- My laptop crashed again. I just got it back today.
- 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.
- 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). - 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.
- N & I are looking to rent a place in Tuscaloosa or Birmingham. Please forward any leads to dave =at= davemadden dot org.
- 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:
- 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.
Category: Announcements
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.
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?
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
Texas, Alabama
Maybe we don’t have to choose.
Or maybe some don’t. I chose Alabama. Suck it, Texas.
Films Watched in Full or in Part Since 2010 Began
Not in chronological order:
- Terminator: Salvation
- Miracle on 34th Street (original)
- Home for the Holidays
- The Marc Pease Experience
- The Brothers Bloom
- xXx
- Alice (Svankmejer, dir.)
- Inglorious Basterds (sic, pending)
What else is there to do when it’s single-digits and snowdrifted outside?
New Accordion
Thanks, Sara G. You’re welcome, music-starved ears of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Living the Dream?
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.
Thanksgiving
Fall 2009 Photo Roundup
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.
“Learning from Movies in Rendering Fiction Characters”
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:
- Do I drive or do I fly? Denver is one of three cities in the world I can fly to directly from Lincoln.
- What hotel should I stay in? The conference hotel is, five months prior to the conference, sold out, quizzically.
- At which hotel’s Starbucks will R.O. Butler park himself visibly and expectantly?
- How many people will walk by The Cupboard’s table, at which I and Adam will be sitting smilingly with the boys from Octopus Books?
- How can we ensure this conference expands an additional day to pack in more time visiting with friends I now see once a year, only at this conference?
To those friends: I’m sorry. We’re just all so far away.
(Part two of “Lush Life” coming tomorrow promise.)
Passive Aggressive Hometowns
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.
Pittsburgh Cuisine Revisited
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.
Windell Middlebrooks
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.
John Tesh is on the Radio, and He Wants to Help You
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.
“Play Dead”
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.
Stasis. Nothing new.
Tomorrow I fly to go marry my sister.
To, that is, her boyfriend.
Chris Higgs: Art Curator
Higgs takes contemporary art images out of the hands of gallery and museum-sanctioned curators, and into the arms of a renegade whose way of uniting images and text feels more related to poetry than to the expectations of art curation.
That’s from Art in America, y’all. So that makes it official.
Higgs’s um “blog” (sorry Higgs) has for a long time been a go-to place for more than just art. It’s called BRIGHT STUPID CONFETTI, and you can find it on your left there, or here.
Good News, Everyone!
The delay in posting has been long. Very sorry. I’ve been waiting jumpily until I could officially announce that my book, The Authentic Animal, has been picked up for publication by St Martin’s Press.
St. Martin’s Press!
I’m way too excited to be able to say much about it. Mostly I don’t know what to do with the news that St. Martin’s seems to love my strange taxidermy book so much. They love it! And it’s a great press, where lots of folks you’ve heard of got their starts (Dan Brown, Augusten Burroughs, Janet Evanovich), to say nothing of the prestige of the parent company and all its subsidiaries.
“Welcome to St. Martin’s Press,” my editor told me earlier this week, and it was like clouds parted and a million trumpets blasted that Macintosh-bootup sound. Except without the apocalyptic overtones.
More news as it comes. Now I just need to finish the book….