If you have seen Melancholia by Lars von Trier and know about the writing colony MacDowell, this will be amusing. Otherwise, this will be very, very strange. MACDOWELLANCHOLIA
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Gunter Grass’ Anti-Israel Poem
Gunter Grass' anti-Israel poem has caused such an outcry that Benjamin Netanyahu has already condemned it, along with hundreds of other intellectuals. The poem has only been published in German but The Guardian has translated and excerpted a few lines.
The most thorough dismantling of Grass came from Anshel Pfeffer, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
"Logic and reason are useless when a highly intelligent man, a Nobel laureate no less, does not understand that his membership in an organization that planned and carried out the wholesale genocide of millions of Jews disqualified him from criticizing the descendants of those Jews for developing a weapon of last resort that is the insurance policy against someone finishing the job his organization began."
The Darth Vader (and son!) Children’s Book Video
This is going to be the biggest children's book since "Go the F*uck to Sleep":
The Alligators of Abraham
Matt Kish of "Moby Dick in Pictures" designed this incredible book cover for Robert Kloss' "The Alligators of Abraham."
Below you can see his first attempt at the cover. But how much better is that second version, right?
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Fun Speed Reading Test
I got 872 words a minute, but most other tests clock me at 700 or slower. Still, a nice little test.
Source: Staples eReader Department
AWP Pins Transformed into Magnets
It's been a week since AWP ended. If you're like me, you still haven't thrown out the things you collected from the main floor that were cool at the moment but quickly transformed into tchotchkes in the light of the real world.
Say, for instance, pins. Yeah, every lit journal gave away pins with tiny logos on front and the type of needles in back that just beg the TSA to give you grief.
If you haven't thrown your pins out already, they're likely languishing in a drawer. But not for me! I put on my arts and crafts hat and made … magnets!
Behold, the process of creation:
Grab some pliers and rip out the hook and pin in the back:
Buy some magnets. This pack of eight from Michael's ran a whopping $1.50:
Apply glue to the backing. I used Aleene's Tacky Glue. Any super glue will work, really:
Apply the magnets and let them sit. They really need a good six hours before the glue hardens and turns from white to clear.
Behold! I give you the fridge which is so much more literary than your fridge!
Thanks to (starting at the left and going clockwise) Willow Springs, The Journal, Five Points, Oxford Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Pank and The Southern Review for providing the art supplies for this little artistic jaunt.
AWP 2012
Excited for the AWP conference, only a few short weeks away. Authors! Readings! Schmoozing! Dancing! (Yes, there is the legendary dance party, happening … nightly). A whole host of literary heavyweights will be there, but as I've discovered from years past, the most exciting part of AWP is not the famous writers but the rank and file. Normal, everyday folk slaving away at their writing just like you.
A smattering of things I learned from last time:
- Even "small" literary journals are hard to break into. And they lavish so much love on their writers.
- Go to panels based upon the people, not based on the titles. Titles deceive.
- Journals are ecstatic about publishing an author's very first story. So claim your virgin status. It's a badge, not a drawback.
- "30% of people who submit stuff are insane" AGNI editor
- Everyone works harder than you do. People at the conference were writing 2 or 3 hours a day despite doing all the conference activities.
If you're going let me know! Always eager to connect with other writers.
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What Could Be Worse Than A Male Book Club?
The most painful situation the writers of this Velveeta commercial could come up with was … a male book club. That's right: talking about books with other men is equivalent to torture. Of course, the sidekicks are willing to suffer through such torture to win the Velveeta prize.
But who knows, perhaps this advertisement is particularly effective among Velveeta's target demographic. After all, only illiterate people would be stupid enough to eat radioactive-colored orange goo.
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Aimee Bender’s “Bad Return”: A Sentence Analysis
Here are the first two sentences of Aimee Bender's "Bad Return" in One Story #158:
"I met Arlene in college, in the freshman dorm. We were not roommates but suite-mates in the corner section of a squat brick house in the center of a small college campus in the middle of Ohio."
Pay attention to the prepositions. Even in that first sentence, we have the double repetition of the preposition, "in." That repetition prepares you for the long string of prepositions in the second sentence, a total of six.
The traditional advice about prepositional clauses is not to string too many together in a row. This is on the whole good advice, the type of advice that beginning writers should obey. Nouns and verbs are the planetary cores of sentences and prepositions are but satellites. Prepositions belong with adverbs, in the category of allowable but only for judicious use.
But Bender doesn't obey this rule. She doesn't ignore the rule as much as transcend it, showing the power of a series of prepositions. By playing with a series of alternating prepositional clauses (in, of, in, of, in, of), she nails you down to a certain location. What's more, the sequence of the locations expands from macro to bird's eye, starting with the corner of the room and taking you all the way out to the view of the state.
It's not the most pyrotechnic sentence but it bears the mark of being well crafted, and its cascading rhythms tumble the reader into the short story. Also, the duality of its clauses prepares us for the duality of the story, which alternates between two main characters, the narrator and Arlene.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s “When We Were Orphans”
In a writing workshop, a friend of mine once criticized Kazuo Ishiguro for his novel "Never Let Me Go," which my friend claimed was a science fiction novel that refused to embrace its science fiction roots.
It's true that the science fiction conceits in "Never Let Me Go" are largely glossed over. Most of the book focuses on the characters and their love for each other, not the details of cloning and organ transplants.
But I think that my friend was mistaken in his criticism. Shouldn't we celebrate books that don't fit neatly into genre categories? Why isn't it possible to write a good novel that draws from genre conceits without fully embodying the genre's conventions? And what's wrong with a bit of subtlety when employing genre ideas?
Ishiguro's novel "When We Were Orphans," a lesser-known predecessor to the famous "Never Let Me Go," hits genre notes in a similar fashion. Instead of science fiction, Orphans plays on detective tropes. The protagonist is a detective, although hardly a Sherlock Holmes archetype. He's delusional, inflating his bumbling missteps into successes. The narrative doesn't progress with the cause and effect sequence associated with most detective novels, though; it has the digressionary structure of a literary novel, floating through the narrator's childhood memories in Proustian fashion.
"When We Were Orphans" has the genre connection to "Never Let Me Go," but its far closer connection in Ishiguro's oeuvre is "Remains of the Day." Both have polite, formal, unreliable narrators who love a woman but find themselves unable to demonstrate that love, and WWII political overtones of a good person unwittingly in cahoots with evil.
It's those unreliable narrators which every writer should admire. After reading Ishiguro's first person POVs, it seems impossible that any first person narrator is telling the truth. Ishiguro exposes how the "I" of any story necessarily skews the world, which not only provides layers of mystique for the reader to interpret, it only creates a complex character. Who is this person and is he lying to me, to others, or only to himself? Ishiguro is a master of liars who do not know they are lying.
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