A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“Aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists, to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
“Shame is a soul eating emotion.”
—Carl Jung
“Don’t think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical.”
―George Saunders (from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline)
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
"There are still subjects that are in the Realm of Pain Beyond Uncomebackability."
—Bill Peters (from Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality)
Do you see the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "uncomebackable" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: TimeOut New York, Newser, NYTimes, ABC News, Slate
Answers to last week's installment:
- "Hank Williams Jr. lashes out at Obama: ‘We’ve got a Muslim for a president who hates cowboys’" (Yahoo News)
- "Iran: If Israel Attacks, We'll Retaliate ... Against US" (Newser)
- "I HAD A FACE TATTOO FOR A WEEK" (Vice)
- "Crime Writer RJ Ellory Caught Faking Amazon Reviews" ABC News)
- "Clint Eastwood's GOP Speech: President Obama, Celebs React to Star's Chair-Talking Ad-Libbing" (eonline)
While I find it very exciting (and positive!) that the naughty vs. nice criticism debate has so thoroughly made the rounds, I’m starting to wonder if people have forgotten that the internet isn’t just about commenting and connecting; it’s also about doing things differently. To me, the fuss isn’t really about being too nice (frivolous) or mean (unproductive). The real issue is that people demand better writing from their criticism: criticism that demonstrates an honest, thoughtful engagement with the book at hand regardless of attitude or posture.
Let me be very clear: personally, I think meanness and cruelty can be exceptionally funny. But I have my suspicions that in this day and age, in the panicked pleas for attention, attitude often usurps critical engagement because that approach gets hits. My issue with the much despised William Giraldi review of Alix Ohlin is that I learned more about William Giraldi — how important it is for him to show us how smart he is — than the books he was reviewing. Book reviewers (traditional ones, anyway) can totally go ahead and be scathing and super mean, but they should be tearing the book apart so we know what’s wrong with the book, not what’s right and self-righteous about the reviewer.
But! We don’t have to live like this. This is the internet. We don’t have to play within the rules of naughty or nice. The Times Literary Supplement,Harper’s, and sometimes the New Yorker still contain very good, serious reviews, but we can also help foster a literary environment that is more interested in exploding the conversation than ending a dialogue at "good" or "bad." Take any shitty book and analyze the decision to write it in the first- or third-person — and then discuss how this may mirror or contradict the "modern experience" of the grocery store, text messaging, OkCupid. How does the author grapple with new media, and how do those choices affect our sense of authenticity? Throw the book into the mortar of anthropological linguistic analysis of pronoun usage. Identify the author’s tics and psychoanalyze the crap out of the poor person who made the mistake of showing their book to you.
There are countless games to play beyond Billy-said-he-likes-it-but-Suzie-said-it-stinks. The Millions, Flavorwire, and BrainPickings have shown that there is serious fun to be had plowing through literature, whether it's top ten lists, favorite quotes, or essays on craft or writer's conferences, and there's no reason we can't invoke that same sense of seriously engaged, enthusiastic play when it comes to reviewing. What I want from criticism is thoughtful engagement with books, the ideas they spread, and the processes by which literary effects come about. While traditional book reviews can and will still accomplish this, there is ample space for criticism that is concerned less with assessment and more with exploration — with enlivening the ways we talk and think about books.
image: doanie.wordpress.com
Sometimes in life, you have to give up the one you love for the sake of a Pulitzer.
But would you do the same for a PEN Literary Award?
Too bad such a decision can't be wrapped up with a happy Pixar ending.
Perhaps that's why so many people seem to be disowning their work nowadays.
On the extreme end, you could just give up writing all together and join the Amish.
But first, you'll want to pawn all those priceless first editions you've been hoarding.
And if you happen to have a pair of those new-fangled prism reading glasses, you might want to keep them.
After all, you know how these twentysomethings love nostalgia of not-so-bygone ephemera.
You know what? Just suck it up and act your own age, or at the very least, your pop culture age.
A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“Confronted by evil, comedy feels no need to punish or correct. It answers with corrosive laughter.”
-Martin Amis
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”
-Romans 12:19
“All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”
-Salinger (from The Catcher in the Rye)
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
-Truman Capote
“Immediately, I’m scanning for anything that might be not just Murman-level Uncomebackable, but Pharaoh Uncomebackable, something so Pharaoh Uncomebackable that Necro will never leave his house again.”
-Bill Peters (from Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality)
Do you see the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "uncomebackable" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: news.yahoo.com Newser, vice.com, abcnews.go.com, eonline
Answers to last week's installment:
- "11 Best Remixes of the Botched Ecce Homo Painting" (jest.com)
- "Man Who Shipped Himself in a Box to His Girlfriend Nearly Suffocates After Getting Lost in the Mail" (Gawker)
- "6 Memorable Letters from Neil Armstrong" (mental_floss)
- "A Pop Queen Flaunts Her Toned Maturity" (NYTimes)
- "Facebook New Campus | Frank Gehry" (arch20)
A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill — it’s a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider.”
—Vincent van Gogh
“To be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless."
—Lacan
“That is why delirium and dazzlement are in a relation which constitutes the essence of madness, exactly as truth and light, in their fundamental relation, constitute classical reason.”
—Foucault
“In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!”
—James Joyce
“Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculptor of his own brain.”
—Santiago Ramon y Cajal
Do you see the connections? Write your guesses in the comments, and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: twitpic.com/amkkt2, Gawker, mental_floss, New York Times, arch2o.com
Answers to last week's installment:
Forget what you see on 4Chan and Reddit, some people think that the Internet is becoming too nice.
Though the Twitter-war that escalated from a harsh book review suggests otherwise.
Not to mention the smackdown that was William Giraldi's review of Alex Ohlin's latest book.
Perhaps those people should go into bookselling, where things seem to move at a much more pleasant pace.
In fact, that community can sometimes bring about miracles if they set their mind to it.
Hey, even the porn industry is experiencing a renaissance in the literary fiction word.
But if that career option is moot, you could always try writing your own version of Tolkien's classic trilogy.
But we hear there's an innovative new book coming out soon that might even be --dare we say-- better?
A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”
-Andy Warhol
“Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We’re all nerds, on one subject or another.”
-Jonathan Lethem
“The brain is the organ of destiny. It holds within its humming mechanism secrets that will determine the future of the human race.”
-Wilder Penfield
“The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.”
-Jose Saramago
“A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.”
-Nikos Kazantzakis
Images: New York Magazine, Slate, BBC.com, BBC News, CBS News
With the death of the author, Helen Gurley Brown, one can't help wonder what Cosmo would have been like without her.
Perhaps they would have gone the Vogue route, and featured famous authors in their fashion spreads?
Or maybe they would've taken a stark, realistic tone and alerted readers about the latest rise in potent STDs.
Though such a grim article could probably use some Lenny Bruce-like levity.
Or you could always hit up one of the top 10 richest authors to throw some literary bones your way if the subject isn't to your liking.
If all else fails, you could always retire to Argentina, where aging writers get a nice little pension.
Just don't take the same route of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun's hero and wind up in jail.
How do you think that kind of incident will look on your college transcript anyway?
The Millions recently proposed the idea that if MFA graduates were finding themselves unsatisfied with adjunct teaching (which, um, obviously), they should look into teaching high school. Nick Rapatrazone, the post's author, does make some pretty sexy arguments for giving your time to sweaty, self-interested quasi-adults who are horrifying at being adequately human toward one another. Still, I’d like to supplement his advice with a few second thoughts.
Let me be clear: if you’re into teaching high school, I applaud you. The prospect of a bunch of MFAs entering the public school system with enthusiasm and literary encouragement fills me with excitement and something close to glee. But as long as we're weighing it against adjunct teaching, I feel other perspectives might be of use.
Maybe try being poor for one minute. This is not to encourage anyone drowning in adjunct drudgery to continue drowning in adjunct drudgery. You are a sucker and totally not being paid what you’re worth. If you get some weird sadistic glee out of the it, please, by all means, keep encouraging universities to crumble under the weight of their own lack of integrity.
But I have to ask: since when were writers supposed to be comfortable? You really want to have to go back to high school just so you can pay rent? In this economy, I say take whatever shitty job you can get. But I also suspect that there’s this lingering hope that getting an education guarantees some future stability in a fulfilling career. I kind of have the feeling that the whole MFA-to-high-school-teacher track is an adjustment, a concession to the dream that was really only for the generations before you. That shit was for the baby boomers and whatever unnamed generations became between them and...what, Gen X or Y? You need to talk to your grandpa (great grandpa?) about the Depression and lard on bread and some shit 'cause you want way too much.
My point here is that if you want stability while you write, be an artist who doesn’t need the approval of a teaching career. Stop thinking you’re owed something because you went to school. School was a privilege you lucked out on. If you write, worry about writing and don’t give a shit about anything except forming your life to allow writing to happen. And if youstill want to teach, god bless.
People who went to school for teaching K-12 are turning away from careers in education. My own mother, an excellent and incredibly dedicated public school teacher for over thirty years (and counting) has said she probably wouldn’t have gone into teaching if the atmosphere had been the same as it is now. This largely has to do with the sheer amount of time spent on test preparation for tests that don’t actually result in students learning anything. I find it horrifying that teachers no longer have as much discretion in what they teach, and I find it doubly horrifying that potentially excellent teachers might be turning away from that career because education is now such a shit show. Sure, steady paycheck, making a difference, etc. etc., but anyone going into teaching high school English under the impression that they’re going to teach kids how to appreciate literature should know that such labors will account for maybe twenty percent of their workload.
I hope with all my heart there are folks out there who will fight to make public education better, whether from the classroom or the capitol. But, my fellow MFAs, just know that it will indeed be a fight.
image: bestofthe80s.wordpress.com
A new weekly series that explores a featured theme—this month, it's "Headcases"—by pairing timeless quotations with urgent images. Read on, spot the connections (some are more hidden than others), and by all means quote your favorite headcase in the comments.
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