Posts by Trevor Owen Jones

"When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures."

— Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer & His Country"

The Tree of Life opens May 27th in theaters; of course, having not yet seen the film there is little I can say about it (the studio released only a few plot details), but a discussion of his previous films may inform a deeper viewing more than simply assuming a passive stance. All too often, we are encouraged to receive films or books this way, in some vague popular idea that our minds are storage receptacles and that we simply experience a movie more or less in the fashion the filmmakers intended. I would like to counter this idea and promote a very much active participation when people 'read' a book or 'watch' a movie, and to counter it properly I will invoke and introduce 

The library is no stranger to babies, toddlers, moms and dads. For many expecting parents, right after leaving the clinic or doctor's office the very next stop is the public library, where resources abound on studying the stages of pregnancy, the essentials of parenting, and sharing with other moms and dads the joys and anxieties of childbirth.

Reference question: when did the largest prison strike in the history of the United States occur? 1890? The 1930s maybe? Wait, was it Attica in 1971?

The answer: December 2010.

It is my day off and I have some errands to do! However, that shouldn't keep me from what I really love: WRITING BLOG POSTS.

Dear T_________,

I hope this parcel finds you well. Enclosed is Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A pint of plain is your only man.

                                  —Flann O'Brien

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
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It is striking the United States has not developed a discourse of precarity. Today, the gap between rich and poor stands at its widest in history, and the unemployment rate hangs around at 8.9%; this statistic does not include the long-term unemployed, the underemployed (those working in part-time positions), and those simply not seeking work at all. There is no discourse or vocabulary for precarity, yet it is structurally integral to how our economy (whatever that word might mean) functions.

Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry will discuss his book, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, Saturday March 5th 2pm @ Hamilton Fish Park Library.

"All profound life is heavy with the impossible."
                                                  —Georges Bataille

If you're anything like me, you'll be walking down the street thinking about science fiction and think to yourself, "Say, what is the Ur-phenomenon of humanity's Utopian drive(s)?" Let's explore this in the best para-academic fashion possible.

If you're anything like me, you've been glued to your computer screen for more than a week observing the will of an entire people force a reckoning with its despotic ruler, against all cynical logic that insurrections and revolutions somehow irretrievably belong to ages past. What is the context for this momentuous event that will undoubtedly have repercussions for years to come? 

Jurgen Habermas famously addressed the controversial subject of post-secularity  in his "Notes on a Post-Secular Society." Therein, Habermas concludes to think and understand the post-secular concludes with a Kantian limit, "So, if all is to go well both sides, each from its own viewpoint, must accept an interpretation of the relation between faith and knowledge that enables them to live together in a self-reflective manner." This is all well and good.

I had not seen my friends S. or F. for quite some time.

We were standing outside the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 5th Avenue; traffic buzzed and halted around us. Sitting on the steps like the boys and girls in Rome who hang around the Spanish Steps, smoke cigarettes and behave like the images they see on television who are modelled after them, I think to myself, we are encumbered in one city by Ghostbusters, in fiction parading out before us, haunted in another at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Citizens take heed of your cities that hallmark events that never happened, I think. I see a stray dog wander by; perhaps it had found some undiscovered corner of Bryant Park to 

There's not much time left to make it to NYPL's many NaNoWriMo monthly write-ins! How is your novel coming along? What is your word count? Are you ahead of the curve or do you have some catching up to do?

Need some encouragement or inspiration? Here's another look at a NaNoWriMoer for 2010!

Please visit nanowrimo.org for more information.

Throughout the month, we'll be profiling some NYPL patrons who are participating in this year's National Novel Writing Month. Please visit nanowrimo.org for more information and inspiration, and get writing!

Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical, stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if that beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and that all we had to do was to keep pulling until 

Perhaps its predecessors can be found in the now vast catalogs of cyberpunk, or its more nebulous younger sister, steampunk, but for a time the deliberately subversive and cliche-defiant umbrella term "New Weird" subsisted as a signal that something new was happening in speculative fiction. For readers fatigued from the same old space operas and Tolkein cookie-cutter knockoffs, authors such as Jeff Vandermeer, China Mieville, Lucius Shepard, Michael Moorcock, and the "biopunk" Peter Watts (among others) reinvigorated the landscape (er, or at least the bookshelf).

When James Myers Thompson died in Los Angeles, 1977, not a single book of his was available in print. Beset for decades by his frail mental health, alcoholism and financial precarity, Thompson had turned to hackwork in Hollywood to make ends meet (an unfortunate fate for many great writers of the 20th century). While posthumous fame is nothing to be celebrated without great qualification, it is ironic that a man who was slavishly devoted to his craft and yet always cheated of success (by Stanley Kubrick, no less), is now a literary star undoubtedly soaring in ascent.

 "What ails you, Polyphemos? Why do you cry so sore/in the starry night? You will not let us sleep./Sure no man's driving off your flock? No man/has tricked you, ruined you?/
Out of the cave/the mammoth Polyphemos roared in answer:/
'Nobody, Nobody's tricked me, Nobody's ruined me!'"

—The Odyssey, Book IX