Sarah Wrote That

Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta (2006)
left: hardcover | right: paperback

13 Jan 2012 11:28

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).

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).

“Henley Street, Knoxville” by Sarah McFalls
from Tennessee Reimagined, a photo essay

In Flycatcher: A Journal of Native Imagination

[h/t Ida Stewart]

capitalnewyork:moorehn:

Rain, 7 am, midtown. (Taken with instagram)

Good morning!

GPOY

Reblogged from Capital

I have missed some popular stories.

Facebook: tapping residual susceptibility to peer pressure for ad $ since 2004.

Joan Didion on A Farewell to Arms, 1998

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.

Reading Flanagan’s piece—twice—I had the unnerving sensation of being kept late at the end of a party by someone determined to get in the last word long after the drinks have run out and the person she was arguing with, or wanted us to see her arguing with, has left for home. Mixing textual analysis with anecdote, the piece blurs the distinction between Didion’s reception in different eras, her social presence (mainly in the ’60s and ’70s), and her writing itself. A feat, to encompass the object of your gaze in such qualified admiration as to narrow the circle of her appreciation and claim her for we few, we mournful few, who know what to make of her.

But the interpretations of Didion’s words—not of Didion the social figure, which I can’t affirm or dispute—seem to me as off as the characterization of those words’ appeal (at least their later appeal).

Read on →

Reblogged from A Veblenesque Gorge

Ernest Ibbetson
lithograph, 1912

Someone please start this band.

R.M.S. Olympic arrives in New York (from a 1935 newsreel); Olympic at speed, 1934

In my Downton Abbey season 2 anticipation, I’ve been browsing Edwardian era artifacts. Screenwriter Julian Fellowes’s use of the Titanic sinking as season 1’s inciting incident might be commended in screenwriting workshops*—up the ante, tidily identify time and place—but also seemed to me to flirt with Forrest Gumpish-ness: characters need less interest and individuation if they only animate a background we already have associations for.

Titanic has been so mythologized that it’s a shock seeing its nearly identical elder sister Olympic (“Old Reliable”) not fixed in 1911-12 amber but in 1935 after years of successful service—and also with a record of ramming things, including a U-Boat, the only recorded such sinking in World War One.

I find these photos entirely eerie—the first, the kind of New York arrival Titanic never got. The occasion for the newsreel from which it’s taken? The ramming and sinking and sinking of the Nantucket lightship from which the second photo was snapped the January before.

*the “Passover question” (why this night of all nights?), while a convenient memonic for writers to check whether they’re recounting something worth people’s time, can also lead to over-stuffing: Dad doesn’t just die in a plane crash, he dies in a 9/11 plane crash...