A bit of advice: always return borrowed books, unless you want to be threatened to a sword duel.
Then again, that kind of incident would make for a good Stephen King sequel, if you replace the sword with a killer dog.
When you're writing the manuscript, just make sure Auto-Correct doesn't replace "dog" with "blog."
But a killer blog? That would make for quite a difficult book, and those kind of things are highly praised these days.
You may even get a blurb from Gary Shteyngart if it's quirky enough.
Who knows? It could be adapted into a movie, and next thing you know, you're beating out Vertigo for greatest film of all time.
So knock back a glass of whiskey and start writing. Or reading. Either one goes hand-in-hand with the right booze.
Of course we all have to acknowledge how incredibly sad it is that the beloved brainchild of the brain, Jonah Lehrer, has gone down. Not only has he packed up his New Yorker blog, but his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has pulled his top-selling book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. All because he self-plagiarized and made up some Bob Dylan quotes.
First, can we acknowledge, in addition to the incredible sadness, how morbidly funny this situation is? I mean, really. Imagine? How Creativity Works? Well, it works by making stuff up. Plus, creativity helps to take original ideas out of context or combine disparate ideas that had nothing to do with one another. That’s fucking imagination. Second, can we imagine, just for a moment, the lengths to which Lehrer’s own personal imagination must have gone in order to even desire pulling off such a ridiculous (and probably unnecessary) deception?
I don’t have a degree in neuroscience, so I can’t begin to explain whatever logical or evolutionary brain systems were responsible for Lehrer’s many missteps. But I do have a healthy imagination, so I’d like to propose a few made-up justifications for Lehrer’s choices. (For a rundown of those choices, check out this article in Tablet.)
Reason #1
He’s actually into psychology and wants neuroscience, as a hip intellectual phenomenon, to fail
In the raging battle fought between sciences for popularity—a vicious, cutthroat, and often violent battle—accuracy and peer-reviewed precision are daggers the scientists use to kill each other’s dreams of maybe being read one day. For Lehrer to so blatantly flout the basic tenets of science changes the conversation from science to feelings. Shame, doubt, disappointment...the interest now is not how fun our brains are but how messed up and totally incomprehensible they are.
Reason #2:
He believed himself to be beyond reproach
In other words, he’s got gigantic, delusional balls. Of the gazillion people who are huge fans of Bob Dylan, approximately half have devoted their lives to studying and memorizing everything the man has ever said. How could Lehrer think no one would notice discrepancies? Also, and this is just a hunch, as I haven’t had the chance to read Imagine, but were the fabricated quotes even necessary to prove his arguments? I sincerely doubt the neuroscience of creativity lives or dies based on the lyrics to "Like a Rolling Stone." I'd also like to thank the New York Times for pointing out that Dylan himself likes to keep his facts slippery. Which either means A) Lehrer's mirroring Dylan but just didn't know how to explain the joke to the rest of us, or B) see "delusional balls."
Reason #3:
...and is ragingly jealous that, even with his mind-blowingly hot career, he will still never be as cool as Dylan. Let’s say little Lehrer is at the kitchen table working studiously on some homework while mom has Blonde on Blonde playing in the background. Lehrer tries to show her how his genius kid mind just did something awesome but she’s a little busy singing along to “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” Lehrer launches further into his studies in hopes of one day gaining recognition and becomes super famous neuroscience man, not only succeeding academically but making neuroscience fucking hip. But who will always be hipper than neuroscientists? Rock stars. And as much as Lehrer has utilized science to show us some awesome and true things about humanity, Dylan kinda also already showed us a shit-ton of awesome and true things about humanity. And Dylan didn’t need a degree or science or anything else to do it.
I do think there's an opportunity here for us to acknowledge the fallibility of human beings and get all warm and fuzzy about how all of us fuck up all the time. But what I'd prefer to take away from the whole affair is this: artists are better than scientists, both ethically and as conduits of truth. Bob Dylan uses storytelling and fabrication in order to reach certain truths that never relied on the facts of the matter, but which ring true in people's hearts anyway. Lehrer's entire body of work relies on facts building on top of one another to establish a particular reassurance of truth. Artists work at bringing about new truths from what never existed before. Scientists have a different kind of task, one that must reveal the truth of that which already exists.
The great tragedy, I think (among the many small tragedies here), is that Lehrer could've probably come up with much better untrue things to say.
image: bobdylan.com
Are you a part of the wave of recent Junot Diaz backlash?
Perhaps you should focus your energy on something else. Like Russian lit.
Just don't go on and put any false quotes into any of those authors' mouths.
After all, there's a dearth in professional writers these days, and we can't afford to lose any more.
And with the rise of double jobs these days, it's not too surprising.
So why not give yourself a break and check out the latest Cloud Atlas trailer?
Book sales are running rampart this week if you're looking for a good deal.
After all, you want to support your fellow artists, considering that money apparently feeds inspiration.
We've even got history to back that claim up, so start reaching into those wallets.
Who knows? We might even have the next Stephen King on our hands.
He or she might even pop up among the hordes of self-publishing writers out there.
Let's just hope there's no self-published mommy porn involved this time.
In the wake of the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, discussion of firmer gun control measures has been whisper quiet, if not completely nonexistent. Evan Selinger contemplates the philosophical defensibility of the neutral weapon fallacy, Hegel mourns the ruthless efficiency of the guillotine, and Marshall McLuhan calls out a Reserve Brigadier General, who also happened to be a telecommunications mogul, on voicing the “Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.”
1.
“Like many other technologies, Ihde argues, guns mediate the human relation to the world through a dialectic in which aspects of experience are both 'amplified' and 'reduced.' In this case, there is a reduction in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as dangerous, and a concomitant amplification in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as calling for the subject to respond with violence.”
—Evan Selinger, “The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun,” 23 July, 2012.
2.
“The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off the head of a cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.”
—G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, 1807.
3.
“… General David Sarnoff made this statement: ‘We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.’ That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say… ‘Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.’ That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good…There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.”
—Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964.
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Image: mankindunplugged.com
Like brains but not a zombie? Check out this beauiful, eloquent essay by Black Balloon's founder on the science of brains and writing.
After all, even the military is using neoroscience, so you better start brushing up on it.
Besides, what would Encyclopedia Brown have been without his all-knowing noggin helping him on the case?
It would also be intriguing to visit the brains of Jay-Z and Mary Karr, two artist deliving into artforms they're not known for.
But while you're focusing on your brian, keep an eye on your money, lest you end up like Mavis Gallant and her sketchy lit agent.
As if it wasn't bad enough that writing literary fiction isn't known for bringing home the big bucks.
So in the mean time, just lock yourself up in a room at the Paris Ritz and start pecking away at that novel.
Image source: Evan "Doc" Shaner
Scientists in Toronto have begun to understand a sleep disorder in which the muscles of the body fail to paralyze themselves during REM sleep, causing the sleeper to act out her dreams in various degrees of embodiment. During her fieldwork in the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston contemplates the body called back to life, and Junot Diaz ferries us back to Haiti for the apocalypse.
1.
“What we call ‘sleep’ involves transitions between three different states….REM sleep is also characterized by temporary muscle paralysis. In some sleep disorders such as narcolepsy and parasomnias, like REM behavior disorder, the distinctions between these different states breaks down; characteristics of one state carry over or ‘invade’ the others. Sleep researchers believe that neurological "barriers" that separate the states don't function properly, though the cause of such occurrences is not entirely understood….[M]ost people, even when they are having vivid dreams in which they imagine they are active, their bodies are still. But, persons with RBD lack this muscle paralysis, which permits them to act out dramatic and/or violent dreams during the REM stage of sleep.”
—The National Sleep Foundation on the condition known as REM Behavior Disorder, undated.
2.
“Here in the shadow of the Empire State building, death and the graveyard are final. It is such a positive end that we use it as a measure of nothingness and eternity. We have the quick and the dead. But in Haiti there is the quick, the dead, and then there are Zombies. This is the way Zombies are spoken of: They are bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that, they were called back to life again.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, 1938.
3.
“For six, seven months it was just a horrible Haitian disease—who fucking cared, right? A couple of hundred new infections each month in the camps around Port-au-Prince, pocket change, really, nowhere near what KRIMEA was doing to the Russian hinterlands. For a while it was nothing, nothing at all…and then some real eerie plep started happening. Doctors began reporting a curious change in the behavior of the infected patients: they wanted to be together, in close proximity, all the time.”
—Junot Diaz, “Monstro,” The New Yorker, June 4 & 11, 2012.
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Image: Felicia Felix-Mentor, photographed by Zora Neale Hurston
While you were looking for loose change in your couch cushions, the Fifty Shades author was busy raking in a cool $1 Million.
Perhaps you should become a justice-seeking vigilante in your spare time to gain a similar amount of fame.
Just don't give up on the book business too soon. Even the tastemakers over at Pitchfork are dipping their toes in.
You'll be in good kompany, konsidering the youngest Kardashian sisters are also taking up the pen.
While you're at it, make sure to throw the English readers a bone -- apparently they're the worst served in the Western world.
Maybe these upcoming European books will shed some light on the situation.
Though the short story business could use more support, considering that their awards are dropping like flies.
Image source: Getty
Flavorwire posted a list of ten of the best books set in the Midwest, and since I’m currently reading Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (#1 their list) and residing in our nation’s heartland (right around where much of Freedom is set), I figured I could help those of you who are unfamiliar with this vast terrain. Here are five things that make the Midwest such fertile ground when it comes to novels.
1. The illusion of safety
Sure, there’s probably less crime (there are, after all, fewer people), but the Midwest is also full of folks less likely to report certain behaviors as criminal. If you have a character who needs to get away with some things, there are a whole bunch of Midwesterners more than happy to look away and tend to their own business, or the neighbors are so far away they’d hardly notice anything awry. This doesn’t mean privacy, exactly; it just means there is more space for those wanting to be left alone. Midwesterners gossip, but we usually don't ask questions.
2. Everybody knows your name
Everyone is in everybody’s shit all the time 'cause they all know each other and there isn’t much more excitement than other people’s shit. If you don’t share with everybody, everybody will talk shit about you. They’re all paying attention. Newcomers and committed outsiders are easy protagonists because it is easy here to rub against the grain.
3. Nature will scare the shit out of you
In the Midwest, nature isn’t just something pretty to describe; it's a force that no one can control and that affects everyone’s day-to-day life. Just askAnder Monson. Nature can be a legitimized mood swing or full-on devastation of life and home. Looking for a villain but don’t want to look too hard? Set your novel in the Midwest and look up. Or down. Take cover and build your ass a canoe.
4. Desire for days
A person cannot help but want something bigger, brighter, and more fantastic if they happen to be confined to the Midwest. Desire will not likely be satisfied here. There will be compromise. The Thai food will not fulfill even your lowered expectations (though if you try really hard you can get great Indian in Ohio and the Cambodian in St. Paul is phenomenal). There is always something better, on either coast, in any big city. All characters must want something, and if your characters reside in the Midwest, they inherently want more. And most of them want out.
5. Space and time (way too much of them)
This is how John Jeremiah Sullivan describes his home state: "when I say "Indiana"…blue screen, no?" There is little to blame frustrations on other than yourself, and yet there is also little to be distracted by, so you’re constantly aware of your own failure/discontent/alcoholism. What’s wrong is your soul: your natural, uncomplicated, and unfettered soul. In a true Midwestern novel, it’s not society that’s fucked; it’s people. I like to think of this as clarity, and it’s great for fiction that strips off the superficial nonsense and cuts right to the bone.
Image: foxnews.com
A Black Balloon Publication ©