Monday, May 14, 2012

The Power of Reading

It was a great day at the Hawai‘i Book & Music Festival last weekend.

I had so much fun talking myth and writing with Don't Look Back contributors Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Marion Lyman-Mersereau and Robert Barclay. I also finally got to meet contributor Maxine Hong Kingston in person, as well as meet with fellow book people in one sunny, airy place, and experience the treat of hearing stories read aloud--what a treat. 

There were a lot of children at the festival, enjoying games but also animated story times, which got me thinking about telling you about this great literacy campaign by Denver, Co-based non-profit Burning Through Pages, which I learned about on Mediabistro's GalleyCat. 

Focused on advocacy for youth reading and writing, Burning Through Pages has set out one momentous and worthy goal: "To inspire a love of reading in today's youth by recommending, donating and discussing books."

Their new and infectious campaign of black and white posters is aimed at parents to inspire them to read to their kids, and designed by Mike Anderick. It has also gone viral, making BTP suddenly popular on the web and facebook. 

What's your favorite time machine?

Monday, May 07, 2012

First the Festival, and then the Gala


2012 Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Awards 
excellent or exemplary manuscripts
Friday May 11, 5:30-9pm at Bishop Museum

Now that you've amped up excitement about local books at the Hawaii Book and Music Festival, you've got another fun chance to support local book publishers, authors and Bishop Museum by attending the 2012 Book Awards. The awards ceremony begins Friday May 11 at 6pm in the Bishop Museum Atherton Halau, followed by a reception in the Hawaiian Hall Atrium and Courtyard.

The awards are given by the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association and recognize the finest books published in the state during the previous year (in this case, in 2011), and honor authors, designers, photographers, illustrators and publishers who create them.

A $25 tickets means you can enjoy heavy pupu, cocktails and gourmet chocolate truffles while you browse nominated books and get them signed by attending authors. Proceeds benefit Bishop Museum. (Available at the door or in advance at Native Books in Ward Warehouse.) 

I will be there to see what books are honored and if, perchance, Don't Look Back: Hawaiian Myths Made New, is one of them. Hopefully, I'll see you there.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Don't Look Back, but it's time for the Hawai‘i Book & Music Festival

I've just put together a panel for short readings and discussion of the enduring power and importance of myth, for this year's Hawai‘i Book and Music Festival

Come down Sunday May 6 at 1pm to listen to me and Don't Look Back contributors Robert Barclay (Melal), Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui ('Ōiwi), Marion Lyman-Mersereau (Eddie Wen Go), and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl (Murder Leaves Its Mark), read from our retellings of Hawaiian myths and discuss the project and myth in modern times.

See below from Watermark Publishing for a discount on book purchases at their booth during the festival, where copies of Don't Look Back will be available.

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Join us at the 7th Annual Hawaii Book & Music Festival
Frances Kakugawa (Kapoho, Wordsworth the Poet) and Christine Thomas (Don’t Look Back: Hawaiian Myths Made New) will be among the panelists featured at the 7th Annual Hawaii Book & Music Festival.

Frances joins authors Janny Scott, Julia Flynn Siler and Sydney Iaukea in the Authors Pavilion at 4PM on Saturday, May 5, to discuss “Agendas in Biography & Memoir.”
Christine will be joined by fellow contributors to Don’t Look Back, Robert Barclay, Marion Lyman-Mersereau, Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanaui and Victoria Kneubuhl, in the OHA Alana Pavilion at 1PM on Sunday, May 6, to read selected myths from the collection and talk about the enduring power and importance of myth.
Visit us at our booth to the right of the Main Stage for great deals on new books and deep discount bargains on gently used bookstore returns. All books are priced 20-80% off!
See below for a coupon good for $10 off your $25 purchase.
For more information and a full event schedule, visit the Hawaii Book & Music Festival website.

Monday, April 09, 2012

A Rambling Hemingway

Book trailers are a recent phenomenon - or, are they? Ernest Hemingway's 8-minute book trailer for Across the River and Into the Trees, was recorded in the '50s with a pocket recorder. The book is set in Trieste on the last day of Colonel Richard Cantwell's life, and circles the theme of facing death.

I'm not a Hemingway fan (Faulkner is more my speed) but it was interesting to hear his macho, inebriated ramblings.

Check out the recording below (or here) and thanks to Galley Cat for alerting me to it.

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

The Great Gatsby -- Merchandise

A Great Gatsby iPhone case? Sweatshirt? Tote bag?

The new merchandise collection by Out of Print Clothing features t-shirts, fleeces, totes, iPhone cases, notebooks and journals with the original The Great Gatsby cover art by Francis Cugat. I surmise that this release is timed with the December 2012 opening of the newest Great Gatsby film version, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy and Tobey Maguire as Nick. 

There is something somewhat appealing about clothing adorned with images from great literature instead of brands and slogans, and a quick peruse of the Out of Print website reveals some tempting kids tees boasting covers like Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Melville's Moby-Dick (although these are also offered for adults).

I'll admit that a Great Gatsby notebook makes some sense, but the rest seems at best odd if not unexpected. As an English major and Gatsby fan - and if you haven't read this book or read it recently I order you to read now or re-read! - I just wish the art was a bit more creative. Perhaps a green light and a dock. Or a library of real books. 

They say the collection features "lavish, literature-based items...ideal for cultural bookworms and Gatsby fans." But this fan's ruling is still out.

What do you think?

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Book Review: A Guide to Religion...for Atheists


RELIGION FOR ATHEISTS: A Non-believer's guide to the uses of religion. Alain de Botton. Pantheon. 320 pages. $26.95

Breezily confident essayist Alain de Botton announced in a recent Twitter post: “If atheists really want to overcome religion, they should appropriate all of its positive sides rather than emulate its flaws.” That’s a miniature edition of his latest full-length missive, a systematic and inventive mapping of why (and how) atheists like de Botton can and should find religions useful and consoling.

After establishing the book’s foundation, that “no religions are true in any God-given sense,” and God doesn’t exist, de Botton tells readers they are now free to view religions differently, “as repositories of a myriad ingenious concepts with which we can try to assuage a few of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life.” This isn’t a purely original ambition, as de Botton acknowledges near the book’s end with a brief discussion of 19th century French sociologist August Comte’s invention of a secular “religion.” But in de Botton’s take, he happily and brazenly picks a little of this and a little of that from his personal religious buffet — a tactic he likens to the literature-lover focusing only on a select group of writers — to reveal how religion might fill gaps in what he calls nonbeliever’s impoverished lives.

Thankfully, he isn’t trying to compare specific religions but religion generally to secular life, and he demarcates the narrative in his customary methodical style, this time by nine facets within the religious prism: community, kindness, education, tenderness, pessimism, perspective, art, architecture and institutions. He then uses specific rituals and constructs from Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism to illustrate bold concepts for overhauling secular life. 

After deconstructing the rigidity of Catholic Mass, for instance, he proposes as secular counterpart to religion’s community a humble Agape Restaurant where people can break bread with strangers and ease isolation. Saint figurines are later likened to stuffed animals, and behavioral star-charts recommended to guide adults to goodness. He argues that art galleries should be arranged to achieve the purpose of churches, and that erecting electronic billboard versions of the Wailing Wall will help people feel company in life’s sorrows. Modern education receives the most provocative renovation, with history and literature departments chucked in favor of using their information as tools in such courses as understanding marriage or dying.

Secular life has all the right ingredients, de Botton writes; it just needs help with the recipe. Founder of The School of Life, which addresses such issues as why relationships are challenging and how we can improve the world, de Botton is anxious to tweak it, offering this book as guide for those disinterested in dogma but seeking inner nourishment and structured advice on living.

One has to appreciate his pluck as much as his lucid, enjoyable arguments, and this book, like his previous titles, is a serious but intellectually wild ride. If anyone can “rescue some of what is beautiful, touching and wise from all that no longer seems true,” it’s de Botton.

Reviewed by CHRISTINE THOMAS
for the Miami Herald

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/25/2712392/a-guide-to-religion-for-atheists.html#storylink=cpy

Monday, March 19, 2012

Looking Back at Fairytales

My hardworking publicist at Watermark Publishing called my attention to this exciting retelling of classic international fairy tales. I wish I'd known about it when it first came out from Penguin in September, 2010, just a year before DON'T LOOK BACK was finally published (if you've not been to this site before, it's my new collection of Hawaiian myths retold by contemporary writers). Now I can't wait to get a copy and dig in. 

Here are the details:

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

The fairy tale lives again in this book of forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.

Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling new volume. Inspire by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Match Girl" to Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" and "Cinderella" to the Brothers Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" and "Rumpelstiltskin" to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico, here are stories that soar into boundless realms, filled with mischief and mystery and magic, and renewed by the lifeblood of invention. Although rooted in hundreds of years of tradition, they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature."


For those of you wondering if it's okay to re-tell Hawaiian myths or fairy tales, check out this Slate piece by Libby Copeland. I love this quote, which is very applicable to my endeavor with DON'T LOOK BACK: 
"If altering fairy tales seems like politically correct white-washing, I would counter that it is the tradition of these folk tales to be changed by the era they’re in. We’re the fools if we treat them like gospel."

Monday, March 12, 2012

Liberating Knowledge




Photo courtesy of Bishop Museum Archives - Honolulu Newsboys, World War I

Part of the proceeds of my new book, DON'T LOOK BACK: Hawaiian Myths Made New, will be donated to Awaiaulu, an organization that develops resources that help bridge Hawaiian knowledge past, present and future. 

Their new project, 'Ike Ku‘oko‘a - Liberating Knowledge, the Hawaiian Newspaper Initiative, is unsurprisingly ambitious and yet surprisingly inspiring. They have set themselves a deadline of July 31, 2012 to transcribe 60,000 digital scans of Hawaiian-language newspapers into searchable typescript. "It will open up hundreds of thousands of pages worth of data on history, culture, politics, sciences, world view, and more," says Awaiaulu.

Many volunteers are needed--consider taking part and if nothing else, tell others about it. Here's the fine print:

"No Hawaiian language skill is necessary to participate. Volunteers log in and reserve a page for typescripting. An image file and a text file are downloaded and then saved on the volunteer's computer. The tiff image file is easily enlarged for viewing, and on the text file one types all the text that is seen on the page. Though the newspaper is in columns, the typescript spans the page like a letter. Guidelines are posted on the website.

"Once a page is completed and checked, it is uploaded through the volunteer's homepage. Upon submitting a file, the typescripter's name is imbedded, and the page can also be dedicated to a special someone. Both the typescripter and the dedication will be included in the searchable text on the web, "This page made possible by XX, dedicated to YY"."

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