Go Ahead: It is Friday

Man don’t drink none ain’t natural.

The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits.

It makes me feel like I have four legs instead of two.

Like my lemonade funny.

Ridiculed, beaten, thrown into a crowd.

(ravn)

Beer has a nice bitter taste after ice cream. Next to music, beer is the best.

The theme is the theme of humiliation.

Are you a hunchback or an old cripple? Whiskey on the house!

They are the we of me.

So why add orange juice?

Listen: if you want to steal the dessert spoon just steal the dessert spoon.

Are you a lawyer, agent, or friend?

Life is good. But there are problems.

Author Spotlight & Random / 1 Comment
January 28th, 2011 / 4:21 pm
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Mega congratulations to Amelia Gray on selling her third book, tentatively titled THREATS, to FSG! What you know about dat????????? Screwed up clique on the rise.

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There Are Always Things On My Mind

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One of the things I love most when ordering a book from Amazon.com or a subscription from one of the well-established literary magazines is I know I can trust I will receive what I ordered in a reasonable amount of time. I know I am not just throwing my money into the wind and hoping for the best. Often times, however, when I order books and magazines from smaller outfits, it feels like a real crapshoot. Maybe I will receive what I ordered, maybe I won’t. Maybe what I ordered will arrive during the timeframe promised, maybe it won’t. More often than not, it feels like I have to track down small press books and magazines I’ve ordered and if I forget I’ve ordered something, I’ve essentially donated that money with nothing but, perhaps, good karma, to show for it. I’ve contributed to several Kickstarter projects and only received what was promised by two. I don’t really care but still, if you say you’re going to do something, you should do it otherwise you really undermine yourself and lose potential customers.

At times, I feel like we eschew professionalism. We don’t use contracts. We don’t stick to timelines. We don’t send out review copies in advance. Sometimes, I think we don’t bother trying to do what the bigger presses our doing because we think we can’t. Word Riot has proven that wrong. Paula Bomer’s book, for example, was reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly and had a mention in O Magazine. We don’t communicate effectively. We don’t update our websites or we delete our archives without notifying our authors. I’m generalizing here, but these things happen all the time and it can be frustrating, as a consumer, as a writer, as an editor.

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Random / 28 Comments
January 28th, 2011 / 2:31 pm

“He heard a bird flush / and he turned and pulled the trigger / and saw his friend get wounded.” — George W. Bush

The Long Now Foundation does these talks now and again in San Francisco and I always tell myself I’m going to go but I never go. The talks are long, sort of. And so now. This talk I’m talking up happened in October. Northeast of me now it did and I am looking Northwest. My ear.

It’s about how language shapes our thoughts and sort of controls our brains. A lot of it is about bilingualism and it makes me think on all sorts of things re: Joyce and Pessoa, i.e. voices, etc. Joyce for example said he was capturing “the great talkers” in Ulysses, was diagnosed schizophrenic by Jung. Pessoa obviously had some kind of disorder. Anyways, there’s a movement right now in cognitive science I guess, away from a lot of Chomsky’s linguistics. And this gal be blowing the conk shell like one of them party whistles.

Lera Boroditsky is awesome. Towards the end of the video she talks up a lot of stuff that I’ve been thinking on a lot, especially internal monologue, which she’s going to figure out for me so I can do other things instead, which is awesome. She is awesome. I am 100% nerd crush.

I want to hear way more.

Random / 8 Comments
January 28th, 2011 / 1:45 pm

Kem Nunn’s Surf Noir Novels

It’s the middle of winter. Everything’s dormant or dead. It’s raining a lot up here in Oregon, as it always does for half the year. I was walking around in my heavy winter coat, grey clouds overhead, and got to thiking about the curative warmth of sunshine, and the golden sexuality of beaches, which left me nostalgic for summer, which got me thinking about the way Nunn’s surf novels had carried me through a similarly dark Northwest winter in 2005, and about how it was pretty tragic how few people seemed to know about Nunn’s books, which, even carrying the bordering-on-corny “surf novel” tag, are dark and deeply engrossing.

Kem Nunn (short for Kemp) grew up in the Angelean interior town of Pomona, a third-generation Californian. After piddling away his 20s, Nunn studied writing at UC Irvine and in 1984 published Tapping the Source. Centered on a naive teenager swept up in one surf crew’s Mafia-ish, pornographic-druggie-biker underbelly, Tapping the Source not only spawned the term “surf noir” for its dark themes and gripping narrative style, but it single-handedly saved what was previously a joke genre. With surf-romance schlock like James Houston’s A Native Son of the Golden West and patronizingly formulaic nonfiction like Caught Inside, In Search of Captain Zero, and, of course, Gidget, surf books have always occupied the lowest rung of commercial publishing, somewhere between niche market how-to guides and pure pulp. As the product of a quieter, once rural Southern Cal, Kem saw surfing as a metaphor “for what we had here and what we have lost.”

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Author Spotlight / 10 Comments
January 28th, 2011 / 12:32 pm

Mendelsund on Kafka

More great covers and Peter’s thoughts on the redesign.

Behind the Scenes / 5 Comments
January 28th, 2011 / 3:37 am

Speaking of Anne Carson,

which we were doing at some point in the last 10 or so posts, there’s a prose poem of hers from Plainwater that makes me want to die.

On Waterproofing

Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sister, Ottla, Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not Jewish. When the Nuremburg Laws were introduced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He at first refused. She spoke about sleep shapes and property and their two daughters and a rational approach. She did not mention, because she did not yet know the word, Auschwitz, where she would die in October 1943. After putting the apartment in order she packed a rucksack and was given a good shoeshine by Josef David. He applied a coat of grease. Now they are waterproof, he said.

Excerpts & Random / 10 Comments
January 27th, 2011 / 8:31 pm

Joan Crawford Says No Rhetorical Questions

All too often, when a writer wants to express some kind of doubt or curiosity or insecurity in their characters, they will invoke a plaintive rhetorical question like, “Ella loved her husband, didn’t she?” or “What was he thinking?” or “This wasn’t really her life, was it?” or “Did that really happen?” These  interrogatory  moments are a facile way of introducing tension, of letting the audience know an internal debate is taking place, of pandering in really annoying ways, of stating the blatantly obvious. Are rhetorical questions necessary though? I think not. They are lazy writing, using the questions to drive the narrative forward when that same forward motion could be achieved by just telling the damn story and showing that doubt or insecurity in other ways.  I have been seeing a rash of rhetorical questions lately. I now often cringe. I am even more troubled when a story begins or ends with a rhetorical question. In these instances, I am left with the impression that the writer is lacking confidence or that the writer is unsure of how to begin or where to end their story. Every one has a different set of rules for writing but I have to insist that two of those unbreakable rules must be: 1) do not use rhetorical questions unless absolutely necessary and 2) never begin or end your story with a question. It’s your writing. You (should) know the answers. Am I the only one who is driven crazy by rhetorical questions?

Wait. See what I just did there?

Craft Notes / 19 Comments
January 27th, 2011 / 8:05 pm

At work today, I was looking at the wear patterns on my keyboard and I realized that when I type, I strike the space bar with my right thumb. I hardly ever use my left thumb.

Random / 24 Comments
January 27th, 2011 / 5:33 pm
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This episode of Radiolab is about the voices in your head.

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