Spacetime is a crooked smile
bent to match the mouths
we love and taste and pray with.
First published at Quatrain Fish.
Tag: Literature
I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone – Richard Brautigan
I first read this years ago. I stays with me.
Over the Wintry – Natsume Sōseki
Over the wintry
forest, winds howl in rage
with no leaves to blow.
Natsume Sōseki
Introduction to Literary Theory with Paul Fry
Spent a lot of time in the car today. Found this on Open Yale Courses and listened to the first lecture. I highly recommend it for both personal and professional reasons.
“In this first lecture, Professor Paul Fry explores the course’s title in three parts. The relationship between theory and philosophy, the question of what literature is and does, and what constitutes an introduction are interrogated. The professor then situates the emergence of literary theory in the history of modern criticism and, through an analysis of major thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, provides antecedents for twentieth-century theoretical developments.“
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/01-introduction/id341652579?i=1000063753360
Isaac Bashevis Singer on the State of the Short Story (circa 1980)
Although the short story is not in vogue nowadays, I still believe that it constitutes the utmost challenge to the creative writer. Unlike the novel, which can absorb and even forgive lengthy digressions, flashbacks, and loose construction, the short story must aim directly at its climax. It must possess uninterrupted tension and suspense. Also, brevity is its very essence. The short story must have a definite plan; it cannot be what in literary jargon is called ‘a slice of life.’ The masters of the short story, Chekhov, Maupassant, as well as the sublime scribe of the Joseph story, in the Book of Genesis, knew exactly where they were going.
Dirty Realism and Very Short Fiction
Over the years, many people have ended up at this blog because of some posts on dirty realism. A definition of the style from Wikipedia, circa 2009:
“Dirty Realism is a North American literary movement born in the 1970s-80s in which the narrative is stripped down to its fundamental features.
This movement is a derivation from minimalism. As minimalism, dirty realism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Authors working within the genre tend to eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.
Dirty realism authors include the movement “godfather” Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), as well as the short story writers Raymond Carver (1938-1988), Tobias Wolff (1945), Richard Ford (1944), Frederick Barthelme, and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (1950).”
My favorite line from this description is: “The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.”
When I was thinking about this a dozen years ago, flash fiction was not as well-established across the literary internet as it is today. The flash fiction I was writing was almost exclusively in the dirty realist voice. In my way of thinking, the stories weren’t really about what happens in them as much as what the actions (or lack of) and the urgency of shorter forms evoke. Compulsions of style and length dovetailed by default. For me, realism was (and maybe is) the natural voice of very short fiction, and very short fiction is a natural expression of the realist voice.
These days, I think there’s much more to it. But there’s still a kernel of truth to these connections, at least for me and for my shorter work. The trick is not to be too clever or too pithy, and sometimes that’s much harder than it sounds.
George Orwell on Dying Metaphors
Get rid of cliched placeholders for better, truer writing.
Source: Literary Lexicon: What’s A Dying Metaphor? – Chris Cocca
Chris Cocca 