It’s good to see Peter Taylor in the hands of Susan Gibb. One of my favorites. Also, tough talk developing here at Mary Ellen’s, following Susan Gibb’s link.
John Timmons sends along this notice on text message novels His messages, and the replies — roughly 1,000 altogether — are listed in chronological order in the 332-page novel written by Finnish author Hannu Luntiala. The texts are rife with grammatical errors and abbreviations commonly used in regular SMS traffic.
Our good friend Mark Anastasio has a write up at the Bristol Observer. A very nice spread for a deserving weblogger and comics writer.
Jennifer Weiner posts on the Connecticut Forum at SnarkSpot. Thanks Susan.
Katherine Min’s story The Liberation of a Face begins like this: One day I stopped looking in the mirror. I was tired of my face, tired of finding fault with it, of wishing it looked a different way or trying to make it look a certain way. It was always just my face. So I [...]
Susan Gibb writes in a comment: Never wanted so much to discuss a book. It is endless in its questions and yet is satisfying in its story. I think you have it nailed with your estimation of Suttree as so completely human, and think that valuation answers the question of monsters within. Don’t we all [...]
Susan Gibb is going to town with McCarthy and Parker at Spinning. It’s interesting to get the impressions of her experience with these writers. I’m not familiar with Parker but have read all of McCarthy’s work. Suttree, the novel she’s currently reading, is one of McCarthy’s best novels, and deals with one his most complex [...]
Both Susan Gibb and Daniel Green are remarking on the state of the book publishing industry. Daniel Green writes I don’t say that too many people want to be writers or that readers should have to make do with whatever books a selected number of book publishers wants to give them. I only say that [...]
So it’s been eval eval eval for the past three weeks and more coming. Anyway, as I read through my short responses to Adam Cadre’s Photopia, I’m coming across interesting views: positive, negative, analytical, and confused. I wonder what it’s like for a student who encounters computer mediated story for the first time, entering the [...]
Since we’re on the subject of Watchmen at the moment in CF, I thought this frought with symmetry and continuity: In the summer of 2002, after I [Ron Suskind] had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior [...]
The idea of recollection is written into Watchmen. As in connections made to what has come before. The big ideas have to do with mirrors, which play with both hidden and revealed structures. We’ve talked a little in class about “reflection” in the text, Laurie reflected in coffee, Jon reflected in the mirror as he [...]
As with all excellent art, multiple readings change the experience. Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen fits this paradigm. I’m into the second round of teaching with the graphic and continue to marvel at the subtleties of the work: clock faces I don’t remember, dialogue that I ran over, mirror juxtapositions and the complicated intercutting and dynamic [...]
Calvino writes, from the terrace of the Swiss chalet, Silas Flannery is looking through a spyglass mounted on a tripod at a young woman in a deck chair, intently reading a book on another terrace, two hundred meters below in the valley. Does this sentence “convey” distance in the writing? A sense of slow, divided [...]
Back to grading grading grading, but the tasks have been interesting reading composition and contemporary ficion papers. It’s an interesting range of subjects: composition, fiction, and new media analyses. We’ll be hitting Calvino on Tuesday, and I’ll be letting the student take over the discussion, have them struggle to deal with the complexities of If [...]
In the film “Tenth” an extraordinary thing happens. A real event acts as a sort of climactic smack on an otherwise calm and interesting situation, the event being the 9/11 attack. Is this short film, therefore, a fiction, a true story, or working with the techniques of Cortazar in A Continuity of Parks and Woody [...]
