FOLLOWUP: Ariana Reines in Haiti
Tents and makeshift shelters
Greetings, friends, from the great state of Colorado, where I am at the AWP conference, passing long and happy days in the meatspace company of many wonderful people I usually only type at, including Gene “the Machine Levine” Morgan, Blake “Lively” Butler, and Ryan “Last” Call, which in this town is apparently 12:45. For all of you at the conference, I hope you’ll come say hello if you haven’t already. And if you’re in the Denver area but not registered for AWP, know that the bookfair is free and open to the public on Saturday April 10, so the same goes for you, too. But I digress. The true news I bring comes from much further afield.
About a month ago, I posted a call for funds to help send Ariana Reines on a UN Mission to Haiti to serve as a French-English translator for a team of trauma clinicians. Well, she went, and upon her return sent a note of thanks to those who donated, as well as a handful of photographs from her trip. All of these things are reproduced in full below the break.
Nick Antosca—
The NYT website has a prominently featured piece titled “In Sleepless Nights, a Hope for Treating Depression”… I read it with interest as I’ve from time to time had brutal, grinding insomnia (as have many other writers I know). Extended periods of insomnia do not in my experience alleviate depression in any way. On the other hand–and this is not insomnia–there are those nights (rather, mornings) when dawn breaks and you’ve been writing nonstop all night and your exhaustion becomes a kind of euphoria. Writing as a profession or lifestyle can be disruptive to circadian rhythms because of those nights–they can fuck up your sleep schedule for a week. (This just happened to me in the last few days, totally disoriented my mind and body in relation to time of day, and may or may not have contributed to a minor car accident.) But those nights are actually one of my favorite parts of being a writer–those nights are when you get the pure joy of creative endeavor unadulterated by the logistical headaches of publishing and promoting and etc etc etc.
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Noah Cicero on Why Writers Write
[Noah Cicero sent this to me last week. And yes, it is another (slight) commentary on a review of Shoplifting from American Apparel. It’s more than that, too. If you’re unfamiliar with Noah Cicero’s writing, you can visit his blog, or check out his latest book The Insurgent. -Gene]
In one of the reviews of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel Huw Nesbitt makes the statement, “Real art seeks to examine the truth as it is; not through relativism, atomism, or universalism, but by seeking that which once was or irrevocably, true.” If you have read analytic philosophy your first thought after reading those lines will probably be, “Those sentences don’t make any sense.” The proposition, “the truth as it is,” is actually relativism and universal in its meaning. How can something be true but not universal is a contradiction. READ MORE >
Roxane Gay—
Daniel Nester has created a group lit etc. blog, We Who Are About to Die. Contributors include Melissa Broder, Nate Pritts, Michael Schiavo and others. Check it out.
Alec Niedenthal—
Comedian Eugene Mirman has been added to the already-sweet lineup of tonight’s Rumpus/Flavorpill/Tin House event. He’ll be joining Colson Whitehead, Sam Lipsyte, Lorelei Lee, Michael Showalter, and others. I’m probably a little late in posting this, but if you’re in NYC right now and, like, somewhere near W 16th street, you should be at this event right now. You know who you are, and you should be there.
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HTML Giant @ AWP: We Global
Here I will attempt to give readers a list of the HTML Giant-related AWP readings. (AWP is in Denver, April 7 – 10.)
Wednesday, April 7:
We arrive. We wait.
READ MORE >
Critics on Criticism: Dryden and Pope on the Evils of Hating, Loving Parts
Apparently something about the Restoration, after all the Charleses and Jameses and Cromwells and who is Catholic and who is Anglican or Puritan, got poets to thinking about the whole versus the part, w/r/t criticism. Thus John Dryden, who was politically moderate but eventually found he had some inclinations toward Rome, on critics who “think this or that expression in Homer, Virgil, Tasso, or Milton’s Paradise to be far too strained”:
Tis true there are limits to be set betwixt the boldness and rashness of a poet; but he must understand those limits who pretends to judge as well as he who undertakes to write: and he who has no liking to the whole ought, in reason, to be excluded from censuring of the parts. (from “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Heroic License,” 1677)
This seems a good rule. I perhaps unfashionably quite enjoy reading good criticism for its own sake, and I believe a person can display a purely critical genius, though their work ought to follow Wilde’s dictum of being a creative act in its own right. I think, here, that Dryden makes a key distinction. He is taking to task critics who profess no taste for any muscular poetry, for the “the hardest metaphors and the strongest hyperboles,” and who then critique individual works of heroic verse that by definition display that muscularity, hardness, and strength.
Jimmy Chen—
Dzanc Best of the Web 2010 contents have been announced, congrats to all the writers and editors; looks like a great issue. Matt Bell is series editor, with Kathy Fish as guest editor this year.