Austin Kleon – Page 597

ETGAR KERET

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer who lives in Tel Aviv. I stumbled onto his work while ordering graphic novels for the library: he writes funky short stories (comparisons to everyone from Ray Carver to Gogol to Kelly Link), but also dabbles in comics and screenwriting. Here’s a few words from an article about him:

In his homeland of only five million Hebrew readers, Keret’s four collections of stories have sold more than 200,000 copies in all….His books are the most stolen volumes from Israeli bookstores, and he’s the most widely read writer in prisons. “A lot is to do with their attention spans,” Keret says of his fans behind bars. “They like my stories because they’re short.” His pithy sentences and blunt prose rarely propel his cameo tales beyond a few pages—a feature of his writing Keret traces to his asthma. “When you are having an attack and say to somebody, ‘I love you very much,’ you could, instead of ‘very much,’ say, ‘Call an ambulance.’ You don’t have time to bullshit.”

I picked up his book THE BUS DRIVER WHO WANTED TO BE GOD. Keret writes a weekly column called “Citizen K” over at nextbook.org. The site also has a reading and interview with Ira Glass. A new film called Wristcutters is based on one of his novellas.

Seems like a cool dude.

MARTIN LUTHER KING

Monday, January 16, 2006

He said:

…nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts….[N]onviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

He also said:

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today’s motor bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaimed the rule of the land. “And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.?? I still believe that We Shall overcome!

Hint: it’s not about black and white, it’s about the haves and have-nots. And along the same lines, a press release from PRKA written by George Saunders.

LAUGHING WITH KAFKA

Sunday, January 15, 2006

“For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny…Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication -theorists sometimes call “exformation,” which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.” Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called “compression” — for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.”

– David Foster Wallace, “Laughing With Kafka,” HARPER’S July 1998

PREVIOUSLY, ON 24

Saturday, January 14, 2006

My fiction teacher in undergrad bugged me for almost three years about 24. He would pound on the table during lunch and say, “If you’re not watching 24 you’re missing the best show on television!” And then, after reading twenty or so plotless workshop stories written about drinking and vampires, he passed out photocopied reviews of the show and said, “You want to learn about plot? Watch 24!”

We’ll, I’m hooked now. Two weeks ago, Meg and I watched the whole set of season one in a week (that’s something like four episodes a night). Knowing there would be no time to watch all the rest of the seasons before the fifth season started, and knowing that my blood pressure couldn’t survive another marathon, we devised an ingenious strategy to get up to speed:

First, skip season 2. (Don told us there was too much annoying crap about Kim in there, anyways.) Just read the episode guides. Then, get ahold of season 3 and season 4. Watch the first couple of episodes of season 3, then skip the rest by watching the “Previously on 24” clips before the rest of the episodes. (Watching all the “Previously on 24” clips in a row is ALMOST as stressful as watching the actual shows, because you’ve got all these plot twists crammed into 2 or 3 minute segments…) Then watch the finale. Rinse and repeat for Season Four. Throw the season five prequel in there, and you’re good to go.

The four-hour premiere of season five starts at 8 o’clock Sunday, and continues on Monday at the same time.

REMEMBER! THE ONLY WINNER OF A RAT RACE…IS A RAT!

Friday, January 13, 2006

B00000J5QC.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg I’ve eaten two Christmas dinners with Murray Saul, and I can tell you, he’s a helluva guy.

Murray’s going on 78 now, but back in the 70s, when WMMS-FM was the #1 station in Cleveland, Murray used to do this thing called “The Get Down.” Legend has it that Friday night at 6 o’clock, everybody in their right mind would tune their radios to WMMS and listen to him announce the weekend with a rant about everything from slavedrivers to chocolate sundaes, topping it all off by screaming, “It’s Friiiiday!”

I saw Murray at the library recently, and he showed me his new column with the FREE TIMES, “Ask Murray.” It’s like “Dear Abby,” but with Murray. You can e-mail him a question, here, and if it’s the best one of the week, you get a free copy of his CD, THE GET DOWNS: VOL. 1.

Here’s a transcript of one of his “Get Down” monologues:

Oh, the slavedriver brought out the meat grinder and the stomper this week, and after they pushed us through, grinding the shit out of us, they threw us on the grill, salt and peppered our wounds, and laughed as they squeezed the onion in our eyes. They make us go to work in the dark, and we end up going home in the dark. We’re lucky if we have five minutes to peek at the sun. We can’t even look out the windows…it’s just like the third grade. The only time they smile is when we’re locked inside, but remember, the only winner of the rat race…IS A RAT.

Listen to it on MP3 at your own risk. Rock on, Murray…see you at dinner.