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Well, I haven't seen him mentioned in the comments yet, so I'll put in a plug for Joe Haldeman. He was a student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, then also taught at U of I for a while. Currently he teaches at MIT.

If you're not into science fiction, you probably wouldn't recognize the name. But he's highly respected in the field, having won several Hugo and Nebula awards.

–jrd

Artists and audiences seek the truth.  Audiences may yearn for “escapist entertainment,” but truth is what they hunger for. Writers may not even realize that they seek truth, but they know when a scene feels “right.” Same thing.

Everyone has a different process for finding truth on the page, but ultimately writers first must find the truth within before they can put it on the page. That may be the scariest thing about writing.

But what does “truth” really mean when it comes to drama?  Calling a scene “honest” is vague. It doesn’t really explain why certain pieces of drama have such tremendous resonance for viewers. Saying that a work is “personal” doesn’t cut it, either, because a personal work may not be truthful and a truthful work may not be personal.

We have to go beyond these petty descriptive words to get at what audiences are looking for when they watch television, and what writers should be aiming for when they compose. As we do, remember that some of the process that we are about to learn occurs in our unconscious. What we need to do is learn how to bring it to our conscious mind to help us tell a story.

Fanciful vs. Imaginative Associations

David Milch who, in his lecture series entitled “The Idea of the Writer” (2007), discusses the concept of “fanciful associations”. The best example of a fanciful association is when you hear a particular song that conjures up some kind of memory for you. The association you make between the song and that memory is a purely personal one, but that song will not have that same association to anyone else. It’s personal and unique to you, and thus defined as fanciful.

Now, if you attempt to dramatize the song with your specific associative moment in a show, it will have very little impact. As Michael Chernuchin said, “You have to depersonalize the experience, and make it universal.”  In Milch’s words, the writer must change that fanciful association into an “imaginative association”, where a commonality of experience that is accessible to everyone’s imagination will give that moment resonance. To do this, he says, you must “neutralize what is initially fanciful and find the common association.”

How does a writer do that?  You must drill down deep into your psyche. You must, as Milch says, “rest transparently in the spirit which gives you rise…in our recollection as artists, an uninterrupted sequence of associations is made available to us which, if carried out, may generate a premise for a story.” 

The premise is our reward for digging in our psychological dirt.  So it is imperative that one follow the chain of associations triggered by a memory and not turn away when they become emotional or revealing.

What is it that this process achieves for us?  Milch quotes a teacher of his who says that, “this…is the process by which everything which seems merely fanciful and is imprisoned in the past, in its seeming unrecoverability, is once again brought to life and conjugated into the future tense of joy.”

In other words, we need to take these memories and associations that may be painful in some way and by converting them into a universal story everyone can relate to, we create something bigger than ourselves, something that harbors resonance and meaning and, therefore, joy.

This is a combination of unconscious and conscious processes.

Let’s see how The Shield fits into this theory. In my interview with Shawn Ryan, he made references to his limited physical stature as a child, and about how difficult it was to “feel like a whole man” when standing next to a member of the Delta Force. And who could blame him? 

So Shawn may have taken a fanciful association of being a boy of small stature (pain of the past), and through a set of imaginative associations, arrived at the iconic alpha-male character of Vic Mackey. He is a deeply flawed character, committed to personal and family gain, but torn by loyalty to his comrades and a sense of justice. These are totally universal and relatable.  Shawn then placed Vic into a venue that interested him intellectually, where these thematic interests could be explored.

Why Truth?

So why is truth so important?

Ultimately, the creative process must be transformative for both artist and audiences; otherwise it is merely an exercise in vanity or craft. Without transformation, the journey itself becomes pointless.

But can you, the writer, seek truth in your material, while working in Hollywood?  The collision between art and commerce makes it difficult. Agents want their clients to specialize in something, since Hollywood employers seek comfort in the form of repeat successes driven by “experts”. We’ll discuss this more in future chapters, but suffice it to say that herein lays the challenge of television.

Ed. Note: This is part two of a two-part series. Part one can be read here.

Excerpts from Inside the TV Writer’s Room: Practical Advice for Succeeding in Television, edited by Lawrence Meyers (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010), by permission. 

Autographed copies available at www.tvwritersroom.com.

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Henry Jenkins has a two part interview (one, two) with Marwan Kraidy, author of
Reality Television and Arab Politics. Jenkins asks:

As you note, many of these reality show formats come from the west but get localized in the Arab context. Can you describe this localization process? To what degree is their western origins central to their political impact?

Kraiday answers:

The localization process underpins the book's main argument that the
Arab reality television controversies are best understood as a social
laboratory where various versions of modernity are tested. The formats'
western origins were never directly important. In the early years of
Arab reality television, 2003 and 2004, critics leveled the charge that
the reality television wave was another episode in a western cultural
conquest trying to impose an alien reality on Arabs and Muslims.

Localization occurred in several ways.

One was a gradual take over by conservative forces. Consider the
case of Algeria, where state television initially aired the Lebanese Star Academy.
After opposition from Islamists, the Algerian president himself is said
to have ordered it off the air, replacing it with a locally-made,
ostensibly more conservative version. One season later, and the same
slot was filled by a Qoranic recitation show, reality style–nominees,
fan mobilization, viewer voting.

Two poetry reality shows epitomize another, and to me far more
interesting, process of localization. Poetry enjoys a status in Arab
culture that it is to my knowledge not accorded anywhere else in the
world. Since pre-Islamic times, poetry is at once art form, political
platform and entertainment. Numerous Arab television channels today
have talk-shows dedicated to poetry, and poets show up on all kinds of
talk-shows for women, youth, etc. A well-known poet in the Arab world
is treated like a rock star. So here comes Abu Dhabi Television,
supported by state financing, with the brilliant idea of launching
poetry competitions, reality television style. The two shows, one
dedicated to Arab poetry at large, the other focused on Gulf poetry,
were major hits. Followers of your blog may have read recently the
story of Hissa Helal, the Saudi woman who reached the finale of one of
these shows, with a poem (in the semi-final) that attacked the
reactionary clerics in her country, a gutsy move that was made partly
possible by the venue–a public, popular poetry competition.

(Hat tip: Jesse Walker)

Poetry's true subject remains words themselves and their delights and vagaries, which is why I want to mention, before considering the books of poems at hand, a nonfiction book with a title that opens a poetic door into what we'd classify as creative nonfiction — a book that is true and not true. And imperturbably biased, which makes it funny. The title is irresistible — The Accidental Adult. The book's subtitle is “Essays and Advice for the Reluctantly Responsible and Marginally Mature” and the author is Colin Sokolowski (from my hometown, St. Paul, Minnesota.) The book is well-written, and ironically demonstrates the confusion admitted to in the title by not including women in its running anecdotes about failed maturity. Only men figure here — in particular only men from a regional, emphatically heterosexual land of “guys.” The word “adult” was not gender-specific the last time I checked, and, despite Sokolowski's “universal” list of “adult skills,” there are whole areas of the country where being an adult does not entail knowing how to load and discharge a shotgun (and where this knowledge might be a reason to think one less of an adult, more an object of deeply wary regard.) But this is a Midwesterner's book of real life and though it doesn't stray far from the familiar Dude Outlook — beer and rock trivia bromides — it's still true that the title opens a door in the mind. We are all Accidental Adults, no? This is a persuasive concept and calls the unquestioned conventions of “Intentional Adults” into question. I had the idea once that each of us should have access to a Responsible Adult, hired to appear in our stead(s) — someone to “show up” and be reasonable, punctual, judicious and civic-minded on our behalf — while “we” stayed in bed and ate Oreos, read Salinger and proffered the opinions of an unemployed social critic. And here is a book devoted to a similar Ferris Bueller-ish credo and cause, replete with the de rigeur “interior monologues” that reveal the ambivalence just under the surface of our mature-seeming organized lives. So I read the book ironically: Sokolowski cops to the limitations of who he is and shares as openly as he can with the other kids in life's classroom.

And now to Poetry, where childhood is the home address. Poets never grow up, of course — but that's another column. In the following discussion of six new books of poems, I must come clean about a few — I have written blurbs for more than one and two of the authors were my students. So: here are brief extended endorsements rather than full-length reviews.

These books are all provocative and beautifully crafted and, in my opinion, worth reading again and again. The themes of loneliness and memory are paramount in all — in Howard Altmann's startling In This House from Turtle Point Press, the two are inextricably wed. “When all that consoled consoles no longer/loneliness finds a room inside the one it knows.” Loneliness is a shelter but also an escape from the familiar — and, in the famous Dickinson example, the result of the soul selecting its own society, then “shutting the door.” These poems seem hermetic, mysterious, but also open, intriguing, welcoming.

The God of Loneliness is the title of a new collection of selected poems by Philip Schultz, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His poems create a persona which is Whitmanesque, great in spirit, alive with chutzpah, talky, darkly funny. Here's a typical amazement: “Sometimes, late at night/we, my happiness and I, reminisce/lifelong antagonists/enjoying each other's company.” There are five of this poet's books represented here — and they provide a history of an utterly engaging original American voice.

Amy Newlove Schroeder's The Sleep Hotel (winner of the Field Prize, Oberlin) is a first book by a poet who has already mastered a style which is gorgeous and intrepid. A few lines: “I don't love you back,/but I flower under your hand, green as limes.” “It's easy to think like Augustine:/ “I understood and then I believed”/I want the opposite.” To read these astonishing poems is to understand how poetry is made anew in the fierce crucible of the imagination.

Becca Klaver's L.A. Liminal (Kore Press) is another first book that illuminates — “a star show: hip, lit, and hallowed.” Read these poems for new insight into Los Angeles, our spectacularly illusory city — by a young poet with incorrigible energy and brilliance.

Finally, Deborah Bogen's Let Me Open You A Swan — her second book –”nourishes the reader” yet creates a sense of boldness and audacity — something “sacred” is sacrificed here, under the constellation Cygnus, or Swan, once called the Northern Cross. Here is a distinctive poetic line, an insistent Anglo-Saxon elegance — another “study” in loneliness and insistent memory.

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John McNally's novel After the Workshop (Counterpoint, 2010) describes a hectic few days in the life of Jack Hercules Sheahan, a media escort in Iowa City, Iowa, forced to take care of preening writers and their unreasonable expectations. Time was, Sheahan was a bit of a star in the Iowa Writers' Workshop himself, having published a well-received story in The New Yorker. But those years are long past. Now Sheahan is derided by the current Workshop instructors, when his presence on the periphery of the action is even recognized. Enter Vanessa Roberts, a memoirist of incest, and also Tate Reinhart, the reigning East Coast literary star, both pressing Sheahan into service. While Sheahan escorts these writers around, at every turn he confronts reminders of his own failed promise. In Tate Reinhart's backward-written words–he takes notes about Sheahan's miserable life for a potential story–”Himself killing from him keeps what?” Jack, of course, discovers this coded message, and wonders what exactly is keeping him from killing himself. A novelist from Sheahan's past, S. S. Pitzer–a “real writer,” we are led to believe–also arrives on the scene, wanting Sheahan to resume writing his masterpiece, which he abandoned years ago; Pitzer is so eager to see this novel finished that he'll undertake the task of completion himself, whether or not Sheahan permits it. It is appropriate that Sheahan eventually gets unblocked due to the helpful ministrations of one Lucy Rogan, a romance novelist he had once escorted and had a crush on. All in all, this is one of the most outrageously funny books I've read in recent years, and the very best novel I have ever read about writing culture. But its appeal goes well beyond writers and would-be writers; its satire is broad enough to take in nearly all of our intellectual and social pretensions in these waning days of empire.

I thought McNally, because he has experienced the Iowa Writers' Workshop firsthand–and lived to tell the funniest tale ever written about it–would be an ideal subject to interview about a lot of concerns in the writing and publishing industries, such as the incorporation of writing into the academy, the relevance of MFA programs, the transition from short story writing to novels, the general political economy of writing–and, of course, the inside scoop on the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Anis Shivani: When did the idea for a satirical novel about the Iowa Writers' Workshop occur to you? I imagine it must have had a long gestational period.

John McNally: About two seconds after graduating from Iowa, back in 1989, I began working on a novel titled Murder at the Writers' Workshop, which I stuck in a folder after twenty pages and never looked at again, but the idea of writing about that world stayed with me. So, the gestation period was almost twenty years. And I guess you could say that I had some issues to work out. I wrote a short story titled “Contributor's Notes” about a writer living in Iowa City. That story, which is included in my collection Ghosts of Chicago, took about six years to get right. Fortunately, I work on a lot of things at the same time, or else I'd be the least prolific writer alive.

A few years ago, I was talking to my then-agent about my days of working as a media escort after I had moved back to Iowa City in the mid-1990s, and she said, “You should write that novel.” That's when the idea of actually writing a full-length novel took root again. Originally, the Writers' Workshop wasn't going to be a part of the book, but once I set the novel in Iowa City and made the narrator a writer with a horrible case of writer's block, I decided to tackle every aspect of the writing and publishing world, including the Workshop. Suddenly, no one and nothing were immune. And that's when I really started having fun writing it.

Shivani: Do you feel purged, having written this novel?

McNally: I do! I don't feel purged when it comes to the absurdities of academia, but as far as the writing world goes…yes, I'm purged. For now. My fear of writing a satire about academia is that I wouldn't be able to stop. It would quickly turn into a multi-volume novel that Time-Life would have to sell on an installment plan.

Shivani: Satirical fiction doesn't seem to get as much recognition or as many awards as the more typical narcissistic fiction. Is it because the reigning aesthetic value is for the reader to be able to identify with characters (mostly grief-stricken), which is harder to do with the unlikeable characters that often populate satire?

McNally: I once taught a course on the history of humor in American literature, and the thing I realized pretty fast was that some people just aren't wired to get humor. We're all wired to recognize moments of grief, but the ability to recognize humor must be housed in a different part of the brain. Or, some people appreciate one kind of humor but fail to find humor in a different kind. Whenever I teach Denis Johnson's story “Emergency” to a class of sixteen students, I'm lucky if two see the humor in it. But the humor in it is dark, and since we're a sentimental culture, we don't want to think that a story in which a character has a knife stuck all the way into his eye can be funny.

I've had students tell me that Flannery O'Connor is dark and depressing, populated with unlikeable characters, and I suppose if you can't see the humor in it, it would be dark and depressing. But here's the thing. She's funny as hell! That's what makes her work transcend the abyss. And here's the other thing. It's not her fault if you don't find her funny.

Shivani: On the other hand, there seems to have been an upsurge lately in works of effective satire. Would you agree with that assessment, and could you point to specific examples that have struck you as accurately reading the cultural moment?

McNally: The 1930s saw the rise, and quick decline, of the protest novel, but those novels, which protested some sort of injustice, weren't funny novels. No one talks about the hilarious, laugh-out-loud adventures of the Joads, for instance. Recently, Jess Walters' The Financial Lives of Poets, a hilarious novel, nails problems with the financial crisis as well as the imminent death of print newspapers. A forthcoming novel by Maya Sloan titled High Before Homeroom does a superb comic job of dealing with, among other things, hero worship. Satire is an excellent vehicle for making the political palatable–and I mean “political” in the broadest sense of the word. Since we're living in deeply divided times, the rise of satire seems inevitable.

Shivani: There has been a lot written in the campus novel genre, both in America and Britain. Many writers continue to try to their hand at the genre, with various degrees of success. This is less true when it comes to taking on writing departments. Is it because it would be too much a case of biting the hand that feeds the writer?

McNally: I'm sure that's true. And I'll confess, I had moments of concern each time I decided to satirize yet another segment of the writing world in my novel, but I'm good at sabotaging myself, so I figured, What the hell…fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

It's also possible that the books are getting written but not published. One recurring reason why my book was rejected, even when it was being championed by editors at various publishing houses, was that it was too insider-ey. Who, except other writers, would want to read the book? Ironically, the only people who've posed that question to me have been other writers and editors. I've gotten plenty of emails from people who aren't writers or editors who've read the book and responded positively to it. After all, the book is really about a guy with a shitty job who's come to a critical point in his life. To my mind, that's universal. If I'd written about a postman at the crossroads of his life, would only postal workers have been interested in it?

Shivani: How do you feel about your writing training on the whole? What are the worst things that stand out for you now? And the best parts of the experience?

McNally: The worst part of my MFA experience was the way that a hierarchy was put into place. I don't know if it's still like that at Iowa, but in the late 1980s, funding was doled out so that there was a clear hierarchy: the Teaching-Writing fellows who taught creative writing on top, those who taught literature just below, those who taught Composition even lower, those who were Research Assistants barely hovering above the bottom, and those without funding–well, they were shit. The hierarchy was reinforced by which students were selected to meet with writers passing through town, who got to eat with them, etc., etc. I didn't have funding my first year, and initially I was one of three who didn't get funding my second and final year. It was only after a visiting editor, who was teaching a summer school course, spoke up on my behalf that I was given a Research Assistantship. I was angry then, but I'm not now, because I started working twice as hard, and it eventually paid off. It motivated me. I still think the hierarchical way things were done was shitty, but I'm the sort of person who, instead of crouching in a corner and feeling sorry for myself, will say, “Fuck you. I'll show you.” The best part of getting an MFA was that I did have good teachers who taught me useful things. My writing improved significantly after two years.

Shivani: Are you more angry or less angry toward writing programs than when you were in the throes of it?

McNally: Less angry. Definitely less angry.

Shivani: Were you ever a media escort yourself?

McNally: Yes, in the mid-1990s, in Iowa City. You wouldn't know it if you've read After the Workshop, but it was a pretty good job. The pay was good. Most of the authors were decent people. A few publicists pissed me off, and I know I pissed off at least one. I tacked on a late fee when one publicist's employer, one of the behemoth publishers, didn't pay me in a timely manner, so the publicist wrote me a personal check and told me my services weren't needed anymore. In my novel, the publicist is gored by a bull in Pamplona.

Shivani: The academy is by nature conservative. It seems impossible when nearly all our writers are affiliated with the academy that their writing won't also become conservative. Do you agree with that?

McNally: Since there are scores of writers affiliated with universities whose work I admire, I have a difficult time making a generalization, but I will say this: To remain at a university, you have to publish; and to get published by a press that your colleagues recognize, you probably have to play it safe, to some extent. But I'm not even sure if that's true. Is George Saunders, who teaches at Syracuse, a conservative writer? Is T. C. Boyle, who teaches at University of Southern California, a conservative writer? I don't think so, but maybe they are in the eyes of someone else. And I suppose if you're comparing them to an avant-garde writer, like Richard Kostelanetz, they are conventional. The answer to your question really depends upon who you ask and what their aesthetic sensibility is.

Shivani: Is there any alternative to writers joining the academy en masse? Have you thought of any alternatives for yourself? Do you know of writers who have successfully taken the plunge for themselves?

McNally: I wish I knew of an alternative! In the 1990s, I spent a number of years earning less than fifteen thousand dollars. I couldn't get a decent job to save my life. And I was finishing up a PhD at the time. I was overqualified for janitorial work, which I applied for. But since I hadn't yet published a book, I couldn't land a tenure-track teaching position. So, I did shitty paying adjunct work at the community college, scored standardized tests part-time for about eight bucks an hour, and signed up with a temp agency. When I think back to those days, as well as other, earlier times, like when I was living in a camping trailer in Southern Illinois and collecting an unemployment check, it's hard for me to thumb my nose at my job now. I have tenure; I make a decent salary; I have health benefits. Even so, I still feel ill-suited for academia. I was a first-generation college student, which immediately puts me at odds with most, if not all, of my colleagues, and I attended a third- or fourth-tier state school for my undergrad, which further puts me at odds. So, when I watch colleagues dismiss state-school grads out-of-hand who've applied for teaching positions in our department, even when those grads have more teaching experience and more publications than the Ivy League grads, I want to scream at them. It's the sort of elitism, not to mention logical fallacy, that drives me absolutely mad. Whatever hierarchy I had thought was in place at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, it's ten-fold in the academy once you start teaching. So when you ask me if I've thought of any alternatives, the answer is that I'm always thinking about it, all the time, but I haven't come up with any good answers. I still have student loan payments to make, and I at least have time to write. Also, I think I'm a pretty good teacher. The writers I've known who've successfully taken the plunge–and I know a few–did so because they landed film deals for their books. They could afford to take the plunge. My father was a roofer, and my mother was an assembly-line worker in a factory that made cardboard boxes, and I know for a fact that I have a hell of a lot better job (and a better quality of life) than either of them, so it's hard for me to bellyache all that much. Furthermore, I know people who'd kill to have my job. I'd have killed to have my job before I had it. I think it's okay for me to say, regarding my life in academia, that I'm often-irritated, lucky, ill-suited, and grateful all at the same time. The day I find a job that pays me good money to read true crime books and watch the Three Stooges with my dogs, however, I'll be in heaven.

Shivani: I feel that regularly reading and critiquing apprentice writing is enormously destructive to the quality of writing one is capable of producing. What do you think?

McNally: Since I've been teaching, off and on, since 1989, I hope to God you're wrong! In all seriousness, the first several years of teaching helped my writing. Here's why. There's a kind of “default writing” that all writers slip into–it's just easy, lazy writing–but it's difficult to know what default writing is unless you've read thousands of pages of apprentice writing, at which point you begin seeing the repetitions, the patterns, and then you can work on purging it from your own work. Or maybe it purges itself. But I do suppose the law of diminishing returns eventually kicks in. I don't believe it's destructive to my writing so much as it is to my soul. Well, okay, maybe not my soul. Maybe it's just my general well-being. If I see one more story about a dead grandmother, for instance, who knows what I'll do? (And why are all dead grandparent stories about dead grandmothers? I don't remember ever reading a dead grandfather story. A dead grandfather story might just change my opinion on the whole genre.)

Shivani: In After the Workshop, you're commenting on the narrow confines of not just writing culture, or literature and humanities departments, but our intellectual life as a whole. We seem to be in a very advanced state of intellectual paralysis, something we might expect at the twilight of empire. Where are the fresh ideas, if any, coming from?

McNally: I'm not concerned about fresh ideas. I think there are plenty of those. I'm more concerned about whether those fresh ideas will have a chance to live, given the state of publishing, the rise of Kindle, the amount of time the Internet cuts into the time we might have read a book in pre-Internet days, etc. And I'm guilty of it, too. I've Googled away a good part of the last ten years. It's depressing, really.

Shivani: What has been the response of your former writing teachers and colleagues toward After the Workshop?

McNally: I'm not sure if any former writing teachers have read it yet. Colleagues? A few have read it. One colleague cut out a paragraph that he assumed was about another colleague of ours and anonymously posted it on the departmental bulletin board so as to stir up some shit. So, there you have it. Academia in a nutshell.

Shivani: If you don't get an MFA, you have to be almost superhumanly talented and persistent and lucky to make up for the lack of connections and the bias of publishers at all levels toward MFA graduates. This seems to be the criterion publishers are most interested in, as a shortcut to judgment, rather than the quality of the writing. In poetry, the only route to publication is through a small press contest, and try doing that without an MFA credential. Do you agree with this assessment?

McNally: I'm probably the wrong person to ask since I have an MFA and a PhD. (I applied to PhD programs when I was living in a camping trailer and unemployed. Going back to school seemed a better option.) What I can tell you is that no agent I've ever had–and I've had five–has asked me what degrees I have, and I don't remember ever telling an agent where I had gone to school when I first approached them. After they took me on, they knew I had gone to Iowa, but I quit mentioning it in my cover letters years and years ago. Furthermore, even with my Iowa degree, I've had four completed novels roundly rejected by publishers–two of them after I'd already published books–so, again, I don't think having an MFA means much of anything. For an agent, I think the primary criterion is “Can I sell this book?” (Most agents will tell you that the primary criterion is “Do I love this book?” and I don't doubt that that's one of their questions, but I tend to think “Can I sell it?” has veto power over “Do I love it?”) I think the same criterion is true for publishers, but I would add this: If you already have a sales track-record, your past sales (if they weren't good) could come back to haunt you. I think it's a ridiculous way of running a business, because there's no correlation between past sales and future sales. The sales of John Irving's first three novels were terrible, by today's standards. By today's criterion of looking at past sales to determine future sales, it's likely that The World According to Garp, his fourth novel, wouldn't have been published, at least not by a commercial press. This is where the publishing industry and, in turn, the chain bookstores that order the books and, in turn, dictate print-runs, shoot themselves in the foot, in my opinion. It's not good for anyone–the writer, the publisher, or the bookstore. It's not good for the culture, either. And yet it's the business model that's in place. Does anyone, in this scenario, care really whether I have an MFA or not? I honestly don't think so. But, again, I'm probably the wrong person to answer this question.

Shivani: What would be your advice to someone thinking about joining an MFA program?

McNally: I've spent my entire adult life trying to figure out how to buy time. Time is the writer's most valuable commodity. There aren't many opportunities that allow you to take a few years off to spend it writing, but an MFA is one of those. I wouldn't recommend going into debt to do it. And I wouldn't necessarily have any other expectations, either. It won't get you a teaching job, unless you publish a book. As I said before, my MFA experience helped speed up my development because I had writing professors who pointed out things that might have taken me years to figure out on my own. The downside is that it's easy to get sucked into all the bullshit that accompanies an MFA program–bitter jealousies, competition, writing to that particular audience, etc. If you can somehow shield yourself from all of that crap and write every day, it's not a bad way to spend two years. And who knows? You may decide, at the end of it, that you'd rather do something else with your life instead of spending it writing.

Shivani: We don't have great critics like Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, or John Aldridge anymore. Why have we lost the great critics?

McNally: The first reason is academia. Critics like Cowley, Wilson, Kazin, and Aldridge are mocked these days. Academic scholars continually have to reinvent the wheel to make themselves necessary or relevant, which is why there are so many generational turf wars within English Departments. But here's the big difference to me. Cowley, Wilson, Kazin, Aldridge–these guys loved literature. I don't see many academic critics these days who actually, honest-to-God love literature, and, in fact, I see critics making entire careers on the backs of writers they don't even like. What's the point, I wonder. My cynical take is that if you still have an old-fashioned love of literature, you're doomed as a “scholar” in an English Department. Or you're seen as a lightweight. Or you're mocked. Novels are no longer novels; they're texts. They're fodder for sociological analyses, as though the novel were an elaborate paint-by-numbers exercise–a giant puzzle that only scholars can decode. How utterly depressing, if that were really the case.

I also blame the culture. Amazon reviews, Facebook, Goodreads. Everyone's a critic. Who needs Cowley, etc., to give us thoughtful observations? Hell, I'll just log onto Goodreads to take the pulse of contemporary literature. Who's to say that if Edmund Wilson were alive today, he wouldn't have a thumbnail photo of his dog to identify himself and use a frowny-face emoticon to express his displeasure with a novel? What does Edmund Wilson think of Proust? The answer is:

I should note that I recently shut down my Facebook page and bought a refurbished IBM Selectric, and I am infinitely happier. The onslaught of public opinion, including my own, depresses me to no end.

Shivani: Does training in writing short stories–the staple of MFA programs–interfere with later development as a novelist? The same question applies to the major first route of publication, the literary journals, which promote short stories at the expense of longer fiction.

McNally: I tend to believe that it does interfere. For me, it's as though I'm using a different side of my brain writing a novel than when I write a short story. While there are a handful of writers who are wonderful in both genres, it seems to me that most writers fall into only one category: they are either good short story writers or they are good novelists. So, it does seem to be a disservice to treat the writing of short stories as the beginning of an arc that will eventually lead to the writing of successful novels.

When it comes to finding an agent, you may find yourself in a Catch-22. It's easier to catch the eye of an agent if you've published short stories in literary magazines, and yet no agent wants to see your story collection. And what if you're really a novelist and not a short story writer? My first novel–The Book of Ralph–is really a collection of linked short stories. I wrote the chapters as short stories, and I gave it to my agent as a collection of short stories. When the novel was published, it didn't say “short stories” on the cover. It said, at my suggestion, “fiction.” The book was reviewed mostly as a novel, so when the paperback came out, “fiction” was replaced by “novel.” I now write novel-novels instead of novels-in-stories, but I don't think I hit my stride until I wrote After the Workshop. A previous novel of mine (America's Report Card), along with four failed and unpublished novels, were clunky attempts at the form, in large part because I had spent the first fifteen years of my writing life writing mostly short stories.

Shivani: Have you read David Shields's Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and what is your opinion of it?

McNally: I haven't read it yet. I've spent the past year reading a lot of true crime and watching the Three Stooges with my dogs. I've been meaning to read it, though.

Shivani: You must have encountered many real-life models for prima donnas like Vanessa Roberts, Tate Reinhart, and Vince Belechek?

McNally: Yes. Absolutely. They all have real-life counterparts. I just can't say who they are.

Shivani: Which is worse, being a media escort or being a publicist?

McNally: As much as the publicist in After the Workshop is a villain, I would have to say that the publicist has the worse job. I actually enjoyed being a media escort. The authors' only expectation for me was to be at the airport to pick them up. The authors' expectations for their publicists? Whew. As a writer, I try to be nice to publicists. I send cookies. That's the key to my success, such as it is. Cookies. Lots and lots of cookies.

With the passing of legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, it seems appropriate for all of us to be reminded one more time that he was as much a life coach to his players as he was a basketball coach.

This is one of a series of Fabulous Forum videos in which Wooden discusses his philosophy of life.

If you have a kid who wants to be an athlete, you might want to ask them to pull up a chair and watch for a while.

John Wooden recites his favorite poem:

Other Wooden videos:

John Wooden teaches a kid the right way to tie his shoes

John Wooden talks about basketball, life and death

John Wooden discusses what is important in life

– Houston Mitchell

Slightly too long, slightly too old, but maybe this? Peire Vidal by W. S. MerwinI saw the wolf in winter watching on the raw hill
I stood all night on top of the black tower and sang
I saw my mouth in spring float away on the river
I was a child in rooms where the furs were climbing
and each was alone and they had no eyes no faces
nothing inside them moved but the stories
they never breathed as they waved in their dreams of grass
and I sang the best songs that were sung in the world
as long as a song lasts they came by themselves to me
and I loved blades and boasting and shouting as I rode
as though I was the bright light flashing from everything
I loved being with women and their breath and their skin
and the thought of them that carried me like a wind
I uttered terrible things about other men
in a time when tongues were cut out to pay for kissing
but I set my sails for the island of Venus
and a niece of the Emperor in Constantinople
and I could have become the Emperor myself
I won and I won and all the women in the world
were in love with me and they wanted what I wanted
so I thought and every one of them deceived me
I was the greatest fool in the world I was the world's fool
I have been forgiven and I've come home as I dreamed
and seen them all dancing and singing as the ship came in
and I have watched friends die and have worn black and cut off
the tails and ears of all my horses in mourning
and have shaven my head and the heads of my followers
I have been a poor man living in a rich man's house
and I have gone to the mountains and for one woman
I have worn the fur of a wolf and the shepherds'
dogs have run me to earth and I have been left for dead
and have come back hearing them laughing and the furs
were hanging in the same places and I have seen
what is not there I have sung its song I have breathed
its day and it was nothing to you where you were you

posted by artlung at 1:02 PM on June 8

Henry Jenkins has a two part interview (one, two) with Marwan Kraidy, author of
Reality Television and Arab Politics. Jenkins asks:

As you note, many of these reality show formats come from the west but get localized in the Arab context. Can you describe this localization process? To what degree is their western origins central to their political impact?

Kraiday answers:

The localization process underpins the book's main argument that the
Arab reality television controversies are best understood as a social
laboratory where various versions of modernity are tested. The formats'
western origins were never directly important. In the early years of
Arab reality television, 2003 and 2004, critics leveled the charge that
the reality television wave was another episode in a western cultural
conquest trying to impose an alien reality on Arabs and Muslims.

Localization occurred in several ways.

One was a gradual take over by conservative forces. Consider the
case of Algeria, where state television initially aired the Lebanese Star Academy.
After opposition from Islamists, the Algerian president himself is said
to have ordered it off the air, replacing it with a locally-made,
ostensibly more conservative version. One season later, and the same
slot was filled by a Qoranic recitation show, reality style–nominees,
fan mobilization, viewer voting.

Two poetry reality shows epitomize another, and to me far more
interesting, process of localization. Poetry enjoys a status in Arab
culture that it is to my knowledge not accorded anywhere else in the
world. Since pre-Islamic times, poetry is at once art form, political
platform and entertainment. Numerous Arab television channels today
have talk-shows dedicated to poetry, and poets show up on all kinds of
talk-shows for women, youth, etc. A well-known poet in the Arab world
is treated like a rock star. So here comes Abu Dhabi Television,
supported by state financing, with the brilliant idea of launching
poetry competitions, reality television style. The two shows, one
dedicated to Arab poetry at large, the other focused on Gulf poetry,
were major hits. Followers of your blog may have read recently the
story of Hissa Helal, the Saudi woman who reached the finale of one of
these shows, with a poem (in the semi-final) that attacked the
reactionary clerics in her country, a gutsy move that was made partly
possible by the venue–a public, popular poetry competition.

(Hat tip: Jesse Walker)

Sourse:Pea Salad Recipe

Cook the Book: Radicchio, Turkey, and Snow Pea Salad

Posted by Caroline Russock, June 2, 2010 at 12:45 PM

[Photograph: Caroline Russock]

Vitello tonnato is one of my favorite summertime Italian imports. It doesn't get any better than cool slices of veal (or even turkey) spread with a creamy, mayonnaise-based tuna sauce dotted with salty capers. Or at least it didn't until I found this recipe for Radicchio, Turkey, and Snow Pea Salad in Recipes from an Italian Summer.

This salad brings in another favorite ingredient of mine, radicchio, and mixes it with sweet-tender snow peas, and chunks of roasted turkey, all dressed with my beloved tonnato sauce. It's a riff on the classic vitello tonnato but transforms the not-that-great-for-you plate (really just meat slathered in mayonnaise) into something that could be considered balanced, if not really healthy per se.

The small dice of turkey mixed with bitter radicchio and snow peas are dressed lightly with olive oil and white pepper—the combination is pretty tasty on its own even. But dressing with a mix of mayonnaise, tuna, capers, and white vinegar and adding a few slices of hard-boiled egg at the end really makes the dish. I ate mine as is but I'm seriously considering mixing up the leftovers and making it into a sandwich with a few leaves of arugula and a squeeze of lemon juice.

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Radicchio, Turkey, and Snow Pea Salad

- serves 4 -

Adapted from Recipes from an Italian Summer.

Ingredients

For the salad:
2 2/3 cups trimmed snow peas
Scant 1 1/2 cups diced, cooked turkey breast
2 1/2 cups shredded radicchio
Olive oil, for drizzling
2 hard-cooked eggs, sliced
Salt and white pepper

For the tuna sauce:
4 ounces canned tuna, drained and flaked
Scant 1 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon white-wine vinegar
2 tablespoons rinsed, drained, and chopped capers

Procedure

1. Blanch the snow peas in a pan of salted boiling water for 3 – 4 minutes until just tender, then drain and set aside. To make the sauce, combine the tuna and mayonnaise in a bowl until creamy, then stir in the vinegar and capers.

2. Put the turkey, radicchio, and snow peas into a salad bowl and mix, then drizzle with olive oil and season lightly with white pepper. Garnish with the slices of hard-cooked eggs, pour the tuna sauce over the salad, and serve.

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I’ve been doing yoga on and off since high school. PE sucked — all those nasty outdoor team sports — so when yoga, modern dance and self defense were offered as indoor alternatives, I jumped, or at least  jettéd, at the opportunity to avoid the evil yellow hurty thing in the sky and its companion balls: soft, base and basket. Ugh.

I loved yoga; we did hatha yoga, and our teacher explained, theoretically, what organs were affected by the various poses. It was mellow, fun and meaningful, unlike other yoga classes I took decades later where there seemed to be a level of competition with regards to both dress and the ability to do a wheel pose. I felt kinda empty after those.

Yoga has been in the United States since the late 1800s, and really took off in the mid-1920s. A ban on Indian immigration from 1924 to 1965 kept traditional practitioners out of the U.S.; but in spite of the ban, yoga became an underground staple with celebrities and alternative types.

Then came the Sixties and all that came with that decade of seeking. The Beatles and the Maharishi, altered states of consciousness, health food, and the lift on the immigration ban.  Yoga expanded slowly at first, but by the mid-90s, yoga studios were cropping up everywhere, yogaini were appearing on morning news shows and gyms were expanding their classes to schedules to  include power yoga with its interminable aerobic “Astanga! Down dog!” Baby yoga! Doggie and me yoga! Yoga pants, yoga mats, yoga magazines, yoga work out videos…and inevitably yoga lawsuits.

In Yoga, Inc., director John Philp takes us through the development and marketing of yoga in the United States including the idea of yoga competitions — which have been around for century, just not with the hopes of a sponsorship by Mercedes Benz, as one promoter wishes for out loud.

Behind the competitions is super yogi Bikram Choudhury, founder of the hot — literally and figuratively — Bik who has copyrighted his own style of yoga and order of poses (asanas), and sued those who dare to use either his name or the poses in the the same order he does. In some cities, chain yoga studios are putting the individually owned studios out of business, and the spiritual practice of yoga seems to have been replaced by a material striving and the desire to have a hard body.  Yoga, Inc. asks the question, “Can yoga survive with its good karma intact?” That remains to be seen, as it’s an $18 billion dollar a year business…

(Watch - Yoga, Inc.)

I’ve been doing yoga on and off since high school. PE sucked — all those nasty outdoor team sports — so when yoga, modern dance and self defense were offered as indoor alternatives, I jumped, or at least  jettéd, at the opportunity to avoid the evil yellow hurty thing in the sky and its companion balls: soft, base and basket. Ugh.

I loved yoga; we did hatha yoga, and our teacher explained, theoretically, what organs were affected by the various poses. It was mellow, fun and meaningful, unlike other yoga classes I took decades later where there seemed to be a level of competition with regards to both dress and the ability to do a wheel pose. I felt kinda empty after those.

Yoga has been in the United States since the late 1800s, and really took off in the mid-1920s. A ban on Indian immigration from 1924 to 1965 kept traditional practitioners out of the U.S.; but in spite of the ban, yoga became an underground staple with celebrities and alternative types.

Then came the Sixties and all that came with that decade of seeking. The Beatles and the Maharishi, altered states of consciousness, health food, and the lift on the immigration ban.  Yoga expanded slowly at first, but by the mid-90s, yoga studios were cropping up everywhere, yogaini were appearing on morning news shows and gyms were expanding their classes to schedules to  include power yoga with its interminable aerobic “Astanga! Down dog!” Baby yoga! Doggie and me yoga! Yoga pants, yoga mats, yoga magazines, yoga work out videos…and inevitably yoga lawsuits.

In Yoga, Inc., director John Philp takes us through the development and marketing of yoga in the United States including the idea of yoga competitions — which have been around for century, just not with the hopes of a sponsorship by Mercedes Benz, as one promoter wishes for out loud.

Behind the competitions is super yogi Bikram Choudhury, founder of the hot — literally and figuratively — Bik who has copyrighted his own style of yoga and order of poses (asanas), and sued those who dare to use either his name or the poses in the the same order he does. In some cities, chain yoga studios are putting the individually owned studios out of business, and the spiritual practice of yoga seems to have been replaced by a material striving and the desire to have a hard body.  Yoga, Inc. asks the question, “Can yoga survive with its good karma intact?” That remains to be seen, as it’s an $18 billion dollar a year business…

(Watch - Yoga, Inc.)

Sourse:Publishing A Children's Book

NEW YORK — Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Sherman Alexie will be among the writers featured at the sixth annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York City.

Readings and discussions will be held from April 26 to May 2. Others expected to attend include authors Richard Price, Jonathan Lethem and Richard Ford, poet-singer Patti Smith and singer Natalie Merchant.

Represented countries will include South Africa, Pakistan, Australia and Ireland.

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The recent Amazon/MacMillan ebook pricing flap, and the brewing battle over ebook prices with other major publishers, has generated a lot of words, many by authors, protesting Amazon's attempt to dictate terms to the big publishers. Many of these authors have applauded the publishers for winning the right to raise the prices on ebooks. They reacted as if traditional publishers getting Amazon to capitulate is a victory for writers.

It isn't.

Just doing the math makes this crystal clear. (Writers seldom do the math–if we liked math, we wouldn't be writers.)

Under the old Amazon model, the publisher would get half the price of a book–$12 for a $24 hardback. Amazon would list the ebook for $9.99, eating $2 a copy to subsidize folks buying the Kindle. Out of that $12, authors would get $3-$6 dollars depending on their ebook royalty rate.

Now Amazon is shifting to an “agency model,” (like Apple's model for the Appstore), where the publisher will get 70% of the retail price. By way of example, let's assume a price of $14.99 for a new release. The publisher takes home $10.50, and the author gets between $2.63 and $5.25. Authors end up losing money, and still have to deal with the archaic royalty reporting system where publishers will take 6 to 9 months to send that money to the authors. This despite Amazon's paying the publisher within 30-60 days.

Clearly higher prices do not benefit consumers. And Amazon is now getting 20% less for each book sold, so it's not benefiting them.

Higher ebook prices only benefit one group: publishers. They're squeezing both ends of the chain. They're paying authors less, they're demanding more from retailers and retail customers. And while their actual income from ebook sales are lower than paper sales, digital sales saves them the costs of printing, warehousing, transporting and accounting for returns (expenses that publishers now peg as a minimum of 10% of the cover price of a book). Ebooks turn out to be more profitable even at a lower, per-unit return.

You may be wondering why the author royalty varies so much? Prior to 2009, when publishers scoffed at the ebook market, they offered writers contracts which gave us half of the money they made off ebook sales. In early 2009, as they realized there actually was an ebook market, they cut the royalty rate to 25% of what they got. This 25% is now considered the industry “standard” and this is the deal they're offering authors as they try to buy up our backlist (old books).

One of my publishers recently offered me the 25% deal on one of my older novels. I turned them down because when I publish the novel myself, either at my website or via Amazon, I make that same 70% the publishers ; and I'll get it in at the most 60 days. Under the traditional model, an $8 paperback, sold on January first, will pay me 80 cents in October. A $5 ebook sold via Amazon on the same day will pay me $3.50 in March. Choosing to publish work electronically myself is really a no-brainer.

So, if you hear authors congratulating the publishers for getting the right to set their own ebook prices, ask them if they've done the math. I have. Higher ebook prices don't benefit me, booksellers or readers, and that means something is really wrong.