tagged with lit

The articles below are worth revisiting in my opinion if not for the mere fact that it lends energy to those who feel weak, insignificant, or have doubts that they are writing the right way. The eternal questions over schooling and if writing can be taught live on. The most important factor in the hard to prove equation is that you need to continue to write to get anywhere. Understanding comes from repetition.
millionsmillions:

I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say this: The short story is  not experiencing a renaissance. Our current and much-discussed market  glut of short fiction is not about any real dedication to the form. The  situation exists because the many writers we train simply don’t know how  to write anything but short stories. The academy—not the  newsroom or the literary salon or the advertising firm—has assumed sole  responsibility for incubating young writers.
Cathy Day, in “The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis”.

Image Credit: Anelise Chen for The Rumpus. Please Click through, the chart accompanies a fantastic essay on the value of completing an MFA program.

This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year

The articles below are worth revisiting in my opinion if not for the mere fact that it lends energy to those who feel weak, insignificant, or have doubts that they are writing the right way. The eternal questions over schooling and if writing can be taught live on. The most important factor in the hard to prove equation is that you need to continue to write to get anywhere. Understanding comes from repetition.

millionsmillions:

I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say this: The short story is not experiencing a renaissance. Our current and much-discussed market glut of short fiction is not about any real dedication to the form. The situation exists because the many writers we train simply don’t know how to write anything but short stories. The academy—not the newsroom or the literary salon or the advertising firm—has assumed sole responsibility for incubating young writers.

Cathy Day, in “The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis”.

Image Credit: Anelise Chen for The Rumpus. Please Click through, the chart accompanies a fantastic essay on the value of completing an MFA program.

This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.

- Eudora Welty, On Writing (via proustitute)

(Source: awritersruminations)

vintageanchor:

What other writers do readers of your favorite author also read?  Click  on a name to travel along. (The closer two writers are, the more likely  someone will like both of them.)  Just be careful not to waste too much  time on this site — you have a lot of reading to do!www.literature-map.com

vintageanchor:

What other writers do readers of your favorite author also read?  Click on a name to travel along. (The closer two writers are, the more likely someone will like both of them.)  Just be careful not to waste too much time on this site — you have a lot of reading to do!

www.literature-map.com


I write because my father handled my first poems with  gentleness and saw the spark of a small diamond buried in their  four-beat boogie.
I write because my mother read to me as a child, because  the whole brood slept on a huge bed under the mosquito netting on the  red tiles of Kynsey Road, Colombo 8.
I write because I grew festooned with plantain trees and  mangos, and the rambutan seller knocked every season on every door of  the house, and, at school, marbles, toffee, and cricket bats whiled away  our days. We knew little then of blood hatred, rape, pillage,  slaughter, burning of a people’s ola leaf manuscripts.
I write because even grown-up and ignorant and wise I try  to shield my children from all of the above scourges, especially  ignorance.
I write because I do not wish to retreat to fantasy, or  escape into a delicious romantic paradise, but will advocate my fellow  man and woman’s pursuit of that kind of happiness.
What’s the harm if we can all eat and have spare time to  listen to music and grow pomegranates and bathe our lovers in  frankincense?
I write because I refuse to become ironic even in these best of times as icebergs become postcards under a boiling sun.
I write because in the end all writing (and thinking) lead to contradictory states of mind: do I dare to eat that peach?
How shall I greet the strongman? Praise him for the order of the streets or the broken skulls brushed off in the gutters?
 Why do we have to destroy to create?
—Indran Amirthanayagam, BOMB 103, 2008

I write because my father handled my first poems with gentleness and saw the spark of a small diamond buried in their four-beat boogie.

I write because my mother read to me as a child, because the whole brood slept on a huge bed under the mosquito netting on the red tiles of Kynsey Road, Colombo 8.

I write because I grew festooned with plantain trees and mangos, and the rambutan seller knocked every season on every door of the house, and, at school, marbles, toffee, and cricket bats whiled away our days. We knew little then of blood hatred, rape, pillage, slaughter, burning of a people’s ola leaf manuscripts.

I write because even grown-up and ignorant and wise I try to shield my children from all of the above scourges, especially ignorance.

I write because I do not wish to retreat to fantasy, or escape into a delicious romantic paradise, but will advocate my fellow man and woman’s pursuit of that kind of happiness.

What’s the harm if we can all eat and have spare time to listen to music and grow pomegranates and bathe our lovers in frankincense?

I write because I refuse to become ironic even in these best of times as icebergs become postcards under a boiling sun.

I write because in the end all writing (and thinking) lead to contradictory states of mind: do I dare to eat that peach?

How shall I greet the strongman? Praise him for the order of the streets or the broken skulls brushed off in the gutters?

Why do we have to destroy to create?

—Indran Amirthanayagam, BOMB 103, 2008

(Source: bombmagazine)

[NOTE TO SELF: request this to be played at my funeral.]
doubledaybooks:

Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz - A supposedly unplayable piece of music by John Stump.

[NOTE TO SELF: request this to be played at my funeral.]

doubledaybooks:

Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz - A supposedly unplayable piece of music by John Stump.

The Scourge of “Like”

scribnerbooks:

Our favorite entry from our favorite grammar grouch, Robert Hartwell Fiske, in his Dictionary of Unendurable English.

Like is used to mean “whatever word or words its user does not know or cannot be bothered to think of… Like means everything and nothing at once.”

flavorpill:

Have you ever punched a pumpkin in the face? Amazing literary-inspired carved pumpkins 

flavorpill:

Have you ever punched a pumpkin in the face? Amazing literary-inspired carved pumpkins 

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List of Book Blogs

noseinabook-:

Last night I made a list of book blogs on tumblr which you can see here.

The true price of publishing

scribnerbooks:


Question: If hardcover books costs appx $3.50 to produce and you buy one for $30, what are you paying for?

Answer: Words.

Another well-written piece about the publishing business from the Guardian. (Pay attention, NYT.)

With thanks to Roger Boylan.

Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté.

- Margaret Atwood (via wordpainting)

All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, “She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard on the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.”


The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument “whose strings buzzed,” and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert has to create a believable village to put Emma in. It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.

-

- Flannery O’Connor in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” an essay from Mystery and Manners

Thanks to kitsteinkellner and italicsmine for the posts that led me to this book.

I looked to see how Lydia Davis translated the sentence O’Connor admired so much. She used this for her 2010 translation:

When it was thus assaulted by her, the old instrument, with its buzzing strings, could be heard as far as the edge of the village if the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, who was passing on the main road, bareheaded and in slippers, would stop to listen, holding his piece of paper in his hand.

The original French goes like this:

Ainsi secoué par elle, le vieil instrument, dont les cordes frisaient, s’entendait jusqu’au bout du village si la fenêtre était ouverte, et souvent le clerc de l’huissier qui passait sur la grande route, nu-tête et en chaussons, s’arrêtait à l’écouter, sa feuille de papier à la main.

Whatever the language, whatever the translation, O’Connor’s point stands: “the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.” This builds on an idea in O’Connor’s previous paragraph:

A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real; and she believes that this is connected with our having five senses. If you’re deprived of any of them, you’re in a bad way, but if you’re deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present.

Finally, the essay seems to have started its life as a talk to a college class. I can’t resist quoting O’Connor’s opening:

I understand that this is a course called “How the Writer Writes,” and that each week you are exposed to a different writer who holds forth on the subject. The only parallel I can think of to this is having the zoo come to you, one animal at a time; and I suspect that what you hear one week from the giraffe is contradicted the next week by the baboon.

(via davidquigg)

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Oliver works it on Tumblr, Beckett theme by Jonathan Beckett