Year: 2013

Ann Friedman doesn’t regret it:

For me, New York is that guy I went out with only briefly and then successfully transitioned into friendship. We were always meant to be platonic. But in the years since I’ve moved away, I’ve learned that “I’m kind of meh on New York” is not a generally accepted point of view. It rivals “I’ve never seen The Goonies” for most controversial fact about me.

It’s always struck me as hilarious that friends who tout their taste in undiscovered music and underground supper clubs were so loyal to the most popular city in America. New York is the prom king. He knows he’s great, and he’s gonna make it really, really hard on you if you decide you want to love him. New York is increasingly a city for people who are already on top, not for those looking to establish themselves. I’ve always been partial to the friendly guy who doesn’t know how hot he really is (Chicago) or the surprisingly intelligent, sexy stoner (Los Angeles) as opposed to the dude who thinks he’s top of the list, king of the hill, A-number-one.

Update from a reader:

Really? Did you even read that puff piece? Somebody in the comments stated that the piece should be retitled, “Why Leaving a Dead End Job and a Stalled College Relationship Was the Smartest Thing I Ever Did, Regardless of City of Residence.”

Nuala Ni Chonchuir describes the genre, also known as “short-short stories, micro fiction, pocket-size, postcard, palm-size and smoke-long stories”:

In my world a flash has about 500 words and is part poem, part story. Plot is not as crucial as atmosphere and significant detail, and, for me, language is paramount. Though short on words, the flash story is long on depth and should sting like good poetry. Punchy, succinct and surprising, the best flash will shift the reader’s heart but also keep it beating hard. Just like poetry, every word in a flash must deserve its place. Flash stories revel in musical prose. There is no room for frills and furbelows but there is for hints, implication and mystery. They accommodate the surreal and quirky well. Backstory cannot exist in flash: everything must be right here, right now. Flash thrives on punchy openings and breath-sucking endings. And, like its sister art poetry, it bears rereading very well.

Writing about John Cheever’s very short story Reunion, Richard Ford said it worked because of its “interconnected, amalgamated, shapely and irreducible self”, and this is a good analogy for flash fiction. The opening complements the ending which complements the subject matter which complements the language: everything connects and folds into a pleasing oneness.

Bert Haanstra filmed his 1962 short documentary Zoo in Amsterdam:

Zoo is a touching and humorous look at the way people and animals behave. This was the first time that Haanstra used a hidden camera. He said: “observing people and animals when they don’t know you’re there is fascinating. I bonded with them”. Making a film of this kind required tact and integrity, and Haanstra and his team were aware of their responsibilities throughout and respected the privacy of their subjects. In “Zoo”, Haanstra and cameraman Anton van Munster filmed people with a hidden camera to see how people behave in different situations and environments, without the self-consciousness created by the camera. They concealed the camera in a huge shopping bag, and hid their equipment in bushes, and built sheds with one-way glass.

The Dish posted Haanstra’s Oscar-winning short Glas here.

(Hat tip: kottke)

Stephen Burt enumerates the many ways poets can show up in their work:

It seems to me that poetry in general lets you create a voice that is you-but-not-you, you-but-like-you, you-as-someone-else, for the writer and also for the reader: that character can speak about you, for you, to you, in ways that you couldn’t pull off speaking “as yourself.”

Sometimes the persona, the you-who-speaks-the-poem, has no name and not much extension other than what’s brought about by the author’s style (the “I” in a lot of poems by Emily Dickinson), and sometimes the persona has a great deal of extension, a prior life as a historical or fictional character (Robert Browning’s Andrea del Sarto), and sometimes the persona’s somewhere in between (Philip Sidney’s Astrophel). Even a poem that looks autobiographical constructs a character anyway — it’s just that the character shares obvious attributes, such as location, approximate age, and marital status, with the “bundle of accident and incoherence who sits down to breakfast,” as Yeats put it, the real-life poet who wrote the poem.

Jacqui Chang argues that forbidding teachers from following students on social media actually does more harm than good:

The result of such policies is a group of adults—those who are largely responsible for our kids’ intellectual development—plugging their ears and yelling “LA LA LA LA” when it comes to students on social media. That is a terrible thing, especially since social media is arguably the number one place we should look when we want to find out how our students are feeling, and where they need help. … [T]hose students are tapping away on their phones, broadcasting their thoughts to everyone and no one as they try to progress into the next stage of their lives—mostly on their own. “I just want to die. Please leave me the fuck alone,” tweeted one of my students recently, just before the school year started again. “Somebody to talk to would be nice.”

This week, Cory Booker’s senatorial campaign hushed a media tizzy over revelations of his Twitter flirtations with a stripper from Portland by saying, “The most shocking part of this story was learning there is a vegan strip club in Portland.” Mauren O’Connor agreed and assembled a FAQ about the club, Casa Diablo: