http://www.christopherhiggs.org/
Christopher Higgs recommends Tierra Whack's WHACK WORLD, Otomo Yoshihide's ANODE, Marlon James's BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF, and a lunch of cucumber, tomato, red onion, feta, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
As Ryan pointed out recently, the school year is now officially underway. In recognition, I thought I’d share with you my first set of notes.
As some of you know, I always take notes while I’m reading and when I’m finished with a text I like to sit down and free-write my initial ideas. I’ve shared my notes with Blake (after reading Ever), with Shane (after reading Light Boxes), and a few other people. They are by no means conclusive or fancy or anything. They just sort of serve to help me puzzle things out, and in this case help prepare me for class discussion.
Anyway, one of my first assignments (in my “Theorizing Modernism” class) was to read Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties.
In case you’re unfamiliar with it, here’s a crib from the back cover:
Travesties was born out of Stoppard’s noting that in 1917 three of the twentiieth centruy’s most crucial revolutionararies – James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and V.I. Lenin – were all living in Zurich.
From there hilarity ensues.
If you’re interested, you can see my notes after the break…
The other day I found this website that offers free downloads of audio books. Not an amazing catalog, but there’s some Nietzsche and a little Jane Austen.
I thought some folks might be interested, so I was going to post this as a little snippet post. But then, right before I pressed the publish button, I got to thinking about audio books.
How many people listen to audio books? How come indie publishers don’t do audio books? In our iPod frenzied times, I’d think there would be a huge market for that sort of thing – and it couldn’t be all too difficult or expensive to do, could it?
I mean, wouldn’t it be cool if I could go to PGP, pay a few bucks, and download a copy of A Jello Horse read by the author?
Or — even better/kookier, what if indie publishers asked authors to do author commentary, like director commentary on dvds? The author could walk through the book and talk about each section or something.
I don’t know. I’m just thinking with my fingers here.
This morning, I came across Matthew Cheney’s blog The Mumpsimus, wherein I got absorbed by this post, in which he addresses a recent statement by Tin House re: their position on “genre fiction.”
A reader wrote Tin House with this question:
I have read several issues of Tin House, including the most recent. Two vegetarians go on a hunting trip . . . enough said. I feel that I have several pieces that would fit the magazine, however, I am struggling with just one thing. This question is geared not only toward the magazine but the writing workshop as well. Do you accept genre fiction? I was also wondering how I might go about determining whether or not my piece fits into a specific genre and what general fiction is. Thank you in advance.
—Confused in LA
A writer for Tin House responded thusly.
I think Cheney’s criticism of the response raises many interesting questions. Why, for instance, in this day & age, are so many literary-types still so anti-genre, so myopic, so essentialist?
Here’s one example: Tin House on “what is genre fiction”:
My personal definition goes something like this: fiction that almost purposefully avoids the literary, in hopes of keeping the reader (or the writer, for that matter) from having to “work” too hard.
Seriously?
No, really.
Seriously?
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, werewolves, transsexuals, and Frankenstein monsters, step right up and see curiosities and monstrosities, wonders and horrors like you’ve never seen before! See the terror of the Antipodes, the ferocious platypus! Behold the dark, twisted longings of the Satanic progeny of the magus Joseph Smith! For the first time anywhere see the elusive metaphor in captivity! And see the most rare and shy of entities, here for your amusement is the good life! Step right up and break through the barriers set up to protect the tender juicy white meat of your fragile mind, step right up and watch as we BUST DOWN THE DOOR AND EAT ALL THE CHICKENS!
Cate Marvin & Erin Belieu are starting a movement for a conference based solely on women’s writing, with an emphasis on contemporary women’s writing.
Dear Friends,
A few days ago, Cate Marvin sent out an open letter to a group of women writers detailing her concerns about certain aspects of the AWP conference and asking if other women felt the same way. She then suggested the brilliant notion of a women’s writing conference and wondered who would be interested in such a thing. The letter has since gone out to hundreds, has been posted in many places, and the response has been absolutely tremendous. This leads us to believe that our moment is definitely NOW (pun intended).
Check out the rest of the letter, along with Marvin’s original letter, by visiting their Facebook group — which already has over 3,000 members (including me) — and while you’re there you should consider joining.
Princeton University Press recently released an interesting-looking book called An Intellectual History of Cannibalism by Catalin Avramescu Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth.
“An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is the first book to systematically examine the role of the cannibal in the arguments of philosophers, from the classical period to modern disputes about such wide-ranging issues as vegetarianism and the right to private property.”
Here’s a review by Jenny Diski at London Review of Books.
To celebrate their first year of publishing, I sent some questions to Adam Peterson and Dave Madden, the masterminds behind The Cupboard (a quarterly pamphlet of creative prose), and they were game to retort.
[interview after the jump]
An English sentence can expand and expand and it can do it with conjunctions (or clauses) — also qualifiers like adjectives and adverbs — but a greatly expanded English sentence is not so different from an English sentence that hasn’t been greatly expanded.
An Interview with Andy Devine
by
Josh Maday
(in the newest installment of elimae)
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
There aren’t a ton of courses available yet, but there are a couple of literature courses that I thought I’d point out to everybody.
Although I’ve yet to listen to any of Hammer’s lectures on modern poetry, I’ve listened to the majority of Hungerford’s lectures on 20th century literature and found them to be engaging and worthwhile:
Modern Poetry with Professor Langdon Hammer
About the Course:
This course covers the body of modern poetry, its characteristic techniques, concerns, and major practitioners. The authors discussed range from Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, to Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with additional lectures on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance.
The American Novel Since 1945 with Professor Amy Hungerford
About the Course:
In “The American Novel Since 1945” students will study a wide range of works from 1945 to the present. The course traces the formal and thematic developments of the novel in this period, focusing on the relationship between writers and readers, the conditions of publishing, innovations in the novel’s form, fiction’s engagement with history, and the changing place of literature in American culture. The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones. The course concludes with a contemporary novel chosen by the students in the class.