February 2012
11 posts
The Brakeman Has Resigned: An Aggressive Student... →
hours:
“Teaching is when you have one person, a teacher in a room, doing improv with a class. Looking at the students, looking at them as people. And all faculty should be made to teach freshmen. This idea that ‘Oh, the freshmen—let’s leave that to the graduate students, the slaves.’…
How to Escape from a Leper Colony →
“Killing a young mother is not such a big thing if the mother is a leper, especially if she was a leper when she conceived. Nuns are not supposed to have romantic feelings for each other or for priests or for us. This is something they are thought to have in common with lepers. We are not supposed to have desires.”
- From “How to Escape from a Leper Colony” by Tiphanie...
Blogging the Caribbean
“For the Caribbean, my favorite blog is Norman Girvan’s Caribbean Political Economy. I was always a fan of Girvan’s writing on the political economy of development and underdevelopment in the Caribbean, and the impact and role that transnational corporations have had on Caribbean political sovereignty and economic integrity. Girvan’s Corporate Imperialism, Conflict, and Expropriation:...
Teaching English: The Keepers: Multiliteracy →
hours:
“[The combination of the sciences and the arts] is exactly what we need. We have to bring this back, this idea of all of culture integrated. This is what we must do for the next generation of students. We must do this. We must make radical reforms of undergraduate and graduate…”
- An excerpt from “Crisis in the American Universities” by Camille Paglia
Leanne Shapton on Process
“Sometimes I feel I get a lot done waiting for something else, with my shoes and coat on, with the car running. I don’t have a set routine. I can work for hours at a time, but I get a lot of stuff done in these weird starts and stops, which makes it a little bit harder to track. I have so many backs of envelopes with notes written on them in my pockets or stuffed into the side door of a...
Good Like Cook Food →
My review in The Caribbean Review of Books of Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose & Essays edited by Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Aza Weir-Soley.
January 2012
28 posts
Bowen on Fiction 2 - Character
Are the characters, then, to be constructed to formula—the formula pre-decided by the plot? Are they to be drawn, cut out, jointed, wired, in order to be manipulated for the plot?
No. There is no question as to whether this would be right or wrong. It would be impossible. One cannot ‘make’ characters, only marionettes. The manipulated movement of the marionette is not the ‘action’ necessary for...
‘Why Write Novels at All?’ →
“The idea that ‘the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness’ crops up all over the writing of the Conversazioni group: in Franzen’s nonfiction, and in Wallace’s, and in Smith’s beautiful encomium to Wallace in her book of essays, ‘Changing My Mind.’ It also helps to explain these writers’...
Borderlines: The Loneliness of the Guyanas →
Geology and geopolitics have defined the isolated world of South America’s northeastern coast.
Bowen on Fiction 1 - Plot
Elizabeth Bowen with students at Bryn Mawr College, 1956.
In 1945, grumpy Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen published “Notes on Writing a Novel,” a treatise as severe as her cheekbones. Her philosophy of writing is knife-sharp and unflinching. Some resist her rules but that she has attempted to construct rules—many very smart—to tame the elephant that is fiction...
The Aporeticus: How to Listen to Jazz →
mills:
Music’s great virtue is its great curse: a listener needs to understand almost nothing of a song’s art, meaning, intent, or contexts to react powerfully to it. The universality of music’s effectiveness is peculiar: people of every conceivable sort have musical preferences they integrate into…
Dave Eggers in conversation with Junot Díaz →
The Erotic "Resource"
“The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
...
Mentors: Matthew Specktor on James Baldwin
lareviewofbooks:
By Matthew Spektor
James Baldwin cc Allan Warren 1969
He missed the first class. In fact, he missed the first three. In his place came an emissary, a small, solemn fellow who cocked his head and closed his eyes and explained how Mr. Baldwin has been detained in Paris. I was nineteen, and had only a cursory understanding of who “Mr. Baldwin” really was. I’d read Giovanni’s...
Guinea Woman
Great grandmother was a guinea...
Kevat: Waiting on Yogic Realism
“For me, Yogic Realism is the application of the spirit of yogic principles and forms, and the application of Indian/Hindu philosophy and concepts to writing. In other words, it is where the writing is serving as a conduit, or yoga, for union with the divine spirit/consciousness—not yoga serving ‘art’ though there is a fine line separating the two, and even instances when...
On Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
In 1936, Ralph Ellison moved to New York City to become a symphonic composer. While that career never materialized, the influence of music on Ellison’s work is clear. John Callahan, Ellison’s literary executor, writes in his essay “Frequencies of Eloquence: The Performance and Composition of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” that the writing of Invisible Man entailed an “antagonistic co-operation”...
December 2011
14 posts
The Aporeticus: How to Listen to Jazz →
mills:
Music’s great virtue is its great curse: a listener needs to understand almost nothing of a song’s art, meaning, intent, or contexts to react powerfully to it. The universality of music’s effectiveness is peculiar: people of every conceivable sort have musical preferences they integrate into…
11 Things to Know at 25(ish) →
What you need to know to be a real adult.
The Pump You Pump the Water From
lareviewofbooks:
SVEN BIRKERTS on writer’s block. Image: cc Lisa Jane Persky
When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts,...
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
– Henry David Thoreau (via anemochorous)