orange crows, where are they?
Snow/ice/snow, it is so funny, like a parfait without a hair in it, but not ha-ha funny like a parfait with a hair. I’m not at AWP. Damn. So I’m thinning mints now, but later I’m going to watch Woody Allen movies on VCR. Also I have a doze to bull, but that’s personal. Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt, has been attacked! Again!! Everyone needs a hobby, OK. The flickering of the VCR, or even hens. The last one on Earth who likes to track? Who here likes to track?
(This post a serious evidence of an earlier A. Robinson post [I researched, but couldn’t find] that says HTML people basically post anything)
But hey: What are you doing while not at AWP?
Looking at the Looker and the Lookee and Thinking About the Looking and the Looking
Sometimes I see a picture of someone looking at someone else in a certain way — the tilt of the head, the position of the eyes relative to the face, the width of the pupils, the relationship of the head to the body, the proximity of one head to another head, the attention implied by the position of the eyes — and I think: I wish someone would right now be looking at me in the way that the person in the picture is looking at the other person in the picture, and that it made me feel the way I imagine it makes the object of the looking feel, and that the person doing the looking meant the looking in the way I imagine the looker in the picture means the looking, and that both of us were as attractive and therefore societally vetted as worthy of giving and receiving looks like the looks that are being given and received in the picture, and that the confidence implied in the giving and receiving of the looks was a confidence that corresponded to my ability to give and receive the looks rather than the confidence that corresponds to my ability to talk about thinking about looking at the people doing the looking.
“Make Believe That You Got a Free Throw”: Red Auerbach on Writing
Do what is best for you.
Relax. Follow through. But make it.
I’m literally making things up.
Every once in a while, I fixate on word usage and hatch wild theories about why a certain word or phrase becomes trendy in conversation. We’re all aware, I presume, of the privileged place “literally” has achieved in our lexicon. It is used most often, it seems, to denote emphasis. I’m not the only one interested in its abuse/overuse. But, like a 70-year-old tweed-clad professor with a pipe and a penchant for pretty coeds, I’m curious about what its popularity might suggest about “the times.” Maybe we are entrenched in an Age of Hyperbole, where everything must be biggened and baddened in order to be heard or believed (see Fox News, etc.). Maybe “literally” signifies some kernel of steadfast truth amidst all of that shouting, a counterpoint to the sensationalism. Or perhaps “literally” is a response to the Age of Irony for the same reasons, where we intend it to denote sincerity. Since my guess is that we’re in the twilight of that age, and are now seeing the quick waning of its companion age, Post-Irony, my hope is that we’ll hear a lot less “literally” and a lot more good, dramatic pause.
Geography Thursday
In “The Wrong Place” (published in Art Journal), Miwon Kwon argues:
Throughout the twentieth century, the history of avant-garde, or “advanced” or “critical,” art practices (however one might want to characterize those practices that have pressured the status quo of dominant art and social institutions) can be described as the persistence of a desire to situate art in “improper” or “wrong” places. That is, the avant-garde struggle has in part been a kind of spatial politics, to pressure the definition and legitimization of art by locating it elsewhere, in places other than where it “belongs.” (42-3)
Do you agree? Is this relevant to writing? Can writing be situated improperly? How so or not?
[Note: This post is being composed in a very wrong place for me: DC in a Starbucks with free wifi.]
Men’s Truation
From Thou Art That by Joseph Campbell:
Picture a little Bushman boy being nursed by his mother, weaned very late, a little boy already, but still nursing on his mother. That little boy, unlike the little girl, will never become the life-body himself. He must learn to relate to that. The woman need not learn to relate to the man because that is not the problem. The problem concerns how the man relates to the woman. She is Life. He is a way of relating to Life.
So what happens with the boy? Nothing ever happens. READ MORE >
Four Brief Notes of Varying Significance
If you’re interested in antique printing, there’s a whole plant for sale in Boston.
I love stand up comedy so I really enjoyed this profile of comedian Greg Giraldo and his untimely passing in The Awl.
Mima Simić writes a disturbing account of how her work was edited, without her approval, for Best European Fiction 2011, by an editor at Dalkey Archive. One of the edits assigned a gender to the narrator when the gender ambiguity was a deliberate authorial choice. It’s not a good situation.
Vida released a count for how women writers are represented across several publications great and small during 2010. Meghan O’Rourke responds at Slate. The numbers are not surprising. The issue is, of course, more complex than mere statistics but statistics are always a good place to start. I find the numbers disheartening. Actually, I think it’s fucked up. I do. I understand if you don’t and why. We’ve had this conversation already but I thought I would share the latest numbers.
{LMC}: A Review of Benjamin Percy’s “The Red Balloon”
I was a lazy reader. I read too much too quickly into the title of Benamin Percy’s story “the Red Balloon.” “Balloon… Balloon… Barthleme. Ripoff,” was the thinking. I grabbed a friend. “Sit down,” I told him. “Tell me what this reminds you of.”
He sat down.
“Remember, it’s called ‘the Red Balloon.’ Keep that in mind. Okay. It’s important. ‘The Red Balloon.’”
I read the first couple sentences for the first time:
“No one knows where it came from. Some say a long car pulled up to the gas station and from it stepped a black haired, black-eyed man in a black suit, who coughed once into his fist and then gripped the pump and muddied it with his phlegm.”
My friend said, “I don’t know who that sounds like.”
I decided I’d better read the whole piece before assuming its contents.
Which Problem is the More Vexing Problem?
1. You want to make a thing, but the thing you want to make is too big, so you spend your time thinking about how big it is instead of making it big.
2. You want to make a thing, but the thing you want to make is too big, so you spend your time trying to make it big instead of attending to the smallnesses from which big rises.
3. You want to make a thing, but the thing you want to make is too big, so you spend your time reading other big things searching for pathways to bigness instead of working on your big thing.