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

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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“For example, this crazy ruffled tee is probably too out there to sell in either store. It's a little rugby-meets-beauty pageant. But I really liked making it. It felt silly and creative and exciting. I haven't felt that feeling in a while.”--Jen Schneider

I’m finally done with the teach-at-two-schools thing. I’m committed now to teaching just at the Colorado School of Mines, which is my favorite of the 40+ jobs I’ve had so far.

Now that my life is less stressful and I’m on summer break for about two weeks (though I have to plan the upcoming semester) I thought, Now I have to get some serious writing done. I began thinking about finishing stories and trying to get them published and that—well, that killed any sort of creativity I might have mustered.

Yesterday I was reading my colleague’s blog for inspiration about blogging. And I was so interested to see her drama with creativity. I hadn’t realized she was selling her sewn wares: Read more »

"Example Dream" 2010 Digital Art by A. Ketcham

I’ve been in a lot of art galleries recently, and I’ve noticed this trend that really bites my nerves. Words on the canvas, only somewhat incorporated into the visual design, and worse, they’re the same abstract words that one should avoid in writing and therefore, I think, doubly avoid in art. You know the list by heart: dream, smile, love, believe, etc. I can deal with a poem ending on the heavy line “I’ve wasted my life,” but for some reason, if that poem were a painting, an idyllic scene of sunlight through pines and golden horse pies and a man in a hammock that had the words “I’ve wasted my life” painted in the sky, I would hate it. That’s what the title should do–provide just enough extra context to give the viewer a jolt.

Environmental phenomenologist David Abram wrote that “…today you read printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor.” Maybe that’s true, and if so, I think that ruining a perfectly fine painting by incorporating the word “believe” is like smearing bear shit over a corner of it.

If the audience should walk away with a sense of dreaming or the desire to create personal goals, the work should convey that. It’s not that I’m totally set against clever inclusions of words in art, and the kind of typographical fun where the type itself becomes important, not the message of the word. And those good examples do exist. Photographer Martin Wilson creates words and phrases on his contact sheets and they look amazing even if the message is a whimsical Motown lyric (eg. “Dancing in the Streets”).
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the critics all agree: way better than the hollywood adaptation.

remember awp, way back when?  i do, because i’ve still got a shitload of lit mags sitting in my apartment that i hauled home from denver, but which, as of yet, i have to read.  and i’ve begged off posting about salt hill because i wanted to do a proper review of this excellent little journal.  it’ll happen someday, but in the meantime i can’t wait any longer to share with you the glory of stefanie posavec’s work, which i discovered in salt hill 22.  if you liked dan’s post with stuff from information is beautiful, this’ll be right up your alley, because this lady’s an evil genius.  she’s taken works of literature and literally mapped them, in various ways, based on sentences, paragraph breaks, chapters, etc.  you can learn about her process for creating sentence drawings, plus get some other brilliant work & links of hers over at eye blog.

and but there’s more!  with a totally unrelated (except for in a conceptual way) link, i also wanted to share with you the mind-boggling awesomeness that is the cyoa project.  in which samizdat took a dozen “choose your own adventure” books and mapped out every conceivable path.  and then animated them in flash.  it’s nothing short of stunning.

similar idea, different medium—each doing something better than the other could.  here’s to always having the best of both worlds.

Apropos of nothing, an author once told me that if I wanted to become a writer, the first thing I should do is hire a good photographer and get some pictures taken, so in the highly unlikely event that everything worked out, I’d at least have some good book jacket portraits ready to go. The author tipped his glass of wine at me and winked as if he had just imploded my mind with his advice. I asked him about the importance of reading living authors and the cannon, and he rolled his eyes.
“You sound like an MFA student.”
When I said I was, he laughed and told me to get my jacket photos taken while I was thin and young and relatively sober.
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The BookBook Case

I was recently traveling by air–on Southwest Airlines to be exact–and I found something quite interesting in Spirit, Southwest’s in-flight magazine.  It was a product feature, in the “Business Perk” section.  Basically, an ad for the latest in laptop chic, the BookBook Case (pictured, left.)

This was not an ad placed by Apple.  Spirit specifically endorses this.  They titled their feature, “A Novel Idea” (super clever) and angled it toward the fearful traveler as a way to prevent laptop theft.  It’s an eighty-dollar case that is designed to look like a rare, leatherbound first edition (of what, it doesn’t say–are Russian authors more likely to scare away thieves?  What about Melville? Dickens?  Whose work is truly tough enough to work as a security system?)

Either way, the article makes sure to tout the benefits of BookBook ownership as it relates to potential theft.  And I quote:

Never again will you have to keep one eye on your laptop as you stand in line for a refill at the coffee shop.  Just zip it up in your BookBook.

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With the movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in town, Stieg Larsson fever has hit Spokane.  Larsson joins Mankell, Sjöwall, and Wahlöö in making the Swedish thriller/detective story popular with English speaking audiences. The Guardian’s John Crace examines why this genre, discovered by German and French audiences years ago, is all of a sudden so popular in England and America when “The plotlines are bleak, the locations are forbidding and the main characters are usually angst-ridden alcoholics.,” which pretty much sums up how I felt about my family’s holiday parties while growing up in Sweden. (Just kidding mom.)

Since the country has a population of only 9.5 million or so, a lot of the books I read in Swedish had originally been written in a different language. I didn’t realize it then, but that meant that I was exposed to great writers that English audiences were not. (Sweden translates roughly 25% of its books; the UK  translates only 3%.) I never paid much attention to the original titles of those books, but now that I’m seeing some of my favorites from Sweden translated into English, the changes are kind of interesting. Read more »

Thomas Jefferson's Notebook on Religion

In his lecture given to journalism students at Columbia University, Steven Berlin Johnson poses the proposition that texts should not be still, that they should move, connect, find new relationships with new texts. He explains that this is actually the way we’ve treated texts throughout most of history. He describes the “commonplace book” that was most popular around the Enlightenment in which scholars, scientists, and wanna be scholars and scientists took notes on what they were reading. Anything that caught their attention or inspired them would go into these commonplace books. John Locke kept a commonplace book in the mid 1600s and developed an intricate system for organizing his passages that is strikingly similar to the way our modern-day search engines function. These commonplace books, which were a lot like the way we catalog our favorite books and websites on our blogs, according to Johnson, caused the texts within them to take on new meaning, never before achieved in their linear forms. So, basically, we’ve been cutting and pasting, linking and blogging, for centuries. Pretty cool. But another of Johnson’s points is that some of our newer technologies (for instance the iPad) and texts (The New York Times Editor’s Choice iPad app) are trying to place texts inside a glass box for readers to look at but not manipulate, and he thinks this is problematic. So do I. The iPad, without certain extra apps, doesn’t allow readers to copy and paste text, something that many iPad users would expect to be able to do, especially if they are also avid bloggers. Readers don’t want to manipulate texts in order to steal their ideas, co-opting them as their own; rather they want to share, rearrange, and communicate with the texts in new ways that will keep the text alive (albeit often in a different body) and keep the ideas evolving. Isn’t this what language is for?

Here’s a quote from his lecture, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

The contrast here suggests to me that we have two potential futures ahead of us, where digital text is concerned, or that the future is going to involve a battle between two contradictory impulses. We can try to put a protective layer of glass [over] the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text? People don’t want to read on a screen just for the thrill of it; even with the iPad’s beautiful display, reading on paper is still a higher-resolution experience, and much easier on the eyes. Yes, the iPad makes it easier to carry around a dozen books and magazines, but that’s not the only promise of the technology. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.

I keep trying to choose between “The semester is barreling toward the end” and “The semester is limping to the end,” which, taken together, make the semester sound like a very determined competitor in a three-legged race. And really, that’s not too far off.

My point is that I’m buried to my neck, with little time to read/do/think anything that isn’t a pile of text in MLA format.

So: pictures?

What we’ve got here is exhibit A in the military’s love/hate relationship with PowerPoint. (via The New York Times)

And if, like me, you don’t want a lot of words looking at you, then stare into this:

A huge diagram of various time travels in movies and TV. (from Information is Beautiful)

Next week: Words!