As my first post for Bark, I figured I should go ahead and introduce myself. This is awkward for me, as I never know what kind of information people actually want to know, so I’ll start with what I feel is (slightly) relevant.

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I realized something kind of disturbing about myself recently. I rarely remember words. As a matter of fact, I have such a hard time remembering my students’ names that sometimes after being with them for weeks and thinking I’ve got their names embedded in my mind, I will go and do something embarrassing like call Ashley Jessica. Who knows why. Somehow my brain computes these names as similar, the same even. I did the same thing with Cassandra and Natasha. Both are three syllables, end in “a,” and have a stress on the second syllable. They must be the same name, right? No, not even close, especially if you’re the girls in my class looking at each other like I’m a fool. Turns out I do a similar thing with poetry. I rarely remember words. Instead, I remember feelings, images, the gist of it. The poem will form a shape in my brain. I’ll feel around for the details in no particular order and pull out a diner, Albert Goldbarth as the speaker, and the story of a woman who practiced trephination (the act of drilling a hole in ones head) in the 1970s. I also remember, and this is quite a feat, that the poem is called “Ancestored-Back Is the Overpresiding Spirit of this Poem.” This is one of my all time favorite poems, and I can’t quote one damn line from it. My father would say that I inherited his bad memory, but I think it’s more than that. I think that maybe this has something to do with how my senses make sense of the world, and as far as I can tell, words are the last things to make connections in my brain. I almost always think and remember in pictures. Maybe this makes me a child of the Imagists, those Modernists who said…what did they say again, something about no_____ but in things. See, I’d have to look it up or sit here anguishing over the blank spots in my mind for…wait, is it “No ideas but in things”? Whew. I think that’s it. I wonder what this says about my writing process, about the fact that I translate images and feelings into words instead of…well, how do other people do it?

"She lives in a world of her own — a world of — little glass ornaments."

In the last few week, on the behest of some fellow Bark bloggers, I’ve been prompted to stand in front of my bookshelf, to analyze its contents, and to examine what it says about me as a reader, and I’ve learned two things: 1) I am woefully behind on my reading, and 2) I am incredible inept in one area–the stage play.

I fancy myself a well-rounded reader and student of literature (what can I say, I’m a fancy lad). As an undergrad my course schedule leaned heavily toward poetry, in grad school my focus was fiction, and now that I work for Creative Nonfiction I’ve been learning a lot on the job. But what I realized, starring at my bookshelf, is that I’ve read maybe, maybe, five contemporary plays.

Sure, I’ve read some Shakespeare–the popular works, mostly–but Old Billy was more a poet than a playwright, and I’ve put some time in with the Greek masters, but my bookshelf houses only four stage plays: two by Tennessee Williams (“The Glass Menagerie” and “A Street Car Named Desire”), Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”–all of which were written in the 1940s–and this hole in my reading feels a bit shameful to me. Read more »

Last week Gawker ran an article by Doree Shafrir entitled, “A Cheat Sheet to the Secret Nicknames of the Literary Elite,” a list designed to be a helpful guide for literary-minded folks to gauge how “in” they are in certain circles. Shafrir provides this useful example: “Everyone will know you’re a poser if you don’t call [NY Times movie critic] A.O. Scott “‘Tony’” (too true!). She then provides her list of nicknames, which she encourages us all to “feel free to pepper [our] conversation with at the next Lapham’s Quarterly party”.

I don’t know about you, but I am sick and tired of all these Lapham parties. Lewis Lapham (or “The Lap” as I call him) is a party animal… it never stops with that guy.

Obviously, I’m kidding. The Lap has never invited me to any of his ragers (and they are ragers), but I appreciate these types of lists. They really put me in my place. After all, I work in publishing in Not-NYC, USA… and since Shafrir’s list is comprised of “mostly dudes…and a lot of New Yorker writers,” (but hey, “maybe it’s a prep school thing”), I guess there are only two choices if you want to hang with the “in crowd”:

1. Move to NYC, attend prep school, and secure a postition at the New Yorker.
[Note: if you're a female, #1 will also require some "cosmetic surgurey."]

-OR-

2. Make your own list of nicknames.

I’m going with #2.

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The memoir market is booming, but as Daniel Mendelsohn writes in the January 25th New Yorker article But Enough About Me: What does the popularity of memoirs tell us about ourselves? this is not a new phenomena. (The article is a review of Ben Yagoda’s “fact-packed but not terribly searching” book Memoir: A History.) We’ve gone through several phases of memoir floods in the literary market and it all started with St. Augustine stealing a pear in 371 AD. Mendelsohn writes:

However trivial the crime and perverse its motivation, this bit of petty larceny had enormous consequences: for the teen-ager’s future, for the history of Christianity and Western philosophy, and for the layout of your local Barnes & Noble superstore.

Every memoir boom time (religious leaders confessions, slave narratives, holocaust survivor tales) has also had its share of fake memoirs and the corresponding scandals. In other words, not only are Frey, Defonseca, and Rosenblat phonies, they are unoriginal phonies following the footsteps of American pilgrims writing fake accounts of survival in the wilderness and white Harvard graduates telling fake slave narratives. Read more »

Highly recommended reading

When I lived in St. Louis, I had the opportunity to take a personal essay workshop under Kathleen Finneran, the author of The Tender Land, one of my favorite memoirs. (On a side note, if you follow that link and check for the used copies of the book at Amazon, you’ll notice that multiple copies are for sale for a penny. Sigh. Kathleen shared a story with our class about how she was told after the fact that a whole bunch of her books had been “pulped.” This is the nauseating practice of turning books into, well, something unrecognizable once they’ve been remaindered. I suppose it’s necessary because publishers only have so much space to store books that aren’t selling, but that’s a big problem with the publishing business. It wants to sell books fast so it can publish new ones, but books are closer to wine than, say, cars or perishable fruits. They often need time to find an audience, but publishers expect the most sales to happen in the first year. Luckily, The Tender Land was reprinted in 2003 by a new publisher. But this is all beside the point…) Kathleen encouraged us students to meet with her outside of class to discuss our writing, and once, even though she intimidated the hell out of me, I took her up on the offer. We met at a bakery on the Delmar Loop to discuss the multiple page list of events and people I thought were interesting from my life that I’d given her in advance. (Who was I kidding? Well, myself, of course!) She graciously read the whole list, told me that my mother seems like an especially interesting “character,” and then commenced to dampen my spirit in regards to the idea of writing memoir.

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dance, magic, dance ... jump, magic, jump.

Last Thursday was the postmark deadline for an MFA student essay contest organized by Creative Nonfiction. I mention this contest for a few reasons:

1) I work there.

2) I love to shamelessly self-promote  (see that picture to the left… yup, I made that).

3) Most of the readers and writers on this blog are probably actively submitting their work to literary magazines.

4) Since CNF does not accept electronic submission (though this is likely to change in the near future), we received a flood of paper submission over the past few days, and as a result I remembered something magical about the good ol’ fashioned physical slush pile (which we all know is dead).

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Last Wednesday marked the passing of the diminutive character actor Zelda Rubenstein, best known for playing the medium in (among other things) Poltergeist. From her obituary, I learned that she was an activist for little people’s rights and an early voice for AIDS awareness and prevention (this was back when you didn’t have to live in South Carolina to make a political career shitting on people with HIV or AIDS). But, like many quasi-famous people, she died in the shadows of giants–in her case, J. D. Salinger and Howard Zinn.

For most people in the public eye, death is more or less the last time you get to make an impression on the world. How you’ve lived your life is no longer open for debate. (One of my favorite exceptions to this is Yul Brynner, who appeared in an anti-smoking PSA after his death.) After you die, your obit is your life. It’s pretty unlikely you’re ever going to make the news again.

So what happens when your notable death is overshadowed by the death of someone much more important? Does that minimize the contributions you’ve made? Or better asked, if the appreciation of your contributions is minimized, are your contributions themselves minimized?

Here are some prime examples of decently famous people whose deaths were overshadowed by much more famous people. Note how the less-famous person’s death seems less of a tragedy when compared to that of the more-famous person, and reflect on the enduring tragic unfairness of life, even in death: Read more »

On Friday, Amazon removed all Macmillan books from its site after what is believed to be a year-long dispute over ebook prices. Macmillan wants titles to be listed closer to $15 while Amazon wants to retain the $9.99 price–despite the fact that this is hurting publishers and writers. Sort of a strange move for a company that got its start in book sales, but it makes sense when you look at the many-headed monster that Amazon has become and realize that losing one publisher will hardly bring the company to its knees. Read more »

I don’t know about you all, but I’m having a good old time here at the new hangout. I have noticed something about myself as a blogger, though: it brings out the a-hole in me.

Writing posts and responding to them – something about the immediacy of it, the quickness and lack of deliberation, the value on punchiness – often leaves me wishing I’d tempered or qualified the things I’ve written. Sharp, fast insults are the coin of the realm. I can do sharp, fast insults – most of us can do them without a thought. (Check out some of the threads – not posts — at HTML Giant, for example; it’s like being at a party with a bunch of hyper-aggressive boys who are not quite as brilliant as they think they are.) (See? a little bit a-holy…) Anyway, it’s one of the things I find wearying in my visits to blogland – everyone’s an idiot or a dumbass, divisions are amazingly clearcut, etc.

Then I find myself doing the same thing. And I think: It must be the medium. Right? (Don’t answer that.)

So, this week: Some enthusiasms. Some appreciations. Some pro-s.

I love long, difficult books, and The Millions has an interesting series about them. Though I often think a writer’s best work is the shorter novel or collection that preceeds the big bonanza (DeLillo and Denis Johnson come to mind), I also really enjoy the slog of a good, long novel. Some of my favorites: The Ambassadors, Sound and the Fury, Absalom! Absalom!, Anna Karenina. I’m reading War and Peace now, and I may be reading it forever. But I like the sensation of a story so big you can’t see either shore from the middle — or one that really tests you as a reader. Novels like Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow leave me baffled, but striving. I don’t quite love them, but I don’t feel put off by their difficulty, either. And I feel that I may read them again, and a little more light will shine.

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