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Book Trailers!

Books have trailers now, too, have you heard? It’s a thing I may want to be wrangling with, soon, so I’ve done some research. Turns out there’s a much broader variety of approaches than what we’ve come to expect in film trailers. (Which makes sense probably.) More than two voiceover artists are used, for starters.

If by “favorite” I mean “the one that most made me want to buy and read a book I hadn’t previously been much interested in buying and reading,” here’s my favorite:

Yes, that’s Pynchon’s voice. You have, like with so many great books, to wait until the very end to get to the best part.

Yours truly = open to ideas for a trailer on a book that uses taxidermy to get at human-animal relationships. Yours truly = even more open to any video-production expertise thhat could be shared.

Ambitions

Lots of times, or well maybe back in the day more, you hear about certain people’s writing being like other writers on various chemical substances. He writes like Aimee Bender on acid. It’s like Jonathan Safran Foer on steroids. But when you think about it, those actual circumstances would be insufferable. Who wants to hang out with a tripping Tim O’Brien, or Marilynne Robinson on a roid rage?

Not me. I’d much rather write like Chuck Palahniuk on quaaludes, say, or Tom Wolfe on little to no sleep.

1991’s College Board Advanced Placement Examination ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION Section II

Question 1. (Suggested time—45 minutes)

Read carefully the following poem by Emily Dickinson. Then write an essay in which you describe the speaker’s attitude toward the woman’s death. Using specific references to the text, show how the use of language reveals the speaker’s attitude.
Continue reading 1991’s College Board Advanced Placement Examination ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION Section II

Found Dream 1

5/25

A wedding similar to that in Iowa the other week. H was there. At one point it was also kinda New Year’s Eve & we young folks were to float down a river on an ornate raft. Later, H & I were looking through an old person’s junk for freebies. I found a Barry Hanna book. Bride announced, “This isn’t the real dessert,” as we were eating dessert. “There’s a chauvinist later.”

“Yer having me for dessert?” I quipped and everybody laughed.

Attention, Nerds!

Did you know that Yahoo! has released, or is soon to release, its own style guide for editing and publishing on the Web? On, yes, “the Web,” capital-W. So sayeth Yahoo! In this it falls in line with the AP, which tackled a lot of new Internet (capital-I) lingo more than a decade ago. And while Yahoo! prefers “Web” and “Web Feed” and “Web hosting” it also demands “webcast,” “webpage,” and “website.” This seems arbitrary, but then again what style guide isn’t? And who wants to keep writing “You can find it on my Web site” for the rest of our lives?

Strangely, you have to buy a print copy of the style manual to read it all, but you can browse through a sampling of the official Yahoo! word list here. Let the outrage commence.

National Lampoon’s Lemmings: Dead in Concert

The conceit of Lemmings is that we’re watching live footage of the Woodchuck Festival, Three Days of Peace, Love, and Death, where people have amassed on a farm in upstate New York to listen to music and kill themselves. It stars very young (and alive) versions of Christopher Guest, John Belushi, and Chevey [sic] Chase. Aided by musician Paul Jacobs and former Miss Arkansas Rhonda Coullet, they play songs spoofing the likes of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker, CSNY, Joni Mitchell, and others.

This doesn’t do the movie any justice.
Continue reading National Lampoon’s Lemmings: Dead in Concert

I Used to Have a Blog

Another one. It still exists. For a time, the most popular post was about Roger Scruton’s “A Carnivore’s Credo”, which you are welcome to Google. Now, this most popular post, by which I mean the post that is read based on the greatest number of Google searches, by which I mean the relevant thing on the blog people are most often searching for, is Jonathan Franzen’s “Perchance to Dream” a.k.a. “The Harper’s Essay”. Here, in the interest of complicating those search results, is what I ages ago had to say about it:
Continue reading I Used to Have a Blog

A Quick Note about Wit and Associative Leaps, Or: Learning from Some Friends

A thing’s wittiness or maybe just general humor level is in direct proportion to the distance across which your mind has to jump to make the proper association. I think that jump is from figurative to literal, and I think this all might have an inverse proportion to the amount of time this leap takes, but that might be throwing too many variable around.

Behold:

I am menstruating.: Nothing very witty or funny about this. Direct report.

I having my menses.: Done with that ironic lilt in one’s voice this begins to move toward humor. But it’s not really funny.

I’m having a visit from my Aunt Flo.: A bit overused, but witty, I guess.

Ugh. It’s shark week.: Wonderful! Thanks, Jen and Tina.

A Quick Note on Narrative Mirroring, or: Learning from The Simpsons

Watching the Ruth Powers episode of The Simpsons. When she picks Marge up for their night out, Marge says Ruth looks “Nice,” and Ruth insists that nothing about this night is going to be nice. Then she pops a tape into the stereo: it’s Lesley Gore’s “Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows”. Maybe the nicest song ever written. “Sorry,” Ruth says. “Wrong tape.” Then she pops in “Welcome to the Jungle”.

Skip ahead four scenes. Wiggum is giving Homer a ride home, after coming across him up at the top of Mt. Springfield. (Or at least wherever the Hollywood-esque sign that reads “SPRINGFIELD” sits.) He’s behind Ruth’s car (stolen from her ex-husband) and decides to pull it over because the left taillight is a little smaller than the right. Wiggum turns on his lights, Ruth speeds off, and Wiggum says, “Looks like we got an old-fashioned car chase!” Then he pops in a tape.
Continue reading A Quick Note on Narrative Mirroring, or: Learning from The Simpsons

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

“And … if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time.”

David Foster Wallace says this early on in the road trip David Lipsky took with him in 1996 for the latter to write a big piece for Rolling Stone on the post-Infinite Jest hype. This book is a direct transcription of seemingly every single thing these two Davids said to each other over the course of three days. Some of it’s great, as above, and below: Continue reading Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Learning (Once Again) from Joan Didion

There’s time now that graduation is over and my grades have been turned in to begin reading in earnest again, and I’ve done so, with Michael Martone’s Michael Martone (a collection of quasi-fictive/quasi-nonfictive contributor’s notes about which I take back everything I’ve said over the past week regarding the demand for factual purity in writing; I want to know everything in that book that is true solely to bask in the thing’s pure truthness), and now I’m about halfway through Didion’s After Henry.

It’s an essay collection, and after reading this paragraph, from “Pacific Distances”… Continue reading Learning (Once Again) from Joan Didion

Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: The End

Maybe this is all why I like taxidermy so much. No one would ever mistake a mounted animal for a live one, no matter how intently the taxidermist tucks his eyelids and paints his nostrils. No matter how lifelike the pose. I mean, which—to borrow a phrase—is the authentic animal?

This:

Or this?

Continue reading Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: The End

Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: Part 3

This (left) may or may not be Robert Atwan.

Regardless, here’s a quote from him, courtesy of :

“The compound seems inescapable: a piece of writing may be aesthetically true, yet verifiably false; just as it can be—as is so much contemporary memoir—verifiably true but aesthetically false.”

Atwan series-edits Best American Essays. I love/hate the idea of a thing being a best American essay. But I tend to love Atwan. Here’s something else he once wrote, which I’ve told students for years: Essays are all about seeing a mind at work.

Atwan!

Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: Part 2

I’ve been a fan of pro wrestling for a long time. Not the inspiredly named NES game pictured at right (about which I can only recall that The Amazon, part-snake, part-man, was unstoppable—at least when wielded by my friend Darrell), but the spectacle that’s now marketed as Sports Entertainment. I shouldn’t be a fan of sports entertainment. I’m so rarely entertained by sports. Fortunately, professional wrestling is to sports what the Jonas Brothers are to rock stars.
Continue reading Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: Part 2

Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: A Series of Blog Posts in Defense of a Position

There are more than two ways to look at falseness.

One of my favorite documentary films is The Cruise made in 1998 by Bennett Miller, who went on in 2005 to make Capote.

The Cruise is made perpetually watchable by its perpetually listenable subject: Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch, who guides Grey Line Bus Tours of Manhattan with a rapidity and a nuance for detail that has to be heard (and seen, of course) to be believed.
Continue reading Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: A Series of Blog Posts in Defense of a Position

S. Ambrose = Plagiarist/Fraud. Who Cares?

In a “Talk of the Town” piece from this week’s New Yorker, Richard Rayner writes that beloved historian Stephen Ambrose essentially lied about the access he was given to President Eisenhower:

Is it possible that Ambrose met with Eisenhower outside office hours? [Son] John Eisenhower [said] that such meetings never happened: “Oh, God, no. Never. Never. Never.” John Eisenhower, who is now eighty-seven, liked Ambrose, and he recalled, too, Ambrose’s fondness for embellishment and his tendency to sacrifice fact to narrative panache.

Ambrose’s lifelong story, Rayner writes, was that his life was changed by the thousands of hours he spent with the president, and it seems that story was a myth. One told by a storyteller. I’m not surprised, nor am I worried about whatever troubles with authenticity I might uncover were I to read his two-volume biography of Eisenhower that Rayner says “is still regarded as the standard.” Here’s Ambrose in his own words, talking to the Times when plagiarism scandals came to light:

“I tell stories,” Mr. Ambrose said. “I don’t discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation.”

Maybe it’s just that these days what readers want are dissertations and not stories.

The New Creative Nonfiction

The current issue of Creative Nonfiction (a magazine out of Pittsburgh; I used to walk past its Walnut Street offices in the days I lived with girls in Shadyside) is in a new magazine format—laid out, graphically rich, pull-quote-heavy, 8ish” x 11ish”—that is welcome and good. I think the days of serial publications looking like novels are over, and it’s clear the folks of CNF have realized this, too. One of the issue’s early essays is from the by now former editor of TriQuarterly, on the move of his journal to an all-digital format, run by students. It’s a decision made perhaps stupidly by Northwestern’s administration, and while it’s a loss, clearly the idea with this magazine (inclusive also of an essay by R. Rodriguez on the death of the PBS Newshour’s five-minute essays) is that change is afoot. Although it’s unclear whether “afoot” means happening now to happening soon, and so let’s just say things change. Let’s make it present/infinite tense because this is a statement that’s always true.
Continue reading The New Creative Nonfiction

Status Update

  1. My laptop crashed again. I just got it back today.
  2. I filed my dissertation last week. It’s a story collection titled The ‘I’ of My Story. I’m aware of this title’s poorness.
  3. I went to the AWP Conference in Denver last week. Thanks to everyone who stopped by The Cupboard‘s shared table with Octopus Books, and extra thanks to those who subscribed to us or bought things. Like the T-shirt seen here, worn by a homeless man we treated to breakfast:

    davemadden.org blog-reader and new friend Dinty W. Moore introduced himself to me, spoke highly of the MFA program at the University of Alabama, and then went on to become AWP president, maybe not in that order. (In fact, certainly not in that order, but I’m shifting chronology in order to achieve a certain effect, which is a kind of in-joke between me and Mr. Moore).
  4. I’m beginning a tenure-track job in the fall teaching nonfiction at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, did I ever officially mention? Met several current and former MFA students last week, and all signs point to a very exciting fall for me.
  5. N & I are looking to rent a place in Tuscaloosa or Birmingham. Please forward any leads to dave =at= davemadden dot org.
  6. When I left last week the large, well, tree (I just spent ten minutes in a field guide to trees and my best guess is an elm) in our back patio was all branch and now it’s all little white flowers and the beginnings of leaves. Give me a couple more weeks and maybe I’ll do a better job of identifying it. Or maybe you can do so now:
  7. Graduation’s in three-and-a-half weeks. Here is an early present N bought me in Denver, the beginning of what I hope to make a nice collection of old male portraits:

    At any rate, graduation looms. My student days will soon be over.