The Paris Review blog is running a series of essays on James Salter. Salter is this year’s recipient of TPR’s “Hadada Prize.” Past winners of this prize have included Joan Didion, William Styron, Norman Mailer and Philp Roth (just to name a few.)
–Rich Farrell
DG is addicted to this stuff. The past is lost, mysterious. Especially in America where the remnants of ancient civilizations litter the landscape—all those mounds, pyramids, middens, ceremonial complexes. It’s much easier to imagine the stone temples emerging from the jungles of the Yucatan than to conjure the lost rites of the Native Americans of the great Mississippian cultures. The French encountered the Natchez before their world completely collapsed. We have their observations. But here’s an essay (excerpted in Slate from the Paris Review) on an even stranger mystery, cave art, newly discovered, left by these ancient peoples and their predecessors. DG is especially grateful for the antique phrase lusus Indorum, Indian whimsy.
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We entered a large hall. The ceiling was very high, it looked a hundred feet high. It was smooth and pale gray. Simek shone his lamp up and arced it around slowly. “What do you see?” he said.
“Are those mud dauber nests?” I asked. That’s what they looked like to me.
“The ceiling,” he said, “is studded with three hundred globs of clay.”
I stared up with open mouth. I didn’t have a good question for that one.
“We said the same thing,” he said. “What were they doing?” So a researcher had climbed up and removed one of the globs and taken it back to the lab at UT. They sliced it open. Inside was the charred nubbin of a piece of river cane, like a cigarette filter. “We got a piece of cane about that big,” Jan said, indicating his little finger. The Indians had jammed burning stalks of river cane into balls of clay and hurled them at the ceiling.
“They lit up this place like a birthday cake, man!” he said.
“Was it some kind of ceremony or something?”
“Who knows!” he said. “Maybe they were hunting bats.”
“What were they doing here?” I asked, as if asking no one.
“Minimally,” he said, “making art, burying their dead, lighting it up like a Christmas tree. Maybe hunting bats.”
Here’s a Julian Barnes essay on memoirs by Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion, both widows mourning the loss of a partner. They are a study in contrasts, and the contrasts illuminate the art of the memoir and personal tragedy.
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“Yet Oates’s A Widow’s Story and Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking could not be more different. Though Didion’s opening lines (the fourth of which is “The question of self-pity”) were jotted down a day or two after Dunne’s death, she waited eight months before beginning to write. Oates’s book is largely based on diary entries, most from the earliest part of her year: so in a 415-page book, we find that by page 125 we have covered just a week of her widowhood, and by page 325 are still only at week eight. While both books are autobiographies, Didion is essayistic and concise, seeking external points of comparison, trying to set her case in some wider context. Oates is novelistic and expansive, switching between first and third persons, seeking (not with unfailing success) to objectify herself as “the widow”; and though she occasionally reaches for the handholds of Pascal, Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Richard Crashaw, and William Carlos Williams, she is mainly focused on the dark interiors, the psycho-chaos of grief. Each writer, in other words, is playing to her strengths.”
via ‘For Sorrow There Is No Remedy’ by Julian Barnes | The New York Review of Books.
Here’s a fascinating biographical interview with critic J. Hillis Miller that spans decades of the development of literary criticism in the U. S. Lovely to watch his exposure to new ideas, his growth as a thinker and reader. Especially interesting is the influence of Kenneth Burke, an American critic not often talked about these days, followed by Miller’s exposure to Derrida and the French. Also not the now laughable academic career-making activity called “indexing.”
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Miller: I learned a lot from myth criticism, especially the way little details in a Shakespeare play can link up to indicate an “underthought” of reference to some myth or other. It was something I had learned in a different way from Burke. Burke came to Harvard when I was a graduate student and gave a lecture about indexing. What he was talking about was how you read. I had never heard anybody talk about this. He said what you do is notice things that recur in the text, though perhaps in some unostentatious way. If something appears four or five times in the same text, you think it’s probably important. That leads you on a kind of hermeneutical circle: you ask questions, you come back to the text and get some answers, and you go around, and pretty soon you may have a reading.
An example of that would be the color red in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. You say, “There sure are a lot of red things in the novel.” You see the red inside Tess’s mouth at some point, and the red sign that she sees painted on a barn. It says, “Thou shalt not commit [adultery],” as she has done, or, strictly speaking, fornication. Then you say, “Hmm, what do you do with all these red things?” That leads you back to the text.
We live in one of the periods of great extinction. Species and languages are disappearing. There is something poignant and touching about this; though nature is merciless and appears not to regret previous losses and only responds to loss by refilling the gaps with myriad new species (um, after a while). But it makes you think, doesn’t it? A language, a whole way of thinking, a mass of knowledge, lore, legend, myth–pffftt! GONE. Listen to the recording of this woman’s voice on the BBC page.
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The last speaker of an ancient language in India’s Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.
The death of the woman, Boa Senior, was highly significant because one of the world’s oldest languages, Bo, had come to an end, Professor Anvita Abbi said.
She said that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage.
Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be up to 70,000 years old.
via BBC News – Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India.
What a civil, undomesticable, and heartening poet is Mary Ruefle: fond of experiment, but just as pleased to write of tilapia or county fairs; always novel, but never pandering to a mode; refusing neither the absurd nor the sublime. Any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence. For more than thirty years, she has freshened American poetry by humbly glorifying both the inner life and the outward experience. Her Selected Poems, like the work of William Carlos Williams, is a testimony not only to the power of artfulness, but to human empathy.via Mary Ruefle – Poetry Society of America.
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This morning I was thinking about the difference between thoughts and attitudes. Attitudes are semi-conscious tilts toward or away from ideas that somehow also precede ideas and condition our acceptance or rejection of ideas. Attitudes seem to exist prior to ideas, with feelings attached, and make the acceptance or rejection of ideas easier. Attitudes are the emotional or psychological structures attached to schematic world views that are somehow absorbed prior to critical thought. Even a predisposition to critical thought is an attitude.
In my lecture at the residency last January, I talked about the metaphysical two-world paradigm that has dogged human thought for thousands of years. There are two basic paradigms in this regard: the Platonic two-world paradigm and the Aristotelean one-world or scientific paradigm. These are very old ideas, ways of thinking, ruts, that people fall into repeating without thinking. And even after thinking about them, people still fall into them (this is the history of western philosophy). We spout fragments of these ideas unknowingly every day of our lives; they somehow live in the discourse of our culture.
Another ancient paradigm we tend to adopt without thinking is the Great Chain of Being which creates a hierarchy of existence, a graded system of value with humans on top and rocks at the bottom, a pretty comforting world view for humans. The Great Chain of Being is basically an outgrowth of the two-world metaphysical paradigm. You can look this up in Arthur Lovejoy’s book The Great Chain of Being. E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture is good, too.
Frank E. Manuel’s little book Shapes of Philosophical History is a like-minded historical analysis of the two basic time paradigms: the cyclical view of history and the linear view. Like the two-world paradigm, the cyclical paradigm is archaic, a vestige of oral cultures (and humans inhabited an oral universe for perhaps 100,000 years; literacy has been around for only a couple of thousand—old ideas die hard). Temporal shapes such as birth-maturation-death, primitive-classical-decadent, the rise and fall of civilizations, etc. are examples of cyclical thinking. The linear view is seems to start with Christianity with its Apocalyptic notion that the world is coming to an end after which some of us will rise again and go to Heaven. Augustine, a Berber tribesman from what is now Algeria who became a Christian bishop, saw history as a progress toward the City of God, the new Jerusalem. Later on, French Enlightenment philosophers invented the modern notion of “progress” which is the idea that science will invent more and better ways to make humans comfortable and happy faster and faster. Evolution itself is an application of the linear paradigm to biology. We “think” fragments of these two ideas every day of our lives as well. Every time you think that culture is in decline, you are mouthing one paradigm. Every time you notice how much cheaper and smarter computers and cell phones are, you’re modeling the other paradigm. The emotional attitudes attached to these paradigms are nostalgia and hope. We moderns are caught between nostalgia and hope, with nostalgia (for a better, simpler, more primitive and virtuous existence) probably predominant. Heidegger’s “forgetting of Being” is a philosophical expression of nostalgia.
These shapes or paradigms are ways of giving structure and meaning to the mega-data of existence. They beg the question as to whether or not the shapes bear any relation to existence. They make humans feel better. A distant alternative to cycles and lines would be Democritus’s idea of time as “whirl” which doesn’t seem nearly as appealing.
The trick is to try to catch yourselves thinking in archaic paradigms and then ask yourselves what is real.
dg
Juan Jose Saer
“Many years later he will understand, from the overwhelming evidence, that the so-called human soul never had, or will ever have, what they call substance or essence, that what they call character, style, personality, are nothing but senseless replications, and that their own subject–the body where they manifest–is the one most starved of their nature, that what others call life is a series of a posteriori recognitions of the places where a blind, incomprehensible, ceaseless drift deposits, in spite of themselves, the eminent individuals who, after having been dragged through it, begin to elaborate systems that pretend to explain it; but for now, having just turned twenty, he still believes that problems have solutions, situations outcomes, individuals personality, and actions logic.” –Juan Jose Saer, The Sixty-Five Years of Washington.
-Quotes brought to you by Rich Farrell, with the help of his exhausted, post-half-marathon-running wife, who read the sentence to him while he typed it. All errors are hers.
Here’s the TLS review of 400 Years of the King James Bible. It toucheth on many topics including translation and mistranslation and, here, yes, even on Robert Alter, critic and translator, whose formalist approach to the Bible (and the novel) dg hath always found revelatory. This little bit is quite funny.
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The liveliest essay in the volume is Robert Alter’s “The glories and the glitches of the King James Bible”, in which he matches wits with the KJB translators. As the editor-translator of The Five Books of Moses (2004) and The Book of Psalms (2007), Alter is well qualified to appreciate not only the skill of the translators, but also their mistakes. After reading Alter’s essay, it is hard to feel quite the same way about the KJB’s rendering of the final chapter of Ecclesiastes, which many Anglicans of a certain age can still recite by heart: “the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets”. Alter is justly admiring of this “great sombre poem on mortality and the decay of the body”, but also points out that some of the poetic effect is actually the result of mistranslation. The Hebrew word hagav, which the KJB translates as “grasshopper”, may refer to the locust-tree; the word aviyyonah, which the KJB translates as “desire”, is probably another plant, the caper-fruit.
Laura Von Rosk alerted me to this fascinating book review essay on James Gleick’s The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood in The New York Review of Books: information theory, science, the world we live in—things it helps to know when you’re sinking in fast waters.
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According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and exchanged information without the concept of measuring it; second the theory, first formulated by Shannon; third the flood, in which we now live. The flood began quietly. The event that made the flood plainly visible occurred in 1965, when Gordon Moore stated Moore’s Law. Moore was an electrical engineer, founder of the Intel Corporation, a company that manufactured components for computers and other electronic gadgets. His law said that the price of electronic components would decrease and their numbers would increase by a factor of two every eighteen months. This implied that the price would decrease and the numbers would increase by a factor of a hundred every decade. Moore’s prediction of continued growth has turned out to be astonishingly accurate during the forty-five years since he announced it. In these four and a half decades, the price has decreased and the numbers have increased by a factor of a billion, nine powers of ten. Nine powers of ten are enough to turn a trickle into a flood.
via How We Know by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books.
Tom Greene, founding President of Vermont College of Fine Arts, writes an occasional column for the Montpelier, VT, bi-monthly The Bridge. It’s called Notes from the Hill. Click the link (or the text image) and read the current issue where he reminisces about the January graduation just past, Richard Farrell’s magnificent speech, and the amazing coincidence that Rich and Tom had played Little League baseball against each other in days long gone. (In his spare time, Tom also writes novels.)
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This is “Math Rock,” Jonah Glover’s music video entry for the Saratoga Springs High School Math Contest. Jonah wrote the words and recorded the music with his friend Sam Hagen. The music is a cover of “Tik Tok” by Ke$ha.
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Jodi Paloni alerted me to this delightful video talk given by Margaret Atwood (in a witty and genial mood) on the new world of digital publishing. This was recorded at the Tools of Change conference in New York mid-February.
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Put your birthday into the Birthday Bestsellers search engine to see a list of New York Times bestsellers the week you were born. Here’s mine:
Are all of these Top 10 books from February 1976 exemplars of fine literature? Surely not. Are at least a couple? Almost certainly. How to know?
As for me, I recognize some of the names – Tennessee Williams, Agatha Christie, Saul Bellow, William F. Buckley, E.L. Doctrow. I’ve read some of their books, but none of these. That includes Humboldt’s Gift, which was part of the oeuvre that got Saul Bellow the Nobel Prize, or that American classic Ragtime. Sadly, the work with which I am most “familiar” is Shogun – at least as it appeared as a TV miniseries years later.
And these are just the lucky 10 books that made the list, for one week during the disco era. Thousands of others– some vastly superior, no doubt – remain totally unknown to me, because the search engine limits my enquiry to bestsellers only.
Read the rest of this entry
Here’s a lovely blog post by Philip Graham, the sort of text that gets me inspired about writing, about form and pattern.
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What’s Structure Got to Do with It?
More years ago than I like to count, when I was but a first year graduate student in creative writing, I came upon a slim volume in a bookstore titled Shakespearean Design, by Mark Rose. I pulled it off the shelf and gave it a glance, because I was taking a summer literature course on the Bard and soon found myself deep in a book that would influence me as a writer for the rest of my life.
Not many people know this, but Shakespeare never divided a single play into five acts. As Mark Rose notes, “In Shakespeare’s lifetime not one of his plays was published with any division of any kind.” And yet all his plays, as we know them today, go hummingly about their business from curtain rise and act one on through to act five and curtain close. These divisions were added to the plays many years after Shakespeare’s death.
So if our greatest playwright never tinkered with five acts (or any acts), what sort of structure did he use to shape his narratives—surely he didn’t simply scribble away?
It turns out he was influenced by late medieval and early renaissance diptych and triptych paintings. Think of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, as an example of a triptych,
via Philip Graham » Blog Archive » What’s Structure Got to Do with It?.
This was just published at Global Brief. Click the link to read the rest.
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But the triumph of spirit today seems paradoxically spiritless. The Christian God has been dead, or at least moribund, since the mid-19th century, when Nietzsche pronounced the obsequies. Liberal political philosophy has progressively eliminated spirit from state and statecraft. Science has eliminated spirit from matter. And economics has eliminated spirit from the market.
Spirit seems to linger in the vociferous, but often derided religious rearguard actions of so-called fundamentalist movements (they seem to exist in every religion). But even the phrase ‘human spirit’ used in conversation is a marker for the naïve and passé. And humanism, without spirit, is derided as just another system of oppression. No longer can we wax romantically elegiac about the residuum of immaterial essence that we feel to be part of our existence.
The old arguments from spirit that every human life is infinitely valuable has led to planetary crowding, the exhaustion of resources, the advent of government-sanctioned abortion, assisted suicide, and various forms of medical rationing (when poor people cannot pay for health care, that is a form of rationing). Spirit has turned on spirit, per force, because species survival depends on it. In the end, our human desire to separate ourselves from nature has had the paradoxical effect of proving that we are nothing but nature.
Excellent news for Numéro Cinq Contributing Editor Natalia Sarkissian. Lorian Hemingway has just published Natalia’s Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition entry “Soup.” Lovely news, lovely story. Congratulations, N.
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SOUP: by Natalia Sarkissian: 2010 Honorable Mention
Mrs. Croftway stood at the sink, peeling potatoes for supper; Vichyssoise was the verdict. But without cream. No chicken stock. No leeks either. Just pepper and the half cube of bouillon left over from yesterday. Mel always fussed over the lack of ingredients, craving comfort. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? That’s how they had ended up here, in this crummy trailer park. She, peeling, boiling, mashing, liquefying; devising undeserved rewards for his crooked handiwork. Mel thinking up new names for the thin white liquid that resulted and cooking up illicit get-rich-quick schemes that flopped.
The wind blew garbage around. Wild dogs had been out last night and had ripped through black plastic garbage sacks. Sand hissed and she imagined it flying through the cracks in the double-wide where the silicon had dried and shrunk and no longer kept the outside completely out. Little mounds of sand would be piled on the linoleum when the wind stopped.
She would sweep it. Tidy, she was. She wished she could sweep up the shards of broken dreams. Pick’em up. Glue’em together. Start over again.
Mrs. Croftway sighed and pushed a faded lock of brown hair out of her eyes. The curl stuck to her forehead. The air conditioning had died. No money to fix it. The lights sputtered dimly—low wattage bulbs—and she had trouble seeing. No money to pay for electricity or repairs either.
She laughed—a mirthless sound.
via LORIAN HEMINGWAY SHORT STORY COMPETITION: SOUP: by Natalia Sarkissian: 2010 Honorable Mention.
Just to make myself ornery, I spent a little time this morning looking at this phenomenon. I found dozens of publishing houses and a whole support system of book pumping PR sites that sell you virtual “book tours.” And these books get on Amazon, often with, yes, dozens of puff customer reviews. Some people will be successful with this alternative to traditional publishing. Few, I suspect. Very few. But this is another sign of the (end) times and a spin-off of the digital publishing trend.
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Vanity presses have existed for decades, but technology has made it much easier for aspiring authors to publish without hefty upfront costs. Gone are the days when self-publishing meant paying a printer to produce hundreds of copies that then languished in a garage.
Now, for as little as $3, an author can upload a manuscript or collection of photos to a Web site, and order a printed book within an hour. Many books will appear for sale on Amazon.com or the Web site of Barnes & Noble; others are sold through the self-publishing companies’ Web sites. Authors and readers order subsequent copies as needed.
via Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab – NYTimes.com.
Here’s a fascinating review of an even more fascinating book. All of you are familiar with Barthe’s essay “The Death of the Author.” I like here the potential contrast between the haiku and the novel, which contrast never actually eventuates apparently.
Part II returns both author and work centre-stage. Barthes investigates the emergence of writing as an intransitive activity, determined not by its object but by a “maniacal” urge in the author’s body. It focuses on the “operations” by which he (the writers considered are all male: Flaubert, Kafka, Mallarmé, Chateaubriand, Proust, etc) passes from the desire to write to creating the work. We learn about the minutiae of authors’ habits: where they write, when, at what rhythm or speed (“at a gallop”, in Proust’s case). For the writers Barthes discusses, the space of writing offers a retreat from worldly preoccupations: Flaubert asks for no more than a quiet room with “a good fire in winter and a pair of candles to light me at night”, whereas Proust favours the bed: “you can work, eat, and sleep in it”. Similarly, the time at which they choose to write often suggests a withdrawal from the world. While Barthes cites Paul Valéry as an example of an early morning writer, he devotes most space to those who wrote at night: Flaubert (sometimes), Rimbaud (once), Kafka (joyous at having written “The Judgment” in one night-time sitting) and, of course, Proust (always). The latter’s “complete inversion of day and night” leads on to a broader discussion of inversion in general as the source of a “perverse pleasure”: perhaps the reason why night work enjoys such privilege in Barthes’s imagination.
via The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes reviewed by Mairéad Hanrahan – TLS.
Here’s a little essay on the lost art of editing. And after you’ve read it, you can look at this one which is actually called “The Lost Art of Editing.” As an author who fairly regularly gets into knock-down arguments with editors, dg tends to take a dim view of the whole business.
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Writers have done little to clarify the role of editors, either. Where the experience of being edited goes well, they’re grateful, but the more publicised cases are when the experience is bad. Henry James called editing “the butcher’s trade”. Byron associated it with emasculation and, he said, would “have no gelding”. DH Lawrence compared it to trying “to clip my own nose into shape with scissors”. And John Updike says: “It’s a little like going to … the barber”, adding, “I have never liked haircuts.” Or listen to the condescension of Nabokov: “By editor I suppose you mean proofreader.” There are, of course, many different kinds of editor – from fact-checkers and OKers (as they’re known at the New Yorker), to line-editors and copy editors, to editors who grasp the big picture but skip the detail. But in popular mythology they’re lumped together as bullyboys, bouncers or, to quote Nabokov again, “pompous avuncular brutes”.
Those who can, write; those who can’t, edit – that seems to be the line. I prefer TS Eliot. Asked if editors were no more than failed writers, he replied: “Perhaps – but so are most writers.”
via Blake Morrison: Black day for the blue pencil | Books | The Observer.
“Portrait and Poem Painting” (1961), by Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara, Image courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.
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As a writer, I often turn to art for inspiration. Flipping through the pages of a Paul Klee book, I can get lost in swirls of color, rigid lines, blocks of symmetry or irregularity and find myself at the exact literary abstraction I was looking for in my writing. Turns out, I’m not alone.
Beginning in the 1950s the Tibor de Nagy Gallery served as a unique artistic salon where many New York School poets and abstract expressionist painters looked to each other for inspiration. Poets such as Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery hung out with painters Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler and Willem de Kooning, sharing an artistic fellowship and an aesthetic style that often resulted in collaborative poem paintings. These paintings offered a unique blend of visual and lyrical artistic passion. The Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York is currently featuring the exhibit: Painters and Poets. The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl disusses the exhibit in the article, “Artists and Writers: New York Mashups” (January 31, 2011). Schjeldahl says the show is primarily dominated by literary material—collaborative imagery, books and ephemera.
“The typical New York School collaboration is a carefully nonsensical interplay of visual and verbal vernaculars, as infection and as frustrating as a lively party overheard through a wall. (You had to be there. You almost are.)”—Peter Schjeldahl
Schjeldahl has an audio slideshow featuring a few poem painting collaborations and an excerpt from John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name.” The New York Times also has an article describing the Tibor de Nagy salon’s early years entitled, “When Art Dallied with Poetry on 53rd Street.” You can see the poem painting collaboration between painter Larry Rivers and poet Kenneth Koch, entitled “In Bed,” (1982, mixed media). The gorgeously designed Poets & Painters catalog features the collaborations and can be ordered through the mail directly from the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
There are many poets and visual artists collaborating today. The Academy of American Poets website regularly features poetry and art collaborations. In addition, Saturnalia Press has published a series of books on artists/poet collaborations. They’re really more poetry pairings, not poetry paintings, but nonetheless, I found them affecting. I especially enjoyed Stigmata Errata Etcetera by poet Bill Knott and artist Star Black, as well as Midnights by poet Jane Miller and artist Beverly Pepper.
“The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess.” —C.D Wright in the introduction to Midnight.
Some poets simply find painting a natural extension of their artistic expression and don’t seek out collaboration, but create their own poem paintings. Poet Kenneth Patchen didn’t consider himself a painter, although almost all of his nearly 40 volumes of poetry and prose had a visual component.
“It happens that very often my writing with pen is interrupted by my writing with brush, but I think of both as writing,” said Patchen. “In other words, I don’t consider myself a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend.” — “Kenneth Patchen’s Painted Poems” on Poets.org.
Trip to Paradise
“Trip to Paradise,” poem painting by Tonia Colleen, current VCFA fiction writing student (Watercolor on rice paper, with the poem hand written in ink. Some of the images are from the artist’s original wood carvings.)
“Trip to Paradise” Excerpt:
The shredding cloaks of poverty
are gleaming satin gowns
and broken doors are used as boats
and oars are pulled by skies.
In Paradise your questions beg
and answers grow like alms.
And yes and no are Siamese twins and
Mondays carry songs.
In Paradise you are who
you are supposed to be and no one thinks to drown.
I’m on the look out for other inventive poem paintings. The visual bath and literary conversation of a poem painting might jar something open inside my brain. Offer me more than just color and light, but some sort of linguistic grapheme to incite a fresh creation all my own.
Anna Maria Johnson’s submission to the Numero Cinq Erasure Contest (above) could be characterized as a poem painting, of sorts. Her Numero Cinq Novel-in-a-Box contest submission is perhaps a “novel painting.” Some writers are eschewing flat paper as a medium all together for their poetry and prose, extending their art form to wood, leaves, rocks. Check out the Off-the-Page Project at the VCFA 2010 summer residency. Also, Writer and VCFA instructor Nance Van Winkle melds her photography with small poems she “graffities” onto a photographic surface resulting in a creation she coined as: the PHO-TOEM (photograph + Poem=PHO-TOEM).
Post below if you find a unique poem painting or other writing/art blend that might excite a writer’s brain.
—Wendy Voorsanger
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(DISCLAIMER: The editors of NC do not recommend trying this at home or abroad. NC does not assume financial or legal responsibility for readers who attempt to disprove theories contained herein.)
Life after the MFA: The pay sucks, publication feels insurmountable at times, a book contract even more so, and landing a job teaching creative writing has been compared to finding a needle in a haystack with a thirty-seven foot pair of tweezers. But, ah! the serendipitous joys of stumbling across random bits of arcane knowledge when researching a new story!
As I surfed the vast encyclopedia of human knowledge and experience known as the world-wide web, searching for answers to my burning creative questions, I unearthed multiple websites that offered serious advise for how to fall out of an airplane (or off a building, cliff, etc.) without a parachute and survive the fall. Yes, I said without a parachute.
The industry-standard, “expert” site, greenharbor.com, offers multiple scenarios, techniques, anecdotes and evidence about this rare and utterly unnerving phenomenon. The number of documented survivors of a radical free fall is truly staggering (something over 40 since people began recording these things.) And barring divine intervention and/or hoaxes, there are indeed ‘tips’ an unlucky person might follow if one suddenly finds oneself falling from on high. Snow, for example, offers a good landing zone if you hit it at the right angle. (No hints how to adjust falling body for impact angle at the terminal velocity of 120 m.ph.) One site suggested looking for large bodies of water, and failing that, to search for swimming pools. (Contributor’s tip: Aim for the deep end.) Trees are good targets, too, but only with certain types of leaves and branches.
A Popular Mechanics article actually simulates the time it would take to free fall from 22,000 feet as you read down the article, offering ‘scientific’ suggestions on how to best prepare for the inevitable impact.
My interest in this topic grew significantly last week, after reading about a climber who fell 1000 feet from a cliff in Scotland and survived. Since said climber kept hitting the side of the cliff as he tumbled, he was technically (according to some sources) not in a ‘free fall’.
Where else could such random, odd information be useful for crafting a new project at work? Where else could a person not only advance his or her career, but also learn valuable skills to boot? Now if I just need to find a way to make this pay the rent!
By the way, when are the Numéro Cinq 2010 bonus checks arriving?
Um, I am in a packet haze. Then I saw this. I have been generating new titles for the last half-hour. Mesmerizing. And truly, truly helpful. I mean really. Sort of.
Best new titles so far for future dg stories and novels: Fallen Stream, The Entwined Silk, Darkness of Flame, The Fire’s Legacy, and my favourite The Mists of the Ashes.
dg
Random Title Generator by Maygra (based on a design by Jellyn).
Now that AWP is over, dg needed something else to worry about. This article explains why there is so much snow in his front yard, inches of ice on the roof and why it was a good thing to lay in a supply of canned goods.
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The Earth’s northern magnetic pole was moving towards Russia at a rate of about five miles annually. That progression to the East had been happening for decades.
Suddenly, in the past decade the rate sped up. Now the magnetic pole is shifting East at a rate of 40 miles annually, an increase of 800 percent. And it continues to accelerate.
Recently, as the magnetic field fluctuates, NASA has discovered “cracks” in it. This is worrisome as it significantly affects the ionosphere, troposphere wind patterns, and atmospheric moisture. All three things have an effect on the weather.
Worse, what shields the planet from cancer-causing radiation is the magnetic field. It acts as a shield deflecting harmful ultra-violet, X-rays and other life-threatening radiation from bathing the surface of the Earth. With the field weakening and cracks emerging, the death rate from cancer could skyrocket and mutations of DNA can become rampant.
Another federal agency, NOAA, issued a report caused a flurry of panic when they predicted that mammoth superstorms in the future could wipe out most of California. The NOAA scientists said it’s a plausible scenario and would be driven by an “atmospheric river” moving water at the same rate as 50 Mississippi rivers flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.
via Magnetic Polar Shifts Causing Massive Global Superstorms – Salem-News.Com.
Guidelines for not-writing your memoir. This should provoke some R & D (rage and derision). Noticed via Frank Tempone’s Facebook reference.
dg
A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.
There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.
But then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose. These days, if you’re planning to browse the “memoir” listings on Amazon, make sure you’re in a comfortable chair, because that search term produces about 40,000 hits, or 60,000, or 160,000, depending on how you execute it.
I was looking up the famous suicide character Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed (also translated as The Demons) and came up this gem in the UK Independent, a classic example of art not mixing very well with life apparently.
For a really good selection of photographs of the murals, including one of Kirillov shooting himself, go here. I love the quote from the artist who did the murals: “What did you want? Scenes of dancing? Dostoevsky doesn’t have them.”
dg
The new station was decorated with black and white marble mosaics of scenes from Dostoevsky’s most famous novels, including Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. But unsurprisingly for a writer famously preoccupied with death, the scenes include images of suicide and murder.
On one wall, Rodion Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment brandishes an axe over the elderly pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister, his murder victims in the novel. Near by, a character from Demons holds a pistol to his temple.
The pictures quickly caused a sensation. Bloggers and websites called the images that appeared on the internet in April “depressing” amid speculation that the images could attract suicides.
via Dostoevsky images on metro ‘could cause suicides’ – Europe, World – The Independent.
“The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp.”
-Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)
Simulacra and Simulation
-Quotes brought to you by Rich Farrell
As a fledgling novelist and BookNet virgin, I became seriously depressed by dg’s recent NC post (“When Sales Data Drive Publishing Decisions: The BookNet Dictatorship by Stephen Henighan at Geist”). Just thinking about a ‘literature sales data program’ squeezed the creative juice out of my whole day. I couldn’t write a word. Then I stumbled across a hopeful voice offering: “New Rules for Writers: Ignore Publicity, Shun Crowds, Refuse Recognition and More,” by Anis Shivani* published in the Huffington Post. His new rules are based on the premise that “writers aren’t forged in social harmony and peer input and obedient fellowship, but in a region where madmen and insomniacs find no comfort.”
“These “rules” totally go against every prescription for writing success you’ll hear as a young writer from all quarters: the conformity-driven MFA system, the publishing industry’s hype-machine, successful writers who act either like prima donnas or untouchable mystics, the marketing experts who seek to impose advertising rules on the writing product. Overpaid editors, illiterate agents, arrogant gatekeepers, and stupid reviewers want you to bargain away your soul for a pittance — the bids in the market escalate downward, a reverse auction where you compete with the lowest of the low to be acknowledged as an entity that counts.”
Shivani lists ten rules. Many go against the typical advice given to emerging fiction writers like myself, but somehow feel truer. Others I can’t exactly abide, like “Converse Only with the Classics.” Ignore Shivani’s hyperbole and glean what you can. I intend to follow rule number four: Seek Unemployment.
—Wendy Voorsanger
* Anis Shivani is the author of the short story collection, Anatolia and Other Stories, published by Black Lawrence Press. Booklist describes the collection as “extraordinary” and “caustically funny.” The collection has been long listed for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award and one of the stories–”Dubai”–was awarded Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize.
My first foray into the realm of Virginia Woolf involved an academically-traumatic experience of attempting to present an analysis of her essay, “The Death of the Moth,” before a high school English/Lit. class. In my esteem, Woolf was a literary archetype—a matriarch of the word (The Word) who created works of biblical proportion (this coming from a person raised Catholic …Irish Catholic, at that). I didn’t want to mess up her essay, and I still don’t. In a diary, Virginia Woolf once described writing as, “The only way I keep afloat.” I’d like to think this sentiment rings true for many writers, that Woolf’s comment represents a greater consciousness of writers. And today, two days after her birthday, I want to pay small (if inadequate) homage to Virginia Woolf—an homage to her ability to articulate the truth and depth of the “loose, drifting material of life.”
Yesterday, Flavorwire published a list of “59 Things You Didn’t Know About Virginia Woolf” (one for each year of her life) in commemoration of Woolf’s birthday; NPR has a short article, “Virginia Woolf, At Intersection of Science and Art,” which reveals the essomenic qualities of Woolf’s observations about the mind; The New York Times has an entire archive dedicated to all things Woolf. But one my favorites, posted below, is an older book review by Daphne Merkin that pays homage (which is actually an homage to an homage) to the full complexity of personality and genius of Woolf.
Woolf wrote “The Death of the Moth” approximately a year before she committed suicide. Reading the essay now, I better understand Woolf’s ability to recognize the “pure bead” of life in the smallest (seemingly insignificant) creatures and objects that would otherwise pass me unnoticed, and Woolf’s energetic prose teems with this recognition. Apparently, I survived my presentation of the essay in high school—as far as I know, I never had a reputation as that girl who didn’t understand Woolf (though if you went to high school with me, I encourage you not to comment on this). But I won’t re-traumatize myself with the impossible task of attempting to articulate a perfect singular meaning from any of Woolf’s work; this time, I’ll leave the interpretation of up to you.
– Mary Stein
How in the world, you may find yourself thinking, can the delicate but overarticulated psyche of Virginia Woolf withstand yet another exhumation? Can there possibly be any gold left to extract from the overmined precincts of Bloomsbury, where Virginia and Vanessa and Leonard and Clive and Duncan and Morgan and Maynard and Lytton moved about with an avid sense of post-Victorian newness, joining in clannish and often churlish and virulently self-documented discourse? It is an oft-told story, gripping in its details: the beautiful but remote mother who died when Virginia was 13; the father grunting away at his literary labors, inconsolable in his grief; the sexual advances of her half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth; the early breakdowns; the rivalry with her sister, Vanessa; the marriage to the ”penniless Jew,” Leonard; the intense friendships with other women, including lesbian affairs with Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth; and then her suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.
(Read the rest of the book review, “This Loose Drifting Material of Life”)