Crime Always Pays, Shakespeare-style

Amazingly enough, Declan Burke, Irish crime novelist and reviewer, has managed to dig up Shakespeare's own treatise on writing. Yes, I could just post the discovery under my own name, but apparently theft is only allowed if you're a genius. Crime always pays, except when it doesn't...Here's the Bard's first rule of writing:

1. Write ye not a new tale if’t can at all be helped. Plunder thou yon histories, myths and pre-Renaissance Italian romances for plot, setting, character, structure, style and theme. If anyone notice, claim ye homage.

For the other nine, I'm afraid you're just going to have to hit the link.

Bathers

Photography can be a bit hit and miss with me. Much of what gets raves in contemporary art culture leaves me a bit cold, and with photographs in particular, I can often feel that the virtues of composition don't make up for the fact that I can't connect in any meaningful way with them.

But coming across Massimo Vitali in the Winter 2009 issue of The Paris Review, I realize that I'm not that as jaded as I might think.

I'm sure we've all seen countless pictures of crowds on beaches and in the water. For me, at least, they are usually more interesting if they are historic shots. You tend to focus on what is different than today's beach fashion and etiquette, and maybe have a kind of ghostly people about people long vanished. Sometimes it's just the sheer density of the crowd that attracts the eye.

Somehow, though, Massali's photographs are all about individual human beings. Although the Paris Review article talks a bit about how he does it, I'm not sure that this goes a long way toward explaining how he manages this multi-individual focus. I think the comparison they make to Breughel is apt--you do see a vast crowd and then slowly stop and look at individual details. But the difference from Breughel is also instructive--Massali doesn't have entire control over who falls within the frame and who doesn't.

And what people are doing in these pictures is not necessarily so entertaining (because foreign to us) as Breughels are of a long vanished culture. And yet Massali has a way of making them all dramatically interesting. You sense that they are all involved in their own life dramas, which are as interesting to them as your own are to you.

The palette, too, is beautiful, which is also surprising. The bright colors of contemporary swimwear against pale beaches and often pale tropical seas is striking. I think we tend to look on cheap commercial fashion colors, and yet seen from afar we can know it as both beautiful and vital.

In the end, I'm not sure that I have explained the allure of these photographs at all. What I can say is that I stopped and reveled in them for awhile in wonder.

More shameless self-promotion, but for a good cause

After my last post, this is all bound to look a little fishy, but I found out today that my submission has been chosen "Pick of the Week" for the Matchbook Story blog. You can view it here, at least till February 5th, when the next pick of the week will appear there.

Which, if you get a move on right now, could be you!

Matchbook Story

Here is a very cool idea from a friend and former coworker, Kyle Petersen. If you check out Matchbook Story you'll pretty much figure it out, but I just thought I would vouch for the enterprise and also say that I'm pretty excited about someone I know getting into the publishing game. From small seeds grow...well you get the idea.

Sneezing at the Sun

I happened on an interesting article about sneezing over at the Care2 website today. Although this post may seem like a lazy way to keep the blog updated--which, in fact, it is--in truth, there are one or two things that have puzzled me about sneezing for a long time. Although I understand about sneezing with colds and allegies, there are a couple of things that make me sneeze which puzzle me. One is chocolate--okay, that might be an allergy, but there is no other effect, and given that, I'd prefer to remain in denial if I can. The other, though, is that if I happen to look up towards the sun, I sneeze. It's actually one of my earliest childhood memories.

Thanks to Care2, I now know that there is something called "photic sneezing", or "autosomal dominant compelling helio-ophthamalic outburst". Which, not quite convincingly, is turned into the acronym ACHOO. What it means is that bright light causes you to sneeze. The only bright light that has ever caused me to do this is the sun, as far as I know. One in three people do it and it's hereditary.

At least according to Wikipedia, sneezing is governed by the trigeminal nerve, and it appears that in some people the optic nerve and this one are very connected, so that when the first is overstimulated, the second causes you to sneeze. In fact, there's some evidence that the overstimulation of any nerve near the trigeminal nerve can create this effect--suddenly breathing cold air, or eating very strongly flavored food.

Interestingly, no one in my family ever seemed to know what I was talking about when I mentioned this experience. It would be a shame if, after all these years, this was the way I found out I was adopted.

The Two Year Novel Writing course at Forward Motion

I just realized that this was the perfect place to post a link to Forward Motion for Writers, and in particular the two year novel writing course that is due to begin again in 2010. It's free, it's highly structured, and this may be the last year it is available to everyone for free. I've done it once before, petered out a bit before it was all done, but still have material I want to work on from it. I'm planning to start 2010 off with a bang, and this looks like a good way to do it. The Two Year Novel course is here. Check it out.

But don't wait too long to decide, because January is upon us.

Fifty Best Lit Blogs

Emerging Writers Network, one of the blogs I watch (though not in as thorough a way as I'd like), posted a link to this "best of blogs" sort of list. EWN made that list. There's a lot here for the literarily minded. I post it now mainly because it makes it easy for me to return to it once I have an hour or two.

Of course, most of my favorite blogs aren't on it...