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.
I’m not sure how to say this, but the new Joanna Newsom album is going to be three CDs/LPs. You can find the first single on the Drag City homepage. It is, um, gorgeous. I feel like most people here probably hate Joanna Newsom. What do you think of Joanna Newsom?
This Saturday marks the first Literary Death Match: Baltimore, at which our own Mike Young will be reading and representing Publishing Genius, i.e. our own Adam Robinson. Michael Kimball will be judging. Go Mike! It will surely be a night of Mikes. I kind of want to move to Baltimore.
David Foster Wallace was never doing anything wrong. Even Wallace’s first published story, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing”–published in 1984 by the Amherst Review, written presumably at the age of 22–bears most of his stylistic earmarks circa Infinite Jest, and grapples with themes that would echo throughout much of his work to follow: infinity, fear, the risk of autobiography, fiction as an event, the struggle to empathize–the struggle to simply be in one’s own skin. All of this with a keen and self-aware sense of humor which dares you not to let Wallace’s cheeky, vigorous and, behind all that, ultimately hurt voice crawl into your head and stay there. But toward the end of his life, Wallace wasn’t sure, any longer, if his stylistic approach to the themes he felt to be most urgent–the themes that ran, almost doctrinairally, obsessively, through both his fiction and nonfiction–was truly effective in the big, big way he wanted it to be. He wanted to pare down the ecstasy of his prose, empty his sentences of self in a move toward mindfulness, toward sacrifice. Partly, I think Wallace’s stylistic shift (which we will see in full force soon when his final, unfinished novel, The Pale King, hits) was simply him doing good work; no artist as intelligent and unremittingly inventive as Wallace could stay working in the same mode for long. But and also (just kidding; I won’t do that here), I think Wallace, the whole time, imagined his work as a call-to-arms to the writer inside of every reader, the reader inside of every writer. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace points toward exactly the kind of shift in literary consciousness–and moral consciousness–away from what he saw as the destructive impulses of postmodernism, the shift which he could never, for whatever reason, fully effect in his own work:
The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of ‘anti-rebels,’ born oglers who dare to step back from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. […] Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end.
I want to concentrate on Wallace’s understanding of the fictionist as, essentially and necessarily, an artist concerned with ethics, with how and why we do the things we do, with aesthetics as absolute freedom, with evil and with personal truth–truth concealed by a lie. And I want to ask why we are not more concerned with his vision. Why we do not, by and large, see aesthetics as ethics, as an ethical act, a metapolitics, for which we, as writers with the power and duty to transform, are deeply and inescapably responsible. And how we get from ethics to moral literature: literature with deep conviction and passion toward the event of truth.
Interesting post by Chris Heavener over at Annalemma on Thursday’s Rumpus/HTMLGiant (what did we do there?) event. Of principal interest is the dialogue in the comments section between Chris and Gigantic/Rumpus New York Editor Rozalia Jovanovick. I liked this event a lot. Especially the readings given by Justin (goddamn, that story he read is so good), Tao Lin, Stephen Elliott, and Deb Olin Unferth (which will apparently appear in this year’s NOON). Yep. Thanks to my mom for the tip–seriously, my mom told me about this on the way to dinner.
Five Dials DFW tribute issue available online here. Subscribe here. Includes eulogies by George Saunders, Zadie Smith, and Don DeLillo, all of which are invaluable in one’s life. Watch Conan’s last night with The Tonight Show here. Listen to new Frightened Rabbit single here. Have a good weekend, wherever you are. I am in Alabama for a few days and it is a pretty sad place to be.
In an hour, a car service is coming to get me. It will bring to me to La Guardia, where I will wait two hours for my flight to arrive. On that flight, I will hopefully not be seated next to people who smell or who make smacking noises with their mouths, nor people who are feeling talkative. I will probably read and work on some stuff for school. Mostly what I will do, probably, is I will listen to Ryan Adams–it has to be music completely disconnected from any event–and stare forward, and wonder how it is possible that I have left the place where I, only so many hours prior, was.
For better or for worse–when it comes to the everyday, doubtless for worse–endings mean the most to me. Reading, writing, “relationships,” split-second goodbyes, drawn out goodbyes that never satisfy, leaving New York City after what amounts to a month here. While reading, I’ll cover up the last few sentences of a book–any book–with my hand until my eyes get there. I almost hold my breath. An ending is an opening, a deep and unmendable rending. While writing, I’ll ensure that the ending unravels, de-sutures, overturns what precedes it. I can control my endings on the page. I want them to spill the weight of the work into a neuter space or something.
Off the page, I am a masterful botcher of endings.
Take our own Ken Baumann. He’s twenty, and already toying with a style, voice, and rhythm all his own–see the newest New York Tyrant for proof. His work is at once strange and familiar, careful and mindful without constraining a sense of freedom which announces the promise of novelty, of a literature which is no longer merely literature. If any of that makes any sense to anyone. What I mean to say is, Ken is a young–very young, college-aged–prose stylist. Perhaps that is a rare feat. Perhaps it is not. But not often does an artist so young fulfill the promise of youth by making it new.
Take Zachary German. He’s twenty-one, I believe, and while he indeed belongs to a certain class of writers, his style, at a very original pace, moves toward a terminal space, a degree-zero. His work has much to say about contemporary art, culture, and values, on both a level of doing and being. In many ways, he walks the talk of a young Camus. He’s twenty-one. How?
I’m nineteen. I strive for an immediate stylism in my work. Whether or not I’m successful I cannot say. READ MORE >
Dennis Cooper and I met outside of PS122–the East Village-ish space for his glorious Jerk–and stood in the cold and talked for a while. Eventually, Blake Butler and Justin Taylor showed up (he’d be listening–a conversation between him and Josh Cohen is forthcoming). We were in no little rush, since Dennis had to be back at the theater in forty-five minutes. I wanted to do the interview in a Subway. No one thought that was funny. Eventually we ended up in some ill-lit restaurant chosen on a whim. Dennis ordered a quesadilla. He eventually finished it. Dennis is a vegetarian.
I listened. I recorded.
There was such bad music playing in there.
This is a pretty long conversation.