Edwidge Danticat has won the first Story Prize for her latest book, The Dew Breaker.

And R.I.P. Philip Johnson.

Andrea Levy's Small Island is Whitbread Book of the Year.

Ms. Vendler does not do e-mail. Somehow this is not surprising. Prolonged reading of her work conveys the sense of a mind utterly devoted to poetry, a woman not at all shy about her bookishness. "I am not interested in groups," Ms. Vendler said during a panel discussion in New York five years ago. "I have never joined a political party. I have never voted. I have never registered to vote. I have never gone to a church. I have never belonged to a club. I've never belonged to anything." For the journalist seeking to interview her, it is something of a relief to learn that she has a telephone.

From Scott McLemee's profile of Helen Vendler in the current Chronicle of Higher Education.

At least you can hear me, my darling,
I'm speaking so softly and clearly....

Once upon a time Corsica was entirely covered by forest. Storey by storey it grew for thousands of years in rivalry with itself, up to heights of fifty metres and more, and who knows, perhaps larger and larger species would have evolved, trees reaching to the sky, if the first settlers had not appeared and if, with the typical fear felt by their own kind for its place of origin, they had not steadily forced the forest back again....

From an excerpt from W.G. Sebald's Campo Santo in this weekend's Guardian Review.

"Everything in a poet's life--I mean this more or less literally--is an incentive to stop writing," says Ron Silliman.

From today's UK Guardian:

A bookseller has become the first blogger in Britain to be sacked from his job because he kept an online diary in which he occasionally mentioned bad days at work and satirised his "sandal-wearing" boss.

Joe Gordon, 37, worked for Waterstone's in Edinburgh for 11 years but says he was dismissed without warning for "gross misconduct" and "bringing the company into disrepute" through the comments he posted on his weblog.

Published authors and some of the 5 million self-published bloggers around the globe said it was extraordinary that a company advertising itself as a bastion of freedom of speech had acted so swiftly to sack Mr Gordon, who mentions everything from the US elections to his home city of Edinburgh in the satirical blog he writes in his spare time.

Full story here; Gordon's blog here.

Dear readers, all three or four of you, we've come once more to the turn of the calendar, the start of a new year & the chance to try to make sense of the year just ended. Among other things, this means the announcement of the 2004 Nicholas Laughlin Book Awards, for Caribbean books (i.e. books written by Caribbean authors, set in the Caribbean, or otherwise of particular Caribbean interest) published in the last twelve months. (Read about the 2003 awards here.)

The sole justification for these awards: self-indulgence. My sole qualification as chief judge: for professional reasons (I edit The Caribbean Review of Books), I try my best to keep up-to-date with new Caribbean books; I read or at least flip through most of the review titles that appear on my desk. (This last year I must admit there's been more flipping through than reading.) My personal opinion is the only criterion for the awards, which are restricted to books published in English, since I don't read Spanish, French, Dutch, or anything else. Omissions due to poor memory are very likely. This year there are just two categories, fiction & poetry, because I don't seem to have read enough history, biography, current affairs etc.

Fiction: The Dew Breaker, by Edwidge Danticat. Anthony Winkler's book of stories The Annihilation of Fish also brought much pleasure, & I even heard Winkler read a couple of the stories when I was in Jamaica last May. He is an extraordinary performer, & this was easily the funniest reading I've ever witnessed. Other "big" books: V.S. Naipaul's Magic Seeds, Andrea Levy's Small Island, Lawrence Scott's Night Calypso, David Dabydeen's Our Lady of Demerara.

Poetry: A good year for Caribbean poetry! The Bounty is still my favourite late-Walcott collection, but the best passages of his new book-length poem, The Prodigal, show our essential poet at the height of his powers. At the very start of the year came Ian McDonald's Between Silence and Silence, & James Christopher Aboud's Lagahoo Poems at the very end. Both extraordinary & inspiring books (see my short reviews here & here). I exercise my judge's right to not choose between these three.

Addendum: Perhaps I didn't read very many new books in 2004; perhaps the new books I did read made no great impression. My greatest reading pleasure came from E.M. Forster, whose fiction I re-read entire last January & February; & from the poetry of Keats, Hopkins, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, & Spencer Short, which I read & re-read throughout the year. Alan Hollinghurst's new novel The Line of Beauty disappointed me by being not nearly beautiful enough. It was a year of re-reading, really. And in the last few days I've been reading a fascinating collection of essays etc. by a friend & colleague. This was privately published, & I know the last thing the author wants is publicity of any kind, so I won't mention his name or the title of the book. But the clarity & reasonableness & decency of these essays--many of which tackle life's fundamental & unanswerable questions--have encouraged & inspired & otherwise helped me through the often difficult year-end period, & I suspect this "secret" book will be a constant companion for many years to come.

I voted for Bombproof Your Horse, but The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox is currently ahead. Vote here for the 2004 Diagram Oddest Title of the Year.

Is it art? Is it "art"? I don't know, but Jeremy Deller is fascinating....

If the whole world is a poem, then the poet doesn't need subjects in the usual sense; he becomes like a sponge, soaking up poetry as he lives, sees, and travels. Increasingly in his recent work, Walcott has had less and less use for subjects and occasions; all of his poems have come to seem like parts of one long poem, which is his life itself. This tendency is brought to perfection in The Prodigal, where there is not so much a plot as a continuous provocation to verse: a conversation on a train, a hotel lobby, a Swiss Alp, a Caribbean beach, are all woven together in a single tapestry.... for readers who know and love the work of the man who deserves to be called the greatest living poet writing in English, The Prodigal will seem like a fitting culmination to a life's work.

-- Adam Kirsch, reviewing The Prodigal in Slate today.

Another sort of novelist would be prone to giving Willie some moment of insight into the shapelessness of his own personality--or perhaps a realization about the course taken by the world over the six decades of his life. Naipaul, however, is never tempted to let his central character do anything but drift. (Even Willie's little moment of waxing philosophical at the close sounds like an evasion of real insight.)

In interviews, Naipaul has indicated that Magic Seeds may be his last book. Finishing it, one has the sense that--in returning to the novel, as if to say a farewell--the author created a kind of scapegoat figure. It is as if Willie were an embodiment of all the anomie that Naipaul had to purge from his system in order to create.

There is a terrible purity to the prose. It is clean and dry, tough but never brittle. Naipaul is pitiless in depicting lies, shame and bad faith. He makes real life look like play-acting--a fiction that nobody really believes. This sounds like misanthropy, and I suppose it is. But when you read Naipaul, it feels like cowardice ever to think otherwise.

-- From Scott McLemee's review of Magic Seeds in today's New York Newsday.

The award-winning US writer Edwidge Danticat is leading calls for an inquiry into the death in custody of her uncle, an 81-year-old Baptist minister who fled Haiti to seek asylum in the US. Human rights groups say his death highlights a discriminatory asylum policy against Haitian refugees.

Joseph Dantica, whose funeral takes place in New York today, was detained at Miami airport on October 29 after requesting asylum, though he had a valid US visa. He died in custody five days later.

From Maya Jaggi's report in the UK Guardian. The wire services have picked up the story and many newspapers in the US & elsewhere have run it already; I hope they'll continue to ask hard questions of the Homeland Security officials involved. I myself can't help wondering if there's any connection between Edwidge Danticat's public opposition to the Bush administration & her uncle's detention.

August 1, 1835, Concord

After thirty a man wakes up sad every morning excepting perhaps five or six until the day of his death.

-- Emerson, from his journal

The art museums, once haunted by a few experts, students, and idlers, have become the temples of the Ideal, of the Other, of the something else that, if only for a peaceful moment, redeems our daily getting and spending. Here resides something beyond our frantic animal existence. Leonardo spoke scornfully of those men who do nothing in their time on earth but produce excrement. Art, in its traditional forms of painting, drawing, and sculpture, is a human by-product whose collection, in homes, galleries, and museums, lightens the load, as it were, of life. By its glow we bask in the promise of a brighter, more lasting realm reached by a favored few--St. Vermeer, St. Pollock, St. Leonardo.

-- John Updike, in this week's New Yorker, on visiting the new MoMA.

Red, blue, & purple maps....

From The Future Dictionary of America:

yestoday [yes'-toh-day] vt. to find something every day that makes you say yes. Not an egotistical, fist pumping yes (i.e. jumping up and yelling "Yes!" when your team scores a touchdown, or when you win a round of rummy or billiards, or when your country bombs another country). A quiet yes. A yes of wonder. A yes that affirms the basic goodness of the world. Going outside and looking at a plant is recommended. Even a weed. Maybe a bird. Did you yestoday yet? COMPARE yestomorrow n. putting off saying yes today. Be advised that yestomorrow rarely comes. It's best to yestoday today. --Gayle Brandeis

Simon Schama on the two Americas, in today's UK Guardian:

"We are one nation," the newborn star of Democrats, Senator-elect Barack Obama, exclaimed, even as every salient fact of political life belied him. Well might he invoke Lincoln, for not since the Civil War has the fault line between its two halves been so glaringly clear, nor the chasm between its two cultures so starkly unbridgeable. Even territorially (with the exception of Florida, its peninsular finger pointing expectantly at tottering Cuba), the two Americas are topographically coherent and almost contiguous. One of those Americas is a perimeter, lying on the oceans or athwart the fuzzy boundary with the Canadian lakes, and is necessarily porous and outward-looking. The other America, whether montagnard or prairie, is solidly continental and landlocked, its tap roots of obstinate self-belief buried deep beneath the bluegrass and the high corn. It is time we called those two Americas something other than Republican and Democrat, for their mutual alienation and unforgiving contempt is closer to Sunni and Shia, or (in Indian terms) Muslim and Hindu. How about, then, Godly America and Worldly America?

The last lights off the black west went, but Harper's is trying to have a sense of (black) humour about it:

A reader’s guide to expatriating on November 3

So the wrong candidate has won, and you want to leave the country. Let us consider your options.

Theo Tait reviews Magic Seeds in the LRB:

Magic Seeds, even more than its predecessor, is a horrible novel--icy, misanthropic, pitiless, purposefully pinched in both its style and its sympathies. If The Enigma of Arrival (1987), a sad and wonderful book, belongs to Naipaul's "autumnal stage", this is bleak midwinter: the cold fury before the end.

And Uday Benegal in the Village Voice:

That Naipaul has been, for most of his career, a remarkably astute--if not always accurate--witness to the world with an extraordinary contribution to literature is irrefutable. But Magic Seeds is a life away from his real worth as a writer. The book is mostly prosaic, needlessly repetitive; if nothing else, perfectly symbiotic with Willie Chandran's own flaccid character. Like Willie it stutters and drifts, lacking cogency and depth of spirit. Naipaul himself seems drained of all desire to engage the reader, or too jaded to try.

And I am too jaded today to try to understand the world.