Power Quote from Annie Proulx
Interviewer: You were in your forties when you wrote the first of the stories from Heart Songs. Do you think you had a late start when it comes to writing fiction?
Proulx: Well, I did yeah. But so what? Why should it bother anybody when somebody starts to write?
Interviewer: It’s fewer years writing the stories that you seem to enjoy writing.
Proulx: Oh, yeah, I suppose, but that’s OK too. The world is spared lots of crap.
The New Paris Review
- This is not Philip Gourevitch.
I bought the new Paris Revivew today. In it is a piece of fiction from the Paris Review’s editor, Philip Gourevitch. He is known primarily as a non-fiction writer, and a brilliant one at that. His book about the Rwandan genocide, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, is truly great and I read it alongside Hannah Arendt, a great biography of Pol Pot called Brother Number One as well as some other hardcore stuff on genocide and it completely held up to the company. But fiction? This is new to me. Also, it isn’t unheard of, but I do think it is rare, for The Paris Review to publish thier editors’ fiction, so I think this is a real treat. Here’s the first graph of the story called “Enough”:
Uncategorized / 39 Comments
April 8th, 2009 / 2:27 pm
April 8th, 2009 / 2:27 pm
Mean Monday: Fuck Everybody, I Hated This Book
Hi. I am in a really bad mood although I was in a worse one a few hours ago but I just paid a woman to make me lift weights for an hour and feel maybe a bit better? Hm. Nah. I came home from working out and spent 30 minutes or so cleaning up cat urine. My house still stinks to high hell. I hate my old cats. I am going to have them put to sleep. I hate them. They pee everywhere. Also, when I was working out? I smelled cat pee. I took my clothes out of a laundry basket full of clean clothes and so what that means is one of them got in the laundry basket and peed on my clean fucking clothes. Hi, lady who worked me out! I smell like cat piss! Be my friend! I was hungover when I got to the gym- hi, scotch and a pack of cigarettes, I hate myself more than I hate everybody else- but now I am not so hungover. One of my cats slept on my head though last night, so I am asthmatic today because of that. Fuck everything. It’s raining like crazy. READ MORE >
Find the Story: A Contest
I am cleaning my office. This sucks. Right now, I am taking a break. Yet, I do find all sorts of fun stuff when I “organize” my life. I found this torn out page from a New Yorker. The date is December 25, 2006-January 1, 2007. Otherwise, all I have is the last page of a story that clearly moved me, in particular the ending (good job, mystery author) and I remember these lines filled a carved spot inside me at the time:
Existence in the here and now only made me realize how much attraction the past exerts.
Elizabeth Ellen Rules
I’ve written about her before, but frankly, I could write about her every week. Check out her website for all thing Elizabeth Ellen, including contributions to A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press and a forthcoming chapbook with Paper Hero Press. Here are some power quotes from the woman who was largely responsible for my change in opinion of “online writing”:
From an interview in 3am magazine (linked here):
As for getting noticed…I don’t know. You can always try to be controversial, I guess. That’s certainly one way of getting noticed. Initiate a public feud. Be a dick. Write about it on your blog. That sort of thing. Other than that, I’d say just keep doing what you’re doing. This is going to sound like total, lameass bullshit, but I swear it’s true: I enjoy writing. I love it. I get off on it. I don’t do it to be in a particular magazine or to get a particular publisher’s notice. Not that I wouldn’t be stoked to be in The Paris Review or Tin House or with a major publisher. Of course I would. That’d be awesome. It’s just not something I think about on a daily or weekly basis.
My Life My Death By Kathy Acker: A Love Letter from pr
PR: Dear Kathy, you are dead. Here is a link to your supposed last writings that I found online. I like it. You are very unclever in it. People want to make you clever, and you are, but I prefer where your cleverness takes you, rather than the cleverness itself. Here is some art inspired by you. I don’t find you clever as much as desperately searching for comfort and truth and honesty.
Kathy: I just write the truth. I don’t write fiction. I write out of need. Culture is that which falsifies.
Mean Monday: Baudelaire’s Preface to The Flowers of Evil
Another Drunk French Dude
Baudelaire was sort of mean-spirited. I would have liked to have gotten drunk with him, maybe just once though, and then probably I would stay away from him. But damn, the preface to The Flowers of Evil is brilliant. The dude was a first class asshole. Baudelaire would have liked when Brian Johnson sang, “you get into evil, you’re a friend of mine:” READ MORE >
Hi, My Name is Kathy Acker: Part 1
(Dodie Bellamy in Kathy Acker’s Clothing.) But I’m special. There’s something special about me as far as sex goes. There’s always been. You have to treat me that way or else get out.
What follows may not be safe for work! All excerpts are from Kathy Goes to Haiti:
The Suburban Swindle by Jackie Corley
Femme Friday People! Next week I’ll highlight some old school righteous woman, but today, I review The Suburban Swindle by the amazing Jackie Corley:
“It’s impossible to be anything but a memory” Juliana Hatfield
Jackie Corley, in her short story collection, The Suburban Swindle, (So New Publishing), creates a loved and loathed world, a deeply felt suburban New Jersey, peopled by flawed, suffering characters and often narrated by an “I” that feels much older than her twentysomething years. Like Justin Taylor in his excellent book of poems, More Perfect Depictions of Noise (soon to be reviewed by my husband) Corley manages to use her youth as a writer to her great advantage. She is so close to her material that a rawness of emotion, a bewilderment with the edges of life, comes alive on the page.
The opening lines say it all and Corley never lets up after them:
What are we? What we are is oiled sadness. Dead Garden snakes and dried-up slugs. We’re what happens when you’re bored and scared too long, when you sit in piles in some dude’s basement trying to get the guy’s white supremacist brother to shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes.
Literary Lessons from Metal Magazines: A Constant Variation in a Series
Cradle of Filth, uh, Rock.
Let’s head bang! I picked up the magazine Metal Edge (I like free CDs) the other day and I must say, I think I like Metal Maniacs better. Metal Edge’s list of the Greatest Frontmen in Metal made my eyeballs spit bacon (thanks Blake!). But I hate to complain. All these hard working metal journalists, not to mention the bands, make me happy. I had known about H. P. Lovecraft’s invented monster/thing/force, Cthulhu, but I didn’t know all the various bands that refer to him/it in their music (Metallica, Cradle of Filth, Black Sabbath, Mercyful Fate, Catacombs, The Black Dahlia Murder (I like James Ellroy’s WORK, WORKEDY WORK- that is for you Blake, and I once owned a first edition of White Jazz signed by Ellroy with this inscription “Fear this evil book”- it was stolen by a douchy editor from New York Magazine))! I also really enjoyed the little write up on Cthulhu by Matt Cibula and thought it worthy to share with my fellow htmlgianters who dig metal: