OK, just did the same work on the Critical Work section. Enjoy the stimulation!
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I just spent a couple of hours working on the design of the Personal Essays section, adding clickthrough photos and blurbs to make it a bit more visually, er, stimulating. I'll be doing this with the rest of the links to my work over the weekend. Enjoy, and let me know if there's anything you'd do differently!
After reading a recent article in Poets & Writers and seeing countless references to it on Facebook and Twitter, I just opened a Pinterest account.
So...what now? P&W made it sound like as a writer I need this tool, so what exactly do I need it for? Comments please, either here or on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other social media platform I waste my time on.
I'm guessing this Facebook page was not created in my honor, but it is something to aspire to:
I've had the distinct pleasure of reading Jericho Parms' work in awe for three years now, and I'm thrilled to see her essay "A Chapter on Red" in Hotel America's Spring 2013 volume.
Jericho does something I've seen few writers pull off: writing about art in a way that's neither arrogant nor stuffy. In fact, her writing - and this is what awes me - at its best manages to have both the elegance of fine crystal and the primal cut of a child's scream.
"A Chapter on Red" works in the tradition of Rothko, William Gass's On Being Blue, and Joni Mitchell's Blue (to name but a few), stringing multiple images, stories, and observances along the trope of a single color. In one of these pearls, Parms remembers busting out her front teeth diving for a ball on the sidewalk in front of her home in the Bronx with her brother, and the days afterward:
My brother brought his friends by after school to show off, like a crime scene, the place where my face stained the sidewalk, which was little more than an inkblot, or splattering of paint. And yet, it recorded, like evidence, my first lesson in glory and pain, of how quickly we fall between the two, how humbled we become by our own missteps.
And as if that weren't enough, the new issue of Hotel Amerika also includes essays by auteurs Joe Bonomo and Chris Arthur. Read up!
"Can you imagine startin' here and getting to pitch for the championship of the World Series in New York City?...One thing makes a feller sad is knowin' that's behind, and what's wrong with him is nothing that giving back twenty years wouldn't cure. 'Cept they don't do that, do they?"
These are the words of my great-uncle Preacher Roe, who pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers after growing up in Ozark country, then moved back to those hills to live out much of the rest of his life. This quote comes from The Boys of Summer , which I'm currently plowing through on the recommendation of my friend Matthew Goodman, whom I've thoroughly regaled with stories of the Ozarks, my Kansas youth, and the obsession with New York City - Brooklyn in particular - that brought me to the greatest borough on earth.
I've been thinking quite a lot lately about Preacher, whom I never knew but my Uncle Jim shared letters with late in Preach's life until his death in 2008, which I mention in my piece "I Was Young When I Left Home." Last Christmas, Uncle Jim gave me one of Preach's old gloves; I never played baseball myself, and in fact I was petrified of being hit by baseballs anytime I was near a diamond (okay, I still am), but I like to put that old glove on every once in awhile now and imagine his life.
I also mention another great-uncle in "I Was Young," my grandmother's brother Ollie, who was also from Arkansas Ozark country but never achieved much fame, dying somewhere in France in 1944 after being drafted during World War II. I keep thinking of Preach's words above, spoken when he was 55 years old, and then thinking of my Uncle Ollie, who was 19 years old when he died. They both came from Arkansas hill country. One died young enough that I can say without reservation that he hardly lived; the other lived to be old enough to regret growing old. One achieved a fame bordering on immortality in sports history in a city that welcomed him; the other died violently, alone and unknown in a land he didn't know. Both seem, to me at least, tragic.
Managed to fire up the grill both nights this weekend and once last weekend, with what will surely be three summer staples in the Proctor household (except of course the fiddleheads, which will soon be gone with the cherry blossoms):
Monkfish kebabs
Tilefish silver dollars, with fiddlehead ferns
Brats!
This week's a big one for me - my essay "How to Tell a Good Joke," finalist in DIAGRAM's Annual Essay Contest, finally came out Wednesday. They gave me one of their new t-shirts at AWP in March, so I decided to take a little "promo shot" with it to celebrate.
Mike and Jerry, with some guy from Tupelo
I just saw last night that Allmusic.com posted a playlist of their favorite Leiber/Stoller songs, which reminded me of how much I love the duo. I would in fact say they're my favorite popular songwriting team of all time. I didn't say they're the greatest - who am I to say? - but they are my favorite, and it's not even really close. "You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog," "Yakety Yak," even "Stuck in the Middle with You" are all so indelibly part of our cultural lexicon that I can't imagine a world without them.
But as great as these songs are, they're just that: great pop songs. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller only once - to my knowledge, at least - ventured into a realm of narrative creation that transcended genre, transcended music, transcended time even: the magisterial "Is That All There Is?," made popular in the version sung/spoken by Peggy Lee.
I actually first heard the song as performed by Polly Jean Harvey from her album Dance Hall at Louse Point; this version is, in fact, to me the definitive one. The song's structure of various Important Life Events - one's house burning down, going to the circus, falling in love, dying - rendered in spoken deadpan with the jovially existential refrain, "Is That all there is, Is that all there is? If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing..." are equally perfect for PJ Harvey and for Peggy Lee, and for the countless wandering souls, myself included, who have found refuge for decades in its not-quite-despair.
It shouldn't be surprising that Jerry Leiber found his inspiration for the song in a short story, Thomas Mann's "Disillusionment." The narrator of the brief tale meets a curious stranger at the Piazza di San Marco in Venice and listens to him relate many of the same Important Life Events, marveling at the man's eccentricity. Leiber eliminated the middle man, relating the bitter disappointment of each MLE failing to meet up to her/his expectations in the first person and adding the wonderfully fuck-it-all refrain, and a song was born.
Recently Ivan Santiago-Mercado wrote a fairly comprehensive overview of the song's genesis for The Peggy Lee Bio-Discography and Videography (how's that for a clunky title?), which you can find here. But more importantly you should listen to the song, again and again, or for the first time.
The show opened last weekend at Miranda Arts Project Space in Port Chester, NY and runs to the end of this weekend. And more importantly for all my Brooklyn peeps, it will have limited run outside the Old Stone House in June. More details to come.
In case anyone would like to take a break from reading updates on the lockdown in Boston and googling Chechnya, I just published a review of Donna Steiner's wonderful "Elements" on Brevity.
After such a sustained time reading and responding to student work this past week without so much of the actual teaching, I needed something to remind me of the many wonderful reasons I believe teaching writing is almost as fun as writing. This piece, Dean Bakupoulos's "Straight Through the Heart" from the New York Times, serves perfectly.
I'm coming off a weeklong binge on freshman writing the likes of which I only have to deal with once a year: 60 12-page essays in 7 days. I'm realizing now, looking back at my Facebook posts over the last few days, I'm realizing tat I'm pretty funny when I'm frustrated.
Last night, stepping out from our friends' apartment into a cool, calm spring evening, my almost-four-year-old daughter had a concerned look on her face.
"I can hear the birds singing," she said.
"I know," I replied. "It's nice, huh?"
"But I can't hear anyone talking." Here she grew even more pensive, and stopped walking. "It needs to be NOISY."
Good lord, we've raised a city kid.
Monday's conversation with Clenece Hills went very well, I must say, though I couldn't help calling her Mrs. Hills since I hadn't seen her since she was my junior high mass media teacher.
Charlie's writing, like Charlie himself, is simultaneously wide-eyed and deadpan, innocent and erotic, bewildered and in complete control. His story "Another Cigarette," recently published in Prick of the Spindle, contains all of this.
I'll be on Clenece Hills' radio show "Timeline" in KLWN radio next Monday, April 8 at 10:00EST (that's 9:00 Central for all my friends back in Kansas), talking with Ted Boyle and Jack Todd.
I've recently been engaged on multiple fronts in a far-too-common discourse for me: comma usage. For one, there's the continual struggle with my students over the ever-more-ubiquitous comma splice (e.g., "I went to the store, the bread smelled good"), which I fear is on its way to such common usage that it's no longer even considered bad grammar.
But before I seem like too much of a snob let me just say that, to my mind at least, the comma's primary function is still what it was since its inception: a time marker. Recently while critiquing my friend Cheryl Wright-Watkins's work, I found myself frequently commenting that she should remove a comma here, or add a comma there. After awhile, I felt the need to explain:
My reasoning is that the comma cues the reader to make a slight pause, sometimes because something is important, sometimes to separate words or thoughts that might get jumbled, sometimes because grammar/mechanics dictate it. I think you’re perhaps overusing the comma because you think certain points need to be held for a second, or perhaps made explicit to the reader. But you have to remember that the flipside of this is that every comma disrupts the flow of the writing, so you have to decide (in my opinion, at least) with each comma whether it’s more important to belabor a point or to keep the reader moving. This is of course a somewhat instinctive thing, and I’ll say here that I’m simply marking while reading when I feel like 1) you’re telling me to pause when I don’t want to, or 2) your pause isn’t long enough, thus the ultimate endgame: the period. (Sorry if I got a little dramatic there.)
My friend Richard Slade, a talented tenor with a wonderfully caustic sense of humor, wrote the following haiku to his Facebook page yesterday:
Purring cat on lap/twenty minutes til gym time/sorry cat must go
To which I couldn't help replying, with a bit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves humor:
Did you mean, "Sorry cat, must go" or "Sorry, cat must go"?
And then today, Cheryl emailed me the link to a list essay (perhaps my favorite form of nonfiction) published today on McSweeney's, "The Comma from Which My Heart Hangs," an ostensible grammar lesson on comma usage that doubles as a breakup song. To wit:
4. Commas, in coordination with a conjunction, are also essential when making comparisons and contradictions. For instance:
“I’d call you cold hearted, but you’re clearly heartless,” Benjamin said.
or
“You might call yourself an academic, but you’re the only one who cares what you think,” she said.
This is all to say - well, not much. But just try reading that last sentence without the comma. Or - god forbid - without the dash. Did I mention how important dashes are?
I imagine these two will have a lot to talk about after this busy weekend.
And the next two - well, there seems to be a communication breakdown.
Few writers can do what James Baldwin does to me - that is, to simultaneously make me feel like both a better and a worse person. To wit, from "This Nettle, Danger...":
"We all attempt to live on the surface, where we assume we will be less lonely, whereas experience is of the depths and is dictated by what we really fear and hate and love as distinguished from what we think we ought to fear and hate and love."
Just yesterday Baldwin, a childless homosexual, gave me some firm, sage wisdom on parenting in his essay "Nothing Personal":
"...nothing is more vivid in American life than the fact that we have no respect for our children, nor have our children any respect for us. By being what we have become, by placing things above people, we broke their hearts early, and drove them away.
...
"Children can survive without money or security or safety or things: but they are lost if they cannot find a loving example, for only this example can give them a touchstone for their lives. Thus far and no further: this is what the father must say to the child. If the child is not told where the limits are, he will spend the rest of his life trying to discover them. For the child who is not told where the limits are knows, though he may not know he knows it, that no one cares enough about him to prepare him for the journey."
I read this yesterday, right before I read a post on Facebook by an old childhood friend who was remembering a mentor who'd died in 2011. I learned from this post that this friend of mine been in and out of the court system from junior high through high school. My remembrance of him was of a fun-loving kid with whom I rode bikes around North Lawrence, comparing the cockroaches in our respective homes and the fish we caught at the sand pit and Lone Star Lake. Like many of my friends, I shared with him a gaping hole where a father should be and a mother attempting to fill that hole by housing with a guy ill-equipped to fill it.
Anyway, sometime between junior high and high school, after my friend had been to court roughly twenty times, he was to be sent to a juvenile detention center. That was when his friend's dad bought him a suit, asked the judge at my friend's hearing if he could assume custody, and taught my friend how to clean carpets, the man's business. Now, after the man's death, my friend owns that business.
I'm pretty sure I could read a James Baldwin essay every day for the rest of my life, and find at least five applications for it in that given day.
With that in mind, I've been in a project I started last September of reading all of Baldwin's published essays in chronological order, just a few each month so I could savor them, let them sit with me, let Baldwin seep into my own sensibility. It's been intensely rewarding; I'm now in 1964.
Another reason for my Baldwin project was more mercenary, or at least job-related. Last December, I edited for Hunger Mountain a celebration of of Baldwin's life and work on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death with Jennifer Bowen Hicks, a born-and-bred Baldwinite both in terms of her commitment to her craft and her intense empathy and commitment to social service (besides writing, she runs a writing program for prisoners in the state of Minnesota).
If editing the project taught me anything, it was the deep and abiding love of Baldwin many writers share with me. With that I'd like to present each of the pieces in Hunger Mountain's James Baldwin Project:
"James Baldwin: A Conversational Review," by Marita Golden, Baron Wormser, and Liz Blood, with an introduction by me
"Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone: A Letter to James Baldwin on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of His Passing," by Kim Dana Kupperman
"Another Country: James Baldwin at 'Home' and Abroad," by Sion Dayson
"James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, and the Ethics of Anguish," by Carole K. Harris
"Baldwin in Omaha," by Robert Vivian
Enjoy, friends.