Filed under Books
Tonight in class I had students write the worst fiction they could. It’s a common exercise, the idea being that it gives us a way to talk about what we value in creative writing and what we abhor. And the writing always ends up surprising and good in complicated ways. I wrote alongside my students, for the first time. Here’s what I came up with. (more…)
:: Share or discuss :: 2010-03-10 :: dave
Filed under Announcements
You’ve listened to his mixtapes, now look at his photographs. My pal Steve toys, oh, let’s say semiannually with an honest-to-goodness Web blog/journal of writing, and but until we get some commitment on that end, what luck that he’s consistent about updating his Tumblr photo blog.
They’re really good, right? What I like about Steve’s photos is that they all feel very old, very NYC-between-the-wars, even when the frame is full of neon and Spandex. And it’s not just because of the use of greyscale. You can tell, flipping through the pages of photos, that he’s got a sensibility developing: a city seesawing on every block between abundance and decay.
Find the snowy horsetrack photos. They’ll break your heart, and then somehow warm it.
Jacks of all trades! It’s like when I found out that Zach also made movies.
:: Share or discuss :: 2010-03-04 :: dave
Filed under Books
John D’Agata writes books in and about nonfiction that get me very interested in and excited for the genre. After the first generation of “New Journalists” who just decided to get out and write great, engaging, personal, subjective nonfiction without dickering over the name of this genre, and then after their 2nd-gen acolytes who made their careers precisely through such careful dickering and promulgation, here’s our 3rd-gen go-to guy, whose nonfiction work seems so smartly disinterested in what (other than its author’s own assertion) makes it nonfiction. And yet his work is so journalistic. By blending and maybe even disregarding genre, D’Agata’s found a way to move the genre forward.
His new book seeks connections between two public events in Nevada: the U.S. Senate’s debate on whether to use Yucca Mountain as the dumping ground for our nation’s nuclear waste, and a 16-year-old’s suicide accomplished by jumping from the observation tower of a Vegas hotel. There is, of course, no connection between these events. The boy’s suicide was not a call against nuclear energy. And yet this is the job of the writer: to look around and make some sense by piecing elements together.
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:: Share or discuss :: 2010-02-28 :: dave
Filed under Announcements
Let me know anything you may want to know about Chicago O’Hare Airport’s Terminal 2 because after visiting it eight times in under three weeks I think I know a good deal about it. There’s a McDonald’s at the terminal’s groin over there; a Chili’s Too where a bartender named George (pretty sure, who bears a rounder resemblance to Brad Garrett) will encourage you not to wait in line for a single table but rather hop up to the bar—single seats! single seats! c’mon folks!—and eventually he’ll convince you it’s the right place to sit, despite your bags you refuse to check, and then there’s a quite shitty Fox Sports Net restaurant where the employees yell at each other. Which of course is probably a carefully planned part of the experience, given the restaurant’s parent company. The going rate in winter 2010 for a men’s shoeshine is $6. The going rate at the Brookstone for an iPod charger is $38. You can’t buy large Cadbury bars for your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day at the Duty Free counter just down from the shoeshine bench unless you’re off to Canada (on Air Canada which departs from gates E1 and E2), but there’s a kind of news & gift kiosk on your way to Terminal 1 (pictured in blue) which sells chocolates to domestic travelers at reasonable rates. Something called Johnny Rockets exists over there. Also: broad, great looking men who wear their khakis well that entreat you into conversation with the enticing offer of a free flight, and but by the time you understand these men are talking to you you’re too many steps along your path to comfortably pause and turn themward, and when you glance back in some kind of apology you realize they want just for you to sign up for a credit card, and not, like, your life story or darkest fears.
Much of my February’s been spent there. I’ve been traveling, meeting people in English departments around the country to mutually assess one another on whether I’d be a good fit among their faculty. It’s looking good that I’ll’ve signed a contract for a job by the end of this week, but in the meantime mum’ll’ve to be the word.
If I get hired I’m going to be hired in nonfiction, hired as a writer and teacher of nonfiction. This makes sense given the pending publication of The Authentic Animal, but is also crazy given the rest of my publishing record. I’ve got an essay in a journal, an excerpt from the book. I’ve got journalism written chiefly in the previous century. I’ll’ve (okay, sorry) graduate students to teach things to, and it’s clear I’ll need to bone up on my reading. Memoir is a genre I know of much like I know of Ayn Rand—i.e., through the harsh or loving words of others.
So I’ll be beginning a program of sorts soon, reading through canonical works of nonfiction, such as they may exist. I’ve got the Modern Library list to start with, but therein lies a list void of Didion and so how much serious attention can really be paid it? In Cold Blood, The Liar’s Club, the works of Gay Talese, the anthologies edited by John D’Agata—all are at the top of the list, some as rereads.
You, reader: any others? What vital nonfiction is out there?
:: Share or discuss :: 2010-02-22 :: dave
Filed under Books
No, it’s not chlamydia. Nor is it the secret mark he made on his keys over there in the glass bowl by the front door, the one that lets you know which are his. It’s this, from his essay, “Distance and Point of View”:
It is not surprising to hear practicing novelists report that they have never had help from critics about point of view. In dealing with point of view the novelist must always deal with the individual work: which particular character shall tell this particular story, or part of a story, with which precise degree of reliability, privilege, freedom to comment, and so on. Shall he be given dramatic vividness? Even if the novelist has decided on a narrator who will fit one of the critic’s classifications—”omniscient,” “first person,” “limited omniscient,” “objective,” “roving,” “effaced,” and so on—his troubles have just begun. (more…)
:: Share or discuss :: 2010-01-31 :: dave
Filed under tabulature
This is I think the one song of the stellar and (for me, at least) seminal Arise, Therefore record that hasn’t been tabbed online. I’m not sure whether it’s 100% on (the song is piano heavy, which always makes transcription difficult), but it’s a start. Please revise/edit as needed.
Note: This is for a guitar tuned down a half step (EbAbDbGbBbEb). The D/G# chord is a D chord with a G# bass. You can play it with a regular D shape by just sliding your index finger up the G string to hit the G# on the first fret. If this pulls your ring finger off the E string, it’s not much of a problem.
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:: Share or discuss :: 2010-01-26 :: dave
Filed under taxidermy
I just wrote what I think might be the last sentence of the taxidermy book, at least in this version I’m about to send to my editor:
“We are not animals, we are given them.”
It felt righter two minutes ago.
1 comment :: Share or discuss :: 2010-01-25 :: dave
Filed under Announcements
weird-science
verb, trans.
1. to fashion an object out of thin air, or to improve the general quality of a pre-existing object, using the vague powers that have seemingly been placed within you by a pair of horny experimenting teens: I’m starving; it’d be great if someone could weird-science me a pizza | Huh, this sweater must have gotten weird-scienced in the dryer because it totally fits now.
2. to influence or affect something far beyond any expectations or senses of logic and reason: I think eight days without sunshine has weird-scienced my brain. | Gee, thanks, Massachusetts, now the right is totally going to weird-science health-care reform.
Use with caution.
:: Share or discuss :: 2010-01-23 :: dave
Filed under Announcements
I.
One of the effects of being on the academic job market as I’ve been since, oh, September, is that you stop thinking. You stop engaging in much else around you that’s not an academic job posting, or a certain wiki. Your loved ones suffer and your liked ones do. Your students. And but it’s also very hard to think about exactly how other people are well if not “suffering” then at least being neglected because of course you’re too busy thinking about why someone you’ve never met hasn’t called you on the phone.
II.
Sorry. – “you” and + “I”
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:: Share or discuss :: 2010-01-21 :: dave
Filed under Books
Here’s another book I want, seen in a well placed ad in the New York Review of Books. Why (and not, please, whether) we care about literary characters is a subject I’m committed enough to to want a read a whole book that finds an answer.
Would you believe it’s $60.00 through Johns Hopkins Press’s site? Sixty! Amazon drops that down to a mere $43.20.
We won’t ever care about Blakey Vermeule, no matter how brilliant her book may very well be, the way we do about, oh, John Dowell, say. And The Good Solider has surely never cost $60, not even with its adjusted-for-inflation 1915 first-edition rate. What the F’s?
It’s clear: there are very few university presses in the world whose business models don’t hinge on overcharging libraries for their products.
2 comments :: Share or discuss :: 2010-01-18 :: dave
