Sean Lovelace is running right now, far. Other times he teaches at Ball State University. HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS is his flash fiction collection by Rose Metal Press. His works have appeared in Crazyhorse, Diagram, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, and so on.
1. This audio interview (The Lit Show) with Martone is sort of great. It sprawls about and then, at the half hour, writers and teachers Rachel Yoder, Dylan Nice, and Zachary Tyler Vickers join the conversation. A lot of glow here on regional writing, teaching writing, experimental writing, etc. Worth a listen.
2. Christopher Grimes goes:
Like life itself, writing and reading can be really boring. Reading boring writing, writing boring stuff.
14. This is not a bible verse. This is that amazing hangover essay from a while back in the The New Yorker:
3. Philip Hunt on creativity.
4. You can get a wine-speckled bar napkin signed by Peyton Manning for 10 dollars.
I like this guy’s jacket, notch and lapel.True to his plan, arrogant and contemptuous of an opponent’s worth as never before, Ali opened the fight flat-footed in the center of the ring, his hands whipping out and back like the pistons of an enormous and magnificent engine. Much broader than he has ever been, the look of swift destruction defined by his every move, Ali seemed indestructible. Once, so long ago, he had been a splendidly plumed bird who wrote on the wind a singular kind of poetry of the body, but now he was down to earth, brought down by the changing shape of his body, by a sense of his own vulnerability, and by the years of excess. Dancing was for a ballroom; the ugly hunt was on. Head up and unprotected, Frazier stayed in the mouth of the cannon, and the big gun roared again and again.
And, you know, this. Whatever.
And could anyone point me to better next-day Kram (or same) writing about sports? RIP literary sports writing, like of the event, once the actual norm before the YELLING. YELLING is now sports reporting, eh? Get off my YAWN. Who writes very well about sports now? I ask you. I ask. I mean in Good Faith: I’ll read your answer.
RIP Joe Frazier.
1. You should probably get the fuck off the chesterfield and grackle your flash fiction manuscript to The Rose Metal Press Sixth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. As you well know, RMP make books that are regal, complex, bebob and badass, all humped and hawking as they fly.
7. John Holten goes:
…the guys making Grand Theft Auto, today they’re real fictional realists.
2. Higher Education says:
3. John Jodzio goes:
I’m fifteen. According to every oncologist, shaman and tea leaf reader in the tri-state area, I’ve got between three and six months to live. Right now, I am wearing a blue shirt that says “Carpe Diem” but I’ve scratched off the ‘e’ and the ‘m’ so the shirt reads “Carp Die.”
4. BOOKFORUM says some writers are not tickled sunny by James Woods:
Jonathan Lethem (8 years later!): Wood is a critic whose better angels are at the mercy of his essentialist impulses.
Allan Hollinghurst: But actually, when he got to the bit when he was imagining how I might write something, it just seemed so pathetic that I stopped taking it seriously.
Hey has anyone else read The Swimming-Pool Library? That book be glow.
13. And Amy Lawless says: “My knees buckle from love and what is going on in the x-snatch.”
14. As a writer, do you like or hate theme issues of literary magazines? As a reader, do you like or hate theme issues of literary magazines?
13.
Donat Bobet invited me to his home for the night of Halloween. I came as a pirate, a costume which I assembled out of a bandana and the cardboard spool from a roll of paper towels.
Ah, forget that one. Let’s go with:
In a distant country where the towns had improbable names, a woman looked upon the unmoving form of her newborn baby and refused to see what the midwife saw. This was her son. She had brought him forth in agony, and now he must suck. She pressed his lips to her breast.
“But he is dead!” said the midwife.
3. You go to grad school and they have these Halloween parties and people get way too cute in their brains about their costumes: People go as Postmodern, as Realism, etc. It’s a genre in itself, the myopic grad student costume. I went once as a homeless MFA grad and I held a sign that said, WILL EXPLICATE FOR FOOD. That seems tasteless and just sort of stupid to me now. Time and place. Who knows?
4. Why in the fuck does Stephen King want to be more respected by academia? By literary circles (whatever type of circle that is [circle-jerk?]) and the like? Let it go, Mr. King. You are Ok and doing just fine. Go have a sandwich or a seizure or a Blow Pop.
Worst book you have ever read? Read all the way through? OK, then, so fuck worst. That’s a lollygag word. It can’t be worst, because you learned something. Something to note/avoid/admire in its essence of awfulness.
Anyway, book you just threw at wall?
Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
(Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction,” The Paris Review Interview, 1956)
Couldn’t locate a book today. That made me a tadpole late for class. But I required down sticky/icky low immersion, that Cormac thing, to show a student. Student penned a meth flophouse story. I needed to tell this student, “Get your story grittier. You went so far and you got squeamish. Go further. Get more squeamish. [Here I am making a squeezing hand motion, God knows why.] Boil your stomach in its own rank juices! No disgust in the writer, no disgust in the reader. Something…” Etc. I wanted to show him Suttree, of course, page where Harrogate gets a side job cleaning out a totaled car at a junkyard. Five “boys” were in the car when it was “Run head on by a semi.” Then this:
He propped his feet against one door and gave it a good kick and it fell open. Some kind of globular material hung down over the steering column. He climbed out of the car and bent down to find the heads of the bolts beneath the seats. The carpeting had been rained on and was lightly furred with pale blue mold. Something small and fat and wet with an umbilical looking tail lying there. A sort of slug. He picked it up. A human eye looked up at him from between his thumb and forefinger.”
But I couldn’t find Suttree, damnit. (In the end this was the fault of Matt Bell, Charles Bukowski, and Philip Young—their three books are the same cover hue [brown] as Suttree so I kept grabbing the wrong title.) I knew Suttree was there—I could smell the thing, all that leprous river mud and catfish whiskey breath. For not the first time I gazed googly-eyed at my tumuli of books and thought, “Do I need a system?” I see the practicality of a system, but also the danger. (Oh, all those failed systems) And I see book-piles as thickets and wonder-clumps, not some cultivated shrubbery/statue garden. I like heaps. Slippery heaps of books. But that isn’t going to work. Do you have a system? How do you find a written thing?
They all wanted Cokes and the grandma said a beer please, and the boy’s father went and ordered, delivering while the pins clinked and banged and rattled.
Another train ride, and here I am with your goddamn strawberry lotion.
She tried to hide her breath, said she had a good day.
The lights were on and so I knocked and then the lights were off.
She was healthy and her laughter proved it, her laugh was like a cluck, like the chickens she used to feed, watch hatch, then butcher.
“What do we do with him when he’s dead?”
“She loved God,” the chaplain said. He was getting wobbly on the drum.
Later, lunch at Denny’s, we talked about what to do with the lorazep, trihexphen, risperidone, fluoxetine, the haldol in the lock box.
I got me a hit record and I ain’t never made a cent from it.
His hug is his beer in a frosted mug.
I don’t apologize that I don’t sing through my nose.
Sitting around the house playing the wife and mother is driving me crazy.
I thought I loved him but he’s dull.
I’ll die before I go all the way pop.
That applause don’t help you any when you’re laying in that bed at night being totally ignored.
I’ll screw the boots off of you.
I’ve become a captive of my own ambitions.
They said I would be the Hemingway of music. I would have my own style.
I got to change my firecracker!
Most lyrics don’t have any balls.
It’s like things are creeping on me and I just want to lay low.
I go to church on Sundays, the vows I make. I break them on Monday.
I don’t give a goddamn!
I’m gonna walk a little bit of dog.