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Tag Archives: writing

From our Editors: thoughts about Paris from Audrey

24 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by west10th in Blog post, Memoir, Uncategorized

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france, French, je suis paris, language, Paris, writing

Reflecting on six years of French class

Audrey Deng is the Copy Editor at West 10th and the Arts Editor at Washington Square News. She is a sophomore studying Comparative Literature and English. Talk to her about Frank Stella’s retrospective at the Whitney, because she’s excited about that.

In my mind, Paris exists in textbook images from high school, a series of impressions divided by semester. In the fall, French class was a sanctuary; we would sip hot chocolate while thinking about what we should/could/would do in the languid conditionnel tense, snow piling outside of the window. We would read about (and later eat) delectable French holiday pastries like Bouche de Noël and fondant cake. In the spring, we flung open the windows and projected images of tulip-lined streets to “La Vie en Rose.” Paris, just saying the word Paris, implied panache. I felt that simply by being in French class, we students sat straighter, spines strengthened by speaking the language of a country heralded for its elegance.
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Last Friday, on November 13, I went to my French class where we learned about the subjunctive (il est important que nous brossons nos dents!). I cooked oatmeal, wrote birthday cards, and Paris erupted into frightened chaos. Guns had fired in the Bataclan concert hall of an Eagles of Death Metal concert, along with bombings throughout the city, killing at least 130 people.

The hateful act of terrorism scorches a sad chapter in the world’s history, but humans have been sad before. The sickening feeling comes from the fact that it is becoming frighteningly easy to measure the passing of time not by how light illuminates the earth, but by how shadows shroud the globe in darkness.

I went to a peaceful gathering in Washington Square Park to pay tribute to France, eavesdropping on the sad conversations held through clouds of sad cigarette smoke. Everything seemed sad. People stood sadly, conversed sadly, smoked sadly. Never, in my life, have I heard a sad French conversation take place in real life until that Friday. “Do you know anyone injured or dead?” one would ask another. “No, all safe, thank God. You?” So it went–and it was jarring.

Understanding sadness in another language permanently changes the way one listens and reads and thinks, vous comprenez? It sharpens the vision, tightens the eardrums. Once you have heard those words of death and injury, the language and your history with it, changes. Tenses take on different meanings: the conditionnel is a call to action, the subjonctif is what we want to do, and the imparfait is the way we used to be. And French will never be the same to me.

Il est necessaire que nous soyons gentils. It is necessary that we are kind.

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From our Editors: LGBT Novel Recs from Allen Fulghum

24 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by west10th in Blog post, books, fiction, Uncategorized

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blog, blog post, Fiction, LGBT, LGBTQ, lit, literary, literature, novels, writing

Hi all, I’m Allen, one of West 10th’s prose editors. I’m a senior in Gallatin studying modernism, homosexuality and the First World War. When I sat down to make a short list of my favorite 20th century LGBT novels to share with you all, I realized that I’d chosen at least one representative of each decade from the 1910s to the 1960s—so here are six decades of LGBT literary history, condensed. 

Six decades, six brilliant LGBT novels

Maurice – E.M. Forster (1913)

66ce77a8-5861-4597-ad54-795fc667828eWritten in 1913 but only published posthumously in 1971, Maurice was well ahead of its time in its nuanced depiction of a young man discovering and coming to terms with his sexuality. While Forster carefully examines the difficulties of identity and love, Maurice is ultimately founded on the belief that same-sex relationships have the capacity to be profound, beautiful and happy—a radical thesis for a novel written when men were still routinely arrested and imprisoned for having sex with other men.

 

 

 

Orlando – Virginia Woolf (1928)

d43caa20-84a8-4de0-81e5-6746f1f1a21eSubtitled “A Biography,” Orlando was written as a paean to Woolf’s friend and erstwhile lover, the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West. With typical élan, Woolf transforms Sackville-West into the novel’s eponymous protagonist, a sex-changing immortal who begins as an Elizabethan nobleman and ends as a successful female author in ‘the present day’ (that is to say, 1928). Traversing three hundred years of Orlando’s life, Woolf relentlessly questions conventional notions of history, authorship, gender and sexuality.

 

 

 

Nightwood – Djuna Barnes (1936)

dc0d6d65-ee3c-4182-b604-469e86106307Contained in a deceptively slim volume, Nightwood is a superbly stylized portrait of a doomed lesbian relationship in the bohemian Paris of the interwar years, explicated through the head-spinning speeches of Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Conner (who is just as campy as his name suggests). This modernist masterpiece was lauded by T.S. Eliot as “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.”

 

 

 

 

Notre Dame des Fleurs/Our Lady of the Flowers – Jean Genet (1943)

b9f2103a-0cad-446a-9298-e28f205ea50bSimilarly to Nightwood, this novel renders the Parisian underworld in prose so rich and revelatory it practically creates a new class of literature. The lives and loves of its central characters—sex workers, trans women, and teenage murderers, all bearing charming monikers like Divine and Darling Daintyfoot—are unspooled by a capricious narrator who creates the world of the novel while masturbating in his prison cell (!!!).

 

 

 

The Charioteer – Mary Renault (1953)

Renault, having worked as nurse at a British military hospital during the Second World 938fdf19-6cb0-4cac-8085-f7edca07323fWar and later emigrated to South Africa to live with her female partner, was uniquely equipped to write this novel, which follows a British soldier who falls in love twice over as he recovers from a combat wound. With equal measures of heartfelt psychological insight and cutting social observation, The Charioteer struggles with the tensions between idealism and reality, individualism and community, and innocence and experience.

 

 

Another Country – James Baldwin (1962)

An earlier novel of Baldwin’s, Giovanni’s Room, is often hailed as a masterpiece of gay literature, but while Giovanni’s Room is a claustrophobic investigation of one man’s psychology, Another Country seems to encompass an era. 2dedb81c-2e50-4c36-8d58-de261d3251ce

The characters are gay, straight, bisexual, questioning and in denial; white and black; working-class and middle-class and destitute and wildly successful. In a rhythm reminiscent of jazz, the novel traces the cast as they move in and out of each other’s lives, coupling and splitting up and getting back together, rising and falling in fortune—but always circling around the specter of a character who commits suicide at the end of the novel’s first act.

From our Editors: why Su Young Lee writes

09 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by west10th in Blog post, Memoir, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

blog post, editor, lit, literature, prose editor, writing

Su Young Lee—this year’s prose editor here. Currently a sophomore who hopefully and finally narrowed it down to studying English Literature, Journalism, and Creative Writing (fun fact, I’m indecisive).

Why (How) I Write

  I see a man with his daughter on his lap, brushing her hair away from her small sleeping face as if they weren’t sitting in the middle of a crowded subway train. I like their intimacy and decide that maybe I’ll write about them someday. I never do. I sit in a café and eavesdrop on a job interview as the man becomes increasingly and amusingly anxious, visualizing his half-uttered sentences in the air, full of ellipses. I sit in my room on an especially bad day and decide that the imagined tragedy of how I feel will look good on paper, but all I can manage is jot down a few phrases that all sound like half-finished lines from terrible poetry—my poetry—and I throw the piece of paper away. You see, I like thinking about writing. Sometimes I convince myself I’m really a writer because all I can think about is how something will look on a page.

    Then I come to my senses and decide that a writer is probably someone who actually writes. This is discouraging because writing is kind of hard. I plan characters, conversations, odd little phrases but when it comes to writing them down and filling in the gaps I find that I’m not a writer after all. Not a writer I’d like to be, or maybe I think I should be, the clichéd artist tortured by the task of translating their genius onto paper. The only thing I’m tortured by is my fear, laziness, lack of inspiration. While everything I see and hear and feel I think about writing down, it’s rare that I actually do.

    This is partly why I sign up to a creative writing class. People say writing comes from the heart, the soul, from whatever other metaphorical body part, but honestly sometimes I just need someone to make me write because otherwise I never will. I have to make it inevitable because when I finally start writing I confirm what I suspected all along—that I hate writing.

   This is the process of writing that I loathe: in bed. I don’t like sitting on a desk because it seems like I’m doing work, even though writing is really hard work. I put on some music before I decide that it’s distracting. I stare down at a blank piece of paper—or Word document. I tend to start with paper the first few times because I think writing by hand is romantic but I throw down my pen and hate myself finding I have more scribbles and crossed-out words than useable material. Blankness is encouraging—threatening—and maybe promising. The ugly blacked out words, however, are sad visual reminders of my failure that I’m too conceited to stand.

    But if I hate it so much, why do I do it? Despite all the complaining and self-loathing, there’s something addicting about the adrenaline that comes with writing, beyond the effects of all the caffeine I consume. It’s the starting that’s hard, but once something is on the page the next words tumble after each other. I let myself ramble. When I finish the piece (the draft) it’s like finally letting out air after holding my breath. It’s at that moment when I close my laptop and go to sleep, because I conveniently write in bed, that I think I have found the reason I write. The feeling of satisfaction. There are a lot of other and often forgotten reasons too, like how I want to be eloquent but writing is the only way I can achieve it, how I like to hide behind the anonymity of words on paper, but how I also like the intimacy it provides. Sometimes I hate it because having to write something interesting is a reminder that my actual life is unexciting, but maybe I like that I can live through the pages I write. I don’t know if that’s sad. Sometimes I think being a writer means being sad—dragging up things that have happened, bad things, or things that never will.  

     Ultimately though, being a writer means writing. I may hate the act of writing but I love its effects, a similar relationship I have to cooking and actually eating the food. Hate the labour, if you will; devour the fruit. If I want to be a writer there’s really nothing else for me to do but write. That’s the one thing that all writers of all genres have in common—writing words, instead of just thinking about them. No matter how bad you think you are or how much you dislike the physical act of writing, writers write. So to all you aspiring writers: give yourself deadlines, make others give you deadlines, find some way to force yourself to put words on a page.

From our Editors: tiny tomorrow manifesto from Justin Hong

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by west10th in Blog post, Poetry, Uncategorized

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inspiration, lit, Poetry, writing

Hello! I’m Justin Hong, West 10th’s poetry editor! I’m a junior studying Asian/Pacific/American Studies and Creative Writing. I am also all about dat anticolonialism, antiimperialism, antiracism, etc.

 

tiny tomorrow manifesto/ Justin Hong

after Arundhati Roy

 

[tomorrow’s instruction manual is nestled inside this very if.]

justplaintired, bonefizzy, and looking past yourself, you’re

 

learning how to make happy, freight happy

with things that haven’t  happened yet. in

 

this sort of invention, the see-do poetics has a

magazine you stuff with a dustcoated heirloom dream.

 

you tug on the trigger and the expired ammu-

nition shatters, linguafranca barrel shatters. does

 

the handheld poetics shatter? it must. joy! but that

is all prepwork. for real step1 is: how to make rubble [hope] count?

 

Advice.

24 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by Michael in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Advice, Stephen Elliott, The Rumpus, writing

Whuddup fools? I know I haven’t posted on this blog for god knows how long, and who knows if anyone even reads it, but here’s a cool tidbit I found on Steven Elliot’s The Rumpus, which is a website ALL OF YOU SHOULD BE READING. Thanks to Elissa Bassist for compiling this list of pointers.

***

[Some of this is stolen. But I won’t tell you what because I want to impress you.]

– First piece of writing advice: “Never take credit”–Stephen Elliott (pictured above)

– Your writing should amuse you; if it doesn’t, there’s hardly any point to suffering this much or being this vulnerable or getting that addicted to [fill in the thing to which you got really addicted or hope to get addicted because it’ll give you “material”].

– Writing is the opportunity to take the worst things that have happened to you and turn them into the most beautiful.

– Do you want someone to tell you that your short story sucks and that you should be intellectually and environmentally safe by recycling it? TOO BAD. No one can tell you this. No one gets to tell you what’s trash/recyclable; you decide.

– An MFA program will really help you if you have a high self-esteem problem.

– If someone judges you through your writing, that someone is doing a bad job reading.

– Write every day. If you can’t do that, do this: set an egg timer for 20 minutes; get a pencil and paper and have them touch; don’t lift your pen or pencil off the paper; write “I cannot write every day” on the piece of paper until you have something else to say; do this every day.

– “The moment I stop being a reader is the moment I stop being a writer”–a famous writer said this to me once.

– A conversation between two writers: Writer 1 says, “Blah blah blah,” and Writer 2 says, “Shut up and write.”

– You can’t dismiss an experience because there have been worse experiences.

– “No one who writes good fiction has an Internet connection”–poorly paraphrased advice from Jonathan Franzen.

– If anyone has told you you shouldn’t write or that no one would read your writing if he/she had a choice or that you’re unloveable, please email me at elissa.bassist@gmail.com, and I will tell you that any person who craps on your dream is a tampon popsicle.

***

Write like a mother fucker.

MC

Gilded Ink Writing Contest

13 Monday Dec 2010

Posted by west10th in contest, Events, fiction, Uncategorized

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contest, david rakoff, Fiction, writing

To all you fiction writers: want to enter a short-story contest judged by acclaimed author David Rakoff? Here’s your chance!

The College Group at the Met and Selected Shorts, a short story performance series at Symphony Space and on public radio around the country, co- present another student writing contest.  Students are asked to write 500 words or less about a “private paradise,” in celebration of the upcoming exhibition, The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City, opening on February 1, 2011.  Four winning entries, selected by the CGM committee, Symphony Space, and special guest judge David Rakoff (author of  Half Empty and  Don’t Get Too Comfortable and frequent contributor to NPR’s This American Life), will be read aloud at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday, February 4, 2011, recorded, and possibly aired later on Public Radio International.  The special event will be hosted by David Rakoff.

Download the submission form here and start writing! GildedInk

Stress, Finals, and a prompt

10 Friday Dec 2010

Posted by farzana2013 in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

finals, prompt, writing

Final papers, presentations, and tests are here…unfortunately. We’re all stressed out and about to collapse because we’re pulling all nighters (I know I am). It’s around this time that we see students falling asleep in the library, their heads on the tables. I’m sure  some of us  have turned to more cups of coffee than usual (hmm..how many cups have you increased?).

Try writing about how you’re like during finals. Are you cranky or a bully to those around you? Do you look like one of the living dead? Do you fall asleep in front of the computer in the library? Are your eyes red as if you put blood colored contacts on? If you feel like you staying up all night to finish that essay isn’t interesting enough and you’ve seen something more interesting or plain weird, then write about that. Have fun!

Personal essays, anyone?

05 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by farzana2013 in Uncategorized

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personal essays, tips, writing

Hi, everyone. I’m Farzana. I’m ecstatic to be a writer for this little blog. I hope you visit often and make sure you harass your friends to visit the blog as well. I’ll be ever so grateful.

Well, now that we have dispensed with introductions, let me as you a question: do you like reading or writing personal essays? If not, I hope you continue to read because then you will benefit from it  (meaning you’ll increase your knowledge on this topic). If you decide not to give me a few minutes of your time, then I hope you like my other posts better! For those of you who do have some positive feelings towards personal essays, I have a few tips on writing personal essays that I have learned from class and from guest speaker Paula Darrow, the articles editor of Self magazine (she’s the editor of the “self-expression” section).  I thought I should  pass on some of the knowledge I gained on to you.

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