May 2013
10 posts
“The average reader is pleased to observe anybody’s wooden leg being stolen.”
—Flannery O’Connor, with what continues to strike me as an incredibly succinct and useful piece of plot advice. (via mttbll) The entire essay (“Writing Short Stories,” collected in Mystery and Manners), is the most refreshing tonic.
A Letter to Young Writers: After Mary Ruefle's "Remarks on Letters"
Last night, I taught my last class as a graduate instructor at the University of Minnesota. I had struggled with how to end class—how to tell them what I wanted them to know—and I told them so.
We sat in a circle as evening came on, on a lawn that had been under snow as late as last week. This is a rough transcript of the letter I read them. (feel free to share with attribution, and please note I quote from Mary Ruefle’s “Remarks on Letters.” Big debts to my teacher Charles Baxter, as well, for his good thoughts on stories.)
This is wonderful.
April 2013
11 posts
"It would be nice if you were a little softer here and there, world."
Mud Luscious Press shuttered its doors very suddenly and sadly just as the forty millionth fucktonsnowstorm started fucksnowing outside my window. I am grading papers and listening to a Fleetwood Mac record. I am thinking of the 3rd years in my cohort who turned in all their great thesis work today. I am fixing tiny errors and moving little stuff very quietly inside my cows before I send off my final, final edits to Magic Helicopter tonight. It’s bruising to hear Russ has lost his book on the night I feel like my chapbook is one step closer to being actually real. All I did at AWP was take drinks of whiskey and then cry happiness. I also kept saying, “I am so afraid it’s going to be taken away from me somehow.” To know that that has actually happened to another writer, much less one who I have been collaborating poems with for over a year, who has been hugely important to my poetry being any kind of smidgen of visible in this dumb, shitty world, is rib breaking.
It’s sad because MLP is one of the first presses I ever really understood as being this small press that was DOING IT, that was publishing the exciting writers they really believed could show us something about Livinglanguage with that capital L.
[…]
Go buy out the rest of MLP’s stock here. Go show them your love everywhere.
Gabe Durham’s Fun Camp was due from Mud Luscious next month. Gabe was the first writer I met at UMass. Fun Camp has been in the works as long as I’ve known him. I read an early draft of it for workshop on a spring night as clear as tonight and could feel its plot and rhythms homing true on their good, funny, tragic work. Somebody needs to pick it up. I’ve never read anything like it and I have yet to read it whole.
Some Benefits of Rationing
No one said times were good, but words
got us a long way. Some said out east,
some back east, and rightly or not we guessed
which skies they were pointed toward and which
they assumed we, too, ignored. Wonder was
at all times preferable—had you ever seen
such silent contrails? Something
in the sense of a late decade.
You could reach all the back shelves
with years to spare. Most likely
tastes were as canned as they seem now
but they were the latest we had.
Daylight held hours after the sun.
We turned off TVs. Someone had a Frisbee and
someone sparklers, and the same kids cycled past
until only their voices showed in the dark—
no sound of traffic, and I thought how it would be
if in fact everyone was where they were going.
photo: Doug Wilson, “Smog Covers Tacoma, Obscuring the Foothills Below Mount Rainier, 6/1973” | Documerica Project
That Spring
I cannot say what anyone wore. Were skirts
about the knee? Was it the year of crochet
or of failed pants no matter how we belted?
I remember we had squirrels. The weed killer men
arrived while we slept. You rushed undressed
and though we were soon hidden
the way you stormed back to me I wondered
who had seen you and what they would say
if I knew who to ask. Later that week or the next
you said: where did the squirrels go?
We have the worst answers.
In the passenger seat of a Honda Civic
at dire speed over half New Jersey
I felt the weather compel our flight while NPR
considered all things except what we were thinking.
“Context removed, everything becomes equally strange.”
—I wrote about Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Pitch Dark in The Common
March 2013
14 posts
“The line that matters most to me might be, “Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?” And of course if I were writing non-fiction, the grammar would be, “Have I thrown …” I couldn’t correct it to that in the novel, though. The wrong voice.”
—Renata Adler
The Moxie of Turning Government
Found poetry from @nytimes_ebooks:
The devil is taking down one person per day
We would have country singers’ buses pulling up outside
Like those sign-covered casinos along the reading room
Greet visitors with a grid of the better
The question is for producing change
It also dies by that illusion
And the moxie of turning government
What remains to be stark
I still sometimes find myself spoken
Before they felt that they did
Were you because you
The lake responded exactly
this was fascinating and intimidating and disorienting to see a document so worked-over! I end up just creating separate files—”Better draft w less food descriptions”—”OK draft w food back in”—etc.
I do, too—I did a comparison between the published story and first draft (which was named “The Horse Orchard,” a title I love but which ended up not fitting).
In And To And From And After #AWP13
Back Bay roofs from the Hynes Convention Center
I attended five panels. Two I left early. Two I would have gladly sat through for another hour, or reconvened. Two I overslept. In a panel titled “Argumentative Fiction,” Marlon James asked why Katie Roiphe discusses only the Davids and Jonathans, and not Junot Diaz, and why she does not compare Portnoy to Yunior. Two panels that I wanted to attend were Friday morning while we shoveled snow and snow fell so fast that in the ten minutes we took to change from our shoveling clothes a quarter inch had covered my car. On the Mass Pike braking was impossible, one lane entirely snowed over. We arrived, parked underground, found the narrowness of our spot and the florist’s truck next to it hilarious.
February 2013
9 posts
Weather Report à la Adler
In the matter of the wind, tonight we are all in it. Some of us are forever talking about the trouble with our hair. Some find trouble less trouble than none. I believe by spring we will miss it all. In Boston, the consultant said, I have to drive all the way and still the snow is not cleared. All the way he thinks how impressed we are by his fortitude. What impressed us was the snow. What worried us was the failure of predictions.
It Must Have Been: Dear Life by Alice Munro →
thecommononline.org
The fourteen stories in Alice Munro’s latest collection, Dear Life, are terser than her stories of a decade ago. Her 2001 collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, nearly identical in length, contained only nine. Many of the new stories trace characteristically oblique paths. Munro draws opening scenes with particular details that seem intended to alert the reader to crucial moments and relationships, and then, instead of continuing those relationships chronologically, she sidesteps to previous events, or heads off in directions not initially suggested. Some stories traverse so many years that their openings, while always fitting, no longer seem the only possible entry points.
[…]
[W]here 2001’s “Family Furnishings” recounts decades of family history over more than thirty pages by way of correcting the narrator’s impression of a single image, Dear Life’s chronological corkscrewing happens at times not between episodes but from one sentence to the next. Particularly in the final four, more autobiographical stories, events seem to change as they’re narrated. Munro’s process of revisiting impressions and discovering overlooked drama has never been so clear.
Dijon Tarragon Chicken
- 1-1.5 lbs boneless chicken thighs*
- 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
- 1/2 teaspoon tarragon
- 1/4 teaspoon thyme (optional)
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- Black pepper
Preparation: Pour the olive oil in a 10-12” fry pan. Rinse the chicken, removing the fat. Dry the chicken lightly with paper towels and place in the pan, using the pieces to spread the oil thoroughly. Spread mustard over the pieces so all the top sides are well-covered. Sprinkle with pepper, thyme, and tarragon. If the tarragon is coarsely flaked, you may wish to crumble it further as you go.
Cook: on medium heat until the undersides of the chicken just begin to brown, then turn (you may wish to flip the pieces back and forth to coat all sides with the topping that comes off in the pan). Remove from the heat when both sides are lightly browned and the spilled topping has reduced to a spreadable consistency. Spread the reduction on the chicken, and serve hot, or cold on salad.
Serves: 4-6
Time: 30 minutes (removing the fat is the most time-consuming step).
*I haven’t tried using tofu, but I’m guessing it’d be delicious. Chicken breasts work, too, but are best split so the centers cook fully by the time the sides brown.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012) →
brightwalldarkroom.com
NIGHT VISIONby Sarah Malone
Zero Dark Thirty, the title, has the cadence and slightly unwieldy precision of military lingo: code, but only cryptic until you’re in the know. It’s meant to be readily recalled and quickly repeated and understood. The tweak from the military “oh” to “zero,” with its sharper sound and richer associations—Ground Zero, Zero Hour, Zero Day, countdown to liftoff or detonation—is characteristic of the film’s method and conundrum. It wants to be authoritative (at two hours and thirty-seven minutes, it had better be). It claims authority or merit beyond drama. “Based on firsthand accounts of actual events,” announces the onscreen text at the beginning, referring presumably to accounts the audience doesn’t have access to, possibly events the audience doesn’t even know of. But far from reportage, the film is an expressionistic odyssey, as focused on a single emotional register as Maya (Jessica Chastain), the CIA agent it portrays, is on Osama bin Laden.
I wrote about Zero Dark Thirty for BWDR. I can’t think of another film that’s left me with as clear and unshakeable a feeling, and as much difficulty trying to parse the reasons for it.
this excerpt is beautiful. what book is it from?
Thank you! It’s a short story I wrote for Grand Central Terminal’s centennial. I was thinking what a force of nature this incredibly engineered thing and all the stuff that’s grown up around it are, socially, and I thought about a friendship always waiting for a train.
The Best Kind of Mistake
photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images in The Atlantic
Our friendship was extremely convenient to major transportation, I said, and Vicky laughed, and immediately we had that, the line, and that we seemed to appreciate it equally, as a joke, and didn’t care that it was true. Her evening proofreading shift began at my preferred train’s departure time. So we had that, too, she said. Jostled between men in sweaty-backed shirts in a narrow bar on Forty-fourth Street, we’d hurriedly decided on an overly flowery white wine and were bent close over small glasses.
“The best kind of mistake,” she said. “Twenty minutes and it’s done.”
“How will that work, with the proofreading?” I asked.
“It’ll have to work, won’t it?” she said.
January 2013
11 posts
From Richard Blanco's Inaugural Poem, "One Today"
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together
[via @IrisBlasi] [full text on NY Times]
“Arguments for guns in America are couched in terms of freedom—the right (freedom) to bear arms, the freedom from tyranny that bearing arms supposedly guarantees (though good luck with that in the era of the modern security state)—with gun regulation portrayed as a necessary constraint. I don’t know what to call the idea that at any moment you might have to kill someone to stay alive—Hobbesian, primeval—but I wouldn’t call it freedom or liberty.”
—Guns In The Family by Sarah Malone (via therumpus)
From my piece up today on The Rumpus
From my piece up today on The Rumpus
