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Grammar Wars
Susie Anderson
Sep 06, 2010
Last week I got in trouble for correcting someone’s grammar on Facebook. It was totally unnecessary and stupid of me to do, and I had one of those terrible fifteen minute arguments where our friendship seemed like it might end, but then I granted them one passive aggressive status and all was well. I don’t know why I did it, probably just pathological need to be right in some way. Up until this point I’ve never been one to call myself a ‘grammar Nazi’, but I think we could safely change my title to ‘unpleasant person who unnecessarily corrects grammatical errors despite their informal setting’. Has anybody else inappropriately corrected grammar for no particular reason?
The Sketchbook Project
Nikita Vanderbyl
Jun 29, 2010
For those writers and artists who like Moleskines, and I’ve noticed there are a few of you. The Sketchbook Project is an opportunity to take part in a touring exhibition in the US. Sign up by 31 October 2010 and you’ll be sent a Moleskine to transform, return it and it’ll tour the US next year. Sketchbooks specifically tour Brooklyn NY, Austin TX, San Francisco CA, Portland ME, Atlanta GA and Chicago IL. There is a small fee for the Moleskine and the shipping, but it might be a small price to pay for international fame.
Tweeting Work In Progress
Elizabeth Redman
Jun 22, 2010
Sharing your work with others can be a terrifying experience. Readers can be pretty brutal in their criticism, though, so it’s key to workshop and polish your writing as much as possible before publication.
One helpful hint doing the rounds of the internet this week is to share snippets of your work on Twitter. Pick one line and post it with the hashtag #wip, suggests blogger Natania Barron. This will force you to look closely at your writing while easing you into the process of sharing your work, she adds.
Judging a book by its cover… or not?
Nikita Vanderbyl
Jun 15, 2010
I was perusing the shelves of my local op shop this afternoon and in between eyeing a giant poster of a young Brad Pitt and several framed Eschers, I found a colourful novel. I did something that we’re repeatedly told not to do, but which books themselves rely on to be picked up of book shelves – I judged a book by its cover.
The hand drawn illustrations of Tom Adams leaped from the cover of Farewell to the King (1970) by Pierre Schoendoerffer and into my hands. It wasn’t until I was at my keyboard with the official site in my view that I knew I’d seen the colourful hand of this artist somewhere before.
It was at the end of an episode of Doctor Who not less. The Unicorn and the Wasp is among my favourite David Tennant episodes and not just for its 1920s set and costume design. The episode was about Agatha Christie meeting a giant wasp-like alien, which subsequently appeared on the cover of Death in the Clouds. Death in the Clouds, among others of Christie’s novels, was illustrated by Tom Adams. It was the same cover which Tennant held up in the concluding minutes of the Unicorn and the Wasp.
I ended up reading the well preserved jacket of Farewell to the King and discovering a post colonial epic set in war torn Borneo of 1942 which I will now read in my study break. Stay tuned for the possible joys/sorrows of picking a book at random and then reading it… will judging a book by its cover, and running with it, stack up against sticking to the canon?
I hope to answer this question soon. And others, such as should we read what we’re told? I.e. should we follow the big old Harold Bloom cannon? Or should we just jump right in and risk getting bitten by a big alien wasp?
Lend me your ears…
Sam Cooney
Jun 02, 2010
…so I can listen to more literary-based aural magic. Seriously, I can’t get enough of the stuff – my own pair of cranium-based listening protrusions isn’t sufficient.
Seriously, do you guys realise how much amazingness there is out there that you can chuck on your iPod, iPhone or iPad? iPeed with excitement when I found out. Here are some of my favourites, currently using up every speck of space on my iPhone.
…so I can listen to more literary-based aural magic. Seriously, I can’t get enough of the stuff – my own pair of head-based listening protrusions isn’t sufficient.
Seriously, do you guys realise how much amazingness there is out there that you can chuck on your iPod, iPhone or iPad? iPeed with excitement when I found out. Here are some of my favourites, currently using up every speck of space on my iPhone.
The New Yorker fiction podcast
So good. Every month New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman asks an insanely talented writer to pick their favourite story from any issue going back to 1925. This writer reads the story out, and then he/she and Treisman spend a few minutes discussing the story. Sounds pretty rudimentary, but the content here is unbelievably good.
My picks are (mp3 download warning): Tobias Wolff reading Denis Johnson’s ‘Emergency’, Junot Díaz reading Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Water Child’, Joshua Ferris reading George Saunders’s ‘Adams’, Mary Gaitskill reading Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Symbols and Signs’, and Tobias Wolff reading Stephanie Vaughn’s short story ‘Dog Heaven’.
Aural Text
Something to put in your weekly calendar. Every Wednesday from 12-2pm (AEST) a couple of literary luminaries (currently Alicia Sometimes and Jeff Sparrow) host this radio program on RRR, which plays and discusses pretty much anything to do with words. Check out their recent playlists for a taste.
If you can’t tune in (coz you’re not within 20 metres of the RRR studios in Brunswick) then you can listen online. Plan your Wednesday around it – it’s worth it.
The Book Show
Presented by Ramona Koval, this radio show runs every day, exploring “the many worlds in which we find readers and writers, publishers and booksellers, playwrights and lyricists, bloggers and journalists, book illustrators and type designers — all working with words and the medium of language.”
You won’t find that every episode appeals to you, but with the magic of iTunes and/or the internet, you can simply pick and choose the ones you like, and download them. Lemon squeezy.
Paper Radio
A newborn on the scene, Paper Radio simply offers ’stories that talk’. Their first episode is an exquisitely produced recording of Chris Somerville’s The Drowning Man (which first appeared in Voiceworks #70 under then-editor Ryan Paine). Have a listen, and keep an eye/ear out for more fiction and nonfiction episodes.
This American Life
Hosted by the famous Ira Glass, this is the most popular podcast in the world. A weekly hour-long radio program produced by Chicago Public Radio, it is generally a journalistic nonfiction program, with a range of interesting stories, essays, memoirs, field recordings and other tidbits.
Subscribe to the podcast, and scroll through the archives for hundreds of episodes.
.
(note: all of the above can be found simply by searching for them in the iTunes store in your iTunes program, except for Aural Text, which has a couple of selected episodes only)
'be my pen pal…or else'
Sam Cooney
May 27, 2010
You may remember a few weeks back when Maddie Crofts posted about how much she loves getting mail – how she uses Postcrossing.com to find friends in different countries (God help them).
Anddemonstrating our penchant for all things epistolary, in a different post VW editor Jojo bemoaned the decline of letter writing (due to emailing and other technology) and the difficulty of recording such an intangible medium for future reference.
Well, I have a solution of sorts, and it’s a wonderfully unique one.
You may remember a few weeks back when Maddie Crofts posted about how much she loves getting mail – how she uses Postcrossing.com to find friends in different countries (God help them).
And demonstrating our penchant for all things epistolary, in a different post VW editor Jojo bemoaned the decline of letter writing (due to emailing and other technology) and the difficulty of recording such an intangible medium for future reference.
Well, I have a solution of sorts, and it’s a wonderfully unique one.
LostVault.com invites you to locate a pen pal……..within the US prison system. Yep. Why have a boring, regular pen pal when you can befriend a convicted murderer, cop killer or robber/murderer?
You can search the inmate database and hunt down your perfect match. Who knows, you might meet someone like Robert G Will, who introduces himself with:
“Sometimes, I have magnificent visions when I meditate. One of the visions I have is of a beautiful, radiant mandala – each ring of the mandala shining, pulsing with life, twirling and spinning, with positive energy. There are small, illuminating, brilliant points of light in the mandala from which vibes of Peace, Strength and Love burst forth like thousands of shooting stars dancing and gliding across the Universe, reaching out to Humanity.”
Oh, and in case you needed some further encouragement, LostVault gives out some fantastically useful advice:
“Prior to writing inmates on this (or any) website, certain precautions should be used. We strongly suggest you get a post office box and we also encourage you to research the inmate prior to writing. We provide an Inmate Locator for states that allow an online search of their inmates. For states that do not have an inmate locator, you may contact the appropriate institution to verify information.”
your new best friend?
Famous Literary Characters: Possible Papparazzi Fodder?
Sam Cooney
Apr 30, 2010
Bailey Kennedy over at FlavorWire has asked the question: how would some of the most famous literary characters fare if they had to exist in today’s real-time pressurised fame container world?
As they say:
“What if your favorite literary characters were subjected to the same level of scrutiny? We have compiled a list of fictional characters that in today’s day and age would be tabloid sensations for their turbulent romances and dramatic downward spirals.”
In doing so, Kennedy also matches some of these characters with a modern day real-life counterpart. For example:
Jay Gatsby and P Diddy
Anna Karenina and Britney Spears
and
Mr Darcy and George Clooney.
Now, some homework: can you match up a famous character from literature with a ’star’ of today?
Here’s mine: Dorian Gray and Jude Law. (Click their names to find out why.)
p.s. Check out the rest of FlavorWire’s Books category, as it has some other great stuff, including a DFW special.
Please consider the one-fingered typists out there
Johannes Jakob
Apr 21, 2010
As a follow up to the Temporary Tatoo’s post, here are some psychologically foolproof coping mechanisms for everyone who is hot for prescriptivist grammar. These include reasons for people writing ‘u’ instead of ‘you,’ and an equally entertaining self-deception technique to use when people write ‘alot’ instead of ‘a lot,’ which frankly I have never seen anywhere, but facts should never stand in the way of good comedy.
I have been told that Voiceworks’ Raf has argued for the abolishment of the apostrophe altogether, because dumbos out there just can’t get it right. Where are the politicians capturing his vote? Why won’t anyone face the big issues?
It's All Their Fault
Johannes Jakob
Apr 16, 2010
Over at Viceland is the first of five extracts from Neil Boorman’s It’s All Their Fault, as well as an interview with said truth slinger. He drops some brutal statistics about how, financially, past generations have screwed younger generations in a major way.
Every baby in the UK is now born owing £22,500 – his or her share of the £1.4 trillion credit crunch bailout. Added to which the average student graduates owing more than £20,000. Add all this together, and you’re left with a generation owing more than £40,000 before they’ve earned their first pay packet. That’s if you can get a job; there are 2.5 million people unemployed in the UK. One million of them are under 25.
This is a huge issue that doesn’t seem to get the attention it needs, in the same way we did, and still do, repress climate change on both a policy and personal level. For baby boomers it’s not a problem (except ethically, I mean), and for everyone else it’s already a fixed reality. The whole things feels so inevitable that the inequalities and injustices don’t really jump out as such, they just seem like the way the world works now. If you think about, say, feminism, that way of thinking is always the first mental block that needs to be overcome with these things. Here’s hoping the next four extracts of Neil’s book, at some point, deal with how to achieve that, because facts alone don’t really seem to hold much sway anymore. Still, hopefully the whole thing gets plenty of coverage and gets through to the right people.
New EWF Website
Johannes Jakob
Apr 15, 2010
The new Emerging Writers’ Festival website/blog is so damn hot, it’s like design porn or something. The folks being exploited by this unabashed fetishism are People Collective, who are also the reason it feels like you are being rude when you look at Voiceworks.
EWF will run from 21-30 May, the program goes up 22 April. Expect more coverage then, but for now, just look at those colours and be soothed.
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Read the postHamesucken n. the crime of assaulting someone in their own home. Which must, in my mind, lead to a particular ...
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