auld lang syne.
Monthly Archives: December 2010
by whatever means necessary
“[Saunders]…In a certain way, if you keep trying to serve the story you would inadvertently or unwittingly push something into a three-act structure.
Guernica: In steering away from your own drift…
George Saunders: I think so. Someone told me once–I mean I said, “Is it ok that I don’t really know what the three-act structure is?” And he said, “It’s basically: Act 1–a guy climbs up a tree; Act 2–people come and throw stuff at him; Act 3–he gets down.”
Guernica: [laughs]
George Saunders: It’s like that with any story. If I say, “Oh, I got so wasted last night, and I drove my car into the Mississippi and then a fish came up and bit me on the ass and luckily I was able to swim to shore,” that’s a three-act structure. I spent a lot of time when I was in my twenties really torturing myself about things like scene and plot and character and stucture–is this a story? is this a novella? So, you know, and then I realized, “Actually, dumbass, all I have to do is keep the reader’s attention for twenty pages, by whatever means necessary.”
-George Saunders, interviewed in Guernica. He has a great short story in the New Yorker now. Via T.B.
this must be distinctly understood
“There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot–say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance–literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.”
– A Christmas Carol, OUP:1989, 7
the first banjo I ever played
is back, and sitting on a bed of Beckett and Proust in the bedroom. It’s good to see you again, too.
this morning,
before work, I walked to a coffeeshop, and I had Larry Levis’s book Elegy in my bag.
As I put it in there, leaving the bedroom, I immediately thought of a blog post that ran something like “This morning / reading Elegy at ___name of trendy coffeeshop____, (sentence continues.)”
Arrgh. Documenting your own life loses authenticity in both the documentation and the life if you start altering either for the appearance of the other.
And yet it is not wrong to be always thinking of the documentation. It’s just that it (the constant thought) can lead to a certain forcedness.
I did not take Elegy out of my bag. I’ve just gotten to the point that I don’t like to leave the house without a book of poems stashed somewhere. Having bought Howl in SF, this has become easier. (And that last is true, not something I made up because it would sound good in a blog post.)
To work, to work. More editing.
new sound files
from November and December for Parallel Octave (“For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry” and “The Second Coming“) are live now on the site.
This one is my favorite: it’s the last recording we did of Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” and the last chorus we recorded in 2010.
Recently on Facebalk,
two of my friends, J and A, each linked to a post, “This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult,” on the Allie Brosh humor blog Hyperbole and a Half. I looked at it, and then I read most of the blog, and then I started writing (by hand, not using a computer drawing program as she does) a journal entry of my own with similar interspersed pictures, trying to use the same format of larger chunks of text interspersed with drawn illustrations.
I really, really like what happened. Really. Really. Alot. I intend to put it up soon.
The results reminded me of other ventures I have made into drawing with text. I’ve experimented with this quite a bit in the past but never found the right balance for myself. I am not a very good artist. I get impatient. I tend to write lots of text and then bore myself having to go back and insert all the pictures. I have several long, long semi-comics that are entirely written and only partially illustrated.
What I like so much about Allie’s format, however, is that she permits herself to use as much text as necessary before inserting the next picture. (In the manner of the This Recording photo essays and other things on the internets, yes, but I hadn’t realized before now that this format would work for memoir/humor/narrative nonfiction sort of things as well as journalism.)
So this means that when writing a picture/story thing, you do not have to use a picture in every panel. The entire idea of “panels” is out. Your images illustrate the text, as in a newspaper article, but you have a much higher percentage of images to text because the format permits you to “print” them without any added cost.
You only need to use as many pictures as you want. For punch lines, or illustrations. It’s like a storyboard with more story than board.
This. Is. Excitement.
Coffeeshopsody
The bottles of Torani syrup line your shelves like monks in their bunks,
and the window across the boulevard is almost smothered with tall green trees of all heights and varieties,
which are themselves obscured by an assortment of capital-lettered SUPERIOR auto-body shops,
and those are covered by cars in motion, square-backed and train-straight in their paths,
and those part-obscured by parked cars,
and those bisected by tables,
and those appended by people with drinks on barstool chairs,
and those cut off by the screen of my laptop,
and my hands on the keys. This place.
This place. I am getting increasingly less work done
the more I look at the landscape. This place, where all things
are several at once.
there are some days
when editing is like being punched in the brain with a sandbag, and others when it is like sliding down a staircase, and others when it is like sliding down a staircase made of sandbags.
Dara Weinberg 