inspire rousing choruses

Oh man, I almost forgot that I went to a reading on Monday night - Stephanie Barber and Barbara DeCesare read some poems at UB and schooled us on how performance and literature can intersect. Barbara is just hilarious, and her short play was notable for causing Adam Robinson (one of the audience members chosen to read it) to yell "let us cast our penises into the sea," and for its mostly accurate depiction of Robert Bly as a pompous old fartbag.

Stephanie's poems are quieter, less bombastic, but still funny in a sly kind of way, and she's very good at engaging readers through small interactions - eye contact, facial expressions, etc. I generally do the token eye contact when I read, and have trouble working with the room with my eyes in a way that isn't jarringly obvious, so hopefully I can pick up some of her mojo through osmosis or something.

Both ladies understand and accept that they are performers when they read their work for an audience, which a lot of writers shy away from to their own detriment. I can't tell you how much good poetry has been ruined for me because the poet is contemptuous (or afraid) of being entertaining instead of highbrow and literary and whatever. It doesn't make sense. If you read your work flatly like you don't care about it, then no one listening will care, either. You don't have to try super hard to put on a show in an artificial, not-really-you sort of way (that's almost worse than being boring), but you do have to accept that, whether you want to be or not, you're a performer when you read your work aloud to an audience. How you embrace that and make it work is up to you.

Relatedly, I also teched a poetry slam last week - Temple and Gayle Danley were the hosts, and man oh man. Those performers were fearless, both in delivery and subject matter, with none of the almost-obligatory forced awkwardness that makes other kinds of readings such a chore sometimes. Slangston Hughes, who won the slam contest portion of the evening, had his ass-kicking boots on that evening, and is someone more people should know about.

Speaking of teching, I need to get to work. While I'm gone, feel free to read this article about how to date a writer, which reads more like a guide to dating a beret-wearing writer stereotype from an early-90s sitcom.

all the unspeakable things

chronological age is not a consideration

Revising short stories is hard, so I'm going to look up fellowships and ramble about art for a second here.

Went to the BMA yesterday and stumbled into their Print By Print exhibit, which the BMA describes as "an epic tour of serial printmaking." I bet that's not a phrase they use very often. In any case, there are some awesome print series on display in there, particularly Piranesi's "Imaginary Prisons," which I'd never seen before. Holy crap. If there was ever a group of images that captured the essence of my upcoming thesis book, it's "Imaginary Prisons." The prints are smoky and dark and distorted, and full of weird, purposeless machinery. The visual effect is very Kafka-esque, or like the menace behind the redundancy of a French farce.

And with all that, what you have are some very cool and inventive pieces of art that challenge you and make you work a little bit, but they're enormously rewarding once you put the time in.

Here's a link to the full series. The website is in Russian, but I think the click-the-thumbnail UI is pretty straightforward. And hey, on the off-chance you can read Russian, what a great time to practice.

shocking pens webs websites

So today is Charles Dickens' birthday, hence the Victorian Google banner and what I'm sure is no shortage of Facebook statuses complaining about how bad Great Expectations is. I hope that's the case, anyway. That book sucked.

But Channel 4 has a neat article up that takes some guesses at what Dickens would be writing about if he was alive now. Turns out all the problems he was exposing then are still issues today, which is kind of depressing, and some of them (like child poverty) are actually on the rise now because of austerity measures in the UK. I'm sure the same is true for America as well.

It's a good list, but I don't know why they left off things like the Occupy movement and the increased militarization of police, both of which would challenge Dickens' progressive-but-not-radical take on social issues. It would also be nice to see a Dickensian take on the modern entertainment industry, which has thus far almost entirely ignored his ideas about the "little people" being as interesting and attention-worthy as the rich and beautiful. Seriously, Fox should just call Bones something like Hot Rich Supergeniuses and drop the insulting pretense that theirs is still a show based in the same universe as its audience. The same could be said for most stuff on TV. Yes, I am bitter.

Oh, and the Artichoke Haircut reading went well. They've listed some other readings coming up this month on their blog, so you should look at that while I return to cleaning and writing and such. Or you can read yet another polemic about how there are too many MFA programs in the shadow of Penn State kiboshing their writing program due to lack of funds. Up to you.

for printing out or reading on your computer screen

Oh cool, more stuff about introverts.

Don't have too too much to say about this article other than to applaud their recognition that being an introvert doesn't mean you're a socially awkward misanthrope - rather, it means that you prefer low stimulation environments. That needs to be clarified way more than it is.

Workplaces need to be de-extroverted too, and really, professional life as a whole needs to calm the hell down. It's reaching the point where there's nothing for you in this world if you're not a natural salesperson or a type-A business school graduate, and it's especially frustrating that being an artist now depends on the ability to spend most of your time and energy turning your life into reality television, to paraphrase Bobcat Goldthwait. People claim that writers don't understand that, but we do - we just hate it because it's draining and it takes time away from our craft and it's often a convenient excuse for publishers to not spend money on promoting their authors because they think the Internet equals free money.

Ironically, the preceding paragraph makes me sound like a socially awkward misanthrope, and a bitter one at that. But I will be promoting myself with three readings in the next four weeks, so I think I've got a ways to go before I go completely Salinger and start peeing in jars.

but we need to care

The final semester is almost upon me! Dear god. On Wednesday, I will begin putting my first by-God book together. Part of me wishes it was a novel instead of a collection of short stories, and another part of me wishes it was being published by someone other than myself for reasons other than finishing grad school, but those parts of me can get bent. This is a big occasion. Besides, I can take what I've learned here and apply it to my novel, which has yet again been shelved so I can work on school stuff.

I'm feeling good about the manuscript. I wasn't before, but I am now. It's not perfect, but it's becoming the kind of writing I want to put into the world; funny when it needs to be, gloomy when it needs to be, moody, atmospheric, all that fun stuff.

I also have some readings coming up. Artichoke Haircut's Spring 2012 issue release party is on Feb. 2nd, and since I'm in that issue, I'll be reading. I'll also be reading at Last Rites again on Feb. 26th, and at the Town Square Reading Series in mid-Feb., although I'm not sure what the exact date is. I want to say the 19th, but I could be wrong. Fun times! I'm trying to get some other readings together for when the book comes out - hopefully I'll be able to attend AWP so I can network my way into a little book tour.

I thought I had more to say, but I don't. To bed with me, then!

rough suggested daily search volumes

Oh man, I forgot to mention that I went to MAGfest a little bit ago! For the unaware, it's an awesome music and video games convention that, at least this year, took over the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor. Being something of a music and video games enthusiast myself, I went down there on the 7th to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out I'm as bad at Mortal Kombat and Bad Dudes now as I was when I was in middle school - there was a whole room full of arcade consoles, and an Atari hooked up to an old TV in front of the sort of couch that must have been in every grandmother's basement between 1975 and 1980. The attention to detail won me over immediately.

I also found out that video game culture pretty much means Nintendo games, specifically the Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy series. Being a Sega Genesis/PC gaming fellow in my younger days, I honestly felt a little out of my depth at times, and even the NES games I liked as a kid - Rygar, Chrysalis, The Punisher, all the cool wrestling games, etc. - are outliers. I think what happened is that I played video games in complete ignorance of the culture surrounding them because, as a pre-Internet young person, I didn't know where to find it, or even to look for it. I also played video games to escape from people anyway, much like I do now, so even if I'd known of a larger video gaming community, I might not have wanted anything to do with it.

Extrapolating from that, I think most of my nerdier hobbies developed the same way - without much guidance from other people with similar interests, I kinda went my own way. Which is fine, but it is weird when I figure out that there's an entire shared canon of books/games/whatever that I've missed out on. The one exception is punk rock - I may not have had access to the scene right away, but I knew it was around pretty early on, so my tastes aren't quite as slapdash there as they are for other things.

So that's that, then. Back to the manuscript!