The Happiest People on Earth
A Nobel Laureate, poems, and the New York underground
In this week’s newsletter:
Fast Five: Tracy Wai de Boer
Celebrating Wole Soyinka
Soundscapes NYC
Meet the Press: Off the Record with the University of Texas Press
Fast Five: Tracy Wai de Boer
Tracy Wai de Boer is an award-winning writer, poet, and multidisciplinary artist. She co-authored Impact: Women Writing After Concussion which won the Book Publishers of Alberta Best Non-Fiction Award and was named one of CBC's Best Non-Fiction Books of 2021. Tracy’s first full-length poetry collection, Nostos, is out now.
How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti — The book that helped me unlearn writing conventions when it comes to The Novel— and fiction more generally. I saw Sheila Heti at the Banff Centre when I was there for my first artist residency in 2017. I didn't know who she was, nor did I know how her writing would hugely impact me. She is a philosopher, artist, writer, and an experimentalist. To me, she is someone who truly has mastery over the form of writing.
Solar Perplexus by Dean Young — One of my favorite poets, a Pulitzer prize finalist, Young passed away in 2022 from complications related to COVID-19. His writing has a momentum, humanity, and surrealism laced throughout his body of work. He does one of my favorite things in literature, which is to pull the reader along for the ride in an enthusiastic and unapologetic way. I especially love his poem, "Infinitives" in this collection. He had a heart replacement surgery that shows up in his other work, notably in Shock by Shock (2015), which I also love.
How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny O'Dell — A book that should be required reading for the 21st Century. Context collapse. That's all I have to say!
The Idiot by Elif Batuman — Dry, witty, funny, and painfully real. Batuman accurately captures the intensity of young love for the overly analytical.
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert — Put me in literary jail, I will always love Elizabeth Gilbert. She understands what it is to be human. She has a clear-eyed, stubborn optimism that always shows up in her writing, be it fiction or nonfiction, and that is something we will always need. The world of this novel is vast and well-articulated. There are moments and descriptions from this book that stick with me years after reading it.
Put Tracy’s picks on your To Be Read list, and check out her new poetry collection Nostos, out now!
Celebrating Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, and political activist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. His oeuvre explores authoritarianism, morality, and ethics. The Nobel Press Release described his literary works as “vivid, often harrowing, but are also marked by en evocative, poetically intensified diction. Soyinka has been characterized as one of he finest poetical playwrights that have written in English.” Read the full, original Press Release here.
Soyinka’s first major work was the satirical play A Dance of the Forests, produced in 1960 and published in 1963 for Nigerian independence celebrations. Soyinka’s most recent work Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth was meant to be completed before the 60th anniversary of the country’s independence. His one act dramatic play “The Swamp Dwellers” had a limited off-Broadway run this Spring. With a career that has spanned over 60 years of novels, poetry, and plays, put some of Soyinka’s work on your To Be Read list.
You can also listen to a few NBN interviews that discuss Soyinka and his work!
In The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers.
Quito J. Swan’s Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation.
Listen to Mikel Burley discuss A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion: Cross-Cultural, Multireligious, Interdisciplinary. This book is a unique introduction to studying the philosophy of religion, drawing on a wide range of cultures and literary sources.
Soundscapes NYC
The Seventies was a calamitous decade, a low point in the history of New York City. City Hall continually failed to balance budgets and turned to austerity, privatization, and sheer negligence when it came to running city services. Roads disintegrated, buildings and overpasses collapsed, garbage piled high, and crime ran rampant. The city literally crumbled under the weight of austerity.
At the same time, underground culture surged with energy, from subway graffiti to experimental theater and gay bars. Musical artists embedded in the urban fabric turned to their craft with gusto. They formed loose networks of like-minded artists who made and appreciated particular styles of music. Their world during this period, at times, reflected the disintegrating cityscape. At other times, their music celebrated the social constraints let loose in a time of crisis, when the city seemed to be falling apart.
Soundscapes NYC is a podcast about how music created in New York has shaped the history of the city and how the city itself has been an incubator in which music has blossomed throughout its history. Soundscapes is a bi-weekly podcast series in which scholars Ryan Donovan Purcell and Kristie Soares talks with artists, music industry professionals, and scholars about NYC music history. Subscribe below!
Meet The Press: University of Texas Press
The University of Texas Press was established in 1950, and has published over 4,000 books! The Press’s major areas of scholarly concentration are American studies, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art, classics, film and media studies, food studies and cookbooks, history, Jewish studies, Latin American and pre-Columbian studies, Latinx studies, Middle Eastern studies, music, nature and environment, photography, and Texas and the Southwest.
UT Press also publishes general interest books on a wide range of topics such as history, current affairs, the visual arts, music, and food. Of course, the Press also produces books on the history, culture, arts, and natural history of the state.
One exciting book series, Latinx: The Future Is Now is devoted to the evolving field of Latina/o/x studies, including Central American, Afro-Latinx, and Asian-Latinx studies. The Terry and Jan Todd Series on Physical Culture and Sports series examines the meanings of active bodies within their broader cultural and historical contexts. The CMES Emerging Voices from the Middle East is a series that aims to showcase writers who are at the cutting edge of Middle Eastern culture.
Check out Niko Stratis’s memoir-in-essays, that tells her story through dad rock in The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman.
Amy Cox Hall’s The Taste of Nostalgia: Women, Race, and Culinary Longing in Peru uses taste as a thematic and analytic thread to examine the ways that women, race, and the kitchen were foundational to Peruvian longings for modernity, both during the Cold War and today.
In Ancient Maya Teeth: Dental Modification, Cosmology, and Social Identity in Mesoamerica Vera Tiesler explores the meanings of Maya dental modification which included filing their teeth flat or pointy, polishing and drilling them, and crafting decorative inlays of jade and pyrite.
Subscribe to Off The Record with the University of Texas Press to hear more interviews with scholars about their fascinating work!
