The sweet smell of history at Rare Book School.
Bringing an understanding of the materiality of the book back into literary studies is something that Michael Suarez, an Oxford-trained specialist in 18th-century British literature and a Jesuit priest who took over as the school’s director in 2009, speaks of with an almost missionary zeal.
“A book is a coalescence of human intentions,” he said in a phrase often repeated around the school. “We think we know how to read it because we can read the language. But there’s a lot more to reading than just the language in the book.”
From, “Literary Ink: Famous Authors and Their Tattoos.”
Rick Moody has one of the coolest tattoos possible (in our opinion), because it’s part of Shelley Jackson’s Skin project, a 2095-word story published exclusively in tattoos, one word each on as many willing volunteers, so it can never be read in its proper order, but just exists, pulsing, out in the world at all times. Photo via NY Press.
Compiled with the help of Lonely Planet and editor Andy Murdock.
- Blue Bar at the Algonquin (Midtown)
- Old Town Bar (Flatiron)
- Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel (Upper East Side)
- Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel (Midtown)
- White Horse Tavern (West Village)
- Sardi’s (Theater District)
- The Half King (Chelsea)
- Chumley’s (West Village)
- Kettle of Fish (West Village)
- McSorley’s Old Ale House (Lower East Side)
Hit link to see descriptions and who used to imbibe in those establishments.
[sigh]… back in the day…
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.
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
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
![[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.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luas8shmSs1qe712jo1_500.jpg)
[NOTE TO SELF: request this to be played at my funeral.]
Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz - A supposedly unplayable piece of music by John Stump.
The Scourge of “Like”
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.”
Have you ever punched a pumpkin in the face? Amazing literary-inspired carved pumpkins
The archives of the former Mississippi Review Online are once again available via its new incarnation, Blip Magazine, and include this 1995 piece from Ann Beattie:
In retrospect, I’ve realized that I’ve never begun a story because I wanted to reveal something about a character. It’s absolutely necessary that I do this, of course, but when I’m working on the first draft, I file that in the back of my mind and proceed to name some hypothetical being who, in my mind, is immediately seen clearly in one respect, standing in a room, or on the beach, or on a lawn. Because I see instantly the character’s context-because I understand the visual world surrounding the character, I’m able to know instinctively whether the story is in past or present tense. I pick up ambient sound before I begin to register dialogue (or awkward silence), I squint to see the character’s first tiny movements (Oh hell: he smokes), and by then, if I’m lucky, the room in which I write has in effect disappeared, and I’m in the room in which my cigarette smoking man stands.
[…]
They’ve come into my life in the same strange way so many things have. Years ago, when I lived with a bunch of people in Connecticut, we didn’t have a key to lock the door in our rented house, so through the years I went back to that house to find, for example, a dead raccoon in the sink with ice cubes dumped over its head (courtesy of the garbage man, who knew one of the people who lived there loved to make road kill stew). One day I encountered the dog catcher eating a sandwich in the kitchen. I don’t believe the dog had run away. Another time, after an entire day home alone, I went for the first time into the kitchen and found a young man meditating silently on top of the washing machine. He had hitched from Vermont to Connecticut and gone to the wrong house. I’m married to a man who moved to Charlottesville, VA for a semester to teach. One month before he left, he caved in to pressure from an acquaintance in New York and called me, having found the one expired phone book that printed my unlisted number.
[h/t Dan Cafaro]
List of Book Blogs
Last night I made a list of book blogs on tumblr which you can see here.
(via wordpainting)
The true price of publishing
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.
