Blog 10: Carole Maso Lecture

Today, April 11, 2007, I attended a lecture in the fourth floor Reading Room in the Student Center. The lecture was held by the author Carole Maso. Maso has been an author for many years and has written six books in total, two of which are fictional books. She has also written poetry and has her own collection of poems called “Beauty is Compulsive.” Maso currently is a professor of English at the University of Brown. In addition to teaching at the University of Brown, Maso is also currently writing a book named Bay of Angels. After Maso was introduced she came in front of the audience and began speaking about the various works she had completed over her career.

The first piece that she talked about was Mother Ignoring War Time. She began by reading a section from the book that she thought portrayed her writing in the best way. At the conclusion of the excerpt from the book she briefly explained the characters and the themes in the book. Afterwards, she began reading an excerpt from another book. That book was Young H. Saved from Infamy. This book was a fictional story using the character that she uses in a few of her fictional stories. Her name is Ava and in this particular novel Ava is extremely ill. The excerpt that Maso read aloud to the audience was a specific scene in which Ava was in the hospital. She was currently about to receive a bone marrow transplant from her own mother. Since she was in so much pain, it was necessary for the doctors to give her a massive amount of medication. Although the medication handled the pain without a problem, it would soon give here hallucinations. The story continued to tell the tale of her recovery after being in such a tough situation.

The last piece that Maso talked about was entitled Intercessions of the Saints. Like Young H. Saved from Infamy, Intercessions of the Saints included Ava as the main character of the novel. However, in this novel Ava is in much worse shape. This time she is lying on her deathbed with her husband at her side. The scene that Maso reads to the audience shows her husband reading to her a book of saints. Maso’s descriptions enable us to see what Ava is actually seeing. She describes how the saints arrive holding a variety of items. She continues to describe how her heart is swinging precisely like a pendulum closer and farther away from God. Since she is on her deathbed, this is strongly on her mind, knowing that she does not have much time left in her life.

At the conclusion of her discussion of the books that she has written, Maso finally began discussing her view on the city of Baltimore. After growing up in Patterson, New Jersey, she explains how she sees many similarities between the two cities. Afterwards, Maso began discussing an excerpt that she had remembered from another book that described how the author wanted to hold the city in his hand for its protection. She then made the same analogy, but she described holding all of the cities in her hands for their protection.

After sitting through Carole Maso’s lecture on her novels and her view on the city of Baltimore I began thinking of the various poems and short stories we have read over the course of the semester. The detail that she uses in her writing all comes from examples of things she finds similar with the church. She uses various things in the church to describe certain aspects in her writing. Many of the short stories and poems that we have read over the semester make reference not just to the church but to other things such as sports in “Slam, Dunk & Hook” by Yusef Komunyakaa or nature in “l(a” by E.E. Cummings. Both of these works focus on one object and analyzes it in such detail that a poem, or in the case of Maso a short story, is created.