Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Monday, February 21
7:30 PM
MIRA BARTOK
The Memory Palace
“The Memory Palace is almost a fairy tale: two little girls grow up under the spell of their mother’s madness. But it really did happen, once upon a time, and Mira Bartók uses her considerable powers of recollection and compassion to understand her family and to present them to readers as complete, loved human beings. This is an extraordinary book.” -- Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry
“Even now, when the phone rings late at night, I think it’s her. I stumble out of bed ready for the worst. The last time my mother called was in 1990. I was thirty-one and living in Chicago. She said if I didn’t come home right away she’d kill herself.”
So opens Mira Bartók’s stunning and powerful memoir The Memory Palace. In the footsteps of The Glass Castle and The Liars’ Club, Mira chronicles her life with her brilliant but mentally ill mother Norma, and explores their volatile relationship and ultimately unbreakable bond with astonishing and unforgettable lyrical power.
A piano prodigy in her youth, Norma’s severe case of schizophrenia created a hellish upbringing for Mira and her sister. When they were young, Norma neglected the girls, and Mira and her sister were forced to make do on their own. As the girls entered their teenage years, Norma’s illness grew progressively severe – she tried to be a loving mother, but her illness made it impossible. Norma became more and more obsessed with her daughters – at times, she wouldn’t let them go to school because she was afraid they would leave her, and she entered their room at night and told them that people were stalking them and wanted them dead. When they left for college, Norma would call Mira and her sister dozens of times a day, appear unannounced at their jobs and apartments, and threaten them if they suggested that she get treatment for her illness.
Finally, after Norma attacked her daughters when they insisted she get help, Mira and her sister decided that, in order to stay safe, they had to change their names and cut off all communication with her. Myra Herr became Mira Bartók. For the next seventeen years, Mira’s only contact with her mother was through letters exchanged through a post office box that she set up so that Norma wouldn’t be able to find her.
During that time she spent away from her mother, Mira travelled the world and continued her career as an artist, but when she was 40, a debilitating car accident left her with a terrible brain injury. She could retrain herself to draw and write, but struggled to regain some of her memories. When she received word that her mother was dying in a hospital in Cleveland, Mira and her sister traveled to see Norma and to reconcile with her. In the hospital, Mira found Norma’s set of keys in a dirty sock in her backpack. Norma told her that one of the keys was to a storage unit where she kept all of her belongings – the sisters went to the unit and discovered hundreds of diaries, photographs, and mementos from their past that Mira never thought she would see again. They triggered a flood of memories and gave Mira access to the past that she believed had been lost forever and inspired her to paint a memory palace, based on a mnemonic practice from the Renaissance used to create a visual map in one’s mind in order to recall people and events.
Mira’s original paintings of her memory palace appear throughout the book, as do passages from her mother’s letters to her and entries from her mother’s journals. Norma’s writing became more and more desperate as the years went by, and readers will be riveted as they become spectators to her descent deeper into madness. But Mira’s beautiful prose and her incredible resilience through everything that life throws at her makes her story impossible to put down. At turns heartbreaking and uplifting, The Memory Palace is an unforgettable memoir that forces you to reflect on your own relationships with loved ones and consider the importance of family and love and forgiveness.
Alison Bechdel, bestselling and award-winning author of Funhouse: A Family Tragicomic, writes that Mira’s “harrowing and beautiful tale of growing up with her paranoid schizophrenic mother is in some ways a memoir about memory itself. For Bartok—suffering from a brain injury and raised by someone who had tenuous contact with the external world—the question “what really happened” takes on a particular urgency. She answers it with painstaking honesty…And as she recalls the shattering experiences of her childhood, literally illuminating them with her haunting mnemonic paintings, something that was never intact is made resonantly whole again.”
Mira Bartók is an artist and writer living in Massachusetts. She has received awards from such organizations as the Fulbright-Hayes Foundation, the Associated Writing Programs, the Illinois Arts Council, Pollock-Krasner Grant, and the Carnegie Fund for Writers. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been noted in The Best American Essays 1999 and other anthologies. Mira also runs an online resource for artists – iraslist.blogspot.com. Listen to Bartok interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
Tuesday, February 22
7:00 PM
FOUND IN TRANSLATION Book Group
The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat
To kick of 2011, we're going to read a book that's widely hailed as one of the greatest works of Persian literature of the 20th century. Coming to us from Iran, it’s called The Blind Owl, and it's been compared to Kafka and Poe for its wide-eyed look into the heart of madness. The plot of this strange, dream-like book circles around an opium addict's obsession with stunning images he encounters in the desert. We'll see if we can channel our inner Freud and unpack some of the surreal events of this book, plus we'll talk about what the heck in the Iran of the 1930s inspired Sadegh Hedayat to write this enduringly odd masterpiece and how this book is inspiring battles over censorship in the Middle East today.
Join us each month for spirited conversation about some of the newest writing hitting the U.S. from all over the globe. No foreign language knowledge necessary and no continental savvy required (but will be appreciated!) -- just bring your desire to read some excellent new books, hand-selected for you by Scott Esposito, of the Center for the Art of Translation and The Quarterly Conversation, who also fearlessly leads the discussion, brilliantly.. You'll also meet some great new people and chat with them about the best new fiction from around the world.
Wednesday, February 23
7:30 PM
DAYNA MACY
Ravenous:
A Food Lover’s Journey from Obsession to Freedom
How can a food lover and lifelong overeater learn to be satisfied?
That is the question Dayna Macy asks in her memoir Ravenous. Like many of us, Macy has had a complicated relationship with food all her life. Rather than head straight for the diet manuals, she chooses to change her relationship with food from the inside out by embarking on a year-long journey—from her childhood home in upstate New York and back up the California coast—to uncover the origins of her food obsessions.
To understand why she craves certain foods and not others, Macy travels across the country, meeting the people who know the finer points of her passions—the olive farmer, the sausage maker, the chocolatier, the artisanal cheese maker. She deepens her understanding of what food means to her by learning where it comes from and paying close attention to the effects it has on her—both physical and emotional. Along the way, she forages for wild plants, tours a certified humane slaughterhouse, learns to practice mindfulness with a Zen chef, revisits her beloved Slim-Jim, and learns to listen to her body through yoga.
Recounting memories from her youth, Macy looks at the nostalgia deeply embedded in food and the powerful forces of family and tradition that shape our diets. Delving deeper into the spiritual underpinnings of eating, she examines what it means to be satisfied — and forges her own path to balance and freedom.
“Food as protection, comfort, pleasure and love, a defense against deprivation, a buffer against pain — so many of us will recognize our insatiable hungers in Dayna Macy’s quest to understand her own. But the real appeal of Ravenous is Macy’s voice: her candor and humility, her curious mind and storyteller’s clarity, and the open, generous heart she brings to her tale of learning to find peace with her appetite and her body.” --Kate Moses, author of Cakewalk, A Memoir
Dayna Macy has written for Yoga Journal, Self, Salon.com, and other publications. She lives in Berkeley with her husband, Scott Rosenberg, and their two sons.
JUST ADDED:
Thursday, February 24
7:30 PM
EVAN CARROLL and JOHN ROMANO
Your Digital Afterlife:
When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter Are Your Estate, What's Your Legacy?
Almost without realizing it, we have shifted toward an all-digital culture. Future heirlooms like family photos, home movies, and personal letters now exist only in digital form, and in many cases they are stored using popular services like Flickr, YouTube, and Gmail. These digital possessions form a rich collection that chronicles our lives and connects us to each other.
But have you considered what will happen to your treasured digital possessions when you die?Unfortunately the answer isn't as certain as we might presume. There are numerous legal, cultural, and technical issues that could prevent access to these assets, and if you don't take steps to make them available to your heirs, your digital legacy could be lost forever.
Evan Carroll and John Romano, the creators of TheDigitalBeyond.com, can help you secure your valuable digital assets for your loved ones and perhaps posterity. Whether you're the casual email user or the hyper-connected digital dweller, you'll come away with peace of mind knowing that your digital heirlooms won't be lost in the shuffle.
Check out this Fresh Air feature!"Death is the final frontier of cyberspace-and this book provides a road map to the key issues, problems and future prospects for bridging this ultimate transition with dignity, security and grace." - Daniel "Dazza" Greenwood, Executive Director of the eCitizen Foundation
"To be ahead of one's time usually means stepping to the side of one's time in order to see it clearly. This book does just that, putting our digital lives and afterlives into sharp focus. Fascinating." - David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author
John Romano works as an interaction designer, technology researcher, and cultural observer. His work centers on the mass adoption of digital tools and the ways they are changing how we interact with each other. When he isn’t writing or speaking, he is designing websites, building stuff in the garage with his son, or riding his motorcycle. John holds a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree from the North Carolina State University College of Design.
Evan Carroll is an experience designer and researcher. His passion is observing how people interact with technology and using that insight to create user-centered products and services—a passion that led him to study the digital afterlife. In Evan’s spare time, you’ll find him pulling for the Tar Heels or escaping the digital world at the North Carolina coast. Evan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Science and has completed additional graduate studies at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science.