bark, bugs, leaves, & lizards

Ever Agile

h/t Rick Magazine Ick Magazine Tube of Glue Blip Magazine

Where’s Rick?

Here.

Bonus: James Robison:

I like short stories. Novels. Screenplays. Very good poems. Why do [I] write? To quote Donald Barthelme: ‘It is the most interesting and difficult thing one can do.’

Bonus bonus: A  fantastic short story by James Robison.

Horn Toot

A short story of mine has been selected as a finalist in the 2010 Faulkner-Wisdom short story competition.  I guess that means I should stop revising it now and start writing something new.  The winner will be announced in late September.  Dedra’s novel was chosen as 2nd runner up in 2006.

Exciting New David Simon Project

Coming to Wilmette, Illinois.

Would’ve Liked To Have Met Him

Sorry to hear Treme writer David Mills died Tuesday:

Accordingly, Mills said he was deeply curious about how “Treme” will be received by viewers who aren’t familiar with second-line parades, Mardi Gras Indians and the peculiar challenges of running a New Orleans restaurant kitchen in the dark days after the 2005 levee-failure flood.

“I’ve got to say that that’s the thing I’m most curious about, because I think it’s an open question whether it will work,” he said. “Meaning, whether a lot of people will dig it. You just don’t know, because you can’t say, ‘People love cops and robbers,’ or ‘People love Westerns,’ or ‘People love gangsters.’ Here, the show is about the specificity of place. That’s a hell of a thing to build a show around.

“Here’s one thing I absolutely know: The acting is superb, and the music is amazing. That’s two things that I know we deliver on. And the rest of it, we’ll see.

“I look forward to eavesdropping in Internet forums or whatnot, or checking out the TV critics who write online, to see what they think about the episodes as they roll out.

“I suspect the power of the show is cumulative. We’re never going to explain what Mardi Gras Indians are or why they exist, or what a social aid and pleasure club is, but by the end of 10 episodes, almost without the viewer knowing it, you’re going to just absorb the essence of the thing. You’re going to understand the magic of the place.”

Amy Hempel @ Tulane

A few impressions from Amy Hempel’s reading at Tulane Monday night:

• I’ve been so awed by Hempel’s writing for so long I guess I half expected her to be … I’m not sure.  Let’s just say I can be easily intimidated by people with such immense talent.  Hempel was gracious and humble, which really shouldn’t have surprised me, because those qualities are also evident in her writing.  I think I may have associated her too tightly with Gordan Lish, an early editor of hers.  I met him in grad school and he was anything but gracious and humble.
• She said years ago she once asked a writer friend of hers if something she wrote was actually a story (many of her stories are very short, just a sentence or two).  He said something along the lines of, “You decide if it’s a story or not.”  Good advice.
• Hempel is the editor of New Stories from the South 2010: The Year’s Best, despite being a non-Southerner (she’s from Chicago and, as far as I know, hasn’t lived in the South).  She’s the first non-Southerner to edit the series, which I’m sure will piss some people off, though I’m certain Southern Literature can survive her Yankee intrusion.  Personally, I think such divisions are usually more about marketing than anything else.  Or maybe I’ve bought one too many issues of the Oxford American … Or maybe I just don’t like purity tests.

Calendar Marking

Harold Baquet, photographer

Wednesday night on Loyola’s campus (7-8:30 p.m., Miller Hall 114) Baquet will be showing some of his early–and little seen–work and talk about his 30+ year career.  Harold is a fabulous guy and will no doubt be entertaining.  He’s been the official Loyola University photographer for many years and before that he was the official photographer for Mayor Dutch Morial the city of New Orleans.  Here’s one of Harold’s shots of Mayor Morial with Miss Squeekie Clean:

Harold describes his work:

Most of my work is still done in black and white. Most of my exhibited work is black and white. It is not public relations photography. One of the greatest compliments given my work came from a fellow artist named Bob Tannen. I was showing in a group exhibit, and he said the differentiating quality in my work was that it involved a hard-edged risk, usually involving the lifestyle of the subject. I’ve covered Klan marches from Texas to Georgia. I’ve documented the lifestyles of children in low-income housing projects. Most of the world tries to avoid my subjects. They attempt to drive by without noticing them. It’s very easy to ignore the unwanted, to deny the ugly side of life. But nevertheless, I feel these subjects should not necessarily go unseen. My hope is that my photographs will be an introduction to subjects which need to be confronted, resolved, and settled.

Here’s a link to his work with the Mayor’s office.  Harold is also rather well known locally for his protests against closing Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic church in Uptown New Orleans.

Eric Overmeyer, screenwriter

Overmeyer is on the Treme writing team and he’s speaking at a free screenwriting seminar Thursday at UNO.

Amy Hempel

Hempel is the Newcomb College Institute writer in residence and she will be reading from her work March 15 at Tulane.

Occasionally I’ll read some blogger point to something as an example of “great writing,” or so-and-so is poetic, etc.  Sorry, but there’s writing, and then there’s writing.  To find examples of truly great writing, open up any of Hempel’s books.  I’m not sure there’s a writer who can write a better sentence than her.  Sometimes I’ll read a sentence of hers and I’m in such awe I wonder why I ever bother to write anything.

Unphoto

I found that blog I recently mentioned I couldn’t find.  It’s Michael David Murphy’s Unphotographable: a text account, where he posts text descriptions of photos he did not take.  I would like to kill Mr. Murphy to steal his idea, but that should not be considered a threat.

Another One Down

I don’t think I’ve ever quite gotten over “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”  Here’s hoping now that J.D. Salinger has died he’ll finally publish some new work.

A Good One Goes [Update]

For some reason it didn’t occur to me that I might want to go to college until after high school.  Nobody in my family had gone to college, so I guess it wasn’t a stretch I hadn’t considered it.  However, after working at a gas station for a while I decided I should really do something else.  Almost anything else.  So I registered for classes at the community college–its acronym was CLC, usually interpreted as College of Last Chance.  My first class was American history and the text was Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.  I plowed through that book–I recall being shocked that I’d read more than 40 pages in a single sitting!  What great stories from American history I’d never heard before!   In a lot of ways, the experience of reading that book changed me.  I was probably primed for its political message, since just a couple years earlier my father had joined a strike (technically, his union was honoring the strike of another union), the strike was broken after many months, and he lost his job and was blackballed from other jobs for years.  The union even paid me $4/hr to walk the picket line for a while, where I was cussed at and, yes, spat on.  By the end my father was disillusioned with not only management but also with his union and with many of the people he thought were his friends and even some family members, including his own father.  I think Zinn’s  book helped me see that my father’s story was about more than my father and our family.  But I think it was more than the politics of Zinn’s book that made such an impression on me.  It just plain made me want to learn more.

So I owe a lot to Howard Zinn.  I’m very sorry he’s gone.

Update: A friend points out that I left out a salient detail about my journey to college. When I worked at that gas station one of my co-workers was Ed, a responsibility averse yet diligent guy in his 60s who worked the daytime full serve island.  He had darkly tanned skin with sharp creases in his face, I assumed from all the full serves.  Ed had this habit of keeping a capless Bic pen in his breast pocket.  But every time he returned the pen to his pocket, he left a black or blue mark on his shirt, so his shirts had generations of pen marks above his breast pocket, fresh ones over varying shades of faded ones. He just didn’t give a shit about the pen marks.  I’ll say this for Ed, though.  He was the only person who worked there, other than the manager, who ever wore a uniform.  So it wasn’t like it was his shirt.  I think those pen marks probably played some role in getting me to college, and Zinn helped me to keep going.