MULTITUDES

New Blog

2013-02-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

I won't be posting to this blog anymore—new posts will appear on the new site.

Resolutions for 2013

2012-12-29T12:00:00.000-05:00

It's hard to believe the year's almost over. A ton has happened since last January, so this blog post is mostly to get it all down on (electronic) paper, organize my thoughts, and start prioritizing for the New Year.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2012

I learned to program. I mean really learned. I'd taught myself a bit of JavaScript and Python the year before; I learned some Java in college; at varying points in my childhood I played around with Logo, HTML/CSS, and TI-BASIC. In the last twelve months, I've gone from knowing relatively little to understanding Python and JavaScript (though the latter still manages to surprise me somewhat regularly) and feeling proficient in (though not yet a native speaker of) Ruby and C. I even learned a bit of Haskell!

I started a new job. In late August, I left Random House (where I'd worked for exactly four years) and took a job with Codecademy. While I owe a great deal to RH and I miss the people there, I now get to help teach the world to program. How cool is that?

I published well. I'm enormously grateful to be able to say my poems appeared in The New Yorker, Denver Quarterly, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, and Crazyhorse in 2012. Huge thanks to the editors of those journals/magazines, my teachers, and all the fantastic poets and writers I had the opportunity to work with during my MFA.

I read lots of good books. Including, but not limited to:

Poetry

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn
Northerners by Seth Abramson
Destroyer and Preserver by Matthew Rohrer
The Chameleon Couch by Yusef Komunyakaa
Ideal Cities by Erika Meitner
The Lichtenberg Figures by Ben Lerner
Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form by Matthea Harvey
Modern Life by Matthea Harvey
Things are Happening by Joshua Beckman
Flies by Michael Dickman
The Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane
Fancy Beasts by Alex Lemon
The Last Usable Hour by Deborah Landau
Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me by Mark Leidner
Litany for the City by Ryan Teitman
Collected Poems by Lynda Hull

Programming

Code Complete (2nd Edition) by Steve McConnell
The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie
The Mythical Man-Month (2nd Edition) by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz
JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke
Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce A. Tate
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by _why the lucky stiff

GOALS FOR 2013

Become a better programmer. There's still a ton of stuff I want to learn, both about the technologies and languages I've already picked up and a thousand other things I didn't have the time to tackle in 2012. The big ones:

More about Ruby, particularly metaprogramming in Ruby
More about JavaScript (which will likely involve plowing through the gargantuan JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan)
Twitter Bootstrap
Algorithms and data structures (backfilling some of my missing CS knowledge)
The UNIX operating system, including bash and zsh
More about relational database systems, as well as their alternatives (e.g. MongoDB)
Information security
Functional programming style, likely through Haskell or F♯
Memory management in C and x86 assembly

Have my first full-length book accepted for publication. I have a couple of manuscripts ready and I think they're where I want them to be, so now it's the ongoing game of musical chairs: matching the book to a publisher before the music stops. (If it stops, it stops, & I'll try again in 2014.)

Learn to shave with a straight razor. After thinking about it for a year or two, I finally went out and bought a razor and strop. After watching a billion YouTube videos demonstrating how to do everything from set up and care for the razor itself to actually shaving with it, I'm reasonably sure I can learn not to maim myself with it in a couple of weeks, and actually be pretty adept with it in just a few months.

Learn more about coffee. I started grinding my own coffee this year and learned a lot about drip brewing. Thanks to friends at work who are much more knowledgeable than me, I also learned a fair amount about espresso. In 2013, I'd like to try out some more brewing methods/types of coffee & learn more about what makes a great cup.

Rebuild my website from the ground up with Twitter Bootstrap. I'd like to incorporate this blog into it, too. I'm not sure a full-fledged Rails app is necessary, but I think something more lightweight (like Express or Sinatra) might be a good solution.

Publish more poems. I've been writing up a storm the last week or so, and I'm ready to hit the ground running come January.

Read more good books. Including, but not limited to:

Poetry

Bender: New & Selected Poems by Dean Young
Poems 1962 – 2012 by Louise Glück
The Word on the Street by Paul Muldoon
The Best American Poetry 2012 edited by Mark Doty
Later Poems Selected and New: 1971 – 2012 by Adrienne Rich
Quick Question by John Ashbery
Maybe the Saddest Thing by Marcus Wicker
Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine
Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds
Thunderbird by Dorothea Lasky

Programming

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson et al. (started in 2012; will finish in 2013!)
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler et al.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma et al.
Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen
Introduction to Algorithms (2nd Edition) by Thomas Cormen et al.
Algorithms by Sanjoy Dasgupta et al.
The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt & Dave Thomas
Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (2nd Edition) by Jon Erickson
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (2nd Edition) by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
Regular Expressions Cookbook by Jan Goyvaerts & Steven Levithan
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
The Joy of Clojure by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! by Miran Lipovača
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
Pro Git by Scott Chacon
Practical Vim by Drew Neil
Ruby Best Practices by Gregory T. Brown
The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black (started in 2012; will finish in 2013!)

Summer—Uh, Fall Reading

2012-09-08T13:55:00.001-04:00

Fall Reading, 2012

The Copper Scroll, Joe Donahue
The Network, Jenna Osman
Regular Expressions Cookbook, Jan Goyvaerts and Steven Levithan
Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis
The Cloud Corporation, Timothy Donnelly
The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
Ruby Best Practices, Gregory T. Brown
Design Patterns in Ruby, Russ Olsen
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Erich Gamma et al.
The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development, Brant Cooper et al.
The Modern Poetic Sequence, M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall
Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, Susan Grimm
Introduction to Algorithms, Thomas Cormen et al.
Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner
The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steven Gary Blank
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter

Suggestions welcome!

Guest Blogging at Ploughshares

2012-01-05T12:00:00.000-05:00

I'll be guest blogging weekly (every Wednesday) over at the Ploughshares blog from now until April. Check out my first post!

New Poem!

2011-11-18T12:00:00.003-05:00

...forthcoming in The Southern Review this spring. Details TK!

In fact, lots of things TK. I've been horribly remiss in my blogging lately; more soon.

09.21.2011

2011-09-22T10:30:00.002-04:00

troy, when the walls fell

— 09.21.2011, 11:08 PM

The walls dissolved. Troy’s citizenry wept.
Achilles’ vengeance canceled out the day.
A man was executed while I slept.

Achilles’ men expected they’d accept
the hollow horse, the camouflaged decay.
Their walls dissolved, Troy’s citizenry wept.

He did not gentle go, and though he kept
beseeching the Achaeans, won no stay.
A man was executed while I slept.

Olympus’ gods were never so inept
as then. Their job’s to know how our hearts weigh.
The walls dissolved. Troy’s citizenry wept.

I would have dreamed through all of this, except
the television woke me up to say
a man was executed while I slept.

Measureless, his heart’s weight as he stepped
into that room. As death was underway
our walls dissolved. Troy’s citizenry wept.
A man was executed while we slept—

Shelley and Byron and Dreams

2011-08-26T12:00:00.001-04:00

Teaching Philosophy

2011-08-23T12:00:00.005-04:00

The Perks of Being an English Major

2011-08-21T12:00:00.007-04:00

Updates, &c

2011-08-10T12:00:00.009-04:00

Two quick updates—

• I've recently been named a finalist for the 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. I'm enormously thankful to the individual readers and the Poetry Foundation overall for selecting me as a finalist, and many thanks to those of you who have wished me luck for the final round. Fingers crossed!

• One of my poems will be appearing in a future issue of The New York Quarterly—details TK.

Current Soundtrack

2011-08-02T12:00:00.002-04:00

"Fake Palindromes," Andrew Bird
"Keep the Car Running," Arcade Fire
"Holland, 1945," Neutral Milk Hotel
"Fake Empire," The National
"Deck Space," Kenin
"Calamity Song," The Decemberists
"Rappaport vs. The Jet (That Bombed the Grocery Store)," Panic Strikes a Chord
"Mistaken for Strangers," The National
"Long December," Counting Crows
"The General," Dispatch
"We Intertwined," The Hush Sound
"Cathedrals," Jump Little Children
"Teardrop," Massive Attack
"New Hampshire," Matt Pond PA
"Down by the Water," The Decemberists
"Wine Red," The Hush Sound
"Such Great Heights," The Postal Service
"New Slang," The Shins

Recently Read/Currently (Re)Reading

2011-07-28T12:00:00.003-04:00

Sum, David Eagleman—superb and imaginative, but not as mindblowing as I'd expected.

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner—I'd forgotten how disorienting the first thirty or so pages are.

The Iliad, Homer—fantastic, but not as good (and, frankly, not as exciting) as The Odyssey. (I'm reading the Fitzgerald translation.)

While Mortals Sleep, Kurt Vonnegut—just started. This is his early, previously unpublished fiction, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's not nearly as good as his later work.

Fall Higher, Dean Young—just started. Impressions to come!

Forthcoming Poems

2011-06-28T12:00:00.000-04:00

I recently found out I'll have poems forthcoming in Denver Quarterly (more details to come) and Ploughshares (2012). Exciting times!

Recent Poems

2011-06-11T12:00:00.003-04:00

New poems in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, and Salt Hill.

Indiana Review also contains a review of Vivisection, and Salt Hill includes a mini-interview with me.

Sean Lovelace has a great "teensy review" of Vivisection up on HTML Giant, along with two other titles. Check it out!

Updated Reading Schedule

2011-05-29T12:00:00.000-04:00

New and improved!

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 7:30 pm: I'll be reading at the Happy Ending Lounge as part of the Southern Writers Reading Series (map here).

Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 3:00 pm: I'll be reading at Sunny's Bar as part of the Sundays at Sunny's Reading Series (map here).

Friday, September 30, 2011 at 7:00 pm: I'll be reading at Goodbye Blue Monday as part of the Stain of Poetry Reading Series (map here).

Summer Reading List

2011-05-18T12:00:00.002-04:00

The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
The Iliad, Homer
The Complete Poems, Anna Akhmatova
Collected Poems in English, Joseph Brodsky
Das Kapital, Karl Marx
The Pale King, David Foster Wallace
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Aimee Bender
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne
L'Être et le Néant, Jean-Paul Sartre
Cane, Jean Toomer
Ulysses, James Joyce
Nox, Anne Carson

Upcoming Readings

2011-05-11T12:00:00.000-04:00

Two upcoming readings this fall, everyone:

Sunny's Bar on Sunday, September 11th, 2011 at 3:00 pm as part of the Sundays at Sunny's Reading Series (map here).

Goodbye Blue Monday on Friday, September 30th, 2011 at 7:00 pm as part of the Stain of Poetry Reading Series (map here).

Hope to see you there!

Utter Shamelessness

2011-05-09T12:00:00.003-04:00

I've picked up a few extra copies of Vivisection from my publisher, so:

1. If you'd like to order a copy directly from me, e-mail me at eric (døt) q (døt) weinstein (åt) gmail (døt) com. The book is $9.00 + $2.00 S&H, PayPal or check. I'll even sign it! Which means it will one day be worth DOZENS.

2. If you'd like to review Vivisection, let me know at the above address and I'll send you a copy gratis.

Website Updated

2011-04-24T12:00:00.002-04:00

Check it out!

Upcoming Readings

2011-04-09T12:00:00.012-04:00

1. Friday, May 6th at KGB Bar as part of the Emerging Writers Reading Series. (Map here.)

2. TBA (July) at Sunny's as part of the Sundays at Sunny's Reading Series. (Map here.)

3. Friday, September 30th at Goodbye Blue Monday as part of the Stain of Poetry Reading Series. (Map here.)

Hope to see you at one of them!

BWR Issue 37.2

2011-03-28T12:00:00.000-04:00

The Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Black Warrior Review is available now. It is mega awesome and you should pick up four to seven copies. Immediately.

Website Up!

2011-03-14T12:00:00.002-04:00

I've finally gotten around to setting up a personal website. You can find it here.

Decisions and Revisions Which a Minute Will Reverse

2011-02-22T12:00:00.035-05:00

I didn't do a lot of revision before starting my mfa. This isn't because I didn't see the value of revision; it simply didn't occur to me as necessary. Poems were accepted for publication or not accepted. If a poem didn't work, I set it aside. Sometimes I revisited or mined lines from it, but apart from that, that was pretty much it.

I still think revision can only be applied to certain poems and within certain spans of time. Some poems "go cold" and need to be completely molten down and recast. Some can be significantly strengthened by exchanging and replacing a few parts, or altering the structure.

Either way, I've been doing a lot more of it. Three of my most recent poems have benefited enormously from the workshop and from serious revision, which I think points to a couple of things.

1. I'm bringing the right things to workshop. I think the poems are less refined than what I'd like to bring, but that's probably the point. They engender discussion, which I think is good. I'm learning to be less attached to something just because I put it on a page. Which leads to my belief that:

2. I'm getting better at revision. I'm more willing to cut something apart once it's written down, whereas I used to roll poems around in my head for weeks or months before committing them to paper. Once they were made corporeal—"made flesh," to borrow from Craig Arnold—I rarely changed them. I think going through several drafts has improved some (but not all) of my poems. Meaning:

3. I'm getting better at knowing what to revise and how. Some poems, as I mentioned, need to be entirely recast, otherwise later alterations will look "scotch-taped on" (thanks, Billy Collins). Others can have parts swapped out, and still others can benefit immensely from a small change in structure, syntax, or word choice. I also think this has to happen in a certain temporal or emotional space, meaning (finally):

4. Revision only works insofar as it's an actual "re-visioning" of the original poem. A revised poem has to get closer to what the original poem was driving at. It has to be clearer, leaner, more complete (whether by the omission, exchange, or addition of words/ideas). In order to accomplish this kind of revision, I find I can neither be too close nor too far from the poem, either temporally and emotionally. Too near the poem, and I can't be objective; too far removed, and I can't return to the state I was in when I originally wrote it. I may betray the poem in this way.

Overall, I think I'm getting better. I have, in large part, my cohort and professors to thank for that.

New Poems

2011-01-28T11:00:00.000-05:00

Three of my poems, "Quarry Song," "Charting the Apartment," and "Love Machine" will appear in issue #27 of Salt Hill Journal (due out in May).

(Next) Next Reading

2011-01-18T12:00:00.001-05:00

I'll be reading at KGB Bar on Friday, May 6th at 7:00 pm as part of the Emerging Writers Reading Series (map here).