November 26, 2008
I was going to take this whole week off, stay on my couch wrapped in a duvet reading Jonathan Coe and Daphne du Maurier, quite happily. But Anneli Rufus's Stuck, which I'm reading for a column and therefore have to finish, is driving me crazy and I would kind of like to soak it in bleach.
I will say this about it: If you complain, at length, about confessional misery memoirs (and really, no argument here about that), are you then allowed in the same book to tell your own miserable story about the hip brace you had to wear in kindergarten? No, I don't think you are. Nor should you be allowed to write half the nonsense that is in this book, but more on that later. I have to make a pumpkin cheesecake now.
November 21, 2008
Watchmen, Condensed. (Link from Journalista.)
Michael Faber talks about The Fire Gospel at the Telegraph, as well as his days as an atheist, and his feminist past.
"I have a lot more sympathy for males these days. Before I was published, I thought men read car manuals or books about football. But once I started having really serious conversations with male lovers of literature I let go of that prejudice. Male lead characters are starting to creep into my work and some of them are lovely."
Someone please slip him a copy of My Gender Workbook.
I am getting to the point in Night Work by Thomas Glavinic where I am realizing the author has no idea what is really happening in his book. I don't particularly need a perfect explanation for why there is only one person left on the planet, or why he starts filming himself when he sleeps only to discover that his sleeping self wears a ski mask, throws things at the camera, puts knives in walls, etc. I don't need it to make sense, but I would like it if I felt like it made sense to the author.
There are only 25 pages left, but I don't know if I'll bother. I've moved on to another book about sleep disorders, Jonathan Coe's The House of Sleep. It's making me much happier.
'Hanging Wallpaper with Ernest Hemingway'
There's a video of Roy Blount, Jr. speaking for about an hour about his new book Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, ... With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory.
November 20, 2008
Jennifer Howard has a terrific story up at the Chronicle of Higher Education about a marathon reading of Paradise Lost. She's even got video.
But *group* marathon readings are for wimps. John Basinger has memorized the whole thing. (He's got clips, too.) From the Hartford Advocate: For about 15 years now, Basinger has worked to memorize Milton's epic. That's right, memorize. And in honor of Milton's 400th birthday, on Dec. 9, Basinger plans to perform a marathon recitation of the poem on Dec. 13 and 14. He guesses that if he starts at about 9 in the morning, he might be able to wrap it up — burning through all 12 books — at around 3 a.m. In preparation, Basinger has been in training, generally working his way through one book a week every Sunday at 2 p.m. at Middletown's beloved free-form performance space, The Buttonwood Tree.
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire has won the National Book Award for poetry. Paul Lisicky, Doty's partner, has been blogging the event and its aftermath: Just to let you know no one around here’s getting too big for his britches… we spent some hours today cleaning the apartment. I’m talking low-down-dirty, down-on-the-hands-and-knees cleaning. Borders is coming over this Saturday to shoot a video inside the apartment, and though we’d hoped to hire a housecleaner, our one possible point of contact—another poet who shall remain nameless here—has apparently driven all her former domestic employees into friendlier lines of work.
Tim Gaze is interviewed about asemic writing: My primary intention with all this asemic stuff is to compile books, printed in black & white, influenced by typographic design, rather than being art books. I'm pointing these books towards pubishers of fiction & poetry, & aiming to attract an audience interested in stimulating new ideas, as well as fans of graphic novels. I like the idea of mass-produced books of simple, enjoyable material. (Via the International Exchange for Poetic Invention.)
Penn Sound Daily has put up a page with approximately 20 recordings of Louis Zukofsky: The earliest of the seventeen readings contained in our Zukofsky archives is a 1954 appearance on Berkeley's KPFA Radio, which includes a number of excerpts from 1946's Anew, as well as "A"-11 and the second half of "A"-9. Selections from Anew and 1941's 55 Poems comprise much of the setlist from his 1958 reading at the Poetry Center at the San Francisco State University, as well as a historic 80-minute homemade tape for the Library of Congress, recorded in November 1960, which also features lengthy samplings from Some Time, Songs of Degrees, Catullus and Barely and Widely. Another homemade tape from the following year includes Catullus 1-46 (save 18 & 19).
Apparently the first recipe for fish chowder to be published in the US . . . was this poem.
November 19, 2008
When I was a kid, I liked to keep things on my bed. Pretty much all things. Mostly clothes (I hate being cold, even for a second, so I would start layering while still under the covers) and books. Every book I was reading, that I might be interested in reading, that I had finished a while ago and quite liked, would be stacked up in my bed until I only had a tiny sliver of free bed space, approximately the size and shape of me lying on my side.
This horrible habit has come back, and the stacks of books took over half of my bed while I was reading for my latest Smart Set column about gender. It wasn't just the three that made it into the review -- Kate Bornstein's brilliant My Gender Workbook, Katrina Karkazis's Fixing Sex, and Thea Hillman's Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word). Also The Riddle of Gender and On Female Body Experience and Sexing the Body and god, even a few others. This did nothing to help me sleep, as if I opened my eyes at 2am, I immediately had an excited "Oh, I'm awake, I can read some more" moment which fucked everything up. But between Hillman's writing style and doodling and writing and taking quizzes in My Gender Workbook, it was the most fun I've had researching in a while.
As I was filling out Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook, doodling in the box that says “Draw a perfectly gendered person,” taking the quizzes to find my Gender Aptitude, and learning to adjust my definition of “transgender” to include anyone who breaks with the traditional portrayal of gender, which would include everyone from drag queens to boys in eyeliner, I started wondering how the me of five years ago would answer these questions. Obviously, I would be drawing “my gender” a bit differently. In my present drawing my gender has a cloche and a fur stole. But five years ago I was in the final throes of my Boy Phase (or, giving my current tendency towards glammed-out femininity, what a friend has recently titled my Pre-Op Period), a span of several years of dressing in men’s clothing and cutting my hair short. Even when I was forced to put on a dress for a work function, I was frequently called “sir,” no one noticing the dissonance created by my skirt.
If you are a successful writer, no matter what you do or where you go, you will be hounded by people who have a manuscript they'd like you to take a look at. Even if you're Graham Greene, hiding out in a leper hospital in the Congo.
We tried to protect Greene from people’s curiosity. The most obvious nuisances were those who wanted his opinion on some manuscript they had in a drawer. The number of people in a colonial town looking for a publisher is amazing. They usually showed up after five o’clock, ‘just to have a beer’. We were well rehearsed. As soon as a car was spotted turning off the road and into the long alley of palm trees, Greene would rush into the house, jump through our bedroom window, and out into the forest.
We are not seriously using Keith Gessen as an example of "How the World Works," are we? In order for this essay about the online backlash against All the Sad Young Literary Men to mean anything at all, it would have to provide ample background about Gessen's smug involvement with smug n+1 (and the crazy e-mails almost every blogger I know has gotten from n+1 writers), Gessen's involvement with Emily Gould, a former writer for the website where most of the ire shot out from, and a basic understanding of how writers have used the Internet well. As it is, Kirsch manages to completely miss the point. It wasn't envy that caused the ruckus; if anything I think it was the Internet offering a nasty correction to the swoony critical praise and fawning NYT profile.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
Out-li-er, noun
1: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from others in the sample.
2: yet another attempt to cash in by presenting a whole load of seemingly counterintuitive facts to tell you something you basically already knew.
Steve Toltz's Fraction of the Whole made the Wall Street Journal wonder, "What ever happened to editors?"
November 18, 2008
Can we stop calling events like this one with Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Wolpe "debates" or "discussions"? They are the wrong words. Maybe "Acts of Not Listening to One Another," or "Pontificating, Alternately."
Vice Magazine talks to Lynda Barry about What It Is, the evils of wind turbines, and why she wrote Cruddy out by hand.
I wrote it with a paintbrush on legal paper. I don’t think it would have happened any other way. I came to that way of working because I had been trying to write a novel on my computer but the problem was that dang delete button. You can get rid of something before you even know what it is. Also there is all the difference in the world between tapping a finger to make an “a” and drawing the letter “a.” For me at least, it’s the movement of my hand that makes a story come to me. After ten years of trying to write a novel on a computer in the way I thought novels were written, I gave up. I remember walking around my workspace saying “OK! OK! If I were doing this, how would I do it?” And I realized that all I needed to do was do what I did when I made a painting or a comic strip. That meant slowly and by hand. It seems like writing a novel with a paintbrush would take a long time but I finished the first draft in nine months. I had the best time working on it. The story was so alive and unexpected. It seems like slowing way down is no way to write a story but it made Cruddy the way it is.
A poet has been forced to launch his new collection in the street after a bookstore cancelled the event because of a campaign by Christian activists.
Patrick Jones was due to sign copies at Waterstone's in Cardiff but the shop cancelled the event at the last moment.
Christian Voice said the book was "obscene and blasphemous" and called on the chain to remove copies from stores.
We could use more obscene and blasphemous poets, not fewer. What was so obscene about the book, however, no one will say in the news story.
I have been getting an increasing number of romance novels lately, and for the most part they're more scary than fun. (Hey, I went through a romance reading phase at 11, too, like every good preteen girl.) But while most of the books are just slightly disturbing, like the unbelievable number of romances involving demon kings and dark princes (can't you just fuck Trent Reznor and get it out of your system?), nothing comes close to being as scary as A Mermaid's Kiss. A mermaid! And an angel! In love! Oh my god, that will never work! I spent a long time trying to decipher the cover art. "Why the fuck is he holding a feather? Oh right, from his wings. He's tearing out parts of his body to give to her? Oh god, I feel sick." I left it on top of a newspaper vending thing (is there a word for that?) so I would stop staring at it.
5 Things I Learned About Women from James Bond Books.
Sorry, I'm still trying to put my brain back together after a long Amtrak trip yesterday.
November 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: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Some pretty interesting things have happened in the past two weeks, especially in California, Arizona, Florida, and Arkansas. Aside from the election of not only the first black president but what seems like light at the end of a dark, eight year long tunnel, a bewildering bit of a gray area still exists. Two factions were brought into the limelight—the religious anti gay marriage camp and proponents of gay marriage. But there are other viewpoints that haven't been covered (or in most cases welcomed) that should be heard and digested, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore shares that view.
Sycamore's novel So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights, 2008), as well as many of her nonfiction works, portray a queer worldview that isn't so much expressed these days, what with the advent of Boy Meets Boy to Queer Eye to The L Word and that annoying gay couple in Desperate Housewives (I swear I'm not watching this). For a good introduction, I suggest you pick up the newly revised edition of That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull, 2008). Read it, digest it, sit on it for a week or so, and make a conclusion afterwards. Or you can just read it and enjoy it. Whichever works.
First off, tell me a little about yourself. When did you start writing and why?
I started writing as a kid, I mean maybe when I was eight or nine and I would write these elaborate stories where the walls were made of emeralds and the ceiling was amethyst and the floor lapis—escape, I guess. I didn't know how to talk about what was really happening.
Later I wrote poetry and eventually that got pared down to almost the opposite of those childhood stories, language poetry where I would try to condense everything that was happening to me and all of my experience into a few words on the page that could maybe shift your breathing. I started writing stories again after I started turning tricks when I was 19, after remembering I was sexually abused and I lived in a culture of radical queer outsider misfits and outcasts—dykes and strippers and activists, anarchists, drug addicts, runaways, queers escaping abusive families and trying to survive in messy and sometimes transformative ways
I started writing stories again because my friends said you have to write that down, and even though I was more interested in trying to change language than in conveying literal experience, I tried writing them down anyway and almost immediately this became a way for me to process and express the worlds I engage with and against, so that I wouldn’t disappear.
What are some themes you believe pop up most often in your writing? How are they significant to your identity as a writer?
Well, let's see—a lot of the themes that appear in my life, I guess—incest, sex work, sex for pay and sex for play and when you can't tell the difference, gentrification, the nightmares of assimilation, hopelessness, sudden moments of connection, music, dancing, personal collapse, chronic pain, activism, homophobic violence, a search for intimacy, struggling to survive the overwhelm of the everyday, breakdown, drugs and trying not to do drugs, flamboyance, the queen's vernacular, and queer dreams and messiness.
So I guess my identity as a writer means trying to express all of these worlds and their contradictions.
Your new novel So Many Ways to Sleep Badly was written in an interesting stream of consciousness narrative. I've also read that you've written this in spurts due to fibromyalgia. Did this inform the narrative and structure of the novel? If you were to write another novel, would you use a similar approach?
I used to always write in crazed manic spurts, like if I didn't write something down then I might die or fall apart, and when I developed all this chronic pain that started in my wrists I couldn't write like that anymore. Since writing has always been one of the ways that I survive, I got really scared and thought, "Oh no, what am I going to do?" So then I decided to try and see my physical limitations as a strength in my writing process instead of a weakness, and I wrote two paragraphs a day with no intention of plot or structure. My idea was that then I would take a look at the whole thing when it was 200 pages and see what the hell it was. I mean, I meant it to be a novel, but I wasn't sure.
What I wanted to do was to expand the flow of my writing rather than limit it, and so I would take something from the radio or something someone said to me on the phone, or a hilarious experience on the street or at Whole Foods, and maybe an incest flashback, a terrible trick, and some amazing music, and I would put it all together in one paragraph. What was so exciting is that it actually worked. I've always said that I don't believe in conventional plot structure, that it limits the possibility of voice and tone and texture. I mean my life doesn't have a plot to less I'm hovering in a helicopter up above and I did that for my first 18 years in order to survive, and now I want to be down here where I can feel things more. But anyway the repetition of theme and subject and especially voice actually gave this crazy thing some kind of structure that worked, and then, since I'm a neurotic editor, I spent another few years editing it like maybe nine or 10 times from start to finish, and eventually it ended up between two covers. Yay!
The first time I heard your name was when the anthology That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation first came out. I had used the book to formulate an agenda that has yet to become reality that involves LGBTQ kids of all classes, races, etc. writing and creating zines. The anthology recently saw an update and expansion. What changes are included in the revision, and what new topics and ideas are covered?
There are five new essays in the expanded second edition. First, there are two that directly engage with early gay liberation struggles—one by Ferd Eggan that starts with the Gay Liberation Front and goes everywhere, and another that's a conversation between ‘70s revolutionaries who were part of the George Jackson Brigade, a group that robbed banks and blew up buildings in the Pacific Northwest. Then there's an interview with Jim Eigo about the early years of ACT UP in New York. And a conversation about the Drop the Debt/Stop AIDS action where activists stripped naked in the middle of the street during the Republican National Convention. And last, a piece called “More Abercrombie That Activist,” about rural queer youth organizing in Massachusetts.
Of course, there are so many things I could also add, and my hope is that there will be 20 or 200 more radical queer anti-assimilationist anthologies, but unfortunately that hasn't happened yet.
You're also working on a new anthology entitled Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: flaming challenges to masculinity, objectification and the desire to conform. Can you tell me a little more about this?
This is an intervention in the hideous dead-end of consumerist gay sexual culture. My question is if our desires supposedly created something liberatory and defiant, then how did we end up with pec implants and the Pottery Barn, or the new PNP—powerless and paranoid? It's almost as if mainstream gay male culture has taken everything that's horrible about dominant straight cultures, and elevated it to the pantheon of the gods. So it's time for an intervention, right?
And this book, like all of my anthologies, is also a personal intervention. I find myself incredibly inspired by the emerging trans, genderqueer and gender defiant subcultures that I am a part of, but simultaneously my sexuality remains bounded by the limitations of the gay world that I despise. So I'm looking for more options. For everyone.
And lastly, what are your thoughts on the passing of Prop 8 in California and its response in the past two weeks?
Oh, no! Well I just wrote a little bit about it on my blog.
Basically, my take is that okay, here was the most expensive campaign other than the presidential election—gay marriage proponents spent almost $40 million in their failed attempt to defeat the proposition. And it was a total failure. So now, what do all these well-funded "nonprofits" want? More money!
The gay marriage movement is to fundamental redistribution of resources in the wrong direction—away from people's basic needs like housing, healthcare, gender self-determination, sexual splendor, the right to stay in the country of their choice, etc. and towards this narrow, single-issue agenda of access to straight privilege for people who want to live in long-term, monogamous relationships sanctioned by the state, while everyone else gets dropped in a ditch.
Furthermore, I believe that this assimilationist agenda furthers homophobia rather than fighting it—gay marriage proponents are fighting for religious bigots to accept “us” on their terms!
So these protests are depressing to me. I'm sick of the stranglehold gay marriage has developed over queer challenges to the status quo. Gay marriage is not a dream, the end of marriage is a dream. Where’s that message?
Mick Imlah is the Guardian's man to beat for this year's TS Eliot Prize. This call may be because of Imlah's status as the poetry editor of the TLS, the winner of this year's Forward Prize, or an understandable fondness for Scotsmen in red shirts. It's a strong year, with previous winners Mark Doty and Ciaran Carson also nominated. Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot, donates the prize money, and she evidently made a showing at the 2007 Prize for a knees-up at the ceremony.
Full shortlist under the cut.
Moniza Alvi for Europa
Peter Bennet for The Glass Swarm
Ciaran Carson for For All We Know
Robert Crawford for Full Volume
Maura Dooley for Life Under Water
Mark Doty for Theories and Apparitions
Jen Hadfield for Nigh-No-Place
Mick Imlah for The Lost Leader
Glyn Maxwell for Hide Now
Stephen Romer for Yellow Studio
The Man Asian is part of the hefty Man Booker family; now Syjuco just needs to find a publisher with their shizz together to release his novel.
The new Warwick Prize for Writing brings us a far-ranging longlist of books with no apparent common thread, save for their palatable sense of post-millennial anxiety: institutionalised insanity, reductionism, slavery, a "beautiful, dangerous, red-headed croupier".
Soon after this press release, the Warwick judging panel all took up smoking and endlessly listening to Nebraska in their bedrooms.
November 16, 2008
Weird observation: Just by looking at it, you would never guess that 2666, probably the hottest book published this year regardless of country of origin, was a work of translation. The translator's name, Natasha Wimmer, does not appear on the cover, the back, the front flap, or the back flap. Perhaps they were worried people would not buy it if they knew it was originally written in another language? Given the cult status of Bolaño these days, it seems like an odd choice to make.
November 14, 2008
Do you have some unpublished WH Auden lying around? Someone is looking for it.
In the early 1930s Auden taught at Larchfield Academy prep, also known as Larchfield School. In 1931, it appears, he published a school magazine, The Larchfieldier. No copies of it have ever surfaced. But the US scholar Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor and editor, is convinced Auden would have included poems of his own among the schoolboys' writings, as he later did at two other schools.
When the graphic novel Skim was nominated for the Governor-General's Award for children's literature, they only nominated the writer and left off the illustrator. There was a protest by Canadian graphic novelists, but the council has responded, "Eh. It's too late now." (Not a direct quote.)
Those Best of the Year lists are rather like Christmas decorations: they seem to come out earlier and earlier, until by early December you're clutching your head whenever you hear "Jingle Bells," or wanting to throw things every time you're told The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was the best book out of the thousands published. (Substitute in 2666 for this year: it's going to be a long two months.) I'm ignoring the lists, because the predictability (and the nonsensical choice by Amazon of Northern Clemency, a book so boring I would have preferred dental surgery) bothers me. Yes, yes, Bolaño. Do you have anything else for us?
If you like to follow such things, however, Largehearted Boy is compiling his annual, comprehensive list of all Best of the Year lists.
One of my friends is a migratory bird rescuer, scooping up injured birds who fly into Chicago buildings before they get stepped on by busy pedestrians. Frequently he's too late, and there will be little paper bags in his freezer, tiny bird corpses to be delivered to the Field Museum for cataloging. I will occasionally come across an injured bird, hopping along the sidewalk wrongly, and now instead of leaving it and feeling bad, I'll pick it up (his wife has instructed me on the best way to pick up a small bird to avoid injuring its wings) and carry it to his apartment. Occasionally this is at 7 am on Sunday mornings, and yet he still speaks to me.
So when I came across this bit from the website for Tim Birkhead's The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology, I immediately thought of him. German foresters used to capture bullfinches and teach them how to sing folk songs, rather than their traditional song, which was as "melodic as a squeaky wheelbarrow." On the website, Birkhead has audio clips of the Germans whistling a song to the finch, and the finch (pretty little thing) whistling the tune right back. The bemused chuckle of the bird trainer at the end is my favorite part.
How do you market a book with a dead author? Well, I suppose you could pitch a bunch of media stories about how the author is dead. (When he died seems to vary according to which story you read -- his publicist should have cleared up the press release a bit.) That seems to be working quite well for Knopf and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
November 13, 2008
Seamus Heaney, interviewed by Dennis O'Driscoll--an extract from the latter's new book of interview with Heaney, Stepping Stones: a poem must have the right sound - I don't mean sound as decoration or elaboration, as "verbal magic"; I mean something to do with what might be called the musculature of your speech, the actual cadencing of the thing as it moves along. When, for example, I wrote the opening of the first poem in my first book - "Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun" - I just knew I had got stuck in in earnest.
It's a bit surprising to see this story--of Welsh poet Patrick Jones's reading being shut down in response to Christian protests--in the UK rather than here. (Via Edward Champion, on Twitter.) Judging from YouTube, Jones is *clearly* a threat to godfearing Waterstone's customers everywhere.
Babs de Genlis has 18 excellent "Reasons to Fuck Poetry." The first: Poetry invited you in earnest. Poetry sent you reams of sonnets, ballads, epics, soliloquies, each lingering on every word, drawing you out of yourself and in to another one, pulling you in, tempting you to hover over every syllable, first concealing and then revealing the whole of its nakedness from angry epiphany to epiphany. Poetry is very fuckable, and poetry wants badly to be fucked. (Via Vowel Movers.)
François Luong on translating procedural poetry (Oulipo, flarf, etc.): My problem with such translation is that it treats more or less the poem as a communicative object. The poem as artifact has something to say. . . . And so, what is interesting about procedural poetry (Oulipo, flarf, some Language poetry) is not so much what they have to say but rather their gestures and their mechanics. The semantic acrobatics are icing on the cake. (Via Gary Sullivan, whose response is also worth your time.
Stephen McLaughlin has posted a playlist of "featured resources" for Fall 2008 at PennSound. It's a bit alarming how easy it is to pass time at PennSound (and at UbuWeb, where McLaughlin also contributes).
But does the literary industry as a whole – agents, editors, booksellers and critics – currently offer disproportionate encouragement to aspiring male writers to produce the kind of serious-minded, bookish work that gets on shortlists, compared to young female writers? Now, I suspect, we're on to something.
Irene Pepperberg showed up on Fresh Air to talk about Alex the Creepily Intelligent and Talkative Parrot and her book Alex & Me. (Read Barbara J. King's feature on the book here.) You learn something new about the bird every day: Alex had object permanence. There's also an excerpt from the book on NPR's website.
It’s an easy concept (which is probably why I thought of it). You pick a literary charity that you want to support in 2009. You sign up to be part of The Year of Readers, get people to sponsor you and just start reading whatever you like. If you’re going to read next year why not join and help a bookish charity at the same time?
November 12, 2008
"I'd rather be addicted to Somerset Maugham than cigarettes or cocaine." Oh, dude, I don't know who you are, but I love you already. From the always excellent W Somerset Maugham blog.
Joan Acocella on a load of books about overparenting. The summation: perhaps you should allow your child to eat paste.
November 11, 2008
Just when you thought we'd blown through most of the megaplex book awards of the year, a loud rumble is heard in the distance and out rolls the monster truck of the lit prize family: the Impac longlist. Check out whether your local library has brought honour to your town or heaped shame upon it's head.
(Jessa, fictional Freud , huh? Why don't you visit your nearest branch with some tea and smut?)
Nam Le has walked off with the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize for his collection of stories, The Boat. As well as having his work described as "a phenomenal literary talent", he pockets £60,000 and gets a night out on the tiles in Swansea with Russell T Davis and Catherine Zeta Jones.
In a location short of Swansea's glamour, but doubtless full of a similar appreciation of fine literature and good whiskey, the French have announced this year's Prix Goncourt. Author Atiq Rahimi (Earth and Ashes) fled Afghanistan over two decades ago and has written previous novels in Farsi, but his winning title, "Syngue Sabour (the Stone of Patience)" was his first in French. This change came after a 2002 trip back to Afghanistan:
In a few hours I'm heading to the airport to pick up David B. He'll be at our reading series tonight. You can check out a preview of his latest book Nocturnal Conspiracies at his publisher's website, and I'll hopefully see you this evening.
Missed this: Profile of Roberto Saviano, who has been living under protection since his book Gomorrah exposed the lives of the Neapolitan mafia.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: All in the Mind by Alastair Campbell.
Sturrock sighed. He was nearly halfway into the book and nothing had happened. No wonder he was depressed. Perhaps he should try sexing things up by going to a prostitute for his usual session.
"Suck on my Weapon of Mass Destruction," he cried.
I remember when As Nature Made Him came out in 2000 and people started talking about intersex surgery. The story of a boy is surgically reassigned as a girl after a circumcision goes horribly, horribly wrong originally was first published as a Rolling Stone article. (Available online here.) The whole story is tragic, as John/Joan never felt like a girl, was reassigned as a teenager, and then later killed himself. But some of the far reaching theories about gender and surgical reassignment and intersex (not to mention the outright demonization of the doctor) are troubling.
Katrina Karkazis responds to As Nature Made Him in her new book Fixing Sex, and I wish passages were available online. Because while Nature was a bestseller and continues to sell well (and got glowing, unquestioning reviews), only a fraction will probably read further into the topic.
(Kind of like when intersex activist Thea Hillman wrote a response to the powerfully positive reviews and sales of Middlesex and could not get it published. It's available online here:
Sometimes I think they just don't want to hear the real stories. I get cynical and think, who wants the everyday details of someone's life when you can use people with intersex to fulfil erotic fantasies, narrative requirements, and research programs? People with intersex continue to be used to satisfy the interests of others: as scientific specimens, as naked teaching models for medical students, as literary metaphors, as gags for popular sitcoms, and lastly - where we at least might get a cut of the profits! - as circus freaks and peep show attractions.)
November 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: Paige Lipari
Years ago, when I was doing my time as a bookseller, I met Paige Lipari. We oversaw the graphic novel, fiction, and poetry sections of a bookstore in Chelsea until NYC rental prices skyrocketed to a point where even a major bookstore couldn't survive and closed its doors after 15 years in business. But whatever. Times change. These days, Paige is creating mini poem-comics that really ought to be getting more attention than they are. She has a way of weaving strange lines of poetry into what seems like random comic art, yet somehow it all flows perfectly, just the way it was meant to.
After reading into what makes these things tick, go check out her work at Before I Am All Poof.
When did you start cartooning and why?
I started cartooning around 6 months ago. It's hard for me to explain where this all came from. To be honest, I had some silly boy troubles and I just picked up my 12-pack Crayola, an old notebook, and in a sort of emotional haze went over to my comfy chair and set forth. I wish I could tell you I have been reading comics forever and ever and always had dreams of being a cartoonist, but it just isn't the truth. Shortly after I began cartooning, it slowly registered that all I am ever doing is creating environments. Whether in a poem, a song, a dress, a room, or a cartoon—I am always moving things around until they feel good. I just found another outlet for my love of imagery. All I know is very quickly I forgot about the circumstance I was in and fell in love with my "comfy chair and crayons time." It felt completely natural!
What are some common themes or ideas you find coming out in your cartoons?
Many of my poems used to be about loss. Or so I am told! I think that still comes through sometimes. I am obsessed with situations happening both wonderfully and fearfully, and much of what I write/draw deals with magic and death. I have a hard time separating the two. I find violence mysterious, as in, when it happens, it is totally inevitable yet a complete mystery. I guess I'm pretty morbid. If something is one-sided, then it just isn't thick enough for me, and it doesn't seem accurate. I want thatched accuracy. Can that be a theme?
You have a cartoon about burnt toast. Can you elaborate on where this came from and what this is about?
Hmmmm. I know what is about to me. I don't always know what my comics are about when I make them, but it is when I don't trust my instincts that the piece doesn't rumble enough. Meaning comes after the comic is already finished.
I think that whatever the piece makes you feel is what it is about. But it's not random. Randomness without constraint doesn't interest me. I take a chance when I move things around in my head. The elements are in place when I experience an overwhelming feeling of possibility.
With this particular comic, I guess there are two friends, overwhelmed by the universe, and searching for meaning that is, for them, attainable. Creating an oracle. But when I made the thing I was probably thinking: sky like toast, burnt lines, oracle in sky, sky like toast, scary mackerel, mackerel sounds like jam, me and my friend, new friends, I'm hungry, far away, look far to see them, look into comic for meaning, look into burnt toast, I want clementines…I mean little oranges!
Lauren Weinstein (Goddess of War) once referred to your cartoons as "square, mysterious, homey but violent poem comics." Is there a balance between comics and poetry when you write? Which do you construct first, and how do they fit with one another?
First of all, Lauren Weinstein is such a wonderful person. This past summer I took a course with her at Parsons. She was a really supportive teacher and definitely gave me the confidence to put my cartoons out into the world! Lauren rules!
As far as whether the image or text comes first, it is always different. Usually I will be thinking about an image or a line of poetry for a few days until I am forced to do something about it. I initially match it up with something too obvious, and then something too obscure. Taking the time to move the images/words around and seeing what reverberates is key. That is the balance. Sometimes I will get lucky and close my eyes and a little plop will happen! But most times it is a bit more anxious than that. It's like matchmaking. I have many words and images floating around waiting to find one another.
So, when I discover the image/text that resonates in a very particular way, the square becomes overbearing. That is maybe one of my goals…to make the box fume. To de-square by heightening it. Similar to when one feels bigger and more complex than the physical world they are contained within, or maybe it's more like when someone pushes their face up against a glass door and it smushes and distorts. It is hard for me to see a difference between poetry, music, comics, etc.. I only see forms as images roaming between them.
Is there any particular poet/artist you recall when you work?
Some creative types that I find truly inspiring: I am a fan of Glen Baxter. He is an English cartoonist that is a bit hard to find in stores, but he creates one-panel cartoons with text. I love the drawing style of David B., and Aubrey Beardsley. Black and white makes me very excited about life/drawing. Paul Hornschemeier makes me cry. I love Oulipian writers Georges Perec and Harry Mathews, and I love the poets Matthea Harvey, T.S. Eliot, Tomaz Salamun, and L.A. Tennyson.
Yet, I am never recalling any particular poet/artist. My favorite thing in the whole world is when someone sets up an elaborate form and then breaks it in some beautifully orchestrated fashion while maintaining an heir of tasteful subtlety! That is always on my mind. That is just fantastic.
If you're reading about genital reconstructive surgery, and you come across a passage about complications arising from using hair-bearing skin grafts on urethra reconstructive surgery in males, no amount of throwing the book across the room and jumping up and down, shrieking "get out get out get out" to the images that immediately flood your brain will ever be successful.
And yes, I am only sharing this because I am a sadist.
Everything about the 39 Clues books screams "We would like you to give us all of your money, please." The tie in playing card packs, the websites that don't really do anything, the "prizes." I read a few pages of the first book, and it was grim. Luckily, Austin Grossman writes a satisfying take down of the series in the New York Times as part of their Children's Books special.
(Also, Gawker has a rather satisfying take down of many of the reviews in the Children's Books special.)
Chip Kidd responds to the Bat-Manga authorship controversy.
Updated to also link to Journalista's commentary on the whole thing.
To the designers of the new Penguin Classics cover for Lady Chatterley's Lover: Well done. Truly.
The Times on the fall of John Updike.
In a way, you can see all the dubious stuff about Updike, the reasons for which he is these days baited or ignored, in The Witches of Eastwick: the big, expansive, sometimes florid prose; the careless misogyny; the all too literal commandeering of what was, in 1984, the fashionable style, magical realism. Updike has sometimes tried too hard to be au courant. And of course, more than anything else, the sex, which is never very far from the navel, if not the heart, of pretty much every Updike novel.
In Sanjay Subrahmanyam's essay about Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize winning White Tiger, he outlines a few problems he has with the language. After all, everyone keeps commenting on the "realism" of the novel.
He describes his office as a ‘hole in the wall’. He refers to ‘kissing some god’s arse’, an idiomatic expression that doesn’t exist in any North Indian language. ‘Half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas’ and the Chinese prime minister is advised never to ‘let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull’. On another matter, he sneers: ‘They’re so yesterday.’ A clever little phrase appears: ‘A statutory warning – as they say on cigarette packs – before we begin.’ Dogs are referred to as ‘mutts’. Yet whose vocabulary and whose expressions are these? On page after page, one is brought up short by the jangling dissonance of the language and the falsity of the expressions. This is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty, without being able to pull it off. This is not Salinger speaking as Holden Caulfield, or Joyce speaking as Molly Bloom. It is certainly not Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, whom Adiga has claimed as his models in speaking for the underdog. What we are dealing with is someone with no sense of the texture of Indian vernaculars, yet claiming to have produced a realistic text.
From Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare comes the ten most irritating phrases in the English language. (The book's cover art makes no sense, and yet I find it adorable.) And then there are approximately 500 others nominated in the comments section.
Good now has a blog, and Ann Trubeck is writing about how to be socially conscious about your book buying habits. And for once there is a suggestion beyond "Order everything through an independent bookstore."
November 07, 2008
Laura Hudson points out that Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan left off a vital piece of information from the cover. As in, who wrote the insides of the book.
And even if we accept that [Chip] Kidd et al. played a very important role in designing and presenting this book to an American audience, I'm not sure how that justifies the de facto usurping of authorship here, or the diminishment of the role played by the actual creator of these materials, without whom Kidd and friends would have had nothing to compile, edit, and claim as their own.
Hudson rounds up other blogs' comments on the scandal. Link from Journalista.
The FBI amassed a dossier on the late journalist David Halberstam for more than two decades – keeping tabs on his reporting, tracking his marriage to a Polish actress and preparing background reports on the Pulitzer Prize winner for other federal agencies, documents show.
Paul Bloom writes about the multitudes that live inside your head. Some of them are mob hit men.
Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life. When Tony Soprano kills someone, you respond differently than you would to a real murder; you accept and adopt some of the moral premises of the Soprano universe. You become, if just for a moment, Tony Soprano.
Bloomberg News writing about Proust? I guess things like this happen sometimes. They profile Proust's The Lemoine Affair, a series of small pieces about an investment scandal written as a pastiche of famous French writers like Balzac and Flaubert.
Proust had inherited De Beers stock from his parents and fretted that the scandal would erode his portfolio. At the same time, he was inspired by the literary potential of Lemoine's intrigue and hit upon an ingenious way to retell it -- that's the true alchemy here.
November 06, 2008
Jessa linked already to the Times's mini-anthology commemorating the end of the campaign, but don't miss Penn Sound's alternative grouping, featuring poems by Kathy Acker, Ed Dorn, and others. For some reason the permalink to this entry's not working, but here are some mp3s: Acker, "President Bush"; Dorn, "Paralyzing Affability: An Analysis of Reagan's Voice"; Jaap Blonk, "What the President Will Say and Do"; Tina Darragh, "Bill Clinton Plane Ride Dream."
Jessica Smith has assembled a giant list of female visual poets.
In "Rimbaud: Teen Top," Michael Eberhardt reviews Edmund White's new biography of "the 17-year-old prodigy-poet from the boondocks of the Ardennes," and interviews him, to boot: Verlaine didn't even know Rimbaud was young and cute. It's one thing to invite someone if you know they're a hot 16-year-old on the make as a writer - but he was actually impressed by the poetry. But Rimbaud arrived with a secret weapon in his baggage - which was "Le Bateau Ivre," "The Drunken Boat" - and he read it to a group of poets, and they were just bowled over, because no one had ever written anything like it.
Jamie James reviews Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell: Lowell's description of attending a literary conference with a ferocious hangover is hilarious ("Lunch: ham mostly fat and terrible things, egglike, that look like they've been through a steam laundry") and disturbing, coming just two months after he was hospitalized for a severe manic episode.
At Lemon Hound, Lynn Crosbie unpacks a Sid Vicious poem, plus an interview: I don’t know how anyone writes poetry without submitting to at least one of its formal attributes. I think my work, all of it, most closely resembles the skeleton of the English sonnet, state, restate, stamp and twist.
At Blog Flume, Ken Parille has an interesting, carefully observed post on Charles Schultz's punctuation in Peanuts: His work is only one example of the ways that text in comics -- and especially in word balloons -- is liberated from the kinds of 'rules' that govern prose. It's a way that comics can be aligned with poetry, which shows far more openness and freedom with punctuation. (Via Austin Kleon--and don't forget that November is the last iteration of his blackout poem contest.)
Alan R. Wilson on the poetry habit (includes audio!): Like the alcoholic who thinks he can handle one drink, I picked up the book and sat. It was a collection of sonnets by a writer whose approach was to start on unpromising turf, inhale deeply and go like mad for 14 lines. I was especially drawn to the use of couplets in place of the eight- and six-line clots of the hardcore sonnet.
David Rees (Get Your War On) has a guide on how to deal with having your mind blown by Obama's election.
Even if you're stumbling around the office saying, "I can't believe it . . . I can't believe it . . . it blows my mind . . ." that doesn't actually mean the absolute, glorious, unfuckingbelievableness of it has caught up with you and officially blown your mind.
Neurologists expect most Americans' minds to blow sometime around 11:00 PM EST tonight (Nov. 5), approximately 24 hours after the election was called.
The number of novels and poetry in translation published in 2008 is surprisingly slim. This year, only 0.6% of all fiction published was in translation. The 3% Blog, which might have to change its name to the Point-6 Percent Blog, has a breakdown of the figures.
August Kleinzahler, John Ashbery, and others were asked by the New York Times to write poems in honor of the end of the campaigns.
Best-selling U.S. author Michael Crichton, who wrote such novels as "The Andromeda Strain" and "Jurassic Park" and created the popular TV drama "ER," has died unexpectedly of cancer at age 66, his family said on Wednesday. Crichton, a medical doctor turned novelist and filmmaker whose books have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles after what his family described as a "courageous and private battle against cancer."
Dennis Loy Johnson on the mighty return of Moby Lives.
It's an astute observation to note that while there are tons of strong political voices in the blogosphere, they aren't necessarily integrated with the literary blogosphere. Not that I think we need right- or left-wing book blogs, but I do think we could use fewer I-got-drunk-and-went-to-a-reading-last-night book blogs, and more that have a more informed idea of how art meets commerce in this political climate.
Tonight's Bookslut reading with Jonathan Ames has been rescheduled. Or, is in the process of being rescheduled to December something or other.
November 04, 2008
City Pages profiles Graywolf Press.
Everyone is voting, yes? It's going to be 72 degrees in Chicago today, so no excuses. Although everyone I know early voted because it is going to be madness here. Anyway, you know all of this, just stating the obvious.
November 03, 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: David Rees
You saw it coming. It's election week, so it was just inevitable—this week's heartthrob is none other than David Rees, creator of the comic strip Get Your War On. The strip has finally been given the collection it deserves in Get Your War On: The Definitive Account of the War on Terror, 2001–2008 (Soft Skull Press). Through both his own voice and the voices of millions who had been captivated by our soon-to-be ex-president's war, Rees effectively narrates the past seven years in a way that captures both America's outrage and its confusion through the use of simple office clip art.
And speaking of confusion, I spoke to Rees this week about the imminent election and what that might mean for future work in the vein of GYWO.
Why did you start GYWO? What made you decide to use clip art characters, and how do you think they benefit the strip?
I started GYWO because I thought the idea of a worldwide "War on Terror" was dumb. I used clip art characters because drawing comics is—for me—time-consuming and completely unrewarding. I think the clip art benefits the strip because it's so awesome looking and people get totally hyped when they see the images -- PEOPLE TALKING ON TELEPHONES!!! OMG THIS IS TOTALLY LOL, LET 'ER RIP!!!
How do you think the strip has changed over the years?
In the beginning, the strip was sort of the medium I used to figure out how I felt about this new Age of Terror we found ourselves in… the post-9/11 world… the now-we've-gone-and-lost-our-innocence-and-who-do-we-have-to-kill-to-get-it-back era… then, after a while, I figured out how I felt about all the relevant issues, and now the strip is just a platform for my rantings and ravings.
Get Your War On saw a stage production a while back. Can you tell me about that? How did this happen, and what was the result?
The Rude Mechs (theatre company in Austin) approached me about adapting GYWO, and I was like, "Sure, good luck with that, there's no characters, no plot, no movement, sounds like riveting theatre," but they rocked it and even toured the show in Finland and won a theatre award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival! AND THEIR SHOW INCORPORATED ACTUAL OVERHEAD TRANSPARENCY PROJECTORS FROM ENRON. I had nothing to do with it. HOWEVER I am now writing and directing little GYWO animations, which can be found at http://www.236.com, and which I love doing because it's a collaborative process with the actors and producers, unlike cartooning which is lonely and isolating and depressing and horrible and you hear voices in the walls sometimes and when you walk outside into the sun your eyes hurt and you're like, "Wait a minute, this isn't talkingpointsmemo.com, how did I get here?"
Let's talk about the election. What do you think is the most lampoonable moment/aspect of the entire campaign?
For me, the single greatest moment of the campaign—the moment when I thought, "Dear Lord, send the plague NOW"—was Rudy Giuliani's sneering dismissal of community organizers at the RNC. The obvious contempt and condescension he (and Palin) displayed towards that career—towards the very idea of helping the least among us—was a beautiful distillation of everything I hate about the contemporary conservative movement, and why it must be utterly destroyed and its idiot acolytes mocked, humiliated, and brought to ruin. Rudy Giuliani is a fucking asshole.
Sarah Palin is already talking about running in 2012 (though this election won't be finished for maybe over 24 hours...). What are your thoughts?
If Obama wins tomorrow, Sarah Palin's time on the national stage is over. She will not run in 2012. Believe that. She can take her stupid husband and her 9(?) children and Joe the Plumber-Crack Douchebag and go back to Alaska and shut the fuck up.
If we were to find ourselves stuck in another period as disgusting as the War on Terror with the next president, would you document it in a similar way as you did with GYWO?
Satirical song parodies! I want to join the Capitol Steps and sing barbershop songs about wacky current events…LOL, let's make it happen…I sing baritone….
Rick Kogan remembers Studs Turkel.
Louis Terkel arrived here as a child from New York City and in Chicago found not only a new name but a place that perfectly matched--in its energy, its swagger, its charms, its heart--his own personality. They made a perfect and enduring pair.
Author-radio host-actor-activist and Chicago symbol Louis "Studs" Terkel died Friday afternoon in his home on the North Side. At his bedside was a copy of his latest book, "P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening," scheduled for release this month. He was 96 years old.
Happy Monday, even though I know some of you are probably hiding under your tables, waiting for Election Day. Well, feel free, but take your laptop down there because we have a new issue. I sat down to talk to Neil Gaiman about his latest book The Graveyard Book, the perils of book tours, hookers in China... and we filmed it, making this episode two of the Bookslut videos. (We are filming two in November, this whole new thing is quite odd.)
And in text, we have Tao Lin speaking to the brilliant Joy Williams. Her novel The Changeling was destroyed by critics when it was originally released, and it quickly went out of print. It's recently been rereleased by Fairy Tale Press, luckily for us because it's beautiful. Barbara J. King pays tribute to Alex the parrot, the bird who you can watch all day on YouTube and never get bored (or stop getting slightly creeped out). Elizabeth Bachner struggles with Simone de Beauvoir's personal diaries, and wonders just how much we need to know about 20th century philosophy's hottest couple. We also have interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Idlewild Bookstore, and more.
