Check out The Great Typo Hunt.

Haven’t you always wanted to do that?

Two guys spent three months driving around the USA, spotting errors in signage and educating the sign owners about proper grammar. And the best part: they weren’t trying to be holier-than-thou assholes about it.

(Second-best part: after a Grand Canyon mishap, a federal judge ordered them not to speak publicly about grammatical errors for a year. That’s got to be one of the most bizarre sentences ever handed down.)

Here’s where I get intimate with you all: I decorate my mother’s grave with stones. (See Melina’s post from yesterday–Jean Michel Basquiat.)

All the stones are from bodies of water. The first set came from the Wisconsin River about a year after she died. It seemed natural to sweep off her gravestone with dead grass and line up a handful of rocks. Then I’d talk (or not) and head out. Simple. Read more »

tombstones/how we speak for the dead: Read more »

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3k5oY9AHHM

And Perpetua looks however she looks when you imagine her while you read Barthelme.

What does he mean to say?

Outside the Wells Fargo on 82nd and Foster a man in gray paces with his cardboard sign. I can’t see the words but can predict the message: “Hungry, every little bit helps,” or “Disabled Veteran,” or “Lost my job, need help,” or “Wells Fargo took my house” …. I wonder if he chose this corner for its backdrop, if he knew the irony of begging for money outside a bank. For the few seconds that I sit at the light, I think this would make an interesting photograph. As a matter of fact, I think, it may even be more interesting if it was a photograph. But why? I think it has something to do with intention, the idea that someone took the time, the initiative to capture the image. It’s the fact that we get to slow it down and keep it in our minds longer, maybe. The framing of an event like this using technology, whether it be a camera or a pen and a piece of paper (or a blog, for that matter), gives it gravitas. Someone wanted people to see this, you think; it must matter. Like the time, over twenty years ago, when a friend of my mom’s found a piece of folded up paper on the street. It could have been trash, probably would have been ignored by most people, but she picked it up, unfolded it, read it and gave it to my mother. It started like this: “Journel [sic] Rick Gordon, age 34 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 9-7-85 The month is September and Oklahoma is hot as Texas. I’ve been free for about three months now….” The entry, on three sheets of yellow, lined, 5×7″ paper, was brief and personal, written by a man who said he was a fugitive and talked about paying his own rent for a week for the first time in three years, of being clean finally and proud. It ended with a list of questions about whether or not he’s up to the challenge of being free and trying to make it on his own, whether he even wanted to stay alive. And inside the folded pages lay a business card for a pawn shop covered in Rick Gordon’s cursive lists and calculations. Ever since his words ended up in my possession, I’ve wondered about his intentions for that piece of paper. Why did he need to write his thoughts down? Did it make the experience of surviving more real for him? Did he hope that someday, maybe after his death, that someone else would read his journal? I can’t say, but there’s something to this whole idea of intentionality, the idea that someone was behind a thing (a piece of writing, a photograph) embedding their own thoughts and emotions into it hoping for someone else to come by and dig them out.

I know we usually talk writing and literature around these parts, about the erosion/evolution of pages to pixels, and so on. I’m gonna go ahead and not talk about any of that at all and instead discuss Monday iPod night at Spokane’s Baby Bar, and how ridiculous the battle of wills can get between people who want to play their music.

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This Is What a Great Thinker Looks Like

Today I thought we’d have a little writing contest. We’re the judges. The contestants will be philosophers. I suppose we can judge them both on the quality of their writing and their ideas. Of course, some ideas are easier to cull and enjoy than others.

“That is why it is so hard to be good; for it is always hard to find the mean in anything; it is not everyone but only a man of science who can find the mean or center of a circle. So too anybody can get angry—that is easy—and anybody can give or spend money, but to give it to the right person, to give the right amount of it, at the right time, for the right cause and in the right way, this is not what anybody can do, nor is it easy. That is why goodness is rare and praiseworthy and noble.”

–Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Chapter 9

“To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity of self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations, e.g. the inclination to honour, with, if it is happily directed to that which is in fact of public utility and accordant with duty, and consequently honourable, deserves praise and encouragement, but not esteem.”

–Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysic of Morals, “The First Proposition of Morality” Read more »

I have two things to admit: First, that I read fantasy. And second, that I feel no shame in this. I believe firmly that there is something to be learned from any book, be it good or bad, literary or otherwise; I’ve banished the phrase guilty pleasure from those I use to describe different aspects of my reading habits. For example, while I know that world description is a huge thing for some readers, reading fantasy, more than any other genre, has taught me how much I hate long-winded descriptions, and so I leave this out of my own stories, because I don’t want my readers skimming entire pages.

But while I enjoy some fantasy (yes, certain works are horribly formulaic, and I don’t like that in any type of writing), I despise most fantasy book covers. With few exceptions, they seem to me childish, to play into fantasy archetypes rather than to break them, and to have too many design elements competing for attention. Not to mention I hate having a character’s cover image fighting against the one I develop in my own mind. These complaints, of course, go for any genre of books, but I tend to see these problems most in the fantasy books, where simplicity is almost always discarded in favor of chaos and where the cover seems to be more interested in making the book fit into the fantasy genre rather than making it stand out.

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will this guy never stop with the lists?  the man responsible for the much talked-about/crapped-upon list of overrated writers has just released another slideshow—this one of the 17 most innovative university presses & the books you need from them.  which, of course, follows up the 17 lit mags that *might* survive the internet, and the 15 feisty small presses (& the books you’ll need from them, too).  makes me wish i got paid by the bullet point, too.

Iris Murdoch and her husband, John Bailey

The last time I visited Auntie’s in Spokane, I nearly ran into a pillar.  Thankfully, no one seemed to be watching.  Also, that pillar was covered with staff-recommended books.  The one closest to my head, which would have left its imprint on my forehead if I hadn’t snapped out of my daydream in time, was The Bell by Iris Murdoch.

I’d seen the movie Iris a couple of times (it features three of my very favorite actors–Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, and Jim Broadbent–who were, incidentally, all nominated for Oscars for their performances in this film) but had never encountered any of Dame Iris’s books before, so naturally I was curious.

For a book written by a noted philosopher, The Bell is surprisingly easy to read.  The prose bears the marks of its time (some overwriting, adjective stacking, etc.) and at times, Murdoch does use some of the trademark tools of the philosophical novel (long speeches delivered by characters, stretches of philosophical internal monologue).  But overall, she lets the reader figure out the message for him/herself–and I appreciated that. Read more »