Sister in Queens
In some dreams, you people show. You are neighbors I didn't know about, stylists, you roll out from beneath cars with grease on your faces. You people, you people. I'm driving around the country and hope to collide with a few of you really. My big idea is to post images and songs along the way when the blog gets quiet. This is the first installment from my sister's place in Queens.
Sufjan Stevens, "Sister"
Mary Anne Mohanraj
Hey guys,
If you are still in the IC, please check out Mary Anne Mohanraj's reading tonight at Prairie Lights. It's at 7pm. She's a family friend and her collection of linked stories is very interesting. Not to mention about Sri Lankans, and you know how I feel about that...
www.mamohanraj.com (FOLLOWING COMMENT NOW OUTDATED BUT ANSWER CAN STILL BE FOUND IN COMMENTS! can't make the link live because I'm posting on a Mac--Chauncey, tips?)
Cheers,
Viz
dry drunk in pdx--day 11
before i left iowa, the head chick in charge took me aside and told me i was drinking too much. a crutch, she called it. normally when i am the subject of a well-intentioned intervention, i just laugh it off and say, "shut up, ian. get us another round," or "quiet, dave. you're spoiling my manhattan." but since i've never been out to a bar or briss or other drinking occasion with this woman, i could not so easily dismiss her as a hypocrite. i guess some of you guys must have snitched on me. i'm not blaming you; i probably had it coming.
quitting drugs was really easy, because i moved to portland and don't know anybody here. also, i'm broke. i've gotten off "the dope" a few times before just by running out of money. i'm not enterprising enough to steal. the booze, though, is quite tough. it's everywhere and it's so delicious.
anywho, i'm doing this kind of home-school version of rehab called moderation management. at the end you're supposed to be able to drink like normal people. perhaps you heard of it when the woman who invented it
killed a bunch of people in a drunk driving accident. i feel pretty good, considering i haven't gone three days without booze since high school
also, today i went to the naked gay beach on the columbia river (awesome) and last night i got fag-bashed (shitty). both were more intense because i was sober. i wonder if i'll end up being one of those awful people who won't shut up about his
higher power...
While You are Procrastinating, Check This Out
Everything you always wanted to know about just about everything. Political rants, random media critiquing, and the occasional reference to adult entertainment, just to keep Artie Writewell coming back.
http://thecontrariangenius.blogspot.com/
to procrastinate, or not to procrastinate
you guys, i found this
version of hamlet written entirely in chat abbreviations. the best is when polonius says to ophelia, "omg did u just fuk hamlet?" rofl, you guys. rofl.
all I need is a Nobel prize
do you have a Nobel prize to give to me, or loan to me, or sell to me, fellow sufferers? I am in urgent need of one because my petition to become a US permanant resident as an extraordinary artist was denied, and to define "extraordinary", the example given in the law is that someone who has won a Nobel prize.
I'm being very serious. Please let me know ASAP if you know a Nobel Prize is available
Need help ordering coffee
The rivers in Seattle run with espresso, and I'm tired of the sardonic smirk the caffeine engineers give me when I order coffee. It causes this quote to scrawl across my cerebellum: "I belong in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split"--Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye (reading him finally). So I need good stuff, something to the effect of a "tall skinny triple lindy double shot riesling, light on the olives". But obviously I don't know the jargon to pull this off. Can anyone help with a delish caffeinated beverage that requires many syllables to order? It's important since I do a lot of my job-searching at free wifi coffee joints, and Seattle-ites are pretentious about nothing (as far as I can tell), except their caffeinated beverages and their outdoor sporting skills--the other day, I hiked up Mt. Pilchuk (elevation really high) and reached the summit feeling like Mike Tyson, drenched with sweat, then looked over and saw three women--apparently crossbred with mountain goats--on some rocks breastfeeding their babies. Okay, that doesn't make the women pretentious, but they're probably messing up their babies' minds anyway. After breastfeeding on a pristine mountain top, the rest of life's got to suck. Climbing a mountain isn't good enough. These women have to carry something delicate and precious too. Okay, that is pretentious. And any baby with a mother like that, who risks the baby's life climbing a mountain and then teases the baby with the greatest life experience it will ever have at two months old...enough said.
I want to get on my tippy toes and look down upon the caffeine engineer as I beautifully articulate my order and a cannot-compute glaze crosses his face and I say, "Do you need me to repeat myself?" Please help.
For a Thousand Reasons, A Few Words About Peter Jennings
I'd put another version of this up on the Barrelhouse blog, but I thought I would put it here, too. ABC is broadcasting a two-hour retrospective of Peter Jennings' life tonight at 8 and for me, it will be must see television.
It might be hard for those of you who've grown up with a plethora of entertainment choices on television to realize that for the bulk of television's history, most Americans got their news from the triumvirate of Jennings, Brokaw and Rather. Too many people think that Shepard Smith is a newsman, that Fox is actually Fair and Balanced, or that the media is part of a liberal conspiracy. Too many people believe that dissent equals treason. But I think you can make a fairly substantial argument that without the influence of Cronkite, the United States would have deepened its involvement in Vietnam, and without the reporting of Peter Jennings, you would not have seen the steps in the Middle East that allowed us to go from the 1967 war to the Camp David Accords in just a decade.
It's difficult to add much to the requiems, odes and tributes to Peter Jennings that have been written and broadcast in the last two days; it is especially challenging to improve upon the essay by CNN's Aaron Brown, Jennings' one-time colleague at ABC. Say what you will about Brown, but he was, like his mentor, a voice of reason on September 11, and he is certainly the best writer among the major network correspondents. He said:
"For a thousand reasons, his death came too soon.
He should have been given the victory lap, the dinners, the articles, the awards, the accolades that mark a job well-done, a life well-lived. He deserved that. And though he would have said otherwise, I think he would have liked it. And we should have had more time to watch him work, to tell the stories that have yet to unfold.
But he would also say that he lived a charmed life. That he'd been to places, and told the stories, and had the experiences that a young boy imagined and dreamed about, and he did. And we should be grateful, all of us who watched him and those of us who were privileged to work with him, that we were part of the ride."
And it was too short a ride. If you want to know why network news is now terrible, consider this question: in the last four years, how many pieces of video have you seen of say, famine in Darfur, protests in the West Bank, Tony Blair in Parliament, or any story from southeast Asia? Only on World News Tonight. It took a tsunami and hundreds of thousands of deaths to get the other networks to send correspondents to Phuket, yet they all managed to send someone to Aruba to cover the apparently drug-related disappearance of one spoiled, rich white girl. Why is it that more people can produce the name of a 14-year-old girl abducted in Utah than can name the prime minister of Canada or the President of Mexico?
If you want to know why broadcast news is terrible, ask yourself if it's really important to have three weather forecasts during a half-hour news cast, or if you really give a good god damn whether the sports guy and the anchor go out for a beer between the 6 and the 11. Ask yourself why CBS spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants, then tells their female correspondents to grow out their hair and wear smaller earrings. Ask yourself why Ashleigh Banfield can't get a job, but any number of interchangeable blondes can go directly from the traffic chopper to news desk on WTTG (that's channel 5 in DC to you out-of-town folks, and shockingly, a Fox News outlet).
Buy a shortwave and listen to the BBC world service. Read the Financial Times. Use the world news function on Google. Go find out for yourself the names of the opposition leaders in Israel and Canada. Peter Jennings could. He used to remind his colleagues daily that the title of the program that he anchored was WORLD News Tonight.
As Dan Rather would have said, that is a part of our world this evening. We are better for having watched Peter, and worse off now that his chair stands empty.
Ropes of Sand Review of Books?
Dear all, Vizzini here. Wondering if anyone has read the new Ishiguro. Also, have recently finished Harry Potter--I apologize if I missed any other discussion here--but what did y'all think of it? It was good, but no "Goblet of Fire" if you ask me, and I found a number of the plot developments too predictable. On another note, anyone here working on any children's or YA projects? I understand the Workshop is offering a seminar on it this year and wish one had been in place when we were there.
Inconceivable,
Vizzini
Nutsy & Boltsy
The time has come to institute some administrative policy on Ropes of Sand. Members, we've heard your concerns. Effective immediately and retroactively, we'll copy Earth Goat's policies: "Anonymous posting is no longer allowed. To post, you must register a username with Blogger.com. To post a lot, you will have to be like the rest of the contributors and divulge your identity, which we will keep with discretion. Comments that are deemed to add little to a productive or interesting discussion will be removed without notice."
We've also set up a blog e-mail account. Members and non-members alike may direct their questions and concerns there: ropesofsand@gmail.com
Probably goes without saying, but our only aim is to ensure our bloggers a sense of safety and comfort and happiness and pleasure.
The Contrarian Strikes
So I'm done with my two classes of summer school, which were remarkably difficult considering the change from Iowa (as in, I had to show up and I had to read books, etc). But the all-white, all-male syllabus of one of these classes got me to thinking about the following: we're force-fed a handful of books again and again, the canonical offenders yes, but also the hip lit of the moment etc. And our blog has been rather stagnant, and I feel like throwing a bomb or two.
Therefore I posit this question: what is the most overrated book you've ever encountered? Or maybe a book that was handed to you by someone whose taste was usually infallible, yet turned out to be awful. I'm thinking here specifically about Doctor Copernicus, recommended whole-heartedly by an otherwise very fine visiting writer last year. I read that book and became convinced that John Banville's notion of authorial choice was not to make any authorial choices.
The book you've been asked to read the most? (Mine, far and away is Gatsby--not overrated, and I still find something new each time).
Let the flinging begin.
For Brains
In preparation for my annual move, I was recently going through some old magazines, cutting out any articles I might want to clutter up my next apartment with, when I came across a copy of the Writers' Chronicle from February of this year containing an essay by Frederick Reiken discussing the merging and separating of Author, Narrator, and Character in modern novels. It's a good article, especially for those of us attempting 1st or close 3rd narratives, and more specifically for anyone trying for a semi-autobiographical book (I am not, myself, so those of you who endured the beginning of my "novel" in Vanderbes's wrkshp can breathe a sigh of relief) and I wanted to bring it to the attention of anyone who might still have a stack of those Chronicles picked up from the Dey House table (you know they get the NY Times everyday now?) It is not available anywhere online, but our brothers and sisters at Earth Goat held a discussion of this very article a while back. Grendel provides a fine synopsis of the major points and then the other kids get in on the action, eventually getting pretty heated debating the pros and cons of a Canin education. Check it:
http://earthgoat.blogspot.com/2005/02/author-narrator-character-merge.html Incidentally, Reiken's a pretty good novelist. His first book,
The Odd Sea, is a super quick read, a nice little bildungsroman (sp?), and the second,
The Lost Legends of New Jersey, is a bit more-of-the-same, but with more psychological depth and, as far as I remember, some teenage sex. Which is good.
Another thing: NPR's The Connection (9 am on 90.9 fm here in IC) is doing a series this week, "Books that Changed My Life" or something like that. Tomorrow Jason Shinder and Mark Doty discuss "Howl," then Richard Ford On Walker Percy's
The Moviegoer on Thursday, and Big Russ Banks talks up
On the Road Friday. Might be worth a listen.
