A painting of Joel Rice, by his wife Morgan Ogilvie. We like the painting, and word has it Joel's mother-in-law will be thrilled to see it online.
There's an entertaining new piece up at McSweeney's Internet Tendencies — the literature and humor site that's part of Dave Eggers' McSweeney's literary empire — by Franklin resident and occasional Scene contributor Joel Rice. Rice also writes for ESPN Magazine, ESPN.com, The Believer and The Skateboard Mag, and he wrote
a particularly memorable Scene story about David Foster Wallacefollowing the author's suicide in 2008.
The McSweeney's piece is the 19th installment in Rice's Flip: A Column About Skateboarding, titled "An Introduction to Literature, Part IV." If A Column About Skateboarding has you expecting lots of "dude!," "suhweet!" and "totally stoked!" ... well, think again. There are references to Dostoevsky, Rice's Shakespeare-denying great-grandfather, and the grisly murder of a college coed, and it begins thusly:
It’s common for students to conflate the “voice” in a given work of literature — be it a poem, novel or short story — with that of the author’s. Of course, even when a narrator speaks in first-person, this does not necessarily signal that this “voice” belongs to that of the real-life author. Obviously, crime fiction author Raymond Chandler is not the same person as his fictional creation, the hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe. It is, at best, usually misguided to assume that novelists or short story authors have direct, first-hand experience of what they choose to write about in fiction.
A brief autobiographical sketch of the author, after the jump ...
