1 Notes

Oh, yeah. I forgot you had a new album out. There must be a million people who want to hear crappy versions of songs they forgot about ten years ago.

Farmer John, from Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
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To blog or not to blog

Okay, so I know it’s a bit early in the history of this blog to be thinking about closing up shop. Yeah, it’s crazy early, so early, in fact, that shutting down might be seen as a reflection of my inability to follow through on certain things Internet-related (I have another website that’s badly in need of an update here). I promise that’s not it (entirely). Explanations after the jump…

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11 Notes

For not to know the nature of justice and injustice, and good and evil, and not to be able to distinguish the dream from the reality, cannot in truth be otherwise than disgraceful to [the writer], even though he have the applause of the whole world.

Socrates
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10 Notes

What Revision Means for a Reader

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about revision. I’m currently working on my first novel (well, the first novel that has a chance of getting published, anyway), and as anyone who’s written one of these bears knows, the writing part of writing a novel is easy. Revision is where the work comes in.

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Expression Isn’t Always Art (Expression 2 of 2)

Yesterday I began talking about why it wouldn’t be such a horrible idea to bring art back into the commercial world where its quality could be held to account. That probably seemed a bit harsh, and I’m aware that it’s harsh. Lots of people are cool with Darwinism until it affects them. Then suddenly Darwin and the Devil are wearing surprisingly similar hats. Yet, what I think confuses most people is this conflation of art and expression. The two are not the same thing, and if more people realized this, fewer people would be disappointed by arts funding’s failing.

Okay, I can see you’re not completely buying it. That’s fine. Let me explain…

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If the truth can be yours for $19.95, it isn’t the truth.

Me
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16 Notes

Stop Funding and Do the Arts a Favor (Expression 1 of 2)

According to a recent NY Times article, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/arts/kansas-and-other-states-cut-arts-funds.html?_r=1&hp, state governments (Kansas is the example) are cutting funding to the arts. Now, I’m not going to say that’s a good thing—cutting funding support to any cultural endeavor is bound to wind up making us poorer in the end—but I do think we should spend more time trying to find the bright side of something that is bound to happen given the current economic climate.

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Vigil by Stuart Dybek

I’ve always loved Stuart Dybek’s short stories. This one in The Atlantic’s 2011 Fiction issue is simply brilliant. Haunting, strange and familiar at once: this is the stuff a reader seeks out and lingers over.

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2 Notes

Tired of Central Park

Apropos of nothing else on this blog (at least as of yet), let me say, as a reader, I am f*ing tired of reading about characters from Central Park West or the Upper West Side. I don’t think that needs too much explanation. Let’s just go for some diversity here. And no, I don’t mean reading about black women on the Upper West Side, I mean real, economical and cultural diversity. In New York alone (and I’m well aware that NYC is only one of many thousands of cities worth writing about in the US), there are so many different neighborhoods with so many cultural signatures, there’s almost no end to the amount of interesting stuff a writer could dig up. Of course, that would require that writers spend more time in some of these unsavory neighborhoods, but that’s a topic for a different post. Truly, I should say stop writing about NYC and start writing elsewhere. But let’s be real, if I could only get people to stop writing about the Upper West and East sides, I’d be doing fiction an enormous and lasting favor.

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8 Notes

From bit to it

Right now I’m reading James Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, and the phrase that keeps coming back to me is, “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Gleick’s entire book seems like it’s going to suffer from this ideology (full disclosure: I’m only 15 pages in, so there’s still plenty of time for me to be pleasantly surprised), and it’s revealing to me how much we all, most likely, see nails when hammers are within our grasps.

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