October 31, 2007
In an interview with the LA Times, Elaine Dundy expressed her displeasure with the cover art for the reprint of her book Dud Avocado. "'I wanted something like this,' she pointed to the slightly artsy author's photograph on the back of the book, taken in Paris in 1950." Mighty Bookslut intern Evan Arnold spoke with Elaine Dundy to ask what it was about the photograph on the NYRB paperback she did not like.
"For most of my books, I've complained about the cover. It's very much what writers do - all the time I've wanted it to be better. [When] they sent me a catalog in which there was a picture of this cover. I hit the ceiling, I had a sky blue fit, as they say in the south, because the girl was naked. I thought, 'she looks like a slut, her hair is uncombed.' I talked about it to my friends, they said you're right, it's terrible. So I wrote to the publisher, I'm delighted to be published by New York Review of Books, and I said I didn't like the hair or the eyebrows - I complained about everything! The publisher, wrote back to say that although your friends thought it was awful, my company thinks it's wonderful. I said don't fight this, you don't need to fight this. And now most reviewers spend as much time talking about how good the cover is as well as the book. So I guess the publisher was right and I was wrong."
Your Oliver Sacks link of the day: Seed profiles him and Musicophilia.
J. Allan Hobson, author of 13 Dreams Freud Never Had, has spent most of his career trying to disprove Freud's theories of dreams. In one of those twists that seem like a bolt of cosmic karma, Hobson suffered a brain injury that took away his ability to dream. The Believer profiles Hobson's career, his fights with neuro-psychoanalyst Mark Solms (read Bookslut's interview with Solms here), and his plans for a dream museum.
While vacationing in Monte Carlo, Hobson suffered a stroke that affected the precise part of the brain stem that he began his career studying. He knew how his body would respond because he had done countless experiments on how damage to this area affects lab cats. He became nauseous, lost balance, and felt he was drowning in his own saliva. For eight days, he lost the ability to fall asleep. For a month, he couldn’t dream. He felt himself becoming psychotic with exhaustion. Like Freud, inventor of the talking cure, dying of oral cancer, Hobson seemed to have the perfect affliction. “I was wide awake all night long,” he recalls. “I said to myself, I am a cat. I am an experimental animal. But this is no experiment.”
The Atlantic has turned 150 years old, and everyone is incredibly proud. But you can be a fan and enthusiastic about the magazine without reading the godawful anniversary issue, says the Washington Post.
Jonathan Ames, and other writers, confess the books they haven't read.
I haven't read the Bible, Ulysses, Moby-Dick, A la Recherche Du Temps Perdu, or any of the Greek tragedies, though I was a palace guard in a college production of Oedipus, and my father used to call me Oedipus when I was a small boy and he witnessed me kissing my mother. He also would cry out "Oedipus!" when he beckoned me to the dinner table.
October 30, 2007
The LA Times is running an excerpt of Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist, an examination of how writers have explained scientific phenomena. The first chapter looks at Walt Whitman's fusion of the body and soul.
Newsarama talks to Shaun Tan about his graphic novel The Arrival, one of my favorite books of the year.
Elizabeth Wurtzel is 40. That makes me feel so old. She's also in law school and discovering that being a literary bad boy/girl does not help your job prospects in the real world.
“One person I interviewed with said, ‘How can we overcome everything we know about you and come to hire you?’” she recalled.
Let that be a lesson to all the other memoir writers out there.
The Times writes about Alasdair Gray and his new book Old Men in Love.
Other writers may produce texts, but Gray’s books will always very definitely be books – all tooled covers, engraved illustrations, ornamental chapter-heads, typographical devices. And then there are the authorial esprits, the inclusion of made-up commentators and real-life friends – as well as guest appearances by Gray himself. There are also endless allusions: Sidney Workman, the fractious fictional scholar whose comments are included in the “Epilogue” of Lanark, identifies no fewer than three distinct categories of what he uncharitably calls “plagiarisms”. There is a danger in theorizing all this playfulness away as “postmodernism”, but that is still preferable to dismissing it as whimsy or self-indulgence. Setting themselves against the ideal of seamless self-containment that conventional narratives have always sought, Gray’s texts are always emphatically open – to question, to commentary. They are democratically accountable, in other words.
October 29, 2007
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: boice-Terrel Allen
Boice is the author of the double paperback Screwball Comedy/Stories Going Steady, which was published under Rattlecat Press. Rattlecat is Boice's brainchild, a press he created himself after long bouts of rejection letters from the big players and other such obstacles.
Tell me about Rattlecat. When did you start it? Is this more of a personal press, or will you be incorporating works in your catalogue by more writers in the future?
Near the end of graduate school at NYU, I’d been working on my first and unpublished novel. Immediately after finishing it, I began work on my first released book (The Daughters of a Mother). For two years I sent it out to publishers and agents with the usual dreams of six-figure, two-book deals, but I basically only received rejection letters. The bulk were form letters from an intern with a time-stamp on them. I did receive a few “positive rejections” which praised my work, but claimed it wasn’t right for them.
Being the impatient person I am, I couldn’t imagine indefinitely sending out my booking waiting for someone to validate my work. Hence Rattlecat. Although three of the four releases, are my fiction books, the anthology I edited, Coloring Book: An Eclectic Anthology of Fiction and Poetry by Multicultural Writers, is my sole crack at publishing others. I definitely haven’t ruled out putting out books by other writers, but I want to become more established in my own right, if for no other reason than to give these writers the proper attention they deserve.
Screwball Comedy and Stories Going Steady are two different works, yet they play off each other in terms of tone. Screwball Comedy has been described as lighter and more "sitcomy" while STORIES is the darker side. Is this why you paired the two books together?
There wasn’t a randomness to pairing the books, although the initial idea was just to have a “general” story collection, but once I came up with an arc for what would become Screwball Comedy, I envisioned it as a novel-in-stories. I really liked the tone I’d hit with the first story and knew I wanted to continue it: upbeat but still a little dark underneath, almost subverting the chick-lit genre.
So once I completed the first draft of Screwball Comedy, I didn’t want to give up or have to wait until later to release the handful of stories I’d been working on concurrently. I realized if I wrote a few more stories I’d have another complete book. I also noticed that the stories I’d written were either very dark or caustic. Many were Screwball Comedy without the lightness. Since I didn’t want to wait to publish them and everything I’d been working on were short stories, why not publish them together? In a sense, Stories Going Steady is the opposite, but the themes of wanting to belong to something or to find connection unites both books.
Alongside your writing, you're also writing music and you recently held an exhibition in Pittsburg. Do you ever combine the mediums? What is the outcome when you do?
I come from the perspective that everything I do has a natural connection. I’ve been writing fiction since 1996 and didn’t start writing music until this year, but I often bring to my songs arcs and plots and characters. That sort of thing. When I had the art exhibition, it was based on Screwball Comedy/Stories Going Steady, which was still in draft-form at the time, but it served as an excellent preview and bridge to its release. It’s quite organic for myself and I don’t really think of them as separate since it all comes from me. Seeing them as separate mediums comes from other people.
I've been reading Alasdair Gray's retelling of Frankenstein, Poor Things. It's not the scary book I'd been looking for, but I seem to be lacking good scary books. There is Henry James's Turn of the Screw, which I reread yesterday, and how do you not love a story with creepy, sinister children and their possibly mad governess? It's a classic. Then there's Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell. The endnotes are just as scary as the book itself. But still, I don't seem to have enough creepy books for a city where the sun begins to go down at around 4pm.
Weekend America has authors like Neil Gaiman and Sean Cole telling scary stories in under a minute.
Edna O'Brien is interviewed at the Telegraph.
"I knew there'd be a storm. I was accused of betraying my country, my locality, my sex. The nuns in my convent went bonkers with rage. But the books survived. I suppose that's what counts."
Neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran gives a talk on brain abnormalities, explaining the disorder that inspired Richard Powers's Echo Maker and why synesthesia is more common in poets, writers, artists, and musicians.
Ali Smith has written the latest in Canongate's myth series, retelling the story of Iphis from Ovid's Metamorphoses in the book Boy Meets Girl. You can read an excerpt at the Guardian.
About one-sixth of the books, monographs and bound periodicals at the Library of Congress weren't where they were supposed to be because of flaws in the systems for shelving and retrieving materials, according to a survey to be made public at a congressional hearing today.
October 23, 2007
Due to a death in the family, Bookslut will be quiet for the rest of the week.
Gawker attends a party for n+1.
In this pamplet, Keith himself expresses regret that he ever attended college, a sentiment later echoed by Siddharta Deb, Rebecca Curtis, and Ben Kunkel... The pamphlet is 126 pages long. However, it only takes 5 minutes and 52 seconds to listen to the song "Common People" by Pulp in its entirety.
NPR.org has an excerpt from Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia. A man was struck by lightning and the only lasting result was an insatiable desire to play the piano.
I'm proud that he's going to turn three in a month and has never heard that there's a guy who floods the world when you fuck him off and that six million people died because they assimilated and God doesn't like it when you do that. He's never going to hear that. If I find out that he has been told that, then I'll bring my own furious vengeance to bear.
Shalom Auslander is interviewed at the Bostonist.
The Guardian has Anne Enright's short story "Caravan" available online.
The National Book Foundation has interviews with the nominees of this year's National Book Award, and asks each of them the absurd question, "In a country such as ours, where reading is in such a state of crisis, what is the role of the fiction writer?" Mischa Berlinski, nominated for Fieldwork, smartly refuses to play along and answers:
I do know that “state of crisis” has a very different meaning here in Haiti—and when it comes to reading, well, seventy percent of the population is illiterate.
Bookslut's Reading Series tonight features Eileen Myles, Pia Z Ehrhardt, and Matthew Eck, whose book The Farther Shore just got a rave review by Stephen Elliott.
October 22, 2007
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Jennifer Camper
Jennifer Camper is a cartoonist and editor for the comix anthology Juicy Mother. Penned as "Comix for gender pirates and sexual outlaws," the Juicy Mother series showcases work from queer artists and writers. The Boston Globe calls the series "what underground comics used to be." Camper tells Bookslut about the new edition, Juicy Mother 2, via email.
Juicy Mother collects comix from both well-known authors (Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse) and relative unknowns. Was there a conscious decision in including work from both these camps?
Absolutely! I wanted to publish the work of my colleagues who have been making brilliant comics for decades, and to offer them a place to do something different from their regular work. I also wanted to provide a place for new talent to emerge. There's very few places that publish comics of the sort found in Juicy Mother, and fewer places for new artists. Certainly the Internet has allowed artists to self-publish online, but pixels just don't have the same power and particularity as books. I think of Juicy Mother as a community, and I like having a wide variety of artists squashed together between two covers.
What's behind the series title? Why "Juicy Mother"?
"Mother" is a spectacular word that invokes both a nurturing woman and a bad-ass mutha. And "Juicy", well, juicy is how I like my mothers.
What do you enjoy most about the cartoon jams, and what just plain sucks about them?
Cartoon jams are the comics version of the "Exquisite Corpse" writing game. One person draws some panels, and gives it to the next person, who draws some panels... and so on. Cartoonists love doing jams because we can let go of control. Most cartoonists are pretty obsessive about the universes they create, but in a jam other artists step in and take over. It can be a relief to let go. Cartooning is a fairly lonely occupation, so it's fun to do group projects. And when you draw another artist's characters, it's a very intimate, sexy thing.
The difficulty with jams is that they take forever to complete, and by the time they get published they can be woefully out of date.
The jam in Juicy Mother 2 is by Alison Bechdel, Joan Hilty, Diane DiMassa and myself. I believe it's the first all-dyke jam ever published.
The previous edition of Juicy Mother [2004/2005] was published under Soft Skull Press, while the second edition is now under Manic D Press. Why the switch?
Juicy Mother 2 was originally to be published by Soft Skull Press. Then Publisher's Group West (PGW) went bankrupt. They were the main distributor for many small presses, and some couldn't survive the financial mess. Soft Skull Press had to drop some titles from their line up, including JM2. Eventually Soft Skull was bought by Winton, Shoemaker, and Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash has kept Juicy Mother 1 in print. Richard's been great to work with, and I appreciate his support of comics.
Thankfully, Jennifer Josephs at Manic D Press picked up Juicy Mother 2. She's very committed to the book and is a dream to work with.
When did you decide to create the series? What kinds of problems did you face in the beginning (or even now!)?
I'm perpetually frustrated by the lack of publishing opportunities for non-mainstream cartoonists. Finally, I decided to create my own anthology to showcase queer comics. I think the idea began peculating in the late nineties, but the project took years to come together and find a publisher.
The problem is, of course, money. I have to work full time to support myself and my art, which leaves me less time for comics. Also, small publishers can't offer much money for these books, so contributors get paid nothing, and I lose money on each project. It's all a labor of love, but it breaks my heart that these talented artists aren't being paid what they're worth.
Are you currently working on Juicy Mother 3? Will the series become a more regular publication, or will it happen when it happens?
Juicy Mother 3 is in the planning stages. I would love to have future issues as well. But who knows? Each book is it's own adventure.
Hey, I know how to make someone do something. Tell them over and over again how much they should. Hence the recent broccoli craze among children. A rush on poetry will be sure to follow.
At least Marjane Satrapi can hold her own against Deborah Solomon.
People either like to write or they like to draw. And we like to do both. We’re like the bisexuals of the culture. People don’t have any problem if you are a homosexual or if you are a heterosexual, but if you are a bisexual, they have more of a problem with you.
J. Robert Lennon (Mailman) has started Litlab.
The Litlab is a highly informal online compendium of literary experiment and investigation, including limiting exercises, textual manipulations, historical curiosities, unusual poetic forms, comedic mimesis, metafiction, egrotic literature, neo-absurdism, lettristic hypergraphics, or whatever other nonsense its contributors happen to invent. The Litlab is intended less as an online literary journal or blog than a haphazardly curated digital museum.
Today's time waster: library video games.
October 19, 2007
Secret Agent Elizabeth Visits the Dark Side: Writers Tell All
Where do the words come from? Dirty little secrets, 7th grade enemies, and the creative trickery to get through the day. A weekly interview feature from Elizabeth Merrick.
Joanna Kavenna, now we all really want to be you! In the Lake District, writing under trees, dodging thunderstorms and never pulling a punch regarding the perplexing segment of the human population that is always chipper:
“…those effortlessly jovial and productively engaged people, who seem to slot into life and do the right thing all the time. They are usually highly successful because they are diligent and energetic; they are commended and rewarded for their diligence and energy. I just don’t understand them at all. I always wonder if their self-confidence is just a façade and if so when the façade is going to crack.”
She also says:
“I’m either in a writing phase, during which I’m pretty obsessive; or I’m not in a writing phase, during which I’m incapable of doing anything constructive and tricks would be sadly futile...”
I love this gorgeous clarity on not HAVING to write all the time. I'm naturally either in a big writing phase or not as well, and it took me years not to be a total lunatic about the times when I was in a not-writing period. Not everybody goes in a daily rhythm, sometimes it's over months or years, and forcing it is pointless.
Elizabeth's new class, Psychic Revision, starts October 30 by phone & online -- audio with Elizabeth explaining each week available at: elizabethsworkshops.com.
Joanna Kavenna is the author of The Ice Museum and Inglorious. She currently lives in the Duddon Valley, UK.
Is there some element of your work that you particularly enjoy and that readers or critics seem not to notice so much?
My dark and twisted sense of humour sometimes gets mistaken for genuine melancholy. But I’m really not melancholic at all, and enjoy trying to make dark and twisted humour of things that might otherwise oppress me. Some people do find my version of humour funny but I suppose other people just don’t. Or they think that the subject matter isn’t intrinsically humorous -- I remember once writing a black comedy about eating disorders and an agent saying to me, ‘It’s impossible to be amusing about eating disorders.’ But I think it should be possible to be amusing about anything under the sun.
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 usually write in the mornings and early afternoon and then stop for the day. For the rest of the time I read and muse vaguely on whether what I’ve written earlier is unadulterated dross. I live in a very beautiful part of Britain – the Lake District – so I do a lot of thinking half-way up mountains or standing under trees while sheltering from sudden rain storms, etc. But my writing patterns are seasonal -- I work intensely on a book for about a year, then I edit it for a while, and in between books there’s always a fallow period when I can’t write at all, even feel a positive aversion to the notion of writing. During that time I usually assume I have developed a fatal case of writer’s block -- I always forget somehow that this happens each time. I don’t really have or need many tricks to make myself productive -- I’m either in a writing phase, during which I’m pretty obsessive; or I’m not in a writing phase, during which I’m incapable of doing anything constructive and tricks would be sadly futile...
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?
Some of the usual reasons -- a bizarre compulsion, creeping misanthropy, a fear of routine. I’ve always expressed myself more successfully on paper than through speech. For years I hardly said anything I really thought to anyone, I was very taciturn. But I could always write down what I thought perfectly well. And I just always wrote -- even when I was 7 or 8, I remember making little books of doubtless excruciating poems and handing them out to my friends. Whenever I worked in offices, I was always surreptitiously writing a novel, ready to close the document if anyone came up to me. I was a very poor employee; I was only really driven to write. Whenever I’ve thought of giving up writing and doing something else I find it hard to think of anything else I could do.
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’d say my fourth unpublished novel (I wrote many unpublished/unpublishable novels before I got one published), which I wrote when I was 25. It was a retelling of the Osiris legend, set in a fantasy land called the Gravan Peninsula. I had everything worked out – I even created a language called Gravan, which my characters sometimes spoke together. There was a glossary of Gravan terms and lots of maps of the Gravan Peninsula. Most of the book took place in a Gravan city called Dullabenna and was narrated by a character called Fettune. There were some decent ideas in it but the main problem -- and it was a pretty major problem -- was that the book was unintelligible unless you had a very detailed knowledge of the Osiris myth and basic fluency in the Gravan language...
I was led down the path to ruin simply by trying to run before I could walk.
I don’t have any rituals, I just panic or, in my more pragmatic moments, accept periods of block as a necessary part of my own process, as above.
How do you feel about writing sex scenes, and how do you handle it?
Well, in Inglorious, with the character I was writing, I felt that it was appropriate to be elliptical. I don’t know how I would feel in a different novel, with a different character. I’m not against the idea of people writing sex scenes if they can do it, but I do read a lot of really badly written sex scenes and think ‘There but for the grace of God…’ etc…
What books do you secretly love? And what books do you secretly hate?
I greatly enjoy certain Philip K Dick novels -- particularly Valis, Ubik, The Man in the High Castle. Dick has a wonderful ability to establish his crazy future-scapes in a few pages, and to make you feel they are fleshed-out and coherent. And in his best novels he manages to convey the strangeness and terror of existence while being incredibly funny. So you are profoundly disturbed and amused at the same time. I don’t much like Beckett’s novels. I find that leaden incantatory prose pretty deadening. Though I find some of his plays very moving.
What is the most terrifying task for you -- whether it be a certain kind of scene, character, or subject matter?
Every aspect of writing is vaguely terrifying, because either your writing will be deemed unpublishable by a load of sanctimonious gatekeepers and then you will be back to the drawing board for another few years, or you will actually be published and then people will start judging your work, holding it up for scrutiny and etc… So it can all be terrifying and then some days it can seem like grandiose fun, and you can’t really believe you are allowed to do this for a living…
Describe the arch-nemesis of your youth. How has this person appeared in your writing?
I suppose there wasn’t a particular person but more a sort of person -- those effortlessly jovial and productively engaged people, who seem to slot into life and do the right thing all the time. They are usually highly successful because they are diligent and energetic; they are commended and rewarded for their diligence and energy. I just don’t understand them at all. I always wonder if their self-confidence is just a façade and if so when the façade is going to crack. I think in Inglorious I decided to send Rosa into the lions’ den in this respect, so she goes away in the middle of the book to stay with a couple -- Will and Judy -- who are deeply admirable and constantly do the right thing. They are very kind to Rosa while also pouring judgments on her head. Rosa is in a generally bad mood and so she comes to hate them, but she also feels that she is powerless to defend herself against their broadly sensible assessment of her.
What project has been the biggest struggle for you so far in your career, and how did you resolve your difficulties?
Getting published was a big struggle for me. I plugged away during my twenties, writing novels and sending them off to agents and publishers, to no avail. I had so many near misses, which stopped me from giving up entirely, but for a while that felt as if the agony was merely being prolonged. Then finally I got the idea for The Ice Museum, and managed to find a publisher who gave me an advance before I’d even written the book. That was very strange, because after years of writing entire books and then not being able to get them published, suddenly I was signed up to a publisher without having actually produced anything tangible. Then I couldn’t write anything for a year or so, because I was so stunned that I had a publisher. It was almost as if my bluff had been called, as if I hadn’t really expected ever to get published.
What unpleasant truth do you routinely conceal from young, fresh writers eager to make their mark?
There are so many…. It’s only by bitter experience that you learn the realities of writing -- unless you’re in that 0.01% who make a fortune with their first book and spend the rest of their days selling thousands of copies and being feted at glittering literary soirees. It is a financially preposterous business for the vast majority of writers. And publishers are mostly bound by the rules of the market; the days when they nobly fostered writers over a long career are pretty much over. Perhaps a few editors still think like that, but they are a beleaguered minority. I remember a literary editor once said to me, ‘If young people come to me and say “I want to be a writer” I always tell them not to bother, that it’s simply a waste of time. If they give up because of that, then I know they shouldn’t have been a writer. If they persevere despite all such discouragements, then they probably should be a writer.’ I’m paraphrasing him, but I see the logic of his statement. He meant that it’s a very brutal business and equally that no one is actually insisting that you should be a writer; really you are inflicting all of this on yourself and so you have to really want to do it, or to be simply incapable of thinking of anything else you could do.
And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?
Could I have a photographic memory and an abnormal capacity for work, and an ability to knock off a formidable masterpiece in eight weeks? That would be most useful…
Susan Faludi is profiled at the San Francisco Chronicle for her book The Terror Dream and talks about some of the nasty responses she got to her last book, Stiffed (a book I still really like).
It wasn't just avowed enemies of orthodox feminism writing on the pages of right-wing journals who skewered her; she got a drubbing across the ideological board. John Tierney devoted a New York Times column to the fantasy of a mud-wrestling match starring Faludi. James Wolcott, writing for the New Republic, ended his review with the thought that "perhaps Susan Faludi went marshmallow on men in 'Stiffed' not because of feminist outreach but because she found herself a nice fella, someone to look after her."
Speaking of the Booker...
Now, in the week that Anne Enright became its 2007 winner, [the Man Booker Prize] is shaking off criticisms of being elitist and out of touch by taking the radical step of placing all its shortlisted novels online, available free to anyone worldwide.
Descriptions of Anne Enright's The Gathering have been making it sound like the bleakest of all books, but that's not the case. Enright is much funnier than the reviews are making her out to seem. The Guardian talks to Enright about her Booker win, the humor of her novel, and the, yes, occasional bleakness.
"One of the things I wanted to do in the book was explore how desire and hatred are closely bound up," says Enright. "You know, that sense that someone - usually a man - is enraged by the fact that he desires someone - usually a woman." In the novel Enright gives this fearful expression during a postcoital scene in which Veronica tells her husband: "Your daughters will sleep with men like you. Men who will hate them, just because they want them." That seems, I suggest, a trifle harsh. Enright giggles again: "Yeah! Result! But desire is sometimes like that. You hate what you desire because you desire it. That's why we speak about something that sounds so violent, namely fucking. I wanted to write about sex in a different way from that bad-boy stuff that men write so often, to think about the violence in desire."
I was 21-years old when I smelled burning sage for the first time. My friend Clover was trying to help me find my animal spirit. She stuck earphones on my head, pushed play and instructed me to dig a hole near a tree in my mind so that I could slip into the underworld. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. I found myself in the middle of the ocean, hugging an enormous shark, who then proceeded to go down on me.
Kimberlee Auerbach, The Devil, the Lovers, and Me: My Life in Tarot, gives the most interesting Book Notes responses I've read in a long time.
NPR talks to Leah Bendavid-Val, author of Song Without Words: The Photographs and Diaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy, and has excerpts from Sophia's and Leo Tolstoy's diaries online.
Troy Jollimore -- previous reading series guest and author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory -- writes about Robert Hass's Twentieth Century Pleasures at Critical Mass.
October 18, 2007
[Still working on branding the poetry links]
Dorothea Lasky has launched a "Tiny Tour" to promote her new book, Awe. The Tiny Tour is a "call back to a long intellectual tradition of holding salons, happenings, lectures, and readings within one’s home," and will feature "guest readers, musicians, dancers and other performers." It appears that Awe enjoys "most favored first book" status this month in the Bookslut community: Olivia Cronk reviewed Awe in this month's issue; Moonlight Ambulette reviewed it on her site; and I interviewed Lasky in this space a couple of weeks back.
Edward Nudelman sees poetry as "a collection of words, each with their own potential energy." (Via The Morning Line)
The Valparaiso Poetry Review's new issue is online, focusing on John Balaban, but with lots of other poems and reviews.
Poem Talk is a podcast, hosted by Al Filreis, in which "four friends and colleagues in the world of poetry and poetics convene to collaborate on a close (but not too close) reading of a single poem." Right now, only the first episode is up, but you can see the promise in the discussion of Williams's "Between Walls."
Marc McKee is "often troubled by the attempts to represent public suffering and catastrophe, current or historical."
Sylvia Vardell on sharing poetry with children.
I was half-hoping that "the torturer's apprentice" would be a pro-war poem of the sort I've been looking for--happily, it's not. (Kristy Bowen's poem is part of Prick of the Spindle's new issue.)
Raymond Bianchi is about to vomit.
My four-year-old would probably sue for emancipation if I failed to link to this article on the House of Poetry within the Star Wars Galaxies MMORPG.
The Futility Review is "dedicated to the non-publication of the best works of the best poets in the English-speaking world. We value diversity and strive to include new voices in our evaluation process. Our goal is to provide a non-venue for all kinds of poetry and avoid the labeling of differing aesthetics." The submissions form is rigorous. Here's hoping they release this t-shirt!
Finally, at this recording, George Saunders explains how he learned that the border-guarding, hysteria-fomenting Minutemen "weren’t racist in a simple way. They were racist in an extremely complicated way," and why that might be worth knowing.
Steve Almond, a common Gawker target, compares Gawker writers to Joseph McCarthy. Classy.
The list of things I will never do with my life includes reading books by Alice Sebold, although I am oddly fascinated with the reviews of her new book The Almost Moon. Especially this review that Carrie pointed out to me in New York Magazine.
The parallels between The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon are ridiculous. They extend all the way from the books’ titles (The Disyllabic Adjective Monosyllabic Noun) to the minor details of scene and phrasing and character. It’s as if Harper Lee had decided to follow up To Kill a Mockingbird with To Manhandle a Cardinal, the story of a Mississippi lawyer who defends a Hispanic migrant worker from racist accusations. The new novel begins, as The Lovely Bones did, with an outrageous crime, bluntly stated—“When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily”—then proceeds (as The Lovely Bones did) to trace that crime’s fallout in shifting small-town suburban Pennsylvania. It also features (as, yes, The Lovely Bones did) a teenage girl enjoying her first kiss from a high-school saxophone player, rash post-tragedy sex as a mode of amnesia, the old schoolyard chant “K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” and the strange sensation of feet sinking into mole tunnels. Both narrators cherish totemic photographs of once-beautiful young mothers who’ve been stunted by domesticity; both have mild, loving fathers who playfully parachute the kids’ sheets at bedtime. In The Lovely Bones, the narrator is murdered in a place called Stolfuz cornfield; in The Almost Moon, the local bar is owned by a family called Stolfuz.
I spent a lot of time recently reading William James's anecdote in Pragmatism about camping with his friends and debating an issue about a squirrel. I found it unbearably charming that, first off, William James went camping. But also that when faced with a joke, he tries to dissect the exact meaning of "going round." (And of course that he would use this unbelievably dorky anecdote as a way of explaining the use of pragmatism.) Oh William James, how I love you and your dorkiness.
(I was going to link to a review of a linguistics book with this very boring example of loading hay onto a cart, but now that I've reread the graceful James essay, my tolerance is too low. Just read the James, screw the linguists.)
Tom Perrotta, author of the newly released The Abstinence Teacher, attends an abstinence rally.
“Speaking as a former teenage guy, the fact that you might someday get lucky was like the only thing getting you through those years,” Mr. Perrotta observed after the event as gaggles of hooting kids thronged through the lobby of the suburban church. “If you take that away I don’t know what’s left. It was the basic narrative of male adolescence.”
Sir Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics, used last night’s awards ceremony as a platform to mount the attack on the art of book reviewing before announcing that Anne Enright had won this year’s £50,000 award for her novel The Gathering.
How much do I love Howard Davies right now? Well, he used his time to attack reviewers for laziness, for reviewing primarily big name authors whose time has passed, for not seeking out new voices, for kissing Coetzee's ass. Good for him.
Matthew Pearl, author of The Poe Shadow, thinks he can lay to rest all of the rumors about how Edgar Allen Poe died -- rabies, poisoning, etc. He may have died from a brain tumor.
The immediate circumstances of Mr. Poe’s death are not in dispute. He had been missing for several days when a man named Snodgrass found him on the night of Oct. 3, 1849, barely conscious and wearing clothes that did not fit, and brought him to Washington College Hospital for treatment. “At the hospital he kind of ranted and raved,” Mr. Pearl said. Three days later, he was dead.
October 17, 2007
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I met David Pearson, who at the time was an in-house designer at Penguin, and showed him a copy of a book I illustrated called 'Der hund von ballard' by Ludovic Roubadi for the publishers Schirmer Graf. Some time later he was looking for an illustrator to help on Great Journeys and thought that this style would suit the series so gave me a call. We started working together and it went so well that what was originally a possible 10 covers turned into 18.I had complete freedom to use whatever imagery I felt appropriate for each book. The beauty of the project was that each story had such rich visual reference that every title felt exciting and individual from the others. The subject matter varied from Islamic tiles to elephants to can-can girls. Penguin would provide me with a synopsis of the book and a selection of images which would act as a starting point for creating my own library of reference.
The mirror image style was already set when I came to the project, which was a lovely, but challenging grid to work to. The problem was making what was an awkward, tall and thin area feel natural in the space and not end up looking like a totem pole or that the cover had three vertical stripes down it. I felt my experience as a graphic designer was really useful for this and ensured that the image was sympathetic to the text. It was a gift though, because in theory it was only half the work, though some images would look great on one side but then when you came to flip them would look ridiculous so would need reworking.
Poetry Daily has "Milton in Guatamala," an essay from Christian Wiman's essay collection Ambition and Survival.
My room was a tiny box made of corrugated tin and cardboard. It was clearly a desperate and hastily conceived entrepreneurial effort by the young, careworn couple below, who slept in one room with their three children, two of whom were infants. Through a large hole in the middle of the floor I could see the kitchen. Through the vaguely rectangular window slashed in one wall I could see a smoking volcano. It was the hole that caused me some anxiety. When I knew I was going to get drunk (a person who carries Milton into a jungle is a person who plans his benders) I'd set various objects around its edges in the hope that a kicked can or bottle top might clatter down into that underworld before I did.
Have you read Oliver Sacks's Oaxaca Journal? No? You should. Never has a book about ferns ever been quite so captivating.
But really we're here to talk about Musicophilia, Sacks's fascinating new book about neurological responses to music. There are videos of him speaking on Amazon, and he's also interviewed (again, video) on the Wall Street Journal health blog. (Titled, magically, "Health Blog.")
Over at Jezebel, Jessica, who felt that Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones "managed to make pedophilia schlocky," gathers the negative reviews of the follow-up novel, The Almost Moon.
Anne Enright won the Booker Prize for her book The Gathering. You can read an excerpt of the book online.
October 16, 2007
How the Wall Street Journal got Bill Watterson to review the Charles Schulz biography. (Link from Journalista.)
Entertainment Weekly has a preview of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier.
Marjane Satrapi, the most amusing interviewee in literature, spoke at a press conference for the movie version of Persepolis.
The only comic I read when I was a child was—there were these American comics coming in Iran, and one of them was called Dracula. […] I started reading it, and I don’t know why, but I decided that it was written in the comic that to become Dracula [my cousins and I] had to eat raw chicken. My cousin and I ate raw chicken the whole summer, and as a result we got worms at the end of the summer. That was an issue with comic books.
The Washington Post book section now has a blog. So far: lists. Hooray for lists, the anti-content. You can smell the contempt they have for whomever forced them to start a blog from Chicago.
The Guardian digests Alice Sebold's new novel The Almost Moon.
My mind turned to the back story, as it so often does when a writer is trying too hard to change the pace and create narrative tension. I thought of how my mother had once been a lingerie model, how everything my father and I had done had always disappointed her, how my father had died ...
After dropping these few heavy-handed clues for the reader, I pushed my mother's corpse into the basement and started washing off the shit.
I forgot to mention: Bookslut is a luxury blog. If they saw my real blogging set-up, they'd take me off that list in a second, but for the time being just imagine I'm blogging in cashmere while eating chevre chocolate truffles.
Down with Quirk. Except for Rushmore.
Quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd … but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair—a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility.
October 15, 2007
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Johnny Temple
Johnny Temple is the Editor-in-Chief at Akashic Books, a small press in New York that dedicates itself to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction that has been largely ignored by mainstream publishers. This month, the press is celebrating its tenth anniversary with two book parties featuring readings by Arthur Nersesian, Felicia Luna Lemus, Preston L. Allen, Tim McLoughlin, T. Cooper and Amiri Baraka. As Temple prepares to celebrate, he tells Bookslut about the future of the Akashic Noir series and an elusive arch-nemesis.
First off, congratulations on Akashic turning 10 this month! Over the years, the press has adopted the slogan Reverse gentrification of the literary world. Has Akashic made the mark you had hoped it would over the past decade?
I started Akashic as a hobby that has ballooned into a real book publishing company. In that sense, Akashic has definitely made more of a mark than I had ever hoped... or even imagined.
What titles from the catalogue best define Akashic?
There are so many books we've published about which I'm incredibly proud, but several books come to mind as being quintessentially Akashic:
Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani
Southland by Nina Revoyr
Manhattan Loverboy by Arthur Nersesian
John Crow's Devil by Marlon James
And the list goes on...
Akashic is also home to an imprint and several notable series. I picked up a copy of Havana Noir while shelving books at my day job and realized that a former professor of mine, Pablo Medina, was included. I guess my question here is where did the Noir series begin and where is it headed?
The Akashic Noir Series began with Brooklyn Noir. We never intended it to blossom into a series, but the book was so well-received as an authentic literary examination of an urban locale that we couldn't resist pursuing DC Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and many others. The series is becoming more and more international. We will be publishing Noir Series titles in more American cities (Detroit, Las Vegas, etc.) as well as cities in Europe (Paris Noir, Rome Noir, etc.) Africa (Lagos Noir), Latin America, Asia, and beyond.
While Punk Planet as a magazine is now defunct, the imprint still lives. Will it continue to embody the same ideals as its predecessor? How will it change in the foreseeable future?
I'm pretty sure that Punk Planet Books will remain an active entity. As to the shape it will take, that is hard to say, but their consistency with selecting really great books is bound to continue.
Finally, if the press were to have one mortal enemy, who would it be and why?
We cannot reveal the name of our mortal enemy because that might tip him off (yes, it's a "he") to the ruthless counter-attack with which we will soon swarm his sorry ass.
Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson reviews the Charles Schulz biography Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis for the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, the Schulz family continues to speak out over Michaelis's portrayal of them.
Comic book writer/illustrator Rutu Modan (Exit Wounds) has an illustrated column at the New York Times.
The Sound of Young America adapts George Saunders's short story "Ask the Optimist." With puppets!
Jeff Parker provides the tracklist to his novel Ovenman in Largehearted Boy's Book Notes.
Shalom Auslander is fucking everywhere these days.
The New York Times wants to make him a Suit Person.
I wonder what Suit Me is doing right now. Perhaps he is at the opera, understanding Italian and shouting Bravo! as the curtain falls. Perhaps he is at dinner with other Suit People, swirling red wine around a glass as he discusses the past week’s lead article in The Economist. “They fundamentally misunderstand China’s relationship to the something something something,” he says. He mentions Turkey, and they all nod. Perhaps he is, if nothing else, feeling ever-so-slightly less lousy about himself than Jeans Me does in his Zachary knockoff. So when the phone rings later that afternoon and I am offered an assignment to dress like a Suit Person for a day — a rich Suit Person — I quickly agree.
He's also at Nextbook, discussing Foreskin's Lament and how perhaps he caused the death of Aaron Spelling.
(This blog post is dedicated to the woman who recently folded her arms and said "You and the blog people LOOOOOVE Shalom Auslander. Did he pay you guys?")
Now we not only have atheist superstars, we have atheist power couples. Fantastic. Salon interviews Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works) and Rebecca Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem).
[Spinoza] really does believe that we can save ourselves through being rational. And I believe in that. I believe that if we have any hope at all, it's through trying to be rigorously objective about ourselves and our place in the world. We have to do that. We have to submit ourselves to objectivity, to rationality.
Neil Gaiman writes about adults reading fairy tales in the Guardian.
Rapunzel no longer let it slip that she had been meeting the prince by asking the witch why her belly had swollen so badly that her clothes would not fit (a logical question, given that she would soon be giving birth to twins). By the third edition, Rapunzel tells the witch that she is lighter to pull up than the prince was, and the twins, when they turn up, turn up out of nowhere.
October 12, 2007
Jonathan Messinger provides the tracklisting for his new book Hiding Out. (John was our Indie Heartthrob this week.)
Lessing's response to the Nobel: "Oh Christ. I couldn't care less." Oh, now I kind of love her.
Secret Agent Elizabeth Visits the Dark Side: Writers Tell All
Where do the words come from? Dirty little secrets, 7th grade enemies, and the creative trickery to get through the day. A weekly interview feature from Elizabeth Merrick.
This week, Neal Pollack sends an update from his "man hole." Funny! Because his interview reminds me so much of this thing I tell my students: In the same way we each have a certain number of parking tickets we're going to get in this lifetime, we also have an allotment of Courtney Love moments. (Just imagine Janis Joplin up in the sky, chewing a pencil and concretizing the mortifying details for you, it really makes it much more bearable). Neal says:
"I did a hack piece for Salon after Dave Chappelle quit his show that was the wankiest, least-well-informed, most unfunny, and most wrong piece of celebrity journalism that I've ever seen. It reminded me of the kinds of crappy essays I used to do about the "PC Police" for my college magazine. That's the most recent freelance disaster. They come along occasionally. Everyone throws one to the backstop now and then."
Totally. The fact is: you're going to have x writing days this lifetime that are the equivalent of waking up to find (your own?) puke in your bangs, wondering why you have 11 voicemails at 10am. So what. You're that much closer to being through your to-do list. How diligent and tenacious of you! xxoo--Eliz.
Elizabeth's new class, Psychic Revision, starts October 30 by phone & online -- audio & free mini-course available at: elizabethsworkshops.com.
Neal Pollack is the author of the extremely controversial parenthood memoir Alternadad, coming out this spring in paperback from Anchor/Vintage. He spends much of his time working on Offsprung, a humor magazine and web community for "parents who don't suck." He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, son, and millions of other people.
What project has been the biggest struggle for you so far in your career, and how did you resolve your difficulties?
The rise and fall of my McSweeney's career has been exhaustively chronicled elsewhere. It didn't resolve well, as you know. Sometimes I wish I'd handled myself differently, given the opportunities I had, but I'm doing fine now. I know that's not very juicy, but a juicy answer would be the professional equivalent of me chanting "Candyman" three times.
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?My writing tends to come in short bursts. I think about an idea for a little while, hours, days, weeks, even months, and then when it's gestated enough, I sit down at the computer and yack it all up. This produces a thousand-word blogpost in 30 minutes, or an entire book draft in four months. As for getting myself to be productive, I just have to think about my dwindling bank account, and then I'm typing like a madman, vaguely resembling Terry Gilliam at the keyboard in the opening credits of Monty Python's Flying Circus. It helps that I work in a basement room that I call my "man hole." It contains XM satellite radio, Direct TV, an air purifier, and mood lighting, not to mention a blue Barcalounger. I'm going to die down there, possibly this week. There's usually a baseball game on the TV next to my desk, or I'm playing music, and my beloved Silver Surfer is always ready to heat up at any minute. Improved marijuana vaporization technology has been great for my work. Or not. I've lost the ability to judge.
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?
I've really never been very good at anything else. I realized this early on and have rarely deviated, except for my pathetic and abortive attempts to be a comedic actor.
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?
Blockage is never a problem for me, not even intestinally. As for the most mortifying thing I've ever written, I did a hack piece for Salon after Dave Chappelle quit his show that was the wankiest, least-well-informed, most unfunny, and most wrong piece of celebrity journalism that I've ever seen. It reminded me of the kinds of crappy essays I used to do about the "PC Police" for my college magazine. That's the most recent freelance disaster. They come along occasionally. Everyone throws one to the backstop now and then.
How do you feel about writing sex scenes, and how do you handle it?
I don't mind writing about sex. Sex is funny. If I have to do a scene, I try to make it short, and generally I make the similies as absurdly overwrought as possible.
What books do you secretly love? And what books do you secretly hate?
I love potboiler historical novels about ancient Rome and ancient Egypt. I spent the better part of my puberty reading James Michener, and my first "grownup" books were the Kent Family Chronicles by John Jakes. And I still have a taste for that stuff. As for what books I secretly hate, I don't make a habit of hating secretly.
What is the most terrifying task for you -- whether it be a certain kind of scene, character, or subject matter?
I hate it when editors make me do an "argument" piece, because then I have to come up with some kind of a thesis statement like I'm writing a sophomore-year term paper. I would really much rather tell silly stories and blow my uniformed opinion around like it matters.
What unpleasant truth do you routinely conceal from young, fresh writers eager to make their mark?That it's really, really hard to make money as a writer. They will find that out soon enough. Same as it ever was.
And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?
I wouldn't mind getting a residual check once in a while. Other than that, I have no disappointments. This is what I've always wanted to do, and I've been doing it professionally for 15 years. So there you go.
The announcement of Doris Lessing winning the Nobel immediately made me think back to my rebellion against my women's studies class over Lessing's ridiculous statements about vaginal orgasms. That is all I associate her with now. I should probably find something else, I imagine.
I had been complaining recently that the graphic novels I've read this year have been particularly lackluster, and then two came into my life: The Arrival by Shaun Tan and The Blot by Tom Neely. (Although I just rediscovered a copy of Gipi's Notes for a War Story, and I do love Gipi.) Neely is interviewed at LAist about his art show and a possible follow up to The Blot called Self Indulgent Werewolf.
October 11, 2007
Kudos to Doris Lessing, and to the Nobel committee for a refreshing choice! I don't think reading The Golden Notebook on a computer screen would be a good idea, but why not listen to Lessing read from it?
Two weeks ago, I asked for examples of pro-war poetry from the past six years, whether "war" is understood as the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, or the Global War on Terror(tm). I've gotten around a dozen e-mails ranging from "none, but Brian Turner is our Wilfred Owen," to "are you nuts? Of course there's none." I would still be interested in hearing about this. I'm working out a longer post about the topic, but I suspect it's a problem that we can't think of any--even bad ones. (At VQR, Daniel Alarcón has found a pro-torture film. It's not even by Mel Gibson.)
At Weird Deer, Travis Nichols has an epic interview with Eileen Myles. (Part one, two, three, & four.) Part two addresses the difficult status of political poetry & poetry in the university, which Joe Wenderoth addressed last week in this space. At Eileen Myles's various home pages, you can find audio & video to complete your sensorial experience.
Andrew Grace has posted a detailed reading of Robert Grenier's "Sentences," which Grace sees as "a sort of epic by inches."
The Telegraph's publication of some Ted Hughes letters (along with video and audio) is getting widely linked, and deservedly so. I was at Emory right after they bought a huge bolus of Hughes's manuscripts and letters, and vividly remember the excitement--the joy of unlearning received opinion about Hughes--that those working on the project felt.
The Romantic Circles Poets on Poets podcast is fresh. Readers include Patrick Phillips, Ross Gay, and Philip Metres.
Awesome: Lewis Turco--author of standard references such as The Book of Forms and The Book of Literary Terms (and many other works, including poetry, essays, & the like)--has a blog.
A bitchily titled post on ekphrasis at This Recording.
If the title's true, I doubt self-publishing will help: "I Got to Pay My Child Support" Book of Poetry.
What poetry on SportsCenter looks like. | As a chaser, here's the Cookie Monster.
It's not about poetry, but as PsychoSlut I have an interview with Mark Edmundson this month, about his new book, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days. Among the questions we settle: Why is it that Freud fares relatively well in English departments?
Finally, a grammar cartoon.
At Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet you can read Karen Joy Fowler's story "The Last Worders."
Christian Wiman is interviewed at Poets & Writers about the last essay in Ambition & Survival and his role at Poetry magazine.
With poetry about a very personal experience, for me, it usually gets transformed in some way by the form of the poem, just the demands of the art. I find that the essay is similar, actually—it requires a kind of discipline that removes you from the intensity of the experience, and helps to alleviate the intensity. I think it is possible to be much more personal in prose than in a poem, at least for me. But I was still aiming at making something structured, a formal work, not just my heart bleeding out on the page.
Shalom Auslander is interviewed at Fresh Air about Foreskin's Lament.
October 10, 2007
Every Wednesday, we will be talking to authors, publishers, book designers, illustrators, etc., on the topic of book design. To start us off, Mark Siegel, the editorial director of First Second Books -- who has published the likes of Eddie Campbell, Joann Sfar, and Nick Abadzis -- discusses one of my favorite book fetishes: the french flap.
I’m a sucker for French Flaps. First Second books all have them. There’s something elegant about a cover or a dust-jacket that wraps into the endpapers. A nice four-inch wide flap adds to the tactile pleasure of holding a book, and offers space and opportunity to say this book isn’t more cheap crap, but it’s getting extra care and attention in design and copy.Practicality is part of it. With First Second, books are mainly high quality softcovers. By adding the flap, we shore up the structural integrity of the whole cover, so it lasts longer than a simple one-layer paperback cover.
Beyond the production side, the French flaps are a vital part of framing the conversation that will surround a book. The back flap will often carry a short introduction to the author and artist. The front flap will couch the book in terms that might condition whoever picks it up, favorably or not.
The bio might try to cast the author as a goofball or a genius, a buddy or an enigma. The book intro might give you plot or tantalizing hooks, or the opening scene, or very little at all, confidently hinting this is so good, you ought to know about it already. Or in some cases, the flap will simply showcase more of the artwork, prolonging the front and back covers.
Both the flap copy and their design suggest a context in which this book will be received. In one instance we bought a book that was released as a cheap mass market paperback in Europe, but refashioning this outer package for the U.S. gave it a new start; here it received serious consideration, many glowing reviews and has gone on to outsell its original edition. I bet the flaps had something to do with it.
National Book Award nominees announced.
The Scotsman talks to Alasdair Gray about Old Men in Love.
1982, Janine, that acid dissection of pornography, reactionary politics and blasted hopes, is his personal favourite of his work. He describes its genesis in the mid-1960s: Gray was then spending a lot of time in small hotels while lecturing "to 22 housewives and a retired policeman" on art appreciation for Glasgow University's extra-mural courses. The rejection of Lanark (one publisher would only accept splitting it into the "real" and "fantastic" sections as separate books) had depressed him. "I shall withdraw from the whole shoddy structure of Western Civilisation" he reminisces, "and it will collapse like a house of cards without my book, the prop that would have saved them - I didn't exactly feel that way. I was bitter and morose. I thought I will write a pornographic novel that will make me plenty of money."
I met with a woman teaching a class on fairy tales last week, and we nervously skated around one important opinion until I finally flat out asked her, "What do you think of Hans Christian Andersen?"
"He's bullshit."
"Oh, thank god."
Not all Andersen, of course, but many of his stories are not fairy tales at all but ridiculous morality tales. The ending of Little Mermaid got both of us fuming.
Michael Sims interviews Maria Tatar, who is responsible for the Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. They do not cover whether in "The Little Mermaid" there is a little asterisk at the end that leads to the annotation "This is total bullshit," but there should be.
Jonathan Coe pays tribute to the forgotten women writers of the Virago modern classics paperback line.
In its day, Pilgrimage was regarded as one of the most important and influential literary experiments ever undertaken. The first volume, Pointed Roofs, appeared in 1915, and subsequent instalments came out at fairly regular intervals throughout the 1920s and 30s, exciting a good deal of comment from Richardson's contemporaries (including Virginia Woolf, who credited her with inventing "the psychological sentence of the feminine gender"). But times were changing. Perhaps, under the shadow of encroaching Nazism, there was no longer such enthusiasm for a book that was overtly sympathetic to German culture, and through which there runs an uncomfortable vein of anti-semitism. ... Already a largely forgotten figure by the 1950s, she had spent her final days in a nursing home, where (so the story goes) her insistence that she had once been a famous writer was taken as a symptom of incipient senile dementia.
October 09, 2007
The movie version of Into the Wild has increased attention to the bus where Chris McCandless lived. Pre-film, most of McCandless's belongings remained on the bus. Now parts of the bus are showing up on eBay. NPR reports.
A man making his own experiences and those of the people he knows the representatives of the human condition: It sounds like a formula for bad science. And yet the formula for bad science turns out to be the formula for good writing.
Slate reviews Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia.
The Guardian digests Philip Roth's Exit Ghost.
Also, James Wood reviews it for the New Yorker.
(By the way, I'm tempted to make a cruel joke about the fact that Amazon's first result for Exit Ghost when I did a search was the large print edition, but it's way, way too easy.)
Stephen Elliott is worthy of your mockery.
Read this: Kelly Link's "Light."
Last week my landlord came in with a list of "repairs" that needed done. All books had to be removed from shelves, shelves disassembled and removed from walls, and things "repaired." After two days of leaping over stacks to get from room to room, I spent Sunday putting books back onto shelves. Not all of them made it. A great deal of them did not make it. I find myself less and less attached to individual copies of books, and unless I can see myself rereading them, they are particularly handsome, they are signed, or they have absurd sentimental value, they were put in a box to be taken away. I had to break up with a few writers. "Jessa, admit to yourself that you will never read another David Foster Wallace book and get them off your shelves."
In the middle of all of this, I started reading Christian Wiman's Ambition and Survival, a collection of essays, and could not convince myself to stop reading it and finish putting my apartment back together. I had already read two essays in the collection, "Gazing into the Abyss" in the American Scholar and "The Limit," which was literally the only thing I remember liking in the anthology What Makes a Man. Still, I wasn't expecting to be so smitten with the entire book. Now that I've come to the end perhaps I can finish clearing a path to my living room.
October 08, 2007
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Jonathan Messinger
Messinger is Co-Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at Featherproof, a small press based in Chicago. Messinger also just published his first book of short stories, Hiding Out, which is also available through Featherproof. One thing that sets Featherproof apart from other presses is the implementation of mini-books: free novellas and short stories by Featherproof authors in pdf format. All you need is a printer and some fancy origami craftsmanship, and you're finally a factory worker on a bookmaking assembly line like you've always dreamed.
What's Featherproof's story? When and how did the idea become the press?
We started in early 2005. My buddy Zach and I both worked at Time Out Chicago (I still do, he's moved on). I edit the books section and Zach was the designer of that section, so we talked books a lot. One day we started talking about the lack of small presses here in Chicago, and what potential we saw in one--creative, not business.
Next thing we knew, we were coming up with terrible names, then one stuck, then a URL was bought, which meant we were serious. Zach sold his car and we used that money to put out our first book, The Enchanters vs. Sprawlburg Springs by Brian Costello. We've been sort of "paycheck to paycheck" since, but we're putting our fifth book to bed in a couple weeks, and it's worked out okay so far.
Featherproof stands out in the way it works with its authors. Can you explain the process and the reasoning behind such a hands-on method in publishing?
Well, that was one of our motivations for starting a press, to make it a sort of "author's press." So we have them involved in every decision, including edits, design, marketing, etc. It's totally up to the author how involved they want to be of course. If they don't feel like dealing with the art side, that's fine. But we find that authors tend to be the good kind of control freaks, and it makes everyone happier if we're all working together. It's more of a collaboration that way.
I think one of Featherproof's loftier goals has been to break down the walls of publishing as much as possible. Internally, that means we never want the author to feel like he or she doesn't have the opportunity for input. They're never instructed in anything. Externally, it means constantly trying to build an audience outside the people who, say, are in book clubs or on GoodReads. Not that we don't love those people. They're our people.
Let's talk about the mini-books. What was the idea behind them, what type of works do you think make the best mini-books, and can even the more inept papercraftspersons fold a mini-book unharmed?
When we started, we wanted to get going right away. And of course the process from manuscript to polished book is a long and arduous one. So we wanted to put something up online, that would let us start engaging with authors right away. But there are already loads of great literary magazines online, and we didn't feel like we'd be adding anything new to suddenly declare ourselves an online publisher.
So we came up with this idea for an online/in print hybrid. And we thought it gave the short story its due, to put it into its own little book, with its own cover and author photo, etc. Plus, we're weird guys who like to make things, so we constructed them as pdfs that people can download from our website, fold, assemble, staple and jam in their pockets for the train commute, etc. It's fun. It's really easy to make them. I have no artistic skills, poor coordination and a wall-eye's depth perception, and I can do it.
What are Featherproof's major obstacles?
Let me count the ways. Distribution was our biggest, of course. Everyone knows that story by now. I feel like we're seeing the light at the end of that tunnel now. We're making the switch to PGW as of 11/1, which we're really excited about. Having pro distribution is definitely going to radically change things for us. For instance: I'm on tour with my book right now, and did a reading at the phenomenal Type Books in Toronto two nights ago. Those guys had to fight for weeks just to get books in time for the reading, and they showed up that morning. Ugh. That's going to get better.
Like every small press, we think we could use a little more money. Right now we're in this cycle of one book paying for the next, etc., with only a little wiggle room. That's okay, because as our books get out there more and more, we're doing better and better. But now we're getting itchy to do more books, so we're working on ways to bring in some more cash.
One thing I will say, just because I get tired of a lot of the whining in the literary community, is that readership has not been a problem. Our books find their readers and vice versa, and its forever expanding. I just think there is no shortage of readers, despite all the doomsday stats.
Lastly, what's in the future for Featherproof?
Well, we're finishing up work on This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record by Susannah Felts, this fantastic YA/adult novel about a girl growing up in Nashville and finding herself bumping up against all these class issues with her friends. It also has this great strain about the way creativity (she's a photographer) can be an escape and a burden when you're just discovering it in high school. We're really excited about it.
After that is this hilarious and weird art book/novel hybrid called boring boring boring boring boring boring boring by Zach Plague. And we're putting the finishing touches on our 2009 catalog (now with more books!), but can't really say what's in there yet.
And then we have this really great idea for dominating the world. It's only a matter of time.
Oh, Texas Monthly. We are so breaking up now.
Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) interviews Alan Moore for the Telegraph. Still talking Lost Girls.
'Frankly,' says Moore, 'creating a piece of pornography that men will respond to isn't rocket science. Charlie Brooker wrote in The Guardian that men get aroused simply by glancing at a crude charcoal sketch of a single boob scrawled on the side of a shed. Quite wretched, and probably true. Most visual pornography is lit as if for brain surgery – the most repulsive strip-lighting imaginable.'
It is the 50th anniversary of Patrick White's Voss, and the Age wonders why the Nobel-winning author isn't more widely read.
Ready your Amazon.co.uk accounts: The new Alasdair Gray is here.
On my last trip, I discovered six Franz Wright poems, torn from magazines, stuck in the pages of the books I had packed. I didn't remember tearing out poems and hiding them, and if I had, why only Wright poems? I wondered briefly if Franz Wright had broken into my apartment during the packing process and hidden them himself. It was a nice surprise, no matter how it happened, and I passed along two of the poems in letters back home.
Over at the Powell's Review-a-Day, they have Helen Vendler's review of two Wright books, Earlier Poems and God's Silence.
October 05, 2007
Secret Agent Elizabeth Visits the Dark Side: Writers Tell All
Oh Leora! You are a gorgeous piece of work and full of some of the best, most block-unraveling honest practical bits of advice I've been too chicken to publicly share with my students:
A) "Good thing that my husband is a psychiatrist and a sound sleeper."
[Elizabeth's free tip to nerve.com: Considering your client base, not bad categories to screen & match?]
B) "To unblock, I watch reruns of 'Law and Order.'"
C) I can't wait for Leora's next book: "It tells the story of a mentally ill young woman in the 1970s and veers through her imagined world, including parallels from other historical eras that she invents from the medieval times through the twentieth century... formally the challenge to juxtapose her invented notebook characters with the every day realism of a mental hospital was the challenge of a lifetime of writing. One editor actually turned down this book and told my agent it "de-stabilized" her to read it. I thought that was sort of funny, actually." -----xxooEliz.
Leora Skolkin-Smith is the author of the novel EDGES, which Grace Paley selected and edited for her imprint at Glad Day Books. Edges was was picked by The Bloomsbury Review in its 25th Anniversary Issue as a "Favorite Book of the Last 25 Years." Leora was awarded a Teaching Fellowship for graduate work at Sarah Lawrence College where she holds a BA and MFA in writing.
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?
My writing habits are so bizarre, it's hard to be even describe them! They vary from awakening at 4:30 in the morning on the waves of a dream, half asleep and nearly sleepwalking to the computer or a notebook to get that one image or intense feeling normal consciousness would have kept concealed from me. Good thing that my husband is a psychiatrist and sound sleeper. I really must look scary and wild stumbling about, eyes still shut and smarting from sleep. Especially in the beginning of a novel --this is important. I slumber and dream and wait until I can leap up and get that one precise moment of insight, that one image, which would unmask and expose what I want to express about my story. I do automatic writing at these dawn hours, letting any words pour out, without censoring them. I don't even correct the spelling or punctuation, I just pour out. Then hours later, I read what I've written. I get whole scenes and plots from these fragments.
The beginning of a novel is the most amazing. Long walks, indulgent naps, carrying a notebook to the docks to write about black ducks dipping in and out on the East River. Or how purple pansies look in the summer sunlight near the Water Club. A long lunch, it's luxurious. Sometimes I think I became a writer because how I could remain a dreamy lazy child. It's just playing around for me, so much fun, all in my own universe. But after the first draft gets written, the stressful strain comes and turns me into a workaholic. I have to actually now make sense to somebody else. No more walks and long lunches and dozey floating and the feeling of timelessness.
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?
I am sure it was not by choice. I loved being alone as a kid, I loved the expanse of solitude. People made me very nervous. I could spend hours and hours just analyzing and living in my own perceptions of reality. Every day relationships didn't let me pursue this subterranean world that fascinated me so much. Everything was permissible when I wrote, the most perverse thought, the ugliest feeling. It meant freedom. Complete freedom of being.
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 tried desperately to write a novel set in France in 1944 about a ship that was torpedoed. Thousands died and the incident was never reported. I thought it would explain 9/11 to me and make me do a responsible job as a writer, be a real writer. It was the worst thing I ever wrote. I can't even read it. I even went to the place in France the ship was bombed at. But ended up figuring out nothing, not about war, loss of life, anything. I thought my writing was narcissistic and too personal and needed to do this. Now, I realize, well, I can't be that kind of writer. But I do admire any writer that can authentically enter another era.
To unblock, I watch reruns of "Law and Order" or go to a grade B movie and love it.
How do you feel about writing sex scenes, and how do you handle it?
I love writing sex scenes. It's part of that freedom I meant in my answer about becoming a writer. They're extremely hard to write, but I grew up in a very strict home where you had to dress for dinner, and I was born in 1952 when saying "fuck" outloud meant you must be a prostitute. It was delicious to lose that inhibition. I don't understand why writing about sex is so disturbing at all.
What books do you secretly love?
I secretly love Proust. I can't say this out loud too much because people think I'm an elitist of some sort. I secretly love Jean Genet, dark sexual and brave books about desire, not "Erotica" though. I really don't like erotica. I admire many European writers like Efriede Jelinek who people in the States find "too dark." To me, she's just truthful and wonderful.
And what books do you secretly hate?
I'm sorry to say and can't name any names, but a lot of contemporary "literary" books drive me crazy with boredom. I usually have no idea why certain writers are embraced critically. But I can't say that out loud. But the acclaim baffles me completely.
What is the most terrifying task for you -- whether it be a certain kind of scene, character, or subject matter?
I think anything that has to do with writing about parts of my past which were definitely painful and certainly traumatic. I like to fictionalize but there are shadows in my fiction which comes from real traumas I'd rather not face.
What project has been the biggest struggle for you so far in your career, and how did you resolve your difficulties?
This last book I just finished has been the most brutal challenge. It tells the story of a mentally ill young woman in the 1970s and veers through her imagined world, including parallels from other historical eras that she invents from the medieval times through the twentieth century. It was a very ambitious and painful book to write. And formally the challenge to juxtapose her invented notebook characters with the every day realism of a mental hospital was the challenge of a lifetime of writing. Also, mental illness is also very threatening to write about. One editor actually turned down this book and told my agent it "de-stabilized" her to read it. I thought that was sort of funny, actually.
What unpleasant truth do you routinely conceal from young, fresh writers eager to make their mark?
That what they might imagine as "successful" is a let-down and illusion. I couldn't believe when after my book was published (and it did only modestly), I missed that old freedom that being perpetually perceived as a failure gave me. Also, I found the business descended on me and I lost that freedom of having time. I hate the competition writers are in against each other and having to practically beg reviewers and critics to give one's book attention. The business humiliates me in general. So I miss the old days a lot.
And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?
Nothing. I mean that. It's a privilege for me, a wonderful gift to be a writer. A realized dream. Even the failures, the struggle, I have had the rare privilege of being able to write. I love being a writer.NPR talks to Bridgit Meeds from Cities of Refuge, where authors who have been banned or censored are offered houses, health insurance, and friendship in Ithaca, New York.
Jamie Rich offers a playlist for his book Have You Seen the Horizon Lately? at Largehearted Boy.
GQ's editor called the magazine recently a "gateway into adulthood." Maybe an adulthood with daddy issues. Under pressure from Bill Clinton, GQ killed a critical piece about the Hillary Clinton campaign by Atlantic writer Joshua Green. The editor swears it was just a matter of the article's quality.
My Tivo is at approximately 90% capacity. Last night while I was getting ready for the Bookslut Reading Series, I finally had a chance to watch a two-day old Daily Show. But soon I stopped digging through my closet for the left heel and sat transfixed while Jon Stewart took Chris Matthews apart about his new book Life's a Campaign. You can watch the video online.
October 04, 2007
Last month, Joe Wenderoth's No Real Light was published by Wave Press. (A brief excerpt is available here.) Wenderoth has published 4 previous books, including Letters to Wendy's and The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft's Secret Self.
Wenderoth's poems can be funny and disengaged, world-weary and determinedly innocent, all within a line or two. No Real Light tries to discover what role poetry could play in a culture of truthiness, one where mainstream poetry has, to a significant extent, been swaddled by the discourse of the university.
Joe Wenderoth responded to a few questions via e-mail.
Were there special challenges in returning to poetry after the success of Letters to Wendy's? Was it hard to resist the call for more of the same?
No, not really. I do still enjoy the form that I employed in the wendy’s book, which is to say, writing on a small card. I like the challenge of knowing I have to convincingly open up something… then pretty soon after that find a way to achieve its closure. Doing that so many times convinced me, ultimately, that the most significant component of form is length—the distance between when you start to speak and when you stop. At first, I thought of the wendy’s project as a nonpoetic project, as it certainly was a departure from what I understood my poetry to be. I’ve come to understand that the letters might be a kind of poetry, though; at the very least, they have poetic aspects. So I don’t know that I’d say that I “returned to poetry” exactly, especially as I never stopped writing (never disavowed!) the sort of poems I wrote before the wendy’s book. I would like to disavow said poems, but it seems that I can’t. That is, so long as I continue to suffer, I continue to sometimes find myself in the position where that sort of speech seems the only way to go. The less I suffer, the less I write (and read!) those sort of poems, but then it would be pretty stupid to think that I will ever stop suffering for any extended period of time. Especially given that I am in the process of “aging,” which is a technical term for “hurting more and getting closer to death.”
(This may be the same question in a different form.) One movement animating No Real Light is the one between "Where I Lie," in part about domesticity and relationships, and "Where I Stand With Regard to the Game," a sort of metapoetic review of one's career. The former is concerned about "the less and less possible / surge of yes and no at the same time," while the latter recognizes what would make that surge possible now: "a complete and hopeless destruction / of every grace, every distance." That destruction would also include the "lie" from the earlier poem. Do you find it harder to achieve that destruction?
That’s a very good question, a very good reading of those poems. I must say that the “yes and no at the same time” is taken right out of Celan (his poem, “Speak, You Also”). I try to figure it a little bit differently, though. In his poem, he seems to assert that speech (i.e. the poet) is capable of speaking a sort of speech wherein yes and no remain unsplit, but then he moves on to notice that the stand the poet has taken is a stand taken upon “shrinking” ground. It’s an odd move; we start off with “this is how poetic speech is achieved” and then we move on to “this is why it cannot help you.” My poem ventures into the same terrain, though I suppose it dwells more on the specificity of the stand that I, personally, feel compelled to take, and it figures that stand more simply, as love(s). The “surge,” now that I think of it, is probably an echo of the “swell” that’s at the end of that Celan poem. I suspect that my poem suggests a potential for a kind of surrender—that is, suggests that at least the surge becomes, in time, less and less possible, which for me signifies the promise of aging and the brain’s deterioration—senility as a reprieve from shapes of love. I’m not sure, then, that this surge is exactly comparable to the leap that is spoken of in the end of the other poem. That leap—that “return” to play—in some ways desires to get back to a time before love. The destruction implicit in this sort of leap is the destruction, I think, of a few things, one of which is the love(s) that the other poem understands as inescapable. Yes, that destruction is difficult. Perhaps inevitable, too. Probably happens all the time, or tries to. I know that sometimes I decide to devote a night to it. Mainly that means whiskey and karaoke.
You have, in the past, been somewhat skeptical of "political poetry," instead emphasizing the way poetry can offer "a glimpse of a less diminished reality." This book, though, features several poems, particularly "The Home of the Brave," that engage the Global War on Terror(tm) more or less directly. (One of my favorite images in this book is from "Sitting in Traffic," where the residue of stickers persists in "adorning whatever it is that moves us / no closer to knowing.") What can poetry offer now to politics, perhaps especially a politics marked by permanent, if oddly removed, war?
Yes, most political poetry is terrible, and this has to do with the fact that, in order for poetic speech to arise, there must be a disruption of the autonomy of the will—a new grasp of the limitations of that autonomy. Political action, of course, is the opposite—it is an insistence upon the sanctity of the autonomy of the will. Escort this insistence into its fullness and you enter Marxism Land. I think of myself as possessed of dual citizenship. How I would hate to be trapped in Marxism Land! How I would hate to be trapped in Poetic Speech Land! One needs to negotiate that border, depending upon one’s context. Suffering through this whole Bush nightmare has led me to try to manifest that rare sort of poem—a poem that tries to balance the sanctity of the autonomy of the will and the inevitability of the disruption of the autonomy of the will.
One of the things that's interesting about your poems is a kind of tension between two impulses that seem quite different: On the one hand, a will to defamiliarize, especially to look askance at the self, and, on the other, a will to aphorism--to provide a mot juste about that defamiliarized self. (Which would theoretically be comforting, because quotable bits imply a kind of stability/common referent.) To what extent does a good poem need to be quotable?
I suspect—if I am getting your question right—that a good poem is entirely dependent upon its quotability. To call a text “poetic” is to distinguish that text as unusually committed to having taken a stand; a “poetic” text is exactly these words in exactly this order, and it is successful to the degree that that insistence comes to be understood as merited. Authority is certainly one of the underlying issues here. Poetic speech has an unusual kind of authority about it—it’s nothing like the sort of authority a specific person (a specific autonomous will) might attempt to manifest. Poetic authority, as you suggest, speaks not from a specific person, but about—or across—that person. It is a mistake, though, I think, to take this to mean that the specific person is of no significance when it comes to poetry (Eliot, in his “Tradition And The Individual Talent” essay, makes this mistake). Poetic authority, though it is, as Dickinson puts it, “an illocal custom,” is nevertheless bound to make itself evident via the specific person it is the end of. Put another way: though poetic authority is never the authority of a specific person, and in fact cannot arise until that person has been sacrificed, it is nevertheless bound to make use of that specific person, wearing that person’s skin to enact the arc of at least one of his lives.
Between "Advice to the Dissertator," "Academia," and "At the AWP Bar," the modern American cultural project of institutionalizing poetry in the university comes off pretty poorly. What could American poetry be, absent the MFA / "Poet-in-Residence" industry? (Or, what could *your* poetry be?)
Yes, I think it’s not going well. And most disturbing of all, from my point of view, is that so few people in the poetry world seem really disturbed about how poorly it’s going. That makes me cynical—makes me question whether these folks really care about poetry. It seems to me that if you really care about poetry, you have to be struck by how pathetic it has become. It’s almost completely subsidized, and the handful of poets who actually sell books outside of the “you are required to read this” realm—well, their notoriety seems more inexplicable than the academic subsidizing beneath them. Rita Dove? Robert Hass? It’s bizarre. As for the way in which the academic world “keeps alive” poetry in some fashion, I suppose that some of that is real, but your question remains. What could American poetry be if it was not owned/subsidized/authenticated by academia—would it dwindle to an even lesser phenomenon or would it begin to become more capable of judging itself seriously? I don’t know. A related and perhaps more primary question occurs to me, though, and it is this: is the poetic, figured as an event, a conceivable part of American life? Could it become one of the valued options—as valuable, say, as going to the bar, going to see a band, going to watch a game, going to the theater, etc… Or one might even ask about the poetic event in relation to domesticity; is there a conceivable space for the reading of poems there? I suspect that the poetic event is inherently opposed to most of American life, which is to say, I suspect that most of American life is made up of events that are anti-poetic, and that the dominant (i.e. corporate-funded) culture seems increasingly able to define itself as essentially anti-poetic. As I said before, to be in favor of anti-poetic events does not mean that one is necessarily against the potential of the poetic event, but our culture is trying to convince us otherwise. It’s foolish for those who value the poetic to allow themselves to become embroiled in this animosity; I am always irked, for instance, when fans of art talk about sport as though it is some poor substitute for art. This is sort of like saying that one has to choose between either eating or moving around. The poetic event only makes sense in relation to all the other events that exist in the society. (Whitman, in his 1855 Preface to Leaves Of Grass, points out that poetry is not an independent phenomenon—it is wholly dependent upon everything around it.) As for academia, one of the problems is having to interact “institutionally” with others. Behave with your colleagues and your students as you behave with your friends . . . and you will likely lose your job. This makes it very difficult to establish a believable community, a community about which one can be passionate, about which one can feel challenged and justified. Art thrives on community, not in some sappy “up with people” sort of way, but via a community’s ability to produce the events the artist needs. Poetry’s captivity in academia deprives it of a believable (free) community, which in turn deprives poets of the events at which they might be forced to improve.
No Real Light's acknowledgements feature the line, "Joe Wenderoth's work can be seen on YouTube." Has YouTube and the ubiquity of video influenced your sense of performance or of your public persona?
When I do the wendy’s material, I have a certain persona, and maybe some of the stuff from the book of essays makes use of something like that same persona. Beyond that, I don’t know that I have a persona—as I have said above, I see the poems as, in some sense, impersonal. Their impersonality, in fact, is what makes them trickier to render in “performance.” When I read poems publicly, I do so in a completely darkened space, and I am out of view. This is done so that the voice of the poems is not obscured by a persona that is apparent in my physical countenance. Other stuff I’ve experimented with during readings—singing, using film clips, etc…--is used to heighten the poetic, as I sense it. I don’t know that the poetic event (poetic performance) really lends itself to being filmed; filming the space (which is mainly dark anyway) in which the reading is happening seems fairly useless. I think you have to be there. That said, I mentioned you-tube in the book because I would like to try to make poem-videos. These are altogether different from readings because they take the screen as the one and only space in which they are occurring. They are film, whereas the readings are theater. I wanted to have a bunch of stuff up by now, but I have been slowed by countless troubles. But soon—probably by next week—I will start putting some things up. I’m sure that the delay has caused the great masses of my fans to be distraught. Or more distraught.
How did the performance with Gibby Haynes come about?
Gibby emailed me about the wendy’s book. He said he enjoyed that book and he invited me to collaborate with him sometime. It turned out to be an interesting thing—it taught me a lot about that weird space wherein poetic speech and music might be simultaneous, or nearly so. It’s a very interesting topic for me; that effort has resulted in so much embarrassing stuff, and yet still somehow there is an inclination to try to go there. I’d like to figure it out.
At This American Life, food writer Jonathan Gold remembers being bullied by Jack Abramoff in high school.
A friend was over last night to watch the Cubs game with me and once we realized there was only despair and misery to come, he started pawing through my to be read pile. "Crap. Crap. Jesus, don't read this. Total bullshit... Oh, this one, definitely read this next." It was Alice Notley's In the Pines. If you hadn't heard, Notley was awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. I'll read it instead of watching the next game in the playoffs.
"Who doesn't want to date a bookseller? We climb ladders in skirts, and remain slightly aloof."
The case is fanning widespread concern that English libel law is stifling writers far beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. Today, any book bought online in England, even one published exclusively in another country, can ostensibly be subject to English libel law. As a result, publishers and booksellers are increasingly concerned about “libel tourism”: foreigners suing other foreigners in England or elsewhere, and using those judgments to intimidate authors in other countries, including the United States.
Benjamin Percy, author of Refresh, Refresh and one of the readers at the Bookslut Reading Series tonight, thinks you should read Owen Wister's The Virginian. NPR has Percy's reason, as well as an excerpt from the book.
Julian Rubinstein recently went to Hungary to interview the subject of his book The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, Attila Ambrus. There is video of Attila speaking of the worldwide toasts held in his honor and life in prison, as well as his flirting with the camerawoman.
Ira Glass and Amy Dickinson are accusing Deborah Solomon of altering their interviews for her New York Times Magazine Q&A column.
Glass went even further; of one exchange, he said that “she never actually asked that question,” and added that Solomon “was changing context in a way that changed what I meant.” In Glass’s case, he told a fact-checker for the magazine about the distortion of the interview, in an attempt to have it corrected. “I made my case as forcefully as I knew how,” Glass said in an email to me last week, “but I guess he just disagreed with me.”
Almost 35 years after Maureen and Tony Wheeler sold hand-stapled copies of their first guidebook at 96p a time, the founders of Lonely Planet have sold up to BBC Worldwide in a deal that will see the full text of the guidebooks going online.
Yes, this is turning into the cut and paste blog, but what can I say. It's been one of those weeks.
October 03, 2007
It turns out men are not from Mars! Nor women from Venus!
Someone tell Rebecca Traister:
It may be pop culture heresy to rope together Susan Faludi's new book, "The Terror Dream," and Bruce Springsteen's new album, "Magic," both released this week. Faludi, author of 1991's "Backlash," is a diligent chronicler of the country's gender problems. Springsteen is a swaggering blue-collar cult hero whose critical thinking about American culture has made him an international rock star. Yet there is a neat perfection in the pairing of these two uniquely American storytellers, ">as if Mars and Venus had conveniently weighed in simultaneously, after six years of consideration, on what exactly has unfolded in this country, with which they are each so critically obsessed, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, which had been planning to publish Tintin in the Congo, a book criticized for its racist, Colonial-era depictions of Africans, has quietly pulled the title from its fall list, PW has learned. The publisher also said it will not include the book in a forthcoming box set of all 24 books in the Tintin series.
October 02, 2007
This week sees the release of Shalom Auslander's memoir Foreskin's Lament. I can't say enough nice things about this book. You can read an excerpt at the New York Times and see for yourself.
October 01, 2007
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Eric Reynolds
Reynolds is co-editor with Gary Groth of MOME, a quarterly comics anthology published by Fantagraphics. Each issue features new work by Fantagraphics regulars as well as an interview with one of the artists. MOME will be celebrating the release of its ninth volume later this month.
Since MOME's inaugural issue, we've seen some great short works by the likes of David B., Paul Hornschemeier and Gabrielle Bell that we wouldn't have otherwise. What was the impetus behind starting the anthology?
Well, it's been clear for a few years now that a smaller, independent publisher like Fantagraphics just can't make a go of new, ongoing and old-fashioned comic book series by unknown talent, especially anything not in the basic black-and-white format. Color, for example, is almost prohibitively expensive with the kind of print runs we're talking about. This has been a depressing reality for a while and is a reflection of where the current comic book market is. But the market is growing for the graphic novel format, just not pamphlets or magazines, and this has forced us to find new ways to develop and market newer authors.
In years past, the way folks like Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware have fostered their talent was by experimenting in their own comic book titles, like Eightball and ACME Novelty Library. Cartoonists coming up today have fewer options in some ways. If you haven't built an audience yet and aren't ready to produce the Great American Graphic Novel, what are you to do? There are some great anthologies out there, like KRAMER'S ERGOT, but they come out so infrequently that it's hard to establish any momentum if you're a cartoonist. So with MOME we wanted to do something with greater regularity, where a cartoonist could try his or her hand at new short stories or even use MOME as a way of serializing a graphic novel, where the quarterly deadline and getting paid as you go can really help you hit your stride.
Meanwhile, at the same time that comic books are becoming more obsolete, the comics 'biz' has had several graphic novels break out over the last decade in general bookstores, things like Ghost World, Palestine, Jimmy Corrigan, Black Hole, From Hell, Blankets, Persepolis, etc. But there's this great divide between the breakthroughs and the folks just starting out. So with MOME we decided to do an anthology that would be marketed as much to the book trade and newsstands as comic shops, which the squarebound format allowed us to do, and can kind of bridge that gap for both the artist and consumer.
I was also thinking of things like McSweeneys, the Believer, Granta, Paris Review, etc., all of which really seemed to be thriving and which appealed to the same kind of person who was buying books by Chris Ware and Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes (including myself). In terms of print, that's kind of what I think the zine culture of the 1980s and 1990s that I grew up with matured into — more professional offset things like the Baffler and McSweeney's. They seemed to be great way to do a periodical while avoiding limiting yourself to the usual magazine newsstand distribution trap, which is a rigged game if ever there was one unless you're operating on a huge, corporate budget and publishing plan. So there were all of these convergences that I was seeing in terms of form, content, demographics, etc. between what they were doing and what we wanted to do but in comics form.
So I started thinking of MOME as more of a 'literary journal' that just happened to be composed mostly of comic narratives rather than prose, and that could serve as an introduction or bridge for people who have begun dipping their toes into the world of comics but don't quite know where to go after the most obvious choices. For better or worse, there are thousands of people who have picked up one or two graphic novels at their local library or bookstore and would invariably enjoy more comics but simply never think to actually seek out a comic book store and actively branch out further. And this could be for any number of reasons: perhaps because they intuitively know enough about their local comic shop to suspect they won't find anything worthwhile. Or maybe there is no local comic shop. Or maybe there is a great store but visiting it just isn't a thought that will ever enter their mind. Most comic shops seem to have a hard time attracting this gateway customer. So with MOME I had the idea that if we played our cards right, we could introduce comics to a new generation of readers in bookstores. Back issues could be racked in the graphic novels section of the local bookstore, but new issues could be racked alongside things like the Believer or Virginia Quarterly Review , where intellectually curious and open-minded book buyers who picked up, say, McSweeney's #13 (the Chris Ware-edited comics issue) might stumble across MOME by accident as much as by design. I don't know if that's really happened.
When I read an issue of MOME, I recall tattered copies of Art Spiegelman's RAW (1980-1991). In other words, short stories, serials, translated works, etc. I guess my question really is A) were you familiar with RAW and B) did you have it in mind when jump-starting MOME?
Spiegelman... is he that guy that who did that funny animal comic, Maus? No, of course I was a RAW nerd. It was a crucial piece of my comics enlightenment as a late teen. Actually, I'm young enough that I identified "RAW" more with the smaller, digest-sized Penguin editions than the original oversized version,; I only mention that because I never thought of it before now but MOME is a similar format. I guess RAW was an inspiration as much as it's one of the great comix anthologies of all-time, but I don't know if it was any more of an inspiration than, say, ZAP or WEIRDO or ZERO ZERO or KRAMER'S ERGOT or ARCADE or any other great anthologies I love.
In terms of format, there's a French anthology called LAPIN that was actually a more direct influence. I liked that format and it's enabled us to run some great European material from that series, like David B. and soon Killoffer. In terms of content, I'm not sure there was any direct influence. RAW is a bit more avant-garde than what we are trying to do with MOME. It's from a different era. We couldn't do another RAW if we wanted, I'm nowhere near as smart as Art. Gary probably is, but he doesn't have the time to devote to MOME that Art did on RAW. RAW was trying to prove that comics were 'Art' and definitely was trying to speak to a more rarefied kind of New York art audience. They were almost trying to trick people about the fact that what they were reading was comics. It worked perfectly, and Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly won that battle for all of us, we don't have to bend over backwards to prove that comics are art anymore, cartoonists today can really just focus on storytelling.
When a story appears in MOME, is it commissioned by the editors [i.e. they're created with MOME in mind] or does the anthology work like other lit/art mags where artists submit their work and hope to god that somebody likes it?
Mostly the former, although their have been a couple of the latter cases, especially more recently as I've been getting more and better submissions.
The upcoming Fall 2007 issue touts a "graphic novella," which is new to MOME, by Jim Woodring. Can you elaborate on this, and will we see more long-form works like this in future issues?
Well, Jim's case is unique. He did this amazing, 45-page 'Frank' graphic novella that was only published in Japan. Unless you were a hardcore comics collector who bought one as an import, you didn't see it, and it might be the greatest Frank story yet. It's definitely one of the most ambitious and mind-bending, without giving anything away. I loved it so much that I suggested to Jim that Fantagraphics publish a U.S. edition, and for whatever reason he didn't feel comfortable with that. So I suggested running it in MOME, just because I wanted to see it published somewhere in the U.S. We debated running it in one chunk or two, and it made more sense in the spirit of the anthology to break it up. I just read a review where Tom Spurgeon criticized breaking it up in a review of #9, but it actually breaks at a perfect point and the story will be completed in #10, so I really don't think any narrative momentum is lost. I'm quite proud to have published Jim in MOME, I think he's easily one of the top five most brilliant cartoonists alive today.
There actually have been other long form works in MOME thus far, including Paul Hornschemeier's ongoing "Life with Mr. Dangerous," Kurt Wolfgang's "Nothing Eve," Lewis Trondheim's "At Loose Ends," Sophie Crumb's "Lucid Nightmare," David Heatley's "Overpeck," John Pham's "221 Sycamore," and Tim Hensley's ongoing masterpiece, "Wally Gropius," which might be my very favorite thing in MOME.
Richard Wirick, author of One Hundred Siberian Postcards will be gracing Chicago this week. Find information about the reading here, read excerpts here.
Andrew O'Hagan on the cell phone:
In the days before office life was subverted by the cult of personality, your average working stiff was always looking for ways to be out of contact. Phones were left off the hook, smokers popped down to the mailroom, phantom meetings were arranged in mystery locations across town, time-serving professionals sat alone on park benches and secretaries were regularly entreated by semaphore to deny one’s availability. That was in the lazy, hazy days before the mobile phone. Nowadays, being unavailable is understood to be an act of aggression equal to driving tanks through the walls of the Danzig Post Office. To fail to answer your mobile phone, or to turn it off completely, is merely to announce that you are deep in the throes of a secret life. You don’t care, you’re not reliable, you’ve got something to hide, you’re screening. There are few modern crimes so remarked on as the crime of unavailability. Answer or you’re evil. Answer or you’re dead.
Which is why my job is the best job. I had my phone unplugged for three glorious days last week. I only meant to unplug it for a few hours so I could nap (nap!) and then forgot to plug it back in.
Oh yeah, and O'Hagan's Be Near Me is one of the best novels of the year, in case you were wondering.
Stuart Dybek is interviewed at Chicago Public Radio's Hello Beautiful! about the MacArthur Foundation fellowship and his writing.
If you donate money to the Daniel Biss campaign for the Illinois state legislature, young adult novelist John Green will wax the limb of your choice. And possibly lick a cat. (Chicago misses you, John Green.)
Was I the only person who liked Stiffed? Me and Chuck Palahniuk, I mean. Either way, Susan Faludi is back (we missed you) with Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. She's profiled at the New York Times.
