March 2012
28 posts
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February 2012
33 posts
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The Sense of the Present →
Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1976 New York Review of Books piece in which she admires Speedboat:
The narrator—a word not entirely apt—is a young woman, a sensibility formed in the 1950s and ‘60s, a lucky eye gazing out from a center of complicated privilege, looking with the cool that transforms itself into style and also into meaning. Space is biography finally and going from one place...
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Blurbspeak
I’m starting to think no book, however great, can withstand the trash and cliché-making of logline and blurbspeak:
An expansive yet melancholy sailor boards a whaling ship whose obsessed captain’s fiery oration compels the crew to a round-the-world voyage that will land alike on tropical islands and metaphysical conundrums. Here are typhoons, and contemplated mutinies. Here are...
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Revisiting W. S. Merwin's The Vixen →
Poets.org has posted a wonderful essay by Matthew Zapruder, on Merwin, being an MFA student, and the development of his poetic philosophy:
without clarity, it is not possible to have true mystery. By clarity, I mean a sense in the reader that what is being said on the surface of the poem is not a scrim or a veil deliberately hiding some other hidden, inaccessible certainty. Clarity for me in...
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New York Judge Rules Town Can Ban Gas... →
In a decision issued on Tuesday, Justice Phillip R. Rumsey of State Supreme Court said that state law does not preclude a municipality from using its power to regulate land use to ban oil and natural gas production. The ruling is the first in New York to affirm local powers in the controversy over drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a gas deposit under a large area of New York, Pennsylvania and...
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“A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality. I lent...”
– Flannery O’Connor, from “Writing Short Stories” in Mystery and Manners. I was reminded of her, thinking why last night’s Downton Abbey finale was so much more satisfying than much of the rest of the second season; its tensions and events once more arose from fairly elemental,...
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Five Years Ago Today
composite view up and downtown West End Avenue [view larger]
After working straight through until eight a.m. from eight a.m. the day before, I awoke from a nap of an hour or so with a strobe-like pain centered in front of my right ear, in a pulsing that was like a tiny lung just under my skin when I placed my finger on it. Coffee did not lessen it, nor did the medicine I usually took for...
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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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