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I was a bit taken aback when I spotted this pocket guide to alternate guitar tunings in my local Half Price Books. Not only does it not have a guitar pictured (well, not really), but it’s very meta.
I’m still shaking my head and going “What?” as I look at it.
In case you can’t tell from my not-so-great cell phone picture, it features a woman (she actually is holding a guitar, you can just barely see the neck) from behind. The “Hip Pockets” guide sticks out of her back jeans pocket, and of course, has a photo of her with the guide in her jeans on it. And on and on and on and on.
This isn’t a book, it’s a fold out, laminated pamphlet-type thing. It would have made more sense to me if the guide were stuck in the guitar strings, but then I suppose it wouldn’t be illustrating the “hip pocket” concept.
Not that this guide actually fits in a pocket, unless we’re talking about those skater pants pockets from the ’90s. It’s is way too tall, so that doesn’t even work.
I can’t help but feel this was a poor cover choice for a guitar-tuning guide. If I were the Meta Police, I might have to slap a pair of handcuffs on this sucker for gross misuse of metafiction… but I’m not, so I’ll just scratch my head and wonder what the art director was thinking when s/he designed this…
February is Library Lovers’ Month, and Pittsburgh’s City Council will declare Feb. 15 “Love My Library Day.”
To celebrate and show my support, and to wish the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh a happy Valentine’s Day, I am sharing all the reasons I love my library. Please share why you love YOUR library in the comments!
One of the dinosaurs you can see from the library. Photo (c) 2008 Kelly Thomas
1. On the second floor of CLP Main in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland, a bank of windows let you look into the dinosaur exhibit of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. There are a ton of great nooks up here to browse some books, check out the dinosaurs and watch all the kids stare up in awe at the giant skeletons.
2. CLP has an enormous book collection, and you can request books from any CLP library and have them sent to your neighborhood branch for easy pick-up and drop-off. My local branch is one of the smaller ones, but thanks to this feature I can get any CLP book, and walk a few blocks to pick it up. Pittsburgh has more than 80 neighborhoods, and while there aren’t 80 library branches, wherever you live in the city you’re never too far from one of the 19 neighborhood branches.
3. It takes me about 10 minutes to walk to my local branch, the Allegheny Library. The Allegheny Library was actually the first Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1895. It was housed in its original building until 2006, when lightening struck the clock tower and caused a lot of damage. (No, seriously, it happened! Read about it in the Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review.) In 2009 a new Allegheny library opened up the street. I attended the grand opening, and I got to sign the original 1895 guest book, which has the signatures of everyone who attended the opening in 1895, the signatures of everyone who attended the centennial celebration in 1995, and now everyone who attended the grand opening of the new building. Pretty cool, huh?
4. The Pennsylvania Room on the third floor of the main branch is the first place I go whenever I want to learn about my adopted city. I especially love the books of old photos, or the ones like Pittsburgh Then and Now which shows photos of various Pittsburgh locales in the past and the present. Another of my favorite finds from this section is The Steps of Pittsburgh, which in addition to detailing the history of the city’s more than 700 public staircases, provides walking tours for many neighborhoods.
5. CLP also has a large multimedia collection. DVDs, CDs, ebooks, audio books, eaudio books and more. I just bought a Sony eReader, and the ability to borrow electronic books from my library was a big factor in my decision. I especially love CLP’s collection of foreign movies. A few years ago I worked my way through most of the Spanish movies and found a lot of gems. They even have anime, documentaries, TV shows and work out DVDs.
During the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s 2011 Winter Read-a-Thon, Jan. 8 – Feb. 19, I will be blogging about the books I read. For more information, to see a list of books I’m reading, and to make a pledge, go here.
- Hours read as of 2/14: 42.75
- Funds raised as of 2/14: $202.38
*Join the Facebook group, or Follow @metafictionblog on Twitter!
Kurt Vonnegut presents an interesting theory about writers in his last novel, Timequake. In it, he says that most women writers are “swoopers” and most men are “bashers.”
Swoopers write “higgledy piggledy” and write a first draft as quickly as possible, and then go back and “painstakingly” fix everything that’s wrong. Bashers, on the other hand, write very slowly and work on each sentence until it’s perfect. “And when they’re done, they’re done,” says Vonnegut.
Now, as I stated in my introduction post to this series of posts about books I’m reading for my public library’s Read-a-Thon, the version of Timequake that I read was an abridged audio book. I make that disclaimer because whenever I read an abridged audio book (sometimes unabridged just aren’t available and I still use cassettes, so that makes them an even rarer breed) I’m terrified I will miss something important. So, in advance, I apologize if I miss something important. Blame the abridgment.
It’s interesting enough to think about the way we write and whether or not it can be more or less split down the gender line (if you’re a writer and you’re reading this, leave a comment and let me know which group you fall more into process-wise and maybe we can do an informal poll), but Vonnegut takes it a step further.
It was not entirely clear to me whether he meant “swoopers” or “women” when he said the following, but as he lumps them together I suppose we can assume he means both. He says that swoopers/women writers are happy to write about and record the lives of people who are “funny, tragic, whatever” without thinking about “why or even how they’re alive in the first place.”
Bashers/men on the other hand, chip away and break down the doors of what it means to be human and the nature of existence. Vonnegut then proceeds to tell an anecdote about World War II, in which he fought. Or as he calls it, “my war and Kilgore Trout’s war” (Kilgore Trout being Vonnegut’s fictional alter ego who appears in many of his novels). The anecdote, which shows us a former Nazi official who is dying, is meant to drive home the point that Vonnegut is a basher.
(I wish I could tell you exactly what the officer said to Vonnegut, but I don’t remember and the trouble with audio books is you can’t flip back and find what you’re looking for!)
Right in the beginning of the novel, Vonnegut tells us he’s been working on a novel called Timequake, but it didn’t work, and instead he wrote the novel we’re reading now. He refers to the failed version as Timequake One, and mentions it frequently, telling us what happened in the original draft. The fact that he abandoned a novel and entirely re-wrote it as a hybrid novel/memoir means that, in essence, his “bashing” did not work. His process failed (as the writing process is often wont to do). He may have struggled and sweated over every sentence, but in the end he had to go back to ground zero and start from scratch.
Granted, that doesn’t necessarily mean he got lost in swooper territory, and yes, sometimes stories and novels just don’t work. Because he does keep parts of Timequake One in the final, published version of Timequake, I will argue that he probably did have to “painstakingly” fix what was wrong, throw out what didn’t work and re-work what he wanted to keep to make it fit the new novel.
So, can anyone really be solely a swooper or solely a basher? Kurt Vonnegut, who claims to be a basher, shows us that sometimes it doesn’t always work to write that way, so based on that evidence, I have to go with “No”.
I will give him one thing, though: Vonnegut certainly chips away at the meaning of what it is to be human and the nature of existence. (But does that mean women writers can’t? No way! Margaret Atwood, is, I think, a prime example of a woman writer who does something similar to Vonnegut in her appraisal and exploration of human nature — but that’s another argument altogether.)
During the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s 2011 Winter Read-a-Thon, Jan. 8 – Feb. 19, I will be blogging about the books I read. For more information, to see a list of books I’m reading, and to make a pledge, go here.
- Hours read as of 2/6: 33.5
- Funds raised as of 2/6: $160.75
*Join the Facebook group, or Follow @metafictionblog on Twitter!
I love my library. I love reading. This is going to be the best fundraiser, ever.
It works like this: Between January 8 and February 19, I read as much as I can (I’m shooting for 50 hours). You sponsor me by pledging to donate a certain amount of money for each hour I read. The more I read, the more money the library gets. More information at the official website here.
To make it even better, I’m going to read metafiction. Metafiction that I get out of the library. And once I read it, I’m going to blog about it, right here!
Here’s my reading list, although the order may change, depending on availability of individual titles. I also can’t guarantee I’ll get through all of these during the Read-a-Thon as some of them are pretty lengthy, but I am sure going to try!
- Don Quixote* by Cervantes (in English this time!)
- House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
- The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leila Marouane
- Timequake* by Kurt Vonnegut (abridged audio book)**
- Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley (comic book)
If you like my blog, if you like me, if you like metafiction, if you like books and/or if you like libraries, please consider sponsoring me, or supporting this effort by reading my Read-a-Thon related entries (they will be tagged with clpreadathon11) and commenting on them.
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh is one of the oldest public library system in the United States, but its facing some major financial issues. We have to make sure our state government knows how much the library means to us and how it important it is to our community — and that is only one of the reasons I’m participating in the Read-a-Thon and blogging about the books I read. CLP is working on a major initiative to find a sustainable source of funding, and public support is one branch of that.
I, for one, am proud to support and use my library! (And so are the 2.6 million other people who visited the library in 2008.)
If you’d like to donate, please leave a comment or send an email to narrativeintheblog@gmail.com. I can’t take electronic submissions, so at the end of February I’ll give you my address so you can send me a check (made out to the library, of course!).
I’ve done the math for you already:
- $.10 x 50 hrs. = $5
- $.25 x 50 hrs. = $12.50
- $.50 x 50 hrs. = $25
- $1.00 x 50 hrs. = $50
- $2.00 x 50 hrs. = $100
Between a few friends and my family, I’ve already got three pledges for a total of $80 (assuming I meet my 50 hour goal). Not a bad start! If you’d rather make a one-time donation, you can do that, too. You can also set a donation limit if you’re making an hourly pledge (so if you would like to pledge $1/hour but can only donate up to $50, you can set your limit at $50).
*I own these two, so I won’t be getting them out of the library. The other three will be library books.
**I hate abridged books, I really do. I’m making an exception on this one because it was FREE and it’s getting pretty hard to find audio books on TAPE. And listening to audio books on tape in my old school (read: lame) car is the only way I stay sane while delivering newspapers as part of my duty as assistant editor of The Northside Chronicle.
I’m back! You can once again look forward to weekly posts on metafiction, structure in fiction, and storytelling! This post is a bit of a mash-up, but lately my thoughts have been a bit scattered, so there. Also, daily views have been way up, even though I haven’t been posting, so thanks for reading, internet people!
I also added “the art of storytelling” to my tag line, because it’s pretty much true. Not sure I’m 100% happy with how long it is now, but I feel it’s much more accurate.
Never fear failure
Well, I “failed” NaNoWriMo. And I also failed at updating you, the reader, on my progress! It doesn’t feel like a failure, though. I figured out what made NaNoWriMo important to me, and why perhaps it will become much less important in the future–or perhaps not.
NaNoWriMo taught me one very important thing: I can write a novel. A whole, complete, finished (if imperfect) novel. I am capable of putting pen to page for 50,000+ words, and taking my characters from the beginning, to the middle, to the end.
I tried Nano in 2007 but quit after a few days because of some boy trouble, and in 2008 I came back at it with a strong sense of determination that paid off. I had a blast, and I proved to myself that I could finish a large writing project. 2009, was in some ways, I think, a reaffirmation of that. The first time wasn’t just a fluke. When I won in 2009, I was proving to myself that I had more than one novel in me.
This year, I didn’t need to reassure myself. I had, the week before, finished another book (the infamous metafictional travel memoir). I knew I could write a novel, and I knew I could write it in 30 days. Maybe I was tired from writing the other book (true). Maybe I was too busy with work and hosting my first Thanksgiving (true). Maybe I was busy with the book drive (also true). But in the end, at the very heart of the reason I gave up on Nano this year, is that I didn’t need it, and I wasn’t having fun doing it.
It felt kind of like riding a bicycle with training wheels, after you’ve graduated to a “real” bike and have been riding it for months or years. It doesn’t feel the same. You feel constricted, like you’re not really free, because you have to write x number of words per day for x number of days. That’s how I felt during November, until I gave up, and said to myself “I might finish this novel, but not right now.”
So will I do Nano next year? I don’t know. Probably not, as I will be up to my ears in an MFA program. Will I ever do Nano again? I’m positive I will. The next time I come to a mountain I can’t climb, or a hill I’m terrified to go down, or I have to graduate to a unicycle, I know NaNoWriMo will be there to help me through it, and teach me what I need to know about the grand adventure that is writing. So it goes.
Audio books, or why my car rides will never be the same again
The first audio book I ever listened to. Awww.
I always thought audio books were “cheating.” You’re not really reading, you’re listening. And maybe I still think that, a little bit.
But I LOVE them! I decided to give them a try during my monthly newspaper deliveries to help the time pass and make delivering 4,000 newspapers in all kinds of weather tolerable, if not fun. I found a few audio books on cassette for sale at my local library, and have been working my way through them. I’ve listened to three book so far, and am on the fourth. I wrote a review of the first one I listened to, which you can find over at The Figment Review!
In a way, I feel as if I’m rediscovering reading for the first time. I’m hungry for audio books. I suddenly want to drive places alone so I can listen to them (no cassette player in the house). Whenever I see one now I want it, no matter what genre, no matter what author. I’ve yet to almost get into an accident, but if I find driving has distracted me from listening, I rewind the tape to make sure I didn’t miss anything. In other words, it’s wonderful.
This is how I felt when I was a kid, and I read anything I could get my hands on. Of course I still read constantly, but never as much as I like. Or perhaps I’m only striving toward some childhood ideal that I’ve inflated in my mind but never really existed, you know, a childhood in which I never watched TV (false) and spent all day curled up with a book (also false). I read a ton, but I also watched cartoons and spent lots of time playing outside (riding my bike, catching minnows and salamanders in the creek, roller blading, shooting my brother with super soakers, etc.) Of course, many of my pretend games were inspired by books (Narnia and Big Red are two examples), though that doesn’t count as reading.
That was kind of a tangent, but you get the point. I feel like that again, listening to audio books. The act of listening, absorbing and understanding the spoken word is so similar, and yet so different, from the act of reading those same words. I think I still prefer reading, because it feels more active, but there is something to be said about the way the human voice delivers these stories to my ears.
In all the audio books I’ve “read”, the readers subtly change their voices for different characters. This creates an effect beyond the differences in characters’ written dialogue. It adds to the book. I like it, because that’s what I do in my head when I read, but I also don’t like it, because the reader’s voice is forcing the idea of a character onto me (kind of like watching a movie and then reading a book, the image of the character from the movie is probably all you can think about while you’re reading).
Even still, the thing that matters the most is the words that the author has put down. The reader can only bring so much to what’s already there. A great reader isn’t going to save a crappy book, and a crappy reader probably won’t ruin a great book. So I think the difference between reading a book and listening to an audio book is subtle, but something I’d like to explore in more detail as I listen to more audio books. I’ve recently got a copy of 1984 in audio book format, and since I’ve actually read that already, I’m looking forward to being able to compare the two versions/experiences.
How about you, do you listen to audio books? Like them, love them, hate them? Let me know in the comments!
