jaime[alyse]green

Jun 10

Booksellers, librarians, and nerds: Can anyone recommend a great audiobook for a road trip? We’ll have thirty hours of driving in one week, and not nearly enough podcasts. We both like sci-fi - some recent mutual favorites have been A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Sparrow, The Windup Girl, and Oryx & Crake - and I feel like a YA book could be especially good for listening, as long as it’s not too romance-based. On the other hand, some interesting nonfiction (if Tom Standage’s new book were out, for example) could be great. What would you recommend?

May 11

On an MFA

I was very afraid, when I decided to get an MFA in creative writing, of what the internet would think. Or of what the internet thought, because what the internet thought, my reading had shown, was that MFAs are bullshit. That MFAs are a waste of money, that they are elitist, that they churn out generations of over-workshopped automota who expect success to arrive on a silver platter the day after graduation.

I never really sat down and made the decision to go. I thought, “I might want to do that,” and then went to an info session and fell in love. I went to grad school because I wanted to become a better writer. I went to grad school because I was terrified of my thesis advisor in college, and wanted to recreate that sense of pressure. I went because a theatre friend of mine was getting his MFA, and I thought, “I’m a good writer, too. Maybe I should do that.” And then I did.

Apr 14

“There is a sea slug scientifically named Doris. … There is the fearsome chaetognath, or arrowworm, which, seen under a microscope, I swear looks like a glass penis with teeth.” Alan Burdick gets pretty fucking delightful about sea invertebrates in Out of Eden.

Apr 3

“I witnessed everything. One morning I would wake and just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses. And still everything moved slowly with the assured fateful speed of a coconut falling on someone’s head, like the Jaffna train, like the fan at low speed, like the necessary sleep in the afternoon with dreams blinded by toddy.” Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

Mar 27

“The notion that a work may be both literary and documentary—that is, rooted at once in the realms of art and actuality—capsizes a whole raft of tightly held ideas about prose writing and its relation to the imagination.” Adina Hoffman, “Imagining the Real,” Raritan volume 31, number 4.

Mar 21

The essay has a long and glorious history as a literary form, and is the intellectual bell-weather of any modern society. The genre is at a particularly interesting transitional moment, what with the emergence of the lyrical essay and other hybrid forms, the debate about the line between nonfiction and fiction, and the resurgence of the essay film, the digital essay and the radio essay. While considerable experimentation is going on at the moment, it should be noted that the essay has always been a daringly open, experimental form—from the French word “essai,” meaning, “attempt.” Unlike fiction and poetry, which have spawned systematized approaches to narratology and poetics, the essay continues to be an elusive eel in the literary waters, neglected by scholars. As one of the genre’s foremost experts, Carl H. Klaus, has written, “a methodology for understanding the essay is long overdue.” The one-day conference will attempt to contribute toward developing this methodology, as well as celebrating the varieties of this ubiquitous form.

Come to this conference that I’m coordinating, April 6th at Columbia. This is going to be a really awesome, interesting day. I look forward to cultivating the brain-crush on Ned Stuckey-French that I discovered at AWP
More info and RSVP here.

The essay has a long and glorious history as a literary form, and is the intellectual bell-weather of any modern society. The genre is at a particularly interesting transitional moment, what with the emergence of the lyrical essay and other hybrid forms, the debate about the line between nonfiction and fiction, and the resurgence of the essay film, the digital essay and the radio essay. While considerable experimentation is going on at the moment, it should be noted that the essay has always been a daringly open, experimental form—from the French word “essai,” meaning, “attempt.” Unlike fiction and poetry, which have spawned systematized approaches to narratology and poetics, the essay continues to be an elusive eel in the literary waters, neglected by scholars. As one of the genre’s foremost experts, Carl H. Klaus, has written, “a methodology for understanding the essay is long overdue.” The one-day conference will attempt to contribute toward developing this methodology, as well as celebrating the varieties of this ubiquitous form.

Come to this conference that I’m coordinating, April 6th at Columbia. This is going to be a really awesome, interesting day. I look forward to cultivating the brain-crush on Ned Stuckey-French that I discovered at AWP

More info and RSVP here.

Mar 3

Why else to people have kids other so that you can buy their kids the books you loved when you were little?

I went up to Rockland to spend some time with my mom and sister, and to go to my step-niece’s first birthday. I did not buy my step-niece this beautiful, tearable picture book. I bought her three board books she can chew on and destroy. But I bought this for her older brother, because he’s just old enough that it might be okay.

I adored this book when I was little. Sure, it’s got a nice bleeding-heart hippie agenda, but I didn’t know that then. All I knew was pages and pages full of drawings of people and the world that I could lose myself in for hours.

I’m glad it’s still in print. (My beloved Usborne Children’s Encyclopedia does not seem to be as lucky.)

Feb 24

awesomeringerud:

Someone wants to turn my silly little site about cats into a book!

We need good submissions! If you want your cat to be famous, submit a review here: http://www.reviewofmycat.com/review

(Make sure to include a nice, big 300dpi photo if you want to see your cat in the Review of my Cat book.)

Help hammer home the sweet irony of my two years of grad school ending as Tanner publishes this book! No, but really, we are a very literary household.

Submit your review and become a famous published author, and make your cat a famous published cat!

Jan 6

Winter break book #4. Devoured (no pun intended, I’m sorry, I just did) in three days. I loved this book so much. At the register at BookCourt I said something about Oprah, and my friend or the cashier asked, “Was this an Oprah book?” And I said, “No, it wasn’t.” Because I’d confused Jami Attenberg with Cheryl Strayed. I realized later this happened because I learned about both of them on the internet.

I started this book a few hours after having a small solo Les Miz singalong in my living room, and the peculiar rhythms of the first few lines got “At the End of the Day” stuck in my head. But the cadences are 100% Jewish talk, the voices of my family, the folks about ten years older than my mom and on up, and it was beautiful, the first time I’ve read a book that sings like that.

This is a beautiful, heartbreaking, generous, wonderful book.

No, not heartbreaking. What’s the word for a book that breaks your heart but puts it back together before it’s done with you? That makes your heart stronger by the end?

Aug 24

vintageanchor:

“Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”
― A.S. Byatt

Birthday wishes to A.S. Byatt (born Antonia Susan Drabble today in 1936). Dame Byatt won The Booker Prize in 1991 for POSSESSION.

Happy birthday, Dame Byatt!

Hang on, lemme find your birthday blingee…

There we go. A proper celebration.

jaime[alyse]green

my parents spelled all of my names weird twitter :: website :: stuff i've written

On an MFA

my parents spelled all of my names weird
twitter :: website :: stuff i've written