September 2011
16 posts
We wrote two plays tonight. One about Amorefest and the lack of chocolate strawberries in Ghana. The other about a parasite convention. (Or was it a convention of parasites?)
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Spent most of today writing a review of The Truth About Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint for Asymptote.
Here’s what I said to the editor when I emailed it to him:
“Attaching my review or an attempt at a review or some words on the book or some words on the book and some gestures towards other books or a bunch of words that don’t really go together but somehow found themselves...
I feel like the part of my life before right now may as well as have happened a million years ago. But what difference does the past make to the present and to the future outside of the conscious minds that seek causation and storytelling.
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Molars Molars says, in response to my last post, “I love your kimchi-in-a-pot voice—it’s your sexiest voice, by far.”
Good! And I do want the rest of you to know that my last post was a warning that this blog will soon be nothing but gratuitous photos of my kimchi.
I’m at another point where I feel like I’ve lost my tumblr voice. What does that mean? Voice is something that is often talked about in writing classes. When I was younger, I used to reject compliments of my “voice” in my short stories and non-fiction essays. I felt like it was a cop out, that the teacher or fellow student had nothing better to say to me and so they fell...
I moved to Iowa City recently. I live near a railroad and if you want to know when the trains go past my house, check out my 2nd tumblr devoted to the subject, Trains and Sway.
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I just saw a picture of Bjork that I found attractive and I suddenly realized that I really like women who resemble my best friend from fourth grade. Have I been fostering an unrequited crush on him for decades or did I become friends with him because he resembled women I desired?
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Still reading Jung. His description of his school days and his relationship to his peers also describes my own feelings and experiences.
He writes, “My ‘unusualness’ was gradually beginning to give me the disagreeable, rather uncanny feeling that I must possess repulsive traits, of which I was not aware, that caused my teachers and schoolmates to shun me.”
Good day, tumblr! Here’s a poem by my friend Kevin Hyde! It’s called Minneapolitan, and it’s about how filling is your beer. Mr. Hyde typically writes prose, so this poem is not one to be feared by those who only read prose.
Amelia Gray has a great little story up today at Dear Navigator. It’s called Device. Here’s the first sentence, “The young inventor created a device that could predict the future within one tenth of a percent of accuracy.”
“The life of man is a dubious experiment. … Individually, it is so...”
– Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
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An email I wrote to someone teaching undergraduate fiction writing who wanted things to teach:
“The one good thing I learned from Curtis Sittenfeld about writing short stories is that it’s like preparing for a packing trip to a mountain top. You pack everything that you are going to need on the way up to get you to the top and you don’t want to pack any extra because it will...