February 2010
29 posts
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Grammar Missteps Into Poetry
It’s 1:30 AM and I am grading papers—writing is glamorous! Then along comes this:
I was invited back in the future.
I want to write an entire piece composed of sentences like that.
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"One of the things that never ceases to amaze me...
- Paul Krugman
I have that same sense every time I ride that line.
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More On The Blizzard Of 1888 →
Looking up Broadway toward the old post office in what’s now City Hall Park. There’s something about seeing recognizable locations so completely different.. something very chilly, and I don’t mean the weather. Then as now everyone is wearing black.
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"Some AccuWeather.com meteorologists have even...
Because ‘blizzard’ clearly can’t convey the extent of snow and wind that confronts us.
‘Blizzard’ is such an awesome word—the punch of the ‘b,’ the white-out fuzz of the double ‘z’… Blizzards were the best parts of the Little House series, when they got to play word games by the potbellied stove and had to go between buildings by...
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Mississippi Review Online Flash Fiction Issue (vol... →
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What’s better than lists of “if you want to write” tips? Well, this from Laura Ellen Scott:
3. If your plot is too exciting or moving too fast, enhance realism by making your characters stop for a meal at an ethnic restaurant. Describe each course and allow your characters to re-cap the plot so far. 5. Do not write a single word unless you know how your story will end. You are...
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Downfall: WSJ Edition
…Or, Hitler finds out that The Wall Street Journal misses why his meme is funny…
I love the Downfall meme (as does the director of Downfall). I’ve been surprised by how much I like it. Describe it literally—Hitler rants anachronistically about some contemporary, usually minor, pop-cultural event—and doesn’t it sound, at best, quease-inducingly disrespectful?
The...
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NPR Three Minute Fiction, Round Three
I’m not usually keen on writing from prompts, but this one I like. The deadline is midnight Sunday Feb 28 (submit stories here). Three minutes=600 words or less—slightly shorter than Amy Hempel’s “Beach Town.” The contest judge is Alan Cheuse (who’s quoted on the dust jacket of Hempel’s Collected Stories as saying that her story “San Francisco” is...
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Thoughts On Flannery O'Connor's Late Stories
We finished reading Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories this week in my independent study. I think I’m becoming addicted to reading entire oeuvres of short stories, or as close to entire oeuvres as possible. So different from reading a comparable page-count of novel(s). More intense, the accumulated weight of choices in subject matter, ways of entering stories, developing...
Tony Judt: wary of -isms, at home on the edge... →
…where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages—often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow...
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“If you had an amazing teacher who was talented... →
- Deborah Kenny via Bob Herbert
Update: this and this
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“I think you should wear skirts more. You look...
- Harry (the one who Met Sally)
While I don’t unreservedly love this film as I once did, this is such a well-written line of dialogue, and it does so much work.
At the end of an afternoon outing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harry and Sally are in the Temple of Dendur. He’s enticed her into speaking in a silly voice, and, still in accent, asked if she would like to see a movie with him...
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“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is...
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
This week I’ve been editing one story about a newcomer to New York and writing a new story about a different woman, years later, slowly realizing that her image of her life there is far from the actual city or her actual life. New York, the newbie and the hardened careerist are all such well-trodden ground; I hope mine are particular enough to make the stories...
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"No matter what the modernists say—or do—there is...
- pseudonymous New Yorker critic T-Square in 1927, quoted in the Times’ always awesome Streetscapes column, this edition concerning 711 Fifth Avenue, the 1926 headquarters of the brand-new National Broadcasting Company.
T-Square really needs to be an architect-turned-rapper.
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Ghostwatching
I came across a thread on Skyscraper City of historical photos of Toronto, plus the occasional (delightful) 1910s print ad and 1880s catalog cover. My favorite is this 1937 shot, “Window Shopping at Simpson’s and Eaton’s”:
Showgirls on lunch break? Brazen hussies? The hats! The almost-work gloves on the woman in the foreground… The light-colored suit and the...
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This Is What a Bubble Looks Like →
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The Parable Of The Fine Restaurant And Magic...
Once not so very long ago, in a place much like this, lived a family who looked forward every week to dining at a fine restaurant. Such care over the menu! Such surprising ingredients and combinations, fruits and vegetables from many countries, and main dishes—fish from far oceans, and meats from farms that the family hadn’t known were right in their neighborhood.
“Not only is every meal here...
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Novel Thoughts
What/How-not-to-write lists usually seem to me to be singularly unhelpful: checking one’s work against them while writing makes for cramped prose and stunted concepts. But longer works, novella-length short stories and novels, take long enough to write—at least for me—that in slack moments sizing up a work in progress can save a lot of time and heartbreak.
Mark Sarvas’s list, made...
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The International Style?
I’m mostly glad to be writing fiction in English because it’s enriched by many influences and unusually willing or able to absorb new ones (no Académie française, flexible syntax). Then there’s this, from Tim Parks in the New York Review Of Books Blog:
we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or...
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Obomanomics One Year Out
robertreich:
If you want to understand Obamanomics one year out, look at the demand-side hole we’re still in, the gargantuan boomer deficit we’re heading for, and the mad-as-hell party these bad times have spawned. How Obama deals with all three will be the real economic test of his presidency.
Read On…
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This afternoon I was rearranging my office and decided I preferred the furniture where it had been. And there was definitely an instant in which my fingers did the keyboard shortcut for ‘undo.’
We’re going to be very strange as old people.
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The Spine Of The Story
We’re reading Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes in my fiction workshop this week, which I’m really glad of, as I would otherwise have been unlikely to re-visit it, and I would have missed a lot that I didn’t get on my first reading, when the book came out in 2006. I was really into Eisenberg’s previous work then, but for some reason—the title story, I think; more on that below—I...
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I Had A Farm In Africa…
I’m moving tomorrow, on unexpectedly short notice—locally, thank goodness, so my glassware and china only had to be wrapped well enough to make it across town in the back seat of the car.
I’ve moved more than I like to think about, seven times within New York City alone, and the last night in a house or apartment never gets any less strange. Twenty-four, forty-eight hours before, everything was...
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Good Times, Bad Times
Oh paper of record, how you keep us on our proverbial toes. I’m a day late on this, but Stanley Fish’s close reading of the Supreme Court opinions is the smartest thing I’ve read about the Citizens United case. And Gail Collins… we love Gail Collins, especially in full attack mode on the federal budget shenanigans:
Before the budget document even went out, Senator Chuck...
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"The toughest part about tracking someone on...
WaPo finds street gangs using social media, oversharing. (Via The Daily What)
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How about some Lost haiku? By Jedediah Berry, whose Manual Of Detection site + blog you should check out: crshd:
Lamppost, leap of faith. How many plane crashes does It take to get home?