Newest Word Pirate Ken Weaver is reading at the Why There Are Words reading series this Thursday at in Sausalito. It’s at 7 p.m. at Studio 333. The theme is Body Language.

Go Ken!

The History Channel says it is. They scanned a death mask found in Germany with 3D computer technology and came up with this image.

Of course, according to this article, no one knows if the death mask that the image is based on is really Shakespeare or not, so this could just be some dude.

If it is him, scientists “say it proves the writer suffered from cancer towards the end of his life.”

Here is a real image of Shakespeare:

The short story I read last week is now up on Bang Out’s site, so now you can read it too. It is called “Five People Describe Burning Up,” in keeping with the “heat” theme.

Read it here.

This Saturday, I am going to be reading a short story for the BANG OUT Reading Series in San Francisco. The theme is HEAT. I will be reading with 6 other people, and I believe it is free. Bargain!

The reading will be at Amnesia Bar, 853 Valencia Street, from 7-9 p.m. I hope you can come.

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I think it is so cool that Moscow has created a Dostoevsky-themed subway station. According to NPR:

The walls are gray and bare, except for murals capturing scenes from Dostoevsky’s famous novels: Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and of course, Crime and Punishment, the book where Dostoevsky digs into the mind of his lead character, Raskolnikov, exploring a young man’s path to murder.

In one famous passage, Raskolnikov cries out, “Good God! Can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an ax, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open … that I shall tread in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal and tremble; hide, all spattered in the blood … with the ax … Good God, can it be?”

The fictional character — poor, desperate for money to help his family and mentally tortured — ends up killing two women. And it’s all depicted in a mural right on the subway platform in which Raskolnikov holds an ax over a woman’s head, while a corpse lies on the ground.

The mural of this scene is causing controversy. Many mental health experts think it will cause suicide and violence. Here is a picture of the image that is causing all the ruckus:

Sometimes people boggle my mind with the dumb things they worry about. That is not a shocking image. And really, the fear of what the mural might do to someone else’s mind is precisely the kind of thinking that leads to banning books or preventing art from being put on display. The subway station might just as easily inspire pride among Russians for one of their great writers. It might even make them want to read more.

Or they might just want to pretend to be a cool guy in a cape:

And yeah, okay, maybe some people don’t want to think about dark topics on their morning commute, and maybe the gray walls might depress someone, but hey, it’s Russia. Isn’t everyone already depressed?

I’m writing a book about cocktails! The working title is DIY Cocktails, so it will be a very hands-on book about how to create your own cocktails using fresh and homemade ingredients. Adams Media is the publisher. Look for it in stores and through online booksellers in May! In the mean time, I still have a little bit of drinking and writing to do. I see a Word Pirates cocktail party in our future.

Photo by wickenden

I love Jennifer Egan, so of course I have already purchased her newest book A Visit from the Goon Squad. From what I read, saying that Egan plays with narrative structure in this book is a bit of an understatement. As the New York Times review puts it:

What’s actually kind of fun for once, however, is attempting to summarize the action of a narrative that feels as freely flung as a bag of trash down a country gully. That’s because to do so captures Egan’s essential challenge to herself: How wide a circumference can she achieve in “A Visit From the Goon Squad” while still maintaining any sort of coherence and momentum? How loosely can she braid the skein of connections and still have something that hangs together? There is a madness to her method. She hands off the narrative from one protagonist to another in a wild relay race that will end with the same characters with which it begins while dispensing with them for years at a time.

In this interview with NPR, Egan talks about the book, which she says she doesn’t think of as experimental because “when I hear that something is experimental, I tend to think that means the experiment will drown out the story.” She goes on to say, “If you don’t have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you’ve got nothing.”

That is why I was crazy about The Keep, Egan’s last novel. When you summarize the plot for people–a prison inmate tells a story set in a gothic castle–it sounds like it wouldn’t work, but it does.

At the last Word Pirates meeting, we were complaining that some experimental novels come off as self-indulgent or boring because storytelling and characters get lost. When a book is experimental AND has a story, I tend to find it really exciting. But when there is experiment with no purpose behind it other than to “do something new” or to show off how clever the writer is, it usually leaves me cold. The best way to experiment is to pick a structure that best serves the story you are trying to tell, not the other way around. Which, as Egan points out, is nothing new.

“If you read novels of the 19th century, they’re pretty experimental,” Egan says. “They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You’ve got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote — these are crazy books.”

I write like

Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

“I Write Like” is a fun site where you paste in some of your writing, it does some sort of comparison against a database of famous writers, and tells you who you write like. I can’t tell what it’s looking for … and it doesn’t seem very accurate. (For instance, it told Margaret Atwood she writes like Stephen King.) But it sure is entertaining.

I went a little nutso with it and put in several different types of my writing. What I got back:

My essay writing is like … Chuck Palahniuk

My fiction writing is like … Stephen King

My correspondence is like … Stephen King

My blog post writing is like … Kurt Vonnegut

Conclusion: Stephen King is an awesome writer? Margaret Atwood and I write a lot a like?

Note: I got all meta and put this post in (every part of it before “Note”) and got Vonnegut again. So perhaps while I am inconsistent in my writing tone and style overall, my blogging is distinctly Vonnegutesque. Vonnegutian?

When you think of Ernest Hemingway, what comes to mind? Did you say shoes? If so, then you and his son Patrick have a lot in common. He’s working with an Oregon shoe company on a line of Ernest Hemingway shoes. Because, you know, Hemingway loved shoes.

“Hemingway was very fond of loafers,” Patrick said. … “I love that you can wear these without socks. I hate socks. Hemingway hated socks, too.”

Some sons publish their dead fathers’ unfinished work, while others put their dead father’s name on a line of El Salvadorian leather shoes divided into the angler, literary, and sportsman collections.

I am imagining pretentious college students backpacking through Europe hoping to fish and run with the bulls while wearing expensive literary loafers. As a woman, there is no footwear for me in the Hemingway line.
I’m more excited about the literary puns than the manly shoes. My favorites so far:

For Whom The Gel Soles and Movable Feets (from @DRUNKHULK)

Shoe at First Light and the Snowshoes of Kilimanjaro (not as clever, sadly from me …)

Side note: He calls his father Hemingway? Is that because he’s being quoted?