quote-o-the-day
When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.
What does Faulkner mean? Does it mean he loved horses and put them everywhere in his work? Or maybe it means your writer and your editor should be far away, divorced, like badly divorced (is there another way?)—like not even in the same city anymore. Writer is writing, editor don’t come around with sugar cubes, don’t come around at all, until later, when the draft is in the stable, then bust out the brush, mane conditioner, and oats. Like maybe you should wait an hour, a day, or maybe even just a dinner before you go and look at a fresh draft…Or, maybe that is not what is meant at all. Maybe Faulkner is saying the working writer doesn’t need sugar, ever. Write to write. Maybe most working writers should be like Woody Allen, a man who has never seen–outside of the editing room–any of his own films. Let’s forget the sugar. When you are “running good” don’t fuck with it, period. Don’t make coffee, don’t surf the net. Don’t even feel excited (a form of sugar). Just run. Run, run, run, until it’s not so good. Maybe?
Strangely enough, Mr. Joyce has almost universally been denied the right to do on a larger scale what any Yankee foreman employing foreign laborers does habitually on a smaller scale, namely, to work out a more elastic and a richer vocabulary which will serve purposes unserved by schoolroom English… Those who cannot transcend Aristotle need make no attempt to read this fascinating epic. The ideas do not march single file, nor at a uniform speed.
too cool for tuesday but hell…
Eerie, refreshing. Odd. Watch this:
What did you think?
Watch it it again with Gus and the MCP (Medicine Cabinet People, as you know).
And?
Control Yourselves: An Adult Sequel to Sweet Valley High Looms on the Horizon
When I was a kid, I read the Sweet Valley High books. I read them all. I may still read them from time to time as an adult but will not confirm this publicly. I loved Elizabeth and Jessica, those adorable blonde twins, those charming California girls. They were twins! But different! I loved Todd, Elizabeth’s serious boyfriend. He played basketball. Jessica was a bit of a loose girl. She made out with more than one guy in high school. I empathized with homely Enid and misunderstood Lila. These people were my secret friends once I had exhausted the charms of Little House on the Prairie. I loved how chaste the books were and how satisfying each story felt. When the Super Editions were released, I was there, I was invested, thrilled to have twice the Sweet Valley goodness in one book.
Today, I squealed like a ten year old because there’s going to be a sequel, and now they are adults, Elizabeth and Jessica. I heartell of a rift. Elizabeth is in New York. Where is Jessica? Why is there a rift between them? I don’t know, but not nearly soon enough, we will have answers. Don’t you dare tell me dreams don’t come true.
Invisibility, you see
A mime is a tragic figure, as they are contained inside a non-existent box, the projection of a world defined by its constraint. Their vocation and existential desperation is to communicate that which is not there. A happy mime is like a happy clown: a satire of itself, as anyone with a heart would be devastated to be locked inside themselves. One’s greatest critic are their organs, conspiring to spaz out any day. Comedy gets a smile and drama gets one salty tear drop because life is 70% sea water and that is some salty shit. Saline the sea of love. Ok I’ll stop.
turning peppers occasionally 4
1. Lucy Corin Web Log:
14. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pMS5IMOxCA
Warhol on the Internet (imagine)
567. What is the contagious psoriasis to write shitty poetry? I did it. Hell, some people make a fine time/dime doing it. (I’m going to hell for linking to that kid, but add to tally, that one Tuesday, etc.) Is it developmental, in our DNA (99% of which we share with mice–this explains the dreadful sonnet [titled “Our Chance has Run”] about an ex-lover/farmer’s wife, a shooting star, and a sad owl I found in the cheese)? Maybe it’s a necessary process. The next step is to seek outlets for shitty poetry, explaining scam operations, blogs, script tattoos, and moms. You did it, right? Wrote shitty poems. Do tell.
4. What’s the glow day and time to write? I’m going obvious: Sunday, early morning, while the sky is low/blue, the caffeine burning off the hangover fumes. The brain hops. No?
“We don’t publish poets; we publish poems.”
Jane Ciabattari: Women who write in the 21st century have wider opportunities than in the past. (At one point women wrote under male pseudonyms or used initials to disguise who they were. At one point literary magazines were filled with stories by and about men and no batted an eye) But we are not in a post-feminist world. If anything, there is a bit of a backlash against the “favored” aspects of affirmative action (Which is too bad, because the point was to restore equity, not swing back). Gender roles, if anything, have shifted back to the more traditional.
I suspect one reason the major raves for the new Jonathan Franzen novel rankle some women writers is that Franzen is writing a relatively traditional nineteenth-century domestic novel, a form perfected by women over the past century, and the response he is getting seems out of proportion.
Sometimes I think on some levels it boils down to empathy. Women in this culture have tended to be raised with a dual perspective, seeing both male and female points of view, and are educated to read and give critical responses to literature by men with primarily male protagonists (we all read Moby-Dick, right? and the major war novels) as well as books by and about women. Most men in this culture are not raised to have this gift for empathetic flexibility, nor offered the idea that books by and about women are of equal intellectual weight.
What we need, I think, is to open the doors of imagination wide rather than favor a few authors who write about a narrow economic niche. I’ve been excited over the past year to read the work of newcomer Tiphanie Yanique, short story master Yiyun Li, the amazing Lily Hoang, who breaks the mold and puts it back together again, Jennifer Egan, who is pushing the limits of fiction in new ways with each book, and I consider them on par with the male writers whose work seems fresh and exciting to me this year.
“On Gender and Publishing”: A Panel Moderated by Carmen Giménez Smith
Department of Regret, Kurt Vonnegut Edition
Silkscreen collaborations between Kurt Vonnegut and Joe Petro III
A few years before Kurt Vonnegut died, I paid a visit to the studio of Joe Petro III of Lexington, Kentucky. Petro was Vonnegut’s late-life collaborator on several series of silkscreened art based upon Vonnegut’s drawings, some of which were new, and some of which were elaborations upon the drawings he had incorporated into middle-period-and-later books such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Hocus Pocus.
Petro generously offered me a tour of his studio, where, in addition to his work with Vonnegut, he had completed work for the likes of Ralph Steadman and Greenpeace. The Greenpeace work had caused him some problems, so he was a little nervous about people knowing where he lived. Nonetheless, he wanted to do his part to champion the work that had become the passion of Vonnegut’s late life, so he consented to an interview, and then he consented to put me in touch with Vonnegut, who had indicated that he, too, was willing to yammer with a nobody such as I was, so long as that yammering was about drawings and silkscreenings. READ MORE >
The movie about the murderous trolley from the future.
Above image from the enticing visual/literary production blog of Looper, a movie forthcoming from Rian Johnson (director of Brick, The Brothers Bloom, etc.) What I know about the movie so far: time travel & corporate sponsored murder & an excellent cast. Favorite time travel, in fiction or film?
Mark Leidner goes vocal in an excellent episode of Apostrophe Cast. I think he is locating a presence in the warped examination & worshipping of cinema in his words. Pretty and strong.
The Trolley Problem. Heard of it? Push the fat man, touch the switch, pivot the disc, kill the people. I think gestures and the power of certain images have more to do with the decision than ethics.
Douglas Coupland lays out 45 reasons to stay inside, or go outside, or move. If you have best guesses for the next 10 years, please posit them here.
A to Z of Stupid Feelings About Anybody
Are you hungry. Did you come because you are hungry. When you eat do you eat more than you had planned to eat and then feel so full you cannot as well move or do you limit yourself to the eating of the thing that might best keep your body toward a vision of something people look toward and do not not see in jest.
Books come in the mail. I stack them up, some on the sofa arms, some on the floor around my bed. At night in the dark trying to walk or piss I slip on them sometimes and often have to move books to make room on my desk to sit my laptop down. I’ve been thinking about reordering my books in the order that I read them. I have been keeping a list for ten years. I’ve yet to make the switch because I am afraid of disrupting the order of the stacks I’ve already put together, which is based on associations such as press, idea, time, generation, like-mindedness, or something else. I mostly know where everything is.
Can you please talk to yourself more. A public forum doesn’t demand the idea of losing steam. It doesn’t mean you are doing a service to people who are mostly wholly worthy of doing service to, but it means there is somewhere doing something and sometimes trying to eat. A girl just sat down next to me in the coffee shop and pulled her shirt down over her pants in such a way. Her pants are too long at her feet. She doesn’t seem to be trying.
Do you think it’s wrong to try. Do you think it’s wrong to say too many good things. Is there so little out here that it’s surprising that the things that get lit to are the things someone would want to talk about. I’m sure there are articles where someone is telling everybody how there are so many books coming out each year. People are worried about machines. Machines are getting older too.