Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle.
Matthew Simmons—
Craven self-promotion + craven publisher promotion + actually kind of an interesting way to get one’s work out = Keyhole is now offering to let you pay for minibooks (like mine) and full titles (like the previously mentioned book by Matt Bell) with a tweet.
14
A little more about Moe.
An earlier snippet linked to a Pitchfork story about Moe Tucker, drummer from The Velvet Underground, having recently been spotted at an Albany Tea Party rally. Not just spotted, though. Ms. Tucker was interviewed, and in grand ole Tea Party style, she talked about being “furious about the way [the country and its citizens] being led towards socialism.”
The snippet says just this: hearing that Moe Tucker, drummer from one of my favorite bands, and creator of some really great solo work, is now part of a political movement I find—when I am trying to be generous and open-minded—baffling, kind of made a little part of me die. (In ungenerous moments, I say “Hear, hear,” to Matt Taibbi’s assessment of the Tea Parties in Rolling Stone.)
A comment made by someone going by R. Ridge:
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Matthew Simmons—
Joyelle McSweeney on Loser Occult. Also, if you ever get really sick of HTML Giant, blow us the fuck up. (Thanks, Johannes. Thanks, Paul.)
Writing Prompt: Ask a small person for assistance.
In 1966, Ornette Coleman did something odd. (Or, well, odder than usual for him.) He sat his ten year old son Denardo down at a drum kit in a recording studio and made a record with him called The Empty Foxhole.
Certainly this may not be the product of thinking something through completely. Having a shaky-timed ten-year-old play drums on your free jazz record plays into the “anyone can do that,” (see My Kid Could Paint That) critique leveled against Coleman’s pioneering musical career. And certainly, listening to the album reveals that the young man—now a respected pro—was, to be generous, a bit outmatched by his dad and Charlie Haden.
But what it may lack in musical virtuosity—a concept I will admit I am only passingly familiar with and devoted to, as I am more in the poorly record punk rock/noise/psychedelic/and black metal records camp—it sure does make up for with ENTHUSIASM! Enthusiasm is the wheelhouse of the ten year old. And the nine year old. And the eight year old. Etc. Working from a bed of this youthful enthusiasm, Coleman finds a way to weave some music I really like in and around the constraints of the young man’s limitations.
Here is a writing prompt. Ask a small person to tell you a story. Take notes. Tease out details when you think necessary. Encourage the small person to expand on promising ideas now and then. Mostly, though, just listen.
Treat the notes you have taken as a outline. Write a story or a poem. Whatever it is you write. Be faithful to your co-writer’s enthusiasm. But be your usual writerly virtuoso self within the outline’s constraints.
And credit your co-author.
Lipsyte ate my brain and spit out a delicious chicken-fried steak
Sam Lipsyte has a really fantastic story in the new issue of The New Yorker called “The Dungeon Master.”
Next year, my collection of short stories, Happy Rock, will come out and it will include a story called “Rabbit Fur Coat.” It’s called “Rabbit Fur Coat” now. It was, in the first year and a half or two years of its existence, called “The Dungeon Master.”
Thematic similarities. Similarities in the characters ages. High school and role-playing games. Outsider freak and difficult friendships. Etc.
And so, the dilemma. Fellow writers (and people who like writing), what say you? Are you, in a similar situation, intimidated? Would you consider dropping the story from a collection? Or not sending said story out anymore, or for a while? Say, until the monster that is a badass story by a badass writer is no longer looming in your closet, making you feel inadequate to your writerly proclivities? Making you pull the sheets up over your head?
Say you’ve got some thunder you are are waiting to bring, and then a veritable god of thunder comes along and brings it first?
Should one cower? Or, hell, should one feel competitive? Should a writer buck up and maybe do a “Oh, yeah? That’s how you wanna play it, Lipsyte?” edit?
Well played, Tao.
Included in this issue is an article about Tao Lin by Tao Lin. I’ll update this post with a link when it is live. Or, if you’re the sort of person who might want to do something like this, you could just go ahead to The Stranger’s website and hit refresh for the next few hours.
UPDATE:
Usedbuyer addresses the fuss.
In Defense of Good Writing: Miss Ethel M. Dell’s Rare Interview on “All This Fuss About Proust.”
Why do you feel that commercial fiction, or more specifically popular fiction written by women, tends to be critically overlooked?
Ethel M. Dell: One has only to really look at the facts. One doesn’t feel one’s efforts to be overlooked in all venues. I do think the Times tends to overlook popular fiction, whether one is man, woman, white, black, or Hottentot. Many of one’s dearest readers tell one how very much they should like to see one reviewed more respectfully in the popular press, but what can one do? The prejudice against lady novelists is not however, I’m very glad to say, universal among the reviewers. The Monkton Combe Post for example, back when they had their book review section, used to say the kindest things about one’s little books…