Archive for the ‘web forage’ Category
web forage
- Greatest wedding invitation ever
- Jenny Diski on her infestation
From then on for two years or more, in hospital and out, I was convinced that I was infested. ‘Infested’ was the word, I thought, as well as ‘contaminated’. The pubic lice multiplied to a plethora and became imaginatively licensed to inhabit my entire body. They crawled on my arms, my torso, my legs, my hair, sometimes my face and neck. They had become all-rounder lice. Not even lice, if someone had pointed out the impossible ethology I had invented for them. They were … I didn’t know what they were, but they were. Insects, lice-like, flea-like, tic-like crawling creatures that lived on me, and indeed, in me. I thought they burrowed under my skin and emerged to wander about on the surface in the dark of night or under cover of my clothes. I felt them, tickling me in specific parts, and the redness I saw when I finished scratching my skin convinced me that they were there (so easy now to write that rational sentence). I saw them, always out of the corner of my eye. I became most distressed at night. I would feel their presence and then turn on the light quickly to catch them, but of course they had burrowed back into my skin by the time I could focus. It was a malevolent game of hide and seek. They had super-lice powers: they sensed me looking for them, and always dodged me. I was sure I saw them, yet I could never quite say what they looked like. I found evidence of them, even occasionally caught one and killed it as you do a flea, squeezing it between my fingers. Then I would put it in my palm and examine it carefully under a light. I saw it was something, a mote, a dot, black, white, grey, but never quite well enough to be sure exactly what. It could have been a flake of skin, a speck of dust, a tiny thread, but I knew it wasn’t. In that special way you know when you really know or are crazy.
- Andrew O’Hagan on the happiness industry
I don’t know if people had ‘personal goals’ in previous centuries. People certainly had ambitions, perhaps even, though I doubt it, the ambition to live a happy life. But since the 1990s it’s the idea of having ‘one shot’ at happiness that has taken hold. Only One Shot makes it plain that a failure to grab that chance is nobody’s fault but one’s own. ‘According to the World Health Organisation,’ the book’s author, Randall Scott Rogers, reports, every year in the US ‘33,000+ people commit suicide, 400,000+ people attempt suicide, 17 million suffer depression, 27 million suffer alcohol and drug addiction, 60 million suffer some form of mental illness, and $11 billion is spent on self-improvement books, CDs, seminars, coaching and stress-management programmes.’
- Elif Batuman on some intellectuals’ unproduced screenplays, like Nabokov:
As a struggling young writer in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov once wrote a phenomenally depressing screenplay titled “The Love of a Dwarf” (1924). The protagonist, a sexually frustrated London circus dwarf, has a one-night stand with the depressed, childless wife of a circus magician. The dwarf quits the circus and retires to a small northern town, waiting vainly for the magician’s wife to join him. Eight years later, she turns up on his doorstep, announces that he has a son, and rushes away. The dwarf pursues her, but dies of a heart attack at her feet. To the gathering onlookers, the magician’s wife announces that her son died a few days ago. In 1939, Esquire printed a short-story version of “The Love of a Dwarf,” titled “The Potato Elf”: it was Nabokov’s first American publication.
more awesome web forage
- Christopher Higgs gives writerly advice (HTMLGIANT)
Become intellectually polyamorous, cultivate an insatiable curiosity for knowledge and experience in as many different guises as you possibly can, question everything, always challenge, learn that failure and rejection are positive things, subscribe to at least three non-literary magazines in three completely different fields (for me, right now, it’s National Geographic, Juxtapose, and Wine Enthusiast – last year it was Seed, Esquire, and Art in America), forget politics: it has nothing to do with you and any time or energy you invest in it is wasted time and energy you could be using productively to learn and experience and create, do not choose sides, do not agree or disagree, embrace contradiction, watch cinema from as many different countries and time periods as you possibly can, seek out unclassifiable music, spend time in unfamiliar locations, expose yourself to new activities, go to the opera, go to the ballet, go to the planetarium, travel a lot, observe as much as you can, pay attention to the way people talk and the way people listen, eat strange food, watch at least one sporting event but instead of thinking about it as entertainment think about it as narrative, ABR = Always Be Researching, carry a notebook and pen at all times, remember it is more important to ask questions than give or receive answers, seek to open up and never close down, seek to seek, do not seek to find, fall in love with language, think obsessively about language, about words, about sentences, about paragraphs, about the sound of words, the weight of words, the shape of words, the look of words, the feel of words, the placement of words, and most importantly be your biggest advocate, think of yourself as a genius, think of yourself as an artist, think of yourself as a creator, do not despair, do not listen to criticism, do not believe naysayers, they are wrong, you are right, they are death and you are life, they destroy and you create, the world needs what you have to say.
- Shakespeare tweets
- Daphne Merkin reviews a book about writerly liasions
The intimate lives of writers have always had a special attraction for readers, perhaps because we imagine that people who can shape ideas and arrange scenes on the page should be able to offer us some special insight into how to order our messy off-the-page lives. This has rarely been proven the case—writers often seem less, rather than more, gifted at the mechanics of everyday existence; all the same it has not stemmed our interest in finding out what Sylvia said to Ted or why Simone pimped for Jean-Paul. This interest speaks, I think, to a dream of coherence—a matching-up of intellect and emotion, of romance and reason—that continues to inspire us even as it eludes our grasp.
web forage
- Kurt Vonnegut’s blackboard (really cute)
- Janet Malcolm on writing her autobiography
Since one of the occupational hazards of journalism is the atrophying (from disuse) of the journalist’s powers of invention, the journalist who sets out to write an autobiography has more of an uphill fight than other practitioners of the genre. When one’s work has been all but done—as mine has been for over a quarter of a century—by one brilliant self-inventive collaborator after another, it isn’t easy to suddenly find oneself alone in the room. It is particularly hard for someone who probably became a journalist precisely because she didn’t want to find herself alone in the room.
- Emily Colette Wilkinson on ethical vampires
Our vegetarian vampires, I think, are afflicted with the same crises of conscience that we are as first-world twenty-first century humans. We eat too much, we shop too much, we use too much fuel, water, land; we mistreat the animals on which we depend for food and the other peoples whose labor produces for us the cheap abundant goods we have all grown so used to. The vampire’s insatiable hunger for blood mirrors our insatiable hungers for food, wealth, property, and possessions. Contemporary vampire fiction mirrors our collective anxiety about our need for self-discipline and a return to a more humane approach to our fellow beings: Now, the vampire, the most appetitive and unrepentantly murderous of our culture’s mythic archetypes, restrains himself in our popular fiction. He has become a “vegetarian” of sorts, the vampire version of a Whole Foods shopper, who prefers humanely raised meat, free range eggs, sustainably farmed produce. From the shimmering pâleur of the vampire radiates something new and hardly otherworldly: an aura of white liberal guilt.
more awesome web forage
- George Prochnik on the dangers of noise:
Noise wreaks havoc on all different parts of our bodies. The heart rate accelerates. We get vasoconstriction. It’s been shown that the elevated blood pressure from nighttime noise continues all through the day. Even if we’re not fully aroused by noise, sleep is fragmented. Loss of sleep is tied to all kinds of immune and heart problems, and a real laundry list of ailments. The really scary thing is even if we do habituate mentally to noise, that doesn’t change what’s happening to our bodies.
One problem we have in this culture is the idea of noise sensitivity associated with weakness or preciousness or a kind of fuddy-duddy crankiness. There are these pejorative associations. Culturally and for commercial reasons noise is viewed as a part of our pursuit of happiness — our drive to have fun.
- Jeannette Demain on classics that get one star reviews on Amazon, e.g. for “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”:
This book is 3 words over and over again: MY LIFE IS BAD. 500 pages and that’s all it says. It’s exactly the same as any other book about a poor family with an irresponsible father and a child who manages to be alright (Angela’s Ashes, Black Boy, Riding in Cars With Boys) the only difference is – THIS ONE IS FICTION. Don’t waste your time, money, or your sympathy on the most over praised book ever written.
- Edith Grossman on why translation matters
By the same token, it is impossible to conceive of the contemporary novel in English without taking García Márquez into account (not to mention Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar). The influence of García Márquez’s writing—presumably in translation, as Faulkner’s influence in Latin America undoubtedly took place for the most part in Spanish—is evident in a gamut of prominent writers like Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, and Michael Chabon, to name only a few. It is wonderful to contemplate, isn’t it: the freedom García Márquez discovered in Joyce, and the structural and technical lessons he learned from him and from Faulkner, have been passed on to a younger generation of English-language fiction writers through the translated impact of the Colombian’s writing. The innovative process of discovery that has allowed major writers to flex authorial muscles beyond the limitations of a single language and a single literary tradition would not have been possible without access to translated books. Translation is, in fact, a powerful, pervasive force that broadens and deepens a writer’s perception of style, technique, and structure by allowing him or her to enter literary worlds not necessarily found in one national or linguistic tradition. Far beyond essentially pernicious anxieties of influence, writers learn their craft from one another, just as painters and musicians do. The days of direct apprenticeship are over, for the most part, except, of course, in formal, academic settings (creative writing programs, studio courses, or conservatory study, for example), but artists can find mentors in other ways. The more books from more places that are available to fledgling authors, the greater the potential flow of creative influence, the more irresistible the spark that ignites literary imaginations. Translation plays an inimitable, essential part in the expansion of literary horizons through multilingual fertilization. A worldwide community of writers would be inconceivable without it.
- Tom Bissell reviews Jake Silverstein’s book:
If I had to guess, I think he is basically copping to what most magazine writers know is true, which is that some measure of fictionalization is unavoidable in what the trade calls “feature writing.” This is not to say that magazine writers make things up, exactly; but the magazine writer’s contrapuntal arrangement of detail and selective use of quotation is close enough to fiction writing to make the distinction between the two often nebulous. Whether a story is “true” has surprisingly little bearing on with the various decisions a writer must make. Where does one begin? At what point does one introduce narrative complications? And where does one end? A magazine writer takes a “true” story, breaks it down into artificial (if not arbitrary) narrative blocks, and shapes “what happened” into the one thing that real life does not and cannot resemble—a story. Nonfiction writers create stories; they do not find them.
- Margaret Atwood learns to love Twitter
But despite their sometimes strange appearances, I’m well pleased with my followers – I have a number of techno-geeks and bio-geeks, as well as many book fans. They’re a playful but also a helpful group. If you ask them for advice, it’s immediately forthcoming: thanks to them, I learned how to make a Twitpic photo appear as if by magic, and how to shorten a URL using bit.ly or tinyurl. They’ve sent me many interesting items pertaining to artificially-grown pig flesh, unusual slugs, and the like. (They deduce my interests.) Some of them have appeared at tour events bearing small packages of organic shade-grown fair-trade coffee. I’ve even had a special badge made by a follower, just for me: “The ‘call me a visionary, because I do a pretty convincing science dystopia’ badge.” It looks like this: They’re sharp: make a typo and they’re on it like a shot, and they tease without mercy. However, if you set them a verbal challenge, a frisson sweeps through them. They did very well with definitions for “dold socks” – one of my typos – and “Thnax”, another one. And they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that “Own the podium” was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested “A podium might be nice.” Their own variations poured on to a feed tagged #cpodium: “A podium! For me?” “Rent the podium, see if we like it.” “Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?” I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!
- Edan Lepucki abstains from Twitter and Facebook for three months
I also noticed how I kept a running Twitter feed in my head: Oh, not my crazy neighbors again!, and, Wow, has anyone read so-and-so’s novel? Someone suggested I keep these in a notebook, to be broadcast at a later date. That might have been funny, but wasn’t the point of my detox to wrest myself away from this real-time cataloging of reactions, emotions, and experience?
- Nicholas Lezard doesn’t like literary festivals
But on they march, these bookish ding-dongs. There’s a recent Private Eye cartoon in which two castaways are washed up on a desert island. One of them says: “Obviously, the first thing we have to do is start a literary festival.” I can understand why you might have one, or perhaps two – but as far as I am concerned Hay-on-Wye is my idea of heaven on earth, a paradise of first-rate second-hand bookshops and good pubs set in beautiful countryside, which for 11 days or so each year becomes uninhabitable.
(I also freely admit that part of my dislike of festivals is that I’m no longer invited to them, which may have something to do with what happened at 6am outside the Queen’s Hotel in Cheltenham in 199-. There was an unusually big audience watching me interview Nicholas Blincoe and Alex Garland later, and I bet quite a few of them were wondering how one half of me got to be covered in mud.)
- Geordie Williamson on the blogosphere’s influence on writing
Of course, the overall effect is distracting. Poems demand total attention: blogs are sites where other texts and all manner of media, from sound to image, are only a hyperlink click away. Think of the mental space to be cleared to properly engage with a long poem, or of those endless 19th-century novels that take chapters to gather up their narrative concerns: any literature that demands an extended period of readerly monogamy will soon be betrayed by the internet’s polyamorous nature.
It is the briefer, nimbler, more flirtatious forms that meet with greatest success in an online setting. The personal essay and the feuilleton — gossipy, critical, glancing supplements to the larger narratives of the day — are the older genres that come closest to matching what the internet does best…Whether our political, business and entertainment elites have the same thing to fear from bloggers remains to be seen; but it is obvious that this particular style, entertaining to the point of scurrilousness, has become the default mode for internet writing. Taken with the failure of poetry and fiction to create a vigorous online presence, it suggests the web is reshaping the way we write.
awesome web forage
- Kara Platoni discusses a little-known Victorian era sex survey
Slightly more than half of these educated women claimed to have known nothing of sex prior to marriage; the better informed said they’d gotten their information from books, talks with older women and natural observations like “watching farm animals.” Yet no matter how sheltered they’d initially been, these women had—and enjoyed—sex. Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse; and about three-quarters of them engaged in it at least once a week.
- Hans Kung recommends abolishing celibacy
Of course, celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes. But it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions. In fact, a glance at the New Testament shows that although Jesus and Paul led celibate lives, they left others complete freedom to do so or not. Based on the gospel, clerical celibacy can be advocated only as a freely-chosen calling (charisma), not as a compulsory rule for everyone. Paul decisively contradicted those contemporaries who were of the opinion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” As he wrote, “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2). According to 1 Timothy 3:2, “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife” (not “of no wife”!).
- Jeremy Bernstein on playing chess with Stanley Kubrick
Seizing the moment I told him that I had been hustling him and had deliberately lost the first four games. His response was that I was a patzer. All during the filming of 2001 we played chess whenever I was in London and every fifth game I did something unusual. Finally we reached the 25th game and it was agreed that this would decide the matter. Well into the game he made a move that I was sure was a loser. He even clutched his stomach to show how upset he was. But it was a trap and I was promptly clobbered. “You didn’t know I could act too,” he remarked.
Wallace’s death was tragic, but the actual tragedy has been further wrapped in a mantle of hysterical pop tragedy, that process by which virtually any self-destroying celebrity is transubstantiated into the avatar of each fan’s personal misery. (Special bonus irony: Who would be perfect to write about this metamorphosis? David Foster Wallace!)
even more web forage
- Tom Bissell on his hobbling addiction to video games (this is a remarkable essay)
Writing and reading allow one consciousness to find and take shelter in another. When the minds of the reader and writer perfectly and inimitably connect, objects, events and emotions become doubly vivid – more real, somehow, than real things. I have spent most of my life seeking out these connections and attempting to create my own. Today, however, the pleasures of literary connection seem leftover and familiar. Today the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games. Unfortunately, the least useful and financially solvent pursuit in my life is also playing video games. For instance, I woke up this morning at 8am fully intending to write this article. Instead, I played Left 4 Dead until 5pm. The rest of the day went up in a blaze of intermittent catnaps. It is now 10pm and I have only just started to work. I know how I will spend the late, frayed moments before I go to sleep tonight, because they are how I spent last night and the night before that: walking the perimeter of my empty bed and carpet-bombing the equally empty bedroom with promises that tomorrow will not be squandered. I will fall asleep in a futureless, strangely peaceful panic, not really knowing what I will do the next morning and having no firm memory of who, or what, I once was.
- Or:
While the GTA IV load screen appeared on my television screen, my friend chopped up a dozen lines, reminded me of basic snorting protocol and handed me the straw. I hesitated before taking the tiny hollow sceptre, but not for too long. Know this: I was not someone whose life had been marked by the meticulous collection of bad habits. I chewed tobacco, regularly drank about 10 Diet Cokes a day, and liked marijuana. Beyond that, my greatest vice was probably reading poetry for pleasure. The coke sailed up my nasal passage, leaving behind the delicious smell of a hot leather car seat on the way back from the beach. My previous coke experience had made feeling good an emergency, but this was something else, softer and almost relaxing. This coke, my friend told me, had not been “stepped on” with any amphetamine, and I pretended to know what that meant. I felt as intensely focused as a diamond-cutting laser; Grand Theft Auto IV was ready to go. My friend and I played it for the next 30 hours straight.
- Joan Schenkar on Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman
Stanley’s wife -– and that’s how we thought of her -– was the writer Shirley Jackson. The first thing you heard about Shirley Jackson was that she was a witch. Shirley tacitly encouraged this rumor, although the evidence supporting it would have been admissible only in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Shirley had written a book about witchcraft; she was known to “read” Tarot cards; she inserted into her exquisitely written fictions quotations from her large collection of grimoires and magic books; and she gave to some of her many cats -– eleven cats! they must be her familiars! — the names of the dukes and demons of Hell.
- Terri Windling on the real Snow White
To most people today, the name Snow White evokes visions of dwarfs whistling as they work, and a wide–eyed, fluttery princess singing, “Some day my prince will come.” (A friend of mine claims this song is responsible for the problems of a whole generation of American women.) Yet the Snow White theme is one of the darkest and strangest to be found in the fairy tale canon — a chilling tale of murderous rivalry, adolescent sexual ripening, poisoned gifts, blood on snow, witchcraft, and ritual cannibalism. . .in short, not a tale originally intended for children’s tender ears.
web forage
- Charles Stross on the economics of book length
Once a trend like that becomes established, it’s hard to stop. Put yourself in the position of a bored browser in front of a supermarket wire-rack, contemplating novels by two authors you’ve never read. They both cost the same, and you have enough pocket money to buy one. The year is 1980; LibraryThing or other internet resources aren’t available. How do you make your mind up? Well, you remember what you’ve heard about the authors, and you look at the cover painting, and you read the back flap blurb. Assuming all of these are equal … you probably buy on weight, because you subconsciously anticipate a longer reading experience and, all things considered, good experiences that last longer are better than short ones. Remember that the actual cost of the paper and ink is only a small component of the retail price of a book — around 10-15%. Increasing a book block’s size from 150 pages to 180 pages is cheap. And so, from the 1960s to the 1990s, publishers unconsciously trained readers to expect longer novels.
- Ask MetaFilter poses a q about add, and gets some incredibly insightful responses (via Rumpus), like:
You know how a tornado can pick up all sorts of things, like cows, houses, Dorothy, frying pans, buses, grass, paintings, fire extinguishers? Without meds I feel like i am in the tornado. All this stuff is swirling around me and I can’t stop it no matter how hard I try because i am a tornado and it’s very nature is to be that way.
Every one feels that way sometimes. I felt like that ALL the time. It was exhausting, everything was always moving.
- Jojo Moyes on the misery in women’s fiction
The misery memoir has left bookselling awash with tales of abuse and despair. I was recently sent a novel to review that began with a rape. It was mostly about cooking. I couldn’t help but think that the event added little to my understanding of Italian cuisine.
- James Mulholland on employment and grad school (in response to this howitzer)
Instead, we must rethink what professionalization means in the academic humanities. What is it for artists to become “professional” in their training? What kinds of cues and advice do fine-arts programs give their students about their future careers? I don’t know those answers, but I think that humanities professors need to talk more with their fine-arts colleagues about how they advise their students about what it means to become a working artist, or how to accept the risk of becoming an impoverished one.
The Jew even ducks away from camera, either facetiously, or more solemnly, with a visceral intuition which brings to mind the true horror of hate. Anybody with a flag on their wall is asking to get into a conversation (just like any male in college with an acoustic guitar in his room secretly wants a record deal or to get laid). The Nazi (or, skinhead) has a wonderful smile, which is very out of character, key word being “character,” as that is all we are, and can be, online. If “all the world’s a stage,” then the internet is where we rehearse our lines, sharpening our tongues for a chance at real life.
