Memoir Manifesto by Deb Olin Unferth Guest editor Deb Olin Unferth offers insights into the art of the memoir and introduces the present and future stars of the genre. Photograph via Flickr by Alice Carrier Let’s have no more insults hurled at the memoir, shall we? A few years ago, when I began writing a memoir, I read piles of them to get a feel for the genre. In the final decades of the twentieth century, the autobiography transformed, as writers began to see the disadvantages of writing blanket summaries of their lives and comprehensive lists of events: the messiness involved in such a project, the inevitable incompleteness, the necessary lack of an arc (if one was going to be honest). Then we begin to see the pivotal classics, such as Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982), Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life (1989), Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995). When Meakin Armstrong of Guernica brought up the possibility of my guest-editing a section, I immediately knew what I wanted to do: a section on innovative memoir.
130, Italo Calvino Upon hearing of Italo Calvino’s death in September of 1985, John Updike commented, “Calvino was a genial as well as brilliant writer. He took fiction into new places where it had never been before, and back into the fabulous and ancient sources of narrative.” At that time Calvino was the preeminent Italian writer, the influence of his fantastic novels and stories reaching far beyond the Mediterranean. Two years before, The Paris Review had commissioned a Writers at Work interview with Calvino to be conducted by William Weaver, his longtime English translator. —Rowan Gaither, 1992 Italo Calvino was born on October 15, 1923 in Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb of Havana. The future writer studied in San Remo and then enrolled in the agriculture department of the University of Turin, lasting there only until the first examinations. Afterward, Calvino began writing, chiefly about his wartime experiences. In 1956 Calvino published a seminal collection of Italian folktales. —William Weaver
William S. Burroughs on the Art of Cut-up Writing In late 1920, the Dadaist writer Tristan Tzara wrote "dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love," which included a section called "To Make a Dadaist Poem," and it gave these instructions: Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Decades later, the Beat writer William S. You can watch Burroughs demonstrating his cut-up technique above, and forever find this clip in our collection of Cultural Icons, which lets you see great writers, filmmakers, and thinkers talking in their own words. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and sharing intelligent media with your friends. Related Content: Gus Van Sant Adapts William S. William S. William S.
'The Black Dog' by W. H. C. Pynchon The Dog, J. Laurent, 1874. From Archivo Ruiz Vernacci, Fototeca del IPCE, Madrid. by W. “And if a man shall meet the Black Dog once it shall be for joy; and if twice, it shall be for sorrow; and the third time he shall die.” In a corner of our country not far removed from two of its great cities, there is a low range of mountains, the hoary evidences of ancient volcanic action. The West Peak stands at an angle of the range. It was late in the spring of 18— that I visited West Peak for the first time. The old horse knew that he was bound for home and he took the road at a very good gait. And this is how I met the Black Dog the first time—for joy. I don’t know just how we came to do it. We talked till late that night, and, as the fire died down to a mass of glowing embers, he told me how he himself had twice seen a black dog upon the mountain, but he laughed at the legend, saying that he did not believe in omens unless they were lucky ones. “I did not believe it before. Transcriber’s note:
Kurt Vonnegut on Reading, Boredom, Belonging, and Hate by Maria Popova “Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.” What makes the commencement address such a singular pinnacle of the communication arts is that, in an era where religion is increasingly being displaced by culture and secular thought, it offers a secular version of the sermon — a packet of guidance on how to be a good human being and lead a good life. It is also one of the few cultural contexts in which a patronizing attitude, in the original sense of the term, is not only acceptable but desired — after all, the very notion of the graduation speech calls for a patronly father figure or matronly mother figure to get up at the podium and impart to young people hard-earned, experience-tested wisdom on how to live well. And implicit to that is an automatic disarmament of our otherwise unflinching culturally conditioned cynicism — which is also why the best commencement addresses are timeless and ageless and sing to us beyond the boundaries of our own life-stage.
www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/burroughs-cutup.html In writing this chapter I have used what I call "the fold in" method that is I place a page of one text folded down the middle on a page of another text (my own or someone else's)--The composite text is read across half from one text and half from the other-- The resulting material is edited, re-arranged, and deleted as in any other form of composition--This chapter contains fold ins with the work of Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Paul Bowles, James Joyce, Michael Portman, Peter Weber, Fabrizio Mondadori, Jacques Stern, Evgeny Yevtushenko, some newspaper articles and of course my own work-- At a surrealist rally in the 1920's Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theatre. Andre Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut ups on the Freudian couch. In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random.
Web Film & Video: Georges Perec - Récits d'Ellis Island, Part 1: Traces (1978-1980) Duration: 60 minutes Part 1: Traces Part 2: Mémoires, 60 min Produced by: Institut National d'Archives (INA) Written by: Georges Perec Directed by: Robert Bober Sound: Jean-Claude Brisson In 1978, Robert Bober and Georges Perec set out to in the search of traces of Ellis Island, that is, as Georges Perec put it, of "the very site of exile, the place of the absence of place, the non-place, the nowhere." They traveled to New York to film what was left of this "Golden Gate", nicknamed "the Island of Tears" by the immigrants. One of the objectives of the filmmaker and the writer was to gather testimonies of survivors who, as children, passed through Ellis Island. However, they also wanted to understand how and why they both felt that this place concerned them personally. Georges Perec in UbuWeb Sound
Books By Bob White Larry Keenan - Beat Generation & Counter-Culture Photography Galleries Thanks to Larry Keenan's masterful photography, we are left with a visually potent view of the Beat Generation and beyond. Keenan's photo-documentation is necessary, for it captures many essential moments -- of Ginsberg, Whalen, Cassady, Corso, McClure, Dylan, and many others. Without Keenan's illustration of people and events that have already hooked us deeply, we would no doubt be struggling along empty-eyed, wondering where's the color, the depth, the light, and the angle of the Beats? We know their literature; we know something about their personal biographies. Yet equally (if not more) important is knowing what everything looked like. Keenan has transcended a few decades of American history and created a movie for us that is shot in still-frames, but which is alive and three-dimensional and momentous.
K. Thomas Kahn on Imre Kertész Imre Kertész. Photograph by Csaba Segesvári by K. Thomas Kahn Dossier K: A Memoir, by Imre Kertész, Melville House, 224 pp. Nobel laureate Imre Kertész is certainly no stranger to controversy. In Dossier K. (2006), published by Melville House this month in a fresh English translation by Tom Wilkinson, Kertész departs from his usual terrain of fiction for that of memoir. The sheer impudence that the book denoted through its mere existence, its style, its independence; a sarcasm inherent in its language that strains permitted bounds and dismisses the craven submissiveness that all dictatorships ordain for recognition and art. Central to this notion is a perpetual reinvention of the self: “being a writer I am constantly working on my identity, and as soon as I come across it I lose it straight away… It’s not always easy to be in full possession of ourselves.” Related to this is Adorno’s famous dictum: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” About the Author:
Writers Who Published Great Books Before Age 25 Picture it: teenage Mary Shelley was on a vacation getaway, with her husband Percy and some of his rambunctious poet friends, like that rogue Lord Byron… and out of the group of legends, it’s Shelley herself who arguably published the greatest work of all at the ridiculous age of 20: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a book that has penetrated our human consciousness. In honor of Shelley’s birthday this month, here’s a list of 25 other writers who created heartbreakingly beautiful work before they could get a discount on a rental car or have their publishers demand an active Twitter account. If you’re 26, get on out of here. (However, interestingly enough, 26 seems to be a magic age for a lot of writers, starting with Thomas Pynchon, which is a whole other list.) Enjoy the depressingly youthful visages and luminous skin below. Norman Mailer — The Naked and the Dead Mailer became a star when this book was published.