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George Saunders on Voice and Voices

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George Saunders, perhaps the most important living short story writer in the English language, served as a guest lecturer during the Tampa MFA program in the June 2012 residency, and as a component of his visitation, he delighted fans and acolytes alike with a reading of a few of his short stories.

After the readings, which were quite the highlight of the residency period, one of my colleagues mused: “Perhaps I would not have liked that particular story so much if he had not been reading it.”

Inside the Notebook

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WaltWhitman-Camden1891

It is typically easy to spot the writer on any given park bench. They sit lost in thought – looking either at the far tree line or into the pages of notebook as they scribble. A notebook is an invaluable device for a poet; most of us carry one. They serve as a place to record observations on the concrete world, capture stream-of-consciousness, or a delightful word, and the occasional salsa recipe.

Yesterday, in what began as a Google–search for “a poet’s notebook,” I happened upon several (now published) personal notebooks by famous writers, including a fascinating look inside Walt Whitman’s notebook. In this little book, Whitman began an on-going conversation with Abraham Lincoln, which later fueled inspiration for several famous poems, such as the venerated “WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOM’D.”

By these accounts, Whitman and Lincoln never spoke to one another in real life, yet when Lincoln appeared on the national stage, Whitman was intrigued. Maybe even obsessed.

Sometime during the late fall or winter of 1860-61, Walt Whitman began an imaginary conversation with Abraham Lincoln that would continue for decades to come, inspiring several of the most famous poems in American literature. The poet began his dialogue with the president-elect “as in a dream.” — ADAM GOODHEART

In reading through Whitman’s notebook, there are passages that reflect his thoughts on political and philosophical divisions that were splitting apart the nation. And personal observations like a journal entry in 1863 where the poet wrote of the “deep latent sadness” in the President’s face as he witnessed Lincoln riding past.

Also inside Whitman’s notebook, there is imagery of storms and it’s tossings of the ship of state, strongly suggestive of Whitman’s thoughts about Lincoln. Easy to see in these brief fragments a foreshadowing of Whitman’s much later depiction, “O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN,” of the martyred Lincoln as captain of a ship.

I found this a very curious companionship and subject matter for a poet’s notebook, as Adam Goodheart notes, “A poet’s job is to speak the truth; a politician’s is … well, not to.”

There is a different sort of reveal and depth of personal thought within the intimate pages of Whitman’s notebook. Unpolished, uncensored, and untethered observations; everything a writer can turn back to for inspiration.

This week, carry a notebook if you don’t already. And prepare for that day when readers want to see your half-formed thoughts in addition to your crafted writings.

Celebrating Bad Poetry

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the Guide

The Vogons, of course, are a particularly nasty race from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. “The series tells that, far back in prehistory, when the first primeval Vogons crawled out of the sea, the forces of evolution were so disgusted with them that they never allowed them to evolve again,” says Wikipedia. It makes sense then that these lowly forms favor poetry and use their particularly poor poetic skills (3rd worst in the universe) as torture. As such, the livejournal profile for the Vogon Poet’s Society reads as follows:

The Society is centred upon the desire to write Painful Poesy: Poems so horribly bad that they cause cancer in lab rats, crippling pain and terror, and publication in MLA poetry anthologies…Please do not post mediocre poetry. And please do not post light-hearted poetry. We only want the worst. The absolute bottom-of-the-barrel sludge of modern poetry. Scrape it up, chip it off, and throw it at this community.

The concept is laughable, and truly there are terrible poems. Here’s one entitled “Belgium!”

Ah! my smelly jelly!
How fishy of you to have noticed
Your quotas are teminally deficient
It reminded me of summer
I hated it/you/life...

And another, entitled “A Cold Vogon Heart.”

...My car starts up like a horse with TB
and my glasses are so fogged I cannot see
I ponder wearing grandpa wear 
So that I can scoot through the day without a care...

Learning Chinese

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I happened upon this essay on The Paris Review Tumblr page — happened upon it courtesy of Facebook power-user and UT classmate D.A. Hosek (subscribe to his Facebook feed if you, dear reader, can). Anyway, so here I was, all happened upon this essay by Roberto Balaño — “Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories” — and two things occurred to me:

    A) To write, you must read. But it is impossible to read everything.

The majority of Balaño’s advice concerns reading suggestions. I have read much of some of the suggested authors; I have read a little of some of the others; I have read none of a few as well.

We want to read great writers. It is just as much a component of learning writing as the writing itself. Just as when learning a foreign language, we must listen to a native speak Chinese just as much as we must practice 你好 ourselves; there must be input and output.

    B) But we must stop reading and start writing at some indeterminate point. Or maybe a point determined by inspiration.

Which is why Mr. Balaño’s point the second resounded so well with myself and several other MFA students:

Short Story Method

(Pardon me as I snip the image rather than transcribe.)

Balaño’s advice to write more than one story at a time is a freeing concept. Write as inspiration leads you, at least when it comes to short-form writing (there’s little choice when it comes to a novel or epic; revision is the space for inspiration in that medium).

And rather than wait for inspiration to hammer away at the same story, let new inspiration create new rivulets of writing. It is potent advice from Balaño, and we are wise when we follow it.

A Medium Reimagined

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A filmmaker and close friend of mine, Ford Seeuws, shared this Verge article Tuesday morning. It introduces the video game Proteus, which offers little action, little storyline, little graphical innovation. In fact, the game looks and plays much like a game we might expect released in 1998:

But here is where it differs:

It may sound boring, as these kinds of games so often do, but Proteus is a surprisingly enjoyable way to spend an hour, and that’s mainly due to the music. Trekking across the island will cue different sounds — from the soft tinkling of rainfall to the excited hops of pixelated rabbits — but unlike more obvious music-focused games like, say, Wave Trip, you can’t use Proteus to craft an inventive new song; it’s much more passive than that. “We didn’t want to make a literal musical instrument,” says Ed Key, who developed the game alongside composer David Kanaga. “It’s more about the world as a piece of music that you can go through and explore in different ways.”

It is a game that focuses on the experiential — the emotional and intellectual — reactions to basic sensory data. It reminds me, in a way, of the brilliant TED Talk from Neil Harbisson, a colorblind man who listens to colors — and encourages other to join him.

What I like most is how the creators of Proteus re-invented their medium. In the past, artistic expression in video games came most often through expensive graphics or complex, orchestrated soundtracks or bizarre, far-flung worlds — think the epic RPGs of Square Enix or the vivid realism and creative worlds of Bioshock. But, the Proteus creators have found an almost impressionist, almost modernist means of creative video game art.

Writers and artists of all brands and genre should aspire to that ingenuity.