"I do remember disciplining imaginary children in the backseat of my car." Tom Waits on Fresh AirIllustration: "Birds" by Alyson Fox
Monday, October 31, 2011
disciplining imaginary children
"I do remember disciplining imaginary children in the backseat of my car." Tom Waits on Fresh Air
no other reason than a sky
As I Walked Out
Don't tell me you've never dreamed of this –
of waking in a room with a wide open window,
the air clear and ringing after night rain;
of needing no other reason than a sky
the unbelievable blue of which
sends you flitting deftly through the house
past the year-old jar of nails and flies,
the pile of dishes in the sink, and out the back door
where you're caught for an instant in the brightness
because the future's so much easier than you'd thought –
slipping your heart under the rosebush like a key,
everything you need in the canvas bag
and life as simple as turning left or right.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
what are we going to do now, asked tommy
“I don’t know what you are going to do,” said Pippi, “but I know I can’t lie around and be lazy. I am a ThingFinder, and you’re a ThingFinder you don’t have a minute to spare.”
“What do you say you are?” asked Annika.
“A ThingFinder.”
“What’s that?” asked Tommy.
“Somebody who hunts for things, naturally. What else could it be?” said Pippi as she swept all the floor into a little pile.
“Oh, all kinds,” said Pippi. “Lumps of gold, ostrich feathers, dead rats, candy snapcrackers, little tiny screws, and things like that.”
Tommy and Annika thought it sounded as if it would be fun and wanted very much to be ThingFinders too, although Tommy did say he hoped he’d find a lump of gold and not a little tiny screw.
Photo: Cricket via Uncrate
Friday, October 28, 2011
it is a brave thing
It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love. The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean GreerPhoto from NYT Archive via Native Kee
Monday, October 24, 2011
the tuesday interview: hannah moskowitz
There's something about Hannah Moskowitz. She's sorta funny and real. She's written these wonderful books that all the reviewers call raw and poetic and they're right. And she tweets a lot. I started with Break, about a boy who sets out to break every bone in his body. But of course, there's Invincible Summer and you can preorder the hardback of Gone, Gone, Gone now.
RQD: What are you working on now? What interests you about these characters?
Hannah Moskowitz: Right now I'm working on another draft of (what is currently titled) Marco Impossible, my next middle grade book. It's told from the POV of the best friend of an openly gay 13-year-old, so I get to play with a lot of stuff that you don't usually see in MG. There's kissing.
RQD: What other art or artists play a role in your work?
HM: Tom Stoppard, definitely, as far as plays go. Motion City Soundtrack, Death Cab for Cutie, and Bright Eyes for music.
RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?
HM: Indigo's Star by Hilary McKay. I have no idea how many times I've read it.
RQD: What are you reading now?
HM: Right now I'm working on Now Playing, the sequel to Stoner and Spaz, but it's taking me a while because I'm an English major and I have to read a lot for school. My reading-for-pleasure time is very limited during the school year. It pretty much sucks.
RQD: What did you read as a kid?
HM: I read a TON of Middle Grade from a very early age; my mom used to read it to me when I was very young. And since I still read it, that's the age group that feels so timeless to me. There's a part of me that will always be twelve, I think.
Album cover: Death Cab for Cutie Narrow Stairs
in the bay area?
Marnie Webb and I have been doing some fun stuff over at Caravan and tomorrow night, Tuesday, October 25, we're teaming up with Local 123 (yum), Youth Uprising, Urban Adamah and Live Local Mission to host our first Community Hacks, a discussion series focusing on how communities make change. Please join us and if you do, introduce yourself. I'd love to meet you.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
because the new york times
This week's issue of Because the New York Times Doesn't Have Comics is the best yet. Including a kid-friendly gallery of photos from Greenpeace's Esperanza in the Southern Ocean. Photo: February 14, 2007 The MY Esperanza in the Southern Ocean
Thursday, October 20, 2011
did anyone else
hear the interview today with Marie Howe on Fresh Air? "Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die." And she read this.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
the tuesday interview: hila shachar
I met Dr. Hila Shachar when I started blogging in 2008. To me she represents so much of what I find in the bloggers I love -- like Porter and Hollister Hovey, like Vic or the ugly earring -- a relentless curiosity. As I've followed her career, I've been interested in how she channels this restless aesthetic into her work.
RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?
Hila Shachar: My fictional book has been sidelined in the past year as I’ve been working on a separate, academic book I have under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. I’m close to finishing this book, which will be published next year. It’s called Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company. I basically examine various screen adaptations of well-known novels, from the 1930s to the present times. I find this topic fascinating because I’ve always been interested in those narratives that we choose to tell again and again, in different media.
RQD: What art or artists have you been thinking about?
HS: I’ve always been fascinated by Maira Kalman’s and Sophie Calle’s work. There’s something about their perspective that resonates with me. Maybe it’s the way they approach the things we take for granted. I’ve been deeply influenced by directors such as Krzysztof Kieślowski and Jacques Rivette. Their cinema is interrogative and unsettling; it asks questions and seeks to undermine myths. That’s the kind of work I’m interested in. As for music, Kate Bush has influenced me a lot. When I first listened to her album The Kick Inside it was literally like a kick inside. I think it was the first artistic encounter I had with a woman being unconventional. I’d like to create writing that is the equivalent of her music.
RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?
HS: Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Fever 103°’, Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ and Irving Feldman’s Holocaust poems. Feldman’s poems in particular remind me of both the power and limitations of words. He creates double worlds through his poems, in which language is ineffectual in expressing experience, but is also simultaneously necessary to articulate that which has been lost. I guess you could say that most of the books and poems I return to are quite extreme in a sense. I’m most interested in writing that sinks its teeth into you, I don’t like skimming on the surface of things.
RQD: What are you reading now?
HS: I’m re-reading The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters. Both hit me so hard the first time I read them, I needed to return to them a second and third time.
RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?
HS: I read everything as a kid. Remember Spot the dog? I loved him. I also loved Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. But the book that made the biggest impact on me was Wuthering Heights. I didn’t understand much of it as a little girl, and I first read it through a Hebrew translation (I grew up in Israel), but it left a mark on my mind. I think this mark had a lot to do with Cathy. Her rebellious spirit and inability to be pinned down to a single meaning just seemed so right to me. I loved the novel so much that I devoted my PhD to it, and I’m now writing a book on its screen adaptations.
Photo: Still from Kieslowski’s "La Double Vie de Veronique"
Saturday, October 15, 2011
gerhard richter painting
Oh. OH, wow, this documentary: Gerhard Richter Painting via Blood is the New BlackPainting: Gerhard Richter via Blue Vertical Studio
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
new york
Photo from The Select (The Sun Also Rises)
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
i'm writing a new book
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
the tuesday interview: lindsey leavitt
RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?
Lindsey Leavitt: A contemporary YA that comes out in Winter 2013 called AUTHENTICALLY VINTAGE. I'm only about halfway through the first draft, so I'm still getting to know the characters, but I am loving writing from the main characters point of view. She's a mix of breezy and bitter, and I love exploring those conflicting emotions throughout. Her relationship with her sister is also important in the story, and since my little sister just moved nearby for the first time in our adult lives, it's been fun "researching" that relationship more.
RQD: Tell me about other influences.
LL: Oh man. The I-now-feel-inadequete-because-I-don't-have-a-muse question. I have nothing. Um, I have pictures my daughters colored for on my office walls. I stare at those. And lately I've switched off between Jimmy Eat World, Adele and Simon and Garfunkel when I write. A lot of time I'll just listen to one song on repeat over and over again to try to feel a certain mood. Since I write for teens, a lot of those songs are from my late nineties adolescence.
RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?
LL: This probably makes me cliche, but I've read Pride and Prejudice more times than I can count. Reading Jane Austen is like eating cookies, comfortable, familiar and delicious.
RQD: What are you reading now?
LL: I just barely finished Sweethearts by Sara Zarr and like every Sara Zarr novel, I adored it. She is one of the greatest voices in young adult fiction right now, hands now.
I'm also reading Unfamiliar Fishes by Sara Vowell (digging Saras lately). Her books are like having your most charming friend sum up the history class you ditched, with lots of asides and tangents.
RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?
LL: Lots of Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, dozens of Newbery winners. When I think back on those books, it's the characters I remember, and try to keep that in mind as I write. Then in Junior High I discovered the high concept creepy goodness of Lois Duncan and Christopher Pike. Those stories are very different from my humorous and or heartfelt stories, but I think I learned a lot about infusing tension and pacing into a story.
Monday, October 3, 2011
are you
Friday, September 30, 2011
because the new york times doesn't have comics
Illustration from Krtek a pramen
my friend clara says
Photo by Clara Azulay
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
the tuesday interview: andrea seigel
RQD: What are you working on now?
Andrea Seigel: Right now I'm working on screenplays more than books, so I'm writing a script about a new suburban community that starts up out in the desert and the teenagers that attend its very, very small high school. The main character is romantic to a fault even though she's never really had a serious love in her life- extreme romanticism has always interested me because of the divide between the way romance plays out on TV and movies and even in your head, and then the forms it might actually take in your real life. I'm also interested in the idea of a group of people who take a lot of meaning from the initial smallness of their group, which makes it special, and then following to see what happens when more and more people start to come in and dilute that club.
RQD: What about other influences?
AS: The album "Late For The Sky" by Jackson Browne wrecks me, but it also puts a really clear universe into my head, and if I could translate the feel of some of those songs into writing, I'd be amazed with myself. Thomas Kinkade is a big one for me. No, just kidding. There's a photograph by Matthew Spiegelman called "Reconstruction Florida" that I've loved and wanted for years, but can't afford. Oh, and Ralph Lauren's furniture. When I look at ads with rooms staged with his stuff, I get this feeling like I could get a ton of work done if I could just be inside them.
RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?
AS: I'm not really big on returning to things because I don't have the patience for it, but the two books I can say that I've uncharacteristically read through more than once are Catcher In The Rye and John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire. Catcher because I'll pull it out to soothe myself with the existence of a really popular book that's loose on plot, and Hotel because Irving is so intensely great at plotting (I'm not) that I like to go back and marvel at how that book is put together.
RQD: What are you reading now?
AS: I just got Meg Rosoff's new book There Is No Dog in the mail, so I'm starting on that today.
RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?
AS: As a littler kid I read a ton of Babysitter's Club, Sweet Valley High, Nancy Drew. I'm sure they had something to do with my favoring getting to know a character over everything else because I kept returning to series- I was more interested in tracking friendships and relationships than I was in whatever dilemma was contained within whichever individual book. And I'm sure that led right into my adult attraction toward soap operas, serial shows, and Us Weekly. I like the intricacies of personalities and smaller interactions more than I care about big external events.
Photo: Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West [after Cormac McCarthy] 2010 by Matthew Spiegelman
Photo: Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West [after Cormac McCarthy] 2010 by Matthew Spiegelman
Monday, September 26, 2011
the person i am tonight
I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald via lines in my palms
Thursday, September 22, 2011
slipstream
Today: this photo of The Castro by Hedi Slimane, this interview with Tom McCarthy, using an Alyson Fox illustration as a tattoo, how bittersweet Christopher Hitchens is on Joan Didion's new book via Something Changed, This recording of Red Rain via 2 or 3 things, Kelly Link and how being a teenager is like living in a strange world where you don't know the rules, this playlist from For Me, For You and putting together the first Community Hacks event in Berkeley.
spend a year playing pinball
What was most difficult about it?
Same as always: getting to the point where you can believe in the book's world as a viable reality. I don't mean a "realistic" one – just one that's carried by its own momentum. Once you get past that point of critical velocity or whatever, the whole project flies – but it's a fucker to get there.
What, if anything, would you do differently if you were starting the book again?
Once you've written a book and look back at the process, it's like the build-up to a goal. You wouldn't change anything, even the missed passes and accidental ricochets, because they led to what turned out to be the thing.
Tom McCarthy talking about C. on The Guardian
Photo: Matt Winter by Nicholas Maggio on A Time to Get via CrankReport
Monday, September 19, 2011
the tuesday interview: vanessa hua
Vanessa Hua is a terribly cool girl. The kind that writes gorgeous stories, wins important awards, and is impossible to hate because she's one of the hardest working writers I know.
RQD: What are you working on now?
Vaness Hua: After finishing the latest revision of my novel, I decided to step away and work on short stories. In the novel, I'd been working on a thread involving female relationships and betrayal, and I continued to explore that in a short story, albeit in a far different setting, and with far different characters. I'm also working on a comic story, based on true events, yet with a high degree of the absurd. A lot of fun to work on, and the perfect break to take before returning to the novel manuscript. At present I'm figuring out how to work in the brief, brief, moments that I have to myself.
RQD: What's interesting to you about the characters you're writing about now?
VH: Both stories involve deceit and secrets, and how the characters carry that burden. I've found that's an ongoing theme in my work. I became a first time mother in August and I’m interested to see how that will influence and change my writing.
RQD: What other art or artists influence you?
VH: I always struggle with the question of influence. While I can readily tell you whose art and music I admire, who am I to say if those elements are present in my work? It seems presumptuous at best, self-deluded at worst. That said, if my writing reflects the playfulness of Calder’s mobiles, the tactile sensuality of Moore’s sculptures, the reimagining of the familiar of O’Keefe’s paintings, then I would be proud and ecstatic.
When working on specific projects, when pondering character and setting, I’ll listen to music and look at art from that era and locale. For example, for my novel, I pored over Cultural Revolution propaganda art and musicals.
RQD: What book or story or poem do you return to over and over?
VH: It depends on what I'm working on. For example, when figuring out how to weave together narrative arcs in two time periods, I studied Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides and Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill, among others. Anything I read while working on a novel, I find myself drawing connections and comparing, analyzing how other authors solve different narrative issues.
RQD: What are you reading now?
VH: World and Town, by Gish Jen and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski
RQD: What were you reading as a kid? how did those books impact the writing you do now?
VH: I read widely and voraciously, from the copy of Little Women that my mother brought over from Taiwan, to my older sister's copies of Candide and Animal Farm (the allegory flew far over my head), and Russian fairytales I found on the bookshelf at home. In elementary school, I wanted to read every book in the library! My favorites were female heroines who were writers: Jo from Little Women, Anne from Anne of Green Gables, and Laura from Little House on the Prairie, and their examples must have made becoming a writer seem possible. I continue to be an omnivore in the subjects and characters I write about.
Photo: Georgia O'Keeffe via PBS
fictions
Life, as the ultimate unity, lies at the basis of the poeticized. Walter Benjamin quoted in The Night Sky by Ann Lauterbachself portraits
Each of these artists enlists the form of the self portrait in their explorations, be their goal disappearance, self recognition, aggrandizement, invention or abstraction; thus showing the versatility of the form. Nica Ross on Self Portraits via ICP's blog, Fans in a Flashbulb
Thursday, September 15, 2011
that tin-bright vision
Last Thursday I saw Christine Schutt read her story ‘The Blood Jet’ at the Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan. I’ve been to over one-hundred readings by fiction writers but this was the most moving. It wasn’t that she performed it so much as she channeled it. But of course what better reader was there? Schutt had worked over those words, those sentences, those movements–she’d created it out of air. Once there had been a blank page and then there was ‘The Blood Jet.’ It’s an angry piece, people treat each other like slop, but the female narrator admits her wrongdoings as well, her naivete. Schutt busted out this murky tune like Coltrane spilling ‘Dear Old Stockholm’ on his eponymous album. She’d didn’t waver at all, the sentences spun, the inflections rose and sank and we were left mesmerized. I started to watch people in the audience. They weren’t moving, they weren’t coughing. The record for the least number of text messages sent during a reading fell. Greg Gerke on The Big Other
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
the tuesday interview: mark childress
Thanks to author Lynn Freed I was lucky enough to meet Mark Childress at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley a few years ago and he was everything you'd think he might be if you've ever read his books: funny, gracious and a hell of a storyteller.
From Mark: I know so many writers are superstitious about talking about work in progress that it has become a cliche, but hey I guess I am living that cliche. I find that if I pre-tell the story I’m trying to tell, to my friends and those nice people who care enough to ask, at some point I have already “told” it and the juice goes out of it that you need for the writing of the scenes. Does that make any sense?
I will say that I have fallen in love with characters before and usually they lead me where they want to go. This time is no different. It’s funny - this will be my eighth novel and it hasn’t gotten any easier at all. It is more rewarding, though, because I know whatever obscure little thing I put in there, somewhere there will be a reader who gets it. That is really cool.
I listen to a lot of music when I am reading but not when I am writing. I listen to classical music or sometimes old rhythm and blues in the morning to get my brain cells lined up in order. I like rock, too, and I have all kinds of weird tastes. The Beatles, both Elvises, Bruce, Joni. When I am traveling I go to the art museum like everybody else and try to learn something about the people from the art ... but generally you learn only about the artist. You don’t learn anything general, but everything specific.
There are some books I read over again, as soon as I have read it, because I can’t believe how good it was and I want to take it apart and see what made it tick. Other books, I delay and delay because I don’t want it to end. And then of course there are those that are like the second term of the Bush presidency, an endless dreary slog. I like to read Anna Karenina every couple of years. I like to read most of Dickens again and again. I’ve been on a David Foster Wallace kick since The Pale King came out. I cant imagine a year without reading some Marquez.
I just re-read The Broom of the System, David Wallace’s first book. I had a great time with In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Also a gripping crime novel by Jane Bradley, You Believers.
Every summer I teach writing workshops up at Squaw Valley. This year Annie Lamott and I were talking about books we absolutely inhaled as children. I started talking about a wonderful book called Follow My Leader, by a writer called James B. Garfield. It’s the story of a boy who loses his sight in an accident with a firecracker. He has to learn to deal with being blind, goes off to a special school to learn how to work with a seeing-eye dog. The details of the training were absolutely fascinating to me; I used the glasses we got from the eye doctor with our dilated pupils, and went around pretending I was blind like the hero the book. I read that book about twenty times, I’ll bet.
Afterward, at least two dozen people came up to tell me that was their favorite book too. Many of them had forgotten it until I mentioned it. Apparently it was a Scholastic Book Club perennial choice and a great favorite of kids everywhere. I highly recommend it, although it may seem a bit old-fashioned now. (I was really surprised to discover the hero’s name is Jimmy Carter!)
I’ve never written about a blind person yet, so I don’t think there has been any direct influence of the book. But I always try very hard to plunge the reader into the sensory experience of whatever is happening in the story. And I’m sure it’s because James B. Garfield did that to me, over and over, long ago.
Monday, September 12, 2011
was, i repeat, highly prized by me
The slight silken scrape of her knock-knees when she walked quickly was, I repeat, highly prized by me. I thought that if I were a locust such a sound would send me soaring over mountain ranges. From Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow via Karan Mahajan in Canteen
Photo by The Sartorialist
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