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On Finishing a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 3: Animal Songs

I like to listen to music when I write. I used to hate this, but now that I write first thing in the morning, it helps get me going. I like also not to have to worry about what sort of music I want to listen to. Usually when working on a short story, I figure out quickly which album I want playing in the background, and then stick with it for the whole project.

This would be hard to do with a whole book. I couldn’t imagine listening to one album for two years or so. So way back at the start of this project, I decided to make a playlist of every song in my iTunes that has or references an animal in its title. It was a great morning of procrastination. Now, as a series of three-minute GTD breaks, I’ve decided to post for you in alphabetical order a list of those animals represented. You’re welcome.
Continue reading On Finishing a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 3: Animal Songs

Reality Confusion

Two things:

I.
A couple weeks ago the Times Book Review complained that a book of nonfiction conflated two dates into one. This week, it reviews David Shields’s Reality Hunger, and has this to say, paraphrasing Shields:

After all, just because the novel is food for worms doesn’t mean that fiction has ceased. Only an artificial dualism would treat every non-novel as if it were reportage or court testimony, and only a fear of the slipperiness of life could perpetuate the cult of the back story.

So which is it, NYTBR? Is nonfiction’s liberation from fact an inevitability from the decline of the novel, or does it damage a writer’s moral authority, as Charles Bock argued in your pages two weeks ago? Maybe it’s a bad idea to demand critical consistency from a reviewing organ, but what’s such an organ’s editor’s job, exactly?

II.
Below is a photograph I took of my friend Steven last night. More insectile than cervine. I’ll need to work on the scale in possible future pics.

Writing Badly

Tonight in class I had students write the worst fiction they could. It’s a common exercise, the idea being that it gives us a way to talk about what we value in creative writing and what we abhor. And the writing always ends up surprising and good in complicated ways. I wrote alongside my students, for the first time. Here’s what I came up with. Continue reading Writing Badly

maystephen’s photographs

You’ve listened to his mixtapes, now look at his photographs. My pal Steve toys, oh, let’s say semiannually with an honest-to-goodness Web blog/journal of writing, and but until we get some commitment on that end, what luck that he’s consistent about updating his Tumblr photo blog.

They’re really good, right? What I like about Steve’s photos is that they all feel very old, very NYC-between-the-wars, even when the frame is full of neon and Spandex. And it’s not just because of the use of greyscale. You can tell, flipping through the pages of photos, that he’s got a sensibility developing: a city seesawing on every block between abundance and decay.

Find the snowy horsetrack photos. They’ll break your heart, and then somehow warm it.

Jacks of all trades! It’s like when I found out that Zach also made movies.

Some Questions Asked to/about a Book I Need to Read Soon

John D’Agata writes books in and about nonfiction that get me very interested in and excited for the genre. After the first generation of “New Journalists” who just decided to get out and write great, engaging, personal, subjective nonfiction without dickering over the name of this genre, and then after their 2nd-gen acolytes who made their careers precisely through such careful dickering and promulgation, here’s our 3rd-gen go-to guy, whose nonfiction work seems so smartly disinterested in what (other than its author’s own assertion) makes it nonfiction. And yet his work is so journalistic. By blending and maybe even disregarding genre, D’Agata’s found a way to move the genre forward.

His new book seeks connections between two public events in Nevada: the U.S. Senate’s debate on whether to use Yucca Mountain as the dumping ground for our nation’s nuclear waste, and a 16-year-old’s suicide accomplished by jumping from the observation tower of a Vegas hotel. There is, of course, no connection between these events. The boy’s suicide was not a call against nuclear energy. And yet this is the job of the writer: to look around and make some sense by piecing elements together.
Continue reading Some Questions Asked to/about a Book I Need to Read Soon

My February

Let me know anything you may want to know about Chicago O’Hare Airport’s Terminal 2 because after visiting it eight times in under three weeks I think I know a good deal about it. There’s a McDonald’s at the terminal’s groin over there; a Chili’s Too where a bartender named George (pretty sure, who bears a rounder resemblance to Brad Garrett) will encourage you not to wait in line for a single table but rather hop up to the bar—single seats! single seats! c’mon folks!—and eventually he’ll convince you it’s the right place to sit, despite your bags you refuse to check, and then there’s a quite shitty Fox Sports Net restaurant where the employees yell at each other. Which of course is probably a carefully planned part of the experience, given the restaurant’s parent company. The going rate in winter 2010 for a men’s shoeshine is $6. The going rate at the Brookstone for an iPod charger is $38. You can’t buy large Cadbury bars for your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day at the Duty Free counter just down from the shoeshine bench unless you’re off to Canada (on Air Canada which departs from gates E1 and E2), but there’s a kind of news & gift kiosk on your way to Terminal 1 (pictured in blue) which sells chocolates to domestic travelers at reasonable rates. Something called Johnny Rockets exists over there. Also: broad, great looking men who wear their khakis well that entreat you into conversation with the enticing offer of a free flight, and but by the time you understand these men are talking to you you’re too many steps along your path to comfortably pause and turn themward, and when you glance back in some kind of apology you realize they want just for you to sign up for a credit card, and not, like, your life story or darkest fears.

Much of my February’s been spent there. I’ve been traveling, meeting people in English departments around the country to mutually assess one another on whether I’d be a good fit among their faculty. It’s looking good that I’ll’ve signed a contract for a job by the end of this week, but in the meantime mum’ll’ve to be the word.

If I get hired I’m going to be hired in nonfiction, hired as a writer and teacher of nonfiction. This makes sense given the pending publication of The Authentic Animal, but is also crazy given the rest of my publishing record. I’ve got an essay in a journal, an excerpt from the book. I’ve got journalism written chiefly in the previous century. I’ll’ve (okay, sorry) graduate students to teach things to, and it’s clear I’ll need to bone up on my reading. Memoir is a genre I know of much like I know of Ayn Rand—i.e., through the harsh or loving words of others.

So I’ll be beginning a program of sorts soon, reading through canonical works of nonfiction, such as they may exist. I’ve got the Modern Library list to start with, but therein lies a list void of Didion and so how much serious attention can really be paid it? In Cold Blood, The Liar’s Club, the works of Gay Talese, the anthologies edited by John D’Agata—all are at the top of the list, some as rereads.

You, reader: any others? What vital nonfiction is out there?

Wayne Booth Has Something to Share with You

No, it’s not chlamydia. Nor is it the secret mark he made on his keys over there in the glass bowl by the front door, the one that lets you know which are his. It’s this, from his essay, “Distance and Point of View”:

It is not surprising to hear practicing novelists report that they have never had help from critics about point of view. In dealing with point of view the novelist must always deal with the individual work: which particular character shall tell this particular story, or part of a story, with which precise degree of reliability, privilege, freedom to comment, and so on. Shall he be given dramatic vividness? Even if the novelist has decided on a narrator who will fit one of the critic’s classifications—”omniscient,” “first person,” “limited omniscient,” “objective,” “roving,” “effaced,” and so on—his troubles have just begun. Continue reading Wayne Booth Has Something to Share with You

“Give Me Children” – Palace (tab)

This is I think the one song of the stellar and (for me, at least) seminal Arise, Therefore record that hasn’t been tabbed online. I’m not sure whether it’s 100% on (the song is piano heavy, which always makes transcription difficult), but it’s a start. Please revise/edit as needed.

Note: This is for a guitar tuned down a half step (EbAbDbGbBbEb). The D/G# chord is a D chord with a G# bass. You can play it with a regular D shape by just sliding your index finger up the G string to hit the G# on the first fret. If this pulls your ring finger off the E string, it’s not much of a problem.
Continue reading “Give Me Children” – Palace (tab)

A New Coinage

weird-science
verb, trans.
1. to fashion an object out of thin air, or to improve the general quality of a pre-existing object, using the vague powers that have seemingly been placed within you by a pair of horny experimenting teens: I’m starving; it’d be great if someone could weird-science me a pizza | Huh, this sweater must have gotten weird-scienced in the dryer because it totally fits now.

2. to influence or affect something far beyond any expectations or senses of logic and reason: I think eight days without sunshine has weird-scienced my brain. | Gee, thanks, Massachusetts, now the right is totally going to weird-science health-care reform.

Use with caution.

Being Part of the Thinking World, and Also the Loving One

I.
One of the effects of being on the academic job market as I’ve been since, oh, September, is that you stop thinking. You stop engaging in much else around you that’s not an academic job posting, or a certain wiki. Your loved ones suffer and your liked ones do. Your students. And but it’s also very hard to think about exactly how other people are well if not “suffering” then at least being neglected because of course you’re too busy thinking about why someone you’ve never met hasn’t called you on the phone.

II.
Sorry. – “you” and + “I”
Continue reading Being Part of the Thinking World, and Also the Loving One

What Appears to Now Be a Series, Assembled by a Cheapskate: The Value(s) of Books, Part 2

Here’s another book I want, seen in a well placed ad in the New York Review of Books. Why (and not, please, whether) we care about literary characters is a subject I’m committed enough to to want a read a whole book that finds an answer.

Would you believe it’s $60.00 through Johns Hopkins Press’s site? Sixty! Amazon drops that down to a mere $43.20.

We won’t ever care about Blakey Vermeule, no matter how brilliant her book may very well be, the way we do about, oh, John Dowell, say. And The Good Solider has surely never cost $60, not even with its adjusted-for-inflation 1915 first-edition rate. What the F’s?

It’s clear: there are very few university presses in the world whose business models don’t hinge on overcharging libraries for their products.

maystephen’s mixtapes

About 90 percent of everything I know about music I know from two friends who both now live (not together) in Brooklyn. One of those is my Pittsburgh friend Steve who has been making and sending me mixes for so long that the first ones were on tape, because few of us had CD-burning laptops even at the turn of the century.

At any rate, I’m still without my laptop, which means I’m without my iTunes music to write to, and while I’ve enjoyed the stuff last.fm has tossed my way based on recommendations I’m ready this morning for something new. And then I remembered it’s been a while since Steve sent me a mix, and but that they were now all available (well most of them are new) on 8tracks.com.

You can find them at 8tracks.com/maystephen, where they stream through your Web browser. There’s classic country, gangsta rap, French soul, British postpunk, and classic alt-rock. I’m listening to “MCMCXIII” right now, and reliving teen years.

On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 2.

Taxidermist Carl Akeley is considered by most taxidermy folks to be the father of modern taxidermy. Taxidermy. Taxidermy taxidermy. Certain words when you write a whole book become very easy to type. Taxidermy. Can’t remember the last time my fingers in that pattern didn’t hit their targets: Taxidermy. Certain words’ meanings begin to fade as their sounds take over. Or no: their status as signifiers gets lost, and they become instead like one’s eyes’ specific shade of yellow, or a hairstyle one’s worn for too long.

For the record, in all my notes, taxidermy’s rendered as capital T. Taxidermists become “Tmen”, viz., “Purpose here is to do what 13 Tmen did up till yesterday—mt part. [i.e. “mount partridge”] in exact pose as reference pic.” I know: Tmen. I regret the sexism.

At any rate, Tman Carl Akeley is the father of modern T. He’s famous enough that you can be his Facebook friend, but his a little too famous to respond to friend requests on time. My book opens not with his birth, but just after: with his first mounted specimen of a canary. Beginning at his birth wasn’t much of a choice because all of us get born in more or less the same way and it takes some time for us to become people enough. People enough to write about. People who act and speak and think on their own in ways that can be illustrative. So gone from the book are the first 12 years of Carl’s life. It’s not a problem.
Continue reading On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 2.

The Value(s) of Books

There’s a new book I want. Well, it’s two books, the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. I like very much my Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which has smart little editorials on words and their usage from Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Stephin Merritt, and other smart people whose opinions I don’t just trust but more like place the entirety of my faith in. (And I know, having read thoroughly my DFW, that the late grammarian would have no problems with the preposition hanging out at the end of that there sentence up there.) The other great thing about the OAWT is its superlative tables for certain groups of adjectives. Like the one that ties “kind” to “cruel” through words like “humane” and “inoffensive” and “pitiless”. Also the tables of specifics for those writers like this one who tend always to satisfy themselves with dull generics. A whole table of terms involved with knitting and crocheting! A list of oaths and curses inclusive of both “fuck it” and “jeez Louise”!
Continue reading The Value(s) of Books