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Getting our Books through Customs

Our books, shipped both from the US and from Amsterdam weeks earlier, had not arrived. A letter to our hotel on Wednesday informed us that our bilingual translation of the first chapter of Burning Silk, neatly bound with the book’s cover art, was being held at customs.  First thing Thursday morning, we retrieved them. Without Inke’s taking the lead while applying the curb to my tongue, I would have had to pick a fight with these most insufferable of the bureaucrat caste.  However, upon the multiple pounding of the official stamp on the last triplicate, we headed for the entry gate of the Buch Messe, our badge firmly established in the carry-on suitcase we towed.

Agents Sequestered

Agents, listed in the invaluable directory (25 euros,) were housed in their own floor with a check-in desk admitting only those with previous appointments.

Using our directory, we identified six agents under “literary historical fiction” to cover our targeted countries, and wrote them emails introducing ourselves.

Attaching a note on sitio tiempo press’ executive letterhead to each bilingual translation, and inserting the book’s postcard and silk bookmark emblazoned with the title, we left bundles for each agent at the appointment desk, for followup post-Buch Messe.

Personal Contacts

A section called the Center for Politics, Literature, and Translation attracted us with its juicy events: presentation of the Paul Celan prize, a Cuban hour with a PEN presence, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the legendary Green’s leader, did NOT show up, while Amir Valles, Rugelio Saunders and Jorge Arzola did speak on the panel.  Multilingual earphone provided access to the discourse in one’s own language.

These events, often at the end of the day, usually concluded with drinks and hors d’s.  Here Inke and I met a publisher from Haiti, Willems Edouard of Editions Presses Nationals in Petionville.  Kettly Mars, a Haitian novelist whose Saisons Sauvages was just released from Mercure to good reviews, is working on her fourth book. (http://repeatingislands.com/2010/03/19/new-book-kettly-mars’-saisons-sauvages/.)

When Willems told me he had published Russell Banks, I offered my card and paid attention. (www.pressesnationales-dhaiti.com)

His catalog features an impressive collection of intellectuals and writers, from the republication of Jacques Romains’ oeuvres to poets, short story writers (Jean-Euphele Milce,) and novelists including Cleante Valcin’s  La Blanche Negresse and Cruelle Destinee, which advised the reader that this was a novel about an unfortunate prostitute.

If the protagonist is named Destiny in this novel of the 1930’s,  I thought, then I have finally found an older woman named Destiny. A short survey of the plots of each of these republished novels led me to believe that Barbara Chase Riboud would be interested in Valcin’s treating subjects similar to hers.  The press on Kettly Mars’ Saisons Sauvages about the Duvalier regime in Haiti deals with master/slave relations as well.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Chase-Riboud)

Many prizes are awarded for literature at the beginning of the fair, to take advantage of the attendant press. At the German Women in Publishing party, I met Ingeborg Hohl of LiBeraturpreis, which awards a prize for women writers from Third World countries.  The winner of the German Book Prize this year went to Melinda Nadj Abonji for Falcons Without Falconers, a story of a Hungarian minority in Serbia.  The novel, which begins with a child’s point of view, continues in the adult woman’s pov in an “apparently carefree Balkan comedy.” One can’t help but think of the beginning of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated with a similarly picaresque beginning; both books conclude in the shadow of wars with genocide as theme.  Undoubtedly we missed a lot, but it seemed strange that only one American author, David Foster Wallace, was included in major events and programming.

Jet Lag cum Geo-psychocultural Whiplash

I made sure that I flew from Frankfurt to Philadelphia, with a several day stop over in our home in the rural Penn-York Valley.  True, I had major events scheduled for two of the three days there, but by the time I arrived back in Northen California, it took me a couple days to get over the worst effects of the jet lag.

I am developing a theory that the symptoms that possessed me–dizziness, fatigue–were really cultural whiplash masquerading as the need to meditate, perchance to dream. From Rebgeshain to Frankfurt, from Amsterdam’s Dutch Resistance Museum,  to Paris and rural Brittany, featuring the prized belon oysters and Neolithic tumulus, I was in the thrall of a challenge to my digestive system–psychic and cultural digestion–spending productive hours flat on my back sorting through impressions, not only filing them but connecting them with their corollary a-ha’s.

Too Big?

We had been advised, through those in the know, that FBM has grown beyond professional enjoyment.  Many of those who we had been referred to–fellow publishing professionals in Europe–no longer attend FBM because it has grown too large and impersonal.  Buch Messe functions through appointments made months in advance.  Inke and I decided that we would attend Wednesday and Thursday, the most intimate days in the opinion of those in the know, to check it out and figure out how it works.

Scaling

The scale of the Buch Messe conference center is roughly analogous to the square footage of the terminals of SF airport or Boston Logan (eliminating roads and runways, drawing the buildings into a more compact oval.)

We spent all of Wednesday puzzling out the complex layout–eight buildings, each with three-four floors–as well as the functions and locations of both events and exhibitors.  We attended an excellent seminar on buying and selling foreign rights (30 euros each.)  We trekked the vast hallways, locating specific presses in the French, German and English speaking worlds.

The English Language Publishing World

Independent Book Publishers Association (ibpa) were there representing our novel Burning Silk as well as perhaps 75-100 other books in every genre.  The wholesaler Ingram had a large airy booth.  We stopped by Verso, the British radical publisher of Tariq Ali, the New Left Review, as well as scholarly leftist texts. [Read more…] about Frankfurt Book Fair & the English language publishing world

As a spanking new press with one publication–Burning Silk, my first novel in the Textile Trilogy–and another in the pipeline, going to Europe to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair would have been a case of the intent of our grasp exceeding our reach.

The Set-Up

But since I was already going to be in Europe as a presenter at an academic colloquium on The Woodstock Years, 1965-75 at Le Havre University, and had exchanged my home in Berkeley for ten days in a canal house in Amsterdam to work on and research my second book, Linen Shroud, we decided to attend the Frankfurter Buch Messe, where the greatest cost was the hotel room (178 euros/night for a hostel.)

Scale

Reportedly 20K book professionals participate in what is styled as the world’s biggest book fair.  Does this include the 10K members of the press?  It certainly doesn’t include the public whose number reportedly swell into six figures.

Gratefully, Not Everyone Speaks English Yet… [Read more…] about Frankfurt Book Fair: the Big Daddy of them all

Metis: Who are they? people of mixed indigenous and European or African blood in the Americas, by Destiny Kinal

While the term metis generally refers to people along the US/Canadian border who are of mixed parentage–indigenous and European or African lineage–the term Mestizo refers to Indios and Spanish along the south borders of the North and South America, and Creole refers to indigenous, French and African bloodlines in Louisiana and along the Gulf of Mexico. But in truth, all of these people of mixed indigenous and European/African/Asian heritage are spread throughout North America.

I first became aware of metis as a girl when I read James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. The fact that Indian scouts spoke several European and native American languages provided a doorway into that time, an doorway that led to further research. Louise Erdrich’s novels, as well as Linda Hogan’s, brought the reality of mixed bloodlines people to life for me and many readers in the past several decades…continued at http://www.destinykinal.com/metis.html

(Destiny Kinal gave the following talk at a Pennsylvania gathering of Unitarian Universalists in September, 2010)

I came across a review in Orion magazine from a decade ago that William Kowinski opened by stating an opinion that resonates today.

“By now it has dawned on some purveyors of deep ecology, sustainability, biodiversity, biophilia and the New Paradigm that these concepts were operating principles in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans decimated the peoples and cultures that practiced them.” (Review of Linda Hogan’s Power in Orion, winter 1999.)

I’d like to add bioregionalism and organic farming to that list. We are rediscovering what had been true for millennia before a brief interruption of several hundred years…continued at http://www.destinykinal.com/matrilineality.html