Further Signals

CanLit

2006-09-02T09:11:00.000-07:00

Douglas Coupland describes Canadian literature as being at a dangerous moment right now, as the younger generation is set to break out.

“There is a grimness around CanLit — the same sort of grimness that occurs when beautiful young adults are forbidden to leave home and are forced to tend to aging and dying family members, when they are forbidden to lead their own lives,” he wrote in the article on New York Times Select, an online service available only by subscription.

WOW. That sounds right.

After editing yumi (http://www.yumiinlove.com), I'm opening up the file where I've hidden the first 45,000 words of my novel.

I have written this many words, twice before, and thrown both drafts away (both different novels of course).

It is my sincere hope (is there any other kind?) that when I open this file (I haven't seen it in more than a year), it still feels like my first novel.

2006-06-05T21:40:00.000-07:00

Winners of Grain Magazine's Short Grain Fiction Contest have been announced.

http://www.grainmagazine.ca/

A heartfelt thanks to Kent Bruyneel, Lee Henderson, and all the great folks at Grain.

04 June 2006
Winners of the 18th annual Short Grain contest
Here, at last, are the winners of the 18th annual Short Grain contest. I would like to thank our esteemed judges and everyone who entered. The winners receive a cash prize and publication in the fall 2006 issue of Grain. Details for this year's contest soon. KB.

. . .

Postcard Story
Judge: Lee Henderson

"You get used to it"
by Terrance Miles

"Judith"
by Rhonda Waterfall

"Chequeov"
by Nick Ruddock

Yumi in Love

2006-05-01T21:55:00.000-07:00

I know, it's been forever since I've written anything here at Further Signals. But that will change as the fiction year approaches...I'm waitlisted at NYU for creative writing, got into Arkansas and UBC. I've accepted at UBC and I'm looking forward to it, but NYU would be quite something, if it was funded of course. Anyway...

This is the place where it's happening!

Also, I have some fiction in the latest edition of The Avatar Review.

READ IT HERE

WISE WORDS

2006-03-01T09:07:00.000-08:00

Miss Snark's good advice

My workshop advice: workshop your story/novel and if the people who share your tastes in literature have a few good comments, check them out. If the people who don't share your tastes hate your work, make them hate it more.

Workshops can be okay as long as EVERYONE reads, and as long as you're strong enough to fight twelve people, if you have to. You can take them.

WHY DO THEY GIVE THESE PEOPLE MONEY?

2006-02-22T07:37:00.000-08:00

Another cheezeball moment of "truth." The type of fiction that would never be given a shot had it not been tagged "Documentary" or "Creative Non-Fiction." Again, for those who missed it, there is no such thing as creative non-fiction. It's fiction, and it's most often terrible fiction. Idiots.

"Cast a wary eye on the authenticity of "Unknown White Male." Cinema can frame the world around us as if we were viewing it for the first time, but "Unknown White Male"'s hackneyed montage sequences--a fumbled juxtaposition of Doug recording his "first" experiences of snow and a fireworks display, a Final Cut Pro-induced disaster in which Doug's reencounter with world history is presented as a short blast of archival footage--unforgivably fail to impart the wonder of seeing anew. Disappointing, because once the issues concerning identity and the difficulties Doug's friends and family have coming to terms with his rebooted self wash away due to Murray's less than penetrating documentary skills, we're left with lazy shots of hands pouring through sand, silhouettes wandering across sunsets, all the standbys of picture postcard, "living life to its fullest" tableaux. But maybe such images appropriately compliment this strangely unaffecting tale: considering Bruce's satisfied insulation, his metamorphosis from cocky bore to reflective soul comes off less like a genuine reawakening than the yuppie fantasy of "Regarding Henry."
-From IndieWire 02-22-06

ART IS A SECULAR WORLD

2006-02-12T07:25:00.000-08:00

Art is a secular world, and that world is non-political. Art may be twisted and occasionally co-opted, but on its own, it is always secular and never political. Otherwise, it is not art. Of course, art may be set against a political or religious background like the great novels of Kundera, Hrabal, Murakami, and Kurt V, or the great films of Kieslowski (and countless others). The setting may be political, but the art remains secular. Can you separate character from situation? There is an important distinction to be made here, and that is this. Situation is important but not paramount. The character's react to situation. If you can change the situation (setting) yet maintain the conflict in such a way that the character's reactions are the same, you may be dealing with art.

DEATH and LOVE. These are the concerns of art. There is nothing else.

J.T. LEROY - JAMES FREY

2006-02-09T08:47:00.000-08:00

Please tell me we can finally stop looking for salacious easy reading material and come back to fiction. Great fiction moves us and informs us, and reveals our humanity.
This Creative non-fiction Memoir shitpile is reality television without the reality and without the television. Is anyone really surprised that their issue ridden sensational "true stories" turn out to be bad fiction. These "authors" can't write fiction well enough to get a book deal, so they shove in "issues." Issues are not the stuff of fiction. Stop reading this shit so people will stop publishing this shit. Let's get real here people. Soon.

OUTRAGE

2006-02-07T08:27:00.000-08:00

People burning buildings, risking lives, because of a little Danish cartoon.

Fucking ridiculous superstitious nonsense.

INTERESTING (and only slightly depressing)

2006-01-28T08:54:00.000-08:00

Book Publishing is more than simply subjective

NONPLUSSED

2006-01-24T08:17:00.000-08:00

Tin House is one of the better Literary Journals out there, but this will not leave you Nonplussed.

In an LA Times story today, President Bush was reported as being "decidedly noncommital...even a bit nonplussed" as questions concerning "Brokeback Mountain" were fired at him from Kansas State University students.

I am somewhat "plussed" at the new Canadian Conservative Government. Now we have a "little Bush" of our own up here.

THE RICKY GERVAIS PODCAST is high quality funny.

2006-01-22T20:38:00.000-08:00

HERE

UPCOMING

2006-01-22T13:05:00.000-08:00

Got into the MFA program at UBC. UBC is a great school with a great faculty. Waiting to hear from ten others including Iowa, Cornell, and Irvine...

The Avatar Review and Nidus stories will be in the next issues (two stories in The Avatar Review and one in Nidus).

PODCASTING THE TRUTH ABOUT SCREENWRITING

2006-01-20T08:15:00.000-08:00

Stephen Gaghan (Syriana) speaks about screenwriting, Tolstoy versus McKee, and Hollywood. I suspect this podcast is much better than the film Syriana, but I'm only half-finished the film.

Check the Creative Screenwriting Podcast link at Itunes!

Or...they'll probably have it here for a while.

Syrania podcast

"Tolstoy...McKee...Tolstoy...McKee..."

Funny and though provoking as hell.

NABOKOV GOT IT RIGHT

2006-01-17T09:37:00.000-08:00

Nabokov from a 1962 BBC interview: "Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions." "I don't give a damn for the group," he told Playboy magazine in 1964, "the community, the masses, and so forth ... there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art." And: "I have neither the intent nor the temperament to be a moralist or satirist." Mediocrity, he thought, "thrives on ideas." By which, he told Time magazine in 1969, he meant "general ideas, the big, sincere ideas which permeate a so-called great novel, and which, in the inevitable long run, amount to bloated topicalities stranded like dead whales." Nabokov didn't give a damn about anything -- politics, feminism, humanism, at least not in any of his fiction.

Nabokov's insistence on art as pure artifice, that it be devoid of all social, political and even philosophical content, guided me to most of the great writing I would come to know before my college years. He made me forever wary of the book that could be "explained" in a few choice sentences. Where there was no ambiguity, he made me understand there was no art.

From Salon Magazine

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/12/22/nabokov/index1.html

The week in review

2006-01-16T13:59:00.000-08:00

MONDAY: Worked. Sick. Set up auditions for Yumi in Love.
TUESDAY: Off. Sick. Set up more auditions for Yumi in Love.
WEDNESDAY: Terrible stagewriting workshop at school (no fault of my instructor)
THURSDAY: Even worse fiction workshop. First really bad one in the last two years. Does anybody read anymore?
FRIDAY: Fantastic class with Chris Labonte. Practical real life writing tips.
I Dropped a great literature class for this one and I am glad I did. Great Instructor. Great class. Great idea.
SATURDAY: Worked. Finally getting over this cold.
SUNDAY: Worked. Too tired to make it up to Brave New Play rites to check out the talent (for Yumi in Love).

READING: The Believer book of writers talking to writers
A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2nd time read)
Dozens of Filmmaker and MovieMaker magazines (getting prepared to shoot this feature length film!)

WRITING:
Polishing a short story "Lucy"
46,000 words into the novel
(trying NOT to write in order to save something for graduate school...is this a mistake?)

TEN ZILLION LITTLE PIECES

2006-01-14T06:53:00.000-08:00

Neil Pollack continues his "bit," allegedly inspired by one James Frey.

Very illuminating.

WORKSHOP TIPS

2006-01-13T11:18:00.000-08:00

I felt like Good Will Hunting, when that guy in the bar goes off on economics and Will steps in to deliver that speech. A young woman (a bright young woman) in my workshop, dying to reveal insights recently gleaned from her literary criticism class (and perhaps excited to hear herself deliver these insights), went off about the "message" we send into the world with fiction, and the author's responsiblity, and the damage done by repeating archetypal stories (I'm serious, she just wouldn't stop) and sending them "into the world" to influence the impressionable minds of young readers. Yikes. The archetypal social/cultural/political template could fit over virtually ANY contemporary or classic story/novel. It was scary and it was disturbing, and it was wild.

This is a problem. The young idealistic academic who does not yet understand that the majority of these archaic views are not indicative of the current social political climate (the real world) can really be a dangerous drag. Of course these ideas feel new and exciting to the young Undergraduate student, but, almost all of these ideas (based on older texts and the lectures of professors who feel that feminism and similar "issues" haven't changed at all since 1982) have been tossed around, defended and debunked for twenty-five years in the "real world", and imposing these outdated (and completely irrelevant) views in a class dedicated to the craft of fiction could be damaging to the impressionable young writers assembled. It is up to the workshop leader to minimize the damage. Let the student know that searching for a "message" (political or otherwise) in fiction is something that happens in literary criticism class, NOT, a fiction workshop. The only responsibility the author has is to entertain his or herself, and, if the reader allows, perhaps illuminate. The contemporary world of letters has more than it's share of social critics. They are at large, actively working to force their will (and their social/political views/templates) upon classic and contemporary fiction.

Just because you feel you've received a "message" from literary fiction, does not mean that the author intended any such message, or would agree with your reading. Nabokov believed in characters and story, NO MESSAGE, Mamet feels the same. it's fiction, and it exists to entertain, and perhaps reveal something of what it means to be human. Isn't it true that the only real issues in the long run are love and death, and how we live with both?

Like religion and government, literary fiction and literary criticism need to remain distinct in order for them to function.

When you pay good money for a workshop...

Fiction Vs. Poetry

2005-12-11T09:39:00.000-08:00

Here is the difference between fiction writers and poets. Seems reasonable to me.

MFA

2005-11-20T16:13:00.000-08:00

Application time. Caveat. Note to self.

In order to concentrate on my novel, I am applying to 11 schools that offer an MFA in Creative Writing. I believe that this will provide me the time I need to concentrate on writing fiction. I am, however (should any of you be concerned), in absolutely no danger of turning into an "MFA factory" writer, churning out watered down stories thick with what Rick Moody calls "the stench of fiction." The reader in me would never let that happen. So, the applications are out....where will I end up...

SOME BOOKS ON MY SHELF

2005-11-20T13:33:00.000-08:00

On the smallish upstairs bookshelf

Franny & Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Wonderboys by Michael Chabon
Writing in Restaurants by David Mamet
Antaeus - Various plays in one act
Leviathan by Paul Auster
Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Ascension by Steven Galloway
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford
Esquire Fiction Collection by Various
Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
On Writing by Stephen King
Independence Day by Richard Ford
The Master & The Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov