// conversation during supper included junior high awkwardness and gothic linguistics (old germanic languages not art/pop subculture).
Category: literature
// weird. fell asleep reading an ezra pound bio and woke up thinking i’m late for class.
// i didn’t know ezra pound had wisconsin connections… chippewa falls connections at that.
//decisions, decisions… eat lunch at my desk while editing audio recordings? or eat in the breakroom and read barzun’s house of intellect?
I’m embarrassed to say that since college… I’ve been so busy speechwriting for Kerry and then Barack that I haven’t been reading all the good literary stuff I used to read…
~Jon Favreau
NOTES:
1) Mark Warren, “What Obama’s 27-Year-Old Speechwriter Learned From George W. Bush,” Esquire, accessed December 20, 2008, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5339/barack-obamas-speech-writer-1208/
Susan Sontag
“To the academic reader, these are provocative, even flashy performances. To the common reader, they’re like shots of intellectual espresso.” read more »
Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age?
A transatlantic debate is currently raging about whether a decade of staring at computer screens, sending emails and text messages, and having our research needs serviced instantly by Google and Wikipedia, has taken a terrible toll on our attention, until our brains have been reconfigurated and can no longer adjust the tempo of our mental word-processing to let us read a book all the way through.
NOTES:
1) Andrew Cowan, “Books special: Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age?,” The Independent, accessed September 18, 2008, https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/features/books-special-can-intelligent-literature-survive-in-the-digital-age-926545.html
What magazines do you receive?
Deborah of 32 poems magazine wants to know:
I’m getting Cimarron Review, Bloomsbury Review, Ninth Letter, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker and some others. The New Yorker hardly needs my support, but there you go. I am morally opposed to The Atlantic, because they do not publish enough poetry. The amount of poetry they publish withered to nearly nothing the last time I checked. That’s about the time I decided to subscribe only to magazines that offered a large poetry presence. You could easily tell me how few poems The New Yorker publishes. Well, The New Yorker is The New Yorker. The prose is also good.
Some other magazines that invite my interest include Southwest Review, Barn Owl Review, and Pebble Lake Review to name a few. I’m only including magazines one can subscribe to, so that leaves out many excellent online magazines.
What magazines do you like?
American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poets & Writers and Small Press Review.
Magazines I used to subscriber to, but had to cancel due to lack of funds: Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Main Street Rag, New York Review of Books, Paste, Salamander and Slipstream.
Of course, if you’re reading this on tumblr, you are probably already perverting the language.
Lost in translation
Considering that I just read a few books of French prose (translations), I find this vaguely interesting.
“Did you know that in America we publish less literature in translation by far than any other industrialized democracy (in America 1% while in France 60%)?” Link
Based on my reading habits, I am a minority among most American.
Before audio books…
“Of all the repetitive, mind-numbing jobs in the late 19th century, cigar-rolling was special. “Unlike sewing clothes, mining coal or forging steel, it was blessedly quiet. And thus cigar workers, whether in Chicago or Havana, were the first ones in their time who managed to introduce that vital commodity — distraction — onto the work floor.“Using their own wages, and backed by a powerful union, they paid for a “reader” who sat in an elevated chair and began the morning with the news and political commentary. By the afternoon, he would usually have switched to a popular novel. The 100 or so rollers on the floor were his captive audience, listening as they worked.”
(via NYT — thanks AdPulp) Link
“I thought Europe was a country”
“Ms. Jacoby… said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way. Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.” Link “I thought Europe was a country”
The elegant lie
Sunday, I had the opportunity to sit in the WPVM studios during a broadcast of WordPlay. Katherine Min read from Secondhand World
The secret lives and desires of poets and writers
From The New Yorker:
Part of the reason there were no real biographies is that little was known about Gibran’s life, and the reason for that is that he didn’t want it known.
Link.
And from Slate:
…one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture…. the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed–as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.
Link.
From 1000 Black Lines:
- Jessica Smith, Burn it. Poetry burns well. And it is a fitting end for poetry, esp. anything from that angsty juvenile period…
- 1000 Black Lines, Thanks for the advice. I’ll burn it along with all the friendship bracelets, florescent T-shirts…. Who needs to worry about the high cost of heating fuel when burning poetry is such an affordable alternative?
Link.
Graphic novels and reader literacy
Will increased interest and consumption of graphic novels increasing reading among America’s youths? From The Kansas City Star:
The school’s Graphic Novels Club more than doubled its members in less than four years.
Link.
I remember when comic books were considered adolescent porn. For all I know they may still be perceived that way. I wonder if the increased interest in graphic novels includes the old Illustrated Classics?
When I was in grade school, my father occasionally bought copies of of the Illustrated Classics. My favorite books were Sherlock Holmes and the case of the hound Of the Baskervilles
Dull-prose hell
So, it looks like I’ll miss tonights Warren Wilson College MFA faculty reading… child care canceled at the last minute. But after reading the following article, maybe MFA’s are horribly overrated. From the Toronto Star:
…when it comes to teaching creative writing, good intentions are nothing but paving material for the route to dull-prose hell. Link.
Warren Wilson College reading — review
Brief review of last night’s Warren Wilson College MFA faculty reading.
Marianne Boruch
Charles D’Ambrosio read a lengthy, intriguing piece that I assume is the opening to a novel. When he finished, I wanted to shout, “What happens next?”
Van Jordan
Michael Martone
Maurice Manning’s poetry lecture summary and thoughts
As promised, some highlights from yesterday’s Maurice Manning
The lecture centered on “Some Thoughts on Sympathy.” Maurice began by defining sympathy. First, it is not the “I feel your pain” emotion that is manipulative, fake and inaccessible — a show of feeling rather than creation of feeling (i.e. the desire that you feel me feeling your pain). Sympathy defined as honest feeling, common understanding — as in “two beasts bound together” like oxen — of suffering.
Maurice cited the Romantic period as the historical place where sympathy in literature is born — where the outward reaching heart surveys the humanity of the world and returns to the mind where it is changed, sympathetic, and reaches outward again. “Isn’t that what we seek in poetry, to be changed?” Maurice asked. From there he presented the two-step machinery of Romanticism — heart and mind cycle — using the physics examples of sympathetic motion in plucked strings and pendulum motion.
This is the part of the lecture where I was deeply engaged. He went deep into physics and linguistics to make the point that sympathy occurs naturally — it is part of our nature. It is the transfer of energy from one property to another, one person to another, from the page to the spirit. This is the kind of lecture that challenges me, resonates with me, makes me want to go deep. I’m starved for it.
Maurice used Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” as examples of sympathy in poetry. After an in depth analysis of the linguistic patterns of “To a Mouse,” he concluded his lecture by stating that the poets he referenced found the self in these poems. “We’re always yoked to something…” he said. “The mysterious force of the poem stays with us even after we have closed the book.”
The applause was loud and seemed not to affect him as he paper clipped his lecture notes. As the applause subsided he quietly stated, “I guess it’s lunch now.”
Maurice Manning’s poetry lecture…
…was ARGH-sum!
I arrived at Warren Wilson College’s Fellowship Hall a few minutes early and waited for the earlier session to conclude. First one out the door was none other than Steve Orlen
I’ll provide highlights from Maurice Manning’s
Did any of ya’ll out there make it to Maurice’s lecture?
Strange Familiar Place comic series
It has been awhile since mentioning a comic strip I’ve written and illustrated. The Indie has published the series since December. It is called Strange Familiar Place and features a magazine A & E editor (at least in the first two strips) and the main character Hudson Stillwater, a graphic designer.
Strange Familiar Place also features Heather (Hudson’s wife) and presents a slice-of-life drama of living and working (and losing a job) in a cultural creative urban mountain city (or at least a city that looks a lot like Asheville).
Published in The Indie, March 1, 2007
Published in The Indie, March 16, 2007Beginning in mid to late April, Strange Familiar Place will be illustrated by someone else. I’ll still be the principal writer, but I hired an illustrator that I am confident will present the visual narrative with a higher quality of art.
Review of Friday night’s reading
The latest volume of The American Poetry Review arrived in my mailbox Friday afternoon. So I tucked under my arm and drove off into the rain to the Fellowship Hall feeling very smart and silly at the same time. I don’t consider myself academic. So the act of trying to look smart in a room full of academics is a foolish charade on my part. Nevertheless, I did read the first few selections while waiting for the reading to begin. I’m still not sure what I think of Mary Kinzie’s poem.
Anyway, Jennifer Grotz, a poet, began the evening by reading two translations by a French poet. She reads slowly, deliberately pronouncing each word as if reading role call for a high school home room or like the Economics Teacher in the movie Ferris Bueller: “Bueller?… Bueller?… Bueller?” She bridged each poem with a bubbly, conversational introduction which the audience seemed to appreciate. Maybe her poems are better read on paper. Her work just didn’t resonate with me at all.
Danzy Senna, a novelist, read from her novel Autobody and read with drama; shifting narrator voice to character voices. She has a subtle lisp when pronouncing “innocence” and “success” and “stare.” Her narrative is captivating and populated with warm approachable characters and full of tense lines like: “the conversation went from ironic to earnest.” I really enjoyed her reading.
Brooks Haxton, poet, began with a humoristic, absurd, controversial (you had to be there to enjoy it) poem about the planning of a large mall in Syracuse. That poem pleased the audience greatly and they responded to all the right lines with loud laughter. Haxton presents his work as recitations, more or less, with the expert use of eye contact; makes one feel like each poem is a conversation or gift to listeners. I like this approach. He delivers the poems to the listener, not the pages on the lecturn.
Kevin McIlvoy read a delightful short fiction monologue from the point of view of a kid playing little league baseball. His animated presentation, complete with humming, singing, raising his left hand to catch a ball, revealed his master storytelling ability.
Review of last night’s public reading
A quick review of last night’s Warren Wilson College public reading at the Fellowship Hall behind the Chapel. I arrived early and chatted with a local poet who is enrolled in the MFA program. He let me read some of his poems as we discussed future Flood Fine Art Center poetry readings–more on that later.
I don’t remember the first reader. She is a novelist and, with all due respect, I couldn’t really get into her prose. It didn’t interest me in the least. I’m sure she is a good writer, but her story just didn’t engage me at all.
The highlight of the evening for me was Mark Jarman’s reading. He read from a forth coming book titled “Epistles” that evoked such lines as: “to some, bliss is when the body becomes words…” and “God has committed you to memory…” Jarman read each line as if delivering a homily; consistent, calculating the gravity of each word, line, poem. This is my first exposure to Mark Jarman so I don’t know if he always reads in that manner or not. But he reminded me of the way a clergyman reads a creed or prayer or scriptures. He doesn’t look up from his text until he is done. And in that case it is a quick glance to where his chair is located. I’m drawn to his new material and look forward to reading his book when it is made available.
I anticipated hearing Stephen Dobyns but there was a change in schedule. I notice Mr. Dobyns isn’t reading at all. I hope he is still doing his lecture on “The Nature of Metaphor.”
Anyway, it was a pleasure to listen to Percival Everett read from a new manuscript–a non sequential novel. Mr. Everett displays a keen wit with ideas and words and reads through his work rather quickly–almost in a manner that suggests he is reading it more for himself that the audience–that sometimes I felt like I missed essential parts of his story. So it was profound when he stumbled over a word, paused for an long silence, and announced “sorry, I just found a typo and I don’t have a pencil to correct it.” He laughed and continued reading at the same pace as before the discovery of a typo. I’ve only recently been introduced to his work and am interested in reading more of it.
UPDATE: MFA Program Public Schedule
Updated schedule
As stated, the schedule is subject to change. However, Amy Grimm, of Warren Wilson College, just e-mailed me an updated schedule for the next two weeks.I’ll post something about last night’s reading later today.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
Public Schedule – Winter 2007
Public Schedule – Winter 2007
The public is welcome to attend the morning lectures and evening readings in fiction and poetry offered during the Warren Wilson College Master of Fine Arts Program for Writers’ winter residency. Events last approximately one hour. Admission is free. For more information, call the MFA Office:
(828) 771-3715.
Readings will begin at 8:15 pm in the Fellowship Hall behind the Chapel unless indicated otherwise.
The schedule is subject to change.
READINGS – 8:15pm
by MFA faculty and graduating students
Friday, January 5
Jennifer Grotz, Kevin McIlvoy, Brooks Haxton, Danzy Senna
Saturday, January 6
Victor LaValle, Betty Adcock, Megan Staffel, Steve Orlen
Sunday, January 7—in Gladfelter, Canon Lounge
Rick Barot, Adria Bernardi, Marianne Boruch, Robert Boswell
Monday, January 8, 5:30-7:00pm
Reception and faculty reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café, 55 Haywood Street, Asheville
Tuesday, January 9
Charles D’Ambrosio, Tony Hoagland, David Haynes, Ellen Bryant Voigt
Wednesday, January 10
Maurice Manning, Debra Spark, Martha Rhodes, Peter Turchi
Thursday, January 11
Graduating student readings: Leslie Blanco, Thad Logan, Anna Clark, Kathy Alma Peterson,
Jason Githens
Friday, January 12 (4:30pm, followed by Graduation Ceremony)
Graduating student readings: Jeneva Stone, Catherine Brown, Catherine Williamson, Bora Reed
Faculty Lectures – Winter 2007
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
In the Fellowship Hall behind the College Chapel unless indicated otherwise.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
In the Fellowship Hall behind the College Chapel unless indicated otherwise.
Friday, January 5, 10:30am
DEBRA SPARK: Size Matters
Feel like you’re writing little stories—domestic dramas or workingman’s woes—when you should be attempting something…ahem…bigger? Something more in keeping with your political outrage and general horror when you read the daily newspaper? After all, isn’t the great fiction of our day about the great crises of our day? Or shouldn’t it be? Well, holy Mrs. Dalloway, maybe the problem isn’t your lack of ambition, but how you’re thinking about size. This will be a lecture on magnitude in fiction, on three, maybe four, novels in which the principal characters intersect with something significantly larger than their selves, and not in the way that all fiction does this—the individual as a representative of the whole, the world globbing itself in a drop of dew—but through a true intersection. How do the novels incorporate the big world and its big concerns, while avoiding the obvious pitfalls of a historical or overtly political novel?
Saturday, January 6, 10:30 am
ELEANOR WILNER: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,
a poem must ride on its own melting….” (Frost)
A talk about the crucible of the imagination, its transforming powers, how a poem finds its own way as it goes, and the different ways that poets may conceive of that “melting.”
Sunday, January 7, 10:30am
KEVIN McILVOY: Making, Masking, and
Gladfelter Hall, Canon Lounge Unmasking “God” in Fiction
In this lecture we’ll take up the uniquely challenging methods of portraying “God” as a figure in fiction. Leo Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” will be our primary focus, but we will also refer to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”
Tuesday, January 9, 10:30am
RICK BAROT: The First Herbert
At the January 2006 residency, Jen Grotz presented a wonderful primer on Zbigniew Herbert and his poetry of “stratagems” and “crimes.” In this lecture, I’ll discuss the work of George Herbert—the ingenious formal stratagems which are signatory of his poems, and the passionate crimes of doubt that is the subject of those poems. Herbert lived from 1593 to 1633, deep in the metaphysical current of English Poetry. He has often been thought of as the minor poet among the metaphysicals. He is not minor. The poems are feats of engineering, as inventively modern as microchips. And they seem modern, too, in their unruly interiorities. The believer in the full flush of his belief feels a “strong regard and awe,” Herbert says. We’ll look at how that “strong regard” led to Herbert’s rigorous, beautiful poems.
Wednesday, January 10, 10:30am
BROOKS HAXTON: Else Lasker-Schüler
This lecture will locate the German Jewish poet, Else Lasker-Schüler in her time and place, present details of her biography, in its cultural and political context, discuss her vision, and offer new translations of a number of her poems.
Thursday, January 11, 10:30am
STEPHEN DOBYNS: The Nature of Metaphor
Friday, January 12, 9:30am
JENNIFER GROTZ: Flung Speech
Emily Dickinson wrote: Prayer is the little implement
Through which men reach
Where presence is denied them.
They fling their speech
By means of it in God’s ear;
If then He hear,
This sums the apparatus
Comprised in prayer.
“If then He doesn’t hear,” one could add, “This sums the apparatus /Comprised in poetry.”
My lecture will consider some similarities in the construction of poetry and prayer. There is no advanced reading required; a handout will be provided.
Friday, January 12, 10:45am
ADRIA BERNARDI: The China Night-Light and the Bottle-Tree: Visual Image and Noise in Eudora Welty
“. . . I know equally well that the bottle-tree appearing in the story is a projection from my imagination; it isn’t the real one except in that it is corrected by reality. The fictional eye sees in, through and around what is really there.”
“Finding a Voice,” in One Writer’s Beginnings
The movement between the inner and the outer, and the primacy of the visual image, are central to the poetics of Eudora Welty. The title of her collection of essays, The Eye of the Story, places the visual image and the act of seeing centrally to her creative process.
I’ve been considering Welty stories in terms of this progression from a Rilke poem, “And I would like to listen in and listen out into you, into the world, into the woods.” The progression, from “To Say Before Going to Sleep,” involves movement from the internal to the external on the behalf of the other. In the case of Welty’s stories, the progression involves a narrator looking into a character, looking out through that character, into the world, or into the metaphorical woods of that character. Rapidly, sometimes in the course a single paragraph, the reader will listen into the depths, only to then shift into or perceive an active world: maybe little gestures of kindness or bravery, more likely pettiness, half-truths, lies, mockery, cowardliness, cruelty—variations of behavior by, as Katherine Anne Porter called them, “Miss Welty’s ‘little human monsters.’” With another quick shift, the story may then enter that same character’s metaphorical woods. Welty’s narrators see and listen into in all of these four places on behalf of a wide spectrum of others.
I’ll be considering the visual images at the transition points where the point of view or level of consciousness shifts. I’m exploring whether the Rilke progression may be useful in considering one’s own work, and how it is that the visual image offers the opportunity to move into another way of seeing, thus finding another place within the story. I’ll be talking about the sensory images of sound in the Welty stories, specifically, those that relate to noise. As in the Rilke poem, visual and aural images sometimes occur together in the stories at key points. Primarily, I’ll be talking about “Death of a Traveling Salesman.” I’ll also refer to “No Place for You, My Love,” “A Memory,” “June Recital,” “Where is the Voice Coming From?” and her essay, “Place in Fiction.”
The MFA Program schedule of lectures and readings
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
Public Schedule – Winter 2007
The public is welcome to attend the morning lectures and evening readings in fiction and poetry offered during the Warren Wilson College Master of Fine Arts Program for Writers’ winter residency. Events last approximately one hour. Admission is free. For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-3715.
Readings will begin at 8:15 pm in the Fellowship Hall behind the Chapel unless indicated otherwise.
The schedule is subject to change.
READINGS – 8:15pm
by MFA faculty and graduating students
Wednesday, January 3
Maud Casey, Debra Allbery, Alexander Parsons, Eleanor WilnerThursday, January 4
Stacey D’Erasmo, Mark Jarman, Danzy Senna, Stephen DobynsFriday, January 5
Jennifer Grotz, Percival Everett, Brooks Haxton, Kevin McIlvoySaturday, January 6
Victor LaValle, Betty Adcock, Megan Staffel, Steve OrlenSunday, January 7—in Gladfelter, Canon Lounge
Rick Barot, Adria Bernardi, Marianne Boruch, Robert BoswellMonday, January 8, 5:30-7:00pm
Reception and faculty reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café, 55 Haywood
Street, AshevilleTuesday, January 9
Charles D’Ambrosio, Tony Hoagland, David Haynes, Ellen Bryant VoigtWednesday, January 10
Maurice Manning, Debra Spark, Martha Rhodes, Peter TurchiThursday, January 11
Graduating student readings: Leslie Blanco, Thad Logan, Anna Clark, Kathy
Alma Peterson,
Jason GithensFriday, January 12 (4:30pm, followed by Graduation Ceremony)
Graduating student readings: Jeneva Stone, Catherine Brown, Catherine
Williamson, Bora Reed
Faculty Lectures
by Warren Wilson MFA faculty follows:
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
In the Fellowship Hall behind the College Chapel unless indicated otherwise.
Thursday, January 4, 11:15am
MARIANNE BORUCH: Is and WasFriday, January 5, 10:30am
DEBRA SPARK: Size MattersSaturday, January 6, 10:30 am
ELEANOR WILNER: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, a poem must ride on its own melting….” (Frost)Sunday, January 7, 10:30am
KEVIN McILVOY: Unmasking “God” in FictionTuesday, January 9, 10:30am
RICK BAROT: The First HerbertWednesday, January 10, 10:30am
BROOKS HAXTON: Else Lasker-SchülerThursday, January 11, 10:30am
STEPHEN DOBYNS: The Nature of MetaphorFriday, January 12, 9:30am
JENNIFER GROTZ: Flung SpeechFriday, January 12, 10:45am
ADRIA BERNARDI: The China Night-Light and the Bottle-Tree: Visual Image and Noise in Eudora Welty
Coffeehouse Junkie 