Author Archives: Jolene

Significant Objects

SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS is an interesting project that pairs thrifted, seemingly insignificant objects with creative writers.  The participating writers then invent fictional stories about the objects, and the objects and stories are sold together on ebay.  The stories suddenly give these discarded objects significance and value, and the stories that are basically pulled out of thin air are pretty surprising.  Significant Objects includes writers from The Elegant Variation and Maud Newton, as well as many other names you might recognize.  Check it out!

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons"- T.S. Eliot

The image of the struggling writer hunched over a desk with an overflowing ash tray and multiple cups of coffee is  a common stereotype seen in T.V and movies.  Blame it on the deadlines, the writer’s block, the late nights that facilitate creativity, or just the roasted aromatic goodness that seems to appeal to everyone, but i think that writing and coffee go well together.

I was recently looking through this month’s GQ magazine and they have an article titled “Where to get the Best coffee in America” that can also be viewed online.  I was so excited to see that Kaldi’s Coffee Roasting Company in St. Louis, and Columbia was listed among the top coffee shops!  While Columbia has a plethora of good coffee shops (many actually located across the street from each other), Kaldi’s definitely stands out as one of the best and deserves recognition.  Perhaps the Kerouac-laden stereotype is irrelevant because coffee is a popular drink loved by many people, but I still can’t help but feel cliché as a sit in Kaldi’s long after dark, working on writing and brooding over my laptop with my bottomless cup

Fears of a College Senior

As a senior at The university of Missouri my time to say “Oh the economy will improve before I start looking for a job” is quickly coming to an end.  The reality being of course that the economy has not drastically improved and that jobs for new college graduates are more difficult than ever to secure.  Its times like these that I start to question the relevance of my college education (I’m an English major) and start wondering if I should have sprinkled in a few business classes here and there.  I was recently lead by my frantic google search of “how to get a job in publishing” to an article titled, well, “How to Get a Job in Publishing.” The approach taken by the writer of the article to find a job is anything but traditional, and she even goes as far as creating an ad for herself on facebook..  I’m not one to shy away from creative approaches, and I am more than ready to give it a good effort, but as I spend more time scanning MediaBistro and Bookjobs,  I’m feeling a bit discouraged with the job market.  GALLEYCAT has a new blog post everytime any major company advertises a job opening, and I can only imagine these positions are flooded with thousands of applicants. I would love to hear if any readers have advice on how to go about getting a new job, or if anyone has been successful in getting a job advertised online.

A week of Awards

Did anything eventful happen this week? Oh yeah the Nobel Prize for literature was announced!  And the winner is…  Herta Müller for her works depicting the ‘landscape of the dispossessed’ with “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose.”  I’d like to give a celebratory high five to Müller for becoming only the 12^th woman to win the prize in 108 years, making this the first year in history that four women have been Nobel laureates (the others being U.S-based researchers Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider for medicine, and Israel’s Ada Yonath for chemistry).  While I’m happy to see the ladies holding their own, the truth is that I know very little about the Nobel Prize, and rarely do I even hear mention of the Nobel Prize for literature.  NobelPrize.org offers a complete list of past winners, and for some interesting commentary HTMLGIANT also offers a funny and brief history of the winners.  Scanning through these lists I recognized very few of the writers, so I’m wondering what impact (if any) winning the award has had on their writing.  Looks like I have a lot to add to my reading list.

So the question remains, will you be reading Herta Müller in the near future? Do awards and prizes influence your decisions about what authors to read?

Oh and this just in, as I’m sure you know, Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.  Any thoughts?

Have a great weekend

we feel fine

Just a short post for today. If anyone is sitting at home on this windy and cool Friday night, you should check out www.wefeelfine.org. While it’s not exactly literary related, wefeelfine is a site that explores feelings and thoughts and all of those other crazy things that some might say are important to literature.  Here is what the site has to say:

“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.”

DO IT!

Have a great weekend

Banned Book Week

September 26 through October 3 kicks off The American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, a week dedicated to “celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment.”  The BannedBooksWeek.org site features a new book censorship map that reveals the locations of book challenges that have been made between 2007 and 2009.

Whenever I hear the term “banned books,” I always think of conservative housewives from the 50’s or overzealous religious parents worried about Harry Potter, so I was very surprised to see that book censorship is still a common occurrence. In St. Louis alone in 2008 over a dozen titles were challenged in the St. Louis County libraries, many of which were non-fiction books on sexuality and sexual health.  I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and was surprised to see that Toni Morrison’s Beloved was actually removed and banned at one of the local high schools in 2009.  I thought it was funny that in North Stafford, Virigina A People’s History of The United States was banned because it was considered by some to be “un-American.”   While the map can be a bit humorous, it’s still an unsettling reminder of the power some people possess concerning censorship and it makes me wonder what people are so afraid of.