Vonnegut’s 8 rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Edeet Ravel (2004):

Look for Me felt uneventful: whatever events there were came at you pretty quick. Sudden. Surprising. With little build up. Things happened in the span of a few words. Even the question that was lingering throughout the book–the one that provided all the suspense–was answered within a paragraph.

Here’s an example from p.51:

“How did you get into photography?” Beatrice asked.
“It’s a long story.”
“I’m going to publish these photos,”she said. “Good thing I married a man who has not only a heart but also money! Now, what about your personal life?” she asked.
“Nothing much going on.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. You can’t live like a cloistered nun, you know.”
“Yes, yes . . .” I said vaguely.
“Don’t ‘yes yes’ me, dear. Are you having sex at all?”
“No.”
“Since when?”
“Four years, seven months. There was someone a year after Daniel left, just a one time thing, it was a disaster.”
“That’s scandalous. Someone like you! Don’t you miss it?”
“I miss Daniel.”
“You feel you have to be loyal to him.” It was a mild reprimand: she clearly didn’t think much of my approach.
“I can’t help the way I feel,” I said appologetically.
“Listen, dear. Would you feel it’s less of a betrayal if we slept together?”
I considered her question. “Yes,” I said at last. “Daniel wouldn’t mind. It wouldn’t bother him.”
She looked at me a little pityingly, as if I were slightly backward. “I’ll stay the night, then.”
“All right. But I’m not experienced with women.”
She laughed. “I’ll let you read the manual first.” She phoned her husband and told him she wasn’t coming home. “Dudu, my love, I’ll be back in the morning, I’m staying with Dana, poor sweet thing,” she said, smiling at me. “Don’t forget Hagari has her project, and there’s that pizza in the freezer … yes … yes … fine. Bye for now, honey.”
“He sends his regards,” she told me, putting her phone away. “So let’s have some fun.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that at the begining. But the style grew on me as the book went on. How like life, I thought. Life doesn’t come with a sound track. There are no violins or cellos in the background of your breakups. There is no orchestra at moments of triumph. No dancing music at moments of joy (except at weddings, I guess.) Certainly, there are moments of suspense, and periods of build up, but, all in all, life just happens. At least, that’s how it feels looking back on it: a series of apparently mundane happenings interjected–momentarily–by perceptually momentus events. Momentus in the sense of how much they shape life’s trajectory in the moment it takes for them to come into effect. Then, Life resumes its course. (There are many physics-based metaphors that come to mind, but there is no need for any, so I will simply enumerate them in my head to spare aching yours.)

Edeet Ravel (2004):

Look for Me–I understand–is the second novel in a triology (Ten Thousand Lovers, and A Wall of Light) about love stories in the shadow of the vivid struggles of the middle east. Certainly, this story is very much about the Israeli-Palastenian conflict–the human side of it–without being didactic about the politics, and without any claim to moral superiority.

I think it’s worth re-reading when I take on the triology (when I get around to it.)

p.179:

At least eighty cars were already parked at the gas station near the border of the South Lifna Hills. People were standing in small groups and talking, or buying coffee and snacks at the little convenience store, or using the washroom. The gas station was on isolated strip of the road; you couldn’t see any towns or cities in the distance, only neat, altering bands of green and taupe, and beyond them the indistinct mauve dunes of the desert. Near the station, scattered randomly as though abandoned or misplaced, were the usual mystifying objects, the exact nature of which no one could guess: some sort of steel tower; a cement cylinder; equipment and machines that appeared to have been designed for complicated engineering feats. I took a photograph of these unidentified buts of civilization; they captured the improvished feeling we all carried within us. We didn’t know where we were going and we wondered how we’d lasted this long on such flimsy foundations and muddled efforts. The myths we grew up on tried to compensate us, but myths were slippery by nature. In fact we were lost, walking on air, inside air, falling.
The organizers handed out tape and flyers in three languages: messages of peace printed in bold letters on white sheets of paper. We taped them to our cars and them we taped numbers on our fenders. Rafi’s van was tenth. Then the organizers gave instructions, explained the mission. I didn’t listen carefully. The instructions didn’t vary much from activity to activity: no violence, no getting into arguments with army or polics or anyone else we encountered. All interactions would be handeled by trained negotiators.

“When the cultural and intellectual history of our time is written, Robert Bly will be recognized as the catalyst for a sweeping cultural revolution,” according to the psychologist Robert Moore; and literary critic Charles Molesworth suggests that some of Bly’s importance and complication lies in the fact that he “writes religious meditations for a public that is no longer ostensibly religious.”

Listen to an interview with Bly on Minnesota Public Radio.

Listen to the reading given by Robert Bly at Unity Temple, in Oak Park, Illinois, on October 22, 2005.

Listen to Bly and Donald Hall on Literary Friendships, a program hosted by Garrison Keillor on American Public Media.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.

This is the opening paragraph of an essay titled “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt; Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, which was written back in 1985, and most recently (Jan 2005) published by Princeton Press as a book.

If you want to know more, check out Prof Frankfurt’s appearance on the daily show, where I -incidently- first heard about the book; or his Princeton Press interview. (A quick google search will link to other videos including lectures on love and ethics.)

The book is a quick and fascinating read, and rings appropriate and true. Mostly, it is about the distinguishing charactersitics of bullshit, and how it’s different from humbug and lying. It also touches upon the dangers of bullshit, before ending with an attempt to answer the question: “Why is there so much bullshit?” (– almost every word in it is worth quoting, but let me only quote this last part:)

The contemporary peoliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “antirealistic” doctorines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.
But it is proposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at alll without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgement that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not perculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

This digs deep, and potentially renders most of my words and deeds under the umbrella of bullshit — not that otherwise was ever implied. Now that that’s recognized, I have no desire to say anymore, so expect this silence to last for sometime, maybe ever — even this implication of concern for the truth might be labelled as bullshit.

Yes, Marcus, this confirms it; it’s all bullshit anyways.

Update:
Ok, so maybe that was more than a tad overly melodramatic. What can I say, it was late at night, and I had had a difficult day, which amplified the resonance of certain ideas from the book with certain feelings I’ve been toying with. Plus, you have to remember that (if we have learned anything from Cosmo Kramer is that) 94% of our communication is nonverbal; i.e. I’m only using 6% of my skills here. See.

In her first novel, back in 1983; through the story of a philosophy graduate student and her living struggle with a dissertation on the mind-body problem; Rebecca Goldestein contextualized a brilliant thesis, which she culminated with the beautiful and concise statements on pages 189-191.

I am most certain that there are other aspects of the book that are of notable literary value, but for me, the aforementioned thesis will surely remain the most memorable part — my first encounter with it was an absolute epiphany; it seemed like time had stood still, and for that fleeting moment, I felt free; like nothing else mattered — no repercussions, and no implications; it simply resonated in my mind the way I always imagine truth does.

I am not sure why I find myself very attracted to this particular subset of literary works: arab (particularly middle-eastern) authors writing fiction in english. (Not that I have read much of the genre, but the interest level seems to hold high pretty much with everything I’ve attempted). Now, you might say that the reason is very obvious, and it has something to do with (easily) relating, but that’s why I pre-empted you with the phrase “I am not sure” — that is to say, I have some speculation (the obvious ones) but I think there’s something more to it than just that.
(more…)

by: Ahdaf Soueif
London : Bloomsbury, 1996.

I think of you often. I think of you often, and I remember. I remember, for instance, your old nanny coming into your room, the edges of her tarha [headscarf] bitten between her teeth to hide half her face. Her eyes, filmed with cataracts, were so dim she must have been seeing you as though through a mist. I remember your husband turning from the phone, and the small gesture of your hand that stilled the impatient words on his lips. The old woman muttered indistinctly as she moved towards you, her arm describing cramped, arthritic circles with the smoking incense-burner. Through the window, the darkness of the Cairo night was so intense, it seemed that if I reached out my hand I would touch black velvet.”

(from “I think of you”, page 129)