Douglas Kearney : The Labor of Stagger Lee: Boar
Rachel Jamison Webster writes a thrilling poem about purpose and pregnancy in Dolphins at Seven Weeks.
Like any good sonnet Anthony Opal’s “Sonnet” is full of lots.
Month: March 2013
My Upcoming 3,000th Tweet
Like many of the people I follow on Twitter, I try my hand a writing jokes. I’m coming up on 3,000 tweets which represents (by my estimations) a full 24 hours of so-so comedic writing. I’ve spent days on lesser activities and writing jokes sure is fun. Follow me if you like some silliness a couple or so times a day.
Borrowed my younger brother’s Heelys to try them out. I feel like a drag queen in X-game high heels.
— Remy Nobody (@13thieves) March 16, 2013
Robert Browning : Sordello
Robert Browning spent seven years composing Sordello, a 40,000-word narrative poem about strife between Guelphs and Ghibellines in 13th-century Italy. It was not received well.
Tennyson said, “There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies: ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told’ and ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.’”
Thomas Carlyle wrote, “My wife has read through ‘Sordello’ without being able to make out whether ‘Sordello’ was a man, or a city, or a book.”
Douglas Jerrold opened the book while convalescing from an illness and began to fear that his mind had been destroyed. “O God, I AM an idiot!” he cried, sinking back onto the sofa. He pressed the book on his wife and sister; when Mrs. Jerrold said, “I don’t understand what this man means; it is gibberish,” her husband exclaimed, “Thank God, I am NOT an idiot!”
In Walter Besant’s 1895 novel The Golden Butterfly, one character spends eight hours trying to penetrate Browning’s poetry. “His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face were twitching. He looked about him wildly, and tried to collect his faculties. Then he arose, and solemnly cursed Robert Browning. He cursed him eating, drinking, and sleeping. And then he took all his volumes, and disposing them carefully in the fireplace, set light to them. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘that I could put the poet there too.’”
Another (apocryphal) story tells of a puzzled friend who asked Browning the meaning of one of his poems. “When I wrote it, only God and I knew,” the poet replied. “Now, God alone knows!”
7 Tips for Writing Fiction : Ernest Hemingway
Shamelessly stolen from Open Culture.
1. Write One True Sentence
“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.”
2. Stop Before You’re Stuck
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.”
3. Think About the Story Only When Working On It
“When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
4. Read What You Last Wrote
“The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.”
5. Make Don’t Describe an Emotion
“I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.”
6. Write Before You Type
“When you start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none. So you might as well use a typewriter because it is that much easier and you enjoy it that much more. After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader. To do this you have to work over what you write. If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.”
7. Be Brief
“It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.”
Film Notes : Beasts of the Southern Wild
“We is who the earth is for,” so says Hushpuppy, the precocious lead of the saccharine film Beasts of the Southern Wild. The only thing more fun than the film itself is the soundtrack, which was among the top snubs of the Oscars (not that the Oscars mean anything).
Dirt Art
Guns : J.E.B. Stuart
Kit Carson Holliday: “Oh, Jeb, what does pride got to do with guns?”
JEB Stuart: “Kit, the two things kind of come together down South. You can’t pry them apart. Not even with guns.”
-from Santa Fe Trail (1940)
Saved : Reinhold Niebuhr
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”
-Reinhold Niebuhr
Women Arrested
Women in Chicago being arrested for wearing one piece bathing suits without the required leg coverings, 1922.
Knife in the Water
the Whole Garden Will Bow 