http://alecniedenthal.blogspot.com
Alec Niedenthal's fiction appears or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Agriculture Reader, Sleepingfish, PANK, Corium, and other places. He currently lives in Sarasota, Florida, where mostly it is hot.
Below are a few eulogies, remembrances, encomia, etc. for the late Barry Hannah. No introduction needed. Thank you, Barry.
Jeremiah Chamberlin (editor at Fiction Writers Review):
I experienced both sides of Barry’s honesty when I was a student of his in 2003 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. The day of my workshop, we moved around the table in usual fashion–what’s working, what isn’t. Janet Peery was co-teaching the session, and among the group were writers such as Ben Percy, Lisa Lerner, Dave Schuman, Dave Koch, Forrest Anderson, and John Struloeff. I was giddy to be in the room with one of my literary heroes. And while the others were offering feedback on my writing, I stole the occasional glance to see how Barry was reacting. Most of the time he spent flipping fairly idly through my pages. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been a surprise when, upon his turn to speak, he began gutting the opening paragraph of the prologue to the novel I’d been working on. Sentence by sentence, word by word, he worked like a butcher, cutting back the fat. Let’s just say that there wasn’t much meat left when he got down to the bone. Or, rather, he showed me that there hadn’t been much muscle to begin with. Would it be too much to say I felt eviscerated along with my work?
Yet it wasn’t cruel. It was honest. And when the furnace of my face cooled I saw that he was mostly right.
Hey, so this year is the tenth anniversary of The Lioness, a seminal album by countryish indie-rockers Songs: Ohia, whose frontman is the estimable Jason Molina (who also fronts Magnolia Electric Co.). Molina’s best, I think, are elliptical, sinister love songs, with which he stuffed The Lioness from front to back. His songs are heavily symbolic, studded with violent images, etc.–just listen to the songs I’m posting below (but don’t watch the videos–they’re just still images of the band), won’t you?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXsFkRBsAF8
From Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence”:
If the rule of myth is broken occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an attack on law is altogether futile. But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and shows by what means. Less possible and also less urgent for human kind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases. For only mythic violence, not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power of violence is invisible to men. … Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch, may be called “sovereign” violence.
I noticed a couple days ago that there’s a countdown on the bottom of the Marvin K. Mooney Society homepage. It was at five then, and now it’s at three. I am drawing the conclusion, I think rightly, that there are three days till we learn what exactly the MKM society is.
Am I the only one confused and a little discomfited by this thing? Who is Marvin K. Mooney? Let’s point fingers at people. I think it’s some creepy editor at Harper Perennial. Or maybe James Franco’s pseudoynm.
Our own Justin Taylor appears on 52 Stories this week with “Tennessee,” one of my favorite stories from Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, which drops tomorrow. It’s something special. Get pumped. You’ll notice some truly spectacular blurbs from a forthcoming New York Times Book Review on the left side of the 52 Stories page. In celebration, here’s a timeless Pavement video that I think pays adequate homage to Justin and, as Harold Bloom might say, whipper-snappers everywhere–and that I think embodies just how happy and excited I am that we have JT as a new voice in American fiction:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrM4UjaQmY
On his mother: “Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. To say, confronted with a certain photograph, ‘That’s almost the way she was!’ was more distressing than to say, confronted with another, ‘That’s not the way she was at all.’ The almost: love’s dreadful regime, but also the dream’s disappointing status–which is why I hate dreams. For I often dream about her (I dream only about her), but it is never quite my mother: sometimes, in the dream, there is something misplaced, something excessive: for example, something playful or casual–which she never was; or again I know it is she, but I do not see her features (but do we see, in dreams, or do we know?): I dream about her, I do not dream her. And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.”
–Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 66
RIP Sweetie Niedenthal (1999-2010)
This is my favorite dog-death poem. It is tearing me up right now. What are your favorite pet-death works, or pet-death moments in works?
I likely don’t have to give Diane Williams any sort of introduction. Her stories come from the heart–a wax, tender heart, and like a dying engine, ready to blow. Her stories come from the head–savagely recursive, a mirror curved to reflect the heart. Her stories bring me great joy, and it was a delight to interview her; I hope you enjoy this delightfully brief Q&A with Diane Williams: the other voice in your head.
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AN: One aspect common to both your fiction and some of the fiction you edit seems to be a voice that is both detached and emotional, I think–in fact, your narrators often seem, under the surface, to maintain a very fragile balance between collapse and self-assertiveness. Would you say that’s accurate? If so, what about that voice compels you? From what I can tell, such equanimity requires a great deal of control and grace. How far have you come, since you began writing fiction, in developing that voice?
DW: A very fragile balance between collapse and self-assertiveness — yes, yes, you’re right! How far have I come — since I began writing fiction — in developing that voice? Uh, oh! — perhaps not that far. I wouldn’t be the one to judge. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had come far and had confirmation on that. What compels me toward this voice is that this is apparently my voice — my condition. I’d like to think that the circumstance of the struggle, the perspective on the struggle shifts.
So Mike Young won the Literary Death Match in Baltimore. I know it was my post here that cinched it. Congrats, Mike! Hopefully there will be videos and so on soon.
This semester I’m taking a class on embodiment. You have a number of options for a final project. One of them is: “The construction of an original piece (or pieces) of art and a 7 page discussion of the impact of one or more of the theoretical works on its production.” How cool is that? What are some good works that deal creatively with the body, or with the collapsing of mind and body? What’s compelling or unique about the work’s approach?