March 31, 2008
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: Terry McCoy
Terry McCoy is a co-owner of the St. Mark's Bookshop, a notorious independent bookstore located in New York City's East Village. He and co-owner Bob Constant have both been with the store from its inception thirty plus years ago. Over the years the store has seen some rather drastic changes in the neighborhood. The gutter punks and young artists have all but been replaced by NYU students, thirty-something yuppies and Chipotle, but the store is still going strong. Being right around the block from The Poetry Project, the store has just started its own reading series, which features notable independent authors. The next installment is on April 3rd and features A.M. Homes, Charles Bock, and Samantha Hunt.
How did you start up the bookstore?
I came to New York in 1968 with the idea of getting work as an actor. One of the jobs I took for survival was a bookstore on St. Mark's Place. Over the next ten years or so I worked off and on at that store and at the Eighth St. Bookshop on West 8th. We opened our store with five partners who had met as co-workers in independent bookstores. Through the years the other guys left and Bob and I are still here.
What do you think makes the store stand apart from the other indies in the area? What does it bring to the city?
The only other indie in our immediate neighborhood that's still standing is the Shakespeare and Co. branch on Broadway south of 8th St. They're a more general appeal store than we are, with maybe a bit more of an emphasis on pop culture. Then there's the Strand, basically a used book store and something of a landmark in its own right. I think what makes us different is that we give a lot of display space to University Press and small press titles as well as major publisher new titles that represent what we think of as the most interesting new stuff out there. Our five display windows and our new and recommended sections will expose a browser to a whole lot of books he probably had not heard of or seen reviewed or advertised. I also think we reflect the interests of our neighborhood, the East Village. We keep a close eye on what's selling and we're guided by that as we shape our inventory. So you'll find that our hot sections are critical theory, art criticism, poetry, graphic design, and film as well as fiction.
Why do you think the store has been able to outlive some of the monster stores lately (namely the Astor Place and Chelsea B&N locations, which conveniently closed down this afternoon)?
We outlived the B&N on Astor Place mainly because they weren't doing enough business to justify the rent they were paying. Our rent is high, too, and a bit of a struggle, but I expect us to be able to muddle through the next few years at least.
How do you see the store doing in, say, 5 years? Consider recent changes in real estate value, re-gentrification, etc.
I'm not sure how that's going to play out for us. As it is, I think books are pretty expensive and a lot of our customers are arts professionals and academics who use books in their work and make enough money to be able to buy them. Still, the changes keep coming, and I don't pretend to know if they'll affect us or not.
Mary Jo Bang reads poems from her collection Elegy on NPR. (MP3 link.) David Orr reviews Elegy at the New York Times.
This little video of a rapping Richard Dawkins is disturbing at best, but if I could have a dancing Darwin on my desktop, I would never get any work done. (Someone create it, because I am out of Friday Night Lights episodes to procrastinate with.) Link from Seed.
A book being used in an English class at the University of Utah is generating controversy. Time Magazine voted it the book of the year, but some students are calling it pornographic and asking it be removed from their curriculum.
Thomas Alvord, with the group "No More Pornography," says, "The issue is exposing people to pornography."
While we're waiting for the last episodes of Lost's season, how about another lost island mystery? I started reading Lee Miller's Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony this weekend. It has creepy, mysterious messages carved into trees, a town disappearing without a trace, and over 100 lost souls. (I remember Roanoke driving me crazy in junior high history class. "What do you mean YOU DON'T KNOW?") Don't ruin the end for me, though, I'm still waiting for a mysterious hatch to appear.
There's an interview with Miller about why she thought she could solve a mystery several hundred years old.
The Children's Book Week website makes me want Adderall, or Ritalin, or whatever it is they give the kids today to get them to put up with this stuff. Any youthful booksluts can vote for the winner of the Children's Choice Book Award online, unlike in my day where you put your entry into a box in the library, and you had to walk to the library, in the sleet, often with no portable mp3 player to keep you company. Instead we had lumps of coal and dial-up, and we were darn grateful for it. Also, start looking after your skin now. You'll thank me when you're older.
It's a big week for prizes named after guys who write, or have written, stuff. What? That's no more vague than an award for writing that "conveys a sense of place." The Ondaatje Prize: because the most important part of a book is its quality of placiness.
This year's shortlist:
Darkmans by Nicola Barker
Paradise with Serpents by Robert Carver
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein
Sea Holly by Robert Minhinnick
The Discovery of France by Graham Robb
Just along the bookshelf from Ondaatje is Orwell, and is it any coincidence that his namesake prize has its shortlist out the very same week? Probably.
Nick Cohen – What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way
Jay Griffiths – Wild: An Elemental Journey
William Hague – William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner
Ed Husain – The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left
Marina Lewycka – Two Caravans
Raja Shehadeh – Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape
Clive Stafford Smith – Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons
I don't know who Donner is or was, but they give serious scratch ($35,000) to the year's best title on Canadian public policy. The 2008 Donner Prize shortlist is here.
The James Beard Award nominees are out. Nom nom nom etc. In the journalism category, Junot Díaz writing for Gourmet on the emergence of Dominican restaurants in upper Manhattan ("It's here where we achieved the condition that must have seemed unimaginable to our first sojourners: density. Density: not great for childhood or privacy, but wonderful for community and of course for the appetite."), is rightly up for the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. Somehow, so is Alan Richman's "The Seven Temples of the Food World" ("You might think the menu has to be in French or the chef has to be on television. That's not important to me.") The third nominee, Francine Prose's article, on grocery shopping as an experience akin to a quest for religious fulfillment,
isn't online, but Saveur does have some mighty pictures of steak up.
The 2008 Book Nominees
Asian Cooking:
My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking by Niloufer Ichaporia King
Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook by Fuchsia Dunlop
The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco by Cecilia Chiang with Lisa Weiss
Baking and Dessert:
A Baker's Odyssey by Greg Patent
Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor by Peter Reinhart
Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich
Cooking from a Professional Point of View:
Bistro Laurent Tourondel: New American Bistro Cooking by Laurent Tourondel and Michele Scicolone
The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cuisine by The French Culinary Institute with Judith Choate
Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking by Masaharu Morimoto
Entertaining:
Dish Entertains by Trish Magwood
Great Bar Food at Home by Kate Heyhoe
Welcome to Michael's: Great Food, Great People, Great Party! by Michael McCarthy
Americana:
The Glory of Southern Cooking by James Villas
A Love Affair with Southern Cooking by Jean Anderson
Rosa's New Mexican Table by Roberto Santibanez
General:
Chez Jacques: Traditions and Rituals of a Cook by Jacques Pépin
Cooking by James Peterson
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food by Mark Bittman
Healthy Focus:
The EatingWell Diet by Jean Harvey-Berino with Joyce Hendley and the Editors of EatingWell
Super Natural Cooking: Five Ways to Incorporate Whole & Natural Ingredients into Your Cooking by Heidi Swanson
The Wine and Food Lover's Diet: 28 Days of Delicious Weight Loss by Phillip Tirman
International:
The Country Cooking of France by Anne Willan
Lidia's Italy: 140 Simple and Delicious Recipes from the Ten Places in Italy Lidia Loves Most by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manuali
Two Meatballs in the Italian Kitchen by Pino Luongo and Mark Strausman
Reference:
Food: The History of Taste edited by Paul Freedman
A Geography of Oysters: The Connoisseur's Guide to Oyster Eating in North America by Rowan Jacobsen
The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide by Mary Lou Heiss and Robert J. Heiss
Single Subject:
Laura Werlin's Cheese Essentials by Laura Werlin
The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Vegetable Harvest by Patricia Wells
Wine and Spirits:
The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty by Julia Flynn Siler
Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar by David Wondrich
To Cork or Not To Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle by George M. Taber
Writing on Food:
American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes edited by Molly O'Neill
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss-and the Myths and Realities of Dieting by Gina Kolata
Photography:
The Country Cooking of France by Anne Willan; Photographer: France Ruffenach
Crust by Richard Bertinet; Photographer: Jean Cazals
Egg by Lyndsay and Patrick Mikanowski; Photographer: Grant Symon
I contributed a smidge to the New York Times' "It's Not You, It's Your Books."
March 30, 2008
Bookslut is seeking a new Comic Book columnist. Send your brilliant ideas here.
March 28, 2008
[When I read the nominees for the National Magazine Awards, I wondered how many of the nominated articles were available online. My next thought was, "Oh, I can watch Quantum Leap episodes online for free? Screw the magazine articles." Intern Margaret Howie has more dedication. Below she presents the nominees that you can read online. - Ed.]
REPORTING
National Geographic: China's Instant Cities, by Peter Hessler
The New York Times Magazine: Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis, by Andrea Elliott
The New Yorker: The Taliban's Opium War, by Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker: The Black Sites, by Jane Mayer
Vanity Fair: City of Fear, by William Langewiesche
FEATURE WRITING
Atlanta: You Have Thousands of Angels Around You, by Paige Williams
GQ: Underworld, by Jeanne Marie Laskas
New York: Everybody Sucks, by Vanessa Grigoriadis
The New Yorker: Swingers, by Ian Parker
Vanity Fair: Gone Like The Wind, by Buzz Bissinger
PROFILE WRITING
The Atlantic: Present at the Creation, by Matthew Scully
The New Yorker: Azzam the American, by Raffi Khatchadourian
The New York Times Magazine: The Huckabee Factor, by Zev Chafets
Vanity Fair: Pat Dollard's War on Hollywood, by Evan Wright
ESSAYS
The Atlantic: The Autumn of the Multitaskers, by Walter Kirn
ELLE: My Year of Living Dangerously, by Katrina Onstad
Harper's Magazine: Chemo World, by Sallie Tisdale
The New Yorker: Parallel Play, by Tim Page
COLUMNS and COMMENTARY
Inc.: Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham, The Offer
New York: Kurt Andersen, American Roulette
Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi
REVIEWS and CRITICISM
The Atlantic: Caitlin Flanagan
The Nation: William Deresiewicz
New York: David Edelstein
FICTION
Harper's Magazine: Death of the Pugilist, by Daniel Mason
Fiction, by Alice Munro
A Report on Our Recent Troubles, by Steven Millhauser
The New Yorker: Good People, by David Foster Wallace
Or Else, by Antonya Nelson
The Paris Review: Monsieur Kalashnikov, by André Aciman
Speak No Evil, by Uzodinma Iweala
Zoetrope: All-Story: The Burning of Lawrence, by Andrew Malan Milward
Those Americans Falling from the Sky, by Fiona McFarlane;
Methane and Politic, by Anya Ulinich
Scans Daily has images of Winsor McCay's vision of the future. In 1937, you will experience the Opera of the Future, Men Will Live on Mountain Tops, and Advertising Will Be Hellishly Annoying. (Link from Journalista.)
Jhumpa Lahiri talks to the Atlantic about her new book Unaccustomed Earth.
An out-of-town guest and a week of intense grading makes for a short, but high-quality, link roundup:
"'Charlie Rose' by Samuel Beckett," a farcical exploration of technology forecasting by Andrew Filippone Jr., has been the most fun I've had this week.
Ton van 't Hof talks poetry with the Jabberwacky chatbot.
Poets and Writers has launched a thoroughgoing redesign of their website.
Patrick F. Durgin reviews Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Torque: Drafts 58-76 in Jacket; see DuPlessis's "Draft 88: X-Posting."
Jordan Davis on Philip Whalen's Collected Poems: Money. For lack of it, Whalen had forgone prospective careers: as a student of Asian languages at Berkeley, as a medical student/poet; even the ashram in Seattle where he might have pursued his interest in Vedantic study of Hindu texts was beyond his means. Choice forced by limited means was a refrain for Whalen. Another was his defense of spontaneity as the aim and indispensable product of study.
Kathryn Crim on the reissue of Reznikoff's massive work, Holocaust: It remains open like a photograph, shocking and repellent. Unlike a photograph, however, we cannot easily turn away from it; its length demands engagement with these atrocities for the duration and requires us to become—as the poet became—a witness. In this way, the poem strives, perhaps unwittingly, to compete in an image-ridden world.
March 27, 2008
Some Philip Whalen links for you, just in case you haven't picked up your copy of the seriously beautiful Collected Poems of Philip Whalen yet:
- Travis Nichols's "How Do You Like Your World?: The Zen of Philip Whalen"
- Bookslut's own Dale Smith on "Reading Philip Whalen" at Jacket Magazine
- A 1999 interview with Whalen
David Hajdu talks to NY Mag's culture blog about his book Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America.
I interviewed quite a few of the kids who were involved in those ritual burnings. It’s really unnerving to think of these events taking place just a few years after the book burnings in Nazi Germany. The kids were building bonfires of comic books and marching around them and reciting incantations. One of the pictures in the book came from a high-school yearbook — the school was so proud of having done this that they devoted a full page to it and they ran this lovely atmospheric description of the event. Meanwhile in the picture you can see the fear in the eyes of some of these kids.
Two things to depress you this morning:
Eliza Griswold, foreign correspondent/poet and author of Wideawake Field, writes about the religious clashes in Nigeria for the Atlantic.
Salon interviews E. Benjamin Skinner about his book A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern Day Slaves.
After reading those, go here.
March 26, 2008
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What led to the redesign of the Oxford World Classics series?
It is ten years since the series last had a makeover and in that time the classics market has diversified, with new players coming into the field and frequent popular abridged spin-offs. Any brand that has been around as long as OWC begins to look tired over time, or to become so familiar as to be almost invisible, and we decided it was time to remind people of the tremendous range and quality of the series by giving the books an uplift with a fresh and contemporary new design.
How was the template chosen?
The new design was chosen over a period of months by sales, marketing, and editorial. We drew up a shortlist of external design agencies and invited them to submit designs. These were considered in great detail until we reached a consensus on the preferred look. The major consideration was to give the series a unified look without overwhelming the appeal of individual titles, with sufficient flexibility to accommodate a range of genres and image styles. For continuity with the current design we have retained a red strip across the spine and back cover, while at the same time introducing an intriguing detail from the cover illustration to make the spines really distinctive. Similar thought has gone into the choice and size of typeface and the formatting of the back cover copy.
How is the artwork matched with a title?
In many cases, where we think the current artwork works well for the book, we are retaining it, but we are making it more dynamic by cropping tightly into a detail of a painting or illustration. In other cases we have selected new illustrations on the basis of several criteria: how well they convey the new series image of being both desirable and accessible; how effective they are when cropped in relation to the title panel; and how relevant they are to the contents of the book. Picture researchers are briefed about the nature of individual titles and we choose an image – a painting, engraving, photograph, drawing – that best meets these requirements.
American Book Review offers the 100 Best Last Lines from novels.
Words not to be used in book reviewing.
eschew: No one actually says this word in real life. It appears almost exclusively in writing when the perp is stretching for a flashy synonym for avoid or reject or shun.
Paul Collins writes the history of the phone book, remembering the days when resort ads could tout "Free From Hebrews and Tuberculosis Patients."
The Telegraph reviews Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.
Reading, says Wolf, changed history. More than that, it changes the brain. It creates new pathways in the brain, and, by doing this, makes us think in new ways. When you read, you see letters written on a page, then you recognise them as representations of sounds made by the human voice, then you join the sounds together to make words, then you fit the words together into sentences.
This takes an amazing amount of ultra-fast processing. Brains that do this are different from brains that don't.
At the end of the review, Will Leith wishes to know more about how the creation of the alphabet changed history. To him, and anyone else interested, I would point to The Alphabet vs. the Goddess by Leonard Shlain.
Happy birthday, Pat Robertson! Or belated, I guess, since your birthday was on the 22nd, the same day as my sister's. (Dear sister: I am sorry.) In celebration, VQR has made their feature "The Christian with Four Aces" available as a sneak preview of their spring issue.
March 25, 2008
New York Magazine asks Graham Rawle to annotate page 209 of his new collage novel Woman's World.
Sticky Pages
One of my favorite authors is Amy Bloom. Not like you asked, but I know you were at the edge of your seat today, waiting for Sticky Pages and shaking your computer screen, nearly dying from curiosity over who is Melissa Lion’s favorite author. Well, now you know one of them. I’ll keep the rest to myself because I like making people beg.
So, Amy Bloom. She had a new book out last year -- Away. It was not her best work. It was jumpy and covered too much time and the obsessively linear structure made the story unbelievable. It didn’t capture what I love about Bloom -- her care with moments. Her ability to capture a single moment of longing, lust, passion and sex with just a few words.
For today’s Sticky Pages, we’re going to check out some vintage Amy Bloom. Go to the used bookstore for a copy of Come to Me. Oh, god, even the title is forcing me to swoon into a lusty, pining heap on my well-appointed four-poster bed.
Bloom’s short stories often focus on affairs, on people falling in love with others, falling into bed with others. She never punishes her characters for loving someone else, but rather, these affairs are simply separate from the original relationship. An opportunity to love a new person and for the character to see herself reflected in another.
The short story, “Faultlines” is the most emblematic of Bloom’s elegant writing and characterization. It’s the story of a dinner party hosted by Henry and Marie, a long-time married couple. Henry has invited Mary and her partner, Nathan. Henry wants to get into Mary’s pants. Mary wants to let Henry into her pants, just one time. Just because he’s so sexy. She finds his personality lacking, his intellect so-so and his arrogance a bit repellent, but she wants to know what he’s like in bed. We all know this fascination, right? Brad Pitt, anyone?
So Mary and Nathan arrive and the four dine together and find that they like one another enough. Mary likes Marie enough to not sleep with her husband, and the men like each other enough to talk about a future fishing trip. And it’s all amenable and sort of bland. But they’ll all be friends who dine with each other occasionally.
At the end of the short story, Henry invites Marie to the garden. She follows. Their sexual energy is gone, replaced by companionship.
Page 110, everyone.
As they turn to go back to the house, one thin black heel catches on the edge of a flagstone, and Mary stumbles. He catches her and his right arm goes around her waist and the other behind her neck, and she lets her head fall back into the damp crook of his arm.
The flowers and the thick lemony air hum in their ears drowning out the hiss of the espresso machine and the faint clinking of small cups into saucers.
A perfect kiss, like a perfect beach or a perfect diamond is not so common in our lives that it can be ignored. As Marie calls them for dessert, they loosen their arms but discover they cannot part, they are inseparable as color and light.
Not a sex scene, but a perfect moment to capture the sexuality and energy of new love.
Happy Spring!
Know Amit Chaudhuri? Share the occasional pint with Andrey Kurkov? Matey with Jane Smiley? They're the three judges for the 2009 Man Booker International, so pay for their next round if you fancy your chances of having your overall contribution to world literature recognised for genius, and getting a tidy £60,000 to invest towards that bronze bust of V.S. Pritchett you've wanted for the back garden.
Bitching about being on an award panel now dates you terribly. Banging on about how great all that enforced reading is makes you very du jour.
The Grant McEwan Authors Award for Albertan writers has been rejiggered into the Grant McEwan Literary Award, now worth $50,000, courtesy a funding touch-up from the Alberta Government.
Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise has been recognised at the 19th Annual GLAAD Media awards as last year's Outstanding Comic Book.
Lott goes on to call women a "dominant group," and says that men are "excluded in schools and in the marketplace." I'd love to get a glimpse of the England he's apparently living in, in which women control the government and media and workplace and men are forced to clean the house instead of going to school. I'd love to see a society in which women's needs are catered to in the marketplace - where, say, every billboard has a picture of a naked man on it - and products for men just don't exist. I wouldn't want to live there - I'd just like to poke around a bit.
One of those overly literate female types did my dirty work for me and managed to read to the end of Tim Lott's anti-Orange Prize affadavit.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: I play the drums in a band called okay by Toby Litt.
We are in a band called okay, lower case italics. I am the drummer, Syph is the lead singer. There's also Mono the bassist and Crab the guitarist.
These aren't our real names. But I expect you've guessed that. Mine's Toby and this is the closest I am ever likely to get to fulfilling my Jeremy Clarkson fantasies. In a knowingly self-conscious way. Obviously.
Fantagraphics has put scans of Dan Clowes's "Modern Cartoonist" from Eightball #18 online.
There's hoo-ha a-plenty over the nominations for the W.H. Smith awards in the UK. While A.S. Byatt is upset over the mere existence of the Orange Prize, knickers are being knotted over the nomination of Katie Price's book in the children's section. Price, aka Jordan, in case your Maxim subscription has slipped, is also the bestselling author of a few scurrilous memoirs, which, along with her this latest opus Perfect Ponies: My Pony Care Book, are widely suspected of being ghostwritten. I am telling you all this so that we can enjoy the following quote from Joanne Harris:
"If this is an award for people who write books then it should be open only to people who write books, not to somebody who lends their name to a book, or who would have written a book if they had time but didn't."
Landscape of Farewell - Alex Miller
Love Without Hope - Rodney Hall
Orpheus Lost - Janette Turner Hospital
Secrets of the Sea - Nicholas Shakespeare
Sorry - Gail Jones
The Fern Tattoo - David Brooks
The Memory Room - Christopher Koch
The Time We Have Taken - Steven Carroll
The Widow and Her Hero - Tom Keneally
The Hugo Awards have their shortlists announced in time for this year's World Science Fiction Convention. It's gloriously specific in the category titles -- not just a Best Novella, but Best Novelette, and Best Short Story to boot. Even editors get props. Plus the term 'Dramatic Presentation, Short Form' for the TV slot is awesome. Shush, roommates, I am partaking in a viewing of a dramatic presentation, and Tyra is making someone cry again.
Best Novel
The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
The Last Colony by John Scalzi
Halting State by Charles Stross
The entire nominee list is here.
March 24, 2008
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: Dave Isay
Dave Isay is the founder and director of StoryCorps, a project of Sound Portraits Productions which airs on NPR's Morning Edition every Friday. Having created StoryCorps, Isay allows Americans all across the country to step into his StoryBooths and tell a story, helping to create an archived American oral history. Isay spoke to Bookslut about the project's founding and philosophy.
How did Sound Portraits Productions begin? What was the impetus behind the idea?
I used to make radio documentaries for public radio, so I've been doing that since I got out of college. I fell into it. The company Sound Portraits started somewhere along the line because I needed a nonprofit in order to get foundation grants. The kinds of stories that I was doing started with kind of the same thing. The first story I did was very similar to the stories I did after that. It's really about defining poetry in the words and voices of the people you find all around you, and, especially in the past, people living on the margins. It's helping voices get across the transmitter that wouldn't normally be heard.
The human voice to me is incredibly powerful. There was a quote in The New Yorker a bunch of years ago that said the voice, even more than photographs and the written word, gives the dead the power to live on. I think the voice also gives us the chance to walk in the footsteps of someone who is maybe very different than us. The act of listening can sometimes bring people together. The listener and the speaker become one, so it bridges divides by exposing all kinds of people to all kinds of other people's voices and helping them recognize their shared humanity.
And StoryCorps?
StoryCorps is almost five years old, and that's the project that I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to. It kind of grew out of every experience I've ever had in my life and the radio work I've done up until then. The idea is to democratize the process of these kinds of interviews that I had always been doing, to give as many people as possible the chance to interview loved ones, and to honor them by listening to them and help share some of these stories. Largely we want these stories to be kind of ubiquitous at some point before too long. So then again people can recognize their shared humanity and how every life matters, and that wherever you come from or how far away you think you are from someone else, you're going to find commonality with the story.
We wrote a book called Listening is an Act of Love, which came out a few months ago, and it sets out the whole spiel.
One of the stories from that book is sampled on your website, the story in which Blanca Alvarez tells her daughter Connie about crossing the Mexican border.
That story has an interesting backstory. I had been on a book tour for about two and a half months and met almost everybody from the book. I was lucky enough to meet Connie and Blanca, and it turns out there was a cancellation at one of our StoryBooths. Connie was there, and she didn't have an appointment. Her mom was nearby, so she brought her into the booth. They had this conversation that they never had before. It was all kinds of serendipity having to do with an accidentally vacant booth, and this amazing moment and interchange happened.
A beautiful story came out of that.
That's the magic of StoryCorps. We see it all the time, these unexpected stories and this kind of poetry, grace, and eloquence coming out of humanity.
Bookslut mainly deals with the written word. Do you think that oral histories play into that?
The stories we bring to the country, people can say whatever they want in the booth. We're not fact-checking the stories that are told in the booth. But the stories that we bring to put on the radio or put in books or wherever they're going to go have been thoroughly fact-checked and are true to the best of our ability to determine that they are true. But I do think that a lot of the stories rise to the place of great fiction. It's both poetry with which they're told and the profound nature of what's being said. To me, parts of listening reads like literature. I know I can never write a piece of literature (or great literature), but what you hear in these stories I think does rise at times to a place of writing that reads like great literature.
Do you have a favorite story from over the years?
I don't. We've recorded 18,000 interviews with 35 or 36,000 participants. I think the piece we aired this morning [March 21, 2008] on Morning Edition was un-fucking believably powerful. Did you get a chance to hear it? I thought it was a piece that really knocked my socks off, particularly taken in the context of Senator Obama's speech on Tuesday. The story we recorded was part of our Griot initiative, this at-large African American oral history tour that we've been on for the past year where we've recorded the stories of about 2,000 African American families. It's the largest African American oral history project since the slave narratives were recorded in the 1930's by the WPA. This is a story from our last stop a couple of weeks ago in Montgomery, AL, and you just gotta listen to it. It's pretty amazing.
So every week I'm kind of amazed, shocked, and delighted, or in the case of this story, kind of horrified by the latest story that's kind of bubbled up by the facilitators or the people who are in the booth who are keeping locks on what had happened. The story bubbles up through the production department and finally to me before it goes on the air each Friday.
What do you have planned for the future of StoryCorps? Where are the booths headed next?
I couldn't tell you where the booths are headed, but you can find that at our website. I think we're just at the first pitch of the first out of a very long game for StoryCorps. I'm going to devote the rest of my life to this project. I have an incredible team of wildly dedicated and brilliant people who feel equally as passionate about the project as do people who participate and people who've listened to it. We're intent on building StoryCorps to a national institution that defines who we are as Americans and helps us recognize our shared humanity. We want to make the content ubiquitous, we want people to be experiencing it in schools and on the radio and in books and wherever we can. We want everyone who wants to participate in this project to bring a loved one and honor them by listening to them, to have the opportunity to do so across the country.
So we are one of the fastest growing nonprofits in the nation. We started out as a $400,000 organization four years ago, and we're a six million dollar organization now. We've gone from six people to close to a hundred people, and we're just getting started. It's all about the power of this very simple idea, which isn't rocket science: it's two people in a booth listening to each other. But at its core, StoryCorps tells people that they matter and that they won't be forgotten, which is all any of us really wants to know.
George Orwell Writes a Novel: "Something is wrong in society. First maybe I will dress as a hobo for a bit. Then I must find out what it is." (Thanks, Ben.)
Evan Smith of Texas Monthly responds to receiving zero National Magazine Award nominations.
Today the nominations for our industry's version of the Academy Awards were announced ... and we got shut out. An oh-fer. A goose egg. Surprising, unfair, outrageous, etc.
Mary Karr writes about Franz Wright at the Washington Post.
Back when Franz Wright and I were in our 20s, teaching English in the academic ghetto around Boston, we both drank a lot and were known as serotonin-deprived individuals. For a while, Wright's phone message was, "At the sound of the gunshot, leave a message," which effectively terrified the casual caller into hanging up.
Now it's completely normal for mom-oirs (I gagged a little typing that) to be brutally honest about the hardships of the first six months or so of an infant's life -- postpartum depression, little to no sleep, bleeding nipples, etc., etc. But less than ten years ago, when Rachel Cusk wrote A Life's Work about her own pregnancy and early child rearing experiences, women who read it quickly got out their knives. They accused her of abusing her children, of being a horrible mother, on and on. (I read it while working at the sex library, and for a while, yes, it made me want to run to my doctor and ask her to remove my ovaries, but I always leaned that way.) Cusk writes about the reaction to her book:
There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze. This time, however, I felt it not as a writer but as a mother. I felt that I had committed a violent act. I felt that I had been abusive and negligent. I felt these things not because of anything I had physically or actually done to them ("she confines her daughter to the kitchen like an animal"), but because I had written a book that had malfunctioned, and had allowed our relationship to be publicly impugned. I see now that it was the reviewer who was violent, with her careless, self-congratulatory brutality ("Believe it or not, quite a few people enjoy motherhood," she went on, "but in order to do so, it is important to grow up first"); the reviewer who, while claiming saintly qualities of motherhood, proved with these lines her utter lack of respect and care for children.
Vanessa Davis (author of the charming Spaniel Rage) re-imagines the tale of Esther, marrying her off to the king of indie rock.
Louis Menand writes about 1954 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing over comic books, with David Hajdu's The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America as the starting point. (There's an excerpt of Hajdu's book at Bookforum.)
“It is my opinion,” Wertham told the senators and the cameras, “without any reasonable doubt and without any reservation, that comic books are an important contributing factor in many cases of juvenile delinquency.” The child most likely to be influenced by comic books, he said, is the normal child; morbid children are less affected, “because they are wrapped up in their own fantasies.” Comic books taught children racism and sadism—“Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry,” he said.
The Orange Broadband Prize Longlist is out, and it's handbags at twenty paces already.
The novelist A. S. Byatt told The Times that the Orange was a sexist prize, saying that she was so critical of what it stands for that she forbids her publishers to submit her novels for consideration. "Such a prize was never needed," she said, noting that many works of literature were by women.
Irrefutable logic there, A. Can't you just feel the oppression, ladies? Tim Lott then does the chivalrous thing and gets out the calculator to have a go:
Despite 12 years of consciousness-raising by the Orange, the Booker still doesn't give women their just mathematical due -- a 3:10 ratio remains. But given that women have won five out of the last six Whitbread/Costas, does the level of injustice remain enough to justify the Orange?
No. Says Tim.
Orange Prize organisers, who published this year's longlist on Tuesday, might point out that, given centuries of women's oppression etc, etc, our turn now etc, etc. This is the "yah boo" justification. But the historical truth is that if the playing field was slanted against women in literature it was far less so than in any other art form, as any comparison between historical female novelists and, say, female painters or composers would prove. And also, the past is gone. Get over it.
I would devote more time to the thorough critical analysis that this considerate piece richly deserves, except reading it I keep getting distracted by the warm flecks of spittle hitting my face.
The longlist is here. Don't click unless you can handle the assault on/by the patriarchy.
Anita Amirrezvani - The Blood of Flowers
Stella Duffy - The Room of Lost Things
Jennifer Egan - The Keep
Anne Enright - The Gathering
Linda Grant - The Clothes on Their Backs
Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom
Nancy Huston - Fault Lines
Gail Jones - Sorry
Sadie Jones - The Outcast
Lauren Liebenberg - The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam
Charlotte Mendelson - When We Were Bad
Deborah Moggach - In The Dark
Anita Nair - Mistress
Heather O'Neill - Lullabies for Little Criminals
Elif Shafak - The Bastard of Istanbul
Dalia Sofer - The Septembers of Shiraz
Scarlett Thomas - The End of Mr. Y
Carol Topolski - Monster Love
Rose Tremain - The Road Home
Patricia Wood - Lottery
March 20, 2008
Dan Chiasson's review of David Lehman's The Best American Erotic Poems has gotten some attention this week, even though because he didn't like it very much. What I was struck by was Chiasson's persistent complaint that the poems are repetitive: Ours is an era of plentiful but repetitive erotic writing . . . Theme-based anthologies have the unintended effect of making poets seem trapped by their subjects: there is no more variation among poets in this book than there would be in a book called, for example, “The Best American Patriotic Poems.” . . . the real problem is anthologies. The many young poets represented here, most of them (Lehman makes a point of this in his introduction) young women, seem much less original than they would if encountered on their own terms. I'd hazard a guess that this repetition tells us more about eros than it does about our era, or even about the anthology--the complaint that erotic writing is repetitive is at least as old as Sade. And any analyst will tell you that what you mostly hear in sessions is the sordid sameness of desire.
This, by the way, is the Auden poem too dirty for the NY Times.
Lee Byron has posted some very interesting diagrams (and this video) of patterns in children's poetry. (Via Neoformix.)
Another online toy: The Concrete Poetry Generator.
Rachel Aviv has a nice essay on Grace Paley's final poems, Fidelity at The Poetry Foundation's website: Paley wanted nothing to do with symbolic grandeur. Her poems are easy to overlook because they are spare, candid, and make no claims to importance. "This eighty-year-old body is / a fairly old body what’s it / doing around the house these days / checking the laundry," she writes in a poem called "Windows."
Don't miss L. K. Holt's "The Ontological Whore": They loved / her as the Devil’s whore: she proved he was corporeal, / the real thing."
Poetryvlog.com offers a weekly video of a poem being read by the poet. You can watch the videos at their website, download them to your iPod, or watch 'em on YouTube, such as this one by Cath Nichols.
Janet Kuypers visited the WordSlingers radio show, and has uploaded most of the results to YouTube: "There I Sit"; "Christmas Eve"; "All These Reminders"; and more.
Finally, Tao Lin has posted his recent poem, "A City in Taiwan, A City in Pakistan, a Cave in Taiwan, a City in New York."
The National Magazine Award nominees are in. My only explanation for the nominees for general excellence with a circulation of 2 million or more is that those are the only five magazines in the world that have a circulation above 2 million. But hooray for nominations for Jon Lee Anderson and William Langewiesche (like a year could go by without a nomination for him). (I will not touch the nominations for Caitlin Flanagan. I am conflicted.) But what happened to the love for Texas Monthly? Did they have an off year? And Babble.com? Do all the judges have two-year-olds they think are the most precious thing in the world or something? Also, if we can give a special award to the cover photograph of the corned beef sandwiches of last month's Bon Appetit, I think we should. I'm hungry again just thinking about it.
Andrew O'Hehir interviews Harlan Ellison about the new documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth and the conversation takes a strange turn.
Despite the genuinely friendly character of our conversation, Ellison remains a slippery interlocutor. Portions are transcribed below, but if you listen to the whole thing, you'll catch the moment when he reverses the interview's polarity and begins asking me whether I'm happy with my life and what else I might like to do with it.
Great apologies, literary prizefight fans -- I have been sitting on the Arthur C Clarke Awards shortlist for a week, then look what happens. The award has been going for 21 years now, and this year's winner receives £2,008 (in 1987, the inaugural winner was just the kind of genre-jostling futurism that the Clarke prize wanted to celebrate).
The Red Men - Matthew de Abaitua
The H-Bomb Girl - Stephen Baxter
The Carhullan Army - Sarah Hall
The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
The Execution Channel - Ken MacLeod
Black Man - Richard Morgan
VQR published an essay by Arthur C Clarke his correspondence with George Bernard Shaw near the end of Shaw's life. They discussed velocity, naturally. They have made it available online in honor of Clarke's death.
March 19, 2008
This week's Guardian Digested Read: Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer.
Danny sobbed. His appeal had failed. He slept. He woke. He slept. He woke. He failed to inject some pace into the narrative.
The lovely Dan Rhodes has won the inaugural Claire Maclean Prize for Scottish Fiction for his novel, Gold. The award was established in Mclean's name after her death in 2007 by her partner, University of Glasgow Professor Mike Gonzalez.
I'm not entirely sure what We Tell Stories is all about, or why mostly men with beards are invited to play, but I killed a lot of time on the site yesterday. Charles Cumming is either retelling 21 Steps or playing with it or just borrowing the name. Who can tell? There are lots of things to click on so I'll be there for a while.
Nerve interviews Graham Rawle about his new novel Woman's World. "The concept for the book sounds, if ambitious, a bit gimmicky: an entire novel constructed from words cut out of women's magazines from the early 1960s." Bookslut's Eryn Loeb loved it. I'm slightly worried it will give me a migraine. But Rawle is winning me over.
[Women's magazines] have such a strong voice, this slightly barmy, crazed sort of optimism. And they're very dogmatic about what a woman should do. You're supposed to be making light shades and polishing your light bulbs. You think, who's ever cleaned their light bulbs? Do light bulbs get dirty?
Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died Wednesday in Colombo, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.
Clarke represents half of my childhood, from bedtime stories to my father's repeated watching of 2001.
March 18, 2008
Dear Conde Nast Portfolio: About your most recent cover... Women who are smart enough to attain powerful positions know not to wear white stockings. Especially with red Mary Janes. Contrary to what you might think, we don't run businesses while dressing like 11-year-old school girls. Thanks for trying, though.
As an urban dweller, most days the only nature I encounter is the mouse that lives behind my bookshelf (his name is Henry) and the occasional wren that flies through my open windows. By the end of Roger Deakin's Wildwood, however, I was ready to pick up my things and go live in the woods. I wrote about Deakin, Amy Irvine's Trespass and Jonathan Rosen's Life of the Skies for my latest column at Smart Set.
Deakin’s book seems to exist in a parallel dimension to the problems of Irvine’s and Rosen’s books. Deakin’s world is one where children are taught biology by being let loose in the forest to document it. He counts moths by lamplight just to revel in their names: green carpet, dark spinach, the uncertain, the willow beauty. He sleeps under a tree with nesting rooks to be able to wake to the sound of their chatter. He spends a page explaining the sensual pleasures of writing with a pencil. “I like a soft pencil better than a hard one. It is gentler on the paper, as a soft voice is easier on the ear.” He writes as if Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature and Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth never existed, as if he is of direct lineage of Walden and Sir James Frazer and the great botanists of our time.
March 17, 2008
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: Maribeth Batcha
Maribeth Batcha is the publisher for the literary magazine One Story. What makes this magazine stand apart from others is that it literally does as its title insinuates–it gives you one short story per issue. Rather than sandwiching a humorous piece between two completely different stories, One Story allows the reader to ingest the entire issue in the way short stories are meant to be read: in one sitting. Batcha talks to Bookslut about the advent of the magazine and her reasoning behind its philosophy.
How did One Story come about? Why only one story per issue?
Hannah [Tinti] and I started One Story in 2001. I was in a writing group with some fellow Columbia MFA grads. We mailed our submissions to each other, and I loved getting one short story in the mail. Each one felt like a little present. At the same time I was working at a magazine job doing a business model for newsletters, and I realized that sending out small things wasn't prohibitively expensive, and I thought that it would be interesting to do a literary journal in a newsletter format.
Hannah (our editor) and I were acquaintances at the time and I brought it up to her at a party. She was excited about the idea because it would showcase short story writers in a new way. The two of us talked about it at other parties for probably a year, and finally, just after September 11th, got it off the ground. We started it with $3,000, a lot of enthusiasm, and crossed fingers.
What were you doing before One Story?
I worked on the business side of magazine publishing for about 10 years before starting One Story. When the idea came to me, I had just finished my MFA at Columbia.
What kinds of work do you actively look for when going through the slush pile?
It sounds silly, but we look for stories with a little bit of magic. They sparkle. We get about 150 submissions a week and publish 18 a year. Genre isn't an issue. We like everything, be it straightforward or experimental, or about mothers or zombies. Because of our format, the story has to feel complete and really stand on its own. We do quite a bit of editorial work on each story, so they don't have to be perfect to be selected, but we have to have a good idea of what the story will look like when it's done, and feel like the writer can work with us to take it there. Of course, the writing has to be really solid, but the story itself has to have some meat to it.
Do you tend to lean towards more well-known names, unknown writers, or somewhere in between?
We lean towards great stories, which means we publish writers at all points in their careers. About 10% of our writers publish their first fiction with us, and watching there careers unfold has been one of the real pleasures of working on One Story. Well-known writers are great to work with, and they help smaller magazines like ours gain a bit more credibility. But we do our best to take each story on its merit. We have to love each story before we send it in the mail. Our reputation depends on it. Sometimes this means we have to turn down a bigger name, and sometimes it means we have to say no to a friend or a colleague. We also only publish a writer one time. This policy keeps us on the lookout for new voices.
What is Save the Short Story? How does it relate to One Story?
We started One Story a few years after Story magazine folded. We felt that while MFA programs were still teaching the short story, and writers were still writing great ones, good venues for short fiction were disappearing. Save the Short Story is a side project of ours. We wanted to have a place where those writing, reading, and publishing short stories could communicate. While the One Story site does this to a certain extent, it's really about One Story, and we wanted to have a site that was more about the form than us. We're still playing around with what Save the Short Story will be. We hope to one day have a conference devoted to the short story in New York. That kind of event would fall more logically under the Save the Short Story umbrella.
One Story is available through subscription only. Why this decision as opposed to having it on the newsstand as well?
We liked the idea of it being a subscriber only publication because we were aiming for a community feeling. We wanted there to be a relationship between our readers, our writers, and us. We wanted to build that relationship by getting it into readers' hands frequently (18 times a year). Also, my magazine experience taught me that the newsstand is not a great place for small magazines - it's not even a great place for large ones. Newsstand distribution is difficult and time consuming. I really felt that the time and energy that we would put into it would take away from the more important work, finding and publishing great stories.
Which stories over the past year are you most fond of and why?
By the time we're done working on each story, we're completely besotted. So my favorite is usually the last one we finished. But this year we published our 100th issue, "Beanball" by Ron Carlson. Getting to that milestone made us really pause and reflect on what we've done. We're usually too busy getting issues out to celebrate, but we did whoop it up a bit with that one.
Thomas Lux and his new book God Particles (read Bookslut's review by Elizabeth Bachner here) are profiled at the LA Times.
27 Reasons Why Your Short Story Was Rejected.
23. Faux jollity. Particularly faux jollity centred around pubs, and particularly around pubs in Ireland. Industrially extruded quantities of guff about distant histories in small town life.
Cracked lists how five fairy tales got Disney-fied. That kiss at the end of Sleeping Beauty? Yeah, it was really coma-rape. Now we have roofies and the morning after pill, so get cracking on a "modernized" cartoon.
Do women really still need manuals telling them how to live alone? Even as I was typing that, I knew it was a stupid question. But Virago is re-issuing Live Alone and Like It by former Vogue writer Marjorie Hillis. Still relevant, because some things never change. Specifically, the joy of having a large bed to yourself and the need to kill the knight in shining armor myth.
“Almost all women are born with a belief that some man will marry and support them, or, at the worst, that a relative will die and leave them a fortune. This is probably an instinct implanted by Providence and has something to do with the progation of the race. We haven’t time to figure out just what, but there it is, and it takes a long, long time to uproot it.”
Over at Jezebel, they're working on new chapters to update the book, like "If the TV's On, You Are Not Drinking Alone," "The Well-Stocked Bedside Table: Weed, Lube, and a Butcher Knife," and "There is not an ax-murderer in your apartment, I promise."
When he is not at his cottage in Donegal composing poetry or attending literary functions in Dublin, O'Searchaigh spends a good deal of his time in Nepal where he has raised money for charities over the past ten years and adopted a son.
But his preference for sex with younger men has placed him at the centre of a public storm in Ireland, with calls for his poetry to be taken off the syllabus.
Happy St. Patrick's Day, y'all.
"The ultimate realization in the book is that the 'us versus them' thinking is doomed - that fighting for your beliefs with such righteous indignation only serves to further entrench in their opposing beliefs those who disagree with you."
Two Amy Irvine Trespass links: a profile at the Salt Lake Tribune, and an audio RadioWest interview.
Australian YA author Sonya Hartnett has been named the winner of the 2008 Astrid Lingren Memorial Award for Literature, which with a $818,000 cheque attached is the richest children's book award going. I read a few Hartnetts back in the last century, and from all of them the strongest impression I have is of the tremendous mullet on this book's cover. Hartnett's most recent title is the novel Surrender.
March 14, 2008
It turns out that the reason the Esquire fictionalized version of Heath Ledger's last days is controversial has nothing to do with how weird it is that Esquire would fictionalize Heath Ledger's last days. It's because it's the worst written thing ever! Enjoy:
Like all of us, I've gone through phases. I've been a young itch, I've suffocated on snatch just to see how much I could get. Then Brokeback, I fell into Michelle. I saw morning coffee in her eyes, this stable Formica future with sweet-hot sex and great lighting. And it was wonderful for a while. I used to say it was like we melted into each other's skin, like she was pouring her body inside of mine and I would hold her inside of me, so that when we wanted to make love all I had to do was wiggle my waist.
The PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction was just won by Kate Christensen, for her satirical novel The Great Man. There's a great interview with Christensen up at PAPERMAG:
We live in a profoundly conservative time. The pendulum has swung backward to "family values," whatever the fuck that means, fundamentalist religions, and a tame and docile population who's being scarily and almost cartoonishly manipulated by the most criminally dastardly government this country has ever had. We dress alike, we talk alike, we are a big homogeneous bunch of domesticated cows in Pottery Barns.
For when you've absolutely got to have a pantoum, about aliens, *now*: Poets.org/m is the new iPhone-optimized poetry archive from the Academy of American Poets. It lets you search the full content of the site, and to browse by several categories as well. When you first access the site, the choices for browsing are "occasion" and "form"--hence the joke above--but clicking on "search" allows you three more browsing options: poem, poet, and prose, as well as a search interface.
Finding Jason Nelson's "Poetry Cube" at UbuWeb (thanks to Stephanie Strickland) led me to spend a diverting few minutes playing game, game, game and again game. Speaking of Strickland, please don't miss Slipping Glimpse.
Frances Leviston explains that, really, it's ok that the Guardian's list of great 20thC poets has only one woman. After all, there just aren't that many great ones. Handy to have that all cleared up! (Todd Swift's response is worth a look.) For a perhaps more reasonable Leviston essay, see her advice on compiling a first book of poems.
In Jacket 35, a long conversation between Robert Grenier & Charles Bernstein.
I'm not even sure what this means: "As poetry collections go, this is quite a long book of long, narrative poems, but that shouldn't deter anyone from picking it up."
YouTube fun: Christian Bök performs part of "The Cyborg Opera: Synth Loops" & "The Aria of the 3-Horned Enemy" (from R. Murray Schafer's The Princess of the Stars). Kamau Brathwaite reads from Born to Slow Horses.
March 13, 2008
My favorite Chicago bird. Okay, done now.
I think I have made my feelings about birds clear: they're speaking English, they're building and using tools, they're infecting their kamikaze chicken troops with avian flu and doing test runs with the human population. They're going to take over. And that's fine, I don't have strong feelings one way or the other. I'm pretty sure my friend the bird rescuer will vouch for me, and those eight years as a vegetarian have to count for something, right? I will bow to the proper authorities and find my place in the new hierarchy. (Except for geese. Geese are bastards. As many times as I've been hissed at, bitten, and run after, I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual.)
Some (most!) call me paranoid! Some taunt me with Edward Gorey postcards with birds making off with the technology. But that doesn't mean I don't love birds. And while falling madly in love with Roger Deakin's Wildwood, I came across the following passage about rooks. If it doesn't break your heart, you don't have one my dear.
[Konrad] Lorenz observed that jackdaws form lifelong attachments, as rooks seem to do, and that there is a distinct, well-understood pecking order within the tribe to which all the members adhere without question. Lorenz gradually learnt the Jackdaw vocabulary: 'Zick, Zick' is uttered by the courting male to mean 'Let's nest together' and, once in possession of an actual mate and nest, 'Keep out.' Any act of social delinquency is immediately censured by the other tribe members with a variation of this call, expressed by Lorenz as 'Yip, Yip.' Most interesting of all is Lorenz's discovery of the subtle distinction between 'Kia' and 'Kiaw.' The first is the cry uttered in flight by the dominant jackdaws to urge the whole flock outward to new feeding grounds. The second is to urge them home. Thus, 'Kiaw' plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the flock when one meets another.
Most birds seem to keep their song quite separate from their language. The staccato alarm cry of a wren or blackbird is quite distinct from its sweet song. Jackdaws, however, incorporate their words into their songs to create, as Lorenz puts it, something more like a ballad, in which they can re-create past adventures or directly express emotions. Not only this, but the singer accompanies the different cries with the corresponding gestures, quivering or threatening like the lustiest performer passionately enacting a song. In a way, the jackdaw is mimicking itself, as a solitary jackdaw kept in a cage will come to mimic human speech, but it may also, Lorenz thinks, be expressing emotion. When a marten broke into the roosting aviary at Altenberg and killed all but one of his jackdaw flock, the lone survivor sat all day on the weathervane and sang. The dominant theme of her song, repeated over and over, was 'Kiaw,' 'Come back, oh, come back.' It was a song of heartbreak.
The Guardian has an excerpt from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational.
What is it about zero cost that we find so irresistible? Why does free! make us so happy? After all, free! can lead us into trouble: things that we would never consider purchasing become incredibly appealing as soon as they are free! For instance, have you ever gathered up free pencils, key chains, and note pads at a conference, even though you'd have to carry them home and would only throw most of them away?
Ahh! BookExpo flashbacks! I don't think I ever read a book I picked up at the first two Book Expos, when I foolishly filled bags with galleys. And I'm pretty sure those two years are why I now have to visit an osteopath.
Enough about god for one day. Here, have some angel/devil comic book porn, brought to you by Neil Gaiman.
I covered conflicts in Africa, in the Middle East, and in Central America, where Western society rained nothing but death and destruction on tens of thousands of people, which is of course what we're doing in Iraq. So, is Western society -- American society -- better for Iraqis? And I think part of the problem is people who create a morality based on their own experience, which is what of course the New Atheists and the Christian fundamentalists have done.
Chris Hedges is interviewed at Salon about I Don't Believe in Atheists.
1. Wowowow? That is the worst name for a website I have ever heard.
2. Oh, I see, it's a website for girls, so we can't just have a weather forecast, we have to know what the weather is going to do to our hair.
3. Well, at least it's not pink.
4. Did they make this on FrontPage? Are there no women web designers they could have hired?
5. If I needed 58 different opinions on the lying memoirists... I can't finish that sentence. No one has ever needed 58 opinions about lying memoirists. Especially not opinions like, "Why is there a market for the memoirs? Because life is full of suffering. It’s hard." It's like the View! But 24 hours a day! God help us all.
The first International Prize for Arabic Fiction was given to Egyptian author Baha Taher for his title, Sunset Oasis. The award, which has become to be known as the Arabic Booker, is worth $50,000 and an English translation courtesy of Granta owner and sponsor, Sigrid Rausing. Taher is the author of six previous novels, none of which have been translated for the English market previously.
This is from a while back, but relevant. Joe Bageant (Deer Hunting with Jesus) looks at the Left Behind books and explains how the 65 million readers started acting on their power in the last few elections.
Lookie here. If you think I’m overcounting, think one more time about those Left Behind books that have sold over 65 million copies at this writing. Sold to people who do not even like or buy books. Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag never wrote anything that sold 65 million. That lead-footed prose and numbing predictability that Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye grind out in the Left Behind series might not even be called writing. But whatever it is, at least 65 million folks that our nation failed to educate find deep meaning and solace in it.
March 12, 2008
There was a time when I liked Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas. It was before I read it. I liked the idea of it, someone explaining why Kansas is such a stubbornly red state, even when it's obvious the Republicans just don't give a fuck about Kansans. Then I started reading it, and began railing about his cherry-picked anecdotes, his delusional description of farmers as blue-collar workers, and the stench of snobbery. At every party I revealed I was from Kansas, the standard response was "Oh, I'm reading this book about Kansas..." I couldn't let it go, and I'd start telling them how wrong that book was. "Besides, Thomas Frank isn't even from Kansas." "But it says in his bio..." "No, he's from Johnson County. Johnson County is not Kansas."
Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting with Jesus is what I had hoped Kansas would be. He's from Virginia, so the tone is different. I grew up in a farming community, which is a completely different environment than Bageant's town. But the small town details and the sense of humor and warmth with which the book is written makes me homesick for 6am pancake feeds with hunters, dairy cows within city limits, walking five minutes in any direction and being far away from humanity, and a very horizontal horizon.
Tony Perrottet traces the origins of Onania, the pamphlet that started the anti-masturbation freak out in 1712.
He quickly expanded Onania into an 88-page tract, padded with soft-porn “testimonials” from readers that seemed mostly to involve attractive young women feverishly pleasuring themselves. Typical was the report from distraught parents of a comely village girl who had taken to self-abuse while alone on the farm at age 14, fell ill, then turned into a nymphomaniac. The harlot evidently died in hysterics at age 19 from an infected “gland” in her clitoris.
Tao Lin gives helpful hints on how you can help his career:
blog about my books even if you hate me; hatred moves units, it distracts from existential despair and loneliness when people type a lot of abstractions to try to defeat someone else's likes and dislikes, and people get 'addicted' to that, and it will not lead to violence since it is on the internet, and on blogs, and about books, so i think it is okay (this is what happens in the major print media like new york times, new york review of books, n+1, etc., except if you do it for me you can have at least some self-awareness of what i just typed about the function of this)
Japan is to bow to international pressure and ban the possession of child pornography, although the new law is expected to anger child welfare groups by exempting manga comics and animated films. (Link from Journalista.)
March 11, 2008
Sticky Pages
The whole point of this column is to hip you to books that have hot sex, but not hot covers. You know, so you can read them on your lunch break or tuck them under your arm and retire to the airport loo. Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, does not have this type of cover. It has nipple. Not exactly sittin’ in the bleachers during soccer practice reading. However, the erotica in it is by far the best I’ve read. The stories are well-written and dirty, elegant and realistic. So realistic, I made that rookie reader move of checking the author’s name against the narrator’s name no less than five times. Surely this is real, I thought, or maybe just hoped.
A column picking out the scenes in this great book would be far too long, so I went for the lazy girl approach. I dropped an e-mail to Rachel Kramer Bussel with seven questions attached. I figured that as a senior editor at Penthouse Variations, a prolific writer, and one of America’s top cupcake mavens (no kidding), she’d be way more interesting than I would. Plus there are a few scenes I need to reread. Excuse me, would you.
What makes a good sex scene in fiction?
A scene where you know what at least one of the character’s motivation is, that you get why they’re having sex with that particular person, what makes it hot for them. You want to put the reader into the middle of the sex and make them feel everything the person is feeling.
What are the beginners' mistakes you see too often?
Sometimes people assume that just by throwing in a requisite number of dirty words, that, voila, they’ve made a sex scene. You need much more than that, and better to build it up than jump right in and ruin things. You don’t need to give a literal blow by blow; all too often I see “and then his left hand was on her left breast” or things of that nature. Try not to use the same words over and over again, but don’t go too far out there that people don’t know what you’re talking about. I think, too, sometimes people focus so much on the scene, that they forget the people in it. It’s not just person x having sex with person y; you need to give your characters a sexual personality too.
How can writers prepare for writing their sex scene?
Just think about what you want the scene to accomplish, why the characters are there, what about the other person attracts them. Sometimes when I have trouble, I think of a prop or a color or a position or a piece of furniture or a fetish, something, that I can go back to if I have trouble making the scene work, I can mention that thing or image or whatever. Like in my story “Icy Hot,” it was ice that was a major player in the story. I had originally written that to submit to a book about sex with strangers, hence the stranger. But having a prop, even a small one, can be a good way to ground the scene and give it some context and make it stand out.
What are your tips for making a sex scene not self-conscious?
While staying true to your character, use the language that you would use most naturally. Think about the ways you think or talk about sex and use that as a guide, rather than what you think a sex scene should sound like. Also remember that a sex scene doesn’t have to mean “the hottest sex ever”; sex scenes can also convey anger or sadness or confusion or longing or all sorts of other emotions. It can also be brief, but shouldn’t be so brief that they just go behind closed doors and we don’t hear from them again. But you can leave some things up to the reader’s imagination as long as you give them enough to know, say, why someone would make a weekly sex date with someone not their partner; we can’t just know they do it, we have to know why and how the sex and the lover are different from what they get at home.
How do you suggest writers keep their sex scenes in voice and not like some engorged thumb in the daisy field of their prose?
One thing is to remember that less can be more. I edit erotica so most of the stories in my books are explicit, but one exercise I have people do in workshops is write a sex scene where there’s no sex. It may sound counterintuitive, but it’s a great way to force yourself to realize that sex sometimes isn’t that sexy, and sometimes the anticipation of sex or the flirtation leading up to it can be just as hot, if not hotter. So while one character may use certain racy language, another may be having an equally good time but not blurt out every detail and may leave some things to the imagination.
It seems that with sex scenes it's all been done before (rock hard cock, dripping wet pussy) how do you keep it fresh?
Well, I think you have to recognize that at some level, it has all been done before. Sex obviously isn’t new, and neither is writing about it, so rather than trying to break new ground, find a way to say something that speaks to you. I started out writing about my own personal life, which a lot of people do, but if you’re writing fiction, you can improve upon real life. I think the language is very important and needs to be authentic to the character. Some people would sooner die than say “cunt” or “pussy” or “cock” and for some people those are the hottest words imaginable.
You can also mix things up by trying to write as a gender you are not, and varying location. Pretend the characters only have five minutes for sex; how do you speed them up? What makes it different than a weekend in bed? I think there are tons of ways to switch things up and make a sex scene exciting, but that doesn’t have to mean making it over the top sexually, unless that’s called for. You can also make things funny, like in Warren Ellis’s Crooked Little Vein, there’s all this very over the top sex and porn stuff going on, but that’s his commentary on what’s happening in our culture. A sex scene can be something to turn the reader on, but it can also speak about sex more widely.
You're not only a well-respected sex writer, but you're one of America's leading cupcake mavens. In three sentences, advocate for more cupcake scenes in literary fiction.
Cupcakes can make appearances at all sorts of opportune moments, from weddings to birthday parties to being thrown at someone in anger. Cupcakes do show up in some fiction, like the YA novel Devilish by Maureen Johnson and Fudge Cupcake Murder by Joanne Fluke and random romance novels, but could definitely be offered up in everything from satire to mystery. Cupcakes get people talking (and make them hungry) and are such a hot topic lately that they would provide humor, if nothing else, to infuse any novel.
Rachel Kramer Bussel is a prolific erotica writer, editor, journalist, and blogger. She serves as senior editor at Penthouse Variations, hosts the In the Flesh Erotic Reading Series, and wrote the popular Lusty Lady column for The Village Voice. Her books include Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z 1 and 2, First-Timers, Up All Night, Glamour-Girls: Femme/Femme Erotica, Ultimate Undies, Sexiest Soles, Secret Slaves: Erotic Stories of Bondage, Crossdressing, Sex and Candy: Sugar Erotica, Caught Looking: Erotic Tales of Voyeurs and Exhibitionism, Hide and Seek, Best Sex Writing 2008, and the kinky companion volumes He’s on Top: Erotic Stories of Male Dominance and Female Submission and She’s on Top: Erotic Stories of Female Dominance and Male Submission. Her first novel, Everything But…, will be published by Bantam in summer 2008.
Rachel's writing has been published in over 100 anthologies, including Best American Erotica 2004 and 2006, as well as in AVN, Bust, Cosmo UK, Diva, Girlfriends, Huffington Post, New York Post, Penthouse, Playgirl, Punk Planet, San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, and Zink, and on Cleansheets.com, Mediabistro.com, and Oxygen.com. In her spare time, she hunts down the country’s best cupcakes and blogs about them at cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com. Visit her at www.rachelkramerbussel.com.
From 3 Quarks Daily: Steven Pinker on swearing. (What is the point of having a conversation about swearing when they bleep out all the fucks? But, hooray, pussy stays!)
This week's Guardian Digested Read: Nothing to Be Frightened of by Julian Barnes.
Looking at my mother's body, I tried to think of what clothes she might have wanted to be buried in. My brother, believing that memories are often false, rebuked me sternly for conflating real wants with hypothetical wants. I replied that Cartesian dualism can be found in the great works of Flaubert and Zola. He riposted with an unbundling of Kantian dialectic and we laughed heartily, our mother now quite forgotten.
Remember when Nerve.com had actual content, instead of endless links to other people who are actually writing things? Those were good days.
Jeff Deck of Boston had seen a lot of misspellings on signs around his city, and one day he decided he just couldn't take it anymore.
Deck cobbled together the Typo Eradication Advancement League and set off on a nationwide quest to repair the mistakes by any means necessary, including chalk and adhesive letters. (Thanks to C. for the link.)
There's still no end in sight to the new wave of atheism, which is unfortunate. I would like to stop reading these books, but I don't have the self-control obviously. At least the latest one is written by Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. I Don't Believe in Atheists was written in response to a debate between him, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Truthdig has Hedges's introduction to the debate online, as well as a report of the debate overall.
Tom Bissell is feelin' surly at the New York Times Book Review, writing about Scott Spencer's Willing.
What is worse, Avery updates the favored Christian rhetorical question of “What would Jesus do?” to “What would Dostoyevsky do?” Probably write a better book than this.
He almost makes the book sound appealing in its badness.
March 10, 2008
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: Ken Wohlrob
Ken Wohlrob, former editor of Bully Magazine, is a self-publishing dynamo out of Brooklyn, NY. Rather than trying his tireless hand at submission after submission to publisher after publisher, Wohlrob has been using what some might call "guerilla literary tactics" to get his work out: podcasting, iTunes, Kindle, even the computer game Second Life. Thusly, Ken has been able to release his book of stories, The Love Book as a paperback because of his online efforts.
Who are the Blacksmiths For Literary Progress? What do they do, and how are you involved?
The Blacksmiths For Literary Progress is a literary insurgency group of dedicated practitioners who believe in two things: good literature and a well-shod horse. We have hammers, we have anvils, and we are coming to your home. Like all literary insurgency groups we focus our energies where it counts: on not actually writing anything. But we have plenty of meetings. We don’t have any secret signs or anything weird like that, but if you spot us together you will notice a slight collective facial tick.
How would you describe your time at Bully Magazine?
Bully Magazine was a shining example of underground publishing in the Internet age: I sweat blood putting together issues for the viewing pleasure of literally three friends (actually one friend if you don’t count the two friends who also wrote for the magazine). But we wrote as if we were speaking to the entire world. That was the key: it didn’t matter how small you were, so long as you deluded yourself into thinking you were important. Somewhere in the process the New York Press actually named us the “Best Angry Young Guys” web site, which is like winning the award for best jackoff who gets drunk and throws up all over his shoes. Ah, good times…
I've been told you're active in the lit scene on Second Life. Can you elaborate? I'm unfamiliar with Second Life other than its Sims-ness, so I didn't know there was a scene.
It is a little odd to do readings for people dressed as Anime cats. Or even worse, dressed as Anime cats pushing around little miniature Anime cats in oxcarts (don’t believe me, here’s the photo). Once you’ve seen that, why go back to doing readings in bookshops? Then again, in real bookshops there’s always that one guy who shows up in three layers of sweatshirts, hasn’t bathed in nine weeks, has never read a line of your work, claims he was into you before anyone, and keeps insisting you’ve sold out by going first on open-mic night. I’m not sure which situation is weirder.
You're also very active in the Kindle/podcast/freebies movement. How do you see these new technologies benefiting the small press while everyone else is losing their wits over the idea
I consider all of these things to be great democratizing tools for independent authors and small presses. You’ll never be able to outspend a big publishing house in marketing, nor convince every reviewer to write about your book. And while I’m on the subject, where the hell is the goddamned review for The Love Book on Bookslut?!
You have to find other ways to get your work out there. It costs you zero to make a Kindle version of your book available (and the royalty rates are much better than print). For podcasts, so long as you have the recording software and mics, it’s free to post it to the web. I have the entire text of The Love Book available as a free PDF download. I even went as far as advertising the free download on Facebook. Am I worried that people are stealing my work? I’m a self-publishing hack from Brooklyn. I’m worried that they won’t be exposed to my work at all. Based on the number of downloads of the podcast and the free PDF, I’m really happy with the results. The bonus with these free forms of electronic distribution is that there is no geographic limit; you are not restricted by bookstore distribution (especially if you can only afford a small print run).
To be honest, there would not be a trade paperback version of The Love Book were it not for the original audiobook podcast version I released on iTunes and Podiobooks.com. It takes a different set of skills to make an audio version of your book compelling. You have to be a great reader; you need to have that knack for storytelling. It was great fun because it became like old time radio hour doing the voices and music. And when it hit the iTunes Top 100 Literature podcast list, I lost all reservations I had about self-releasing a collection of short stories (which most people will tell you is publishing suicide). I knew I had an audience for these dark, quirky stories that publishing houses would never touch.
Tell me about The Love Book.
The Love Book is a collection of five gritty, dark, and absurdly comic tales. I like stories you can sink your teeth into, characters that have blood in their veins, and the harshness of reality laid out on the page. So these are tales of people getting what they think they want out of life and then suffering the consequences of their own desires. These are stories where things happen. And I grew up in New Jersey, so things are a little off: tales of obese female pro-wrestlers trapped in dingy motel rooms, old couples pondering suicide, one-armed women getting involved in online dating, and Italian guys who are a little too into the Asian fetish thing.
When I first shopped it around to agents and editors, they all turned it down. I have the most exquisite list of rejection slips. But the interesting thing was that I never heard, “these are bad stories,” or even, “you need to go back and rewrite.” Often what I heard was, “You’re a good writer, and you have a unique style, but these things don’t sell well.” I decided why should that financial-based decision by an agent or editor stop my work from getting out there. That’s how I got involved in podcasting, releasing electronic versions for free, and on-demand self-publishing.
It has been a grand experiment allowing people to download it for free, listen to the podcast episodes, and then (here’s the important part) because they liked the free content, picked up a copy of the trade paperback.
I’ll even be hosting a reading/release party for The Love Book at Freebird Books in Brooklyn on March 22nd. It will be an all-original member reunion of the Blacksmiths for Literary Progress, so joining me will be Tim Hall (author of Half Empty), Mike Faloon (publisher of Go Metric), and Brian Cogan (author of The Punk Rock Encyclopedia).
What are you working on now?
I’m just getting started on my next book which will be about Satan. I won’t say anymore about it other than it will be a full-length novel and promises to be one of the least important dismal failures of our time. Also, I’ll be putting together the next short story collection which will be called The Life Book. That will then be followed by The Death Book. And then The Now That You’re Dead Your Relatives Are Fighting Over Your Assets While Your Soul Drifts in Limbo Since Heaven Doesn’t Really Exist Book.
No Depression is moving to a web-only format. The letter from the editor:
The decline of brick and mortar music retail means we have fewer newsstands on which to sell our magazine, and small labels have fewer venues that might embrace and hand-sell their music. Ditto for independent bookstores. Paper manufacturers have consolidated and begun closing mills to cut production; we've been told to expect three price increases in 2008. Last year there was a shift in postal regulations, written by and for big publishers, which shifted costs down to smaller publishers whose economies of scale are unable to take advantage of advanced sorting techniques.
Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry: "Hello. We're talking about language." (Link from Seed.)
Ali Smith writes about Carson McCullers.
There is a great deal of sweetness in the prevalent vision of McCullers as the poet of haunting oddbods, the laureate of American loneliness, the gifted bard of adolescent girls.
Consider the case of the "Hitler Diaries", "discovered" by journalist Gerd Heidemann and published in April 1983 by the German news magazine Stern.
The 60 small books, however, were proved later to have been fabricated and both Heidemann and their real author -- notorious German forger Konrad Kujau -- were sentenced to 42 months in prison.
If you can go to jail for pretending to be Hitler, I don't see why you can't go to jail for being a white girl pretending to be Native American.
The Irish Book Awards shortlists have been announced. Several Booker veterans are jostling for the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year:
Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett
The Gathering by Anne Enright
Redemption Falls by Joseph O'Connor
The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black
Cut & keep facts for your next literary conversation: A Zugzwang is a chess term, for a chessy type thing.
The rest of the award categories and nominees are here.
The NBCC awards gala means... another liveblog!
7:10 p.m.: Tim Jeal takes the mike, and is "deeply grateful" to his wife for putting up with him. Says "gobsmacked," which is the best reason for putting anyone from the UK near a mike.
Winners yonder:
Fiction: Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
General Nonfiction: Harriet Washington: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Autobiography: Edwidge Danticat: Brother, I'm Dying
Biography: Tim Jeal: Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
Criticism: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Poetry: Mary Jo Bang: Elegy
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: Sam Anderson, book critic for New York Magazine
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Acheivement Award: Emile Buchwald, founding publisher of Milkweed Editions
A hefty list of nominees has been announced for the 2008 LA Times Book Prizes. Among the shortlist, Maxine Hong Kingston will be the recipient of this year's Robert Kirsch acheivement award, for "a living author with a connection to the American West whose works have made a substantial contribution to American letters." Ishmael Beah has been nominated in the category 'Current Interests', which he certainly is.
Ooh la la! Le Prince Maurice Prize, the award for the outstanding literary love story, has announced the shortlist for the prize's sixth year. Tim Lott, the prize's president, muses in the Guardian on the lack of romance in contemporary lit in favour of 'bodice-rippers and bonkbusters'.
Luckily we have the literary types in the award panel to save us with some quality fiction guaranteed to provide heart palpitations. Who better to determine a winner than that Georgette Heyer of our times, Irvine Welsh? (Aside from Bookslut's own Melissa Lion, that is).
This year's shortlist is:
Salley Vickers: The Other Side of You
Ewan Morrison: Swung
James Meek: We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
Jonathan Trignell's novel Boy A is the first winner of the Talking Point award, a World Book Day initiative to recognise a work "which inspires debate and discussion among readers." A recent interview with Trignall covers snails, living in France, and the infamous Jamie Bulger murder case that has become synonymous with his title:
Boy A is very specifically not about that case, particularly in relation to the victim, but it does deliberately mirror some of the things that happened to Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the two boys who murdered James -- although they were eventually released without spending any time in a prison, unlike my character. The fictional crime occupies the press and public consciousness in the same way as the Bulgers' tragedy gripped the nation
The Lionel Gelber Prize (which the Economist seems to think is 'the world's most important award for non-fiction', oooh, burn, Quills!) has gone to Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.
Former Booker judges takes on the Booker of Booker of Bookers range from glassy-eyed reminiscences to crankiness on a grandparental scale. Adam Mars-Jones, judge in 1995:
Should win Will win... I'm afraid I'm not playing that game. This Best of Booker is only looking after itself. What would be much more interesting would be to look at the books that never won the Booker but that did extremely well nevertheless. That would be wryer and less self-righteous.
I hate that question that ends up on so many Q&As: If you could have five authors, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would you invite? How the hell should I know? Is James Joyce a picky eater? These things are important. Then I started reading Amy Irvine's Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, and I not only wanted to invite her over, I wanted to get myself a gun and kill a goose for dinner.
It is only in the last few years, before moving to Monticello, that I have remembered how I thrived on meat -- especially wild, savory game. Our freezer was full of every kind that inhabited Utah -- mule deer, moose, elk, antelope. There were birds, too, ducks, and geese, and fish -- along with half a cow from the Blaisdell ranch. And if my father ever asked me to run down to the basement and pick something out to thaw for dinner, I always chose the wild over the domestic -- that fresh, uncultivated taste that could almost be described like a fine wine, with hints of cedar sap, wild mushrooms, and sagebrush after a hard rain.
That is my kind of woman. So I would invite her, and maybe Terri Jentz, whose Strange Piece of Paradise I kept thinking about while reading Trespass -- they're both written by steely women out in the west -- even if that would mean I would be the drippy water sign at the table. But I would have a goose, with turnips and apples, and dressed in bacon. (I just noticed Paradise is remaindered at Amazon, so if you haven't read it yet, now that it's $5 you have no excuse.) Irvine is interviewed at KUER about her beautiful book.
March 07, 2008
Slate updates us on another memoir controversy: The Australian's campaign to debunk Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone.
But these denials haven't stopped the Australian from waging one of the fiercest, knock-down, drag-out literary feuds in recent memory. The fight pits three Australian reporters, Peter Wilson, David Nason, and Shelley Gare, against Beah, Crichton, and Silverberg. The standoff has spanned four continents and bled into cyberspace, as both sides have entered competing changes into Beah's Wikipedia page. Last month, Wilson tracked Beah around London during his European book tour, trying to land an interview after repeatedly being rebuffed by FSG.
Sadly, No on the Charlotte Allen Washington Post chat (Thanks to Jennifer for the link):
Someone at the Post needs to be fired over this. Badly.
March 06, 2008
Jennifer Knox is guest-blogging right now at The Best American Poetry. (See my interview with her from a few weeks back about Drunk by Noon.
Wajahat Ali has posted part 1 of a long interview with the ever-prickly (not angry! prickly!) Ishmael Reed: I have T.V. on all the time when I’m writing. I have music on. I’m engaged with the world. If the phone rings, I answer it. I’m not the kind of writer who sits around 8 hours a day writing. I’ll write in the morning, and sometimes I’ll get up 4 in the morning sometimes and do this Anthology I’m working on. Apparently part 2, to come next week, takes on The Wire. I don't know if I can link to something hostile to The Wire . . .
Barrelhouse Magazine's Growler has its "early spring" reviews up, including my take on Matthew Lippman's The New Year of Yellow
Jack London's poems get a bad review: far too many of the poems in this volume are stilted, their metric rigidity strangling the natural flow of the language. Written in the formal style of their day, which encouraged an artificial poetic vocabulary, formulaic phrasing and inverted syntax that seem laughable by modern standards, the poems read as occasional rather than essential, more like warming up exercises than actual expressions of genuine feelings and original ideas.
Magma Poetry has selections from its new issue online. And Octopus Magazine has its 10th issue online, including Bookslut favorites such as Dorothea Lasky and Jason Bredle.
Bookslut poetry columnist Dale Smith has edited a feature about Philip Whalen for Big Bridge: Whalen, the bachelor-turned-Zen-priest, accommodated his life to a provisory form of subsistence. By remaining free of teaching obligations he could, through extreme poverty, conduct his craft without inhibition. Like Olson, he drew on the work of Pound and Williams, but he took that inspiring modernist model in another direction away from the Olsonian epic toward the space of the long poem as material collage. His writing coordinated complex phenomenal registrations within the daily reality of a studious mind.
Poems by veterans; relatedly, see Larry Winters read at the Post Traumatic Press festival.
Jeannine Hall Gailey interviews Matthea Harvey about Modern Life: Robots are another old love. My first robot crushes were R2-D2 and K9, Doctor Who’s robot dog. I didn’t know anything about Astro Boy until you mentioned him to me, but reading about him and watching a few episodes, he’s clearly Robo-Boy’s cooler cousin.
Jeff VanderMeer, who writes the Comicbookslut column around here, interviews Toby Barlow about Sharp Teeth--in v-e-r-y free verse.
It's World Book Day. Or was. Or something. The Guardian asks us how the world celebrates World Book Day, and I have a feeling it's something like, "Huh? Is that today? Weird."
The Charles Taylor prize for Canadian literary non-fiction was awarded to Richard Gwyn for his title John A: The Man Who Made Us: The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald. 74-year-old Gwyn said about the challenge of writing compelling non-fiction, "You've got to write a solid book of non-fiction, your facts right and all the rest of it, but you've got to write in a way that pulls the reader in, that makes it accessible to the ordinary person... The truth is, a lot of our history is written in a very dull way."
Foreword Magazine has announced the 658 finalists for their Book of the Year Awards. All the books are independently published, and around 350 different publishers are represented by the really long shortlist. Winners will be announced on the 29th of May at BookExpo America.
The 2008 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a $10,000 award in honour of the late, lovely George Plimpton, has been awarded to Jesse Ball's story "The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp, and Carr". The prize, instituted in 2003 after Plimpton's death, is for an emerging writer whose work is featured in the Paris Review. Ball's most recent work is the novel Samedi the Deafness.
Philip Gourevitch, the editor of The Paris Review, has called Jesse Ball "a true American original—language-rich, mysteriously spellbinding, wise and elusive at once; he is that rarest and most exciting young writer whose every page, every paragraph, every line declares his command, his sensibility, his immense achievement and immense promise."
Margaret Howie, intern for Bookslut, has called Philip Gourevitch "so totally dreamy... he's like number four, if not three, on my contemporary literary crush list. I'd like to bake little cakes for him."
Jeannine Hall Gailey -- author of Becoming the Villainess, a book that I love -- interviews Matthea Harvey at the Poetry Foundation website.
Robots are another old love. My first robot crushes were R2-D2 and K9, Doctor Who’s robot dog. I didn’t know anything about Astro Boy until you mentioned him to me, but reading about him and watching a few episodes, he’s clearly Robo-Boy’s cooler cousin. I particularly love that Astro Boy prefers the cube shape to the shape of a flower, and I liked the scene in which his skin suit is pulled over his robot body. Astro Boy (with his rocket legs and laser fingers) is much more powerful than Robo-Boy, though: He’s a force for good in the world, whereas Robo-Boy is just trying to muddle through, like we are.
Harvey is the author of Modern Life, and was interviewed on Bookslut a few months ago. Harvey also gets a review by Bookslut contributor -- and fabulous poet -- Daniel Nester.
It's strange to agree with a book and yet still hate it. I agree with most of Eric Wilson's argument in Against Happiness: anti-depressants are over-prescribed, that sometimes those unhappy states are there for a reason and can lead to better ones, and the fact that some creativity is linked to mental illness makes the widespread usage of antidepressants a little scary as far as our literary future goes. Strange, then, that I still wanted to open my door, light the book on fire, and fling it out into the alley. Also strange that I found myself actually agreeing with Peter Kramer, a man whose philosophies I would sarcastically reduce down to Prozac for Everybody! The two came together in my latest column at the Smart Set:
Wilson loves melancholia. He wallows in it. He seems to want more of it for himself, breathlessly telling sad tales of artists more melancholy than he. If only we could all be this sad, this damaged, just think of the art we could produce.
March 05, 2008
I lied.
On Sunday, The Washington Post's Outlook section published a piece by Charlotte Allen under the headline "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?" Responses, most of them angry, flooded in -- hundreds of letters to the editor, more than 1,000 comments on the article on washingtonpost.com and more than 10,000 related blog posts.
Wednesday, March 5 at 2 p.m. ET, Allen will come online for a special chat to answer readers' questions about her article and the public's reactions and rebuttals to it.
I will be in a garden during that time, absorbing oxygen and colors other than grey, so ask her why she hates the ladyfolk so much for me.
I’ve seen the independent publishing houses, like the independent bookstores, disappear, bought up by multinational corporations: consolidated, conglomerated. Those few that survive do so because their owners have an independent income that allows them to soldier on with low or non-existent profit margins.
Umm, does she actually know any independent publishing houses? Because that certainly does not describe my favorites. (And it's a slightly idiotic thing to say, as if equating small publishers with vanity projects. Small publishers are still businesses. Next time I'm in the room with the indie publishers, the room filled with Cuban cigar smoke and trays of caviar and gold-leaf wrapped blinis, I'll be sure to ask them how little they care about people reading their books.)
I promise this will be the last post on the vile Charlotte Allen (and really, I don't recommend you spend the day Googling her and reading the results, or you will lose all faith in mankind). CJR accuses the Washington Post of selling out for page views.
You don’t have to be Nick Denton to know that pissing people off is a surefire way to increase your eyeball count. And, judging by the hundreds of comments the piece has already received, it’s a winner, tally-wise, whatever else its (many) failings. Because of that, we’ll probably see more similarly ridiculous pieces in the Post’s pages and elswhere. I, for one, am already looking forward to the paper’s upcoming eyeball-grabbers, “Asians Can’t Drive,” “Jews Are Cheap,” and “Old People Smell.”
When you're done with that, there's a palate cleanser at Jezebel: "Dudes do read comparatively intelligent books; I have seen it on the airplanes."
The gripping memoir of "Margaret B. Jones" received critical raves. It turns out it should have been reviewed as fiction.
The author of "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed autobiography about growing up among gangbangers in South Los Angeles, acknowledged Monday that she made up everything in her just-published book.
Her sister turned her in! It's not quite Kaczynski-esque, but that's gotta make family gatherings more awkward.
In this "Reviewers Reviewed" article, listing "Book Critics We Like," I would like to add Jenny Diski and Andrew O'Hagan. (And respond with a small "aw shucks.")
March 04, 2008
Sticky Pages
I was madly reading the sex chapter of Single State of the Union, a collection of nonfiction about being single, edited by Diane Mapes, for this week’s Sticky Pages column. I hoped for some hot single sex. You know, the kind you have when you’re single and think, oh this would be so much better if I were married to this person, and then you do marry him/her and you’re like, huh, well, I miss doing it on my futon in my one-bedroom apartment. I didn’t find much in the way of futon sex, but there are some very good sex stories in the collection.
Rachel Kramer Bussel’s “A Work in Progress” is an incredibly honest and poignant essay about her life as a single sex columnist -- her dry spells, her conflicting desires -- orgies and oodles of babies -- and her simply moving forward, day after day, trying to tie it all together.
“Next is Now” by Michal Reed seems a bit self-conscious, but gives hope to all women that the pool boy fantasy can come true.
My favorite of the collection is Sarah Iverson’s “Sex Ed.” The first line: “It is a large vibrator. The kind you plug in.” She’s in a masturbation workshop at Brown University. She’s seventeen and never really done it before. More importantly, she’s never come. Eventually she gets a boyfriend who gets her off and she begins masturbating during a semester abroad.
I know Sticky Pages is all about the nookie. And I’ll throw in a wee bonus* sex scene for you, but this week, my favorite passage is the moment when she returns from her semester in Morocco.
Page 162
When I come home, I break up with him and buy a vibrator.
“You don’t treat me well enough,” I tell him.
His is sad and generous. “My dad told me the same thing,” he says.
We part ways, and the last thing he says to me is either, “I’ll have to find someone smarter than you, because I’ll never find someone better in bed,” or “I’ll have to find someone better in bed than you, because I’ll never find someone smarter.”
I can’t remember which it was because I recall knowing with Tiresias-like clarity he would find neither.
For those of you, like me, who went to public school in Californian post-Prop. 13, Iverson explains that Tiresias was a guy in Greek mythology who had been turned from a man into a woman, then back to a man and was also given the gift of prophesy.
What a delicious break-up scene. I’d like to go back to a few of my exes and start batting around insults and prophesy under the guise of Greek mythology. I’d like to call a few guys and tell them they’ll never find someone as well read and as good in bed as I was. Except, the last time I was dumped, or did the dumping, I was in my twenties and everyone knows that until you’ve reached your thirties, you’re still messing around with the bestseller lists and thinking you’re something notable because you swallow. So if I did drop those guys a line, they’d first accuse me of cyber-stalking (moi?) and then they’d stare at me blankly. And then they’d rip my clothes off and purr in my ear about always dreaming about my thirtieth birthday and then we’d do it on my futon. Wait, no. Sorry, I’m still hunting for some yummy anonymous singles encounters in literary fiction. Anyone have any suggestions? Here’s the catch: it can’t be guilt-ridden. See, this sex scenes in literary fiction stuff is hard work.
*Bonus Sex Scene
(Page 160: Annie Sprinkle is hosting a presentation on female ejaculation at Brown)
Annie plays us a video in which she is spread-eagle on a table and serviced by a team of women in elf outfits. One fucks Annie with a dildo, one palpates her mammoth breasts, one rubs her clit with a gloved finger. Various permutations occur. Sometimes Annie gets a finger in her pussy, sometimes a dildo, and -- for one scary moment -- a fist.
Superimposed over this is a line graph that represents Annie’s level of arousal. This line mounts higher and higher, then spikes. Annie comes, with great howlings and thrashings. The elves murmur encouragement and redouble their efforts. Now the bar graph enters a plateau phase, and a clock appears in the corner of the screen, measuring the duration of orgasm. Annie sounds like a soprano doing bizarre vocal exercises. The clock hits one minute, then two. This has to be a world record. At some point, copious liquid shoots from her pussy.
-- “Sex Ed” by Sarah Iverson
This week's Guardian Digested Read: Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi.
Even I have secrets; dark, terrible secrets that torment my unconscious and spiral me into page after page of solipsistic diarrhoea on the unbearable angst of a west London literary colossus. Unbearable for you, that is. For me, they are the very essence of Thanatos and as Ruth Rogers shows me to my usual table at the River Cafe, I find myself ruminating on my drug-taking, tattooed, bisexual, mixed-race, single mother, council-flat living, anarcho-syndicalist sister, Miriam, for whom my dear friend, the eminent theatre director, Henry, has conceived a passion.
Dear Washington Post: If you want people to understand that your bullshit is "tongue-in-cheek," you should not hire a woman who has written widely as an anti-feminist. Also, you might want to check with the author to make sure she was being tongue-in-cheek. xoxo, J.
I would much rather read this meditation on death:
This preoccupation with death takes Julian Barnes on a journey that meanders as delightfully as the topic is melancholy. He imagines his own death and contrasts his parents' deaths – decrepitude versus dementia; he analyses various religious, ethical and even political approaches to death (via a bizarre case of amateur French cryonics and some faulty wiring). What would a "good death" be? Is there any feasible afterlife: harps and wings, the DNA of your children, your immortal literary works?
than, ugh, this one:
None of this stops him from waging an unspoken and lifelong competition with his father. The Freudian nature of this contest has not escaped him: "The length of my penis is 6" (boringly, frustratingly average); I've measured it several times. My father, though much smaller overall than I am, is, I'm pretty sure (glimpsed discreetly), markedly more well-endowed. No wonder he used to be such a sex fiend."
How exactly do you get away with lying about being raised by wolves during the Holocaust? Compare the skeptics to Holocaust deniers.
When Ha'aretz interviewed Belmont and mentioned historians who doubt Misha's veracity, she said: "That is exactly like the people who deny the existence of concentration camps. This is a true story. Everything that happened during the Holocaust is unbelievable and impossible to grasp."
I am simply going to acknowledge the existence of this and move on. I got 4 minutes and 27 seconds into it before deciding it was not going to be worth it.
March 03, 2008
Jim Shepard's newest short story collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway has won the Story award (which is, apparently, an award for stories).
Over on the internet, the shortlist for the Delete Key Awards (an award for 'the years worst writing in books') have been announced over at One Minute Book reviews. Between Atonement getting shut out of the Oscars and this, poor old Ian McEwan is having a rough month.
Will a self-published book ever win a major book award? (No. - Ed.)
The longlist for the Orwell Prize is out. Entrants range from Alistair Campbell's diaries to Marina Lewycka's novel Two Caravans (Strawberry Fields in the US), but, along with fellow Smiths fans the world over, I'm hoping for more recognition for David Kynaston's superb Austerity Britain, the detailed chronicle about how being British after WWII was really completely rubbish.
The full list:
Charles Allen – Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling 1865-1900
Tim Butcher – Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
Alastair Campbell – The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries
Nick Cohen – What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way
Orlando Figes – The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
Roy Foster – Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970-2000
Jay Griffiths – Wild: An Elemental Journey
William Hague – William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner
Ed Husain – The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left
Yasmin Khan – The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
David Kynaston – Austerity Britain 1945-51
Marina Lewycka – Two Caravans
Mark Lynas – Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
Andrew Marr – A History of Modern Britain
Timothy Phillips – Beslan
Raja Shehadeh – Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape
Clive Stafford Smith – Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons
Graham Stewart – Friendship and Betrayal: Ambition and the Limits of Loyalty
J. Wood is more obsessive about Lost than I am, and that's comforting. (Although, really, who needs porn when you have Sayid as Super Assassin? Seriously.) Wood is writing about Lost and Slaughter House Five and icosahedrons. Also, the Illuminatus Trilogy, which I mercilessly made fun of my sister for reading recently.
In interviews, I get asked a lot, “What’s it like to write in Brooklyn?” I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it’s like to be a writer in Brooklyn. What do they expect me to say? “Instead of ink, I write in mustard from Nathan’s Famous, a Brooklyn institution since 1916.”
I am going to condense Charlotte Allen's "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?" so that you don't have to read it.
Women! You are pissing me off with your emotions and your Botox and your Oprah! You should listen to me, even though I obviously can't think for myself since I bought into the Fox News storyline that Hillary was openly weeping instead of just getting a little choked up. And that Elizabeth Gilbert! How dare she get a divorce. Marriage is a sacred vow, made for life! She should have just stayed home and kept her mouth shut. Seriously, HOW DARE SHE. And lest you think I'm one of these bitter, lonely women, let me tell you. I am MARRIED. I have a HUSBAND. He would be LOST WITHOUT ME. Ladies, we are borderline retarded, we might as well just admit it. We should not be allowed to vote, or drive cars, or do math. Not like we could if we tried! Did I mention I'm MARRIED?
You're welcome.
Andrew Meier (have you read his Black Earth yet? You should) is at the New York Times Magazine profiling Edward Limonov, "poet-turned-populist who heads the National Bolshevik Party."
Not an Onion story:
A Belgian writer has admitted that she made up her best-selling "memoir" depicting how, as a Jewish child, she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust, her lawyers said Friday.
