Today is the start of the oddly-shortened NaNoWriMo, which is described on its official website thusly:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved [italics added].

I honestly don't know how I feel about this kind of thing, so I'm going to relate a little story that a professor told me in undergrad. It goes like this: Three men go golfing. Two of the men are writers and know each other, one being the other's mentor.  The third is a heart surgeon, and is just meeting the other two.  They introduce themselves, but the younger writer is a little embarrassed to admit to a doctor what he does for a living, writing novels. He explains that he's also a college teacher and administrator.

The older writer says simply, "I'm a novelist." 

The heart surgeon has a lot of questions about the "writing life," and reveals somewhere around the ninth hole that he has always harbored a secret desire to write a novel.  "I have this great idea, and I have all the characters," he says.  "One of these day, I'm just going to take a sabbatical, rent a cabin out in the woods, and just write." 

The younger of the writers encourages the surgeon, and listens for the next few holes as he describes his idea for a novel.  He asks questions to let the surgeon know he's interested.  He offers him advice on how to get his novel published once he writes it.  The elder writer is silent during all of this.  The three men finish their game.

As they're parting and shaking hands, the older writer, suddenly very animated, says to the heart surgeon, "You know, I've always had this idea that I was meant to be a surgeon.  I think I'd be pretty good at it.  I have all the tools and drugs and stuff.  One of these days, I'm just going to take six months off, rent a cabin out in the woods, and just cut people open.  Just get in there and dig around!"

Of course, the heart surgeon is pissed, and the younger writer is horrified, but the older novelist has got his point across: writing is a profession like any other, like medicine, and requires more than enthusiasm and a little time.

Now, I'm all for encouraging people, especially young people, to go into writing as a profession, but if things like time and effort scare you, then it's probably not for you.  There are dedicated, hard-working people who spend their whole lives writing.  They live and die writing.  It is a respectable profession, and assuming that anyone with a little time and a fleeting interest (they said it, not me) can do it well is disrespectful.

There is a notion that art is easy, that art is a trick.  Not hard work or a career path, like real jobs, just throwing something together at the last minute and calling it "art."  Art is, in fact, a stunning amount of work, and time-consuming to boot.  It is not nearly as much fun as the NaNoWriMo website says it is:

We love the fringe benefits accrued to novelists. For one month out of the year, we can stew and storm, and make a huge mess of our apartments and drink lots of coffee at odd hours. And we can do all of these things loudly, in front of people. As satisfying as it is to reach deep within yourself and pull out an unexpectedly passable work of art, it is equally (if not more) satisfying to be able to dramatize the process at social gatherings.

If you're writing to show off how tortured or eccentric you can be, you're probably writing for the wrong reasons, and you'll probably lose interest once you realize the "fringe benefits" don't even come close to outweighing the "time and effort involved." 

If you want to write a novel, write a novel (and hey, November's as good a time as any), but don't imagine that it's easy, or that you'll take to it like a duck to heart surgery.  To quote NaNoWriMo one last time: "Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap."

Thanks to Sarah Layden for the heads up.  Seems that Anna Journey, winner of Sycamore's 2005 Wabash Prize for Poetry, has discovered a previously unpublished Sylvia Plath poem in the archives at Indiana University.  The poem appears to be a reaction to Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby written in Plath's senior year in college.  It will be published in Blackbird, VCU's online literary magazine (as soon as tomorrow, if their site is to be believed).

Read Anna Journey's Sappho at the Edge of the Bayou, winner of the Wabash Prize for Poetry.

The New York Times is reporting the anticipated finalization of a production deal for one of Kubrick's lost manuscripts.  And I do mean lost:

“When Stanley died, he left behind lots of paperwork,” Mr. Hobbs said in a telephone interview. “We ended up going through trunks of it, and one day we came across ‘Lunatic at Large.’ I knew what it was right away, because I remember Stanley talking about ‘Lunatic.’ He was always saying he wished he knew where it was, because it was such a great idea.”

Lunatic at Large will be directed by first-timer Chris Palmer from a script finalized by Stephen R. Clarke. 

You heard me:

The rapper, along with award-winning playwright David E. Talbert, has released his first book, Love Don't Live Here No More: Book One of Doggy Tales.

The novel is the first in a seven-volume book series whose content is inspired by Snoop's own life... 

Is there anything that man can't do? Read about it.

The New Yorker has an article up about Will Wright, inventor of SimCity and The Sims.

For the past six years, Wright has been working on a new game, which will be released in 2007. It is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

Okay, New Yorker.  That's your Ulysses allowance this year.  Everybody gets twenty.  See you in January.

Well, not exactly.  The Guardian has a riveting story about the announcement and sale by Amazon of Useless America by Jim Crace, a book the author claims never to have written:

Now we are in the world of guesswork. When the book was "announced" all those years ago, someone at Penguin couldn't type, possibly, or someone at Amazon was hard of hearing. "Used to" became "Useless", an amusing error. But an error with a life of its own. The Amazon computer sucked the information in, fleshed it out, nurtured it, gave it provenance.

Spooky, eh?  For the record, Amazon is no longer carrying the phantom novel, the Kafkaesque product of its own twisted bureaucracy.

60 Minutes has cast some sort of unholy union with Yahoo! News of all places to present this chopped up version of a J.K. Rowling interview just in time for Halloween.  After some ornamental sections examining whether or not Rowling believes in magic (nope) and how she goes about naming characters (oh, there's a process, alright), we get down to the bloody business at hand: killing characters.

Not a damn word.  Not one single word about murdering the little wiz kid.  What kind of reporting is that?  The best we get is a long distance shot of Rowling's plot grid for the next novel (and man does she look nervous showing it) and a poll on the video page asking if you think Potter dies in book seven.  Yes, I think he does, and hope against hope every night before bed.  How many times do I need to say it?  Internet polls aren't enough.  I need assurances at this point, because honestly, my faith is flagging.  I don't think J.K. has it in her anymore.  At this point, I don't even remember how all this death-watching got started.

In other news, the actor who plays Harry almost saw a girl's bum and had to avert his delicate eyes.

Let's play, "What has the internet replaced now?"  It's easy, just pick a website, find the real-world thing it emulates, and declare that thing dead.  At what point can we just declare all of reality dead...oh, how 'bout now?

Ugh.  Sorry about the pun.  I really should be reigned in one of these days.

The McGuire Gallery of Frederick, Maryland is the first stop for a travelling exhibit of Theodore "Dr. Suess" Geisel's artwork.  Apparently there's more to him than children's books and overt racism.  He also painted (semi-)serious works and made carvings of his imaginary creatures, incorporating horns and bills from dead animals procured by his father, a zoo superintendent.  Sound Like anyone we know?

"The Art of Dr. Suess: A Retrospective and International Touring Exhibit" will open on Saturday in Maryland.  It's hard to find details about where and when it will be traveling next (Lafayette, Indiana, perchance?)  but I'll keep an eye on it.  You can find more information and look at some of the exhibit here.

Personal favorites:  Young Man Shaving (above) and The Myopic Woman, which is really just strange and good. 

Jenny Diski has an interesting blog post up on Guardian today about how (brace yourself) writing isn't the best way to get rich quick. Diski writes about the the ever-popular "I have this great story; all I have to do is write it, watch it rise on the best-seller list, and book my first class ticket to Chicago to chat with Oprah about the writing process" daydream. Call it the Dan Brown daydream. Of course, this is all well and good. Yes, people often idealize, or overlook completely, the reality behind writing. As Diski puts it,

If you are literate (though it's getting to be a much less than universal ability) then, the thought goes, you can write a book. If you have a life, a mind that thinks, then you can write a book. Have story; will narrate. So my father thought, though he didn't actually put it to the test.

My problem with this blog post is not what she argues here (although my reaction does slightly fall in the "Tell Me Something I Don't Know" category). My problems come with what follows. Really with two very specific statements that follow.

Statement 1: Of her daydream-chasing father, Diski writes

Nowadays, he would have joined a creative writing course, that marvellous money-spinner for cash-strapped universities. It's always been the case that people will find a way to cash in on daydreams. What's new is that educational institutions are ripping off their students - customers, these days, like any other business. Buyer beware. You can take a narrative to a creative writing course, but you can't make it a fine novel.

Ah, the good ol' "MFA programs, who needs 'em?" argument that we're so fond of here at the Sycamore blog.  That's right, creative writing programs are for people who want to cash in on their daydreams of becoming bestselling novelists.  They couldn't possibly attract writers who are interested in honing their craft, or devoting a certain amount of time and hard work to developing their writing skills. 

Statement 2: Of writers in general:

Really the job of writing is for those, like myself, who are socially dysfunctional. I actually want to be on my own a lot. I hate parties. And I don't have the slightest desire to do any of the things that people seem to do when they are very rich (aside, of course, from not having to worry about money - though I suspect that the very rich have to worry about money more than I do).

Give me a break. Do we really need writers cultivating and encouraging the stereotype of the dark, brooding writer figure who can't function in normal society? Don't criticize people for romanticizing the writer's lifestyle with the Dan Brown daydream, and then feed me some crap about writing being for those who are "socially dysfunctional."

A while back, we posted the link to an NPR interview with Jonathan Franzen about his new memoir. One of the things he spoke of during the interview was the fact that, for the longest time, he felt really guilty and embarrassed in the literary world of the fact that he actually liked high school. He said

You wish you could point to this very cool disaffection, trauma even, that you’d been through, and in fact, all I had to say about myself was that I had a good time…I had a lot of friends, we did a lot of really fun things. In the literary environment, in the world I inhabit, that becomes this thing I feel I have to conceal.

I hate that notion that if you aren't two minutes away from sticking your head in the oven, or if you haven't at some point suffered through an emotionally disturbing, life-altering event, then you can't really be a writer.  And I also hate it even more that this is a misconception that is perpetuated from within the literary world.  It's not even practical, really.  As Diski points out, " most writers don't even earn an unsupplemented living."  That supplemental job for many writers is within the academic world.  And it doesn't pay to be socially dysfunctional in the academic world.  Eccentric?  Sure.  Socially dysfunctional?  Not so much.  Berryman was fired from Iowa pretty damn quickly because of his, umm, "social dysfunctions."  And it pays even less to be socially dysfunctional if you venture outside of academia for that supplemental income.       

Do writers have weird problems and social issues?  Sure.  But hey, so do most people.  And one of those problems shouldn't be having to worry about being labeled as socially dysfunctional by people in your own field, or, worse, being looked down upon by other writers because you've somehow managed to *gasp* lead a relatively happy, normal life as a functioning member of society.  And as for Diski's claim that writers don't like parties?  Well that's just plain silly. 

Read Diski's post here.           

Let's take a little trip down Lifetime Movie Network memory lane, shall we?  The year is 1996, and the movie is No One Would Tell, starring one Fred Savage.  I could summarize the movie for you, but IMDB has done a great job with this already: 

16-year old Stacy is asked out by hunk Bobby, and soon they're a couple. But Bobby is psychologically unstable and uses violence whenever Stacy does something out of line. Soon he controls what she does, who she meets and how she dresses. It's puppy love turned into a disaster.

Puppy love turned disaster indeed.  Basically, Fred Savage's character spends the movie beating the crap out of his girlfriend, played by none other than fellow former child star Candace Cameron.  Now, I get the whole "I want to break into new roles/I was a child star and all I got was this stupid Swiss bank account/when will I be taken seriously as an adult actor?" thing that most child stars go through.  I get it, but I don't have to like it.  In fact, my thought process as I watched the movie probably went a little something like this:

Hey, Kevin Arnold is in this movie, cool!  Aw, remember the first time he and Winnie kissed under that tree?  That was so sweet.  Wow, he's really gotten old.  Wait a minute, what is Kevin Arnold doing beating up that girl?  Oh my God, that's not just a girl, that's D.J. Tanner! He's beating up D.J...no, wait...my GOD, KEVIN ARNOLD is killing D.J. Tanner!!?! 

And the whole point of this entry is that how I felt about No One Would Tell is basically also how I feel about this.

I've given away the ending of the movie, and for that I am sorry.  But not as sorry as I am that the words "nude scene" and "Daniel Radcliffe" are being used together in an article. 

The New Yorker has an interesting interview up with Phillip Levine and Galway Kinnell about their careers, Vietnam, and their first publishing experiences with the magazine:

LEVINE: I remember Howard Moss [The New Yorker’s poetry editor from 1950 to 1987] saying to me, “Don’t you think we should call this ‘Conscientious Objector’?” And I said, “No, that would be inaccurate.” I was not a conscientious objector. I refused to serve. I was not a pacifist. And when asked that very question by the draft board, I said, “No, I could kill some people, but they’re all here in Detroit.”

 

After an 18 month bout with a disease called Spasmodic Dysphonia that rendered Adams unable to speak in most everyday situations, he has suddenly regained the ability to speak.  From his blog:

The weirdest part of this phenomenon is that speech is processed in different parts of the brain depending on the context. So people with this problem can often sing but they can’t talk. In my case I could do my normal professional speaking to large crowds but I could barely whisper and grunt off stage.

So how did he recover?  The power of poetry.  Sort of.