The Other David Burn
Did you know I was a Scottish-born pioneer and dramatist from the 19th century?
Wikipedia knows.
Fresh Poetry
Entering Fort Lauderdale
The back of my 32 year-old thighs
no longer command
top dollar
from the gentlemenly class.
Now I work
behind a bar
in a Bam Bam outfit
and men still look.
I let them eye my dance
with cash and whiskey.
Some still offer me money
to go home with them.
I say, “I’m not a whore, asshole.â€
But I go home with them sometimes.
I take their money too.
It’s a free country.
Rat In A Coffee Can
Poet and professor, David Kirby, writing in Paste Magazine sounds as if he likes the poems of Beth Ann Fennelly, a Chicagoan now teaching at Ole Miss.
Beth Ann Fennelly’s best poems are as noisy as a rat in a coffee can: They twitch, scramble and all but turn themselves inside out on the page. A classier way to put it is that the poems are over-determined, like dreams. Freud observed that dreams have more than one cause, which is what makes them action-packed; the same is true for poetry. In Fennelly’s best work, you get an entire bookful of images in just a page or two.
With vivid language of this sort in a review, I had to find out more about Fennelly’s work. A few Google clicks in, I stumbled upon this poem from her new book Unmentionables:
from The Kudzu Chronicles – Oxford, Mississippi
by Beth Ann Fennelly1.
Kudzu sallies into the gully
like a man pulling up a chair
where a woman was happily dining alone.
Kudzu sees a field of cotton,
wants to be its better half.
Pities the red clay, leaps across
the color wheel to tourniquet.
Sees every glass half full,
pours itself in. Then over the brim.
Scribbles in every margin
with its green highlighter. Is begging
to be measured. Is pleased
to make acquaintance with
your garden, which it is pleased to name
Place Where I Am Not.
Yet. Breeds its own welcome mat.2.
Why fret
if all it wants
is to lay one heart—
shaped palm
on your sleeping back?Why fright
when the ice
machine dumps its
armload of diamonds?
Blogger Dude Scores $300,000 Advance
If you have an extremely popular blog, other media makers might be willing to bet on you. That’s the idea forwarded in today’s Sunday Styles.
image of the white guy likin’ a dog, courtesy of Flickr user, PancakeJess
At the center of the piece is Christian Lander, an Internet copywriter who launched Stuff White People Like last January. The blog has since entertained millions of visitors with things white people like. Some of those things are: Having Gay Friends, Dinner Parties, Book Deals, Graduate School and The Idea of Soccer.
One of the intriguing aspects to this story is how literary agents have swooped in to scour the net for talent.
One of the first literary agents to troll the Web for talent was Kate Lee, who in 2003 was an assistant at International Creative Management, the sprawling talent agency, looking for a way to make her name.
When she started contacting bloggers and talking to them about book deals, many were stunned that a real literary agent was interested in their midnight typings. Her roster was so rich with bloggers, including Matt Welch from Hit & Run and Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, that the New Yorker profiled her in 2004. Two years from now, the magazine noted, “Books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon.â€
And two years after that?
“If I contact someone or someone is put in touch with me, chances are they’ve already been contacted by another agent,†Ms. Lee said. “Or they’ve at least thought about turning their blog into a book or some kind of film or TV project.â€
I found it interesting that Kurt Andersen, a founder of Very Short List, who is represented by the William Morris agency and acts as an adviser to Random House, had a taste maker’s role in taking Stuff White People Like to book form. Lander’s agent asked Anderson to bring it to the attention of Gina Centrello, the president and publisher of Random House, which he did.
The Ambitious Writer’s Ambitious Tale for the Ambitious
“I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
According to The New York Times, The Great Gatsby is required reading at half the high schools in the country and resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.
Thanks to this scholastic market, the books sells more than a half million copies a year.
The article looks at Jinzhao Wang, who has been studying Gatsby in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. She says, “My green light is Harvard,” comparing her longing for an elite education to Jay Gatsby’s longing for Daisy Buchanan.
One of the things that interests me about this book is how it acts as a filter for your own experience. If you’re in high school, the book tends to be aspirational. Gatsby appears heroic in his striving and he’s a charming guy to boot. But that reading morphs into something else altogether when you’re at Bard wearing black turtlenecks. Then the book is pure condemnation. It’s an exposé on the hollowness of the American dream.
I’m not in school, and it’s been a while since I’ve reread The Great Gatsby. But I love Fitzgerald for his language and his choice of subject matter.
Got 140 Characters? Write A Poem.
A Fertile Place for Poetry
Chris Corrigan walks some pretty literary streets–the kind that don’t exist in strip malls.
A few months ago as I was walking in Government Street in Victoria I met a woman standing beneath a tree outside Munro’s Books. The tree had small pieces of paper attached to them and when I looked closer I saw that they were poems, hanging on a “poet tree.†The poet turned out to be Yvonne Blomer and she asked me if she could read me a poem. When I said, with delight, “of course!†she asked whether I preferred any particular subject. I replied that I wished her to read me a poem about the territory of the open heart. She looked at me for a second and then reached into a file folder and pulled out this one:
To watch over the vineyards
O carrion crow, pulpy skull of scarecrow
going soft in your black bill,
in this fetish-orange field lies worship:
the sweep of glossed plumage over glistening
membrane; lies the sweet blood of purple skinned grape
cut on your sharp edged tomia,
shimmering there; sun-light on wet earth.
You too sweet to ripe; you black in the shadows, calling when you’re calling – –
the herds fly in dust gone crow, gone scare,
gone trill in clicks and shouts of krrrkrrr.
It seems to me that poetry belongs outside, in the town square or on the street, like this. It’s a spoken form that doesn’t always translate well from the page, nor make the kind of impact it might otherwise.
From the Novel by Cormac McCarthy
Yesterday the rains fell, so we made our way to Sea Turtle Cinemas for a Saturday matinee. The draw was a new Coen brothers film, No Country for Old Men. I didn’t realize until the credits rolled that it was an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same name. My bad.
Here’s how Miramax describes the story:
The story begins when Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) finds a pickup truck surrounded by a sentry of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones)—can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives (played by Javier Bardem)—the film simultaneously strips down the American crime drama and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
While there’s plenty to say about the film, I’ve been meaning to read All the Pretty Horses for years, so when we got home from the theater, I did some interweb sleuthing on the mysterious man of letters. According to Wikipedia, literary critic Harold Bloom named McCarthy one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and sometimes to Herman Melville. That’s some stout company.
One of the links I followed from Wikipedia describes the dark depths that McCarthy mines. “Like the novelist Honoré de Balzac, who minutely chronicled every aspect of 19th century French society, McCarthy examines exhaustively the reptile brain of Appalachian hillbillies, and assorted Sonoran flotsam.” This latter category is where No Country for Old Men falls.
The imagery from the film (or book, I would imagine) will linger. But not all of it’s vile. Southwest Texas is rendered beautifully, for instance. In the Coen brother’s expert hands, it’s a romantic and timeless place. Sure, it can also be seen as an inhospitable desert, but human dramas play so well against these stark settings.
Seduced By Inanities
Doris Lessing, who published her first book in 1950, won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Her acceptance speech addressed the value of books, or rather their diminshed value in our internet-obsessed modern culture. While certain members of the technorati have poked fun at her for being old-fashioned, I think we ought to listen to her warnings, or find ourselves dumbed down.
The Guardian has her speech in its entirety, but here are a few key portions:
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
Ouch. As a writer who has moved from producing poems, stories and essays to producing blog posts, this hits home. Of course, there is another side to the argument. The side where the internet is a place to share ideas. Many would argue the internet makes us smarter for that instanteous, worldwide sharing. I suppose it depends on how one utilizes the internet. If one’s time is absorbed in cultivating “friends” on MySpace and Facebook, one’s mind is likely not being enriched. On the other hand, if one uses the internet to seek out stories in The New Yorker or other more obscure but equally heady sites, then writers and intellectuals have every right to celebrate this new communications medium.
But what about the computer as composition tool? It’s a great word processor, but to think large and lovely thoughts, email, IM, iTunes and all other “distractions” must be disabled. I write blog posts with these apps running in the background, but the production of literature requires a deeper space.
Lessing has some thoughts on this too.
Writers are often asked: “How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?” But the essential question is: “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.” If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. “Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?”
I dream of that space. And wonder where it might be hiding. Is it inside my own house at five in the morning, before mundane but economically necessary work calls? Perhaps. But it doesn’t look like that in my dreams. In my dreams it looks like a cabin in the woods, or a repurposed guesthouse in the mountains. Wherever it is, I know where it’s not. It’s not inside the web of interlinked items, fascinating and otherwise.
When Writers Are Characters
courtesy of The Pussy Ranch
In a celebrity-obsessed culture like ours, writers can benefit from the creation of a personality that fits and enhances their writerly identity. Of course, it takes a special talent to pull it off. Many writers are simply too shy and otherwise focussed to enter these waters.
In today’s Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, one writer’s journey from Catholic schoolgirl in suburban Chicago to Minneapolis copywriter to totally nude stripper to blogger, author and screenwriter is on display. Brook Busey-Hunt adopted a sexier non de plume–Diablo Cody–and is now a hot property in Hollywood screenwriting circles. Her screenplay for “Juno,†a film directed by Jason Reitman, is set for release by Fox Searchlight on Wednesday.
To get the full effect of her self-induced persona, see this appearance on Letterman. Dave asks her if her stripping wasn’t a form of prostitution and she replies, “I think everything is prostitution in a way…when you’re exchanging some kind of sexual stimulation for money, I think that is prostitution. I mean that’s a heavy question, Dave. Let’s keep it light here.”