aaron hamburger

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Why Write? Why Read?

A week ago, I was honored to give the commencement keynote address at the Stonecoast MFA Program. I'd like to share one section of the speech I gave, which I think speaks to the current unease about the state of where we are now as writers and book lovers:

Recently, in the Guardian newspaper of London, novelist Philip Roth predicted that in 25 years, the number of people reading fiction would be similar to the number of people who today read Latin poetry. If you talk to authors, editors, and journalists who cover writing, they'll all say the same thing: The publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it's ever been.
Then again, the good news, I guess, is that for as long as I can remember, people have been saying the publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it has ever been. I keep asking myself, when was this supposed golden time in publishing when everything was just hunky dory?

Still, I do think it's fair to say the notion that a work of writing is something you can exchange for money is becoming fairly outmoded. Increasingly, text, or what is currently referred to as "content," is something that readers expect to be delivered for free to their laptops, their PDAs, and now their Kindles. Remember when we used to buy newspapers and magazines? Remember when we used to buy books in bookstores? Remember when books were made out of paper instead of digital blips?

When it come to the economics of publishing, we don't know if we're at the bottom of a valley that in the coming years will slope back upward, or if we've reached a new plateau that will stretch on to the foreseeable future. Maybe writers will once again be able to earn money for their work in the way that they used to. Or maybe they won't.

However, there is one thing I do know for sure: The world needs writers.

I'll say it again. The world needs us. In fact, at the very time that our work seems at its most under-read, undervalued, underappreciated in every way, the world needs us worse than ever, even if the world doesn't quite know it yet.
Facebook is fun. Tweets are witty. Blogs are, well, blogs are blogs. But none of these can inspire us in the same fundamental and important way that a great work of literary fiction and pop fiction, non-fiction, or poetry can. I'm thinking here of E. M. Forster's simple yet desperate plea from his brilliant novel Howards End: "Only connect..." Forster wasn't talking about searching for a WiFi connection to log onto his Gmail account. He was asking us to see and hear each other in the fullness and richness of the individual human experience. And in an age when we're constantly glued to screens, both for work and for pleasure, we as human beings are in desperate need of genuine connection with each other and ourselves.

Now, I don't mean to sound like some Luddite here. I love my laptop too. I watch TV pretty much every day. I check my email almost every five minutes.

Also, I want to make clear that the acts of reading and writing are not the only antidotes to our contemporary illness of being entertained to death. There is a whole host of things we all could do each day to fulfill E. M. Forster's maxim of "Only Connect": We could cook a good meal for a friend, we could listen to someone we love, we could close our eyes and take several deep breaths of air, or simply smile at someone we don't know. All of us, writers or not, can do things like these every day to connect more deeply with the very real world in which we live, at a time when it's so much easier and more tempting to simply connect to the Internet.

The trouble is, that all too often we forget to connect. So we need certain people in our society to remind us to do just that. And that's where writers, you guys, come in. By laboring each day to use black ink-marks to recreate our world, or to imagine worlds that don't exist but just maybe might, you stir us to stop watching passively as our lives go by, to stop whatever we're so busily doing for one moment, and... think. Just think.

So that's why I think it's not only advisable but in fact essential that as writers you keep doing what you're doing, published or unpublished. And if not for us, then do it for yourselves. Even if your work touches just one soul, it's worth it. And maybe that one soul just happens to be your own.

posted by aaron hamburger at 4:29 PM | 0 comments

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Book Recommendations from 2009 for 2010

I've never liked year-end top ten lists, though I'm a sucker for looking at them, because it seems strange to me that good films, books, albums should occur in multiples of ten. What's so special about the number ten that causes newspapers to make a festish of it every year?

With books, this practice seems more than a little suspect given that no one can possibly have read all the books that have come out in a certain year and from those select the ten "best." Therefore, I'd just like to note a few books I read in 2009 (where they were published in that year or not) which gave me pleasure:

1. The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler: This guy knows his way around a metaphor like few writers I've seen. I love the plots, I love the worlds he creates, but above all I love hard-bitten, wisecracking Philip Marlowe.

2. Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre: A fun, old-fashioned, Dickensian style novel bursting with characters and incidents.

3. Reading Jesus by Mary Gordon: A chance to explore the New Testament with a stirring and sensitive reader.

4. Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton: The first half of this book is a devastating take down of our obsession with status. The second half, in which de Botton advises us on how to deal with the problem of status, is not as strong as the first.

5. Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill: Why this book wasn't more celebrated is beyond me, especially since it so radically outshines other clunkier efforts (like the new Lorrie Moore novel) to capture the tragedies of the Bush era. Stylistically and emotionally, a triumph.

6. The Scenic Route by Binnie Kirshenbaum: A former teacher of mine and a wonderful, wry stylist, Kirshenbaum creates a vivid profile of a passive life.

7. A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein: Lauren is also a friend of mine, but trust me, this book well rewards your reading. It's a gripping emotional thriller about a man determined to protect his son to a fault. Read this book.

8. Unaccustomed Earth and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri: Lahiri's first book, Interpreter of Maladies left me baffled about all the praise it received. Her second two have made me a believer. I can't think of another contemporary author who musters so much sympathy for her characters. I loved these two books.

9. The Believers by Zoe Heller: I read this in one day. Heller makes you care about her characters, even if you don't particularly like them.

10. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama: Whatever you think of the politician, you have to be impressed by the writer. A surprisingly naked and moving self-portrait.

11. Perfume by Patrick Susskind: A terrific ode to the senses, with many beautiful passages.

12. The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain: The kind of book you dip in and out of rather than read cover to cover. The anti-European bias is unintentionally hilarious and a fascinating portrait of American reverse snobbery when it's offensive.

13. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh: I've read it before, but I reread it this year. What a strange book! The first half is one of the most beautiful portraits of young love I've ever read. The second half is a lame apology for it.

That's it for now. I'd love to hear from other people about books they enjoyed...

posted by aaron hamburger at 12:48 PM | 1 comments

Friday, December 11, 2009

This is Just to Say...

I'm busy as hell right now with the end of the semester, but I thought I'd leave a quick note to say I've been immersing myself in the novels of Raymond Chandler and they are indeed, delicious...

posted by aaron hamburger at 10:49 PM | 1 comments

Monday, November 02, 2009

I Like You, You Like Me, We're a Happy Family

If there's one word I'm sick of hearing in a literary context, it's "likable." Then again, maybe I'm sick of hearing it in any context.

Remember when it was fashionable for political pundits to say that the reason Bush Jr. was elected was because he was more "likable" than his opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry? Or in the last campaign, when Hillary Clinton was accused of the grave charge of not being "likable." It seems a little odd to me that one of the standards for being elected leader of the free world should be "likability," but if that is a measure voters are using, then it's a tendency to be decried, rather than analyzed.

Or, on a much more mundane level, imagine if a friend came up to you and said, "I just wanted to tell you, you're really likable." Would you take that as a compliment? Would you even know how to interpret such a remark? One possible response: "Gee, thanks for telling me that it's possible, even probable, that people like me."

And yet, in literary criticism, it's become accepted, even fashionable, for readers, critics, and editors to routinely charge writers with the crime of creating characters who are "unlikable." Forgive me for thinking that my job as a writer was to create characters with distinct and recognizable traits, characters with lifelike complexity, characters who do and say memorable things. No, it turns out that what writers are really supposed to do is create characters with whom a reader might like to split a salad with at lunch. Or, rather, we're supposed to create characters whom editors in New York imagine that readers in such exotic locales as St. Louis, Chicago, or Seattle might like to split a salad with at lunch.

In the past few months, I've read three novels by Raymond Chandler and The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten, and reread A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. These books all had two qualities in common. First, they were brilliant works of literature that were fun and absorbing to read. Second, they featured oodles of characters who could not be called "likable." Coincidence? I think not.

If I want an agreeable lunch partner, I'll call up one of my friends. If I want to read a great novel, the last thing I'll do at the bookstore is scan the jacket copy as if it were a personal ad in the hopes that the characters might be plausible BFF candidates. In fact, what I'm often looking for is quite the opposite.

In life, I would not want to hang out with Philip Marlowe, Hyman Kaplan, or Miss Quested and Dr. Aziz. They'd probably be too much to take after a short while. But in literature, I get the chance to spend time in their company for as long or as little as I wish and whenever I wish, without the burdens of courtesy, comparing schedules, remembering birthdays, etc. Furthermore, the authors who've created these characters have done me the favor of excluding the un-interesting parts of their lives and saving all the interesting stuff for the page. And I'd rather have unlikable and interesting than likable and boring.

I guess what it comes down to is that I read to expand my knowledge of the universe, not to confirm what I already know. As I open each new book I read, my hope is that I will get to observe people and places and storylines that I may not come across in my daily routine. If all I wanted were the latter, I could always go on Facebook.

posted by aaron hamburger at 1:22 PM | 1 comments

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Yom Kippur Reflections

One of the many things I like about the synagogue where I attend High Holiday Services is the fact that the rabbi opens services by giving us permission to let our attention lag. That's right, if we find ourselves getting bored during prayers and find ourselves daydreaming, reading ahead through the prayer book, even dozing off, we have our rabbi's blessing.

The idea here is not to indulge the ever-diminishing attention spans of a contemporary congregation, but in fact to give our minds some valuable time to pause and breathe between moments of pious contemplation.

During one of these moments, I happened to read through some of the anecdotes printed in my book, and I came across one that I found particularly inspiring. A prophet goes to the city of Sodom to try to get its citizens to change their evil ways. Predictably, he has no success. Still, he keeps preaching. A child goes up to the prophet and asks why he bothers, since there's no sign he'll ever succeed and getting the Sodomites to reform themselves. "At first I did it to try to get others to change their ways," says the prophet. "Now, I do it so that I don't change my ways."

This story is the perfect analogy for being an artist at a time when the arts are hurting, not just for money, but also for passionate and discerning audiences. Why write, paint, act, dance, compose, on and on, when there is so little hope of being read or watched or listened to? In order to preserve one's soul from getting sucked into the vapid wasteland otherwise known as our contemporary culture. Every minute I'm working on a book, story, or essay is a minute I'm not spending answering the latest Facebook poll, researching the lives of John and Kate (whoever they are), or downloading some useless "app" for my iPhone. Every precious minute I'm sitting quietly reading a book, I'm not checking email, watching TV, or doing some other activity that feeds my candylike craving for instant gratification, but leaves my soul to starve.

posted by aaron hamburger at 3:25 PM | 0 comments

Friday, September 04, 2009

Leaving Umbria

I've been living next to a castle in Umbria for a month, but now my time here is drawing to a close. For the most part it's been a wonderful remove from daily life, though thanks to the Internet, I haven't found it possible to be totally removed.

Aside from a few pounds, I've gained the chance to take a deep breath and hit the "reset" button in my life. As a writer, I find that sometimes it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of editing words or sentences, or the latest ups and downs that are the inevitable condition of an artistic career.

So what's it all about? What's it really all about? Here's my latest guess.

When I was a kid, I used to go down to the basement and act out stories, performed by my stuffed animals. Today, I do the same thing, though generally without the stuffed animals. As a kid, I didn't worry about whether I'd sell my stories, whether they'd be favorably reviewed, or in what quantities they'd be sold. These are the illusions that come with adulthood, because you feel that as an adult, you don't have the right to play. In fact, you do have a right to play, just not the right to expect that anyone else cares.

And so as I move forward with my writing, the one thing I want to focus on is preserving as much as possible that sense of play. We play not only because it amuses us but also because it defines us, shapes our experience, transforms life's inexplicability and randomness into bite-sized morsels of order and beauty.

We know all this without having it taught to us when we're kids. Now as adults, we have to learn it all over again.

posted by aaron hamburger at 4:24 AM | 0 comments

Friday, August 07, 2009

An Italian Adventure

I'm about to leave for a month's adventure in Umbria, Italy. I was lucky enough to receive a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, which gives writers, artists, and musicians a chance to live for six weeks in an Italian castle in the countryside between Rome and Florence. You can check it out at: www.civitella.org

After working on a novel set in Berlin, I'm ready to begin doing a little groundwork for a new project set in Italy, filled with sunshine and pasta. However, writing an Italian story presents its own challenges, namely, that it's been done thousands of times before. Usually the story involves uptight fair-skinned people from northern countries coming to Italy and losing their inhibitions. I'll be looking for some way to give that story a new spin.

When I tell people I'm going to Umbria, they usually give me a blank look. Today, Umbria is probably best known for three things: 1) Perugia chocolates 2) the truffle 3) "Foxy Knoxy" a.k.a. American exchange student Amanda Knox, who was accused of murder and is right now languishing in jail while the Italian court system takes its summer vacation.

Sadly, my partner has to stay home for this trip, but his spirit will be with me, inspiring me, teaching me, encouraging me, as always. In the meantime, I'll be posting my impressions on this site, so stay tuned...

posted by aaron hamburger at 10:14 AM | 0 comments


	Saturday, January 23, 2010 Why Write? Why Read? A week ago, I was honored to give the commencement keynote address at the Stonecoast MFA Program. I'd like to share one section of the speech I gave, which I think speaks to the current unease about the state of where we are now as writers and book lovers: Recently, in the Guardian newspaper of London, novelist Philip Roth predicted that in 25 years, the number of people reading fiction would be similar to the number of people who today read Latin poetry. If you talk to authors, editors, and journalists who cover writing, they'll all say the same thing: The publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it's ever been. Then again, the good news, I guess, is that for as long as I can remember, people have been saying the publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it has ever been. I keep asking myself, when was this supposed golden time in publishing when everything was just hunky dory? Still, I do think it's fair to say the notion that a work of writing is something you can exchange for money is becoming fairly outmoded. Increasingly, text, or what is currently referred to as "content," is something that readers expect to be delivered for free to their laptops, their PDAs, and now their Kindles. Remember when we used to buy newspapers and magazines? Remember when we used to buy books in bookstores? Remember when books were made out of paper instead of digital blips? When it come to the economics of publishing, we don't know if we're at the bottom of a valley that in the coming years will slope back upward, or if we've reached a new plateau that will stretch on to the foreseeable future. Maybe writers will once again be able to earn money for their work in the way that they used to. Or maybe they won't. However, there is one thing I do know for sure: The world needs writers. I'll say it again. The world needs us. In fact, at the very time that our work seems at its most under-read, undervalued, underappreciated in every way, the world needs us worse than ever, even if the world doesn't quite know it yet. Facebook is fun. Tweets are witty. Blogs are, well, blogs are blogs. But none of these can inspire us in the same fundamental and important way that a great work of literary fiction and pop fiction, non-fiction, or poetry can. I'm thinking here of E. M. Forster's simple yet desperate plea from his brilliant novel Howards End: "Only connect..." Forster wasn't talking about searching for a WiFi connection to log onto his Gmail account. He was asking us to see and hear each other in the fullness and richness of the individual human experience. And in an age when we're constantly glued to screens, both for work and for pleasure, we as human beings are in desperate need of genuine connection with each other and ourselves. Now, I don't mean to sound like some Luddite here. I love my laptop too. I watch TV pretty much every day. I check my email almost every five minutes. Also, I want to make clear that the acts of reading and writing are not the only antidotes to our contemporary illness of being entertained to death. There is a whole host of things we all could do each day to fulfill E. M. Forster's maxim of "Only Connect": We could cook a good meal for a friend, we could listen to someone we love, we could close our eyes and take several deep breaths of air, or simply smile at someone we don't know. All of us, writers or not, can do things like these every day to connect more deeply with the very real world in which we live, at a time when it's so much easier and more tempting to simply connect to the Internet. The trouble is, that all too often we forget to connect. So we need certain people in our society to remind us to do just that. And that's where writers, you guys, come in. By laboring each day to use black ink-marks to recreate our world, or to imagine worlds that don't exist but just maybe might, you stir us to stop watching passively as our lives go by, to stop whatever we're so busily doing for one moment, and... think. Just think. So that's why I think it's not only advisable but in fact essential that as writers you keep doing what you're doing, published or unpublished. And if not for us, then do it for yourselves. Even if your work touches just one soul, it's worth it. And maybe that one soul just happens to be your own. posted by aaron hamburger at 4:29 PM \| 0 comments Sunday, December 20, 2009 Book Recommendations from 2009 for 2010 I've never liked year-end top ten lists, though I'm a sucker for looking at them, because it seems strange to me that good films, books, albums should occur in multiples of ten. What's so special about the number ten that causes newspapers to make a festish of it every year? With books, this practice seems more than a little suspect given that no one can possibly have read all the books that have come out in a certain year and from those select the ten "best." Therefore, I'd just like to note a few books I read in 2009 (where they were published in that year or not) which gave me pleasure: 1. The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler: This guy knows his way around a metaphor like few writers I've seen. I love the plots, I love the worlds he creates, but above all I love hard-bitten, wisecracking Philip Marlowe. 2. Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre: A fun, old-fashioned, Dickensian style novel bursting with characters and incidents. 3. Reading Jesus by Mary Gordon: A chance to explore the New Testament with a stirring and sensitive reader. 4. Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton: The first half of this book is a devastating take down of our obsession with status. The second half, in which de Botton advises us on how to deal with the problem of status, is not as strong as the first. 5. Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill: Why this book wasn't more celebrated is beyond me, especially since it so radically outshines other clunkier efforts (like the new Lorrie Moore novel) to capture the tragedies of the Bush era. Stylistically and emotionally, a triumph. 6. The Scenic Route by Binnie Kirshenbaum: A former teacher of mine and a wonderful, wry stylist, Kirshenbaum creates a vivid profile of a passive life. 7. A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein: Lauren is also a friend of mine, but trust me, this book well rewards your reading. It's a gripping emotional thriller about a man determined to protect his son to a fault. Read this book. 8. Unaccustomed Earth and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri: Lahiri's first book, Interpreter of Maladies left me baffled about all the praise it received. Her second two have made me a believer. I can't think of another contemporary author who musters so much sympathy for her characters. I loved these two books. 9. The Believers by Zoe Heller: I read this in one day. Heller makes you care about her characters, even if you don't particularly like them. 10. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama: Whatever you think of the politician, you have to be impressed by the writer. A surprisingly naked and moving self-portrait. 11. Perfume by Patrick Susskind: A terrific ode to the senses, with many beautiful passages. 12. The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain: The kind of book you dip in and out of rather than read cover to cover. The anti-European bias is unintentionally hilarious and a fascinating portrait of American reverse snobbery when it's offensive. 13. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh: I've read it before, but I reread it this year. What a strange book! The first half is one of the most beautiful portraits of young love I've ever read. The second half is a lame apology for it. That's it for now. I'd love to hear from other people about books they enjoyed... posted by aaron hamburger at 12:48 PM \| 1 comments Friday, December 11, 2009 This is Just to Say... I'm busy as hell right now with the end of the semester, but I thought I'd leave a quick note to say I've been immersing myself in the novels of Raymond Chandler and they are indeed, delicious... posted by aaron hamburger at 10:49 PM \| 1 comments Monday, November 02, 2009 I Like You, You Like Me, We're a Happy Family If there's one word I'm sick of hearing in a literary context, it's "likable." Then again, maybe I'm sick of hearing it in any context. Remember when it was fashionable for political pundits to say that the reason Bush Jr. was elected was because he was more "likable" than his opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry? Or in the last campaign, when Hillary Clinton was accused of the grave charge of not being "likable." It seems a little odd to me that one of the standards for being elected leader of the free world should be "likability," but if that is a measure voters are using, then it's a tendency to be decried, rather than analyzed. Or, on a much more mundane level, imagine if a friend came up to you and said, "I just wanted to tell you, you're really likable." Would you take that as a compliment? Would you even know how to interpret such a remark? One possible response: "Gee, thanks for telling me that it's possible, even probable, that people like me." And yet, in literary criticism, it's become accepted, even fashionable, for readers, critics, and editors to routinely charge writers with the crime of creating characters who are "unlikable." Forgive me for thinking that my job as a writer was to create characters with distinct and recognizable traits, characters with lifelike complexity, characters who do and say memorable things. No, it turns out that what writers are really supposed to do is create characters with whom a reader might like to split a salad with at lunch. Or, rather, we're supposed to create characters whom editors in New York imagine that readers in such exotic locales as St. Louis, Chicago, or Seattle might like to split a salad with at lunch. In the past few months, I've read three novels by Raymond Chandler and The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten, and reread A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. These books all had two qualities in common. First, they were brilliant works of literature that were fun and absorbing to read. Second, they featured oodles of characters who could not be called "likable." Coincidence? I think not. If I want an agreeable lunch partner, I'll call up one of my friends. If I want to read a great novel, the last thing I'll do at the bookstore is scan the jacket copy as if it were a personal ad in the hopes that the characters might be plausible BFF candidates. In fact, what I'm often looking for is quite the opposite. In life, I would not want to hang out with Philip Marlowe, Hyman Kaplan, or Miss Quested and Dr. Aziz. They'd probably be too much to take after a short while. But in literature, I get the chance to spend time in their company for as long or as little as I wish and whenever I wish, without the burdens of courtesy, comparing schedules, remembering birthdays, etc. Furthermore, the authors who've created these characters have done me the favor of excluding the un-interesting parts of their lives and saving all the interesting stuff for the page. And I'd rather have unlikable and interesting than likable and boring. I guess what it comes down to is that I read to expand my knowledge of the universe, not to confirm what I already know. As I open each new book I read, my hope is that I will get to observe people and places and storylines that I may not come across in my daily routine. If all I wanted were the latter, I could always go on Facebook. posted by aaron hamburger at 1:22 PM \| 1 comments Tuesday, September 29, 2009 Yom Kippur Reflections One of the many things I like about the synagogue where I attend High Holiday Services is the fact that the rabbi opens services by giving us permission to let our attention lag. That's right, if we find ourselves getting bored during prayers and find ourselves daydreaming, reading ahead through the prayer book, even dozing off, we have our rabbi's blessing. The idea here is not to indulge the ever-diminishing attention spans of a contemporary congregation, but in fact to give our minds some valuable time to pause and breathe between moments of pious contemplation. During one of these moments, I happened to read through some of the anecdotes printed in my book, and I came across one that I found particularly inspiring. A prophet goes to the city of Sodom to try to get its citizens to change their evil ways. Predictably, he has no success. Still, he keeps preaching. A child goes up to the prophet and asks why he bothers, since there's no sign he'll ever succeed and getting the Sodomites to reform themselves. "At first I did it to try to get others to change their ways," says the prophet. "Now, I do it so that I don't change my ways." This story is the perfect analogy for being an artist at a time when the arts are hurting, not just for money, but also for passionate and discerning audiences. Why write, paint, act, dance, compose, on and on, when there is so little hope of being read or watched or listened to? In order to preserve one's soul from getting sucked into the vapid wasteland otherwise known as our contemporary culture. Every minute I'm working on a book, story, or essay is a minute I'm not spending answering the latest Facebook poll, researching the lives of John and Kate (whoever they are), or downloading some useless "app" for my iPhone. Every precious minute I'm sitting quietly reading a book, I'm not checking email, watching TV, or doing some other activity that feeds my candylike craving for instant gratification, but leaves my soul to starve. posted by aaron hamburger at 3:25 PM \| 0 comments Friday, September 04, 2009 Leaving Umbria I've been living next to a castle in Umbria for a month, but now my time here is drawing to a close. For the most part it's been a wonderful remove from daily life, though thanks to the Internet, I haven't found it possible to be totally removed. Aside from a few pounds, I've gained the chance to take a deep breath and hit the "reset" button in my life. As a writer, I find that sometimes it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of editing words or sentences, or the latest ups and downs that are the inevitable condition of an artistic career. So what's it all about? What's it really all about? Here's my latest guess. When I was a kid, I used to go down to the basement and act out stories, performed by my stuffed animals. Today, I do the same thing, though generally without the stuffed animals. As a kid, I didn't worry about whether I'd sell my stories, whether they'd be favorably reviewed, or in what quantities they'd be sold. These are the illusions that come with adulthood, because you feel that as an adult, you don't have the right to play. In fact, you do have a right to play, just not the right to expect that anyone else cares. And so as I move forward with my writing, the one thing I want to focus on is preserving as much as possible that sense of play. We play not only because it amuses us but also because it defines us, shapes our experience, transforms life's inexplicability and randomness into bite-sized morsels of order and beauty. We know all this without having it taught to us when we're kids. Now as adults, we have to learn it all over again. posted by aaron hamburger at 4:24 AM \| 0 comments Friday, August 07, 2009 An Italian Adventure I'm about to leave for a month's adventure in Umbria, Italy. I was lucky enough to receive a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, which gives writers, artists, and musicians a chance to live for six weeks in an Italian castle in the countryside between Rome and Florence. You can check it out at: www.civitella.org After working on a novel set in Berlin, I'm ready to begin doing a little groundwork for a new project set in Italy, filled with sunshine and pasta. However, writing an Italian story presents its own challenges, namely, that it's been done thousands of times before. Usually the story involves uptight fair-skinned people from northern countries coming to Italy and losing their inhibitions. I'll be looking for some way to give that story a new spin. When I tell people I'm going to Umbria, they usually give me a blank look. Today, Umbria is probably best known for three things: 1) Perugia chocolates 2) the truffle 3) "Foxy Knoxy" a.k.a. American exchange student Amanda Knox, who was accused of murder and is right now languishing in jail while the Italian court system takes its summer vacation. Sadly, my partner has to stay home for this trip, but his spirit will be with me, inspiring me, teaching me, encouraging me, as always. In the meantime, I'll be posting my impressions on this site, so stay tuned... posted by aaron hamburger at 10:14 AM \| 0 comments		Literary Blogs Beatrice Book Angst 101 Bookdwarf Booklust Book Ninja Book Slut Conversational Reading Emerging Writers Network Gawker James Tata Jessie Sholl Literary Salon Moby Lives Queer Type Rake's Progress The Reading Experience Tingle Alley Other Sites Eco Home Gear Recent Posts Why Write? Why Read? Book Recommendations from 2009 for 2010 This is Just to Say... 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