That is, if you're not interested in writing The Great Icelandic Novel. If you are, then Crusher has no idea if you need a Stupid Fucking MFA.
Go ask someone else about that. Crusher's busy.
24.8.07
He's Laurence Sterne, Bitches!
Horace, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy;--(I forget which)--besides, if it were not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's pardon;--for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man's rules that ever lived.
Oh, and all you way cool "experimentalist" out there, sipping your double espressos and cracking open a story by Gospodinov: Anything you can come up with, Sterne and his dawg Cervantes did it first. And better than you ever will.
And now, if you'll excuse Crusher, Crusher's going to crack open Gospodinov's Natural Novel. Which is very fucking funny.
23.8.07
The Wars
Timothy Findley's novel describes the life and death of Robert Ross, a young officer in the Canadian army of World War I. Ross dies from wounds suffered in a fire; he was trying to rescue horses, disobeying orders to save them. Before shipping overseas to France, he trained out West. This scene occurs as Ross rides the troop train through his hometown, heading for the war.
Then he could smell the city of his birth--even though it lay about him in the dark--and he stood and he stared as he passed the fires of his father's factories, every furnace blasting red in the night. What had become of all the spires and the formal, comforting shapes of commerce he remembered--banks and shops and business palaces with flags? Where were the streets with houses ranged behind their lawns under the gentle awnings of the elms? What had happened here in so short a time that he could not recall his absence? What were all these fires--and where did his father and mother sleep beneath the pall of smoke reflecting orange and red and yellow flames? Where, in this dark, was the world he'd known and where was he being taken to so fast there wasn't even time to stop?
21.8.07
My Cucumbers
The Cucumbers of Praxilla
Of Sicyon
What is the best we leave behind?
Certainly love and form and ourselves.
Surely those. But it is the mornings
that are hard to relinquish, and music
and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty
piazzas in small towns flooded with sun.
What we are busy with doesn't make us
groan ah! ah! as we will for the nights
and the cucumbers.
Jack Gilbert
* * *
Deer feeding in the field behind my house on Russ Hill Rd.
"Misguided Angel"
Roasted garlic
Light blue chambray shirt my ex gave me
The laughing Quebecois girl, washing the grass off her legs
Peregrine over Spruce Mountain
"Early Sunday Morning"
Of Sicyon
What is the best we leave behind?
Certainly love and form and ourselves.
Surely those. But it is the mornings
that are hard to relinquish, and music
and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty
piazzas in small towns flooded with sun.
What we are busy with doesn't make us
groan ah! ah! as we will for the nights
and the cucumbers.
Jack Gilbert
* * *
Deer feeding in the field behind my house on Russ Hill Rd.
"Misguided Angel"
Roasted garlic
Light blue chambray shirt my ex gave me
The laughing Quebecois girl, washing the grass off her legs
Peregrine over Spruce Mountain
"Early Sunday Morning"
19.8.07
KJV
The King James Version of the Bible contains some of the most beautiful poetry and prose in the Western canon. Good shit, in other words, Crusher says. Anyone interested in cadence, flow, imagery--i.e., anyone interested in being able to read and write well--should study at least parts of this text carefully. Read it aloud, especially. So Crusher is pleased to find Mary Rakow, author of the remarkable novel The Memory Room, credit the KJV for its "literary effect" on her:
L.A. WEEKLY: Your background is primarily theological and academic -- was it literary as well?
RAKOW: It was literary only to the extent of having, since childhood, a consistent exposure to the Bible in its King James Version. I did not read fiction or poetry until my mid-40s, after I started writing.
She also rightly notes that the Bible is, in a very real sense, "experimental" literature:
L.A. WEEKLY: Surely, though, you have literary influences.
RAKOW: I am still thinking about the Bible as I knew it -- two columns side by side on the page with the numbered chapters and verses, the names of each of the books contained รค in the Bible, the table of contents. These are forms and certainly not the forms of the original texts, the scrolls. Seeing written words organized in this way probably had an effect.
Also, the Bible, without apology and without effort, combines poetry, prose, law, narrative, biography. So it feels very natural to me to have between two covers of a single book, multiple books, multiple voices and multiple forms. You have Levitical law, gospel, psalm, creation myth, the anger of the prophets, all in one book. It never occurred to me that this would be a problem or that it was new or unique or creative or anything. I wrote The Memory Room so that what was on the page embodied what I felt inside and didn't ask myself these questions.
If you're asking Crusher what to read from the KJV, and why shouldn't you be?, Crusher would urge you to start with Genesis and the Gospel of St. Luke. Then try some of the prophets (Crusher finds himself again and again reading Jeremiah and Amos, for what that's worth), the Gospel of St. Mark, and Job. The Psalms, of course. No matter what, read it aloud and slowly. Find the rhythms, let yourself be carried along by them.
Penguin Classics has a superb new edition out, which includes the Apocrypha as well as a good introduction and notes.
L.A. WEEKLY: Your background is primarily theological and academic -- was it literary as well?
RAKOW: It was literary only to the extent of having, since childhood, a consistent exposure to the Bible in its King James Version. I did not read fiction or poetry until my mid-40s, after I started writing.
She also rightly notes that the Bible is, in a very real sense, "experimental" literature:
L.A. WEEKLY: Surely, though, you have literary influences.
RAKOW: I am still thinking about the Bible as I knew it -- two columns side by side on the page with the numbered chapters and verses, the names of each of the books contained รค in the Bible, the table of contents. These are forms and certainly not the forms of the original texts, the scrolls. Seeing written words organized in this way probably had an effect.
Also, the Bible, without apology and without effort, combines poetry, prose, law, narrative, biography. So it feels very natural to me to have between two covers of a single book, multiple books, multiple voices and multiple forms. You have Levitical law, gospel, psalm, creation myth, the anger of the prophets, all in one book. It never occurred to me that this would be a problem or that it was new or unique or creative or anything. I wrote The Memory Room so that what was on the page embodied what I felt inside and didn't ask myself these questions.
If you're asking Crusher what to read from the KJV, and why shouldn't you be?, Crusher would urge you to start with Genesis and the Gospel of St. Luke. Then try some of the prophets (Crusher finds himself again and again reading Jeremiah and Amos, for what that's worth), the Gospel of St. Mark, and Job. The Psalms, of course. No matter what, read it aloud and slowly. Find the rhythms, let yourself be carried along by them.
Penguin Classics has a superb new edition out, which includes the Apocrypha as well as a good introduction and notes.
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