Category: Reviews

The Greatest Guitarists of All Time

I care more about the ambitious Sigma Chi boy down the road’s plans for next year in his bid for house pledgemaster than I do about whom the editors of Rolling Stone think, this year, are, in order, the top 100 guitarists of all time. It is the exact sort of non-journalistic ad-seller that makes me pine for the demise of magazines that’s not coming as quickly as those prognosticating the end of newspapers seem to claim. There’s nothing to be said about RS‘s actual list, except guess where they ranked Jimi fucking Hendrix.

Here, though, are the letters RS claims in its 19 Jan 2012 issue to have received, which are, alone, a source of robust comedy:

THANK YOU FOR THE 100 Greatest Guitarists issue [RS 1145]! In a time when we find ourselves so preoccupied with political, economic and climate-change woes, it was so cool just to kick it all aside and read up on and debate some real heroes [sic]. I may not agree with some of the rankings or omissions, but I felt your four choices for the covers said the most. Those guys rocked the world like no one else. —Jeffrey Gennett, via the Internet

I WAS IMPRESSED WITH THE group of judges you assembled. The results were dynamic [sic]; it was great to see musicians reflecting on fellow guitarists who influenced them. —Andy Olavarria, McCall, ID

I SPENT AN AFTERNOON completely obsessed with the “100 Greatest Guitarists” list. Absolutely nourishing stuff! It was brilliant [sic] to put together a diverse panel of players, have them vote and gather the stories about why their world was moved by another musician. —Kevin Bedard, Pine, CO

I’VE READ YOU SINCE I WAS a young twerp with braces. Now I’m an older twerp who plays drums in a band. I was very disappointed to see that your list reeked of sausage. Where was Maybelle Carter and Carrie Brownstein? Where the ladies at? —Rebecca DeRosa, Brooklyn

I AM FLATTERED AND A LIT-tle astonished to be included in your “100 Greatest Guitarists” list. I wanted to point our, however, that Wilco’s song “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” singled out as one of the examples of my work, actually features extended guitar forays by our leader, Jeff Tweedy, not me! I wasn’t even in the band when that song was recorded. Got to give credit where credit is due. But thanks, everyone. —Nels Cline, Number 82, Wilco lead guitarist [emphasis added]

Two lessons, here. One, never listen to what a male Rolling Stone reader has to say. Two, don’t subscribe to three years of RS on supercheap Web discount because you think it’ll help you stay connected to what’s going on in music these days.

BlogWeek, Day Four: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

The problem with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the problem with all the past alternate Zeldas: redundant parts that get tedious and turn play into chores. Start with Ocarina of Time which is flawless. God, remember Ocarina of Time? Yes, there was that wacky goosechase/errand boy mini-quest where you had to pass successive objects from one lazy Hyrulian’s hand to another, but something about this felt to me heroic—or at least a form of good citizenship.

Then we got Majora’s Mask, the central conceit of which was (if memory serves) that you had to keep living the same three days over and over again, doing things differently each time to make your way toward Zelda. (Maybe? I never got to the end.) Redundancy and repetition. I never felt comfortable in that weird world, nor did I feel gallant and ambitious in my discomfort.

Next is—wait, I’ve got it wrong. They don’t exactly alternate between good and bad, because next was Wind Waker, which started out nice and graphically cool, but then (again if memory serves) you’re tasked with going on your little raft back to all these tiny islands you hit up earlier in the game, in, I think, a certain sequence. Just to get an item you need to continue in your quest.

This is the point I’m trying to make: it seems that alternate Zeldas take these kind of narratively lazy shortcuts as a means of prolonging game play, where rather than move little Link forward and onward, they stick him in a kind of recursive loop for a few cycles. The effect is either like being a hockey player in a penalty box, or falling down a chute when you want to climb a ladder.
Continue reading BlogWeek, Day Four: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Ideas about the Present for Writers, Or at Least This One

IDEA ONE
This idea is from Nathan Heller’s review in The New Yorker of new books on the incredible Pauline Kael:

In a 1964 essay […] Kael fretted about “structural disintegration” in movies, a loss of the “narrative sense” that used to make even the bad ones palatable. She saw it as a symptom of an atomizing culture. Now Kael went about the business of building a structure in the rubble.

Heller points out two ways she does this, this rebuilding:

  1. She “toss[ed] away everything that seemed perishable,” and
  2. She “praised [movies] she thought were daring, fresh, and well made—not just in the context of the season’s releases but by the measure of all art, ever.”

Continue reading Ideas about the Present for Writers, Or at Least This One

Movie of the Year

These days I like premature pronouncements. Steelers win the Super Bowl.

The Trip came to Tuscaloosa tonight (and only tonight, is how art-house flicks work down here). An improvised drama about Steve Coogan going through the north of England touring nice restaurants and taking Rob Brydon with him. I’d never heard of him either, but apparently he’s what’s known in the UK as a television presenter.

Foremost, though, he’s an impressionist. He does Pacino, Burton, Hoffman, Connery, Woody Allen. The hits. But like also he can do Billy Connolly, which to me is nothing short of incredible.

Normally, a man standing on a stage and positing premises voiced by idiosyncratic celebs is often just the sort of thing that makes me want to stab venom into my eyeballs. Right? I know I’m not alone on this. It’s the contrived nature of the impression. The belabored setups, the exemption from context. The Trip knows this, too, and it does smart, subtle work of showing the way Brydon’s impressions pain everyone in their vicinity.

See especially Coogan’s mother near the film’s end. If she’s an actress her eyes deserve their own BAFTAs.

How The Trip turns impressions from agony into delight is by making them some kind of contest between Brydon and Coogan. You probably saw the Michael Caine clip that everyone posted on Facebook earlier this year, and while that scene is one of the best, it’s not the only such moment in the movie. Endlessly, these two are trying to one-up each other with certain voices, and with such quick back-and-forth it becomes narcotic. I’d spend another $7 to watch these two try to out-impress one another for two hours.

I know it’s not enough to say there’s something transformative about a well done impression. But with the impression’s transformative power The Trip finds much fun to be had. Just see the movie. Not necessarily for the accuracy of the impressions, but for the joy in them. The joy of other people.

Very Bad Paragraphs, or What I’m Coming to See as a Fundamental Incomprehension regarding Structure in Nonfiction

From Robert Root?s chiefly problematic The Nonfictionist?s Guide (the title of which I greatly admire):

Contemporary creative nonfiction abounds and examples of idiosyncratic experimental forms. Some, like Nancy Willard?s ?The Friendship Tarot? or John McPhee?s ?The Search for Marvin Gardens,? are so distinctive and individual that they are unlikely to lead directly to anyone else?s work. What are the chances another essayist will find it appropriate to invent a tarot deck and imagine a reading in order to tell the story of a friendship, as Willard does? What are the odds of another essayist needing to alternate between a board game and tour of the city it?s based on, as McPhee does between ?Monopoly? and Atlantic City?

The writing here is so emphatically sure of itself and so wrong in its understanding that my reflex is to get all sarcastic here, but I’ll refrain. I don’t know Willard’s essay (though now I want to find it and read it), but I know McPhee’s well, as do most NF folks. To characterize its structure the way Root does here is akin to asking why a painter would ever use both orange and yellow after Rothko did it in Orange and Yellow.

In other words, he’s mistaking structural form with the content it helps wrangle.
Continue reading Very Bad Paragraphs, or What I’m Coming to See as a Fundamental Incomprehension regarding Structure in Nonfiction

New Criticism

Not that kind of New Criticism!

Back in April, I whined about book reviews online being too long! Gosh: they’re long. I said that if people wrote book reviews offline for an online readership, the reviews were wordy and long and took their time getting to their points. And but then if they were written online for an online readership, they were flashy and brief and substanceless.

I asked anyone to point be toward substantive books reviews under 400 words. I didn’t originally use the word substantive and I apologize now for not going with a plainer word like meaningful.

At any rate, look what @legaultd posted to Twitter, which @angermonsoon rewteeted, which is how it made its way to my eyeballs:

Infinity Blade is a game about iteration, about retreading old ground, about the small changes that surface across endless repetitions.

It operates around a simple conceit: the God King, the game’s strange central figure, has seeded a bloodline of warriors. A warrior approaches the God King’s fortress, fights his way to the throne room, and dies at the God King’s blade. He never leaves the castle. His son comes to avenge him, and the process repeats.

Each repetition ends the same way: with a son, wearing his father’s armor, carrying his father’s weapon, approaching the place of his father’s death.

The gameplay is predictable. Each bloodline is a series of fights. Each fight is a series of gestures. The enemies are variations on a theme. The spells are incremental improvements. We do the same things, over and over.

Infinity Blade may be a commentary on the grind of gaming, the relentless churn of killing and harvesting to gain new equipment so that we can kill and harvest more effectively.

But to continue playing is to live the same life a little bit better, a little bit smarter, a little bit longer than the time before.

That’s under 200 words if you can believe it, and look at how much it has to say about Infinity Blade itself and video games more generally.

Here’s a link to the review, published in Kill Screen. I don’t know if it’s the magazine itself or its writer, J. Nicholas Geist, but they’ve got my attention. As @legaultd said in his tweet of the review: “This is what electronic writing should be doing all the time.”

Yes.

UPDATE: Ha! So apparently I missed the “Begin Bloodline 2” button at the bottom of the screen, which begins through some javascript witchery (even the essay’s source code‘s a good read) to revise the review right before the reader’s eyes, inserting clarifications and more details. Through subsequent bloodlines the piece swells to 317 words before gradually deleting most of its sentences while keeping its argument fully intact! Damn it! It’s something incredible.

Lorrie Moore on Memoirs

She’s a smarter writer than everyone, so when she takes on this sort of thing we’re all smart to listen.

Dinty W. Moore (let’s hope there’s a relation but I doubt it) over at the calls her thing absurd and writes it off as “memoir bashing.” He’s upset that Lorrie Moore seems (anti-Shieldsly) to prefer novels, to assume that stories about real people would be better told in the novel form. But he’s missed the point, I think. See here, from Moore’s review (my emphasis):

Though [such reportage-based info as] epidemiology and public policy might disrupt the poetry of bereavement, a reader can long to see eloquent tears made useful. Memoirs often exist precisely for this reason—and their improvised form allows for accommodations of this kind without intruding on any narrative magic. Certainly [family members] remain engaging subjects deserving of the deep imagining, revealing design, and solid construction of heroines in good prose fiction, but real life is messy and sometimes gracelessly crowds out an enduring story, something no memoir reader necessarily expects. Advocacy of a certain kind can be a memoirst’s muse and companion and in any case is not a guest that will ruin the party. Even Nabokov’s canonical Speak, Memory does not give us the brilliantly vivid and coherent dreams of his novels—because it simply can’t.

In short, memoirs aren’t lesser than novels, they’re nonfiction. And novels are fiction. And while “the gold standard” (as Lorrie argues) for memoir may be the novel’s “subtle characterizations and rich and continuous dreamscape,” nonfiction as a directly intimate form doesn’t so much disallow continuous dreamscape, as it makes continuous dreamscape feel like coloring with only one crayon from the box.

Imagine writing a novel where everything was made up, but done so exclusively through dialogue. Like a radio drama, say. It would be a bad novel, because lesser.* Novels can get so quickly and thoroughly into people’s interiority. So with, Lorrie Moore argues, the work of nonfiction that hinges too fully on straight narrative. We can talk with our readers. We can show them some research. We can connect—frankly and out loud—the lives of people we love among grander landscapes and fuller social concerns. Novels, prissily, won’t abide such business (unless Tom Wolfe’s doing it). Shouldn’t memoirs, if we’re to see them as a form of their own, embrace it?
—
* Okay, yeah, I read Nicholson Baker’s Vox, too, so I see the inaptness of this analogy.

Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

The basic premise of Judt’s great book is that the West is in a very bad way and this is because of its ever growing inequality. The rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. The solution is a retooling of the conversations we have around public policy.

He’s for social democracy. Social democracy is not socialism, mind. The latter is an old-timey notion that tried to displace capitalism for some other regime. Social democracy, Judt argues, uses capitalism as a means to address the “hitherto neglected interests of large sections of the population” (229). It’s basically how the U.S. operated from like 1939 to 1980.

Here’s the problem, as he paints it: the decline in social democracy since the postwar period (accelerated by Reagan’s top-first policies) has resulted in just one section of the population getting its interests met: the superrich. Let’s call them Satisfied Americans (this is my term, obviously). We could call them the not-poor, but let’s call the Satisfied Americans.

They’re not you. You’re not one of these people.
Continue reading Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

3eanuts: A Recapitulation

In other recently-shared-on-Facebook news, back at the end of last month I linked to 3eanuts, which tramps through Garfield Minus Garfield territory by removing Schulz’s final panels in order to wallow in the angst built in the first three.

Facebook friends—well, actual dear friends the Madej’s (say /MADGE-ee/)—leapt to Schulz’s defense, arguing that such a site as 3eanuts wasn’t just heretical, but neglected the way some of the full 4-panel strips equally wallowed in angst. I said “Good grief” and but look at the strip I read in the barbershop today, unfindable online and so rendered through always-exciting dialogue-only transcription:

PANEL ONE
(Linus is at the fridge while Lucy is at the table with some kind of food it’s impossible to make out.)
Linus: “What I think I’ll do today is take some money out of my college trust fund and go buy a dog.”

PANEL TWO
Lucy (at table): “You don’t have a college trust fund.”
Linus (now possibly at table, too? or maybe still standing): “I don’t?”

PANEL THREE
Linus (now, yes, definitely sitting next to her at the table): “Please pass the grape jelly.”
Lucy: “We’re all out of grape jelly.”

PANEL FOUR
Linus (head resting dejectedly on palm, elbow on table, in that classic Schulzian pose): “How can anyone not have a dog, a college trust fund, and grape jelly?”

End of strip. Amazing, right?

An Old, Old Journal Entry on Vegas Which Basically States Everything I Thought I Came Up with in Class Last Week while Discussing D’Agata’s “What Happens There”, Excerpted from His About a Mountain

From June 2004:

The tagline on the new ad campaign for Las Vegas as a tourist destination is something along the lines of: “Vegas — What happens here stays here.” In other words, Vegas is presenting itself as a kind of anything-goes Eden of hedonism, a place for young & old alike to visit and let off some steam, at best, & at worst, marry someone you just met & spend the extended weekend fucking in public places, sometimes with an audience.

Now, if the people that I knew who had been to Vegas, & if the people the TV-commercial’s actors are portraying, were all ascetic responsible people, then maybe I could get on a side of this campaign. But is there any restraint left in contemporary American culture, at all? If Vegas didn’t exist, would anyone have to look very far for an excuse to act self-indulgently on a weekly basis, if not every day?
Continue reading An Old, Old Journal Entry on Vegas Which Basically States Everything I Thought I Came Up with in Class Last Week while Discussing D’Agata’s “What Happens There”, Excerpted from His About a Mountain

More Words about Harper’s Magazine

I’m behind. Oh, just way behind on all my magazines (pay no attention to the New Yorkers buckling N’s midcentury endtable in the corner). I read the second half (story onward) of the January 2011 issue. I’d like to come back to the story by Mark Slouka in a future post. It’s incredible. Well, here, lemme just quote the part of the story that contains most of its awesomeness—wherein the narrator’s father goes every day to a rabbit hutch in which his family is hiding a man during wartime. I’ll do that at the end, because here, from Lopate’s little fawning essay on Emerson:

For several months I have been camping out in the ind of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is a companionable, familiar, and yet endlessly stimulating place, and, since his mind is stronger than mine, I keep deferring to his wisdom, even his doubts, and quite shamelessly identifying with him. All this started when I came across in a local bookstore the new, two-volume edition of his Selected Journals, published by the Library of America, and decided to give it a whirl. Some 1,900 pages later, I am in thrall to, in love with, Mr. Emerson. If this sounds homoerotic, so be it.

It’s like he just learned the word last week. No, Phil. No.
Continue reading More Words about Harper’s Magazine

Some Hackneyed Ideas about Tech Use

So: everyone knows about the flow from early adopters to late adopters and if you haven’t read Gladwell’s The Cool Hunt from 1997 that details this whole progression just go read it, if anything for details about what was cool among NYC street kids in 1997. But here’s something I’ve been thinking about.

I.
Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is, well let’s just say it’s my album of 2010 because it may have been the only album released in 2010 that I bought in 2010 (and I didn’t like The Suburbs). And there are all kinds of tracks that use auto-tune. And the auto-tune use is incredible. One track (I don’t know the names yet) ends with what sounds like this droning synth, changing notes every bar or so. But this sound is cut up with the distorted intake of breath. And yer like: Oh, that’s Yeezy just like humming while auto-tune is on. And putting the distortion on, proverbially, eleven.
Continue reading Some Hackneyed Ideas about Tech Use

Two Kinds of Comedic Agony

By “agony” here I’m talking about mental anguish than can often manifest itself physically. I experience two chief ones when watching comedies. And by comedies I mean sitcoms.

Type One: Gervaisian
It began in The Office and it went through to Extras and then (or before?) it became the basis for the U.S. Office. Maybe there’s a more general term for this. Maybe it predates Gervais/Merchant. But you know what I’m talking about, those moments when David Brent’s/Michael Scott’s idiocies, ignorance, or delusions of grandeur are exposed to public scrutiny (other characters’ and ours). So like the time when David begins telling his “black man’s cock” joke and then a black man walks up. Or Scott’s Tots finally learning the truth. When I laugh at these moments, it’s always to alleviate intense discomfort. N has this great “Oh God!” he yells to indicate the degree of agony we’re both experiencing. It goes far beyond mild embarrassment. It’s a big part of what makes these shows so attractive, that we can be forced so fully to this weird pain. And that we can revel in it and laugh.
Continue reading Two Kinds of Comedic Agony

Benjamin Nugent, American Nerd: The Story of My People

Katie gave this to me to read and I’d expected light Klosterman fluff. Klosterman blurbed the book, for instance. Instead, I got a wonderfully smart book on the origins of nerddom that was incredibly researched without being bogged down by its incredible research. Nugent reads proto-nerds in Dr. Frankenstein, Austen’s Mary Bennett, and Forster’s Tibby (from Howards End, currently reading). He roots the stereotype in anti-Semitic terror around wartime, as something “muscular Christianity” had to fight against.

Or, well, maybe it’s others than have done the rooting for him, but Nugent is if anything a skilled amalgamator of material. But then he reads hipsters (current, Williamsburg “look at this fucking” hipsters) as fake nerds, and suddenly he’s maybe the smartest guy in the room. It’s a form of rebellion kids make away from “bobo” parents, Nugent argues (following Brooks), an alignment with some artificial form of purism. (Hence PBR, trucker caps, taxidermy, mustaches: it’s all old school.) Then he quick-sums-up Mailer’s “White Negro” (which argued that white hipsters in the 1950s fabricated an identification with the Negro to hold onto the living-under-threat they felt during the atomic age) and ends up here:

What we have right now, in Brooklyn, the Bay Area, Portland, East Los Angeles—neighborhoods where bourgeois young people work at magazines, movie studios, TV shows, Web sites and advertising, so that cultural trends work like weather at sea, offering the newcomers a chance to prove themselves, upending the complacent—is a similar choice on the part of the privileged to identify with the outsider. The outsider in this case is the nerd, because nerds are people incapable of, or at least averse to, riding cultural trends. When your greatest fear is that you will become a loser because your intuition will fail to keep up with tastes, you embrace the nerd like a little harmless teddy bear who’s the one creature in the whole wide world who would never do anything to hurt you. (121, my emphasis).

Yes! I’m unable to recall the product sold and Google searches brought up nothing, but there’s some booze commercial with panracial hipsters dancing a nightclub, and there’s one guy with classic nerd glasses and carefully chosen “nerdy” clothes, and you look at him dancing in this club with all confidence and you know he, like, got laid at age 13.

Maybe hipsters-as-fake-nerds isn’t some groundbreaking revelation but it hit me as smart. And then there’s the rest of Nugent’s book, about his own nerd upbringing, which is racially and socioeconomically complicated and generally tragic and yet uplifting. Honest, overall. Go buy this book.

UPDATE: It’s this guy, below, from this stupid commercial.

I Review Myself, Posted as Promised Below

The very cool blog, We Who Are About To Die just published a review of my Stamp Story with Mud Luscious Press, which asks writers to write a story in exactly 50 words. Or is it 50 words or fewer? And then prints these stories on a stamp. Mine’s an excerpt from the taxidermy book.

(It occurs to me that an interesting way to go about doing this would be to write 1.6 words each day for the month of November.)

At any rate, you’ll find the review here. Of course I panned it. Can one possibly not? There are other self-reviews on WWAATD, and it would be cool to watch this become a genre of writing. In this, its protean stages, self-deprecation is (I think?) the norm. Who will be the self-reviewer to smash convention and love his own work? Or the self-reviewer who … reviews someone else in his own self-review!

I now regret the tack I took.

So Long, Harper’s Notebook

I usually skip the Notebook, that essay that begins each issue of Harper’s, particularly when Lapham writes it. I don’t know why this is. I also usually avoid history. I’ve for so long distrusted its usefulness with respect to the present. And so imagine my surprise to read the following conclusion to what seems to be the last Notebook essay and to come out of it wishing I could read more. More Notebooks. More history:

The more interesting questions [than those regarding what’s lost with new reading technologies] are epistemological. How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a figure or a form of speech. The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that within the wind tunnels of the “innovative delivery strategies” the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne’s or my own, tend to be disoriented and confused. I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

That’s Lapham. Wish I could link to the full essay but it’s not online, suspiciously. One has to love a use of image in the thick of polemic that would make Orwell gleeful.

Here’s to decreased attention paid to news items linked on friends’ Facebook walls!

Marriott’s “A Matter of Substance”

I want really badly to write the definitive piece of e-criticism about this phenomenon that is shockingly nowhere to be found online, despite its creators’ undoubtedly desperate wishes for it to have taken the Internet by storm, oh, back in August 2001 perhaps. But, to paraphrase Twain I think, I don’t have the time or the energy to write something short. So I’m going to have to just ramble in this discursive way, and apologize now, and say that I’ve been spending the last two days up here in Rochester, Minnesota, at the Mayo Clinic, for reasons that are worth telling but, again, I don’t have the time to get into in detail. The short version: something scary was afoot, and now everything is fixed, but we can’t leave yet until we know more things for certain. At any rate, it is tiring to sit in hospital rooms all day, just as it is probably tiring to sit in meetings all day when you are a worker traveling for business. This is a segue.

Here’s what I’m talking about.

Most Marriott hotels I’ve been to (most hotels in general) have their own TV menu systems that appear when the television turns on, which system enables you to see information about your room or your stay, or order porn, or get channel listings, or what have you. Marriott has some free programming. Workout videos is all I can remember. Workout videos and something it calls “A Matter of Substance”. This is like some kind of subnetwork that plays four programs, on demand, whenever you want.

Here’s what the programs are called:

Rest, Rise, Rebel, Rally
Continue reading Marriott’s “A Matter of Substance”

Franzen’s Freedom

Finished!

I liked it well enough, despite its cover and its title. I mean: I really, really liked it, though I’d like also for Franzen to write his next novel about something other than a midwestern family. Sure, his book expands to somewhat of a national/global scale at one point, but this one felt at times stuck in the rut of its characters. I don’t know how The Corrections avoided this, but maybe it was in its far superior title.

I don’t think I’ll ever get over this title.

Here’s J. Picoult’s complaint about the media hullabaloo descending on this book:

I think the New York Times reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you’re a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink.

Which brings to mind that line from Lorrie Moore’s excellent (and a superior post-9/11 novel than Franzen’s) A Gate at the Stairs, which I don’t have in front of me right now, and so I have to paraphrase:

“Those people who claim they don’t care about a person whether he’s black, white, green, or purple. As if black were a nonsense color like green or purple.”

Did I Not Blog about This Blog about Blogs?

Another blog endorsement, this one apparently defunct, alas. Look at This Fucking Idea for a Blog-to-Book Deal is the smartest satire on hip blogs/memes you’ll find.

You can read the entirety of it in a half hour, and it’s a worthwhile half-hour to spend. My favorite entry is a late one, called Road Signs for Carol. Behold:

This is the part of the post in which I was going to suggest other entries to look for, but then I realized I’d just list every entry in order.

Found Scholarship: Louis O. Mink’s “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument”

Upgrading my office iMac’s Ubuntu boot to 10.4 took so long I had to get up and walk through the library. I grabbed at books under the LOC subject headings “Prose – Technique” and “Nonfiction – Technique”. Mink’s essay comes at the tail end of an anthology on the writing of history called, creatively, The Writing of History. He begins by setting narrative on a kind of continuum.

Even though narrative form may be, for most people, associated with fairy tales, myths, and the entertainments of the novel, it remains true that narrative is a primary cognitive instrument—an instrument rivaled, in fact, only by theory and by metaphor as irreducible ways of making the flux of experience comprehensible.

Narrative, to Mink (pictured above?), is the iconic union between theory and experience, much as comics, to McCloud, are the iconic union between language-signs and the things they signify.
Continue reading Found Scholarship: Louis O. Mink’s “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument”