Something I Wrote in 2009

 

I wrote this in 2009. I didn’t fine-tune it. I didn’t submit it. I didn’t blog it. It just sat there. I thought of it fondly. I reread it this morning for the first time in approximately two years, and a lot of it seems to holds true. Here is the unedited version (with yes, Hemingway, the 30s, 40s, 90s, and copious exceptions to this “study” missing):

notes on literary style concerning male protagonists: early-mid 20th century vs. turn of 21st century

– seems like an interesting thing to investigate, have noticed some interesting differences

– in significant works of early-mid 20th century male protagonists seem to uphold certain amounts of confidence, toughness, dominance, even in the face of hardship, emotional experience, or tragedy

– beginning in late 20th century, moving to 21st, male protagonists seem to experience greater awkwardness, greater sense of helplessness and hopelessness, less ambition, less necessity to uphold spirit and status

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Behind the Scenes / 10 Comments
July 18th, 2011 / 11:38 am

from Feedback

Three or four years ago, I was reading an ambitious student story that made very little sense to me. The language was pleasing rhythmically, sonically, but it was all fairly abstract, too. I found myself writing again and again in the margins: Could this be stated just a little more clearly? Could this be a little more concrete/precise? On a single page, some version of the preceding two sentences appeared five times, and I began wondering what a text composed of only my marginalia might look like. After all, students most likely read what I write in the margins as if it is its own kind of text, one comment after another after another. I held on to this idea for some time, and then finally, earlier this spring, I began creating texts from some combination of my marginalia and end notes. A part of me worries I’m betraying the confidence students place in me when they so bravely hand over stories they have written, but a larger part of me feels compelled to share the conversation, however seemingly one-sided it may seem, as a way of demonstrating the dynamic exchange that takes place between readers and writers. I’m calling the series of texts “Feedback.”

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Craft Notes / 3 Comments
July 18th, 2011 / 10:57 am
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I don’t mean to be a nudge, but I actually do. If you haven’t filled out my small survey, would you please? I’d like at least 30 more respondents in order to get a proper non-scientific view of how a tiny sliver of the population views the J-O-B word alongside creativity and other such nonsense. I will write an exciting post about this very subject! Including data!

A job worth doing.

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Seven Things For Sunday

You must read the first ten pages of Kyle Minor’s The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, which is up at Guernica.

Michelle Dean wrote a great essay, What Harry Potter Knows, for The Millions.

Wendy Wimmer does some analysis of Best American Short Stories and where those stories come from. Others have done similar breakdowns but it is worth reading. Over half of the stories over the timeframe she studied come from the same twelve journals. I’m not surprised.

There is a drawing for every page of Moby Dick.

Patsola Press is doing a Kickstarter.

Do we focus too much on plot?

Harper’s has six questions for Colson Whitehead. I only have one. You might also enjoy this interview with John Freeman.

Roundup / 35 Comments
July 17th, 2011 / 6:20 pm

Back to a future

Scat-stacking shitty yesterdays together I go back in time, on my therapist’s chair, retrace particular events in my childhood, and open my eyes to the blurry wet room, depleted and calm. He’s been leaning in, elbow dents on his knees, eyes maybe a little wet too. I am trying to correct the past with my personal fucks capacitor. Lived a dumb tv movie life, or better yet when movies from the past wound up on tv; went to college at an English lit class lived a dumb book life, or better yet when those books wound up as movies; moved to a city for a dumb metrosexual life, or better yet someone tell me what that even means. Maybe, the past unforgiving, you moved from one city to another, kept exchanging cities, trading in your tokens at casino life for better cards, fairer dice, the unsightly decorative carpet under your feet, heads locked in vices in rooms you couldn’t see. And if gambling is our metaphor, I’ll be the old guy at the slot machine, the repetitive injury of his right arm pumping away at some statistical god, awaiting the golden shower of coins which will sound as a tambourine, hey play a song for me, I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to. In 1985, with that preceding Orwellian-slash-Van Halenian year neatly tucked behind us, one Marty McFly disappears from a suburban parking lot at night.

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Film / 4 Comments
July 16th, 2011 / 1:29 pm

Power Quote: Trinh T. Minh-Ha

To use language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader. True, but beware when you cross railroad tracks for one train may hide another train. Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order. Let us not forget that writers who advocate the instrumentality of language are often those who cannot or choose not to see the suchness of things—a language as language—and therefore, continue to preach conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing: principles of composition, style, genre, correction, and improvement. To write “clearly,” one must incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify; in other words, practice what may be called an “ablution of language” (Roland Barthes). (pg. 16-17)

Trinh T. Minh-Ha – Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Indiana University Press, 2009)

Power Quote / 4 Comments
July 16th, 2011 / 11:40 am

Everything I Submitted from 2006-2008 & What Happened To It

[Key: Journal / Title of Work / Date Sent / Date Response Received / Accepted?]

[Strikethrough = withdrawn]

 

2008

Proximity (solicited)                     Bath or Mud (reprint)                        12/29            1/14            Y

Dewclaw (solicited)                            New Sick & Sentencens            12/29            12/29            Y

Dalkey Archive                        2 nov excerpts                                    12/29

The Cupboard                                    Sourcebook                                    12/18            RETRACT

Diagram                                    100 Children                                    12/16            1/14            N

Noon                                          Sourcebook                                    12/12            2/20            N+

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Behind the Scenes / 53 Comments
July 15th, 2011 / 5:49 pm
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Please, please, no more promo emails for your client’s new book where the first line is a question meant to sum up the central conflict. I seriously just got this one: “Dear Blake, What happens when a serial killing cab driver and a suicidal socialite collide?” Bro…

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I’m curious about your  job and how you negotiate job vs. creativity–or if there’s a difference. Take my survey? I’ll post results/anonymous responses and conclusions when I get enough responses. A Job Worth Doing

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“My writing isn’t a career or a craft or a hobby or anything like that. It is more like a tiny annex to my life, a little crawl space in which I occasionally end up by accident in the dark.” — Gary Lutz, interviewed by David Winters @ 3:AM Magazine. Also: Lutz is reading tonight at the Soda Series.

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