A Podcast That Has Old-School Smarts
[Julie] Klausner might be at her most irresistible when the speed of her monologue picks up, and she seems to be working out ideas out loud. As critics develop and refine opinions into reviews, their first impressions, which is often the most honest ones, can get lost or muted. That rarely happens in “How Was Your Week?” In fact, Ms. Klausner, who studied at the Upright Citizens Brigade, makes you think that criticism could learn something from improv.
—Jason Zinoman, The New York Times
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When you started writing, in high school or college, it wasn’t out of a wish to be published, or to be successful, or even to win a lovely award like the one you’re receiving tonight. It was in response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive. Remember?
—Jeffrey Eugenides, 2012 Whiting Award speech
[Image: via]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/3bc5d0eab7d12ac1f8d24c6fca4cd93d/tumblr_mfp4xqka771rruvf1o1_500.jpg)
When you started writing, in high school or college, it wasn’t out of a wish to be published, or to be successful, or even to win a lovely award like the one you’re receiving tonight. It was in response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive. Remember?
—Jeffrey Eugenides, 2012 Whiting Award speech
[Image: via]
The patient process of Nature was once imitated by men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest perfection … all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.
—Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)
The Village seems to be the hardest-hit, its streets a fluorescent wasteland of yogurt shops: eight by our count with another on the way. “There’s been a veritable war in the Village,” Douglas Elliman’s retail queen Faith Hope Consolo remarked. “It’s the fastest growing franchise in the country.”
The Food That Ate Manhattan: The Implacable Rise of Frozen Yogurt Leaves Us Cold
JEFFREY BROWN: Give me an example of some either connection between a contemporary writer and an older story or, I don’t know, some insight that surprised you.
LORIN STEIN: It was a lot of fun seeing Mona Simpson, who is a writer and used to be an editor of the Paris Review, talking about when Norman Rush’s story came into the Review and how her colleague read the first sentence and said, we’re going to publish this after reading one sentence. It’s something editors don’t usually admit, but you can tell in one sentence.
JEFFREY BROWN: Really?
LORIN STEIN: Yes, you can, you usually can. Not always, but usually. A story is short enough that if you don’t make a mistake in the first sentence, you probably won’t make a mistake all the way through.
Moving backward from the center of the present moment as it exits my inside thinking of it, the progression of my father’s dementing memory forms a film of familiarly linear burrows.
Blake Butler / Seven Interruptions of the Image / Frequencies, Volume 1
Picasso produced hundreds of great paintings; Ralph Ellison wrote one great novel. Art is hard, but literature is murder.
Joe Queenan / One for the Books
“The Hare with Amber Eyes” describes the rise and fall of one family in Europe. Having written about them, the author was faced with the unintended consequences of his discoveries: that just as every national history belongs in a different way to every nation, so every family story belongs to each relation, and every narrative contains elements claimed in equal measure by the teller and the told.
Edmund de Waal’s Unfinished Business / More Intelligent Life
“There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”—Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder
“Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.”—J. G. Ballard
In true Sontag style …
Aphorisms are rogue ideas. Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you: he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details. Aphoristic thinking constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast, and move on. An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that. To write aphorisms is to assume a mask—a mask of scorn, of superiority.
From As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980, by Susan Sontag. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, page 512. This quotation is from 1980.
Writing a review of Cometbus and remembering my old zine from college, The Growing Upheaval.
25 Writing Prompts to Inspire Twitter Fiction
18. What would a superhero tweet?
19. Write a blurb describing how your favorite novel makes you feel, without using the name of the actual novel.
20. How would your favorite historical character use Twitter?
