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Jan 31

New era, new novel, pls preorder: penguinrandomhouse.com/books/671348/t

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King

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Salman Rushdie

@SalmanRushdie

The photo in @NewYorker is dramatic and powerful but this, more prosaically, is what I actually look like.

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New York is such a weird place. It is time to leave.

This article is how I know some people just don't know how to mind their business. Just mind your business! You will know peace.

In a city of Rachels and Libbys, the FX show has some New York moms worried they’re the ones in trouble.

Veblen stay beating y'all's asses.

thecut.com

The Fleishman Effect

Or take a class with Garth Greenwell, lol.

Anyway, dramatic principles have a lot of offer fiction, lol. And one way to start to learn about that sort of thing--one of many ways--kind of on the cheap is to read good film critics.

It's something that I try to do for my own students. That entering the play of their story and taking the things and people seriously and asking of them questions that I would ask of real people. And to me, that is what great film criticism does and can offer fiction writers.

Not applying like fancy rhetoric, but the ability to just like enter into the dramatic situation of a given narrative and look around like you're looking around at actual breathing people and to ask the kind of questions one might ask of real people and things.

When I think about watching Garth Greenwell operate as an instructor, the thing that sticks out most to me is that he would read so deeply and so carefully in exactly the same way that my favorite film and tv critics read, taking the life of the characters as though they're real.

Obviously, it does more than that, but as far as being a pedagogical tool for the teaching of fiction, that is one of its major benefits, lol. In addition to the aesthetic pleasure of watching a smart person wield words effectively.

And the best film criticism makes dramatic principles accessible and interesting to the reader, and it's a good place to learn about how drama operates without the oppressive effects of reading about your direct medium or form.

I think that reading too much literary criticism and too many book reviews can make a writer early in their development too self-conscious to do much good work. BUT. Movie reviews and film criticism are good because they pattern good habits of mind and discernment.

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I was in a bookstore the other day and opened several novels and wowee, the concept of the dramatic has abandoned us and we are WRETCHED. Fighting for our lives out here, lol.

Next time I teach a workshop, we're just reading plays the whole time, lol. And I don't mean none of that 2000s stuff. I mean, like, PLAYS.

Whatever maybe plot and notions of dramatic enactment are bourgeois values and I get it, y'all wanna write your little socialist fragments in the idiom of your abstraction of the abstraction of the abstraction of working class life, but, like, idk, in media res made some points.

I know that the post-Obama identity era made y'all think plot was fascist, and the MFA as CIA psy-op tweets got y'all thinking fiction does not need dramatic principles, and like, okay, fine, but some of that stuff was good, lol.

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a truly thrilling and surprising honor, for which i'm so grateful. special thanks to all of my friends and colleagues at

@NewYorker

, especially my brilliant, kind, patient theatre editor Shauna Lyon. just one more bit of encouragement to keep going.

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CornellArts&Sciences

@CornellCAS

Vinson Cunningham, a theatre critic at The @NewYorker, has been named winner of the 2021-22 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Congratulations! The award is administered by @EnglishCornell. as.cornell.edu/news/new-yorke @vcunningham #theatre

Vinson Cunningham, African American w/black beard, brown glasses, smiling, wearing black shirt and jean jacket.

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He said

From

Chopin after he wrote Nocturne No. 7

From

And when it explodes into drama???? Baybeeeee!!!!

Those delightful little bits of near dissonance in No.4 in F Major? Baybeee

Chopin really put his Chopinussy in these nocturnes.

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The Defiance of Salman Rushdie

Now -THIS- is a profile.

newyorker.com

After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act.

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for this week's

i wrote about a superbly acted production of Samuel Beckett's "Endgame"

newyorker.com

Finding Laughs Amid the Gray, in Beckett’s “Endgame”

At the Irish Repertory Theatre, John Douglas Thompson and Bill Irwin wring moments of superb physical comedy from two characters who struggle to move.

I actually do not require assistance, I was just tweeting about my feelings. Relax.

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Maybe I just need to delete my account for a while again, lol. That always makes me feel better.

It’s not like…a quality thing. I think it is very much a me problem. I mean, I can listen to like, Schumann and Chopin and Rachmaninoff, etc. but I really really find it challenging to take in anything else. I am so…outside the flow of culture and it is getting dire lol

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When I try, I just turn it off. I can’t bear it. And I just be over here with my own little thoughts and then the sun goes down and it’s bed time. Idk.

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I used to like…listen to podcasts and watch tv and movies and listen to music, etc, but lately I have felt so deeply, deeply bored and/or annoyed thay I’ve not finished ANYTHING at all in the past month or two.

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I have a very much me problem that I am going to tweet. I understand that it is a me problem. I am not trying to argue with you. Or make you feel argued at or influenced. Again. It is a ME PROBLEM. As in, a problem about ME. No one is trying to put mimetic thrall on you.

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[gazes at American publishing]

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