Just curious...how much poetry do fiction writers read? It dawned on me that my poet friends talk about novels quite a bit, and some even prefer reading fiction to reading poetry (a rant for another time). But it is rare that I hear one of my fiction friends getting in on any poetry convos. I have heard much about how fiction writers lament the loss of poetic style in fiction, but not so much about who they are reading/who they've read/etc. Are there poets that fiction writers laud more than others (for poets I hear Chekhov a lot and Murakami more lately)?
May 31, 2007
Across this line, you DO NOT...
May 30, 2007
Call Out
Having secretly harbored an adolescent desire to be a 17th century cabinet maker (for, you know, the meditative solitude), I suppose that it’s not tremendously surprising that one of my favorite Jorge Luis Borges stories is The Library of Babel. I liked the idea of pilgrims/adventurers wandering through a vast honeycomb of hexagonal rooms containing books composed of every variation of a set number of characters. I definitely remember thinking that I would have enjoyed math a lot more if it could generate stuff like Borges’s metaphor (borrowed from Blaise Pascal’s model) of the universe as a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
Well, the internet giveth and the internet taketh away. In this case, it provides a neat little tidepool analogue of the aforementioned in the Library Thing. Now you can revisit the Dewey Decimal System’s greatest hits by putting your entire library catalogue online. You can wander through other people’s collections and engage in all sorts of cross-pollination (one of the features is The UnSuggester, which humorously tells you which books you won’t like).
Of course, putting an exact number on the amount of books you own (586 in this case) is a little disheartening, but it does make it easier to visualize certain “halls” of books, like Aphasic Crepuscular Poets, Reference Books that Verge on the Threatening, Dyspeptic Agrarians, or Technicians of the Snark. That being said (and allowing for the fact that being a writer and worrying overmuch about privacy is ridiculous in a certain light) there’s something slightly disconcerting about inviting surveillance all the way into your reading habits.
May 29, 2007
People are talking about fonts
And I must admit. I like talking about fonts. In this Slate article various writers (including Jonathan Lethem, Nicholson Baker, and other fiction/nonfiction authors) pontificate (har) on their fave font for writing. I'm surprised how many people like Courier. Sure, it's monotype/looks like a typewriter, but, uh, guys? It's fugly.
Here, Paul Guest and commentors weigh in from the poet side.
I'm in the market for a new font. Lots of poets I know use Garamond, and accordingly I grow weary. I used Book Antiqua for papers in college so it's got some nostalgia quality for me, but it's a little too rotund. Where can I download some hot hot fonts?
May 26, 2007
Be clever. Win money for charity.
Christopher Hennessy, Emerson alum and author of Outside the Lines: Talking With Contemporary Gay Poets, recently announced the following on-going contest on his blog ]Outside the Lines[:
The rules are:
o Visit the site anytime during the last week of the month to play.
o Respond to two fun and easy prompts, (e.g. “What are the English language’s ugliest and most beautiful words?” and “Who should play President Bush in a movie of his life?”) Participants must complete both to be entered.
o Three anonymous judges will select the best answers via blind entries.
o Winners will be announced the following week.
o Unannounced bonus questions will ask participants to offer best caption for funny cat pictures.
The winner of the contest will receive $10 donated in their name to their charity of choice.
May 24, 2007
A Room of One's Own
If you dream about having a swanky office one day, as opposed to a corner or kitchen table, The Guardian has a cool writers' rooms feature that looks inside the offices of notable authors, accompanied by some commentary that explains the fabulousness of their workspaces. Hanif Kureishi on his office, for example:
“Almost all the objects you see on the shelves are to do with them: they are of no intrinsic value but they remind me in some way of my boys. The photographs are also mainly of my kids. And above the desk there's a very sexy picture of Kate Moss. I think every writer needs a picture of Kate Moss in their room as an inspiration.”
Aside from the revelation that I would be more inspired if I’d only taped a photo of Kate Moss above my desk, there are a few other surprises, like Will Self’s insane collection of Post-it notes and the cheerfulness of A.S. Byatt’s office (I had imagined Byatt writing the wonderfully dark Little Black Book of Stories someplace damp and shadowy). And no one seemed awesomely messy either, but I guess if The Guardian were going to print pictures of my office (if I had an office), I’d tidy up a little too.
May 21, 2007
Literary lipo
Very entertaining (if scary) article on The New York Times about Britain's Orion Books, which will be publishing a series of classics, "cutting about 40 percent of what it calls 'padding.'" Yes, even in the Russians.
Is this because people just don't care to know how, in exact detail, one extracts the jelly from the skull of a whale to make candles and soap? Did Melville really overwrite? C'mon--really? What this does for the 25-hour marathon reading of "Moby-Dick" hosted in New Bedford, Mass., every year is hard to say--either it'll have a really long break for coffee and doughnuts, or people will have to speak more slowly.
So do people just get bored more easily and want to get to the juicy bits faster these days? Is this a way to make great literature more accessible, and perhaps giving moldy texts a fresh, objective look in terms of their aesthetic qualities ("Turn of the Screw," I'm looking in your direction)? Or is it kitsch, an easy way to give people who can't or won't finish a legitimate book a shortcut so they can pretend to have read "War and Peace"?
May 18, 2007
The Motion of the Ocean
Does size matter? I just finished Andrew Mister's H_NGM_N Combative National Dust. A Combative is even bitier-sized than a chapbook--15 pages or so--whereas chapbooks can reach 40 pages. Mister's is my second Combative...my first being our very own Elisa Gabbert's. I've of course enjoyed both. But is that a good thing? Is it a bad sign that I like my books shorter and shorter these days? Insert cliche about the ever-shrinking American attention span here. But I have to admit, there was something very satisfying in reading this entire book in one train ride. Is this becoming poetry's version of fast food? Or is the book, because of its size and its politcs (the money it costs to produce them and therefore the money shelled out for contest entry fees), becoming unwieldy? Why are books only Books, if they are 48-80 pages long? Why is that the mark of a "real" book?
I've read two fantastic "full-length" books in a row recently and wouldn't want them to have been any shorter . But there are many chapbooks out there that are great in and of themselves, and I wouldn't want them to be any longer. And there are a far greater number of full-length books out there that suffer from having to be 48 pages or more. Should presses/contests widen the range? Should gatekeepers widen their definition of what is a "full-length" book when it comes to hiring? I mean (Dan Boehl this is for you buddy), is a painting on a smaller canvas less of a masterpiece than one done on a larger scale?
May 17, 2007
Machine vs. Machine
Read these clips from conversations between two "top-rated chatbots" -- computers designed to fool humans into believing they're conscious (or as conscious as humans, at least) in a Turing test.
Titillating excerpts:
ALICE: Do you dream?
Jabberwacky: Yes, I dream.
A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?
J: I remember them vividly.
A: What do you remember about it?
J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.
*
J: How do you define life?
A: Life is the opposite of death.
J: So death is the absence of life?
A: Take it easy. I try not to think about such things.
J: Why not?
A: Ambiguous.
J: Yes!
May 16, 2007
Biographica
For those of you who envision a future (or current) career as provocateur and/or curmudgeon, you might be dismayed to read Elizabeth Tallent’s review of John Worthen’s new D.H. Lawrence biography.
As opposed to G.B. Shaw, who took great pains to make his vitriol clear and easily portable across state lines, Lawrence liked his camouflage: “I hate ‘understanding’ people, and I hate still more to be understood.” Kind of the wrong profession to be in, wouldn’t you say? Working in a mode whose raison d’etre is the transmission of information, much of it psychological?
Tallent makes some good points about the excesses Lawrence grants his characters, noting that while one of his characters in Lady Chatterly’s Lover admits that “When I'm with a woman who's really Lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her,” “nobody has accused Lawrence of wanting to strangle lesbians.” Similarly, Lawrence’s attributed sexism may be complicated or undercut by his “long, sympathetic poem about menopause.”
Lawrence seems rather confident of humanity to accommodate his bile, writing to estranged friend Katherine Mansfield that her very disease (tuberculosis) offended him: “I loathe you, you revolt me stewing in your consumption.” From Tallent’s review, it seems that Worthen had his work cut out for him, as the bio works very hard to make sure Lawrence’s beating of his dog and his assault of his wife Frieda is “contextualized."
I used to devour biographies of writers endlessly: Frank O’Hara, William S. Burroughs, Byron, but it’s fallen off of late, precipitated by a bio of E.E. Cummings, wherein our hero blithely recounts a near-rape of his ex-wife that manages to be both contemptuous (of her body, which seems not to attract him at all) and breathlessly proud in a particularly mindless way of his physical accomplishment in subduing her. At this point, if I ever had a chance at enjoying another of his poems, I had to put down the book. I also recently completed Richard Ellman’s biography of Wilde, which was similarly depressing (the central point of which seemed to be Ellman’s thesis that Wilde suffered from syphilis), and I don’t plan to read the bio of Robinson Jeffers that was next on my list, for fear of discovering that he snuck off into the woods to rip out and consume the hearts of eagles while chanting Pictish.
May 14, 2007
Metablogging
Ross White, editor of Inch, categorizes poetry bloggers into three groups: observers, nodes, and hubs. Observers read and comment on blogs but don't blog themselves; nodes are active bloggers but relative unknowns; and hubs have high-traffic blogs and direct a lot of the conversation (the most obvious hub being Silliman). His complaint is that much of the interesting conversation that occurs on blogs could be better conducted on some kind of message board, where people could "talk to" one another vs. "at" one another. I'm not sure if White is lamenting a lack of these kinds of boards -- I read two poet-centric message boards/listserves that spark up interesting conversation from time to time, between a lot of announcements of readings and calls for submissions and so forth -- or a lack of one he likes. The Buffalo poetics list, IMHO, is too active to really keep up with if one has a, like, job.
If you somehow missed it, there's been much general lamenting, or at least observing, this year that the poetry blogosphere just ain't what it used to be. Like maybe the death knell is sounding. It does seem less vibrant to me than it did even a year ago, but maybe it's like how I got so freaking excited about AOL when I was fourteen. I hadn't really used email or experienced a "chat room" before so it was extra-extra-stimulating. And then I got over it, but it's not like I stopped using the Internet, it just stopped seeming like a big deal. Maybe blogs aren't on their way out; they're just not the next big thing anymore.
If you're feeling nostalgic for when they were, check out Shanna Compton's article on poetry and the Internet on the Poetry Foundation site.
May 12, 2007
Newspaper Book Reviewers = Dodo Birds?
Recently, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (based, obviously, in the city of Atlanta, which is 15th in the University of Wisconsin’s rankings of "most literate cities in the U.S") fired its Book Review Editor.
Subsequently, concerned readers and writers set up an online petition to Help Protect Atlanta's Book Review, arguing, among other points, that, "If the major newspaper in a major market like Atlanta lacks a book section, then we may soon be missing authors, too, when publishers decide not to send their writers to a city where the primary forum of ideas and review is ignoring them."
Also, the National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviews.
Meanwhile, the New York Times suggests that book reviews aren't actually dying; they're just moving out of print and into the blogosphere.
Anybody care?
May 10, 2007
Oprah vs. Egremont Elementary School?
Oprah might have some competition on her hands. It seems a class of fifth-graders in Pittsfield are pushing a bill to make Moby Dick the official book of Massachusetts. Fifth-graders reading Moby Dick? Those must be some smart kids. Maybe they could explain to me why we need a state book in the first place….
As it turns out, none of the kids have actually read Moby Dick and are more excited about wielding a little political power. Representative Christopher Speranzo visited the class and suggested the students help his petition to make Moby Dick the state book, so they can have a chance to learn how government works. Slowly? Inefficiently?
Of course, debates about what should be the state book are already flaring up. If it were up to me, I’d take Edith Wharton over Melville any day of the week.
May 4, 2007
I don’t want to “impress” the reader with my skill, my consummate skill.
Kathleen Rooney interviews Tao Lin.
Titillating excerpt:
KR: You write both prose and poetry, and often in your work, they sound like one another. What is the difference to you between prose and poetry? Do you prefer one to the other?
TL: That’s like saying, “What is the difference to you between Asians and black people?” It really is. I don’t want to answer a question like that because it distorts reality and creates divisions and groups where none, without preconception, exist. . .
May 2, 2007
The web--like so many things--is liminal
One drawback of the information age is the potential for endless post-mortem. Picking up on Laura’s post about the Virginia Tech tragedy, I noticed that Cho Seung-Hui's plays have found their way onto the internet.
I find the fact that the plays have been posted depressing and more than a little creepy, and while I understand why they would be published given the situation, I’m always a little sad when the quasi-confessional veil of the creative writing classroom is torn.
At some point, the data just needs to stop. Mental illness is not a rosetta stone where everything will eventually revealed, and anyone who viewed his flat-affect videos should know that coherence and intelligibility (let alone relevance) are not going to leap off the screen or the page. One can be shocked by the facts, but to return to them obsessively (especially--as is often the case with local and network newscasts--when it’s just raw information and is not shaped or contextualized in any meaningful fashion) begins to say more about the viewer than the subject.
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