Went to the Hyde Park Square Art Show on Sunday and came across a painter whose work I like a lot. Ken Swinson. Check his website and his blog, and what he has on [...]
Not my words; they belong to Richard Powers, in his novel The Echo Maker. What he says accurately describes our reading of his book.
[...]He stuck with the story, to protect his investment, throwing good hours after bad.
Since before this year even started, everyone and their mother started writing about the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s On the Road, and the traveling exhibition of the scrolled manuscript. Good stuff over at friend Xark’s, for example.
Remember that 10,000 Maniacs song: Hey [...]
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your [...]
The entry title is another googlism (see link from previous entry). I’ve got my book back, so about reading. The book, Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers, has appeared here before, linked (use search function to your right for ease, if you like; please do not [...]
This is what shows of a spam in my gmail account, registering just as I clicked on the “spam” button to forever remove it. Not forever gone, we see.
Last night we went to Brock Clarke’s reading of his new novel, An Arsonist’s Guide [...]
All last week I was somewhere in upstate SC in a hotel room miserable and sick; no idea really what was wrong exactly, as I spent the first two - three days sleeping nearly the whole time (C. was off on work-related business, the reason for our being there). I [...]
Sharing my earlier post about Joni Mitchell, Dan over at Xark says not.
It doesn’t matter how you answer that question publicly. It matters how you answer it to yourself, and you’d better goddamn answer it.
The world is full of people [...]
For writing practice to be complete, we must give it away: the effort, the results, and identification with the results. Much of the happiness that total absorption in an activity brings is nullified by the belief that it is ours — that we know what we are doing. But anything [...]
I have mentioned here before Cabinet Magazine. It’s always got something evocative in it. I got a few pages into the most recent issue, and into Brian Dillon’s Inventory: Talk to the Hand, when [...]
This was a line I found myself writing in something today and knew at once — and stopped — that it was one of those cases of projecting onto your characters. You know, like She stared blankly, unable to come up with a single thing to say; or He went [...]
The Maytrees.
Review: Marilynne Robinson, A classic of cosmic realism; NPR: excerpts and Dillard reading a selection.
Annie Dillard has characters who think.
Lou:
In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty, over the tide slacked holding its breath at [...]
of the variety in which I just think all day, I suddenly realize at the end of it. This was not one of those days. It could have been: I woke up from a dream in which was Matthew Buchinger, “The Little [...]
One of the requirements for the masters of fine arts degree at the Warren Wilson MFA program is the teaching of a class. Mine had something to do with the use of details, specifically color, but that is irrelevant. C’s was on immediacy. Attendees wrote their critiques and feedback about [...]
Back home, Cincinnati, which is my home now, for now, any entry I have thought to make here has been one I thought better of in the spirit of how I determined last February moving here that I would enjoy my time here. My time here being my life, after [...]
Kafkology. Underlining July 3: Franz Kafka’s birthdate in 1883, and some years later mine. (But possibly you, depending on who you are, remember this from last year.) This year I have a new to me used copy, a [...]
… it could go either way, and then it just goes one way.
[...]Annie Dillard’s whole oeuvre, she agrees. Daniel Asa Rose put it out there; the conversation first appeared at Washington Post Book World.
It’s [Dillard’s new book, The Maytrees] such a passionate ode to love [...]
Which could be taken as a pun, perhaps. The Guardian reports that a Spanish publisher has decided it is time to publish the erotic musings of Juan Ramón Jiménez, which has [...]
Guardian has the summer fiction special online.
In case you didn’t know.
In case you need something more/different/other to read.
[...]Featured this week in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column. (Column 116) Kooser on the poem:
It’s the oldest kind of story: somebody ventures deep into the woods and comes back with a tale. Here Roy Jacobstein returns to America to relate [...]
Someone has let me know that coincidentally — though I doubt it’s coincidence, but more on that later — The Sharp Side has posted today about, in part, the same Nabokov quote/topic as did I last. [...]
We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor [...]
I have to go shopping and I don’t want to, but it’s impossible not to, it’s too far gone now: I have to go. Have to pull myself out of here, when I am in the thick of things. So good to be in the thick of things again but [...]
Chicago Reader’s Julia Rickert finds The best-selling self-help book Oprah’s thrown her muscle behind appears to contain at least one fabrication while reminding
I BELIEVE THAT the truth matters,” Oprah Winfrey assured her viewers last year following her on-air confrontation [...]
Julian Gough essay here on Divine Comedy that disapproves of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (Gutenberg etext, if you’ve never read it or have a mind to) and the [...]
The Virginia Quarterly Review has Campbell’s entire essay The Accidental Plagiarist: The Trouble with Originality online. Many footnotes, many of them very funny. Like Lethem’s essay, some serve to credit the “original” source from which Campbell appropriated. (Note: Lethem’s were [...]
I got this (Fence) book, Not For Mothers Only, Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing (editors, Catherine Wagner and Rebecca Wolff) for, not surprisingly, Mother’s Day. But more on that later. The back cover shows (but in color) a piece of Gilian Conoly’s [...]
Recently, I got a flute that I’m going to learn to play. I had piano lessons when I was very young and then played the clarinet for many years. My parents chose the instrument for me; I wasn’t very happy about playing it (I wanted to play the flute!); the [...]
From You Must Revise Your Life (The University of Michigan Press, 1986) and as regards his poem “Yellow Cars”:
Yellow is the color for many reasons — the sun, gold, light, spring flowers. But I do not make the choice by realizing the literary or worldly justifications for my choice, but [...]
Everyone is writing a memoir it seems. I am not, or I don’t want to be. I want to set this tale in fiction, a fictional landscape, time and place. Fictional characters. The lie that tells the truth truer. This is the rambling beginning. The warm up. Clearing my throat. [...]
…delightfully rambling [and thoughtful!] and I’ll take it, and say thanks for the notice. The local LitChick blog is One book lover’s take on what’s between the pages, the one book lover is Sara Pearce, writing about area and regional authors, [...]
The “cruellest” month, National Anxiety Month, Cesarean Awareness Month, all done for another year.
It was a spectacular weekend, rains ended, temperatures raised. We drove to Yellow Springs for the Artists Studio Tour, thereby giving me [...]
Katherine Mansfield.
He asked the class if any young lady present had ever been chased by a wild bull. She raised her hand because “nobody else did… (though of course I hadn’t). Ah, he said, I am afraid you do not count. You are a little savage from New Zealand.”
Ali Smith [...]
In Paradox Americana, San Francisco Bay Guardian online, Paul Reidinger writes about the novel, and literary forms, getting at the everlasting issue of Shouldn’t the content determine the form vs. but then who would read it if it didn’t take (that is, be forced into) the [...]
