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.
I’m literally making things up.
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.
11 Pringle cans of furled knees
14. WTF? I thought Shane Jones killed February? (as noted) Today I learned that freezing rain is different than sleet. The hayseed fear-mongering weatherman just went simile on the ice; he said, “It’s like a candy shell.” Not bad, though a discord of tone. University dismisses the pacing, caged jaguar of classes; milk and bread sales go all Kelly Clarkson; and I wonder how many sit at home on their MePhones? Just years ago would have been a book for every downtime: waiting room while oil is changed, the vehicle registration line, the afternoon at the bar, this big-ass blizzard. Now it’s a phone. Just saying, but not me. I’m about to cuddle up with Into Thin Air and my Hobart flask.
9. To shit you or to shit you not. I shit you not. Reality rajah Mark Burnett is making literary Cliff’s Notes (yes, those little yellow pamphlets that borrow their color scheme from roadsigns) into a TV comedy series. OK.
1. Dawn Raffel at Willow Springs (with all kinds of good extra links).
94. Look here you smarmy-asses: novels in which the author appears as himself!
2. A sudden thought: What if AWP is snowed in and everyone having to sleep on the Book Fair floor curled inside their satchels, lean-tos made of idiosyncratic eyeglasses, perfect-bound tents of spine-broken books? And when the power fails, what book will we burn first for heat?
2 girls and 1 song
I had to google “Ke$ha,” and now I know she’s a singer, and that “Tik Tok” is a song of hers. Amy is really pretty and sings the song relatively well, lending a folkly sensibility to a hip-hopish song. In the comments, guys say they love her, and that she’s really beautiful. Katie, conventionally speaking, is pretty ugly, and doesn’t sing the song that well. Due to her weight problem, she speaks and sings in that “fat” way that sounds like gasping for air. I’m not trying to be mean, or exploit Katie. I’ve just been obsessed with these two clips for awhile. I want this post to be about how deep down inside Katie is a great person and how deep down inside Amy is some bitch, but that would be presumptuous and unfounded. You might want this post to be about how I see beauty in Katie, perhaps even a humane fumbling truth, but I don’t. We all want songs to sound good, and for people to look good. The videos are “related,” so many of the guys who said they love Amy were also really 2x mean to Katie in the comments. One guy even said his dick fell off. I once had dinner with a friend, among other friends, and she said how attractive everyone was, not in a flirty way, but a self-satisfied way. I remember being disgusted by that comment, and felt sad for this world. I know I sound like god damn Holden Caulfield right now, but I think I’m frozen at age 17, save my hair line. Everything I’m saying is obvious. I’m a hypocrite. I like James Joyce and hot chicks. I guess I’m saying I wish I weren’t shallow. And dare I say, I wish you weren’t shallow either. I wish I liked Tom Clancy and Thomas Kincade. I wish the dollar symbol wasn’t “cool.” I wish we’d all stop trying to fuck hot people. I hate sexy, and I’m starting to hate sex. But Morrissey ruined celibacy for me. I hope Katie is a happy person. This post has depressed me.
Ursula LeGuin on Roberto Bolano’s Monsieur Pain
I wish I could stick a USB jack into certain heads and simulate the experience of reading certain books through the filter of the host head’s consciousness/aesthetic inclination/interior life/knowledge/etc. I would like a simulation of the experience of being David Foster Wallace and reading Tom Clancy. Here are some other dream scenarios I’d like to inhabit: Susan Sontag reading Barry Hannah, Philip Roth reading Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer reading Erica Jong, James Wood reading Vladimir Nabokov, Lydia Davis reading Marcel Proust, Brian Evenson reading Robert Coover, Diane Williams reading Christine Schutt, Rick Moody reading Dale Peck, Alice Hoffman reading Richard Ford, Stephen Dixon reading Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Bernhard reading Thomas Mann, Slavoj Zizek reading Deleuze and Guattari, William Gay reading William Faulkner, Jennifer Egan reading Edward P. Jones, Edwidge Danticat reading Lyonel Trouillot, Pauline Kael reading Walter Murch, Lawrence Weschler reading Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter reading Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood reading Dan Brown, Borges reading Kafka, Kafka reading Nathan Englander, Nathan Englander reading Zadie Smith, Zadie Smith reading Edward Said, Edward Said reading Snooki, Snooki reading Milan Kundera, or Ursula LeGuin reading Roberto Bolano. READ MORE >