Many readers may have been aware of the thousands of free e-books available on Project Gutenberg, but did you know they also have music? The Gutenberg Sheet Music Project, thanks to the work of many volunteer hours, has digitized public domain sheet music, using a variety of techniques (MIDI, PDF, MOBI, plain text, etc.), to enable study and performance. For the most part, the musical pieces created have been chamber music, with composers such as Brahms and Beethoven. A great incentive to getting together your own community music group!

“Graphic Classics is a series of books presenting great fiction in comics and illustration for contemporary readers ages 12 to adult. Each volume features the works of the world’s greatest authors, illustrated by some of the best artists working today in the fields of comics, illustration and fine arts.”

Here’s the problem when you have a friend who writes a book and gives you a copy, then wants to know what you think about it. What if you think it’s absolute crap? Well, long-time friend of NewPages, Marc Fitten, would know that if I thought it was crap, I would tell him so, with lots of facial gestures and dramatic delivery of, “Oh my god, this is the worst thing I’ve ever read.” And that would only be the beginning.

As it turns out, Marc’s first novel, Valeria’s Last Stand, out now from Bloomsbury, is not crap (how’s that for a book cover blurb?).

However, fearing it would be, I did put off reading it for a while, which is not what I would recommend to anyone else. In fact, once I started reading it, fearful with every turn of the page that it would disappoint in some way, I have to admit, I became completely absorbed in the story. I found the characters entering my daily thoughts and I was eager to get back to reading, to find out what was going to happen next.

Likened to a fable or fairy tale, I would take this novel and its characters to another level. This is mythology and archetypes vividly developed with contemporary twists. The main character, Valeria, is the town matriarch/baba yaga. She is a 68-year-old spinster living in a fictional, off-the-map small town (Zivatar) in post-Communist Hungary. Though ostracized in some ways of the baba-yaga, at the same time, she yields great power over the community, keeping the daily market standards high under her scornful eye, as in this exchange:

Valeria then sniffed the vegetable in question and shook her head.
“How old is this?”
The vendor was speechless.
“Why does it smell like urine?”
The vendor shrugged.
“Are you letting your cat pee on these? You should be imprisoned,” Valeria said, and tugged at her keys.

Her ever present maternal keys, the symbols of her meager power and control over every cupboard in her home, soon fall to the wayside along with her self-control, as she finds herself attracted to the equally aged town potter. Not to give away too much, Valeria and the potter have a lovely tryst, which is problematic for 58-year-old Ibolya, the Aphrodite bar owner who has her own flocculating relationship with the potter. Add to the mix a Loki chimney sweep whose entrance into the village creates greater havoc than luck, and a Zeus of a mayor who sees the town and the people as his playthings while (of course) screwing around on his trophy wife. It’s delicious. All absolutely delicious. And that’s just a loosely related character map. There’s so much more.

Most stunning to me in the book is the third person omniscient narration that fairly reveals the complexity of thought of each character, not necessarily in segments, but interwoven throughout the story. As carefully as we read and watch the potter build prototype after prototype of his creations for Valeria (first an ewer, then a pair of vases), so too does the story blend and mix the clay of the characters through each new development of their stories.

And, no, the potter has no name, nor does his male apprentice, nor the male chimney sweep, nor the male mayor character (well, other than Mayor, at times). Which is not to say this isn’t a man’s story just as much as it is a woman’s story. In that, Fitten has created a wonderful blend, and played both genders seamlessly. It reminds me of the line from the movie As Good As It Gets, when the woman asks Jack Nickolson’s character, “How do you write women so well?” Only, instead of his smarmy response, I can say that Fitten writes both men and women well, tapping into that which makes them tender as well as tough, each with their strength of independence, and each with their need for one another, right down to the most resistant of them.

Shifts and changes in relationships and aging are all a part of this narrative. Considered the first in a trilogy of books focused on strong female characters, our protagonist in this story is 68, but no where near retirement from that which brings her pleasure in life. In fact, Valeria is just beginning a very new kind of awakening for herself. At 58, Ibolya sees her days of sexual power coming to an end: “no matter how short her skirt was or how far over she leaned, the men she enticed were now all older than she was. Their handsome grandsons smiled and flirted, but she could see in their eyes that there was no real interest in there.” To solve her dilemma, and keep the men drinking and spending money, she hires young Zsofi, who is in love with the potter’s somewhat clueless and somewhat resistant apprentice. Theirs is the youngest relationship in the book, and equally as intertwined with the others.

In addition to creating the story of the daily lives of these characters as they move forward, Fitten has also done well to include numerous backstories in the narrative. That of Valeria’s having to grow up quickly and take care of herself, of the potter’s care for his dying wife, of Ilboyla’s being left alone to fend for herself and using her sexual power to do so, of the mayor’s long list of failed attempts to bring capitalism to the town that time forgot, and of the chimney sweep’s disgust for his own profession, as well as, of all things, an intriguing backstory of the bicycle he uses as his transportation. These backstories do not disrupt nor drag on the flow of the story as they are carefully crafted into the narrative and so concisely and specifically developed in the intricacy of their detail as to feel necessary and integral.

Thematically this is an ambitious novel: place, change, progress, power, love, lust, ambition, aging, relationships, and how much more? Yet, I never felt in reading it that there was any lack of control or chaos among these. Each seems to come forth through the myriad characters and storylines that create the narrative in whole. It was only in finishing the book did I feel a sudden, overwhelming swirl of all it had contained. Not a negative outcome for me as a reader, and actually, one which I prefer, since it keeps me thinking about the book long after I have finished reading it. As well as recommending it to others. Highly. And anxiously awaiting the next in the trilogy.

Started in 1981 in downtown New York, BOMB has continued through the years to provide a forum for conversations between artists, writers, directors, actors, and musicians. This spring, BOMB gets a bit of a makeover with new layouts, a new logo, and a new, even larger trim size. Still the same is the great content BOMB has long established, including its literary supplement insert, including works by Ana Menedez, Rusty Morrison, Sally Anne Clegg, J.R. Thelin, Charles Mary Kubricht, Ben Ehrenreich, Laura Mullen, and Michael Martone. And this is just the insert, so you can imagine what the rest of the magazine has to offer! Or, better yet, visith BOMB and find out for sure.

“The Idea: Cut the bindings off of books found at a used book store. Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration. Put pages in the mail and send them all around the world. Lather, rinse, repeat.”

The Altered Books site is a chronicle of a very specific set of collaborations between the artists and titles. Participants include: John M. Bennett, David-Baptiste Chirot, Holly Crawford, Fran Hill, Jennifer Hill-Kaucher, Geof Huth, Adeena Karasick, Helen Kaucher, Donna Kuhn, Jim Leftwich, Mike Magazinnik, Tim Martin, Kristen McQuillin, Sheila E. Murphy, Ross Priddle, Meghan Scott, Michelle Taransky, Kevin Thurston, Nico Vassilakis, Dan Waber, Marlea J. Waber.

Editor Jim Coppoc debuted the new quarterly Second Run at AWP 2009. Second Run was started to address the “problem” of previously published works that have fallen out of public access or were never accessible online. Second Run accepts re-submissions of poems, plays, essays, and short stories along with a one-paragraph provenance to let readers know where the piece came from, where you were in life when you wrote it, where it was first published, etc. Authors retain all rights except the non-exclusive right for Second Run to publish submitted work in perpetuity.

For the first issue, Coppoc says he wanted something “special,” so “instead of posting mass solicitations in all the usual places, I spent a long time thinking about who has influenced me as a writer and as a literate human being. Then, I asked them for their work. Some of these writers are close friends, so I knew I’d get a response. Some I only know in passing, but I wanted to acknowledge the deep influence they’ve had on me by putting their work in this issue. I was pleasantly surprised to see that most of the people I asked for work actually sent it.”

Issue One includes prose by Michael Martone, Sheryl St. Germain, and John Domini, plays by Murray Wolfe and John Fenn, and poetry by Patricia Smith, Ted Kooser, Matt Mason, Heather Knowles, Jim Moore, Deborah Keenan, Ada Limon, and Bryonn Bain.

DOXA
Documentary Film Festival
Vancouver, CA
May 22nd – 31st, 2009

DOXA is presented by the Documentary Media Society, a Vancouver based non-profit, charitable society (incorporated in 1998) devoted to presenting independent and innovative documentaries to Vancouver audiences. The society exists to educate the public about documentary film as an art form through DOXA – a curated and juried festival comprised of public screenings, workshops, panel discussions and public forums.

The Goods
“Geist is delivering the best Canadian writing to classrooms from Tatamagouche to Victoria, from high school to grad school, from creative writing to English composition. Four times a year we publish fiction, life writing, essays, poetry, comix, rants, photo essays and unclassifiable dispatches — a cornucopia of genres and styles for teachers and students of writing.”

The Deal
“We send you a free class set of Geist.
We post free lesson plans that you can use in the classroom.
That’s it! No strings, no sales, no spam.”

The Agenda
“Geist is always looking for new writers and readers.
Writing teachers are always looking for new teaching ideas and opportunities for emerging writers.
Geist in the Classroom puts us together.”

Gest in the Classroom

11th Allied Media Conference
“We Are Ready New: Media and creativity to transform our selves and our world”
July 16-19, 2009
Detroit, Michigan

The 11th AMC will advance our visions for a just and creative world. It will be a laboratory for media-based solutions to the matrix of life-threatening problems we face. For the past 10 years, we have evolved our definition of media, and the role it can play in our lives – from zines to video-blogging to breakdancing, to communicating solidarity and creating justice. Each conference builds off the previous one and plants the seeds for the next. Ideas and relationships evolve year-round, incorporating new networks of media-makers and social justice organizers. The 2009 AMC will draw strength from our converging movements to face the challenges and opportunities of our current moment.

Published by the English Department at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Works and Days provides a scholarly forum for the exploration of problems in cultural studies, pedagogy, and institutional critique, especially as they are impacted by the transition from print to electronic environments. Each issue of the journal is organized around specific inquiries conducted as shared disciplinary or postdisciplinary research projects. Works and Days aims to serve not only as a forum for collaborative research and teaching, but also as an environment in which mutual inquiries may flourish.

Issues include:

Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University
v26-27, 2008-2009

The Society for Critical Exchange–Phase 1: 1975-1988
v25, 2007

Intellectual Intersections: Ethnic and Racial Crossings
v24, 2006

Richard Ohmann: A Retrospective
v23, 2005

Capitalizing on Play: The Politics of Computer Gaming
v22, 2004

James D. Houston, author of Snow Mountain Passage, Continental Drift and, with his wife, Farewell to Manzanar, died on April 16 as a result of complications from cancer. He was 75.

Educator, Author Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Dies at 58
By Advocate Writer Michelle Garcia

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a prominent theorist who is often cited as one of the founders of queer theory, died on April 12. She was 58.

Sedgwick was reportedly diagnosed with breast cancer in 1991, prompting her book A Dialogue on Love. Sedgwick taught English at several institutions including Boston University; the University of California, Berkeley; and Duke University, where she was a Newman Ivey White Professor of English.

Sedgwick has written many books on gender and sexual orientation, including Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire; Epistemology of the Closet; and Tendencies.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned 90 last month, and this month will see the premiere of a documentary about Ferlinghetti’s life and work on April 28 at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Director Christopher Felver crafts an incisive, sharply wrought portrait that reveals Ferlinghetti’s true role as catalyst for numerous literary careers and for the Beat movement itself. The film features archival photographs and historical footage, with appearances by Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Billy Collins, Dennis Hopper, Robert Scheer, Dave Eggers, and Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder. The appearance of numerous other prominent figures from the literary, political, and art community further underscores the enormous social impact Ferlinghetti’s legacy continues to have on the American cultural scene.

From New Directions Publishing.

The newest issue of Ruminate (11, Spring 2009)features the magazine’s 2009 Short Story Prize winner, as selected by Brent Lott: Susan Woodring with her story “The Smallest of These.” Woodring’s story can also be read online. Anna Maria Johnson’s story “Charlie’s Arm” was the runner-up and is also included.

“Most frequently I paint the sky; it is a space where we can find peace; it is a space for our soul; it is a space where we can find hope.” Soojung Cho, artist

Check out Soojung Cho’s online portfolio for more beautiful, peaceful oil paintings.