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.
Friends,
It is with a heavy yet satisfied heart that I announce my resignation from HTMLGiant. I have enjoyed just over two wonderful years (roughly equivalent, in internet time, to a decade and a half) as a contributor to this blog. It has been a privilege and a thrill to be part of this site since its inception. Endless thanks are due to Blake Butler and Gene Morgan, for inviting me to join up in the first place, and for all the good times since. A hearty cheers as well to the other contributors here (past and present) and to our legion of commenters and readers. It has been a lot of fun to talk and debate with you (most of you, at any rate) and I’m sure we’ll still be seeing plenty of one another around the web, and maybe in meatspace too. Now, before things get too sentimental, here’s Woody Guthrie to play us out.
Upriver, dawn’s dry herald brought to the hungover steamship crew news of the pervert Evavangeline had gutted the midnight before. It went bunk to bunk in whispers and giggles. Instead of falling into the water like decent folk, the pervert had gotten tangled in a fishnet hung along the ship’s port side. Throughout the night a pulsing contingent of catfish, carp, grinnel, gar, sucker, alligators and even a few river-lost sand sharks disoriented by fresh water had followed the boat, swirling in the ooze. In the morning light, enormous orange crawfish with their pinchers clicking rode the body, one arm of which trailing in the water was festooned with moccasins attached at the fang. When one became too blooded it fell loose and sank in the clouds in the sky in the river.
- Tom Franklin, Smonk
[FYI: I know it's Mean Week, but here's something not mean. Bryan Charles's memoir will be published by Open City Books in November. New York folks, Charles reads with Ed Park at the KGB Bar on Wednesday, 10/27. - JT]
I received a box of business cards that said BRYAN A. CHARLES, STAFF WRITER. I sent one to my mother and she was delighted. I started reading the Wall Street Journal and various financial websites, learning the biz. I made sure Clara saw the Journal open on my desk every morning. Occasionally if I felt comfortable I’d mention an article or some topic of interest to the markets generally. I ran drafts of my “Thinking Primarily About Mutual Funds” piece by Peter, the senior writer. He was in his early thirties, had been at the game a while, and had a great gift. Peter could open his mouth and speak fully formed marketing sentences. But there was an irony in his manner that subtly conveyed the absurdity of our task. Peter taught me that financial services involved pushing and repackaging and reselling the same few concepts: diversification, buying a new home, saving for your children’s college education or your own retirement. But the bedrock tenets of financial marketing were stressing the importance of taking a long-term view and encouraging investors to consult financial advisors.
Today is awesomepoet Mary Jo Bang’s birthday. Over on her wall, the best wishes are piling up; fellow awesomepoet Erin Belieu even proclaimed-
which seems just about right to me. As our regular readers know, HTMLGiant encourages you to celebrate the existence of writers you admire and enjoy by reading their work and buying their books. You can start over at Poets.org, where there are five MJB poems and a bio. A similar setup, but with mostly different poems, can be found at the Poetry Foundation. Her most recent collection is The Bride of E, and the one before it, Elegy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Those two are both published by Graywolf. I also know many people who are strong partisans for her early book, Louise in Love. All this plus The Eye like a Strange Balloon and The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, so there’s really no excuse for not getting your fill. Mary Jo Bang, HTMLGiant wishes you a very happy birthday, and advises that you never–ever–do a Google image search for your last name. Cheers!
Hey, guess what? Fourteen months after first announcing our project on this site, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is as real as a needle driving ink into your skin. Today is Publication Day for us, and my co-editor Eva Talmadge and I want to take a moment to offer our gratitude to all of the HTMLGiant readership. Without your early support, encouragement and re-blogging, this project might well have come to nothing. But instead, we’ve got this full-color anthology of hundreds of tattoos in a panoply of languages from book and body-art enthusiasts all over the U.S. and the world. Eva and I have done a lot of press already, and there’s more coming. I won’t be gumming up the works here at Giant with a running tally, but one of the highlights for us thus far has been our appearance this morning on NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook. You can stream our segment here. Also, many listeners are uploading pictures of their own literary tattoos to a fan gallery that NPR is hosting on their site. We’ve also been getting a lot of new tattoos to our submissions address, tattoolit@gmail.com , and we’ve been posting those on the book’s official site. If you’ve got one (or ten), we want to see it, so please do keep ‘em coming in. And thanks–seriously–for everything. Cheers!
This was just posted to Unsaid literary journal’s Facebook. Reposted here in case you don’t do the Facebook. (If you do do the Facebook, you should click on the link: “like” the post, “friend” the journal, &c.) There’s also an interview with Powell in the new issue of the New York Tyrant.
Keep in mind what writing should do:
1) Be alive.
2) Be surprising.
3) Obey tenets of economy, verve, etc.
4) Amount to something (usually, in terms of having “something at stake”).
5) Payoff (i.e., resolve).
Any three of five is worth spoiling paper for. It should be remembered also that:
6) Brave wild failure is applauded.
And that:
7) You should be less comfortable if you’re pretty sure of what you’re writing about.
And that:
8) You should ignore, at all times, all sense of authorial narrative obligations, and, certainly, your own preconceptions and ideas.
This is more preaching than could possibly be salubrious. So, some more: Obey only the logic of immediacy, from word to word. Or, obey only its obverse, the illogic of immediacy, or the logic of inimmediacy, as you prefer.
[Caveat spoiler. Enter this and all voids at your own risk.]
Enter the Void, the new film by Gaspar Noe, is a nearly three hours’ slurry of blur and brightness, punctuated by lucid moments of pornographic violence and/or actual pornography, and informed by exactly two ideas: the first, that everything about a fluorescent light is utterly fascinating; the second, that the only remotely interesting thing about a woman is her tits. Everything else the film has to say–drugs are bad, kind of, but maybe they’re just really cool; fucking your sister, like fucking your best friend’s mom, has its pros and cons; Japan is really shiny and has relatively few Japanese people in it; something something reincarnation–is either so hopelessly garbled or else delivered in such cliched terms (“Rockabye Baby” plinked out on a celeste! A drug dealer who is also a gay rapist!) that the temptation is to think the movie is inviting your laughter. (O, would that it were so!) I saw it last night with Joshua Cohen at the IFC Cinema in New York.
Moe Tkacik–the Moe who hasn’t joined the Tea Party–takes New Yorker staff writer Peter Boyer to the woodshed over his lying profile of the lunatic monstrosity that is The Family. Boyer’s article, an unlikely piece of hack inside-jobbery, basically exists to quell the rumors you may have heard about The Family–that they’re a secretive sect of influence-dealing theocrats, that they’re genocide-friendly, that they’ve got a kind of perpetual hard-on for dictators and fascists, that they hate women, that they are the force behind the Ugandan gay death penalty legislation, and that for one reason or another are probably actively plotting your death right now–all of which are pretty much true. I remember reading the Boyer piece whenever it came out (a week or two ago?) with a growing sense of cognitive dissonance and a slowly rising gorge. Everything about the piece is inexcusable, beginning with the existence of the organization being profiled. It’s heartening–but also induces further rage–to read such an incisive and thorough response, and Moe Tkacik is not only the best person for the job, she’s pretty much the only person who would bother to do it. Lucky us! Speaking of which, this piece appears on Das Krapital, Moe’s new gig as a daily blogger for the Washington City Paper. You should also check out her piece on “Why the Right Hates Freedom“, and basically be reading this blog every day. Expect to hear about it again. Also, check out Jeff Sharlet’s blog.
Christian Lorentzen does the Malcolm Gladwell.
The Guardian Books Blog on “How Writers Review their Critics.”
Elif Batuman’s epic piece in the NYTimes Magazine on the purgatory of some of Kafka’s papers.
There’s a great piece over at The Millions on what it means to be a “best bookstore” and how, contra the insidious “death of books/bookstores/reading/literacy” meme that we’re all always seeing spread around, there’s actually a lot to be excited about on these fronts. Among the other fun stuff in the piece, is this offhand list of “the top 10 booksellers in America … Stephanie Anderson from WORD, Emily Pullen from Skylight, Michele Filgate from Riverrun, Rachel Fershleiser from Housing Works…”. The article also mentions a crucial point first made–by Rachel F.–on the Housing Works blog, that many of the best bookstores in NYC have opened rather than closed within the last ten years. Counter-meme, anyone?
Every time you think you know Joshua Cohen, he finds something else to surprise you with. Apparently, homeboy has been (or is now?) publishing a new unpublished piece of short fiction every week on his website. Check out the Paragraph for Liu Xaiobo.
And finally, something I was right about. Remember back when we were talking about the suicide of Kevin Morrissey at the VQR? In a comment on that post, I argued that the charges of “workplace bullying” leveled against VQR editor Ted Genoways appeared off-base and reductive. I suggested that people read Emily Bazelon’s Slate reporting on the Phoebe Prince case. Well, a couple of days ago Slate published a big new piece by Bazelon about the VQR, what workplace bullying really is (and isn’t), and how the media made a caricature out of Ted Genoways. You should go read that piece right now.
A few of the big winners: DeLillo takes the Saul Bellow award for Achievement in American Fiction. Anne Carson wins for Poetry in Translation for An Oresteia from the Greek, and, in a separate translation prize, Michael Henry Heim wins for Wonder by Hugo Claus, from the Dutch. This caught my eye because Heim’s translation of Mann’s Death in Venice pretty much made my summer. I feel like I’ll read anything that guy turns English. Anyway, full list below the fold.
Charles Bock reviews Richard Yates in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Here’s my top pick for a pull-quote: “[Lin] provides accurate, often filthy dispatches on what it is to be young and pushing against the world.”
… Also, in case you didn’t catch it when we bugged out about it the other day, TL’s self-profile in The Stranger is the best piece of satire of 2010 so far, and a strong favorite for best of the year.
Dear Stephen,
I actually started writing this as a private email to you, but then I thought that posting about it would be more in the spirit of the Rumpus, and that the resulting conversation might be a useful one–more useful than if it was just you and me emailing. So here goes.
Why do so many posts on The Rumpus start from the premise that the author is somehow incapable or a weakling? I feel like I see examples of this all the time, but looking at the frontpage right now, there’s the Angela Stubbs article on Gina Frangello (second sentence: “She’s [the] kind of person you meet and you know seconds after meeting them, they’re capable of things you’d never be able to accomplish.”) and then the newest installment of Sari Botton’s Conversations with Writers Braver than Me, which I’m sorry, is about as terrible a name for a column as I can imagine–which is a shame, since it’s a good column. Oh and there was the Steve Almond’s “One Over Forty,” which was, actually, in some limited but real sense brave, and yet insisted on assuming the posture of a whipped puppy, even though the only one doing the whipping was Almond himself. Other examples abound, if anyone wants to go dig them out. I guess what I am asking is, have other people noticed this trend? And what is the deal with it? Does anyone have any ideas?
Unsurprisingly, I have an idea–and it’s that the Rumpus just happens to be where I’ve noticed something that is much larger: part of a general trend in contemporary indy- and small-press lit-land that insists on modesty to the point of self-abasement, encourages people to get awestruck at the drop of a hat, and rewards the expression of self-doubt rather than self-confidence. I think it’s related to the question Blake posed the other day, about why writers obsess in public over their rejections in a way that they never would (and, crucially, would never be allowed to) over their successes. In the case of both the above-quoted Stubbs sentence and the Botton column title, the attempt seems to be to pay a compliment to the subject of the piece, but the actual effect is to deflect positive attention from the subject (Frangello; Gould) and back onto the writer of the piece in the form of negative attention. In both cases, the reader has been put on notice that the author may not be equal to her chosen subject-matter.
It has not escaped my attention that both these examples are of women writing about other women. I keep trying to figure out how gender and gender-role-enforcement might play into this, but it’s a little bit more than I’m prepared to take on right now, other than to say that in American culture women are consistently forced to adopt or rewarded for adopting an aww-shucks posture in relation to the people and things that they would champion. This is a tendency which ought to be resisted with main force. Last thoughts: There’s no honor in being called brave by a self-professed coward. If your goal is to tell somebody “you are awesome,” try not to follow it right away with “and I am shit.”
Bookslut #100 exists and is wonderful. Founders Michael Schaub and Jessa Crispin exchange letters and fond memories. Jim Behrle draws Bookslut’s origin story. Ben Greenman and Pauls Toutonghi kick off a new series together, where they exchange letters about authors who have won the Nobel prize. Eryn Loeb talks to Rachel Shukert. Michele Filgate talks to Lee Rourke. Elizabeth Hildreth talks to Dorothea Lasky. Rachel Rabbit White talks to Stephen Elliott AND Steve Almond AND Tao Lin about sex “after Portnoy” (a long goddamn time after Portnoy, btw, but hey, live and let live). Our own Blake Butler talks to our own Christopher Higgs. Plus the usual wealth of reviews and columns. One hundred congrats and cheers and kudos to Jessa & Michael–long may you both slut.
Deming & Wilson in their natural habitat: slightly out of focus on the uptown 1
HTMLGIANT IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE ENGAGEMENT OF JOHN DEMING AND MELINDA WILSON.
The happy couple–who together comprise 2/3 of the Coldfront editorial triumvirate–have been dating for as long as we’ve known them, and already own two dogs together, so this might seem like not such a big deal to you, but we think that it is really huge and we are very excited and happy for them. It is unclear as of this writing how the official consolidation of their power will impact the other 1/3 of Team Coldfront, the Canadian poet Graeme Bezanson. Other details surrounding the engagement are likewise sketchy, though we did learn from Wilson that Deming was “very cute” and “got the ask right the second time”–which we think is pretty not bad, and probably better than we would have done in the same situation–which, we’d like to note, we are not even remotely close to finding ourselves in. [Sigh.] Bezanson is traveling later this week to Africa–ostensibly to his own sister’s wedding, but potentially to form new poetry-criticism-website-related alliances in the face of this sudden change in the landscape of power. He is expected back well in advance of the D+W wedding, which will be in New Hampshire sometime in early 2012, contingent on the forbearance of the Mayan calendar. Maybe they will have wedding photos that look like this:
My old New School buddy, Melissa Petro, has an op-ed up at the Huffington Post about the closing of the Craigslist adult services section- Thoughts from a Former Craigslist Sex Worker. Also, you might remember Melissa’s previous piece about sex work, “Not Safe For Work,” which appeared on The Rumpus.
One of the classes Melissa and I took together at New School was a seminar on the 20th century novel, taught by Dale Peck. Dale is 1/5 of a new publishing collective called Mischief & Mayhem, whose site went live just today. From their hot, fresh statement of purpose:
The collective came together in response to the increasingly homogenized books that corporate publishers and chain retailers have determined will sell the most copies. We recognize that there are readers who want to be challenged instead of placated.
The other four M&M-ers, by the way, are Lisa Dierbeck, Joshua Furst, DW Gibson and Choire Sicha. The collective seems to have a raft of events and projects planned, and will bring books into the world as an imprint of O/R Books, publisher of the Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish (see our sidebar ad) and Eileen Myles’s Inferno: A Poet’s Novel.
Another school-friend of mine, our own Amy McDaniel, has a fantastic essay in the new issue of Tin House. The theme of the issue is “Class in America” and it’s a doozy from start to finish–there are stories by Benjamin Percy and Charles Baxter, an excerpt from Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary, poems by Major Jackson and Sarah Gambito, an interview with Luc Sante, A.N. Devers visits Poe’s house(s), and a whole lot more. I am enjoying this thoroughly & recommend it heartily.
And finally, there’s a new installment of Poets off Poetry, a series edited by Jackie Clark and published on Coldfront, which is run by Graeme Bezansen, John Deming & Melinda Wilson–New Schoolers all. In this POP-isode, Mathias Svalina (who did not go to NS, but looooves someone who did) writes about the time he listened to Side A of David Bowie’s Hunky Dory for a week straight.
A new major book review section is about to open, at… the Wall Street Journal?
Jeff T. Johnson’s got an essay on “The New Hybridity” at Fanzine.
Castro thinks Ahmadinejad should stop slandering the Jews. You can add that to the list of things Castro and I agree about.
Mathias Svalina has been writing Book Proposals for Broadway Books. From “My Year on a Moving Sidewalk”:
This book will be popular among readers who enjoyed such books at Mary Roach’s Stiff, Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars & the City of Portland, Oregon’s downloadable pdf “SIDEWALK REPAIR MANUAL: How to Repair and Maintain a Sidewalk.”
Bianca Stone has a new chapbook coming out. Someone Else’s Wedding Vows is now available for pre-order from Argos Books.
Tender, imaginative, wry and wise, the poems in Stone’s first collection take the reader from the bottom of the ocean to the orbit of the moon. In between, the geography of the heart is mapped lyrically and unexpectedly.
Not a lot to complain about in that description, is there?
At the Faster Times, Kyle Minor absolutely loses his shit over Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird. I stopped pretending I could follow what he was talking about somewhere toward the middle, but the upshot seems to be that he likes her book very, very much.
And finally, as if you needed me to tell you, the launch event for Richard Yates is at BookCourt tonight. It begins in about ten hours, which means that I am going to leave my house in a few minutes to head down there and claim a seat.
Today’s the day for Joshua Cohen, frequent target of this blog’s affection and voice of his generation for all those whom Tao Lin is not already providing a voice. So, how are you going to celebrate thirty years of the Tribe of One? As always, this blog recommends that you mark the existence of writers whose existence you are glad for by buying their books.
Witz is 20% off if you buy direct from Dalkey Archive. (Read Drew Toal’s Time Out New York review, and a snippet from Blake Butler’s in The Believer). A Heaven of Others is available new, used and Kindled at Amazon. You can get Witz there too, obviously, so if you want both you can probably score free shipping. And once the shipping’s free, why not pump those savings into Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto? The trifecta is very much in the spirit of thirtytude. Here’s me and Kyle Minor in conversation re A Heaven of Others at The Rumpus. Here’s Cohen himself answering Stray Questions at the Paper Cuts blog. Oh, and don’t miss Christian Lorentzen’s profile in the New York Observer.
From Yuri, Stoya, and all of us at HTMLGiant–Happy Birthday!
