Yesterday evening Tracy and I came across a beach on the walk home from the train station. True, we live in southern Germany. There is a very green slow moving river in town, but the beach wasn’t built on the Pegnitz. A beach doesn’t need a body of water. All it really needs is a field of soft shifting sand, beach chairs, straw umbrellas, sun, and drinks.
Last weekend the entire city dressed up as a flea market. Stalls strung for kilometers displayed all you could ever need or hope for: bronze gongs, fur shoes, Smurf figurines, horned headdresses, engine parts, and piles of miniature porcelain arms, legs, and heads.
The best thing we’ve happened upon so far in our intent-on-entertaining city is this:
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And also just because they are cool.
This week the NYC Municipal Archives released over 800,000 photos from its collection of 20th century NYC photos. I’d post some of them here, but there’s a license fee, so click through to enjoy.
Note: Of course I’m not the only one to discover this awesomeness. The online archive is currently down due to overwhelming demand. In the meantime, here’s a site with a bunch of the images.
I spent three years in deep East Texas, at Stephen F. Austin State University, getting my BFA in creative writing. For those last two years, I had two roommates in a three-bed/three-bath apartment. One of those roommates was often naked.
This is pre-nudity, in which she is abiding by our roommate-agreed zombie contingency plan.
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Get Lit! was an amazing experience, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help this quiet ennui that’s crept up on me since it ended. I met and heard some spectacular authors, writers who who’ve inspired me, artists that I never dreamt could all inhabit the same 30-mile radius without imploding or summoning the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And it’ll take me at least a fortnight to absorb all of the wisdom I gained during the past few days. I learned so, so much.
It’s like seeing your favorite band for the first time live. Leading up to the event, you’re a manic wreck, sporadically blurting out the band’s name in daily conversation, listening to their records over and over again, making sure that you’ll know all of the words so you can sing along and not miss a beat or a word. You become what Steve Almond calls a Drooling Fanatic. You start to lose your grip on time. The closer the event comes, the faster time goes. And then it’s here. Your favorite authors, the people who inspire you, the books you owe something to, they’re all around you and it’s tough to take in. You don’t realize what’s just hit you. Read more »
If you can understand the me, then I can understand the you.
–Metallica, “The Unforgiven II”
Don't Get Trapped in the Yellow Dog Sentence
Back in my demolition days, I was going to a lot of Amazon parties. That was when Amazon had ads every week in the Seattle Weekly and The Stranger in an ongoing hiring spree.
While Amazon snatched up my friends, I tore down walls. I remember describing some of my misgivings about my job to a woman while sipping wine from plastic cups in an overgrown yard in Wallingford. The sledge hammer was heavy, its blows loud. I wasn’t sure I had enough “rrrr” in me to last in the field.
The woman I was talking to had probably graduated from an Ivy League school and moved to Seattle to work for this start-up. She was the type of person who still thought she was the smartest girl in the world. She said, “You need to embrace your inner balls,” and then demonstrated how I should approach my job by springing into a lunge with fists punching the air, scowling, and growling. Read more »
Poster Design by Michael Goldkamp
Check out some great interviews with festival authors by The Inlander.
Check out more interviews and kind festival coverage at the Spokesman-Review.
For the official word on times, locations, prices, etc., please check out ewu.edu/getlit or pick up a festival guide at your local Inlander rack.
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention!/A kingdom for a stage, princes to act/And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
–Prologue, King Henry V, William Shakespeare
If I have a muse, she’s a bit of a strange one. She doesn’t whisper things in my ear too often or write my words for me; her favorite method is to get me reading the right books. She’s of the teach-a-man-to-fish variety, I guess, and lately, she’s been on a roll. I say to myself, Where are all the books about actors? and she tells me to read Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, which I purchased at the used bookstore a year ago because of the kitschy 1970s cover and a previous positive experience with Murdoch’s work. Turns out, it’s about a retired actor/director/playwright. I wonder about the intricacies of rewriting a Shakespearean play as a contemporary novel, and she sends me to my bottom shelf, where Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres sat unread for goodness knows how long, thinking I’m reading it because it’s about family. About a paragraph in, I realized I’d read about this family before.
At first, I thought A Thousand Acres might only incidentally reference King Lear Read more »
When I was a senior in high school, I had to fill out a form detailing my career goals. Based on this form, I was assigned a group for career day. Each group would spend first period in a classroom with a group of adults who had succeeded in their field of interest. I knew kids who spent their mornings with engineers, doctors, and teachers, but on my form, I said I wanted to be an actor. Maybe a director. That I’d like to start my own theater company. This put me in the miscellaneous group.
The miscellaneous group contained about fifteen kids out of the eight hundred who would graduate with me that year. We got the whole performing arts center to ourselves, presumably because it seemed aesthetically appropriate and not because we needed the space. We had speakers from a variety of careers in arts and letters: a radio personality, a journalist, a novelist, and a couple others whose presentations I can’t remember because I was busy counting the empty seats in the auditorium. The radio personality was the closest to an actor the school could scrounge up. They didn’t even bring in a drama teacher for the occasion, though a small handful of us had theatrical aspirations. Maybe they were trying to tell us something.
Of the presenters we had, the novelist interested me most. He was middle-aged, portly, and had put on a plaid button-down for the occasion. At that point, I hadn’t dreamed of being a writer since about sixth grade, when I wrote what I believed to be a novel (finding it years later, it was twenty-five pages in fourteen-point font) about a cute boy who fell inexplicably in love with a girl like me. I had been immersed in the theater for several years, moving from show to show with hardly a breather, often doing my homework in class or on breaks during rehearsal. I had no time for writing. But sitting in the cavernous PAC, listening to a man who finished a mystery novel every six months or so, I remembered how much I’d loved it. I listened with fascination as this man told us how many novels he’d published (I wish I could remember his name) and how, if you filled seven legal pads with fiction, bam! You’d have a novel. Read more »
The dissident among his adoring fans.
In his 1967 “Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers,” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn writes:
Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not pass on to society its pains and fears, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read.”
Solzhenitsyn’s letter is primarily a call to end Soviet censorship of the arts, but this question of the political and social work of literature seems, now, to be his more controversial claim. I can think of no living artist who would, as the Congress of Soviet Writers did, vocally support government censorship of the arts. But many American writers would readily dismiss Solzhenitsyn’s suggestion that literature must warn against “threatening moral and social dangers” as antique. Read more »
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