Mike Young is the author of Sprezzatura (poems), Look! Look! Feathers (stories), and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (poems). He designs and publishes NOÖ Journal and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.tumblr.com. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.
from Julio Cortázar, The Art of Fiction #83 in The Paris Review (via Matt Bell)
INTERVIEWER
Have fame and success been pleasurable?
CORTÁZAR
Ah, listen, I’ll say something I shouldn’t say because no one will believe it, but success isn’t a pleasure for me. I’m glad to be able to live from what I write, so I have to put up with the popular and critical side of success. But I was happier as a man when I was unknown. Much happier. Now I can’t go to Latin America or to Spain without being recognized every ten yards, and the autographs, the embraces . . . It’s very moving, because they’re readers who are frequently quite young. I’m happy that they like what I do, but it’s terribly distressing for me on the level of privacy. I can’t go to a beach in Europe; in five minutes there’s a photographer. I have a physical appearance that I can’t disguise; if I were small I could shave and put on sunglasses, but with my height, my long arms and all that, they discover me from afar. On the other hand, there are very beautiful things: I was in Barcelona a month ago, walking around the Gothic Quarter one evening, and there was an American girl, very pretty, playing the guitar very well and singing. She was seated on the ground singing to earn her living. She sang a bit like Joan Baez, a very pure, clear voice. There was a group of young people from Barcelona listening. I stopped to listen to her, but I stayed in the shadows. At one point, one of these young men who was about twenty, very young, very handsome, approached me. He had a cake in his hand. He said, “Julio, take a piece.” So I took a piece and I ate it, and I told him, “Thanks a lot for coming up and giving that to me.” He said to me, “But, listen, I give you so little next to what you’ve given me.” I said, “Don’t say that, don’t say that,” and we embraced and he went away. Well, things like that, that’s the best recompense for my work as a writer. That a boy or a girl comes up to speak to you and to offer you a piece of cake, it’s wonderful. It’s worth the trouble of having written.
I just got this email from Chris Newgent of Vouched Books in Indianapolis, IN, which I think is a generous, lovely project, so I am re-posting this here.
“Big Car Arts Collective is in the running for a $25,000 Pepsi Refresh Grant to support our new community space here in Indy called Service Center for Contemporary Culture + Community! The top 15 projects get funded. We are in the final push at 9th place with 10 days to go, which means if we can just hold on we get the grant!
At this new space, we plan to host events (the next Vouched Presents reading will be here), maintain a community garden, hold art and writing workshops (e.g. we plan to have a Dzanc Day event here next year), and have a lending library (you can bet I plan to stock that puppy with small press literature galore). On top of that, they’re devoting a shelf to Vouched Books so people visiting the community space have the opportunity to buy my books whenever the space is open. The whole endeavor is to kickstart a revitalization of a neighborhood in Indy that is in desperate need for new life. READ MORE >
From Jamie Iredell:
Thanks to everyone who submitted something for a free copy of Freaks!
The winners, selected by Roxane Gay and Mike Young, are:
“Ain’t Saying She’s a Grave Digger” by “joe bloe”
“The West Coast” by “Frank Tas, the Raptor”
“VAG” by “barry”
“Pets” by “Tyler Gobble”
Get me your contact info (email me at jamieiredell [at] gmail [dot] com) and I’ll mail you a(some) book(s) and other bullshit.
All of the entries were awesome, awesomely funny and disturbed. They made my week. Below one can read the winners’ entries. These entries do not reflect the opinions of HTMLGIANT or of Jamie Iredell and remain the sole property of the authors. These are caveats. Caveats remain.
Read the winning entries after the jump:
“We need critics who set impatient standards, ask uncomfortable questions, and maintain an omnivorous appetite for the unfamiliar, the awkward, the angry, the untoward. Instead, we have a gated community, a velvet-roped garden party, a Brooklyn vs. Cambridge fantasy baseball league. We don’t need critics obsessed with the real, or with whether the novel is alive or dead. We need critics willing to look at the novels that are already out there, going about their business, quietly making the future of literature, whether “we” like it or not.” — from Jess Row’s provocative and expansive “The Novel is Not Dead” in the Boston Review, which has so far scored a Benjamin Kunkel self-defense in the comments; so, you know, bombs away.
Jamie Iredell is giving away his killer new book, the weird faux-encyclopedia of trash talk and straight talk: The Book of Freaks. Here follows the scheme from Jamie himself — MY
“I want to give away some copies of The Book of Freaks.
I’m thinking that the most entertaining way I might achieve this is to have other people write their own entries to The Book of Freaks.
For examples, some of the entries that I wrote can be found
at Hobart
at the2ndhand
at PANK
at Robot Melon (x2)
at Mad Hatter’s Review
at Servinghouse
Write your freakish entry. It can be about anything you damn well please. Post your entry in the comments here. Entries will be judged by Roxane Gay and Mike Young. Three winners and a runner-up will be selected to receive a signed copy of the book and some other junk that I decide to send your way.” Post your comment entries by Thursday May 12th.
“There are always new darknesses to rally against. But should I choose to revisit those old stories, the stories that dealt so specifically with that period of darkness, a darkness that almost took me but for the books that showed me what it was to survive, I know now how to write the ending.” — Chris Newgent with a poignant blog essay, “The Why Behind Vouched,” at Vouched Books
Poets are dreamers who don’t understand capitalism. Poets are sandwiches who don’t understand fried chicken. And some of them are going to be reading for Supermachine tonight @ 8PM at the Outpost (1014 Fulton Street) in Crooklyn. And by some of them I mean all of them are good: Paige Taggart, Justin Marks, Jeannie Hoag, and our own troublemaker Andrew James Weatherhead.