February 2012
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Chance and Attention →
I have a guest post over on HTMLGiant about teaching creative writing:
Ideally what happens in creative writing classes is less different from the way we write on our own than academic trappings and the rituals of workshop™ might make it seem. We’re hopefully reading widely and intently regardless, developing a personal canon and an ear for line-level nuance, an eye for overall shape....
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“Language, in these instances, is regarded as a kind of afterthought or additive:...”
– Marjorie Perloff via Elizabeth Cantwell. I love this essay.
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“Really, almost everything that’s been done since was done in Don Quixote and...”
– Jennifer Egan is hopeful about the novel’s ability to assimilate and adapt. In Capital New York [by Dan Rosenblum via @tmcgev]
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From Chiltney [a fragment]
She’d been baptized Elizabeth Darby but at Chiltney Farm she was Lizzie, second youngest of ten, with lips that felt less outsized when she was moving them, and a broad face that to her oldest sisters’ secret astonishment boys couldn’t steal enough glances at. She took the longest time at the mirror, getting her reflection right. A blessing, the oldest sister said; a curse, said the next, the...
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jeanhannah: looceefir
“Amanda tried writing a card or something. She wrote that she and her fiancé had decided not to marry. Then she wrote that her fiancé had decided not to marry her. She said that she was sorry for any inconvenience. She added that she would appreciate gifts anyway.”
— Allegra Goodman: “La Vita Nuova” : The New Yorker
Hits the ‘Lorrie Moore’ side of spurned-romance...
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January 2012
34 posts
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20,000 words
I’m handing in the first chunk (out of a likely 3) of my novel on Tuesday, just over 20,000 words, 90 pages with the formatting I’m using.* I’m hoping for an eventual ±60,000 words and really, really not hoping for 400-500 pp, but I’m consciously letting it find its own duration, and three times now this has been the point where initial arcs have progressed far enough that...
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Close-reading a Downton Abbey B-Plot
Mary and Sybil’s interactions in this week’s Downton Abbey (season 3 episode 2) b-plot were a particularly well-done bit of writing, very complex and real and satisfying, partly because the place where it lands us is for now relatively without consequence in a show that often limits its gratuities to shit the Dowager Countess says.
In Act I, Mary comes upon Sybil and Branson the...
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Two or three weeks ago, I wrote to my Congressman, John Olver, protesting SOPA and PIPA*. This morning his office replied:
Critics have raised several objections to these bills. Some worry that their definition of an infringing website is overly broad and could lead to the shutdown of US sites without due process. There are also concerns that the bills may affect the Internet’s...
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“[T]he meatiest bits feature the three wealthy Crawley daughters, reared like...”
– Emily Nussbaum on Downton Abbey, in The New Yorker
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elisabethdonnelly replied to your photo: Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta (2006) left:…
I wonder if that hardcover sold any books or not. It’s not so flattering, if nipple-y.
No…. it does seem more ’70s to me, and more hardcover-y; it certainly wants to make an announcement, if a cryptic one. I don’t think it sold very well. I don’t remember what the...
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italicsmine replied to your link: PANK: Ask the Author
I am obsessed with Dana Spiotta these days!
She is so, so good! Her prose simply crackles with life at the line level; I’m in awe of her ability to conceptualize the entirety of a novel. I especially love the last section of Stone Arabia and first chapter of Eat the Document (I have yet to read Lightning Field).
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PANK: Ask the Author →
J. Bradley interviews me about time in fiction, awkward jokes, walks of shame, and other fun (my story “Light at New Latitude” appeared in November’s PANK).
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veblenesquegorge:
“To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.”
-Caitlin Flanagan, in The Atlantic
No. Didion is one of the few female writers that has crossover gender appeal. I know a number of males who adore her. Something that probably can’t be said of Caitlin Flanagan.
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“Everybody that you know winds up in your voice”
– David Lee Roth via @Maura
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“I like to be tidy-minded, but I so rarely am. Now the threads of halfremembered...”
– Dylan Thomas, letter to Pamela Johnson, March 1934 (via katepetersen)
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“Cities like Berlin and London, historic agglomerations of villages, include vast...”
– Michael Kimmelman
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“We have so much foreign influence today. I’m looking at a Coke can with a polar...”
– Comment from an audience member at Santorum event in Iowa (via soupsoup). This makes a lot more sense as surrealist poetry: I’m looking at a Coke can with a polar bear on it. Where do we go from here?
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December 2011
58 posts
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I made a public version of my Tumblr theme →
It’s still awaiting moderator approval (and for all I know may need to be renamed… there are 1200+ themes out there)… but meanwhile:
I’m mainly excited to share:
- toggle-able drop shadows for images
- margin-setting for left/right aligned images
- individually customizable fonts for blog title, post titles, body text, and widgets
Guide and examples here. Let me know...