Lily Hoang
https://literature.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/lhoang.html
Lily Hoang has published some books and won some awards. She is Director of the MFA in Writing at UC San Diego.
NBCC finalists 2010
Any surprises? Anything here you want to read but haven’t? Anything here you read but wish you didn’t. (Matt Bell has one that I know of!) [NOTE: I didn’t mean that I wish I hadn’t read Matt’s book. I am very happy to have read it. I meant he’s reading a book on this list and may or may not wish – see comments below – he wasn’t.] Do you care about prizes, or are they just dumb? A creative writing professor once told that the only people who really care about prizes are the other people who give out prizes, meaning: prizes neither reflect the “goodness” of the writing nor do they impact sales, etc., BUT one prize often leads to another prize leads to another prize, and on and on. [Full press release here.]
Fiction
Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Goon Squad, Knopf
Jonathan Franzen. Freedom. Farrar, Straus And Giroux.
David Grossman, To The End Of The Land. Knopf.
Hans Keilson.Comedy In A Minor Key. Farrar, Straus And Giroux
Paul Murray. Skippy Dies. Faber & Faber.
Hey, baby, what’s your sign?
So, according to astronomers, we’ve been fucking fools. Gotcha, suckers, you thought you were an Aries, nope, turns out you only saw characteristics in yourself because you wanted to. Really, you’re a Pisces, or whatever.
But why is this important? If Facebook posts (or any popular media outlet) are any indication of anything, people care. People are pissed that their astrological sign may have been wrong. Most of my friends on Facebook are Giant-type people, or, at the very minimum, grad school social science/humanities types, by which I mean, they’re generally critical thinkers. So am I. And yet, everyday, I hit my widget button (F4) and read my horoscope. I’m going to approach this horoscope issue two-fold: first, why people care, then, why people care. That sounds tautological, and maybe it is, but that’s what I’m doing.
Geography Thursday: people as ‘functions of landscape’
In Jeff Malpas’s excellent book, Place & Experience: A Philosophical Topography, he writes:
In Proust’s work, persons and places intermingle with one another in such a way that places take on the individuality of persons, while persons are themselves individuated and characterized by their relation to place; persons come to be seen, to use a phrase from Lawrence Durrell, almost ‘as functions of a landscape’ – in some cases, even of a particular room or setting. In fact, the narrator of Proust’s novel, Marcel, grasps his own life, and the time in which it is lived, only through his recovery of the places in relation to which that life has been constituted. Remembrance of Things Past is thus an invocation and exploration of a multitude of places and, through those places, of the persons who appear with them.
What do you think about this? Should our characters be ‘functions of landscape’? How does thinking about characters – especially in Proust – in this way alter our experience of a text? Are we – real, live human beings, as opposed to our fictional characters – functions of our landscape?
Commence arguments.
Geography Thursday: A Place of Dreams
A non-magic magic story: In April 1879, a French postman tripped on a stone while he was delivering mail. Inspired by its shape, form, texture, whatever, he picked it up. From that day forward, this postman, named Ferdinand Cheval, collected rocks in a wheel barrel after work, and from these rocks he built a palace. I wanted to use the word “castle” to emphasize the magic component, but “palace” is just as sufficient. He called it Palais Ideal, his Ideal Palace. It took him thirty-six years. Below, you’ll find images, lots of them. They are glorious.
Hotness: Here’s a toast to the douchebags! Here’s a toast to the vain!
Last night, as I walking home in -9 without wind chill temperatures (Celsius) and foot upon feet of snow, I heard the most fantastic (ironic) thing. Granted, I was mad at the weather, and because my anger would be futile against snow and cold, I steered my aggression onto three darling little assholes.
Here is the conversation I overheard:
Guy 1: You know, dudes, I only have one problem.
Guy 2: Not enough pussy?
Guy 1: Yeah.
Guy 3: (With a hint of jealousy and maybe irony) Fuck you.
Guy 1: Nah, really, dudes, my only problem is that I fucking hate fat. Like I can’t stand it if a girl’s fat.
Guy 3: Fuck, dude, like who likes fat chicks?
Then, they turned onto Princess street (our main “drag”) and I had to turn a different way to go home. Needless to say, I wanted to hear more! But given only the brief bit of friendly banter I witnessed, I dedicate this to them:
On over-writing, distance, fiction, theater, and film: A series of disorganized thoughts
Last night, I saw Black Swan.
Last night, I read Linda Lê’s The Three Fates.
Last night, I didn’t fall asleep until after 4am.
The first two things contributed to the last thing. I’m usually a very good sleeper. It’s one of the few ways I cope with anxiety: sleep. It is something I’ve trained myself to do since I was a kid. That sounds stupid, but I’m sure a lot of people here have problems sleeping. We’re an anxious lot, what else can I say?
Last night, while I was trying to get to sleep, I kept thinking about Linda Lê’s book. The Three Fates is a book about a two sisters and a cousin (the three fates) who want to bring their old father (called King Lear) from Vietnam to France to show off their successes. The three fates were whisked away from Vietnam before the fall of Saigon. Their father remained. The book is written in this hyper-stylized way, seemingly over-written, over-the-top, a fairy tale with characters unabashedly stolen from other literary works (notably: plays). What sticks to me with this book though is how over-written it is. Every sentence is excessive. If this were a fiction workshop, I’d write next to every single line: “Over-written.”
Geography Thursday #I lost count
“Science is not about verification, it is about falsification. And science is therefore the art of being precisely wrong!” -David Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise
Three things I’ve watched recently and loved plus one, or, the rational love for immorality
I’ve been watching a lot of television lately. Television off the internet. This is a preferable way to watch television. For one, I don’t have to deal with commercials. Also, I can watch a whole season at a time, and being naturally obsessive, I can’t deal with the suspense of waiting an entire week—much less a whole year for a new season to start—to find out “what happens.” That being said, I have to wait on two shows now, which brings me great displeasure and discomfort.
I’ve seen a few things recently, and I’ve struggled to understand what makes them enjoyable, what compels me to keep on watching. After all, if I weren’t watching television or movies, I could be reading. (Though to be fair to myself, I spend my days trekking through fairly dense geographic texts, so by the evening, I like to relax with my partner and our two cats, “turn off” so to speak, even though I know my time could be spent in a more “productive” manner.)
But even as I’m “turning off” and letting myself get tangled in television or film, I remain critically alert. And in the end, I realize the reason I love watching what I’ve watched is because through these particular shows and films, my morality is challenged and I not only empathize but also desire the success of immoral characters. It is not unlike the experience of reading Crime & Punishment, where the reader rallies for Raskolnikov, even though he is a murderer. We don’t want him to get caught. We want him to be ok. We want the best for him. And in the end, as his consciousness fractures under the weight of his lawfully unpunished crimes, we want him to be physically punished, just to alleviate the psychological punishment.
To MFA or to not: Reflections on utility
Are you tired of hearing this tired debate? To MFA or to not MFA? I am, but I’m writing about it anyway. If you’re bored with it, don’t bother reading this post. It won’t hurt my feelings any.
I’ve been thinking more and more about how “useful” my MFA has been. I went to a decent grad school (Notre Dame) and got my MFA in 2006 in prose. I knew walking into the program that I would have a hard time getting a job, that by the time I got my degree, I would be underqualified for certain jobs (the ones I wanted, mainly, professor jobs) and overqualified for just about everything else. Even though I knew this, I was deluded enough to think I was different, special maybe.
middle-where?
What’s the difference between middle-class and bourgeois? Cultural consumption? Money? Conspicuous consumption? The size of tv screen or SUV?
I ask because I’ve been thinking about flaneurs a lot, especially the modern flaneur and what he would embody. Findings to come, as I find them. They are somewhere, probably between the covers of The Arcades Project.