Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of short fiction. Recent stories and essays were published in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, Surreal South, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and Best American Mystery Stories 2008.
I only learned about Steve Davenport’s Uncontainable Noise because it was published by tiny Pavement Saw Press in 2006, and Pavement Saw Press was based in Columbus, Ohio, where I happened to live, and the assistant editor there (who was also a night manager at the Kroger’s supermarket where I sometimes shopped for groceries) was taking classes from a friend of mine, and pressed a copy on my friend, and soon my friend was pressing copies on everyone he knew. And, as it happens, the night my copy was pressed on me, my second child was unexpectedly (and dangerously) born three months early, by emergency C-section. And so it was that I found myself in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, one hand in an isolette, those fingers touching a baby the size of my hand, and the other hand holding a copy of Uncontainable Noise, reading poems with such muscular titles as “Arrange Their Sea-Smooth Bones In Fourteen Broken Rows” and “Last Night My Bed A Bed of Whiskey Going Down” and “Murfy Blesses The Cowboy Of Drunken Love’s Love.” The preferred form of the poems was the Yodel, which is, as best I can tell a fourteen line poem of twelve syllables per unrhymed line, which contains at least one if not twenty-seven words of the relative intensity of slaughter, bomb, swagger, massacre, exploding, or, in the case of “Watch The Hot Young Women On Puritan Benches,” blow, beat, and bang bang. The rest of the poems take such forms as the horse opera, the clap-without-cure, the mountain price, the hayseed flaneur, and the hundred-line drunken cowboy sonnet. And I almost forgot to tell you about thirteen-page cycle of contentious love poems, the lovers in question being Georgia O’Keeffe and Wallace Stevens, who do things like drive to Holy Ghost, Illinois; perform their love in trees; move West and argue about flowers; make like monsters over New Mexico; go for their guns; plead with the seven angels of confusion; drink outside a bowling alley; and undo their bundle of hiss. READ MORE >
Thirteen pages into “The Pugilist at Rest,” which is a twenty-three page story, which has up till now told a Vietnam War story, the first person narrator goes to white space, then returns with this:
“Theogenes was the greatest of gladiators. He was a boxer who served under the patronage of a cruel nobleman, a prince who took great delight in bloody spectacles. Although this was several hundred years before the times of those most enlightened of men Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and well after the Minoans of Crete, it still remains a high point in the history of Western civilization and culture. It was the approximate time of Homer, the greatest poet who ever lived. Then, as now, violence, suffering, and the cheapness of life were the rule.” READ MORE >
Tonight at Midnight, I’ll be reading Long, Last, Happy in its entirety in an exclusive HTMLGIANT webcast. Thanks to the good people at Grove/Atlantic, we’ll be giving away copies of the book and exclusive Barry Hannah bookmarks and stickers manufactured by Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, Barry’s hometown bookstore. The estimated duration of the webcast will be 15-25 hours. Stop by, have a listen, leave a comment about your favorite Barry Hannah story.
Live updates (what story I’m reading, how to win a free copy of Long, Last, Happy) starting at midnight on Twitter: follow @kyle_minor
Angela Carter, badass
Concluding line of Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”:
“See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.”
J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. New York: Viking, 1999.
Acts: 3.
Chapters: 24.
Chapters per Act: 8.
Pages per Chapter: 8-10. READ MORE >
1. Johannes Göransson interviews Robert Archambeau about the Cambridge School, among other things, at the UK’s Argotist Online:
JG: But what about Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of Kafka as “minor literature.” His very deformation of the German language becomes a profound type of political activity. Could there be a minor politics involved in the Cambridge School?
RA: This, I think, is an interesting path to pursue, and one that leads in a similar direction to the observations of Sadri and Kiberd. For Deleuze and Guattari, major literature is the literature that articulates the values of a dominant population. I think Goethe’s Faust was the example they used in the book on Kafka: Faust became a kind of model for the bourgeois subject of the nineteenth century, trying to police his own desires in a world of new powers and possibilities, and in the absence of the old hierarchical constraints on actions. But minor literature, in this scheme, is the really interesting thing: it’s the means by which dominant values, and even the language through which they are articulated, and inverted, parodied, questioned, and mocked. Deleuze and Guattari didn’t see this as necessarily the literature of a marginal or oppressed population, but to write in this mode was to position oneself outside the dominant values of one’s place and time. Is this political? It depends on the definition of the term. If we take politics in a very strict sense—as a change in the polity—it’s probably fair to say that such a literature is political, but weakly so. If we think of long-term shifts in consciousness, its role could be taken to be larger, perhaps considerably so, but of course it is easy to exaggerate this, and hard to demonstrate it. I remember a conversation back in 1996 at the “Assembling Alternatives” conference in New Hampshire, a huge event that gathered experimental poets from all over the English-speaking world. A woman from the audience stood up, and declared that the funding for her experimental poetry magazine, and for all other magazines, was precarious, because “the power structure knows we’re the ones challenging their language.” This, I thought, was an understanding so crude as to be almost a parody. I’ve encountered that kind of thinking more than once, though. (http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Archambeau%20interview.htm)
What would happen if you were to connect all the ZIP codes in the US in ascending order? Is there a system behind the assignment of ZIP codes? Are they organized in a grid?
More here: http://eagereyes.org/Applications/ZIPScribbleMap.html
First paragraph from Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves:
The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling. The man sat down in an upholstered chair and began taking his gun apart to see why it wouldn’t fire. The baby’s crying set him on edge. He put down the gun and looked around for a hammer, but saw the gramophone. He walked over to it. There was already a record on the spindle, so he cranked the mechanism and set down the needle. He sat back down in the chair and picked up his work as the music flowed into the room. The baby quieted. An unearthly violin solo in the middle of the record made the man stop, the pieces of the gun in his hands. He got up when the music was finished and cranked the gramophone and put the recording back on. This happened three times. The baby fell asleep. The man repaired the gun so the bullet slid nicely into its chamber. He tried it several times, then rose and stood over the crib. The violin reached a crescendo of strange sweetness. He raised the gun. The odor of raw blood was all around him in the closed room.
Margaret Atwood, Twittering into the Dystopian Future
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939. This Thursday she will be 71 years old. Since 2000, she has published 13 books in five genres (novels, short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books.) She is writing the libretto for a chamber opera to be produced by City Opera of Vancouver. Her middle name is Eleanor. She has 100,122 Twitter followers. Some of them compose Tweets and send them to her. She responds daily to many of these Tweets, even the mean ones. Here are a few representative Tweets Atwood has recently Tweeted:
@anthonyslatcher: handmaids tale sucks & I’m gonna fail alevel exam because of it, thanks..not!! M:Aww.I flunked algebra. I didn’t study.
@Gaiaellyn: I hope that you are able to eat crunchy foods again… M. sez: Not yet :( But learning to appreciate wet noodles.
@keeleyoconnor: hi :) we are in english class in HONDURAS discussing your poems! We have some questions? M: Short questions? :)
But have I ever mentioned Bat Segundo? Mentioning now:www.edrants.com/segundo
paulcgallagher: Hi, planning to continue story of Oryx & Crake/Year of the Flood? Wondering what might happen next… M: Tis the plan! :)
I have some IKKS men’s reading glasses left at #giller table 16: I took them into protective custody for their own safety. Let me know…
@Bexxaloon: so how close do you think we are to Handmaid’s Tale becoming real life? #ofGlenn M: Too close, but with different outfits..
@EvenCool: My daughter’s very own creation: youtube.com/watch?v=Y4hYSe… M: Very soothing for this painkiller’d old biddy…Tx!
Mike Young and Askold Melnyczuk at RIDE, FLY, PENETRATE, LOITER: A Barry Hannah Tribute, November 3rd, 2010, organized by Friend-of-Giant Gene Kwak, at Newtonville Books, Newton, MA.