February 2nd, 2010 / 4:00 pm
Author Spotlight
benmarcus.com
Ben Marcus has updated his personal website with new content, with excerpts of some recent work (specifically, a section of “The Moors” from the latest Tin House, and a piece on Thomas Bernhard from Harper’s in 2006). Hopefully this is a precursor to his hopefully soon forthcoming next novel, The Flame Alphabet.
He’s also put up some pieces by other authors, including a ridiculously sublimed piece, “The Copper Beeches” by the excellent Mark Doten. Check this man out:
Mother, father, me, here in the mansion, she and her father over the garage, the Mechanic’s House, we called it, her father a mechanic, then a suicide, still after his death we called it the Mechanic’s House, not the Suicide’s House. Spied through bedroom window, tits in profile, bigger by the year, opera glasses, the two of us children, just think, two children, running among the sycamores, then our crawl space where the Second Nocturne hissed. Our hand-crank record player, she wouldn’t have abandoned all that. And the stench in the foyer, lounge and conservatory, rotting meat. Perhaps a human stench, a human rot
I want Doten’s book Green Zone Kidz now.
Tags: ben marcus, green zone kidz, mark doten
ben drew those pics for Flame Alphabet too. ‘the moors’ is powerful in a different way for him. the only reason i bought tin house. also, new interview w/ marcus in an upcoming issue of WE ARE CHAMPION, mid-march-ish.
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Crawl spaces always give me hope, constitute sites of most intense love, desire.
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Doten = genius.
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February 2nd, 2010 / 5:17 pmmagick mike—
2nded
shit is dope
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reading the age of wire and string right now. going to finish it tonight.
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Mark Doten is amazing.
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February 2nd, 2010 / 10:22 pmCatherine Lacey—
Here here. I want to marry that story.
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Hi. Could someone explain what’s “ridiculously sublimed [sic?],” “genius,” “dope,” and “amazing” about the excerpted bit of prose? Is it the semi-rhyme of “tits” and “hissed”? Is Mark Doten the third-person plural version of the verb Mark Dotar? (The third-person singular being “Mark Doty.”) Thanks for elaborating . . .
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February 2nd, 2010 / 5:45 pmBlake Butler—
not sic.
read the whole piece.
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February 2nd, 2010 / 8:14 pmLee—
i meant “sic” in terms of “incite a dog to attack” . . . i see his prose is actually “sick,” as in ill, as in what literate New Englanders might call “wicked good.”
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February 2nd, 2010 / 8:51 pmTim Ramick—
Though I despise our current collective propensity for hyperbolic sound-bites like “amazing” and “genius” and even “that shit is dope” (I, myself, am often guilty of throwing lyrical confetti-praise such as “phosphorescent” or “luminous” around), I have to ask, Lee, if you truly expect any fan of Marcus’ or Doten’s writings to adequately take on your challenge. This is a blog forum, and we’re writers and readers looking for a little light in the morass. We’re not capable (in this space) of rising to the levels of George Steiner on Dostoevsky or Susan Sontag on Syberberg here, are we? Is that worth expecting? And would you be willing to critique Doten’s excerpt with similar “objective” thoroughness, through and through, after reading it at least several times to make sure you’re absolutely secure in your position (perspective) and that you won’t regret perhaps getting it wrong? Isn’t it worth letting some fanboy enthusiasm go by unsquashed just for the sake of its puppy-dog joy, even if it doesn’t resonate with your tastes? Since Ben Marcus and Mark Doten aren’t run-of-the-mill writers (I don’t mean that as a back-handed compliment—I’m just pushing the exaggeration toward the direction of understatement for sake of balance), I think we should all be grateful for their efforts at exploration (whether we love every aspect of their works or not).
PS I did, however, chuckle at your mock-conjugation of Dotar-Doty-Doten (who is Mark Dotar, by the way, other than perhaps an obscure auctioneer in Florida?)…
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February 2nd, 2010 / 10:00 pmTim Ramick—
Of course, as usual, I spouted before doing all of my homework. You are fully capable of writing excellent and humorous (even if brief) impressions of both semi-popular and semi-obtuse writings (your takes on Bernhard are especially fun, and I trust you’ll indeed get to Extinction once the weather warms). Also, by the way, I enjoyed reading your oddly affecting (always tricky to effectively sustain an unreliable narrator) “Carry Me Father No More” just now:
http://www.bu.edu/agni/fiction/online/2007/klein.html
Anyway, I do think Doten (in larger context, beyond that excerpt) is worth a look. And Marcus is always worth a chunk of one’s time, if only for the jolting skew of his syntax.
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February 2nd, 2010 / 10:09 pmLee—
Cool, Mr. Ramick – thanks. Mr. Marcus performed “a special workshop” upon that story at my graduate fiction writing school a few years ago — he was mainly concerned about “the emotional angle,” which freaked me out a little because I’d first workshopped the story with Frank Conroy, who kept talking about Barthleme etc and never once mentioned “the emotional angle.” I felt like I’d entered Bizarro Workshop World: traditional writer of the heart and gut talking about metafiction; unconventional writer of the head and upper atmosphere talking about the heart . . .
February 2nd, 2010 / 10:42 pmaaron—
shit. i didn’t realize that story was published, lee. i remember it/that workshop session got blogged about somewhere back then, as someone writing about marcus’ visit to iowa (no?), and i was super curious to read it. off to do so now!
February 2nd, 2010 / 10:01 pmLee—
I was just interested in reading a few more words than “amazing” or “great,” which tend to make people sound like sports commentators — ie, every writer/player is “great.”
Unusual, or reminds me of Quentin Compson (not the excerpt but the form of the longer excerpt), or inspiring/liberating/titillating — any sort of quick earnest personal articulation of WHY someone likes something would’ve been cool, though I’m glad no one dropped ye olde HTMLgiant critical standby “fucked ” . . .
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February 2nd, 2010 / 11:09 pmTim Ramick—
Agreed. We could all try a little harder (without making my common mistake of trying way too hard and expanding my comments into treatises—sorry).
We all want that goddamn book. Books. Ben’s. Mark’s.
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My undergrad CW class this semester at LSU is using the anthology Marcus edited, THE ANCHOR BOOK OF NEW AMERICAN STORIES, as their text book. It has been amazing so far.
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February 2nd, 2010 / 8:54 pmRyan Call—
andrew, i use that anthology for my intro fiction (lit) course at u of h. i agree thatit is amzing.
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Thanks Blake, thanks for reading, guys.
Very excited about the new Marcus — there’s this built-in extra drama for a writer like him, who does that Beckett think of writing within a very specific universe that slowly mutates book to book. Judging from The Moors and a reading I saw him do for Harper’s a while back, looks like he will move another step on the Age of W&S to Notable A W trajectory of making use an increasingly consolidated narrative, while using that central stability to do increasingly weird stuff on the margins, and raise increasingly complex ontological, epistemological and linguistic questions. Dude’s a hero, can’t wait.
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