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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: donald barthelme, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 4 of 4
1. Padgett Powell: The Powells.com Interview

"Padgett Powell is an extravagantly talented writer," raves The New York Times Book Review. We also think he's one of the funniest, saddest, and most innovative writers that you might not yet have read. His first novel, Edisto, was nominated for the National Book Award, and he's also won the Prix de Rome of the [...]

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2. Stop the clocks: how Twain celebrated Thanksgiving

This cartoon — found in Mark Twain Himself: a Pictorial Biography, thanks to Macy Halford — exposes my beloved Twain as a fellow noise-intolerant freak. Evidently he rose on Thanksgiving night at the cartoonist’s house “to stop the clocks that were interfering with his sleep.”

I myself have gotten out of bed to silence clocks in other people’s houses. I do this so customarily, in fact, that by now my sister would probably be surprised if I left the batteries in her guest room ticker intact. Even in my own apartment, I keep my midcentury-atomic model unplugged more often than not because once I become aware of its ticking I can’t concentrate on eating, talking, writing, or sleeping. Or anything else. I start to feel like a Poe character — I believe it was his timepiece. Yes, his timepiece!

The aversion runs in the family; my father once became so agitated at the sound of a clock in a hotel room that he tore the cord from the wall with such force, we couldn’t get it to restart the next morning. This kind of intolerance is often said to be learned rather than hereditary, but I am actually very distantly related to Twain through both of my dad’s maternal grandparents, who were his fifth cousins once-removed (grandmother) and twice-removed (grandfather), and maybe on my mom’s side too, so who knows?

As for Thanksgiving, Twain described the holiday as “a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for–annually, not oftener–if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments.”
 

See also: Jenny Diski on noise; Dana, Ed Park, and me on teeth grinding; Thanksgiving menus from Twain’s day; and Donald Barthelme on Thanksgiving (“Thank you, O Lord, for what we are about to receive. This is surely not a gala concept”).

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3. Kurt Vonnegut, e.e. cummings & Shel Silverstein Are Most Popular Literary Tattoo Inspirations

Twilight tattoos are not the only contenders on the literary tattoo playing field. Novelist Justin Taylor and literary agent Eva Talmadge collaborated on a nonfiction compilation of literary tattoos based on their blog, tattoolit.com.

The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide came out this week from Harper Perennial and the trailer is embedded above. We caught up with the authors to talk about how the book came to be.

E = Eva Talmadge
J = Justin Taylor

Q: From your experience, which book/author receives the most tattoo requests?
E: Kurt Vonnegut and e.e. cummings are probably the most popular authors when it comes to literary tattoos.
J: And of course, if we had wanted to we could have done an entire book of just Shakespeare.

Q: Which children’s book illustrations are most popular?
E: Shel Silverstein, by far.

Q: What was the most interesting “story” behind a tattoo?
E: Best story by far is how Jamie Garvey of Gainesville, Florida, came to copy his e.e. cummings tattoo (“how do you like your blue-eyed boy now, mr. death?”) off the one and only Harry Crews.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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4. The Teacherly Personality

In "Show and Tell," the Louis Menand/New Yorker essay on creative writing programs (June 8/15, 2009), these words arise:

Personality is a job requirement for the workshop teacher, and it doesn't matter what sort. Teachers are the books that students read most closely, and this is especially true in the case of teachers who are living models for exactly what the student aspires one day to be—a published writer.

John Gardner, Menand says, "was a flamboyant and intensely personal teacher. His preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples." Donald Barthelme, for his part, "assigned students to buy a bottle of wine and stay up all night drinking it while producing an imitation of John Ashberry's 'Three Poems'." And then there was Gordon Lish, who "had students read their stories aloud to the group, and would order them to stop as soon as he disliked what he was hearing. Many students never got past the first sentence."

I'll be teaching the advanced nonfiction workshop at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, and so Menand's essay gave me pause. I hadn't, for example, planned on having my students empty out the nearest liquor store. I also thought that I might give my students more leash than the first few words. But more than that, I plan to teach, along with the writing, so much essential reading, for it is only by reading that writers—aspiring or not—gain footholds against language and idea. I'll be encouraging students to read not me, but the books that I believe will matter most in their long-long evolution.

My course description for the few who bravely enter in:

“Maybe the best we can do is leave ourselves unprotected…” the poet-novelist Forrest Gander has written. “To approach each other and the world with as much vulnerability as we can possibly sustain.” In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will seek, and leverage, exposure. We’ll be reading writers contemplating writing—Natalia Ginzburg, Larry Woiwode, Vivian Gornick, Terrence des Pres, Annie Dillard. We’ll be reading writers writing their own lives—Gretel Ehrlich, Anthony Doerr, Stanley Kunitz, Brooks Hansen, Jean-Dominique Bauby—as well as writers writing the lives of others—Frederick Busch on Terrence des Pres, for example, Patricia Hampl on her parents, Michael Ondaatje on the utterly cinematic characters of his childhood. The point will be to get close to the bone of things. Students should each be prepared to craft and to workshop six new short pieces of analysis, memoir, and literary reportage.

10 Comments on The Teacherly Personality, last added: 6/16/2009
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