Category Archives: The Arts

Fiction on Twitter: From short short story to endless stream

It is said that Ernest Hemingway once bet that he could write a complete short story in six words. He was Twitter-ready a half century before anyone conceived of tweeting.

Last week Twitter announced that at the end of November the company will host a five-day Twitter Fiction Festival (#twitterfiction), “a virtual storytelling celebration held entirely on Twitter” inviting creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world.

According to Twitter, it has hosted great experiments in fiction already, from Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” to Teju Cole’s “Small Fates” to Dan Sinker’s @mayoremanuel. And Twitter notes it has even inspired some literary criticism.

To get into the spirit of things, and without getting into the whole business of streaming and interaction as components of twitter-fiction (working within the limitations of the classic tweet, you could say), I came up with this tweet-length short short story:

On the desiccated, recalescent planet, barren at last, the lonely creature, a cockroach, grief-maddened, devoured the corpse of its mate.

Just sayin’.

Hemingway won the bet, by the way. As the story goes (and the anecdote itself may be fiction), he scribbled “For sale: baby shoes, never used” to take home the pot.

Untitled Mural

Attributed to Jr & Vhils
Unusually affecting portrait at 617 S. Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles attributed to Jr and Vhils. The head was created by scraping the stucco down to the building’s brick wall and shaping the features of the face with paste.

Resources:
The Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles
Los Angeles Murals: Red Line Tour (DiscoverLosAngeles.com)

On the Road: Roll On, Bob

Heading east on I-40 toward Gallup. Bob Dylan‘s great bluesy new album, Tempest, on repeat. Nobody cops licks & embraces cliches with more gusto & abandon than Bob Dylan.

The band’s hot. The stories’re gripping. 50 years and counting. Amazing.

You can get Tempest by Bob Dylan at Amazon.




Good Eatin’: “I love coffee sweet and hot…” *

Follow-up to Good Eatin’: Health Benefits of Coffee (The Detourist 2012-05-17):  The Case for Coffee: All the Latest Research to Defend Your Caffeine Addiction, in One Place by Brian Fung (The Atlantic 2012-07-03)

*Java Jive

Free Urban Foraging: Fallen Fruit is a great site for finding fruit to pick

Double the health benefits of your daily walks with free urban foraging.

Fallen Fruit is a long-term art collaboration that began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects and site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world.

“By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works reimagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. Public Fruit Jams invites a broad public to transform homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making as experimentation in personal narrative and sublime collaboration; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours explores the boundaries of public and private space at the edge of darkness; Public Fruit Meditations renegotiates our relationship to ourselves through guided visualizations and dynamic group participation.

“Fallen Fruit’s visual work includes an ongoing series of narrative photographs, wallpapers, everyday objects and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. Recent curatorial projects reindex the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing permanent collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject matter.

“Theoretically, David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young are the three artists of Fallen Fruit that imagine fruit as a lens through which to see the world.” — from the website.

Download a classic short story every week

A nice break for detourists: sign up for Library of America‘s free story of the week and have it sent to your e-reader. Perfect airport reading. Free.

Wearable Art: A big boost for my belt buckle collection

I’m the first to own one of Los Angeles sculptor Robert Toll‘s new one-of-a-kind welded-steel belt buckles.

Readin’, Writin’ & Ramblin’: Travel Books & the Lit’ry Life

Since 1998, a lifetime in Web years,  Literary Traveler has anthologized travel books and essays with artistic ambitions, and arranged literary tours and literary events for readers who like to travel and travelers who like to read.

The many dozens of literary articles and travel profiles by and of famous writers are arrayed alphabetically from Louisa May Alcott to W.B. Yeats. A list of recently added authors, for example, includes Joseph Reading iconConradStephen King, Shirley JacksonEdward Gorey, Victoria Hislop, Che Guevara, Naguib Mahfouz and Mario Vargas Llosa. A sampling of recent articles – Of Dreams and Dolls: American Girls and the Spirit of Exploration; Colin McPhee’s Musical Life in Bali; Karl Marx’s Revolutionary Brussels; Jim Morrison & Lipstick Kisses at Oscar Wilde’s Pere-Lachaise; Origins of Crime & Justice in James Patterson’s Washington DC; The Real Story Behind Dickens’ A Christmas Carol; Shirley Jackson’s Outsider Perspective of Bennington, Vermont — reveals the range of interests explored by the site’s contributors.

In the nature of things, most of the familiar names are in the public domain, but so what?; there are endless hours of classic travel writing on the site, including a series on Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Hemingway’s Places, interviews with well-known writers like Alan Lightman, and links to recommended  volumes for purchase.

Primarily or at least most usefully a subscription site, Literary Traveler offers two types of memberships: free and paid. A free subscription provides limited access to many of the articles; an all-access premium account including a monthly newsletter costs $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year.

Site: Literary Traveler

L.A.: Hip movie rental store adds extension program

Vidiots, a venerable indie video outlet in Santa Monica, now has a Hollywood film studies program taught by industry professionals, critics and academics. You can register for four-, five-, or six-week series ($128-$192) or for individual classes ($40) in the new Vidiots Annex, 302 Pico Boulevard, next to the store between Third and Fourth Streets across from the Santa Monica Civic parking lot. A Saturday night film club includes a discussion afterward. 310-392-8508; http://www.vidiotsannex.com.

Easing the burdens of summer

The pages of The New Yorker should change color when they’re read. Sky blue would be nice. That way, when it’s time to head for the summer house, it won’t be necessary to schlep the whole pile, just those with pages that are still mostly white.

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