Author Archives: weinberg

self-blogerential, writing

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.

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self-blogerential, writing

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.

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Uncategorized

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.

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Uncategorized

ovhd in sbux

Man: Aren’t you my bus driver? I know you’re my bus driver.
Woman: (unintelligible)
Man: You’re great.
Woman: (pause)
Man: Come on. You’re great. I know you’re great. I know you’re great! Come on!

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Uncategorized

Firefox

prevented this site from opening a pop-up window, but it didn’t prevent me from feeling a sense of nostalgia for Northern California. Stay classy, Mountain View! It’s never enough time with anyone there.

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writing

Never change anything if you don’t agree with the change.

You taught in the John Hopkins writing program for 26 years before your retirement. What sort of impact did this role have on your own fiction? What were some of the most vital lessons that you endeavored to impart on, what turned out to be, a generation of writers?

I taught for 27 years. Sept., ’80 to June, ’07. Maybe that is 26 years. Teaching had no impact on my writing.

My main characters were often teachers in college, but you rarely saw them teaching. One story, “Eating the Placenta,” in my 1984 collection Time to Go, has a teacher trying to avoid an unavoidable student who wants feedback on a story he’s written. The teacher wants to hurry home to attend to his wife, who called him in his office to say she needs to be taken to the hospital to have their first baby. The student is unrelenting, follows him most of the way home. That’s an example of how I included my teaching experiences into my writing.

Or in Frog, a writing teacher goes crazy in the classroom, turns over a table, needs quick psychiatric help. Otherwise, I found the academic setting void of material. I kept the experience of teaching on the outskirts.

Lessons? I taught line by line, story by story, word by word. I told them there were no rules in fiction writing. I was always encouraging, pointed out where they were writing well, was very easy on them when they weren’t writing well. My young writers were very sensitive about their work, and I didn’t want to hurt any of them. My impression of their work meant a lot to them. Somehow, they all became better writers. Benevolence works. I told them never to fool themselves that something is better than it is. Don’t call a work finished till it’s the best you can do. Never change anything if you don’t agree with the change. Develop self-editing skills, because one day you’ll be out there writing alone. And so on. Practical advice. Don’t let rejections stop you if writing is what you love most to do. And don’t change a word just to get it published. If you do, even once — I don’t care for how much money or recognition — you might soil your writing from then on.

– Stephen Dixon, interviewed by Sean Carroll in the December Bookslut.

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Cali

va”continued”cation

Yesterday, after ashtanga:

(1) Posted new sound files from “Cat Jeoffry” at the Parallel Octave site yesterday.
(2) Brunch! Original House of Pancakes in Los Altos.
(3) Harry Potter 7 for the 3rd time, with P’s friends J and B.
(4) Chinese food en masse at Z&P’s traditional dim sum restaurant on Castro. Mmm.
(5) Falling asleep before a screening of Dark City could commence. (Still jet lagged.)

Today, I am working from Z’s place this morning, then going to San Francisco to see old friends.

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Cali

yesterday,

I finished a grant proposal for a filmmaking project–Parallel Octave wants to make a film composed of ten or so short music videos for our audio tracks.

Then I spent some time that afternoon in Books, Inc. and Dana St Coffee with Z. Old Mtn. View haunts. It’s nice to be on the West Coast, where the latest, most wild McSweeney’s releases are in the bookstores.

Afternoon: Okami, The Video Game Where You Get To Be A Wolf. Evening: Momoya sushi with L&C, followed by double-15 chicken-feet dominoes, Scotch, and Joe’s O’s. They are going to be RF/CD/resident adults in a dorm at Stanford next year. I’m proud of them, and really excited to visit them on campus.

This morning I went to my first Ashtanga class ever. Today, some sort of unscheduled hanging out is in order.

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