It occurred to me the other day — and in fact I may have already bored one or two Printculture readers with this — that it would be useful to think about why so much academic work on contemporary material isn't very good. But perhaps the premises bear repeating: (1) a higher percentage of literary critical or cultural analysis of contemporary material — fiction, poetry, film, the culture in general — says, by my standards, completely predictab...

To follow the recent reflections on printculture writing by E Hayot and S L Kim, one of the things that’s struck me often is the frequency with which I encounter old versions of myself – either in that I discover a “new” idea is actually one I’ve already written (and promptly forgotten) about or as today where I feel a kinship with myself from a year ago, writing then about the work of end-of-the-semester grading. It is that time of year agai...

Cathy said she would buy the bread herself. Leaving the children with Rosa she escaped into the corridor, which felt cold, dark, and sterile after the noise, heat, and familiar banana-and-soap smell of her apartment. Her feet padding on the carpet as she walked towards the elevator, pulling her coat around her, she thought again that stepping out was like the prequel to swimming: standing alone and without the protection of clothes, shivering,...

I’m on draft 6 of my post for today, on bunco. (Yes, bunco. Come back in two weeks.) I have reached the bad place, the place where I start to pull on my hair and the self-hate begins. I have to make a decision about the point of this essay, the reason, the stunning conclusion. If I could decide that I could finish it. I read C Bush’s post on Finishing, which makes me think I should scrap bunco and write about Starting, ‘cause, hey, that would ...

Blogs and open-mike comments—self-evidently good, right? But what happens when the virtual soapboxes are set up on the virtual grass is less so. Of blogs with more than, say, a dozen regular comment-leaving readers, how many manage to keep up a real discussion for more than three or four exchanges? Every news link I’ve followed sooner or later collapses into dogmatic posturing, name-calling, ignorance, and an assortment of offers for miracle p...

The subtitle of Entertainment Weekly’s interview with memoirist Augusten Burroughs promises Burroughs thoughts on “adjusting to the post-James Frey world.” This temporal marking of a pre and post moment—the pre-James Frey world in which we all trusted the veracity of life writing, and the post-James Frey world in which every memoirist is a suspect—sounds a lot like the nostalgic clichés which abound in discussions of the postmodern...

There seems to be no real blueprint for literary magazines. There are good examples, and influential publications, but it's unclear how to go about making one, and it's equally unclear how to read one. They’re magazines, but they want you to read them as books. They’re shaped like books, they don’t have glossy pages, and for the most part they don’t inform you of anything – they are the things you’re being informed of. Soft Targets is as new ...

I’ve been making lists today, as usual—lists with top and bottom items, lists that have been through a lot of additions and retractions, lists in multiple colors. I have precedent: Writing begins with lists. Lists of kings; lists of cattle, goats, captives, acreage, shields, and units of grain, beer, oil. Lists of who owed what to whom. There is an entire literature consisting only of lists: the corpus of writings in Mycenaean Linear B, deciph...

I need to write. I need to write. I need to write. I'm at that point in the semester, and at that point in a project, when I know I need to start writing. But everytime I catch some free time, when I know I should begin, I read another article. I go to the library and check out another book I won't read till the summer. I take more time than usual to grade. I sign up for another reading group, volunteer to help with another conference, visit a...