The doors open at 7:00PM at Ladder 15 located at 1528 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, 19102. Tickets are available online, or at the door.

Now, I will focus on the first thing I saw this morning when I got onto the computer. My friend sent me the link to a hot sauce company. I LOVE HOT SAUCE and everything spicy (I heard the LDM tonight will be pretty hot)! BUT, this is not just a hot sauce company: it is home made, all natural and named after a few sweet dogs. Each dog has an online bio and each is paired with their own hot sauce based off of their personality. The company goes by the name of Ladybird & Friends, and 5% of their profits go to the ASPCA. There is a reel of recipes, and a blog attached to the website.

When I can afford it, I cannot wait to try some of these interesting, but delicious sounding hot sauces (Hot Pink Grapefruit). What is better than hot sauce and dogs?

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/16/orwells-nineteen-eig.html

Author Dani Shapiro, perhaps best known for the best-selling Slow Motion, her memoir of decadence and death, sits in as editor in the tenth entry in the Best New American Voices series: the 2010 edition.

How I am reading the best voices of 2010 while sitting a 2009 living room is beyond me. Perhaps the suggestion is that these time-traveling voices are the ones we ought to watch for in the new year. I was never much good at science.

At any rate, a leisurely 8-hour bus trek from Massachusetts to Philadelphia (including the obligatory breakdown at the side of the highway, but the extent of literature I could make out in the darkness were terse text messages) provided me with plenty of time to chisel my way through Shapiro’s selections, gleaned from writing programs and summer conferences such as Bread Loaf and Sewanee. So far the memorably named Boomer Pinches has underwhelmed, David James Poissant writes of broken father-son relationships with the same exterior grit and interior sentimentality of a Bruce Willis character, Claire O’Connor tackles cancer and great white sharks, and Christian Moody of the University of Cincinatti outdoes his peers with the truly original “Horusville,” a place where trees have eyes and record the lurid private lives of the town residents.

The Best New American Voices series first came on the scene in that dastardly year 2000 (remember stocking up on water and canned green beans? I know you do) and has since been edited by, in addition to the changing yearly guest editors, executive editor John Kulka and writer and critic Natalie Danford.

There are two types of Household Names. Strain A of Household Names are so pervasive that even a young Hellen Keller would have a hard time escaping them: Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Danielle “superfluous use of adjectives like ‘velvety’ or ‘dazzling”” Steele.

Then there is Strain B of Household Names, subtype Not-Really-Indie-Indies, the literary equivalent of films like I Heart Huckabees or Little Miss Sunshine. Hollywood? Not quite. But art house? I don’t think so. These writers are more often known by their works than their names — The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera), What is the What (Valentino Achak Deng), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers).

Then, we have those writers who are not exactly obscure, for no writer, published, in print, read by eyes not belonging to friends and family and exes who cock their heads and wonder, Is that character me? is ever really obscure. But they are not household names, not even in the homes of self-styled intellectuals who make lots of references to Camus or Colette.

Kate Braverman is one of these not-exactly-obscurities. Born in 1950 and based in L.A., I feel Braverman deserves a bit of applause for her ventures into experimental hybrids of prose and poetry. Her short story “Vanishing Acts,” featured in the Spring 2004 issue of the Mississippi Review, goes out on a limb — out on a tightrope — and dashes plot and character to the ground in favor of sheer atmosphere. How lazy, bitter aspiring writers may be tempted to think — but “Vanishing Acts” is anything but. Braverman successfully takes an abstract concept and manages to conjure up exactly what she means while never directly explaining herself.

“This is how to vanish,” her — story? poem? essay? — begins. “[Vanished women] wear boots because they prefer walking,” she writes. “It’s the only way to become intimate with a city. You must kiss each brick, each cobblestone with your feet.”

We are never allowed to know explicitly what a vanished woman is. But we feel it. The writing is heard with the bones, not the eyes.

Evenson won an O. Henry award for his story “Two Brothers” in 1998.  He has published numerious collections of short stories, including The Wavering Knife and Altmann’s Tongue. Interestingly enough, Evenson even wrote a media tie-in novel for the Aliens franchise under B. K. Evenson entitled Aliens: No Exit, 2008.

…Now what?

On October 17, 2009, Rosemont College (located in Rosemont, PA, at 1400 Montgomery Avenue) is hosting an all-day writer’s workshop. For a fee of $75 — okay, maybe not a drop in the bucket for the average college student, but hear me out — you gain access to a whole slew of events from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. You can find the whole schedule in detail here, but for starters, you’ll:

• get breakfast and lunch
• hear published authors speak
• take your manuscript through a round of “speed-dating” with real editors (just like during Drexel’s own Week of Writing — and if you missed it, check out my article)
• breakout sessions including topics like “Finding a Home for your Short Story,” “Polishing your Poetry,” “How to Succeed in Submissions,” “Do I Need a Publicist?” and more.

So get your baby out in the world!

But for me, Twitter had to go.

I parted ways with my account some 3 days ago. The obituary should be appearing soon in newspapers around the globe, spinning in black and white toward the camera with melodramatic trombone tones announcing the end.

Why delete my Twitter account?

A waste of time, yes. Inherently stupid, sure. Flamboyantly meaningless, absolutely. But what really bothered me about my Twitter usage was that it was sucking blood from my writing. My writing.

Free to constantly rattle off any fragment, any snatch of a sentence that sounded good, what was at first liberating was quick to become tiresome. The phrases I found myself constantly splashing up were pointlessly cryptic, not intriguing. They were lazy, not profound. It’s not as though you can edit “tweets.”

I realize of course that Twitter doesn’t claim to be, or want to be, some powerhouse writer’s tool. It’s a fun, silly little outlet for all the run-over Facebook can’t contain. But I have to be a writer first — I can’t trade off instant gratification for dilution.

So, I say tweeting is for the birds.

The Paris Review‘s spring 2009 issue also features a bland interview with Annie Proulx who regrets writing Brokeback Mountain and claims that creative writing students should learn to “cut their teeth” on novels first because the short story and novella form is harder to control because of its limited length.

And why should they have? After all, she’s notoriously — okay, maybe that’s stretching a bit, but at the very least, she’s, shall we say, notably reticent about her personal life. Even in fits of spontaneous Googling, I’ll catch the leak on you, Carson!, the only readily available info out there seems to be that she lives in Canada and does a lot of translation, plus some poetry.

What kind of poetry? The pretentious kind, according to critic James Pollock.

Well, that’s quaint, because it also happens to be the kind of poetry that appeals to someone — that’s me, by the way — more likely to make fun of poetry than take it seriously.

I recently read her book The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. I have to concede — not the most accessible title. But non-accessible doesn’t have to be synonymous with non-pretentious, and in Carson’s case, it isn’t. It’s intelligent; it’s challenging; it isn’t your chapbook of poetry clichés, you won’t find any rants about consumerism or bitter comparisons between losing one’s virginity and dying animals. It tracks the endless decline of a doomed marriage between two artists, even beyond their divorce.

One of my favorite bits, from “II. BUT A DEDICATION IS ONLY FELICITOUS IF PERFORMED BEFORE WITNESSES — IT IS AN ESSENTIALLY PUBLIC SURRENDER LIKE THAT OF STANDARDS OF BATTLE”:

“He seemed happy. You’re like Venice he said beautifully.
Early next day
I wrote a short talk (“On Defloration”) which he stole and had published
in a small quarterly magazine.
Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.
Or should I say ideal.
Neither of us had ever seen Venice.”

The poem in its entirety can be read here.