A D Jameson

http://adjameson.com

A D Jameson is the author of three books: the story collection Amazing Adult Fantasy (Mutable Sound, 2011), the novel Giant Slugs (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011), and the inspirational volume 99 Things to Do When You Have the Time (Compendium, 2013). His fiction's appeared in Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Unstuck, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Birkensnake, PANK, and elsewhere. Since 2011, he's been a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Besides HTMLGiant, he also contributes to Big Other and PressPlay. He's currently writing a book on geek cinema.

Writing Game #1: “25, Strange as You Can”

I like making up writing games.

Let’s start with a simple one: Write the strangest, grammatically correct 25-word-long sentence that you can.

If you want an additional challenge or jumping-off point, you can specify that one or more words must be included.

Using this random word generator, I came up with the word “abbeys.” So let’s try writing a few strange 25-word-long sentences with that word:

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Craft Notes / 13 Comments
November 7th, 2012 / 11:43 am

In defense of romance novels

Piggybacking on Mike’s earlier post, I have long found it curious that the romance novel is the one genre no one wants to defend. (See, for instance, this comment.) But time was, romance was the genre.

It seems to me that the contemporary romance novel—of the paperback bodice ripper variety (see right)—arrived on our shores of our literary imagination in no small part due to writers like D. H. Lawrence. And what could be more literary than Lawrence? I myself can conceive of no formal reason why a romance novel can’t be art. Indeed, I suspect that someone out there is already writing great ones. (Hell, isn’t Lolita a romance novel?)

Part of what I love about this Chicago Reader review of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is its understanding of how Stephanie Meyers’s books and the resulting films—regardless of their quality (I haven’t read or seen them yet, though I intend to)—do partake of a larger literary tradition:

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Craft Notes & Film / 72 Comments
October 31st, 2012 / 8:01 am

On the inevitability of more Star Wars films

film year production budget worldwide gross
Star Wars 1977 $11 million $775,398,007
The Empire Strikes Back 1980 $18 million $538,375,067
Return of the Jedi 1983 $32.5 million $475,106,177
The Phantom Menace 1999 $115 million $1,027,044,677
Attack of the Clones 2002 $115 million $649,398,328
Revenge of the Sith 2005 #113 million $848,754,768
$404.5 million $4,314,077,024

Net profit: 3.9 billion dollars.

And that’s just ticket sales.

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Film / 19 Comments
October 30th, 2012 / 9:35 pm

Borges and Ice

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one who skates at the Place de la Concorde on blocks of ice. I walk through the streets of the 8th Arrondissement, and stop for a moment, perhaps touristically now, to look at a book of old photographs; I know of Borges from the posters for sale at German websites. I like the Champs-Élysées, its cafes and guillotines and obelisks; he shares these preferences, but swishes by, vainly, a total showoff. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship, as in the Reign of Terror; I live, I escape the fate of Marie Antoinette and Danton and Robespierre, so that Borges may contrive his skating, and this skating justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid figure eights, but those maneuvers cannot save me, even if he makes the Olympic team. Perhaps his perfect 10 form belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to whomever has coached him, or posed him for what upon careful review is clearly a posed photograph. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, while he will end up for sale online, or hung up in a physics classroom in a high school in Philadelphia. Little by little, thus, by means of confusion, I am becoming him, lassoing cars, and scooting along behind them, much like in Back to the Future, a film I will never see, as I will go blind—not to mention, die roughly one year after its theatrical release, which means that one can assume I never saw it, as I had by that time moved to Switzerland to die from liver cancer, and the IMDb doesn’t record a Swiss theatrical release (though Argentina got it right after Christmas, the bastards). (I did see Citizen Kane, and King Kong, for what it’s worth, and I reviewed them.)

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Author News / 9 Comments
October 27th, 2012 / 12:20 am

Is this Borges? Meaning Jorge Luis Borges?

My pal Elf came across this picture, in poster form, at the school where he works. (Here is is for sale online.)

Anyone know the story behind it? Did JLB have something to do with it, or does it refer to some other Borges?

(I found this thread debating it, but it’s hardly conclusive.)

Massive People / 26 Comments
October 25th, 2012 / 10:39 am

The Chronicles of Mitt

If you haven’t been reading the ongoing Chronicles of Mitt at Daily Kos, you’ve really been missing out:

I no longer feel confident that I want to be president. Why was I running again? There was the tax cut, but surely it would have cost less money for my fellow wealth units and I to simply purchase sufficient lobbyists to obtain it. Now in order to satisfy critics I have had to claim that my singular goal, a very large tax cut, would not actually cut taxes. That is, in all of this, the one policy alteration that I cannot abide. I do not care about the other things—the nonsense about “ObamaCare,” the being angry with China, and the other things are all merely strategic calculations, but the very large tax cut for myself was the one policy out of all of them that I had designed myself, and that I felt strongly about. I spent many an evening explaining to Ann how I would carefully reapportion the money from our very large tax cut into each of our various accounts. To disown it feels like I have disowned a child. A particularly good and uproarious child, like Tagg, not one of the others.

The archive’s here.

Massive People / 2 Comments
October 24th, 2012 / 10:19 am

Stanley Kubrick’s first feature film, “Fear and Desire” (1953), comes out today on Blu-Ray

Paul Mazursky in “Fear and Desire.”

What the title says. This is the first time Fear and Desire has been available on DVD.

The film was written by Howard Sackler, who later won the Tony and Pulitzer (in 1969) for his play The Great White Hope. And it stars Paul Mazursky, whom of course we all know from inventing hipster culture.

I saw it once on VHS (a terrible bootlegged copy) back in the late 1990s. I’ll be curious to revisit it. What I remember most of all is the strength of Kubrick’s cinematography (unsurprising, given his background as a photographer).

(It should be noted that Kubrick disowned the film, going so far as to block its release during his lifetime.)

Film / 4 Comments
October 23rd, 2012 / 9:01 am
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R.I.P. George McGovern.

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Holy shit, Kōji Wakamatsu died

He got hit by a taxi three days ago. Cripes.

Wakamatsu started directing in the early 1960s, primarily making highly artistic and complex exploitation films. His 1969 feature Go, Go Second Time Virgin has long been a favorite of mine:

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Film / 7 Comments
October 20th, 2012 / 5:25 pm
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Here, as part of a larger feature on “Book Blogs.” (The review is by Matthew Vollmer.)

(To read the whole thing, you need Project Muse access, but even without it you can read some of the thing.)

(The feature was edited by Brian Carr, and includes reviews of NewPages and The Rumpus and The Millions and Big Other and The Nervous Breakdown and Bookslut and The Barking and MobyLives. Also, one of those reviews is by Mike Meginnis, and one is by Roxane Gay.)

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