"Mount Rushmore Carved With a Swiss Army Knife"

With the theatrical adaption of The Road finally arriving, Cormac McCarthy's ol' mug has been popping up everywhere - newspapers, magazines, online, right here. I remember reading The Crossing in high school, the second installment in his Border Trilogy, and not liking it. Despite its beautifully described violence, which I didn't know could exist, I was confused and too young to understand such a sparse world and such a different view on humanity. The Road, however, destroyed my preemptive and immature view on McCarthy's writing. With 2010 quickly approaching, it will undoubtedly be considered one of the best books of this decade.

This is not my point though. Neither is Hilcoat's film adaptation of the book (I haven't seen it yet, but his previous film The Proposition was certifiably "badass," so I have pretty high hopes). My point comes down to this sweet little bitty right here:

This is Cormac McCarthy's typewriter. As the New York Times article explains, he bought it in 1963 for $50 and typed every novel of his on it.

And he's giving it away.

The proceeds, which are expected to be between $15,000 and $20,000, will go to his beloved Santa Fe Institute. Glenn Horrowitz, the rare-book dealer handling the sale, marvels at the "talismanic" quality to the typewriter that wrote novels like The Road, Blood Meridian, The Crossing, Child of God, etc.: "It's as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife."

I love typewriters. I love Olivetti typewriters. I love a writer of a bygone generation who refuses a computer, a word processor, electricity. But is not some part of him sentimental over the typewriter? Despite buying an exact replica on Ebay, won't he be nostalgic for that one he spent so many hours with, clacking away on his novels? I guess, as his literature would also lead you to believe, Mr. McCarthy is not a sentimental person. The typewriter must seem just an incidental tool in the process he loves and slaves over. He says in this great interview with The Wall Street Journal, one of two ever granted (his one with Oprah is dreadful and awkward to watch, but inspiring if you just close your eyes and imagine it's on the radio), writing itself is the vacation:

"I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time. [...] I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."

As always, well said.

In other news, YouWillGetPapercuts will be accepting tax deductible donations, anywhere from $5 to $15,000. Or $20,000. Whatever you can spare.

Anger = Fuel

"I will confess to you now that anything I have ever accomplished as a writer, as somebody doing TV, as anything I have ever done in life down to, like, cleaning up my room, has been accomplished because I was going to show people that they were fucked up and wrong and that I was the fucking center of the universe, and the sooner they got hip to that, the happier they would all be … That’s what’s going on in my head."

-David Simon,

creator of "The Wire"

I am an unabashed fan of The Wire and David Simon has in many ways become the end-all-be-all to me, not only in his being a journalist, a screenwriter, a novelist, a newspaper advocate, etc., but because his anger seems palpable in anything he pours himself into. His ego may seem bigger than Baltimore, but at least he's a screenwriter with convictions.

His statement also brings up one of the bigger(biggest?) questions about writing, whether it's short stories, poems, essays, articles, novels, blogs: Who are you and why does what you're writing matter to me in my separate universe?

Sometimes, definitely in Mr. Simon's case, anger and self-righteousness can help the writer blaze on through that question. Others, as Dubus' quote a few posts back about Hemingway's "lack of talent" shows, have doubts about their worth as writers and their perception on the human condition.

So maybe we should take a lesson from David Simon every once in a while. If we hit a brick wall or come to an impasse filled with doubt, tear that shit down and shout, "I am the smartest motherfucker who ever constructed a sentence."

Andre Dubus' "Letter to a Writers' Workshop"

"We can't make them perfectly, only as best we can. Hemingway once said that he had very little natural talent and what people called his style was simply his effort to overcome his lack of talent. Don't take it lightly. What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?"

-Andre Dubus
"Letter to a Writers' Workshop"
MEDITATIONS FROM A MOVABLE CHAIR

Hiatus

Youwillgetpapercuts is hereby resurrected.

The summer hiatus is over.

Let the posting begin.

"Everything's okay."

Dov Alfon, editor-in-chief of Israeli newspaper Haaretz, decided to give all of his journalists the day off last Wednesday and have the news scribed by some of Israel's finest living authors instead. It proved to be a worthwhile experiment.

Avri Herling's stock market report:

"Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again…."

The weather, a poem by Roni Somek:

"Summer is the pencil
that is least sharp
in the seasons’ pencil case."

The New York Times would never do something like this. And even if they did, would that New Yorker sensibility get the best of the authors and make the news even more neurotic, paranoid, and pessimistic than it already is?

Thanks to Marcia for the link.

Daily Math

This:

Plus This:

Will hopefully turn Dan into this:

Photo 1: I paid $2.95 for this notebook. I spend more than that on bagels some days and this Beach Lady Notebook has proven to be more faithful, knowing, and supportive than any bagel I've ever met.

Photo 2: My brand, spankin' new Olivetti Lettera 35 typewriter given to me for the price of on-the-house, courtesy of The-Now-Retired-Eadie.

Photo 3: Raymond Carver typing away in Syracuse, New York, 1984.

Not pictured: My new short fiction workshop at The New School. I paid $647 for this workshop. I could have bought about 216 of my favorite Beach Lady Notebook for that same price. I won't know what the better investment will be until the workshop ends, but I'll keep you posted.

Finally

Yup. She's mine. Don't know what "she" is? Then stay tuned. Plenty more pictures are sure to come.

Novel Approach

"After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally "pure." Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels."

- D.H. Lawrence, LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER

Upon not sleeping I find three poems...

I Want to Sleep

I shall be still stronger,
Still clearer, purer, so let
The sweet invasion of oblivion come on.
I want to sleep.

If I could forget myself, if I were only
A tranquil tree,
Branches to spread out the silence,
Trunk of mercy.

The great darkness, grown motherly,
Deepens little by little,
Brooding over this body that the soul-
After a pause - surrenders.

It may even embark from the endless world,
From its accidents,
And, scattering into stars at the last,
The soul will be daybreak.

Abandoning myself to my accomplice,
My boat,
I shall reach on my ripples and mists
Into the dawn.

I do not want to dream of useless phantoms,
I do not want a cave.
Let the huge moonless spaces
Hold me apart, and defend me.

Let me enjoy so much harmony
Thanks to the ignorance
Of this being, that is so secure
It pretends to be nothing.

Night with its darkness, solitude with its peace,
Everything favors
my delight in the emptiness
That soon will come.

Emptiness, O paradise
Rumored about so long:
Sleeping, sleeping, growing alone
Very slowly.

Darken me, erase me,
Blessed sleep,
As I lie under a heaven that mounts
Its guard over me.

Earth, with your darker burdens,
Drag me back down,
Sink my being into my being:
Sleep, sleep.

- Jorge Guillen, translation by James Wright

Moonrise


Will you glimmer on the sea?
will you fling your spear-head
on the shore?
what note shall we pitch?
we have a song,
on the bank we share our arrows;
the loosed string tells our note:

O flight,
bring her swiftly to our song.
She is great,
we measure her by the pine trees.

-H.D.

Evening


I am strange here and often I am still trying
To finish something as the light is going
Occasionally as just now I think I see
Off to one side something passing at that time
Along the herded walls under the walnut trees
And I look up but it is only
Evening again the old hat without a head
How long will it be till he speaks when he passes

-W.S. Merwin

I remember being young, sitting on my mother's lap in the front seat of our station wagon on the way home. It was past my bedtime and everything, even houses we had passed on the way home again and again, was suddenly exhilarating. I could see the moon through the windshield and no matter how fast we went or what turns we made, the moon was always still there, neck and neck.

"Why is the moon following us?" I asked mom. The rest of the family giggled at me.
"No, honey," she said. "It only looks that way. It stays right there, always."

Clarence Thomas Loves Egg McMuffins

This hilarious post at The Curious Life is definitely worth a look. Bill Geerhart posed as a young boy and wrote letters to the Governator, Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, Clarence Thomas, and others. Some are very very creepy (looking in your direction, Ramirez), while others, like Clarence Thomas' declaration of love for all things McDonald's, are just downright heartwarming.

This reminds me of something ominous I have been thinking about for a while. Unfortunately, letter writing is on its way to being deader than dead. Here's an eerie question: in the future, will Knopf or RandomHouse or any other publishing house be publishing The Collected Emails of So-and-So? Will the opus DiStefano: The Complete GChat Correspondences someday be lost in a Barnes & Noble clearance bin?

What can we do to change something like that?


(Thanks to Marcia for the heads up)

Tragic Age

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

-Opening paragraph of LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
D.H. Lawrence, 1928

Career Shmareer

Pamela Slim has a great article in the New York Times about the economic downfall being as good a' reason as any for leaving your career and pursuing the dream job you've always been, well, dreaming of. Check it out.

If this article makes you turn off your work computer, book it toward the elevator, and happily march off into the sunset never to be seen again by your employers and coworkers, then we at YWGP salute you.

Thanks to Steve for the heads up.

*Any article link we suggest can be reached simply by clicking on the word "article." We're working on changing the link color, but get off our back, we're at work.

Mark Zuckerberg Has Dorm Syndrome

Well, it's lunch time in the Cave, which usually means eating at my desk and watching Woody Allen movies on NetFlix, or facebook-ing. Yes, I am ashamed of myself for using the word "facebook" as a verb, but thanks to Mark Zuckerberg (or Suck-erberg, hahaha, fistbump!), the word is very much a part of the cultural lexicon.

Friends and I were drunkenly discussing the facebook phenomenon, critiquing its new format, debating on whether it's ahead of the times or if the times simply adapt themselves to whatever facebook decides. We came to a sad conclusion that on the most part, present company included, a drastic change in facebook is usually met with a lazy shoulder shrug, a wave of the hand, and an obligatory, "Eh, just trust facebook, I'll adapt to it sooner or later."

So is facebook taking advantage of our generation's rampant ennui, or is Signore Zuckerberg the patron saint of our collective apathy? He is only a 24 year old college dropout who started a website to rate the ladies of his not-quite-alma-mater. This site, however, has morphed into the facebook you all know and love, landing him on Time Magazine's The World's Most Influential People List for 2008, the cursed cover of Forbes magazine, and into the hotseat of being one of the country's youngest CEO's ever. Pretty impressive, until you actually see this douchebag:














Boom. Adidas sandals? And I trusted this asshole? Adidas sandals, every time all the time. This isn't a fucking swim meet, you rich prick. We're not in a dorm shuffling from our bedroom to the showers. We're running a multimillion dollar company and cyberstalking each and every one of our clients. At least wear dress socks. Or better yet, lets do a little Mark Zuckerberg Exchange Program: I'll slip around in your sandals and NorthFace fleece, chestbumping my fellow douches all day, and you come wear the dorkyasssshit I wear to work and put in a 9-to-5 in the Cave. You wouldn't last an hour.

Zuckerberg looks like the kind of dude who roofies the Gatorade at a high school girls field hockey game. So it's no wonder his newly amended Terms of Service is essentially an internet gangrape on your rights, allowing facebook ownership of anything and everything you post, always and forever. Beware Zuckerberg. I know you're standing on the mountain that is facebook, looking down at your minions, chanting "I own you" while high fiving yourself, but there will come a day when you're nothing more than a synonym for Friendster.

So I have a new motto: Don't Trust Facebook. In order of this motto, I will be making t-shirts:



Contact youwillgetpapercuts@gmail.com if you're interested in purchasing one.

The Cave-Dan

This is where the magic happens. Co-workers have affectionately called this "The Cave." Since there is another Dan working at (Blank) & (Blank) and having two people with the same name in the work place is apparently frowned upon, I have been nicknamed "The Cave-Dan."

Having no sunlight makes it impossible to even have a plant back here. So in some ways, The Cave-Dan is a rare specie. It thrives under artificial light and little human contact; has a regimented diet of packed lunches and high speed internet; is recognized by its poor posture and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Even if I had a window, I'd only be able to see across Park Ave and into other people's offices.

Hi, my name is YouWillGetPapercuts

We at YouWillGetPapercuts are recognizing a sad trend. Is our creativity dying a little from our day jobs, or just getting really stifled? We are firm believers that writers, no matter how “successful,” will write through anything, even a nine-to-five.

We created this space for people like us: young and bright folk who are underpaid, overqualified, and bored.

Admit it. You should be making photocopies, listening in on that important conference call, or getting papercuts while mailing packages off to exotic countries. Instead you're doing character sketches for your first novel, writing song lyrics on the back of a receipt, or making a life-size replica of Michael Jackson's head out of chewing gum and white-out.

Whatever it is that you're doing, show us what you've got. Send us what you’re writing, let us see what pictures you’re taking, clue us in to what we should be listening to, and tell us why you hate your boss and how much better of a job you could do.

We will read anything and everything you send us, but we will only publish what we like.

Work in Progress

Hello friends, family, and internet brethren. We have just begun this experiment and will hopefully update soon....