HOBART

30 Rock and an AWP Flashback

Tina Fey's star vehicle is outshining itself this season, but I thought the "Generalissimo" and "St. Valentine's Day" episodes of 30 Rock were particularly good. (You can watch them on Hulu.)

In "Generalissimo," Jack Donaghy's doppelganger Hector Morir, the star of a Mexican soap opera, interrogates a kidnap victim. "Digame donde estan los amantes clandestinos!" he shouts, slapping his captive in the face with a glove. "Tell me where the hidden lovers are!" At Jack's direction, Liz re-writes Morir's character (Jack has arranged NBC's purchase of the show's rights) so that Morir becomes a gentleman, and this bit of trickery helps Jack secure the love of his mother's nurse Elisa. Meanwhile, Liz, in an opposite but equally uncharacteristic turn, attempts to win the love of her upstairs neighbor Dr. Baird by acting out the same deceit she's just written out of Morir's character. Tell me where the hidden lovers are! It's like Shakespeare, but with Doritos jokes. I think Fey's line, "I am the Generalissimo!" and John Hamm's reply, "I don't know what that means!" will go down in tv comedy history.

"St. Valentine's Day" is just as good, if not better, and involves brilliant use of a McDonald's ice cream dessert as metaphor, always a strong literary move.

On another subject, there was just one problem at AWP, as far as I could tell. The "lake" conference rooms were too small. They quickly filled up, forcing late-arriving audience members to huddle outside the door. If you walked down that hallway that's what you saw -- little clusters of people outside every doorway, leaning in close to hear the panelists inside.

I wish someone had taken a picture of that. Maybe someone did and can point us to the link? The signs announcing the panels were right there, so you could have told the story in a single shot: A sign, a doorway, and all those huddled writers, leaning in to hear a voice inside.

-- Sean

(photo of Tina Fey from "Sandwich Day", Season 2)

one more reason why we heart Norm Macdonald

Matthew Simmons' CAVES!

First things first, we'll go ahead and admit up front that we haven't read very many e-books. Elizabeth says she doesn't think she's ever read one and that's probably true. I've read a couple over at Publishing Genius, and that might be about it. So... you know... apologies if you have one and we haven't read it. We're practically Luddites when it comes to reading stuff online. 

That said, we both read Simmons' new e-book, CAVES, up now over at Lamination Colony, and it rules. Like, super-wicked-awesome-rules. Check out this first line:

This man only dated caves. It was, like, a fetish or something.

Does that not convince you to read more? Why not? Is it because you're boring?

The story is told in 21 sections, with an additional "intermission," each of which works like one of the best short shorts you've read in recent memory. Section 18 starts:

He enjoyed an overcast climate. When it was sunny out, and everything was bright, it always looked to him like the world's edges were way too sharp.

And, as someone who has been writing a series of shorts all called "Overcast," I'm pretty jealous I didn't write that. I'm not sure what else to say about it other than you should go check it out right now. Elizabeth would say more, in her rad "blogging style" that she finally put to use in the two previous posts below this, but she says she is too tired and can't think and is now too busy working on a crossword puzzle. But, if not from me, take it from her, someone who is very hard to convince to read an e-book but who wanted to blog about this one as soon as she was done. (Also, reading the preview of this, she wants to add that she loves the layout, that it made it very easy to read.)

-aaron & ee

What a Bitch

 

bitch magazine has been on my shit-list since last summer when they favorably reviewed this book:

the lolita effect essentially blames the media for the "sexualization" of young girls (i.e. girls going through puberty). I don't know what's feminist about thinking girls' sexuality needs to be blamed on something (as opposed to boys' sexuality which, i guess, occurs blame-free and without the media's help or involvement). the book and the magazine claim that girls are becoming sexual at a younger and younger age. what an original thought. haven't we been hearing that since forever? the fact is, girls' developing sexuality has always been viewed as scary, whereas, no one seems to notice boys turning into men. they certainly don't sit around analyzing it to death. bitch magazine seems to want to applaud the type of girl/woman they see as valid/hip/cool (think: ellen page and tina fey) and criticize/take down everyone else (don't even think about wearing makeup at age thirteen!). talk about misogyny! personally, i'd rather read esquire. oddly, they don't seem to spend their days and nights picking apart women. and they certainly don't feel the need to find excuses for their sexuality. 

-e.e.

Let the Right One In

i just took my kid to see this movie and afterward we were both like, "oh my god, that was the raddest movie ever!" it's a swedish vampire movie (that's right, you have to read subtitles. quit whining! it's worth it.) but there are undercurrents of "kids" in there and maybe even a little "romeo and juliet" mixed with "the exorcist." in other words, it's freakin' badass! it's based on a swedish novel you can order here (which we just did). it's only playing in a handful of cities this week and a few more next week, but it's supposed to be out on dvd soon. look for it. watch it. read it. i promise you, you will not be sorry. and if you are, bite me.

-e.e.

more praise for Mary Miller

In the coming week or two, we will likely be spotlighting some of the great books and journals and people we met at AWP. So it seemed natural enough to start with our very own author, Mary Miller! After who knows how many emails back and forth -- kind words about seeing her stories online, working with her on HOBART 9 and then BIG WORLD, gossiping about other online writers -- we finally got to meet Mary last week "for reals," in person, etc. and she was as delightful and wonderful and every other "-ful" we can think of. Also, she says "y'all" a lot, in this really adorable way that made me smile big every time I heard it, and makes me picture her every time she now writes it in an email. So, we thought we'd take that as an excuse to highlight a few more kind words for her collection, BIG WORLD:

First up, Timeout Chicago reviewed the book, which you can see in full here. And a little excerpt here:

Poorly concealed traps lie all over for the women in Big World in the form of married men, exes, a damaged sense of relating to the world. In other words, the traps are so big, they hardly see them before walking straight in.

Also, as of about ten minutes ago, her Book Notes is live over at Largehearted Boy. For those not familiar with the blog/ongoing series, it is basically a super awesome idea where authors suggest a soundtrack for their book, with a little note about each story, and the archives are a thing of wonder. A kind of kindred spirit the the "DVD-style, bonus materials" websites we do for every print issue. Her into to the Notes:

Disclaimer: Most of the music I listen to is circa 1995, the year I graduated high school. Somehow I stopped collecting CDs after this and I'm not very tech-savvy so my iPod holds whatever songs my little brother puts on it, which are pretty good but not very motivating at the gym. My sister is horrified by my CD collection. There's no David Bowie, no whatever else it takes to make a person cool. My collection consists primarily of Ben Folds Five, The Cranberries, The Cure, and Pearl Jam. What I'm saying is that I'm going to try and make this list as decent as possible but it will probably suck. I don't even know enough about music to ensure that it will suck.

David Kramer, the amazing artist of the great front and back cover art, blogged about enjoying the book, too! There's something about the way that he can summarize a story that I can't help but love:

In one story she writes about being a terrible waitress who only keeps her job by sleeping with her boss. And she even fucks that all up too by not being able to carry through on being an adequate girlfriend when the boss dumps his original girlfriend and wants her to fill the original's shoes. Her stories... are all written in a style, like Carver, that makes the ordinary and familiar compelling and worthy of the phrase, page turner.

And, finally, Patrick over at I Read a Short Story Today is still working his way through the collection, and still loving it. Lots of kind words for Mary all over his site!

Here's another thing Mary Miller does really well: Putting you in the head of characters who only mention their sadness in passing and yet still making you feel the sadness.

-aaron

Best Book Tour Title Ever

No doubt AWP was many things to many people. For Kathleen Rooney and Kyle Minor, it was the midway stop on a book tour. And not just any book tour, the best-named book tour we are likely to see in our lifetimes.

I know I've been prone to hyperbole on the blog lately, but Sam Ligon's glazed donut story really was good, and c'mon, the title of Rooney and Minor's book tour is "Live Nude Girl in the Devil's Territory." You think we'll ever see a better book tour title? There's just no way. The mystery. The sexual innuendo. The suggestion of peril. I have no idea what happens when the Live Nude Girl enters the Devil's Territory, but I desperately want to know. I want to know more badly than I can say. More badly than is healthy, probably.

The tour, by the way, is to promote Rooney's book "Live Nude Girl," about her work as a live artists' model, and "In the Devil's Territory," Minor's debut collection of stories.

Even as I type this on the internet, Rooney and Minor are wending their way (no casual word choice thrown in to add variety, this -- they really are wending. Not drifting or roaming -- wending.) down the East Coast, with upcoming stops in Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. Catch them at Minas Gallery in Baltimore this Saturday, where they will be appearing with Blake Butler, Shane Jones, and Rahne Alexander as part of the 510 Reading Series.

I'm hoping to make the trip to Baltimore on Saturday, if I don't just do the easy thing and see them in D.C. on Sunday. But if you're in the Bmore area, you should go. The 510 readings are friendly, spirited gatherings, and there are drinks afterwards down the street. It will be AWP all over again.

Details on the tour here. The tour's excellent blog is here.

-- Sean

Dispatches from AWP: The Party's Over

Well, the AWP is over, I've carried my bags and books back from Chicago, and I'm home. My Hobart shot glasses made the trip without breaking and there are no more friends or panels to see.

On the train from downtown Chicago to O'Hare I scribbled a few notes about my last day at AWP, a few anecdotes and impressions that came to mind. So with Ray LaMontagne playing on the stereo I'll write them here, as my last dispatch from the conference.

Being Philip Graham

As I mentioned before, I started Saturday with the panel of dispatchers for the McSweeney's website. As Philip Graham, a University of Illinois creative writing professor and the editor of Ninth Letter, described his dispatches from the year he spent teaching in Lisbon, a strange thing happened. I found myself sort of wanting to be him. Graham has a shaggy mane of grey hair, natty wire-rimmed glasses and a black wool coat, and even when he isn't smiling he somehow looks like he is. He described what sounded like the perfect life  -- spending a year in Lisbon with his family and occasionally sending dispatches back to McSweeney's. If these are the terms, who wouldn't want to be Philip Graham?

It's worth finding Graham's Libson dispatches on the McSweeney's site (oh wait, here they are) because they are terrific, plus they will be collected into a book this fall and so won't be on the site forever. They make great travel reading, but each one also represents a small learn-by-example correspondence course in travel writing.

How, for example, might one introduce a series of travel essays? Well, take the opening paragraph of Graham's first Lisbon dispatch. He is sitting in a restaurant, eating sardines and watching Portugal play a World Cup game on television. Here is how he describes the scene:

I take another sip from my glass of vinho verde and peer up at the small square of the TV perched on a high shelf beside the restaurant's open door. The screen displays a smaller green rectangle of a soccer pitch, with the even smaller figures of the players racing back and forth.

Isn't that great? Graham is looking at Portugal through a kind of keyhole, a rectangle inside a square, and inside it the country is playing the world's favorite game. This all takes place above a door, the ultimate symbol of passage. Maybe I'm reading too much into the image, but I thought it was pretty cool, the way he described in simple detail such a perfect symbol for the story he was about to tell.

I spent a fair part of the day wondering how I could get my hands on the kind of life Graham appeared to be leading. Unfortunately for me (and fortunately for him), apart from bundling Professor Graham into a steamer trunk, donning a grey wig, and hoping no one notices the lack of any resemblance, I have no idea how to go about it. But I'm committed to figuring it out.

(Note to Professor Graham: I am only kidding about the grey wig and the steamer trunk.)

Notes from an Underground Book Fair

From the McSweeney's panel I walked down to the tables in the book fair, where I didn't spend enough time wandering around. But I did roam by a few things and heard about a few others that are worth tracking down.

As I mentioned before, Quick Fiction, edited and published by Jennifer and Adam Pieroni, is not so much a literary journal as an object d' art. Each issue is cut in a square, almost the size of a pocket book, and graced by beautiful cover art, so you might think you are holding a ceramic tile or a miniature painting. But in fact it's a magazine. The stories are all 500 words or less, pieces that may be called flash fiction but also represent a kind of poetry. Check it out.

Another journal I discovered at the book fair is Absinthe: New European Writing, a stylish journal edited and published by Dwayne Hayes and Jennifer Bomarito. The art direction is by Stefan and Sanaz Kiesbye, Hobart friends from way back. Absinthe presents European writing in translation, and reading it is probably the best way to keep up with new fiction coming out of the New Old World.

Other things I was reminded about, or heard about, at the conference, that are worth adding to the list: Coconut (an excellent on-line poetry journal), Orante Churm's Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre (a print creative nonfiction journal), and the websites for the Mississippi Review and the Southeast Review (both of which are rich in on-line content).

Remembering Grace Paley

After a little hanging out at the book fair, and a break for lunch, it was time to hit the panels again. At the Grace Paley tribute, which I chose over the Stewart Dybek reading, writers Barbara Selfridge and Eva Kollisch talked about Glad Day Books, the small publishing house Paley founded with her husband Robert Nichols. Selfridge and Kollisch also played audio and film clips of Paley answering interview questions and reading her work, including a wonderful video clip of her reading her amazing story "Love." Finally they showed a series of photographs that captured the beauty of every phase of Paley's life, and that left all of us sad, and a few in the audience in tears.

Partying with the Social Justice Poets

At the Paley tribute I ran into Cliff, a friend from Zoetrope, who invited me to a party a group of social justice poets were throwing at the Palmer House.  This was how I learned about the Split This Rock Poetry Festival, a bi-annual event organized by D.C. Poets Against the War and held in Washington, D.C.'s U Street neighborhood, the original birthplace of the Harlem Renaissance.

We took the elevator to a suite on the 13th floor, where a woman took our coats and served us wine and chocolates. It was like a dream in every respect, except that there was no sign of Philip Graham. But it was still a good time. I met some great poets. The festival, by the way, is a celebration of poetry concerned with social justice and political change, and will next happen in 2010. Learn more, and donate to the cause, here.

It was time for a brief nap, dinner at the sushi restaurant across from the hotel, and then the last night's dance in a ballroom on the second floor of the hotel. I should mention that I missed a live taping of Selected Shorts, featuring short stories read by B.D. Wong, Rita Wolf, and series host Isaiah Sheffer. See? There was too much to take in, too much fun to be had.

The Next Hobart

This part might sound like a product placement, but at the dance Elizabeth raved about Claire Watkins' story in the upcoming print issue of Hobart. Claire is in the MFA program at Ohio State, and her Hobart story is her first publication. Go Claire! Claire and I spoke for a few minutes, and she said something about the drive from Reno to Las Vegas that was so hilarious and perfect that repeating it here would feel like stealing. If Claire's stories are as good as her party anecdotes (and how could they not be?), she has a bright future.

All Dreams Must End

After the dance it was time to go back my hotel. I slept in the next morning, and then rode the blue line train to O'Hare. But there was still one more odd experience waiting for me, a sign about the literary life I've been chasing this week, and whether I'm really on its trail. It happened as I made my way down the aisle of United Flight 614, too loaded down with bags to keep from knocking into passengers who had already taken their seats. I looked up and there he was. The grey hair, this time pulled neatly back into a small pony tail. The wire-rimmed glasses and the black wool coat. His back wrenched into an unnatural position as he tried to load a small bag into the overhead bin.

"My God," I thought, "it's him."

It wasn't the time for small talk about the AWP but I didn't let that stop me, and so as I moved past I said behind his back, almost into his ear, "Philip Graham!"

But he didn't move, didn't even flinch, and then over my shoulder I was finally able to get a better look.

It wasn't him.

-- Sean

Dispatches from AWP: A Dispatch on Dispatches

Never let it be said that there are no practical offerings at AWP. In the middle of this morning's panel on McSweeney's dispatches, I realized I needed to call these entries by that name.

"Yes!" I thought, "I'm writing dispatches!"

So, from now on, I'm not live-blogging, I'm writing dispatches. I like what the name connotes: a shoestring adventure, the enigma of a foreign experience, the whiff of khaki.

It also speaks to my general obliviousness as a writer that it only occurred to me halfway through the panel -- while I was thinking how cool it would be to write some dispatches, and how I might go about doing it -- that I was already doing that very thing. The realization of my ignorance about my own literary output was both crushing and liberating. Crushing, for obvoius reasons: there's no hope for me if I don't even realize what I'm doing; liberating for, ironically, the very same reason: Good news! I'm so far ahead of myself, I'm already doing the thing I want to do!

The panel was tremendously entertaining. Roy Kesey used up all his time tracing the etymology of the word "dispatch," thereby leaving himself no time to discuss his adventures in China. Holly Jones spoke about reporting the lives of challenged kids in Washington, D.C.'s rough Anacostia neighborhood. Phillip Graham spoke about being lost in Lisbon, Rob Jacklosky spoke about being an extra in the Met opera War and Peace, and John Griswold spoke about writing pseudonymous dispatches from the University of Illinois. They were all hilarious, and spoke knowledgably about self-effacing travel writing, about how on travel you never know what you are doing, and in some sense are always doomed to fail.

At the end I was inspired to ask my first question. While I was asking it the panelists all nodded and smiled, and encouraged by their happy nodding faces I kept going, to the point that I had started rambling. After another few words I stopped. At that point, Phillip Graham took the microphone, to answer my question for the group. "No," he said, and then gently and eloquently disagreed with the suggestion I had made.

I love the AWP. If nothing else, it feels like I'm learning a few things, even if they are only the things I'm not actually learning.

-- Sean

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Dispatches from AWP: The Best Glazed Donut Story Ever

[Hobart blogger Sean Carman is writing dispatches from the AWP conference in Chicago, whenever he can find a few spare minutes and feels he has something to say. Here, two full days into the conference, he offers his first dispatch that, thankfully, is not about the hassle of traveling to Chicago, or all the British people he met upon his arrival in the Windy City. This one is actually about the conference, and about stories and writing.

Here are the instructions for reading Hobart's dispatches from AWP: Scoll down to start at the beginning of the series. Scroll even further down to read a wonderful Claudia Smith interview with Shane Jones, and to learn about Big World, the Mary Miller Hobart mini-book you should be ordering, and that was written up in Time Out Chicago this week. Thank you.]

Faithful readers of the Hobart blog, I bring you news tonight from AWP of an event that changed my life. Last night, at the Innertown Pub in some neighborhood north of downtown, the name of which I really should have written down, I heard the best glazed donut story ever in the history of world literature.

It was written, and performed beautifully, by Sam Ligon, as part of the Quickies fiction series, a regular quick-fiction reading series here in Chicago that held a special AWP reading Thursday night. More about the glazed donut story in a second, though. First, I have to set the scene.

I'm learning more about why everyone loves the AWP. It's a huge conference, and truly overwhelming. The lower level of the Chicago Hilton is taken over with hundreds of small magazines, with booths set up trade-fair style, and you could spend hours just wandering from one table to the next, having an endless series of pleasant conversations with the good people manning the tables all day. The nice thing about this, if you are a fan of or sometime contributor to one of these magazines, or if the people running one of these magazines might have come across your work somewhere else -- is that you get to have the experience of connecting with another person with whom you share a very personal, almost intimate, interest.

I'm not describing this well, but it's a very fun experience. You wander through bookstores, finding these neat little magazines, and as you read them you fantasize about the people who run the magazine. What must they be like? What kind of lives must they lead? Well, at AWP, you actually get to meet all of these people. And if you want, you can meet all of them in the space of three days.

On the floors above this, pretty much throughout the hotel, the rest of AWP is going full-steam. AWP is as many hours a day as you want to spend engaged in animated, or feverish, or merely just pleasant conversation about writing and publishing, or intensive listening to panels in which accomplished writers and editors engage in animated, feverish, or merely just pleasant lecturing and talking about writing and publishing, and then in the evenings, if you want, you can hang out at the bar, and spend all night in animated . . . well, you get the idea. It's sort of like a narcotic, this conference -- very intense, an overload of the senses, and ultimately exhausting; this would be no way to live for more than a few days at a time. It's a rush, in other words.

Now I feel I can talk about the donut.

One of the fun things to do at AWP is venture outside of the hotel in the evenings, where dozens of local venues are hosting poetry and fiction readings. Last night I went out with a group that included, in addition to Aaron and Elizabeth, Adam and Jennifer Pieroni, publisher and editor, respectively, of Quick Fiction, a gorgeous little bi-annual publication of flash fictions. Quick Fiction publishes exceptional micro-fiction, and the journal itself is a beautiful little work of art. Jennifer and Adam do an amazing job with it, and they are also a ton of fun to have dinner with. Anyway, our destination was the Inntertown Pub, a little place about the size of a boxcar decorated with the most miraculous collection of kitsch I've ever seen. There is a stained-glass window at one end of the place and, high on the walls, velvet paintings of waterfalls, fairy-tale renditions of western landscapes, and more Elvis paintings, lamps, and other icons than you can count.

We were there for Quickies, a monthly reading series of short fiction. Each reader gets five minutes, a time limit strictly enforced by organizers Lindsay Hunter and Mary Hamilton, who listen to each reading with a stopwatch and a pair of whistles at the ready.

All the readers were great, but in the second-half of the evening, fiction writer Sam Ligon read what I will forever defend as the best glazed donut story in the history of world literature. In the story, a man and a woman share a box of donuts. Eventually, there is one glazed donut left. They fight over it, but not in the way you would think. It's a passive-aggressive battle. What each one wants, really, is for the other NOT to have the donut. Not to have the pleasure of enjoying the last donut, that is. Now isn't that already brilliant? But it gets better. It soon becomes clear that the fight is not about the donut, of course, but something deeper. Ligot makes that move so gracefully and so perfectly; it's the moment you realize you're in the hands of a master, and that this not your run of the mill donut story, but a work of art. Then the scene takes another turn, one I won't reveal, to an even greater height of heartfelt, comic absurdity. Ligon had the place in tears by the end of his five minutes.

I don't know where to find Ligon's donut story -- I don't even remember it's name; maybe it is in his collection "Drift and Swerve," which I'm going to order as soon as I'm done with this post (find the link on his website). But the thing is, hearing Ligon read was just one of the mind-blowing experiences I had at AWP yesterday. There were others, far too many to write about here.

One last thing I'll say about AWP, that I hinted at above -- it's truly exhausting. As wonderful as it is, if you don't take a break, it's too much. So I took some downtime today, a nap in my room this afternoon, dinner with some friends in the city, and now this blog entry and a little work on a story I have going. But even these activities seemed more intense (except for the nap -- my naps are ALWAYS intense), maybe because the AWP force-field was having some effect on me.

Anyway, that's all for now. Tomorrow is Saturday, the last day, and I can't believe it's going to end so soon. I'll try to write one more post before I board the plane and go back to D.C.

-- Sean