two ducks, take two

two ducks

The Summer Pennsylvanian

I wrote for The Summer Pennsylvanian my last two summers before college and also was given the title of Copy Editor. I could handle proofreading then, but I remember that their editors, juniors or seniors at UPenn who went on to work at The Wall Street Journal and Newsday, would tear apart my stories. I don't recall landing an article on the front page, but I guess I did. And then this issue is also online, and I have an article on page seven, and a couple other issues include my Copy Editor byline. I suppose real journalists drink whiskey, no chaser, when they aren't bagging new stories while tired teachers search online to stumble upon stuff they wrote in high school.

my hunger

 
The L.U.S.K house copy of Hunger by Knut Hamsun, previously blogged upon here and here and here.

briefly on Balzac and bussing dishes

"One Step Forward" from Philadelphia's Rodin Museum

I've never read Balzac, and have had always had mixed feelings for prolific novelists who were widely read while they were alive, but I just read past Elif Batuman's mention of the French writer in her The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, and it reminded me that I'd shared "One Step Forward" on facebook earlier in the day. An imagined essay I've drafted but never completed is on my brief literary tour of Philadelphia's Rodin Museum. This "tourism" includes a statue and "statuette" of Balzac: Rodin's "Colossal Head of Balzac," which I have always called, "Bust of Balzac" and the parody, "One Step Forward," which I have called "Balzac in the Shape of a Seal."

The Batuman is fun reading, and I've just made it to the Dostoevsky section toward the end. His novel The Possessed is important to me because the old hardcover Constance Garnett translation of it is one I borrowed from Shakespeare and Company when I was "un commis," bussing dishes in Paris, France many moons ago. On Wednesday in Clemson, I'll be reading from a story that includes some detail from those travels as an undergrad taking time off from college.

MFA V. NYC?

The book's title is cute, catchy, and, to an extent, realistic, but also an obvious false binarism that leaves out other 21st-century American novels that have made their own tiny ripple in the literary waters. Neither camp deserves credit for Fight for Your Long Day, and the "knowledge cogs" in charge of both "arenas" publicly ignore it for the most part, but we shouldn't expect anything less from the capitalist economy we persist in. We're all desperately clinging to whatever meager market share we've been fortunate enough to commandeer, inherit, luck into, or work our asses off to achieve.

But the anthology includes a roster full of talented, relatively big-name writers, and will probably be fun reading for many. In a bookstore, yesterday, I stumbled upon a lone copy on the corporate shelf, and then sat and read Keith Gessen's "Money" article from 2014. I'd read his first one years ago, and I always think of the n + 1 editor as smart, hardworking, and fortunate, so it was with disbelief that I processed his facts about how he squandered 300K+ in advance money although I'm sure a quick breeze through NYC rental prices would reveal that really isn't so shocking.

In the piece, Gessen gets handed a creative-writing class at a school that sounds like Sarah Lawrence, but could be others, and so he includes some funny details about the workshop life and the students who doubt, sleep, agonize, and scribble there. If I remember correctly, one reason he doubts he'd enjoy or be successful at teaching long-term is that he doesn't see himself as a nice person. He also mentions that it felt unethical to teach where institutions charge such outrageous tuition, something I've felt in the past as well. But it was a good, interesting piece of writing, and so, yes, MFA V. NYC may well become another book I read when I should be grading or writing.

Fight for your short grade.