One needs to both live in or near Stamford, Conn., and also be willing to travel (supposedly for last-minute script changes?). They require three to five years TV production or writing experience which of course I don’t have. Also a familiarity with WWE superstars and their histories and narrative development. I’m no WWE PPV subscriber, but when pressed I could parlay with one about who I think should win. Er: “win.”
Against, perhaps, my better judgement I’ve applied. Will keep folks posted.
On Labor Day, 2009, I lost my camera (sorry, Mom!) and the day after Thanksgiving, 2009, it was found (thanks, N!). Here’s what you (and I) missed:
Thanksgiving weekend roundup to come.
Today the Times‘s book review asks Stephen King to review the new biography of utter wretch/mad alcoholic Raymond Carver, who, after taking Carver to task for being such an utter wretch of a mad alcoholic (at a party, he reportedly smashed a wine bottle over the head of his first wife—who seems to have supported him throughout most of his early career—when he thought she was being flirtatious), has much more ire to throw at Carver’s legendary editor, Gordon Lish (pictured at left in, strangely, a photograph attributed to William F. Buckley, Jr.):
[I]n 1973, when my first novel was accepted for publication, I was in similar straits: young, endlessly drunk, trying to support a wife and two children, writing at night, hoping for a break. The break came, but until reading [this] book, I thought it was the $2,500 advance Doubleday paid for “Carrie.” Now I realize it may have been not winding up with Gordon Lish as my editor.
Burn! I’m not a Carver fan, and but this may be mostly a reaction against the morass of it and its predecessors I’ve had to swim through in a creative writing program. And but also I’m if not a Gordon Lish fan than a fan at least of some Gordon Lish disciples/associates (Christine Schutt, Gary Lutz, Leanord Michaels, Barry Hannah—if I’m not being too presumptive about any of these folks). I wonder whether reading the newly restored “author’s cut” of Beginners, Carver’s original title for the Lish-usurped What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, would restore some admiration I could have in the writer.
Then again, I’m reluctant, perhaps overly so, to admire writers who can’t help themselves from drinking too much and then terrorizing the people they decided to marry and to bring into this world. Then again, I admire John Cheever.
C.B.’s own bad example of superimposing the past on the present was bad, he said, because it didn’t involve any kind of superimposition at all, merely an interjection. A “flash back” if you will:
Ramona was bored by Baxter’s presentation in the Little Theater. What was he talking about? Lushness, or something. Outside, the grass was fragrant. Sitting back in her uncomfortable chair and gazing first at the grass and then up at the ceiling’s crisscrossed wooden beams, Ramona thought back to the previous week, when she had visited the Vermont State Fair. [. . .] Suddenly startled, Ramona came back to the present. Baxter was still droning on about lushness.
The problem with such a passage is its implication that the past resides in a place separate from, or beside the present. That we exist in both times at separate occassion, whereas, Baxter argues, quoting Faulkner, “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” If the past resides in the present, then writers looking to capture that experience need to render both simultaneously.
Continue reading Charles Baxter, “Lush Life” craft lecture (part 2)
Just found out that my short pedagogy paper (see above title) was accepted for the pedagogy panels at the 2010 AWP conference. It’s in Denver in April. It’s not a terribly huge thing (dozens upon dozens of people get accepted), but still nice to hear.
Here are the basics of the thing I’ll be presenting:
First, students are shown a clip from a movie with the sound cut out. The task here is simple: students take all the notes they can and try to uncover as much about the characters as possible. This can be done collectively, as a class, or competitively, in groups. Practically any film’s opening scene could be used, but one especially effective movie to screen is Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. Its opening seven minutes is devoted to the titular family’s backstory, and it includes a voiceover narration that rather self-consciously mirrors the narrative voice in third-person omniscient fiction. When the film clip is over, students are informally quizzed on what they learned. “Tell me about these characters,” is a reasonable prompt. “What did you notice?” Students will then provide everything they noticed and deduced about the characters simply by gauging their looks and watching them act. The extent of students’ observations should be recorded on a black- or whiteboard, and students should be pressed to share every last detail. Then, the film clip is shown again, this time with sound. This time around, students take notes only on the new information they receive through the more discursive modes of dialogue and contextual narration. Afterward, they share their findings. Invariably, the seen information far outweighs the heard.
Now I get to apply for travel funding from my department. The questions:
To those friends: I’m sorry. We’re just all so far away.
(Part two of “Lush Life” coming tomorrow promise.)
Earlier this week, C. Baxter came to the UNL English department to talk about style in fiction writing—specifically lushness. Those of you who read this blog who were at Bread Loaf this past summer (tally = 0?) heard this same lecture (and I believe the pretty stunning short story, “Mr. Scary”, he read later in the evening). For everyone else, here’s a recap as best my scribbly notes can give me.
C.B. began immediately by listing all the problems inherent in putting together a talk about lushness in art. He called it “nearly impossible” for a number of reasons:
Vis-a-vis the mention of McCarthy above, CB admitted that while he is often lush w/r/t violence in his books, he is spare and cold when it comes to “intimate emotions.”
So a stab at definition. Lushness is not romantic or embarrassing or manipulative or stupid. It is not showing off on the page. It’s not purple prose. It does seem to want something from you. “However,” CB argues, “every style wants something from you.” By way of definition, CB played S. Vaughn’s cover of B. Strayhorn’s blues tune “Lush Life”, an example of what CB called the “It’s 2am and I’m completely fucked” genre of music. Pinning down certain sounds of the music and vocals and certain passages of the lyrics, he came to three distinct features/elements of lushness:
Another musical example before the literary ones, this time from Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances”, which incorporates in its first movement an Eb alto saxophone—the first time Rach. used the instrument. CB passed out the sheet music to the piece, which was considerate of him, and we followed along as this very new instrument (the piece dates from the ’30s I think) played what felt like a very old-country melody. And it was a heartbreaking melody. And CB called it lush, pointing out that it was lush only when played on the sax; the effect of it being along the lines of “I’ve never been so lonely.” Later, when the melody is picked up by the entire string section, the lushness is diluted, resulting in a kind of absurd “We are all lonely in the exact same way.” This was maybe one of the keenest insights of the whole talk, this difference in emotional engagement we feel in solo v. group voices.
So it’s the old superimposed on the new, the past and the present blended together. Lushness is not nostalgia, nor does it require a nostalgic frame of mind to exist. Lushness is, however, the signature style of nostalgia; you cannot be nostalgic without it. The bulk of CB’s talk, then, turned to a close reading and analysis of ways writers can superimpose past on the present. First up was his own bad example, made bad because it is the default move every writer first makes when confronted with the following puzzle: How can you indicate that something in a scene is making a person think about the past?
The answer tomorrow, or soon.
Herndon, Virginia, the town I’m from, has been popping up in the oddest places lately. First on Patton Oswalt’s DVD Werewolves and Lollipops, and now on passiveaggressivenotes.com one of the blogs I semi-frequent. The site’s a depository for people to send in scans/photos of notes they’ve found or been left that usually form some kind of complaint, and are often darling in how angry they are.
Lord knows I’ve written my share over the years.
The one from Herndon is here. If I had to guess the restaurant I’d go with the Amphora. What’s doubly-odd about it is that this post is followed by one from Sioux Falls, S.D., which is N’s hometown.
No reason for this post, really. Just a place to spend a few minutes every week.
Construct a story such that each verb can be read in either the present or past tense. You can start with this sentence:
“I set my keys noisily on the countertop and then spread my hands out over the cold surface.”
Past? Present? There are probably like 5 such verbs in the language. Read, put … nothing else comes to mind. Any more?
Tonight, after an episode of Man v. Food which sent Adam Richman to Pittsburgh to stuff his gut along the Strip, I decided it was time to introduce N to the Primanti’s sandwich.
Italian bread, kielbasa, provolone, homemade fries, and homemade cole slaw. It wasn’t 2:30am after a night at the bar, but we ate them up greedily nonetheless. Delicious!
Lemme know if you want the recipe.
Has anyone seen the new Miller High Life ad campaign? Well: “new”. The one where some distributor/deliveryman wiseacre crashes upper-crust fetes at the horse track and I think a yacht? and kidnaps their untouched cases of Miller High Life to then redistribute / -deliver said cases to “common sense” folk?
Putting aside the whole general dumb offensiveness of the ad—and the way many people still assume class snobbery is unidirectional from the top down—I have to admit its cleverness. Or at least Miller High Life’s malleability. Let’s stop and look once more at the name of the beer—”High Life”—and remember that this is a beer that likens itself to champagne on its label. In a time when any touches of the upper class are to be met with near-universal loathing (at least on TV), what’s a fancypants beer to do?
One solution: fire Errol Morris, and hire the Robin Hood of beer.
His name is Windell Middlebrooks, and for Lincolnites, he’ll be at the 27th & Cornhusker Super Saver this Friday 6 November from 10am to 11:15am.
Let’s not ask how I know this.
(With apologies to A. Peterson’s On Editing a Novel series.)
“The home stretch” is a baseball metaphor, right? Far be it from me to be familiar with baseball metaphors, but I think this is where I am. In, on, or at least facing the home stretch here. Two-to-three thousand more words and I’m finished. Carl Akeley, who is dead, has to die, and then I have to show readers what his African Hall is like. Then, maybe, I need an epilogue at the pet cemetery in town, the one that doesn’t bring its animals back to life.
When you’ve been working on a nonfiction book for four years, reading hundreds of source texts and rereading a handful of source texts many, many times, it all starts to feel like this thing infesting your head. This tapeworm or something you need extracted. Because as the texts accrete and the time passes, unless you are a much more organized person than I am, the hard part is figuring out: okay, is this something I read, or something I heard, or something even I’ve just made up? If something I read, where did I read it? Did I take notes on it, or not? Where can I find it?
Where can I find it?
Continue reading On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years: Part 1
This is a thing now?
According to NBC Must-See Thursday it is. First-up on the so-much-greater-than-last-season Parks and Recreation was, oh, the young intern girl in the office. The one who I think was in the latest Judd Apatow. The one with the boyfriend who himself has a boyfriend (hilarious). One of her talk-to-the-camera cutaways involved complaining about the lameness of Ann(e)’s party. “I passed over a gay Halloween party for this. Have you ever been to a gay Halloween party? They’re incredible. Last year I saw three Jonas brothers make out with three Robert Pattinsons, it was amazing.”
Then one of 30 Rock’s plot lines involved the male writers trying to be nice to Jenna in order to get in with her gay posse and get invited to a gay Halloween party, because it’s where all the hot girls are.
I’ve thrown at least one Halloween party. Maybe two. But this was back when I was playing it straight, so no wonder they were boring, I guess. I’ve never been to a gay Halloween party. I’ve been invited to meet up with some folks tomorrow night at the Q, which for outsiders is Lincoln’s gay danceclub. It sounds to me even more terrifying than the Q on every other night.
Is it a thing? First Oscar night and now this. Maybe we’re quietly taking over the nation’s holidays. When people scheme to get into Gay St. Patrick’s Day parties* you’ll know we’ve fully arrived.
—
* The rainbow? “Corned beef”? It’s perfect.
Like yours truly, David Andrew Maddan was the youngest of his siblings. Unlike same, he was an incredibly good swimmer, serving eventually as captain for the UC-Santa Barbara Gauchos swim team. At some point in this swimming tenure, someone gave him the Milnean nickname “Pooh.”
In 2005 doctors found cancer in Pooh’s bones. They diagnosed him with osteosarcoma. In the coming year he lost most of his right leg and all of his right kneecap. Then he lost parts of his lungs. Another year passed and doctors diagnosed him with leukemia. He began another round of radiation and chemotherapy, with minimal results. He died in October 2008 at the age of 28.
Pooh’s parents, Jack and Anna, have started a foundation in their son’s name, to assist in the medical treatments of other young cancer patients. Maybe you know someone in this situation, or maybe you’d like to help. You can read more about the David Andrew “Pooh” Maddan Foundation here.
It’s in the Nov 09 Harper’s (pictured, right). The pizzicato paragraph structure, the prose itself, the density of its Bay Area history. It’s incredible:
In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance has placed proximate to them. So, I suppose, it is incomplete to notice that the San Francisco Chronicle has become remiss in its obituary department. Of four friends of mine who died recently in San Francisco, not one wanted a published obituary or any other public notice taken of his absence. This seems to me a serious abrogation of the responsibility of living in a city and as good an explanation as any of why newspapers are dying. All four of my friends requested cremation; three wanted their ashes consigned to the obscurity of Nature. Perhaps the cemetery is as doomed in America as the newspaper, and for the same reason: we do not imagine death as a city.
The essay’s relentlessly bleak, completely disinterested in pointing out what might come in place of the daily morning newspaper to act as an improvement on the earlier model. (Did folks fret this much when the evening newspaper died back in the middle of the last century? Has anyone missed it?) But I do appreciate Rodriguez’s linking the newspaper’s decline not to “The Internet” but rather to the decline of the importance of place in our lives. I appreciate it as a fresh contribution to an otherwise rank and bloated conversation.
Continue reading Richard Rodriguez on Newspapers Dying
I’m writing a course proposal for a class I’m unoriginally calling “Weird Stories”. So: stories that don’t do anything expected or familiar either in terms of form or content. Here are some texts I might use:
Donald Barthelme, “On the Deck”
Lydia Davis, “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman”
Franz Kafka, “The Country Doctor”
Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”
David Foster Wallace, “Oblivion”
J. Robert Lennon, “The Accursed Objects”
Christine Schutt, “You Drive”
Kelly Link, “Lull”
Speaking of lulls, I’ve got one in my thinking. Can anyone help me think of stories that are great, mostly in the way they flat-out confuse or confound their readers?
Did you know that Tesh is kind of a media empire now? From Entertainment Tonight host to Yanni-lite act to syndicated radio host. He’s on before Delilah, I think, on at least two stations in the Omaha/Lincoln broadcasting area.
To differentiate his act from others, Tesh has come up with this factoids-as-public-service bent. “Intelligence for Your Life” is the slogan, and it involves Tesh cutting into the songs he plays with such advice or wisdom as “Ride your bike around town instead of joining a gym” to save $5,000 a year.
Or, and this is new, vocabulary words. There’s a contest on Tesh’s Facebook page (17,589 fans as of this post) where if you can use the vocabulary word of the day in a sentence, you could win $100. Is it a lot of money? No. Is it worth submitting to? Probably not. Does Tesh allow such sentences to be only 255 characters long? Yes, alas.
Tonight’s word: copious. Here’s my sentence:
In an unlit room, Mary Hart tips out the last drop of Tussin and takes a quick survey: regrets, illusions, scented candles—copious.
Just 131! I’ll let you know what I do with the money.
Does anyone remember how the original U.K. Office came to lead TV comedy in new directions through the force of its genius and novelty? And then the U.S. Office surprised everyone by actually being good through the strength of its performances and the idiosyncrasies of its secondary characters?*
What happened? Jim Loves Pam swelled into this tsunami that flooded out any other subplots and diluted all the stuff that made the show innovative. Tonight was the culmination: the hour-long wedding episode that was a total inevitability from like the first time Jim looked longingly at Pam as she left the office with Roy.
The inevitability of wedding episodes is fine, I guess. Rites of passage and all that. But what a shame that The Office, in trying for something new and outrageous to do at a TV wedding, opted to grab some tedious viral video off YouTube.
Maybe you’ve seen it? Twenty-some million apparently have. Instead of the boring old Pachelbel a wacky group of wacky young white folks decided to play a pop dance song and like boogie down the aisle in shades! I don’t get it, right? I have no idea why anyone would want to watch this video.
But why does anyone watch anything on YouTube? This doesn’t matter. What matters to me is that a show like The Office, which I used to, okay, “believe in” in big ways that are probably silly, not only just took this whole idea and dropped it right into the script, but made sure to clue the audience in not once but twice! to the fact this is from YouTube. That this ridiculousness has been sanctioned on the Online, and so it’s not stupid and unfunny, but rather culturally relevant!
It’s like it’s more important for The Office to be in on the joke than it is to actually make the jokes.
===
* Dear The Office: keep Meredith and Creed on heavy rotation and I’ll still bring the love every week.
Did anyone catch the Magazine’s On Language column? Maybe you heard last week that its longtime columnist, William Safire, died. This week’s is written by Ammon Shea, who recently achieved fame in that newly named genre of annualist nonfiction by reading the OED over the course of a year.
I didn’t make it a habit of reading William Safire, despite my shared interests in language, but from what I knew he was a pretty strict prescriptionist when it came to grammar and usage. Sure, he tried in his column to get a perspective on new, hip coinages, but prescriptive usage—the insistence on following certain established authorities in the constructions of utterances—and maybe of course conservative punditry are what he built his long career on.
Shea’s column isn’t just descriptivist—i.e., insisting on the inherent authority of any native speaker in constructing utterances—it’s basically a manifesto for the beleaguered descriptive grammarian. “My aim here,” Shea writes near the top, “is not to illustrate how to be annoyed by those who insist on correcting your language (that will come naturally) but rather to provide a guide for how to make them go away.”
Continue reading NYTimes’ Changing of the Guard
Got the current issue of Tampa Review in the mail today. It’s in hardcover! There’s an essay in there taken from the opening chapter of The Authentic Animal, about a dead pet canary that becomes a museum relic.
Other essays therein by Douglas Danoff, Jack E. Fernandez, and Gary Fincke. Fiction by Heather Brittain Bergstrom, John Matthew Fox, Chris Huntington, Manjula Menon, and Courtney Zoffness. Poetry by lots of people.
The dustjacket, as you can see, looks like a Duchamp, and if you like that you should see how gorgeous the cloth cover is. Order an issue here.
