Category: Announcements

Skullcandy! [Fist-shaking]

I broke my second pair of Skullcandy earbuds on the train ride up. I nodded off. They were plugged into the side of my laptop. The laptop slid off my tray table and hit my thigh, waking me up, and the plug bent literally out of shape and the wires got disconnected. I thought: these are expensive.* I thought: I’m going to fix these!

I went to Radio Shack, following some Web sites’ advice. Here’s what I ended up with:

Thanks, brother-in-law, for soldering help. Alas: it didn’t work. Not a sound came through. Then my sister came home from work, and she fixed them:

Thanks, sis, but oh, what a rickety little plug!

—

* Wrong. One can nab a pair on buy.com for about $10 shipped.

In Which My Career as a Comedy Writer Begins (And Probably Ends)

Here’s a joke in this week’s Women’s World, read aloud to the room today by my sister:

Q: What happens to frogs who illegally park?

A: They get toad.

It was requested by my father that she repeat it later, and people laughed genuinely at the silliness of it. The sudden wordplay. My sister looked at me expectantly. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

Everyone vocally hated on me.

“You should change it to, ‘They find themselves toad’,” I said. And then I totally roflmao’d.

So, to recap:

Q: What happens to frogs who illegally park?

A: They find themselves toad.

Hollywood: I’m free this summer.

One Success

(Photo: Dinty W. Moore)
In the aftermath of from November, not only has my pedagogy paper, “Anything but the Truth: Lies in Nonfiction”, been accepted at the 2011 AWP Conference, but I was selected to deliver the Nonfiction Forum’s craft lecture.

I keep wanting to call it a keynote. I’m just going to call it the 2011 AWP Conference Pedagogy Forum in Nonfiction’s Keynote Craft Lecture.

Here’s some of the gist of my paper:

This exercise asks students to focus on form and structure while keeping content off their radars. Specifically, students are told to write an essay in which nothing is true, everything is made up. They cannot, however, produce fiction. This tension helps us talk in class about just what it is that makes an essay an essay. If nonfiction is no longer beholden to “the truth”, what makes it distinct from other genres?

I did this with my graduate students this semester as an in-class exercise, and they all (or, well, those that spoke up) seemed to love it. What I did was give them titles of essays on index cards. I recall “On In-Laws” being one of them. The questions I had are the questions I have about nonfiction that interest me. Who starts with history? Who (like me, all the time) leans on etymology for insight? Who explores through personal narrative and who avoids it?

Of course, writing something in which nothing is true is impossible. A lot of them go to the truth. It’s not a problem; they have to, really. Maybe it doesn’t logically follow (please remark) that because it’s impossible to make everything up, it thus is equally impossible to make nothing up. Maybe this isn’t a sound argument for the allowance of invention in nonfiction.

At any rate, I’ve got a 15-minute paper to write before February.

Sisters, Cats, Ailments

I have sisters and these sisters have cats and I’ve been staying these past few nights with my sisters and their cats, back in old Northern Virginia. Here’s Alex:

He’s a bit crosseyed, and looks over your shoulder when he’s trying to look at you.

Here’s Whimbley:

She has arthritis in her forepaw and thus holds it in the air while seated.

Here’s me:

I’m allergic to cats.

Sudden Changes in Thinking and Attention

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about scope. I’ve been reading about new developments regarding taxes and the U.S. Congress and the presidential candidate I voted for in 2008, and I’ve been reading about work by a gay artist that has been removed from the Smithsonian, and all the news looks bleak. It’s been a very long time (2008, I imagine) since I’ve looked to the year ahead and seen sunny days and clear skies. I don’t know that our country will ever be a place to be proud of again.

I’ve diagnosed myself as suffering from abstraction sickness. It’s a malady similar, perhaps, to Reality Hunger. I can define it as an inability to focus on or fully comprehend items, concepts, and people that are both geographically distant and generally plural. I read an article about gays in the military and I find no clarity, and then I attend a meeting of the Capstone Alliance—UA’s queer faculty advocacy group—and I feel some small kind of warmth. The creator of a very successful cable television show tells me through acquaintanceship that no TV writers’ room she knows of would ever let a book-writer like me inside, and then I read a profile of Chuck Lorre in the New Yorker, and like that I lose all interest in people who write television for a living.
Continue reading Sudden Changes in Thinking and Attention

New Cupboard Volume: Andrew Borgstrom's <em>Explanations</em>

At last! After a prolonged delay caused by trying to figure out the workings of this pamphlet series I co-edit now that I live in a new state, the next volume of The Cupboard is out and ready for you .

Andrew Borgstrom’s Explanations is a deceptively slim volume, comprising just thirty-six voices explaining the ways of the world. But such voices! And such ways of such a world! It’s impossible for me to pick a favorite, but here’s one I love incredibly:

A Critical Thinker Explains Of and For

Oxygen! That’s what I would die for, fight for, fight to the death for, die gasping for. If I died of lung cancer, I would have died for cigarettes, and for freedom, and for pleasure, and of addiction. The coroner will say you died of something, and the eulogist will say you died for something. It’s largely setting. Some of us die fors, but all of us die ofs. They want you to tell them what you’re willing to die for, but not what you’re willing to die of. If you don’t know what you would die for, you may not know what you’re living for, but you can be assured it’s the oxygen you’re living of.

You can also subscribe to The Cupboard, if you haven’t already. Still just $15 for four quarterly volumes.

Interview on NF and The Authentic Animal with BWR

Eric Parker interviewed me a couple months ago for Black Warrior Review and because it was over email and not in person I was able to say coherent things.

Minor successes!

You can read the review, in which I call out the Republican Party and David Shields regarding certain qualms of mine, here.

(No ideas on that making-it-tough-to-read background.)

Black Warrior Review Fundraising Auction

For those of you in or near Alabama, much-esteemed literary journal Black Warrior Review, run entirely by U of A’s astoundingly great graduate students, is holding a fundraising auction on 11 November 2010. That’s right, Veteran’s Day, so be sure to schedule your holiday festivities early. The auction starts at 7pm. At a place called Little Willie’s. Let’s hope this isn’t some kind of innuendo.

Yours truly is donating his time, as below:

I, Dave Madden, though never having worked as a professional maid and never having really been known for cleanliness, am nonetheless very good at cleaning a place when my mind is set to it. If you bid on me, I agree to clean your home one afternoon or evening, on a day that works for both of us. I’ll wash dishes. I’ll scrub the kitchen and one bathroom. I’ll dust. I’ll vacuum (I’ve got a Dyson!), Swiffer, and mop your floors. I’ll do the insides of windows. I’ll make beds and fluff pillows. I won’t do any yard work—for which you’re welcome, trust me. I’d rather not tidy up a mess, seeing as how I won’t know where your clothes and items go, and I’d like not be sent into attics, crawlspaces, or anywhere likely to contain spiders. I won’t do laundry, but I’ll gladly fold laundry, unless one of us gets embarrassed. No oven-cleaning, but I’ll take on your stovetop. Other tasks negotiable. I can provide cleaning products, unless yours are better.

I’ll happily listen while you tell me about your day, or about your dreams, or about the foods you like best, or I can also just plug in to my iPod and keep quiet while you read. But I won’t wear, like, an outfit.

I mean, let’s be civil.

Not sure whether bids can be made remotely, but I can ask around. If you are in town, please stop by. There’ll be lots of more-satisfying things to bid on, I’ve been told.

I Read before the Whole World

“Who wants to buy a 1995 Toyota Celica? I see a nice one right over there….”

Last month, when I gave a reading from The Authentic Animal for my colleagues and students at the University of Alabama, there was someone pointing a tiny box at me the whole time. I knew it was a camera, I just knew it.

If you’d like to hear some stuff on jackalopes and terrorizing monkeys, you can find it at itunes.ua.edu. You need to have iTunes installed on your computer, and you’ll need to find the “Bankhead Visiting Writers” collection under the category of “literature”.

Literature!

And you’ll need to forgive the voice I apparently solicited Ray Romano to provide. Why did no one tell me I sound so froggy? “Something from the grill, Jill?” “Meat makes me ill, Gil.”

Do, though, stay tuned or like fast forward to Kellie Wells, who reads this amazing story about terrorizing mutant rabbits.

Animals are dangerous, clearly.

Status Update 2

I’m on Cipro. Sick six days so far.

Taking ciprofloxacin increases the risk that you will develop tendinitis (swelling of a fibrous tissue that connects a bone to a muscle) or have a tendon rupture (tearing of a fibrous tissue that connects a bone to a muscle) during your treatment or for up to several months afterward. These problems may affect tendons in your shoulder, your hand, the back of your ankle, or in other parts of your body.

…says the National Institutes of Health. “Up to several”? Check back with me at Valentine’s.
Continue reading Status Update 2

CNF‘s Quarterly Blog Roundup

Creative Nonfiction in its new format now accepts nominations for blog posts to reprint in its quarterly print issues. It’s a bit like the Findings section of Harper’s, I guess. Yes, you can in fact nominate yourself. I thought vainly this would maybe be a good idea, so I went to CNF‘s Web site to see what’s what:

We’re looking for: Vibrant new voices with interesting, true stories to tell. Narrative, narrative, narrative. Posts that can stand alone, 2000 words max, from 2010. Something from your own blog, from a friend’s blog, from a stranger’s blog.

Of more than 130 posts on this blog so far, I don’t think a single one qualifies. It’s never occurred to me to use this blog as a medium for recording narratives. It seems I have no true stories to tell here.

Am I a disappointment? I say aloud often that people have an innate hunger for narrative, and yet what I do here is all analysis and criticism. I have a tiny audience: would you rather get more true stories? Is narrative what people go to blogs for?

Here’s a true story. Since last Wednesday morning I’ve been spending twelve hours a day in ward 2C of the Francis Building at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota—part of the so-famous-I knew-of-it-before-I-ever-knew-how-properly-to-spell-mayonnaise Mayo Clinic. I sit those twelve hours just two steps away from the bed of my boyfriend who’s maybe seventy-percent of the way through a slow recovery from small intestine resection surgery. Wednesday, his surgeon expertly cut out a cancerous tumor the way a poor darner might fix a hole-torn tubesock—slicing laterally twice through the tube and sewing the two new open ends together. Except what the surgical team sliced out of my boyfriend was eighteen inches in length. “You’ve got more than ten feet in there,” Dr. Swain told me afterward. “He won’t miss it at all.”

Hours later they put him in a shared room, despite our requests he be given something private. Already, a large man lay in the bed closest the door, awake and curious, giving me and N and his nurses and his mother the thrice-over. His eyes moved like a scary cardiogram. It was Tyler Perry. The actor-writer-director-producer Tyler Perry was sharing N’s recovery room. I shook his hand and said, “I’ve only seen two of your movies, but I liked them. You have so many others, don’t you?”
Continue reading CNF‘s Quarterly Blog Roundup

Free Mac Solitaire: Avoid Boredom!

Most Popular Solitaire is a collection of only the best and most popular solitaire games.

We have looked through all the hundreds and hundreds of solitaire games and chosen only the thirty best games, the thirty games that people like to play the most.

These are the games that solitaire players from around the world keep coming back to play more often than any others. There are just enough games to keep you from getting bored, but few enough to keep it simple.

With beautiful playing cards, full undo and redo of all your moves, automatic game saving, and complete statistics, Most Popular Solitaire is solitaire the way it ought to be.

Free Mac Solitaire: It’s as Simple as That!

Computer solitaire is one of most popular games, ever. Solitaire games have been played for hundreds of years and remain to attract millions of card game players and we wanted to continue the tradition with Simply Solitaire. We hope you enjoy Simply Solitaire for Mac, the Apple computer, (Macintosh) as much as we enjoyed making it. Our aspiration is that you have a good time playing our classic mac solitaire games. If you’re here to find out about the specific rules for solitaire games, click above or click here: solitaire rules. It’s as simple as that.

Is Louie C.K. the Zach Schomburg of Comedy?

No, probably not. This answer is why I’ve been avoiding this post I’ve been threatening myself to write since C.K.’s Louie premiered on FX, which if you’re not watching you’re missing out on one of the most incredible shows ever. And why I mean incredible is here is a show written, directed, edited, and acted by a comedian that is mostly unfunny, and which show’s unfunny moments are its most watchable and interesting. Its existence is incredible as in not credible.

And it just got renewed for a second season of 13 episodes!

But, like, look:
Continue reading Is Louie C.K. the Zach Schomburg of Comedy?

Blog Endorsement

Some people, believe it or not, like semantic arguments.

My friend Cara is one of these people, whose brains sort of open up a little more from semantic dickering, or like who see semantic dickering not as idiotic quests at being Right but rather as quick and fun investigations that yield certain small truths.

Behold: Continue reading Blog Endorsement

Stolen Idea

I’ve finished revisions on the taxidermy book, coming in at 87,226 words in 283 pages, plus end notes. So now what? Well, to fill the writing time in the mornings until another longer project came up, I’d planned to write missed-connections ads and post them to Craigslist. These would be mini essays, nonfiction in every way, based on real people I’d encounter in my day as a new southerner negotiating a new landscape.

I’d figured such a thing had probably been done before: lyric missed connections, it’s such an obvious romantic form. But who would have thought such a thing would be going on in Tuscaloosa?

We’ve got a top-ten MFA program here, so I should have thought. And I would have taken tacks different from this writer:

In your first life, you were foolish–running where you shouldn’t be running, crashing into trees, touching everything you saw. In your next life, you were more cautious–ducking when things were thrown your way, jumping over crevasses. In the lives after that you began to understand the world that you were placed in: that things, terrible things, can come at you from behind, from underneath. To be swept off one’s feet only to fall again from the sky, curled up in a ball, rotating. When I saw you, surrounded, you were aware of the names of things–you knew that when you jumped you could move back and forth in mid-air like a balloon, like wings, like spiraling.

Like, I would have tried to be more concrete and honest. But now? I’ll try nothing. The excitement of the project is all gone.

Or maybe not. Maybe I can help turn the otherwise negligible tuscaloosa.craigslist.org into a literary thunderdome. Game on, wistful connection-misser! We’ll see whose inbox fills more quickly with desperation.

UPDATE: Some of these are actually quite awesome.

“In the Desert Air”

It’s not my best title, but I’ve got an essay up in the new issue of Noö. That is, the new Noö. It’s about a single night I spent with a friend on a cross-country trip taken so long ago it feels like ancient history.

Thanks to Adam for asking me to be a part of it, and to Mike and Ryan for putting together this guest-editor-rotating online venue.

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.