Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. He is the editor of The Apocalypse Reader, Come Back Donald Barthelme, and co-editor (with Eva Talmadge) of The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. With Jeremy Schmall he makes The Agriculture Reader, a limited-edition arts annual. He lives in Brooklyn.
Ah, woe is me!
What have I dared? where am I lifted? how
Shall I descend, and perish not? I know
That Love makes all things equal: I have heard
By mine own heart this joyous truth averred:
The spirit of the worm beneath the sod,
In love and worship, blends itself with God!
–Epipsychidion
Stephen Elliott at The Rumpus- “Notes on Book Publishing in a Socially Networked World.” Our main man does some post-game on his Adderall Diaries galley-lending library project. >>One thing to remember: If you don’t write the right book nothing will work. The reader has to connect with the work. I would advise against putting significant time and resources into a work you don’t really believe in.<<
Joann Wypijewski is probably the most incisive and trenchant writer in America on matters of sexuality and sexual politics. In this new piece in The Nation, she talks about the profit-motive behind medicalizing sexual behavior- “Sexual Healing.”
Over at the Barnes & Noble review site, Maud Newton is onto Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. >>Since the publication of her first collection, Self-Help, in 1985, so many readers have identified with Moore’s witty, cynical and yearning failed-relationship stories at a similarly impressionable stage that her writing has become as formative an influence on American fiction as her hero John Updike’s was in an earlier era.<<
Oh, hey, special The Nation bonus: William Deresciewicz on a new biography of Marquez, and this classic by Akiva Gottlieb, a great short piece by him on one of my favorite subjects/bands, Against Me!: “Political Punk: Rage Against the Band.”
For Thursday (9/10) we read “My Dog is a Little Obese” by Ellen Kennedy, “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie” by Junot Diaz, and “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell. The theme was DIRECT ADDRESS and INSTRUCTION. As on Tuesday, we spent most of the time on the fiction piece. I think this is because fiction feels “easier” to talk about than poetry, like you’re not going to screw up the technical terms or something. And I think that having a teacher who is primarily a fiction writer contributes to this atmosphere, so I’m going to work harder in the future to check myself. But I think there’s a second reason as well, which is that a relatively straight prose narrative like the Diaz story (or Hemingway last week) yields itself to a kind of knee-jerk cultural studies reading, where the text is really just a pre-text for the themes and politics it evinces or brings to light. Especially with a piece like this one by Diaz, where the narrator is giving “you” instructions on how to re-arrange your apartment so you don’t look as poor as you are, and then impress the various girls you might have invited over, with particular race-based instructions for each one. I hate this way of reading.
Norman Podhoretz’s new book, Why Are Jews Liberals? is organized around a non-thesis so idiotic it’s not worth discussing, but the NYT got Leon Wieseltier to do it anyway. It’s actually a pretty good piece of writing, considering the topic is a book that in a half-sane world wouldn’t exist in the first place.
Meanwhile, over at Tabletmag, Adam Kirsch has the slightly less disgusting but probably equally irritating task of discussing Rich Cohen’s Israel Is Real. Here are just two of the lowlights.
From the intro (click through for the full piece):
Drew Toal and I were having such a great time talking about Tao Lin’s new novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel, that we figured we owed it to the world to go public. So we forced ourselves to not discuss the book anymore until we were both finished, then we scheduled a time to meet up online and gchat about it. We ended up talking about a lot of extra-literary stuff (maybe too much?) but given that it’s Tao, and that we know him, that was pretty much unavoidable squared, but I think we did a pretty kickass job with the book when we got around to it. Drew was at his office, in mid-town, and I was at my office, in my bedroom. After the jump, we get down to it.
This semester I’m teaching an undergraduate survey of creative writing at Rutgers. We’re two class meetings in, the students are all excited and smart and engaged. They’re making it a real pleasure to show up to class, which anyone who has ever taught before can tell you is not always the case. Because it’s a survey class, the idea is that we’ll look at the major forms of creative writing–fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. Instead of doing “units” on each of these sections, my hope is to pair pieces from different forms, both oriented by a theme or element of craft, themselves relatable back to a writing exercise, and see what kind of glad serendipities result from the juxtapositions.
Dave Neiwert , the award-winning journalist and managing editor of Crooks & Liars–one of my favorite blogs–discusses his book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etoyumdyRS4&
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elbJ4hy5C7A
After the epic fail that was Matt Soucy’s lazy, mean-spirited review in Coldfront–a rare blunder for one of the best poetry sites out there–it brings me enormous pleasure to direct your attention to Chris Tonelli’s excellent microreview of sometimes my heart pushes my ribs, newly online at Open Letters Monthly.