May 2010
27 posts
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So... →
…may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight.
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Action, Adventure and Sympathy for the Devil
I’m with Katie: this makes it difficult to see how the world needs another Gladiator a grim Robin Hood leading a cavalry charge along a beach. Robin Hood lives in Sherwood Forest and he will always be Errol Flynn, and Errol will always be the merry outlaw. Emphasis on “merry,” not just “outlaaaaaaaaaw!”
My favorite Robin Hood—the story, not the outlaaaaaaw—is...
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My (very short) story “State Trooper” is up at Matchbook.
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Other People's Writing
Publication and news from UMass folks:
“The Future Of Family Radio,” a new story by Christy Crutchfield, is up at Necessary Fiction
Jensen Beach has two stories in the 2010 Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions, “Family” from Necessary Fiction and “We Cannot Cross the River” from Everyday Genius.
Also in the Top 50 are several stories at journals edited...
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My cousin rocks The New Republic with her piece on the race to fill John Murtha’s House seat.
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“I don’t know if you can say [writers today] are doing any one thing in...”
– Sam Lipsyte, interviewed by The New York Tyrant. Via Gabe Durham
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To this day when I read Law & Order: SVU what I see is Law & Order: SUV
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"It Seems That 35 Is When It Clicks"
So The New Yorker is publishing a second list of:
20 individuals under the age of 40 whom they believe to be the most talented and important American [fiction] writers of their generation.
Lists! They are irresistible! The Observer thought this list was link-bait interesting enough for not one but three four articles. Lists ask us to take sides, to pick them apart, gloat or disparage,...
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"[T]he Gulf of Mexico is the primary disposal site... →
Crooks & Liars:
Many of these bombs are unstable. Just about anything could detonate them - say, an oil rig that’s digging deeper than what owners noted on their permit application. So we’re leasing offshore drilling rights to oil companies IN A FRICKIN’ MINE FIELD. (You’ll notice this NY Times piece on the problems of offshore drilling doesn’t even...
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If You're In Northampton And Thinking Of Living In...
Someone has chalked “C.H.U.D.s” on the sidewalk in front of it, with an arrow pointing towards the front door. So, you know. Laundry in the basement might not be an advantage.
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Too Insidery? →
My piece on Being John Malkovich is up on A Bright Wall In A Dark Room, to start off Charlie Kaufman Week. Ten years on, the movie is no less weird and wonderful.
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Except for Friday evening, the wind has been gusting here for five days. Thursday afternoon some of our graduating writers gave a reading outdoors at the UMass Renaissance Center.
The gold in the valley is tree pollen, and dust from the new furrows.
Through the entire reading (Luke Bloomfield, Jamie Berger, Lily Ladewig, Boomer Pinches, Ata Moharreri, Gabe Durham, Jess Fjeld, Mike Young, and...
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Researching for a story set in Manchester, Vermont, I found this:
Radio station WEQX’s tower is located on [Equinox] mountain, hence the callsign of the station. There is also a former hotel, the Sky Line Inn. A small, abandoned Cold War-era NORAD radar station can be seen near the summit. An abandoned, now collapsed tunnel boring dating to the mid 1960s, would have provided access to...
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Nicole Cliffe’s choose-your-own-adventure House Of Mirth has been waiting to be written for a hundred and five years:
Premise: You are an attractive, well-bred young woman in your late twenties; genteel, if shabby. You have poor impulse control, no real money, and a reasonably well-off aunt who generally bails you out of scrapes.
(Also: Eric Stoltz—too clean-shaven for a Gilded Age...
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"The nature of the genes in humans that differ... →
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Into The Flood Again
Michelle’s piece on Singles (1992) is so. Good.
I was in college, the young side of its target audience, when Singles was in theatres. I played its soundtrack on my college radio show and put Chris Cornell’s “Seasons” on way too many mixed tapes (not ‘mixtapes’ then—and they were on tape), but for various reasons—its lukewarm reviews; my lack of cash and...
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Two poems by my fellow UMass MFA-er Jessica Fjeld in the beautifully designed Absent Magazine:
The Green Leaves
grow and the men go down the stairs. The sun comes up and the men go out. The corner smells like men. The windows are dusty, like as not unlit… (read on)
via: ewilcox
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Bronze, “Sara Lisa”
Get the whole EP...
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"Gordon Brown is a character from a tragic opera,... →
- A.A. Gill
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