let me start off by saying that my all-time favorite ever piece of writing is a novella (kinda). it’s called pafko at the wall. except that it’s not really called that. or, at least, you & i don’t know it as that. we normally call it the first 49 pages of underworld. it’s the prologue to one of my favorite novels, and it got re-released (after initially appearing in harper’s as a “folio,” according to wikipedia) by the publisher as a novella after the novel came out. and if i read it by itself, i might think “wow, that was some beautiful writing, and a cute little story.” but as part of the novel, it becomes something much larger (as things tend to do in delillo books).
so, right after someone explains to me what the fuck a “folio” is, we can start talking about what a novella is, i suppose, because why on earth else would we be celebrating national novella month, if not to define the damn thing?
It’s summer, I don’t have to go back to full time teaching until the fall and in between the projects on my to do list for this time off (garden work that will never happen, filling out the paperwork for becoming an American citizen, brushing the dog, planning for lessons, watching bad TV) I thought I would do some writing. However, my motivation to put words on paper plummeted to the lowest low when Monday’s mail brought two rejection letters. Scott, Shira, and Sam have already “barked” on the subject and I don’t have anything to add other than that this video cheered me up. Here’s Irish comedian Dylan Moran as the main character in the TV series Black Books reacting to a recent rejection letter.
This summer, I’ve given myself a project: study the lyric essay. Over the last year of grad school I’d heard it mentioned in passing, but never really thought about it—too busy trying to figure out what a regular essay involved, really. But now that I have some time, I’m interested to discover what the lyric essay is.
Over here in nonfictionland, we like to say that poetry and creative nonfiction are lovers. For me, and maybe only me, it’s true because my poems and my essays are so very personal, all about the “I.” I also like to think that I really care about my sentences. One reason I love writing poetry in form (I’m hearting cinquains lately) is because you have to, have to, find that one perfect word. The word that maybe has a couple of meanings, the word that makes your prose march. I have always tried to pay just as close attention to the words and lines in my essays. I even like to think of my poems as cute little essays.
I like swearing, especially creative swearing. Maybe that’s I like King Missile’s “Pain Poems,” which aren’t really poems at all. Instead, they are just excuses to swear creatively.
And yes, I know, I know, swearing for swearing’s sake is juvenile. But this is King Missile, the band that brought us “Detachable Penis.” So it’s not exactly high art to begin with.
I’m also fond of the Shakespearean Insult Generator, which has a whole slew of insults gleaned from the bard’s plays. They aren’t exactly artistic, and some of them read a bit like the transcript from the French taunting in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. Nevertheless, if you’re heading to a Renaissance festival (dorks!) it’s a handy reference.
I find that I’m writing more and more with a first person who is me. And it scares the crap out of me. So I’ve been looking into the “I,” then trying to look through it—pretend it isn’t there. Sometimes, I hide the “I” in a “you,” but that feels like cheating. Cate Marvin’s explains slanting the “I” in poetry and comes to say:
I am also somewhat pleased to discover I’ve tricked someone into believing the world of my poems is “true”; the sensation is akin, to paraphrase W. H. Auden, to feeling as if I’ve picked the reader’s pocket.
Tricky indeed. Where is this balance of drawing the reader into an experience had by a live body, a body they later learn is not solid and breathing? How do you fictionalize yourself in your writing?
A couple of weeks ago, Jamie brought up one of the more interesting discussions making its way through the internet: is our interaction with the internet rewiring the way we think?
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Steven Pinker, at the New York Times, on the value of new media:
And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.
The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.
Much has been made of the connection between artists and mental illness, but I’ve often wondered if physical ailments aren’t overlooked in that regard. Many artists who were being treated (or attempting to self-medicate) for chronic physical conditions ended up with mental illness as a result of their medications: Antonin Artaud was given opium to medicate the effects of childhood meningitis and prolonged neuralgia, a painful disorder of the nervous system, as well as depression. Ian Curtis’s depression and eventual suicide was likely at least partially the result of the epilepsy medication he was taking. Kurt Cobain famously dealt with chronic acute stomach pain, which I assume was temporarily lessened by his drug use. And Frida Kahlo lived with severe pain her whole life as the result of a bus accident, and earlier still, childhood polio. Those are just a few of the examples I can think of.
I’ve paid attention to these facts throughout the years because I’ve also had severe chronic pain since I was thirteen: a rare, nameless auto-immune disease that causes extreme inflammation in the back of my eyes, producing a type of pain that I imagine feels something like a very bad migraine concentrated in one or the other of my eyes, often spreading to other parts of my face if left too long untreated. I won’t go into my endless medical history with this condition here, but I have been wondering for a long time about how dealing not only with acute pain, but also strong, addictive medications, uncountable doctors’ visits, seemingly tortuous procedures, etc., have affected who I am as a writer and otherwise inclined-to-make-things type of person.
Just a quick survey today: When you write, do you listen to music or do you require complete silence? Do you listen to the news or something else in the background or do you put in ear plugs? If you do listen to music while you write, what’s your writing play list look like? Here are some of my favorites:
Cat Power
Joanna Newsom
Joe Purdy
Joe Henry
Counting Crows (mostly August and Everything After)
Iron & Wine
Alexi Murdock
M. Ward
Regina Spektor
Rosie Thomas
The Finches
Timmy Curran
Tool (Yeah, they’re kind of an outlier, but I really love this band.)
Cat Stevens
Mazzy Star
As you can see, I like to listen to emotional, if not depressing, music when I write. It gets me in the mood, as they say. What does it for you?
Above is a trailer for Bad Writing, an upcoming indiedoc I learned about today, while trawling YouTube for videos to upload in lieu of writing a full blog post. This is probably old hype, but I’m nonetheless curious.
Though most days bring rejection or silence for writers, each day there is the possibility that this is the one on which your work will be discovered. I had hopes that Saturday might be one of those days. I was scheduled to meet with one of the editors of Electric Literatureat 2:00 at Tattered Cover in Denver to discuss my story “Ash Wednesday.”
Before my personal meeting, I listened to Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum talk on a panel about the future of publishing. I was surprised by how generous and down to earth they seemed. Their model for success in an increasingly failing world doesn’t seem to have gone to their heads. Lindenbaum somehow memorized everyone’s name in the audience—at least every person whose name was called by Andrea Dupree, Program Director of Lighthouse.
Hunter is shyer than Lindenbaum and sometimes was happy enough with what Lindenbaum said that he didn’t feel the need to add anything; other times he took the conversation to new and beautiful places and still others he took something Lindenbaum said and extended it. For instance, Lindenbaum was talking about the tidal wave that was coming to sweep away the future of books and writing as a profession. Lindenbaum pointed out that many on shore are ignoring the approaching tidal wave, saying, “Oh, I’m fine. I have my house here on the beach.” Then Hunter asked if he might extend the tidal wave metaphor and talked about some surfers in Australia who rode a tidal wave rather than being destroyed by it. Read more »
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