Susan Taylor Chehak

"After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read. We learn to do so by an extraordinarily ingenuous ability to rearrange our “original parts” — like language and vision, both of which have genetic programs that unfold in fairly orderly fashion within any nurturant environment. Reading isn’t like that..."

This is the beginning of a comment by Maryanne Wolf, author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain."

Read more here: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/?scp=1&sq=reading%20brain&st=cse

Just when I've been considering not reading any books at all for a year -- creating head-space and heart-space and office-space for myself, just to see what happens, find out what shows up instead, to fill those empty spaces...

http://www.readallday.org/the365project.html

Once upon a time we had easy access to our imagination and we knew how to tell a story without having to work at it so much.

Here is a "breathtaking story by Capucine. Starring baby monkeys lost in frightening trees, a witch, crocodiles, a tiger, a 'popotamus' and a lion, and even a 'tremendously very bad mammoth.'"

Atlantic Monthly: Essays Fiction 2009

Telling Tails, an essay by Tim O'Brien

"The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination. To vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events, or sequences of events, is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer."

www.theatlantic.com/doc/200908/tim-obrien-essay

This is from Janet Maslin's review of Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, which appeared in the NY Times on Sept 9.

"But here’s the thing about that dog story: it’s awfully good. Not fancy, but it really makes a point about socks, dogs and art. The dog ate the sock. The sock had to be removed surgically. And somehow that makes Paul think of one of the nifty poetry-writing tricks that he knows: you write a poem about something that’s real. (Call that a sock.) You let that reality 'slide right into your poem and twirl around in it.' Then you cut out the sock as if this were veterinary surgery, but that just makes the poem better. The poem winds up with 'a mysterious feeling of charged emptiness, like the dog after the operation.'"

I like to think of what this might mean for fiction, too?

We spent a couple of days in Santa Fe with Brohak. The highlight was the burning of Zozobra on Thursday night. I fell for it completely. My list of worries and gloom filled both sides of an index card, very very small printing. Later, I remembered a couple that I'd forgotten, but... We watched that mthrfckr BURN!

QUE VIVA!

Re: the Google Books Settlement

This from Authors Guild: "The settlement would make millions of out-of-print books available to readers again, and Google would get no exclusive rights under the agreement. The agreement opens new markets, and that's a good thing for readers and authors. It offers to make millions upon millions of out-of-print books available for free online viewing at 16,500 public library buildings and more than 4,000 colleges and universities, and that's a great thing for readers, students and scholars. The public has an overwhelming interest in having this settlement approved."

Read more here:
http://authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/amazon-accuses-someone-else-of-monopolizing.html

Agnes Martin: "I paint with my back to the world."



Empty mind.... yes. No ideas... what would that be like?
(more…)

I'm reading Making An Elephant by Graham Swift -- a writer writing about writing -- and this afternoon I came upon this passage:

"'Which writers have influenced you,' is a complicated question. How writers affect other writers is as mysterious and misunderstood as how writers are made in the first place. The word 'influence' itself is misleading. It assumes that one writer's writing can directly shape and inform another's, as it can, but surely the most important influences aren't influences in this sense at all. They are those other writers who, though they may not leave on you any stylistic mark, yet ignite or reignite your simple desire to write."

Graham Swift was this to me when I was writing my first (published) novel. I read his "Waterland" and was ignited.