“…he [Eastwood] vowed he’d kill Michael Moore if the documentarian ever showed up at his house, the way he had doorstepped Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine.”
“‘I don’t pay attention to either side,’ he claims. ‘I mean, I’ve always been a libertarian. Leave everybody alone. Let everybody else do what they want. Just stay out of everybody else’s hair. So I believe in that value of smaller government. Give politicians power and all of a sudden they’ll misuse it on ya.’”
Posted by admin on May 3rd, 2008 — Posted in MFA, school
Just popping in to give a quick update, as the blog is beginning to decompose over here. In the final stretch of a too-long undergraduate career, studying for finals and preparing presentations, yada yada. And today I’m researching Evansville’s Civic Theater in preparation for an interview with its current director, Lynn Kinkade, this afternoon for a story to appear in the June/July issue of Evansville Living. Looking forward to seeing the inside of the place–such a cool little building they’ve preserved. I drive by it every day and always think, “I should go see a play there.” I’ve been thinking that for years. Why haven’t I? Dunno. But the place used to be a movie theater in the 1920’s that also had vaudeville acts, and its exterior just has a really classic look. I’m hoping the interior is just as cool.
Visited Greensboro last week with SIR for UNCG’s Southeastern Literary and Small Press Festival, and to get a good look at the town where I’ll be spending at least the next two years. Happy to say that it pleasantly surprised me. There are some great restaurants and bars, lots of trees, and really cool people. And it’s such a relief to see that the mall and Wal-Mart and most other corporate eyesores have been relegated to the outer edges of town where I don’t have to look at them (but can still get to them if I need to). It’s not that I’m so anti-corporate or idealistic about such things; I just think these entities are ugly and that they make too many towns look the same. Greensboro feels like its own place, and I like that.
Looking forward to the transition, to a life mostly focused on writing, to hanging out with new friends in a new town. To eating a lot of gyros at Jack’s.
I could tie a bow (?) and showed interest in family, but had a negative self-image and didn’t contribute to group discussions. OK, maybe not much has changed there…
Apparently I had trouble saying words like “top.” You know, easy ones. I wonder how I did on the hard ones?
Not surprisingly, had some trouble with muscular coordination. Oh well.
Posted by admin on April 16th, 2008 — Posted in books, fiction
“The phenomenon of memoirs has several aspects to it, I suppose. There is the therapeutic one for author and reader seeking to reveal, confess, and discuss a real-life problem. There is the desire of readers for Something that Really Happened; my ten-year-old feels this way. Things don’t hold his attention unless they are Actually True. This speaks, too, I think, to the failure of a voice to cast a spell. If prose can cast a spell we will listen to it no matter what it’s saying (and maybe decide afterward whether we like what it’s saying—how else could, say, Lolita work?) If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn’t cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened. So in this way, there is a wider range of prose abilities in memoirs, it seems to me.”– Lorrie Moore, from an interview in The Believer
I’ve heard it a lot lately: I don’t really read fiction. Those who say this mean, of course, they neglect reading fiction in favor of something that really happened. Nevermind that this is so often spoken entirely dismissively to those of us who have built our lives and futures around this very endeavor of creating fictive worlds. Fine, people don’t know what goes into it, and I can’t expect them to. It’s no different than when a well-meaning someone says to you–after you’ve just spent the last eight hours agonizing over half a page of dialogue and feel the entire structure of your story falling apart and have, after years of work toward this singular goal of telling stories in prose, nearly thrown in the towel (again)–says to you, “Yeah, I think about writing a novel sometimes.” You might want to claw out their eyes, or you might want to ask them what they do for a living (Oh a neurosurgeon?) and casually suggest that you sometimes consider doing that (I’ve thought about working on a brain or two…). When it comes to writing fiction, try getting anyone who hasn’t done so to take you seriously. Try, or just let it go and do what you do.
But I digress. My point is this: There is not a single person I’ve ever heard say this who has read, say, Lorrie Moore, or Michael Chabon, or Stuart Dybek, or Amy Tan, or…I’m gonna go ahead and stop myself before this becomes ridiculous. Call me an elitist, but if you don’t like fiction, you’re probably just reading the wrong stuff.
And there’s this, that it’s all fiction. You cannot write what really happened. The dialogue in a memoir, for starters, is nearly entirely fiction (do you remember entirely a conversation you had even last week?). The events get mixed around. New scenes get introduced, irrelevant ones taken out. The timelines shift. You put the thing into the structure of a good story. You should know this going in: what you’re reading did not really happen. It’s all fiction, baby.
Posted by admin on April 13th, 2008 — Posted in books
According to a Facebook survey (only accurate for a pool of Facebook users, I suppose), these are the current top five “books” (in quotes because of number 4) for my home town:
1 The Bible
2 Harry Potter
3 The Da Vinci Code
4 Stephen King
5 To Kill A Mockingbird
