Guest Posts

HTMLGIANT thanks our many guest writers for their words.

Tyrant/ParkLit Event Thingy TONIGHT

Tyrant Books is participating in ParkLit again this summer and our event is TONIGHT at 6:30! Oh no, that’s really short notice, but anyway, you should come. Susan Froderberg and Eugene Marten will be reading, and Gordon Lish will be doing the introductions.

The reading is supposed to take place outdoors, it being ParkLit and all, but it looks like it’s going to rain, so the event has been moved to upstairs of the Russian Samovar (russiansamovar.com) on 52nd between 7th and 8th Ave, which is a really gorgeous room with lots of leather and marble and they have all kinds of vodka. And not all kinds like Smirnoff or Belvedere, but all kinds like apple and horseradish.

Some info on the readers:

Susan Froderberg (published several times in the Tyrant under the name S.G. Miller) has a novel, Old Border Road, coming out this December by Little, Brown. Her stories have also appeared in Conjunctions, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly, and Massachusetts Review.

Eugene Marten is the author of In the Blind and Waste. Tyrant Books is releasing his third novel, Firework, on June 25th.

Hope to see you all there!

love and kisses,
Gian

Events / 6 Comments
June 16th, 2010 / 1:44 pm

GIANT Guest-post: Kati Nolfi on “Please Give”, Catherine Keener, and the Holofcener oeuvre

“Oh my God!” and “This is horrible!” clucked and gasped the audience of Please Give.  They were responding to the film’s many cynical and self involved remarks.  It wasn’t as antisocial as a Todd Solondz film, but people are unused to women representing and speaking their ugly truth on film.   Nicole Holofcener’s movies show angry, bitchy, unhappy characters—usually women—in unflattering lights, such as laughingly wondering if you can fuck in a wheelchair, or hoping for the death of an elderly person. But unlike other directors who show the worst of human relationships—Neil Labute, for example—Holofcener has compassion for her characters.  She and her actors create multidimensional portraits of women, mostly white and upper class.  When she attempted to deal with race in Lovely & Amazing, it was awkward.  For all the flaws and missteps in Holofcener’s movies, they address class when most films do not.  There is honesty in these movies about how class separates people, how we hang out with our own kind, though sometimes I wonder how critical she is being.  And her women, as horrible as they may be, are respected as whole fallible humans.

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Film / 11 Comments
June 3rd, 2010 / 1:56 pm

Michael Kimball Guest Lecture Series (6): Acoustics

I hate this quote from Janet Burroway: “Novelists and short-story writers are not under the same obligation as poets to reinforce sense with sound.” I don’t think she understands what Andy Devine does: “Words have acoustical qualities that resonate with being human.”

Fiction begins with language, which is an acoustical occasion. The fiction writer who writes with acoustics uses a kind of close attention. It’s looking hard at the sentence until it opens up. It’s feeling around between words until you find spaces that require new words, new beats. It’s beyond semantics (though it still depends on sense). It’s recognizing the recurring sounds and using them to rewrite a sentence. Maybe the first word in the sentence has a long-o sound in it and the sentence will feel finished if it ends with another word with another long-o sound in it, say, smoke. Maybe the fact that that sentence ends with a hard-k leads to the next sentence beginning with another hard-k sound, so the consonants run together and there isn’t any space between the sentences, not even really a pause, and then all of a sudden the narrative speeds up in a way that feels thrilling and there’s a fire and that story never would have happened if the fiction writer weren’t working with the acoustics. Working with acoustics, it’s a different way to find the right word, or the right place for the right word. It’s a different way to write or revise a sentence or a group of sentences. I like the compositional nature of it.

Dawn Raffel

The fiction can sound however you want it to sound, but it’s figuring out what those things are for you, or for the piece you’re working on, and then using those sounds to make something happen in the fiction, even if it’s something that the reader only feels and doesn’t quite know why. I know writers who are partial to glottal stops and other percussive consonants. I know writers who like the liquid consonants and sibilance. And I know one very particular writer who tries to remove all of these acoustical relations, so that no single sentence is repeating any particular sound. I used to focus on assonantial relations within sentences, but now I’m more often looking for them from one sentence to another sentence, a way to get from one sentence to another sentence.

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Craft Notes / 13 Comments
May 13th, 2010 / 12:20 pm

Hatin’: A Letter to HTMLGIANT from P.H. Madore

Behind the Scenes / 196 Comments
May 11th, 2010 / 10:39 am

Film & Music & Reviews

GIANT Guest-post: Kati Nolfi on The Runaways

I’ve been living life as a Runaway.  I saw the movie three times, I read the books Neon Angel and Joan Jett, watched Foxes, and cut my hair.  This narrative has a pull over me, a grown lady who should be done with slouching and greasy hair.  The Runaways, the books, and the interviews, especially of Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, are texts that clarify and complicate the meaning of child actors and musicians growing into adulthood.

Kristen Stewart is amazing.  In interviews she’s not coy and cute, she’s weird and rude and awkward, defying the script of normal behavior.  Her Internet lovers and haters seem obsessed with her nervousness and stuttering.  Nothing seems to be a pose and that seems to piss people off, as if she should posture, stand straight and smile.  The truth is in the YouTube commentariat, mean, gracious, and otherwise.  One detractor says, “Kristen looks more like a hobo than a star.”  That’s a good thing!  Girl, meet me in the desert and we can be friends.

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26 Comments
May 10th, 2010 / 9:47 am

Reviews

Keith Lee Morris’ Fragile Men

Call it What You Want: Stories by Keith Lee Morris. Tin House Books. pp. 264, $14.95 list ($10.76 at the above-linked B&N.com).

Reviewed by Jennifer Bassett.

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My first “real” writing class was in high school and taught by a young man who had just graduated from an MFA program. He was excited and passionate and on the first day of class he read us Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” from Jesus’ Son. We were all riveted. First of all, the story involved drugs (!) and secondly the writing was so sharp, it practically slit our wrists. For me, personally, that moment was particularly pivotal. Jesus’ Son and Johnson’s particular brand of writing—tough, honest, gritty, male, but with an undercurrent of boyish vulnerability—came to represent a standard by which I judged everything else.

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9 Comments
May 7th, 2010 / 10:26 am

Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front

[A poem by Wendell Berry, with compliments and hat-tips to Jeremy Schmall, Robert Snyderman, and everyone at the Corresponding Society. – JT]

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“Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

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Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

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Author Spotlight / 25 Comments
May 6th, 2010 / 6:29 pm

Ronnie Scott on Phrasings

I went through the cover emails for the last 200ish submissions I’ve received for my magazine, thinking I would present the first lines here in case your own cover emails have started to bore you. I really just picked anything, unless it seemed identical to a line I’d already copied and pasted in.

Some of them are fairly awkward, so I should say that if I went through my own cover emails from the last couple of years, I would probably cringe so hard that it would basically count as vomiting. I’ve also sent some really weird rejections.

I think I accepted four of these, but from the opening lines, you would never guess which. In fact, I have probably never paid the cover emails this much attention before. I just download the files and keep them all in a folder, then do a Gmail search for the filename when it’s time to respond.

My own standard cover letter is: “Dear [NAME, not “Editor”, unless it’s multiple editors],

I’ve attached a short story for [YOUR MAGAZINE]. It’s about [HOWEVER MANY WORDS], and I hope you like it.

Thanks for reading,

Ronnie.

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Behind the Scenes / 26 Comments
May 3rd, 2010 / 12:47 pm

Noah Cicero Reviews Sam Pink’s FROWNS NEED FRIENDS TOO

Sam Pink's Book

Sam Pink told me before he wrote Frowns need Friends Too he traveled to the Upper Peninsular of Michigan in the middle of winter. He bought a snowmobile and traveled deep in the American forest. Sam Pink sat under a tall coniferous tree in the zazen and meditated for 40 days and 40 nights. During those forty nights the devil made him work each new day at a different occupation. One day he was a marketing agent making a commercial for Nike, one day he was a stock broker on Wall Street. One day he was he was a politician for a congressional restrict in Nebraska, and on other days he was a poor white factory worker in the Rust Belt making small plastic parts, a Mexican picking fruit in California, a black person that had made and became a nurse with a good 401K plan, then he became a billionaire with tax shelters in the Caribbean, he was a poor black crack head walking down the street with nowhere to go and nothing to do, a soldier hunting down terrorists in Afghanistan and finally one of those people that shop at Wal-Mart that scare normal people with their obesity, bad outfits, and mid 80s hair style. The devil made him try all these jobs and said, “Which job do you want Sam Pink? And Sam Pink replied, “You will never recover from how you treat yourself?” Sam Pink stood up, stretched, yawned, and walked out of the forest to a local bar in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He found several men and women sitting in a bar drinking draft beer. He sat at the bar and said, “I forcefed you smegma with my fingernail and we sat naked on the tile floor- carefully avoiding every emotion. We became normal again.”

A middle-aged woman at the bar with stretch marks on her belly from having three kids said to Sam Pink, “I don’t want many friends because I am too weak for that kind of work. I am too weak to have friends.”

Sam Pink Replied, “It is okay to hurt someone’s feelings. It is ok.”

The woman smiled and lit a cigarette.

The oldest man in the bar who didn’t know the difference between the Twin Towers and the World Trade Center said, “I don’t know what I am doing.”

Sam Pink smiled and said, “But sometimes I accidentally tell the truth. One day I will fulfill my greatest aspiration when I walk down the sidewalk and take off my pants and beneath the pants there’s another pair of pants and then I keep walking, never returning to retrieve the previous pair of pants.”

The people in the bar felt his words and knew this was bad. They could not allow such words and contamination of the youth to take place. Sam Pink saw there faces and said, “I’ve felt stupid and fake every time I’ve apologized.” Sam Pink laughed.

One of the men at the bar pulled out a hand gun and shot Sam Pink several times. Sam Pink laid on the floor of the bar and thought that the floor was dirty and said, “It will never be over.”

____________________

You can buy FROWNS NEED FRIENDS TOO here.

Noah Cicero blogs here.

Uncategorized / 17 Comments
May 3rd, 2010 / 10:39 am

Do You Really Want To Live Forever??

[Giancarlo Ditrapano sends word of Lish’s upcoming class in NYC -BB]

So you still want to be a writer? Ah man, you are relentless! Good for you and all, but it’s getting kind of annoying, so here’s your last chance for a shot at immortality. (But if it doesn’t pan out for you after this class, you’ve got to promise me you’ll just go to law school and give up your dreams, okay? Okay.) Here’s your golden ticket, Charlie. Don’t choke on it: The Mercantile Library in NYC and Noreen Tomassi have organized another superb class for this summer. Every Monday, starting June 7th and ending on the 23rd of August, Gordon Lish will be teaching again. He took a little break (ten years) but started up again last summer. Due to how wonderfully that went, he is coming back for more. The classes run from 5 o’clock until around 11 or 12. Whew! That is a lot of hours, huh? So many hours! And all beside each other, one after the other! But you won’t believe how fast the hours fly by. The energy in that room could power a train.

N.B. If you have any ego whatsoever, or your feelings are easily rattled, or you think you’ve got Gordon’s number and you just might have something to teach the class yourself, then you should probably bag it. You are already dead in the water, my friend. But if you are prepared to throw it all away and start anew, here is your chance. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’ve heard about the Lish classes. I’ve heard it too. Who hasn’t? But instead of sounding like an idiot after spewing a bunch of garbage about them and then saying you’ve never taken one or even met Lish, why don’t you take the class so you can really back that garbage up, huh? Wouldn’t that be great? For once talking about something you actually know about? What do you have to lose? No, really. What do you have to lose?

Here’s the link. And you’re welcome.

Events / 20 Comments
April 27th, 2010 / 4:23 pm