Prairie Schooner

This is the first in a series of blog posts by guest contributor Nabina Das. Born and brought up in Guwahati, Assam, India, Nabina has a novel titled Footprints in the Bajra (Cedar Books, Delhi) and an MFA from Rutgers University. Winner of several writing residencies and national poetry prizes, Nabina’s poem has been included in the Nagaland Secondary Board of Education syllabus. A 2007 Joan Jakobson (Wesleyan) and 2007 Julio Lobo (Lesley) fiction scholar, she has worked in journalism and media for about 10 years, trained in North Indian classical music and folk songs, and performed in radio/TV programs. Nabina lectures in classrooms/workshops, designs brochures and poetry post cards, and blogs at http://nabinadas13.wordpress.com/. She loves reading (never call it teaching) poetry and doing street theater with children.

This is the fourth installment of an ongoing series written for the blog by Peter Rorvik. Peter is the Director of the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, as well as Director of the Durban International Film Festival.

The International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) is a cool festival. This is not to say it is a hip, little niche festival. Far from it. IFFR is huge, probably the largest cultural event in the Netherlands, attracting attendance of over 274,000. It is different from the other major festivals in Europe such as Cannes, Berlin and Venice, because despite its size and prominence, there is no red carpet here, and the star-driven media frenzy is refreshingly absent. With lots of great films - 550 to choose from - IFFR has a very business-like attitude.

This is the first in a series of guest posts by Hali Sofala and Eric Jones on the connections between video games and the literary.

The game is simple. All you do is pull back the bird, loaded gormlessly into a giant slingshot. The strain of the digital sling creaks until you’ve built up a quiet momentum. Then, let go.

The bird smacks into a heavy carton of wood and bricks, hopefully moving through and smashing into a green pea-sized pig that erupts deliciously into a plume of smoke. This is all that the game is. And, to a varying extent, all any video game is: a set of digital parameters voluntarily adhered to for enjoyment. But as those parameters widen, they exert a peculiar influence on the literary landscape.

To accompany Air Schooner's new Super Tuesday podcast focusing on politics and the American literary landscape and featuring interviews with Nikki Giovanni and Cynthia Hogue, PS senior reader Bob Fuglei interviewed Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love, Saul and Patsy, and Shadow Play, among many other novels, story collections, and works of criticism and craft commentary. Fuglei and Baxter discuss the influence of figures such as Nixon, Bachmann, and Gingrich on contemporary literary discourse, as well as question of politics and the MFA.*