a war worth fighting

Who else has www.kittenwar.com on their dashboard?

Apparently Angel Poo (right, or look under "winningest kittens") has won 75% of 796 battles. Crackers, please. That coy little paw! Those foldy ears! Let's make it 100%.

free fun at the aadl

When I go to the public library, I like to pick up one of the free bookmarks that they give out at the front desk. Today I got this. I am confused and delighted. What to make of this? Are we meant to assume since "dooooo" is replaced by "read" that the rooster is telling us, "Do(oooo) read!"? I know that the rooster is not really telling us anything, but I have spent perhaps too much time thinking about this bookmark and the people that designed it, and whether they just wanted any excuse to include the word "cock" on a bookmark. (Hello new readers/searchers for roosters/porn/roosterporn!)

There were still a few bookmarks left, but I can't imagine they'll be there long.

Best Books Written Since My Birth

Any thoughts on this list?

I haven't given it too much thought beyond noticing it's the #1 most e-mailed article today and was #2 yesterday. I have yet to even read A.O. Scott's related essay.

Perhaps some of you have considered this list (or your own) at greater length and wish to share. Beloved is certainly one of the finest books I've read in my 25 years on the planet, and maybe later I'll have the brainpower to think about why.

Magical Realism in Action

Just in case any of you missed this, I thought I'd post it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/09/world/asia/09cnd-runner.html

Also because it made me think of this Rushdie quotation I read a long time ago, about how magical realism might've been invented because life in some places is too absurd and too huge for the language of realism. It's a familiar idea, of course, but Rushdie put it better than I can, so if anyone knows where I can find that quotation, let me know. I think it was in a book by someone called Daniel Chua, maybe (?), about postcolonialism or anti-imperialism or some such Thing.....

News Flash (woosh!)

Why, you ask, does a story like this make the news? Maybe the creators of Southpark were right: everyone loves a cripple fight. The headline says it all.

Loose Motions

Ha ha. The title is a reference to a conversation some of us had a few days ago; I think I'll just let the rest of you wonder about it (and no, it's not a problem currently affecting me, thank you very much).

Anyway, where is everybody? Shall we make more lists? Here are some things, literary and non-literary, currently making ME happy (and I hope you all appreciate the gall involved in creating a NEW POST for my list rather than appending it as a comment to Bizness's post):

1) Not having to teach anymore, particularly because it means I won't ever again have to lay eyes on a certain lumpy lab rat of a boy who only bought the textbook 3 weeks before the semester ended;

2) The tulips in my front yard -- we didn't plant them, so what a nice surprise! Tulips, where there were none before! Just like that! 0 effort, all reward! The tiger-striped ones are my favourite.

3) Frozen treats (and the weather to eat them in): lime popsicles, red bean popsicles, green tea mochi, passionfruit sorbet.

4) The hubbub over Kaavya Viswanathan (age 19)'s fourth-rate plagiarised novel:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/books/04/23/young.author.ap/index.html

And more here, to lend credence to the accusations of plagiarism:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=512968

I swear I wasn't originally jealous of Viswanathan's big contract, because what's to be jealous of? So some college sophomore writes a shitty book that everyone wants to read -- I do believe any of us could've written such a book as college, if not high school, sophomores. If anything, it made me sad (once again, or still) that that's what people want to read these days. But then, after the plagiarism accusation, when she came out and said she'd read both _Sloppy Firsts_ and _Second Helpings_, and that these books really "spoke to me," I thought, okay, this girl needs to be taken down. To find nothing better to copy, when Dickens and Nabokov and Rushdie and Ian McEwan exist or have existed, now THAT'S a crime.

5) This and other poems by Nancy Willard:

http://maggles.stumbleupon.com/

6) The Martin Amis story in the most recent New Yorker -- okay, at one point I thought I wouldn't be able to finish it because terror clogged my throat and I couldn't swallow my mochi (by the by, do you know that choking on mochi is one of the most common causes of death among old people in Japan?) -- also, now that I think about it, I'm not sure I can list this story as a thing that makes me "happy." Nevertheless, there it is. A thing that keeps me awake at night.

Won't you all come out to play? If not with lists, with amusements of your own?

small bright things

When I move away, I’ll get my own blog and it will be nothing but useless lists. Until then, link-lists (with little to no book/writing related content) and the occasional embarrassing comment will likely be my only contribution to this fine robotblog:

1. Michael Chabon writes about the good his MFA program, with its “regular exposure to the healing rays of healthy disillusion, and in particular the hard-earned skepticism of grown women,” did him. I very much like the end, where Chabon manages to mention Doritos and the smallness of our lives in a single paragraph. (The Doritos-&-life-is-finite combo. actually seems a pretty natural match. Doritos totally freak me out though, for reasons I won’t get into here). [Via Bookslut]
2. I read “Black Hole” by Charles Burns this weekend and was mesmerized. Any recommendations of other graphic-novel/comic series that I should immediately read (besides Optic Nerve, Strangers in Paradise, and Jimmy Corrigan—my only other genuine forays into the genre) would be most welcome.
3. None of the aforementioned comics brings me as much glee as my new favorite. I sure hope there is more to come, and soon. (Click the pictures to make them bigger.)
   
4. The main squeeze and I saw “Thank You for Smoking”last weekend and both dug it (a two thumbs up from the Bizness/Squeeze duo is far rarer than the Ebert/Roeper variety). It was quick and fun; I’m not sure how long it will stick with me, particularly since it seemed to last a little over six minutes. The Michigan theater screening room was totally packed and while I love watching funny movies in full theaters (never were burp jokes funnier than when I watched “Monster’s Inc.” seated behind a class full of kindergartners) the laughter was so riotous as to obscure some of the very hilarity it was in response to. It reminded me of concerts where you can’t hear the singer’s banter over the fans. Let Debbie Gibson talk, people! (Hers was the first concert where I personally experienced this frustration).
5. As hard as I try, and the Squeeze can attest to the fact that I have been trying very, very hard, I cannot grow tired of this song.
   

Please: tell me about the ephemeral pleasures that have recently made you glad for your short, orangecheesefood-fingered time on Earth.

in the what of experience?

This is a two-part question, first "deep" then shallow. Does anyone know anything about Lawrence Durrell? I'm asking because I have this quotation from him on my little bulletin board, and I've been thinking about it lately. I can't decide if it's really inspiring or sort of obnoxious in a self-help kind of way. Here it is:

"Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough."

It's from Durrell's book Justine, which is part of a four-book series called The Alexandria Quartet. I have never read these books. Maybe a character who's a real jerk says this statement, or maybe it's meant sarcastically. I know it as the epigraph from one of my favorite collections of poems: Order, or Disorder by Amy Newman.

I like the quotation, I think, because it is something I want very much to believe. I dislike it a little because it's so instructional: be more loving! You are not patient enough! These are concerns I have already, so I don't need Mr. Durrell to let me know how my lack of patience means not only that I'll never be a good kindergarten teacher, but also that I'll never surprise the order of experience.

If you've read Durrell, should I tackle this four-book series? Is he worth it? And what do you think about this order & coherence idea? Isn't it what really good writing does--brings a little order to the chaos?

The shallow: does anyone tape The West Wing? Because I really want to watch last week's episode where Josh and Donna FINALLY made out.

Someone Please Make This Man a Hero of a Novel, or a Poem, or a Story

You'll know who I'm talking about.

I've been reading Jesus' Son again for one reason or another, and when I came across this following paragraph it struck me as being the whole purpose of the collection, as though everything written before it existed just to give this passage its maximum effect, and everything written afterwards is merely a fuller cushion. And not necessarily because it, the passage, is in itself the most brilliant...although maybe it is...but just: this seems to be the whole point of what Johnson was trying to do here, here in these stories, arguably among the best put together in our lifetimes....

But without further ado:

There was a guy with something like multiple sclerosis. A perpetual spasm forced him to perch sideways on his wheelchair and peer down along his nose at his knotted fingers. This condition had descended on him suddenly. His wife was divorcing him. He was only thirty-three, I believe he said, but it was hard to guess what he told about himself because he really couldn't talk anymore, beyond clamping his lips repeatedly around his protuding tongue while groaning.

No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.

Thank you, Mr. Johnson, I really appreciate it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I Likes Chocomuts

This post isn't really about chocomuts, or chocolates for that matter, so move along now if that's what you're expecting or hoping for. I only borrowed the title from the "American Voices" column in The Onion, in which they ask the same six faces (with different names) every week what they think of a particular current issue? Anyway, one time the question was about US-Cuba relations or something and one of the guys said, "Uh, I likes chocomuts."

But what I really wanted to post about was this: remember when Jonathan Franzen was here, and he said -- either at his round table or his lecture, I can't remember which -- that the greatest novels are all comic novels? It emerged, subsequently, that he had people like Gogol in mind, but the comment got me thinking (I know, I've been thinking about it a long time). There are some amazing comic novels out there that say profound, uncomical things -- even if we want to talk only about 20th-century-and-later books, _Midnight's Children_ comes immediately to mind (or, really, any of Rushdie's books, but I don't know whether the rest of them qualify as great novels), as does Peter Carey's work in general.... But recently, for reasons of my own, I've been taking another look at _Atonement_, which I consider a great novel, and not comic at all. I also think it's one of the most moving novels I've ever read, as is _The Story of Lucy Gault_, also patently un-comic (if you haven't read these, bear with me, because I'll soon be getting to a point for which you won't have to have read them, and you'll probably come up with lots of examples I haven't read).

The point is this: I can't really think of a novel that combines the high humor and boundless energy of _Midnight's Children_ with the cathartic, punch-in-the-gut, let-me-just-lie-here-and-cry-for-a-week sadness of _Atonement_. _The God of Small Things_, at the mere mention of whose title our esteemed faculty (and many other people besides) shudder (but oh, I love that book, I do!) comes pretty close, I think (though how comic is its comedy to people unfamiliar with South Asian culture? I can't really tell). But I'm having trouble coming up with another recent novel that combines comedy and tragedy like that. Is it even possible to write a novel that's both comic in the grandest sense and moving in the best way? Because I just love bawling when I get to the end of a novel, but I also love wit and silliness and nonsense and playing with words, and I love a writer who can show off those aspects of his or her writerly personality. I really do. As writers, do we always have to choose? Is this a very foolish question with very obvious answers? Am I missing something? Are your bookshelves full of flawless tragicomic novels?

corazones dulces

happy heart day, robotdinosaurswithhumanhearts. you can make your own chalky masterpiece here. i thought about trying to make this literary by asking for your favorite love poems or love stories or romances depicted in film, but really i just wanted to post this cute heart. i'd still love to hear what you love, though. xo.

Post about the Black Eyed Peas. And also misery.

Hey all. It's Rachel L. I won't type out my full last name for fear of exposing this secret little blog to the millions who have me on Google Alert. Bizness just invited me, and although I was initially certain I'd have nothing of value to contribute besides inappropriate jokes and updates on 2 Live Crew, I find myself already wanting to ask a really depressing question: what are your thoughts on writing and misery? I'm going to be frank: writing poetry depresses the shit out of me and for all of the obvious reasons: Introspection ends in the recognition of futility. Introspection magnifies and mythicizes one's mistakes. Writing often requires analysis of the past and all the bad memories thereof. Even good memories are often painful, in the way that snowfall and christmas lights and thinking about perfect fishing trips with your brother as a child make you cry. Beauty is painful. The sublime is painful. My arm is painful. Oh wait, that's because I did a cheesy aerobics class last night...or IS it? DAMN you, poetry!

Maybe this is specific to poetry and not fiction? Maybe this is specific only to me. Maybe this is specific only to people who would be depressed anyway, and writing only exacerbates it. But I feel like I remember being happier before I wrote poetry (though maybe that's because I was young and lithe and didn't have hormones). I wonder if what would make me happier is thinking about those fishing trips, watching the snow, crying, and leaving it alone.

Did I even ask a question? Oh, writing and misery? Does writing make you miserable? If so, what ever will you do about it? Anyone ever consider just stopping? There's also the entire side issue of writing making you miserable not for the personal, psychic crises it causes, but because it's so difficult not to sound like yourself...or for me not to sound like myself...which is taxing and sad. I give up. Thoughts?

Glad I can bring so much mirth to my inaugural post! I absolutely must end this on a lighter note. Hey did anyone hear that that song "My Humps" was the most successful download campaign ever...or something? I have no absolutely no documentation of this, nor can I cite where I heard it...or if I dreamed it...which would be alarming....

Love,
R

Thanks, Ralph. On to you, James.

"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies--captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly."

--RWE

and who's letting it (die)?

Damn good social commentary on the Win/frey spectacle of yesterday's afternoon.

the story that just won't die

okay, I don't exactly feel sorry for Frey, but still, embarrass & discredit the guy & be done with it already! Instead it looks like the scandal that rocked book clubs all across the land is going to ooze into its second month with Oprah's tearful reversal of her previous support for the book. Man, if you make Oprah cry hot tears of rage on TV, where can you hide? He's a ratfink, but any publicity is good publicity for book sales: when will this story die?

kumbayah

So, the other day party of my heart & jesmimi & I did a little panel for MLK day on creative writing and social justice. Party organized it, it was great, a completely surprising number of people came, we all looked hot doing it, fine. Since then, I've been thinking about some of the issues we talked about: politics & aesthetics, who gets to speak for/to whom, teaching writing as a mode of social justice, beauty and morality, guilt, truth. Heavy stuff. What happened to me a little bit at the panel discussion is something that used to happen to me in grad school classes. I've thought about the issues, done some reading, I think I know what I want to say, and half way through saying it I feel 1) like I don't really even know what I'm talking about, and/or 2) like I am completely wrong and want to immediately reverse all my previous statements & argue the exact opposite. These are just the flashes I'm getting as words are physically coming out of my mouth. Sure, I get the occasional flash of "wow, hit that nail on the head, I didn't even know I had that in me," but those are few & far between.

I felt okay, even good, about the panel afterward though, but now my appetite is whetted. I want to think more about these things, so I figured I'd throw it out there. What do you all think about morality in your writing, or the responsibility of your art to contribute to The Greater Good? Have you read anything lately that seems relevant to these issues? We'll have our own little panel discussion here, and no aggressive nail-clipping, dog-rescuing Christian speakers will be able to muck up the Q&A.

(title=party thought we might start the panel with a rousing chorus of kumbayah, but we saved that for later, when the Christian speaker heard us gossiping about her & came back to kick our asses.)

And what about JT LeRoy?

I came into the bookstore today all up and ready with my Frey news, ideas about how I would tell customers (on the sly, on the sly) that it was made up, cruel little schadenfreudes about making tense lesbians all flustered with disbelief/-appointment. I was gonna be the cool kid in the bookstore, finger on the pulse, but when I got in there--boom--there's talk of this.

[Quick summary for those who've never heard of LeRoy (as I hadn't) and who are too lazy to travel to link.... Or not; this shit's so complex; please travel to link and read and come back.]

And it's all so crazy, right? It's all so crazy and complex. I can't hold any of it in my mind, I can barely understand the first steps of these messes, and I know there are endlessly more. Layers inside layers. An enigma wrapped inside of Churchill's belly. Being made all the more complex by my having to now stand behind that rash call to arms of three months ago. To refresh everyone's memory:

What if we write non-fiction that's fictional? No I'm serious. This is kind of like my earlier post, the one about adding fiction to this world, little lies, small sparkles that aren't true.

.... Give them non-fiction, yeah, but make the shit up.

So yeah--there's that.

But what did I mean by that? Oh fuck I meant, in so many words, in four to be exact, A Million Little Pieces. But why do I not mean that now, and why does it feel like there's no way I could have meant it then? And why do I think what Frey did was wrong, and why am I uncomfortable, right now, with saying that?

His book had meaning, it meant something to me and it meant something to millions.

He lied.

How do I reconcile the two? How do we all?

On the one hand, it's so simple and it goes like this: The whole reason we are here to write--or the whole reason I am, and the whole reason I hope we all are--is to tell the truth, there is no point in writing if we are not revealing what we know to be true. This is why I don't read things that help me "get away," because "away" is not where I want to be, "away" is not at all where I want to be, I want to see things and help people and help people to see things. And if these things are true, and if what James Frey wrote is not, then no matter how much good his book effected, and no matter how much people may have been helped, he lied, and so he did not tell the truth, and so he did not effect good. His readers were lied to. His readers were disrespected.

But then there's this, from a December article on LeRoy in the Chronicle:

[Paul] Greenberg called the LeRoy debate a symptom of celebrity culture. "Celebrity has become a way of moving up to a higher class. Lesser writers, lesser artists are going to their real experience and to their memories just to promote their social ambitions."

...

Either way, Berkeley critic and author Greil Marcus sees something insidious behind the debate.

"What it all signifies to me is a deepening mistrust of the imagination, or the driving out of fiction by nonfiction," Marcus wrote in an e-mail this week.

"People will read fiction about a gender-confused teenage or preteen parking-lot hustler -- but only if they can believe that what they are reading is true. Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with art."

A "driving out of fiction by nonfiction"--this is exactly what jesmimi was talking about in November. But I want to move past that and get to this: "Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with the art." To wit, if people picked up AMLP and read the first few pages as a novel, as fiction, why, in this cultural milieu, would it have been so much less compelling? I'm culpable in this, too--I'll cop to that, I have to, I read it (the first several pages) in a store in Berkeley two summers ago and was transfixed--I can't at all guarantee that I would have bought it were it registered as fiction; I was riveted because it was memoir, because it was true. Because I could say to myself, every time I turned the page, This happened, this happened to someone, this happened.

But why is this? Of what is this a sign? Earlier in the article, there was a mention of a post-9/11 turn to reality, that somehow the incident--or perhaps the fallout--or what have you--somehow called for "the verity of non-fiction," in some fashion created "a tremendous thirst for authenticity." Leaving aside metaphysical inquries into the derivation of this feeling--viz., could this not just as easily have led to an avoidance of reality, a burrowing in, and away?--its existence can't be denied: jesmimi pointed to it this fall, Frey enacted it three years ago, and we all know how reality ('reality') TV has exploded in the past 5 years....


Oh, man, this fuckin post is everywhere, all over the place and of course it's also nowhere. But I'm gonna post it because I think there's at least something to wrestle with, and I'd love it if you all would take up the baton, even for just a few steps. This all is really blowing my mind, and I probably should have sat down for a minute before writing, probably should have laid down. So that's just what I'll do right now, and write more, maybe, in my morning.

this article reminds me of a conversation had a while back (youpeople, i believe you were urging us to make up memoirs?) about memoirists taking "creative liberties." digested version, for those of you not into reading police reports as a form a procrastination, here.

As in, 'funny ha ha.'

So, a funny thing is happening.

Sometime last fall, Matt Klam shared with the workshop some quote from some old(er) British writer that said something like, If you ever write a sentence that makes you satisfied--because it's nice, or deft, or cute, or knowing, or brilliant, and you get the picture--then you should immediately throw it out. Delete it. Banished.

Why? I don't know why, not exactly, just like I don't know exactly what the quote was, but I think the reasoning went something like this: We're not here to come up with zingers; we're here to say something honest. We're here to try, just once, to say something honest.

I think that's what he meant. And I'm pretty damn sure that's what Klam intended for us to think it meant. (He was big on cutting to chases, not being ornate.) Either way, that's pretty much what I, sitting in that Angell Hall classroom, took it to mean, and I remember thinking at the time, What horseshit. And I remember thinking at the time, Leave it to the scientists and the anthropologists to write truth unvarnished and -adorned, ugly and plain like those news anchors on Batman (the first one, people) after the make-up scare courtesy of the Joker. Splotched. Ashy. Etiolated. We're writers; half of what we do is make it sound nice. Otherwise any nitwit with an email account and enough fingers to type can be widely, and satisfyingly, read (forget for a moment blogs, okay?).

But a funny thing is happening. I'm starting to...if not agree with Klam and his limey hero, then at least, I don't know, at least I'm beginning to not stand up and scoff and shout against this position. And I'm beginning to tire a little of paper thin back flips.


Definition of terms: I'm not calling for owner's manual prose here. I'm not demanding that it be pared down. This is not a banner for clauseless sentences, I in no way want to do away with metaphors, similes, allegories, what I'm talking about is not gettothepointpeople. Rather, it's just....

I'm reading this book right now. The galleys, or the advanced reader's copy, or whatever they call it (love the bookstore job)--Which Brings Me to You, by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott (man, would you check out the consonants on that girl??), "a novel in confessions." Boy and girl meet up at a wedding, both single and alienated (subtext: both single and alienating), they don't have sex in the coat closet because he thinks he likes her, they agree to send each other confessions in the form of letters. The trail of dead in their love lives. I didn't say it was plausible, but that's not the point.

The point is this: leaving Almond aside, I like the way this girl writes, but that's the problem. I like the way she writes. Understand? I like the way she writes. Eh? As in, she's writing, right, and I'm trying to feel something close to true; as in, she's writing, and I can feel her wanting to make those sentences, and not that those sentences are making her write themselves.

About a month ago I got a gift in the mail from a friend who was then traveling in Poland. A Soviet cigarette case with a lighter inside it, so that when you closed the case after extracting your cigarettes you could pull at a button/trigger/flange and light your cigarette. Way cool I thought, loved it so much that I decided to not continue quitting smoking like I'd started to, and when I busted it out a week later one of my friends out here, an Italian guy named Manlio (not a typo--pronounced 'Mah-lee-oh'), he said, Ohh, dees peece of sheet is yours?? I was flabergasted. How could he? What a great thing this was, what a babe magnet and what a party trick, and how could anyone but think that I possessed so much coolness to own such a thing, it was great.

But he was right. It is a piece of shit. The lighter stopped working two weeks ago, and it looks like if I want to use the lighter--that cute, fantastic sentence that makes people go aww--I'll have to fill it up with butane every fortnight. Dees peece of sheet.

I don't know I don't know, maybe it's because 45k words into my novel and so few of them are precious, so few sentences are the kind of beautiful I always hoped a child of mine would be, and so now I'm making a virtue of necessity, but maybe it's not that? Maybe language should be less about impressing people, and more about getting it right, whatever it is that's in our heads?