“I started zoning out a little. My eyes drifted over toward my cat. Mr. Patterson pulled me right back in by saying, ‘Once you have the outline, start writing dude, you’re ready.’ It was that dude that woke me.” At The Awl, Patrick Hoffman reviews James Patterson’s MasterClass on writing. Pair with Bill Morris‘s account of losing his Pattersonian virginity at 32,000 feet.
Dude You’re Ready
Maybe Now You Can Understand It.
Artist John Vernon Lord drew inspiration from Irish literature’s “books of the dark” to adapt James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into a series of illustrated images. Over at The Guardian, Lord discusses how he developed some of his pages.
What’s In A Name?
Not to Be Missed
At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell reports back from The Boring Conference, a riveting event that takes place each year in a nondescript hall in East London.
Writing Without Reading
Buzz Poole expands Macy Halford's riff on the consequences of writing without reading. In the process, he refers back to last month's popular piece here at The Millions by Steve Himmer.
●
●
Writing From the Other Wordsworth
The Oxford University Press blog has a never-before-published poem by Dorothy Wordsworth. She constructed the piece in 1839 while suffering from arteriosclerosis and dementia because “there was a therapeutic dimension both in creating and ‘performing’ poetry,” writes Lucy Newlyn.
●
●
Twenty Years of Jest
Recommended Reading: Tom Bissell reflects on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest twenty years after its publication. You could also read our review of The David Foster Wallace Reader.
●
●
Bernhard and Olive Garden
"You could say that Fancy is about a couple of comical old kooks stuck in a dismal town finding creative ways of making themselves (and some luckless bystanders) crazy … and you wouldn’t be wrong. But you could also say that it’s the story of the composition of the manifesto of a bizarre and protean (protozoan?) order of being in which we’re all just patterns mistaking ourselves for people." In a piece for BOMB Magazine, Scott Esposito interviews Jeremy M. Davies about Bernhard, Olive Garden, writing Fancy and reintroducing humor into modernist literature. Their conversation pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone's look at, well, the conversations of BOMB interviews.
●
●