The Elements of Style from Jake Heller on Vimeo.

Thanks for the link, Indigo Editing!

Charles Yu, rendered by John Sperry

For me, working for the Festival as an author coordinator (I get to weigh in on which writers are asked to come and then facilitate the logistical details of those invites, along with four comrades, not too shabby), I’ve been astonished that each year has surpassed the one before in terms of size and scope and popularity. 2011 looks well on track to repeat that magic.

Apparently the printed work is far from defunct.

Here’s just a few of the authors I’m especially excited to meet this year.

Vanessa Vaselka is not only a disturbingly original writer, she’s Portlandian. Her debut novel Zazen is a laugh-out-loud, upsetting and visionary work of fiction about a United States of the near future where uprisings are not only constants, they’re à la mode. Months ago when I first read this, I envisioned an America a year or two away from now. As of this writing, Vanessa’s bleak future looks more like cinema verité.

She will read from Zazen along with another genre-buster, Charles Yu (that’s his portrait above, by Jon Sperry). Charles is the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, one of the wilder books for sale this year at Wordstock. And Charles and Vanessa are in good company this year for fellow trailblazers; Jennifer Egan will be here with her Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis will read from Wildwood, their marvelous book for young readers about the Impassable Wilderness (aka Forest Park).

Among a wide-ranging slate of intriguing conversations this year, my personal favorite is “How to Win Over Agents and Editors,” moderated by Mandy Hubbard, which includes three prominent and local publisher/agents — Rhonda Hughes, Victoria Blake, and newcomer Betsy Amster — in addition to New Yorker David Forrer.

And if international literati are more to your taste, there is Irish author Anne Enright, who won the Booker Prize not long ago, and Michael Ondaatje, also with a Booker Prize to his credit among many, many other distinctions.

You can browse the schedule here. Check out also Alison Hallett’s equally idiosyncratic picks at the Portland Mercury.

Say hello when you come. I’ll be the nervous guy in the black t-shirt, nervously wringing his hands in the back of the smaller stages. And loving every minute of this weekend.

Of course you’ll notice that the caption below should read “if Joyce were a peanut,” but who’s counting, right? It’s Bloomsday!

Sigh. I promise to have my own, original content soon. Meanwhile: enjoy.

The rain had let up and leveled out to its usual winter-long pace . . . not so much rain as a dreamy smear of blue-gray that wipes over the land instead of falling on it, making patient spectral shades of the tree trunks and a pathic, placid and cordial sighing sound all along the broad river. A friendly sound, even. It was nothing fearful after all. The same old rain, and, if not welcome, at least accepted — an old gray aunt who came to visit every winter and stayed till spring. You learn to live with her. You learn to reconcile yourself to the little inconveniences and not get annoyed. You remember she is seldom angry or vicious and nothing to get in a stew about, and if she is a bore and stays overlong you can train yourself not to notice her, or at least not to stew about her.

Illustration by Carson Ellis from the Wildwood series, by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis

True confession: it had been a while since I’d read One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Just a little while. High school, actually. And somewhere along the line I read Sometimes a Great Notion, which totally eclipsed Kesey’s earlier book for me. So I had a long time to forget just how awesome Kesey’s first big success actually is.

Recently that was remedied thanks to Literary Arts, which asked me to take over the Ken Kesey seminar in its popular Delve series. I dived into both of the major novels at once, then went on to watch the movie versions of both books. You can skip the major misfire they made out of Notion, but of course the outstanding adaptation of Cuckoo, starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, made film history.

Coming to Cuckoo’s Nest again was a revelation for me. What read to a 16-year-old as a novel about how the evils of society (as represented by Nurse Ratched) now comes into focus for me as a much more nuanced story about human failure — and triumph — within each of the characters, the “Big Nurse” included. The characters’ essential humanity shines through. Listen to this passage about life in the mental institution, voiced by Chief Bromden, the inmate that patients and staff alike wrongly think is stupid:

It’s like each face was a sign like one of those “I’m Blind” signs the dago accordion players in Portland hung around their necks, only these signs say “I’m tired” or “I’m scared” or “I’m dying of a bum liver” or “I’m all bound up with machinery and people pushing me alla time.” I can read all the signs, it don’t make any difference how little the print gets. Some of the faces are looking around at one another and could read the other fellow’s if they would, but what’s the sense? The faces blow past in the fog like confetti.

As if were not pleasure enough to spend six weeks discussing these great books, Portland Center Stage will be producing Dale Wasserman’s celebrated stage adaptation of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, from February 22-March 27. The excellent cast includes Gretchen Corbett, one of Portland’s finest actors, as the buttoned-down Nurse Ratched — it’s going to be an unforgettable production.

The book’s subtitle says it all: “How to Find Funds and Write Foolproof Proposals for the Visual, Literary, and Performing Arts.” The how-to part of the equation is here in abundance, but what I appreciate about this volume is the moral support its author offers. Gigi’s writing is casual yet no-nonsense; she speaks from her own experience, as one from the trenches, so she sounds like a pal, like a peer — rather than Moses handing down commandments from on high.

Now this is one book where you should not skip the preface and introduction and go straight to the instructional sections. If you do, you’ll miss out on guideposts that map the rest of territory for you. I was surprised to learn, for instance, that in 2007 the largest group of grants (44%) went to literary artists. Who knew? There is support out there, if you’re willing to attack it with the same zeal you put into your work.

Knowing where to look for money is a major part of this endeavor, and Gigi appends an extremely helpful list of places to look. But the bulk of the book goes toward how to craft grants once you’ve found potential funders, and the cultivation of your donors once they’ve funded you. And lest you rankle at the idea of jumping through hoops for filthy lucre, our guide suggests that it’s all in how you frame it; the artist who can articulate what she’s up to is often an artist in greater command of her medium.

Bonus: there is even a chapter on DIY fundrasing. Thank you, Gigi! The Artist’s Guide already has a place on my reference shelf, within arm’s reach of my desk. I’ll be turning to it many, many times in the months to come.

Many thanks to the rarely seen but ever vigilant Cousin Tabitha for this fun video, created for the 5th Typophile Film Festival.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/6382511

Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles from Brent Barson on Vimeo.

Selected Reading (Nausea) by Eric Yahnker

This excerpt, borrowed from Lorrie Moore’s marvelous novel Anagrams, exquisitely yet wryly expresses the wonder and the mystery of how humans create infinite meaning from a very finite array of vocal sounds.

When I was little, I didn’t understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, “Donna who?” I would say, “Donna Gilbert. I thought close was good enough, that sloppiness was generally built into the language. I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Crosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday were the same person. That Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy were the same person. It was a shock for me quite late in life to discover that Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau were not even related. Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive the slightest reshuffling of letters. One gust of wind and Santa became Satan. A slip of the pen and pears turned into pearls. A little interior decorating and the world became her twold, an ungrammatical and unkind assessment of an aging aunt in a singles bar. Add a d to poor, you got droop. It was that way in biology too, too. Add a chromosome, get a criminal. Subtract one, get an idiot or a chipmunk. That was the way with things. When you wanted someone to say “I love you,” approximate assemblages — igloo, eyelid glue, isle of ewe — however lovely, didn’t quite make it. “You are my honey bunch” was not usually interchangeable with “You are my bunny hutch.”