How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, by Philip K. Dick: The strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title “science fiction” is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another [...]
Category Archives: Writing
≡The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain
Monday, June 16, 2008
I’ll call an end to the Stevens binge with this one. It’s been fun, especially for something that I took up on impulse. Sometimes it’s best to just pick something and start it and see where it leads. There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed [...]
≡Restatement of Romance
Friday, June 13, 2008
Going to a wedding this weekend. The night knows nothing of the chants of night. It is what it is as I am what I am: And in perceiving this I best perceive myself And you. Only we two may interchange Each in the other what each has to give. Only we two are one, [...]
≡The “thirteen ways” meme
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Selections from a couple dozen pages of Googling… Thirteen Ways of Looking at Super Mario Bros. Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A. I linked this a while back (almost 2 years ago!). Very good essay. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ingmar Bergman Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetry Manuscript, some tips before you [...]
≡Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Thursday, June 12, 2008
I haven’t shared any of Wallace Stevens’ longer works that I like because it doesn’t seem like a good context for it. But I can’t overlook this one. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was the focus of one of my research papers back in college. I remember finding it when class was looking [...]
≡The Snow Man
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Wallace Stevens reads The Snow Man. Jay Keyser reads it on NPR (less dreary, more enthusiasm) and praises it highly before dissecting a little bit. Keyser also has this crazy idea of writing the poem out on notecards and making a hanging mobile out of it a la Alexander Calder. One must have a mind [...]
≡This Is Just to Say
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
I have stolen the idea that I saw in RSS and which you maybe have already seen today. Forgive me it is hilarious and I can’t help it. [via austin kleon]
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Alex Ross on Wallace Stevens: Stevens’ grandeur is an inch away from absurdity, if not in the thick of it. This is by intention. He liked to deflate solemnity with silliness. His humor is his least noticed attribute, probably because it is so widespread. Even his titles—”The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”—undercut [...]
≡The Brave Man
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
A good wake-up poem from Wallace Stevens: The sun, that brave man, Comes through boughs that lie in wait, That brave man. Green and gloomy eyes In dark forms of the grass Run away. The good stars, Pale helms and spiky spurs, Run away. Fears of my bed, Fears of life and fears of death, [...]
≡Bring on the Wallace Stevens
Monday, June 9, 2008
I’ve been going back and reading Wallace Stevens lately. I first came across his poetry a while back in a college modernist lit class, and keep coming back every so often. For the next couple days I’m going to go on a little Stevens bender around here, sort of like my Frans Masereel festival a [...]
≡Men Made Out of Words
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
What should we be without the sexual myth, The human revery or poem of death? Castratos of moon-mash—Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one. The [...]
≡The New Kings of Nonfiction (review: 3/5)
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Ira Glass curated this collection of nonfiction. The New Kings of Nonfiction is a selection of favorites that he’s had filed away for a while, articles that he keeps passing along to others. The focus is on good storytelling found in original reporting: I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For [...]
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Monday, May 26, 2008
“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
George Orwell’s essay Poetry and the Microphone talks about broadcasting verse over the radio, but I think there are some internet parallels here, another way to cross distances. People who are interested can find and enjoy just as easily as those who aren’t interested can move along. That combination of distance and intimacy affects how [...]
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Sunday, May 18, 2008
Writers really do die young, especially poets, based on research in The Cost of the Muse [$, or use your library's access]. [via maud newton]
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Thursday, May 15, 2008
Rob Giampietro is blogging via postcard this week. I got my first one this afternoon:
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Monday, May 12, 2008
I tracked down John Haines’ poem, Return to Richardson, Spring 1981, which I first came across in the recent profile of composer John Luther Adams.
≡Then!
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
A short story written by the 6-year-old brother of one of my co-workers: One day I woke up. I was haf chipmunk and bus. Then! I stareted to driv bep bep. Then I stareted to run wee. Thes is fun driving and runing. Then I crasht in to a treey. Ach The third sentence is [...]
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Sunday, May 4, 2008
There’s a really good, really funny interview with Richard Price in the Believer: I have to be a little intimidated by what I‚Äôm writing about. I have to feel a little bit like I don‚Äôt think I can do this, I don‚Äôt think I can master this, I don‚Äôt think I can get under the [...]
≡PLEASE STOP MOWEING YOUR LAWN SO EARLY
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Today I spent some time sorting through a bunch of old documents, notes, letters, tickets, playbills, etc. I came across an old letter placed in the mailbox back home when I was away at college. A summer of cutting the grass earned me a bad reputation that Dad must have continued into the fall that [...]
≡Graphing the accepted spelling of “ThunderCats, ho!”
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Based on some keyword research I did this afternoon. “ThunderCats, ho!” is a natural winner in Google search results. The long tail of enthusiasm extends to over 35 o’s, after which point I gave up. The most interesting part is that HUGE drop in hits for the 3-o version. Among its neighboring easy-to-type competitors, “ThunderCats, [...]
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Monday, April 21, 2008
A collection of 100 great opening lines. I wonder, for comics, what a collection of great opening panels would look like…? [via sbh]
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Monday, April 21, 2008
The Well-Dressed Man With A Beard. After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun. If the rejected things, the things denied, Slid over the western cataract, yet one, One only, one thing that was firm, even No greater [...]
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Sunday, April 6, 2008
Stefanie Posavec made a diagram of every sentence in On the Road organized by words per sentence. Here are more literary diagrams.
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Tuesday, April 1, 2008
This fictional Paris Review Interview with “Constance Eakins” is a clever bit of promotion for The Mayor’s Tongue. Here’s a pdf of the interview [1.5mb]. Eakins started with comics: Interviewer: Was it when you ran away from home that you began to feel that you were going to be a writer? Eakins: No, I always [...]
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Sunday, March 30, 2008
The Thurber & White send-up on the knee phenomenon: Simply stated, the knee phenomenon is this: occasions arise sometimes when a girl presses her knee, ever so gently, against the knee of the young man she is out with… Often the topic of conversation has something to do with it: the young people, talking along [...]
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Saturday, March 29, 2008
The seven deadly words of book reviewing. There are over 200 comments now that add to the list, most of them very good.
≡Die Sonne (review: 4/5)
Friday, March 21, 2008
A man chases the sun through city, sky, and sea in this wordless story by Frans Masereel. Here’s my favorite sequence from Die Sonne: [update: images removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity---you'll have to trust me that it's worth your time] Take a look at some other woodcuts from [...]
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Thursday, February 21, 2008
I rediscovered Chuck Klosterman this week. Even when I don’t buy a word he writes, it’s usually just plain fun to read. From a good review of his book I’m reading now, Chuck Klosterman IV: Younger generations of Americans urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by [...]
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