A Million Little Catfish Pieces, or, the Question of Truth

Damn near a month ago, Blake saw Catfish and posted about it here. Well, Catfish finally came to my quaint Canadian town, and I saw it last night. It was good. It was scary.

But what strikes me about this film is the obsession (re)viewers have with whether or not it is true. And sure, I’m no different. After I saw the documentary, I went home and immediately plugged into Google to find an answer.

What is our obsession with authenticity? Why do we “have to know” if something is real or not? Of course, not so long ago, there was a big “to do” about James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, if only because he called some real that was not real. Why does it matter though?

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Film / 12 Comments
October 22nd, 2010 / 11:18 am

Do Mechanics Matter? Get Off My Lawn!

In my writing classes I often tell my students that I’m teaching writing, not grammar, that there’s a difference between the two. I talk about how I’m more interested in how they express themselves and demonstrate critical thinking than I am in grammatically perfect prose. I also tell students, however, that grammar does matter—to be well versed in the mechanics of writing can only strengthen their work and, where applicable, their argument.

In creative writing, the same thing is generally true. I can forgive unpolished prose if I’m reading an amazing story or poem. At  the same time, I’ve seen a rash of work lately where writers have clearly not taken the time to read their own work. I’ve seen missing words and characters whose names have changed mid story, sometimes more than once. The quality of writing is just terrible at times, so terrible that I cannot focus on whether or not the story, creatively, is something I am interested in. It’s quite difficult to take a writer seriously if you cannot really read their writing.

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Craft Notes / 43 Comments
October 22nd, 2010 / 11:00 am

Reviews

Thoughts on 98.6 by Ronald Sukenick (FC2, 1975)

pg. 26

My fellow language junkies, this book should interest you:

To celebrate the near completion of their house Ron makes up a song. The song he makes up on this occasion is part of his plot to destroy the English language. The song goes like this.

Bjorsqi poppamomma
Wocky wocky
Plastic jam
Iron blintzes
Fill the inches
Sooky buby nishtgedeit

(pg. 74-75)

To map the boundaries of 98.6 is to acknowledge the absence of start and finish, the absence of unification, cohesion; to map the boundaries of 98.6 is to recognize recurrent motifs: community, mythology, language, communication, sex, obsession, religion, history, destruction, evil, jealousy, ownership, nature, grief, sadness, loneliness, desire. The way these concepts manifest in the material world is at the heart of 98.6.

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6 Comments
October 22nd, 2010 / 10:04 am

Timothy Buwalda’s Hyperrealist Smashups

Dislocation, Timothy Buwalda

More paintings, installations, and nightmares here.

Random / Comments Off on Timothy Buwalda’s Hyperrealist Smashups
October 22nd, 2010 / 7:44 am

The drive for originality is also a big impediment to writing. On the one hand, we suffer from a sort of transcendental illusion. We (or I) think to ourselves that if we have an idea it can’t possibly be original precisely because the idea is familiar to us. It is not new to us. But writing is not for us, but for others, whether those others be our own future selves or the self we are becoming in the act of writing (writing has the magical power to remake you) or for the others who might read our scratchings on bit of napkins. On the other hand, originality cannot be anticipated. If originality could be anticipated it wouldn’t be originality. Rather, originality follows the logic of Lacan’s tuche or chance encounter. Originality is something that occasionally takes place, but if it does take place it can only be known as having had taken place, it can never be experienced in the moment. We only ever know that originality has taken place retroactively. As a consequence, it’s important to surrender the desire to anticipate originality so as to clear a space in which the event or chance occurrence of originality might take place.

Levi Bryant on writing.

Random / 14 Comments
October 22nd, 2010 / 12:07 am

Ha-ha

Before the advent of mechanical lawnmowers a commonly-used way to keep grass trimmed was to allow livestock, usually sheep, to graze; a ha-ha allowed them to trim the grass of large estates while keeping them out of view from the house.

The ha-ha is a feature in the landscape gardens laid out by Charles Bridgeman, the originator of the ha-ha, according to Horace Walpole (Walpole 1780), and by William Kent and was an essential component of the “swept” views of Capability Brown.

The contiguous ground of the park without the sunk fence was to be harmonized with the lawn within; and the garden in its turn was to be set free from its prim regularity, that it might assort with the wilder country without.

Walpole surmised that the name is derived from the response of ordinary folk on encountering them and that they were, “…then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Has! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk.”

An unusually long example is the ha-ha separating the Royal Artillery Barrack Field from Woolwich Common in southeast London. This deep ha-ha was installed around 1774 to prevent sheep and cattle, grazing on Woolwich Common as a stopover on their journey to the London meat markets, from wandering onto the Royal Artillery gunnery range.

Ha-has were also used at Victorian-Era lunatic asylums such as Yarra Bend Asylum and Kew Lunatic Asylum in Australia. From the inside, the walls presented a tall face to patients, preventing them from escaping, while from outside the walls looked low so as not to suggest imprisonment.

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Excerpts & Random / 6 Comments
October 21st, 2010 / 10:01 pm

Another Random List of Things

1. UVA issues its audit of VQR: No bullying on record. Conversely there’s also this piece of reporting. Hopefully VQR will resume publishing soon.

2. Elaine Castillo at Everyday Genius.

3. Luke Perry is willing to take a picture.

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Random / 12 Comments
October 21st, 2010 / 4:55 pm

Comment: Easy there Bernhard, it’s as easy as ‘Enter’ then ‘Tab’…

Thus far, Justin RM has garnered 2 “people liked” for his quick response to Kyle Minor’s admittingly Bernhard-esque sans ¶ break post. Minor has an MFA in Literature, and obviously knows how to indent; he was simply employing a denseness in aid of the compulsive quality of the post, a rhetorical compulsion that operates as sentiment/endearment towards the book under review. Justin’s comment is witty, but does things which bother me: 1) he name drops a non-mainstream esteemed author to establish himself as one of the initiated, 2) he uses “easy there,” a phrase commonly used at/with/for a horse, dog, or some unconstrained wild animal, 3) he ends with the ever ominous ellipses, as if he could go on, but won’t, because, well, he’s not an impulsive uncontrollable hog, unlike Minor; and finally, 4) he uses “easy” twice, splitting the effect of that word in half, with no ear for alliteration.

Justin’s comment pairs well with gorgonzola on wonder bread, for one wonders if it’s the cheese, or if Justin just removed his shoes.

Random / 29 Comments
October 21st, 2010 / 4:24 pm

Pimp C on Writing

“I got too much cake, plus bitch I’m on parole, plus bitch I pimp dis microphone my mouthpiece is too cold to be stuntin bout some small change, bitch do ya see dis chain, cant ya see I got ya life in my pinky ring?”

“My Stepfather comes to me one day and he say “You know the problem with that rap shit? The problem with that shit is that it’s noise.” So I got defensive, because that’s what we do. “What you mean it’s noise?” He say “Naw… listen to what I’m telling you boy, that shit is noise, ain’t no music in that shit. You put some music in that shit and you might be able to get paid.””

“I never got no training ‘til I went to school. I was playing by ear. I had a drum set and I had the organ and I used to bang out. I learned early on that the white keys was, in my opinion, the “happy” keys and the black keys was the “sad keys.” That’s what I called them. Later on I would describe the black keys as the more funky keys than the white ones. I like minor notes, I like playing in that register, I enjoy the black keys. [But] I feared music at that time so I would stay away from the black keys ‘cause they were sad to me.”

“We didn’t consciously shape a certain sound. When I took a handclap out of my 808 and made it into the snare drum and played the hi-hat double time for the first time and shaped the sound that all these motherfuckers is calling all these different names; crunk an all this other shit, I wasn’t settin out to make no statement. I was trying to make a good record for Master P that day, when I made “Break ‘em off Something.” That’s all we ever set out to do is the best we could do that date and be a little bit better than we was the day before. I figured out a long time ago I couldn’t talk like New York, so I stopped trying to do it and I stopped trying to rap like them. This not an act—this is how I towk. This how we talk down here, some of us got a little deeper accent then others but this how we towk, so I said fuck it we gonna talk like this on a record. We sound different, my voice was high-pitched, I was different than the rest, you know, fuck it.”

“You magazine muthafuckas need to have more responsibility for what you write and put on your goddamn covers. I couldn’t get on a Source cover ’til I went to prison. I had to go to prison to get on the cover of yo funky-ass magazine?”

“I tell the truth even when I lie. I’ll pay a mothafucka to try me, bitch.”

“We didn’t have sense enough to know that they had people called producers that actually make the music, so we made our own music because we didn’t know no better.. Shit we thought everybody made their own beats, ya dig?”

“Every year for Christmas I’d get another piece of equipment – a drum machine, a four track here, a keyboard there.”

“Our thing is this, if it ain’t ready we don’t put it out, we put it on the side and come back to it. Some songs come together real fast, in one or two nights. Some songs take two years. Some take six years. It depends on the song and what’s going on.”

“All y’all niggas talking about selling dope? If y’all niggas was some d-boys, guess what, man? I don’t believe you niggas no more cause I’m seeing you niggas in button up shirts getting cute and pretty trying to look sexy. Nigga, fuck you. Nigga, and I ain’t gotta say your name. Play with me and I’ll expose the niggas that was wearing backpacks with their pant leg rolled up back then in Atlanta when me and Big Meech used to be off in the club kickin’ it buying each other champagne.”

“You aint a gangsta because you platinum or you drive a coupe, truth of the matter you’s a high dollar prostitute. You aint from ATL, you from Macon.”

“What causes a motherfucker to just straight up be a hater on these streets? What causes a motherfucker that you went to school with your whole life to want to shoot you and rob you? Jealous, envy, greed, wicked men, deceitful hearts, females with penises. Bitch ass niggas is what causes this shit.”

“You remember the pictures of Eric B & Rakim? Them niggas was cool motherfuckers. You had to be to get on a record. Just to touch the microphone you had to be a cold motherfucker. Now a person say “rapper” they think of a fugazi motherfucker, a fraud. A motherfucker that lies and talks about shit he ain’t never done. We done let so many fake motherfuckers come into this game and have embraced so much fraud shit and have gave awards and put crowns on so many pussy motherfuckers that to be a rapper now it ain’t even the thing to be. A rapper ain’t no upstanding citizen, a nigga gotta check your credibility.”

“The only nigga I see [in Houston] goin’ to the mall by himself is Slim Thug. Other niggas, when I see ’em, they got bodyguards around ’em. How you gonna be scared of the neighborhood you supposed to be reppin’? All them [Houston rappers] that think they stars, guess what, bitch? Ain’t no stars down here. Only stars is in the muthafuckin’ sky!”

“I want to use my influence to bring some positive things to this game. We’ve done enough tearing down on our own, let’s bring something positive to this shit. Let’s get back to the music instead of all the bickering and arguing about where a motherfucker is from. Just represent your hood to the fullest and everything gonna be alright.”

“See, real niggas don’t swap it out.”

Craft Notes / 11 Comments
October 21st, 2010 / 12:23 pm

A Conversation with Mel Bosworth

Mel Bosworth is the author of Freight (coming 2011 from Folded Word), and When the Cats Razzed the Chickens (Folded Word, 2009). His most recently published book is Grease Stains, Kismet and Maternal Wisdom (Aqueous Books/Brown Paper Press). He lives, breathes, writes, and works in western Massachusetts. Visit him at http://eddiesocko.blogspot.com/ and in the meantime, join us as we talk about his book, switching publishers and whether or not he is a dirty boy.

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Author Spotlight / 13 Comments
October 21st, 2010 / 11:00 am