Good News from up North
Rob Hicks' "Family Day" has received an honorable mention in
The Fiddlehead's annual fiction contest. Make that honorable-with-a-U, as both Hicks and The Fiddlehead are Canadian. The issue will be out in April. Canadians can score their copies at bookstores. The rest of us should send a $10 (US) check to The Fiddlehead,Campus House, 11 Garland Ct., UNB, PO Box 4400, Fredericton NB E3B5A3, Canada. Ask for issue No. 227 (Spring 2006). I have a tentative plan to smuggle a crate or so of Fiddleheads across the border on my next prescription drug run, but my contacts in the seedy Canadian underworld are not to be relied upon.
Our Dear Hynes
Visit the Boston Review and read
The Dreamlife of Rupert Thomson in which our dear Professor Hynes makes the dream of the continuous dream seem dreamy. You'll see what I mean. It's a great read and one that will make you desire more fully those superhuman reading powers.
al gore must be spinning in his grave...
"while in the bathroom, you notice a coworker has a gun in her purse. she says she only uses it for protection after work."i came across this little gem yesterday, during the four hours of self-directed, online training i underwent for my minimum wage job. i realize that posting this hypothetical violates the acceptable use policy of the company —i was read a copy of this policy by a disembodied human resources henchwoman. the sadist who designed the system made it impossible to click through without listening to every last word, but it was worth it at the end; i got to print a certificate with my name on it and everything. for four hours, i watched classy animations made out of tasteful calligraphy, serif typefaces, and stock photography. one of the photos depicted a black man in a suit sharing a document with an asian woman. those two must work at a different branch, because everybody who works here is white.
i kind of just glazed over and stopped listening for a while, but i distinctly remember the computer telling me i had to adhere to "the code" under penalty of referral to the vice-president of finance. the training module malfunctioned, however, so no word yet on what is actually in the code to which I have pledged allegiance.
the greatest part is that for sitting at a computer and not choking myself to death with the chord of the mouse, i got paid thirty whole dollars! ironically, i felt a strong urge to use a gun after completing this training. i went shooting this morning (only paper plates were killed in the outing). is this how office rampages start?
the recommended action, by the way, is to immediately contact the vice president of finance, i guess to warn him that the lady flashing her pistol in the shitter wants to blow his fucking head off.
Appetite for Appetities
I've been thinking lately about those New Yorker pieces that feature the lives of famous writers, politicians, mathematicians, painters, prostitutes, and the like. It seems that generally the occasion for these pieces is the release of new scholarship. The article serves as a sort of gloriously executed annotated bibliography, reviewing past and present treatments of the individual's life and contribution, often summarizing those sources' weaknesses in comparison with one another. But it also serves as a bite-sized biography, often positing its own notions with authority and veracity. I feel sated and informed after reading them. Happily educated and not super interested in further reading. More often than not, they satisfy my appetite, rather than creating one. And I do have guilt about this.
I've often wondered how all this might sit with writers whose works appear in summation or in passing. Perhaps they've made it their life's work to study and dig and write -- how must it feel to see the field reduced to a single large-circulation magazine article? We get a little glimpse of that in this series of e-mails from Valerie Lawson, the author of a decades long in the making biography on Pamela Travers, to the editors of the New Yorker:
The Secret Life of A Letter to The EditorThanks to Powell'sBooks.Blog for the link and to CJR for the publication of the exchange.
