In this week’s posting, we have read list contributions from Ben Marcus and Darcy Steinke. This is the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing feature of the RATs website, where authors will submit their suggested reading lists, writing exercises, and anything else that may be of use to those of us in our literary development. If there’s anyone you’d particularly like to see here, please let us know and we will contact them (particularly to all you poets and non-fiction writers).

Darcy and Ben have both supplied suggested reading lists. You will no doubt be surprised and intrigued by their choices, and we hope you’ll go out and track down these books. (In fact we will try to do so for you and provide links. –Ed)

Ben has also given us a series of exercises that he used as a teacher at Brown. If you’re having trouble with your thesis, give one of these a shot. They can be a great way to jolt you out of a rut.

I also want to take this opportunity to encourage people to check out the German Portraits show at the Met titled, “Glitter and Doom“. This is a great exhibit of drawings and paintings from Germany between the wars. The exhibit is dark and grotesque, but the pictures themselves are thrilling.

Good luck. And Happy New Year!
In our next post we will tell you about a short writing contest we will be running on the RATs site.

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This week on the RATS blog, we’re tossing buckets of chum your way.

Amy Hempel has been kind enough to offer up a suggested reading list. Anyone who’s a fan of Hempel’s work (and there are many, many) will be interested in checking this out. This is part of a new section on the site devoted to recommended reading from well-known authors and teachers … Remember: If you’re stuck, it’s always good to go back and read, read, read.

Elimae, the online literary journal, also offers a page of recommendations that is worth checking out.
http://www.elimae.com/recommended.html

Here is a piece from The Believer about the late Donald Barthelme’s class syllabus/reading list.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200310/article_moffett.php

Here is an essay by Flannery O’Connor called “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” Anyone familiar with her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”, should enjoy this one. It includes such choice bits as: “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

We are in the process of creating several new sections on soarats.org. The hope is that these sections will expand over time and make the site a useful resource for students working on their theses.

In addition to reading lists, another section of the site will be devoted to bookstores in Manhattan. Personal favorites include: Housing Works Book Cafe on Crosby Street in Soho (also a great place to work if you need one), 12th Street Books near Union Square, and Mercer Books near Houston.
Housing Works: http://www.housingworks.org/usedbookcafe/index.html
Mercer Street Books: http://mercerbooks.com/

Coming soon we’ll also have a section devoted to writing exercises. I know, I know…exercises…oy! But wait and see. These can be a great way to think critically about your theses.

Reading series in the boroughs can be hit or miss. One that’s more often a hit is the Happy Endings Reading Series. While it suffers from some of the usual woes, host Amanda Stern, has wrangled big name readers, like James Salter, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, Ben Kunkel, Jim Shepherd, Gary Lutz, and Aimee Bender, to name a few. It’s worth getting on their email list. (At one reading, John Lurie (see Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, The Lounge Lizards) read a piece from his memoirs, about dropping acid and shooting an art film on stolen money, and then having the money stolen by hookers. Then he played harmonica on-stage for the first time in thirty-five years and nearly collapsed.)
Happy Endings Reading Series: http://www.amandastern.com/happyending.html

And finally, for your reading pleasure… Here is a great interview with fiction writer, Padgett Powell from The Believer.
Padgett Powell Interview:
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200609/?read=interview_powell

Stay tuned for writing exercises and more reading lists!

–Alex

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For a while now there’s been an ongoing debate about what the influence of the Internet will be on literature. This is an interesting discussion and one that is bound to continue for some time.

Another interesting question is what resources the Internet offers for practicing writers. My experience is that the web offers a mixed bag. As someone who sits in a cubicle at least four days a week, I’ve had ample time to comb through what’s out there. Here are a few sites that may be of interest to you.

For self-publishing or starting your own blog, you can go here:
Blogspot is a nice, simple interface that anyone can use.
(Also WordPress, the hosted version of the software you are looking at right now. –Matt)

For one of more well-done web magazines check out elimae, which stands for “electronic literary magazine.”

The Center for Book Culture runs a pretty good website where you can read reviews of contemporary fiction as well as interviews with a lot of great authors. There’s a particularly good interview here with David Foster Wallace.

For a near comprehensive list of places to publish stories, go here:
http://www.litline.org/links/journals.html

I have no idea how I came across this website, but it’s an incredible resource for writers and readers. I highly recommend downloading Realplayer (free and easy to install) and listening to some of these interviews. Don Swain might not be the world’s greatest interviewer, but he has managed to attract some of the best writers in the world. Among the interviewees are: Barry Hannah, Mary Gaitskill, Anne Beattie, Raymond Carver, Paul Auster, Harold Brodkey, Harry Crews, Stanley Elkin. Pretty much anyone great you can think of is on there.

Another interesting destination for interviews with authors is Bookworm, a public radio show based out of KCRW in LA. Bookworm’s site has an archive where you can listen to all past shows. Some notable ones include: Deborah Eisenberg, John Updike, and Don Delillo. (For music, check out Morning Becomes Eclectic)

Here is a link to a great interview with Saul Bellow.

Hope something here sparks your interest. Keep checking back to the site. More updates to come.

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Welcome to the new Research Arts blog. We’ll be posting an array of information here to keep you engaged and pounding away at your theses. There’s no set method, but we’ll try to post a few times each week—mostly about things that’ll make you want to write, such as particularly notable readings, art exhibits, links to useful interviews, articles, web resources, etc..

To get things going, here’s the first head’s up. This was passed through the division email, but it is definitely not to be missed.

Sunday, October 8, 2006, at 2 PM, fiction writer, playwright, and poet, Denis Johnson will be reading at DIA: Beacon, an art museum located less than an hour upstate via Metro-North (leaves from Grand Central, nice ride, costs like $5).

This seems like a really special opportunity to hear Johnson (author of Jesus’ Son!) read at a great museum. DIA:Beacon is a converted Nabisco factory that serves as a permanent home to works of conceptual art, sculpture, installations, and earth art that are too large or unwieldy to fit in conventional museums. For instance, one enormous warehouse at Dia is devoted to Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses. If you like the idea of walking inside the hull of enormous, rusted iron ship with the sensation that the walls are about to collapse on you, then you’ll love this. It’s beautiful and scary.

The art is big and amazing to see in person. There’s work from Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Sol Lewitt, among many, many others. I’ve been several times and it’s definitely worth the trip.

Keep checking back to the blog. New stuff will be up shortly.

http://www.diacenter.org/

Denis Johnson
Sunday, October 8
2006, 2 pm

Denis Johnson was born in 1949 in Munich, Germany, and raised in Tokyo, Manila, and Washington. His fiction includes Angels, The Stars at Noon, Jesus’ Son, and The Name of the World. In 2001, a collection of his international journalism Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond appeared. His books of poems include The Man Among the Seals, Inner Weather, The Incognito Lounge and The Veil. His plays include Hellhound (on my Trail), and Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames. He lives in North Idaho.

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Finally, a real understanding of SOA RATS.

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