There’s a difference between greatest or best and most beneficial books. But if no one is going to visit the library to discover them, will they truly be great, best or beneficial? Some people must be reading those odd artifacts called books. Otherwise a self-published novelist with a great book deal would have remained in the shadows of the literary landscape.
Oh, bother… maybe I need to switch from coffee to chai.
From Unclutterer:
Coffee beans you aren’t going to grind and brew within two weeks can be kept in the freezer, but they should not be stored in the refrigerator. Moisture isn’t good for coffee, well, unless you’re actually in the process of brewing. Don’t believe me? Here are a few insights from people much more informed than I…
Link.
And loosely related, from The Point:
…it’s not surprising that studies have shown caffeine is an effective aid…. For caffeine to be most effective, however, regular users need to minimize their caffeine use so that when they need it, caffeine will give them a boost.
Link.
From Seth Godin:
used bookstores hate Amazon
And so do independent bookstores
Link.
Who vs. how many.
Link.
More marketing links than you can read…
Link.
Used bookstore owners
hate Amazon. But why? The
staff and owners of
used bookstores know the hands and
faces of bibliophiles.
Read this from AdPulp:
Hugh Macleod is not part of the Facebook-hating mob… but he does like this critical Guardian piece on the politics behind the company.
Investigative journalist, Tom Hodgkinson, says he hates Facebook in his lead. He then delves into a deep background check on the money men behind the soc net.
Link.
An interesting report regarding Facebook. But the journalism is questionable. When a journalist expresses bias before “objectively” reporting the story two things occur. One, the integrity of the investigation is compromised due to the predetermined objective of the journalist. Two, by framing the story as an anti-Facebook article, the journalist sets the reader up for biased propaganda that is supposed to convince the reader to hate Facebook. And that is not journalism. It is a well researched essay at best or simply an op-ed piece.
From Seth Godin:
I was talking to someone yesterday about naming books, and I realized that there are three useful schools of thought here.
Link.
From Gapingvoid:
Beware of turning hobbies into jobs.It sounds great, but there is a downside.
The late billionaire, James Goldsmith once quipped, “When a man marries his mistress, he immediately creates a vacancy.”
What’s true in philanderers, is also true in life.
Link.
Sounds advice for practicing poets and writers and artists and gardeners, but not sound advice for managers, art directors, publishers, marketeers, and business owners.
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
This fits/agrees with the post about audio quality of MP3 files.
From Seth Godin:
The thing is, when you dumb stuff down, you know what you get?
Dumb customers.
And (I’m generalizing here) dumb customers don’t spend as much, don’t talk as much, don’t blog as much, don’t vote as much and don’t evangelize as much. In other words, they’re the worst ones to end up with.
Link.
You want quality customers/fans/groupies, give them quality schtuff. For example, the books I design are carefully crafted. A book is a book is a book, you may say. But in this info age, a book needs to be packaged as a souvenir in much the same way an album is packaged as a CD. Why is this important? Regarding the books I design, they are lifestyle objects. When people buy a copy of one of the books I design I want them to emotionally and intellectually connect with the book as one might connect with a new friend. My desire is that these book buyers invite/introduce other people to the experience. This translates to quality customers/fans/groupies.
Instead of the romanticized “how do you write?” maybe the question should be what do you write? Or, maybe, how well do you write?
I suspect, that a publisher doesn’t give a flying flip how one writes as long as it is well written and it moves (i.e. sells) magazines, books, or what ever tool is used provide literary content of merit.
I’ve been dubious for years at the proliferation of iPod/MP3 music. I find this article, “The Death of High Fidelity,” delicious. Maybe it’s the former radio guy or just plain audiophile geek in me that screams, “Rawk on!.”
It’s not just new music that’s too loud. Many remastered recordings suffer the same problem as engineers apply compression to bring them into line with modern tastes…. MP3 and other digital-music formats are quickly replacing CDs as the most popular way to listen to music. That means more convenience but worse sound…. MP3s don’t reproduce reverb well, and the lack of high-end detail makes them sound brittle. Without enough low end… “you don’t get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a power chord.”
Link.
And further (this is great):
Still, “it’s like going to the Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there’s a 10-megapixel image of it… I wouldn’t look at a Kandinsky painting with sunglasses on.”
Now, I am not advocating abandoning iPods and other MP3 players.
It is just the fact that art, literature and music have been so diminished in the last couple decades that most people in our culture couldn’t tell quality art, literature or music if it was served them on a silver platter with a cue card reading “applause.”
For my generation, Gen-X, the touchstone song is Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Suddenly I feel old.
From The Times:
The Prince of Wales has watercolours, it’s true, but it’s hard to imagine him getting to grips with the waka, with its 31 syllables, strictly arranged into five lines in the 5-7-5-7-7 structure. Akihito and Empress Michiko knock out four waka apiece for New Year’s Eve as well, reflecting on the year just gone by, and this year’s offerings were helpfully put out in English by the Imperial Household Agency last week. Translating poetry is notoriously difficult and the waka usually come out sounding as poetic as the instruction manual for a vacuum cleaner. Link.
Maybe if I translate my grocery list into Japanese it will sound poetic.
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.
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
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.”
The Maurice Manning
Marianne Boruch
The event is free to the public and begins at 8:15pm in the Fellowship Hall behind the Chapel.
…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?
Anyone planning to attend the MAURICE MANNING
In 1771, Henry Mackenzie, a Scotsman, published a short satiric novel called The Man of Feeling. Literary historians tell us this novel—driven by the political philosophies of fellow Scots like Adam Smith and David Hume—helped to establish sympathy as a social virtue. Sympathy means “to suffer together”; more simply, I think it can also mean “to share feeling,” certainly one of the things we create as poets and seek as readers. In this lecture, I’d like to parse out an agreeable understanding of sympathy, briefly trace its history as a kind of ethical aesthetic in poetry, and discuss its continuing significance. I’d also like to demonstrate how English language syntax necessarily places phrases and clauses in sympathetic relation to each other. Finally, I think the poetic line itself is a sympathetic locale; such a proposition will turn the discussion to poetic devices such as tone, diction, alliteration, meter, and our old friend, metaphor. In a handout I’ll provide an example of a very bad poem, a poem from Robert Burns, one from Coleridge, and a couple of contemporary gems.
The lecture will be held in the Fellowship Hall, behind the Chapel, at 11:15 this morning. Hope to see you there.
Holy Shoot! About.com’s poetry blog listed and linked to my list of 7 things you should know about being a poet.
Crazy, right? Does this make me a poetry blogosphere rawk star? No. It means I spend way too much time blogging when I should be working… er… writing… like poetry or something.
Okay, so, About.com visitors, thanks for visiting. If you want to actually read schtuff that was published (poems, essays, etc.) follow this link. To read a weekly column I used to write go here.
Since lists and confessions seem to be on my mind; Aaron McCollough, a University English lecturer, offers his advice. Here’s the first two, read the rest by following the link:
- There’s generally no such thing as royalties in poetry. You don’t get a dime from the books you publish, even if someone actually buys a copy. If your heart is set on being a professional poet, either score a lecturing job or get used to Ramen.
- The most common way for new poets to get their work published is by entering in poetry contests. They cost money and are usually only won by people already established in the poetry community. Good luck.
(via Deborah Ager) Link.
Deborah Ager offers her 7 things here.
Coffeehouse Junkie offers 7 Things:
Peace out, my lit junkies.
01. I still have not purchased a Christmas Tree…
02. and I am not going out this weekend to purchase one.
03. So, there will be no Christmas tree this year.
04. Something about the holiday consumerism confuses me…
05. and depresses me…
06. and oddly I am grateful because book sales for the publishing imprint I helped launch is more than 20% better than projected.
07. I’m still sleeping in the living room.
08. I will not explain #7.
09. But I will explain #10.
10. My entire library and art supplies were moved to the garage.
This afternoon I was working from The Drip and noticed several other WiFi and coffee addicts smashing away on keyboards and surfing the wild world web and… and I noticed several laptop users had notebooks (some basic notebooks… others moleskin notebooks) they were writing in or reading from.
The asymmetry of new and old technology is sublime. Despite the WiFi access, people at The Drip were actually writing–regardless of proper penmanship– in analog. Not typing directly into cyberspace or IMing or emailing or blogging, but writing the ways the ancients did–placing stylus to parchment. This represents the hope that our culture still has a grasp on the necessity of reading and writing and the cognitive exercise to accomplish that task.
For magazine publishers who are moaning about the plummeting subscription numbers, a word of advice from AdPulp (via 5280) Link.
To sell ads, you’ve got to attract a worthwhile audience. To attract an audience, you’ve got to give them compelling content. All of which convinces me that good journalism can be good business.
You know what the key ingredient to this success story is?
…we’ve had to more than triple our staff and increase our editorial budget…
Well, duh. Magazine publishers–still asking questions?
01. Homemade chocolate chip cookies taste really good at 10 p.m.
02. I’ve been sleeping in the living room since October.
03. This photo of the Burnsville Town Square reminds me of a weekend I didn’t have to work.
04. It also reminds me of how many days I missed chasing this illusion called a career.
05. I have $3 in my wallet…
06. and it has to last until payday.
07. I have not bought a Christmas tree yet…
08. because it costs more than $3.
09. And I don’t want a tree that has to be senselessly cut down and kept on life support until it slowly withers and dies around January 18th.
10. An Alpine Spruce is nice and will be decorated, watered and planted outside facing west when the time is right.
11. Also, I’m wearing a pair of Ugg boots a family member bought me nine years ago. They are comfortable, do not need repair, look great and make my other shoes jealous.
It’s been a long time since I did an Asheville open-mic circuit on a Thursday night.
The Open Mic at Dripolator offered quite a full evening. Kapila hosts the event. The Drip sure pulls a crowd. Parking was an issue–I had to park two blocks away. Kapila read some of his work around 9 p.m. In one, he laments that this city is now called Ashevegas when Ashevillage is he would dream she be called.
I hung out for awhile and listened to several good singer/songwriters and poets. But I left with an annoying thought–I’m not feeling Asheville. It’s an expression I lifted from another local writer. He uses the expression when a line of prose or poetry works: “Yeah, man, I’m feelin’ it now.” I suspect the expression has jazz or blues roots.
The Courtyard Gallery Open Mic offered a sparse gathering, but I arrived after 10 p.m. So there may have been a larger crowd earlier. Jarrett Leone graciously invited me to read a couple poems I found in my notebook. The same notebook I haven’t been able open since the writers residency back in July. I read a couple blues poems because it seemed to be the only sketches I was feelin’. My voice strained to pull the words off the page and send it to the audience. Jim, a regular at the Courtyard and previously Beanstreets, greeted me warmly and told me he was thinking about me the other night when he was reading through my old chapbook, Late Night Writing
I began to feel Asheville again, but it was awkward–like kissing an ex-lover. A lover that has moved onto to someone else, and the space between us is more than physical. It is an annoying thought that troubles me tonight. I’m not feelin’ Asheville. And I don’t know why.
Coffeehouse Junkie 