Tag / albany

by Michael Janairo

Where I’ve Been: Part 2 — In Class with Lydia Davis

For five weeks, on Tuesday nights in October and the beginning of November, I’ve spent a few hours in a room at the University of Albany with a few fellow writers and the multiple-award winning writer Lydia Davis.

My classmates — all published writers — were talented and well-spoken, even if a few weren’t as gregarious as others.

Speaking of gregarious, Lydia encouraged all of us to track metaphors in are daily lives — to include them in the things we overhear and read as part of our writer’s diaries — and that common abstract words like “gregarious” were derived from metaphors, because the word stems from a Greek word for “herd.”

As for what to include in our writer’s diaries, Lydia suggested that she writes “whatever goes into my mind that interests me.”

Most of the class was a writers workshop, reading fellow writers’ stories-in-progress and talking about them, which is always interesting to me. And we got to know each other by sharing what we’ve read in the past year — and that “reading diary” moment generated a long reading list for me.

In terms of talking about the craft of writing, Lydia shared what she called five different kinds of narration, which she wasn’t sure if she had ever seen before but thinks she may have made up as a way of taking a writerly approach to reading to discover what a writer was doing in certain passages (and how a reader may want to make use of those moments in his or her own writing).
These five categories aren’t anything new, but they offered a practical way of reading:

1. Action: characters do things
2. Comment: a reflection on something from a point of view
3. Description: things shown through sensory detail
4. Dialogue: characters talk
5. Exposition/back story: things get explained, or histories get filled in

It was all good stuff, and I enjoyed my fellow students’ writings immensely.

So even though this all came right in the crush of the new website I have been working on, I’m glad I was able to take part. And it was free, courtesy of the New York State Writers Institute.

by Michael Janairo

“ET HE UGLY RUTH” courtesy of a sponsored ad on Twitter

et=he=ugly=ruth

A young person I know recently said something along the lines that Twitter was going down the drain. I don’t where that idea came from. I’ve been using Twitter since Sept. 19, 2008. (which is longer than 99.755% of all other Twitter users, according to http://twopcharts.com/howlongontwitter).

Perhaps the young person was thinking of sponsored contents like the ad here from the Alliance for Quality Education of New York. I ignore most Twitter ads but this one got me because of the words “ET HE UGLY RUTH.”
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by Michael Janairo

Double-dog graphic design at the gas pump 

The first thing that caught my eye at the gas pump the other day as the phrase “Free meat,” right there on the upper right of this sign. As gas fumes swirled in the cold air around me, which was tinged with the taste of the rock salt that covers roads, tires and car bodies, I couldn’t help but think that nothing sounded less appetizing than the desperation of a phrase like “free meat.”

Of course, that wasn’t the end of the line, but in my years as a headline writer I’ve come to respect linebreaks in a way a poet can understand. That the end of a line is an occasion for meaning. So I focused on “free meat,” before I realized that what the sign was really talking about was “free meat sauce” to go on the hot dogs, as well as “fixin’s.” So though the apostrophe may be correct as a way to signify a dropped letter, in this case a “g,” it also has the unintended consequence of making the word seem like it is a possessive (as in these signs).

Then I saw the hotdogs. Are they supposed to be cute and charming, dressed like chefs about to cook themselves? Is that why their smiles seem so forced, their eyes seemed to be crossed (as if to suggest lack of intelligence?), and the dog on the left is giving the finger? Are these subversive hot dogs?

Anyway: As I finished filling the tank, I was happy for this momentary distraction. It’s a lot better than the pumps that have the screens and the volume blaring at you. All I could think was that someone nearby was sitting at a desk and designed that thing, and someone else approved of it.

Good going, whoever you are!