Blog

  • Motif Index of Folktales

    This is an interactive database of folktales… LINK

    S. Thompson. Motif-index of folk-literature : a classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, medieval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends.

    Revised and enlarged. edition. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1955-1958.

  • Escaped Lettuce // Winter Cabbage

    From a kind cabbage site

    Insurrection in Produce! Cabbages leap crispers. Tumble from trays. Roll down aisles. Exit into the chill beyond. Climb planters, burrow roots, sprout, fiercely blossom; then whither, rot and shrivel back into tight black fists to still menace the store.

  • Drafting means printing out a story, marking it up and rewriting it. The ‘artistic’ process takes root in the reinscription.
  • The above makes writing seem even more excruciating a process.
  • Publishing fiction seems as daunting and frustrating an obstacle as certain other adolescent yes/no binaries were in high school. No doubt in retrospect the angst surrounding it will seem just as wasteful and silly.
  • Solutions to any prose problem can be found in other texts.
  • Reading is as much a process and a ‘search’ as writing is. Output can only be as good as input.
  • One may ignore the mandates of others within ones text, including the MSWord grammar check.
  • James Wood is probably right about free-indirect.
  • Critiquing work properly involves re-re-reading and marking up (i.e. similar to the drafting process).
  • SPARK GAPS AND CIRCUITS: PROBING THE HOLES IN FICTION

    Black hole
    Writers are risk-averse. Necessarily so, because writing is really a sort of willful blindness, each sentence depending on all the ones preceding it, the way digging a tunnel depends on each shovel scoop. Experimentation is potentially catastrophic (or worse, embarrassing)… [LINK]

  • Thirty-First Birthday

    Grey

  • Without a Phone

    Are you trying to get ahold of me for Christmas? If you are, please email. My phone died and I will be without until my next paycheck at the earliest. Merry X-mas. — J

  • “I used to be a writer…”

    Thinking of applying to Mitch & Murray

  • BAPTISM BY SODA: A LOOK AT THE JUGGALO PHENOMENON

    As legions of cool-hunters trawling the Internet and bohemian sectors of cities are well aware, given that most subcultures are spun around a kernel of hoodlum glamour and guilt-free rutting, selling youth culture is not exactly hard. Youth movements are appropriated and neutralized at such a ferocious rate, that no musical subculture since “Gangsta Rap” has been subversive enough to resist the American mainstream for long save for one: the juggalos (sic) – the off-brand soda flinging, hatchet-wielding followers of The Insane Clown Posse… [LINK]

  • One Million Colors


    From Wikipedia

  • Am now a 3QuarksDaily Columnist…

    http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/11/we-welcome-our-new-columnists.html