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BIG EASY PIANISTICS!

3 EVENTS: SUNDAY, MARCH 20th

1:30 pm- A worldwide reading in solidarity with jailed dissident poet Liu Xiaobo, 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

3 pm- POET!
Mary Winegarden reads from “The Translator’s Sister”

3/20 – 4:30 & 5:30 (2 sets) – which way west? concert Macy Blackman and the Mighty Fines

Answering a call by the Berlin International Literature Festival for worldwide simultaneous readings, we… along with writers and organizations in 33 countries and 90 cities…will share the honor of reading aloud two works by Liu Xiaobo.  The first, “Charta 08,” is a manifesto demanding democracy and freedom in China, written by Liu Xiaobo with others and signed initially by 350 Chinese intellectuals and human rights activists.  Charta 08 now bears more than 10,000 signatures.  Liu Xiaobo’s poem “I wait for you with dust” will also be read. Our participation was requested by the Berlin International Literature Festival, originators of the event.

Nobel laureates John M. Coetzee, Herta Muller and Elfirede Jelinick, as well as writhers as Breyten Bretenback, Alberto Manguel, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth are among those reading in solidarity with Liu Xiaobo in other localities.

3 pm- POET!
Mary Winegarden reads from “The Translator’s Sister”

Mary Winegarden, a poet and translator and an SFSU lecturer in English who has long lived in Glen Park, has written a “poetic fiction” which intertwines her own voice with the lost voice of her sister, the translator Katherine Washburn, who died of a heart attack at age 57.  Mary has shaped her work around lines of her sister’s writing, from books, manuscripts and letters, that resonated with her during the mourning and adjustment that came in the time following her sister’s unanticipated and sudden death.

Her book-length work is in essence a conversation between Mary and her dead sister, which shape-shifts and shimmers, crossing genre-boundaries—between prose and poetry, fiction and memoir—playing off the root meaning of “translation”: “to carry across.”

Anita Cabrera and Julyan Peard, SFSU writer-colleagues, will participate with Mary in this reading.

Mary’s husband, Geoff Hoyle, and son, Dan Hoyle, are well known here and internationally for their work as actors and playwrights.

3/20 – 4:30 & 5:30 (2 sets) – which way west? concert Macy Blackman and the Mighty Fines

Macy’s rundown of New Orleans piano styles was a major highlight of our piano marathon in January, and cinched the deal in raising enough to buy a great piano for the store — the piano he’ll be playing on for this date.  And his two sets with his rollicking band known as the Mighty Fines last year still has folks talking. Now he’s bringing the band back to Bird & Beckett for a full dose of R&B New Orleans-style that will knock your socks off.

“The song list includes jump blues to get you dancin’, some gumbo grooves to make you stroll, slow blues to put you in the mood, and the surprising ‘Papa’s Cool Blues’, an instrumental that conjures up a smoky Bourbon Street club.”  Ira Kart, The Golden Gate Blues Society Newsletter