Sunday, November 23, 2008

A New Post

Frank Stanford
Quite a gap between posts there. That's not like me. But I have been busy with a class I'm taking and finishing The Savage Detectives and putting up storm windows and reading my friend Dawn Potter's blog and wondering where all the world's money went and putting up storm windows.

I just finished an essay on Stanford that is okay. I started with a title that came to me when I woke up one recent morning after I had been thinking about it for awhile:

The Blackest Joke: Frank Stanford’s Surreal Ontology

I liked it. I said it to myself while I drove to work. Sometimes when I was shaving. I said it at Catherine like it was a dare. Then, I decided I better figure out what the hell it meant, so I started making up stuff, pretty much. It's amazing how closely critical writing resembles creative writing. I mean, you can only map so much out on an outline and then you have to close your eyes and start typing.

Anyway, The Savage Detectives is so sadly thrilling. It would be book of the year if I kept such ratings. Now for another long book, probably David Copperfield.


8 comments:

Mason said...

I just heard the studio version of Brother Sport that leaked last week. I think it's already changed my life.

Mr. Hill said...

yeah, I can't decide about it--a part of me still likes the live versions better because avey's yelps are so crazy.

collected animals has been pretty funny lately with everybody dying for a leak.

Unknown said...

Did you get all excited for that fake-out a week or so ago?

The world is a cruel place.

Dawn Potter said...

I look forward to reading your Stanford essay. I think your description of critical writing as creative writing is very apt.

Dawn Potter said...

P. S. But what does ontology mean?

Dawn Potter said...

P.P.S. Don't you think that photo of Frank S. looks strangely like a movie still of Warren Beatty playing a famous Lothario poet named Frank S.?

Mr. Hill said...

Nathan--I fell for one of them a couple of weeks ago, but have given up. It will be obvious when it happens, though I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet.

Mr. Hill said...

Dawn, I have no idea what it means! I'm kind of stuck at that part right now and was just about to ask if you knew!

Actually, it's sorta, like, this thing about metaphysics. In the paper, I use it to describe the kind of, you know, "rhetoric" Stanford exhibits. There's an essay by a guy named Cy Knoblauch that uses the term, and I'm ripping him off.

I don't know if I'll let you read it though. It's a little half-baked still.

But that could totally be Warren Beatty, though. Maybe a little after Dobie Gillis and before Bonnie and Clyde.