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Trailer seems decent, but when does The Unconsoled get made into a movie?

Via i09

“We’re starving for a new science-fiction drama that doesn’t substitute special effects for real character-based storytelling. So we’re very hopeful for Mark Romanek’s understated English drama, based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go.”

A personal milestone for me– my very first rejection, an email from The Missouri Review. They said they liked my story and asked me to submit again so this is about the best result I could have hoped for short of acceptance.

Benjamin Percy gave me some great advice at the Seaside Residency– submit to the top mags and send the story to five more markets for every rejection I get. After logging this rejection, I immediately sent out three electronic submissions and will mail two paper copies (snail-mail? geez) tomorrow.  It’s a positive approach and I’d encourage others to try it.

Excerpt:

Descent

The wing can hold the curve of the earth
Tucked like a pillow under its hard arm.

Australia is passing me her endless
Biscuit prairie, patch scrub trimming off

To curly beach. Peninsulas are sharp
As holly. And then a rash of salt lakes,

A strange pox, turquoise then urine.
At such altitudes, reassurance arrives

Poetry mystifies me. I know what I like but not really why I like it– engaging a poem analytically has always seemed either too rigid or too vague. I really enjoyed the examination of this poem, though.  I just wish that it had come afterward so that the reader could engage the piece without a filter.

Thesis – I own an iPad.

Antithesis – I collect typewriters.

Synthesis = USB typewriter goes ‘clackity clackity clack DING’

I’ve been very impressed with the iPad as an e-book reader, preferring it over traditional paper books. But the technology is still evolving and, for those who choose to publish their work through Apple’s online store (a walled garden controlled by a single corporation), censorship remains a real hazard. A reminder of this at Daily Finance—

Rob Berry and Josh Levitas’s “Ulysses Seen” webcomic is, by all accounts, an ambitious undertaking, as any adaptation of the Irish author’s nearly 1,000-page tome would be. And with a readers’ guide, translation into foreign languages and other complementary materials, it would seem like a natural for the iPad and its multitouch user interface.

But Apple had a surprise up its sleeve, thanks to its strict guidelines about adult content, and the nudity present in “Ulysses Seen” was verboten.

The offending image can be found here.

David Mitchell, author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, discusses the process he went through in writing his 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas. His approach to narrative structure is especially interesting.

The first iPad edition of The Virginia Quarterly Review is now available for download with a 29-page sample to whet your mental.  $3.99 for a digital copy vs. $14.99 for the paper edition.

Earlier this year, VQR’s Editor Ted Genoways wrote a provocative article on the future of literary magazines– the comments after the article are especially interesting.

Marvin Bell has a poem in The New Yorker. I think he read this one at our Residency at Seaside, OR.

NPR has a review and excerpt of Aimee Bender’s second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.

Aimee Bender gave an excellent craft talk at last year’s MFA Residency in Forest Grove in which she discussed two different approaches to plot– one in which character is revealed through what a protagonist does (most modern literature) and an older tradition in which character is revealed through what happens to the protagonist (fairy tales). She then examined how this second approach could often reflect the protagonist’s inner self more accurately than a realistic plot and how the suspension of disbelief inherent in “magical” events and objects allows access to deeper currents of the human condition than is possible through realism. It was one of the best craft talks of the residency and I often refer back to the notes I took.