Incendiary Lit

I was trying to think of a grabbing title, what do you think? Of course he means it, and he doesn’t mean it. Like we all do. Emotional truth right? Capsules of time and spheres of existence and…. Yeah. Anyway, I was flipping through the new New Ohio Review and saw one of Bob Hicok’s lovely long titles in the table of contents: “Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry” and thought Hmm. I too feel like picking on an oil company, the Deepwater Horizon’s spill still fresh (sadly, even while writing this right here, still gushing).

Also, is it just me, or does the name Deepwater Horizon sound, at least in retrospect, like Event Horizon? About the ship attempting a form of travel (drilling) never tried before, to a place never gone before in space (the ocean) and after a mishap a dark presence is making its way toward our homes. How did we not see it coming?

Anyway, Hicok’s poem begins “Never before have I so resembled British Petroleum.” Of course, British Petroleum is the essential parent company of Transocean, operators of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Now comes the part where I say the ironic tone of the poem perhaps rings even truer in the light of the current gulf spill. The poem is anchored very well in a time not far divorced from the spill (present) with other lines referring to current events such as:

…Isn’t a corporation technically a person
and responsible? Aren’t I technically a person
and responsible?

which seems, at least to this reader, to be very much a comment on the supreme court ruling allowing corporations the rights of citizens, and therefore the right to donate to political campaigns (which gets chosen politicians, law/policy makers in a place of actually deciding law/policy, with a debt of sorts to that corporation).

Hicok critically questions his own actions, his own ineffectualness, at the same time as asking the reader to consider their own global ineffectualness without getting preachy. How? Well, because he’s a magician, mostly, but also by building a strong case of self deprecation before laying into the ubiquitous you with: “How far would you walk for bread? For the flour // to make bread?” And, as promised, the poem goes awry at the end in a very organic way. From destruction to apathy to well, what’s next? I was going to quote his line about how gently BP planned to drill for their oil, but I’ll let you discover that as it was intended, within the poem, which New Ohio Review’s graciously produced not only in their pages, but also on their website as a pdf.

Read Bob Hicok’s “Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry”

That pretty much sums it up. It’s a stereotype, of course, but a funny one. Here’s the link to the article on College Humor and here is the first picture… can you tell? Science Fiction Writer or Crazy Person?

Willow Springs is a sweet literary journal from Eastern Washington University that publishes accessible and excellent poetry and prose. They’ve recently started a feature on their website that has the poet writing (at decent length) about their poem. Dorianne Laux is one of the best contemporary poets, and you should all be more familiar with her work. Dagnabbit. Here’s her feature at Willow Springs for her poem “S. Sgt Metz.”

ENJOY

I’m working on an essay, just, you know, because, and I’m only half-remembering a Vonnegut quote about the two types of writers. One of them he called “bangers” I’m pretty sure, but essentially what he was saying was that some writers mentally edit each line over and over again before they’ll let it touch the page, while others will just write-write-write then spend a lot of time on the editing process. You can’t half-quote or summarize someone in a halfway decent essay, so I turn my search over to you, sentient beings of the internets. That series of tubes. Google was unable to satisfy my search. I feel like a hologram suddenly popped out of R2D2 “Help me internet surfers, you’re my only hope.” I believe the essay was in either Palm Sunday or Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, because I have a distinct memory of reading the quote at work at Red Oak on a break, then re-reading the essay by buslight as I bumped and jostled my way home, eastward in the darkness. But, I could’ve sworn it was Li-Young Lee who wrote “the halved-apple faces of owls” when really it was Amy Hempel. In my defense, my memory of reading that line as I walked into the Singing Hills kitchen at 5:00 to get the restaurant ready to open was indeed correct, it was merely the book that I had wrong, having read both Reasons to Live and Rose in the same week.

So if anyone happens to know the quote I’m talking about, I’ve been scouring both books and haven’t found the quote so I’m beginning to think maybe it was in an unrelated essay, or, gasp, could possibly be an entirely different author. I hope not, though, because I’ve got it in my head that it was K, and I’d hate to be wrong about that.

As a senior project three students (Chrystal Hartberg, Jessica Tyson and Zebulon Huset) at California State University- Long Beach produced the following collection of poems and essays.

Though originally meant to be an alternative to the Best American Series, it changed slightly as the process of reading over a hundred literary magazines polished the shrine of subjectivity that is reading poetry. Instead the collection took on the theme of excellent entertainment and was printed for adviser William Mohr.

Digital images of the project are now online here, under the title Better than the Movies 2008.

Oh the rejection slip, but is it vain to keep it? When does the collection become a horde? I think the surface reason that I was able to come up with was that I want to keep up to date records, but I hate throwing away that little reminder that _______. <—- but what is that blank? I’m not sure. Is it that “there’s a lot to learn” that “hey, at least I’m trying” or is it something more Shakespearean about my words being immortal and when they’re revered I’ll be able to look back at the notes and marvel at how I persevered… do I need a safe deposit box where these rejection notes will be safe for my fantasy future self? I’m hoping that once I got past the initial, “hey, I sent out some work to be published, and even though it wasn’t I tried” (phase one of “hey, at least I’m trying”) phase, that I kept them filed and alphabetical (for the most part) out of some inner desire to be tidy that I’ve cocooned well, well away from my everyday messy habits. But I am a writer, and therefore inherently neurotic and a little vein, so I’m not entirely sure how pure my intentions are, and that’s a little scary, that tiptoeing around the phrase “narcissism” with the word “writer” as a buffer. I don’t know, I guess my mom used to keep the little “contestant” consolatory ribbon that they gave out in track and field every year. Right alongside the second and first place ribbons. In a box. Where my rejections are. That’s sane. Yes.

Anyway, anyone else keep their rejections? Or have a picture of the on the wall or refrigerator? Of the foot locker completely filled with rejections, or for the secret poet Al Bundys, a Foot Locker completely filled with rejections would be even more impressive. Help prove I’m not crazy…

Thank you yet again Cornell University. Here for your listening pleasure is an audio interview with Charles Simic from earlier in October (2008) on the Writers at Cornell blog.

Alex Lemon’s poetry collections include Hallelujah Blackout (forthcoming from Milkweed Editions), Mosquito (Tin House Books 2006) and the chapbook At Last Unfolding Congo (horse less press 2007). His memoir is also forthcoming from Scribner. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including AGNI, BOMB, Denver Quarterly Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Open City, Pleiades and Tin House. His translations (with Wang Ping) of a number of contemporary Chinese poets have appeared in Tin House, Artful Dodge, New American Writing and other journals. Among his awards are a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He co-edits LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation with Ray Gonzalez, and he teaches writing at Macalester College in Minnesota. And he’s a badass. You’d better believe that.

Zebulon Huset: Do you have a favorite two-word color?
Alex Lemon: Butter-blue.

ZH: Do you have any tricks that you use when a particular word in a poem just doesn’t feel right?
AL: I open a new document, type the word, and then stare at it. If nothing happens, I stop writing and read. I like dictionaries, especially The Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

ZH: If you were stranded on a desert island what three movies (or books or CDs) would you bring (with the island’s magical cd/dvd player in mind, I guess)?
AL: It really depends on who I wake up as in the morning, so day to day, this would change. Today, let’s say I’d bring Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree and this afternoon, I’d like to watch Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Tomorrow, Nina Simone, CD Wright and Herzog’s Wheel of Time. Oh yeah, and then the newest Brother Ali album, The Undisputed Truth would appear with John Hammond’s Wicked Grin and the largest dictionary in the universe.

ZH: If an actor was to play you in a movie, who would you want it to be?
AL: Jesse Sawyer asked me this question in an interview for The Mac Weekly and I think I answered Seal, but I’d like to revise my answer, and say a group-cast of Daniel Day Lewis, Forrest Whitaker and Ben Kingsley.

ZH: Do you have any tips for writers just beginning to submit their work for publication?
AL: Read the journals you want to submit to, and always think about your writing’s relationship to the many aesthetics that are out there. Don’t get demoralized if your work is rejected—there are so so many good writers and so few places to publish. Lots of good work doesn’t get accepted (for numerous reasons). It doesn’t always mean that your work is not good because an editor declines it. That idea of worth is a tricky thing for writers; but in a pure way, it would be ideal (and maybe impossible) to judge your writing by an internal barometer and not an editor’s thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

ZH: If you could only ever read the books of one author again, who would it be?
AL: Shakespeare or Funk & Wagnalls.

ZH: Do you have any guilty pleasure books/movies?
AL: I like Richard Price books a lot, but I’m not sure that counts. I watch a ton of baseball.

ZH: What was the last book (or poem) that you’ve absolutely loved?
AL: I loved the Matt Donovan poems in AGNI 67. Adam Clay’s new poems are knock-outs.

ZH: Have you found the process of writing a memoir very different from writing poetry and short fiction?
AL: Yes. It’s been very, very hard. Much more challenging than I had first thought. I had to really work at peeling the just-right amount lyrical veneer away from my early drafts of prose. My M.O. can be abstract and imagistic and lyrical and sometimes that sacrifices narrative and clarity. I’ve had to acknowledge my tendencies and learn how to work with and against them. I feel fortunate to have an amazing and helpful editor. But it’s been a harrowing and wonderful thing.

ZH: Do you have any advice for students applying to the writing MFA program at the University of Minnesota, or elsewhere?
AL: Before you apply to a MFA program make sure it’s what you really want to do. It’s a terrific thing if one takes advantage of it. Apply to the programs where you think you’ll be able to learn and read and write. There are so many variables to the MFA experience, all of which are clouded by expectations, and I was lucky. The U of MN was ideal for me.

ZH: Young-poets?
AL: I had the pleasure of reading at the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival this spring, and while I was there I got to listen, and then read a lot of student work. That place is packed with wonderful poets.

He was 71 when he died yesterday from heart failure. If you don’t know who George Carlin was, I don’t know how that’s even possible, actually. If you don’t know who George Carlin was I hope you’re under the age of 18 and/or were raised in a strict religious cult because the man was brilliant. There’re a ton of clips of him on Youtube if you wanna reminisce. Click here for a bunch. He was the author of some of the dirtiest jokes to not be the Aristocrats, and scathing political and religious satire. There. I told you, just in case you only landed on Earth today. Go watch some of his bits. Here’s one about death that may help those mourners through. Don’t mourn for long though, he was always a celebrant, so instead celebrate his work and move on to more acts of creation like writing or singing or making babies (unless you’re a big dummy, in which case, please don’t procreate).

This little piece originally appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, then in her collection Tumble Home, or, seven short-short, or just plain short stories and an 86 page novella. Very good stuff. There’s an image of an owl’s face, I won’t ruin it for you, but I’d been attributing it to Li-Young Lee, someone who I was also reading a lot of at the time. I just remember walking around the hotel I worked at thinking about how perfect the description, how apt. I also like that she (Hempel) doesn’t connect the dots for the reader, she just presents them in a clear pattern and says, essentially, “Have at it!” More after the story.

Church Cancels Cow
by Amy Hempel

Pheasant feathers in a plastic jack-o’-lantern–this is the way people decorate graves in October across from my house. In winter they tie wreaths to the stones like evergreen pendants in December. The halved-apple faces of owls on a branch will spook you, walking at dusk as I do with my dog who finds the one real pumpkin, small on a stem, and carries it off and flings it and retrieves, leaving on the pumpkin the marks of her teeth, the only desecration in these rows of tended plots.

Or not, according to the woman at the wheel of the red Honda Civic that appears from behind the Japanese maple and proceeds past the hedge of arborvitae where she slows and then rolls down her window to say, “You should keep that dog on a leash.” She says, “That dog left faces on my mother’s grave.”

When I realize she means feces, I say my dog didn’t do it. She says yes, my dog did it. I say, “Did you see this dog leave feces on the grave?” She says, “I found faces on my mother’s grave. I had to clean them off.” I say there are other dogs that walk here. I say my dog goes in the woods before the place where the headstones start.

I leave her talking to me from her car. I walk away with my dog in the direction of my house, and she follows in her car so I turn back around and lead her through the cemetery and sit down on a random grave and take a wire brush from the pocket of my coat and begin to groom my dog, brushing slowly from the ends up to the skin so as not to tug and hurt her. I stay where I am until the woman drives away, and I stay until she reappears. When she leaves the second time, she leaves rubber in the road.

For days I see her car across the street, parked on the little-used access road, her at the wheel just watching my house where my dog patrols the yard, unmistakeable dog. I write down her license plate number, so what. I pull weeds with my back to her. And after thoughts of worse things than bricks coming flying through the windows of my house, I pull off grass-stained gloves and cross to her car and say, “You know, I’m on your side about this. I have relatives buried here, and I don’t want to find faces on their graves.”

She says, “You have relatives buried here?”

For peace of mind I will lie about any thing at any time.

In fact, she says, she has counted three dogs the other day from her car. Like counting cows, in the game I played in cars when the family went out on long drives. My brother and I were told to count cows in the fields we passed along the way, me counting cows on one side of the road, my brother counting cows on the other. But if we passed a church, the person on whose side the church appeared had to start their count over again.

Why did church cancel cow? The question was not a question back then, and when I try to think why, the best I can guess is–because we were having fun? Until I mention it to my brother who says, “Don’t you remember? You don’t remember. It was cemetery, not church, that cancels cow.”

And why it comes to me now.

—
Right? Take it in for a second.
/
,
.

.
,
/
OK, I just wanted to talk a little about the layering and parallels in this piece. There’s the obvious parallels: Cemetery from the cow game and from the Japanese lady’s face-stained grave; the counting of dogs and the counting of cows, both from a car. What really got me was the profundity of the game these kids were playing, and whether or not they were told the cemetery cancels cow rule or they made it up themselves, they clearly understood the concept of death at a young age. And though the narrator clearly thinks the Japanese lady’s absurd, her behavior in such a close proximity to death is humanized by the remembrance of mortality’s early place in even the lighter times.

Also, come on, faces/feces is pretty funny, or, that the narrator calls them faces when she confronts the stalker in her car. I love that. I always think of the Big Lebowski, how the Dude took phrases or unique words he’d heard earlier in the movie and says them. Or more recently in Hot Fuzz when Danny repeats Angel’s vocabulary guideline corrections immediately, and often incorrectly (”What made you want to be a policeman officer?”). The narrator here, was being more wiseass about it, which is funny also. Then the repetition of faces with that amazing “halved-apple faces of owls” which is so accurate. See:

Then of course there are other little things, like: “When she leaves the second time she leaves rubber in the road” which is a pretty crafty way to make “she peeled out” artistic. Small details like that are things that you need to pay close attention to in your own writing. Saying things in an easily understandable, but unique way. Something that the reader hasn’t read fifty times. The formatting is also a little off from ’standard’ with the dialog (normally each . This choice helps the reader breeze through the dialog a little more smoothly, I think. Though if it would slow the reader down, who knows, unless someone’s really curious, I guess they could reformat it themselves and report back.

This is a little too long to submit to the Indiana Review 1/2k prize, as it’s 591 words, but it’s close. A lot can be done in 500 words, as the notoriously brief Amy Hempel proves yet again here. My favorite, and many people’s favorite Hempel story is “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” which is in Reasons to Live as well as her collected stories… but I also found this little article about the story and a little research about the, apparently semi-autobiographical story. Very interesting, posted at the Hipster Book Club.

The Writers @ Work (where hip meets lit according to their website) is a conference held in Utah June 23rd-27th. Yes, just days after my birthday and I didn’t win free tuition from a pool of hundreds. So sad. Anyway, here are the winners. Go here to check out more information about the conference. It looks really cool.

(from their website www.writersatwork.org)

Winner: Margot Wizansky, Brookline, MA, for “Cosmography”

About “Cosmography,” Ms. Addonizio had the following comments:

“The author of ‘Cosmography’ has a gift for narrative and for language which creates an experience of lived life for the reader. I admired this writer’s ability to convincingly render the voice of an eighteenth-century midwife in the ambitious opening poem. Like the description of a steak in ‘Breakfast at the Retirement Home,’ the writing here is often ‘luscious, blood-rare.’ ”

1st Honorable Mention: Keegan Goodman, Chicago, IL, for “Four Poems (’Residence’ and others)”

About “Four Poems: (”Residence” and others):

“From an autobiography written by a dead man to a woman attempting to construct human beings out of grease fat and coffee grounds, these prose poems create their own marvelous and off-kilter worlds.”

—

I don’t know about you guys, but that first honorable mention sounds awfully interesting. Russell Edson-esque is what I’m hoping for, but we’ll see. These winners will be published in an upcoming Quarterly West, and will receive free tuition to the Writers at Work conference. The poetry winners were chosen by Kim Addonizio, fiction by Steve Almond, nonfiction by Abigail Thomas. The other winners were (fiction)

Winner: Ben Roberts, Ogden, UT, for “The Three Nephites”

About “The Three Nephites,” Mr. Almond had this to say:

“My God. I was absolutely blown away by this story, which does what every great short story must: it creates its own world and sucks the reader into that world and horrifies us and at the same time (and this is the miracle, I think) makes us never want to leave. The voice is absolutely fearless, ecstatic, and dangerously wise. I could feel my heart thumping as I read the last line, and for a long time after.”

(not exactly a scathing review) and nonfiction:

Winner: Valerie Due, San Diego, CA (Yay San Diego), for “The Skinning Board”

About “The Skinning Board,” Ms. Thomas has the following comments:

“I love the emotional restraint coupled with the ravishing prose of the piece. It serves so perfectly the young narrator whose initiation into the harsh realities of life–and death–on a farm is being presented here.”

Click here now. (audio file)

Kurt Vonnegut is sort of a religion to me, and if I didn’t have so much school to blame it on, I could very likely commit Hari Kari for not knowing about Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s new and uncollected writings. Mark relates a few anecdotes from his introduction the posthumous book. Never has an egg metaphor been so sad. Learn a little bit about American literature, listen to this excerpt. Then buy his books and read them all (but don’t start with Galapagos. You need to work your way up to that tremendous, but very odd novel). I’m a huge fan of Bluebeard, Player Piano, and Cat’s Cradle, and Siren’s of Titan too, but I’d say read one of the other three I mentioned first. Plus, if you don’t care which edition you get, pretty much all of the books I listed can be found for about $1. So spend the ten dollars that would use to buy a burger (without tip) at Chili’s, and get three books that will make you laugh a minimum of ten times, as well as have interesting and imaginative plots. Do it. Go Vonnegut.

Jessica and I are working on an independent study class right now that involves reading as many 2007 journals that we can find, and pick the ones we like the most. The project still has a ways, but I’ve really started noticing some of the same names, especially in the smaller journals like Cairn and the Pacific Review the Willow Review and the like. Patrick Carrington, Sean Kilpatrick, Jonathon Wells, Emma Bolden, Geof Hewitt, Gary Nowacki, and Marilyn Ringer. This, of course, is merely coming from some guy who thinks he’s learning to become a poet, so take it with a grain of salt. The names may be terribly familiar, or new, but check out their poems when you come across them, at very worst they’ll be decent poems. I guarantee it.

For those of you with $1900-2400 disposable, and July 5-13th off of work, this sounds like the trip of a lifetime. A week at a Guatemalan lake with three great writers? Almost everything you’d need is included in that price, too, so check it out: The Joyce Maynard Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop.

I have a bad habit, or a good habit, depending on how you look at it, of buying books that look interesting, despite the lack of time and already mountainous pile of books (I’m not even mentioning the nonfiction books on Easter Island, Peru, Oak Island, mythology etc etc) that I haven’t been able to read more than a little bit of, and it’s really annoying. Late night amazon.com shopping sprees are responsible for many of these, the rest are from discount shelves/bins. Today I’ll focus on poetry, and bear in mind, there’s a ton more in the stack of “to be read” beyond, and in some cases above these.

The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems of Albert Goldbarth. (also include Saving Lives by Albert Goldbarth). I wrote a paper on Goldbarth in the Fall Semester, and it very nearly caused me to apply to University of Wichita to seek his tutelage. Yeah. He’s really, really good. Unfortunately MFA applications were a gigantic bust from my grand plans, so I may still apply… it’s just, you know, Wichita. But that’s one of the only things the program has going against it, so anyone who doesn’t mind the small town school, check out their MFA website here. Goldbarth’s the SHIT. Both of these books were the result of a late night Amazon spree.

Toward the Winter Solstice by Timothy Steele. Dr. Bill Mohr’s one of the greatest assets possible for CSULB. He’s been in the LA poetry scene for decades and with Momentum Press published many tremendous artists. He introduced us to Timothy Steele, who is kind of a neo-classicalist. Or something like that. He usually writes with a very well handled rhyme scheme, but the subject matter is more of a gritty everyday sort, similar to Phillip Levine. I think, at least, from the little of the book I’ve managed to find time to read. Very good stuff. He handles meter and rhyme with such ease, I’m hoping to take this book on the next roadtrip I embark upon and hopefully learn a thing or two about rhyme while I’m at it. This was a $1.50 bin book at school. Who can resist that?

The October Palace by Jane Hirshfield. She’s a buddhist, I think, and she’s highly acclaimed. I can’t quite remember which poems of hers I’ve read in classes or journals, but I know there’s been quite a few. I’ve picked this book up a few times and read a couple poems, but still, less than half probably, and never in ideal poetry reading settings. This was a $5 purchase in a bookstore outlet (which was located in a vacant supermarket in Santee, CA).

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees. Again, Bill Mohr turned us onto Kees, a wonderful poet and his collected poems is, what I’ve read, a solid collection, but with school’s reading, and then my own writing and trying to keep up a little, at least, with journals, simply no time. This was actually not an amazon spending spree. I thought about this one before I was at a computer.

…to be continued…

I’ve been slowly working on a novella/novel for the last 4 or so years. Or, I wrote a version that became more of an outline back then, and after 2 major overhauls, the last one just finished which added almost 10,000 words, it is finally just about ready to go out. It is a good feeling. An accomplishment. I’m definitely very happy to hopefully have the major work of my first long project done. I did kind of steal an idea for the formatting from the novel I just began, of telling it in short vignettes, which worked because it was already formatted like that with only an extra break to indicate a time break. OK, that’s probably more than you needed to know, but I just wanted to share, and offer the suggestion of vignettes to people who may also be struggling with formatting their own novels. It’s fun, and if you have any time breaks after something particularly poignant, by having that as the end of a chapter, meaning your reader has to turn the page to read anything else, and in that break they’ll be thinking a little bit longer about what just happened, which hopefully will ingrain your words a little deeper.

After the break, there’s one of the couple very, very short chapters pulled from the middle of my book, “The Smiles Are Killing Me.”
(more…)

Coming from the UK (New York) Times, this interesting article about Cormac McCarthy. I’m sad to admit other than his name, and the title of some of his books (mostly ones turned into movies) I’d be lost to tell you anything about the Pulitzer Prize winning man, or even his writing style. It’s one of those rare days where I can say “I learned something today.”

Junot Diaz’s first novel (following sensation short fiction collection Drown) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a tale of immigrant struggles, a bone fide curse, a sci-fi fantasy dork (Oscar) and his tumultuous family. It was one of the most highly reviewed books of 2007, getting praise like “this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel” from Publisher’s Weekly and “Propelled by compassion, Díaz’s novel is intrepid and radiant.” from Booklist, yet, its sales thusfar have been a mere 27,000. And it is highly likely to be nominated for a Pulitzer. Isn’t that scary? That your book can be wonderfully reviewed, there’s buzz of a Pulitzer (Junot has yet to cross over into his 40’s) and yet, your book, your baby, is left to be dusted on store shelves. Jeez.

Here’s a yahoonews article outlining other publishing failures, and successes of 2007.

So, I’m apparently the last person to grab this gravy-train, and I feel like I’m dressed in my best and covered in Thanksgiving sauce. Or something. But The basic plot of Nabokov’s Lolita is very similar to the earlier (1916 to Nabokov’s 1956) version, an 18 page ‘novella’ which sounds about average short story length, but hey, who’m I to tell those crazy Germans (and the author did become a prominent Nazi journalist) what to call their pedophilia? Anyway, here’s the opening paragraph of a John Lethem essay from Harper’s recently called Love and Theft…

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel.

OK, paragraph and a sentence, big deal. Anyway, he gave the original author a different name than what I’d read on the St. Petersburg website, where there was an article titled “Nabokov was no plagurist, say his admirers” but seeing as the head of the Nabokov Museum offered such unbiased insight as “He couldn’t understand German well enough to read such literature.” But seeing as he lived in Berlin for 13 years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the Museum officers are worried about Job security.

Jonathon Lethem’s essay goes on to talk about Cryptomnesia which is: the appearance in consciousness of memory images which are not recognized as such but which appear as original creations. New word for today. Whee. Have a pleasant day.

Janet Holmes, poet, editor and teacher at Boise State, which is quickly climbing the ranks of MFA programs I’m interested in (you can rent a 3 bedroom house, with front and back yards in Boise for under $1000 a month. Wow.), has a blog called Humanophone, I just came across this little post from The end of August about teaching Frank O’Hara in Idaho in 2007, and some of the questions she fielded. Really entertaining, and relatively sad, how little some college students know. But it’s also entertaining. Check it out here.