that. But I did have the sense—I did this one time in my life—that I was extraordinarly fluent, and I’m never fluent. I wrote those five pages as if I heard a voice.

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Posted in The Shawl, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »