A ‘life-changing’ book
Two weeks ago, after my class and I read Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life, we talked about how the book affected us. I asked them to describe how they felt immediately after they finished reading the book. I tried to explain to them that after I finished reading My Happy Life, I just sat in my house at my desk and stared at the wall and felt emotions, but as I felt the emotions, I had a hard time realizing which emotions I was feeling, as if the realization that I was feeling emotions was incompatible with the actual feeling of emotions. Does that make sense? Then I stopped talking and looked at my class and giggled.
Anyhow, some of the students also added their experiences to my own, and though I can’t remember all that was exactly said, I remember that what was often described was this sense that the book left the student both feeling happy and sad (this seemed to be an exciting part of the conversation because it required us to keep in mind sadness and happiness simultaneously), that the book had made the student think about the ‘details’ and ‘little things’ of his or her life (remember the narrator’s collection of tiny objects?), that no matter how shitty you think your life is…and so on.
Meet Penelope
My friend just got a puppy.
NaNoWriMo Tips from Mark Sample
A little over a week has passed this NaNoWriMo, and though I am pretty much skeptical of the whole production, I have to say that I’m cracking up at some of the NaNoWriMo tips that Mark Sample sends out on his twitter feed. Follow him at samplereality (you’ll have to scroll through his feed to find his old ones) to get tips. Here’s a handful that I enjoyed:
#NaNoWriMo Tip: Reenergize your writing by changing your workspace. Move out of your parents’ basement.
#NaNoWriMo Tip: Rehearse for your imminent book tour by showing up drunk at a Borders and telling everyone “I’m here to sign my books.”
#NaNoWriMo Tip: Add tension by making the gender of your narrator indeterminate. This works for race too. And age. And number of nipples.
#NaNoWriMo Tip: Writing about a brilliant professor who solves 1,000-year-old mysteries? This is for you. Why does my cat puke in my shoes?
#NaNoWriMo tip: “Write about what you know” is good advice, unless you’re OJ Simpson.
#NaNoWriMo Tip: RT @wshspeare Take advantage of the rich tradition of stealing other writers’ ideas and words when you run out of your own.
#NaNoWriMo tip: Use foreshadowing to hint what’s to come. E.g., have the vampire say “I want to suck your blood” before he sucks blood.
#NaNoWriMo tip: Novelists should dress for success just like everyone else. Failing that, novelists should at least dress.
Nabokov Book Covers
Over at Design Observer, John Gall has shared this cool project of redesigned Nabokov book covers, which he created by taking photographs of specimen boxes. The boxes were assembled by a variety of designers, whom he names in the post. Have a click over.
(via @parisreview)
What is an ‘essay’?
Over at the Brevity blog, we have this:
Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore is pleased to have published what he believes to be the shortest essay ever, in the new Mississippi Review.
Of Dinty Moore’s piece, Mike Scalise sincerely asks “can someone please explain to me, in sober, clear, and intelligent terms, what makes ‘I have a tendency towards glibness’ an ‘essay’?”
In the introduction to the issue, Jane Hamilton explains in postive/negative terms:
To the right of zero, we have “essay,” “hybrid” and “lyric”—positive terms, assertions of form in the absence of form. But as the works collected here demonstrate, these terms describe forays to the left side of the number line, attempts to fill in the lacunae of memory, find the truth in untruth or half-truth, to compensate for the limitations of language and labels. In these poetic non-poems and narrative non-stories, we can see what I’ve always suspected to be true—the real action is in front of zero.
What do you think, marmot?
(TOC here)
My Favorite Kind of List
![[melissa.jpg]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_gd1T5F8bPNc/SvHfXqK4N9I/AAAAAAAAAOg/qebNh7Jn6c4/s1600/melissa.jpg)
All this blahblahblah about end of the year lists makes me hungry. So lets talk about my favorite kind of list: the grocery list. Amanda Nazario recently completed a project that compiled a bunch of grocery lists into a zine titled THE GROCERY LIST LIST. You can go to her blog post about it here and contact her if you’d like her to send you one (or if you’d like to send her your own lists). The above picture is a sample of the zine, which you can see big here.
Fourteen Hills, WTF?
Fourteen Hills, I respect you, you had a cool anthology, and I’ve sent you stuff before because I like you (and will probably send you stuff again), but couldn’t you have just pretended this particular 775-day form rejection ‘got lost in the mail’? I mean, I understand shit sometimes falls behind the mini-fridge, but two years? Good grief – next time, just take the SASE and use it for yourself. Nobody will ever know.
What’s great about this is I can’t tell who has the better sense of humor: the author who reported this rejection on Duotrope or whoever on your staff decided to write this bit of copy: ‘Fourteen Hills is a testimony to the fact that independent, innovative and experimental literature is alive and thriving.’
Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily,–but what a sight for a father’s eyes!–he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.
– from The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
Have a good Halloween.
Caketrain #7 Now Ready for Your Grabbing
Caketrain #7 is now available for order! It features work by Nora Almeida, Arlene Ang, Jonathan Ashworth, Andrew Borgstrom, Travis Brown, Michael Burkard, Tetman Callis, Emily Carr, Roxanne M. Carter, Julie Choffel, Rob Cook, Matthew Curry, Matthew Derby, Nicolle Elizabeth, Margaret Frozena, Noah Gershman, Alina Gregorian, Ariana Hamidi, Colleen Hollister, Chanice Hughes-Greenberg, Lauren Ireland, AD Jameson, Jeff T. Johnson, Michael Jay Katz, Michael Keenan, Marc Kipniss, Darby Larson, Norman Lock, Lisa Maria Martin, Jessica Newman, Alec Niedenthal, Sarah Norek, Carol Novack, R.D. Parker, Emma Ramey, Joanna Ruocco, Zachary Schomburg, Jeanne Stauffer-Merle, Eugenia Tsutsumi, J.A. Tyler, Lesley C. Weston, John Dermot Woods, Joseph Young.
I’m excited about the cover, which features artwork by Washington DC’s Matthew Curry, whom I met when I lived in Northern Virginia (his wife, Eugenia Tsutsumi, went to Mason with me; she also has a text in the issue, happily).
Here’s an interview with Curry at Diskusdisko. Here is Curry’s Flickr stream.
Really, people, this is my favorite Caketrain cover yet (and they’ve had some awesome covers in the past); I can’t wait to read the insides. Amanda and Joseph, congrats on another good looking issue.
Uncategorized / 14 Comments
October 31st, 2009 / 1:28 am
October 31st, 2009 / 1:28 am