Stories require all kinds of shapes and sizes to exist. Some need the space of hundreds of pages, others only hundreds of words. Heather Palmer flirts with the latter in her debut chapbook, Mere Tragedies, and kicks some pretty good game.
In Mere Tragedies Palmer opens up small windows into the lives of various characters, allowing us to peer in only for a moment before slamming them shut. Each story –– most not much longer than a page, some shorter –– situate a reader in an instance; a snippet in fictional time.
Some of these snippets are heavy, such as the one involving a man overcome with shame. Shame in the form of knick-knacks like candy wrappers and unflattering elementary school pictures he hides daily under his mattress. Shame that pains his reflection with blemishes, “he’s blue-black and when he looks at himself he thinks of a bruise.” And with tact, Palmer’s words project this mans shame off the page, allowing us to connect on a human level –– it’s no secret that every one has something they are ashamed of. Read more »
I’ve just finished downtown fixture and prolific rock and roll poet Patti Smith’s latest, Just Kids. I expected a full autobiography and, in a way, it is, but what’s really special is that it’s an incredible love story for the tomes. Smith shows us what love looks like in all stages, even when her partner, the famous Robert Mapplethorpe, admitted he was gay and eventually died from AIDS. Robert and Patti are always one—a string the weaves through them and that glows when either is in need of the other.
I’ve been a huge Patti Smith fan for a while. I learned her through her music. Her 1975 album, Horses, is one of the best albums of the century. Her voice has a girl-like-Leonard Cohen-mixed-with-Tom Waits ramble and her sound is simple. But what really shine are her words. Once I discovered this, I jumped into her poetry.
I consider myself a poet and have been writing seriously for over ten years. Until yesterday, however, I hadn’t written a poem in almost a full year when I wrote one daily. My website grew static, no one had visited. It was dark and dull—perhaps a relic from Victorian England. Poetry is part of my soul and I felt I were dying, suffocating with lack of creativity.
Violence doesn’t turn me on. In fact, gore is the fastest way to make me run out of a movie theater crying like a little kid. There are lots of reasons why horror movies don’t do it for me – not the least of which is knowing some dude (because let’s face it, it’s mostly dudes) had to come up with those scenarios – but the long and short of it is, if someone’s getting cut up into little pieces, I’m probably not watching.
That is, until I stumbled upon AMC’s new series “The Walking Dead.”
I didn’t plan on watching it. Too many Facebook status updates happily describing how violent it was had me sure I would never see an episode. But then I got bored. And started writing something that teetered on the supernatural. And since iTunes was letting me download the first episode for so cheap, I decided that watching it on my computer would not only give me some creative ideas, but also allow me to switch to YouTube videos of laughing babies if stuff got too gross. Read more »
In the introduction to the third volume of the literary journal, Electric Literature, the editors lament the decline of traditional reading. Yet they also recognize the fact that we are all now reading more than ever, and at a faster pace: tweets, blogs, texts, and, yes, books. So instead of publishing a death notice for the literary age, the editors present an innovative collection of stories, mediums, and writers meant to challenge the idea of conventional literature. Read more »
This whole classic-literature-meets-monsters trend keeps getting weirder and weirder. The latest mashup is Mrs. Darcy vs The Aliens, which author Jonathan Pinnock describes as:
Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens is a slightly demented sequel to Pride and Prejudice, although it has been described more accurately as “not so much Pride and Prejudice‘s sequel as its bastard offspring following a drunken one-night stand with the X-Files.”
Mostly, I like this idea because of the book trailer the author put together. It has Colin Firth in it, it’s in French, and it’s one of the weirdest book trailers I’ve ever seen.
If I could speak with one person dead or alive, I would want to chat with Jane Austen just so I could get her reaction to all these mashups. Given that she was apparently pretty risque and controversial in her day, I have a feeling she would think it all was a very good joke–what do you think?
In preparation for the endless holiday season, New York’s Overlook Press has sent over a copy of Jerry Williams, Ph.D’s newly-released must-buy contemporary break-up poetry playlist: It’s Not You, It’s Me. Culled from poems that have consoled him through various states of distraught over the sharper edges of monogamous love, Williams and Overlook have created an anthology certain to provide comfort to purchasers of niche-collections everywhere. Friend dumped? Dumped yourself? Dumping someone and don’t know how to say it in your own words?—
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
- Elvis Costello
Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking when I hear the silly things that you say...
Oh Elvis. You’re so wise. It’s true, using one medium to describe another is always a challenge, and writing about music is no exception. This of course hasn’t stopped people from trying; there is a massive and constantly-expanding network of fanatical bloggers and music critics out there, passionate listeners who deconstruct every obscure indie release in excruciating detail, who obsess over artists 99.8 percent of us have never even heard of. And you know what? Despite its occasional pretensions, I love this community; their relentless sifting of new music has lead me to some great bands, and they are ultimately the ones who identify and dictate what music will be popular in the future.
What I don’t love is the style of writing that many of the people in this community employ: the use of fragmented images and phrases to try and illustrate what a particular piece of music sounds like. You’ve probably read some of this before; a reviewer will attempt to describe a song by writing something nonsensical like: “The verse shimmers along, buoyed over a gentle sea of bass by airy wisps of keyboard, until it explodes into the chorus, a glorious cacophony of overdriven guitar and distorted drums.” This style of writing is ridiculous and a waste of time. No one could ever read one of these crazy streams of consciousness and gain any real kind of understanding of what the song actually sounds like; music is too subjective, and the terms used in these descriptions are too abstract to be useful. (They are also often repeated – for example, the verb explode is one of the most prevalent and pernicious words in all of music writing, appearing in about 60 percent of music reviews. It seems like every song is combustible.)
We here at Lit Drift are trying to take a look at how storytelling and literature are changing because of (and in spite of) popular culture.
But when some people talk about storytelling, they mean the oral tradition. Someone standing up in front of a group and talking, motioning with their hands, using facial expressions and sounds, dancing, laughing, relating. I’m increasingly finding myself drawn to this art of storytelling as it existed before all of our contemporary mediums…before radio, before television, before podcasts, before microfiction, before Twitter, before Facebook.
I know we’re called “Storytelling in the 21st Century,” but I guess I keep wanting to write like it’s …1899? Maybe the 21st century of storytelling will start to look a bit like the last century when people get tired of technology and yearn for something more…human. Well, I might not be too far off since it seems that this ancient art of storytelling is in the midst of a revival.
I should've known what I was in for with this poster...
I’ve just returned from an incredibly enjoyable breakfast at The Smith with a good friend that I haven’t seen in some time. We caught up a bit and discussed our lives in the city a couple years post-film school. In our catching up, I told her about a screening I went to yesterday for the much anticipated film New York, I Love You. I felt that after a solid 15 hours after my viewing of this film, I’d be calm enough to discuss it rationally and gently encourage her to wait until it comes out on DVD before seeing it. Instead, a certain rage and fury came flying out of my mouth along with flecks of my ham, Gruyère and egg brioche (okay, that last part was a lie – I just really wanted to relive my breakfast in any way possible). Riding on the success of Paris, Je T’aime, this collection of somewhat cohesive short films was expected to be vignettes of people’s lives accented by the essence and nuances of the city. In some cases, it turned out to be a complete mockery of what Hollywood thinks this city is and in others, it may as well have been Random City in Middle America, I Love You.
May I also point out that there was no storyline featuring a black character? Or a gay character? Asian characters were only the most overused stereotypes – cab driver, hooker, laundromat owner. The movie was shameless in its portrayal of New York. Did a tourist make this film? At one point someone actually says, “This is why I love New York – moments like these.” Unlike most feature length situations, this project has multiple directors and multiple writers to blame. Brett Ratner (who was at the screening for a Q&A afterwards) was one of them. His short was probably one of the most enjoyable – based on his real life high school prom night. Though Ratner is an alumnus of NYU, he did his growing up in Miami so the original story is Floridian… other than the story taking place in New York and a rather unnecessary voiceover discussing how many drug stores there are in New York, there was nothing very New York about it.
Well, then what was I looking for, you might ask? If I’m going to complain so much, how would I have fixed it? Read more »
Glancing through the NY Times film reviews last week, “Goodbye Solo” caught my eye. Set in Winston-Salem, a Senegalese cab driver and a washed-up old man develop an unlikely friendship as they traverse the roads of North Carolina. I was born in Winston-Salem and went back there for college, so the novelty of seeing W-S on the big screen at the Angelika Film Center in Soho was an opportunity I could not let pass me by. As it turns out, I was rewarded for my curiosity. Read more »
Stories require all kinds of shapes and sizes to exist. Some need the space of hundreds of pages, others only hundreds of words. Heather Palmer flirts with the latter in her debut chapbook, Mere Tragedies, and kicks some pretty good game.
Violence doesn’t turn me on. In fact, gore is the fastest way to make me run out of a movie theater crying like a little kid. There are lots of reasons why horror movies don’t do it for me – not the least of which is knowing some dude (because let’s face it, it’s mostly dudes) had to come up with those scenarios – but the long and short of it is, if someone’s getting cut up into little pieces, I’m probably not watching.
In the introduction to the third volume of the literary journal, Electric Literature, the editors lament the decline of traditional reading. Yet they also recognize the fact that we are all now reading more than ever, and at a faster pace: tweets, blogs, texts, and, yes, books. So instead of publishing a death notice for the literary age, the editors present an innovative collection of stories, mediums, and writers meant to challenge the idea of conventional literature. 
We here at Lit Drift are trying to take a look at how storytelling and literature are changing because of (and in spite of) popular culture.
