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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Imagine you’re walking through the main market of the old city at night and you see this projected on the side of City Hall. So, what do you do? Perhaps you’d order an Aperol Spritz and sit for a proper screening. It turns out what we saw was a run-through for the actual event the next night.

Blue Night is celebrated each May in Nuremberg by illuminating various buildings with blue and offering light shows and other art exhibits. Of course, happening upon a light show when hardly anyone is around is much more magical than setting out to see it in a crowd, but here is a bit more of what we shared with 120,000 others:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This show was created by Casa Magica, a German company that has also undertaken architectural projection on the pyramids of Giza, the St. Jean Cathedral in Lyon, and has even transformed Tampa into awe-worthiness.

Is your city out to impress you this summer? How is it doing so far?

Oh, and what is the music to which this light show was set?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Read more about it here.

Visit the artist’s website here.

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.

This is pre-nudity, in which she is abiding by our roommate-agreed zombie contingency plan.

I should explain that her rampant nudity was not due to a hatred of clothing. She was a sculptor in the BFA art program, and because she worked with bronze, glass and aluminum, she was often at the foundry, firing in kilns. Summertime in Texas can be delicately described as hot as Satan’s balls; add to that hot kilns that get up to 2000° Fahrenheit or more, and you have a recipe for buckets of sweat and a general feeling of disgust. So when she was done for the day, she’d come home, strip on her way to her room, and immediately take a bath. Then she’d air dry in her rocking chair in the living room, completely unselfconscious or modest in the slightest, dressing only if a potential male friend coming over was heterosexual.

None of this is the point of this post, exactly. The point is that Naked Roommate and her art made me think of my own writing as art for maybe the first time. (However, the story itself is just funny.)

Living with someone who I deemed An Artist was interesting. While Other Roommate, a poet, and I would sit on the couch and put on foreign films as background noise while we wrote, Naked Roommate had to actually leave the apartment for her art. She spent hours in the foundry, working on huge, semester-long projects and preparing for her senior art show. While she fired and glazed and shaped her pieces, I sometimes stopped writing stories or poems long enough to take a nap, or eat Cheetos, or play Zelda. She didn’t. She worked hard, came home, got clean and naked, ate dinner, and went to bed. Day in, day out. That was An Artist to me, and I considered myself only a writer because all I needed to create my “art” was a working computer and a comfortable chair.

But in a recent discussion with the much beloved Naked Roommate, I saw things a little differently and have her to thank for it. “My art is a conversation you can see and touch,” she said, while visiting me a few weeks ago. “It’s just like what you do, except in pictures you put your hands on.”

Art is pictures and conversations you can touch, feel in your hands. A conversation without words. Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake here, but it sounds to me like both of us are doing the exact same thing, only with different tools. I don’t have to fire my art in a kiln for it to be art. I use words and weave them into sentences and evoke the same reaction in my audience—in this case, a reader—that she does with her beautiful installations. It made me see art in general in a new way, where everything is art—written, visual, auditory. The message and the conversation is the same connection to humanity that all artists strive for.

The only difference between Naked Roommate and me is that my art doesn’t require hours and hours slaving over a kiln. Also, I don’t wander around nude a majority of the time.

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.

And then it’s over. The rock stars have left the building. Life returns back to normal. You wipe the drool off your gaping mouth, and you’re left with the books you’ve purchased and the words they’ve shared. You leave a better person. Literature rules.

I would be more forlorn if I didn’t know that next year we get to do it all over again. Who knows who will grace our presence next year, who will share their wisdom, who will make us laugh, make us think, make us get a little misty-eyed; bring out our inner Drooling Fanatic. This makes the sadness sweet because it’s only a waiting game now. Next year may be even better (if that’s even possible) and we’ll be as ready as we can be. Because this year, Get Lit! surpassed any expectations I could have had. And next year I’ll be ready. Until then I’ll be waiting.

Bring it on.

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.

I think I quit my job the next day. I just wasn’t an Amazon sort of girl. The friend who invited me to this particular party was reading a book at the time in which the author encouraged other women to “bite off more than they could chew” in order to advance more quickly and gain more responsibility. Biting off more than one could chew seemed scary. What if you couldn’t deliver, I remember wondering while walking around Greenlake with my friend.

I’ve been wondering about this recently, too, wondering how I’ll manage what I’ve bitten. I’m very lucky to have started a new job. I’ve felt grossly under qualified for it, though. Yes, the job is to teach English to non-native speakers. True, I am a native speaker of English and have two degrees in English. And thank you if you’ve happened to notice that my grammar is relatively flaw-free.

But I had no idea that English had twelve simple tenses until last week when I realized I had to explain them to my class. Nor did I have any idea how many rules exist that determine when to use articles for nouns and which articles to use. I’m the sort of person who, when trying to explain a grammatical rule, gets dizzy with the possibilities.

For instance, when a student suggested a sentence should read, “The yellow dog is the old dog,” I thought, Well, yes, that sentence could work, and then I lost myself in imagining the very strange scene that would need to exist in order for a person to say this: There are two dogs—one old and the other young. The yellow one is the old one, but one of the people in the conversation can’t see so she is unable to tell that the yellow one is the old one. That is why her friend has to tell her this very important and fascinating detail.

What it comes down to is that I’m not good with absolutes. My mind almost always sets out to explore what ifs. And this is why I began to wonder if I was–or even could be–qualified to teach English.

But this weekend I watched Black Swan, was infused with ambition, and this is what I came to realize: I am the kind of person who can sit down for three hours at a stretch and read rules about article usage with feral interest. I’m the kind of person who enjoys talking about the possible uses of each sort of word and the nuanced differences in meaning that can be gained with the slightest variation. I care about language in a way many don’t. I care in ways most people can’t—unless perhaps they realize that language isn’t just about following rules. What if I were able to spread my crazy love for English to my students?

I ventured to try today, during one of my not-so-clear-answers regarding why “electricity” didn’t get an article and “telephone” did.

“I know it can be frustrating that English has so many exceptions,” I said, “but one of the good things is that there are lots of ways to say things in English and many of them can be right. I encourage you to experiment, to play with language, to have fun trying different ways of expressing things.”

And that is when the Metallica lyrics appeared in the Skype chat box.

Lay beside me, tell me what they’ve done
Speak the words I wanna hear, to make my demons run
The door is locked now, but it’s opened if you’re true
If you can understand the me, then I can understand the you

“This was written by a native speaker,” one of my students told us. “I never could understand why there is an article before ‘me’ and one before ‘you.’ Is this what you mean, Shira, about playing with language?”

And I think we all took some comfort there.

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, beginning with the iconic division of the empire (in the novel’s case, a farm of a thousand acres) between three daughters, whom Smiley has even given referential names (instead of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia she writes Ginny, Rose, and Caroline). From there, she could have gone anywhere; she was not necessarily bound to her inspiration. For the next hundred pages or so I ignored any Lear-ishness and just went with the novel, but when Ginny and Rose send their father out into the storm, I kept expecting him to cry out, “[L]et not women’s weapons, water-drops,/Stain my man’s cheeks!” à la Lawrence Olivier. I started trying to figure out who exactly was Kent, who the Fool, and had on several occasions to resist getting out my complete works of Shakespeare to remember which duke was which, and whether Smiley had represented Edgar and Edmund. It bothered me throughout that the author’s use of Shakespeare’s plotline should be so distracting. Instead of feeling horrified by Harold Clark’s blinding, I laughed aloud, having been curious at how Smiley would handle that particular moment for several pages. I could not fully absorb into the story.

I’m glad, really, that I read this retelling or reworking of, in my mind, one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. As good as the book is in many ways, and despite its winning the Pulitzer Prize, I felt it illuminated a pitfall or two. I do think she did a marvelous job of taking the story to another time and place, and what’s more, looking at it from the treacherous daughters’ point of view. Her interpretation or reimagination of Goneril is one I never would have devised. But I wondered, as she made sure to touch on iconic scenes from the original, if her adherence to the play might have limited her imagination of where the story would go. I wondered, too, if she felt more inspired or more limited. Was Shakespeare her muse or her prison guard? Is there always a difference?

I’m sure, if I looked it up online, I could find dozens of interviews with Jane Smiley that would answer these questions. I guess I don’t really care about her answers as much as I care about my own, or what they would be if I were to make a similar attempt at rewriting a classic. In my current project, I’m using The Tempest within the story, but I’m not rewriting the story of The Tempest. I thought I might. Or Much Ado About Nothing or Twelfth Night. They say there are no new stories, so why not revamp an old one? As Picasso, “Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.”

Maybe it’s different with comedy than tragedy. The movie Ten Things I Hate About You is a rewrite of The Taming of the Shrew. I haven’t seen it in a while, but when it came out it quickly became my favorite movie. In amorous moments, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt would spout verse and instead of jarring me out of the contemporary high school story, it added another layer of laughter. But when Jane Smiley acknowledges her story’s parentage, it pulls me out of otherwise heartbreaking situations, and suddenly I’m aware again that I’m in my living room, reading a novel. Or maybe the difference is that one is a book and one is a movie. I expect very little surprise out of a romantic comedy and am thrilled when I get it; I read a novel with the intention to be wowed.

In some ways, I think that Shakespeare’s stories call out to be novelized. It’s been said that Iago is the only purely evil character in all of literature. I think that’s bunk, and I think the broader scope of a novel could prove it wrong. I think Shakespeare’s villains, fools, and clowns are some of the most interesting characters ever written despite what they’re lacking in stage time. The internal lives of the characters can be expressed through the actors, but ultimately, the audience only hears the play.

I think the prologue to Henry V expresses some of the limitations of theater, especially in Shakespeare’s time when shows had to be done at noontime on sunny days to be properly lit. No matter how brightly the sun shone, how well the company acted, or how much the queen enjoyed it, they could not recreate war on the stage of the Globe. This speech (of which I’ve just quoted the first four lines–it’s quite a bit longer) along with various other clues that I won’t go into here, partially because I don’t know the theory in its entirety, caused one of my former acting teachers to assert that Shakespeare, if he lived today, would have been a splatter man: He would have made movies that reenacted events in gory detail. I don’t know if this is true or not, though the violence found in Macbeth, King Lear, and Titus Andronicus do seem proof to me. Either way, Julie Taymor’s on top of making those dreams come true.

Maybe there’s isn’t a good answer here. Maybe some people read A Thousand Acres without ever noticing that it was King Lear set in Iowa. After all, the story continues after the play ends; Jane gives us five sections to correlate with the five acts and then adds a sixth, all her own. And as much as I squirmed to see the book’s skeleton poking through the flesh, I still loved this book and would recommend it to anyone. It didn’t have the stink of fan fiction that books like Bridget Jones’ Diary and other Austen imitators/idolaters exude. It’s more serious than that.

So my muse has nudged me into a bit of a quandary. She’s so philosophical, that one–why won’t she just tell me what to do? I suppose she wants me to think for myself. How annoying.

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.

But the best part, he told us, was that novelists get to work alone. He chuckled. Sometimes he got to go days without seeing anyone except his wife. If you crave solitude, he said, this might be the job for you.

I imagined him in a little office with his legal pads, scribbling away. He was absorbed in his work. He was smiling. I thought, I wish that were me.

For years, I had an image of myself in my head, should I become a writer. I was alone in a sun-filled room, at a round cafe table, and the walls were yellow. There was a vase, a few flowers, and I, comfortably but fashionably dressed, wrote longhand in a notebook. Later, I developed an image of myself in a room painted olive green, at a desk with a typewriter, scowling at my pages and typing furiously among piles of writerly detritus. Here, I don’t know what I’m wearing, but I look a little crazy and sometimes I have glasses, though I’ve always had perfect vision. These images usually coincided with whatever writer I admired at the time. I had a (short) Kerouac phase, a Dorothy Parker phase, an Emily Bronte phase, a Lorrie Moore phase (for some reason this image involved writing in the park–I think there’s a story in Like Life that influenced me), etc.

Several times, I’ve stacked up seven legal pads with the intention of filling them, as the man in plaid suggested, with my novel. It never happens. I start writing but soon I’m crossing things out and rewriting paragraphs; as much as I’ve tried, I’ve never been one to write a draft straight through. Writing in the park produced only poems about ducks and children. Anything I’ve ever written under the influence of a highball starts with a Parker-style wit but, as the alcohol kicks in, devolves into sentimental gibberish. I never acted out my idea of writing with a quill on the heath while wearing a mud-stained gown, but I’m sure it wouldn’t produce Wuthering Heights.

And yet, I think these images–these ideals–have pushed me forward. Though they have little to do with the words I write, I think they give me a way of visualizing the good part of writing, when the work is working, when the words are loose inside my head, ready to be plucked and put in order. My actual writing time rarely resembles the ideal, but it gives me hope, and though I might be wearing the wrong thing, sitting in the wrong place, when I get into that happy writing place,  Image Laura writes along with me.

It does occur to me that this sort of idealization of writing is a little hypocritical. I have on several occasions ranted about people who hear that I’m a writer and seem to think it’s such a luxurious thing to do, to lounge around with your ideas all day. I rant because this idyllic image of a writer tosses off the frustration, the tendinitis, the coffee jitters, the endless suffering of revision. And yet it’s just like the image in my own mind. I’ve also ranted about writers who are more concerned with maintaining their image as a “writer” than actually writing. I suppose if I were to costume myself and set myself up in public places waiting to be asked what I was working on, or if I stopped trying to write whenever I couldn’t achieve the ideal circumstances, I would feel guilty about this.

As it is, I do feel a little guilty about keeping my image of the man in plaid. To me, he will always be happily scribbling away in his legal pads, playing an everlasting game of Clue in his mind. Because he writes “genre” fiction, I have assumed his work is easier than mine. That is unfair. Because he seemed so happy on career day, in my mind he’s forever smiling. That is also unfair. He might have popped an extra pill or repeated affirmations to his mirror just to be able to stand in front of us. He might have had a great morning–a publication agreement, a good stretch of writing, sex with his wife–and so when we saw him, the world looked rosy. He might not have meant anything he said as simplistically as he said it. But still, I see him writing with a smile. Over the years I’ve even added frills–sometimes he’s leaning against a tree, wearing a fishing hat–but he always has those yellow pads.

Of the “real” careers I considered before settling on creative writing, psychology was probably the most probable. I vetoed it, in the end, because I knew I would want to write books about all my patients, which would be a sort of violation of trust. I’d want to help them, sure, but I’d probably be more interested in poaching their stories. Their problems would be my research, and I didn’t think that would be fair. But though I’m not particularly educated in the subject, I often find myself wondering about the psychological implications of various aspects of my writing process. Would they be considered healthy? When I picture myself as a writer, it isn’t really me. It looks a little like me (though, I’ll admit, Image Laura is usually slimmer and clearer-skinned) but it’s more of a version–a characterization of myself, if you will.

When I was in college, I spent some time going to the school’s counseling office, where a PhD candidate shrank my head once a week. She administered a lot of the more basic tests you might give a child: draw a tree, draw a house, draw a person. She was baffled when my person was a stick-figure ballerina with straight dark hair.

Is this how you see yourself? she said.

Of course it wasn’t. She said to draw a person, not to draw me. Apparently most people draw themselves (or most children–I wasn’t quite sure if adults usually got this test but I remembered drawing a tree for a shrink when I was about four that apparently alarmed her: in my tree there was a hole and an owl living in the hole). But I felt like drawing a ballerina. She then told me to draw myself and I think I did a pretty accurate job. She looked satisfied and marked something on her clipboard. I wonder what she would have said if I drew my writerly ideal. Would she have seen the inconsistencies?

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.

His claim is a product of living in a repressive society, they suggest, of making art under the heavy hand of Glavlit and Goskomizdat, the Soviet censorship agencies. We, in the civilized West, can turn our attention to domestic and individualistic concerns and leave the onerous and inconvenient heavy political and social lifting to our compatriots who have the bad fortune of living and making art in less open societies.

In 2008, in the lead-up to the announcement of Nobel Prize finalists for that year, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, suggested that contemporary American literature was too insular to matter much on the global and historical stage. Perhaps this avowal to “warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers” is part of why.

Contrast a few recent Nobel laureates in literature: Mario Vargas Llosa (2010), J.M. Coetzee (2003), Günter Grass (1999), José Saramago (1998), Dario Fo (1997), Seamus Heaney (1995), Octavio Paz (1990), and, for that matter, the most recent American writer to win the prize, Toni Morrison (1993). (Solzhenitsyn himself won the prize in 1970).

Is it possible, then, for literature to avoid the explicitly social and the explicitly political and still be “the air of its contemporary society?” It is possible, of course. But even that is outside the bounds of what many American writers seem interested in doing. What matters is the fun, the wonder, the joy of making, and so on. What matters is that it makes me happy, makes me feel fulfilled. Literature is about the self, about expression, they claim, not about the society, and so, Solzhenitsyn might say, it does not deserve the name literature, and it will be quickly forgotten.