Beards, they're good.
Whenever I listen to music, I can’t help focusing on lyrics. Sure, I love guitar riffs and drums and the occasional accordion, but when it comes to music, I tend to favor writing and lyrics.
There are all sorts of exceptions to this—bad lyrics aren’t a death knell, not everything has to be deep—it’s just that the bands that I associate most strongly with tend to feature lyrics that I consider well-wrought.
This means that there are certain bands I hate. Top 40 hits aren’t exactly rife with fine writing, and for the record, I despise you, Timbaland, and your idiotic “The Way I Are.”
Anyway, so for your consideration, here’s my list of musicians that I think can write. Most of the folks I’ll mention are pretty recent:
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I just finished reading Susan Orlean’s, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, a collection of profiles from the New Yorker. It is a core sample of Orlean’s work for a dozen years, 1987-99. She makes it look easy—simple language, an accretion of details, and finding that one moment that unfolds a life like origami. I also just finished reading the majority of the literary magazines that have been adding up on my nightstand for the last six months. All of them had nonfiction in them, but everything I read fell under two categories: narrative nonfiction, or the lyric essay. Not one of them had published a profile. I can only speak for the few lit mags I subscribe to, and I’m sure that many literary magazines have published profiles, but where are they?
If you want to find a profile outside of the New Yorker, you have to read Esquire, Rolling Stone, or Outside Magazine. Why are the big magazines the only ones who seem to publish profiles? I know what you’re thinking. It’s because they pay. But why doesn’t the free market—the one that pays in contributors copies—emulate this?
The dominant topic from most panels or interviews on the subject of nonfiction is how massive and indefinable the genre itself is, and it is. This is my cue to feel smug, to equate my genre of choice with the universe, its exponential growth being so fast that I can’t even comprehend it, man. An ocean of ink has been spilled over the definition, or lack thereof, of creative nonfiction. A former teacher of mine once said that the reason you can’t define nonfiction is because it’s the only genre that hasn’t yet atrophied. But if this was true, wouldn’t we see a greater variety of work in the slush pile?
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many books died to bring you this art by brian dettmer
welcome to the all-(book)art edition of the friday link-a-palooza.
if you enjoyed melina’s book art, you should definitely check out brian dettmer’s work. my favorites include his series with atlases and dictionaries. btw: brian’s art is on the cover of the new issue of hayden’s ferry review (#46), which also happens to have some pretty cool visual pieces containing only the punctuation from well known works of literature—like horton hears a who.
i love maps. i love books. dell loves maps of/on books.
if you love book jackets like i do, then you’re gonna love the book cover archive and faceout books. you can just scroll & scroll & scroll.
on etsy, home to all things hipstercrafty, little blue bird studios has some nice looking prints on old dictionary pages, including one of that mischievous cheshire cat.
and, fittingly, for galleys week at willow springs, enjoy some excerpts and examples from in the land of punctuation, a graphic designer’s go at illustrating typography.
enjoy. issue 66 will be coming your way before you know it.
Good writers, that is, by winning the bad writing contest. While the “official deadline” for the Bullwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has passed, founder Scott Rice says it will accept entries until early June.
The contest, named after Victorian author Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton of “dark and stormy night” fame, asks entrants to compose the opening sentence to a terrible novel.
The contest seems to favor long twisty sentences, with lots of adjectives and commas. Many of its entrants, Rice has said, find inspiration in “tar baby” metaphors, the kind you can pick up and you can’t put down. My favorites among the winning lines tend to be the ones that avoid such absurd literariness in favor of straight-up absurd situations: Read more »
I keep trying to choose between “The semester is barreling toward the end” and “The semester is limping to the end,” which, taken together, make the semester sound like a very determined competitor in a three-legged race. And really, that’s not too far off.
My point is that I’m buried to my neck, with little time to read/do/think anything that isn’t a pile of text in MLA format.
So: pictures?
What we’ve got here is exhibit A in the military’s love/hate relationship with PowerPoint. (via The New York Times)
And if, like me, you don’t want a lot of words looking at you, then stare into this:
A huge diagram of various time travels in movies and TV. (from Information is Beautiful)
Next week: Words!
Staples had a very hard time at Spokane’s literary festival Get Lit! Not the store or the soul singer, but the little metal clip that holds together papers.
Nobody's hating on Mavis
At least twice, panelists or guest authors used the detail of staples to infer a book or journal’s lack of quality.
We know better than this. (There’s a cliché that comes to mind.) The opportunities provided by the internet and print on demand make the cliché even truer: quality cannot be judged by design or packaging. Specifically in regard to staples, many small and micro presses are publishing chapbooks as interesting and riveting, in my mind, as most of the work the New York houses are paying to be featured on the tables at chain bookstores.
The follow-up question then, which was asked at the “How Publishing is Changing” panel at Get Lit!, is who keeps the gate? With the countless small presses, online journals and self-publishing opportunities, how do we determine what is good? Read more »
For the love of all things holy, click here to see the world’s most complete, kick-ass, and giant illustrated explanation of the book publishing process.
(Once you’re there, be sure to click for the full-size version. It’ll blow your mind/monitor.)
To paraphrase a David Mamet line: “Everybody loves money, right? That’s why it’s called ‘money.’” So, let’s talk money, lets talk about reading fees, and what is appropriate to charge a writer to submit their work.
Personally, I’m fine with charging (and paying) a reading fee for a contest, especially when the prize is worthwhile–say, publication in a magazine you like and a little folding money. I’m even okay with magazines charging a fee for e-submissions ($3 seems to be the norm, which is about what it costs to print and mail a submission). After all, if I like a magazine enough that I’m seeking publication within their pages, then I’d rather they take my money than the USPS.
And yes, I know that writers are poor, but so are most small publications (not to mention their editors)–and we’re all just trying to get by.
That being said, I think Narrative Magazine is taking the pay-to-play model to the extreme. Do they run a lot of great contests? Yes, absolutely. However, they’re gearing up to launch a new iPhone app and the ratio between fee, editorial time, and reward, at least in my opinion, is off.
The details:
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