Know Thyself... but be open to new ideas

Note: I’m part of a small writing guild called Scrawl. This is an excerpt from an issue of the Scrawl newsletter.

For various reasons, I’ve recently been thinking of Emerson’s concept of Self-Reliance. Now, that’s not meant to go against the spirit of collaboration that this guild is founded upon – after all, our group perfectly matches Stephen King’s advice: “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open” – and the comments on this last round of stories seemed to be particularly insightful. However, Self-Reliance is meant in the spirit of inner reflection and the contemplation of your core values, even those that swim upstream of society and resist conformation with the world.

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- That is genius.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We’ve all read those advice lists about writing and immediately thought of a counter-example. For instance, in Chuck Palahniuk’s essay “Submerging the I,” he advises hiding the fact that the story is written in first person until after the narrative has been established and the story has some authority. He writes, “My personal demon is any story that starts with ‘I.’ That instantly turns off my attention. But that’s just me.” It is just him, because when I read that, I instantly thought of the opening of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground: “I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.” That’s the example that comes to mind, but in every one of those rules for writing articles, you’re going to find a few that rub you the wrong way – Jonathan Franzen’s “It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction” also looms at hand, with writers like Teju Cole publishing compelling fiction via Twitter accounts just one illustration of how that can’t be true.

Yet we still read these lists because for every rule that doesn’t get you, you’ll find one that seems to have been unlocked from deep within your soul. You need to mix Emerson’s “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” with Aristotle’s “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Know thyself – but be open to new ideas.

A Look Back to DB10’s Conceptual Fiction Folio w/ “Stranded” by Marcos Mataratas

This blog may not have been updated recently, but I wrote a post for Drunken Boat's blog the other day, which I thought I'd share here. I'll be writing another one next month, all leading up to when the 15th issue of Drunken Boat is released. 

UPDATE - March 31st, 2012: I just wanted to add the link to my most recent article up on Drunken Boat's blog: Joseph Pascale on DB9’s “The Bull’s Eye” by Inderjeet Mani. You can access the story "The Bull's Eye" in Issue 9 of Drunken Boat.

My other blog entries about literature for Drunken Boat:

• 10 Years of Electronic Literature @ DB [Part 1] / [Part 2]
• A Tentacle-Guided Tour of DB12

Creative Overgrowth in a Windowsill Garden

I am honored to have my work included in On A Narrow Windowsill: Fiction & Poetry Folded Onto Twitter alongside 42 other wonderful writers. Folded Word Press has crafted a print version that is a sleek volume presenting the once Twitter-exclusive stories in a way that brings them alive. Appropriately enough, it is also available for ebook readers such as the Nook. According to Folded Word Press:

“Written on four continents and read on six, the works in this anthology celebrate the birth of a new literary form: the tweet. Ironically, the 140-character limit of the Twitter platform has inspired new and veteran writers alike to stretch traditional boundaries.”

Ben White, known for publishing his fiction on Twitter @midnightstories has several stories included in the anthology, and on his blog he writes:

“There is only one carefully curated Twitter-based creative writing anthology. And that book is On a Narrow Windowsill, out in the time for the holiday season from Folded Word.”

I really admire the microfiction of Daniil Kharms, and his work taught me that a story can be short - incredibly short, even only a few lines - and tell a complete story without feeling as though anything is missing. In fact, a story can benefit from the short form and be even better than if more had been added. That is the spirit behind the works in On a Narrow Windowsill, and it is fascinating to see what authors have been able to create with the short form working within the limitations imposed by text messaging technology and the Twitter platform.

75% of the book’s profits will be donated to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

You can order a copy directly from Folded Word Press here: Google Books provides a preview of the book here.

Contributors to the Anthology: Rose Auslander, Amanda Lawrence Auverigne, Ashley Baldon, Nathalie Boisard-Beudin, Mel Bosworth, Johnsie Noel, Eric Burke, Karyn Eisler, Jay Flemma, Opal Castmin, Andrew Dobbs, Kaolin Imago Fire, F.I. Goldhaber, Joel Handloff, Ludimila Hashimoto, Michael Lee Johnson, Beth Katte, S. Kay, Peter Keller, Robert Laughlin, Ellaraine Lockie, Jenny McFadyen, Joanne Merriam, Winifred Hunter Moore, Nora Nadjarian, Derek Osborne, myself, Cynthia Reeser, Adriana Renescu, Eric Richens, Michelle Ristuccia, Stephen D. Rogers, Ethel Rohan, meika loofs samorzewski, J.Y. Saville, Linda Leedy Schneider, Nate Sullivan, Jennifer Tatroe, Christian Ward, Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Ben White, xTx, Changming Yuan
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Related Posts:
#Twitterfiction and the Art of Microfiction 

Ulysses - Oxford World's Classics

Recently, I've been working on my novel The Bookstore Hobos, and I've amused myself by adding a minor, yet impossible, detail. There's a scene when two of the characters are perusing the James Joyce section. One of them, having previously noticed one of the B&N's giant posters for Ulysses on the wall near the bathroom - "The Modern Library's #1 Novel of the Twentieth Century" - takes a copy of the novel from the shelf. As he turns the thick paperback book in his hands, he notes that a quote on the back claims that "Ulysses is a novel to end all novels."

What's impossible in a scene like this? Well, I based the version of Ulysses that the character picked up on my own personal copy - a copy which came to me via abebooks.com that was originally published in England. The scene in The Bookstore Hobos is set in Seattle, Washington, so it seems impossible, or at least improbable, that they'd be selling an English printing of the book in a store that only sells new books. There is an American printing of the Oxford World's Classics version of Ulysses, but it doesn't feature Harry Levin proclaiming it as "a novel to end all novels." The biggest quote on the back of that version is Gerry Dukes exclaiming "this is the one to buy."

If you'd like to find out more about my novel-in-progress, I posted a 23-word excerpt on my Twitter account.

UPDATE - December 5th, 2010: Last week I was in a Barnes & Noble in Paramus, NJ and it was humongous. They had a large selection of used books in the store, which I had never seen in a Barnes & Noble before. It was so tempting that I couldn't resist buying a copy of Notes From The Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky for $3.50. After the experience, I remembered back to this blog post, when I commented that Barnes & Noble doesn't sell used books. Apparently, some of them do. Despite this fact, I'm still proclaiming the scene in my novel to be impossible. First of all because it is most likely that the Barnes & Noble in the novel is like 99% of the Barnes & Noble stores I have gone to and did not feature a used section; second of all because, even if for some reason Zaid fails to tell you about about the used book section as an unreliable narrator, that doesn't change the fact that they were upstairs in the fiction and literature section where they were selling new books and not old versions from England. On a related note, I read a 10-minute excerpt from The Bookstore Hobos at the "Writers on the Rise" event hosted by Centenary College and Warren County Community College (page_8) , and I appreciated the audience's laughter and applause.
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Seven years after this blog post was written, The Bookstore Hobos was published in the Eunoia Review. After numerous revisions, the 90,000 word novel was abandoned, only to be resurrected years later and recreated from scratch as a novella. Now for the first time, the world can read the story of story of Zaid Mohammed--novice philosopher, apostate Muslim, and, most recently, bookstore hobo. He quit his stable office job in too much haste and finds himself sleeping in his aunt's garage in New Jersey. The bookstore seems like his only haven, but New York City is beckoning him to experience the real world beyond his books, discover his future, and finally finish his philosophical treatise. If you're reading this blog, you've probably been a bookstore hobo yourself, so of course you'll want to read The Bookstore Hobos.