Ann Gelder
- Birthday
- December 31
- Bio
- A writer and recovering academic. You can read my work in Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, Portland Review, The Millions, The Rumpus, and Tin House. I have taught comparative literature at Stanford and Berkeley, and I recently completed my first novel.
MY RECENT POSTS
- Personification enlivens
abstraction
May 22, 2012 03:11PM - Flashbacks in fiction: Do they
suck?
May 14, 2012 05:37PM - In praise of the writerly
surprise
May 08, 2012 08:52PM - Just a little more on 2666
May 03, 2012 11:40AM - Speaking of large, sprawling
novels...
April 27, 2012 11:02AM
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “What an awesome
image...and beautiful
thoughts.”
May 22, 2012 10:54PM - “Well done, Kenneth.
Thanks for the laughs (dark
though they
may be).”
April 24, 2012 04:15PM - “Kenneth and
Roberto--thanks for the nice
comments. And for
the Italian
lesson, Ro…”
April 11, 2012 10:55AM - “That was my other
question: what exactly is a
"flaw"? I
suppose the
one…”
March 21, 2012 11:00AM - “Yes, the all-or-nothing
mindset is really hard to get
over. I
find it applies
in…”
March 20, 2012 06:26PM
Ann Gelder's Links
MAY 22, 2012 3:11PM
Personification enlivens abstraction
Here's another thing writing teachers always tell us: Be concrete.
Use words that create images in the reader's mind; make them feel
or hear or see or smell something specific. (Smell is an especial
favorite.) This dictum is a variation of the dreaded "Show, don't
tell," and, like its counterpart, it…
MAY 14, 2012 5:37PM
Flashbacks in fiction: Do they suck?
A writing teacher once told me that you should resist including
flashbacks in your fiction at all costs. If you absolutely must add
a flashback, each one can be no more than three lines (or was it
sentences? Lines, probably, because with sentences you could cheat,
spinning out subordinate clauses for…
I've been dipping into George Saunders's essays in The Braindead
Megaphone. I've always admired Saunders as a writer of the kind
of surreal, hilarious, and deeply sad fiction I wish I could come
up with myself. But man, can he rock an essay.
I suppose that what makes his fiction great is…
I suppose that what makes his fiction great is…
MAY 3, 2012 11:40AM
Just a little more on 2666
...because I'm obsessed, still hung over, grasping at the fading
glimmers this novel's explosion left in my psyche.
I came across this piece, In the Labyrinth: A User's Guide to Bolaño, on the New Yorker web site. Now, I actually receive the New Yorker at my home on a mostly regular basis,…
I came across this piece, In the Labyrinth: A User's Guide to Bolaño, on the New Yorker web site. Now, I actually receive the New Yorker at my home on a mostly regular basis,…
APRIL 27, 2012 11:02AM
Speaking of large, sprawling novels...
While we're on the subject of
large, sprawling novels, why can't I think of any by women? Is
there a female DFW, Dostoevsky, Melville, Tolstoy, or
Bolaño? There is, right? Am I just drawing a blank,
or is this really some kind of guy thing?
Middlemarch, maybe? Anne Rice doesn't count. I'm…
Middlemarch, maybe? Anne Rice doesn't count. I'm…
APRIL 24, 2012 12:08PM
Must the Great Novel be large, sprawling, frantic, and a bit of a mess?
No, I didn't disappear under a pile of fennel, but of work...which
is like fennel, in that it is tough and large and sometimes hard to
cut through, but very good roasted.
In addition, I have been racing to finish
Roberto Bolaño's 2666, because I took it out
of the library, and… Read full post »
APRIL 12, 2012 4:08PM
Instead of fiction, fennel
Not really feeling the literary life today; not sure why, but allow
me to compensate by talking about fennel! It's awesome! Yeah, that
stuff that grows in huge clumps along the freeway here in Northern
California is just the best thing ever, roasted or sauteed. Nor
does one need to park…
APRIL 10, 2012 12:05PM
An adverb of note
From
time to time I like to say something nice about adverbs.
Stephen King has said the road to hell is paved with them, and no
one knows the way to perdition better than King. And it's true that
writers often employ adverbs for the sole purpose of shoring up
weak…
APRIL 3, 2012 6:52PM
A toned-down rant on education, with bonus crackpot theory
So this is very cool.
It's TED Curator Chris Anderson's animated talk, "Questions No One Knows the Answers To." Are kids everywhere watching this? And adults as well? I hope so.
As I have mentioned, I went to an excellent public school and had a presumably excellent science education therein. Yet never/…
It's TED Curator Chris Anderson's animated talk, "Questions No One Knows the Answers To." Are kids everywhere watching this? And adults as well? I hope so.
As I have mentioned, I went to an excellent public school and had a presumably excellent science education therein. Yet never/…
MARCH 27, 2012 6:21PM
Freaks and Geeks and mining your childhood
We just watched Episode Fifteen of the eighteen total episodes of
Freaks and Geeks. As we near the end, it's all starting to
seem darker and sadder, because we know there will never be any
more episodes, ever, and also because the later episodes explore
darker themes (addiction, accidental pet death,…
MARCH 22, 2012 3:53PM
The Hound of the Baskervilles: Pwned by Holmes
So, three weeks ago precisely, I wrote a
terribly excited post about how Holmes and
Watson had accidentally allowed their client, Henry
Baskerville, to be killed! And it was really cool, because, see,
Conan Doyle had introduced this really troubling moral dimension to
the whole sleuthing business, an…
MARCH 20, 2012 1:13PM
For the love of the flawed novel
From Emily St. John Mandel's review of
Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker on The Millions:
It seems so to me, as well. Part of what I love about The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, is the sense that its…
[I]t seems to me that there’s something magnificent about sprawling and ever-so-slightly flawed novels.
It seems so to me, as well. Part of what I love about The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, is the sense that its…
MARCH 19, 2012 12:36PM
A brief but passionate rant about education
I break my usual Monday silence to share some thoughts that came to
me after reading this
article. Its overall point is that homeschooling must be more
closely regulated. While the author, Kristin Rawls, acknowledges
that few formal studies have been done on the matter, anecdotal
evidence suggests ma…
MARCH 15, 2012 12:30PM
Justice and the satisfying ending
Today's writing lesson is nominally about Hound of the
Baskervilles. But since I haven't read any further from last
week, I will have to speak about Larger Issues as opposed to
specific literary techniques. For example, the matter of justice:
What does fiction have to do with it? Can it bring…
MARCH 13, 2012 12:03PM
Staying in touch with your writing
Over the last few weeks I've been fairly consumed with editing
work. Which is good! Very, very good! But it has left me a tad
depleted on the verbal front, not to mention reluctant to spend any
more time in front of a computer screen than necessary. So I didn't
work…
MARCH 7, 2012 11:36AM
A small accomplishment, overblown
I'm short on time and brainpower this week, so I'll just show you
this picture--
--which is of me at Pt. Reyes, just before I free-climbed that rock wall in the background.
Yes, well. I didn't climb the part that's over the water. Also, the same feat was achieved by many others, including…
--which is of me at Pt. Reyes, just before I free-climbed that rock wall in the background.
Yes, well. I didn't climb the part that's over the water. Also, the same feat was achieved by many others, including…
MARCH 1, 2012 2:39PM
The Hound of the Baskervilles: Holmes and the uncanny
Well, Hound
gets very exciting in the section I read this week. A murderous
convict loose on the moor! An encounter with a fallen woman!
Horrid, blood-chilling screams and/or baying in the night! Another
mysterious man loose on the moor, who appears silhouetted atop a
tor in the moonlight, and when…
FEBRUARY 28, 2012 7:12PM
On sexism and sympathy
I read Jonathan Franzen's now notorious piece on
Edith Wharton a few weeks ago, and I admit to not being
immediately enraged. Mostly I was focused on his ideas about how
authors create sympathy for characters, since this is a
preoccupation of mine (and I taught a class on this topic…
FEBRUARY 23, 2012 5:40PM
The Hound of the Baskervilles: More on character in mystery stories
I suppose I've been hitting this topic pretty hard lately, but I
continue to be amazed at the importance of characterization in
Hound.
This is my first time reading a Sherlock Holmes story, and I
expected it to be formulaic, at least when it came to the rendering
of people. Yet,…
FEBRUARY 21, 2012 6:46PM
On the thin ice of a new day (on Twitter)
Yes, I caved. My first day on Twitter was largely spent blocking a
passel of unusually friendly young women who for some reason wish
to follow me. It will take me awhile to get comfortable with the
form, which seems to me less like birdsong, and more an endless
series of…
FEBRUARY 16, 2012 7:16PM
The Hound of the Baskervilles: Point of view
I will get to this week's discussion of Hound
via Transsiberian. I mean Transsiberian the
film, of course! Like most people I had never heard of this 2008
film, and that's because it opened the same day as Dark
Knight. We watched it last night; in accordance with the
consensus on…
FEBRUARY 14, 2012 6:23PM
Stories without consequences
So like just about everyone else I've been watching Downton Abbey.
I've now watched every episode, always a day or more late, since we
don't have TV, only the Internet.* I can't say I have
Downton-mania, exactly. I don't love it or hate it. Most of the
characters leave me cold…
FEBRUARY 9, 2012 6:36PM
The Hound of the Baskervilles: Learning to look at faces
This week's reading of Hound
is really just a commentary on one phrase. But this little
description of Stapleton's physical appearance came pretty close to
astounding me. Describing his new acquaintance in a letter to
Holmes, Watson writes:
There is a dry glitterin his eyes, and a firm set of his thin… Read full post »
FEBRUARY 7, 2012 6:52PM
How Sherlock Holmes enchants the world
I'm a little behind on my Hound reading, but fortunately I
have a
great link to keep that Sherlockian tingle going till next
time. Via
Andrew Sullivan, Michael Saler says that the deep appeal of the
Holmes stories is a kind of
enchantment--and not the usual kind, either. Holmes goes
against…
FEBRUARY 2, 2012 1:40PM
Books, ebooks, and how everything's always changing
So Jonathan Franzen has gone and said another odd thing in public,
this time about
ebooks and their apparent threat to civilization. Not
surprisingly, I'm ambivalent about these remarks. I do wonder about
the relative impermanence and mutability of ebooks (though the
corollary is that ebooks won't go…
Chicken Mãâàn
David Goodloe
roberto luigi
STATHI STATHI
DH Austin
kenneth houck
Salon.com