Communicating through ink.

Tattoo ink, specifically. This blog, Contrariwise, features tattoos of literary quotes (and some lyrics and some symbols and some definitions...).

How much do you have to LOVE LOVE LOVE a quote or an author or a song to ink it on your body permanently? I like some of the ee cummings (i carry your heart in my heart), some Sylvia Plath (i am. i am. i am) and a few others. But my favorite is the Vonnegut-inspired ink at the top of this post. I mean, if you're going to get a tat, you might as well class it up a bit with some literary inspiration.

"It Ends With a Whimper"

Good story title, right? Today's reading comes from Dark Sky magazine, an online pub that features literature and art.

An excerpt from Patrick Parr's story, "It Ends With a Whimper," below:

You are on your fifty-first can of beans as the sky continues to crack and groan. You’re in your basement, or the basement below the basement. It’s a bunker you built nine years ago, right before the turn of the century. Though difficult to later admit, you were one of the dozens who took Y2K seriously. You dug an eight by twelve hole, reinforced the edges and slapped a thick metal door on top of it. The engineers who helped you said you could live inside it for seventy days. After that you’d run out of air. At the moment, you have no choice. It’s been forty-three days since you first (and last) heard the report of worldwide annihilation. Since that day you’ve remained in your bunker, listening to the sky sound like mountains breaking.

Makes you wonder, right from the start, fifty-first can of beans??

Today's reading:

Love this imagery and phrasing:

The night she walked to the house

she held a string; on the other end,

fifty-three feet in the air, a kite.

Wind provided the aerodynamics.

From "The Aerodynamics," by Rick Bursky, on AGNI

There's more, and it's a delight to read.

Image: "kites or hypercolor sky spermies" from NotRocket on flickr.

Old people pretending to be hip: Lk, i no how 2 txt!

Dear Newspaper Editors:

Please, for the love of all things that are good in this world, stop using text-language in headlines. It's not clever, it never was clever, and it shows how un-hip you are. It's like using the word "bling." But worse.

See: Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

Thanks,
Your humble reader

PS -- Apparently, I didn't really read that article. Because it was online. And things that are online aren't "really" reading, right?!

The New Yorker's Book Bench

Another good resource for tidbits on the literary world: The Book Bench.

A nice round up of news and observations. The name, according to their about page, comes from a bench in the lobby where they toss new and old books for the staff to beg, borrow and steal. Book nerds fighting over literature?! How cute is that?

Image from the New Yorker.

Why sentence structure matters:

Whoaaaaa, wait, what? Let's look at this again:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A bulldozer driver went on a rampage in Jerusalem on Tuesday, hitting vehicles near a hotel where U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is due to stay later in the day before he was shot dead.

Hmm. Methinks this sentence should be rewritten.

Will they fix it before you visit this link? Gawker spotted this earlier today, and no change yet...

File under: interesting stories

Sick of the Revolution
By Deb Olin Unferth

Part One

My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution. Nicaragua had the best revolution, he and I agreed. There were several other revolutions in the area—in El Salvador and in Guatemala, in Honduras, in Panama (sort of). My boyfriend said we should get shots and malaria pills and that we would ride the bus there.

I knew my mother and father were not going to go for this so I didn't tell them. I wrote them a letter from Mexico. Actually I wrote the letter in Nogales on the American side of the border, then I crossed the border and mailed it from the Nogales post office on the Mexican side.

Another good resource

The Kenyon Review, a solid lit mag based in my ol' home state of Ohio (but don't hold that against them, please), has a solid online presence at their site, here. Lots of essays, poetry, reviews and, of course, a blog.

Here's a snippet of one essay:

"Just below us was a young couple, the woman eager and attractive and the man cocky and fulsome. He was oiling her up at such a rate that finally my brothers and I slowed our conversational ramble and bent to listen. We debated the right word for the young man: unctuous, said one brother, sharkacious, said another, oleaginous, said a third, horny as Howard Hughes' fingernails, said a fourth. Finally there was a moment when the young man leaned toward the young woman and gently covered her exquisite digits with his offensive paws and said, hopefully, you and I . . . at which point my brother Thomas stood up suddenly, launched himself over the balcony rail, landed with a stupendous crash on their table, and said to the young man, Never, and I mean never, begin a sentence with an adverb."

Who said grammar can't be funny? That essay came from Brian Doyle, right on the main page of KR Online.

On being a working, publishing poet

Seth Abramson, whose blog I quite like, has a lengthy post on being a working, publishing poet.
He's working under a contemplation of small literary presses, but he delves into the whole idea and mood of being a working creative writer now.

The post has a mantra near the top that is thoughtful and useful:
"1. Good work will find an audience.
2. Good work largely ignored is still good work; bad work widely read is still bad work.
3. Identifying problems in distributing good work is the beginning, and not the ending, of any publishing-related conversation worth having."

Interesting stuff to chew on, particularly for people who are in the midst of this writing-for-a-living thing. I also like this bit:
"If the maxims above offer up any wisdom whatsoever about being a poet, it is (reduced to simplest terms) the following:Write as well as you possibly can, as independently as you can, for as long as you can. Decide whether you want an Audience.If you do, show them the respect of considering them when you write, being as persistent as possible in trying to reach them, and reaching them (when and as you do) in as direct a fashion as possible. Foreclose no avenues of reaching your Audience, which means both acknowledging the problems of the Art Equation and being in no way whatsoever cowed by them.Have sufficient courage to meet the inevitable adversities."

New Kid on the Lit Block

I dunno, maybe it's not new, but it's new to me:
Chicago Literary Scene Examiner

So far: interviews, lit news, Chicago-related events. More to come, I'd guess.

The Poet Laureate at Work

So it turns out that the new poet laureate (see earlier post below) not only hates workshops, creative writing classes, and many poets)... she's also pretty hilarious.

She falls into the "writing as a solitary act" school of thought, which has been a point of discussion in (cough, shame) my writing group. Let's imagine what happens when said solitary writer goes to AWP, the nation's largest writing conference. What fun ensues!

Check out her 2005 essay in Poetry, "I Go to AWP," in which she compares writers in groups to spawn of the devil. An excerpt on workshops:

"Workshop. In the old days before creative writing programs, a workshop was a place, often a basement, where you sawed or hammered, drilled or planed something. You could not simply workshop something. Now you can. You can take something you wrote by yourself to a group and get it workshopped. Sometimes it probably is a lot like getting it hammered. Other writers read your work, give their reactions, and make suggestions for change. A writer might bring a piece back for more workshopping later, even. I have to assume that the writer respects these other writers’ opinions, and that just scares the daylights out of me. It doesn’t matter if their opinions really are respectable; I just think the writer has given up way too much inside. Let’s not share. Really. Go off in your own direction way too far, get lost, test the metal of your work in your own acids. These are experiments you can perform down in that old kind of workshop, where Dad used to hide out from too many other people’s claims on him."

Update: Shakespeare folio thief

Whatever happened with that recovered, formerly missing Shakespeare first folio? Dear reader, fear not! The detectives have questioned Raymond Scott, a "dilettante" and "amateur bibliophile" (his words) who never went to college, has never really worked and mooches off his mum, a retired government employee. He was arrested in England while pruning roses for his mum. He regularly places roses on Princes Diana's grave in Paris. Sweet of him, no?

Props to the Washington Post for their entertaining coverage of this case.

Poetry News

Look, we don't know who's in charge of the EPA anymore, and apparently a lot of people don't even know that Dick Cheney is the VP (I read, in Newsweek or somewhere, that many American college students can't name the veeeep).

But we should still take note that there's a new poet laureate.

So without further ado, meet Kay Ryan, whom the New York Times says is "known for sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes."

And a sample poem, courtesy of the New York Times, courtesy of Ms. Ryan's book, The Niagara River.

THINGS SHOULDN'T BE SO HARD
A life should leave

deep tracks:

ruts where she

went out and back

to get the mail

or move the hose

around the yard;

where she used to

stand before the sink,

a worn-out place;

beneath her hand

the china knobs

rubbed down to

white pastilles;

the switch she

used to feel for

in the dark

almost erased.

Her things should

keep her marks.

The passage

of a life should show;

it should abrade.

And when life stops,

a certain space—

however small —

should be left scarred

by the grand and

damaging parade.

Things shouldn't

be so hard.

The Perfect Novel?

At the New York Times books blog, PaperCuts, there's a heated comments-based discussion on whether such thing exists as "the perfect novel."

Is it The Great Gatsby?
Lolita?

I think I might be more on the side of "there's no such thing as perfect" -- but I'm willing to hear arguments. PaperCuts had 135 comments on the topic, last I checked -- and I'd wager there are more even now.

Annie Leibovitz + Miley Cyrus + scandal =

Donald Duck.

Image from Vanity Fair, via Gawker.

When Nick Hornby started to write...

...he had three ambitions, or so he says on his blog:

" I wanted to be published; I wanted to support myself, and one day my family, through my books; and more than anything I wanted my work somehow to provide the inspiration for a bath or shower product."

And now, he's achieved those goals, notably No. 3: Lush, a British body products company, has named a chocolate body wash Sonic Death Monkey, after a band name in High Fidelity.

I think we all have something new to which we now aspire.

Congrats, Mr. Hornby! That's an accomplishment few writers (I think) will achieve in their careers.

NU MFA buzz

Northwestern is starting a part-time creative writing MFA program, which is getting some buzz on the literary-blog circuit. (Lit blog circuit? Really? Yes.)

Details from the institution here, discussion here and here.

"Piles of cannabis and cocaine"

The literary detectives at Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library managed to recover a 400-year-old Shakespeare collection valued at $30 million. Some genius dropped it off to get it "verified as genuine." Turns out it was stolen from an English university 10 years ago. Oops.

My favorite line in this AP story about the theft and recovery is this: The book remains at the Folger Library, one of the world's leading centers of Shakespearean research. Durham Police said authorities felt it would be safer there than in "an FBI warehouse next to piles of cocaine and cannabis."

Image from http://literature.sdsu.edu/coursedescriptions/spring08/shakespeare.jpg.

The Trib's favorite magazines

The Chicago Tribune has posted its 50 favorite magazines.

Among their picks, you would expect (and rightly so) The New Yorker, Chicago, Rolling Stone and Esquire. But would you guess that the list also includes G-Fan (made for and by Godzilla fanatics), Nintendo Power (no explanation needed there) and Modern Drunkard (oh, that I had created such a magazine title!)?

There's also a neat little typography quiz, on which I scored an 84 percent. Beat that.

Writing about writing

If you've ever been to a writer's conference, you know they have a way of putting your mind in a different place. Being around all those writers, fascinating and bizarre people, can distract you from your original purpose for attending (working on your craft). If you're lucky, accomplished and talented people are there, too, inspiring and coaching and sharing their thoughts. But there's also the element of strange, the parallel-universe-ness of it, that take you into a whole new world.

So maybe that's why I liked Rebecca McClanahan's piece, Scenes from a Weekend Poetry Conference, in the latest version of Brevity. She captures the beauty and the mystery of such events.

"Never before so much hair in one space, so much hair so carefully out of place, and to arrange a ripped T-shirt to slide over one bare shoulder is an art in itself, as is the negative capability of shawls that fall just far enough. Here are jeans slashed to reveal knees polished to perfection. The mysteries abound: why such violence? Was it passion, going down on the Muse, and who mussed her hair into such chaos?"

Read more from Brevity here.

So... I'm not a writer?

"As you may have heard, all the writers are in Brooklyn these days. It’s the place to be. You’re simply not a writer if you don’t live here. "

From "I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It." The New York Times.

Feeling better about selling out:

This column on Poynter today had a few good reminders for why I left the newspaper business.

"First, working in public relations does not preclude a return to journalism. I'd argue you might even be a better journalist for having had the experience of being covered by journalists. Second, there may well be days when you miss the rush; hopefully, there will be more days when you find great satisfaction in the work you choose to do. And finally, if anyone should feel betrayed, it should be the journalist who worked 11 hours a day for more than a decade and wasn't paid well enough to buy a house."

From Butch Ward, Poynter Institute Distinguished Fellow

I also love this affirmation he included:

Remember how talented you are: You can write. You can think critically. You can ask good questions. You are creative. You have passion. You can handle tight deadlines.The business world, I assure you, values these skills and -- this might be too obvious a point -- needs more people who possess them.