KEEP UP WITH MY PROFS

they are outputting. getting interviewed in places.


steve tomasula, my advisor, does a podcast for FC2 in which he talks about TOC and calls AWP "stodgy".


and joyelle mcsweeney, interviewed at someone's blog, makes the interview into a work of art. here's what she has to say about south bend, indiana:

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word!) inspiration?

I turn to South Bend. Really, until you have lived in a rotting rust belt town you have not lived. People are hurting here, and they are dogged and ingenious. They drive their trucks through the walls of their living rooms on a nightly basis. They get in fights and throw pregnant dogs at each other. They find remarkable items to pawn (one winter morning two middle aged people were standing outside one of the many pawn shops at 7 AM trying to hold a window airconditioning unit up out of the snow. They were wearing sweatsuits and no coats.). There are residential motels here, one is called the Wooden Indian and it has almost no interior. So it’s a shelter without any shelter. We have a lot of yard sales around here where everyone tries to sell used goods to everyone else. The same used goods just pass back and forth. Capitalism is played out and distended here and very visibly broken. As a pregnant woman and a mother with a toddler, I fit right in to most expectations about women in this place, at least until I open my mouth and reveal myself not to be a Hoosier. But most of the time, at the supermarket, the BMV, the playground, the IRS office, daycare, I do not open my mouth. One is not invited to do so. As Denis Johnson writes at the end of Jesus’ Son, “I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

it's a good career when you can count them as your teachers.

THE BEST WAY TO LIVE IS TO EXPECT NOTHING

you can read this article in the new new yorker (why do I type that word twice) about creative writing programs, or you can pick your belly button lint. both are probably equally productive. I have been considering the question of "whether creative writing can be taught" for too long now and it's so obvious that MFA programs are worth it that I don't even care to make an argument. I only want to question the entire debate; it seems like a false question to me, since teaching creative writing is like teaching any other discipline. there will be students who memorize the knowledge they're handed, and then there will be the ones who possess creativity and reformulate ideas. I mean, I don't see how teaching creative writing is unlike teaching anything else; you can teach physics to a science student, but it will only be the creative original thinkers who go on to create real art (I would actually call science, esp. physics, an art). that is to say, creativity is creativity in any field; it doesn't magically become more subjective when it comes to writing.

what you should really read is the article about bruno schulz by david grossman (who wrote see under love which I recommend), which is extremely heartfelt and touching.

I don't recommend you see religulous, unless you are seventeen and just starting to come around to the fact that a majority of people hold magical beliefs and this just irks the hell out of you. bill maher seems like a very intelligent guy but man, did he come off like an idiot in this film, the entirety of which was spent pointing out that, regardless of modern science, people still believe in things like talking snakes and the apocalypse. nowhere in the film does bill maher seriously pose the question of why this is; nowhere does he acknowledge the basic function that religion serves in many lives. so basically, he's looking about as myopic and ignorant as the evangelicals he makes fun of. I'm not saying the evangelicals make any sense; but rather that maher's approach was seriously lacking in human identification. the only moment he tried to do anything besides ridicule, when he told the truckers off-handedly that "you're all smart people," came off as false and condescending. to me, this film just further proved my suspicion that americans must radically simplify everything to make it comprehensible. the two hours would have been better spent investigating in a less accusatory light what purpose these magical beliefs could possibly serve, which I think is maybe the most fascinating question there is.

reading stephen hero again; went to georgia, going to illinois soon.