4 Comments The muse is on vacation. So here is Tom Jones, dancing like hell.
If you’ve seen it already, watch it again. If you haven’t, don’t bail before 1:20…
(Dan and Rachel — I am going to do my best to imitate this in Milwaukee. It will be my gift to you.)
I’m sure everyone with an hour to kill and an interest in writing has done this already.
Sort of alike
But I discovered who I Write Like this week.
Stephen King, with the occasional dash of Joyce, David Foster Wallace and Robert Louis Stevenson.
I always knew I was Stevensonish. The King thing I hadn’t realized. But who am I to say? I hadn’t yet figured out the following: 1) I write like David Foster Wallace; 2) Virtually everyone who ever wrote writes like David Foster Wallace; 3) therefore, I do not write like David Foster Wallace.
The web site I Write Like will analyze a passage of writing and say which famous author it resembles. I’m not sure how it’s done – I believe a “algo-something” may be involved – but it seems less than exhaustive. Using a semi-colon is a good way to score a David Foster Wallace, and using some short dialogue might get you a Raymond Chandler.
(Before I go any farther, a disclaimer: I know this is stupid. It is stupid and vain and fun.)
If you put in successive paragraphs from a single story (the level of my effort here is starting to embarrass me …) you will get a crazy array, mostly. Or I did, at least. I put several paragraphs of one of my stories into I Write Like, and this is who popped up: Stephen King, David Foster Wallace, Raymond Chandler, David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, Stephen King, Robert Louis Stevenson, King, David Foster Wallace.
You probably know David Lynch is a filmmaker like no other — the guy who made Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, Elephant Man and others.
Lynch also has produced Interview Project, a web site that documents a cross-country journey, one personal story at a time. These short films give us the stories of people on the margins, typically unnoticed or bypassed by the vision of America we usually see. We learn about their childhoods, their losses, their triumphs, their beliefs, all in their own words. The films are often sad and moving — but they’re sometimes poignant in unexpected ways, as in the video below, where a flamboyant West Virginia man’s love of Stevie Nicks takes a turn toward sorrow and then toward strength.
Great Literature Retitled to Boost Web Site Traffic
The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World
8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The
American Dream
1 Weird Thing Caddy Smells Like
(Lacher also wrote this Short Imagined Monologue, titled “I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.)
With apologies to Lacher:
Lose pounds now — 17 Foolproof Strategies to Avoid Getting Money for Food
Dramatic Proof That a Sturdy, Religious Marriage is Superior to One Full of Passion and Intensity and Rash Acts in Train Stations
Whales die! Whalers die! Lone Survivor Spills Story
Anyone else?
As I culled my bookshelves recently – supposedly getting rid of books I will never read or do not want, only to find that I almost never put any books in those categories – I was struck by how many anthologies I have.
Just think what he might have accomplished with two ears
There are the bricklike Nortons, of course – about 50, it seems, from my various forays into higher education. There are lots of similar textbook-ish anthologies – of modern poetry, of Western poetry, of existentialism, of “American letters,” of flash fiction, of this and that.
Then there are some themed anthologies, collections that seem to promise something stranger or more various.
You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe is one of those – a collection in which authors write essays about their favorite short stories, followed by their favorite short stories. So we get Tobias Wolff on Carver’s “Cathedral,” Eudora Welty on Chekhov’s “Gooseberries,” Mary Gordon on Joyce’s “The Dead,” T.C. Boyle on Barthelme’s “The School” …
I was surprised, flipping through the pages of this book, how unsurprising most of the selections were. Easily more than half of these would be familiar to anyone who took a lit class or two.
School’s out, as the great Mr. Cooper would say, for the summer.
So how ’bout a quiz for old times sake?
I’ve been pondering the necessity of artistic failure lately – trying to take comfort in the notion that even the best writers wrote bad books. Sometimes, my rationale goes, getting that bad one out of the way just makes room for the great one to follow.
So I put together a list of obscure novels by people who have also written massively well-known ones – not to equate popularity with quality, but trying to do this based on artistic merit presented a few too many problems that seemed insurmountable, at least in the time I had.
I wonder how many of these are truly obscure, and how many are simply obscure to me? As with the previous quiz, I think this is reasonably difficult. I’d be surprised if someone could get 10 of them right. I think I’d get six or seven, if I got lucky on a couple guesses.
Answers will be posted later in the day.
No Googling.
I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like, and I like this guy: Baptiste Debombourg.
He’s French. I’d never heard of him before running across a link at Flavorwire. Here are some photos of his work. I can’t offer much interpretation or insight – my response to these, and my interest in offering them, is not unlike that of a toddler who found something fresh and original to look at. The artist offers some theory and explanation at his web site, but I find it doesn’t do much for my enjoyment of the art itself.
Enjoy.
This is a mural he created using staples.
I wonder what kind of ratings this would get these days: Vladimir Nabokov and critic Lionel Trilling and a Canadian interviewer discuss Lolita, art, sex, love, and the novelist’s intentions.
I’ve watched this interview from the 1950s a few times over the past couple of years, and what interests me most — apart from my simple fanboy interest in Nabokov — are the strange little details of the production. The book-strewn set. The bygone formality of the setting. Nabokov’s accent. The seemingly huge number of lamps. The on-air smoking, the mispronunciations of the author’s name, the fact that the three parties all get up and change seats while continuing their discussion. My favorite nugget is the fact that Nabokov identifies something he calls the “artist-reader,” the kind of reader he’s aiming to affect with his work.
Nobody publishes short story collections, right?
Wrong! Those of us who whine about this – count me among us – have been officially proven wrong by the following news: Scribners will publish a debut collection by James Franco this fall. Title: Palo Alto.
Not that Franco
This is great for the form. Just when it seemed that no one really cared about us and our toil, we learn that in fact people do care about us and our toil. They care a lot. Thank you, James Franco.
On the other hand, the news – well, it’s not really news, but I only recently found out about it – will surely prompt a cascade of derision among writers, especially those of us who have been so far scorned by Scribners. But I don’t know. While I can get onboard with jealousy and self-pity as much as the next guy, and while it does seem patently unfair that a famous, good-looking actor gets a book deal, while I, unrecognized genius that I am, apparently can’t even bribe a goddam publisher – wait, what was I saying?
Book trailers are not exactly a new thing, but the use of them does seem to be growing. My question would be: Is it helping any?
I’m dubious. I don’t know that there’s any really scientific way to track this – just as there is no hard-and-fast way to judge the effectiveness of an advertisement or any other promotional event. Even books sold at a reading – can you say the reading sold those books? Maybe some, but I know I typically buy books at readings that I am fairly likely to buy anyway, and i assume the book-reading audience is comprised largely of the book-buying audience.
I also wonder if the trailers, by trying to be entertaining in a visual medium, may inadvertently highlight all that books are not – if you catch a non-reader with a flashy object that isn’t book-like, will they be any more likely to read?
But even if the trailers don’t magically jack up sales, that doesn’t mean they can’t be interesting or valuable.
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