Monthly Archives: July 2010

Via the Guardian:

Saturday poem: The Life of Fiction
by Thomas Lynch

Excerpt-

Everything must, of course, advance the cause
of atmosphere or character or narrative:
the walk up the coast road, the sudden rain,
the stone shed at the sea’s edge to shelter in,
the two of them waiting out the weather,
pressed into the corner, alone at last.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Yes, she is.

via Salon.com

Is Shirley Jackson a great American writer?
The author of “The Lottery” is still not getting the respect she deserves

Jackson… wrote during more or less the same period, but where the fiction of Mailer and Bellow is expansive, hers is (intentionally) claustrophobic. She was the bard of the domestic nightmare (as Ruth Franklin astutely pointed out in a recent essay for the New Republic), of people who were trapped, excluded, usurped and pushed in a corner to wither away unnoticed. If there was anything Homeric about her — and come to think of it, I believe there was — it was the serene pitilessness with which she dispensed their doom.

Illuminating article at Newsweek, The Creativity Crisis. One quote that struck me:

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Hat tip to Electric Literature for the pointer.

Two aspects of the Internet as it relates to literature–

From NPR:

William Faulkner Goes Online, 50 Years Later

In the late 1950s, English students at the University of Virginia got the opportunity that most American literature scholars would kill for — to speak with William Faulkner.

Faulkner spent two years as the writer-in-residence at UVA, where he gave lectures and readings and took questions from students. The lectures were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes, which have now been digitized and published online.

And from The Guardian:

The art of slow reading: Has endlessly skimming short texts on the internet made us stupider? An increasing number of experts think so – and say it’s time to slow down . . .

If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.

I Write Like (via tweet by Electric Literature)

Check what famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of the famous writers.

(My results– James Joyce and Stephen King).

Author posts her vampire novel online for free — and gets an awesome book deal

Can posting your unpublished novels online for free still lead to a nice book deal, now that the web is saturated with free fiction? It worked for author Marta Acosta, whose young-adult vampire novel will come out from Tor Books.

Okay, so I don’t know how applicable this case would be to most writers– factors mitigating the headline would include the author already having her book under consideration at Tor and other publishers, that the book is about vampires and boarding schools at a time when both subjects are very popular, and that the book is YA which might make it more accessible to readers used to online text.

Still, Ms. Acosta’s success is heartening to consider. At the very least, it demonstrates that the Internet can provide writers with an alternative entry into existing markets as well as creating new ones.

but that’s just from my first 4 rejections– still plenty of time to run the table.

From The Chicago Tribune:

Top 10 most-used phrases in rejection letters
There are many ways of giving a brush-off, especially when it comes to rejection letters. After a rather unscientific poll of both our Facebook friends and Twitter followers, here’s what we found to be the most commonly-used phrases in rejection letters to writers:

1. “Best of luck in your future endeavors” or “best of luck finding a publisher for your work.” The subtle difference is key here. One says “good luck, now please stay the hell away” while the other is more cordial in its “good luck placing your work with someone who is not us. Not ever, ever, ever us.” Ouch factor: 4

A short piece by Pacific University MFA faculty, Debra Gwartney.

Via The National Book Critics Circle
What Are You Looking Forward to Reading, Debra Gwartney?

I also plan to take the summer to read some NBCC finalist books I haven’t yet been able to get to. I was knocked over by Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage, and am eager to fall into Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall

* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I post a pointer to a site that offers fiction and/or poetry either as free content or as samples from subscriber issues. Today’s pointer is to THE COLLAGIST.

THE COLLAGIST is published once a month. We publish fiction, non-fiction, and poetry from general submissions, as well as book reviews, novel excerpts from upcoming releases, and special features such as our Classic Reprint series.

Short Fiction excerpt from: Calvino’s Fingers by Brian Kubarycz

On Spring afternoons, when the scent of the ponds, which sat green and alive beyond the courtyard of cathedral school, drifted into the classroom and filled us with thoughts of rolling mud balls and heaving them like frogs against the sidewalks, or rubbing them into the newly starched collars of all altar boys, I knew we would soon be asked to find a jar big enough for a dozen pickles, poke holes in the tin lid, and walk out to the ponds to catch a frog we then could skin and anatomize as our faith-school science project. By then I had already smelled Calvino’s fingers.

Even if you’re not a baseball fan, this video is really cool. Takes a little of the sting out of a bad season, losing to the NY Yankees at home, and trading Cliff Lee to the Texas Rangers.

Run-in with Ichiro leaves teen ‘starstruck’

A teenage fan sitting in a seat near the right-field foul line at Safeco Field had an interesting “meeting” with Ichiro Suzuki in the first inning Thursday night.

The Mariners game against the Yankees was not even two batters old when Mark Teixeira hit a fly ball to right field. As the ball hooked toward the stands, Ichiro gave chase and reached into the first few row of seats trying to snag the ball.

He didn’t make the catch, and his extended arm collided with 17-year-old Aris Skinner, who was standing up and holding her cell phone.