December 2011

Interview with Sam Pink

Author Spotlight / 19 Comments
December 17th, 2011 / 4:56 pm

RiFF RAFF SODMG recommends NY TYRANT

“Guess what we got here… new book.”

TYRANT 9

Literary Magazine Club / 26 Comments
December 17th, 2011 / 3:22 pm

Workers in a Field

Jean-François Millet’s “The Gleaners” (1857) shows three peasant women gleaning a field after a harvest of crops, its depiction of the lower class most irksome to the French upper class, who didn’t want rural poverty and intimations of the 1848 French revolution in their Salon. I imagine artisanal cheese melting in their mouths and coursing straight to their hearts. Millet is just as known for “The Sower,” later copied by Van Gogh, and from which Simon & Schuster’s colophon is derived. Realism is used to describe Millet’s paintings, implying a kind of artistic integrity or moral clarity necessary for the unglamorous staunch view of the world; the problem is that Realism is also used to describe our later Renoir and Manet, whose pasty bourgeois subjects are safe from the sun under parasols and hands of shadows taught by the leaves above to protect the smiling faces. In fact, from the field to the park, the real R-word is Romantic, the aesthetically adroit projection of an ethos by which the lesser, us, learn to live. In 1999, three actors were allowed to do what they, likely with grim office jobs themselves in their past before said success, had, like us, fantasized doing. They were told to walk into a field subconsciously on the perimeter of an office building and destroy a fax machine with only their feet, fists, and one bat. They took turns with the bat, a phallic democracy both homoerotic and most American. Directer Mike Judge (Office Space, Beavis & Butthead), whose genius shall not be argued here, later added a Geto Boys song as an ironic, and mildly racist, “juxtaposition” to the whiteness of their white collar plight and excised rapture. When faceless bureaucracies are embodied by the broken means meant to convey them, it’s time to freak out. That a fax from afar is printed on recipient paper and not the sender’s is often forgotten, with people getting angry at the sender for being out of paper. The age of reason is now unreasonable. To come full circle is to start all over again, and I sometimes wonder if I’d be happier before the industrial revolution. I’d have strong arms, a nice tan, and no tweets to worry about. If the reader does not know where this is headed, may he or she be pointed outside, to workers in a field, whose very work seems futile but is somehow necessary in small unseen ways, from flax to fax, of horrible jobs existing for a reason, of civilization moving along slowly, before the sun sets, through near darkness and its nightly requiem of crickets, until it rises again.

Random / 8 Comments
December 17th, 2011 / 2:48 pm

Gordon Lish, 1986


A former professor of mine recently gave me a copy of StoryQuarterly 21: Stories from the Gordon Lish Workshops (edited by J.D. Dolan). I don’t want to excerpt too much, but here are some words from Lish:

“This feels good. I tell you, it feels good to have my hands on this forum, and I am not going to let the moment get away from me without my offering a remark or three….I tell you, I take such delight in them all, in all these students, in all these writers, that I’d like to sit here and start reciting names–this in the exorbitant spirit of the madman who thinks the mere calling out of the entries in a list must offer to all who hear an invitation to war.”

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Craft Notes & Massive People / 6 Comments
December 17th, 2011 / 5:43 am

Reviews

1-800-MICE

1-800-MICE
by Matthew Thurber
PictureBox, 2011
176 pages / Buy from PictureBox

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There isn’t much crossover between the worlds of experimental comics and small press literature—perhaps some of us literary folk even harbor an unconscious prejudice of the comics form, writing it off as a lowbrow and degraded medium particular to a certain class of socially inept nerds (as if writers possess any kind of social grace…). If we adhere to these arbitrarily demarcated disciplinary boundaries, we will totally miss out on some mind-blowing gems out there, like Matthew Thurber’s hallucinatory and brain-bending epic 1-800-MICE. (Watch the trailer here.)

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11 Comments
December 17th, 2011 / 1:55 am

Pink Movie Diary

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Film / 11 Comments
December 16th, 2011 / 5:04 pm

The Crow Arts Manor Needs the Classics.

The Crow Arts Manor—a new-ish writing endeavor in Portland that hosts readings and sets up workshops with Massive folks like Kevin Sampsell, Emily Kendal Frey, Zachary Schomburg, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Monica Drake as instructors—is gathering a library. Here’s a note I got from the director, Sid Miller:

Crow Arts Manor, located in a Northeast Portland, is a 501c3 non-profits writing center, that provides low costclasses and workshop. Over the last 9 months we’ve been hard at work assembling a literary library. Through donations we’ve been able to obtain a large amount of current literary journals, magazines, books of poetry, short fiction and criticism. But it’s been difficult to obtain the classics, from writers going back to Whitman reaching to the end of last century. So now we’re asking the public for help. We’re looking for folks willing to donate a title or more from their own personal library. Our library will be open to the public and will be a tool for local writers, as well as local schools and non-profit organizations. It will be a place to read, write, and engage with other writers. We will never charge a fee for use of the library. If you are willing to donate, we are happy to send you a present, a past copy of Burnside Review (our partner). Please e-mail me if you are interested in helping.
sid@crowmanor.org

Help ’em out?

Behind the Scenes / 3 Comments
December 16th, 2011 / 4:00 pm

ToBS R2: Celeb fiction vs. talking shit about the New Yorker while submitting frequently to the New Yorker

[matchup #42 in Tournament of Bookshit]

Since 2004, Katie Price, the British glamour model, singer and actress, has written four autobiographies and seven novels. Her novels are called Angel, Crystal, Angel Uncovered, Sapphire, Paradise, The comeback girl and Santa Baby. Lots of people love to read these wonderful books because they give realistic insights into the ultimate human lifestyle that everyone aspires to live in 2011: CELEB/CELEB-SPOUSE. The novels contain a lot of very detailed descriptions of outfits and accessories and perfumes and luxury products that everyone wants to buy. The main characters of the novels are usually the wives of footballers or glamour models. Everyone wants to be a wife or model so it makes sense that the books are so popular. Also they are beautifully written. Here are examples of the writing in Santa Baby: READ MORE >

Contests / 6 Comments
December 16th, 2011 / 3:30 pm

ToBS R2: declaring ‘__ is dead’ vs. horny middle aged balding poetry professor on campus

[matchup #41 in Tournament of Bookshit]

Steve Roggenbuck

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Contests / 140 Comments
December 16th, 2011 / 12:40 pm