WRiTE CLUB!

Fear not, children. No soap is involved.
Unfortunately, neither are Brad Pitt's abs.

I'm not winning at internet communication this week. I totally failed to put up a WTFSIRF yesterday, I missed most of the #PtBiB drinkalong, and now I'm trying to talk myself out of continuing a nasty exchange of Facebook remarks with a racist jerkface on a friend's wall by posting about something wonderful. To wit, WRiTE CLUB 2012! The brainchild of the splendid & generous DL Hammons, WRiTE CLUB is a super-simple, super-awesome, unusually fun & interactive writing competition for folks who are interested in getting their work out in front of some thoughtful readers and possibly some agents, editors, and ultra-friendly-and-helpful published authors. It's so easy that you have no excuse not to join in. You submit an anonymous 500-word sample, any style, any genre (including poetry, kids!), self-contained or a selection from a work in progress. Then, staring July 30th, every week for 12 weeks (and possibly twice a week, sez DL, because lots of people are participating!) two submissions will be picked at random and go head to head (hence, you know, the title reference) with people voting for their favorite selection in the comments. Winners advance to a "playoff" round that starts in October.

Eep, public voting? Ack! Halp! Horror! Except, um, not actually. You've got to register to vote (and while we're at it, November's not very far away, kids, know the laws in your district and come to the polls registered and prepared if there are ID requirements!! which there aren't here, hooray) and I can say from experience that the readers & writers in DL's circle are kind souls and not horrible flamers. (Unlike me. Today I was a horrible flamer. I gave in to temptation. I should not have done it, because it was not constructive and I knew it wouldn't be constructive. It's just, when somebody tries to use "science" to justify their deeply racist statements, I can't back off. Because, you know, I'm Jewish, and that shit don't fly after the Holocaust, son. Or actually ever. Ever.) So, anyway, I think they are lovely people, and I'm not utterly terrified to put 500 words of my work up in front of them. Especially anonymously. Because submitting is hard and scary and this is just about the nicest way I can think of to do it. As DL says,

Things in My Cabinet: Magical Realism is Actually Just Realism

Here is the Lady K. That top window? is part of a GIANT
USED BOOKSTORE. Also, the cafe is named after a
LADY PIRATE. And they serve BEER. It is all of
the awesome. Via Lauren C. on Yelp.

Just before I left Western Mass, I was in my most favoritest cafe, just, y'know, failing to read The Fellowship of the Ring because I was flirting with the barista (who happens to be my boyfriend, which is great, because he flirts back like he means it) and a guy I know sat down next to me with a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I mentioned I had recently reread it after trying it and completely failing to like it at the age of 16 or so, when I couldn't keep all the Arcadios and Aurelianos apart (I still can't, but now I suspect I'm not really supposed to, plus I found the family tree in the front of the book this time and bookmarked it, son) and had come away this time liking it okay. Which makes me feel wildly guilty, because it is Great Literature and all that, and a book snob like me is supposed to think it's the greatest thing since paperbacks! But...

What The F!#& Should I Read Friday: Envy & Adventures in the Skin Trade

What the F!#& Should I Read Friday: Books to Make Your Weekend Weird & Wonderful

Envy & Other Works by Yuri Olesha

Translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew, W.W. Norton, 1981

Adventures in the Skin Trade & Other Stories by Dylan Thomas

 New American Library, 1964

It is a lovely summer evening, the sort that makes you feel like if you're not enjoying a nice crisp beer you are probably Doing It Wrong, and therefore I am enjoying a nice crisp beer (Magic Hat #9, if you care, which I for one have been taught to do by my mustached beer-snob boyfriend, who takes these things Seriously) and writing this review in the hopes of shooing away a few shades of blue that seem to have settled in for the weekend with all the tenacity of a bad hangover. Why am I blue? I don't know, maybe because I'm moving away from the parenthetically-mentioned and very wonderful boyfriend in three weeks - admittedly to go home to the San Francisco Bay Area, which is wonderful, especially after six bloody years in Massachusetts, but I really don't like that whole part about leaving when it comes to my beloved - and also maybe because I have just reached that point on the second draft of my novel where I'm thinking, oh, f!#&, this thing is a huge f!#&ing mess, and generally speaking I'm feeling a little weepy and despondent and inclined to heaving deep anxious sighs. This is not, again, generally speaking, my style.

So I'm going to try and write my way out of my gloom. Because what the hell good is a blog about a museum of joy if I can't use it to lift my own flagging spirits? NO GOOD AT ALL, that's what. How am I supposed to instill joy and wonderment in all of y'all if I can't do it for my own damn self? CAN'T DO IT NOHOW. Also, Father's Day is this weekend, and it just so happens that my dearly beloved father is the one who introduced me to both of the fabulous books in the swell two-for-one deal you're getting today. (In fact, he introduced me to last week's book, and the one before that, and the one before that too, although not the one before that one, even though it's pretty much his style too and I'm surprised I found it by myself) The reason you get so many of his picks is that THEY ARE ALL THE AWESOME and also there's a pretty fair chance that you haven't had them recommended to you already, because they are fabulously cool in a hip, kinda obscure way. Oo, that reminds me, I totally have a hipster lightbulb joke for you!

Q. How many hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. (weary sigh) It's a really obscure number. You probably haven't heard of it.

Do you get it? Oh god, you don't get it. Quick, onto the questions!

1. Who the f!#& wrote these books?

2. What the f!#& are they about?

3. Where the f!#& should I read these books?

4. When the f!#& are they set? 

5. Why the f!#& should I read them?

What The F!#& Should I Read Friday: Points of View - An Anthology of Short Stories

What The F#!& Should I Read Friday: Books to Make Your Weekend Weird & Wonderful

Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories

Edited by James Moffett, Signet Press, 1966 

So I went to not one but TWO book events while I was in Britain last week. They were events for two newly published short story collections, and they were super fun! The first night, the author spoke at length of his love of the short story, then did two very funny and well-read selections from two of the stories in the collection, and I was so taken with the reading that I bought the book. The second night, the author spoke at length of his love of the short story, then did two very funny and well-read selections from two of the stories in the collection, and I was so taken with his articulate, intelligent praise for writers I love and respect that I bought the book.

The first one was mediocre, decently written but full of very oddly antiquated fabular elements. The second one was so poorly written I couldn't finish.

I won't name the authors here. I like them as people. I think they both have a righteous and most excellent love of the form, even if their admiration for it doesn't translate into the ability to do it especially well themselves. Both of them spoke incredibly lovingly of what makes a great short story, and said insightful and clever things that I agree with. So really, when I put the second book down halfway through because the prose was too wooden for me to stomach without excreting sawdust later, all I wanted to do was pick up, well, a really great short story. 

In case you can't tell, it says "America was proud of its front
porch until John Steinbeck showed the backyard." Um, do
they maybe mean "showed the migrant workers gradually
becoming slave labor in the backyard" or did he maybe
write a book on lawn bowling that I wasn't aware of?
Via SubtleTea, which has some great quotes of his.

Points of View is a collection of some of the best American short stories ever written. I have the 1966 edition, with the cool dotted circle on it. I'm the kind of person who clings to the editions they encountered first, because other editions are wrong and don't do it right, so I'm going to tell you to get this edition if you can as well. The revised edition is cool and all, and has more writing by non-white-straight-male-dudes (stories from Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Toshio Mori, etc), but they took out some of the really great masters to make room. I'm all for contemporary authors and cultural scope, heck yes. But what I loved about Points of View is that it showcased the people who perfected the form first. (So buy both editions, I guess.) They took out Bernard Malamud. They took out William Carlos Williams. They took out John Steinbeck. And Conrad and Joyce and Chekhov and Dylan f!#&ing Thomas. Really. Why they saw fit to make such substitutions and not just create a Volume F!#&ing II is beyond me. So I will calmly and quietly refer you to the original edition, with the older stories. And then, once you're firmly convinced that short stories are ah-may-zing, why not get the newer edition, with the newer stories? Right. Good. So...

1. Who the f!#& wrote this book?

2. What the f!#& is it about?

3. Where the f!#& should I read this book?

4. When the f!#& is it set? 

5. Why the f!#& should I read it?

Things In My Cabinet: A Distant Voice in the Darkness

How awesome is this? Via Favim.

The Museum of Joy might one day be a place, and when it is, it ought to be the kind of place where a man can lose one voice and find another and a dream can turn into a book you can pull down from a shelf. Until I can find enough bits of green paper to buy a piece of land and build that place, however, this blog will have to do. And today this blog, at least, will have that man and that dream in it.

The man who lost one voice and found another is Roger Ebert. Now, I used to be a big movie buff; I wanted to be a director from the age of twelve until sometime in my first year of college when I realized that making movies involved working with other people, at which point I decided to be something else instead. (The jury is still out on what, exactly.) So I read a lot of film books. I had some book of Ebert's that included his rating for practically every movie ever made, and I went through and carefully starred every one I'd seen. I read screenplays, and reviews, and everything William Goldman had ever written. (That includes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, for those of you not in the know. And if you don't know about those, there's something terribly terribly wrong with you and you should go away right now and watch them.) I decided the only film critic I "respected" was Ebert and the rest were hacks. (Gimme a break, I was 17.) Then I started studying nineteenth-century art history and basically stopped watching movies in the theater because I was too broke and stopped renting DVDs because our lovely local video store shut down and have pretty much just wandered around on my streaming Netflix for the last two years. Which is to say I didn't follow with any particular closeness the doings of Mr. Ebert. Until today somebody I'm friends with on Facebook posted this lovely, lovely quote: