February 2013
2 posts
Through the Uprights!
[Dear Thomas Friedman: I have written your Sunday column for you. Sincerely, Sean Carman (with special thanks to Ezra Klein and Lucia Graves)]
I was taking a cab from National Airport to my apartment in Washington the other day. I live in a gentrifying neighborhood that is home to a rising, fairly well integrated class of African-American, Ethiopian, and white beneficiaries of globalization and...
A Brief Ode to Richard III
Beneath space 5 King Richard lies; Of his bones the tarmac’s made; Those potholes were once his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, His welcome here is o’er-stayed Six centuries’ fines unpaid. Parking maidens ring his knell: Ding-dong. Hark! now I hear them — Bloody hell.
January 2013
4 posts
First They Came for My Assault Rifle
I wrote this piece early in the morning on the day after the Newtown shooting, at the small desk in my room at the Milwaukee Hilton, where I spent the month of December for work. Yesterday it ran on McSweeney’s, to mark the passing of one month since the tragedy.
Resolutions
My new year’s resolution was to be more present. As a result, I spent the first few weeks of the new year scolding myself whenever I caught myself daydreaming, or absent-mindedly leaving my apartment without something I meant to bring along (the shoes I needed to take to the shoe repair store, for example). One day last week I caught myself returning the ice cream to the refrigerator. Later...
Geoff Dyer Writing About Not Being Able to Write
The best circumstance for writing, I realized within days of arriving at Alonissos, were those in which the world was constantly knocking at your door; in such circumstances, the work you were engaged in generated a kind of pressure, a force to keep the world at bay. Whereas here, on Alonissos, there was nothing to keep at bay, there was no incentive to generate any pressure within the work,...
Precipice
“This time,” the Speaker said, “we have to insist on massive spending cuts.”
“Absolutely,” his first aide said.
“But we cannot propose any cuts ourselves,” the Speaker said.
“Goes without saying,” the first aide said.
“Wait,” the second aide said. “Why not?”
The Speaker and the first aide looked at him.
“I mean, for the sake of argument,” he said.
“Because no one wants them,”...
September 2012
2 posts
Kryl's Horn Still Blows
This weekend I was in Crawfordsville, Indiana, attending a celebration of the life and work of my great grandfather, the 1930’s cornettist and bandmaster Bohumir Kryl. Kryl carved the Indiana limestone friezes on the Victorian man-cave (personal study) built by Crawfordsville resident General Lew Wallace, the Civil War hero who wrote the novel Ben Hur. After completing the sculptures,...
Michelle Dean on Leaving "Brooklyn"
We’ve all read personal essays that lurch from one subject to the next, their loosely-connected ideas rolling along like train cars threatening to jump a disjointed track. Michelle Dean’s Saturday Rumpus essay on realizing your dream by leaving the place most associated with it organizes its themes into a streamlined whole. Like any good story, every turn feels at once surprising and...
August 2012
7 posts
An Interesting Case of Fertility among the Peasant...
“It happened the previous year Kardamanov had sent to the magazine Niva an article entitled “An Interesting Case of Fertility among the Peasant Population,” and receiving a reply which reflected unfavorably on his pride as an author, he complained bitterly to his neighbors, thereby earning the reputation as a writer.”
Anton Chekhov, “St. Peter’s Day”
An English Translation of William Giraldi’s Review...
[With apologies to William Giraldi.]
In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, William Giraldi wrote an inexcusably vicious review of Alix Ohlin’s novel Inside and her story collection Signs and Wonders.
Unfortunately, Giraldi didn’t write his review in English. Instead, he wrote it in an ornamental, hyperbolic, pseudo-intellectual approximation of English, that employed synonyms and...
"These Things Will Make All of Us Just a Little...
But for me this trial is a “so-called” trial. And I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of falsehood and fictitiousness, of sloppily disguised deception, in the verdict of the so-called court.
Because all you can deprive me of is “so-called” freedom. This is the only kind that exists in Russia. But nobody can take away my inner freedom. It lives in the word, it will go on living thanks to...
“So thought Pierre, and the whole of this general deception which everyone accepts, accustomed as he was to it, astonished him each time as if it were something new.”
— War and Peace
On Usain Bolt
You might think he has the perfect sprinter’s name, but in fact Mercury, the winged messenger, would be even better: A fleet, antic envoy between the mortals and the Gods.
Olympic Poetry
Here’s my favorite of the Olympic poems I’ve found so far, “Once More,” by the Slovenian poet Ales Steger, featured on NPR’s Poetry Games. Translator Brian Henry notes that the Slovenian title would translate into “Encore” in French, but encore is an English word, too, and would make a better title.
So here it is, “Encore” by Ales Steger:
Encore
If a great idea is translated into a body, Then...
The Poems of the 30th Olympiad
McKayla
On the runway she is either a rocket sled or a girl sprinting toward a dream or both, but on the vault she is an uncoiled spring.
In the air she is a galaxy —bright, stretched out, spinning with celestial grace. She lands like a thrown-down switchblade — thump. Arms raised, it’s over in an instant.
On the Small Travesties of NBC’s Olympics Coverage
On the...
July 2012
4 posts
Naked Characterization!
Before William Giraldi turned Alix Ohlin’s novel Inside into a small sensation by giving it such an underservedly vicious review, I reviewed Alix’s novel for the Rumpus.
At some point in Inside, Alix Ohlin’s elegant second novel, you will probably notice, as I did toward the end, that her characters have a lot of sex. I mean a LOT of sex.
Holy cow do they have a lot of sex.
Read...
The Pulitzer Prize Debacle: A Confession
By Sean Carman
Believe me, I was as surprised as anyone to find myself sandwiched between New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and Joyce Dehli, Vice President for News at Lee Enterprises, at one end of a long line of battered wooden tables, under a stained glass window depicting Lady Liberty floating on a cloud.
How had I been chosen to serve on the Pulitzer Prize Board? Beats me. Like a...
On Afternoon Thunderstorms
One of my favorite things about growing up in Laramie, Wyoming was the afternoon thunderstorms that rolled through in the summers. Every day, it seemed, after a morning and early afternoon of sunshine, gathering clouds would darken the land, pour down rain, and fill the sky with bolts of light and thunder. Then the skies would clear, as quickly as the clouds had formed, and when you went back out...
The Thinking Man's Rape Joke
Lindy West’s piece on Gawker is the best thing I read about Daniel Tosh’s insensitive rape joke at the Laugh Factory two Fridays ago. (Tosh either responded to a heckler by joking she should be raped, or said to a woman in the audience who asked him not to talk about rape, “You sound like you got raped by, like, five guys or something.” For purposes of the ensuing internet...
June 2012
7 posts
My Cartoon Caption Contest Entry
I’ve thought about posting my entries here before, but I worried I wasn’t allowed to if the contest was still continuing. But then I learned that Roger Ebert posts his entries on his Chicago Sun-Times journal page. Well, if Ebert can do it, so can I!
Here’s my (almost certainly) losing entry for contest number 340:
On the Book Publishing Anti-Trust Settlement
As Michelle Dean points out on the Rumpus today, Monday is the deadline for public comments on the Consent Decree in the settlement of the United States’ anti-trust lawsuit against publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to fix the prices of e-books they sold to Amazon.
Michelle’s piece mentions Ken Auletta’s piece in the June 25 issue of the New Yorker (available here...
Jonah Lehrer: Self-Aggregator
Jonah’s Lehrer’s habit of recycling his own content is being referred to as “self-plagiarism,” which is, of course, oxymoronic, as Michelle Dean points out in this excellent piece. You can’t plagiarize yourself.
What he’s doing, it seems to me, is self-aggregating. He’s taking content from, say, Wired, that he wrote, and presenting it on the New Yorker...
From "Little Golf Pencil" (A Poem)
Still, after all that sitting around in the courtyard eating sandwich halves, I had a nice feeling of sharing, so when they asked me if I had anything else to say I told them that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world. They seemed satisfied with that. Cops, they’re all so young.
From...
Conversations in Paris, Part Deux
Here’s another exchange I had with the locals, this time with two young guys working in the Apple Store in the gift shop section of the Louvre:
Me: Bonjour!
Apple Worker No. 1: Bonjour!
Me: Je suis désole. Je suis un American. Je parle soulement en pieux Francais.
Apple Worker No. 1: It’s no problem. I speak a little English.
Me: Je voudre … uh . . Je voudre to buy a Macbook...
Excerpts from my Paris Trip, Part 1
One of the exciting things about traveling to Paris is that you get to practice the French you’ve been learning in your classes at home. On actual Parisians!
My trip was no exception. Take, for example, this conversation I had, on the second day of my trip, with the waitress at a small bar in the neighborhood where I was staying:
Waitress: Bonjour.
Me: Bonjour.
Waitress: Pour boir?
Me:...
From the Wikipedia entry for the Galician-Portuguese word “Saudade”, which I discovered through the twitter feed of Anuskha Jasraj (@anushkajasraj):
Saudade was once described as “the love that remains” after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the...
May 2012
2 posts
Busboys and Bistros
My favorite thing about this essay by Jackie Kruszewski is the way it embraces, and revels in the delights of, a job that most of us would consider stressful and exhausting. It’s true: Jackie loves waitressing. She does it for fun.
Last year (or maybe it was the year before?), Jackie asked me to recommend a book by a Russian author. She was canvassing friends for travel-appropriate...
Big Time
Here is the story I told at the Story League contest “Odd Jobs: Things We’ve Done for Money,” at Busboys and Poets on Sunday.
———
Big Time By Sean Carman For six months I lived in a hotel, in Boise, Idaho, working on a trial in federal court.
It was like being chained to the wheel of suffering.
For one thing, every day was the same. We had breakfast, then...
April 2012
8 posts
We Want it To Be True: My Interview with Elif...
Elif Batuman was kind enough to let me interview her on the Rumpus. We talked about Mike Daisey’s narrative transgressions, his public treatment, and Tolstoy’s background research for War and Peace.
The five people who read this blog will know that these are issues I can’t stop thinking about — well, except for the part about War and Peace, that was news to me. Mike Daisey...
A Memoir Writing Tip from Darin Strauss
Last night, in exchange for a modest contribution to a cause I love, I got to stand in author Susan Shreve’s living room and listen to Darin Strauss talk about his memoir, Half a Life.
Strauss’ memoir is about the life-long secret he kept about the girl who darted in front of his car on her bicycle when she was 18, killing herself and leaving Strauss to face a lifetime of grief and...
How Steve Saved Civilization
I wrote this story for Steve Souryal on the third anniversary of his reading series, the lowercase, at the Big Bear Coffee House in Washington’s Bloomington neighborhood.
How Steve Saved Civilization. Or a Small Piece of it, Anyway. By Sean Carman In late December of 1993, a dying Charles Bukowski, the poet laureate of skid row, was using the last of his strength to finish the manuscript...
A Biography for Steve Souryal
Wednesday was the third anniversary of the lowercase, a reading series at the Big Bear Cafe featuring the work of 826DC volunteers.
For some time now, Steve Souryal, the series founder and host, has been introducing his readers with fictional reader bios.
For the series’ third anniversary, DC writer William Bert arranged to have regular lowercase readers offer fake biographies of...
A Note on Kayden Kross
But that got me out of bed and onto the Spanish tile of the floor, slow and barefoot, cold soaking through to the bone. It felt like home back when home was my grandma’s. I washed my face in cold water and dried off with what smelled like a line-dried towel, like it was scented by the same fruit tree that hangs above my grandma’s with the sun bleached wooden clothes pins and the sagging rope....
Roadside Assistance
I had to call my insurance company to arrange to have my car towed, because it wouldn’t start. Here is a partial transcript of the conversation:
Insurance Representative: Emergency roadside assistance. Are you in your car and are you safe?
Me: I’m not in my car. I’m calling from my office.
Insurance Representative: But are you safe?
Me: I think so.
The Edge of Heaven
Fatih Akin’s 2007 film is a masterpiece. On the surface, it is a complicated story about a Turkish prostitute working in Hamburg, whose murder prompts her killler’s son to locate and help her daughter, a Kurdish political activist in love with a Hamburg student. On a deeper level, it is about blindness, and the peace that comes from seeing others with compassion.
The movie circles...
More on Mike Daisey
On Tuesday of last week, Mike Daisey appeared at D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theater, ostensibly as part of a forum to discuss the theater’s decision to bring Daisey’s show back for a limited run this summer, but in fact it wasn’t clear what Daisey was trying to do. He offered an apology but didn’t explain what, exactly, he thought he had done wrong, beyond a vague...
March 2012
4 posts
On Mike Daisy and This American Life
I just finished listening to the This American Life episode recounting the lies in Mike Daisy’s monologue about working conditions at Apple factories in China. This American Life broadcast parts of Daisy’s monologue in an earlier show. Having learned that many of the scenes depicted in Daisy’s monologue never took place, and that many of his claims in the monologue aren’t...
Let Franzen Be Franzen
“Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose…it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters.”
With those words, Jonathan Franzen set off a small internet firestorm.
He said them in in New Orleans, where author Jami Attenberg wrote them down, and then put them on her blog, saying she was “sort of infuriated.” Her post was...
This was pretty funny . . .
An Essayist's Lament
One of my favorite passages from What We Should Have Known, N + 1’s pocket discussion book of literary regrets:
Keith Gessen: I want to move us into life choices. Does anybody regret the profession they have chosen?
Mark Greif: I have no profession. Whatever profession I do, I regret it.
Benjamin Kunkel: What do you … mean? What are you talking about?
Mark Greif: I regret it!
...
February 2012
1 post
My Favorite Rockabilly Band
I ventured out to Arlington with my notebook and my camera and wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about my good friends The Highallers. The story is here.
November 2011
1 post
From the Mailbag!
My longtime friend Lawrence Averill learned from the “About” page on this blog that I’m proud to have received encouraging rejection letters from some of America’s finest literary publications. Wanting to help me out, and understanding that you can never have too many rejection letters from America’s finest literary publications, Larry sent this along …
Dear...
Literary Death Match
I first read my own writing in public more than ten years ago, at the Lux coffee bar in downtown Seattle, as part of a reading series sponsored by the newly-formed Hobart and Monkeybicycle magazines. I remember being terrified. The first public readings I did were the only time I questioned my decision to try to become some kind of writer. “Maybe,” I thought, “I could be the kind...
October 2011
3 posts
A Review of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Radio Panamericana in Lima, Peru, is the Huffington Post of 1950’s Latin radio. Its prospects rise and fall on its advertising revenue, it copies news items from more reputable sources, and it even has the radio counterpart of slide shows of half-naked, intoxicated celebrities: daily radio soap operas. The news side of the operation may be more reputable, but the daily melodramas drive...
See the Links in the Right-Hand Column?
See them over there?
It took me forever to figure out how to do that.
More content here soon …
September 2011
2 posts
I flew back from Tunisia through Paris, and...
It's Better in the Second Kingdom
Inspired by Elif Batuman’s piece in the September Harper’s, I finally finished the Hollanders’ translation of The Inferno, which I started last year. Naturally, when I had finished the Inferno (Spoiler! Hell is pretty much as you’ve heard: a frozen wasteland with Satan at its very center, half-buried in ice, chomping on the body of Judas), I plunged straight into The...
August 2011
3 posts
Watch This Space!
We have it from a reliable source that a spooky dream I had will appear on the blog of a well-known literary critic. Stay tuned!
Update: Posted! SPOOKY READER DREAM REVEALS POTENTIAL LOCATION OF LOST DANTE MSS
I Saw Nick Drake: A Note on My Fifth Dispatch
I titled my fifth McSweeney’s dispatch on the Tunisian revolution “Ways of Seeing,” after the Jon Berger’s slender collection of art criticism.
I was either paying tribute to Berger’s book, or stealing its title, I’m not sure which. But I spent a lot of time wondering whether I should find a way to acknowledge that it was Berger’s title, not mine. I...
The Douchebags of Florence
The always-entertaining Elif Batuman has written four blog posts over the last several weeks about her back-and-forth with a Harper’s editor over her use of the word “douchebags” to describe the residents of Florence as they appear in Dante’s Inferno.
There are four posts, and they are worth your careful study (start here), not only because they are entertaining, but also...
