Craft and the City: Writer as Flâneur
A while ago, Lily pondered the flâneur in this post, and in the comments section Ken referenced Nassim Taleb, and it seems that interest in the flâneur, like the figure of the flâneur itself, meanders around the consciousness of many of us, possibly. There is something perennially appealing and perhaps romantic about the flâneur–the apartness, the deliberate purposelessness–and I remember that it took, for me, reading Benjamin’s The Arcades Project to understand Baudelaire (the man and the work) in a more complete and meaningful way. Some years ago I wrote an essay (whose title is the title of this post) that sought to explore the idea of text-as-city and reader as flâneur, and then, by extension, the work of writing as its own kind of flânerie. (Really wanted to publish it as Flânerie O’Connor, but then I would’ve had to punch myself in the face really hard. And also get it published.) Anyway, here are some excerpts/cut-ups from that essay:
Belladonna * at AWP!
I’m overwhelmed by how jam-packed with goodness AWP is this year! Belladonna * are going to have some pretty amazing events, which you all should attend! Here are the details:
Belladonna * is part of Table X at the conference bookfair:
ROW I1 – I11 and I28 – I36
AWP BELLADONNA EVENTS:
Friday, February 4, 2011; 4 – 6 pm
SAYING IT:
A Walking Poem Against Censorship
JOIN US for a march & speak-out against the silencing of voices that want & need to be heard and a celebration of voices, of our voices, of your voices. Bring signs, texts, images, costumes!
Location: GATHER outside Marriott Wardman Park Hotel (conference hotel) on corner of Connecticut Ave & Woodley Road NW, Washington DC.
MARCH on Connecticut Ave to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Monument at M Street NW for SPEAK-OUT, reading, breaking of silences.
Friday, February 4, 2011; 6:30 pm
PROSE EVENT:
Reading and Conversation with Bhanu Kapil, Eileen Myles, & Vanessa Place
The first of four Belladonna* Collaborative PROSE EVENTS: a reading and conversation with prose writers who write at the intersection of fiction and the essay, producing texts that are urgent and often unclassifiable.
Limited edition chaplets available!
Location: Hamiltonian Gallery;1353 U Street, Suite 101; Washington DC
Directions: Half block away from U Street / Cardozo Metro stop at 13th St. Take the Red Line from Woodley Park, transfer over to green line at Chinatown/Gallery Place, and get off at U Street. Or a 15 minute cab from AWP.
Raúl Zurita @ AWP
It’s hard to keep track of anything if you’re going to AWP, but here’s one I’m making sure not to miss: Raúl Zurita reading and in conversation Friday at Noon in support of his new book from Action Books, Songs for His Disappeared Love. From Johannes: “This is like getting Neruda to the fucking AWP. This guy spent 6 weeks in a shed being tortured following the Pinochet coup.” More info and locations here.
While you’re at it, come by and say hello as a bunch of us from HTMLGiant will be at a monster table chillin.
What other events are worth seeing?
SPIRALS ARE THE MOST CONSCIOUS SHAPES BECAUSE THEY OBSERVE THEMSELVES
Factory Hollow Press and Alex Phillips have, for me, some specific experiential associations with the good writers of Massachusetts and the state itself, specifically the Factory Hollow Pond in Amherst. Because I don’t know anything else called Factory Hollow, I can say that these two entities alone—the collective responsible for creating Phillips’s book and the body of water in the general area where I was then poet-socialize-learning—created in me a rarely literal cognitive dissonance between language and place, seen and scene, a subject not implicit in Phillips’s debut book, but which tangentially gets built around its content, and rapidly.
This past summer I attended the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and took a one-shot class about James Tate’s poetry and what people think about it. Alex instructed and was pretty great about presenting and depicting the positions of what he considered Tate-hater’s flawed reasoning and Jim’s actual poetic importance in just a two hour session. Later, Alex read at the nightly readings from Crash Dome. He dropped his water bottle and then said he’d just start from wherever and opened the book. READ MORE >
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January 31st, 2011 / 11:51 am
January 31st, 2011 / 11:51 am
A Conversation with Deb Olin Unferth
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of Minor Robberies, a collection of stories, and Vacation, a novel, both published by McSweeney’s. Her new memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, has been excerpted in Harper’s and The Believer. It will be published tomorrow in hardcover by Henry Holt.
MINOR: You left college in 1987 to join the Sandinista Revolution. You’ve written plenty between then and now, but not this story. Why did it take so long to decide that this was a subject for a book, and then to write and publish the book?
UNFERTH: I was very self-conscious about writing a memoir. For many years I wasn’t sure if it was a form with enough intellectual energy, which I now know was silly, since I’m very excited about memoirs and feel like they have tremendous intellectual energy. It was probably just an excuse for me. Also, I think maybe the story wasn’t over yet? Maybe I had to live a little more to figure out what the story was. Also I think I’ve struggled as a writer to figure out how to open up and reveal myself. Writing my novel, Vacation, helped me figure out how to do that, and afterwards I was ready to jump into the memoir. People had been telling me to write up my “revolution story” as a memoir for years. Tao Lin mentioned it to me I don’t know how many times. Also Nate Martin.
MINOR: What was the thing you figured out that allowed you to open up and reveal yourself more than you had in the earlier stories?
UNFERTH: I started out as a philosophy major. And I’ve always had an interest in form and in more intellectual styles of fiction writing. I think I was afraid to write with bald emotion, I thought it was too feminine or something. I think the breakthrough came when I read Chris Ware. I read that big red book of his, the compilation of Acme Novelty Library. It was very formal and right from the first pages dealt with ideas and theories about art and philosophy, and yet it was one of the most emotional books I’d ever read. READ MORE >
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January 31st, 2011 / 12:00 am
January 31st, 2011 / 12:00 am
Coming Soon
Nephew, an imprint of Mud Luscious Press, publishes raw & aggressive pocket-sized titles in limited-editions. Readers will have exactly three months from the first day of sales to purchase one of 150 available copies. Once all 150 copies are ordered or when we reach three months of sales, whichever comes first, that title will immediately print & ship. There will be no subsequent editions & only e-galleys will be available for reviewers. Titles will also not be revealed until their sales period opens, though we are willing to give you a peek of the first:
“It beguttons the buttoning of alarms or the on of the radio. Somewhere pianoish, Rachmaninoffish. Awake. A little chilly. In the hall where the hall rolls bathroom-toward near the mirror and our donkey, a bit of trouble, of seeing himself clearly. Nevermind that. He dabs drips which are of a muskier something. The mezzo-soprano sang, then bang, ended, the audience sang, off with their pointed hats.”
XXX XXXXXX XXXXXXX by XXXXX XXXXXX, coming very soon.
The Fallacy of Fixed Meaning
“…the dogma that words come to us out of the past with proper meanings—fixed and immutable—is a fallacy. The only meanings a word has are those that the speakers of the language choose to give it.” The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing
This from Wikipedia’s entry on linguistic prescription:
In linguistics, prescription denotes normative practices on such aspects of language use as spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and syntax. It includes judgments on what usages are socially proper and politically correct. Its aims may be to establish a standard language, to teach what is perceived within a particular society to be “correct” forms of language, or to advise on effective communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might (appear to) be resistant to language change; if the usage preferences are radical, prescription may produce neologisms.
Prescriptive approaches to language are often contrasted with descriptive linguistics, which observes and records how language is practiced. The basis of linguistic research is text (corpus) analysis and field studies; yet description includes each researcher’s observations of his and her (own) language usage. Despite apparent opposition, prescription and description (how language should be used, and how language is used) exist in a complementary dynamic tension of mutual linguistic support.
Again, from Kane in Oxford: “Words, then, are far from being tokens of fixed and permanent value. They are like living things, complex, many-sided, and responsive to pressures from their environment. They must be handled with care.”
I love the freedom of language, neologisms, mutability–moments that allow for creative energy. I also love grammar, rules, usages that make the reading experience universal. Maybe that’s why I write poems and edit. This is a political topic, to be sure, but it’s definitely a matter of craft as well.
Where, as a writer, do you think should be and is [of how language is used] meet?
4 lightstands, nightstands, washstands hurtling past
14. Literary profiling. The books you ‘like’ on Facebook. Do you ever go vexatious on what books populate your most obvious bookcase? Like maybe you’re having a Superbowl party at the house and what books will the visitors eyeball? Ever left a book out on your desk/table/car floor with intent? Come on, do tongue. Like Play it Again, Sam and the track and field medal. To be petty is to be human.
2. McCain aide outed as “anonymous” O author? I wonder what vice-presidential nominee he is describing here, The Barracuda:
thick hair piled up high, chin out, defiant, taunting, flaunting that whole lusty librarian thing, sweet and savory, mother and predator, alluring and dangerous…
Kyle’s summer reading99. Holy shit Truman Capote’s house is selling at a bargain price! Discount, discount, and with 7.5 bathrooms. Now if I can only hustle a few more chapbooks…
4. The 10 greatest child geniuses in literature. What?! Hal Incandenza only gets 2nd place? And they left off Ignatius Jacques Reilly, Dolores (AKA: Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo and L), and that daughter from Stories in the Worst Way. Man.