October 31, 2008
Jennifer Howard looks into The Original Frankenstein, an attempt at restoring Mary Shelley's original version of the novel before it was tarted up a bit by her husband.
The Bodleian edition costs no more than a hardcover novel. To prepare it, Robinson returned to the Notebooks and stripped Percy out of the text altogether, leaving the reader alone with Mary's voice. Robinson also included the text of the 1816-17 draft, with Percy's edits clearly marked. The juxtaposition gives us a closer look at the creative give-and-take — word by word, sentence by sentence — of the Shelleys' relationship. It's a reminder that, as Victor Frankenstein learned when he tried to create life, sometimes there is no substitute for the original.
Impetus Press is sadly shutting down.
Daniel Handler analyzes the book preferences of our presidential candidates.
Obama's list says that he'd like to convey a willingness to face heartbreak and irony, that he's open to the new and to the experimental, but that he's serious of purpose and true of heart.
McCain's list says that sure, he reads books, but he's not a pansy boy.
I'm beginning to wonder if we should implement a tax system for reviews of graphic novels. If you mention Maus or compare a comic book writer to Art Spiegelman, you have to send him $5. Then maybe we can finally get a new touchstone in the reviews.
"I resist becoming the Elie Wiesel of the comic book," Art Spiegelman once said. Too bad! Just as the name Wiesel will be forever linked with Night and other Holocaust literature, so the name Spiegelman will be forever suffixed with "You know, that guy who drew the comic book about Auschwitz." It doesn't matter what else he does. He can draw a graphic memoir of 9/11 starring the Katzenjammer Kids (In the Shadow of No Towers). He can write and publish charming kids' books (Jack and the Box and Open Me… I'm a Dog!). He can crucify the Easter Bunny on the cover of The New Yorker. It just doesn't matter.
Slate has a slide show of his new book Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!
In Frankfurt there was a lot of discussion about the collapse of manga. Well, about the collapse and about how no one can figure out how to move those readers onto something else. But let's take the optimistic approach today and read about how manga took everything over in the first place.
Emily Dickinson's hemlocks are in peril: It is so much a mystery that a plan by the Emily Dickinson Museum and Homestead to cut down nearly 200 hemlock trees outside her window and replace them with a hedge has sparked debate and a question in the town she seldom left: What would Emily want?
As part of the Virginia Quarterly Review's fall 2008 issue, there are some new poems by Brian Turner, such as "VA Hospital Confessional" and "A Poem for the Last American Soldier to Die in Iraq": To be moved by the sheer accretion / of loss, that’s what this feels like, standing / in the scrub grass and the wind, gravestones / in their ranks and files before me. It’s as if / we must make a conscious effort / to recognize our failure to remember / just who these people were.. As a web supplement, Patrick Hicks interviews Turner. You can see Turner read "Here, Bullet."
The Exorcist is like Lyrical Ballads: Taylor draws a parallel between horror films as a genre and Romantic poetry. The poets, he says, were reacting against the Enlightened sensibility that everything could be figured out. The French Revolution happened and, "It reminded the world that there are forces that are very hard to explain." He cites author Mary Shelley, creator of "Frankenstein," as the direct link between the Romantic tradition and horror films. "Horror is about the underside of civilization, that all could come bursting out of us at any minute," he says.
In a guest spot at Lemon Hound, Patrick Rosal comments on Robert Hayden's poem, "Frederick Douglass": It’s one of the few poems I have memorized, one that I recite to myself in the subway or on line at the bank. Once, I was stalled in the basement of the Middlesex County courthouse waiting to be called up for jury duty. When we were directed to wait in a second chamber upstairs, the bailiffs made it clear we had to leave everything behind – bags, books, notebooks, pens. All I had was this poem in my head, reciting it over and over silently among strangers in a courthouse in New Jersey.
I wouldn't have thought Tao Lin's "I went fishing with my family when I was five" would make for a good reading. (Also see this interview from this spring.
At about 6 minutes in, this video turns into CA Conrad's poem, "Dear Mr. President, there was eggshell under your desk last night in my dream," which seems like a good thing to watch while waiting for the madness to end. And don't forget Wave Press's Poetry Politic, which will close up shop after the 4th.
October 30, 2008
I am trying very hard not to throw my laptop through a window right now, so expect blog updates to be sparse until the nice young men come over and fix it.
October 28, 2008
My favorite book of the year thus far is probably Metropole. I keep picking it up again to reread bits of this bizarre little book. My review is running at NPR.
The comparison to Kafka is apt, but Karinthy — a prolific Hungarian-born novelist and playwright who died in 1992 — reaches more for screwball comedy than tormented existentialism. Although angst is here in spades. Budai is a specialist in language and yet is so incapable of parsing the local tongue he cannot even understand the name of the woman he is sleeping with. It's as if he unknowingly hired Sartre as his travel agent.
I was talking to a friend last night about books that could slaughter you if they ended badly. I had forced Maugham's Mrs. Craddock upon her, and she was threatening to throw herself off a building if Mrs. Craddock did not get out of that marriage. If Budai in Metropole had stepped in front of a train, I possibly would have followed him.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike.
The next Christmas, Alexandra heard from Jane that her husband had also died of cancer. "Let's-s-s go to Egypt," Jane said with her usual s-s-sensuous s-s-sibilance that she used intermittently, and Alexandra hesitantly accepted the opportunity for another Lonely Planet roundup, interspersed with a pointless hex on a bat and endless chat about snoring, cock, incontinence, pussy, cock, death, ass and cock that was totally unconnected to the preoccupations of a male writer in his late-70s.
Iain Sinclair (London Orbital) had his invitation to read at a Hackney library rescinded after he published a London Review of Books essay criticizing the preparations being made for the London Olympics. (Link from Moby Lives.)
I would like to start an official year-long boycott of the Vancouver Courier for their headline: "Le Guin and Bear It." It's so bad it makes my teeth hurt.
October 27, 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: Phoebe Gloeckner
Phoebe Gloeckner is a comic artist best known for her collected stories A Child's Life and her illustrated novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Her newest piece appears in the anthology I Live Here (which is just beautifully designed, by the way). Her new story is another departure from her comix style. Rather than drawing the grizzly murders, Gloeckner constructs and poses dolls with superimposed photographic faces.
When I spoke to Phoebe we seemed to have somehow shared a nasty virus by breathing on our e-mails. Hopefully you won't get anything by reading this.
Your new piece focuses on a series of murders in Ciudad Juárez. What made you want to write on this?
Well, the woman who was putting the book together, an actor named Mia Kirshner, called and asked me to get involved. She asked me to travel to Mexico to research the circumstances surrounding a few of the murders in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, directly across the Rio Bravo from El Paso. I was hesitant at first, because I had just finished 4–5 years of work on a book, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and wanted to clear my head and get some paying illustration work. I Live Here was a labour of love for all involved, or so I understand—I don't believe anyone was paid for their work.
I hemmed and hawed and finally decided to do a story for the book.
The art here is drastically different from some of your previous work. Can you describe the process in creating the dolls for the story?
Well. A few weeks before I left for Mexico, I was hired to illustrate a book called The Many Joys of Sex Toys (by Anne Semans). I remember receiving a stack of documents from Amnesty Int'l about the murders of girls in Juárez the day I was beginning an illustration to accompany a chapter about "rectal plugs"—what they are and ways to use them. The text described preparing one's body to accept larger "plugs" by beginning with the smallest available—they are available in sets of varying dimensions. Some people would insert them for the day, even carrying them inside the rectum while at work—an exercise for the anal sphincter muscle.
Anyway, my assignment was to make this and other practices easily understandable and to help remove any attached taboo with clear and warm, friendly drawings—to make people feel comfortable with a variety of sexual practices they may or may not have previously considered or tried.
The Amnesty documents described the forced anal intercourse and concurrent strangulation of victims. They described the insertion, per anum, of splintered, broken lengths of wood. One victim was impaled in this manner and apparently was left to slowly bleed to death.
I suppose it's hard to describe the revulsion I felt after going to Mexico and then returning, two weeks later, to finish the sex book. It wasn't because I felt the sex manual was wrong or bad—it's because the wires in my brain had become crossed sometime during my immersion in all this. Drawing something, or trying to, requires that you create the thing in your head even if it's something you're drawing from direct observation. You aren't able to see the thing in three dimensions, but you're trying to suggest that it does indeed exist in space and communicate this illusion on a flat piece of paper with a goddamn pencil. Your brain sort of creates a wire-mesh version of your subject, much like a 3D modeling program does on a computer. You need to maintain this vision in your head while you're drawing, and before and after, as you try to get it right and to know whether you have.
And I was trying to draw an 11-year-old girl being raped in the ass by two middle-aged men while trying to draw a nice boxed set of heavy latex rubber butt plugs of varying sizes (they come in pink and brown).
I think I came as close to having a nervous breakdown (what is the modern word for such a thing) as I ever have at that point. Everything seemed bad, there seemed to be no reason to live. The line between sexual pleasure and sexualized rage had been eradicated. I went for a period of a month or two were I found no comfort in anything and couldn't work on either project.
It's quite hard to describe the hopelessness I felt, and [it's] even harder to communicate this to a voice on the phone who simply and cooly calls, with patience understandably wearing thin, to know when you'll have sketches ready.
Very depressing.
But hey, I came out of it. I finished the sex book. And I came up with a plan that I imagined would help me do the Juárez work with less personal damage and more quickly even!
"I'll use dolls," I thought. "I don't have to draw them. I can photograph them. And better yet, I can murder them and resurrect them, wipe the blood off their faces and give them clean clothes. I can give them a power the real girls didn't have, and perhaps give them a little afterlife too by telling their stories."
God I don't want to bore you, but the process of getting from the point of the idea to any result could easily fill its own heavy volume. I did try photographing dolls, dolls that I had already or bought on ebay or at garage sales, but the result was distant and silly and superficial feeling. It took three years beyond that point to teach myself how to make dolls that I felt had a soul—I exhausted every material I could think of—I couldn't sew, so I learned how to sew. I couldn't build, so I learned how to use big and little power tools. My studio requirements went from 100 square feet to I'll-never-have-enough. I had sand all over the floor to look like the desert. It was great to walk in, too, until my cats started shitting in it. So I mixed pounds of sand with library glue (strong, yet flexible), and painted layers of sand on huge canvas tarps to make a desert that cats didn't fancy as a toilet. Photography was another huge challenge. I couldn't ask for a whole lot of help because I couldn't articulate what I wanted to do. I didn't have a vision of what I wanted until I made 50 iterations of the same image. I continue to to work towards getting it right as I work on my current project.
You started out as a medical illustrator. Can you describe the transition into comix/literature?
It's not a hard stretch. I grew up sitting in my grandmother's office reading her surgical journals. The articles are illustrated with series of drawings, frequently with captions as well as explanatory text worked into the drawings themselves. I recall reading these long before I ever noticed comic books. Words and pictures combined serve well to communicate complex tales both pathological and humorous in nature. And comics and medical art seem to be two sides of the same creature, or whatever they say.
Also, I've got a compulsive need to note and record detail. This is possible and often desirable in comics and medical drawings.
I hear you're hoping to turn your story from I Live Here into a long-form narrative. Can you tell me more about the project?
I think I've already said something about it in a round-about way. The piece for I Live Here was short and rather general, not necessarily to its detriment (I have yet to see the book), but I had intended to do a whole story focusing on a specific girl, and sooner or later found that there was no way I could have gotten close enough to her in the time I had or had enough space in that piece to have done her justice. Obviously, I'll always be an outsider in Ciudad Juárez, but I had to spend enough time there to transcend the shock of difference. I can't say that I'm quite transcendent yet. The poverty is appalling and paralyzing the first time you see it, but I knew I was blinded by my shock. I've returned seven or eight times, getting to know the same people and the same streets even better, as well as going new places. At some point what was "other" begins to become normal, or IS "normal," no longer fully good nor bad, and this is the point where better observation and understanding is possible, do you know what I mean?
And now, the argument against Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize winning novel The White Tiger.
I did not know until I began reading the novel that the protagonist, Balram Halwai, is from the state of Bihar, where I was born and grew up, and which Halwai in the course of the entire book calls by the name Darkness. But more than the name was unsettling.
In the book’s opening pages, Halwai begins to tell the Chinese Premier the story of his life. We are introduced to the poverty of rural Bihar, and the evil of the feudal landlords. Halwai’s voice sounds like a curious mix of an American teen and a middle-aged Indian essayist. I find Adiga’s villains utterly cartoonish, like the characters in Bollywood melodrama. However, it is his presentation of ordinary people that seems not only trite but also offensive.
Kirsten Menger-Anderson offers the tracklisting to accompany her new novel Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain.
While I was working on Doctor Olaf, I saw Hieronymus Bosch's "The Extraction of the Stone of Madness". The painting depicts a doctor (wearing a hat that appears to be a funnel) cutting through the skull of a passive white-haired man while a woman with a book on her head observes. The inscription on the painting reads (and this is a rough translation) "Master remove the stone, my name is Lubbert Das." I was so taken by the painting that I wrote a short story about a character named Lubbert Das who gets trepanated, much like his Bosch counterpart, by one of Dr. Olaf's descendants in New York City. Which brings me to Wire, which also references the Bosch painting, incorporating the painting's inscription into the lyrics of "Madman's Honey": "master cut the stone out, my name is Lubbert Das."
I think on Chicago Tonight I said of Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture that it had "not a chance in hell" of winning the Booker, even though it was my favorite on the shortlist. Turns out it came in second.
The Economist's Intelligent Life has a feature on David Rees's Get Your War On: The Definitive Account of the War on Terror, 2001-2008.
In those early, angry days of the so-called "War on Terror", Rees took aim at what he knew to be absurd: the air-punching sloganeering that inaugurated America's long and complicated struggle against international Islamist violence. War on Terror. Dead or Alive. With Us or Against Us. Everyone wanted the fight to be simple, the bad guys clear, the good guys secure in the knowledge that they were doing right.
I realized I had packed all of the wrong books a couple days into my trip to Germany. I had brought mostly nonfiction and was craving fucked up science fiction. The English language section in the bookstores were decent. (I picked up Elizabeth Gaskell's Lois the Witch and Wilkie Collins's The Haunted Hotel, which was at least closer than The Book of Calamities: Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meaning -- what the fuck was I thinking? Probably that the Frankfurt Book Fair would be an exercise in suffering, and that Peter Trachtenberg could help me through it.) But the SF section was always one Philip K Dick book and ten Terry Goodkinds.
Luckily, while I was in Berlin I discovered that the night before my trip, when I was drinking while doing last minute packing, I shoved a Stanislaw Lem book into the bottom of my bag, and it was a relief. Then it was over, and I had to make do with a book about witch hunts. (Actually, I probably would have torn through it if my companion on the flight home had not been an adorable four-year-old Russian girl who wanted me to play with her for the entire nine hour flight. I got zero reading done, but I was at least happy about it.)
One should always remember the Graham Greene rule of packing books: pack the opposite of where you are going. If you are going somewhere pretty and calm and, well, German, pack fucked up shit. If you are going into a warzone, try some Trollope. My next trip is into Michigan, and I am trying to figure out what the opposite of Michigan is.
Although you wouldn't guess it, we're having a reading series on Tuesday, with Todd Hasak-Lowy, Doug Dorst, David Mura, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. I meant to update the readings page while in Germany, but yeah, that did not happen. So yes! Tuesday! 7:30 at the Hopleaf, as always! I will try to update the readings page and such, if I don't fall asleep again first.
October 25, 2008
I thought it would be a nice change not to check my e-mail for a week or so while I was in Berlin. The insane amount of undownloaded mail, however, crashed my fucking server. So if you noticed the site gone, or have tried to e-mail me and it bounced back, um, sorry about that. It is now safe to resend the e-mail, and I'll get back to you, I'm sure, when I'm wide awake at 1am, thinking, Huh. Now what?
October 24, 2008
Last night's technical difficulties seem to be resolved, so:
Apparently Wednesday in Cambridge a group read Paradise Lost aloud. All of it. And a podcast will be up soon.
Samuel Pisar explains, on the occasion of its performance next week in London, why he finally agreed to write a text for Leonard Bernstein's Kaddish: Ultimately Pisar "let the child speak"; and as a result, he has, he says, "attained a universal feeling precisely because it is so personal". In an audacious dialogue with God he reminds the deity that those who died did so with his name on their lips. Thus, they are bound to Him and He to them. "It's a complex concept yet also quite a basic one," he notes, adding: "Mine is a layman's kaddish, dedicated to your tormented children, Jews, Muslims, Christians, believers and non-believers."
$11,400 for an "original copy" of "Easter 1916."
Caroline Kennedy on her childhood love of reading: It was writing or finding a poem in a poetry book or anthology and picking a poem out that we liked, and either memorizing it or copying it over. That was one of the gifts we would give to my mother and my grandparents on holidays or birthdays. I think that really gave my brother and me an appreciation for that sort of independent reading and discovery.
3am magazine interviews Travis Jeppesen about his recent novel, Wolf at the Door. (I reviewed Jeppesen's Poems I Wrote While Watching TV a while back.)
The Washington Times reviews Inside Bob Dylan's Jesus Years, a documentary out next week on DVD. I guess I know what I'm getting Mom for Christmas: "Jesus Years" makes the perhaps easily overlooked point that Mr. Dylan's embrace of Christianity was as polarizing as his "Judas!"-eliciting switch from acoustic music to electric rock in the mid-'60s.
A documentary about the Beat poet Gregory Corso: "Corso overcame abandonment, a life in the streets as a child of the Depression," said Reininger. "He read his way through maximum-security prison, ended up as a poet in residence at Harvard, and ultimately met Alan Ginsberg and started the Beat movement. It’s a story of human triumph."
Via Paul Vermeersch, the German site LyrikLine.org (the link's to an English-language version) features poets from many languages reading their poems. (At least some of these poems have been featured at the Berlin Poetry Festival.)
Penn Sound has an interesting two-part interview up with Eleni Sikelianos.
Via Bookninja, "Baiku": "There are people who have a lot of trouble putting 'biker' and 'poet' in any given sentence," says Wolf, whose bike is a shiny green-and-black beauty with custom seats and a license plate that reads RDPOET. "My job and the job of folks in this club is to show that poetry is not what you learned in junior high school."
Finally, apparently William Carlos Williams was a *very* bad roommate.
October 23, 2008
Hearty and sincere congrats to Rawi Hage, whose second novel, Cockroach, has pulled off the pretty nifty hat trick of becoming a finalist for Canada's top three literary prizes: the Governor General's Award, the Scotiabank Giller, and the Rogers Writers' Trust awards. Hage already has an IMPAC Dublin Literary Award on his shelf (or wherever writers keep these things) for his first novel, DeNiro's Game.
Could the literary gatekeepers maybe do us a favor and spread out the shortlist announcements a little bit? Some of us are still recovering from the Nobel.
Mark Liberman over at Language Log has had a couple of fascinating posts lately about Sarah Palin, James Wood, and the word "verbage." I can't do justice to Liberman's reaction to Wood's New Yorker column on verbage, so I'll give you a excerpt and point you here and here.
Now in fact, I'll join Mr. Wood (and my fellow linguist Geoff Nunberg) in recommending against pronouncing verbiage as [ˈvɚ.bɪdʒ], or using it to mean "The manner in which something is expressed in words". But Mr. Woods treated this as Gov. Sarah Palin's "coinage", and wrote that "It would be hard to find a better example of the Republican disdain for words than that remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language". In contrast, I took the trouble to do 30 or 40 seconds of research, and discovered that the American Heritage Dictionary gives both her pronunciation and her meaning as secondary options, without any usage note, as does Merriam-Webster; and that the Oxford English dictionary traces the meaning "Diction, wording, verbal expression" back to Wellington in 1804, and forward through the 19th century.
Liberman goes on to knock Wood for his "childish egocentrism, which assumes without checking that 'This isn't how I pronounce or use this word, so it must be wrong; and I don't recall having seen this before, so it must never have happened before.'" The New Yorker comes in for some chastisement, too, for "its characteristic failure to exercise its duty to check the facts of language in the same way that it checks facts of biography or geography."
Nothing makes my day like the unveiling of the shortlist for a literary prize. So it brings me joy to tell you that the Man Asian Literary Prize finalists have been unveiled.
The drama here centers on Yu Hua's Brothers, a controversial bestseller (the best kind, really) in China.
Brothers is the story of two step-brothers, starting during the Cultural Revolution and moving through the economic reforms of the 1980s, where in the get-rich-quick society one brother creates a beauty pageant for virgins, and the other surgically enhances one of his breasts in order to sell breast enlargement gel. Panned by some Chinese critics, it has been praised by others for its compelling portrait of an increasingly materialistic Chinese society. The Man Asian judges described it as "a big, spirited comedy of society running amok in modern China".
It's been One of Those Mornings. I won't burden you with the details, which are tedious and annoying.
Somewhat less tedious, perhaps: A fellow Czech writer leaps to Kundera's defense, and the man himself threatens to sue the newspaper that ran the allegation that started the whole row.
Cartoonist Andy Riley's The Book of Bunny Suicides gets a second chance at life at an Oregon high school:
An Oregon woman who refused to return "The Book of Bunny Suicides" has changed her mind.
Taffey Anderson says she will make the book available for the Central Linn School District's review committee to screen. The Halsey woman recently said she would burn the book rather than take a chance on it returning to a shelf at the Central Linn High School library.
Anderson says the comment about burning the book was made in anger, and she regrets making it.
I wonder how Anderson will feel about Riley's new book, D.I.Y. Dentistry.
(Via.)
I am sitting in a Berlin Dunkin Donuts (as one does) so that I may pass along the news that Moby lives, for real this time. The Melville House Press´s shiny, pretty new website is live. Go take a gander, send them my love, and buy their beautiful books.
Now where did I put my sausage...
October 22, 2008
Dear Santa: I will believe in you forever if you bring me the new British Library "Spoken Word" CD for Xmas.
Rare recordings of some of the last century's greatest writers are to be released for the first time - from F Scott Fitzgerald reciting Othello to Tennessee Williams lambasting critics and Raymond Chandler drunkenly slurring his way through an interview with Ian Fleming.
The British Library CDs are a literary goldmine, with recordings of 30 British writers and 27 from the US, most of whom are being heard for the first time since they were in front of the microphone. They include the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf, the sole recording of Arthur Conan Doyle, battily explaining the importance of spiritualism and the existence of telepathy, and Gertrude Stein incomprehensibly explaining how she writes.
Arthur Conan Doyle speaks! How cool is that?
Courtesy of the Washington Examiner: the "ultimate guide to pairing alcohol and literature."
Your friends at Bookslut remind you to read responsibly.
Sara Gruen, author of Like Water for Elephants, will be doing a live chat tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern time on Gather, "the social network with substance for the 30+ set."
And something for you Chicagoans:
A new gallery devoted to books and periodicals by Chicago-area publishers and authors has opened at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph Street at Michigan Avenue. The Chicago Publishers Gallery, a permanent collection of more than 1,500 books, as well as numerous magazines, newspapers, journals, independent “zines,” and comics, showcases Chicago’s thriving publishing industry.
October 21, 2008
Attention DC-area readers: Local arts editor and critic Mark Athitakis has compiled a pretty comprehensive list of who's reading in these parts over the next few months. Check it out at Athitakis' American Fiction Notes blog.
Trendy vocabulary word of the day: celanthropy (philanthropy wrought by celebrities).
Watch/listen to our new poet laureate, Kay Ryan, strut her stuff in a rather charming, self-deprecatory way at the LOC. (Fast-forward through the intro by James Billington if you want to get directly to Ryan's reading.)
This adapt-or-die stuff is getting old, even when it comes from Paulo Coelho.
Doris Lessing likes cats. I like Doris Lessing for having had a cat named El Magnifico.
(Via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.)
"Pat Kavanagh was so feminine--but she could be so fierce"
I'd like to think that Robert Harris didn't write the headline that runs with his appreciation of his late, legendary literary agent. Then again, he does refer to her as "feline in looks and temperament" and "more like a dancer in style and appearance than an agent."
Of course they say that about Andrew Wylie too.
Books that sell well during a financial panic: cookbooks, thrillers, personal-finance titles, Warren Buffett bios, and...the oeuvre of Naomi Wolf.
Outside a Manhattan Barnes and Noble bookstore, Anne White, 64, an artist from Newbury, Massachusetts, said she bought "The End of America" and "Give Me Liberty" by Naomi Wolf.
"I'm hoping I will see some answers about what I can do, because you feel a little hopeless about the whole thing," said White. "The financial crisis represents the greed that is taking place in the United States right now."
October 20, 2008
Books about DJ culture. Read 'em and spin.
A whole bunch of old-ass books have been nominated for the Australia-Asia Literary Award, which considering that there is two continents and a sub-continent to draw from, is puzzling, until you ken: they want prestige, and all that high rolling, big pimping literary shit. Says none other than Western Australian Premier Alan Carpenter, "It is a relatively small amount of money, but in terms of literary awards around the world it is big time".
Repping with Alan is the longlist:
J.M. Coetzee - Diary of a Bad Year
Matthew Condon - The Trout Opera
Michelle de Kretser - The Lost Dog
Ceridwen Dovey - Blood Kin
Rodney Hall - Love Without Hope
Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mireille Juchau - Burning In
David Malouf - The Complete Stories
Alex Miller - Landscape of Farewell
Haruki Murakami - After Dark
Indra Sinha - Animal's People
Janette Turner Hospital - Orpheus Lost
If you read Alex Clark's Booker Judge Diary and thought, That's the life for me!, here's the chance to join the panel of another middlebrow, British-ish, promo-sticker lovin' book award. The Costa (formerly the Whitbread) Award is recruiting. I think that it'll be like being in the X-Men - you're a mutant with special powers.
News broke recently that Milan Kundera, as a 20-year-old student, handed a spy over to the Czech secret police. This revelation, understandably, has not done much for Kundera's image. In the American Prospect, my friend and former editor Richard Byrne parses the charge that Kundera was a collaborator:
And the headlines accusing him of "communist collaboration" (as the Guardian put it)? Absurd, wrong-headed and even stupid. Of course Kundera was collaborating with communists in 1950! He was a communist! To conflate this incident in 1950 with cases of active collaboration with the secret police in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s -- after the show trials, after the Soviet invasion in 1968, after the creation of Charter 77 -- is completely inappropriate. Doing so is a sign of the poverty of the Western narrative of communism and its downfall, and not a signal of some moral weakness in Kundera.
But Byrne--a playwright and journalist who knows the Eastern European scene first-hand and has his own blog, Balkans via Bohemia--doesn't exactly let Kundera off the hook either:
The deeper question, however, is how the reader should assess Kundera's approach to many of his pet themes -- memory, betrayal, and the defense of history against the violence done to it by our political leaders East and West. Knowing now that he denounced a spy is no violence upon memory, but it can certainly be read as a sin of omission in his nonfiction. And his fervent denial of it now that it has been uncovered may indeed be a sin of commission, an attempt to erase memory by an author who has so eloquently denounced such actions in his works.
Jim Hynes knows a thing or two about horror. (Just read Publish and Perish if you don't believe me.) A couple of years ago, Maud Newton asked him for a list of 10 terrifying tales. Now he's posted another list, James Hynes Presents Stories for Late at Night, over at his blog, Cultwriter:
It's Halloween again, my favorite holiday, and I'm trying to get in the mood, despite the fact that the scariest thing I can think of right now is Sarah Palin being elected to...well, anything, really.
How'd he choose?
I toyed with the idea of making this new effort a themed list: short stories that had been adapted for the Twilight Zone, or stories that had been published in the New Yorker, from the days when the magazine used to publish macabre stories by writers like John Collier and Roald Dahl, or stories from the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies I loved as a kid, which were my gateway drug, the very books that hooked me on horror even before I discovered M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft. But rather than limit myself to one of these themes, I've done a sort of mash-up of them all. Not all of them are ghost stories, some of them are borderline science fiction, and some of them are more unsettling than they are flat-out scary. Their one commonality, in fact, is that most of them are dark and melancholy rather than gut-wrenching in the manner of a contemporary torture porn or J-horror film.
Contrary to popular belief the Library of Congress does not keep a copy of every title ever published.*
Nobody's perfect.
(*Message you get when you can't turn up what you're looking for in the LOC's catalogues.)
Over at the Guardian, John Freeman says that the short list for the National Book Award proves that Horace Engdahl doesn't know what he's talking about:
All of the finalists are in dialogue with world literature. Salvatore Scibona, who built a sad, beautiful story around one day in Ohio in 1953, is influenced by Halldor Laxness. Marilynne Robinson, who continues the story of Gilead in Home, has written extensively about the influence of John Calvin on her thinking and work. Hemon has said he works in dialogue with Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kis, Isaac Babel and William Shakespeare, among others.
I appreciate that Freeman wants to defend American lit, but is it wrong of me to wish he wouldn't? I'd rather let the writers speak for themselves--if they're not too busy dialoguing with Shakespeare and Calvin, that is.
Good morning, blogosphere. Jennifer Howard here, sitting in for Jessa while she's on the road. If you've got literary news, tips, or provocations to share, don't be shy; send 'em along.
Speaking of provocations: The Swedes have Horace Engdahl, we have Andrew Wylie.
October 19, 2008
One last last thing: Tomorrow morning the lit world gets more than it deserves with the relaunch of Mobylives!
October 18, 2008
Ok. I think my time is (way past) up here. So thanks for reading and for sending in all the news items.
I'll away go back (after pie, ok?) to shipping stuff out to all the people who bought books in our Obama-fundraiser sale, setting up readings for Ben Parzybok's debut novel Couch, and publicizing (hey look kids!) Michael Dirda and Lizza Aiken's event (Nov 16th, 1PM, ok??) at Books of Wonder in NYC for The Serial Garden.
Last item anyone in the Happy Valley who likes kid's and fantastic art should go to the Eric Carle Museum this week and see the "Flights into Fantasy" exhibition which has weird and great stuff from Kay Neilsen and many others.
On Friday I was without internet access at UMass Amherst library while reading for the next The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror -- the most recent one just came out -- and apparently the internet did not notice I could not update this blog. Dammit. (Recommendations of fantasy short stories always welcomed.)
October 16, 2008
Nikki Giovanni talks with NPR about her new book, Hip Hop Speaks to Children: Children's literature, Giovanni says, is like folk literature — and the folk "had to have a way of conveying information," so they used a cadence.
The British Library has bought a large archive of Ted Hughes's papers, avoiding the national shame of losing all the poet's material to Emory.
Craig Dworkin is interviewed on the Ceptuetics radio show about the UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing. From his introduction to that collection: what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with "spontaneous overflow" supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the poet's ego were turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the poem itself? So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.
Todd Swift considers to what extent syntactical innovation is going mainstream: In a paradox that I think has not yet fully dawned on British poets, modernism's no-nonsense tenets propelled the sort of Protestant work ethic of the Movement style, and its purities of diction - Davie, after all,
admired Pound.
K. Silem Mohammad has an excellent post proposing a relationship between poetry and stupidity. (I once reviewed an excellent book on psychoanalysis entitled Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology, and generally am sympathetic to arguments suggesting the point of knowledge is something other than mastery: The susceptible stand before poetry like gullible five-year-olds before uncles who pull coins from behind their ears. Initially, it's very impressive--and being impressed in that way is a true pleasure--but if they are capable of learning, eventually they develop some savvy and learn to see the uncle as a schmuck unless he can come up with some more impressive tricks. Depending on the strength of the savvy, at some point no trick, no matter how spectacular, will make any impression, because even if one doesn't know how the trick was done, one knows it was a trick. This is why only children and idiots like magic acts. Or other magicians, who are always looking for new techniques to use on their own idiots.
One thing you don't see much of in the magic business, I'm guessing, is magicians who fall for their own tricks. That wouldn't just be stupidity; it would be insanity. In poetry, however, it's fairly common. Draw your own conclusions.
Mohammad, Nada Gordon, Sharon Mesmer, and Gary Sullivan read at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
At InsideHigherEd.com, Alan Contreras writes about how to honor Reginald Shepherd: t is sometimes easier to describe what a poet didn’t do and didn’t like rather than to classify his work into a poetic taxonomy. There were no pallid stones in Reginald’s work, he never attempted to leap chasms on melting wings of assumption, he had no time for the poetry of pathological personalism, he recognized that after a certain point economy of expression becomes chastity of imagination, he had no allergy to facts and he wasn’t about to geld any lilies merely because critics preferred parsnips — let the lilies show their stuff.
The Turkish epic poet Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca has died.
Via Silliman, Heather A. O'Neill offers a retrospective of lesbian poetry: With the Librarian of Congress appointment of Kay Ryan as the nation’s 16th Poet Laureate this summer, we decided to look back on some of the great lesbian poets and poems throughout history.
William Gibson can see the future and apparently the world will end in 2012 when the PALIN/WURZELBACHER ticket will run away with it all:
If this dream ticket seems hopelessly far-fetched, to you, just remember that Karl Rove and I are both huge Borges fans.
Bobby Byrd, co-publisher of Cincos Puntos, pointed me toward this NYT City Room blog piece on a fascinating looking b&w graphic memoir, Pitch Black.
Note: when writing about people living underground, there will always be trolls!
Australian Margo Lanagan's stories can be a short sharp shock. Her new novel Tender Morsels is rich, fertile stuff. In her imaginary interview within an interview by either Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert she says:
JON/STEPHEN: Well, reading this book blew the top of MY head off. It wasn't so much the sex scenes, as the... Look, I went back and made some notes. Your new novel - for our young readers, remember, people - begins with a witch-girl and a height-challenged man having a roll in the hay, right? Then it proceeds through not one but two very graphic miscarriages, which are the result of the heroine's incestuous abuse by her father. THEN [deadpan sweep of the studio], we have a birth scene, followed soon after by a rape scene - a gang-rape scene, no less. Do I have this right so far?
More after the cut.
Is the reader a tender morsel you chew over as you write?
The reader is not exactly the farthest thing from my mind as I write a story, but they're some distance off. I've found that it just gets in the way of the writing if I think of any reader bar myself, until quite a way along in the process.
That said, the reactions I get make me think that, yes, people can feel a bit chewed up and spat out after having read a Lanagan story. And Tender Morsels is no different; it really puts you through the mill before the good stuff starts. All the way along, though, I scatter pretty things, sparkly things, so that you'll have a hard time resisting being drawn into my lair. And afterwards, you'll be so glad you visited!
Why should adults read books marketed to young adults?
(a) So that we can converse intelligently with the younger adults in our lives.
(b) Because young adult literature is where a lot of the good stories are living these days.
(c) Because we should always defy marketers' expectations of what we'll like, just to keep them on their toes.
If you were given 5 minutes on national TV in the US (say an interview with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert) what would you say?
Oh geez, Markus Zusak gets thet kind man Charlie Gibson, and I get the wasp-tongues? That's not fair!
Well, after Jon/Stephen had mentioned all Tender Morsels' sexual content and general weirdness and darkness, and waved the book around and asked "What is in the WATER down there in Australia, that your young people read this sort of story?," I would say:
"This book sits right on the upper edge of the YA category, and in fact in Australia it's fallen right off the fence and is published as an adult book. But, categories-schmategories, Jon/Stephen - this is just a story. I'm going for a sense of story that may be hardwired into us, or at least is laid down when we're very young, and never goes away. If you've ever enjoyed being creeped out by a campfire story, or enchanted by a fairy tale - or in fact if you've ever had an imaginary refuge that you go to in your head, a mountain cave or a sunlit forest glade - you'll like Tender Morsels. This story is the kind that pushes everyday life out of your head completely."
JON/STEPHEN: And replaces it with fornicating bears?
MARGO: Well, bears have gotta do what they gotta do, no? And I have it on good authority, from one grown-up female reader, that some of these bears are dead sexy. There's a lot of bad sex in this story, but the bears get some of the good stuff.
[I've never seen Stephen Colbert in action, but Jon Stewart would give one of his deadpan looks around at the audience at this point.]
MARGO: Don't you think so, Jon/Stephen?
JON/STEPHEN: Well, reading this book blew the top of MY head off. It wasn't so much the sex scenes, as the... Look, I went back and made some notes. Your new novel - for our young readers, remember, people - begins with a witch-girl and a height-challenged man having a roll in the hay, right? Then it proceeds through not one but two very graphic miscarriages, which are the result of the heroine's incestuous abuse by her father. THEN [deadpan sweep of the studio], we have a birth scene, followed soon after by a rape scene - a gang-rape scene, no less. Do I have this right so far?
MARGO: And then there's attempted suicide.
JON/STEPHEN: I was getting to that.
MARGO: And then everything gets better.
JON/STEPHEN: Before it gets worse again. I mean, is there any form of depraved human behaviour or suffering, Margo, that you would not urge our wholesome American teens to explore?
MARGO: In a book? No. A book is the perfect place to envisage and consider the things that pain, or revolt, or frighten you. A book is a place of safety; you always have the option, unless the book is on the school curriculum, of closing it if things get too graphic or too close to the bone for you.
JON/STEPHEN: And you don't think there's a risk of Tender Morsels finding its way onto the junior high curriculum?
MARGO: It would be wonderful for sales, but I wouldn't want to be answerable for the consequences for your teenagers' psyches. This is a book you probably shouldn't read before you're ready.
JON/STEPHEN: As an adult, I found this novel spellbinding, almost literally. It was like being in a fairytale, but I could feel and taste and smell that world, you made it so real. And it was funny! I can hardly believe that a book with so much dark stuff in it made me laugh out loud so often!
MARGO: Oh, there's some silly stuff in there.
JON/STEPHEN: I don't think we should restrict its readership to the young adult category. People, however old you are, or young, get yourselves a copy of Tender Morsels, why don't you? I promise you, you won't be sorry.
Doug Lain posted an interview with Jeff Ford on the newish blog How to Write Stories about Writers:
Ask any writer who is publishing today who had Gardner as a teacher and they’ll tell you he was great at it. We didn’t bother with the Moral Fiction bullshit when he was teaching me, he was trying to show me how to edit and talking to me about irony and suspense and the things that make a good plot.
The Guardian quiz wants to know how deeply you're invested in the Booker brand. About 50% for me. Must brush up on my scandal.
4. Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the prize in 1993 but which other novel was also published in the same year and failed to make the shortlist, prompting its publisher to describe the judges as "a bunch of wankers"?
October 15, 2008
Orhan Pamuk has 70,000 books. Jealousy is setting in. Pamuk was at the Frankfurt Book Fair talking about his new book, Museum of Innocence, which comes out here, uh, sometime:
Some of you expect a love story to be sweet and sickly... but when I talk about a love story, it is more like a traffic accident or a serious disease.
EW does a version of the Guardian's digested read ... on a Brady family memoir:
I don't want to demean what happened to McCormick, which is very sad, but if there ever was a book that didn't need to be written, it's this one.
The National Book Award nominees came in and it turns out that all the nominees are American! They all wrote books! Also: It's Gender Equivalence!
Nominees after the cut. Congrats to all the peeps!
Fiction: Men 3, Women 2
Nonfiction: Men 2, Women 3
Poetry: Men 4, Women 1
Kid's: Men 1, Women 4
FICTION
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)
NONFICTION
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt)
POETRY
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)
YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE
Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum)
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Alfred A. Knopf)
It's Teen Read Week (ok, so I like YA books, I'm only here for a couple more days) and everyone is celebrating books with bite. Note: not books that bite.
Alan Gratz and Dial Books have put his first mystery, Something Rotten, up for free, to get the word out for Something Wicked. (Guess which plays these books are based on!) Wish they were downloadable—we do that at Small Beer and people like choosing their own formats—instead of only on Scrib'd. One step at a time.
Sometimes it seems like that obnoxious guy who said people in the US don't want to read about the rest of the world is right. Right now it's certainly annoying as we just published a novel about Cambodia, Geoff Ryman's The King's Last Song, and the silence has been, um, resounding? Gah.
But then sales go nuts for the latest Nobel Prize winner (Mr. LeCrazio!) and Charlie Rose is talking to a Syrian poet, Adonis. Maybe maybe the world doesn't stop at the borders after all?
Ever since he "received a package from Juneau, Alaska — its ends taped over with duct tape several times over, my address written on a black magic marker, in a tight, clipped scrawl (without my name) and with no return address" Twin Cities genius poet Alan DeNiro has been taking his life into his hands transcribing the "Palinomicon":
The paper is caribou and pancake
breakfast leaflets,
cremated all-together, then breathed
Upon by tasered polar bear.
Harper’s publisher Rick MacArthur (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur's grandson—you may have heard of their foundation...) claims You Can’t Be President. Maybe he knows your secrets? Chicago is getting ready to welcome home this local hero and his populist message:
Anything can happen. But this is the general rule: Follow the money and you will find the presidential nominees of the two Corporate Parties.
Or as MacArthur puts it: "One Abraham Lincoln does not a democracy make."
And even then, remember that Abe was his time's version of a corporate lawyer.
Scott Pack wonders why Norman Thomas di Giovanni's translations of Borges' work were replaced and points toward some rare Borges material available online for anyone to read for free:
If Borges himself was such a fan of Norman's versions then why would the estate replace them? Could it have been something to do with that 50/50 split of royalties? Did they just feel it was time for fresh translations? Did they want to relaunch Borges work to the English-speaking world? Who am I to say?
Answer: Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, which last night won the 2008 Man Booker Prize.
Question: What will your aunt's bookclub be reading next March?
Responses are piling up - the Times is quite jolly over the result, saying that 'The White Tiger is an exciting novel because it understands how to make reality suit its needs.' The NY Times has got their mind on the money and the money on their mind: 'Mr. Adiga joked, “The first thing I am going to do is to find a bank that I can actually put it in.”'
The BBC, in their wisdom, decided to crop a photo of the shortlisted authors to remove Adiga and make it appear as if the rest of the writers are shilling their books down the market.
October 14, 2008
YA bestseller Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes) lets slip the secret of inspiration:
How do you stay inspired? You don’t. How do you stay in love with the book you’re writing? You don’t.
One of my fave books from a couple of years ago was M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party—which went on to win the National Book Award. Today the 2nd volume comes out and everyone should run out and get it so that when it wins a passel of awards you'll be able to say you read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves way back when. After the cut: Anderson on Obama and more:
Did you walk around Boston (or sail down to Virginia) to get a feel for what Octavian had to do?
Boston now has almost no resemblance to the city in the 18th C. We've chopped down the hills and filled in the Back Bay. We've removed all the offal, damn it, and chased out the public swine. So though I did go on "walks" through the city, it was via period maps and prints. I tried to imagine what various spaces must have been like before the Revolution -- and what changes the Revolution must have wrought on the landscape as the city was fortified. I wish I could see the city in the period ... I hang on little hints we get of what it was like, in memoirs like Royall Tyler's The Bay Boy. He talks, for example, about what it was like on the Sabbath -- when no one worked, according to holy statute -- and you'd walk down the street and hear the sound of rough-hewn hymns and Bible readings coming out of the windows. Rock on, Boston!
I did go to Colonial Williamsburg and environs -- and I'm going there again in a few weeks. By sheer coincidence, they're holding a reenactment of some of the events dramatized in The Kingdom of the Waves. It will be very moving to see these things played out.
Why was Octavian Nothing split into two volumes?
I felt it would be more 18th C. They were always dividing their books up into volumes like this. Also, the story falls into two pretty clear halves: In one, he's sympathetic to the Patriots, in the other, he has joined up with the Redcoats. In one, he's passive, in the other, he's increasingly active. And so on.
In the upcoming election, who would Octavian support, and why?
Well, this would be kind of a no-brainer for him. Not simply for the obvious reason of racial solidarity (though Obama's bid itself would make him weep with joy) -- but because Obama's tax plan, with its emphasis on the American worker, rather than the 1% of the country which profits enormously from America's hard-won (and expensive) stability and from the labor of millions, would seem to him just -- and a clear recipe for growth.
He would also have a big crush on Michelle O. But then again, so do we all.
Watch Lisa Gabriele hilarious attempt to get a $1/4 million in funding for her next Great Canadian Novel on the Dragon's Den, stop laughing, then go see her read tonight with Courtney Queeney and Lily Hoang at the Bookslut Reading Series, upstairs at the Hopleaf, 7:30.
October 13, 2008
Part of today's mail (ok, Saturday's, it can take a while for Stuff to be Dealt with) was a great packet of stickers from David Erik Nelson:
In just 22 days these stickers will either be the vinyl badge of a proud, hyperpatriotic, and enthusiastic America, or a sad reminder of dashed Hopes.
Sweet indeed.
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: Cristy C. Road
Cristy C. Road's newest novel, Bad Habits: A Love Story, speaks with a mind not unlike Lynda Barry's in a world recalling that of Maggie and Hopey. Through a Brooklyn immersed in sex, drugs, and violence Road weaves her story between words and abrasive-yet-stunning illustrations ranging from the literal tugging at the heartstrings to recharging a robotic pelvis. She sets her story in words that flow the way words were always meant to flow in a brief description of Brooklyn:
…like Brooklyn, the human heart is divided into several humble portals, each with a function, relevance, history, and culture distinct to its region. Every developmental blow cripples the antiquity of its boroughs, and every imperfect experience cripples the wellbeing of every corner of the heart. But the city doesn't stop, and the human heart trudges with clandestine motivation.
I spoke to Cristy this week about the reason, method, and motivation behind her latest work among other things.
How have your roots at Greenzine impacted your work today?
I wrote Greenzine for about ten years (age 14-23), and it ultimately built the foundation for everything I do. All of my creative projects have really just popped out of me, organically, one after the other. The whole process was pretty gradual—I began writing just about Green Day and how they saved my life. How the "sellout" dichotomy always felt a bit classist to me. It seemed like such an economic privilege to say success was evil, so I had to gripe about it. Eventually, I started writing about other punk rock bands, as I delve much more into the subculture- outside of Green Day. That experience led to writing about my personal views on sex, gender, racism, and such things that were beginning to completely destroy my worldview. Fortunately, the punk scene provided a platform where I felt comfortable writing about these things. Before I knew it, I decided the fifteenth issue of my zine should be a novel, due to its long content and subject matter.
It was about being latina, punk rock, female, and queer while growing up in Miami in the 90s. I wanted to attempt to reach out beyond the confines of indepdendent zine culture by putting it out in book format, and that lead to where I am now- putting out Bad Habits.
Bad Habits calls to mind Lynda Barry's illustrated novel Cruddy. Has this inspired your work at all? If not, what has?
I loved Cruddy! It actually was the only illustrated novel I had ever seen that wasnt strictly in comic-book format. Although, through my early years, the stuff that really affected me and pushed me to create anything was a hybrid of my favorite song writers (like Billie Joe from Green Day and Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill), John Kricfalusi (Ren and Stimpy, Spumco), Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets, Locas), Eric Drooker's art, and a lot of writing that is pretty stylistically different than mine: Toni Morisson, Dorothy Allison, Tom Robbins.
In writing Bad Habits, how did you manage the illustration and writing aspects? Did one instruct the other, or were they more complementary processes?
I tend to write first, always. I write all day, everywhere I go; but drawing is more of a planned process. Once I had a concrete story, I started art, but of course that wasn't so structured. I definitely had spurts of ideas for art, made it, and re-wrote certain parts of the book in order to fit the new image. So it's not the most stable process, but I've learned I can't work any other way. I tried the whole storyboard thing. It was a nightmare!
How do you think your writing has changed between working on Indestructible and Bad Habits?
I basically started reading a lot more fiction (and English grammar books); and this inspired me to focus on my writing differently than I had in the past. I never really took English classes in high school seriously, and growing up, I wrote in both English and Spanish (my first language). I focused on English, obviously, living in America and all—I just didnt really know what I was doing, which I believe is the best way to learn! (Dabbling in appealing, yet alien terrain) I had always written in a more poetic/song format: many, many fragments and useless sentences that look hella good on their own. With Bad Habits, I wanted to stray from that.
Another thing I learned between the two projects was how to tell a story, thus displaying a theory as opposed to writing out the theory with little explanation on the time/place/characters. I felt I had to do everything differently in order to be better at this, since i was no longer writing short pieces for zines (and Indestructible was very much like that, except on a consistent subject, so in chronological order it made sense as a novel). Basically, as I grow I ramble and over-analyze a lot more, so I sorta had to learn SOME structure. What started as a short story that was going to be 100 percent illustrations (with occasional text bubbles) turned into Bad Habits… It's 'cause I'm a Gemini. And we don't shut up. It's all good change. I even learned how to use semi-colons! I don't just use them 'cause they look cool!
You worked on a series of illustrated novels based on Esther Bell's upcoming Flaming Heterosexual Female. Can you tell me about the film and how you got involved?
Oh, Esther and I met through mutual friends when we both lived out in Philly, when she began working on the script. Unfortunately, we've stopped working on that right now! Getting a movie out is hard work that I can't even imagine, so the novels are being put off for a while until plans for the movie itself solidify. Tragic.
If you were asked to write and illustrate a Sarah Palin biography, how would it look and where would you start?
I would start by making sure it's written through a truthful and objective lens as opposed to those of her tyrannical allies. Then, I would make sure I have the freedom to illustrate her agenda through my own lens; thus exposing the inhuman effects her politics would have on society. The lighting in such drawings would be dark and grim. The story will conclude with a classy full color piece showing her severed head inside of a giant condom, encircled by a montage. This montage will illustrate the outcomes (STD's, pregnancies by way of abuse, dead polar bears) of some of her proposed VP policies. Basically, before engaging in such a project, I will ensure the author ties her TRADITIONAL VALUES to such unfortunate circumstances such as GENOCIDE, BLINDNESS, and complete and utter POWERLESSNESS; specifically among the minds/bodies of American women.
I will also make sure to remove that over the top contour from the illustrations of her face. Homegirl needs some assistance at the MAC counter at the mall, dear god.
William Smith of Hangfire Books has one my fave blogs about smutty books, bookselling, bookplates, and so on. If you're delicate and love books as physical objects, his latest post may put you off your afternoon delight:
If you have a sensitive constitution or are easily offended by violence against books please stop reading now.
I meant it.
Are you still here?
Marcel Reich-Ranicki thinks there are too many book prizes in Germany (just like here!):
"I don't belong here among all this rubbish," the 88-year-old critic and author said from the stage of the annual German Television Awards gala in Cologne. "I have been given many literature prizes in my life, but I don't belong in this line-up. If the prize was linked with money, I would have given the cash back too."
Andy Hatchell, one of the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards judges, tweeted the results to his lj last night. So futuristic.
And the winners are . . . Ginn Hale for her debut novel, Wicked Gentlemen, and Joshua Lewis for his lovely story "Ever So Much More Than Twenty" from the anthology So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction, edited by Steve Berman. The winners are right from the roiling creative edge of publishing: So Fey was originally published by Haworth Positronic Press, who then dropped their fiction line so the book is about to be reprinted by Prime—a POD behemoth, if that's not an oxymoron—and Wicked Gentlemen is published by Bellingham, WA-based Blind Eye Books, an indie press (with hilarious guidelines) who sell thousands of books at yaoi conventions and other spots not counted by Bookscan.
October 11, 2008
Yes, yes, yes, one last thing before I go, and it is self-promotion. My latest column at the Smart Set is about pornography, but I wanted to point out what a remarkable little book Debbie Nathan's Pornography is. It's designed to be a small primer on the different viewpoints, and in under 100 pages, she manages to be clear and focused and thorough. And it's handsome and fits in your pocket. As I try to cram hardbacks into every available square inch in my bags, it's something I appreciate more and more. To the column!
But the discussion of pornography really isn’t just about the Internet and DVDs anymore. These days porn does not stay in its little XXX-rated boxes. It influences a huge swath of our culture, from clothing — and for anyone who had swooned in horror at the sight of an 11-year-old girl wearing pants that say JUICY across the ass, I feel your pain — to mainstream entertainment to advertising. And not just advertising directed at men, like the “Drink Remy Martin and You’ll Have a Threesome” ads that currently greet me outside my door every morning. Ads for products directed at women also take on pornographic imagery, like the Clinique ad of a woman’s face with a white splotch of moisturizer coating her eyelid and cheek. I have yet to figure out why this is appealing: “Clinique Moisturizer: Kind of Like Having a Man Ejaculate on Your Face.” But it is, of course, eye catching.
October 10, 2008
Bucking Nobel Lit Award fashion by being happy, pretty, and French, Le Clezio is easily the best arguement for book prizes I can come up with. It's just a pity that none of us can buy his books yet, but perhaps you were one of the lucky sods who beat the bookies at their own caper. Imagine if last year we'd been told that literature was likely to provide a better return than hedge funds.
It's all enough to dull the horror of Ginger Spice winning some pretend sales nonsense prize item for her genuinely ghastly children's books, or the grinding tedium of people moaning about how the Booker prize doesn't really mean anything, does it?, until my ears hurt and I need to smack them (probably with this). Speaking of the Great British Book Fandango, the hullabaloo reaches a zenith next week. If you're in London, you can buy tickets to watch the authors sweat it out on the eve of the announcement.
I am getting ready to leave for Germany, and there is still much to be done. The stack of 20 books has to be winnowed down to a reasonable number, and that takes ages. Important questions have to be asked, like, Can you read Jung on a business trip? What is the ideal ratio of Books You Have to Read and Books You Have Been Dying to Read? Also, how high is the potential risk of doing permanent damage to your back carting all these bloody things around?
Anyway, I'll be gone for two weeks, and Gavin Grant and Jennifer Howard will be filling in for me here. Have a good October.
Phil Ponce did not giggle after saying Bookslut (and I was also alarmed to be told "Phil read your blog entry"; I really have to remember this blog exists outside of my own head), and I have proof: Chicago Tonight is now archiving its show online. You can watch my segment about the Booker Prize if you like.
Mick Imlah, editor at TLS, has won the 2008 Forward prize for poetry, for The Lost Leader, his first book in 20 years. Read "I'm not suggesting he was Oscar Wilde." Kathryn Simmonds's Sunday at the Skin Launderette won for best first book. You can see her read "The Woman Who Worried Herself to Death."
In Bookslut's October issue, Kate Greenstreet (the proprietor of Kicking Wind and the author of case sensitive) has a terrific interview with Stephanie Strickland: I've made one collaborative work, Errand Upon Which We Came, which incorporates sound. It is difficult in that it adds another element to track, both artistically and technically. I'm not fond of sound that "illustrates" or "captions" or directly voices text onscreen. Things like sferics (lightning-induced radio signals), or the sound of image -- because we can transform those signals one into the other -- that sort of thing fascinates me.
David Alpaugh asks, "What's really wrong with poetry book contests?" (.pdf): They are being rendered less effective each year by the supply side economics that has subsidized their exponential growth and that promises even more in the foreseeable future. (Via The Great American Pinup.)
Shirley Dent on radical British poetry: There is poetry around today – particularly by young poets – that is genuinely startling, formally innovative and striking in content. But it is far subtler – and as a result far more disturbing – than the plethora of poetry that self-consciously labels itself as politically radical.
Michael Atkinson on Mary Ann Hoberman, who is the children's poet laureate: For grown-ups, children’s poetry poses its own set of receptive and authorial issues. For instance, the empathic connection we’re used to enjoying with a poet through his or her poem—the hearing of the poet’s voice speaking directly to us, and our consideration of the poet’s intentions and personality as mediated by the poem—is so subjugated to the image of the child reader receiving the work that our bond with the writer can often be nonexistent. When we naturally admire the poetry of Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstein, we’re not looking back, as it were, toward the poets and their self-expression, but forward, to the next lucky kid whose life may well be changed in the reading.
Rachel M. Simon reads at From the Fishouse. (I reviewed her book, Theory of Orange, in the July 2007 issue.)
It's a little mesmerizing to hear Ferlinghetti reading his version of "The Lord's Prayer" while the record spins.
October 09, 2008
The anthology I Live Here, besides the fisting picture, has some interesting stuff, although nothing as interesting as the new piece of work by Joe Sacco, "Chechen War, Chechen Women." New York Magazine has an excerpt.
More about translation today: listen to this translation episode of the World of Words (MP3 link). The German translator of Infinite Jest talks about the death of David Foster Wallace, a segment on translating poetry, and also translating in war zones. (Thanks to Anne for the link.)
The Guardian podcast talks to Richard Holmes about Age of Wonder and the meeting of science and art in the Romantic age.
Daniel Hahn won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his translation of José Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons, a book I quite liked. He's in the process of translating his fourth Agualusa book, Estação das Chuvas, and is keeping a diary at Translated Fiction.
In this blog I hope to examine the translation process, working through a novel from my own first launching into a first draft, right up to publication. It’s not a blog about the life of a translator – musings about translation generally, reports of events I’ve attended or readings I’ve given, people I’ve met at launch parties, books I’ve read – but intimately about a single piece of translation work, which I hope will bring you closer to the experience, to the pleasures it brings and the questions it raises.
France's Jean Marie Gustave le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said.
Le Clezio, 68, is an ``author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization,'' the Academy said on its Web site. He was born in Nice in 1940.
October 08, 2008
I'll be on Chicago Tonight this evening, discussing the Booker shortlist. If you want a drinking game to go along with my appearance, take a drink every time Phil Ponce giggles after saying "Bookslut."
You know, when you get a package from Random House, the last thing you expect is to open the book they sent and come across a very graphic image of a woman getting fisted. I don't know how to feel about this new direction they appear to be taking in this book.
The Telegraph reviews Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
Building on a generation of revisionist scholarship that has been barely visible beyond the groves of academe, Holmes triumphantly shows that the Romantic age was one of symbiosis rather than opposition, in which scientists such as Sir Humphry Davy were also poets and poets such as Coleridge had a shaping influence on scientists - we discover indeed that it was Coleridge who was responsible for the early 19th-century invention of the term 'scientist' as an alternative to the older nomenclature 'natural philosopher'.
October 07, 2008
I have a framed picture of Mr. W. Somerset Maugham on my living room wall. He sort of scowls down at me. I had it framed a few days after an ex moved out -- it seemed fitting since the spinsters are always the most interesting characters in his novels, and they get all the great lines. All of this is to explain that I have a seriously deep affection for Maugham's works.
Which is why I'm bookmarking the new blog "A Year with W. Somerset Maugham." It's already inspired me to pack The Summing Up for an upcoming trip, and I geekily wait to see what else comes up.
Rolf Potts brought me a couple Little Blue Books when he came to Chicago for the reading series, and bless him for it. (If you have not read his Believer article about Emanuel Haldeman-Julius and the Little Blue Books, you really should.) He included two stories by Haldeman-Julius himself, co-written by his wife Marcet, like "The Girl in the Snappy Roadster." I am in love.
Fannie was as snappy as her shining new roadster. Five feet four in height, weighting not more than one hundred and fifteen pounds, she was a trim thing. Her rather plain face was not pretty, but it was vivacious and intelligent. Although she was 27, her blonde hair worn in a long bob with curls clustering around her neck made her look not more than the 24 which she admitted. She had sharp, lively blue eyes. In her simple stylish clothes she caught the eye and filled it. Moreover Fannie had a way with men. In a quiet, unobtrusive, cautious fashion she was experienced. She had long since decided that she preferred married men of substantial position. They were careful and never talked. She had a prejudice against drug store sheiks, and had definitely decided that she didn't like "kids." Fannie was quick, resourceful, inventive. She could turn her hand to almost anything.
It's a shame these don't seem to be available anywhere, they're lovely.
I was having some computer problems yesterday, so I eventually gave up trying to put up the new issue and went to clean sardines for two hours. I don't know if you've ever cleaned a large bag of sardines (gut, cut off their heads, rip out their spines with your fingers) but it is strangely meditative. And then you roast them with olive oil and sea salt and it is the best fucking meal ever. Wait. Where were we? Oh yes, new issue in a bit, now that everything seems to be back to normal.
October 06, 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: Shannon Wheeler
Have you ever read Shannon Wheeler's Too Much Coffee Man series? If not, then you should. Not because I told you. You should because it's bizarre, hilarious, and oftentimes bewildering in all the right ways. That and it was made into an opera (twice!). Wheeler's newest offering, Postage Stamp Funnies, is a three-book box set about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Each page is a story unto itself, spanning from a wine bottle longing for its lost glass to a fecal judging panel. If you don't feel like collecting back issues of The Onion (because why would someone do something so silly?), you can pick up the collected strips via Dark Horse.
Where did the idea for Postage Stamp Funnies come from?
The size of the comic came from the Onion wanting me as a cartoonist. They said they hadn't figured out their page layout so they weren't sure what size I would have. I told them that I'd draw a comic any size and they gave me a postage stamp sized space. I love it. The title comes from Bill Waterson (I think) complaining about the ever-shrinking size of comics on the comic page. He said that eventually they'd be the size of postage stamps.
Even the packaging is pretty unique. Was this your idea?
It was my idea to use that sort of package but I have to admit that I stole the package format from Maurice Sendak's Nutshell Library collection. Those were my favorite books as a kid and I've always wanted to do something similar.
What were some of your favorite stamps to work on?
The word balloon saying "aaarg" that pierces the guy. I love how the brain thinks he's saying "aaaarg," then switch to seeing it as a physical object that's piercing him, then the brain switches back because if he's pierced he must be saying "aaaarg", etc. The right-brain left-brain switch back and forth is great.
How would you describe the process in creating short form comics like this to, say, the Too Much Coffee Man series?
The longer format is like dribbling down a basketball court. It doesn't have to be perfect you've just got to get to the other side. Doing a gag comic is like shooting a basket—either it makes it in or it doesn't.
There was an opera (and sequel/refill) for Too Much Coffee Man. How did this come about, and how did it turn out?
The Too Much Coffee Man opera was an amazing event. I still can't believe it ever happened; it's so improbable. A composer approached me and asked me to write a libretto. When we were just about finished with the piece I happened to be in the right place at the right time and met the director for the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. They agreed to co-produce it. Of course, even after the pieces were in place, it took an incredible amount of hustle to get it actually staged.
What are you working on now?
I've got a couple of projects that have been written by other people that I'm very interested in drawing. One is a kids' book called "Grandpa Won't Wake Up," and the other is a graphic novel called "Drunk and Drunk Dwarf." I should be finished by about 2010.
This interview is a little Local Public Radio Station sounding, but I did like Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine so much.
Hadley Freeman (whom I love) takes a break from her fashion duties to write about children's books written by celebrities.
The time has come, the celebrity column said, to talk of many things: of Jools - and David - and Madonna's bilge, of Jordan - and Geri. Huh. That didn't scan quite as well as Lewis Carroll managed, but then neither did the works of any of the aforementioned. You see what we did there? Form echoed content. Man, this literature crap is easy to toss off.
October 03, 2008
Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners is now available as a free download.
Most of the Banned Book Week stuff I've read has been dreadful -- the standard newswire-type stories that are just reprinted once a year. And then there's this:
"I don't suppose an affair is out the question," asked the languorously effete Michaelis. "Why not?" she replied, before yawning as he prematurely ejaculated for a seventh time.
"What ye need Ma'am," said Mellors the gamekeeper, "is the swarthy ever-ready cock of a horny-handed son of the soil. A man who will call your cunt a cunt and a fuck a fuck and will pleasure ye till ye can take no more."
The Guardian digests some banned books for you, in case you can't find them on your library shelves.
Nick Bertozzi and the SVA Comic Book Storytelling Workshop have adapted some O Henry stories into comic book form. They can be read online.
This election season is proving to be the most exciting one in decades. A black candidate! A female contender! Widespread fear of an economic recession! Retarded babies! Well, the latest issue of Black Clock, published twice a year by the California Institute of the Arts, won't help sort through and make sense of the process, but it will provide you with political reading material rife with humor and intelligence. Some of the pieces are didactic, such as Anthony Miller's compilation list of the best campaign writing; some are nostalgic and investigative, such as the e-mail correspondence between Steve Erickson and Michael Ventura in which they discuss the virtues and faults of the two golden candidates pre-Obama nomination; and some, like Seth Greenland's journey into Al Gore's chagrined conscious, are just effing hysterical.
I am completely brain dead from a reading series on Wednesday, followed by filming another video yesterday. (I am slightly disturbed that the whole video project doesn't have a name yet. Maybe I should hold a contest for a name and give as a prize... let's see, what do I have around here? A handful of awful YA galleys? A failed pound cake? [Not my fault. The cookbook crazily asked for the butter to be added directly to the dry ingredients instead of whipped with the sugar, which is madness.] A catalog from an art book publisher? All of this can be yours -- and more! Good lord.) Just warning you in advance, in case I start blogging about my hair or something.
October 02, 2008
The week started off somberly, with the death of Hayden Carruth. Perhaps the best tribute is at MetaFilter.
Emily Gowers reads Lucretius: Lucretius sharpens our eyes not just to observe daily miracles, but also to prepare us to confront the unconfrontable: the moral abyss opened up in Epicurus’ city, Athens, by universal plague; the degeneration of civilized mankind after its first grunting, self-interested stabs at a social contract; and the unmanageable terror of “void”, which means both the vacant parts of the physical universe and the gaping hole opened up by death.
Janet Maslin reviews Billy Collins's new book, Ballistics: The title poem in this supple collection, a book in which Mr. Collins reiterates many of his usual themes with a healthy dose of his usual panache, performs one of his best-enjoyed feats: skewering poetry. Other people’s poems are favorite targets, although the pedantry of the poetry-related workshop, classroom, students’ notes and interpretation also excite his most entertaining ire.
Felix Dennis on the difference between crack and reading: He tells me about the crack years. "Let's say," he says, "that you've made a huge sum of money, and you're spending your time with all these beautiful ladies of the night, taking vast quantities of crack cocaine - of the highest quality, by the way - and having a fantastic time. But do you know what? You do regret it. And I don't regret any book I've read. I don't regret any great painting I ever looked at. I don't regret any wonderful piece of music I ever heard."
Found poetry: Sarah Palin. Meanwhile, the Times commissions anti-Biden light verse.
I have a feature on recent evolutionary science writing in Boldtype this month, and last week wrote about the use of Flickr in the new Babar book for GeekDad.
Melissa Lion is incredibly in demand these days. Good for her, not so good for Bookslut. We're looking for a replacement for her blog series on literary sex scenes and the cookbook columnist. You don't have to do both. But if you're interested, please e-mail me.
Neil Gaiman is in Downers Grove tonight, reading at the Tivoli theater. (Downers Grove = one of Chicago's super scary suburbs. They have no sidewalks, and in the winter very rich women go grocery shopping in full length fur coats.) If you are torn between the reading and the vice presidential debate (currently I'm trying to decide if watching it will make me want to jump out my window), you should know his readings are being recorded and posted online. He's reading a chapter of his new book The Graveyard Book a night, so at the end of his book tour, the whole thing will be online, read by Neil.
The Phoenix profiles Kelly Link, who has a new YA short story collection called Pretty Monsters.
In this New Republic review of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Christopher Benfy mentions Lowell's near-miss marriage proposal:
"I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can't cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. I've never thought there was any choice for me about writing poetry. No doubt if I used my head better, ordered my life better, worked harder etc., the poetry would be improved, and there must be many lost poems, innumerable accidents and ill-done actions. But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had."
Bishop's characteristically down-to-earth response to all this melodrama was basically: get a good shrink and don't drink.
I'm rather tempted to get a copy of Weird Chicago: Forgotten History, Strange Legends, and Mysterious Hauntings of the Windy City, but if the ghost chapter does not include my kitchen -- where wine glasses fly, measuring cups spin, pots begin banging -- how comprehensive could the book actually be?
October 01, 2008
Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.
Counters the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation: "Put him in touch with me, and I'll send him a reading list."
Counters smart ass Chicago blogger: "If the National Book Award finalists for the past couple years are on that reading list, dude, you're not helping."
