Accept no substitutes

Month: September 2009

Concise-ness of Carver in Heath Anthology

We went to pick up our son for his extended weekend away for Science and Math yesterday. On his desk was the Concise Edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature! And yes it included Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” I wrote the Carver headnote for the Heath Editions — Concise and Less-than-Concise-but-multivolume-and-full-of-more-literature Editions — and so was delighted to see the story included.

I had rushed to meet a deadline for the new edition back in January when the Heath editors changed the Carver story from “A Small Good Thing” to WWTAWWTAL.

I also made changes to the Teachers Guide, but since that is online only now there was less of a rush.

What drove me was the importance of recognizing the publication of the original pre-Lish story, Beginners, from which WWTAWWTAL was formed (by Lish’s strong editorial hand).

I’m not sure if this penultimate paragraph made it as an addition to the headnote or not:

Yet there is new controversy about Carver’s rewriting and of his relationship to his editors, particularly Lish. The recent publication of “Beginners” in the New Yorker, the story that would become – after extensive editing by Lish – “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and the accompanying article and an online exclusive displaying Lish’s edits in detail show that Carver’s rewriting may have been as much an attempt to recover his stories as an enlargement of earlier minimalist works. Once some legal issues can be resolved, we will be able to have a much closer look at Carver’s process, intentions and art as well as an ability to evaluate the relationship between Carver and Lish.

I don’t see it on the website for the Anthology. Looks like I need to check in with the editors.

Cubed Roots?

Fall comes to the Carrboro Farmers Market and with the sudden cool wet weather comes a harvest of root vegetables. I’ve taken those roots and made salads using the greens and roots, made soups and gumbos, roasted and baked them, but I wanted to try something different — crunchy, but not raw; mixed but still with unique flavors, spiced some.

My solution was to dice several roots, stir fry them for differing amounts of time depending on how crunchy or squishy they should be, spice them some and eat ’em up.

My plan for this week is to use garlic then onion then ginger to flavor the oil then add small cubes of sweet potato, turnip, golden beet (red turn it all red and I want some color effect), carrots and stir fry to slow cook the root concoction and add some seasonal spice like basil, rosemary or marjoram.

Looking for other suggestions and experiences.

NC Literary Festival Panel of Twitter 9/12 at 10am

NC Literary Festival
Come see us @nc_litfest‘s Twitter & Literature Panel Tomorrow Sept 12 at 10 am @mightymur @waynesutton & @smalljones Moderator @hartzog / in Murphey Hall at UNC. Full Saturday schedule here.

I plan to talk about several poetic experiments: @haikuoftheday and @sonnets for two and ask for others. One fairly complex moderated Twitter Haiku collective from Phil Boiarski.

I’ll also contrast @PatrickHerron‘s use of Twitter based on this statement:

I often use twitter in series posts (1of2, 2of2, etc.) to go just a little bit further than aphorisms. Or to just sort of “toss up” fragments of text that are scheduled to land in pieces in my new project. Twitter then acts as a sort of ‘locus of detachment” where I can put things in public and be done with the personal dimension once and for all.

with Philip Boiarski’s much more personal statement:

Twitter has been a life saver for me as a poet. I have a real life gig to support my poetry habit. Now, in my : ( sixty fourth year under heaven, I am not, by nature, a man who takes lightly his obligations to spouse and family. How one dares to have a family, a life, more than a tent and a horse, the muse has yet to explain to me. My workday doesn’t make it easy to make notes, or jot down ideas for poems, lines that come to me, etc. The 140 characters in a tweet seem to me to be of a perfect length to hold in mind until a minute frees up to iPhone, keyboard, thwirl, them in. I now link them to my blog about writing and am running there a “Twitter Experiment” (It’s at Boiarski theblog if you want to see). I have thousand plus fans many of whom are poets, avid readers, amateurs, etc. and they react and clue me as to what hits a chord, what I might take time to write further into on the weekend or evenings. So for me, the tweet has taken the place of the little ring notebook I used to carry in my pocket. But now, I write it where a thousand folks can read and react. I have a friendly place to try out my words and objective input into what communicated to real folks and not to just my idea of an audience.

And these two notes from Robin Black:

1) Best 140-character story submitted to our booth at #BrooklynBookFestival or tweeted to @onestorymag wins subscription + dinner with OS staff

2) Georgia Review recently blogged about what Michael Martone is doing with Twitter. I don’t have that link, but his nom de Tweet is @4foraquarter. He’s writing a book about things that come in fours and has used Twitter to explore the idea.

Twitter = epigram, epigraph, epitaph, epithet, epilogue, episode, epiphany, epic, epicenter, epidemic? an epistle to an epicene epicure? the epidermis of an epistemological epitome’s epicyclical by an epiphenomenonal episcopal epigone?

I can also talk about small groups vs larger groups vs broadcast and “thick” vs “thin” tweets if you like.

Battle of the birds

A goldfinch, trying perhaps to convince me that he’s the prothonotary warbler (see below), was hanging on the nectar feeder that has been under the protection of a very aggressive hummingbird. The goldfinch was sipping a little water that was in the feeder to discourage ants from crawling into the nectar when the confrontation occurred. Here’s how it played out as captured by my iPhone.

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