On Not Rolling the Log

lareviewofbooks:

Image: © Paul Bausch onfocus.com

Today The Dial is in the hands of novelist Glen David Gold, who explores the prickliness of literary sociality, the loneliness of an aging William Faulkner, and other tribulations that flesh is heir to.

— Tom Lutz  

Transactions along the Mississippi Delta

GLEN DAVID GOLD

Recently, I spoke to a group of MFA students at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I wanted to pass along the best advice I got in my own MFA program 15 years ago. Our professor Wilton Barnhart had said, “cultivate literary friendships.”

It was almost a koan in its three-word simplicity. He meant us to sift through what that verb, that adjective and that noun might mean to us. He did not add a clause that I now wish he had: “and for Christ’s sake, do not let them become transactional.”

The world after publication is — beyond its many joys — an evaporating and ruinous goldfish bowl of thwarted ambition. If you write long enough, you will know editors and agents. You will have dinner with people who give interesting fellowships to weeklong retreats in the south of France. You will teach at good programs and you might know when a publisher’s child is having a birthday and what his favorite Transformer is, and these facts more than the quality of your humanity might be what makes you a chess piece when another writer slaps you on the back and asks you if you might read something he wrote.

It’s hard to explain to writing students that there are pods of very friendly, arguably moral authors who treat each other as if the literary life is led on a firing range. They meet you alertly, brightly drawing from natty holsters their own signs of power, rank and aid, and then requesting that you do the same. They aren’t evil, really, and the impulse behind it is so close to camaraderie it almost smells right. We all need help, and we all want to help each other, which makes the nuances of the transaction murky. Some people never see the problem at all and others treat every request like you’re asking for a toe of which they are particularly fond. In the end, parsing the aspirational nature of literary friendship is as much of a longshot as sexing the yeti.

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utilities:

Eames | Dot Pattern Fabric - Design Drawing / Sketch

I love getting to see preliminary drawings and sketches for pieces of art and design. Sometimes works are so iconic I forget they once didn’t exist. Seeing such small pieces feels like viewing the exact moments someone was creating something great. Amazing.

Antoine Wilson’s Notes on “Hack”

lareviewofbooks:

¤
ANTOINE WILSON

Notes on “Hack”

“Taste has no system and no proofs.”
               —Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’”

1. To start with comedy. There is only one unimpeachable criterion: Is it funny? But a question follows close behind: Funny to whom?

2. Apocrypha from the world of television: A sitcom writers’ room is working late into the night, trying to generate the perfect gag to punch up a scene. Joke after joke is pitched, but nothing seems to work. The scene remains stubbornly flat. Finally, a writer pulls out a box of index cards and rifles through them. He stops, pulls out a card, and asks: “Can the floor be wet?”

3. A Hack can get a huge laugh out of an audience. And yet he can also rightly be called unfunny. When we employ Hack as a pejorative, we call into question the audience’s taste. We say, in effect: You are laughing only because you have no taste.

4. Meanwhile, to himself and to his fans, a Hack is justified by his success; he need not justify himself otherwise.

5. The comic who recycles old jokes, confirms stereotypes, pantomimes his way through his act, and makes folks chuckle without in any way threatening the established order is offensive to us precisely for failing to offend.

6. A Hack comic is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, “poking fun,” never “killing.” He is the jester who won’t risk the king’s displeasure.

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lynda barry card w/ purple paint spatters © by xinem

… [Lynda Barry] told a story about the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who helps patients experiencing phantom-limb pain. Barry discussed one patient who felt that his missing left hand was clenched in a fist and could never shake the discomfort — could never “unclench” it.

So Ramachandran used a mirror box — a compartment into which the patient could insert his right hand and see it reflected at the end of his left…

See Your Own Trouble Reflected

[caption id=”flickrImage_1” align=”aligncenter” width=”375” caption=”lynda barry card w/ purple paint spatters © by xinem”][/caption]

… [Lynda Barry] told a story about the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who helps patients experiencing phantom-limb pain. Barry discussed one patient who felt that his missing left hand was clenched in a fist and could never shake the discomfort — could never “unclench” it.

So Ramachandran used a mirror box — a compartment into which the patient could insert his right hand and see it reflected at the end of his left arm. “And Ramachandran said, ‘Open your hands.’ And the patient saw this” — Barry opened two clenched fists in unison. “That’s what I think images do.

“I think that in the course of human life,” she continued softly, “we have events that cause” — she clenched her fist and held it up, inspecting it from all angles. “Losing your parents might cause it. Or a war. Or things going bad in a family.”

The only way to open that fist, she said, is to see your own trouble reflected in an image, as the patient saw his hand reflected in a mirror. It might be a story you write, or a book you read, or a song that means the world to you. “And then?” She opened her hand and waved.

I read this article about Lynda Barry - who became a writing and creativity teacher when the market for her comic strips dried up.

I was pretty troubled in college - and whenever people (people like the other girls in my eating disorders recovery group, for instance) would suggest to me that writing was therapeutic for me - I thought this idea was bullshit at best.

However, I do think writing has a cathartic quality - not in a confessional, I’m-making-my-audience-my-therapists! way. Rather, in the way Barry describes above.

If something has caused you to close, cave in, get smaller - writing about it, creating around it, reflecting it in the world again and again - gets you bigger again.

via Cartoonist Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself - NYTimes.com.

Original Article

….from Bernard Malamud:

“If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”

— 

The Drawing Board (Terri Windling’s blog): On Creative Burn-out: Part IV

Reading all the parts, all the quotes, and everything Terri posts: Always recommended.

(via gwendabond)

I don’t know what nationality this werewolf perched in London is, but I have to think he’s American.

If I were to make blog t-shirts, the first would say PROVOKE ANXIETY.

This feels like a founding principle to me – of the way I write, the way I live, the way I encounter the world.

If I’m doing something that doesn’t make me anxious – that doesn’t make me delay, worry, perseverate, talk about it endlessly – it doesn’t feel worth doing.

I don’t want to waste my time feeling…

Provoke Anxiety

[caption id=”attachment_1706” align=”aligncenter” width=”461” caption=”I don’t know what nationality this werewolf perched in London is, but I have to think he’s American.”][/caption]

If I were to make blog t-shirts, the first would say PROVOKE ANXIETY.

This feels like a founding principle to me - of the way I write, the way I live, the way I encounter the world.

If I’m doing something that doesn’t make me anxious - that doesn’t make me delay, worry, perseverate, talk about it endlessly - it doesn’t feel worth doing.

I don’t want to waste my time feeling safe and comfortable.

I provoke anxiety - in myself, in others - because that’s where art lives.

Art is anxious. Not safe.

[caption id=”attachment_1708” align=”aligncenter” width=”614” caption=”In an effort to take you behind the scenes here on the blog, I bring you a picture of this blog post being written — in the lobby of The Hoxton, London.”][/caption]

*

I’m listening to Julie Klausner’s amazing podcast “How Was Your Week.” She really loves the things she loves (1970’s stars, animals reading her book, musical theatre, reality T.V.) — and helps you love them too.

Original Article

Positions of Privilege

lareviewofbooks:

MATTHEW SPECKTOR

on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.
Joan Didion © Ed Wexler
The Los Angeles Review of Books  gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” That attention to style, structure, perspective, and meaning animates these essays by Meghan Daum, Susan Straight, Amy Wilentz, Richard Rayner, Amy Ephron, and today, Matthew Specktor, who grew up around the corner when Didion lived in Brentwood.

¤
Joan Didion
Blue Nights
Alfred A. Knopf, November 2011. 208 pp.

Joan Didion is, as we know, a cool customer. Long before The Year of Magical Thinking, in which a social worker calls her just that, we understood Didion to be cool in every sense of the word. Whatever was happening behind those bug-eyed sunglasses, within that frail frame, the author’s relentless arrangement of information — the research, the reshuffling — kept hot feeling in line. This was true in Play It As It Lays, where the institutionalized Maria Wyeth’s separation from her young daughter exists mostly between parentheses, and it was true in The Year of Magical Thinking, where the immediacy of loss is often cut with diagnostic material: W.H. Auden, observations about grief, and observations about those observations (“the question of self-pity”) interceding before anyone gets wet. There is a moment in Blue Nights, in one sense The Year of Magical Thinking’s logical extension but in another sense unlike any book in Didion’s corpus, that seems to me specifically revealing: leaving a physical therapy session where she’s been working out alongside members of the New York Yankees (!), Didion remarks upon her declining capacities. “My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether,” she writes. “Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.”

“The correct stance?” It seems an odd thing to be fretting about in the midst of a meditation on aging and grief, but, in a way, Didion’s entire body of work has been about this positioning: “the attitude, the tone.” These things have always been primary in Didion — the words themselves have never been permitted to violate or distress the stance too much — which is frankly why a good portion of it doesn’t interest me much. It’s also why Blue Nights is so forceful. On the one hand, her cognitive confidence — or at least her cognitive capacity — is as powerful as it ever was. The book’s surpassing lucidity (its title, seemingly generic, is in fact perfectly chosen, referring as it does to a specific set of latitudinal conditions in which “the actual light … becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres”) owes much to the tension between that cognitive strength and the cracking, at last, of the writer’s attitudes. Neither nakedly confessional nor coldly composed, Blue Nights is startling in its effect, and remarkable even within the context of Didion’s impressive shelf. (Just because the work doesn’t interest me doesn’t mean I haven’t read a lot of it, or that I don’t think it’s any good.) Blue Nights is heartbreaking, in a word, and if it isn’t among her most exacting performances — in fact it contains a few moments of unusual clumsiness — it may yet be among her finest.

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yourmonkeycalled:

Saul Steinberg is the Best #4
from Steinberg at the New Yorker