Way back when I had hair, and that hair had actual color, Roger Lathbury, who was then Roger Lewis, was one of my favorite professors. We’ve been in touch on and off over the years. I have no idea, really, why he bothers with me, but for me, his impossibly cool erudition make him something of an ideal reader, and a lot of times when I’m writing, I think of him, as in, what would Roger think?, which can be a powerful means for making the really crappy sentence jump right off the page—and force me to take advantage of that jumping to swat it away.
After the departure of Marie Arana and much rumor, The Washington Postannounced last week that it was going to discontinue Book World as a standalone tabloid in the Sunday paper. (For the record, I wrote a couple of reviews for her several years back and found her to be a wonderful editor.)
Of course the Post is not the only newspaper to eliminate its book section qua book section, nor likely will it be the last. Continue reading →
This is the novel I promised myself I’d have finished last year. Well, it’s now this year. I’m hanging this out there in the electronic universe just in case anyone wants to read and comment on it.
I’m using Apple’s Pages to write it, and but to put it out there using Adobe’s interesting beta, I had to convert it to Word, which doesn’t get all of the formatting exactly right, and since I use fonts that you might not have, I’ve changed some of them to more or less universal fonts.
Update: Acrobat.com is no longer in beta, and I don’t really have any use for it. You can see pieces of TBD on Fictionaut, if you really want to by using the link.
This is a work in progress, in which on a day his wife has served him with divorce papers, his company is hinting at layoffs, and he is really in no condition for any more weirdness, the most unprecedentedly weird thing happens to him imaginable. He runs into himself, or, more literally, himself runs into him. This is not a guy who looks like him. This is him.
Even more weirdness ensues.
If you want to take a look and give me feedback, please email me and I will give you access.
I am not an apologist for snark—Stark, yes—but not snark. And I’m not going to argue that profanity—cussing as this young fellow, featured on a recent story on NPR has it—
I think David Denby and others are right that discourse—or some of it—has deteriorated in the digital culture.
But all of that aside, it seems to me that there are distinct and visceral pleasures—an onomatopoetic expression of sensation merged with the physical sensation of its experience. The two most popular “cuss” words, it would seem to me, are the S-word and the F-word. And both can be deployed in a variety of ways that are entirely irrelevant of their dictionary definitions and to express a wide variety of emotions. (And a lot of times can be used with a lassitude that labels the user as stupid and inarticulate.)
Explosively expressive
The thing about these two words in particular, and some others—the B-word, for example—is the sheer physicality of their use. In linguistic terms, most of the tastiest profanity is loaded with plosives, or little sudden stops in giving breath to a sound, as in sudden halting of the final consonant of the S-word. Ditto the final consonant of the F-word. They’re also loaded with fricatives, in which the voicing of the consonant sound is more or less crushed upon its escape—between teeth, between lips and teeth, between tongue and palate or tongue and teeth. Which also occurs in these two words (ditto the B-word). You have the fricative at the beginning of the monosyllable, F forced between the upper teeth and lower lip, and then a satisfying middle period of pure sound that’s almost groan and uses pretty much the entirely of the mouth, and then it’s suddenly halted by the back of the mouth by the tongue—K, which also has a fricative quality.
So you’re hammering a nail and miss and your errant thumb just happens to be the recipient of the hammer’s blow. Seems to me that that sort of monosyllabic expression, with all its rough edges and sibilance, is very close to an onomatopoetic expression of the similar physical sensation currently being expressed by the neurons in the thumb.
So should I use these and other colorful words as much as I do? No. And why have I not used them here? Do demonstrate their power. You know what I’m talking about.
Which sort of goes to what the young man in the video above—in his NPR interview—says about “dang is okay.”
Persephone’s Box says in this post:
“Why are replacement words like “fudge” or “frigging” or “cheese and rice” or “heck” or “gall darn it” or “sugar” considered better than the actual terms when we all know that’s what you’re really thinking? I don’t think they are any better.”
But the kid has gotten “death threats.” What a bunch of toadsuckers there are out there.
It’s hard to recommend Synecdoche, New York, the newest film from Charlie Kaufman. Although I deeply admire Kaufman’s work, and, it should be said, I deeply admire this work, it’s not a kind of movie that leaves you with the sense of wanting to rush to the putative water cooler and go, Wow, you have to see this, as with, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Being John Malkovich. Rather, it’s the kind of movie that you, on one hand, (or least I) cannot help feeling as though you just endured Charlie Kaufman’s two-hour nightmare. For its nonlinearity, for its elisions, for its chronological shifts, for its tenuous but nonetheless sensible (sort of) logic, it has all the trappings of a dream/nightmare.
If the eBook is ascendent, who or what else is also ascendent?
The excessively simple narrative of the history of book publishing goes sort of like this: writers hired printing presses to bring their work into the world in book or other form. To protect writers from unscrupulous printers, there arose publishers who would pay the writers a fair rate and also make money. But the scruple-less roamed the land and so came literary agents to protect writers from unscrupulous publishers, and also make a buck.
And this model worked reasonably well for a while until hypertext came along and screwed up everything.
But it’s a way slo-mo earth quake, this screwing up of things that hypertext hath wrought. Continue reading →
McGonigal’s concept of alternate reality games is actually pretty fascinating.
Not long ago, I had the idea (way less interesting than hers) that it’d be a very cool thing to do to see what would happen if someone created a fictional book of fiction and then try to generate buzz for it.
This sort of almost happened when Sex and the City, the movie, came out there was a mention of a book in it. It was nonfiction, but nonetheless. (Read about it in the Times here.) And but so the mention of this book in the movie “caused real-life people to storm to their real-life online bookstores in search of” it. And it jumped from pretty much nowhere to very high on the Amazon sales list.
That book had a mention in a major motion picture, but what I’m thinking of would be way lower key. People just start talking about it. The _____ would be this great book that had everything, suspense, romance, horror, maybe some recipes for people who like that kind of stuff.
It would seem to me that there would be a web site for the book, with a cover, and blurbs, but no actual content except for the blurbs. Maybe there would be a synopsis, but it’d be better if there were not.
Someone way smarter than me would have to think up a way of tracking interest, so maybe people could “buy” the book, but in such a way as not to hurt them (i.e., they wouldn’t get charged anything and wouldn’t have to give a credit card number—maybe just a notify me when this is available kind of thing).
I’m probably old fashioned in the sense that I believe what I read in the paper. I grew up in a time when the newspaper and the radio new were the only sources of reliable, credible information about the world. (For whatever reason, I have always discounted television as actual news.) I was also a young adult in the Time of Reagan, so I was pretty much afraid that the world would come to an end, and, if I went camping or something, I would miss it.
And so when I heard Malcolm Gladwell talk on This American Life about his time at The Washington Post—a paper that not only was my hometown paper but was also a significant source of income, since I had been a carrier (in those days, a paperboy, a proud moniker)—I assumed he was being pretty much entirely, though believably, facetious. Continue reading →
There is something weird and utterly fascinating about the newest case of ‘literary fraud.’ Which is to say that I come at this as a consumer of narrative. Not (at least I hope to think) as a tut-tutting moralist with any sort of moralistic judgment to make.
A young woman (Margaret B. Jones/Margaret Seltzer) creates a narrative that she sells as a memoir of a not-so-privileged life. Dupes willing agent and willing publisher. She gets major review in the New York Times. She gets a big puff piece in the New York Times. Then her sister, for whatever reason, exposes her as a fraud upon seeing the latter piece.
One can only wonder at the level of self-deception necessary to think that she’d actually pull this off. Continue reading →
John Gardner, in an interview, said an editor once told him about his novel The Sunlight Dialogues,that it needed to be cut by a third. He retorted, he said, Which third?
When it was finally published, it went on to be a bestseller. I remember reading in in paperback when Gardner was recommended to me by a teacher, the novelist and short story writer Richard Bausch. It’s been a long time since I read it, but one of the things I remember about it was “the Sunlight Man” delivering long, hectoring lectures to the main character, Fred Clumly. And I remember feeling a little hectored myself, and skipping a lot of that. Continue reading →
