I’m a believer in a liberal arts education and all that it stands for, including (but not limited to) the enhancement of critical reading and thinking skills, a broadened cultural perspective, an appreciation of the arts, and a context for determining why we’re here and what our purpose in life may be. That does not, however, preclude us from equipping our students with practical skills, such as those needed to communicate in an ever-increasing digital world.
Learning such communication skills is an important part of The Missouri Review internship program. Not only are our interns immersed in reading and discussing manuscripts, but they also learn about the larger business of running a magazine. Last semester, that included teams of interns producing video podcasts. These students experienced all aspects of production, including storyboarding, the capturing of video, and editing audio and video tracks. Video subjects included author and staff interviews, an interview with our poetry editor, and a short on the “The Life of a Manuscript.” For a brief insight in what happens to a submitted manuscript, click here. And thanks for the creativity and diligent work by this team of interns (which, by the way, does include more than English majors): Scott Scheese, Kate McIntrye, Lindsay Sihilling, Cody Horton, and Emily Wunderlich. Original music by Kyle Stokes. We’ll post more video podcasts in the coming months.
Take a look behind the scenes of a literary journal as The Missouri Review reveals what happens to a manuscript once it arrives at our offices. Thanks for the creativity and diligent work by our team of video production interns: Scott Scheese, Kate McIntrye, Lindsay Sihilling, Cody Horton, and Emily Wunderlich. Original music by Kyle Stokes.
This week Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ramona Koval interviewed Jason Anthony about his experience in Antarctica. Anthony’s essay, “Song of Hypothermia,” appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of The Missouri Review and was the springboard for much of the conversation. We’ve posted the full essay for your reading enjoyment, and you can hear the interview here.
We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Audio & Video Competition. We received 211 entries, and the quality was deep in nearly every category. Over the next few weeks we will audition the winners and select runners-up for your listening enjoyment.
Narrative Essay
First place, $1,000: “Dayenu,” by Judith Sloan
First runner-up: “What’s Your Status,” Judith Sloan
Second runner-up: “‘Reverie’” Reclaimed, Nancy M. Williams
No student entries/winners
Documentary
First place, $1,000: “Love Triangle,” Lauren Kirby
First runner-up and best student: “Dad’s Naughty Pictures,” Ken Cormier
Second runner-up: “Love, War, & PTSD: Peter and Anna Mohan”
Voice Only
Fiction
First place, $500: “Annunciation of the Baby Jesus One Block North of Riverfront Dr.,” Ann Rosenquist
First runner-up and best student entry: “Glorie in a Small Town,” Kristin S. vanNamen
Creative nonfiction
First place, $500: “Smoke Rings,” Rachael Hanel
First runner-up: “Mary Lee,” Robert V. Wolf
Second runner-up: “Foreign Land,” Sue Mell
Best student entry: “Personal Assistant Needed,” Kristin S. vanNamen
Poetry
First place, $500: “Living the Life of the Great Buster Keaton,” Douglas Collura
First runner-up: “Fear of Moving Water,” Alex Grant
Second runner-up: “There’s a Guy in L.A. Who Charges a Premium Teaching Men How To Get Women,” Todd Boss
Best student entry: “The Life Expectancy of a Fruit Fly,” “Some Revisions,” Marcus Wicker
Video
Creative Short
First place, $500: “Separate Vacations,” Anne Lewis
First runner-up: “A Length of Time Is Measured By the Space Between 2 Hands,” Ryan Scammell
Second runner-up: “The Clam Diggers,” Tim Wilson
Documentary
First place: $500: “The Unhappy Traveler: A New Yorker in India,” Basia Winograd
First runner-up: Inventing the G-Suit: the Life Story of Dr. Earl Wood,” Bill Bonde
Second runner-up: “Coming Home,” Dmae Roberts
Best student entries: “Nokota,” Lucie Schwartz; and “The Palmyra Massacre,” Brian White
Seems like everything costs more these days–a gallon of gas at the BP, tickets to a baseball game at the new Yankee Stadium, mailing your manuscript to The Missouri Review.
That’s right.
New postal rates go into effect Monday, May 11. This means envelopes large and small. When enclosing a SASE for an editor’s response, the stamp for the #10, self-addressed business envelope will cost you 44 cents. And we like, even encourage, you to use the correct amount of postage.
See, while our office tries to cover the additional postage required during these times of rate transitions, we don’t always catch ALL of the envelopes with insufficient postage. Then those same envelopes dribble back to us over the course of several months marked “undeliverable, postage due” or sit as “postage due” unclaimed at your local mail stop. You drop your story or poems or essay in the mail to us, then wait and wait, chew your nails, swear and think how inconsiderate and unresponsive that Speer Morgan is.
We don’t want this to happen to you.
So, if you want to increase the chances that the U.S. Postal Service will actually deliver our editor’s response to your submission, we recommend you use “Forever” stamps on those SASES.
In case you’re interested, here’s the breakdown of the new rates for first-class mail:
Letters – first ounce (3-4 sheets of paper) $0.44
Large envelopes (manuscript-sized) – first ounce $0.88
Additional ounces $0.17
Postcard $0.28
The search continues for missing poet Craig Arnold. The following message comes once again from Jess Piazza, one of the primary forces in marshaling resources that first raised the alarum and is continuing to work with Craig’s friends and family to keep up search efforts:
With the assistance of the University of Wyoming, a fund has been established to support the search efforts to find Craig. Even the smallest contribution would be of use. Thank you so much for your love and support.
Donations can be made via the Paypal link here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick& hosted_button_id=5149253
Or by sending checks made out to “Find Craig Arnold” to the following address:
UNIWYO Federal Credit Union
1610 East Reynolds Street
Laramie, WY 82072
This fund has been created to support the search efforts for Craig Arnold. The outpouring of concern for Craig has been remarkable, and your donation will be deeply appreciated. Thank you for your help and support.
Your donation will be used for the following purposes:
To fund the inclusion of an independent non-profit expert international search and rescue team, 1 SRG (http://www.1srg.org/)
To (potentially) fund the expense of continuing to engage local Japanese resources beyond Sunday, should that prove necessary.
To fund Craig’s safe return to the United States and, should there be any, medical expenses to bring him back into full health either in Japan or here or both.
In the event that there should be any funds remaining in this account after the search has been concluded and Craig has been recovered, any and all remaining funds will be used to establish an educational fund for Craig’s son Robin.
Full disclosure: the account “Find Craig Arnold” has been opened in the name of Beth Loffreda (the director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Wyoming, where Craig teaches). This was done to create the fund quickly, with the full permission of Rebecca Lindenberg. Control of the account will be transferred as soon as possible to members of Craig’s family.
Again, confirmed news can be found at the Facebook site or findcraigarnold.blogspot.com.
For those of you following the ongoing search for Craig Arnold, the American poet who disappeared earlier this week while researching volcanoes in Japan, you may find his blog, The Volcano Pilgrim, of interest. Last updated April 26, just before he went missing, he describes his surroundings with a poet’s eye and clearly capture’s the feel of the remote Japanese island.
Last night I received an urgent message from my friend, the poet Jessica Piazza, a friend of the poet CraigArnold. As those who travel through the literary blogosphere already know, Craig went missing on April 26th (or even Monday, April 27th, Japan time) while visiting a small Japanese island to research volcanoes. Support and information networks have sprouted all over the internet, with the two primary sites being the Facebook group Find Craig Arnold and, for those without a Facebook account, findcraigarnold.blogspot.com. There have been several reports today from variousmediaoutlets, and other information is searchable by Google. If there is anything you can do to help invigorate the search for this wonderful poet and beloved family member and friend, please don’ t hesitate to contact someone through the above sites. Below you will see Jess’ original message along with the document she refers to which gives further background on Craig and the current situation, which although slightly behind the times, still contains pertinent information and a plea to contact your state representatives.
From all of us here at TMR, we wish his friends and family the best possible outcome to a terrifying situation, and assure them that our hopes and prayers are with them.
Hi all…
I’ m writing because a dear friend of mine and an exceptionally talented poet, Craig Arnold, whom some of you know, has gone missing on a small volcanic island in Japan while on a creative exchange fellowship. Craig, an experienced explorer of volcanoes, never returned to his inn after leaving alone to research the island’ s active volcano for the afternoon. The authorities are on the third day of searching for Craig, and are scouring the small island (of only 160 inhabitants) with dogs and helicopters. If he is not found by the end of the day, the authorities will call off the search.
We need your help to insure that the search will continue. The island and areas surrounding the volcano are small enough that an extended search will surely lead to Craig’ s discovery. WE NEED PEOPLE TO CONTACT THEIR LOCAL CONGRESSPEOPLE AND SENATORS TO PRESSURE THE JAPANESE STATE DEPARTMENT TO CONTINUE THE SEARCH. WE ALSO NEED HELP SPARKING MEDIA ATTENTION FOR THIS STORY, WHICH WE ALSO HOPE MIGHT INCREASE PRESSURE ON JAPANESE AUTHORITIES TO FIND CRAIG. Please feel free to use this as reference material
Good news this week for the English language, which welcomes into usage the term opposite marriage, courtesy of Miss California 2009, Carrie Prejean.
Political affiliation and current events knowledge aside, Prejean should be commended for having achieved accidentally through some miracle of ineloquence what many of us strive to do each waking hour: invent and advance a new term. Let’s face it. That’s no easy feat.
No? Go ahead, then. Come up with something and get it to catch on. I dare you.
While the embattled former Miss USA contestant has drawn criticism for her opinions on gay marriage, I, for one, welcome opposite marriage into the lexicon. This could be because I’m alarmed at the number of English words and phrases that are falling out of use — more, it seems, than are entering — and, at this point, I’ll take what I can get.
It could also be that I admire the unintentionally subversive element in the term opposite marriage. It defines itself (or tries to define itself, as best it can, with the awkward omission of the word sex) through opposition to the term same-sex marriage, which has had to define itself in relation to the term marriage. So Prejean used opposite marriage to mean marriage, and in doing so privileged the term gay marriage, and marginalized marriage by presenting it as a term that requires definition through that which it is not.
As a nonfiction writer, I’m all for getting a rhetorical piece of that linguistical action. The day is nigh, my friends, when we will wander our local bookstores in search of some inspiring new poetry, nonfiction, or opposite nonfiction.
I will remember you on that proud day, Miss California ‘09.
What I like most about opposite marriage is that the term seems to skip over any meaningful commentary on gender, sexual preference, or state law to precisely describe a much more mysterious social phenomenon: the pairing of one person, who is attractive, smart, graceful, charming, and dazzling in every possible way, with another person, who is really just some big, stumbling goob. Consider this recent engagement photograph. Note how my fiancée remains poised and elegant even while beach wrangling what looks to be a pigmy tyrannosaur that just ransacked a Banana Republic.
Opposite marriage, ladies and gentlemen. It may not mean what Prejean would have liked for it to mean, but it’ll come in handy, nonetheless. My only regret is that the Miss America Pageant at which it was uttered was held after we had the wedding invitations printed up. Imagine: “Please join us in celebrating the beginning of our life together in opposite marriage.”
I’m going to try Twitter. My user name is speerladdie (pardon the cuteness; everything simple was already used). So join with me. I’m particularly interested in authors, writers at all career phases (we specialize in “firsts”, so I’m very interested in writers at the struggle phase), good new books, and other editors, including those at literary magazines and publishing houses. Writers and editors of the world unite!
By the way, we are close to finishing up the next issue in production, which in fact has to do–directly and indirectly– with the struggles of writers and artists. We still need one more essay or piece of fiction. So if you’ve got a good one, submit it online.
Sixteen years ago we published a remarkable coming-of-age short story by Kevin Canty, which was later included in his fiction collection A Stranger in This World. This year, that story, “Blue Boy,” will come to life on the big screen at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival. This short film is one of only 46 shorts and one of only 8 student films selected to be screened. bcpid1475276001?bctid=16772536001
We also look forward to reading Canty’s upcoming story collection, Where the Money Went, due out from Random House this summer.
As study-dwellers, we spend a lot of time in spaces surrounded by paper. Our desktops, shelves, armrests, and pretty much every vertical surface is piled high with magazines, stacks of ungraded student papers, books, lists, diagrams . . . and that’s okay. We’re comfortable here.
But so are bugs. Thus, there are really only two kinds of study-dweller: those who have lifted a pile of paper to reveal a hairy spider the size of a work glove crouching underneath, and those who will. That’s why I recommend the Backyard Safari Bug Vacuum, a fierce green pistol that can suck all but the most enormous spiders right off the rug, and can also, I discovered, suck a bee right out of the air.
I know it can do these things because I took this baby out looking for bugs. That’s the kind of fearlessness the bug vac bestows. Maybe that courage derives from its pistol shape, which should give anti-gun activists every cause for alarm. One moment, I am terrified of stinging insects to the point of fleeing a room a wasp has entered; the next, with a finger on the smooth, plastic trigger, I am taking it to their turf, gunning for them.
When pulled, the trigger activates the surprisingly strong vacuum. Bugs unlucky enough to find themselves staring down the barrel with their multiple eyes are vacuumed into a detachable examination capsule that can be sealed with a knob on the side, allowing for catch-and-release bug removal. This is actually what I like most about the bug vac. I don’t like bugs, and don’t altogether mind killing them, but it’s gross when the wall where a bug once scurried looks like someone lobbed a used soup ladle at it. Plus, I’m soft enough that I would take a merciful option if one presented itself, which it did, at Christmas, in bug vacuum form. (Thanks, Mom)
A few tips before you set out on your office bug safari:
Replace the batteries. The Backyard Safari Bug Vacuum, found in the toy department at Wal-Mart, comes in a package labeled “try me,” with an arrow that points to the exposed trigger. At least open it up and test the batteries. You do not want to face off with a silverfish on half-juice, my friend.
The bug vac comes with a choice of two barrels to use — one with a narrow end and one with a round end. I pack the round-ended one, but that’s just how I roll.
It is wise to put the examination capsule in the icebox for a few minutes before releasing the bug into the wild or the toilet. The cold will immobilize the bug and eliminate the chance it will seek vengeance on you as you dispose of it.
The sole bad reviews I found for the bug vac when I researched it last fall were from parents whose children used it to amass captive insect stockpiles that they could release at once into their siblings’ rooms. Although this may sound like an awesome prank, or, if you’re Bill Gates, a forceful way to punctuate a statement about malaria prevention, it’s kind of a jerk move. It might get you grounded.
Bad news this week for Steve Martin, whose play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, was banned from being performed at an Oregon high school because some parents complained about its content. Martin, various news agencies report, has offered to pay for the play to be produced off-campus. I recommend reading the actual letter he sent to the editor of the La Grande Observer, because it is about as hilarious as a letter to the editor can be.
That Steve Martin! He’s . . . well, you know what kind of guy he is.
It just so happens that on Sunday, my supremely talented community theater castmates and I finished a four-show run of — you guessed it — Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Since I played the title character — Picasso — I feel highly qualified to chime in on this matter. Please imagine that everything from this point on is spoken with an accent that’s one-third Antonio Banderas, two-thirds . . . something else. Accents are hard.
First of all, I can report that there is a moment in the play, just after he shows up, when Picasso announces he’s “been thinking about sex all day,” and that shortly thereafter he drops the play’s sole F-bomb. However, I suspect that if La Grande High (Go Tigers!) has gym classes, study halls, passing periods, or lunch, Picasso’s entrance is probably already echoed at least once a day.
Per student.
Second, it’s true about the presence of adult themes in the play, such as kissing. Picasso kisses girls, and I don’t have to mention what a slippery slope that can be. Let me just pass on, though, for the benefit of the students and their parents, a little tip I picked up during rehearsal. Actor kisses are totally different than regular kisses: no tongue.
Very important to always remember.
And yes, to some degree the play glorifies hanging out in a bar and having affairs and drinking lots of alcohol, but to a greater degree it glorifies being inventive and articulate and prolific. Privilege is placed on the performance of thoughtful comparison and the construction of well-reasoned argument.
In his 2007 memoir Born Standing Up, Martin only mentions Picasso at the Lapin Agile once — he’s got a pretty full life, after all, with all the stand-up gigging, the SNL appearances, the movie career, the banjo playing — but he writes that the play was one of the only things he ever did that won the approval of his late father, who said it should have gotten the Nobel Prize.
It doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize, nor does it deserve to be banned.
However, at least having a work banned would put Martin in the company of a certain other sharp-witted, white-haired American humorist, who also criss-crossed the country and liked to perform in an all-white suit: “Censorship,” quoth Mark Twain, “is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
Maybe, with regard to doing Picasso at the Lapin Agile in a high school, Martin is a little ahead of his time, not unlike the enigmatic messenger who appears close to the end of the play.
It’s good that Martin is prepared to fund the production at its new location, anyway. That way, like that aforementioned messenger, he’ll be ready to deliver his funny, insightful message to those who’re open to receive it.
On a side note, while there’s sadly no video of our performance other than a scene we did for the morning show, to which I linked above, curious fans will be happy to learn that several members of our the cast — and our amazing director — have been admitted into TMR’s bank of voice actors. Listen for them in upcoming TMR audio issues.
Out my window is the Gihon River, still mostly covered with ice, but the water peeks through in spots, and it’s rippling around a bend just beneath the bridge nearby. Vermont is cold in March–what isn’t covered with snow is gray and wet (the ground) or gray and dusty (the roads). But it’s paradise to me and home for the next two weeks. I’m at the Vermont Studio Center, a colony that includes writers and visual artists of all kinds.
On the shuttle yesterday from Burlington Airport, I met a painter from Beijing, a writer from NYC, an art teacher and muralist from North Carolina, and a painter from LA who is a recidivist, here for her fifth residency. David, our shuttle driver, talked of Vermont and the studio center and a life of producing various kinds of art (and buying vintage fire trucks) as we wound through the mountains toward the small town of Johnson. Tonight he’ll screen a film, Days of Heaven… which reminds me… I’ve got more True/False films to write about. Ah, but I’m at a writing retreat. I should be writing. Wait! I am writing. But, not the kind of writing I thought I’d be doing. I just got here, okay? I’m still in that first/second day figuring-things-out stage. Yes? I’ll have it all figured out tomorrow. I promise.
As one of over 600 volunteers at the True/False Film Fest this past weekend, I witnessed a passionate, diverse, and creative community–from international filmmakers to downtown dwellers–come together, transforming an already eclectic Columbia into a “small-town Midwestern utopia.”
My first assignment at The Blue Note, a renovated vaudeville house–now a popular music venue–overlapped with the beginning of the inaugural parade, the March March, at 5:30 on Friday. Clearly, the buzz surrounding the festival manifested on the street, with a palpable electricity saturating the air. I felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland, except lacking the costume to match the decked out aliens and clowns, not to mention all the enthusiastic sideline spectators.
This spirit lingered throughout the festival, as I processed tickets, assisted festgoers, sat in on films, and attended stylish after parties–including a volunteer-only event Sunday night at an old mule barn (now being converted to a mixed-use building for loft apartments and commercial space): think Warhol’s Factory with a distinctive T/F flair.
Of all the festivities, perhaps most memorable was watching an aging, somewhat overweight, wine-guzzling (though nonetheless record-holding) Slovenian endurance swimmer attempt to cross the deadly and lengthy (to put it lightly) Amazon River in the film Big River Man. An unlikely hero, Martin Strel tempted fate and defied nature, ultimately becoming more myth than man.
For me, community and boundless creativity defined the Fest, now in its 6th year. With over 40 films shown on seven screens, innovative art installations, assorted music events, and countless other festivities, T/F packed a powerful, extended-release punch. It was a wonderland bordering on whirlwind, but I don’t regret plunging in headfirst.
Eric Daniel Metzgar’s Reporter profiles New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof’s work in the Congo. The film, screened last weekend at the True/False Film Fest, concentrated on Kristof’s relentless pursuit to find the face of the Congo. He found that face attached to the 60-pound body of a 41-year-old woman displaced by the warring lords of the Congo. Her name was Yohanita. I say “was” because she died a few weeks after Kristof, the film crew, and two assistants to Kristof – Leanna Wen and Will Okun – found her.
The film directs attention to the problems of how people respond to the need for aid. Kristof cites multiple studies revealing people are less likely to get involved when presented with a scenario of need for two or more individuals or when presented with mass numerical statistics. However, when people are presented with a personal story, the likelihood for aid greatly increases. So, humans are humane, right? We want to connect on a personal level, right?
But what about us? What about the writers and the reporters like Kristof? It seems like sad, tragic events become story ideas. Kristof travels from village to village, asking refugee after refugee for a sick a person. Finally, he stumbles upon Yohanita and the look on his face seems so indifferent. Wen, a medical student, immediately asks for a hospital. Her face is filled with worry in mere seconds. Kristof and crew took Yohanita to a hospital after much reassurance to the villagers and family. The film shows Kristof writing in his column, “How can you walk away from a human being who will surely die if you do so?”
Even so, Kristof is conflicted by the big picture. In the same column noted above, he continues to write, “Instead of spending a few hundred dollars trying to save Yohanita, who might die anyway, we could spend that money buying vaccines or mosquito nets to save a far larger number of children in other villages.” What is more humane? Attempting to save the dying woman in front of you or raising awareness about the hundreds and thousands dying all around her?
I refuse to believe we, as writers, lose our hearts and souls to the story idea. I believe what Kristof does is incredible. However, I can’t help but wonder, as Kristof walks to his jeep and waves farewell to the villagers and says to them, “I hope things get better,” does he really mean it?
It was downright nippy last weekend here in Columbia, Missouri, but that didn’t keep my fiancee Neesha, her parents, and me away from the True/False Film Festival. Turns out, nothing gets a family talking like a solid piece of nonfiction filmmaking. We saw a whole bunch of films. Here’s the roundup on our favorites.
Loot
Remember how Bill Murray acts in Caddyshack? That’s how this Lance guy just kind of . . . is. Father of four, he drops everything to scamper off to Austria and the Philippines to hunt treasure on sketchy information gathered from WWII vets. Allegory for documentary filmmaking as a whole: Could be something there to dig up, but it’s far from a sure thing.
Waltz with Bashir Academy Award-nominated, Golden Globe-winning, I liked it because it’s clever and skillfully animated. Neesha liked it because of the scene where the filmmaker, an ex-Israeli soldier who is trying to uncover a buried memory from the Lebanese war, asks one of the interview subjects if he can sketch him and his son. The guy agrees.
“Sketch anything you like,” he says, “but no filming.”
As we were all leaving the theater, Neesha asked me what I make of that.
I don’t know what I make of that.
We Live in Public Josh Harris seems like a total d-bag in the film — moreso in the post-film Q&A — and none of us had even heard of any of the “pioneering” web projects he helmed (Pseudo?). His doom and gloom prophecies about diminishing human interaction and privacy did make us all want to deactivate our Facebook and Myspace pages, though.
Rough Aunties
Follows Bobbi Bear staff through multiple attrocities in South Africa. We cried. My soon-to-be mother-in-law sums it up best: “The subjects were the least self-serving and the most self-sacrificing, all for the sake of women and children.”
Sounds Like Teen Spirit
Speaking of children . . .
This was unanimously adored in our party, maybe because it was the last film we saw, and by then, we were all desperationed-out and ready to surrender to the joyfulness of children competing in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest.
I think all the films we saw had lessons for nonfiction writing as a genre, but especially this one, which is about kids following their dreams. For some of us, writing is our childhood dream. We ought to love it like children, I think, or we ought to look for something else to do. That’s the lesson I got. That and the value of a little levity.
These were some of our favorites from True/False. If you got to go, what were yours?
In addition to the dozens of docs screened during the True/False Film fest, a number of workshops and classes are offered. Wanting to deepen my knowledge of the industry, I checked out a couple, including “Hybrid Cinema: A Filmmaker’s Guide to DIY, Web and Self-Distribution.”
Jon Reiss, director of Bomb It, a doc about the “battle for public space throughout the world” (or graffiti), led the presentation. I was struck with the similarities of marketing a literary journal and marketing a documentary film. At one point, Reiss stated that when the doc was completed, the filmmaker was only half-way through the process. He or she must get it out in the public. I think, in some broad way, that’s true of a literary magazine. After we’ve accepted the final prose or poetry piece for our journals, we’re ready to put our feet on the desk, lean back in our office chair, and congratulate ourselves on putting together another fine publication. But as wonderful as our magazines may be, we haven’t done our job fully until we’ve reached the largest audience possible given our budget, personnel, and time constraints.
For many in literary publishing, marketing may be the least favored part of the job. As Reiss said early in his presentation, he went into filmmaking because he didn’t want to go into business—but that career choice turned him into a businessman. Likewise, I’m sure many of us feel the same way about marketing, but if we want our journal to succeed, we need to make smart choices.
Reiss uses his blog (http://jonreiss.com/blog/) to raise attention for his films and long-term audience development. You can check out his blog to see what he’s doing in this regard. And if anyone is interested in some of his specific blogging tips, comment below and I’ll add a “part two” later in the week.
Blood Trail centers on the work of freelance war photographer Robert King. The film shows King’s transition from a frightened and inexperienced nobody in Bosnia to a widely published and reliable correspondent in Iraq. A heavy dose of guile and booze transform him into an artist in a theater of terror.
But is snapping shots of burning bodies and French troops with prostitutes (King’s first big break) art? Does the work of a war correspondent involve expression, creativity, and imagination? Of course it does.
First, King’s photos express the conditions of a people. The film shows some of King’s work concerning alcohol abuse in Russia. One photo displays a group of young (they look to be at least under the age of twelve) children drinking beer. Next, King constantly had to find ways to show the people back in the States the toils of war in a new and creative way. He took on the stories no one else was covering: French troop involvement with prostitutes and the conditions of the frontline. Finally, King used his imagination to find the right shot. He captured the French troops mingling with prostitutes from an abandoned bus. Often, King immersed himself in the culture of the Russian clubs.
However, the characteristic that legitimizes King as an artist the most is arguably his suffering. The art family has a fascination with the tortured artist. We regard Frida Kahlo, Beethoven, and Hemingway highly because of their tribulations. The artist tormented to death, Sylvia Plath for instance, maybe even lures us more. Does the key to the expression, creativity, and imagination of art lie in personal tragedy? Does an artist have to suffer to create?
A teenager in a hoodie and frayed sneakers gave me a bright blue slip of paper. She wore a festival pass hanging from a metal lanyard–it said Volunteer and contained a sketch of a human heart. The slip she handed me said 156. I was number 156 in the Q line. 155 people would get into this film before the veteran volunteers inside the theater would consider giving me the nod. That is, after they let in the first 1,000 True/False Film Festival goers who actually bought tickets beforehand to see the Oscar nominated documentary film, Waltzing with Bashir.
I got in, as did several dozen others with numbers higher than mine. The rainbow-painted cardboard Q that watched over us from the top of a ten-foot pole in the lobby of the Missouri Theatre blessed us. And the Q line continued to bless me all weekend.
I saw seven films, including No Impact Man and Burma VJ. As I write this, the festival continues on with the closing night film, The Yes Men Fix the World, and Busker’s Last Stand, one final opportunity for festival musicians to perform and pass the hat. Seven films was enough for me - thank you, oh Q line - and I’ll have to wait for Yes Men to find its way to RagTag in the months ahead.
I wouldn’t watch documentary film if it weren’t for this festival. Documentaries are hard work, and I don’t mean for the filmmakers, though, of course it’s tough work for them, too. As an audience member, witnessing Buddhist monks beaten and thrown into police trucks on the streets of Rangoon or untangling an Isreali soldier’s memories (or lack) about the Palestinian genocide in Beirut is not easy, but True/False makes it possible. Indeed, this festival has convinced me that documentary film is an art form essential to understanding what it means to be human. Documentary shows us how to “make sense of our own role in the daily global drama,” as T/F co-conspirators Paul Sturtz and David Wilson put it.
It’s not all death and destruction. Going green in the heart of NYC has its charms, as one family does in No Impact Man. One of the best lines of the festival was when Colin Beaven, in response to an audience member’s question about toilet paper, explained that half of the world sees “washing better than smearing it around.” Colin, his wife, Michelle Conlin, as well as the directors were on hand to discuss the film afterwards. One of many unique aspects of T/F is that every film has someone in attendance to answer questions after each screening–a director or a producer, and in some cases, the people whose lives are actually examined in the films.
It’s been a long weekend. Did I mention the party Friday night? The parade? Oh, and the four other films I saw. It’ll have to wait–the pillow is calling… I’ll write more this coming week, and several other folks at The Missouri Review will have their own stories to tell, too. Check back soon.
Last night, the True/False Film Fest (www.truefalse.org) launched its sixth annual festival with the screening of Afghan Star,directed by Havana Marking. First, though, festival co-founder David Wilson announced the winner of the Creative Short category of our annual Audio and Video Competition.
Anne Lewis takes home the top honors with “Separate Vacations,” an animated short about a narrator who drops her dog off at the kennel and finds herself facing agonizing decisions concerning her dog’s possible future. The screening delighted those in attendance at the state-of-the-art classroom/theatre in the recently-opened R.J. Reynolds journalism building on the campus of the University of Missouri.
On the documentary side, the winner of our competition goes to “A New Yorker in India,” by Basia Winograd. The doc features lush photography and insight into India’s culture as a native New Yorker travels across the country by train.
Both winners, along with the winners of the audio competition, as well student winners (to be named soon) will be featured on our website. Watch this site for more information and blogs about the film festival.
Bad news this week for people awed by the final frontier and the second-to-final frontier, which are apparently getting a tad crowded. The much-discussed collision of two satellites in low Earth orbit and the just-disclosed deep sea nuclear submarine fender-bender in the Atlantic Ocean indicate that it might be a good time to turn the music down and do a hand check, because whoa, people, everybody’s getting awfully close.
Look for that call for a hand check to ring loudest from groups like the Solent Coalition Against Nuclear Ships (SCANS) who already had a bone to pick with the nuclear submarine as an appropriate aquatic vehicle. Every time a lonely nuclear sub leaks a few tons of deadly radiation into the world’s oceans, or breaks mid-trip and dooms a bunch of Russian sailors to an unspeakable and heartbreaking underwater fate, SCANS is up-periscope with two hands on the ideological torpedo key. Imagine what those guys are going to say about this — two nuke subs, one incident, and an accidental one, at that. Right now, inside the SCANS office in Southampton, smart, civically engaged people are hunched in front of laptops trying to figure out the most articulate way to express, “Oh, for cryin’ out . . . c’mon!”
Meanwhile, at the UN, the orbital collision is being debated by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCPUOC).
(For any acronymologists just tuning in, it’s SCANS one, UNCPUOC zero)
It’s looking like there may be some legal fallout regarding the spacecraft smash-up since one of the satellites belonged to the Russian military and the other belonged to a private company in the U.S., but more pressing is the issue of whether the debris from the crash will harm other satellites.
For both of these cases, it’s important to understand the size of the objects relative to the environment. For instance, I always assumed the average run-of-the-mill satellite was about the size of a beach ball, but it turns out that’s way low in terms of scale. The two satellites that became one above Siberia last week were more like Ford F-150s, each weighing about a ton, and yikes! they were moving! How fast? According to Hampden-Sydney College’s physics and astronomy web site, this fast:
I know, right? Crazy fast. It would take me close to half an hour to race the distance one of those satellites travels in one second. Granted, I would lose little momentum at the water station, but still! And not only are the busted, F-150-sized junkers still going this fast, but so are all the pieces that flew off in all directions.
Experts who’ve been interviewed for both incidents have remarked about the unlikelihood of these events in the first place. Both events have to do with collisions between sophisticated, highly specialized objects that normally function in total solitude. In other words, they each describe a pair of graduate students knocking together at a vast mixer, one resulting in a sudden, alarming — frankly disturbing — bump that is destined to be referenced vaguely in some future poem; the other a spectacular spill that sends cabernet sauvignon and cheese cubes on toothpicks flying around the planet at close to five kilometers per second.
All I’m saying is, this could be coincidence, but it could also be a sign of the times. When country crooner Lee Ann Womack sings that she hopes we still feel small when we stand beside the ocean, she isn’t messing around. But how large can the ocean be when nuclear submarines are dinging each other’s doors? How spacious is space any more? NASA’s chief orbital debris scientist just announced that there are 19,000 satellites up there, pretty much for good, and we’re just getting started.
Out-of-commission this week: two nuclear submarines, two communications satellites, one TMR blogger’s sense of the sublime.
Word has it that our stand at AWP, along with several of our competent, cheerful interns and many innocent Chicagoans, was nearly torn apart by the clamoring throngs who had poured into the conference in the hopes of meeting me, only to find out that I didn’t go.
I’d like to take a moment to apologize.
I’m sorry, folks. Thanks for making the trip, but there’s only so much of me to go around. I am, after all, just one humble blogger. I understand your disappointment — believe me — but there’s really no need for the violence. It is my honest hope that you were able to find other fascinating people to hang out with in the Windy City.
Besides, somebody had to stay back and hold down the TMR fort, and let me tell you, I think it was time well spent. Allow me to present a little project I like to call “TMR Valentine.”
The best part? It’s just in time for Valentine’s Day!
Well, actually, the first phase probably won’t be ready until next Valentine’s Day, but here’s a sneak peak: TMR-themed candy hearts! Now, I realize they may be a bit hard to read here, but imagine holding them each between your index finger and your thumb an inch from your eyeball.
You may be thinking. How come nobody at TMR came up with this up before? It baffles me, frankly, because candy Valentine TMR hearts are so intuitive! Many of our subscribers and contributors are teachers, and teachers use chalk, which is exactly what these babies taste like.
I know — so obvious! The only downside, as I said, is that there’s no chance I can get them out the door (or approved) in the next eight hours.
However, since I don’t want to break anybody’s heart on Valentine’s Day, I’ll go ahead and roll out phase two: actual TMR Valentines. Just download the image to your desktop, load the image into the photo editing program of your choice, resize, color adjust, render, rasterize, and print! It’s so simple!
I’ll admit, creating this handsome image was no small task. First, I wanted the text to be some moving snippet from our magazine’s pages — a touching stanza, or an essay in very, very small font — but all that stuff comes with copyright baggage, so I had to come up with something witty on my own. Then, I wanted to decorate it with actual cover art, or maybe one of our cartoons, but, same deal — copyrights. I found an image from our web page that I think is good to go. A little somber, yes, but nothing a few clip art hearts and a flying cupid can’t perk up. Oh, and the dashed white line — I had to eyeball it. Go ahead and fold on the dashed line, but keep the scissors handy, just in case.
Also, seriously, safe travels home from AWP, everyone. Happy Valentine’s Day!
Bad news this week for advocates of the apostrophe, and no, O gentle reader, I’m not talking about this kind of apostrophe — it’s doing just fine — I’m talking about the captain of contraction, the prince of possession, the hovering hero who hauls “he’ll” out of “hell.” Officials in the English city of Birmingham have decided to turn away from the apostrophe — a punctuation mark that takes its name from the Greek apostrephein, which means ”to turn away” — and have banned it from use in public signage.
As the Birmingham story was breaking, it just so happens that I was finishing the chapter on the apostrophe in Richard Lederer and John Shore’s Comma Sense: A Fundamental Guide to Punctuation. My fiancée, who had devoted much of the day to deciding how to most convincingly dress up like a cowgirl, was currently having a hootin’, hollerin’ girls’ night out across town, which left me a few hours to let my mind get buck wild in the world of grammar and punctuation. I learned a lot I didn’t know about the apostrophe. I came to appreciate the way it floats at the end of a word, flung forward, jeopardized, but elegant, nonetheless, much like the image of my fiancée in the photos I would be shown later that night, her slim figure frozen in flight an instant after being launched helplessly from the back of a mechanical bull.
Associated Press writer Meera Selva reports that those responsible for the Birmingham apostrophe ban justified it by claiming the apostrophe compromises GPS navigating systems (Garmond users, please weigh in on this). They also claimed the back and forth over apostrophes has taken too much time in city planning meetings. Plus, they said, many of them have become obsolete, and are, in general, confusing. The following quote was given by Councilor Martin Mullaney, pictured at the left on what the British call “a lammy,” from Birmingham’s transport scrutiny board. And yes, that’s right — he’s from their transport scrutiny board.
“Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed,” said Mullaney. “More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don’t want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it.”
Basically, the argument is that apostrophes are confusing, and it’s better to take them out. After all, on many street signs, mailboxes and billboards, they’re already missing or misplaced. And yes, they can be confusing. Words like “hers” and “yours” are possessive, and they don’t need apostrophes. Family names that end in S are hard enough to do right when they’re pluralized without throwing apostrophes into the fray. And who among us nails “its”/”it’s” 100% of the time, in every medium, even text messaging? Not I. The apostrophe was just an early printers’ innovation, anyway. It wouldn’t be the same as, say, flushing out the colon.
Still, to me, this all seems a little unfair. All this time, it’s been doing its own job and somebody else’s — expressing contraction (the job it relocated from France to work, according to a history by Cavella and Kernodle) and also expressing possession. Hire some more help? Not in this economy. So while all the hip little marks are hanging out together, bragging about the quotable quips they get to punctuate or the celebrity names they expect to hyphenate, the apostrophe’s doing double duty up in low orbit, keeping pretty much to itself, but being largely misunderstood, and wildy abused.
Something else I notice, now, as I look at my fiancée’s pictures from last night at the honky tonk: a woman on the dance floor, dressed in Western wear, who has paused mid boot-scoot to shoot my fiancée and her faux-cowgirl posse the evil eye. I flip a few photos further to the image of my bride-to-be in apostrophic ascent off the bucking mechanical bull, and it occurs to me that regardless of the location, the environment, or the culture, there will always be some who would rather remove something than make an effort to learn about it. What a sad thing that is.
I flip back to the image of the glaring, Western wear-ing woman.
“Whoa,” my fiancée says, “I didn’t even see her do that.”
I’m glad she didn’t. I hope the apostrophe didn’t see it coming, either, over there, across the pond.
Good news this week for people who like holograms. An article just out in New Scientist says we all just might be living in one.
… I know, right? As I read the article I noticed my face mimicking the expression of the tiny framed Shakespeare hologram I have on my wall here, which I purchased from the hologram store in the Denver airport reluctantly for $10 when I was in junior high, having lacked the two hundred bucks needed to purchase the wicked hologram of T-Rex. Yesterday, as I learned about how that shop was maybe a hologram that sold holograms, my expressions cycled from enlightened to puzzled, with tiny 3D Shakespeare watching me from the wall — paused, at my angle, midway through his reverse-epiphany, as if to say, “Methinks … whoa!”
The New Scientist article reports on the findings of German scientists who noticed some weird readings from a huge, entrenched detector that was supposed to measure gravitational waves, but instead kept picking up ”an inexplicable noise.” It’s been suggested that the “noise” is the threshold at which the image that is the universe becomes grainy — kind of like how a newspaper photo becomes nothing but dots at a point when looked at very closely. People who know about black holes wonder whether this means that the universe is not just “a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface,” but a blurry one, at that.
I can see that — literally — especially after last week when my fianceé shot me in the eyeball with a Nerf gun while I was driving, thus bringing about the exact scenario my mother warned could happen anytime my kid brother and I dared to wave our Nerf guns around in the car except that we didn’t crash and die. I hypothosize that since last Tuesday I have perceived existence as it truly is with my right eye — a big, slightly blurry mess where things are mostly as I perceived they were before, but not quite.
Of course, I lack the mathematical machinery to express this — a foam dart leaving a plastic barrel at an unknown speed while also traveling at roughly 50 mph down the road at a perpendicular angle — or to check the findings reported in the New Scientist article, or to do much of anything, really. The room-length chalkboard in the math and physics lecture hall of my mind still shows the faint traces of perimeter and area problems, maybe some notes on how to multiply fractions, part of the quadratic formula …. As I look at this photo, to me, the person on the left, who knows a lot about black holes, could easily be standing one position up the conveyor belt from the person on the right, who knows a lot about donut holes. They appear to have similar hats.
Speaking of hats, the hats we happen to wear, as writers, and artists, and critics, and readers, designate us as people who have feelings about the nature of reality and how it is to be negotiated. What the news this is all a hologram means for philosophy and religion is anyone’s guess. I have a sneaking suspicion it will be taken as kind of depressing by some, and as kind of validating by others. In other words, I expect global reactions to be a lot like tiny 3D Shakespeare’s, who is very disturbed, or very satisfied.
Six days into January, people are still saying “Happy New Year” and expressing hope/doubt/nervousness/fear/anticipation about what will happen in this next calendar year.Having recently had an intense, out-of-time experience with a dying relative, I’d been thinking already about the artificiality of time markers such as years (Very Bergsonian/Faulknerian? Maybe, but I’m no philosopher.)
Recently CNN featured a video about twins who were born in two different years. The mother says she wanted both boys to be born in 2009, which is understandable from the point of view of convenience and mental tidiness–think about how many times she’s going to have to tell the story of their different birth days, months and years–though really, what difference does it make? Experientially, labor is labor, birth is birth, dying is dying, all part of a continuum that can only barely be interpreted and superficially managed by means of “clock time.” Whatever psychological need people may have for the breaks in the calendar that renew hope or sweep away disaster, it’s a good exercise now and then to remember that they are illusory.Sitting by my relative’s bed and remembering other younger, more vital “versions” of her–which all seemed as real and present as the wasting person in the bed–I asked myself, as I frequently do, whether time exists at all.
Anyone want to weigh in on that?
Then I started reflecting about narrative: how authors use organizational strategies such as breaks, chapters, section headings and other types of segmentation to create the impression of unsegmented time.All of which was making my head spin, but you get the idea. And the irony:what we can’t control or understand, we chop into pieces (minutes, days, years) so that it seems like we can, and then some of us–writers–are compelled to recreate the illusion of continuous experience by means of a whole other set of pieces that are the conventions of narrative structure.
My son will be 11 on January 23.But really, what is that saying?He’s already older than he was a minute ago. What difference does the number 11 make? I used to think if I picked him up every day, there would never be a day when I couldn’t pick him up (unless of course I broke my arm, which I never have) because how could he weigh that much more one day then the previous?But that was when I could pick him up.Now it’s impossible. Explain that, and you’ll be one step closer than I am to understanding the difference between a moment and a moment later.
So, I am writing this post as an ode to my lovely fellow poetry readers at TMR. I have never been a part of an academic group so nerdy and so much fun in my entire life.
Before joining the poetry team at TMR I had all of these worries about my ability to analyze a piece of poetry as well as my fellow staff members. I had this idea in my head that I was going to pick the worst piece in the world and pass it along to someone who was going to judge my reading abilities. “Oh, Nick passed along this packet of poetry. Personally, I thought it was garbage, but Nick here must have seen some value in it.”
Or so I thought until I got to the poetry team and met the most diverse group of people I have ever seen when it comes to poetry tastes. I tend to like things that are lyrical, light, and accessible, while another guy likes to read Buddhist poetry, and another likes to read poems with weight and sophistication. We all like different things. Which I think gives our poetry reading even more strength, because for a poem to be accepted it has to go through all of our varying poetry criteria before being accepted, appealing to a bunch of different interests.
Earlier this month, we had a meeting where we read poetry for 4.5 hours, and none of us regretted a single minute. It made for a very humorous retelling to my not-so-literary-inclined friends about this and it followed with shaking of heads, a few screams, and the response, “Nick, you’re giving me a headache.”
But all in all, we love what we do. We love to read poetry, any kind, even the ones we don’t like get treasured by us on staff, because they were memorable. What do I mean? Here is an example of some of the more humorous phrases we have thrown around in our meetings.
This poem has “hidden, erotic moments”
“All good poets seem to come from Ohio.”
“I will proceed to read this poem in the exact accent I believe this woman would have said it.”
“28 MPH”
Anyway, I say this all to make a statement how we’re really don’t act like we’re any better than anyone else and the atmosphere is really open to suggesting new ideas and making pitches for poems that are unusual and strange, and how everyone is really on an equal footing when it comes to reading these submissions. I have enjoyed having this niche to really work in, because a lot of people who are not in the literary world find poets to be weird. Non-ficiton, sure there are a ton of those people. Fiction, great, everyone seems to love fiction. But poetry? All I hear is how it doesn’t make sense or it’s too complicated or its just a bunch of gibberish.
But really, it’s a kaleidoscope. It’s taking a bunch of colored pieces and putting it in a cylinder and making a beautiful design out of it. And I have come to realize this from hanging with the poets, in that poetry is not a stuffy art, but an art of opportunity and exploration. I love the poets because we’ll try anything and we are a small, closely-knit group. And it’ll always be my favorite academic group.
After many months of recording and editing, we are proud to announce that Audio Issue 30.4 is online and available to download for free. Check out poets Preston Mark Stone and Stephen O’Connor reading their own poems aloud.
Future issues will be available for purchase–more about that soon. Enjoy!
