Uncanny Valley

The "Need" to Write

noreply@blogger.com (carrie murphy) — Sun, 06 May 2012 15:59:00 +0000

"You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else." --Grace Paley

"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon which one can neither resist nor understand."-George Orwell

"I write for the same reason I breathe -- because if I didn't, I would die." --Isaac Asimov

"This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple, I must, then build your life according to this necessity."- Rainer Maria Rilke

I come across this particular kind of idea about being a writer every once in a while. That it's a need, a compulsion. That if you aren't wanting with every fiber of all of your cells to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, you somehow aren't a "real" writer. You don't deserve to be a "real" writer.

I don't think I've ever felt, or will ever feel, this way. I like writing, obviously. It's sometimes hard and sometimes fun and sometimes all kinds of bullshit. But I don't do it because I feel some encompassing need deep down in my soul, some thrumming of words in my blood. I do it because writing is a weird, constantly changing challenge: making words fit together in the way I want them to, making my writing engage with the ideas, themes and feelings I find interesting and relevant. It's a way to be in the world and a way to understand the world.

I feel like I see this WRITE OR DIE sentiment more commonly directed towards writing students and younger writers. It's supposed to be inspirational, I guess. Aubrey Hirsch wrote about this phenomenon on her blog, using an example of the famous Charles Bukowski poem "so you want to be a writer?" I can't stand Bukowski anyway, but her refutation of his rhetoric is pretty spot on. A lot of writing is work; the simple fact of fucking sitting down and doing it, whether you've got some kind of divine inspiration or not. That willingness to read more and write more and learn more and always be open to more and for more, that's a big chunk of "it," the writing life. But I'm not sure I see the writing life as a slog through some long tortuous journey of constant effort and work, either.

What about you? Are you compelled by the singing tides of your blood to write? Could you stop writing if you had to, or if you wanted to? Does it matter?

These Are My Funnies #22 and 23

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dicks) — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 12:38:00 +0000

#22 (65 seconds): We are in a packed hockey stadium. On the ice, zebras kick with short, wild strokes, lean into their sticks as they skate, look grim, desperate. The scoreboard is just visible at the edge of the screen, but we don't need to look at it to know the game has gone tense. The zebras knock the puck around, achieving nothing, until the audience seems ready to collectively shout. The ice looks ready to split. Finally, one zebra angles the puck across the ice, nearly slipping it into a goal before it is intercepted and knocked back, through the air. The audience inhales in preparation for a groan, then holds its breath when it sees the little red light blinking on the puck, the blades freshly sprung from inside. The zebras are too confused and stunned to move, even after one of them catches the bladed puck with his head. It hangs there and we wonder if he's dead, standing thanks only to a sudden stiffening of muscle, but then he pulls off his helmet, holds it away from himself, and examines the weapon lodged there. How did it come into play? Do all the pucks he's ever swung at hold such deadly blades? The players stare and the audience stares and we stare, until someone in the stands throws a plastic cup of beer out onto the ice.

#23 (2 minutes): A father, mother, and son sit around a modest dinner table. Dishes steam before them. The son, who is maybe eight, spears a pile of meat and raises it, dripping. His face is rapturous. "This pot roast is a slam dunk," he says.

The father snorts. "A slam dunk," he says. "A slam dunk." He turns to the mother. "Do you think he even knows what a slam dunk is? A slam dunk."

"I'm sure he knows," the mother says.

"I just mean--"

"Get outside," the father says. "I don't want you touching that food until you perform a perfect slam dunk." The father watches the boy, who starts to move, but slowly. "Now."

Cut to: a driveway basketball court, the hoop mounted above the garage door. The father sits in a weathered upholstered armchair sinking into the grass. An impossible number of emptied beer cans gleam at his feet. Starting at the end of the driveway, the son runs forward, dribbling a faded basketball, and leaps with it in one hand. He is young and short and does not come close to touching the hoop.

"Slam dunk!" the father yells.

The boy dribbles the ball back to the end of the driveway, then into the street. He kicks at the road like a bull, knocking up pebbles. It's dark. Lights are on in the houses all around and soon someone will complain about all this dribbling but the boy doesn't care. He clamps his jaw and runs down the driveway, knocking the ball against the concrete, and leaps for the hoop, and clatters into the garage door. The ball falls from his grasp and bounces into the grass.

"Slam dunk!" the father yells.

Pretty Party Tilt Knife

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:01:00 +0000

My good friend, and co-contributor, Carrie Murphy, has a beautiful book out soon from Keyhole Press, titled Pretty Tilt.

And you may remember me writing about Dan Magers needing a real book that smells and feels like stuff. Well he does, and it's called Party Knife, by Birds LLC.

The first person to pre-order Pretty Tilt, email me (rawendeborn at gmail dot com) a screen shot of the receipt, will be sent a copy of Party Knife. Everyone after that will receive an erasure from a children's book. Both of these books are amazing and you will not be disappointed. Plus $10 for 2 books?! This deal ends today.

These Are My Funnies #19, 20, 21

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dicks) — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 13:12:00 +0000

#19 (45 seconds): Two people walk along the edge of a park while wind bullies their clothes. Their conversation looks awkward, and as we come close enough to hear it over the wind noise, we learn that it is. “So now that’s why I don’t eat cheese,” the man says. “Not that you would remember if I ate cheese. I mean, you wouldn’t be keeping track, I don’t think you’re a wierdo.” “Ha ha,” the woman says. A gust of wind tears at them both and, after a few awkward seconds, the man says, “Don’t get blown away.” “You jackass,” the woman says. “‘Don’t get blown away.’ I hope you do get blown away.”

At that moment, a howling gale tears around the cars and through the open park space and lifts the man off the sidewalk, over the trees. We follow close, so that his terrified face is sharply focused and the world grows indistinct and colorful beneath. After some time the man’s mouth closes, then his eyes. The colors of the world beneath go from green to gray to blue to green again.

#20 (75 seconds): Everything is dark. Water burbles softly. Then! A flame blazes! A woman’s smudged and determined face is revealed in red and orange tones. Around her: the distant walls and ceiling of an underground research facility.

“That’s it,” she says. She leans forward, far forward, and we move back, until we can see the torch in her hand, the wide vat before her. “Sea monkeys,” she says, her voice faltering and then rising as she stumbles, drops the torch, catches it with her other hand as one foot spears the water of the vat. She flails, then is still, relieved, until tiny creatures swarm up from the black and over her leg, her hip, furring her body, then her neck.

#21 (40 seconds): We’re back on the face of the man from #19. He appears unconscious or worse. Colors blur by, far beneath, faster than seems possible. Soft violin music starts up and we expect that now the man’s eyes will open. Instead, a child’s voice says, “The Lord said unto--” Then the screen goes black.

These Are My Funnies #16, 17, 18

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dicks) — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 11:07:00 +0000

#16 (3 minutes) A board room, tall windows, a view of the city. A paper coffee cup spatters against the glass and we pull back to see a crowd of confused suits around a conference table. One of them, the one who threw the coffee, looks more confused than any. Why was he emotionally moved so thoroughly as to throw his coffee? All the hostility and passion has left the room, drained from it, and now he is a quiet fool being stared down by other suddenly quiet fools. He stands and knocks over an easel displaying new product art as he leaves the room.

Cut to: his living room, small but luxurious. The man is asleep on an expensive couch. Blankets trail from his body and into potato chip bags and beer bottles on the hardwood floor. Traffic noises come in through the wide windows. The man comes awake with a groaning sigh and rubs his face, stops. We zoom in and see his beard: an uneven field of tiny peppers.

Cut to: a few days later. The growth of peppers on the man’s face is such that his jaw has become a strange terrain. He stands in the narrow kitchen of his apartment and on a cutting board is a handful of tiny peppers which he dices with quick and then quicker movements. Cut to: thirty minutes later and he’s standing in the same spot but now the cutting board and produce sacks are gone and in their place is a plate of reddened noodles. He forks a bite to his mouth, chews slowly, then grins and chews more, then stops and runs to the sink, then chooses the refrigerator instead, pulls a bottle and drinks milk from it.

Cut to: a few months later. The scene is still and in its center is a play button. We are on Youtube. A mouse pointer enters the frame and clicks and then we’re moving again, in low quality streaming video. A teenager centered in the frame holds a handful of something. Someone behind the camera says, “Tell us what you’re going to do.” The teenager says, “So, these are beard peppers, gross, supposedly the hottest peppers you can buy.” “Worse than the ghost pepper,” the guy behind the camera says. “And I’m going to eat all of these,” the teenager says, and, in a quick motion, he does. Behind him, traffic passes slowly. A blue sky reaches all around. We are in a suburb.

“So?” the camera operator says.

“It’s hot,” the teenager says. A few minutes later he’s walking in tight circles while the camera operator laughs, then guffaws, then is quiet. “Tommy,” the camera operator says, but Tommy is down the street now, bent over, leaning on his knees. He collapses.

#17 (15 seconds): An old man digs through an alleyway garbage bin. He is dressed in expensive but subtle clothes and a dark pair of sunglasses. Agitation crimps his face. He is not accustomed to digging through trash and has lost hope that the act will pay off. “Horse head,” he says. “Horse head.” He is looking for something or someone called Horse head or he is looking for an actual horse head or a representaiton of a horse head. Or he is swearing in another language, using a word or phrase that sounds like “Horse head.” We will not know, and the uncertainty will return to us months later in the bathroom of a party while people laugh in a distant living room and we consider using the host’s razor to trim a missed patch on our necks. “Horse head,” we will say.

#18 (5 minutes): A quiet apartment, flooded with sunlight. A male voice speaks, tentatively and almost miserably, sounding out a word that is only just recognizable. We pull back and pan around so that we see a shaggy yellow dog, stretched on a rug with a hardback book held open between his paws. The dog’s pronunciation is bad and we get the impression he has no idea what he’s reading, is just saying words without understanding them, reading from a book someone left on the living room floor, but still we are a little impressed.

Cut to: another day, a morning of gray light. We are close on a bookshelf in the apartment, so that when the dog jumps up to worry free a novel we see just the blur of his ear flopping into frame. He leaps again and this time we see his eyes as his teeth snap at the ragged line of books. He leaps again and bites a clutch of magazines and, probably by instinct, his feet scrabble at the shelves of books and abandoned drinking glasses and some figurines and a purse and a bowl of coins. A calamity of items flop and rain to the floor. All is quiet for a moment, then a door opens somewhere in the apartment.

Cut to: the wet alley behind a convenience store. The dog, dirtied now and thinner, has pulled a garbage bag from a bin, eviscerated it, and strewn out popular magazines freed of their covers and dirtied with trash wetness. The dog reads vapid celebrity news in a voice now sure. We learn that a celebrity has bought a home worth more than 4 million dollars and that a television chef has signed a two-book deal for a cookbook and a history of meat preparation in Europe and Europe-like cultures. The dog reads about someone’s surgically altered face, then about someone’s upcoming film adaptation of another Philip K. Dick story. The contents of the magazine grow stranger until we realize that the dog is bored, creating the text of articles now for his own amusement.

Cut to: a serene park, dark grass, quiet air. The yellow dog lies next to a brown dog and tells the brown dog that he spent such effort and time learning to read and speak that he forgot he was a dog, that time was passing. The yellow dog’s breed, the yellow dog explains, is not known for longevity, and he has been underfed for a long time now, and suspects his gut of harboring numerous parasites. “I will spend my last months or year teaching other dogs,” the yellow dog says. The brown dog doesn’t lift his head or raise an ear or move his eyes.

We see several short clips now: the yellow dog attempting to teach other dogs to collect their thoughts into words and then to express those words. In each clip the yellow dog is more frustrated, less patient. In the last clip he sits in a gorgeously sun warmed park, expectantly watching an enormous cane corso, which opens its mouth as if to test a new sentence but then rushes through open grass to pee on the wheel of a baby stroller. The yellow dog stands, steps out of frame.

Cut to: a darkened living room, small. Windows are open to the lights and noises of a city. The yellow dog has rented a studio apartment and filled it with chairs and shelves and art objects that look like cheap versions of what filled his last, real home. He is old now and paces the room carefully, as if afraid he might fall. Books and magazines line shelves but none are opened on the couch or on the desk in the corner. Horns sound outside and a drunken woman shouts her joy to a friend. The dog goes to the window, gets two paws up, and looks out. When he drops to the floor we wonder if he will take down a book for solace, but he instead climbs onto the couch, paws a remote control, summons the blue light of the television, begins exploring channels.

Why I'm Terrified Of Jac Jemc's MY ONLY WIFE

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:45:00 +0000

I have not yet read, but am nonetheless terrified of Jac Jemc's MY ONLY WIFE...

because I have terrible luck with relationships.

because I desperately believe in life-long love, commitment, and happiness, despite my terrible luck with relationships.
because it seems no one knows how to be honest in the narrative world, and I'm afraid that the story not only will make me sad, but will also be dishonest.

because I'm divorced and I know how sucky a disappearance-narrative structure can be.

because I've put myself entirely into an Other's hand and they weren't gentle.
because I know exactly how it feels when someone you love disappears and you feel like they're dead, but they're alive and just don't care about you.
because I have the same questions about the Other as Žižek when he quotes Badiou: "What does 'respect for the Other' mean when one is at war against an enemy, when one is brutally left by (our love) for someone else, when one must judge the work of a mediocre 'artist,' when science is faced with obscurantist sects, etc.? Very often, it is 'respect for Others' that is injurious, that is Evil."

because there is so much dark, and we all live in it.
because having a person in the dark makes it so much more bearable.
because unrequited love is universal: the universe hates us despite our love of the universe.

because an Other has put themselves entirely in my hand and I wasn't gentle.

because love is the only way to really understand an Other and when love isn't reciprocated it seems to justify all our mistreatments of our Others.

because of that song by Gotye.

because even when an Other doesn't know us, we still will claim ownership: my partner, my lover, my ex.

because I started crying when I read this by Christopher Higgs.

because I'm going to read My Only Wife and it will probably destroy me inside a little and make me cry.

because even when someone destroys me, I'm still alive.
because even a fictional narrative can be dishonest, can be manipulative, can disrespect the reader: the Ever Present Other.
because "we should never reduce (our) Other to our enemy, to the bearer of false knowledge, and so forth: always in him or her there is the Absolute of the impenetrable abyss of another person."

because I'm still alive even though I've been a little destroyed before.

because I'm more alive when I feel a little destroyed, and feeling more alive than usual is the best thing for anyone that cares about living.

because I'm an impenetrable Abyss, and I want you to know me.

The Book Changes You

noreply@blogger.com (carrie murphy) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:14:00 +0000

I recently reread a book, When The Messenger Is Hot, that I last read when I was in high school. I've always remembered it and thought of it fondly, so on my post-Christmas Amazon spree I added it to my cart.

I first read this collection of short stories when I was 17. My local library had a short stories section and I'd always pick out a few collections and toss them in my mom's LL Bean tote (our shared book bag). I read this book of stories and my 17 year old mind WAS. BLOWN. I even brought it into school to lend to my friend Lara and she loved it too, and we both just felt like, wow this is a book that was meant for us. I ended up writing a poem based off of one of the stories, a poem about awkward and doomed love, which is what I interpreted Elizabeth Crane's story "He Thinks He Thinks," to be about. I remember When The Messenger is Hot being all about love and sex and cool city life and women and drinking and everything I wasn't fully yet but wanted to be.

Reading it again, I'm struck by several things. I still enjoy the book quite a bit. It's funny! And it's good. Also, I think Elizabeth's Crane writing style has affected my own writing style without my having realized it. She wrote all these long sentences with lots of ands, sentences that make you feel like you're speeding, breathless, with feelings and reasons accumulating behind you. I had never before read a book whose words read like my thoughts or my patterns of speech; When The Messenger is Hot did. She also uses the second person a lot, which is common to my writing, both my poems and the small amount of fiction I've written (none of that fiction will ever see the light of day).

I have enough distance from the book that I'm not really reading it nostalgically or trying to recapture the feelings of my first read. In 2003, the book felt like a primer on adulthood. How to be the kind of glamorously fucked up yet smart yet sad yet sexy young woman I imagined myself growing into once I was in college and the "real world." The women in the book were the women I wanted to be and the women I imagined myself being, kind of truer-to-life versions of romantic comedy heroines like Lalena in Reality Bites, or maybe a poorer and less ridiculous Carrie Bradshaw. They had jobs and boyfriends and messiness and man, the messiness seemed like JUST the messiness I envisioned my life having when I was in my twenties.

The book itself doesn't change, but my own narrative changes. The adult reader in me reacts to totally different aspects of When The Messenger Is Hot, like the way that the book is SO MUCH about the female speakers' grief over the death of a parent (something I have firsthand experience with) and guilt/shame about not really having found a place in the world or conventional success (career-wise. Also? DING DING. Something I have personal experience with.) I am connecting much more to what I see as the collection's realistic rendering of the blahness of adulthood, a "variety of scenarios ranging from me forgetting to pick up milk to...car accidents varying in degree from chipped paint to fender-bender." I find myself laughing at different parts of the book, like when the narrator of "Year-at-a-glance" decides to smell her dead mother's perfume sparingly so it doesn't get used up. I don't really laugh at the fucked up boyfriends doing typical fucked up boyfriend shit, something I imagine I laughed knowingly about when I was a teenager.

I read When The Messenger is Hot once, almost ten years ago, but my reread made it clear how much it stuck with me. Weird, though, how our relationships with books, even important ones (even important ones you didn't know were important), change. How you change, how the book changes you. How the book changes, although of course the book doesn't actually change. I don't know. I think I've said everything I want to say but I don't feel like I made the awesome point I set out to make when I started this post. Of course we, as readers, aren't static. Of course we don't read in a vacuum and of course we take our lives with us to the page. I mean, that's what literature is about, right?

The Virus: A Misunderstood Metaphor

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:16:00 +0000

A Virus is self perpetuating. Once exposed, a Host will reproduce the Virus, by the command of the Virus' DNA. Viruses enter a host cell and use the host cell's available tools and materials to produce more virus. Viruses can even insert part of their DNA into the Host cell to be reproduced alongside or as the host DNA.

Outside of emotional appeals (patriotism, religion, cute things, sad things: the most sentimental), nothing forces the mind to accept and propagate an idea/experience. But even to this, the human body is becoming immune.

These Are My Funnies #13, 14, 15

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dicks) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 05:33:00 +0000

#13 (4 minutes 15 seconds): All is darkness until a narrow door is nudged open. Sunlight streams in, almost washing out the child as he steps inside. After some more darkness he finds a switch and electricity hums and bright bare bulbs hanging from chains illuminate work benches and shelves dense with aging electronics. We see oscilloscopes, microfiche readers, green-screened computers.

A montage: the boy explores many devices, bending around them to find their cables, then their switches, and many times he is rewarded with their sudden awakening. He is most delighted by a miniature synthesizer, which he sets before himself on the workshop's worn carpet. He is no musician but smashes out chords, first in thin electronic approximation of electronic guitar, then in echoing piano, then in the bright voice of a spaceship computer.

Days pass, not many but enough that we can almost see the boy age as he visits the workshop, takes down the synthesizer, plugs it in, and plays. He gets better; his chords are planned now, and his melodies run together for notes at a time. One day he comes into the workshop and takes down the keyboard and wears the steady face of confidence well earned, but when he presses keys there is no sound. He checks the power cord, the power switch, but there is power. The red light is on. He presses the keys again, then stops. Sniffs. Bends forward.

He goes to a tool chest, comes back with a pair of screwdrivers. The smaller is the right size. As he opens the synthesizer we know what he will find: an orchestra of tiny men and women, grieving the death of one of their own, too shaken to play, and how could they play without their comrade? And how could they grieve without a way to bury him? They have no tools for digging in plastic. They do not even know what death is. But no: such tiny people do not exist. What the boy finds in the guts of the synthesizer is a nest of stillborn rats.

#14 (20 seconds): A man sits at a keyboard, opens a web browser, a blog. "These are my funnies," he writes. A woman looking over his shoulder says, "You know these aren't really funny, right?"

#15 (85 seconds): A young woman shrugs her backpack around, then continues up a narrow stairwell. She emerges into a high floor of an academic library. Students lean and sleep and read all around. Her backpack is lumpy against her shoulders, the books inside straining, and she leans too hard against a shelf. A few feet away there's a thump: a shelf has fallen into another. She backs away, instantly mortified although the shelf she touched remains upright. But then there is another thump, farther away, a crash, a strangely wet spilling noise as books fall and fan against the tile floor.

"You!" someone yells, and the woman turns to find a balding man with a librarian's name badge pointing at her. Then there are others, their voices loud enough to carry over the clatter of all the shelves all around collapsing, of one of the elevators failing and falling, of a window giving out. "You! You!" they call, with such fervor that some of their faces start to melt, then the flesh of their necks. What's left is shiny metal, the chemical sour of melted plastic. Metal skeletons gambol and shout, pointing, unaware that most of their selves has melted away.

The woman backs away, toward the stairwell. She expects to be chased but the machines seem to be locked into their behavior, all still moving from foot to foot, still pointing, still yelling at where she'd been standing. She keeps backing up until her hand touches the stairwell door. "You stupid robots," she says.

According To Google, Ben Marcus Is Not Related To Peter Marcus: a review of two reviews

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:33:00 +0000

Ben Marcus wrote a book that I want to read. I usually don't like to read books unless they're going to be made into movies, or they they are TV shows called Friday Night Lights, or they are poetry. I don't think any of those things apply to Ben Marcus's book, The Flame Alphabet. What made me want to read a book that will not be a movie and is not a Friday Night Lights and is probably not strictly poetry? It was this awesome review on The New Inquiry. Just the quote from the article on their tumblr made me want to rub my face in the open pages of this book:

Certain forms of discourse — realist novels and poems, the bureaucratic dialects of authority and business — have been eroded and rendered meaningless, or they are obstacles put in place by power to preserve itself.

Right??? Makes you want to punch yourself in the face/genitals for getting an MFA/writing anything that doesn't have long strings of vowels inserted into the text according to the golden ratio or the actual ratios of my body or just white letters printed on white paper or write anything at all ever again ever. I wish I could say something smart about things people write. I really do. Instead I only relate to smart things people say with feelings or with other things.

So, read another review, at The Lit Pub about We Make Mud, a book out by Dzanc, that has some language that sounds pretty fresh and new and it made me wonder, what would the main character of Flame Alphabet think of Peter Marcus's We Make Mud? These are books I have not read (again, neither are Friday Night Lights or Hunger Games or poetry), so I don't know. It seems he would love it, as an attempt to create new, less toxic language (as it feels sort of antiquated or out of sync with normed language usage), or would hate it, find it toxic like his daughter's language. Has anyone read both of these books? More importantly, is google wrong; are these two authors related? I mean, they don't really look like each other, but still...

Moments from AWP 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:49:00 +0000

On our arrival, while we were waiting to check in to our room, Sal Pane greeted us from behind (shouting MIKE!, which is about what it takes to get my attention). He was dressed like Sal Pane. I thought, "That's Sal Pane." I was right.

After registering at the conference proper, I turned around into a hug from Brian Carr, probably one of the sweetest men alive. Last year we had Ethiopian food together; this year we didn't find the time. Next year we'll do better.

At the Booth booth, which Tracy and I visited often, searching for a former teacher (Booth editor Robert Stapleton), we spoke at length to two students of the new Butler MFA program. They like Indianapolis, which I mostly do not miss -- I liked a lot about it, for instance the trees and Holiday Park, but I hated all the driving. A shy, nervous girl who constantly giggled overheard me telling said MFA students that my story "What They Did with the Body" was in the new issue of Booth, which it is. The girl seemed positively star-struck to meet someone published in the annual print edition of a weekly online literary magazine and actually requested that I sign her book, which I did. (My first book signing.) She was very sweet. I wish her the best.

Speaking of the things I miss from Indianapolis, I did not get to meet our former teacher Susan Neville, though Tracy briefly did. We did catch Robert Stapleton, eventually, and we spoke with Bryan Furuness, who is so kind it is unnerving, and with our former English department's chair, and I saw Andy Levy (now the head of the Butler MFA, as I understand it, but formerly our early American lit instructor) from behind, leaning over the table, I think sharing a joke. He was always very funny. (Best wishes, all.)

From NMSU I saw a number of my fellow students, though only one graduate, Carrie Murphy (author of the forthcoming book of poetry Pretty Tilt). Well, two graduates: Joe Scapellato, with whom I played a recent game of Exits Are, left NMSU the year before we arrived, and he was there also. Puerto del Sol is still one of the most attractive and underrated university-affiliated literary magazines out there.

Our camera is broken, so we did not take pictures.

I met J. A. Tyler. I think I had seen him before at a reading, last year, but if it was him then this was while he didn't have hair, which has a very different effect from J. A. Tyler with hair, who looks rather more like say my dad, and rather less like say a man who could beat my dad up. (I have no idea how old J. A. Tyler is, but my dad is younger than you might think, and not well-prepared for fighting.)

I got a hug from Brian Oliu. I met Jensen Beach. I met Matt Salesses, again. Last time was in DC, in a bar, while I was waiting for a reading; he rather amazed me by recognizing me from across a room, sort of huddled in a corner. (Note that it is amazing whenever anyone recognizes me at AWP, because among that crowd I am extremely generic, a white dude with dark hair, a beard, and glasses.) This year I enjoyed his laugh a lot.

Matt Bell is busy, guys. I feel kind of bad for Matt Bell.

I had an awkward moment with Adam Robinson wherein he overheard something I had sort of whispered at the Dalkey Archive table, and thought that I said it to him, and it would have made sense if I had said it to him, but it would have also been awkward and terrible, so I hope he believes that I didn't say that to him. Later he gave me a book, I am looking forward to reading it. His beard was less spectacular than last year's beard but it is still quite a beard.

We met David McNamara, our magazine's printer, who was sweet and funny and also impressively bearded. Next to these guys my beard is very weak indeed.

We only actually went to one panel, the one about Internet literature whatever. It was a good panel -- refreshing in its calm, its honesty, and its willingness to engage with what is difficult and silly about being a writer. I liked it. Afterward I high-fived Roxane Gay. It was the only time we saw her, sadly. Her voice was totally, tragically gone. She went on to win a competitive reading; don't ask me how. That's the power of Roxane.

We ate dinner with Gabriel Blackwell, who puts up with me beautifully. The nearby Thai restaurant his friend suggested had a shocking lack of vegetarian options for a Thai place, for vegetarian Gabe.

Erin Fitzgerald and Laura Ellen Scott make an excellent comedic duo.

A. D. Jameson is even more energetic and funny and fun to be around in person than he is in blogs. He described to Tracy and me the four best Star Trek: The Animated Series episodes that we have to watch, and shared his feelings on the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine finale (he likes it more than I do).

Did a whiskey shot with Aaron Burch at the Hobart table to celebrate our good fortune. This made the constant press of bodies a little easier to bear.

Bought many books. Sold many books for Noemi. Saw many other people. Missed a lot I would have liked to see. Successfully attended just one reading, Saturday's Unstuck reading, which was very good; they are a good magazine. Gabe read here. I thought he did very well. The story is such a good one.

I have forgotten many things that happened. I was grateful to see everyone, that everyone was so kind to me, that they forgave me my awkwardness and my nerves. I am terrified of other writers. I want them to like me. I don't believe that they do. But they are nice about it. Thank you for your kindness. Sometimes, with you, I feel almost at home. That's saying a lot.

Where We'll Be at AWP

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Rae Bowling) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 23:29:00 +0000

No table this year--we'll be running a mobile operation. We'll have limited copies of the first issue with us, which you can purchase for a discount $10 if you find us. We'll give you a cereal box prize, too. More importantly, just find us and say hi; we can't wait to see everyone! Any given afternoon, you have decent odds of finding us wandering the bookfair or helping out ~~at the Puerto del Sol/Noemi Press table.~~ (Update: Oops, we lied. Noemi Press is sharing a table with Belladonna Collaborative as part of the Table X co-op, and that's where we'll be!) Other that that, we're going to try to be at these locations (updated throughout the week):

Thursday, March 1

Panels we like:

1:30pm: Beyond Pulp: The Futuristic and Fantastic as Literary Fiction
Subtitle: Someday They'll Believe Us.

Basically every year we try to go to one of the panels where Brian Evenson talks about genre fiction as it relates to literary fiction. Usually we don't hear anything we don't already know -- that there is great genre fiction being written every year, that literary writers would benefit from opening themselves to it, and etc. -- but sometimes we like to indulge in nodding our heads to things we already believed.

Turns out we got in late and couldn't make it to this one. But know that Uncanny Valley shall continue to stand a beacon in the genre fight, until it is no longer a fight.

Readings and Events:

7:00pm: Mud Luscious/Annalemma/PANK Present: Convocation in Chicago

Where we hope to run into contributors Laura Ellen Scott, Brian Oliu, and Roxane Gay, among other wonderful people.

9:00pm: AWP 2012 Karaoke Idol

Sorry we missed these as well. Hope to catch many of you somewhere today.

10:00pm: Action Books/Birds of Lace/Kate Durbin Present: An Evening of Intimate Readings in the Bathroom of a Goth Club

One of us in each bathroom, I suppose. Contributor and pal Carrie Murphy will be reading in the ladies' room, where Mike will not be able to see or hear her. Maybe this is political commentary. (Mike says he really wants someone to use the toilet while they read -- not because it would be a good idea, at all, but because why else are we in a bathroom?)

This was eventful. Four people crammed into a bathroom, doing call and response poetry to the sound of others at the club angrily peeing. Eventually, from what I'm told, they got kicked out of the bathroom and the cops said no more readings in the alley. But they persevered! I didn't get to hear many of the readings, but Mike and I danced to fun music with writers and goths who I think, by the end, came to accept us as kindred spirits.

Friday, March 2

Panels we like:

9:00am: Literature and the Internet in 2012

Contributors Blake Butler and Roxane Gay will be here talking about online publishing, as well as Stephen Elliott and James Yeh. Seeing these folks share their enthusiasm is always encouraging.

This was a really great panel in that everyone came to the topic with slightly different online lit experiences and priorities, so there was a lot of productive disagreement and discussion. It also had the serendipitous effect of correcting a lot of audience members' bad online behaviors.

4:30pm: The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House: Organizations Supporting Women in the Literary Arts

We are big fans of VIDA and their work drawing attention to gender disparities in publishing.

But it turned out the numbers were all we needed to know this year. And, it turned out we were tired.

11:00am: SECRET BRUNCH at the Artifice table.

What is SECRET BRUNCH? We're not sure. But their blog advertises it, so apparently it's not a very closely guarded secret. The Artifice folks are obviously great pals to us, and we buy their magazine every year at AWP. It is a Tradition.

A tradition with, apparently, orange juice! It was good to meet the editors and share some high fives over Exits Are.

7:00pm: A reading. We don't know which one. We will probably decide based on the number of postcards we are handed. SO EVERYONE GIVE US ALL YOUR POSTCARDS OKAY.

We received VERY FEW postcards and so went to no readings. Your own fault. No. I lie. We are just really, really lame. We are sorry for how lame and bad at partying we are. We had a great time, though, having Thai food with Gabe Blackwell.

10:00pm: Somewhere else. Drag us by the arm to somewhere where we can dance. Or back to a hotel, where we will give you horsey rides around the pool.

I said, "Return to the hotel room and watch Downton Abbey," didn't I?

Saturday, March 3

Panels we like:

12:00pm: Making Room for the Graphic Narrative

Comics! These panels never work out as well as you'd hope, but we'll keep trying.

Ohhh, noon! I couldn't find this panel in my schedule. Wandered the bookfair instead, where I got to chat with Kate Bernheimer of Fairy Tale Review and Danielle Dutton of the Dorothy Project about the growing number of homes for fairy tale and speculative writing, especially writing by women. And I filled my sack with books.

Tortas, caldos, and Mexican hot chocolate TBD at XOCO. Meal companions are very welcome!

Deep dish pizza at Pizano's. The walk and probable forty-minute wait at XOCO did not seem workable since Mike needed to get back to the Noemi table, where he spent the afternoon. I spent the afternoon having crowd-induced panic attacks and hiding on the fifth floor. :( Seriously. I have never had that happen before and it makes me question my fortitude for future AWPs. I've got to work on this. Gathered masses of writers are not mortal threats. They're not. Right?

6:00pm: Silver Tongue and Orange Alert Present the Unstuck Group Reading at AWP

Contributor and Noemi Press author Gabriel Blackwell will be reading here, along with lots of other cool folks. We'll stay as late as we can manage, but we have to drive home after this!

We stayed the WHOLE TIME. It was a great group of readers, all of whom are doing really fun work. Unstuck is a magazine I am very excited about, a new favorite to be sure. Love their work, love their editorial philosophies. I would like us to be sisters someday. Or cousins. Family.

Did you know that this part of Chicago shuts down most of its carry-out places at 8:00 on Saturdays? We didn't. Burger King in EmptyTown, Illinois it was. We arrived home around 1:30 to a cat so needy and buzzed she didn't remember that humans pass out for prolonged periods every night and aren't available for play. This is a picture of our cat, for A.D. Jameson, who asked:

Thank you all for your company, your high fives and hugs and smiles, and your conversation. It was so good to see (meet) so many people we care about. Till next time!

Exits Are in Alt Lit Gossip

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 01:50:00 +0000

So the Alt Lit Gossip tumblr took a break from posting videos of Noah Cicero and Tao Lin's photoshop art to mention Exits Are. Is Alt Lit Gossip growing up? Are they finally covering real literature? Does this mean they're mainstream? Or was it just a boring day at the office? Or, more importantly, is Uncanny Valley officially Alt Lit enough? Is Titanic the best poker movie of all time???

Exits Are

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:19:00 +0000

Hey guys. Guys! Guys. Ladies.

I'm really excited to announce the publication of my free, online, serialized ebook, Exits Are, written in collaboration with many players. The first game, posted today, is called "Your Brother Isn't Talking." I made it with Blake Butler. You can find out more about how I play the games here, but the short version is that we take turns making up a story over gchat. I usually act like a text adventure (think Zork), and the other player can pretend to play one of those adventures, or they can do other, stranger things. It's up to them. The results are wild, improvisational, weird, and sometimes uncomfortable -- all in the best way. And you can play too! You just have to go here to find out how. Uncanny Valley is publishing the "book" cooperatively with Artifice Books, who have been kind enough to host it.

A new game will be posted every Wednesday, as well as the occasional extra game or bonus material. I'll remind you occasionally to check it out. I've already played games with cool folks like Tim Dicks, Aubrey Hirsch, Brian Oliu, Elisa Gabbert, Robert Kloss, and A D Jameson, with many more on the way.

I hope you'll have as much fun with this as I'm having making it. Go check it out.

Why (When) Subtlety Doesn't Matter

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Rae Bowling) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:49:00 +0000

I saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close this weekend. As the reviews have said, it is not a masterpiece. It is not a very special or important film. It is nominated for an Academy Award probably by default--nothing else hefty enough to stand up to their kind of recognition.

I do not think, though, that this movie is an F, a fanciful failure, or a manipulative mistake. I think that EL&IC is as sentimental and contrived as any other movie that could stomach Tom Hanks cast as a dead father, and as sit-throughable. Again, it's no masterpiece. But the things that are getting attacked about it seem really artificial.

Many people call out the annoying obsessiveness of the main character, his insistence on doing things a certain way, his histrionics when the emotions catch up with him. I think that the movie is aware that his behavior is objectively annoying, and that it spends most of the film trying to get us to acknowledge that this behavior is sort of necessary and that we need to be able to understand it and forgive it. The movie is kind to him, but it doesn't take pains to always view him through the most loving lens. It does sort of conveniently forget that minor characters in the story have independent lives and that this kid's force of personality wouldn't necessarily occasion the kind of outpouring of kindness and acceptance it gets. But this is a common fault among ostensibly artier, more subtle films. I'm supposed to believe that an entire town actively and with the utmost kindness encourages the relationship between Lars and his real girl? Ryan Gosling's believable sweetness and need does not make the contrivance here any less believable. You must choose to overlook this much if you want to even finish the movie. Is a kid developing an intricate system for decoding what he thinks is his dad's last message for him any less of a stretch? Is that kind of obsession really so unbelievable?

In my MFA program, obsession in fiction was typically viewed through a bifocal lens. On the one hand, people noted, a character has to want something pretty bad to even get a story to happen. On the other hand, people don't usually go to the kinds of lengths that, say, Oskar Schell goes to, and so, the argument went, care should be taken not to strain the audience's credulity too much. But this argument often hinged on the idea that real people do basically nothing about anything, that humankind's true state of being is just a kind of extended sitting on the hands. This led to a lot of stories about nobody doing anything, the kind of strict domestic realism that most of us who want to consider ourselves innovative strive to avoid. The trick for an intelligent artist was, I think, supposed to be to maintain a very tentative balance, where there was some essential sort of wackiness or whimsy, contrivance, about the story's conceit but the execution of that conceit was roughly as difficult or messy (or, if you really wanted to capture the slow, grinding machinery of society, plodding or inconvenient) as it would have been in real life. Oskar Schell's efforts are not really ever hindered by time, distance, practicability, or interference from others. But I really don't think that makes them less real as an expression of grief, anger, confusion, and bereavement. I think the real thing about EL&IC that's sticking for artists and critics is that it does not subscribe to the notion that the truth is subtle, undramatic, and hard to access.

Fiction, it bears repeating, can never be reality. It represents reality. And the challenge for a writer of realistic fiction is how to represent reality in the most honest and appropriate way. The representation that many critics have taken issue with is the film's direct use of images from 9/11. This strikes them as dishonest, calling up already existing emotions rather than creating its own fictive ones. And it's true that for many audiences, the simple act of reshowing the famous footage of 9/11, of reproducing that day, is creating what can fairly be called a false catharsis. Many people are crying in the theater because of a collective emotion that was quickly and insistently attached to those images by others: These are the towers that represented our prosperity and achievement. These are the towers that stood for our strength and perseverance. This is the day we learned what it was to feel unsafe, violated. When our icons were injured, we all were all injured. This is the day we mourned as a nation. And of course (though usually more distantly), these towers represented real lives, abruptly and needlessly ended.

It would be naive to say that the movie does not rely on and intend to call up those associated meanings. But I don't think it spends near the time on calling up our collective meanings for those images that it spends drawing new, extremely specific meanings for them. For me, all the emotional value of the film came when Oskar Schell crumbled, not when the towers did. For him, the towers falling meant a very particular, very visceral, very final loss. In that moment, they meant the loss of the single most important person in the world, and an indelible, lifelong guilt. The weight of that loss was more incredible than the loss we felt as a nation, and it was humbling, heartbreaking to have this new meaning of the disaster drawn, and to feel even the fraction of its intensity that a story allows.

For the majority of us far from New York City the day of September 11, without loved ones there on that day, the measure of a "good," truthful 9/11 story can only be in its ability to provide a window into the very real terror of a city and the very real grief of any single one of its victims. The art born of tragedy can only deliver lasting comfort on the level of individual characters--they may figure out how to move forward in life, but we, collectively, the human race, will never feel "satisfied" by a Holocaust treatment; we will never feel like it's been settled. It is too big to be settled. Especially for our comparatively less tortuous, less decimating, less protracted national tragedy, I do not think it's fair to ask any art made about it to operate subtly, broadly, with the intent of representing our much quieter feelings of collective grief and terror. If we can't derive enough meaning from glimpsing the depth of one person's suffering--and suffering is a loud, sloppy, pathetic, unsubtle thing--if we demand that stories put words to how we all actually feel instead of how individuals might feel, we'll miss a lot of what fiction can do for a society. The only truth worth telling about 9/11 is its cost in individual human suffering. The only lesson worth taking from a story about 9/11 is to become generous in our response to individual suffering--generous enough to break our taboos about letting people into our houses, about participating in their rehabilitation. The argument that this is not what really happens is a weak one. Some of the most valuable fiction is about what could happen. What should.

This movie is saccharine, and it probably won't change your life. It is missable. It probably doesn't deserve a major award. But it's a working story. It's affecting. And if you set aside the notion that truth is by necessity quiet, private, hidden, it carries some valuable truths--easy to name, but also easy to forget.

All of the Air Bud movies

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 06:48:00 +0000

Learning from games: eight virtues of good design

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:49:00 +0000

So I was watching this talk by game designers Jonathan Blow (Braid) and Marc Ten Bosch (Miegakure) and I thought, "This is something we can apply to writing," because that's what I do. There are a number of interesting little discussions here but the centerpiece is a list of eight virtues of good design according to a certain aesthetic both Blow and Bosch advocate as one good option among many -- one way to shrink the space of possible games such that you are more likely to create a good one. You won't have to watch it to understand this post, but here's the talk:

So now I'll list the eight virtues and describe how I think they relate to the problem of writing a novel. These rules wouldn't be shocking to good game designers and their applications in writing won't have shocking consequences either, but they can serve as a useful and memorable heuristic for making decisions (again, reducing the infinite space of possible works to something more manageable).

1. Richness. This one seems like it would require the least explanation. They describe "richness" as the virtue of selecting a space rich with potential consequences for you to explore. But the key here is selecting a space. The richness of consequences will emerge from rules -- in a game, these rules are called game mechanics. (Mario can jump this high, but he can jump this high if he has a running start.) I think a lot of writers find rules frightening because they limit possibility or because we are trying to write toward "the truth" and any limitation will perhaps stand between us and that truth. I think it's common to underestimate how many constraints any good piece of writing necessarily contains, and how these limitations ultimately create a rich space for exploration. Your characters, your choice of tone, your method of structuring scene and chapter and etc., all constitute rules (or even game mechanics: we are playing a game with the reader). In short, while it might seem that richness suggests excess and maximal inclusion, we actually need to be selective about the elements we include, or the novel will not be rich so much as an incomprehensible blur, a smear of language. Think about the very real limitations of Pynchon as a novelist: many complain about his flat characters and slapstick humor, but without those elements to manage the text and simplify it, his already dangerously complex fiction would become unreadable.

2. Completeness. This actually sounds like the opposite of what it is. You're not trying to put everything in, you're trying to use everything you put in as completely as possible. They describe it as "completeness of exploration." Jonathan Blow says that he will do this in a game even to the point of removing fun -- presumably because other, perhaps more complicated pleasures become available . Think here about chess. You don't really get anything out of playing one game of chess, and you don't get much out of playing five. At first, when you don't understand the possible permutations of the game, your moves seem meaningless. After several dozen games, you begin to understand the space of possibilities enough that many moves are meaningful. The better you get, the more you know what can happen in the game, the more rare it becomes for you to take a move just for the sake of taking a move. You can't afford to waste anything. The trouble with Chess is that it has too many moves. This is why I can only intermittently enjoy it: I know that mastery would require a lifetime. (This is also the genius of chess.) And of course Chess has evolved to reach its present state over a very long time, passing through the hands of countless people. Most of us don't have that long. We need fewer mechanics, fewer rules, a smaller space; once we have that, we can begin to explore the consequences of what we have.

When I wrote my novel Fat Man and Little Boy (forthcoming from no one at no time, as of yet) I limited myself to two primary characters who would explore four locations over the course of the novel: Fat Man, Little Boy; Japan (especially Nagasaki (after the bomb)), France (unnamed city, south of Paris), France (the concentration camp Gurs, remade as a hotel), and Hollywood, in that order. I also limited my important secondary characters (two women, one man). I made rules about how long a given chapter could be and how many sections could be in a chapter. There were half-length chapters (about four pages), full-length chapters (about eight pages), and double-length chapters (about sixteen pages). There were also a number of restrictions on the language, in terms of tone, style, and syntax, many of them deeply idiosyncratic. So here is how I wrote the book: I combined these elements in various combinations until I had exhausted their interesting consequences. I asked myself, "Have I checked in with Little Boy recently?" If the answer was no, then I wrote a chapter about Little Boy. I asked myself, "Has he spent significant time with this secondary character yet?" If the answer was no, then I paired him with that secondary character. Sometimes I still didn't know what to do, so I reminded myself of the underlying mechanic for each character: Fat Man was defined by gluttony and guilt (if in doubt, I made him eat something) and Little Boy was defined by shame and a desire for silence (if in doubt, I made him stay quiet against the wishes of other characters). When I had used all the best combinations in a given environment, I moved them to the next one. Do this enough times, put the results in a sequence, you have yourself a plot.

The primary method of advancing story in character driven narratives is to put two characters together who have not been together before. That's really what this virtue of "completeness" is all about.

3. Surprise. Blow describes the desire to make a game surprising as a counterbalancing force to the desire for completeness. You don't have to show everything because we know what results a lot of combinations would yield. By focusing on surprising results, we focus our attention and the reader's on things that will bring pleasure and new information. In a game, this means that Mario doesn't have to stomp a goomba in every possible situation. In your novel, it might mean that we spend very little time with characters who get along and agree on everything: they're not going to surprise us. My character Little Boy only really interacted with my character Rosie, a potential mother figure, when it was too late for her to mother him; because he was too old, and because there were other demands on her as a mother, she had a reason to actively try not to serve as his surrogate mother. Before that, they would have gotten along too well, so I mostly kept them away from each other: a scene where the motherly character mothers the childish orphan character wouldn't tell us anything we didn't know about the characters or their world.

4. Lightest contrivance. When we feel the author's hand too much in the text, we usually lose interest. We like it best when the mechanics of the text guide its outcomes in a way that feels organic. But, as Blow points out, relative levels of contrivance within a game (or, for our purposes, a novel) can matter a lot: if one mechanic is very contrived and another is not contrived at all, that looks weird and ugly. If the amount of contrivance is roughly even throughout a text, that bothers us less. As much as possible, though, we want to let our various rules interact with each other as cleanly as possible, and accept the results as the truth of the novel, even if we ourselves don't appreciate it very much. Unlike a game, the best outcomes in a novel are often (even usually) those that come about because of the rules and in spite of the desires of author and reader. Flannery O'Connor's worst stories are consistently those where she imposes her will on the story in the climax in order to avoid an outcome she dislikes. "Everything that Rises Must Converge" is my favorite example. The old lady's death has nothing to do with the reality of the story and everything to do with our desire to see her punished.

5. Strength of boundary. This is really about knowing the identity of what you're working on. They discuss eliminating unnecessary mechanics. I would say eliminate unnecessary characters, settings, chapters, paragraphs, sentences -- all with an eye toward clearly establishing a voice, style, and identity for your novel. Sometimes you cut things because they aren't you, not because they aren't good. This is another way of saying: revise.

6. Compatibility. This is pretty much the same principle as the last one, for our purposes. Don't add a new element if it doesn't interact with the elements you have in ways that reveal new and interesting things.

7. Orthogonality. Marc Ben Tosch argues that game designers should make sure their game's mechanics are orthogonal -- that they overlap as little as possible. You don't usually want to have two or three mechanics that do the same thing in the same way. In a novel, this often means creating characters that contrast with each other as much as possible. Characters can reveal more about their world and its rules if they have different desires and capacities. For this reason, my last three novel manuscripts have starred comic pairs. The first pair (both cops) was black and white, clean and dirty, careful and careless, empirical and fanciful, respectively. The second pair (Fat Man and Little Boy) had the obvious contrasts (size, apparent age, maturity, hunger, power) and some others (facility with language, virility, "softness"). The pair I'm working with now, two brothers, are contrasted in terms of intelligence, self-control, strength, attractiveness, moral clarity, and fear. Of course this is a very old technique.

You don't necessarily need pairs, though, you just need people that see things differently, or different modes of narration, or different objects for one character or one mode of narration to react with. Language-driven novels without much in the way of character tend to operate by applying one mechanic (one style of language) to a variety of situations and environments: the variety of objects refracts the language and twists it into new forms. (A lot of the writing we talk about here does this.)

One thing Blow and Tosch don't discuss -- probably because it's much more pertinent to fiction than to games, where this issue will often take care of itself -- is that contrasts become most effective when the things being contrasted have a lot in common. The characters, scenes, or situations in a given novel are usually variations on a theme, more alike than different in key respects. (Or often there are several interpenetrating groups of like characters, as in Pynchon's V, where certain tendencies repeat themselves across time and space.) In House of Leaves, the characters are defined by their reactions to the overwhelming reality of the house.

8. Generosity. In Braid, one of the key mechanics is that you can reverse time. You don't have a limited number of opportunities to do this: you can do it again and again. Why not let the player explore the consequences of your mechanics fully? In terms of a novel, this has fewer obvious applications, but I do think it's worth thinking about who is being generous to whom in the case of a novel. In a game, you create an environment and explicit rules for interacting with that environment. You're building a space for the player's agency. In writing a novel, the relationship is much less clear. You're still creating a space for the reader's agency, but you're not sure how that agency will operate, because you're creating the only concrete object that will definitely exist in each writer/reader interaction: they might write a review, they might blog about the book, they might write on the page or tear it up, but they might just read the book and think about it for a little while. So here the generosity has to extend to the person with the more concrete forms of agency -- the writer. You have to trust that if you explore what's interesting to you about the space of your novel, your readers will be generous enough to allow you the time and language that you need to do that. At the same time, you want to remember to allow your readers as much space as possible to experience the book in the way that they want while still maintaining the integrity of your story (such as it is).

Conclusion: Blow discusses how much pressure these rules have taken off of him as a game designer. If the game isn't fun and it doesn't make him rich, as long as it's guided by these virtues it will probably have something valuable in it. I feel the same way about the rules by which I write. So far I haven't published any of my novels, so I haven't been successful in a lot of key respects. I don't know if my books are good or fun or whatever. But I can have some confidence that by following my own rules, I did something that was potentially beautiful according to its own measures. For now, that's enough. As a general rule, I don't know what to do if someone tells me to say something smart. But if they tell me to say a sentence with seven words in it, I can probably accomodate that. These sorts of rules can't guarantee you a great game or a great novel -- but they can limit the space of creation such that creation becomes possible, and provide heuristics by which to judge your decisions.

Playing the odds

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:51:00 +0000

When I was doing my senior workshop during my undergrad, I did something I've never seen another writer do: I took polls on my writing. My project was a murder mystery about a unicorn. The mystery was being investigated by the Atlanta Snuff Films Unit (in this universe, there were a lot of snuff films). It was set in the seventies. Richard Nixon was a character. The killers were the heir and transexual heiress to the Coca-Cola fortune. In the climax, the main character fights a sword-bearing detective on a unicorn. This was all the result of my belief that my best stories come from premises that sound too stupid to possibly work. The class, who were mostly literary realists and memoirists (usually at the same time, usually without acknowledging explicitly the element of memoir) in the way of most undergraduate students of creative writing, were understandably unsure of what to do with the book.

Most undergraduate students are afraid to say "I don't dig this." I wanted to know how they really felt about the book, though, and my instructor was not a fan of the rule of gagging the author during workshop, so I went ahead and tried something. I asked them to raise their hands if they had lost interest in the story at various points. By the end of my questions, I had lost something like half the class. I thought, "Well, probably about ten percent more didn't like this than will admit it, but even keeping forty percent engaged without the advantage of self-selection [i.e., the tendency of people who pick up a given book to be the sort of person who wants to read that sort of book already] is pretty great." I learned a lot from polling them informally on different decisions and scenes in the book.

I realized that I could make my life as a writer easier by thinking in terms of probability. I believe that writers should generally maintain a profound skepticism about their ability to judge their own work or even the works of others. Knowing whether something is good, whether it works, is too damn hard. I don't like trying to sort that mess out. My preference is to structure my work in a way that is more likely than not to satisfy my own requirements and those of my readers. In other words, I try to think less about whether something is the right decision and more about whether these sorts of decisions have tended to work out in the past. I try to think about whether this is likely to satisfy a decent percentage of the people who give the book an honest shot. The two questions are not that different if you accept that the whole exercise is subjective anyway, but it does put me in a different mindset that I find useful. We like to think that we can control the experience of the reader and so ensure a certain level of quality and satisfaction. This isn't very realistic. But to create a book as an environment that is more likely than not to produce a good experience for most of its attentive readers? I think we can figure out reliable ways of doing that, and I think we can apply them. I don't know how to make you like a story. I certainly don't know how to please God or the universe's underlying aesthetic principles or etc. But I have some idea how to make one out of two likely readers enjoy it. And for me, that's enough.

Words With Friends Sucks

noreply@blogger.com (carrie murphy) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:40:00 +0000

It was fun for a while, right? But then the novelty wore off. Now you're stuck with tons of games and all these little notifications popping up so you feel like you should keep playing, but you're totally just doing the easiest move you can because this is boring now and you just want to get it over with without being rude.

I feel weird playing against the "lit" type of people in my life, because I feel like it's a silent-yet-deadly battle to see who can come up with the awesomest words. And I feel weird playing against the non "lit" people in my life, because they know I'm a writer and they're probably like Why the hell isn't this girl better at Words With Friends? But honestly, I feel like Words With Friends is way more about spatial reasoning and I suck at spatial reasoning. My boyfriend kills me every single time we play and it's because he has a math brain. I once played a 106 point word against him and he still won.

I let my mom win like five times and then she legit beat me like five times. The most random people I went to high school with keep playing me, and actually utilizing the little chat box, which is another level of awkward. No, I don't want to catch up on the last nine (holy shit, it's NINE now?!?!) years while we're playing a pseudo Scrabble game through Facebook. No, thanks.

And the app keeps breaking my phone when I use it, and the Facebook version keeps making me reauthorize it. It also keeps wanting to publish my moves/scores even though I have never ONCE clicked yes in regards to that option, because I don't find want to bombard all my social media people with those little blue, yellow and red announcements. I'm just trying to be polite, and Words With Friends is making my online social life about FIFTY BAJILLION times harder, what with the etiquette of notifications, of reminders, or what caliber of word to play against who, of how fast to play a move, when to say good word or damn you or ewwww I have all vowels.

At first I was like Hell yeah Alec Baldwin! Fight the power with Words With Friends! but I'm disillusioned now. It's not with friends, it's with Facebook friends, and we all know what kind of friends those are. It's not friendly, it's oppressive! Down with Words With Friends!

(But Scrabble itself can stay. Because I'm staring you down over the board, about to play QUINCE for a triple word score.)

OOOoooooOOOOOOOOOooooooOOOOOOHHHOOoooooH

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dicks) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:47:00 +0000

(Did you read this post’s title correctly? The correct way to read it is as a ghostly, mournful howl.)

Happy Friday the 13th! I’m going to tell you a ghost story. This is actually a story not about ghosts but about the weird ideas people have about ghosts. I’m joined in this telling by my pal, Sarah.

Sarah grew up in a small town clinging to the Mississippi River. Her grandmother’s brother ran a combination grain/feed/trucking business inside a large agricultural-industrial building, and Sarah and the other kids in her family were sometimes allowed to play inside. There was a lot of open space in the building and there was an office stocked with toys.

After her family left the business, most of the building was converted into storage, but her grandfather continued working out of one of the offices. After he died (during Sarah’s junior year of high school), his office was sold and redesigned into a salon.

You told me this new salon was popular with teenagers in your town.

This hairstylist was very popular with the girls in my high school. She was young and probably what the residents of a smaller town would consider hip. She was known for giving short haircuts with a lot of layers and colors. She used razors instead of scissors! Her products and prices were written in colored chalk on a blackboard like in the coffee shops I would come to know when I left town to attend college and then graduate school. This was all very different from the other salons and stylists around, who were established in the 70s and 80s in a town where the elderly greatly outnumbered any other age group. I will remind you that my graduating high school class was made of 48 students.

You liked the haircuts this stylist gave you. Was it weird sitting in your grandfather's old office, having this woman snip snip snip at your head?

She did give me two very good haircuts. Or maybe they weren’t that great, but were the best I had until that point in my life.

It’s always strange to see things change, especially the things you have fond memories of from being a child. Since my grandfather’s office was only a few blocks from my home, we would often walk over to say hello and eat the candy he kept for our visits. His death was very hard on my family, so I suppose having the office change was in a way welcomed. It was different now, and didn’t have those ghostly reminders and heartaches hiding behind familiar objects.

So let's get to the ghost.

The GHOST!

The first time I decided to get my haircut by this stylist it was a little over a year since my grandfather had passed away. It started innocently enough. We were engaging in the normal conversation. What grade are you in school? What do you want to do after school? And then it happened. “You’re his granddaughter! Did you know he HAUNTS this place!” I could not describe the level of shock I felt.

“Haunts this place?” I asked.

“Yeah! I started to notice that when it’s late and I’m closing up I’ll put something down on the desk and it will DISAPPEAR! I’ll find it later in the back room. And sometimes after I lock up and leave my husband drives by and notices that the LIGHT HAVE TURNED ON! But they are always off again when I get there in the morning to open.”

I can’t really describe to you all the emotions I felt during this conversation. There was an immediate feeling of anger that she had reduced my grandfather to some sort of faceless and strange poltergeist who spent his afterlife taking joy in moving around her curling irons and bottles of hair dye. As if he wouldn’t have anything else better to do! Or that if there is some sort of afterlife, his would be spent wandering the earth, forever doomed to cause problems for this spunky young hairstylist. My grandfather was a very kind and generous man who befriended all he met. And now I was being told that his was how my grandfather was forced to spend the rest of eternity.

Since I am polite and hate all confrontation, I held these feelings in and went along with the conversation. And really, what choice did I have? She was in the middle of cutting my hair. I knew better than to upset a person who was holding a razor. I let it go and listened to her ghost stories. She ended the conversation by telling me that now when she closes up the store she says goodnight to him.

I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife. At that point, I felt a little hope that maybe it was true; if my grandfather was playing practical jokes in this woman’s salon, at least he wasn’t dead. At least he wasn’t gone. Some part of him was still interacting with this world. He did love his job, loved talking to people. Perhaps his spirit found his way back to the office and wanted to shake things up a little now that it wasn’t the same place he remembered it to be. Maybe there is something else after this for me. For all of us. But that wasn’t who my grandfather was. And even though a little bit of me would love to be able to hold on to that hope and believe it, I can’t. At best I could believe that it was some OTHER ghost giving this woman trouble.

Did she seem to have any doubt that you would be thrilled with this news?

I doubt she had any idea that the thought of my grandfather haunting her salon would be upsetting to me. She had to be in her early 20s, and I remember that ghost stories were one of the currencies of cool in my high school. She also didn't really know my grandfather personally, so it must have been easier to see him as a faceless invisible prankster than a real person.

This story highlights a contradiction in how we think about ghosts. We (culturally, in our stories) engage with the sappy undead and the gruesome undead and the horrifying undead, but the vampires and zombies only rarely were ever anything but undead. We rarely see them alive and happy, then dying, then gone; instead, we cut straight to the part where they lurch from the earth. And then, even on a personal, "real-life" level, someone (like your hair stylist) may believe in the ghost as the embodiment of a real, once-alive person, yet believes that this real, once-alive person is now content to rattle around a salon and move bottles of hair dye.

It does seem that we all take on a different meaning to different people after we die. A meaning that we no longer have any control of or participation in. Even the people we knew well become changed in our minds after death, so that we usually remember more of their goodness than their faults. Sometimes they become symbolic to us and take on a meaning they never intended or would have wanted. They become one-dimensional. And for those we didn’t really know, we get to interact with what has been left behind and create our own meaning for it. We can all more easily interpret a traditional ghost from a faceless entity, but it’s much harder to make that leap when we have had a relationship with that person. Ghosts in a sense are divorced from their humanity.

Did your grandfather's (and, more recently, your grandmother's) passing affect how you think about the undead? I'm curious here specifically about your engagement with the undead in stories, or video games, or movies. You're a woman who loves zombies, or did for a while.

I think my grandmother's passing is what made me remember what happened with the hairstylist for the first time in years. It did take me a while to process it, because for a while I didn't really understand what made me feel so violated. It was the first time I was asked to engage with someone I knew and loved in real life as one of the faceless undead we see in stories.

But not all undead in stories are completely faceless. I'm reminded of a scene in Shaun of the Dead which has always stuck with me, in which one of the characters dies while they are all in some sort of getaway car. In one moment he is still their beloved family member who had passed, and in seconds he has transformed into a mindless, flesh eating zombie. I think really good zombie movies and graphic novels are the ones which explore the relationship between real people and the faceless undead.

It's very unsettling because it violates how we view humanity. Are they still human? Are they still the person/spirit/soul we know and love? Or have they become something else? It’s an interesting dynamic.

Do you ever think of your grandfather when you see a movie or read a book populated by ghosts? Does your memory of the conversation with the stylist affect your enjoyment of ghost stories now?

Actually, no. I've never really thought of real people when I see/read zombie/ghost movies/stories. I really haven't thought much about that conversation until we spoke of it earlier this week. I hope it doesn't happen, but it probably will now. THANKS.

I guess I have mostly thought about what I would do if YOU were turned into a zombie. How would i deal with that? Probably throw you to the zombie wolves.

I have three last questions for you:

How would you spend your time if you died and hung around as a ghost?

Interesting question. If there would be a way, perhaps I would like to haunt Xbox Live. Sort of like Master Shake in that Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode with mega-ultra chicken (No! Shhh! He is legend.).

How do you think other people would imagine your ghost spending its time? If someone was convinced you were haunting a house, what kind of behavior would be attributed to you?

I'm sure that every flicker of light, missing object, or loud noise in the night would be blamed on me.

Maybe I should start actively cultivating my ghost personality now so I have some control on how I’m viewed after I die. Mention in casual conversation how I totally plan on doing (insert funny idea here) when I’m a ghost. Just wait and see! And then when that mentioned thing happens, everyone will just automatically assume it’s me.

How do you think I would spend my time as a ghost?

Your specialty would be to cause a very loud noise to happen just as someone took a sip from a cup.

My story "Zero" available for purchase.

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:44:00 +0000

Hey guys. This isn't so much an Uncanny Valley thing as a me thing. I wanted to learn how to make ebooks, so I pretty much hand-coded one from scratch using my story "Zero." The story was originally published in The Lifted Brow, which, that being an Australia-based publication, means you probably missed the story. 1.5 years later it's still one of my best and very likely my most bleak, and so I decided to make it available for purchase. You can get it from the Kindle store or directly from me (in which case you get the epub version as well as the mobi file). Here are the first few paragraphs:

For all legal purposes, her husband was alive. The doctor made a point of this. Given a physician's agreement, removal of a rubber feeding tube was not murder. To put a knife through his neck, or to shoot him, or to instruct the body to end himself somehow—this was different. “Not that you would do such a thing,” said the doctor, “but you should know what could happen, if you did.”

Medically speaking, the case was more ambiguous. If a virus—which has no metabolism but does reproduce, though only through host cells—could be considered alive, then so could her husband. “If,” said the doctor. “The jury is still out.”

Her husband was perhaps a kind of parasite. “But aren't we all,” the doctor said. He adjusted his glasses, smiled without mirth. “There's a joke in there somewhere.”

Philosophically, well, it depended a great deal on one's philosophy. The doctor said that his was medicine. He had to preserve life (or its appearance) at all costs. He asked about her philosophy. When she said she hadn't chosen he insisted she must for the sake of discussion. He suggested possibilities.

“Utilitarian, I guess.”

He didn't seem to know what that meant.

“It means I have to minimize suffering,” she said.

That was all right, then. Not pertinent, though. Her husband was not suffering. It was important she remembered.

“So your husband may not be alive anymore,” said the doctor, “or he might. It's essential that you don't settle the question by killing him. It's called persistent vegetative state, not permanent. He may still come out of this thing. Wouldn't that be something?” He nodded several times.

He said, “It can be frightening.” He said, “The body might be childish at times. He may seem moody. He will do strange things. Sometimes he'll get up in the middle of the night and rifle through the refrigerator, removing expired products. Sometimes he'll organize your records. We don't know why this happens, but it does.”

I hope you'll buy it, and I hope you like it.

Music Doesn't Come From My Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 15:21:00 +0000

I can't make music come from my brain. It just doesn't. If I ever hum anything, I make it up, unless it's the Elmo Song, or the Wedding March, or Do Your Ears Hang Low. How the fuck am I a poet? How did any sonic qualities get into anything I write? Actually the last rejection I got, a good rejection, suggested a path for revision favoring sound and lyric over things and rhetoric...

I do love process though. I love forcing things to arrive by a machine I've created. Here are some beautiful music machines that I love...

I am worse at titles than Carrie.

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:23:00 +0000

Like, a lot worse. I love how her post about the difficulty of choosing a title features like three excellent titles, none of which I could have possibly thought of (with the possible exception of "Riding in Cars with Boys," simply because it's pretty literal). The truth is that when it comes time to title a story or a novel or whatever, I have a pretty consistent strategy without which I am totally helpless, like a babe in the woods. I'm not sure if my first novel ever had a title, but if it did it was probably named after the protagonist, so then "Tom." (It was about a kid who shrinks until he disappears. It was awful. No copies, printed or electronic, survive, and I thank God for that every day.) The second novel had a stupid title and it sucked and I won't mention it here. (Also pretty much gone, although I had my gmail account by the time I finished it, which is the point at which nothing ever really disappears.) The third novel was called "ALASKA," with the caps, because it featured Alaska as a central imaginary location. The fourth novel was called "Goliath in Heaven," because the most important character was named Goliath and he was in a place called Heaven for most of the book. This one was briefly (and poorly) agented, but it's probably for the best that nothing came of that. My sixth novel is called "Fat Man and Little Boy" because those are the two main characters. Do you see a pattern here?

Basically, I have to name every story I write after the most important object, character, or location. Occasionally I go hog wild and name it after a concept instead. If this strategy isn't available to me, I'm hopeless. My fifth novel, which fell into the awkward transition between undergraduate and graduate school, never even got a title. It was about two detectives -- the Atlanta snuff film unit -- who found a video recording of a unicorn being shot to death with a shotgun. It was also about a third detective who found the corpse beneath a statue of the (fictionalized) father of Coca Cola, and what that did to him. It was also vaguely about Vietnam. Richard Nixon was an important character. The villains were an heir and (transexual) heiress to the Coca Cola fortune. There was no way to title this sucker that didn't feel totally ridiculous. What was I supposed to call it? "The Murdered Unicorn"? "Two Snuff Detectives"? "Coca Cola Killers"? I'm actually pretty fond of this story and a little sad it fell between the cracks, but I can't imagine going back and trying to revise it into shape now, so it remains untitled. But I really never have thought of a good one.

One of the best parts of my "Bodies" series is that I got to name them all by number, in the order I wrote them. It doesn't get any easier than that!

My most apparently abstract titles are usually the ones for my Google-based poems, like "A slave is." But actually these are very concrete! Generally I'm just telling you what I googled to find the language that generated the poem.

Right now I'm writing a novel about superheroes. I have no Earthly idea what I'm going to call it. Every title I think of is ridiculous (in a bad way). Most of the characters have sort of idiotic names that work in the context of the book I think but not at all as something that would make you want to pick up and read and maybe buy the book. There isn't really a clearly most important character anyway -- not in the same sense as there usually is, for me. There isn't any one central MacGuffin or concept. Instead there are a million-some MacGuffins and concepts. Practically every other page introduces a new one. So right now, you want to know what the file name is?

"Super.doc."

Because if nothing else, we can all agree that the dudes in this book are "super."

Gonna have to do better than that come publication time. Ayup.

The Tyranny of My Book Title

noreply@blogger.com (carrie murphy) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:58:00 +0000

I recently announced that my first collection of poems, PRETTY TILT, is coming out from Keyhole Press sometime in 2012. I am happy and excited. I had a hell of a time finding a title for it and this is why.

The book, the bulk of which is my MFA thesis, was originally called STICK PINK. I still like this title, but a lot of people thought it didn't fit the book, especially as it evolved. One of my MFA classmates said "Why did you name your book penis?" which pretty indelibly ruined that title for me. The book is largely about teenage girlhood and the formation of identity, so I wanted the title to be something that evoked femininity but also had a dark side. Teenage girls have some very dark sides.

Then I named the book LIKE THE LITTLE LIGHTNING, which was a line from one of the important poems in the book. I still like this title, but I think it's kind of twee and not reflective of the book's overall concerns. This is the final title of the thesis...if you ever go look me up in NMSU's library, that's what you'll see. But I knew LIKE THE LITTLE LIGHTNING wasn't the REAL title.

I haven't ever had too much trouble titling my individual poems, so people were like HEY! Just name the book after one of the central poems. But that didn't work. No one poem or one phrase or one line seemed to sum up or capture the book's whole scope. These are poems I'd been working with for years and I knew their personalities. I wanted a title that sounded good when you said it out loud. I wanted one that instantly evoked a specific image or feeling. I wanted a title that would make me want to read the book if it wasn't my book.

So the book was eventually accepted for publication, but I still had no title. I did everything I could think of to generate one, including going through the book with a fine-tooth comb, scrambling the book a full three times, soliciting opinions from everyone I could think of, emailing the manuscript to friends and teachers, and whining incessantly on Twitter. I whined a lot to myself, too; I've had a hard time adjusting to writing outside of the bubble of the MFA program and I was angry at myself for not being able to title my own book without asking a billion people what they thought.

Still, nothing seemed right or felt right. I thought, maybe, that when I heard the perfect title I would just know, like some kind of message from the art-gods to me. You know when someone has a new baby and you say Oh, how did you pick the name? and they say We just looked at her and knew she was an Anne! (Or, more likely these days, an Ella or an Emma or an Isabella). I thought something like that was going to happen. I would suddenly hear or think of the perfect title and that would be that.

But that was never that. I kept a running list of possible titles in a Gmail draft, but I hated all of them. I sort of wanted to name the book RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS, which is a reference to the 2001 Drew Barrymore movie that I watched incessantly as a teenager. Four poems in the book are titled RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS so it seemed fitting, seemed to tie the book together in a good way. But my publisher said it would fuck up Google search results and that was a good enough reason, so I abandoned it.

So, PRETTY TILT. How did it come to be? Well, it came out of the random scrambling of the manuscript, oddly enough. PRETTY TILT was one of the phrases that the automated scrambler came up with. I kind of liked it and then I asked some people's opinions (OF COURSE) and they seemed to like it, including the publisher. So I said ok. Relatively anticlimactic, right? But it fits the book and I like the way it sounds on the tongue and to be honest, I was just done hemming and hawing over the title. PRETTY TILT is on its way into the world now. That title is going to be printed on a book with my name underneath and my poems inside. Whoa.

Merry New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:48:00 +0000