In the next couple of days I want to post more of my notes from the Yale Writers’ Conference. Today though Sergio Troncoso sent his workshop students this great link to Jorge Luis Borges’ lectures on poetry and philosophy:
Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary)
A few nights with D in New York City at Latino Literacy Now’s Latino Book Awards Ceremony. Grateful to be on hand at the Cervantes Institute to pick up my Honorable Mention. So many great writers and inspiring words.
Planning a lecture on Fight Club and its dystopian themes. Spending time watching this 2003 Palahniuk documentary/video thing called Postcards from the Future:
Latino Literacy Now has listed my book The House of Order Stories as a finalist for their Mariposa Award Best First Book Fiction Award: 2013 Int’l Latino Book Awards Finalists. Could not be more pleased or honored.
Just finished a very engaging What’s Write for Me interview on my book, writing and the process of writing. Thank you to the host Dellani Oakes.
This afternoon I’m rereading Mark Richard‘s “Strays” for my Lit 150 class:
“Uncle trash rakes everything my brother and I owned into the pillowcases off our bed and says let that be a lesson to me. He is off through the front porch door, leaving us buck-naked at the table, his last words as he goes up the road, shoulder-slinging his loot, Don’t ya’ll burn the house down.”
Prepping to discuss Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale tomorrow in my Lit 111 course. We’ll discuss more dystopian elements, feminism and watch some scenes from the film adaptation.
Reading an article about the Salinger documentary. The new poster has an interesting design.
Preparing for Lit 150 and discussion of Amy Hempel’s stories “The Cemetary Where Al Jolson is Buried” and “The Harvest”. This morning I’m reviewing Tom Spanbauer’s notes on literary minimalism:
Notes on Literary minimalism—(exemplified by Mark Richard, Amy Hempel and Chuck Palahniuk)
Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist authors eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story, to “choose sides” based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than reacting to directions from the author. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.
Instead of grand narratives we see briefer and more economical scenes and seemingly insignificant moments that “add up to more than the sum of their parts.”
Reading about Pablo Neruda’s remains that are to be exhumed. It is alleged Pinochet’s regime poisoned the poet.
I’m looking forward to reading this award winning book by Benjamin Alire Sáenz.
Great interview here: “An award like this isn’t ever just for the person that won it; it’s for the community who raised that writer.”
Columbus owes Washington Irving quite a bit. Also his portrait/face has never been authenticated. In fact, Charles Patrick Daly calls this painting from 1592 “pure fancy.”
Not much changed in these different cartoon and feature film representations of Columbus:
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Prepping a lecture on Howard Zinn A People’s History of the United States, post-strucuralist analysis and Christopher Columbus. But I’m lazy and probably going to rely on Robert Wuhl’s Assume the Position.
Reading this LA Times article on Amazon purchasing Goodreads. Not sure how I feel about this.
Drafting and revising semi-orphaned novel project but had some time to finish reading Orwell’s memoir/nonfiction/autobiographical novel about a young writer’s time in the ghettos of Paris and London. He works in restaurants and sleeps in homeless hostels. Pawns his clothes for food and also closely observes the down and out people he encounters. What strikes me most in Orwell’s work has to be his readability and the chapter movements. I’m also struck at his closely drawn character studies of those he encounters–the fat man in Paris and also Bozo in England are the stand outs. One thing that seems consistent throughout his writing is the strong sense of empathy and humanity. Here’s one of my favorite passages:
“Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then what is work? A navy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out-of-doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course – but, then many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout – in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.
“Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? — for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that is shall be profitable.”
