Author: utpress

Meinke’s Inspiration

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St. Petersburg resident and all-around Super Poet, Peter Meinke, once had the MFA students at the University of Tampa visit the Salvador Dalí museum. Meinke himself frequented the museum. The daring and talented paintings inspired Meinke to think, pushed him to be creative.

I am not a big fan of Dalí myself, but his paintings, his warpings of the world, his unique means of protesting, preaching, and confessing forced even myself to look at communication, writing, and art anew.

As writers, we are wise to draw inspiration from different mediums of art. Some of Meinke’s poetry — and some of the great poems in the English language — started with or simply are a description of an actual painting.

It is with that in mind that I pass along this music video. Of Monster and Men did the song “Little Talks,” which many younger readers (or radio listeners of all ages) will have no doubt heard. The latest music video, released last week, has — I hope you will agree — the rich vividness and openness of purpose that Dalí so well-weilded:

(Pump it to hi-def, if the you’ve the bandwidth for it.)

The Odd Dangers of Writers as Readers

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Here is T.S. Eliot reading “The Love Song for J. Alfred Prufrock”:

In undergrad, I read Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape and loved it. Then, near the end of that same semester, I had a chance to see the play performed by a man Beckett had personally chosen to play Krapp. It was like seeing the piece performed in Beckett’s own mind — I was thrilled.

Until I saw the play.

The Future of Newspapers is Paved with Code

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Double Octuple Newspaper Press

Innovation tends to create new niches, rather than refill those that already exist. So technologies may become marginal, but they rarely go extinct.

—“Only the digital dies,” The Economist, January 26, 2013

Earlier this January, I posited the publishing industry would not stop printing books, or at least not hardbacks. Indeed, the lesson of history and technology history is not that technologies die, but that demand for technologies realign.

If my prognostications about publishing are correct, the old-style printing presses — now being sold for pennies — may come back into fashion. The cheapest forms of book publication — once paperback books, now ebooks — may be in direct competition for reader’s hands, but keepsakes like hardbacks should become only more expensive and important in the marketplace.

Where does that leave newspapers? Unlike magazines, which are printed full color on glossy paper and on a longer schedule, newspapers churn out their cheap-ink-on-recycled-paper product daily. The newspaper, for ages, was the cheapest form of news transmission. And though many blame internet news for killing it’s physical-news brother, the internet merely has dealt the death blow — or perhaps knockout punch. But we must remember, the first act of violence began with the radio.

History Without Fiction?

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How many people can say the 1993 slaying of Fulbright scholar, Amy Biel, in South Africa, is an event that has remained fresh in their memory? And for those too young to have been exposed to such brutal news, how many can say they have, in recent years, heard it talked about or written about in the press? Not many, is my guess. You might argue, and understandably so, that it’s been so long – 1993 – that’s a lifetime ago! Maybe so, especially because equally horrendous crimes have continued to make headlines.

This post, though, is not about the Biel tragedy, for the Biel tragedy is merely a fraction of the countless moments in our course of existence that recede to the rearmost space of our collective consciousness. This post is about art — fiction, in particular. It’s about how, long after news headlines have turned their attention to the next moment’s happenings, fiction grabs hold of that moment, immortalizes it, so not only do the “facts” endure, but the moment never runs out of breath — it remains in the present tense, ever living and breathing.

Amy Biel’s murder, for instance, has struck me anew. It feels raw again because I’m reading Sindiwe Magona’s book, Mother to Mother, in which a fictitious mother of one of Amy’s killers ventures to write a letter to Amy’s mother explaining the root of her son’s violent act in the hope that this, according to the author, “might ease [her own] and the other mother’s pain … if a little.”

This event, now interlaced with fictitious characters whose humanity you and I can relate to, and scenes so photographic you’d swear the author had to have witnessed the event firsthand or at least known Amy or the young murderer’s mother intimately, no longer remains only about the murder. Now, it becomes an occasion for self-examination. We ask, “How do we see ourselves in this story?” “How are we to react to it?” And because we discuss fiction in the present tense, Amy Biel’s story lives to the end of time.

So Now You’re a Writer

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You’ve read Bukowski’s “So You Want to be a Writer?” and in spite of it all, though your stillness is in fact a kind of madness, it nonetheless “doesn’t come bursting out of you.”  Not the way it comes bursting out of Bukowski.

“How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche?” by Lorrie Moore says it in a voice a lot like the way you wish your voice could be, a voice you want so badly to steal. You like how she talks about failure. Failure is more your speed.

Still, you have no clue how to be a great writer. But you do finally know how to be a writer, and it has nothing to do with saying you’re a writer, planning to write, dreaming about one day being a writer, outlining projects, telling your bartender the plot of a project you’ve outlined, hanging out in coffee shops and bookstores, reading poems and essays about the fact that you want to be a writer, or getting a subscription to The New York Times so you can read poems and essays about the fact that you want to be a writer.

Of course you’ve always been eager to learn the craft, embrace your art and celebrate literature. But you’ve found these tactics impotent without the single vestige that, despite your many failings, has allowed you to meekly proclaim yourself a writer:

Writing.