Burn Pile: Brodsky and the water of Venice, the sea and surrealism, “He’s-at-Homes", Proust’s honey bread, and Marlon James talking about Toni Morrison

Brodsky sighed when churches were closed for the night. 

Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel-lauerate emigre poet, wasn’t buried in Russia, his motherland, but Venice, in which he found less a second home than an imaginative companion. In an essay from The Smithsonian, a walk through Venice with the great poet is recounted; a wandering through half-finished ideas and revisions inspired by the city.   

“Time can be an enemy or a friend,” [Brodsky] said, quickly returning to the subject of the city. He argued that “time is water and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it.”

A quick recommendation. Although she needs no help, like at all, Valeria Luiselli wrote a beautiful mediation about walking, sidewalks, Brodsky, Venice, Mexico City and graveyards: Sidewalks. From Coffeehouse Press. 

The sea washes up unexpected objects. And in that way, in much more complex terms, the poet Agnieszka Taborska argues that in the sea one finds an organizing principle for surrealism. "It is no accident that the Surrealists' map of the imagination had more water than lands.” From Asymptote. 

A whaler's wife might as well be a widow. However, certain issues can be worked around. An article about the fascinating history of “He’s-at-Homes,” more commonly know as dildos, and whaling culture. 

She unwrapped the stony phallus from its pink tissue paper and handed it to me. It was heavier than it looked. The head had been painted wild-berry red. The shaft was off-white and touched with light brown stains. Through the center was a hole no thicker than a straw, as if it had been skewered for drying. Saw marks streaked the cross section of the flat base, and it had been circumcised with whittling scrapes. “No mistaking what it is,” Connie said, as I turned it in my hand. From LitHub. 

A fun fact for those times when you pretend you’ve read In Search of Lost Time: The famous madeleine (of whose fame I just learned of) that triggers the “deep-dive” into memory was almost not a madeleine at all. "A first draft of Proust’s monumental novel dating from 1907 had the author reminiscing not about madeleines as the sensory trigger for a childhood memory about his aunt, but instead about toasted bread mixed with honey." From the Guardian. 

Marlon James has this to say about finishing Morrison’s Song of Solomon (and more): 

 "I finished that novel thinking I could fly."

From the Guardian (again).

BURN PILE: Too much voice, too many pictures, the Nobel, writers who don't write in cinema, and other concerns from around the Web.

To be filed with Problems I'd Like to Have - joining such travails as "embroiled in a love parallelogram" or "needing an accountant" - is the horror of having a distinctive style. I do see the author's point though in this article about authorial parochialism - a fancy way to say "all the shit you write sounds the same" - although he puts it more elegantly. "There’s something undeniably great about having Voice like that, a voice you can’t escape, like Tom Waits. Or Cher...There’s a downside to that much voice. An unsurprisingness. A feeling of sloggy repetition and even self-parody." From the Millions. 

George Scialabba is a critic's critic, whatever that means, and he's just quit his day job which prompted a celebration by his admirers. To join them, here's a particularly apt description of Christopher Hitchen's writing:

 "of course, not all of Hitchens was very good, even before 9/11 drove him mad. He was always too ready with abuse (‘stupid’ and ‘tenth-rate’ were particular weaknesses). He is a compulsive name-dropper: In his very short Letters to a Young Contrarian, for example, the words, ‘my friend,’ followed by a distinguished name, appear dozens of times, giving the reader’s eyebrows a considerable workout." From the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has commissioned a translation of the Bard into modern English. And of course, many many people have an opinion. The Wall Street Journal elucidates why this is not such a terrible idea. 

You think that's a pretty mountain, eh? You think the light has never broken through the aspens like that before? How about we go take a photo of the most photographed barn in America? Camera Restricta, is a speculative design of a camera that would preempt compulsive photographers from snapping away at well-snapped vistas. Because do we really need another picture of the Louvre? From Hyperallergic. 

And, for context, an article by Teju Cole, who has an excellent column on photography for the New York Times, about the glut of digital photos and their artistic potential.  

Much like digital photos, there's a surplus of films about writers and writing, in which younger writers are apprenticed by older writers who are, surprise, surprise, damaged. From Electric Literature. 

More importantly, on the Harper's Blog, there's a conversation with Bryan Doerries, Creative Director ofOutside the Wire, who brings classic tragedies to intimate venues. The embedded video of Paul Giamatti performing Steven Mitchell's translation of The Book of Job speaks to concept better than I can. If perhaps you have a subscription to Harper's, first of all, good for you, second, can I borrow your username, there's an excellent article about Doerries from a year ago. From Harper's. 

And lastly, Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize. Here's a profile from the New York Times. 

And here's an excerpt of her writing from the Paris Review. 
 

BURN PILE: The Punctuation Exchange Market, Blurbing for the sake of Blurbing, Celebrating Translation, and “everything I write ends with hair”

What’s the conversion rate between periods and commas? The history of the use of punctuation. I’m in the bag with George Bernard Shaw in regard to his opinion about apostrophes: There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli. From the Guardian.

Are Geniuses Geniuses before they get a grant? Or do geniuses get grants because they are geniuses? These (inane) questions aren’t answered by the MacArthur Fellowship, but the new class was announced which includes Ben Lerner and Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others. A full list from the MacArthur website. 

Blurbs: The Blubber of Publishing. Did you know the first recorded blurb was by Emerson for Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? A hidden surprise: a tumblr dedicated to Gary Shteyngart’s blurbing obsession. From NPR.

Wednesday was International Translation Day. And if I knew that before writing this post, I might’ve sent unsolicited letters of gratitude to Edith Grossman, Suzanne Jill Levine, Chris Andrews, and Megan McDowell (personal favorites). Sadly, this holiday wasn’t automatically included in my parochial, insular iPhone calendar. In a late celebration, here’s an article about Robert Walser and his microscopic translations. From the Paris Review. 

And for those whose eyes are tired, here’s a Radiolab episode from long ago, concerned with the art of translation. 

On a sadder note, Carmen Balcells, a literary super-agent who almost single-handedly orchestrated the Latin American Literary Boom in the sixties and seventies, died just over a week ago. She brought attention to such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Mario Vargas Llosa, among others. She was called “Big Mama. An obituary of sorts was printed in the New Yorker. 

And to end on an eccentric note, here’s an article about the Theory of Hair. Make of it what you will. From the New Republic. 

BURN PILE: Hemingway's Hoarder, Two Interviews, and a retrospective on Yogi Berra and his verbal idiosyncrasy

Hemingway was a pack rat. Some selections from his extensive papers are being shown at the Morgan Library & Museum, including, but in no way limited to, this annotation of a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Kiss my ass/E.H." From The New York Times.

About crowdsourcing annotations and Alice in Wonderland. From the New Republic. 

A deep dive into Hamlet’s body type. Would it change your perception of the play if Hamlet happened to be fat? Is that a question you never even considered? Somebody at Slate did. 

Eileen sits down for an interview with Ben Lerner for the Paris Review. Also, in room 223 of the University of Montana Liberal Arts building, there’s a picture of Eileen Miles sitting on a toilet. 

"There’s nothing more ambitious than a young poet. You feel omnipotent. You’re on the upswing of bipolar. And that enrages older poets—which, to a certain sensibility, only makes you want to be more vapid and fame obsessed and glib."

Ben Marcus and George Saunders sit down for an interview with essayistic questions and answers, in the process challenging every  student of writing. As Ben Marcus puts it: I ask, among other things, for students to envision the short story in fifty years. To think about skipping ahead and writing that story now. From Granta. 

And in conclusion,with Yogi Berra's death this Tuesday, we've lost one of the most linguistically interesting Americans in recent history.

A list of 35 of his most famous malapropisms, courtesy of the New York post. 

My personal favorite: He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious. 

Don’t be quick to label the late Berra as a simpleton. As an article from The Economist points out, he had a more plastic and humorous idea of language than others. 

"Mr Berra would have chuckled at being taken so seriously by a language columnist. But he also was clearly having a laugh at those who took him so literally. He knew his reputation, and enjoyed it. His name is so synonymous with verbal gaffes that many sayings are falsely attributed to him. Or, as he put it, “I never said most of the things I said.”

BURN PILE: Letters, Longlists, Valerie Luiselli's Teeth, and an old story about orthodontics and pornography

No one William Carlos Williams went to school with knew the waltz. Or so he says in his letters from his time at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He was a theatre-member, Erza Pound's dinner companion, and a good son to his mother. Apparently, he was too good of a dancer for his own good. "Pretty soon she started on a journey from my leg. This was too much for me and I backed out...I saw her contemplating me with a sad, disgusted look on her face." From the Paris Review.

To no one's surprise, Franz Kafka had some issues with his father: 47-pages of issues. Some selections from a novella of a letter that the younger Kafka sent the elder after the failure of his engagement: "I should have been happy to have you as a friend, as a boss, an uncle, a grandfather, even (though rather more hesitantly) as a father-in-law. Only as a father you have been too strong for me.." From the biographile. 

On a lighter note, the long lists for the National Book Award have been released for Fiction, Poetry, Non-fiction, and Young People Literature. Don't worry if you haven't read them all, or any. That's why literature awards were invented! 

Likewise, the Man Booker Prize released its short-list. 

Valerie Luiselli's new book is about an auctioneer who sells off the teeth of famous writers. Who had better teeth, Virginia Woolf or Thomas Wolfe? If you have never thought about it before, now you will. My money is on Virginia. 

 Here's a review from 3AM concerning the intriguing origins of the novel.

And, in a reach into the NYT archives, a story about a son's orthodontic needs inspiring a father to write mail-order pornographic novels. A loose thematic bow!  

BURN PILE: "How to Write a Thesis," day jobs, and the joys of the "wrong comma"

Salman Rushdie reflects in the New Yorker on his time with Günter Grass. Through the late 1990s, every student in Italy hoping to earn the equivalent of a bachelor's degree would be expected to compose a thesis. Umberto Eco's 1977 advice on the "magical process of self-realization" has now become available in English for the first time: See this New Yorker piece on "How to Write a Thesis." 

Do you feel an affinity, for the plentiful, abundant use of commas, such as that favored by certain New York copy-editors? Elisa Gabbert on on the "joys of the 'wrong comma'" for The Smart Set. See the original New Yorker story here.

A newly-discovered passage cut from "A Wrinkle in Time" illuminates the author's politics.

What good is a day job? One answer can be found in a late 18th century example. For The Millions. Earlier: Nell Zink on ideal work for The Paris Review Daily. Earlier still: on "working the double shift," back at The Millions.

Sherman Alexie talks about his books being banned - again. For KUOW Seattle.

BURN PILE: Jane Austen juvenalia, nameless narrators and the power of reading

Tom McCarthy on "fiction in the age of data saturation." Or, what would have happened if Joyce worked at Google.

According to a new book titled Ungentle Jane, Jane Austen's early work was "violent, restless, anarchic and exuberantly expressionistic. Drunkenness, female brawling, sexual misdemeanour and murder run riot across their pages.” Review from the Times Daily Supplement.

TKAM2 update: Harper Lee tells reporter to "go away!"

On dystopia and the nameless narrator in the New Yorker.

Memorization of poetry used to be the pedagogical norm - but what did this mean for poetry? "Orality, Literacy and the Memorized Poem" from Poetry Magazine. 

On the transformative power of reading, in the New York Times. 

BURN PILE: TKAM2, famous last lines and being twee

ICYMI: Earlier this month, it was announced that Harper Lee would publish a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, her sole publication in 55 years. The public reaction to that announcement has ranged from delight to skepticism to indignation - with good reason. At 88 years old, Casey N. Cep weighs in for the New Yorker here. See also: a look into the scandal and lawsuit regarding TKAM in Vanity Fair. Also at the New Yorker: Joyce Carol Oates reviews The Whites by Richard Price, writing as Harry Brandt. “The Whites doesn’t race so much as lurch and careen along, often with little breathing space between frenetic action sequences, emotional outbursts, and sheer surprise..." It is a crime novel of "conscience, fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity" Oates says, suggesting a crime drama that is more than just a crime novel.

On the Millions, a look at the last lines of classics including Philip Roth's Everyman: “He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing. Just as he’d feared from the start.”

Mark Spitz wrote a whole book about all that is "twee," aptly titled Twee, calling the phenomenon "the most powerful youth movement since Punk and Hip-Hop." (A movement characterized, for those who don't know, by "owl-shaped cushions, bird-print textiles and kitten ephemera...Cotton candy, gluten-free acai berry cupcakes and quinoa fritters with probiotic goat yoghurt," and more, reviewer Anna Katharina Schaffner says.) Read the review at the Times Literary Supplement.

Plus Zadie Smith on diary-keeping for Rookie Magazine. Her verdict: Don't.

BURN PILE: Feast or Fiction - Literary Food Links

In honor of Thanksgiving, a forkful of literary food links.  NPR interviews Dinah Fried, author of Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literatures Most Memorable Meals. 2014. Read Salon's review of the book and see another slideshow here, and read Maria Popova's take at Brain Pickings here.

Slideshow: "Ten Great Meals in Literature" from The Telegraph. 2013.

A is for Apples, B is for Booze: "Writer Food from A to Z" from the Awl. 2012.

"Food Writers Share Thanksgiving Stories," from the Daily Beast. 2011.

Scrumptious descriptions of food abound in literary fiction - see ten great examples at Flavorwire in "Fictional Feasts: Mouth-Watering Moments of Literary Gastronomy." 2011.

From Tin House magazine, a collection of writing and recipes from their Readable Feast and Blithe Spirits features.

BURN PILE: Nabokov, overheard haiku and Laura Ingalls Wilder

Fiction from fact and the birth of Lolita: Sally Horner of Camden, New Jersey was abducted in 1948 when she was 11 years old. For almost two years, she was shuttled around the country by her abductor, Frank La Salle, whose convoluted criminal past went unnoticed by friends and neighbors who believed his story - that he was her loving, albeit controlling, father. Although her story didn't leave the local media, it caught the attention of one man who would use the news accounts as a springboard for one of his most important works - Vladimir Nabokov, and his Lolita. Read more here at Hazlitt, from Penguin Random House. For more Nabokov, see this Playboy interview from 1964 at Longform.org. On the spoken word, in verse: Damion Searls of the Paris Review Daily ruminates on overheard haiku: "Around half a tweet, but again, a very different form."

Laura Ingalls, even wilder: For those who grew up reading the Little House series, a researched annotated autobiography titled Pioneer Girl is available from the South Dakota Historical Society Press. Read the Slate review by Ruth Graham. 

Another childhood favorite hits the big scream - er, screen: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is being developed for film by John August with CBS films.

BURN PILE: Collaborative fiction, the history of slang, and more.

Exquisite Corpse: From Zadie Smith to R.L. Stine, fifteen writers contribute to one story for T, the New York Times Style Magazine. On poetry and popcorn: Dorothea Lasky and Adam Fitzgerald swing from snack food to the metaphysical in a conversation for Granta.

Why does science speak English? Nobel laureates for physiology and medicine May-Britt and Edvard Moser are Norwegian. So why did they, like so many others, publish in English? Michael Gordin's forthcoming Scientific Babel attempts to answer why. Until then, see Nina Porzucki for BBC News Magazine. 

Frightening BOO-ks: Ayana Mathis and Francine Prose discuss the scariest books they've ever read for the NYT Sunday Book Review.

I hear you've got swagger - and you're not the first: On the evolution of slang, from "swag" to "hipster" at the New York Times.

A Scanner Transrealistically: Somewhere between realism and science fiction/fantasy, transrealism has been part of the conversation for 30 years. Damien Walter, for The Guardian, posits that this popular cross-genre hybrid will be around for at least thirty more.

Thank you, but no thank you: Jean-Paul Sartre politely declined the Nobel prize in 1964. According to Rob Lyons for spiked, his explanation holds weight in award culture today.

BURN PILE: Food, brains and books - plus contest information!

Want more time to write? Engineer/entrepreneur Rob Rhinehart suggests that we can add 90 minutes to our day by spending less time on food preparation, consumption and cleanup. Food writer Nicola Twilley discusses Rhinehart's "Soylent" product at Aeon. This is your brain on Shakespeare: Jillian Hinchliffe and Seth Frey explore the link between cognitive science and literature at Nautilus. 

What's the point, anyway? Time Parks takes a look at the "social function of the novel" at the New York Review of Books. From Tristram Shandy to Tess of the d’Urbervilles to Uncle Tom's Cabin, literature has shaped the social conversation, and continues to do so in increasingly varied ways.

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2015 Contests Open Soon!

CutBank sponsors a variety of contests, including the Montana Prize in Fiction, Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, as well as our annual CutBank Chapbook Contest. Submission dates vary so  see our full guidelines for more information. Please send only your best work. With all three of these awards, we’re looking for work that showcases an authentic voice, an original perspective, and a willingness to push against the boundaries of form. All entries must be submitted electronically.

BURN PILE: Buttering The Toast, reflections on final works and more

On new beginnings: The Toast will launch its new companion site, The Butter, on October 15 with Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay at the helm. Gay says the site will "focus on cultural criticism and personal essays that make readers think and feel.” Which is fine with Toast co-founder Mallory Ortberg, who says the site will be "WHATEVER ROXANE WANTS IT TO BE."

And on the end: Roger Grenier, prolific French author and editor, reflects on the literary version of "famous last words" at The American Scholar. "Is the final work of a writer—or for that matter of any artist—final according to the writer, or final for everyone else?" Grenier reflects on the creative process in what a writer believes to be their last days, and what happens when the end comes unexpectedly. 

A literary salon grows in Brooklyn: At a Brooklyn bar, patrons workshop short fiction as a game over beer: anonymously. Bartender Matthew D’Abate collects submissions throughout the week and makes five of them available during his Sunday shift at The Plank. D'Abate also cultivates an email list and sends out one of the five to subscribers each week. From a recent email: “The point of Literate Sunday is to remove, if not subvert, the idea of fame, removing the ego and the names from the pieces so the stories may speak for themselves."

On the proven benefits of "slow reading," from the Wall Street Journal: "Screens have changed our reading patterns from the linear, left-to-right sequence of years past to a wild skimming and skipping pattern as we hunt for important words and information... None of this is good for our ability to comprehend deeply, scientists say."

Love from NewPages.com!

CutBank 81 has been featured for review on NewPages.com! Utne magazine calls NewPages “the best overall Internet portal to the alternative press,” and we are thrilled to be featured on their site. To read what they have to say, click here . In the words of reviewer Melanie Tague: “CutBank always delivers well-crafted pieces of work that offer fresh perspectives and most importantly inspire readers to work on their own craft.” Thanks, Melanie! To submit to CutBank 82, please see our submission page. We are also seeking submissions for our regular web features – click here for more details!