“
I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea.

- Jennifer Egan, explaining her latest New Yorker short story, which the magazine is tweeting via @nyerfiction.

One example:

Throwing back your head and closing your eyes allows you to give the appearance of sexual readiness while concealing revulsion.

I’m not sure yet how I feel about this story, but A Visit From the Goon Squad left me ready to follow Egan anywhere.

sights from Saturday

Click for high-res photo

(Source: penandink)

(this post was reblogged from penandink)

The trailer is out for the new Gatsby movie. If you feel weird watching what is, after all, an advertisement, here — free of charge — is some pseudointellectual cover to legitimize your viewing experience:

1) My 7/30/11 (possibly crackpot) explanation of why I’ve come to believe that Gatsby wasn’t rich.

2) My 1/12/12 “A 3-D Gatsby?” and my catchily titled 1/15/12 “‘a 3-D Gatsby?’ ctd.”, in which I argue, respectively, that Baz Luhrmann might conceivably make a film worthy of The Great Gatsby and that Luhrmann can’t ultimately harm what is “as close as any novel that I can think of to being indestructible.”

sights from Monday morning

“
It’s very easy to fool yourself that you’re working, you know*, when you’re really not working very hard. I mean, I’m very lazy. So for me, I would always have an excuse, you know*, to go - quit early, go to a museum, you know*. So I do everything I can to make myself remember this is a job. I keep a schedule. People laugh at me for wearing, you know*, a coat and tie to work.

- biographer Robert Caro

Caro is one of my few heroes, so I can’t help toying with the (admittedly facile) notion that I can be like Caro if I start wearing a coat and tie every day.

It might even work. Not because the coat matters. Not because the tie matters. Ritual matters. Any clothing could serve as my daily reminder that there are sentences to write, that there are imaginary people to make real, that there is work to be done.

This brings us to Tin House blog’s “Super Sad True Habits of Highly Effective Writers: Part Two” and the writing wear of essayist Chloe Caldwell:

There’s a mirror above my desk, so sometimes I put on a trucker hat and/or bright lipstick, so I can imagine I’m someone else. It makes me braver.

Therefore, be it resolved that I will sit down to write each day wearing a coat and a tie and a trucker hat and bright lipstick.

* Back when I was a newspaper reporter, KUOW invited me to come on the radio and talk about transit policy. Until I heard my voice played back, I had literally no idea how often I say “you know.” I say it a lot. So I wince for Caro when the NPR transcript shows him using “you know” four times in 76 words, but I also take secret pleasure — OK not secret if I’m blogging about it — that the master and I lean on the same verbal cane.

“Between numbers, she coughed like a consumptive. During the songs, she sounded like no one else.”

From Wyatt Mason’s smart, engaging “Regina Spektor Has Piano, Will Travel” in the NYT mag:

On a cold night in late February, Spektor was preparing for a benefit concert in New York for HIAS, the organization that helped her family immigrate. Spektor had bronchitis, and the day before it looked as if she might have to cancel.

In the dark, she sang song after song, many from her new record, but not “How.” Her manager had heard her at sound check playing through most of the new record and suggested, strongly, that she keep some things in reserve, fearing that recordings would pop up on the Internet the next day (they did). Between numbers, she coughed like a consumptive. During the songs, she sounded like no one else.

The way Spektor sang reminded me of something she told me earlier about the kind of art that matters to her. “I love worlds that are so complete that you just can relax,” Spektor said, “because when the art is that complete, it makes something in me just calm. But a lot of new things … there’s this tension. I’ll take everything that is awesome from it and leave everything that I don’t like. It can be an uneven piece and still worth it. But you put on ‘Rubber Soul,’ or ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ or ‘Freewheeling Bob Dylan’ and it’s just … solid. From the first note you hear, it never goes wrong. Why can’t everything be like that?”

Thanks to Austin Kleon and Maria Popova for the links that brought to Mason’s piece.

“
It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

- John Steinbeck in a letter to his creative writing professor

(via Stephanie Richter)

sights from Monday

sights from a Saturday visit to @Ravenna3rdPlace and @Vios3rdPlace

We entertained ourselves yesterday by spinning an empty key ring on a tabletop and shooting motion-blurred photos. I recommend it. Click for high-res photo

We entertained ourselves yesterday by spinning an empty key ring on a tabletop and shooting motion-blurred photos. I recommend it.

“I didn’t realize we were bragging”

Maybe I’m the last to know about David Rees. He’s the guest on the latest episode of Brad Listi’s “Other People” podcast. He turns out to be very funny. If you ever hear me attempt to droll up a conversation by saying “I didn’t realize we were bragging,” you will know it’s because I stole the line from Rees …

REES: Well, first of all, I never had any kind of sports memorabilia on my wall. Wasn’t really my scene. I did have some pretty amazing Lamborghini sports-car posters on the wall because I went through a phase where I was obsessed with Italian sports cars.  

LISTI: I had a Porsche.

REES: You literally had a Porsche? Or you mean a poster?

LISTI: No. I had a poster.

REES: I was gonna say. It must be nice. I didn’t realize we were bragging. Yeah, I used to have two Izod button-down shirts.

The interview also features a surprisingly elaborate dialogue on the aesthetics of phone numbers. And there’s still about 25 minutes to go.