Ephemera: The Ice...

And Baby Talk Update

Thank You, Kyle, for the Heads Up

In 1990 at one of his first workshop sessions, Tom Spanbauer read aloud the story Strays from the Mark Richard story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World. As his students, we were transfixed. The story demonstrated all the rules of Minimalism, plus it contained more plot than all of the books we’d read since college — combined.

That collection, plus Hempel’s The Harvest, plus Thom Jones’ The Pugilist at Rest formed the basic trinity of what Tom taught. Each showcased “voice” in ways we’d never seen. The stories stayed focused by using Gordon Lish’s “Ruthless Exclusion.” Yet they rose above style to tell dazzling well-plotted stories.

Published in 1989, The Ice at the Bottom of the World is now becoming a movie. Let’s hope a film leads to a film tie-in edition of the book, and a cheap trade paperback. It’s a book every Minimalism should own.

This Week I’m Wading Through the Your Baby Talk

Some of it is eye-opening, a mish-mash of pidgin and hillbilly. To my surprise, Baby Talk is also Sexy Talk, the language of seduction and submission. It forces me to read aloud at times, just to appreciate (and comprehend) the inventiveness. By the weekend I’ll choose a first-round winner who’ll receive The Insider, but over the following weeks I’ll continue to choose winners until the Jackalope heads are all awarded. Please post any late entries Here.

Lest you feel an exercise in writing Baby Talk is useless and demeaning, I give you the opening paragraph from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:¹

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…

As Anthony Burgess² stresses:

Sooner or later it will become necessary for the artist to kill English by driving it to the limit, to put in is place a created language of his own. Meanwhile he must fret at the incompleteness of his emancipation: Ireland he (Joyce) may use in his art, but English will still use him.

We must not resign ourselves to a life of being used by proper English. No matter what frowning Mrs. Francisco in your Fourth Grade class said. For all of her parsed sentences, dour Esther Francisco is dead.

1. A book that made a lot of money.

2. Who wrote books that made a lot of money.