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.
I just read this post on io9 about Thomas Allen, who is an apparently awesome photographer (though that doesn’t really do justice to the amount of craft that goes into making the things he ultimately photographs) about whom I knew nothing until just now.
io9 has a small gallery of his work attached to their post, and there’s another (where I’ve been pinching these images from) at the Aperture Foundation page for for his book, Uncovered.
Oh and he has a blog too.
The work of unruly teens?
ALL POINTS BULLETIN: To anyone who was thinking about writing a story “premised” on the uber-inclusive Safe Haven law of the state of Nebraska, be aware that your work has just become HISTORICAL FICTION. (all text leads to full NYT article)
Top Google Image Search result for "historical fiction." Umm, okay.
The law was revised during an emergency legislative session this week, is supposed to be signed today, and will go into effect at 12:01 AM Saturday, i.e. tonight. So if you’ve got a baby, child, tween, or teen you’ve been waffling about getting rid of, I advise you to put petal to the metal RIGHT NOW, and decide if you’re really serious while you’re en route. For reference, this where you’re headed:
Dateline: New York City
CUSTOMER SERVICE.
I forwarded this piece from the NYT Cityroom blog, “M.T.A. Plans Steep Service Cuts and Fare Increases,” to my friend and co-editor (of The Agriculture Reader) Jeremy Schmall. It’s a short article, but if you want to know why I sent it to him in an email with the subject-line “like being fucked with a laser beam that is somehow also a rusty old knife,” this paragraph pretty much explains it:
>>For New York City Transit, the biggest component of the authority, the deficit-closing plan would eliminate the W and Z subway lines; eliminate service on the M line to Bay Parkway in Brooklyn; shorten the route of the G line, which will permanently stop at Court Square in Long Island City, Queens, instead of 71st and Continental Avenues in Forest Hills, Queens; lower the frequency of most letter-line trains to every 10 minutes from every 8 minutes on weekends; lower the frequency of all trains to every 30 minutes from every 20 minutes from 2 to 5 a.m.; eliminate overnight bus service on 25 routes; and eliminate the X27 and X28 express-bus lines.<<
Anywho, Schmall wrote back the following cryptic musings, and I thought I would share them with all of you:
>>zizek writes that the atrocities of communism are easily identifiable, quantifiable, and well known; of capitalism, however, little is said.
nathanael West told his teacher he wanted to be a writer, and she advised that he would need to get used to being poor. the ensuing great depression made that easy: everyone was poor.<<
A PRIMER FOR THE UNINITIATED BUT CURIOUS.
LOOK FOR THE SILVER LINING.
HAPPY BRAVE NEW WORLD, EVERYBODY!
It was difficult to pick a winner. Many of the submissions were excellent critiques of the photograph, especially Adam R’s Life is awesome and Darby’s Jesus Christ looks down and Larry and JImmy briefly… Jereme managed to draw some human interest to the pink-dress character as a professional tree-kicker. She’s almost forgivable in that light. Almost. Really, you are all winners in my eyes, but since I have to choose one, I think the winner is Mark:
[Here is the original photo, and the winning prose – JT]
Come in and eat something. It’s all free for me. It’s all free from me. Do the dodododo. What’s new pussycat?
My chest is elevator globules. I’m less bouncing than freighting. I can’t say where my car was parked.
In retrospect, maybe this was a ridiculous idea.
WINNER.
If you don’t already know from having seen it on his own blog (where I found it), you might or might not be interested to know that a person named P.H. Madore has posted something he calls 8,794 Rambling Words On Tao Lin. I don’t know what it is about Tao that somehow, simply by existing in the world, he is able to bring out the stupid in otherwise reasonable people–or else to bring out the stupid people into otherwise reasonable discourse.
I’m always in the tank for Tao’s writing, and I’m usually in support of whatever bizarre culture-jam or e-bay auction or stunt he’s got going on, but man–his super-fans are just some of the most irritating fucking people you’ll ever encounter.
As soon as I saw that Part One of this post was entitled “Half-Assed Introductory Words,” I started yawning. I can’t stand it when people start out by telling me what a piece of crap the thing I’m about to read is. Why do so many writers do this?
SELF-FLAGELLATION #1: YOUR PERFORMATIVE SELF-ABUSE REVEALS ITSELF AS A CRY FOR ATTENTION AND PITY.
I thought to myself, who is P.H. Madore? So I skipped the next 8790 words, and went down to his bio note, which reads >>P. H. Madore was once a finalist in Riot Lit’s novel contest. That novel sucked, but you can read it and other stuff through his website, freemadore.<< More self-abuse. How charming. Also, I’m sure Riot Lit (whatever that is) will be thrilled to know that the novel they almost published “sucked,” though in all fairness to Madore, it probably did, which in turn begs the question: why would anyone want to read it? It would be easy–perhaps, too easy–to read this bio solely through the lens of S-F#1, pictured above. But friends, before you jump to hasty conclusions, consider another option:
SELF-FLAGELLATION #2: YOU ARE ACTUALLY VERY SERIOUS ABOUT THIS--AND GUESS WHAT? I STILL DON'T CARE.
Anyway, the rest of the post is a lot of transcribed g-chats, emails between Madore and Tao, categorically idiotic assertions such as “Tao Lin is a better artist than Andy Warhol,” and a section on a dozen writers who Madore considers Tao Lin “followers.” “[M]ight be you can count me among them,” he writes. Good company! A few lines down, he tells the followers not to lose heart, because “[a]rticles like this will be written about each of them one day…” Don’t worry Gene Morgan, everyone grows at their own special pace! Keep drinking milk! You too, Brandon Scott Gorrell!
Was the young William T. Vollmann a Tao Lin follower?
If I had to identify one truly, unimpeachably excellent thing about this post, it would be that somewhere in the middle of it there’s a link to this picture:
Don’t worry, Ellen Kennedy! Even though P.H. Madore ranks you with the other followers, he knows that you’ve got your “own things going on.”
Friends, this picture was provided to us by an anonymous friend of mine, who is an excellent and well-known publisher. S/he forwarded it to me yesterday, with the following message appended: >>this girl made fun of me in high school (pink dress)<<.
For the first ever HTMLGiant literary contest, you are invited to write an original piece of literature inspired by this photograph. Poetry, prose & indeterminate forms are all acceptable. Feel free to simply provide a caption, or to produce a short-short up to, say, 300 words. Leave your entries in the comments section of this post.
My anonymous friend will judge, and it will be up to him/her what–if anything–the winner receives.
PURITY BALL.
I think these new rules should be enstated, on HTMLGiant if nowhere else. They both have to do with terms we use and how we use them.
THE FIRST.
From this day forward, if you want to use the term SELLING OUT, you must needs be able to identify
(a) what is being sold out,
(b) to whom it is being sold, and
(c) what you believe the sale garners the seller.
If you don’t know all three of those things, or aren’t prepared to defend your choices, then you should stop talking/typing right now.
FATHERS HOLD THEIR DAUGHTERS' SMOOTH BARE TEENAGE SHOULDERS. STILL PURE. STILL A BALL.
THE SECOND.
I think the terms “innovative” and “avant-garde” and “experimental” writing are often just code for one of two things. The first is “non/anti-narrative”–which are both fine, if that’s what you’re into, but why not just say so? The other thing those words are often code for is “this bullshit I cranked out in 20 minutes and am going to start submitting as-is, and I guess one of these fourth-rate online lit journals is bound to pick it up.” (I think a lot of writers today go through a phase where they do shit like this—it’s a function of the age we live in, when submitting is usually one-click free, and every third person with a blog claims to be a “review” of some kind or other. The question is whether you grow out of it. And just to prove that this is the voice of bitter experience speaking, rather than a claim for my own intrinsic betterness or intelligence, I invite you to go search for the stuff I published a few years ago in Mad Hatters Review. Just don’t tell me about it after.)
THIS IS WHAT GOOGLE SAYS SILENCE LOOKS LIKE (WITH SAFE SEARCH ON).
Anyway, from now on, if you want to describe writing as:
“innovative” – I want you to be able to tell me in plain English what exactly is being innovated. It doesn’t need to be an exhaustive critical essay. A simple, “I think this opens up the possibility of ____ and/or shows a new innovation in the field of _______ literature” will do fine. In college I took a literature course which examined Marilynne Robinson’s innovative use of spaces–especially the domestic space–in her novel Housekeeping. My teacher also mentioned that the book actually includes a neologism- the word “lucifactions,” used to describe light on water, in the scene where the girls are out on the lake.
THIS IS AN INNOVATIVE WRITER.
“experimental” – you should be able to describe the experiment. “I wrote this to see if I could fabricate the feeling of a Burroughs cut-up without writing a text and cutting it up, so I made up three storylines and forced myself to switch off between them mid-sentence, twice a paragraph.” It also works when you’re talking about somebody else’s writing. “Dennis Cooper said that one of the ‘rules’ for his novel, Try was that there had to be action in every single moment of the book.”
THIS IS AN EXPERIMENTAL WRITER.
“avant-garde” – is a military term, which literally means “advance guard.” As Donald Barthelme once pointed out, the function of an advance guard is to protect the middle. It would probably be useful, when thinking of things that are avant-garde, to think of them in this way. What body are they advancing out of? What middle is it that they (or you) are protecting?
MADE THE WORLD SAFE FOR RAYMOND CARVER, WHO DID NOT RETURN THE FAVOR.
I’m not saying every use of these terms has to come with an attached explanation. I’m just saying these are things you should think about when deciding whether—and how—to deploy them. If you were also capable of discussing your thought process in conversation, well that would just be jimmies on the sundae, wouldn’t it?
I USUALLY CALL THEM SPRINKLES, JUST LIKE YOU DO.
Matt Hart, the genius author of Who’s Who Vivid and editor/publisher of the stellar Forklift, Ohio, will be appearing on The Joe Milford Poetry Show tomorrow, and I hope you will all tune in. Not only is Matt a great editor/publisher, and a fantastic poet, but he’s got a bar-none reading style that pretty much doubles the pleasure of what was already some of the best shit going these days. Don’t screw this one up.
Except I might mean it’s awesome how stupid this is. But no promises.
He’s wrapped up so pretty
And I can unwind
His neat little ribbons,
And then I find –
His tummy comes open
And what do I see?
Special little organs that
Belong to you and me.
I wash them all off
So he can be clean
Then put them back in
And do up his seam.
Then just like a mummy,
I wrap him up tight
Then I cuddle him close
And hold him all night.
