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.
“Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: “Socialism!” Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway, where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.” – Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
(Thanks to Jeremy Schmall, who is presently reading Marx so that the rest of us don’t have to.)
Did you read these two pieces at the Poetry Foundation about the prize-winning poet whose prize-winning poems about Hurricane Katrina were mostly stolen verbatim from narratives by the non-prize-winning people who actually suffered through the storm and its aftermath? The first piece is by Abe Louise Young, proprietor of Alive in Truth, the site from which the narratives were taken. The second piece is by Raymond McDaniel, the poet who made use of them, and in it he discusses his process of composing the book and attempts to contextualize and justify said use. Both pieces are interesting, though I think that McDaniel’s is most notable for its defensive tone and refusal to deal directly with the concerns raised about his work. I’d be interested to hear what people think about this, though I want to offer the following caveat: anyone who types the words “Kathy Acker” or “David Shields” in re this is a fucking asshole. There I said it.
Another good piece on the late lamented Frank Kermode- “The Literary Critic as Humanist” at Slate.
There’s a new William Deresiewicz piece at The Nation. It’s about Javier Marias.
Franz Nicolay and Peter Bognanni talking to each other. That’s good.
Tao talks dirty at Thought Catalog. “I remember focusing on doing things with my fingers in a manner I felt would be conducive to her orgasming.” Me too, ‘bro.’
David Backer on Shane Jones: It made me write this in the margin on page 26: “it’s as if we can occupy a fantasy world of two-dimensional humanity hoping that truth will come to us. we sit and read literature like this as if we’re eunuchs in some feudal court, prancing around with velvet clothes and bells attached to our shoes trying out-somersault one another while beyond the windowless walls of the castle billions of people live dynamic and variegated lives, in many cases suffering at our expense.”
Paste magazine has suspended print subscription (read=folded) but their website seems to still exist, and may continue to exist. Fingers crossed.
Oh and hey, did you hear the one about the lunatic who took people hostage at the Discovery Channel headquarters? Well, he’s dead now, but his website lives on. Apparently his main demand is for “daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn’s “My Ishmael” pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other’s inventive ideas.” Wow. Anything that starts with Daniel Quinn is going to end poorly; just saying. Read the rest savetheplanetprotest.com.
Hey, let’s just do this once, okay? This picture was emailed to me by the journalist and photographer Alberto Riva, a man I’ve never met. It came with this note- “Hi Justin – I just read your book on a beach in Corsica, and I thought you might like to see a photo.” You thought right, Alberto, and thanks! Alberto’s got a website, and there’s some great stuff on there, including these images of New York, and a talk about photography with Lou Reed.
Matthew Simmons invited me to talk Apocalypse for Hobart. Our conversation is now live (and has been for a while, but I’ve been lazy/away).
I wrote an essay for the “Selling Shorts” series at Beatrice.com on “The Crazy Thought” by David Gates.
I gave this reading list to InDigest magazine.
I participated in a series called “The Great American Novel: An Honor Roll of Fallen Genres.” This is is in the new issue of Canteen (#6) which is available now or very soon. My response is not online, though Tao Lin’s is. Speaking of which, keep an eye peeled for the September Bookforum, which will feature a review of Lin’s latest by local favorite Joshua Cohen. Worlds collide! I’ve got a piece on Matthew Sharpe’s You Were Wrong in the same issue.
And last but not least, all of Brooklyn hails the return of Drew Toal, former Time Out (New York) books guy, erstwhile contributor to this blog, once and future roommate of yours truly–all his shit is in the living room and he is nowhere to be found. Now I am going to go and drink his beer. (UPDATE: That turned out to not be Drew’s beer.) Welcome home!
And to everyone else, thanks for bearing with. We won’t be doing this again anytime soon.
On Sunday, August 15, 2010 Eva Talmadge and I shot a book trailer for our forthcoming photo-anthology, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. First we spent a couple of hours with our videographer, Dev, at Eva’s apartment. We answered some questions, tried not to cut each other off too much, and did an impromptu scrounge of Eva’s library for books that inspired tattoos included in our book. I guess we found about two dozen. Then it was off to the legendary Fineline Tattoo on 1st Street and 1st Avenue. Fineline is the longest continually running tattoo shop in New York City, with a history that goes back into the underground days when tattooing was still illegal in Manhattan. Eva and our agent, Brandi Bowles, got themselves some literary tattoos from Mehai Bakaty, the son of Fineline founder Mike Bakaty and a worldclass tattooist in his own right. (I had initially promised to get inked, too. Needless to say, I bailed.) The trailer itself should be available sometime in the next couple weeks, but in the meantime I offer the following photo gallery- a preview of the preview, if you will (please do).
On her Facebook page The Housing Works Blog, Rachel Fershleiser asks: Which authors’ next books are you sure to read whether or not the subject matter interests you at all?
August 9, 2010 is the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Jerry Garcia. My favorite biography of the Grateful Dead is Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure by Carol Brightman. There’s also the Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. There’s also Rolling Stone magazine’s Garcia book, and Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia which seems to have just been republished by something called Plexus Press. For those of you who would rather mark the occasion with listening than with reading, I heartily recommend any (read=all) of the following:
Don’t Let Go - a great double live comp from ’76; highlights include “I’ll Take a Melody,” “Sitting in Limbo,” and the gospel triple-shot that rounds out the second disc: “My Sisters and Brothers,” “Lonesome and a Long Way from Home,” “Mighty High”.
The Grateful Dead – Road Trips Vol. 3 No. 3 (May 1970) – I wrote about my love for this most recent GD Productions release here last month.
Jerry Garcia and John Kahn live at Marin Veterans Auditorium 2/28/86 – What can I say? Single disc acoustic gem.
Workingman’s Dead, which btw turns 40 this year
Garcia Plays Dylan - a wonderful two-disc study of JG’s incomparable Dylan covers. “Visions of Johanna” alone is worth the price of admission, but don’t miss “Tough Mama” and, you know, all the rest of it.
And hey, as long as we’re getting into this–people who have read my short story “The New Life” might remember that at one point Brad buys his friend Kenny a Grateful Dead live release for his birthday. The release is 2/11/69 live at the Fillmore East, and I am happy to report that you can download the two-disc set directly from the Dead website for a measly $12.99 (or more depending on your chosen quality/format).
The historian and critic Tony Judt died this weekend from complications related to Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). He was 62. From the obituary in the Times.
An impassioned left-wing Zionist as a teenager, he shed his faith in agrarian socialism and Marxism early on and became, as he put it, a “universalist social democrat” with a deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues, identity politics and the emerging role of the United States as the world’s sole superpower.
[...]
“Today I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney-tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I’m regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist,” he told The Guardian of London in January 2010. “I like that. I’m on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable.”
There’s a wealth of links on the obit page to articles by and about Judt. I recommend “Israel without Cliches” (6/9/10). Also, here are excerpts from Judt’s most recent book, Ill Fares the Land at the NYRB and at the Times. Here’s all of Judt’s NYRB work (not sure how much is accessible without a subscription). Also check out “Bush’s Useful Idiots” from the LRB. And here’s an interview with Marc Tracy at Tablet, and another on Fresh Air about living with ALS.
Just about one year to the day (7/24/09) from when the idea was launched from this very blog, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is an imminent reality. The book–a full-color photo-anthology co-edited by Eva Talmadge and yours truly–will hit stores in October. You’ll be hearing plenty more about it then (we hope), but in the meantime I wanted to let folks know that we now have a website up and running at tattoolit.com. The site–which is primarily a tumblr–updates daily with re-blogs of literary tattoos from around the web that we find, literary quotations that seem like they might be worth writing on your body forever, and in the future will also have some previews/excerpts from the book itself, a book trailer, and whatever else we think of. You can also follow TattooLit on Twitter (the Twitterfeed streams to the website, but please don’t let this stop you from following it). Also^2, there’s the Facebook page. Also^3, even though the book is finished, we’d be glad to post a picture of your literary tattoo on any and all of the above-mentioned, so if you have one or are getting one, please feel free & encouraged to send them our way.
Shteyngart & Cohen at Vox Tablet. Shteyngart, btw, also just got a mind-erasingly ecstatic review from Michiko Kakutani. Cohen, not to be outdone, is running for mayor of Annapolis, Maryland.
Snowden Wright loved Eugene Marten’s Firework.
Ed Champion did not love Richard Yates.
Did somebody say politics? Not bloody likely. But anyway, let’s meet Emily Henochowicz. I got turned onto her personal blog after reading about her in the New York Times. Seems the 21 year old artist / exchange student / demonstrator lost an eye after being shot in the face with a tear gas canister by Israeli police. But that news is almost two months old. The article I read, which went up on 7/27, is about how the Israeli Ministry of Defense is refusing to pay (and denying responsibility for) her hospital bills. Anyway, if you go over to her blog you can check out Emily’s art, including this pair of one-eye-favoring glasses that she designed herself.
The Economist had a great cover story this week (last week?) on the absolute fuckedness (my paraphrase) of the American prison system. The web version seems to be behind a paywall, but maybe you can find the issue at the story. Did you know that over 1 in 100 Americans is currently incarcerated, and that if you factor in people on parole and probation, the figure rises to 1 in 31* Americans under some form of corrective supervision. Related, this Nation piece about BP’s use of prison labor in Louisiana.
Also, the Economist apparently has an arts/books blog now. It is called Prospero, and here’s an interesting piece about arch-agent Andrew Wylie partnering directly with Amazon (and bypassing publishers entirely) to release e-book editions of Portnoy’s Complaint, Updike’s Rabbit books, and a suite of others.
Finally, Unsaid editor David McLendon announces on Facebook that Allison Titus is the 2010 recipient of the Transport of the Aim Poetry Prize. You might remember that Titus’s Sum of Every Lost Ship was one of five small press poetry titles to read this summer. I liked her book a whole bunch. So congrats, Allison! And a hearty cheers to Unsaid.
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*For a few days this read “1 in 3.” Thanks to Steven Augustine for catching the typo.
via Nathan Salsburg‘s facebook page- the above was shot on 7/26/1983, or 27 years and 2 days ago. Some of you might recall that I really liked I Want to Go Where Things are Beautiful, a Nimrod Workman album made from recordings done by Mike Seeger, and released through Twos & Fews, the Drag City imprint that Salsburg runs. What you may not know is that Salsburg is also the driving force behind Face a Frowning World: An E.C. Ball Memorial Album, which is one of the most spectacular comps I’ve acquired in I don’t know how long–years. Even if you don’t have a clue who E.C. Ball was, you’ll find plenty to love about this record. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, the newest Twos & Fews release is called The Good Old-Fashioned Way; it is a collection of recordings by a man named Hamper McBee.
Hong Kong skyline w/ self-portrait & living room.
Hey it’s night time here but morning there–unless there is here for you, too, which if it is you should leave me a note and we should hang out. Anyway, here’s some stuff I’ve come across recently that might be of interest.
First, in honor of my being in Asia, here’s your weekly dose of Tao Lin- homeboy’s got “An Account of Being Arrested for ‘Trespassing’ NYU’s Bookstore” up at Gawker.
Hoist the blowhard flag! Ron Rosenbaum jumps a stack of sharks, and the moon too (jumps the moonshark? sharks the jumpmoon?) propelled by nothing more than an endless current of his own hot air. If you thought that the Original of Laura was a tempest in a teapot, then his “next big Nabokov controversy” is, I don’t know, a cheerio on a baseball field or something. Basically, Rosenbaum takes the fact that the poem “Pale Fire” from the novel Pale Fire is going to be published as a de luxe essay-accompanied strand-alone by Gingko Press, in November, argues for a reading of the poem that boils down to “even when Nabokov was bad he was good,” and then flogs the fact with the argument like an octopus against a stone. When it’s over, four breathless screens later, he passes out in a sweaty heap of his own inane superlatives, leaving the Slate commentariat to communally shit the bed with rage, which they promptly do. In a fitting Kinbot(e)-ian irony, the most interesting piece of interesting and useful information in this article (to me, anyway) is the footnote-fact that the artist half of this art-book, Jean Holabird, was for many years a collaborator with the great poet, Tony Towle. Here’s a picture of the two of them together in 1981. You can see some samples of their collaborative work at Tony’s website (look down near the bottom).
You may or may not remember that I was also in Hong Kong this time last year, and my visit happened to coincide with the Hong Kong Book Fair. Well, it happened again- I came, and so did the Fair. So I went back. The line for entry was even longer this year, despite the controversial banning of the pseudo-models in effect for the first time. Once more the Kubrick bookstore/art-publisher booth won my vote for Best In Show. Unlike last year, where I just gawked, this year I came prepared to buy some art books–and I did. More on these later. I also made it over to the Hong Kong University Press booth and bought a few books about Hong Kong: Ken Nicolson’s The Happy Valley: A History and Tour of the Hong Kong Cemetery, after reading about it this morning in this article in the HK Weekly, and Ackbar Abbas‘s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance.
In non-meatspace news, a preview of The Incongruous Quarterly #1 is now available. The new magazine will have fiction, poetry, and a section called “Kill Fee,” which will feature “Work that was originally meant for other publications gets a new lease on life. Featuring art, essays, fiction and articles that were supposed to belong to the New York Times, the Believer, the Globe and Mail, NPR, Daily News and Analysis India and more.” This is especially interesting, because I had been under the impression that the term “kill fee” was invented by the Paris Review two weeks ago, so I can only wonder where these guys heard it. Speaking of which, I’ll end this post in my least-favorite way possible, which is with a self-correction & apology. I contributed a piece of bona fide “shit talk” to the comment thread attached to this post of Blake’s. Without rehashing what it was I had a bug up my ass about, let me just say that I completely misunderstood what I read, and responded from a position of pure ignorance. So, you know–sorry.
Here’s a big ole FYI for y’all. There’s not a thing in this world that would keep me from this event, save for the fact of my being on the other side of said world until mid-August. Take it away, Joanna Yas of Open City:
David Berman will be making a very rare appearance in New York on Sunday, July 25, 6pm, for a reading and discussion at the NYU Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street (btw 5th & 6th).
This event is part of the the Open City Summer Writing Workshop, but we have a very limited number of seats available for the public for $15.
Tickets are available here (tickets will not be sold at the door)
http://www.opencity.org/ocsummerberman.html
Greetings from Hong Kong! It is early in the morning here and a five-year-old is trying to get me to help her watch some kind of Barbie-as-the-little-mermaid DVD, but instead I am doing this. Mark Doten, good friend of HTMLGiant’s (and of mine), has put together a Day dedicated to The Mountain Goats for The Weaklings. It is filled with riches, not the least of which is a new interview with John Darnielle. Here’s a choice gleaning:
MD: People often speak of certain common technical mistakes in the work of young fiction writers — POV that doesn’t gel, overuse of adverbs in dialog tags, that sort of thing. Are there specific technical problems you see repeatedly in the work of beginning songwriters?
JD: Yeah there’s one, a pet one, which I’ll get to shortly, but the main thing is less technical than – well, for lack of a better term, “moral.” Not moral problems in the sense so much of “what you are doing is morally indefensible,” but more of a “the terms of the moral universe in which you are setting your song are lame, and since you’re the one setting those terms, this is a problem you should fix.” What the hell am I even talking about — this: young men (this problem really doesn’t seem to exist for young women who write songs) often like to present a narrator whose self-destructive “urges” (they usually aren’t real “urges” so much as cosmetic choices about how to present himself) are clearly placing him on a collision course with doom. The narrator of these songs often seems to hope that the important people in his life will be both very impressed by the special nature of his pain, and that some people who have spurned him will be so horrified by the things his pain has made him do that they will either a) give him what he wants from them or b) speak with awe about him.
Really can’t stand that kinda stuff. There is one thing special about your pain: it’s yours. That ought to be enough, in my opinion; you can describe it from there, and take control of it, detail it lovingly, etc. But when a narrator seems to think that he is somehow beatified by his own particular collection of neuroses, well, this bugs me. I was as guilty of this early on as anybody, and one of my most popular songs is pretty much One Of These Types, and it’s not that all songs like this are bad. In fact many of them are quite good. But it’s a tendency that should be outgrown quickly. Often there are two main characters in a song like this, and almost always, the song would be a much better one of the two weren’t acting like a child.
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You should definitely go over there and check out Mark’s Goats Day. Also, you might want to refresh yourself on this Goats essay by Alec Niedenthal, published here last November.
I’d rate the movie solidly in the middle of the pack of Disney live-action films: Escape to Witch Mountain, The Gnomemobile, and the Midvale High movies. Better than the Apple Dumpling Gang, but not as good as Old Yeller.
- Michael D. Houst, Barrington NH, reviewing the new Sorcerer’s Apprentice in the comments section of A.O. Scott’s review of same.
There are very few things in music right now that excite me more than the words “new Alasdair Roberts record.” I became something of a Roberts evangelist last year when his album Spoils came out, and since then I’ve been availing myself of his back catalog, which includes several wonderful albums of traditional ballads and songs. His new record, Too Long in This Condition, is another collection of traditionals, and it is a delight. Sonically, it feels closer in spirit to Spoils–which was a (relatively) boisterous album of Roberts originals–than to his earlier traditionals records, in particular The Crook of My Arm, which remains (by a small margin) my favorite thing Roberts has put out to date. But there’s plenty to love about Too Long in This Condition. Highlights include marvelous takes on “The Two Sisters”, “Barbara Allen” and “The Daemon Lover”, the ecstatic jaw-harp-featuring “Kilmahog Saturday Afternoon,” and “The Golden Vanity,” this last being the record’s standout track. Also look out for “Little Sir Hugh,” which as near as I can tell is a song about Jewish blood libel–and I don’t mean “about” in the sense of “discussing” or “critiquing,” but rather in the sense of “features a Jew luring a child into her house and then murdering him for his precious blood.” Ahh, history!
via Ellen Kennedy’s tumblr, which is rarely updated but always worth checking up on. Did she take these pictures herself? Here’s hoping. I especially like this one, which looks like something tiny that floats near the bottom of the sea:
