Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Saturday, July 16, 2011
So...moonbows are real?
Amy Hempel wasn't kidding. And in honor of her short-short, I am posting this educational video about the illustrious moonbows of Yosemite Park. (There's even a bear at the beginning of the video!)
Moonbows!
Moonbows!
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Midnight in Paris
I just saw this movie the other day. (At an 11 AM matinee. I swear I'm 22.) It got good reviews and I'm a fan of old Woody Allen movies, but it looked like a romantic comedy so I was skeptical. It was so much better than I expected. There are characters of F Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates!), Salvador Dali, Picasso, Hemingway. Hemingway was a pretty awesome character. Anyway, since pretty much every movie out right now looks horrendous, I definitely recommend this one!
"The Boat" by Nam Le
Hi from Yaddo.Last night I read the first and last stories in an amazing collection. I am annoyed because the author, Nam Le, was in residence here, but he left the day I came. Maybe it's just as well, though, because if he was still here, I might not have read the book. (I have it at home and didn't read it.) I can't say for sure how much it is this book and how much it is Yaddo, but these stories really really knocked me over. I think it is the book (as corroborated by truly spectacular blurbs from a number of writers I admire). If you are interested in the short story, and you want to check out state-of-the-art execution, get this book.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Trying...
Hello all! I am playing around with the formatting of this blog now - I don't really, truly know what I am doing (wooden planks? cabin fever theme?), so please let me know if you have any suggestions at all...trying to navigate my way through the template designer. Yikes.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Is the formatting too weird for this blog?
I am happy to make any (or all!) of you an "administrator" if you feel like fooling with the graphics or the format.
Aside from this, as I am just sending my e-mail out to everyone to remind them of the existence of this thing, I just want to reiterate that it is yours to do whatever you want with -- writing/reading notes, gossip, exchange of news, fantasies, invectives, etc.
Aside from this, as I am just sending my e-mail out to everyone to remind them of the existence of this thing, I just want to reiterate that it is yours to do whatever you want with -- writing/reading notes, gossip, exchange of news, fantasies, invectives, etc.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Who wants to start a writing group?
I haven't written anything since class ended. I think I need some direction.
Also, one of my friends from work and I keep talking about how we need to start one.
Also, one of my friends from work and I keep talking about how we need to start one.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
T.C. Boyle
Has anyone else read Wild Child by T.C. Boyle? (Kyle...?) I was between it and The Joy Luck Club at the airport bookstore, and I'm glad I went with it. Also, there's an animal in almost every story, but a majority of them have been killed in traumatic accidents.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Hello hello!
Have any of you guys read Arthur Nerserian? I got to meet with him the other day. He was really nice! He said he was working on a new book and asked me to read his draft in a few weeks and give him notes on it - how cool!
Graduation was rather anti-climactic today, I left a little early so I didn't see anyone except Matt for just a second, but maybe I'll see some of you in the hoopla tomorrow.
Hope everyone is well! Let's all hang out soon!
-Kyle
(I don't know why my name comes up as lucia on this...)
Friday, May 13, 2011
Covered Mirrors
This is a short by Borges, originally published in The Maker.
Islam tells us that on the unappealable Day of Judgment, all who have perpetrated images of living things will reawaken with their works, and will be ordered to blow life into them, and they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires of punishment. As a child, I knew that horror of the spectral duplication or multiplication of reality, but mine would come as I stood before large mirrors. As soon as it began to grow dark outside, the constant, infallible functioning of mirrors, the way they followed my every movement, their cosmic pantomime, would seem eerie to me. One of my insistent pleas to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream of mirrors; I recall clearly that I would keep one eye on them uneasily. I feared sometimes that they would begin to veer off from reality; other ties, that I would see my face in them disfigured by strange misfortunes. I have learned that this horror is monstrously abroad in the world again. The story is quite simple, and terribly unpleasant.
In 1927, I met a grave young woman, first by telephone (because Julia began as a voice without a name or face) and then on a corner at nightfall. Her eyes were alarmingly large, her hair jet black and straight, her figure severe. She was the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Federalists, as I was the grandson and great-grandson of Unitarians, but that ancient discord between our lineages was, for us, a bond, a fuller possession of our homeland. She lived with her family in a big run-down high-ceiling'd house, in the resentment and savorlessness of genteel poverty. In the afternoons -- only very rarely at night -- we would go out walking through her neighborhood, which was Balvanera. We would stroll along beside the high blank wall of the railway yard; once we walked down Sarmiento all the way to the cleared grounds of the Parque Centenario. Between us there was neither love itself nor the fiction of love; I sensed in her an intensity that was utterly unlike the intensity of eroticism, and I feared it. In order to forge an intimacy with women, one often tells them about true or apocryphal things that happened in one's youth; I must have told her at some point about my horror of mirrors, and so in 1928 I must have planted the hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now I have just learned that she has gone insane, and that in her room all the mirrors are covered, because she sees my reflection in them -- usurping her own -- and she trembles and cannot speak, and says that I am magically following her, watching her, stalking her.
What dreadful bondage, the bondage of my face -- or one of my former faces. Its odious fate makes me odious as well, but I don't care anymore.
Islam tells us that on the unappealable Day of Judgment, all who have perpetrated images of living things will reawaken with their works, and will be ordered to blow life into them, and they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires of punishment. As a child, I knew that horror of the spectral duplication or multiplication of reality, but mine would come as I stood before large mirrors. As soon as it began to grow dark outside, the constant, infallible functioning of mirrors, the way they followed my every movement, their cosmic pantomime, would seem eerie to me. One of my insistent pleas to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream of mirrors; I recall clearly that I would keep one eye on them uneasily. I feared sometimes that they would begin to veer off from reality; other ties, that I would see my face in them disfigured by strange misfortunes. I have learned that this horror is monstrously abroad in the world again. The story is quite simple, and terribly unpleasant.
In 1927, I met a grave young woman, first by telephone (because Julia began as a voice without a name or face) and then on a corner at nightfall. Her eyes were alarmingly large, her hair jet black and straight, her figure severe. She was the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Federalists, as I was the grandson and great-grandson of Unitarians, but that ancient discord between our lineages was, for us, a bond, a fuller possession of our homeland. She lived with her family in a big run-down high-ceiling'd house, in the resentment and savorlessness of genteel poverty. In the afternoons -- only very rarely at night -- we would go out walking through her neighborhood, which was Balvanera. We would stroll along beside the high blank wall of the railway yard; once we walked down Sarmiento all the way to the cleared grounds of the Parque Centenario. Between us there was neither love itself nor the fiction of love; I sensed in her an intensity that was utterly unlike the intensity of eroticism, and I feared it. In order to forge an intimacy with women, one often tells them about true or apocryphal things that happened in one's youth; I must have told her at some point about my horror of mirrors, and so in 1928 I must have planted the hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now I have just learned that she has gone insane, and that in her room all the mirrors are covered, because she sees my reflection in them -- usurping her own -- and she trembles and cannot speak, and says that I am magically following her, watching her, stalking her.
What dreadful bondage, the bondage of my face -- or one of my former faces. Its odious fate makes me odious as well, but I don't care anymore.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
Why You Should Never Plagiarize
So some guy in Tisch thought it would be a good idea to plagiarize an animation and submit it to a festival. He won the festival, but was found out by his peers.
While the "whole story," as the loud-mouthed whistle-blower (who is friends with my roommate) likes to spew everywhere, is that the director denied it for days until pressure from the film crew forced him to confess and withdraw his film, I think this has brought out a lot of useless ire. Essentially, people are being really unforgiving and cruel.
There's a lot to bring up about this, whether it's the way the public responds to plagiarism, or maybe that sense of intense competition Marcelle brought up when we were discussing MFA programs. I'm of the belief that students here, and especially in Tisch, can be unnecessarily hostile.
Perhaps most baffling is that the short, though it won the Campus Film Festival or whatever, is pretty bad. I watched it before I watched the film from which is stole and yet the French animation still resonated about three thousand times more deeply.
Thoughts? I know Gwynna's in the film program, where, according to my roommate, this has blown up.
While the "whole story," as the loud-mouthed whistle-blower (who is friends with my roommate) likes to spew everywhere, is that the director denied it for days until pressure from the film crew forced him to confess and withdraw his film, I think this has brought out a lot of useless ire. Essentially, people are being really unforgiving and cruel.
There's a lot to bring up about this, whether it's the way the public responds to plagiarism, or maybe that sense of intense competition Marcelle brought up when we were discussing MFA programs. I'm of the belief that students here, and especially in Tisch, can be unnecessarily hostile.
Perhaps most baffling is that the short, though it won the Campus Film Festival or whatever, is pretty bad. I watched it before I watched the film from which is stole and yet the French animation still resonated about three thousand times more deeply.
Thoughts? I know Gwynna's in the film program, where, according to my roommate, this has blown up.
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