June 29, 2007
Secret Agent Elizabeth Visits the Dark Side: Writers Tell All
Where do the words come from? Secret Agent Elizabeth investigates dirty little secrets, 7th grade enemies, and the creative trickery writers use to get through the day. A weekly interview feature by Elizabeth Merrick, whose NYC writing and creativity workshops use intuition and the occasional dance party to fine tune all sorts of creative trickery & get her students art into the world fast enough to balance out the Republicans' bad juju.
THIS WEEK: Jillian Weise
Jillian Weise's book of poems, The Amputee's Guide to Sex, came out earlier this year from Soft Skull Press. Her most recent work appears in Tin House and Hanging Loose. Plays have been staged at the New York Fringe Festival and the Provincetown Playwrights Festival. She teaches and studies at the University of Cincinnati.
Inquiring minds want to know: what are your daily writing habits (and vices)? What appalling tricks do you use to get yourself to be productive, and are there any you have discarded?
I spend the day teaching, studying and eavesdropping. I write at night until the sun happens. If I get stalled, I like to read magicians such as Cortazar or Pinter or Duras. Around 2am, the Fifth Amendment Bar closes and there's usually a fight on the street outside my window. If I'm stuck, I'll take the words from the fight ("Didn't I tell you? Didn't I tell you? I knew if I told you, you'd be pissed"). If that fails I call some other late-nighter to flirt or pour a half-shot of gin with tonic. Either one will do, though one will do without anything at stake.
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?
I took a bus to follow a man to New York. I didn't know I was following him at the time but that became apparent when he got off the bus and we walked the same direction twenty blocks and we were standing at the corner of 57th and 9th. He turned around and said, Are you following me? Maybe, I said. As it turns out, he was already following someone else, an aspiring model, and on top of that he was a writer. So I waited and started writing some letters addressed to the man I was following. When I showed him the letters he thought they were okay and anyway, it didn't work out with the model.
What is the most mortifying, worst thing you've ever written and what led you down that path to ruin? Do you have any rituals you use in an emergency or if you're blocked?
I wrote some poems about monomania and they were awful. I thought I'd personify these historical monomaniacs but then I didn't live in the 17th century and I couldn't hear any of the people clearly so it got confusing. As for the path to ruin, now that you mention it, I kind of like that. I just spent the night with Temple Drake and she headed down the path to ruin. As for rituals, I try not to ever say, "I can't go out. I have to write." When I've said that in the past inevitably I've ended up watching four hours of Forensic Files while the person I've said it to ends up writing their magnum opus.
How do you feel about writing sex scenes, and how do you handle it?
I think sex scenes are very difficult to write. If not done well they come off overwrought and embarrassing, often because the author is giving voice to some secret wish or just wants so much for the general narrative arc to hinge on the encounter, when most such "real life" encounters hinge nothing together but the obvious. So you have to be careful. And that's why I try to write sex scenes as if the people, instead of having sex, were shopping for a used car. What about the service plan? Do you swear you didn't turn the odometer back? What if I pay you in cash and where can I get a raccoon tail for the antenna? Problems arise with this method, of course, when I am forced by the natural progression of the poem or story I am writing to present two characters who are actually shopping for a used car. And then they're on the lot saying improbable things to the salesperson, like, Pull my hair, please, and if I do it sideways can I get this in chartreuse? To avoid such problems -- and I would advise all young writers to do this -- I usually just have my characters take the bus.
What books do you secretly love? And what books do you secretly hate?
I secretly love Hugh Prather's Notes to Myself. I secretly hate Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. She died before she finished it and no one told me. After 644 pages of pure delight, she drops off on the sentence: "...let me go to sleep, and dream about my dear Cynthia and my new shawl!"
What is the most terrifying task for you -- whether it be a certain kind of scene, character, or subject matter?
I'm nervous about writing nature; it's so symmetrical and indifferent.
What project has been the biggest struggle for you so far in your career, and how did you resolve your difficulties?
The Amputee's Guide to Sex was a struggle because I had no clue how to translate the experience of physical difference to the page. Suddenly I was writing poems in which the speakers varied from hot to cold with how they handled disability. In a way, I did not know what it meant to be disabled until I started writing the poems. And then, I didn't know who to read for help. Milton, Pope, Keats, okay, but how instructive are they concerning how to write about their disabilities in verse? To complicate matters, I was reading contemporary stories in which the disabled are tropes that reinforce stereotypes more than characters that breathe air. You've read these people before -- the disabled character, let's call her Suzie, enlightens the main character, this leads to a paragraph of introspection on how Suzie with her one arm made the main character appreciate his two arms, and then the main character takes a walk. I am not entirely resolved about the issue.
What unpleasant truth do you routinely conceal from young, fresh writers eager to make their mark?
I try not to say, "You will always be applying for things, there will be so many things to apply for, and you will write many checks for $15 that are never acknowledged, and you could be spending this money on something with instant gratification, like a haircut."
And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?
I'd like to own a peacock dress that has teleport powers.
Seed has the video of Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, being interviewed on the Colbert Report.
Eddie Campbell explains how Batman caused him to start a company called Antelope Pineapple Pty. Ltd.
Shalom Auslander's memoir Foreskin's Lament doesn't come out until October, but you can watch this video preview on his website. (I usually don't read advance copies of books for some reason. I like to wait until around the release date. But I could only resist Shalom's book for about a week and then read it all in one sitting. It's very, very good.)
June 28, 2007
Via Bookninja, a study arguing that children remember facts from books (free registration required), even the "truthy" ones. From the article:
Parents, beware: Beloved childhood classics such as Winnie the Pooh may be teaching kids false facts about the world — like tigers are bouncy and donkeys are chronically depressed.Kids believe what they read — even if it's wrong. This may seem fairly obvious (don't adults do this too?), but it's now been statistically confirmed by scientists, who say that parents and teachers should use care in choosing books for their kids.
I'm a little punchy today, and so don't mind risking a quick digression: this phenomenon appears in my classes in two different directions. First, everything's a "novel." "In the novel 'Deceptions' by Philip Larkin . . ."; Steven Johnson wrote a novel, Everything Bad Is Good for You, which explains . . . " Genre gets flattened all to hell.
In the other direction, students become convinced that something's true, just because it's in a novel or a film. For example, after watching Zero Patience, several students believed that Richard Burton is in fact still alive, in Canada, and wanted to bring him to campus for a lecture. (Which would, I think, be pretty awesome.)
It's not just students, though: A fair number of people seem to believe that the phrase "informative novel" conveys something meaningful.
On to the links!
"Five titles you shouldn't be allowed to give yourself": #5: Poet.
Another reason to be glad one doesn't teach at Yale, or perhaps that one isn't the inimitable Harold Bloom (though it's good to occasionally be on the same imprint): "Harold Bloom, who in fifty-three years of teaching literature at Yale University has had many undergraduate poems pressed hopefully upon him . . ."
Poetry & Tide liquid detergent. Before moving to Connecticut, I had a small edition of Keats's poems that had originally been a favor included in some long-extinct brand of laundry soap. I thought it was terrific that there was once a time in America when the prospect of receiving a miniature selected Keats would drive one's decision to buy soap flakes. No idea where it is now.
The newest recordings in the Romantic Circles Poets on Poets series are up. Readers include Charles Bernstein, R. Erica Doyle, Yunte Huang, Elaine Sexton, and John Struloeff.
June 27, 2007
Just a reminder about tonight's event: It's at the Stop Smiling space at 1371 N Milwaukee (kind of half way between the Division and Damen blue line stops). Also, it is evidently starting at 8 instead of our usual 7:30 because the Printers Ball folks, our co-sponsors, misprinted promotional materials. Otherwise we will just see you there.
Hugh Aplin discusses translating Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich at Hesperus Press's Magazine.
Jamey Gambrell writes about the risks journalists take in Putin's Russia in the New York Review of Books.
The body count among Russian reporters is now thirteen murders in the line of duty since Putin has been in power. In each case the reporter was investigating or had published stories critical of government or business officials. No one has been convicted of these killings, even in the rare instances when the police have apprehended suspects. The murder last October of the brave, rash Anna Politkovskaya, about whom Robert Cottrell wrote eloquently in these pages recently, got worldwide attention but others are little known abroad. The Committee to Protect Journalists found in 2006 that Russia was the third most deadly country in the world for reporters.
I was trying to find an archived version of Melvin Jules Bukiet's essay for the American Scholar's spring issue, but it doesn't seem to be online. (Also possible: I'm blind.) Along the way, however, I found two other remarkable pieces:
- Christian Wiman from Poetry writes about a short span of time that included a loss of the ability to write poetry, a wedding, and a diagnosis with a rare form of cancer of the blood.
- Also, Mary Gordon writes about her mother, which is, I'm guessing, possibly an excerpt from her upcoming book Circling My Mother.
I really wouldn't recommend reading either one unless you're in a good place emotionally. Otherwise you'll have to put on a Caruso record and cry after.
If I can find one Andrew O'Hagan audio interview or speech a day, that would be great. I love his voice. He's on the Leonard Lopate show, discussing Be Near Me.
June 26, 2007
Virginia Quarterly Review has put up a large portion of their summer issue.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown.
Acknowledgments:
One of the nicest things about writing this book has been the opportunity to remind everyone that I am extremely well connected. To this end, I would like to list five pages of my closest establishment and media friends as a warning to critics that they will never work in journalism again if they give this book a bad review.
David Mitchell talks about his upcoming book at The Japan Times. (Link from the Literary Saloon.)
If my imagination doesn't work "passively" or even "intransitively," at its own behest rather than mine, and come up with cliche-demolishing twists of phrase and turns of plot and happy accidents and unexpected reactions from characters, then the book will be sterile. Well-written with luck, and even intelligent, but sterile. Maybe this answers the question this paragraph opened with: Imagination is what makes art fertile.
Covering Photography writes about the use of Aaron Siskind's photographs for book covers.
When I flirt with the writers I'm interviewing (always, really, except for Anthony Bourdain, because I spent most of it afraid he was going to punch me if I asked the wrong thing) I usually cut it out of the transcript. Actually, I usually fast forward through it while transcribing. Daniel Asa Rose, however, leaves it in. The whole first page of this interview with Anne Dillard about her new book The Maytrees is a big, long flirtation, and I have to say I'm a little enchanted with it. If only I flirted so well.
Dillard: I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore. I'm 62 now.
Rose: For me, you'll always be the way you were then: svelte, incandescent.
June 25, 2007
I missed the MoCCA festival this weekend due to a memorial service for a coworker, so here's the first set of photos via Heidi MacDonald. I'm really not bitter though. When else is someone going to group chant W.B. Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Aengus" next to the Hans Christian Anderson statue in Central Park? That's the thing about old hippie funerals. They never actually bog you down the way you'd expect.
From the files of the people vs. "JT LeRoy". Meanwhile, a film adaptation currently titled "Sarah Plus" is in the works. Didn't we already see this a the end of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things?
Ms. Albert, both in testimony and through her lawyer, Eric Weinstein, has said that JT Leroy was never a profit-making venture, despite the fact she paid a friend to appear in public as "JT" in a blond wig and sunglasses to promote the book. Her contention is that JT Leroy was not an ordinary nom de plume in the Mark Twain-Samuel Clemens mold but a fictional necessity, a sort of imaginary survival apparatus that allowed her both to write and to breathe.
The next Judas conspiracy theory book toting the name Elaine Pagels to make it more worthwhile: Reading Judas. I actually work with a Dominican priest (flowing dress and all) in my bookstore (he is the creepiest, most amazingly grumpy and disturbing gay man I have ever met... I really ought to Ghost World him on my last day and find out where he lives), and this is the sort of thing he'll throw at the religion customers when provoked.
Los Bros. Hernandez, as interviewed by...Wizard?!
JAIME: I could tell you that Gilbert's approach helped me a lot in taking the girls out of the science fiction, to handle stuff more at home. Gilbert was the older brother, anyway, so he really did everything before me, ever since we were little.
I always knew Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory wasn't quite right for small children. Scared the shit out of me as a kid. Well, that and Troll II.
SMITH Magazine offers its favorite places to find short fiction and nonfiction this summer.
This week in The New Yorker: Joan Acocella on the Waugh literary dynasty.
Over at Fresh Yarn: Rachel Kramer Bussel on babies:
As I left their apartment, I had to face the fact that when it comes to babies, I'm easy, and it's not just because I long for one of my own as, at 31, I hear my biological clock blaring its ultra-loud alarm at me morning, noon, and stroller-filled night. I have what I call the "wall of babies" on my cubicle at work -- at porn magazine Penthouse Variations; most are the children of friends or family members, though one is a clipping from the newspaper of a yawning newborn named Dio who I deemed too cute to be banished to the recycling bin. Do I love him? No, but my heart flip-flops just a little when I see his photo.
And if you're in New York on Wednesday, this week is The Happy Ending Reading Series's season finale. This week's readers are Eliza Griswold, Jean Thompson, and Alison Bechdel, with music by One Ring Zero (you remember "the author project," don't you?).
I should have read this before this weekend: How to get rid of your books.
Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey, librarians in Plainville, Connecticut, received an NSL to turn over computer records in their library on July 13, 2005. Unlike a suspected thousands of other people around the country, Chase, Bailey and two of their colleagues stood up to the Man and refused to comply, convinced that the feds had no right to intrude on anyone's privacy without a court order (NSLs don't require a judge's approval). That's when things turned ugly.
In other library news:
"A Chicago suburb's public library received a $3,000 grant enabling it to develop the country's first transgender resource collection."
When I need something I fear might reside in my office closet, I usually see if I can restructure my life without it first. There were times in the past when I would have a few glasses of wine before trying to figure out how to get rid of all of these books, and mostly, evidently, I would pack them into boxes and put them in my closet. Very effective. Just opening the door would cause crashes I was unprepared to deal with, so after a while I just blocked the thing off and tried to forget about it. But this weekend, completely sober, I decided to haul everything out and call the people who normally take books away from me. (Adrienne runs a used bookstore, Linda accumulates books for nursing homes in the area, and my landlord runs a reading program for the homeless.)
There was a lot of sneezing and a lot of bewildered "so that's where that went." I opened a small box from the top shelf and discovered a dozen Christopher Pike novels. Flesh eating killer cheerleaders! Men come back from the dead to kill your ass! If a beautiful woman wants to sleep with you, she's probably just trying to tie you to her bed so she can kill you! It was worth cleaning out the Closet of Doom (sorry, too much Day Watch) to find those.
Now, as soon as Adrienne, Linda, and my landlord show up, I can walk through my kitchen again.
Susanna Moore responds to the label "transgressive" (thrown out there by Michiko in her review of The Big Girls).
“Transgressive means to me breaking the rules and sinning. I don’t see myself as breaking the rules and sinning. I’m really interested in what it means to be female. That, I would say, is the subject of all the books.”
June 22, 2007
Secret Agent Elizabeth Visits the Dark Side: Writers Tell All
Where do the words come from? Secret Agent Elizabeth investigates dirty little secrets, 7th grade enemies, and the creative trickery writers use to get through the day. A weekly interview feature by Elizabeth Merrick, whose NYC writing and creativity workshops use intuition and the occasional dance party to fine tune all sorts of creative trickery & get her students art into the world fast enough to balance out the Republicans' bad juju. Next class: Creative Jumpstart on Sat. 6/23.
THIS WEEK: Patrick Somerville
Patrick Somerville lives in Chicago. His first book of stories, Trouble, was published by Vintage Books in September of 2006. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, EPOCH, GQ, The Barcelona Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. You can read some of his stories at www.patricksomerville.com.
Is there some element of your work that you particularly enjoy and that readers or critics seem not to notice so much?
I think there are ideas about religion in Trouble -- particularly, ideas about living without religion, and still seeking meaning, and spiritual knowledge, still looking for mystical experiences, minus the rituals and guidance of the church. I think most practicing Christians in our country look at atheists and see people who have elected to reject the metaphysical entirely -- that there is no difference between atheism and nihilism. That drives me fucking bananas. I write about it, albeit in a very abstract way. But the ideas are there if you look closely. At least I hope they are. I’m trying to get better at using that kind of stuff out in the open, and not burying it deep inside of what I think is a theme, but what actually turns out to be totally invisible.
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?
I’d like to say there was a moment when I looked up and shook some famous writer’s hand and realized what I wanted to be, but I didn’t know any writers and didn’t even really know how one could be a writer. My dad is a doctor and that’s what I was going to be -- at least until the second semester of my sophomore year of college, when lab happened in biology, and I realized I had some problems with the detail-oriented work of science. (This made me imagine, like, forgetting to put an organ back inside of someone.) I did read a lot, though, and I liked to write fiction as a hobby, but even at that kind of mental breakdown point in the middle of college, I still thought that creative writing classes were strange and self-indulgent and that the whole idea of MFA programs was misguided. (I don’t think that anymore, not at all. I think I didn’t understand what creative writing classes were, then, but that’s for a different question.)
I grew up with parents who valued literature and reading, and it made me read for pleasure -- that’s probably the most important single thing that made me become a writer. I’d find my mom reading everywhere, at all hours. I would often wake up in the middle of the night and find her sitting at the kitchen table in her pajamas, finishing a novel. Seeing that kind of thing is important.
The first book I can remember reading was Treasure Island, and soon after that, I read something like 50 Dragonlance books in a row -- actually 50, there really are that many -- and became deeply, entirely, insanely consumed by storytelling. When I got a little bit older I read Catch-22 and The Stranger, and those two books, I think, were the ones that really shocked me into realizing just how much was possible in literature.
Inquiring minds want to know: what are your daily writing habits (and vices)?
I usually write every day, depending on what’s going on, and what kind of work I’m doing. Until recently I was an editor working in a cubicle. That kind of thing tends to cut into your energy for writing fiction, as does commuting, as does anything that gets in the way of big blocks of time with not a lot of interruptions. An ideal writing day for me -- and by ideal I mean a day in which I’m not teaching or doing some kind of freelance work -- is waking up at 8:00, drinking lots of coffee, reading a little, writing for three or four hours (on the computer usually, but sometimes in notebooks if I’m out somewhere -- I don’t care much about the specifics of how I’m writing), eating lunch, writing for another hour or so, making notes about what I’ll do the next day, and then moving on to something boring, like laundry or TV or the bank or whatever. I try to read at night, too, but, well, I like movies. I don’t write for 14 hours a day, but I like to know that I could, if I needed to -- once in awhile those days come out of nowhere, and it’s good to be able to stay with something if it feels right.
What appalling tricks do you use to get yourself to be productive, and are there any you have discarded?
Reading again. It has a meditative quality to it that gets me into the right psychological place. I think you can force your way into the same place by sheer will and insistence, but not always. Beyond that I usually just leave if it’s not happening. I play guitar or go out. I feel like I might be damaging something in my imagination if I try too hard, like shifting gears without using the clutch right. I’m scared of my brain falling apart.
I guess that’s not appalling. Oh yeah, wait—sometimes I go out and kill people when I can’t think of good endings.
What is the most mortifying, worst thing you've ever written and what led you down that path to ruin?
The most instructive bad story I’ve written came back in high school, during my junior year. My sophomore year I had written a story that won one of the school’s awards and let me go to this Wisconsin fiction-writing convention. I had written it while lying on my bed the night before it was due, just enjoying myself, really. So it won an award, and I got all full of myself, and the next year I decided I was going to write an excellent short story with excellent themes and excellent characters and win the same award again and go to the same convention. It completely sucked. It had a mutilation scene involving a janitor.
The point, though, is about the spirit of the writing. Something much better had happened when I was relaxed and writing for myself, hanging out on my bed. Shooting for profundity ruined the second story. Things will almost always go wrong if your intent is to write something that will make people respect you. Fiction will turn into rhetorical, pseudo-symbolic garbage with no real life if you become preoccupied with whatever authority is waiting to appraise it on the other end.
Do you have any rituals you use in an emergency or if you're blocked?
No. I leave. For me it’s like lying in bed when I can’t sleep. I don’t even bother staying there, waiting. I don’t want to build up any anxiety or to be able to look back and say, “Well, last time I sat here for four hours and didn’t write shit, let’s see what happens this time.”
How do you feel about writing sex scenes, and how do you handle it?
My basic approach to writing sex scenes so far has been to write, “They fucked,” or some variation of the same thing, and to be done with it. Which is cheap. Like most writers, I’m a little afraid of writing sex scenes, only because, like sex itself, the whole mood can go so wrong, so fast, with just one misstep. Fiction is an illusion you don’t want to be jolted out of, and I think that readers are paying extra attention when anything sexual is happening. The stakes are much higher, as are the chances of really bombing. I remember reading an airport-book by Ken Follett, who is usually pretty good, about five years ago, and I remember the female protagonist looking at her love interest’s crotch and imagining the “fire hose” inside of his pants. There goes everything. It was a good demonstration of how an inopportune metaphor can destroy about twenty-five pages of story in either direction, just because it was so bad, and drew so much attention to itself, and was so not sexy. Suddenly you’re sitting in an airport terminal, holding a book, thinking about the dude who wrote it and why he made this error rather than continuing to be immersed in the story.
My teacher Stephanie Vaughn always used to note the moments when people opted out of writing sex scenes and challenge them to at least think about why they’d done so. She called it the Victorian Curtain lowering down over the story. I think the basic idea is that drama comes from conflict and confrontation, and if two of your characters are having sex, that’s certainly a confrontation. The fear of getting it wrong is usually not enough of a reason to insert a section break and start up again when everyone’s smoking cigarettes.
What books do you secretly love?
I kind of like Anne Rice erotica.
And what books do you secretly hate?
Let me qualify this by saying I’m a huge science fiction fan -- maybe that’s why I’m more critical of these books. That said, I’ve always found Brave New World to be unbelievably bad. And while I know that it’s hot to like Philip Dick, and while I know a billion people will hate me for saying it, I have trouble reading his books. I give him all the credit in the world for examining identity and memory, and for injecting a whole new strata of thinking into the genre. And for being funny. And for being wise about advertising and the growing corporate impact on culture. But I have trouble getting through his writing at the sentence-level -- I don’t think he paid enough attention to his prose. It all feels like first drafts to me. Maybe that shouldn’t be the point of the Philip K. Dick experience, but for me it gets in the way.
What is the most terrifying task for you -- whether it be a certain kind of scene, character, or subject matter?
Awkward moments when characters are doing what they can to reveal painful truths to one another. Yikes. But that’s usually where the best moments come from, and for me, where the most unexpected turns develop. You just have to try them over and over again, and be humble enough to realize when you’re getting it wrong, and when you need to keep working. And it’s okay to get it wrong. Fiction is not a performance art.
What project has been the biggest struggle for you so far in your career, and how did you resolve your difficulties?
Writing a novel, and the jury’s still out on the resolution. It’s a little rocky to go from short stories to novels. If you want to maintain a whole system of meaning in the subtext for 300 or 400 pages, if you want to write a really good book, it’s just impossible to keep that strange, magic, half-invisible tonal glue in your mind and accessible for a whole year or two years or however long it takes you to write your draft. Life gets in the way. You change. I find there’s a kind of romance to writing short stories in that you can locate the right tone and voice and sort of ride it for a limited time, for a few days, thinking to yourself, as you write, “Do not look at it directly or it will go away.” Novels are too complicated to get built organically and intuitively. They are huge, constructed, labor-intensive things. Even bad, flawed, unsuccessful novels have taken an incredible amount of work from a single, focused mind, which is humbling to think about as you’re slogging along with your own work, or as you’re snidely dismissing someone else’s. It’s changed how I read, and what I pay attention to. I don’t for one second believe in the On the Road scroll myth, this idea of sitting down and it all kind of flowing out, benzedrine or no benzedrine. Even if it’s actually true I don’t believe in it, if that makes sense. I’m not sure I even believe in inspiration when it comes to novels. It’s more like hauling cement. I think the ultimate effect of novels should contain that illusion of effortlessness and the enthusiasm we might associate with inspiration, but making that, and doing it well, is hard work. The only way to resolve that is to do it, and to not quit if it’s not always fun.
Describe the arch-nemesis of your youth. How has this person appeared in your writing?
Am I allowed to say that I am my own arch-nemesis of my youth? Whatever I was from the age of 5-14 seems disgusting to me now. Possibly 5-16. I don’t want to take any responsibility for anything I said or did. I wasn’t mean and I wasn’t a bully but I was so -- I don’t know -- so made by my environment. Maybe it’s not fair to abuse my inner twelve-year-old for not being more real, but I could have used a stronger dose of courage, and a stronger drive to question my own values. I’m glad that my parents raised me without any religion, but I do think that some kind of context about asking larger questions -- particularly moral questions -- would have been good for me. Characters like that -- characters who are on cruise-control through life because it’s easy to be that way, and because it’s hard and disruptive and painful to change -- are almost always a negative force in my writing.
What unpleasant truth do you routinely conceal from young, fresh writers eager to make their mark?
#1: It always takes more work and more time than it seems like it’s going to take.
#2: It may not be possible to be a “professional” writer anymore. There isn’t very much to go around, and that stems from there being an ever-slimming amount of attention given to literary fiction, and to print-based forms of art and entertainment in general. There will always be the lucky few, and there is more money when the movie industry gets involved, but the truth is that you’re probably going to be doing something else while you’re writing your books. If you can make peace with that, you’re okay. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing.
And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?
I’m 28 and I feel like I’m only now admitting to myself that art is a crucial, valuable thing for the culture. Basically, that it matters. Maybe that should be self-evident, especially for somebody who’s claiming to be a writer, but there will always be a utilitarian voice inside of me saying that it’s self-indulgent, not quantifiable, pointless, ephemeral, a game, a puzzle, whatever, and therefore not worthy of a whole life’s work. I wish I’d learned to ignore that voice much earlier.Gawker spoils The Manny's sex scene. Thank god you didn't spend the $25.00 to get to this climax:
It was never like this with anyone. Not even in college. I couldn't believe I was thirty-six and getting to feel this way. I wanted to consume all of him. He lay on top of me now, and then, straddling me, tore off his shirt. Oh my god, that chest. He looked so happy, like he was having a really, really good time.
If you're like me and in theory you want to see A Mighty Heart but the whole thing just looks too awful, you should instead take the chance to read Bernard-Henri Levy's Who Killed Daniel Pearl. It's a tremendous book, and there's no Angelina Jolie in a bad wig.
Modern culture has an ugly story to tell about what happens to little girls and boys who win talent shows and then try to grow up.
Andrew O'Hagan writes about the spark for his novel Personality, the "brilliantly talented and savagely manhandled" Lena Zavaroni.
Carrie took the words right out of my mouth:
I’m confused by the John Casteen essay in this summer’s VQR. Is what’s available online the entire piece? Because if so, doesn’t it seem like Casteen is chastising David Orr for employing “ad hominem tactics” against Dana Goodyear by employing ad hominem tactics against David Orr?
June 21, 2007
(Actually, it's way beyond 8500, sadly. We deleted a bunch of archives a while back, so lord knows how many posts we actually have written. My guess is too many.)
The much-discussed book of poems by prisoners in Guantanamo is forthcoming in August. Predictably, a lot of the reaction hasn't been especially edifying (last two links via Andrew Sullivan).
Via dumbfoundry, I note that Jacket 33, guest-edited by Pam Brown, is partially up, even though it's not yet July. Of particular note: Gordon Ball's photo-essay on Ginsberg and his crew, Barbara Claire Freeman's group review of Brenda Hillman's Pieces of Air in the Epic, and lots else. I like Sam Sampson's "Diagram (Lines for, and from, Samuel Beckett: Centenary 1906-2006)" (scroll down--it's the third poem on the page) a great deal.
What's more alarming than the prospect of a one-man theatrical adaptation of Aristotle's Poetics? The review that celebrates the play for "plucking ‘totle’s tome out of the academic ether and landing it onstage without a trace of pedantry." (The show, staring David Greenspan, has been well-reviewed.)
Tony Blair's got Crabbe.
The wizards at the Blake Archive have just published an electronic edition of Blake's illustrations of Milton's "Comus." According to Blake, "Milton lovd me in childhood and shewd me his face."
I've been trying to keep these posts free from unseemly logrolling, but, really, what else is a blog for? My colleague Ravi Shankar's "Oyster" was yesterday's poem for the day at Poetry Daily.
More celebs: Kate Moss and Pete Doherty have "been writing a lot of poetry lately and feeling quite political. Like John and Yoko, they're hoping to turn the relentless fascination with their relationship into something positive." That "and" is doing a lot of work . . .
Finally, a link that came in response to last week's post: If you were going to write slash-fic about Thomas Hardy, what would you call it? Perhaps the Immanent Willy? (Thanks, Matt!!)
(On a slightly different point: Jessa's last update was, incredibly, the 8500th Blog of a Bookslut post!)
Books about farming are trendy now. Wow, that's one of my niche interests I never thought would get a trend piece in the New York Times. Read Jane Brox! George Pyle! Watch The Real Dirt on Farmer John, the only documentary to ever make me cry over land usage.
Salon has an article about the independent publishing losses from the PGW disaster.
Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash puts it more bluntly, "The independents got fucked by the Enron of publishing."
Sherman Alexie is interviewed at Powells. He has regrets about past works, including Indian Killer.
I was trying to write an actual mystery novel, and I ended up getting too fucking literary and didn't solve the mystery. That's really what bothers me.
I considered going to the Michael Ondaatje reading last night, but Diviserado is not getting great reviews, and nothing could surpass the last Ondaatje reading I went to, sick and mucousy, drugged to the hilt with antihistamines, and wandering in and out of consciousness as Ondaatje's lovely voice seemed to narrate my dreams. I wanted to take him home with me to talk to me as I slept every night, the best subliminal audio imaginable.
As I was in good health and fully conscious, I instead dragged my friend to see Day Watch. That movie has Chalk of Fate. Also, a Ferris Wheel of Death and Dumplings of Terror. (Actually, the dumplings looked pretty good. My friend and I were drooling a little.) The Night Watch and Day Watch movies are based on books I will never ever read. But throw in a heavy metal soundtrack, a cute vampire, and a few gory decapitations and I'm dragging people to see it. I thought my friend would never speak to me again after the film, but her eyes just got big and she said, "That was great!" Another convert.
A marriage proposal found inside a used copy of Generation X. One must wonder if it was the choice of book used for the proposal that caused it to be discarded. (Thanks to Margo for the link.)
The Book Show has archived Andrew O'Hagan's opening address for the Sydney Writers' Festival, "The Power of Literature: The News That Stays News." His novel Be Near Me is one of my favorite books this year. (From Maud.)
June 20, 2007
Two commencement addresses:
Dana Gioia -- chairman of the NEA -- at Stanford, which I wanted to like but mostly made my head hurt. Is there any way to talk about the way our culture has changed without is coming from a "When I was your age..." place?
Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) at the Center For Cartoon Studies.
The committee that recommended Salman Rushdie for a knighthood did not discuss any possible political ramifications and never imagined that the award would provoke the furious response that it has done in parts of the Muslim world, the Guardian has learnt.
The latest entry at Largehearted Boy's Book Notes feature is Anosh Irani's The Song of Kahunsha.
VQR presents an online gallery of Peter Kuper's sketchbook of his time in Oaxaca last year. The sketchbook accompanies Matthew Power's "One More Martyr in a Dirty War: The Life and Death of Brad Will." Both will be available in the Summer 2007 issue, and both are the two things you should really read today.
June 19, 2007
Amy Fusselman is interviewed at the Gothamist about her lovely new memoir, 8, or as I heard her describe it to someone, "a feel good story about having had a pedophile." (Fusselman will be participating in our Reading Series on July 24th.)
This week's Guardian Digested Read: Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin.
Thirty years after writing about gay sex and Aids, no one is really interested any more. Everyone is writing about sex and, thanks to the drug cocktails, a lot of us didn't die. So what's the story?
Well there isn't one really, but my publisher thought you might like a follow-up and I could kind of use the money, so here we go.
Ethan Persoff offers a comic book put out by Planned Parenthood. It's not quite as good as the Choose Your Own Adventure-type books I found at the Planned Parenthood Sexuality Resource Center I worked at as a librarian, where you would turn to page 62 if you decided to head into Rick's bedroom even though you don't have a condom only to discover you will develop a nasty rash. Some days I really miss that job. (Link from Journalista.)
Farewell, Punk Planet.
Their reviews section was always butt-ass terrible, an overlong string of three-sentence snippets on self-released seven-inches that nobody would ever really need to hear. PP usually had some really long and ranty political articles, which I'd usually not read and then feel vaguely guilty for not reading, like I wasn't doing my punk duty or whatever. It also had a sex-advice columnist who usually made sex sound like the most tedious thing on the face of the earth. Still, I'm not sure I can adequately describe how important a magazine Punk Planet was for me.
Someone has leaked a letter from Waterstone's Bookstore with the price list of promoting your book in their stores. It goes up to £45,000 per title at Christmas. While it's no secret that chain bookstores charge for front of the store placement and table diplays, it's not often that the actual numbers are uttered aloud. Nor the consequences of not playing the game:
Anthony Cheetham, the chairman of Quercus books, a small independent publisher, said: “It’s not a system you can opt out of. If Smith’s offer you one of these slots and you say no, their order doesn’t go down from 1,000 copies to 500 copies. It goes down to 20 copies.”
June 18, 2007
Sad news: Punk Planet is folding, although the books imprint will continue.
Recently read books that I can probably swear by if the time comes where I need to swear by a massive leatherbound book again:
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter GodwinThe Three Paradoxes by Paul Hornschemeier
Soon to join that very list:
The War by Marguerite Duras
What hit me about the Godwin book (other than having studied under the writer at one point) was that it wasn't just a memoir about his father's familial revelations (he had hidden the fact that he was a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor living in Zimbabwe for years) and illnesses -- it was 344 pages of hardcore foreign reporting on the state of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. At one point, Godwin's father remarks that "A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere -- on suffrance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility" (266). It's quite the paradox, especially in Western eyes.
The first chapter of When a Crocodile Eats the Sun went up with The New York Times this week. Mark Gevisser has a review, and so did Michiko Kakutani about a month ago (dear God, she didn't burn this one!).
And speaking of first chapters, I've done some digging and stumbled upon a slew of others that should be interesting. Check out the first chapter Yasmina Khadra's The Attack as well as the first chapter of Jay McInerney's The Good Life.
Also in the Times, Jennifer Egan reviews Jean Thompson's Throw Like a Girl: Stories:
Thompson has set herself a punishing technical challenge in this volume; a literary system without sentiment or faith is one in which the basic machinery of most short-story writing — transformation, epiphany, self-discovery — can't function. As a result, these stories have a pleasantly drifty, off-kilter feel, with events accreting slowly and then suddenly, sometimes randomly.
Dykes to Watch Out For episode #509 is up. You can catch Alison Bechdel at the MoCCA Arts Festival in New York this weekend as well as a bunch of other great comics writers.
SMITH Magazine also has the next chapter of A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge.
"But once the customers are through the door, they can't help but to spend money hand over fist on the impulse-displayed kitten bookmarks, a copy of Redbook and overpriced Chekhov."
Iran accused Britain yesterday of insulting Islam by awarding a knighthood to Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses prompted the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his assassination.
Literago reviews the Bridges, Burning discussion between Dennis Loy Johnson and me.
According to Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House and Jessa Crispin of Bookslut, book reviews in major media outlets are the result of endless mutual masturbation among corporate houses, corporate papers, and corporate magazines. Jonathan Safran Foer is the retarded scion of corporate incest, the paradigmatic example of what happens when you cross the New Yorker with Harper Collins and the Times.
Note the phrase "retarded scion" is her own. I wish I had been able to think of that during the event, though.
Can someone write a book about science without the snobby bullshit included? I would be much more willing to finish reading The Canon if Natalie Angier had not kept including constant swipes at people who believe in god, the superstitious, and people who read fortune cookies. I've always believed that the best way to convince someone they're wrong is to call them an idiot.
Colleen Mondor has a list of YA authors being interviewed across a multitude of lit blogs, starting with Gene Yang, author of American Born Chinese, at Finding Wonderland.
June 15, 2007
Secret Agent Elizabeth Visits the Dark Side: Writers Tell All
Where do the words come from? Secret Agent Elizabeth investigates dirty little secrets, 7th grade enemies, and the creative trickery writers use to get through the day. A weekly interview feature by Elizabeth Merrick, whose NYC writing and creativity workshops use intuition and the occasional dance party to fine tune all sorts of creative trickery & get her students art into the world fast enough to balance out the Republicans' bad juju. Next class: Creative Jumpstart on Sat. 6/23.
THIS WEEK: Ellis Avery
Ellis Avery studied Japanese tea ceremony for five years in New York and Kyoto and now teaches creative writing at Columbia University. Her first novel, The Teahouse Fire (Riverhead, 2006), set in the tea ceremony world of 19th century Japan, was recently named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book and shortlisted for Lambda and Ohioana awards.
Ellis is also the author of an award-winning nonfiction book, THE SMOKE WEEK: SEPTEMBER 11-21 2001, and has published work in The Village Voice, Publishers Weekly, and Kyoto Journal.
What books do you secretly hate?
Anything by Colette! And Hopscotch, by Julio Cortezar. I know, sacrilege! I was so eager to read Hopscotch because Ana Castillo's brilliant first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, owes a formal debt to it, but, ugh, there's only so much tragic pampered boy profundity one can take.
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?
Loving books as much as I did growing up made me feel like, really, writing novels was the only thing worth doing.
Inquiring minds want to know: what are your daily writing habits (and vices)?
It depends on what stage of the process I'm at.
When I worked on the first draft of The Teahouse Fire in my regular life, for the first year I wrote for an hour a day and did research for an hour a day, Monday through Friday. During the second and third years, I read less and wrote more.
I also worked on the first draft during two month-long retreats, during which I made myself write 4pp/day, good or bad.
When rewriting, I just worked as much as I could, five days a week.
When doing last rewrites and proofreading, I gave myself a page count: 5pp/hour, 8 hours a day, for ten days. And it really took me that long!
What appalling tricks do you use to get yourself to be productive, and are there any you have discarded?
For writing the first draft, my trick was to put on the hot water for tea, turn on the computer and get to the file I was working on. That way, when the water boiled, I'd bring the tea to the file and start working instead of emailing. Not appalling, really. My willingness to piss time away on email is what's appalling.
For proofreading, I bought these bars of Japanese confection called yokan. I'd cut the yokan into pieces, and every time I finished 5 pages, I'd get to go have a bite. Again, the appalling thing is how oppressive the work felt.
What is the most mortifying, worst thing you've ever written and what led you down that path to ruin?
Hm... I published some Elfquest fan fiction -- cowritten with my best friend, who got me into it --when I was in my teens. That was pretty bad.
Do you have any rituals you use in an emergency or if you're blocked?
I go on a one-hour "writing retreat" in my apartment -- on the fire escape if it's nice out, or in the loft if it's cold. I set a timer for an hour and my job is to think about my project -- not even write, just think about it. It works -- I come away with sentences I really want to work on. The trick is giving myself that hour.
How do you feel about writing sex scenes, and how do you handle it?
A little goes a long way. So far, I've written sex scenes that used a lot of buildup for a little sex, but they've turned me on, so, good enough.
What books do you secretly love?
Well, it wouldn't be a secret, would it? I do still have my copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from the '80s. And YA novels by Kate Seredy, Elizabeth Scarborough, Susan Cooper, and Ellen Raskin.
What is the most terrifying task for you -- whether it be a certain kind of scene, character, or subject matter?
Oh, starting, definitely. Starting anything!
Is there some element of your work that you particularly enjoy and that readers or critics seem not to notice so much?
When I wrote The Teahouse Fire, which is not autobiographical, there's a scene where I borrowed a hard-won image/realization from my own life, and re-saw it through my narrator's eyes, with her priorities and passions. I'm proud of the work I did to see it from her point of view, not mine.
When I attended the intensive tea ceremony program in Kyoto on scholarship, we ate meals together in the cafeteria, first bowing to a photograph of the head of the household that ran the school. When I took my portion of rice out of the massive rice cooker every day, I would look up at that photograph and think, "I'm eating this man's rice." I felt suffocated by my dependency on him.
However, in the case of Aurelia, a servant in a house that runs a tea ceremony school -- narrating an experience that took place more than a hundred years before the one I described above -- she loves the family she works for, especially its mistress, Yukako. The first thing Aurelia does when she has her first paying job outside the home (as a translator) is go buy herself a snack. Here's a pared-down version of what happens when she goes home for dinner:
At dinner, out of habit, I filled my bowl as high as any other night, but I forgot that I had just eaten. The letters Miss Starkweather had not understood, she now did, and I had the full belly to prove it. I watched Jade lift the lid off the steaming pot of rice and barley and dip in the bamboo paddle for a second helping. When she reached for my bowl, I covered it with my hand. “I’m fine,” I said.
We all had Yukako to thank for our dinner, her cunning and vigor; the great steaming pot held hours of her life. This is her rice, I thought. I was too full to eat another bite: I almost cried. My independence tasted like exile.
“Aunt?” said Jade’s young voice.
“There was something in my eye,” I said.
What project has been the biggest struggle for you so far in your career, and how did you resolve your difficulties?
My first novel, which was rejected by 19 agents and 32 presses. I don't think it will ever see the light of day. I dealt with that disappointment -- and it took a long time -- by writing a better book.
Describe the arch-nemesis of your youth. How has this person appeared in your writing?
I got teased for years in elementary school by many kids, but there was one girl named Tara who was a real ringleader. Including Hazu, a girl who is a relentless bully and tease, felt inevitable in The Teahouse Fire, probably because of my own experience.
What unpleasant truth do you routinely conceal from young, fresh writers eager to make their mark?
What my hourly rate teaching adjunct creative writing classes comes to.
And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?
Um, I'd be a citizen of a country with universal health care and subsidized housing for artists.
Paul Morton interviews Kevin Sessums (read Bookslut's interview here) for EconoCulture.
Maud Newton has excerpts from the book What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew about Women. Written by a man, of course.
Colleen sent me a link to Joanna Kavenna's piece about men's disinterest in books written by women. In it she mentions the habit of publishers to put chick lit-inspired covers on women's books, something I mentioned about Kavenna's own book, Inglorious. Last night I noticed the strap on the strappy high heel on the cover is broken, making me hate that cover even more. Nervous breakdown = broken shoe. Very good analogy, Major Publisher!
A sense of frustration courses through the works of the underrated author Meg Wolitzer, whose books appear with splashy chick-lit covers, although she is one of the finest writers in America today. In The Wife, Wolitzer portrays a woman who denies herself a career as a novelist and becomes her husband's ghostwriter. She understands the unpalatable truths of literary reception, and opts out: “Everyone is still fascinated by the inner lives of men. Women are fascinated. Men win, hands down.”
June 14, 2007
Either through coincidence or some obscure operation of the Immanent Will, my summer section of Brit Lit II reached Thomas Hardy yesterday, just on the eve of the Hardy at Yale conference this weekend down Route 9 in New Haven. In addition to a high-class set of academic papers, Andrew Motion will give a reading on Saturday night.
Beyond this, as I type The Travesty Theatre Company is giving a performance of Jude: A New Musical, which, according to the press clippings, is a "contemporary opera . . . which uses modern music, similar to that of U2, performed by classically trained singers."
Here are 4 private favorites: "Often When Warring", "I travel as a phantom now", "Heredity", and, "Her Second Husband Hears Her Story," which I can't find online readily but is certainly worth knowing:
"Still, Dear, it is incredible to me
That here, alone,
You should have sewed him up until he died,
And in this very bed. I do not see
How you could do it, seeing what might betide.""Well, he came home one midnight, liquored deep--
Worse than I'd known--
And lay down heavily, and soundly slept:
Then, desperate driven, I thought of it, to keep
Him from me when he woke. Being an adept"With needle and thimble, as he snored, click-click
An hour I'd sewn,
Till, had he roused, he couldn't have moved from bed,
So tightly laced in sheet and quilt and tick
He lay. And in the morning he was dead."Ere people came I drew the stitches out,
And thus 'twas shown
To be a stroke." -- "It's a strange tale!" said he.
"And this same bed?" --"Yes, here it came about."
"Well it sounds strange--told here and now to me."Did you intend his death by your tight lacing?"
"O, that I Cannot own.
I could not think of else that would avail
When he should wake up, and attempt embracing." --
"Well, it's a cool queer tale!"
Thom Gunn says that his poem "The Miracle" is "similar in tone" to this Hardy poem, though I doubt even Hardy could have rhymed "I can still see him shoot / Look at that snail-track on the toe of my boot."
After reading about the closing of Thunder's Mouth Press and Carroll & Graf, I started to wonder how the authors must be feeling. I asked Justin Taylor, a Bookslut contributor and editor of the anthology The Apocalypse Reader, published by Thunder's Mouth right around the time it was shut down, to talk about the ramifications for the writers.
First, tell us about your book.
Sure. The Apocalypse Reader is an anthology of 34 new and selected short stories about the end of the world. So it's a themed collection, but I want to really stress that there are two themes, the first one being doomsday but the second one being the short story form itself. Within those broad parameters, anything goes, from Poe, Wells, and Lovecraft, to Josip Novakovich, Kelly Link and Brian Evenson. There's are new stories by Matthew Derby, Shelley Jackson, a Gary Lutz-Deb Olin Unferth collaboration, and a lot of other new stuff too. Some of my favorite stories in the book are by people whose names you won't know, which includes people who are basically unpublished, but also people like Allison Whittenberg, who is known for her Y.A. book Sweet Thang, and Grace Aguilar, who was big in the 1830s and '40s but hasn't been published commercially in roughly 100 years. Which is not to downplay the reprinted work of the Really Famous Writers. I didn't put anything in the book for purely... uh, let's say "pragmatic" reasons. If it's in there it's because I thought it was awesome. But to keep things interesting I tried to pick lesser-known or odd-ball stories by the bigger names. Joyce Carol Oates gave me a story that she published once in a journal in the '90s but then never collected in a book. It's in two parts, and part one is in two columns. Neil Gaiman's story is a Bosch painting, animated by Pixar, narrated by an eleven year old girl. Rick Moody's story is from "The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven," his first collection, a book I really love. Michael Moorcock mailed me copies of two of his books (both out of print, I believe), a story collection of his called The Opium General and a fantasy anthology he edited in the '70s. Each one came inscribed to me with suggestions of what I should look at first, what I might enjoy.
When/how did you find out Thunder's Mouth would no longer be in existence?
I found out when the press release came out, just like everyone else, or maybe it was an article in Publisher's Lunch. Nobody from the Avalon office contacted me or warned me. Even before the announcement of the sale and closure (which is weirdly, almost fittingly apocalyptic, don't you think?), this book was always sort of a one-man show. That's not to dis the Avalon folks -- I mean they helped plenty -- but the expectation was more or less that we'd signed a contract for a manuscript to be turned in on a certain day, and what I did between signing day and turn-in day was really my own concern. Looking back, I'm grateful for the freedom they afforded me. I think a major strength of this book is how varied the work in it is, and that's the direct result of my gregariousness as a reader. If I'd had some person or committee to answer to, we almost certainly would have wound up producing a more run-of-the-mill anthology.
What does this mean for the Apocalypse Reader?
The Avalon office is officially closed down on June 29th -- this happens to be my 25th birthday. I went down there yesterday and picked up a box of copies of the book and am now doing all my own PR -- out of my own apartment, and out of my own pocket. I've basically been cut totally loose. It's pretty absurd, because I don't have the time to do PR mailings and I shouldn't be the one paying to ship books around the country, but I don't have time to wait around for Perseus to assign someone to me. It could be months before that happens.
The book had no promotional budget in the first place so it's not like I'm losing that. Maybe there will be some confusion when it moves to the backlist, or some sort of contract trouble with this or that individual story if we want to do a second edition later down the line, but I really just don't know. I hope someone from the Perseus office will get in touch with me at some point, just to say "hey, you're with us now, and we love you, and things will be okay." We can have a little Miranda July moment on the phone. I would like that very much.
I'm trying not to read too much of Inglorious because I can already tell I'm going to be sad when it's over. I'm switching it off with Natalie Angier's The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. With the recent talk about communicating science advancements to the public in a more clear manner, this is a pretty good place to start. You can listen to Angier talking about her book on her website (MP3 link).
NPR celebrates summer reading by... offering an excerpt from Moby-Dick. I'll get right on that.
Books you cannot read:
New York Magazine asks people in the know what the best fiction that has not been translated into English is.
Pretty, pretty books recently released in Spain. (Link from Anne.)
June 13, 2007
The £60,000 Man Booker International prize goes today to the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe in a decision which confers equal lustre on giver and receiver.
Something Awful reimagines pulpy comic book covers. My personal favorite: "Goddamn Indians Took the Pussy!!!" (From Journalista.)
The Guardian digests Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great, so we definitely don't have to read it now. Phew.
Religious friends - I use both words guardedly - often call me a seeker because I have studied the world's sacred texts in greater depth than any scholar. Like almost everything else, this irritates me immensely. I read these books because I am, by nature, tolerant and wish to engage with the idiocies many hold dear. The difference between me and them is that while I would not try to convert others to atheism, they feel obliged to save my soul. This is an important distinction. The purpose of this book is not to prove God does not exist; it is to prove I am cleverer than Richard Dawkins.
In fact, despite what the bloggers themselves believe, the future of literary culture does not lie with blogs — or at least, it shouldn't. The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers. For one thing, literature is not news the way politics is news — it doesn't offer multiple events every day for the blogger to comment on. For another, bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.
Out of curiosity, has anyone ever heard a blogger say WE ARE THE FUTURE? Me either.
Our June 27 event is actually part of the larger Printers' Ball event, celebrating local independent media in Chicago. It's a month-long affair starting June 20 and ending in the Printers' Ball itself. You can check out the other events (ours is the best) on the PB website.
I am completely smitten with Joanna Kavenna's Inglorious. Utterly. Rosa is charming and frustrating, wandering in the depths of her debt after quitting a job she decided she just couldn't do anymore. She sits around and makes to do lists ("Get a job. Wash your clothes. Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities. Hoover the living room"). She asks her lawyer friend to send threatening letters to her ex-boyfriend about their furniture. And she continually writes letters.
Dear Mr. Sharkbreath, Thank you for your letter dated whenever of whenever threatening to send bailiffs to my address if I don't pay the interest on the loan you gave me in August. You are of course welcome to drop round, but Jess might be angry. Jess owns the flat I live in, and all the furniture. I am afraid that in recent months I have given most of my things away, or sold them. There are a few things I could offer you: one smart suit in cream (more like oyster, really), a pair of jeans and a sweater, two shirts, my small collection of undergarments, four pairs of socks, a very warm grey coat, and a couple of secondhand books. If you feel any of this would help then do come and get it. Yours ever, Rosa Lane.
Dear Viracocha, Buddha, Osiris, Isis, Zeus, Allah, Jehovah, Shiva, Humbaba, Yabalon, and the rest, What is it that you want me to do? Just what is it? Yours expectantly, Rosa
Excuse me, I have to buy copies for everyone I know.
Soft Skull also needs some help paying the bills. They're offering 40% off website orders. May I suggest you start with some Lydia Millet?
June 12, 2007
Somehow I missed this earlier: Chris Mooney (The Republican War on Science) writes for Seed about the need for the scientific community to better communicate with the public.
McSweeneys is having a sale and auction to raise funds to recover from the PGW bankruptcy.
New York magazine is running excerpts from Paul Hornschemeier's Three Paradoxes in this week's Comics Page. (Hornschemeier is participating in our reading series on June 27.)
I'm worried that the US publisher of Joanna Kavenna's Inglorious wants to market it as chick lit. There are strappy high heels on the cover and spine. Nowhere on the dust jacket does it mention that Kavenna is also the author of The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule. The only hint that it might be something else is from the blurbs: Andre Aciman and Aleksandar Hemon instead of Kinsella or Weiner. My fear is that women cannot write about urban women in their twenties and thirties without getting the chick lit treatment these days. You can read an excerpt online.
Tom Wayne has amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used-book store, Prospero's Books.
His collection ranges from best-sellers, such as Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" and Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," to obscure titles, such as a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But when he wanted to thin out the collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops; they said they were full.
So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books in protest of what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word.
I was relieved to see this is happening in Kansas City, MISSOURI, not Kansas. It's a tiny victory, I'm sure.
I misspoke last night at the event: I referred to the Katharine Weber e-mail that circulated last year about the NBCC award ballot, claiming it was unfair and biased, without ever saying her name. That's what I meant when I said I thought the debate was going to come to blows.
Also, I think I mispronounced Jonathan Lethem's name four times. Sorry about that.
As you were.
June 11, 2007
Final warning:
Bridges, Burning: The Death of Newspaper Book Reviews and the Future of Book Publishing
Monday, June 11, 2007 @ 7:00 PM
The recent closing of several newspaper book review sections has been decried by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and numerous cultural commentators, including many of the major players in New York’s biggest publishing houses. They see the trend as the end of literary criticism, and a serious blow to the business of book publishing in America.
But not everyone agrees with this perspective. Join Jessa Crispin, an NBCC board member and the founder of Bookslut.com, the nation’s most visited book blog, as she discusses the issues with Dennis Johnson of Melville House, this year’s Association of American Publishers "indy book publisher of the year."
Venue
Stop Smiling Storefront
1371 N. Mikwaukee Avenue
Chicago, IL 60622
RSVP: rsvp@stopsmilingonline.com
Last week, as we are all well aware, Oprah picked Middlesex as her new book club selection. Working in a bookstore, this became immediately apparent when I opened a shipment of eight boxes containing new editions of the book. This means a whole new ISBN, the whole shebang. The big difference with this edition? The Pulitzer Prize seal was removed in favor of a wonky, removable Oprah sticker. Because, you know, being in Oprah's favor is more important than winning a Pulitzer. At least this time they didn't permanently imprint it on the damn cover.
Via Richard Nash: Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown is a Quills Finalist in General Fiction. Vote away, all who are eligible!
Jacob Covey equates a pregnant Salma Hayek with Gilbert Hernandez's Luba characters. This was spawned last week by a comment over at The Beat.
The new issue of Words Without Borders is up. This month features an excerpt from As You Were Saying in which Rick Moody and Marie Darrieussecq collaborate.
I just discovered GoodReads.com, and I'm slightly addicted. It's incestuous. It's self-flattering. It's amazing. I know I'm going to spend plenty of useless hours updating my library so the world can know that I've owned Angela Carter's Wise Children for years and still have it on my to-read list.
This has to be the absolute worst author photo I have ever seen. W.E.B. Griffin smoking down on that cigar will haunt my dreams for at least a couple weeks.
Miranda July on the Thunderball soundtrack...:
I looked at the picture on the album cover of two men wrestling underwater, and my heart throbbed, like a thunderball. I stood up quickly, and my head swelled with blood, like a thunderball. I knew what I had to do; it was massive and unavoidable, like a thunderball. I had a soundtrack; now all I needed was an original motion picture.
And Jeffrey Eugenides on seeing Walkabout with his mother:
As we went to our car, my mother and I made appreciative noises about the film in order to disguise the awkwardness of having seen it together. It must have been clear to my mother that she was losing me to all the film depicted, not only to sexuality but to a life without a parental center. The film's suggestion, that a father wasn't something to be counted on, we left unvoiced, but that general idea––of the irrelevancy of fathers––always hovered between a mother and son.
And this is entirely off-topic, but this Rasputina press release has got to be the weirdest yet:
"Champion" is mostly the translation of an Osama Bin-Laden speech; "Child Soldier" references the phenomenon of African children's armies; "In Old Yellowcake" utilizes imagery of the destruction of Fallujah. This is coupled with the album's overall narrative of Mary Todd Lincoln as Queen of Florida, with her blimp armies having attacked Pitcairn Island, where Fletcher Christian's son Thursday emerges as a resistance icon, before the record's grand end and subsequent denouement.
My interest has been piqued, and what I've heard so far sounds just amazing, especially in regards to the lyrical content. The All Songs Considered Summer Preview has a clip for "Choose Me for a Champion," and "Cage in a Cave" is up with the press release.
Tania Kindersley wants more sympathetic portrayals of the upper classes in literature. Umm, what? (Wasn't that The Emperor's Children, and didn't that suck?) As soon as working classes show back up in something other than Scottish fiction or this-is-what-I-escaped memoirs, then maybe we can get back to the rich.
Over at Columbia Journalism Review, a reporter watches in horror as his article becomes fodder for the Dr. Phil Show.
I tuned in to episode two, a week later, and there was Sarah, looking particularly deranged as she roamed the streets of Annapolis smoking crack and hooking, all of it in slow motion while foreboding music played in the background. And there was Dr. Phil, appearing suddenly on a plasma screen to berate the girls with boot-camp rhetoric: “You’ve entered my world now,” he tells the sisters. And later: “Come tomorrow morning, I’m coming for you.”
Joy Press, Steve Erickson, Molly Haskell, and other writers list their favorite book-to-film adaptations.
Oregon may have shut down 15 library branches due to lack of funds, but they're now considering their options, including outsourcing.
John Burnside talks about the memoir I could not stop reading this weekend, A Lie About My Father.
Although his father died in 1988, aged 62, it was only five years ago that Burnside uncovered some truth about the man for whom he once waited in an alley with a knife, intent on murdering him, and of whom he writes: 'I had carried him with me, an ember of self-loathing in the quick of my mind, caustic and unquenchable.' Burnside knew his father had been adopted as a baby. What he learned from his aunt was that his father had been a foundling, left on a Fife doorstep in 1926. 'It made me think differently about him because he'd had to suffer things that, had he told me about them, I might have been more forgiving of his behaviour. I started writing this partly because I needed to work out how I felt about my father now that I knew his history.'
The first odd thing that caused a slight delay in the new issue was waking up one morning and having my website be a blank page. That one caused some panic, but a nice gentleman named Grant (introduced to me by Maud, who saved my ass) found it again. A few days later my laptop refused to boot. I had to drag out a ten-year-old PC from my closet while chatting on tech support to another nice gentleman, this one's name I did not catch. You don't really know pain unless you've run Photoshop on a ten-year-old PC. Unless you've gone through childbirth, I guess.
This all happened, by the way, before Mercury even went into retrograde. (Starts on Thursday, I think.) I can't fucking wait to see what else can go wrong.
But finally, here we are with issue #61. Michelle Risley talks to Goli Taraghi about her work, and also the publishing process until the rule of Ahmadinejad. She explains step-by-step what an author must do in order to get his/her work published in Iran, and how some authors must wait for years to hear if they're work will be accepted or not. Zoe Ward (of one of my favorite publishers, Archipelago), interviews Catherine Wagner about her poetry and making a song out of the lines: “Here comes baby / Screaming down vagina / Brain tissue coning / Making of himself a painful / Squeeze-toy.” Judging a Book by Its Cover focuses on the high end of comic books, the swanked out collections publishers seem to be focusing on these days. Ned Vizzini interviews the proprietors of Impetus Press of the exquisite problems involved with starting an independent press these days. Barbara J. King becomes addicted to Tikkun, and we also have interviews with Felicia Luna Lemus about her new muse, Cecil Castellucci about changing mediums from prose to graphic novels, and David Pitts about finding an angle on JFK not already told to death.
In columns, Girl, Interrupted looks at two new "feminist primers" and finds them both lacking. (Turns out saying the word "fuck" a lot does not make you edgy. I am going to have to rethink my entire approach to blogging.) Jeff VanderMeer at Comicbookslut, wants some comic book writers to make things up every once and a while. Hollywood Madam begs Zack Snyder not to destroy her warm feelings towards Watchmen as it heads into adaptation (good luck, Liz). Our YA columnist Colleen Mondor provides a summer reading list for girls.
We also have new reviews of Michael Lowenthal, Julia Glass, David Markson, Terry Eagleton, Darcey Steinke, Jaime Sabines, Diane Lockward, and more.
June 08, 2007
Secret Agent Elizabeth Visits the Dark Side: Writers Tell All
Where do the words come from? Secret Agent Elizabeth investigates dirty little secrets, 7th grade enemies, and the creative trickery writers use to get through the day. A weekly interview feature by Elizabeth Merrick.
THIS WEEK: Lynn Harris
Lynn Harris, an award-winning journalist, is author of the comic novel Death By Chick Lit and its prequel, Miss Media. She is also author of Breakup Girl to the Rescue!, which is based on BreakupGirl.net, the award-winning website she co-created with supergenius Chris Kalb. The “Rabbi’s Wife” columnist for Nextbook.org, she also writes frequently about gender politics and pop culture for Salon.com, Glamour, the New York Times, Nerve.com, and many others.
How do you feel about writing sex scenes, and how do you handle it?
Gosh, I’ve written so few. Okay, none. In my novels, they’re the kind of thing where one character is like, “Hey, let’s wait, no rush, where’s the fire?” and the other character touches them in some excellent way and they go, “Oh. There’s the fire.” And then there’s some sort of winking ellipsis and we cut to the next morning where she’s in his shirt. So how do I handle it? Winking ellipsis, baby, winking ellipsis. You can use that for your band name.
Important: Elizabeth wants you ALL to come out and have too much fun next Wednesday night for DIRTY GRACE to hear Ducky Doolittle, author of Sex with the Lights On. Wednesday 6/13, Solas, 232 E. 9th St, 7pm, upstairs.
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?
Harriet the Spy. She was my hero. Back then, of course, I thought being a writer meant lurking in the neighbors’ bushes and writing down everything they did. Only later did I realize that -- actually, that is what being a writer means.
Inquiring minds want to know: what are your daily writing habits (and vices)?
I am a morning person. It’s not that I’m particularly jaunty in the morning; it’s just that I’m, well, up. And now that my fancy new daughter and her child care arrangements put strict limits on my work time, I’m up at my desk around 5 AM -- I know, I know -- in order to get a head start at least on busy work. (Non-writers often think that working writers actually spend most of their day, you know, writing. How romantic! Mostly, we do e-mailing, reporting, invoicing, editing, filing, fact-checking, and putting off writing.) I’m generally hanging out with Bess between 6 and 9 AM, then back to the putting off writing until 5 or 6.
What appalling tricks do you use to get yourself to be productive, and are there any you have discarded?
Discarded: Coffee. Appalling: Chocolate-covered espresso beans aren’t coffee!
What is the most mortifying, worst thing you've ever written and what led you down that path to ruin?
Back in the day, when I’d write anything for clips/money, I wrote a sewing and fabric newsletter. (A, this was before crafting was cool, and B, I know nothing about sewing. Or fabric.) Here, however, is what I wrote about one particularly fetching new line of tulle: “These barely-there sheers just may be this summer’s best flirts.” I am going to sewing hell.
Do you have any rituals you use in an emergency or if you're blocked?
Well, it’s not so much a ritual, but I stop whatever I’m working on, do something else, often something involving a snack, and come back to it later.
What books do you secretly love?
Junky thrillers. I am especially cuckoo for Patricia Cornwell; love her Kay Scarpetta character and her excellent badass lesbian helicopter-pilot niece, who in my mind is Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry. But I digress.
And what books do you secretly hate?
Okay, this is bad, but chick lit. NOT FOR THE REASONS YOU THINK. I don’t think chick lit is “bad for women;” it does not offend or upset me in any way. On the contrary, in fact: I think the snobbism about it is misplaced (and actually, that THAT is bad for women. Digressing again.) This is simply a matter of personal taste. Specifically, I just have no interest in stories -- same goes for romantic comedy movies -- where you don’t know if the girl is gonna get the guy. Because you KNOW THE GIRL IS GONNA GET THE GUY. This is not a political issue; I’m glad the girl gets the guy. Whatever. But I like suspense, intrigue, double-crossing, truly unpredictable twists and turns. So just let me flip to the end so I can watch Prison Break already.
What is the most terrifying task for you--whether it be a certain kind of scene, character, or subject matter?
Plot. With non-fiction articles and essays, I hardly even outline. But the idea of plotting out a novel -- which, really, you have to do for mysteries, which is what I’ve been writing -- makes me quake in my boots. I’m petrified by any plot, but especially mysteries. Dialogue, no problem. Scene by scene, cake. But figuring out the play-by-play and clue-planting and misdirection? So scary! If you have a new thought and change one plot point, you might wind up having to change everything! That fear, and this: that you work so hard and make little index cards and diagram the whole damn thing on your wall and the reviewers still say, “Uh, we knew who the killer was on page two.”
Is there some element of your work that you particularly enjoy and that readers or critics seem not to notice so much?
For one thing, some people who know that I’ve written a dating quiz or two in my time somehow think that’s all I write. Nothing’s wrong with a dating quiz; some of my best friends are dating quizzes. But I am also fortunate enough to get to write all sorts of weighty stuff that I care about, about reproductive health politics and gender and religion and things, and yet some people still think “all” I do is write for women’s magazines. Which is wrong on many levels, not the least of which is that the weighty stuff I’m writing is often for women’s magazines. (Hi, Glamour. Love ya).
What project has been the biggest struggle for you so far in your career, and how did you resolve your difficulties?
There was a “situation” with my former employer -- let’s call them “Moxygen Edia” -- that totally took my innocence and very nearly destroyed my soul. No lie. How we resolved our difficulties was with lawyers. How I resolved it for myself was, well, I had to rub a bit of the glow off of my own world view, to accept the fact that sometimes things, and people, really can be shitty. Though I really could have done without the whole episode, I will say sincerely that I did appreciate the new sense of texture -- rough though it may be -- that it added to my life experience.
Describe the arch-nemesis of your youth. How has this person appeared in your writing?
Well, there was this one particularly terrifying gazelle-like creature (if gazelles smoked and wore heels) in my high-school class. At age 17, she was already like a beautiful, bitter, divorcee. She has not appeared in my writing, however, for I fear that if she found out, she would stab me in the night.
What unpleasant truth do you routinely conceal from young, fresh writers eager to make their mark?
“There is nothing I can say on this coffee date/phone call that will actually help you ‘break into’ writing.”
And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?
I would get the stratospherically successful writer E. Lynn Harris to use a pseudonym.June 07, 2007
I'm writing this from DC, where this weekend I'm at a union meeting. Since the president is a poetry scholar, I thought I'd begin this week with some working-class/labor activist poems:
From 1978-83, 925 was a "free poetry magazine" devoted to "the poetry, prose, and drawings of everyday life and work." There are some sample poems and covers.
Mark Nowak on how "that moment when the factories were closing (1980s deindustrialization) and the sounds of the assembly line, the stamping plant, were returning like electronic ghosts in the music of this period, that creates a certain soundtrack for my work."
Gary Soto's "How Things Work."
Diane Kending, reflects on "having faced no working-class antagonism except in academia," while "academia happens to be where I work."
And since there's something a little dissonant about a professors' union, I'll end this little thematic tour with the opening stanza of Ross Runfola's "(A Real Poet)"
if I was a real poet I would have a poem
in The New Yorker
but that would mean I had compromised my literary soul
by sacrificing unadorned language
for the obtuse lines
that are the hallmark of the college professor’s safe and uneventful existence.
"(A Real Poet)" is part of the Quercus Review's special section on the Guerilla Poetics Project.
Leonard Nathan has died. Here's Ted Kooser introducing Nathan's "The Potato Eaters."
Charles Wright's Scar Tissue and Don McKay's Strike/Slip have won the 2007 international and Canadian Griffin prizes. Don McKay was on Words at Large in April, offering sound advice to young poets:
Don't wait for the landlord to put a new bulb in the landing. Buy one yourself. Despite many signs to the contrary, you are too valuable to risk serious injury, and lord knows you don't want to stop going to the pub to hear poetry readings, or just read.
Since Bookslut enforces a strict policy of linking to Tao Lin material, here're are some bear videos he posted in May--including the bear's unsuccessful attempt to entice people to listen to poetry. (Thanks, Ella!)
Kay Ryan, writing in Arabesques Review explains that "much of the best poetry is funny. Who can read Hopkins’s 'The Windhover,' for instance, and not feel welling up inside a kind of giddiness indistinguishable from the impulse to laugh?"
Probably not funny: Steve Vickers reports on "the monthly House of Hunger Poetry Slam" in Zimbabwe.
Theo Huxtable has a one-man show based on his poems. There's a trailer. If you'll be in LA this month, why not buy tickets?
Okay, so, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut about the idea that Elizabeth Taylor does not live in Chicago. If it were true, it would have theoretical implications (Chicago's literary scene has serious image issues and insecurity issues because we're largely ignored and told a billion times a year "Why don't you move to New York? That's where the real writers live"), but really, the only real question is what is the quality of the Chicago Tribune Book Review? How is it serving Chicago? I obviously have opinions on that. (It's also a question that gets left out of the Campaign to Save the Book Review: What are we saving exactly?) Not that I was trying to turn this into a way to once again promote the event I'm hosting with Stop Smiling and Dennis Loy Johnson, but I guess that's exactly what I'm doing. The title of the event says it all: Bridges, Burning. This is what we'll be discussing: the purpose and quality of book review sections in newspapers, the future of independent publishing, and why whenever I talked to anyone at indie presses at Book Expo about the campaign, the response was mostly disinterested shrugs. (At one point, one of the smartest people in publishing leaned over and said to me, "None of it matters because the entire publishing industry is going to collapse in fifteen years." But I think maybe he was drunk.)
So come to the event, and Dennis, who is responsible for some of the best books being released in the last few years, and I will do what we can to address some of the issues not being raised in the larger conversation.
Bookslut contributor Justin Taylor has an excerpt from his story "Estrellas y Rascacielos" -- available in the anthology Userlands: New Fiction Writers from the Blogging Underground at NPR.
Can you be on the Chicago Lit 50 list if you don't live in Chicago? Turns out, yes. Check out #6. Not that I'm complaining, I'm not behind Billy Corgan this year. But where are the comics folks and the Punk Planet dudes? (Apparently, E. Taylor lives in Chicago. I'm not sure how it became common conversation in Chicago about how she lives in New York. But it is, and sorry for the error.)
And also: The Chicago Reader has discovered Literago.org.
"Great Books Not Meant to Be Used as Weapons." Except for maybe the hardcover of Infinite Jest if there's an intruder or something. Although, you're right, that book was pretty overrated.
Jeffrey Brown illustrates the latest poem at the Poetry Foundation, selecting Russell Edson's "Of Memory and Distance."
DC Comics recently released Minx, a new imprint of graphic novels aimed at girls. Douglas Wolk timidly raises his hand and asks if DC is really so concerned about girls, why are they still producing offensively sexist material, like putting tentacle rape on their covers? (Okay, that was Marvel, but still.)
The cover Takeda drew for Heroes for Hire #13 shows several of the series' women tied up, showing a lot of skin, bleeding a little, and being manhandled, or rather squidhandled, by a set of sinister-looking tentacles. There's no visible penetration, of course --Heroes for Hire is the equivalent of a PG-rated movie at most-- but it's very obviously an allusion to tentacle porn. (Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, asked point-blank about Takeda's cover, claimed rather disingenuously that it was just a straightforward illustration of a story point, nothing porny about it.)
Someone get Brendan Sullivan a blanket.
“Writing has ruined my life and cost me many, many girlfriends,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I have thrown away several careers and one college degree to spend my time working in bars, D.J.’ing in bars and drinking my rejection letters away. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, and I’ve made many of them since I started …. I also abandoned my agent with words harsher than those I’ve saved for lost loves.”
DUDE. It's okay. You're 25. You have a while before you can justifiably freak out.
June 06, 2007
It's not so much that we think the May issue was so unbelievably fantastic that perhaps you need a few extra days to really appreciate it, but really nasty technical snafus that end with me spending hours on the phone pretending to the nice helpful tech guy that I know what the fuck he's saying. Although the May issue was pretty fantastic. I apologize for the delay, and now that we seem to be back on track, the new issue should be appearing any day now.
Also, remember that in the next few days will be Bookslutastic. (Please shoot me if I ever use that word again.) Tonight is our reading with Andrew O'Hagan and Ander Monson. On Saturday I'll be interviewing Monson live at the Printers Row Book Fair at 3:30 in the University Center. (When I asked someone what I should ask Monson, they replied, "Ask him what kind of pie he likes." My friends are no help whatsoever.) Then on Monday at the Stop Smiling Storefront at Milwaukee & Ashland-ish, Dennis Loy Johnson and I will be discussing the future of independent publishing. (RSVP at rvsp@stopsmilingonline.com.)
You must read: Tony Millionaire reviews Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great.
Anne Ishii reports on the most exciting part of Book Expo this year.
Women’s bathroom banter, part 2. Long line for the bathroom. Dude who looks like Crispin Glover on a month-long meth binge and wearing glasses walks through the women’s line asking individual women without blinking:
Are you a Harry Potter fan?
If you said yes, he’d hand you a book called, “Finding God in Harry Potter.” If you said no he’d tacitly look ahead to the next woman and ask the same question.
Seriously, it was a boring, gross year.
Meatcake author Dame Darcy talks to Cut Out and Keep. (Link from Journalista.)
"Even though I am focusing on business at the moment, it doesn't mean that I don't still see fairies and swim in the ocean and be a mermaid. I still play dolls and have tea parties with little girls. I'm surfing again too, I love the ocean. The stuff I like is either the stuff that little girls, grannies or teenage boys like, but I'm not any of those things."
While living in Austin, I think the most I ever did at the Ransom Center was watch videos of Mike Wallace chain smoking his way through interviews with Margaret Sanger and Frank Lloyd Wright. (There, I just lost an hour watching Mike Wallace on YouTube. I'm addicted.) But the list of what the Ransom Center actually has will make your head spin.
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac’s spiral-bound journals for “On the Road”; and Ezra Pound’s copy of “The Waste Land,” in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: “For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E.” Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Brontë wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of “Ulysses,” on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel?
The New Yorker examines why a small city in Texas consistently outmaneuvers the larger institutions when it comes to these acquisitions. "Once, he put a woman he thought was dating Cormac McCarthy on the Ransom’s advisory board in the hope—vain, as it turned out—that it would prompt the reclusive author to sell his papers."
Tao Lin interviews Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House.
I don’t think we work any harder than most other indy publishers (or most other mom and pop businesses, either), although I do think we work a lot harder than most people in the conglomerate houses. We’re better looking than they are, too.
This week's Guardian digested read: Sleeping Around: Secrets of a Sexual Adventuress by Catherine Townsend.
Andrew was gorgeous. Unfortunately, he was still married and I was sobbing over our breakup when the phone rang. It was my publisher again.
"Look," he said sternly. I do fancy a man who's into S&M. "No one's very interested in whether you're in love or not. We've all read that before. Just get out there and have sex with a few more people."
June 05, 2007
Douglas Wolk talks to Berkeley Breathed at Salon about his new book Mars Needs Moms.
The LA Times reports on a tiny little victory in the continuing battle against the holders of James Joyce's copyrights. The article is also a good primer on why Mark Helprin's op-ed on copyright was such a vast oversimplification.
"'…When love of any kind has outlived its feeling and usefulness and assumed the form of habit or obligation, it is time to move on, to cast off from the mooring, as the captain might say, and sail, sail away.'"—Frederic Tuten, Tintin in the New World
BEA was this weekend in NYC. While I was definitely jealous that my brother, who works for a language tools publisher, got to go (might I add, after much debate and discussion, he did not end up having to attend dressed as the Michelin man), part of me is glad I didn't set foot in the Javits Center again. Memories of myriad storm troopers at the New York Comic Con still plague me. I was, however, able to attend the small press party in Dumbo, which was more than enough BEA action for me.
Speaking of which, some BEA news: Fund Takes Risks for Small Press Books. The Literary Ventures Fund (LVF), a nonprofit foundation, aims to eliminate publishing practices that executive director Jeffrey Lependorf said "get between books and their potential readers." … The LVF does not make grants. Rather, the nonprofit group "assumes risk" on particular titles of its choice--and expects returns.
Currently, the LVF has eight titles under its belt:
American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman (Soft Skull)
Gates of the Sun by Elias Khory (Archipelago; reprinted by Picador)
Monique and the Mango Rains by Kris Holloway (Waveland)
Firmin by Sam Savage (Coffee House)
The First Hurt by Rachel Sherman (Open City)
Because a Fire Was in My Head by Lynn Stegner (Univ. of Nebraska)
The Fires by Alan Cheuse (Sante Fe Writers Project)
Poetry in Translation [anthology] (Copper Canyon Press)
Since the film won the Jury Prize at Cannes, several more Persepolis trailers have appeared online: the original teaser 1, teaser 2, the Bande Annonce, and the FIDH teaser, as well as tons of behind-the-scenes extras at the official Persepolis MySpace page. I doubt coverage will die down for a while, at least not until the film premieres in the states….
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home just won the Lambda Book Award in the lesbian memoir/biography category.
Though I hate John Knowles, most this week's summer reading-themed New York Times Book Review makes me want to gag. For instance, Joe Queenan's essay, "Summer Bummer":
For as long as anyone can remember, well-meaning pedagogues have been sabotaging summer vacations by forcing high schoolers to read "Lord of the Flies," "All the King's Men" and "A Separate Peace." These books may be the cornerstones of our civilization, but they're certainly no fun. One reason the average American male reads only one book a year may be the emotional trauma suffered in trying to hack his way through "Wuthering Heights" at the age of 14.
We can now be thankful to know that Emily Brontë is the scourge of male literacy.
On the other hand, John Hodgman (The Daily Show) on anything, let alone comics summer reading is always a blast, so I forgive thee, NYTBR. Proceed as you were.
Tao Lin has put two stories from Bed online.
June 04, 2007
I am going to need to detox for a week to recover from Book Expo (I have never been tempted by a sign advertising aura cleansing until now), so just a few quick things before I hop on a plane back to Chicago.
If you have not read Andrew O'Hagan's "The Things We Throw Away" at the London Review of Books, you should do so right now. Also, you should come to our reading series on Wednesday with Andrew O'Hagan and Ander Monson.
You should vote for Bookslut contributor Mark Doten in New York Magazine's literary idol thingamabob. (It's early.)
Shalom Auslander has finished his memoir, and is on to writing a novel. Nextbook follows his process.
Hey, maybe I’ll do volumes? Holy shit—volumes. Yes, I like that. “A three volume novel by the author of Foreskin’s Lament." Hot damn! Make it four. It’s going to be a box set of four handsomely clothbound volumes. But it’s also going to be a big book culturally speaking, an important book. An important Book, actually, with a capital B. Maybe I’ll do that, too, capitalize things indiscriminately. Yes, I think I Will. But I want to be very clear about this before I commit even one word to paper: this novel is going to be an earthquake, a seismic shift in the history of American letters, a clarion call, or maybe a wake-up call, or maybe both of those types of calls.
I can't wait.
June 01, 2007
Secret Agent Elizabeth Visits the Dark Side: Writers Tell All
Where do the words come from? Secret Agent Elizabeth investigates dirty little secrets, 7th grade enemies, and the creative trickery writers use to get through the day. A weekly interview feature by Elizabeth Merrick.
THIS WEEK: Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet is the author of five novels including My Happy Life, which won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction, and most recently Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, recently shortlisted for Britain's Arthur C. Clarke Prize. Excerpts can be found at www.lydiamillet.net.
What is the most mortifying, worst thing you've ever written and what led you down that path to ruin?
An early "novella" called Parts and Services. The thing was basically an adolescent feminist manifesto in which a strident female narrator yells an angry screed at a second-person male reader for about a hundred pages. The kind of humiliating abomination that, if you have any self-respect, you should never mention again. I am here violating that key directive. Luckily all copies have been incinerated.
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?
My father thought I should. My mother thought opera singer, but that didn't work out.
Inquiring minds want to know: what are your daily writing habits (and vices)?
I always wonder who cares about this. Who cares? And why? Assuming anyone really does: I write in public places. Deters procrastination. When you try to look studious, you become studious. Main vice: TV.
What appalling tricks do you use to get yourself to be productive, and are there any you have discarded?
When I was in my 20s I used to tell myself, in the competitive, motivational-speaking mode, that if I worked really hard I would be successful. That old saw. In my 30s I saw the folly of it. Now I work because it makes me happy.
Do you have any rituals you use in an emergency or if you're blocked?
Mostly I revise, I guess. The pitfall is I get sick of looking at my words and end up with a kind of allergy to my own books once they're done. Probably that happens to most writers who aren't clinical narcissists, though.
How do you feel about writing sex scenes, and how do you handle it?
Never use the words vagina or cock. Focus on abstractions. I practice the literary equivalent of Just Grin and Bear It.
What books do you secretly love?
It's not really a secret, but sci-fi is kind of a guilty pleasure for me, I guess. To call it guilty begs the question of why, but I'm not going to get into a whole discussion of genre here. Nothing wrong with genre, but I do feel geeky in my sci-fi fascination at times. Also I crave teen fantasy like Philip Pullman and Amanda Hemingway. I love that shit.
And what books do you secretly hate?
Phone books. I feel strongly they should be fully electronic.
What is the most terrifying task for you -- whether it be a certain kind of scene, character, or subject matter?
I guess being forced at gunpoint to write a detailed football scene would be bad. Though I do enjoy watching "Friday Night Lights."
Is there some element of your work that you particularly enjoy and that readers or critics seem not to notice so much?
Mostly just the genius. The monumental and glorious genius.
What project has been the biggest struggle for you so far in your career, and how did you resolve your difficulties?
The project of publishing. I don't know that the difficulties of the industry can ever be fully resolved.
Describe the arch-nemesis of your youth. How has this person appeared in your writing?
I didn't have a nemesis, except for a brief moment in grade school where I had a rivalry with a red-haired boy named Cary Linden. I wrote about it in an essay in a Star Wars anthology. He punched me and put worms in my hair. I'm sure I probably deserved it though. I was a weaselly, buck-toothed little critter.
What unpleasant truth do you routinely conceal from young, fresh writers eager to make their mark?
Probably the same truth I conceal from myself -- that few marks will finally be made.
And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?
I'd like more people to read my books.
