Ocean Vuong is the model Asian diasporic poet from the genocidal imperialist's assembly line. Vain and self-centered. Ahistorical, incurious, opportunistic. The empire's clerks type furiously, hoping the clicking sounds will drown the screams from their beloved atrocity machine
once, on a non-smoking overnight train from malmo to berlin, i noticed we'd been stopped for a while, so i decided i'd hop off and have a cigarette, only to find that the whole train was on a ferry on the baltic. that was a beautiful night, a genuine surprise.
jesus christ. i assumed this poster was mistaking YA for literary fiction, but i looked it up and this author was longlisted for the booker prize, or as her website has it, the booker price.
take the beginning of this chapter: this is entirely just description, as if someone were recollecting a scene from a film in an overly detailed way. this type of writing used to relegated to the fringes of genre, now it's all over literary fiction. this is not creative writing.
'catcher in the rye' hate has changed in my lifetime. when i was younger, it came from people who thought it was childish, and now it comes from people who think all books should have pictures and characters with magical powers.
the plagiarism is less interesting to me than how the impulse to be considered a writer overtakes the actual desire to write, which is apparent throughout the essay.
would be funny if you talked about literature on here in the way you talk about politics, eg, 'realism is a deathcult,' or, 'metafiction is disinformation.' would also achieve similar results (none).
this is what my novel, 'the apology,' will look like. it'll be out 11/1/2021. as the cover makes clear, it's set in the office and at chili's. here are things that some writers i admire very much said about it:
if i'm about to blow my life up to keep writing, then let me post this writing advice denis johnson had pasted to his printer. (the only good writing advice ever)
the only people i find it hard to love are the joyless, but then i remind myself how difficult it is to commit to joylessness and i love them for that. i love almost everybody.
the little guy i'm holding in this picture turned 13 today. he'll probably be taller than me by the end of the year. he's going to rome tomorrow because he really needs to see the colosseum. just a rad person — couldn't be more proud of him.
89 years is a nice long life, but the fact that he was still capable of writing books as good as 'the passenger' and 'stella maris' makes me wish he had another decade or so.
@nate_knapp24
i knew there was water between sweden and germany, but i just assumed the train would go the long way around while i slept. my brother and i grabbed chocolate and beer from the duty free and went up to the top deck all night. one of my favorite memories.
nabokov's 'picnic, lightning' is probably still the best parenthetical ever, but saul bellow really gave it everything he had in 'mr. sammler's planet.'
Cormac McCarthy is dead. Martin Amis is dead. People are making nice noises about their dedication to style. None of it makes any difference to authors who imagine they can choose their influences, as McCarthy and Amis did.
whenever i'm writing a book, i hit a point where i know it'll be unacceptable by mainstream standards. anyway, hit that point on the book i'm working on today. you can decide for yourself when it comes out on a micropress in ten years.
i took a couple of workshops with john ashbery in college and i don't remember there being any craft talk. he would just say 'this is good' or 'i don't get it' and then tell funny stories or give us good poems to read. i miss that.
i love watching the slow acceptance that ellis is one of the best writers or our time. (one of the few positions i staked out unironically from the beginning, a hill i knew they couldn't kill me on)
fortunately my advisor, garielle lutz, and i both left academia, and garielle's mentor, gordon lish, was not an academic in the first place, tho of course, lish edited ol' ray carver, who taught at the program i attended, but that was long before i went to work with george sau
20 years into our marriage, my wife just used the phrase 'if you're looking for something to do,' and i had to explain to her that i am never, ever looking for something to do.
i'm all for self-promotion on here, but i saw somebody call his own forthcoming book 'powerful, devastating and heartrending' and i don't think that's how you do it.
i simply do not maintain friendships with people who are bad at art. my friends are either good at art or they don't make it. (goes without saying that they are all funny and attractive)
during today's 'humanities are dying or not' discourse, i met with an engineer about semiconductor policy, and when i pointed out that there's an ethical component to all aspects of chip design, production, and distribution, he said, confidently, 'not materials.'
i know it's cool and romantic to say the humanities serve no purpose, but it was actually very dumb of us to leave the big decisions to STEM and social 'science.'
this novel of mine, published in 2007, went out of print almost immediately (because it was too good) (this is true, but a long story) and is now available for preorder.
it should go without saying, but as review copies of my new novel make their way into the world, i'll remind you that the narrator is my mouthpiece, and i endorse everything he says and does. the other characters are also me.
in all the panic about how ai will ruin education, i haven't seen anybody point out that the humanities are best when a bunch of people read a book and then sit around a table talking.
A first line should open up your rib cage. It should reach in and twist your heart backward. It should suggest that the world will never be the same again.
COLUM McCANN
#amwriting
#writing
#writetip
all this barth talk on the timeline reminds me of when people in grad school would ask me why i still read the postmodernists, and all i could say was that they seemed like the only writers who were having any fun.
i never met gian, but this is devastating. i know a handful of writers who are committed to doing their own thing, but as an editor/publisher, he might have been a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. love to his friends and family.
my son is handling this surprisingly well, but every now and then he stares off into space and says, in a kind of haunted voice: i wanna go on a train.
i get psyched every time i remember that in june, the library of america is publishing barthelme's complete stories in one volume, in the order of the original collections, which is something i've wanted since i discovered him in high school.
it would be cool if the academy chose another outsider for the nobel this year. someone who specializes in short stories and hasn't published a book over 200 pgs. an american, recent transplant to the hudson valley, maybe. not a great dresser, hair a total mess, fun to drink wit
i always repost pictures of my books because i'm here to promote my work while i goof off with weirdos. but you need to know that i got my copies of 'we go liquid' yesterday and pictures can't do it justice — it's a really pretty object.
@longdaypress
did a great job!
it is charming for me to see the children posting about their feelings to richard siken — and siken responding so generously — because he gave me the most ruthless edits i've ever gotten, which was also generous (made me a better writer).
dead: nathaniel hawthorne, nikolai gogol, isaac babel, flannery o'connor, augusto monterroso, donald barthelme, barry hannah
alive: rebecca curtis, padgett powell, garielle lutz, robert coover, camille bordas, myself
the fucked up thing about my insistence that you can read and enjoy books by monstrous people is that when i die there are gonna be all kinds of articles saying, like, actually he was a good dude, fun to get beers with, dependable, set the dance floor on fire, tipped well, etc.
have now read both the dewitt and krasznahorkai, and if the other new directions storybooks are anywhere near as good, this will be the best publishing series ever.
my motivation for finishing this novel is that i will never feel compelled to write another novel again. it will be short stories for the rest of my life. i say this every time.
Lauren Groff's writing process: "she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over...working from memory...only the best, most vital bits survive."
i like this line from lorentzen's piece on amis, and, without having actually formulated it this way before, i've applied it to every book i've ever read.
my son is 13, and he grew up in a cramped apartment in chicago, but i was still not ready for how stoked he'd be to pick out a huge christmas tree and set it up in our spacious living room today. he was so happy.
this is a disaster. on the same day penguin decides to re-uncensor roald dahl, all of my publishers have banded together to announce that they are removing references to chili's and applebee's in my books and replacing them with the cheesecake factory.
blurbs definitely help small press writers and readers. but also, my first book had a blurb from george saunders, which led to many negative reviews that said, 'this dude is not like george saunders.' (i'm a calvinist not a buddhist)
a classmate in grad school did a whole presentation pronouncing goethe as go-eeth. one of the smartest people i know and my favorite living short story writer.
analytic philosophers should try reading fiction. i just read about how derek parfit 'discovered' the 'non-identity problem' when it was basically the premise of 'tristram shandy' three centuries earlier.
i always thought it was corny when people said they wrote to comfort the uncomfortable, but that was infinitely preferable to an entire literary culture dedicated to comforting the comfortable.
'In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.'
1. Ever wonder what the rest of the Mona Lisa looks like?
Got
@Adobe
Firefly to help fill out the background for me with the power of AI
Here's what the backgrounds of the most famous paintings in the world look like with AI:
salman rushdie did a reading/talk at bard while he was still in hiding. it struck me as very courageous and was a formative experience for me. i'm praying for him.
almost done with the first draft. looks like it will be more like five weeks. (spread out over two-plus years, due to late capitalism or whatever it is you guys are blaming things on these days)
still reading 'the passenger,' still considering the responses, imagining people reading 'the trial'and being like, 'josef k. is clearly guilty of something, but kafka will not reveal why he is bad.'
people like to rhapsodize about maxwell perkins, but really the best editor of all time was whoever at the new yorker read a donald barthelme story and said 'let him cook.'
my son asked me to take him to the grocery store to buy spherical ice cubes, and when i asked what he wanted to do with them, he said, 'marvel at them, i guess.' (we will get them tomorrow)
i agree that a book should be as long as it needs to be, but somehow 350 pages is almost always exactly 150 pages shorter or longer than it needs to be.
my wife doesn't read my fiction, and there's usually no reason to show her what i write for my day job, but today i read her something i wrote about quantum computing and it made her laugh out loud, so my career's going ok.
probably also worth pointing out that 'satanic verses' is a good book. i haven't read it since i was in my teens, but it lit me up at the time. i remember the prose seemed so full of joy i wondered what his face looked like while he wrote.
there was a group of blind people at my bus stop today, and one of them was like, 'who woulda thought there'd be 4 blind motherfuckers here at the same time!' and they all laughed because there were actually 5 of them.
gotta be honest — i wasn't particularly interested in the eclipse, just wanted to see some friends and make my wife happy by taking her up to the adirondacks to be a hippie for a day. but the totality was eerie and stunning, one of the loveliest things i've ever seen.
i know it's unfashionable to like auster, but tonight i was reading 'the music of chance,' and there's a very brief scene — set at a dinner table — that made me laugh out loud, which is rare, and not something i expected from auster at all.
last year i predicted that i would move into a house on a waterfall and that happened. (i had already bought it.) this coming year i think i will finish writing a novel called 'anderson, awake.' i also hope you get to do some of the things you want to do.