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Archive for the Writing Category
November is National Novel Writing Month
Posted in News, Writing with tags Nanowrimo08 on 31 October, 2008 by S&Co.The Hypocrisy of Disco
Posted in Books, Excerpts, Writing with tags Clane Hayward, Hyprocrisy of Disco on 30 October, 2008 by S&Co.
This book, a memoir, by an Austin writer named Clane Hayward, is almost certainly good, possibly great, perhaps even brilliant. I’m not sure yet because I have not read enough of it to say for sure. But it has definitely, belatedly, one year after publication, caught my attention:
[p. 13] Andrew and Matt and Melena and their little brother, Jude, and their mom, Susan, they live in a house near us, near me and Haud and our mom and our little sister, Ki. We live near the river in a vacation cabin even though we’re not on vacation. Because it’s cheaper, our mom says, even if it is a little chilly and dark. Scott and Cynthia live with their mom across town. We haven’t lived here that long, we never live anywhere long, we move all the time. We come and go with no explaining, and all the people I know come and go with no explaining either. Maybe the only thing I can explain for sure is my name. When people ask how we got our funny names, and they always do, I say, with extra patience, Our dad is Claude and our mother is H’lane and it goes Haud and Claude and Clane and H’lane, get it? Then I say I also have a sister named Ki and a brother named Random, and they’ll ask, Key like in lock and key? and I say no. Ki means life force, it’s Japanese. Random like, by chance? No, duh, Random like Random House.
– Clane Hayward
Writers Group forming now.
Posted in News, Writing on 20 October, 2008 by S&Co.NOTICE: Kaet Morris and Peggy Miller are forming a “critiqueing writers group” for playwrights, screenwriters, and novelists. If interested, reach Peggy at highlandwinds@gmail.com or 541-7577.
… as if a madman had come along …
Posted in Books, Excerpts, Writing with tags Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation on 10 October, 2008 by S&Co.Deb Olin Unferth’s Vacation really knocks me out. Read an interview with the author here.
Deb Olin Unferth; credit: Sasha Benjamin
[p. 85] Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t search all the town. Look at this map. The towns dotted the page in casual disorder. And he wasn’t going to be able to inspect every tourist. There were hundreds of them, limping around with their sissy bottles of water, Myers among them, one of them. The Nicaraguans were all right, not waving the tourists away like stray dogs or chasing them off with sticks. Everybody seemed to get on fairly well. But the whole experience was inconvenient for one thing, lots of getting up and sitting down, lots of staring at the pages of the guidebook while trying to walk without bumping into anything and pitching over. And the entire affair was too hot, as if a madman had come along and heated the place up — really outrageous — and everyone walking around as if it were normal, as if the heat were the least interesting outrageous experience of the day.
– Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation (McSweeney’s; $22) IN STOCK
Deb Olin Unferth
Posted in Books, Excerpts, Writing with tags Deb Olin Unferth on 1 October, 2008 by S&Co.
Oh, Deb Olin Unferth is a fine, fine writer. The novel, her first, is Vacation, just published by McSweeney’s.
[p. 7] I was born in the city. My father was a bank man, my mother starred in soaps. We lived like the famous in a house by the park and I woke to a vase of fresh tulips each day. We had long hallways and long tablecloths. My mother had rooms full of clothes. So many strangers gave us presents that we had a man to pen our thank-yous. Photographers slept outside the house.
– Vacation (McSweeney’s; $22) IN STOCK.
“Deb Olin Unferth is, I believe, one of the crucial literary artists of her generation. Her fictions give evidence of an artist determined to speak about the remarkable, who manages with exactitude all elements necessary to produce the well-made, eccentric object. Her vision evokes high comedy and the violence of tragedy heard through voices exquisitely particular to her mind.”
-DIANE WILLIAMS
The VP Selection & Etc.
Posted in Books, Excerpts, News, Writing with tags Angelina Jolie, Cormac McCarthy, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin on 4 September, 2008 by S&Co.See? I had it right. Angelina Jolie was the right pick. Who’s more bad-ass than Angelina? Nobody. I just don’t know if Joe Biden rises to Angelina’s level.
In America, bad-ass trumps everything.
Meanwhile, oh lord it’s a bad sign when a nonfiction writer uses a quote from All the Pretty Horses as an epigraph to his nonfiction book (brand new, from a major publisher, but I will not name the book) about the Iraq War. A very, very bad sign. And sure enough:
[p. 3] The marines were pressed flat on a rooftop when the dialogue began to unfold. [Does dialogue actually unfold?] It was 2 a.m. The minarets were flashing by the light of airstrikes and rockets were sailing [sailing?] on trails of sparks. First came the voices from the mosques, rising above the thundery [thundery!] guns [Guns?! What kind of guns? Can you be more specific?].
“The Americans are here!” howled [you can't really howl these words in English, but perhaps in Arabic?] a voice from a loudspeaker in a minaret. “The Holy War, the Holy War! Get up and fight for the city of Mosques!” [This sounds like bad movie dialogue unfolding.]
Bullets poured without direction and without end [classic hyperbolic McCarthy horseshit]. No one lifted his head.
[...]
And then, as if from the depths [the depths? of the desert? of the buildings?], came a new sound: violent, menacing and dire. I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant field at Falluja’s northern edge. A group of Marines were standing at the foot of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts.
It was AC/DC, the Australian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled sounds [violent, menacing, dire, unbridled; now we're in horsey romance novel territory]. I recognized the song immediately: “Hells Bells,” the band’s celebration of satanic power, had come to us [yes, reader, via the Marines, through a speaker] on the battlefield. Behind the strains of its guitars, a church bell tolled thirteen times. [The church bell has guitars? And why thirteen? And how long did the thirteen tollings take to unfold?]
I give up.
Women Film Critics and the Lack Thereof …
Posted in News, Opinion, Writing with tags Annie Wagner, Pauline Kael, Susanna Sonnenberg, Women Film Critics on 27 August, 2008 by S&Co.
The great Pauline Kael
A piece in today’s Alternet confirms what we’ve suspected for a long time: there are not enough women film critics getting published! Locally, I have missed Susanna Sonnenberg since she retired from the craft (we were lucky to have her doing that job for so long). A review by Annie Wagner (The Stranger’s film editor) showed up in the Indy a while back, and I got excited about that, but she has not since returned that I’m aware of.
Here is the source for the Alternet piece.
The arts writing at the Indy has seemed very dude heavy for quite a while, has it not? I hope that, with Erika Fredrickson editing the arts section, we will see a better balance.
The Feeling That Something is Happening
Posted in Books, Excerpts, Writing with tags Daniel Mendelsohn on 11 August, 2008 by S&Co.
[pp. 260-261] Surely the most revealing expression of Capote’s difficulty with endings, and all that they represent, is the lyrical scene with which In Cold Blood ends. He liked to say that part of the appeal of writing the book lay in the discipline imposed by having to recount a true story: ”I like the feeling that something is happening beyond and about me and I can do nothing about it. I like having the truth be the truth so I can’t change it.” The great sweep of the story he tells in In Cold Blood, with its severe and measured pacing — the discovery of the terrible crime; the search for the killers, craftily intercut with flashbacks to their wretched lives; the canny rhythms with which Capote presents the hasty trial and the prolonged delay before the executions — culminates beautifully in a final scene that takes place in a cemetery where, on a wind-swept day a few years after the killings, Alvin Dewey, the detective who solved the murders, encounters a young woman who had been the best friend of the teenage Nancy Clutter, one of the victims. A brief conversation between them pointedly gives both Dewey and the reader a gentle sense of closure, and the novel ends with one last alliterative evocation of the bleak Kansas landscape: ”Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.”
The problem is that this ending is too artful: as it turns out, the scene was entirely fictional. Capote added it, he later told Clarke, because the ending that real life had provided him — the hangings of the killers — didn’t seem satisfying. ”I felt I had to return to the town, to bring everything back full circle, to end with peace.” Faced with an ugly reality, he withdrew into a beautiful fantasy — the kind of gentle peace that imbues his evocation of childhoods long past. (Gerald Clarke rightly notes that this final scene rehashes the ending of The Grass Harp.) Capote knew, finally, that he wasn’t up to bringing his most serious and important work to an authentic conclusion. The coda as it stands was just the last in a series of endings that he fudged, or from which he retreated; and you can’t help wondering whether the inability to face unalterable facts (as represented by this particular false ending) was, in some way, the key to Capote’s disintegration. His own words suggest as much. ”No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me,” he later said. ”It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me.”
– Daniel Mendelsohn
“The Truman Show” from How Beautiful It is And How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays
(Harper; $26.95)
The Super-Superfluity of Sub-Substance
Posted in Books, Excerpts, Writing on 6 August, 2008 by S&Co.
On my short-list for nonfiction book of the year:
I am a collector, something a lot of people can understand. My being a collector of nothing will require explanation. I am on the small side. A neighbor told my parents I was the only child he’d ever seen who could walk upright under a table. Eventually I grew to a normal height, but I sometimes think of myself as an overgrown runt. My weight always hovered just above normal, which is typical, I think, among people who grew up fighting for a larger portion. I have two younger brothers who could easily be cheated, though I choose not to, and an older sister who always wanted it all and could not be cheated because she was disadvantaged, disabled, disastrous, and later insane. Because of her, I tend to measure my fair and healthy share, then sneak a bit more. My eating disorder is my collecting. I eat nothing, in excess.
I’ve read accounts of people who one day give away everything, purging themselves of material association. They report feeling liberated, disburdened, and alive for the first time. The moment of my divorce might have been a good moment for me to cleanse myself that way. I did not like what I saw under the bare bulb in that shadowy garage. There, mixed in with my necessaries, shone forth what had doomed me to a life of collecting — that super-superfluity of sub-substance. During twenty years of living with my wife, decades of relentless acquisition, I had found ways of weaving my collections into the lattice of our life. Now, brought out from concealment, arranged in heaps, not carelessly but also not artfully, these things looked like signs of hoarding, which is a diagnosis, not a hobby.
So I transported the cumbersummation of me into the Ryder and into my new, unmarried life, in the hope that I might locate myself somewhere in the midst of it.
– William Davies King
Collections of Nothing (The University of Chicago Press; $20) IN STOCK
