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.
“Critics are the sum of their biases—they begin as arbitraries and end as certainties (the course of my own criticism has sometimes been the other way round). You can’t stand that ditherer Coleridge, she can’t stand that whiner Keats, I can’t stand that dry fussbudget Wordsworth, and we all hate Shelley—poets are Rorschach tests.”
And just to keep the MEAN WEEKness nice and fair, here’s Brian Henry at Verse Magazine, trashing William Logan’s then-new collection of criticism. Here’s a taste: “Despite his claim to read too many new books of poetry, Logan seems oddly unaware of the state of contemporary American poetry. He admits that trade presses have largely given up on poetry, but one would be hard-pressed to glean this from this selection of reviews.” OOOOOOOOOhhhhhh.
I wish I could tell you how many people–editors, event hosts, other writers–have approached me privately, strictly off-the-record, and complained about how much they disliked Valzhyna Mort’s Factory of Tears. But nobody wants to be the one to call Franz Wright and his Pulitzer out on their bullshit, much less risk ruffling the feathers of her otherwise highly venerable and respectable publisher, Copper Canyon. (Note: those are non-ironic assessments of CC. They publish Ben Lerner, Erin Belieu, and all sorts of other writers I love.)
Anyway, The Poets&Writers May/June covergirl has, as near as I can tell, racked up exactly ONE critical review. It was written by yours truly, for Coldfront magazine in April. I think Mean Week is a good time for everyone to revisit my work and tell me how brave I am.
over at Dennis Cooper’s blog, The Weaklings.
For folks who don’t know, Cooper runs one of the greatest blogs on the net. He organizes his posts into massive, theme-driven “Days” and posts a new one daily, Mon-Sat. Topics range from literature to cinema to art to professional wrestling to gay porn to music to whatever else you can think of. He’s also a big advocate of collaboration and participation, and is always eager to have members of his blog community to guest-curate a Day of their own devising.
A semi-random sampling from the blog archives:
October 8th was David Ohle Day, guest-curated by Jeff
October 2nd was John Ashbery Day
On September 22nd we checked out some male escorts
On September 19th I curated a day of pictures of my friend Maggie
On June 7th we reviewed some of the history of Queer Punk
On May 6th we looked at 10 squats
March 13, 2007: A Basic Layout of David Lynch’s ‘The Air is on Fire’
Dear when.parents.flee.the.country,
I don’t usually get involved in blog-related confrontations, for what I assume are obvious (though, perhaps, not to you) reasons. You are hardly the first troll/weirdo that Tao Lin has had to deal with, and I am sure you won’t be the last. That fact of Tao’s life has little–if anything–to do with me, other than that it makes me sad for him sometimes (also exhausted and pissed off on his behalf) but this isn’t why I’m writing today.
Agriculture Reader #2 was edited by my good friend–the magazine’s founder–Jeremy Schmall. I have some poems in it, and soon after that issue came out I moved to my present position as its co-editor. (Our next issue will come out in February 2009.) You probably noticed that the AGR is a handmade journal with a prominent design element. Its entire print run is somewhere in the low to mid three figures. We hope, therefore, that every copy we sell or give away will be cherished.
Your utter lack of civility, displayed repeatedly over the past few days in the comments section of Tao’s blog–including but not limited to stalkerish language and intimations of violence, compounded by the cowardice of your refusing to reveal your identity–makes me doubt your capacity to appreciate art in general, and the AGR in particular.
It grieves me that Agriculture Reader #2 may not be bringing you the joy you had hoped it would, but my greater concern is that you are not the sort of reader we are looking for. The AGR is a finite resource, every copy of it is precious, and I hate to think of even one copy being wasted. I hope you will consider returning your copy of the magazine, so I can give it to someone who can appreciate it. (Note that I do not say “will.” We do not require our readers to provide a guarantee of validation or an echo chamber of praise; but we confess to a bias for those with the capacity for comprehension and, if need be, civil discussion.)
Please contact me in the comments section of this post regarding my offer. We can exchange mailing addresses, or perhaps agree to meet at some neutral location. In exchange for your remittance of the magazine (undamaged, and with the included audio CD), I will bring you several paperbacks from the thrift store near my house. In a best case scenario these will be Tom Clancy’s Op-Center(TM) novels written by someone other than Tom Clancy, or perhaps some entries in the R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series.
Yours,
Justin
Barrelhouse is a thing we like and their blog has reviewed new chapbooks by people we like so you should read the review and like the books and the people too.
A Tale of Two Chaps discusses They All Seemed Asleep, by Matthew Rohrer from Octopus Books, and Hit Wave by Jon Leon from Kitchen Press.
Here are two unhelpful excerpts from the review:
On Rohrer- >>You’ve never heard of anything like that, right? <<
On Leon- >>I should say that the chapbook begins with two quick odes…<<
On Saturday 9/27 at Tao Lin & Nicole Spector’s reading at Solas (part of LitCrawl NYC) I sat next to Soffi Stiassni and tried to get her to write a poem with me. Soffi’s work appears in regular typeface; my contributions are in italics)
“Poem”
I hate all the noises in here… And most of the people making the noises into their fancy hats.
+
See? You see how it’s a prose-poem?
“Abner Jay, the first of the original black musicians. The only electric six string banjo you’ll ever hear. Abner says the original thirteen are dead, and he is half dead. For forty two years Abner has been playing banjo, drums, harmonica, and singing all at the same time.” I don’t know when that was written, but he died sometime in the ’90s. I don’t really know a whole lot about him, except that if you click the link you can listen to a whole LP’s worth of his rad music at the WFMU site. I prefer side one–mostly because of the opener, “The Backbone of America is a Mule and Cotton,” which explains in great detail the advantages of owning a mule rather than a horse, and also because of “Oh Susanna”–but you should really listen to the whole thing.
And PS if you were wondering- This totes counts as literary because I got the link from Ariana Reines whose new poetry collection, Coeur de Lion got some love this morning from Ben Mirov at Coldfront.
Talking Man is now available–like as of yesterday, this is some serious brand-newness–from Small Anchor Press, a Brooklyn-based independent chapbook publisher of poetry and prose. Some of their other titles include Joshua Cohen’s “Two Tribal Stories,” Joshua Furst’s “Close to Home,” Mathias Svalina’s “The Viral Lease” and Betsy Wheeler’s “Start Here.”
Talking Man is the second in a series of four thematically linked novellas to be published in 2008 and 2009. The first part, Man Talking (that was released–it’s actually the fourth novella in the series; don’t ask) is available as a FREE DOWNLOAD from Heppner’s website. Talking Man is being released in a gorgeous handmade, highly limited edition of 60. I can’t wait to get my hands on one, and you shouldn’t either.
The other two novellas–Man and Talking–will be released in December ’08 and Sometime ’09, respectively. No word on what format(s?) those works will be available in, but why don’t you stop worrying about that right now? You’re already two novellas down–time to get cracking.
Said publisher Jen Hyde to me in a gchat yesterday: “Mike Heppner is two steps ahead of the publishing world [and] you can quote me as a publisher on that one[.]” Done and done, sister.
Oh, and for those of you in the NYC area, Small Anchor writes: “We hope you will join us Friday, October 3rd at Freebird Books & Goods at 7:30PM for a reading and release party.”Directions are available at www.freebirdbooks.com.
