Reading this novel seems similar to donning an exquisite tuxedo that has its pockets line with the occasional -- how do I put it? -- fecaloid-related manner? No, no. More to that later.
There's craft, here, in Millard Kaufman's first novel, very enjoyable craft, and beautifully rendered sentences.
A List of Interesting Words
Clanks
Scut
Hob
Trumpery
Caparisoned
Hussar
Shako
Roupy
Brisket
Scragged
Things That Made Me Laugh
1. The Reverend Doctor Dewey Lipgloss -- just what I need -- ...
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
re: the Dylan article in the NYTM
The article: link.
Brief notes:
1.
Yes! Let's confine easily explored territory to the realm of "mystery." What could we ask, if we were willing to venture in such a direction? Why does the poet invoke these military-language questions? Why does the poet invoke irrelevant questions? Is there something antagonizing about the poet's presence? What? We're not going to explore that? Fine by me.
2.
No, it won't be. You explain it for yourself:
That's not hard to understand at all, is it?
Stop that. Unless you're employing this sort of language for ironic effect, you already understand perfectly well what the film is about, even quoting from Haynes' pitch later on --
-- and this sort of backtracking -- this repetition of "I don't get it!" -- only does a disservice to the reader.
Brief notes:
1.
“A poem is like a naked person,” Haynes said. “Some call me a poet. . . . A song is something that walks by itself.”
Whishaw paused. “O.K., fidget a little,” Haynes said. The director read on. “We just wish to make inquiries,” he intoned. “Are you an illegal alien?”
“No,” the poet replied.
“Are you an enemy combatant?”
“No.”
Let’s not bother with what it all means. No one on set seemed to know for sure; they all pretty much trust Haynes that it means something.
Yes! Let's confine easily explored territory to the realm of "mystery." What could we ask, if we were willing to venture in such a direction? Why does the poet invoke these military-language questions? Why does the poet invoke irrelevant questions? Is there something antagonizing about the poet's presence? What? We're not going to explore that? Fine by me.
2.
Because Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand.
No, it won't be. You explain it for yourself:
Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive.
That's not hard to understand at all, is it?
It might sound like a parlor game, or like cheating on Haynes’s part, but to make sense in a film about Dylan would make no sense.
Stop that. Unless you're employing this sort of language for ironic effect, you already understand perfectly well what the film is about, even quoting from Haynes' pitch later on --
“I is another.” Then came the Scaduto quote about Dylan creating new identities. Then the pitch, two paragraphs: “If a film were to exist in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced, a film that could open up as oppose to consolidating what we think we already know walking in, it could never be within the tidy arc of a master narrative. The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation. Imagine a film splintered between seven separate faces — old men, young men, women, children — each standing in for spaces in a single life.”
-- and this sort of backtracking -- this repetition of "I don't get it!" -- only does a disservice to the reader.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Book Review: Brevity & Echo
Anthologies of short short fiction do exist, but the first publication from Brookline-based Rose Metal Press, Brevity & Echo, has a few things going for it that others don't:
(1) The reader gets an inadvertent sense of community, as all of the writers are Emerson College alumni.
(2) "READ SHORT, THINK LONG" -- which the Editors (Kathleen Rooney, who posts on the Ploughshares blog and just did an interview with Tao Lin, and Abigail Beckel) used as their m.o. in compiling the book, which I'll get to in a second, as it ties in with the
(3) quality of the writing. Slogging about the internet today, I stumbled across what seems to be a fair assessment of the faults of short shorts / microfiction / flash fiction / itty-bitty cutesy-wutesy story bumps (which will catch on as a name, mark my words):
How, indeed? And the book answers with the quote from 2, "READ SHORT, THINK LONG." That makes for stories dense with language and compression, like "The Custodian," the brilliant "How to Make Potato Salad," "Out of Africa," or "July," which I'll quote in its entirety:
That's a very well written 234 words. The book's filled with plenty more like it.
(1) The reader gets an inadvertent sense of community, as all of the writers are Emerson College alumni.
(2) "READ SHORT, THINK LONG" -- which the Editors (Kathleen Rooney, who posts on the Ploughshares blog and just did an interview with Tao Lin, and Abigail Beckel) used as their m.o. in compiling the book, which I'll get to in a second, as it ties in with the
(3) quality of the writing. Slogging about the internet today, I stumbled across what seems to be a fair assessment of the faults of short shorts / microfiction / flash fiction / itty-bitty cutesy-wutesy story bumps (which will catch on as a name, mark my words):
After all, how can you express vision in 100 words? As for plot and character development, give those antiquated goods to Goodwill. All that matters with short shorts is a competent writing style and a desire for lots of publication credits.
How, indeed? And the book answers with the quote from 2, "READ SHORT, THINK LONG." That makes for stories dense with language and compression, like "The Custodian," the brilliant "How to Make Potato Salad," "Out of Africa," or "July," which I'll quote in its entirety:
When we get real bored, we ask Nipple (whose real name is Amanda, Sarah just started calling her Nipple one day because she heard it meant "idiot" in British slang), we ask her if we can smash the old television that her Mom's new boyfriend Tommy lugged to the curb earlier that day to make room for the new one they won off the radio, and she asks her Mom who says "sure," sipping a cheap beer, so we grab a baseball bat and a hammer and the five of us kick it and take turns swinging the tools; Ian's the one who finally cracks the glass in the front, and we're all cheering until a cop pulls up, silent, with the lights of his car flashing and asks us what we're doing, and none of us answer, but then he sees Nipple's Mom: in a bathing suit top and cut-offs, framed by the doorway, who yells "Oh, hey Jim!" and smiles, offering one of her cold beers to the uniformed man who greets her on the stoop with a wink, and soon enough he's following her inside to watch the game, and we're already bored with the broken television, now an electronic mess all over the shoulder of the road, so we throw the hammer back in the shed, but keep the baseball bat, and walk around looking for something else to break.
That's a very well written 234 words. The book's filled with plenty more like it.
Interview: Kathleen Rooney
Kathleen Rooney is the author of Reading with Oprah (which is coming out in paperback soon), a regular contributor to the Ploughshares Blog, a regular contributor to the Redivider, and the co-founder of Rose Metal Press (along with Abigail Beckel), who publish books in "hybrid genres," including Brevity & Echo, a collection of short shorts. A witty, wonderful teacher who was constantly recommending me books while I was her student during my freshman year of college, she currently resides in Tacoma, Washington. 
TT: Why short shorts? Why now?
KR: From the outset, Abby and I wanted Rose Metal Press to promote forms that are relatively recently emerged, or not traditionallly "established," and short shorts seemed to be a good place to start. As a new press, we knew that we had close at hand many talented writers of short shorts that we could reach and get to contribute work. Thanks to BREVITY & ECHO, we ended up falling so in love with the form, that we started a Short Short Chapbook competition, and our first winner of that, Claudia Smith, will have her book THE SKY IS A WELL AND OTHER SHORTS out with us next month. Short shorts have a relatively small, but dynamic and committed community surrounding them, and having begun working with them ourselves, we can see why. They're contagious; after the pleasure of reading a few, the form sort of invites and encourages you to try it yourself.
TT: Did you see anything out there in the world of other short short anthologies that you wanted to address / respond to / politely fix with "Brevity & Echo?"
KR: We like and admire the many short short anthologies that pre-date BREVITY & ECHO, and have found the authors and editors of those books to be quite supportive. Robbie Shapard, for example, co-editor of the SUDDEN FICTION books is going to be the judge of our next chapbook competition. That said, Emerson has been known for a long time and probably should be even more widely known as an incubator for a lot of really excellent writers of short shorts, due largely to Pamela Painter's presence in the Writing, Literature, & Publishing Department. BREVITY & ECHO seemed to provide an opportunity to showcase that excellence. All the stories in the book have been previously published in places like Quick Fiction and McSweeney's, but they'd never been collected.
MB: What sort of advice have you been getting re: the press?
KR: We've been fortunate to get really good advice from people like Pam Painter, Ron Carlson, and Martha Rhodes (of Four Way Books), and our pro bono arts lawyer Serge. He helped us get our non-profit status from the IRS, which we just received last week and for that he is our hero.
MB: I'd heard about that (the wait for the non-profit status). What took so long?
KR: Waits of arbitrary lengths seem to be sort of the IRS's "thing." At one point, Abby called their hotline to check on the status of the paper work Serge had helped us file, and she was told by the pre-recorded message to "try again another day." Not that her wait time would be x minutes, or even to call back later that morning, but to actually just not bother and call back another day.
MB: How'd you approach editing with the writers? How'd it go?
KR: The nice thing about putting together an anthology of previously published material is that most of the stories we ended up accepting had already been fairly thoroughly vetted. The hardest part of it, honestly, was tracking some of the authors down. People had graduated long ago, changed their names, moved out of the country and so forth. Abby and I had to put on our deerstalker caps and sleuth around to track everyone down to get permissions and bios and final revisions. Abby looks adorable in a deerstalker cap.
(Image courtesy of KathleenRooney.com)
(Originally published at Boston Metblogs.)
TT: Why short shorts? Why now?
KR: From the outset, Abby and I wanted Rose Metal Press to promote forms that are relatively recently emerged, or not traditionallly "established," and short shorts seemed to be a good place to start. As a new press, we knew that we had close at hand many talented writers of short shorts that we could reach and get to contribute work. Thanks to BREVITY & ECHO, we ended up falling so in love with the form, that we started a Short Short Chapbook competition, and our first winner of that, Claudia Smith, will have her book THE SKY IS A WELL AND OTHER SHORTS out with us next month. Short shorts have a relatively small, but dynamic and committed community surrounding them, and having begun working with them ourselves, we can see why. They're contagious; after the pleasure of reading a few, the form sort of invites and encourages you to try it yourself.
TT: Did you see anything out there in the world of other short short anthologies that you wanted to address / respond to / politely fix with "Brevity & Echo?"
KR: We like and admire the many short short anthologies that pre-date BREVITY & ECHO, and have found the authors and editors of those books to be quite supportive. Robbie Shapard, for example, co-editor of the SUDDEN FICTION books is going to be the judge of our next chapbook competition. That said, Emerson has been known for a long time and probably should be even more widely known as an incubator for a lot of really excellent writers of short shorts, due largely to Pamela Painter's presence in the Writing, Literature, & Publishing Department. BREVITY & ECHO seemed to provide an opportunity to showcase that excellence. All the stories in the book have been previously published in places like Quick Fiction and McSweeney's, but they'd never been collected.
MB: What sort of advice have you been getting re: the press?
KR: We've been fortunate to get really good advice from people like Pam Painter, Ron Carlson, and Martha Rhodes (of Four Way Books), and our pro bono arts lawyer Serge. He helped us get our non-profit status from the IRS, which we just received last week and for that he is our hero.
MB: I'd heard about that (the wait for the non-profit status). What took so long?
KR: Waits of arbitrary lengths seem to be sort of the IRS's "thing." At one point, Abby called their hotline to check on the status of the paper work Serge had helped us file, and she was told by the pre-recorded message to "try again another day." Not that her wait time would be x minutes, or even to call back later that morning, but to actually just not bother and call back another day.
MB: How'd you approach editing with the writers? How'd it go?
KR: The nice thing about putting together an anthology of previously published material is that most of the stories we ended up accepting had already been fairly thoroughly vetted. The hardest part of it, honestly, was tracking some of the authors down. People had graduated long ago, changed their names, moved out of the country and so forth. Abby and I had to put on our deerstalker caps and sleuth around to track everyone down to get permissions and bios and final revisions. Abby looks adorable in a deerstalker cap.
(Image courtesy of KathleenRooney.com)
(Originally published at Boston Metblogs.)
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Friday, June 29, 2007
Book Review: The Orange Order - In Progress
What, with the recent peace breakthrough in Northern Island, I thought it'd be beneficial to take a look at the area's history, hence Eric Kaufmann's The Orange Order: A Contemporary Northern Irish History.
Book Review: In the Driver's Seat
The More Traditional Review
The funny thing about Helen Simpson's In the Driver's Seat is that I couldn't accept the collection as short stories. As "short stories," I thought these things were flawed -- simple "plots," characters, and conceits that were clever but seemed to've sucked the chance for the width of exploration dry. Cliches popped up, too, which worried me.
However, I can almost accept them as "short shorts," which makes me wonder about the standards of the short short form itself, and whether or not switching the labels is enough to justify a swing of judgement. I don't think I can accept this, though, as short shorts aim for a compressed intensity which these lack: these stories are simple and laconic.
Here are the "plots," and here's what happens: children sneak onto a vacation house on the Mediterranean, then run away; a woman suffering from PTSD has a door replaced, then feels better about the door and herself once it's replaced; a woman comforts the upset child of a young mother at a swimming pool; a woman's worried about dying, loses a limb in an accident, then feels better; a woman drives some kids to school, feels lousy no one says goodbye to her, then feels better when someone does; a woman's mother is worried about a tree, and makes a mistake; a man makes his girlfriend feel uncomfortable, but for reasons the narrator doesn't understand, sticks with him; a foreign correspondant thinks he has cancer, and is probably the best story in the book; a woman can't stop thinking about the war; a life coach coaches while her coachee can't make sense of the world with an ineffective "Christmas Carol" analogy; and a sixty year old has a baby. Mostly, the stories don't extend beyond their plots.
The climax of one scene of "Every Third Thought":
How one character describes their workload:
Or this:
Reality can be done better than that; reality can be livelier than that. "If I'm Spared" comes close to what I imagine the stories are trying to be, and captures all sorts of varieties, evolutions, regressions, and emotionality. In fact, I liked "If I'm Spared" quite a lot.
I'd like to make special mention of the story "Early One Morning" (he wrote.) There's an absolutely infuriating tic in here (he wrote), making me think (he thought) that there must have been a better way presented to the author during the course of writing these things about how to communicate interiority more effectively (he wrote), or, at least, a clearer way to tell the reader what a pronoun was (he wrote.)
The problem here is, they end well. I like the endings (save "The Phlebotomist's Love Life, he wrote.) I just wish there was another way to get there.
Things I Didn't Know
* That "like a house on fire" was a euphemism more than one person knew.
* What a Barclaycard was.
Things That Made Me Laugh
1.
2.
The funny thing about Helen Simpson's In the Driver's Seat is that I couldn't accept the collection as short stories. As "short stories," I thought these things were flawed -- simple "plots," characters, and conceits that were clever but seemed to've sucked the chance for the width of exploration dry. Cliches popped up, too, which worried me.
However, I can almost accept them as "short shorts," which makes me wonder about the standards of the short short form itself, and whether or not switching the labels is enough to justify a swing of judgement. I don't think I can accept this, though, as short shorts aim for a compressed intensity which these lack: these stories are simple and laconic.
Here are the "plots," and here's what happens: children sneak onto a vacation house on the Mediterranean, then run away; a woman suffering from PTSD has a door replaced, then feels better about the door and herself once it's replaced; a woman comforts the upset child of a young mother at a swimming pool; a woman's worried about dying, loses a limb in an accident, then feels better; a woman drives some kids to school, feels lousy no one says goodbye to her, then feels better when someone does; a woman's mother is worried about a tree, and makes a mistake; a man makes his girlfriend feel uncomfortable, but for reasons the narrator doesn't understand, sticks with him; a foreign correspondant thinks he has cancer, and is probably the best story in the book; a woman can't stop thinking about the war; a life coach coaches while her coachee can't make sense of the world with an ineffective "Christmas Carol" analogy; and a sixty year old has a baby. Mostly, the stories don't extend beyond their plots.
The climax of one scene of "Every Third Thought":
"That's enough," said Harry, putting the paper down at last. "Didn't you hear your mother?"
How one character describes their workload:
I had so much work on that it wasn't funny.
Or this:
He had been flipping between channels for a while now, the flares and flashes and explosions changing place with roaring and balls and goals. Men are for Mars, she thought; is that it?
"Can't you stay with one channel?" she asked.
"I just wanted to see how Arsenal were doing."
Reality can be done better than that; reality can be livelier than that. "If I'm Spared" comes close to what I imagine the stories are trying to be, and captures all sorts of varieties, evolutions, regressions, and emotionality. In fact, I liked "If I'm Spared" quite a lot.
I'd like to make special mention of the story "Early One Morning" (he wrote.) There's an absolutely infuriating tic in here (he wrote), making me think (he thought) that there must have been a better way presented to the author during the course of writing these things about how to communicate interiority more effectively (he wrote), or, at least, a clearer way to tell the reader what a pronoun was (he wrote.)
The problem here is, they end well. I like the endings (save "The Phlebotomist's Love Life, he wrote.) I just wish there was another way to get there.
Things I Didn't Know
* That "like a house on fire" was a euphemism more than one person knew.
* What a Barclaycard was.
Things That Made Me Laugh
1.
I think he married me on the Picasso principle -- however old and ugly I get, with any luck I'll still be less old and ulgy than him.
2.
"Do you like beards on men?" she replied.
"No, I said. "I think they hide double chins."
There was a pause anda cold old blue-eyed stare.
"You know it all, don't you?" she said, and smiled in some version of triumph.
Then she started feeding peanuts into her tea again.
"What's the matter?" she said when she saw me staring. "Haven't you seen this done before?"
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
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