MacQuarrie & Manannan mac Lir – Still Lording Over the Underworld After All These Years

Book news:

Title: The Waves of Manannan mac Lir

Author – Charles MacQuarrie | Illustrator – R. Tato

Find it:  Sagebrush Cafe has a limited number of promotional copies and is offering them to customers starting Monday, January 12.

Mythology is populated by figures of sky and sea, fire and water, might and wisdom and all that stuff. We like to think that mythology belongs to the past. Greek culture, in terms of mythology, is not identical in our minds with the reported lethargy and decadence of today’s Greece. (I’ve never been there, but that is what people say…) No. Our image of Greek mythology is set firmly in the past.

But those stories somehow translate to the present. One reason this is true – people keep making new translations of ancient stories.

Who is doing that translation and breathing life into those stories? Well, one person doing it hails from the Antelope Valley. Professor Charles W. MacQuarrie has made a book on a figure of Irish and Scotish mythology – Manannan mac Lir, god of the underworld.

“Manannan mac Lir was the king of the Celtic underworld in the sea and under the earth of Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. There are many stories told of him from the Voyage of Bran which was written down around 750 a.D. to his appearance in James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, which was published in 1939. This is a long life, over 1200 years, but Manannan is an immortal after-all. In this book we have translated and adapted the very earliest, and some of the best, stories about Manannan. We very much hope you will enjoy them.”

The illustrated collection of stories produced by MacQuarrie includes the work of R. Tato, an Antelope Valley artist who also has ties to the Antelope Valley College/Cal State Bakersfield satellite campus in Lancaster.

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Sagebrush Cafe is located at 42104 50th Street West, Quartz Hill , CA 93536. 

Supplies are limited.

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Reading and Author Discussion with Dr. Rebbecca Brown in the AVC Art Gallery

Reading and Author Discussion

With Dr. Rebbecca Brown

 Friday, October 17, 4:30 pm in the AVC Art Gallery

 

From the Antelope Valley College Website:

“Rebbecca Brown spent much of her formative years in the Antelope Valley, graduating from Palmdale High School in the early 1990s.  This Friday she will be reading from They Become Her, her first novel, which received Honorable Mention in the 2009-2010 Starcherone Innovative Fiction Contest. Dr. Brown’s poetry, fiction, and essays have previously appeared in American Literary Review, Confrontation, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Eclipse, Requited, H_ngm_n and Ekleksographia (among others).

DESCRIPTION of THEY BECOME HER

 

Humorously ardent and poetically rich, They Become Her tells the story of Delia Bacon, the first to propose that Shakespeare did not write his own works and whose own literary ambition inspired a life filled with fame, fervor, and scandal. In addition to Delia’s impassioned missive, three fictional biographies of contemporary writers – all sharing the name Rebecca Brown – are implicated in Delia’s quest. At the novel’s conclusion, it is unclear who is writing whose fictional biography. They Become Her provocatively questions identity, the relationship between texts and their authors, and the predicaments in which many artists inevitably find themselves. Along the way, it invites a self-reflexively enraptured entanglement with the reader herself, who won’t be able to resist playing along to the unexpected end.”