Who knew you could go to McSweeney’s for advice about women? Or about physics? Or about how physics, that field of nerdly-thick glasses and dry symbols, is apparently a lot like women, at least to physicists?

I didn’t, until one of the most promising female poets of our time (and yes, she happens to be a personal acquaintance, so I’m biased, but her publishers agree with me) pointed me to this, which is one of lists in their list section that I overlooked and shouldn’t have, by Simon Dideo:

Which is about as astute an assessment as I’ve seen, ever, I think, even if I’ve never thought about higher physics or women at the same time, nor am I likely to do that again.

Also, I admit that my over-analytic mind then started thinking about whether this applies to guys, too, in which case I know where I fall on this list… but do you? (Don’t tell me. Thanks.)

Click on the image to go to the actual page so you can actually read it, unlike this picture, which is probably tiny on your laptop screen. The rest of McSweeney’s is pretty good, too. And, you know, influential and entertaining and all that. (Speaking of which, their response to the much-announced death of newspapers is great.)

The author Simon Dedeo, by the way, is an incredibly brilliant fellow who works at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for the Physics and the Mathematics of the Universe, which sounds a lot like something out of Douglas Adams, but is actually a big deal in the real world, too. He does this writing stuff on the side.

h/t the marvelously talented s.l.

No comment. A+

h/t b.f.r.

Herta Müller delivered her Nobel Prize lecture yesterday, and it’s darn good:

DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF was the question my mother asked me every morning, standing by the gate to our house, before I went out onto the street. I didn’t have a handkerchief. And because I didn’t, I would go back inside and get one. I never had a handkerchief because I would always wait for her question. The handkerchief was proof that my mother was looking after me in the morning. For the rest of the day I was on my own. The question DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF was an indirect display of affection. Anything more direct would have been embarrassing and not something the farmers practiced. Love disguised itself as a question. That was the only way it could be spoken: matter-of-factly, in the tone of a command, or the deft maneuvers used for work. The brusqueness of the voice even emphasized the tenderness. Every morning I went to the gate once without a handkerchief and a second time with a handkerchief. Only then would I go out onto the street, as if having the handkerchief meant having my mother there, too.

Twenty years later I had been on my own in the city a long time and was working as a translator in a manufacturing plant. I would get up at five a.m.; work began at six-thirty. Every morning the loudspeaker blared the national anthem into the factory yard; at lunch it was the workers’ choruses. But the workers simply sat over their meals with empty tinplate eyes and hands smeared with oil. Their food was wrapped in newspaper. Before they ate their bit of fatback, they first scraped the newsprint off the rind. Two years went by in the same routine, each day like the next.

In the third year the routine came to an end. Three times in one week a visitor showed up at my office early in the morning: an enormous, thick-boned man with sparkling blue eyes—a colossus from the Securitate. (…)

© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2009

Read the rest here. Or in the original German, “Jedes Wort weiß etwas vom Teufelskreis,”, if you prefer. (Btw, her name is pronounced Miller, not Muller.)

Those of us who occasionally work as editors are well aware of just how terrible some writers’ sentences can be (for example, Dan Brown’s or Stephenie Meyer’s.) Those of us who deal with academics also know a bit about long sentences, the sort that use a lot of big words without really saying anything at all. (And for those who always suspected that there’s a sentence generator for these, you’re right, courtesy of the University of Chicago writing lab.) And of course, lawyers, law-makers, diplomats, and bureaucrats are great at obfuscation.

But what about the practical minds that build things, that create the clean lines and minimalist elegances of our cities, whose vision is all pragmatism and no frills? Surely they agree with William Zinsser, who writes in On Writing Well that “clutter is the disease of American writing” and that “the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its clearest components”? You know, like architects do when they design high-concept, super-practical buildings, with the steel beams and concrete exposed so we know what we’re looking at?

Well…

Maybe we need to face the facts: Educated people spend so much time and effort trying to sound smart without saying anything, it must be an art form. I call for the establishment of an obfuscation theory of literary criticism, complete with courses in Theory of the Unintelligible and Departments of Befuddlement. Oh, wait. We’ve already got that.

h/t r.b.

Christmas always means travel for me. This year, I won’t be in Europe, but if I were, I wish I could spend an evening in Lyon, France, to see their Fête des Lumières:

h/t: L’AlessandroTC

I believe in conversations.

And the conversations I always learn the most from are those I have with people who are not too much like me. They may not blow me away (I’m afraid I’m sort of granite-like), they may not change my world (I rather like my world), and I might enjoy them more for me than for them (don’t we all), but they certainly add facets and perspectives to my life that make it more deeply worth having. They open windows onto existence that I didn’t know were there, and for someone who likes sunlight as much as I do, that’s reason enough.

I believe the same thing about literature.

Some important people have said that Americans are too insular when it comes to their books; this is, of course, not the case. After all, American books and those closely related to it, from Britain, sell wildly in most other countries, both in the original English and in translation. Most international writers read American fiction: The world is very much in dialogue with American literature. It’s just that American literature isn’t very good at listening back. It pontificates. It talks. It discourses. It shines. It glitters. It amuses. It does all those things really well. But, like so many brilliants, it often neglects to care what the patient and equally intelligent audience might have to say, what’s on its mind, how its day was, whether perhaps it might have something equally brilliant or even more insightful to say.

Most of us here in America know this, too, in those moments when we make ourselves read books more foreign than, say, Canadian ones like Michael Ondaatje’s English Patient, the short stories of Alice Munro, or Margaret Atwood’s many strange and thought-provoking novels. (Her short story “Happy Endings” is still one of my favorites, by the way.) After all, we all get quite excited — albeit that excitement might run the gambit from ecstatic to virulent — when some professor makes us read Kafka, Achebe, Mann, or García Márquez for his survey course. We don’t mind mentioning that we enjoyed Hesse, Remarque, Borges, or Bolaño. Since nobody has ever read him, we love smirking at people who mention how much they enjoy Proust. We acknowledge the worldliness of those who can say they’ve been reading Pamuk, or Ōe, or Eco. We feel good about reading mysteries written by Scandinavians like Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, or Arnaldur Indriðason.

But then we get over it, like we get over the sushi craze or Yellow Tail wine. The books become conversation pieces we might leave lying around coffee tables, to buy five minutes mutual assurances of, yes, look, we are both cultured and interesting, when an awkward silence threatens to mar our hospitality towards the most recent set of guests and the prints of paintings on the wall have exhausted themselves.

But what if, instead of getting bored with such inroads into other literatures because we have allowed ourselves to feel pretentious, instead of finding ourselves embarrassed at one more conversation that boils down to showing that we, too, are open-minded and exotic  – what if we delved deeper, beyond the cliché, beyond the tired checklists, beyond the few outliers that make it here from their roaring successes in Paris, London, or Berlin, the places that matter as much, or more, to the world’s literary conversation as New York does? What if a constant exchange with other literatures became so natural and normal to us that we don’t even need to mention it anymore?

The Dalkey Archive Press has decided to become even more proactive in promoting translated fiction by publishing, for the first time, a collection of short stories modeled roughly on the Best American Short Stories series, except that this collection will include short stories from all over Europe — including such countries as Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Macedonia, and Liechtenstein. It’s edited by Chicago writer Aleksandar Hemon and titled Best European Fiction 2010.

Gregory Cowles from the The New York Times Book Review has interviewed Aleksandar Hemon about the collection for the Paper Cuts blog:

Q. What was the biggest surprise for you, editing the collection?

It was less of a surprise than a reminder: how unabashedly comfortable many of the writers are to engage with literary forms that would be perceived as experimental or avant-garde here. In turn, I was reminded how deeply conservative contemporary American literature is in terms of form. And that conservative bent is a recent development, I believe. The European form flexibility is not a consequence of some snotty, elitist aesthetic but rather of the fact that there are many stories to be told and many traditions to draw from.

Q. Could you, then, venture to define what makes a story particularly “European”?

Europe is fantastically dense, varied and small by American standards. Everything is within two hours by plane. It takes as long to drive from, say, Norway to Greece as it does from Chicago to Miami. And if you were to drive from Norway to Greece, you would pass through countless different landscapes, cultures, languages, histories. Yet each of these autonomous spaces is bound together by a common überhistory — no country or language or people managed to escape the calamities of the 20th century, for example, or the vast migrations that have been taking place since World War II, peaking in the last couple of decades. It is impossible to retain an ethnically clean space in Europe, despite periodical genocide or the exclusionary policies of European governments. What is European, then, is that cultures and literatures always see themselves in relation to other cultures and languages — sometimes in opposition, sometimes in kinship, often both at the same time.

Q. Do any of the represented countries seem to you to have especially vibrant fiction scenes right now?

I was really impressed by the Baltic countries: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Finland. Translating those pieces alone justifies the project.

And because, like I said, I am interested in such conversations, I’ve ordered a copy of the book and am expecting it today or tomorrow. I will be blogging about stories and authors from the collection here once a week or so, just to see whether we, as literary people in the U.S., might not want to take up some of these writers on their offer to say something, to open up a window to life that we did not yet know was there. And to explore also whether, perhaps, it would be worth it to us to share those stories with others — our friends, our colleagues, and even, for those of us who also teach, in one of those survey courses.

Buenaventura Press gives us this neat set of prints that sums up all the characters you need for an epic tale. So if any you were writing one (as I know all of you are), and you thought you might be missing a dancing bear or hermit, and also you needed another stock character to pair them with, here you go. The artist is Scotsman cartoonist and illustrator Tom Gauld.

h/t i.t.

I was thinking about graffiti earlier, and I remembered this picture my brother-in-law took on his last trip to Berlin. It’s still one of my favorites, especially if you think about Berlin’s history with dictatorships (Nazi and Stalinist), monarchies, dissidents, and counter-culture. Or if you know my brother-in-law. Or if you simply like clever graffitis, especially if they’re not just some stupid tag.

I don’t like graffitis. But I do like Berlin so much that I don’t care.

h/t gbp

You know you’re an English major if you think this is one of the most hilarious ideas ever…

For those of you with a life, Sylvia Plath was a poet. She lived from 1932 to 1963. Most of the time she was depressed. This is her happy face:

Sylvia Plath wasn’t really a good poet, but this was at a time when there weren’t that many women poets worth reading (I guess, although I can think of a few), and literary critics thought Sylvia Plath was okay by comparison, so that’s why we still have to read her in lit courses. She reps the gloomy sort of poet who is real deep because she thinks the world sucks and her daddy was mean to her. So she was suicidal: “Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.” Good poetry, eh? It’s what’s called “confessional poetry,” the kind that you basically want to answer with a loud, Oh shut up already and pull yourself together!

The best thing Sylvia Plath did in her life was marry the Poet Laureate of England, Ted Hughes:

Apparently they didn’t get on so well. It’s basically a test whether you’re a real feminist poetry critic that you have to think Ted Hughes is a bastard and poor Sylvie was whatever the opposite of a bastard is. Of course, it could just be that Ted Hughes showed poor judgment by marrying someone as unhinged as Sylvia Plath.

Sylvia Plath mostly moped about a while and wrote more bad poetry and boring books and had some children, and then one day she turned on the gas oven in her kitchen and put her head in it and gassed herself. That’s what’s called a poetic ending. And that’s the other reason we have to read her in lit courses. Lit professors like morbid things to happen to poets and writers because that means they must be at least as good as John Keats, obviously, even if they aren’t. And that rescued Sylvia Plath’s reputation and made her the poet all the people love who also paint their fingernails black.

And that’s why those mits are hilarious.

The End.

h/t L.D.