But inside Rowe's Iain Nicolson Audubon Center, they keep a map on the wall so crane tourists can mark their hometowns with stick pins. This season alone, visitors have come from nearly every state and perhaps two dozen international locations, including Bermuda, Venezuela, Spain, Poland, Latvia, Turkey, India, China and East Timor.
Sounds like everyone wins!Ed Zimmer, the city's historic preservation planner, acknowledged that was an unusual move but, "we're attempting to create an opportunity to save this building."
Peter Katt, an attorney speaking on behalf of B&J Partnership, said his client would rather move the house than tear it down.
"We believe that the best outcome for this property is to be saved rather than demolished," Katt said.
Amber Mohr, museum administrator and curator of the Great Plains Art Museum, said the reason the cemeteries are typically exclusively Czech is a matter of the historical record.
"About 50 percent of Czechs who immigrated (to America) had no religious affiliation," she said. "They were agnostic and called themselves ‘free thinkers.' Because of this, Catholics and Protestants refused to bury them in their cemeteries. So the Czechs had their own.
The exhibit runs until April 18th at the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St., Lincoln NE. Go here for hours and directions.
"In this clip, Bernstein sums up how America's melting pot of cultures distilled many different kinds of music into quintessentially "American" music. Too often we try to ignore cultural differences and pretend they don't exist. Pointing out the things that are particular to a group of people is seen as "impolite". I prefer to celebrate all of the ethnic cultures around me here in Hollywood- Hispanic, Asian, Black, Middle Eastern- it's all more interesting to me than the plain old white bread people I grew up around. As a cartoonist, the differences between all of us are much more interesting than the similarities. Viva la difference!"Obviously, PSR doesn't deal with music at all, but I think some of this applies to American art and literature as well. Plus, aren't all the arts are deeply interconnected anyway?
Ahh, toys. Ask most people when they started to fall in love with photography and many, if not most will hark back to the golden days of their childhood, when life was simpler, the sun shone brighter and film was, as the only option available, still cheap. Most photographers of today who were raised in the odd limbo generation of the 70s and 80s grew up on one or more of the futuristic Polaroid instant cameras kicking around the house. Or maybe you had the cartridge-based 110 film and disc cameras, invented by Kodak and popularized with the Kodacolor VR, or any number of short-lived point and shoot cameras, that weren’t toy cameras per se, but today can be found lining the discount bins of used camera resellers and garage sales alike, the world over.
Here's what the designer had to say about the process:
"The author, Gail Carriger, had done some research on her own (I love a design-minded author) and found a photo of Donna Ricci, the “goth supermodel”, in an awesome victorian kind of steampunk outfit, and sent it to us. The image was a near perfect starting point, so we just decided to see if we could use that very image. Donna was very happy to be our Alexia, so after a little Photoshop magic to make her look a little less punk and a little more proper Victorian, we were off to a pretty good start. The foggy London backdrop was a no brainer for the story and feel. As you can see from the in-progress image, we initially went very Victorian, very steampunk-feeling. I even designed a medal that I was going to use on the back (the octopus is drawn from the story)...but ultimately it was too old-timey, a little too dark."
“It has been very humbling to talk to these women who are disadvantaged,” she said. “I have gained respect for people who have overcome trials and tribulations. It’s not always easy to talk about post-traumatic stress disorder and injuries. Their strength has touched me the most.”
"God designed the month of March to show people who don't drink what a hangover feels like."How true! Are you all doing anything fun to celebrate the return of above-forty temperatures? I'm finally going to go see what all the fuss is over these Sandhill cranes.
I am not talking about hypocrisy. I am talking about the mere appearance of goodness as a substitute for honest art. The trend is everywhere. It is to be found, for example, in Lorrie Moore's short stories, especially "People Like That Are the Only People Here," the longest tale in Birds of America, her acclaimed new collection. The story is about a newborn baby dying of cancer. That is, the story's emotional register begins, from the very first paragraph, far beyond the reader's capacity to develop his or her own response to it. The effect is to place the supremely empathetic author in a protected niche, far beyond the reader's capacity to criticize. In this way Nice Writing fosters Nice Criticism. Anyone who writes nice writes with impunity.Full disclosure: I really liked the Poisonwood Bible. But I see what the author is saying too. What do you think?
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.Worst advice? I think Will Self's advice is pretty bad. He advises writers to stop reading fiction and to write about characters watching television. I want to do neither of those things. What's your favorite writing advice?3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
Dr. Jeffrey Karnicky, Assistant Professor of English at Drake University and author of Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture, will present from his work-in-progress, “Scarlet Experiment: Human-Bird Interactions in America,” which makes a wide swath from Audubon, Thoreau, and Dickinson to Roger Tory Peterson and Ken Kaufmann. His talk explores the limits of a system of ethical thought that seeks to engage birds as cognitive beings.
Dr. Thomas Gannon, Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at UNL, will read from his recently published book, Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature, in which he perceives a recent egalitarian, even familial, re-connection with other species that transcends the oh-so-human poetic projections of centuries, as evidenced in the work of recent Native American poets.
Andrea Comiskey Lawse, 3rd-year Ph.D. candidate in English at UNL, brings an interest in dietary theory and criticisms of taste to the table, exploring, for instance, whether the discourse of a Western “Culture of Taste” has helped establish an informal ornithological taxonomy of songbird versus fowl, of noble bird of prey versus despised carrion-eater.
Sometimes, if there's no cockerel, a bossier hen will assume the role, even being the first to leap to the defence of the brood at great personal risk. If a cockerel is subsequently introduced, a period of adjustment to the pecking order follows. A good cockerel enjoys droit de seigneur (frequently) but is a fierce and brave protector of the flock, putting himself between the threat and the hens, defending to the death if necessary. When tasty food is served he waits courteously for the hens to have their fill. A diffident cockerel is cold-shouldered by the hens.
All this might seem maniacally pointless pedantry. But as cognitive therapists note, thoughts trigger emotions, and "finalistic, absolutistic" thoughts trigger stressful emotions. "I am a failure" feels permanent, all-encompassing, hopeless. Restating it in E-Prime – "I feel like a failure" or "I have failed at this task" – makes it limited, temporary, addressable.I'm guessing this won't catch on any time soon. However, it reminds me a lot of the French subjunctive, where you have to use a special "mood" just to show that you are speaking subjectively. I never did understand why the French insisted on using the subjunctive, but I guess after reading this article I can kind of get it!
In a 2004 essay, [Albrecht] coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ”
Of course, he wants to become a character,” Stephin Merritt, who is the lead singer of the Magnetic Fields and a friend of Gaiman, says. “He’s not Salvador Dali, but he’s not far off. There’s no hard line between his persona and his private life.” Jon Levin, Gaiman’s film agent, says he recognized his client’s popularity only when he took him to a meeting at Warner Bros. and all the secretaries got up from their desks to ask for autographs. Someone said, “That never happens when Tom Cruise is here.”
Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.He's talking about writing, but his advice can be applied to other tasks too. (For instance, this advice could be applied to the task of sending in one's (slightly late) PSR submission.) (Also: is it okay to use parentheses within parentheses?!)
Post worked on “Etiquette” for nearly two years. Claridge describes her daily routine as follows: she woke at 6:30 A.M., ate breakfast in bed, and began to write. Midmorning, she took a break to give instructions to the household help; then, still in bed, she continued to write until noon.
P.S. You have fifteen days to send in your submissions! Do it!It is possible to perfect the camera to the point where it will become an automatic instrument which will focus, expose and process the film by the mere push of a button. In this way we will be able to realize a medium possessing an immediacy between seeing and recording unachieved by any other art.
Journal Star: Describe some of the lessons that you learned from different people, maybe even just beyond the lessons of the recession's impact, kind of life lessons, I guess.
Bruggeman: A lot of these small towns, they don't have big movie theaters, art houses, Broadway plays, all the things that people in big cities depend on to entertain themselves after they get off of work. They find happiness in the smaller things in life. I really learned from that that it's more than just the entertainment values of the latest craze of the Internet that make people happy. Sometimes it's family, friends, the home you live in and the dogs you raise, to even crops, just being a farmer and having land that you raised by your hands is something that makes them happy and that's what they live by.
Vladimir Nabokov: Men who use words like ‘dubious’ and ‘tenacity’.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Sommeliers.
Cormac McCarthy: Men who don’t eat cream cheese.
WSJ: Do you feel like you're trying to address the same big questions in all your work, but just in different ways?
CM: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way. Things I've written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them. So there's something about writing about it that flattens them. You've used them up. I tell people I've never read one of my books, and that's true. They think I'm pulling their leg.
* Writers Write!
Mike Gunderloy, editor of the zine review guide Factsheet Five, used to say that, even if you aren't a writer to begin with, after cranking out a million words or so, you're a writer! Gunderloy himself was a prime example. He wasn't much of one when he started F5, his "zine of zines," but he sure as hell was by the time he called it quits many millions of words later. By then, he had truly mastered the art of short-form, concise and spunky media criticism.
Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you're fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences.In my experience, the best way to beat writer's block is just to write something, anything on the page. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be something to get you going and kickstart your creativity. So this little application could be quite helpful for desperate situations!
‘My god,’ said Geoff, ‘so it’s true. We hold in our very hands the original draft of the hitherto unknown third treaty of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia signed by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III himself.’via kottke.org
‘Yes,’ confirmed Sally. ‘Who would have thought when we set off this morning for this remote Swiss village that we would end the day in possession of the very document which marked the birth of modern European statehood?'
‘Certainly not me!’ laughed Geoff.
Euclide explores the difficulty of escaping the cultural lens from which we view nature. Images from traditional landscape paintings, wildlife documentaries and travel guides construct our cultural expectations and define how we view land. Euclide’s work explores the conflicts between these images of idealized, picturesque views and the desire to truly experience nature as it is.Not near Denver? The website has a photo gallery where you can see the art!
Director J. Daniel Veneciano will discuss artist Aaron Douglas, who graduated from the University of Nebraska. This program, part of UNL's Diversity Working Group talk series, will be held in Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium. It is free and the public is invited. Visitors who bring brown bag lunches may eat in the Sheldon boardroom after the talk.
From a hieratic, hermetic art object the novel is blooming into something more casual and open: a literature of pleasure. The critics will have to catch up. This new breed of novel resists interpretation, but not the way the Modernists did. These books require a different set of tools, and a basic belief that plot and literary intelligence aren't mutually exclusive.
In fact the true postmodern novel is here, hiding in plain sight. We just haven't noticed it because we're looking in the wrong aisle. We were trained—by the Modernists, who else—to expect a literary revolution to be a revolution of the avant-garde: typographically altered, grammatically shattered, rhetorically obscure. Difficult, in a word. This is different. It's a revolution from below, up from the supermarket racks.
What do you think, readers? Is plot the next big thing? Do you prefer a suspenseful plot, or do you put more value on other aspects of the novel?
It takes a big book to portray such an immense, complex place, and this spacious volume, vividly introduced by poet Ted Kooser, fits the bill. Intrepid photographer Michael Forsberg presents breathtaking images of wide-open spaces and portraits of wildlife from bison to butterflies, bobcats to frogs. Historical geographer David Wishart contrasts the lives of the region's Native peoples with the deleterious impact of settlers, who plowed up the grasslands, sending countless species into decline and losing precious topsoil to wind erosion. Wildlife biologist, rancher, and writer Dan O'Brien-flinty, funny, and skeptical-dissects the mythology of the Great Plains, the `monumental hubris, greed, and lack of common sense' that led to its near destruction, and, on the upswing, today's bold restoration efforts. In all, a quintessential and crucial American story, powerfully told. -BooklistYou can learn more about the book and Michael Forsberg from this Journal Star article.
What caused the accident, no one can say — the only witnesses are the sandhill cranes, half a million of them, who stop outside Kearney each year on their migratory journey. Ancient and silent, the birds “dance as they have since before this river started,” re-enacting their hard-wired ritual of departure and homecoming. That Powers will use these denizens of the natural world as feathered avatars of his human characters is a given; that he is able to tease out surprising resonances is part of his gift.Check it out on Amazon
Poet Rachel McKibbens is an ex-punk rock chola with five children. Known for her astonishingly visceral stage presence and devotion to craft, McKibbens has become one of the most respected poets in the spoken word community. She is the 2009 Women of the World poetry slam champion, is an eight-time National Poetry Slam team member, a three-time NPS finalist, and a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and Pushcart nominee.Shows:
Were you a fan of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books? They say in the article that her works are becoming a popular subject of study in midwestern universities. I wonder if UNL will offer a class in On the Banks of Plum Creek anytime soon.
Rose saw her mother as a literary apprentice, not as an artist, even though she had always encouraged Wilder’s writing—first the journalism, then the juveniles; they were a less strenuous and more profitable source of income for an elderly woman than chicken farming. But, whatever art may be, the Little House books fulfill its purpose as defined by Horace: “to entertain and to inform.” Mother and daughter essentially divided that labor.
I'm going on Saturday. I'm most excited about the Wild West talk!Thursday, Sept 17
Friday, Sept. 18
Ted Kooser signing and book launch. The University of Nebraska Press and poet Ted Kooser will celebrate the publication of his new memoir, Lights on a Ground of Darkness, with a book signing. (7 pm., W. Dale Clark Library, 215 South 15th St.; Free and open to the public.)
pulp & poetry: tales of romance & adventure at the joslyn. An hour-long tour of the Joslyn Museum's permanent collection, led by poets reading their original work inspired by the museum’s paintings and sculptures. (1 pm, Joslyn Art Museum, 2200 Dodge St.; Cost: Joslyn admission.)
(downtown) omaha lit fest opening night party
Featuring: twisted lives, tormented loves and the rocking chairity fundraiser.
(6:30 pm-10 pm, W. Dale Clark Library, 215 South 15th St.; Suggested donation of your choice.)Saturday, Sept. 19
afternoon conversations with writers at KANEKO. Writers and critics discuss the influence of classic pulp fiction (romance, westerns, noir, horror, etc.), and contemporary genre fiction, on their work specifically and the literary culture in general, at KANEKO (1111 Jones St.—11th and Jones), noon to 5 pm. (buy books at Aromas Coffee House; sales provided by the Bookworm.) All panels below are free and open to the public.12 Noon. Noir at Noon: the comforts of crime in scary times. The unseemly appeal of the criminal element. With: Sean Doolittle (Safer); Harley Jane Kozak (A Date You Can’t Refuse); Evie Rhodes (Expired); and Jonathan Segura (Occupational Hazards). Moderated by Joi Brozek (I’ll See You Soon at Coney Island).
1 pm. Trashy Behavior: the writer’s life in the new economy. The roles and challenges of the publishing industry, newspapers, and memoir in chronicling hard times. With: Belinda Acosta (Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz), Joy Castro (The Truth Book), publicist Lauren Cerand, Jeff Koterba (Inklings), and Amelia María de la Luz Montes (contributor to An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working Class Roots).
2 pm. Love &/or Seduction: women writing romance. Women writers discuss writing for and about women. With: Victoria Alexander (The Virgin’s Secret); Kim Louise (Sweet Like Honey); Amelia María de la Luz Montes (editor of the Penguin Classics reissue of Who Would Have Thought It? by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton); Rachel Shukert (Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories). Moderated by emily danforth (Lucky Human).
3 pm. Vampires ♥ Zombies: the art and language of horror. The enduring appeal of the bloodsucker and other archetypes of misanthropy. With: Artist Jeremy Caniglia; D. Lee Hatchett (the Black Angel Trilogy); Chloe Neill (Some Girls Bite); Marcus Pelegrimas (Blood Blade); Evie Rhodes (Expired). Moderated by Timothy Schaffert.
4 pm. Wild: mythmaking and the American West. Writing about the legends and realities of the classic and contemporary West. With: Marcus Galloway (The Man from Boot Hill); Stew Magnuson (The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder: And Other True Stories from the Nebraska Pine-Ridge Border Towns), David Philip Mullins (True Love Versus the Cigar Store Indian).
literary happy hour. An evening at Nomad Lounge, featuring performance by aetherplough. (5 pm, 1013 Jones St.) Also, Fashion Week Finale! Free Fashion Week finale tickets for Lit Fest event-goers.
Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down. His wife has been killed; a mysterious stranger offers him a job. But Mr. Wednesday, who knows more about Shadow than is possible, warns that a storm is coming -- a battle for the very soul of America . . . and they are in its direct path.The plot takes them all over America as they see the small towns, big cities, and roadside attractions that give the Midwest its unique flavor. I would recommend it to anyone who's ever driven out of their way to see Carhenge or the World's Largest Ball of Twine.
“It makes one exceedingly weary to hear people object to football because it is brutal. Of course it is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi; that is, they all alike appeal to the crude savage instincts of men. We have not outgrown all our old animal instincts yet, heaven grant we never shall! The moment that, as a nation, we lose brute force, or an admiration for brute force, from that moment, poetry and art are forever dead for us, and we will have nothing but grammar and mathematics left.”
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