How would you describe the MFA aesthetic? Jason responded to Anis Shivani’s new page-view-hungry article, and it got me thinking about this MFA aesthetic we often bemoan—I’m not sure I could define it. I know when I see it. How would you define it, in poetry or fiction? Read more »

Can we mention Franzen one more time? Only to point out that amid the discussion of the Times’ treatment of female writers, Jennifer Weiner tweeted something I hadn’t thought about, or at least not in the terms that she uses:

I’m amused by the idea that *anyone* chooses what kind of book to write. You’ve got as much control over that as your blood type.

Is that true? Is that your experience? Are there genres, styles, formal experiments, voices that you just cannot write, despite your interest and diligence?

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?

Some quotes:

Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”:

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.

Read more »

Dawn Raffel’s third book, she tells Michael Kimball in a great interview, is “at its heart…about what we do with loss.” She strips the language down to its essentials to reflect her mourning characters’ desperation. They manage what they can. Sometimes they can only handle nouns.

The past never changes materially—visit and visit, Eliana thinks. Her head is in the basin. The dead are still dead. She splashes the water onto her face; she towels—absorption.

Slippers, headache, ever so slight. The cells that must wriggle and wriggle and wriggle inside her. “One, two…”

A seed, a wretched pellet.

She smells Jerome’s skin as she lies down beside him, divided, awake, and wonders, will she miss him?

Once inside their worry, I felt similarly to the way I did reading Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, a little manic but heavily invested. Read more »

Andy Rooney in your workshop, a collection of quotes:

I’ve been revisiting Michael Kimball’s craft note on plotting because I’m stuck on some work. I appreciate how he summarizes the variety of driving forces fiction can utilize:

I often tell writers that they have to make the reader want to turn the page and there are plenty of ways to do that. It can be because the reader wants to find out what happens next or because the writing is so funny that the reader wants the next laugh or because the writing is so amazing that the reader wants the next amazement. That is, there are plenty of great books that have been written without using story and plot in traditional ways—Stanley G. Crawford’s Some Instructions and David Markson’s late quartet of novels are good examples of that. That is, what is on the page can be anything, but it has to be something.

He quotes Edna O’Brien:

Well, fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth, and the perfection and care with which it has been rendered. After all, you don’t say of a ballet dancer, “He jumped in the air, then he twirled around, etcetera . . .” You are just carried away by his dancing.

How do you plot your stories? Are you more intuitive, like Doctorow’s headlights at night? Like Flannery O’Connor discovering as she’s writing “Good Country People” that Hulga is going to have her leg stolen? (Sometimes my intuition is just wrong.) Maybe you’re more of planner, in charge of your galley slaves. Or do you hope something else is carrying your readers away?

I think authors should take cues from Ben Marcus when creating their websites. Collect your essays and work you admire (like a Barry Hannah short story or an excerpt from Joshua Cohen’s forthcoming Witz), but keep the site design uncluttered.

Can I borrow some money so I can enter Adam Robinson’s Light Boxes giveaway?

My favorite podcast is Marc Maron’s WTF. Check out his interview with Robin Williams about the seventies comedy scene, cocaine and heart surgery. Marc’s also got great interviews with Sam Lipsyte, Zach Galifianakis, and Jerry Stahl.

Here’s a video interview the Marilynne Robinson about her faith, a subject she also addressed in her interview with Willow Springs. Reverend John Ames, from Robinson’s Gilead, is one of the few fictional religious characters that has ever interested me.

Even Tom Waits is on twitter.

Cut off all your hair, stuff it in a nylon and help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Finally, because of Brett’s lack of appreciation for Matt Berninger’s lyrics, here is NPR’s stream of The National’s new album High Violet.

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 »

My office is aching for a spring cleaning I’m probably not going to get to until June. My bookcase is also stacked with plenty of books I need to read this spring. What’s on your Spring Reading list? I’m hoping to devour Dawn Raffel’s Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life, Lydia Davis’ Break It Down, and Barry Hannah’s Ray before I clean my office.

Because the chances I’m going to be a rock star are as slim as ever, whatever rapture I find in music, I want to appropriate into fiction. I want to translate the mood, the timbre.

The National’s songs demand multiple listens. They mount—added guitar lines, horns or changes in the rhythm reflecting the way the phrases in the bridges and choruses open up as they’re repeated. Most of the tracks have a strong driving beat. Matt Beringer’s sentences, seemingly nonsensical at first, take shape. I love The National’s characters: past their primes, promising to be funny again. If you carry their drink, they have everything else. I love the song’s settings, that apartment downtown, milling on the balcony or under strung lights in the middle of the city. It’s always evening.

And while the setting and characters on the surface are very different, I think Christine Schutt’s Florida appropriates a lot of the mood that fascinates me in The National’s music. Read more »