Roxane Gay's writing appears or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Blip Magazine, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, Annalemma, McSweeney's (online), and others. She is the co-editor of PANK, an assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, and can be found at http://www.roxanegay.com. Her first collection, Ayiti, will be released in 2011.
The entries for the Kama Sutra contest were so great, I need help picking a winner. Feel free to vote in the comments by listing the number of your favorite. You have until Monday! Whichever entry gets the most votes, wins!
1. The Ron Paul Real Talk Presidential Nation Express: Dream of something that will never cum.
2. The Across the Universe: The ability to give one another an orgasm from a distance.
3. The iForn: Standing, both partners hold mobile device in right hand and lock arms so that they face opposite directions and each looks at his or her respective mobile device. With left hand, reach beneath and between partner’s buttocks. Dial. Accept.
4. The 66/99: When two egotistical people fight over who goes down on whom first.
READ MORE >
I started a micropress, Tiny Hardcore Press, and it has been an awesome but very challenging adventure. The best part is getting to work with writers I respect to publish awesome books that practically fit in the palm of your hand. There is no worst part but every single day I learn something new. Most of these lessons have risen from my own ignorance. Who just decides to start a press? A press is a small business. I should have done more research. I had put out two books already via PANK, but that’s not really research. My first mistake was diving into the deep end when I should have been in the kiddie pool with my floaties. I offer these observations in no particular order.
1. No matter how much money you think it’s going to cost, running a press will cost more, like, at least twice as much more and then a little more on top of that. Sure, you can run a press on the cheap, but it is pretty hard to avoid spending a lot of money.
The amazing writer S. Bear Bergman has started a Kickstarter to fund a really exciting, much needed project: Flamingo Rampant–Gender Independent Kids Books.
Why?
Kids’ ability to see themselves in books available to them is an incredibly valuable thing. Any parent, teacher, librarian, or caregiver will tell you that kids love books that reflect their daily experience. Kids with dogs like it when the kid in the book has a dog; kids with non-nuclear family structures cherish books in which families like theirs are shown.
Knowing this – or instinctively grasping it, as most of us do – makes it easy to see the value of children’s books with trans characters to trans or gender-independent kids (or kids with transgender family members).
More details here! This is definitely a project worth throwing a few dollars at.
The Darlings
by Cristina Alger
Pamela Dorman Books, February 2012
352 pages / $26.95 Buy from Powell’s
From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant
by Alex Gilvarry
Viking Adult, 2012
320 pages / $26.95 Buy from Powell’s
For the past couple months, Full Stop has invited writers like Justin Taylor, Alexander Chee, Danielle Evans, Maud Newton, and many others, to discuss the situation in American Writing. Most of the questions focus on the concerns contemporary writers face, particularly in terms of the responsibility, if any, writers have to respond to popular upheaval, social change, and the various crises our world is facing. It’s an important question–how do we write about the world we live in? The range of answers to these questions has been fascinating and they reveal the many differing opinions writers have about what we should be writing and what responsibility we have to document the world as it is changing.
I recently read two very different books, both responding to this world we live in, books that made me think about the different ways writers can approach the issues currently shaping our sociopolitical climate–The Darlings by Cristina Alger and From the Memoir of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarry.
Over at The Rumpus, Elissa Bassist offers great advice on how to write like a funny woman.
The National Book Critics Circle has announced the finalists for their 2011 book awards.
Edith Wharton turns 150 on Tuesday and she still looks great. The New York Times gives her a nod as they talk about heiresses and social climbers and such.
Anil Dash discusses the web as a medium for protest.
On her blog, Anna Leigh Clark shared an image of the most amazing writing group that included Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, June Jordan, Lori Sharpe, and Audrey Edwards, among others. I want to know absolutely everything about this group now.
Margaret Atwood revisits The Handmaid’s Tale, which has remained in print since 1985.
Cory Doctorow’s essay about a vocabulary for speaking about the future is really interesting.
Are you watching Downton Abbey? Team Mary, right? And Edith; she is the worst. Over at The Millions, an essay about the literary pedigree of the show. Also, Shit the Dowager Countess Says and Downton Abbeyonce. You’re welcome.
Jennifer Weiner looked at the gender breakdown for reviews in the Times for 2011.
In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan wrote a… curious essay about Joan Didion that included the assertion that to really love Didion, you have to be a woman. Like I said, curious.
Penguin Classics is releasing a new translation of the Kama Sutra, the ancient spiritual sex manual (yes, it’s much more than that, I know) that people pretend to know all about when they want to impress a date. Or, maybe I saw that in a movie once. This new version, translated by A.N.D. Haksar, has been adapted to modern lives. It’s the Kama Sutra, for the people, now featuring wit and charm.
Penguin has offered to give a copy to a lucky reader, so I’m having a contest! To enter, invent a new sexual position that belongs in the Kama Sutra. Leave your entries in the comment field. The best one wins and you have until Wednesday, the 25th. This will be fun, I hope. I’ll also throw in Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron, The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein, and also some galleys TBD.
THE BELIEVER: When you were a little girl you wanted to be an actress, not a writer?
JOAN DIDION: Right.
BLVR: But you said it’s okay, because writing is in some ways a performance. When you’re writing, are you performing a character?
JD: You’re not even a character. You’re doing a performance. Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.
We’ll get started with the Literary Magazine Club of discussion of Versal on January 9th. Details, here, if you’re playing along. If you want to write something about Versal, and I hope you do, please get in touch with me at roxane at htmlgiant.com. There’s a lot to talk about. For starters, what do you think about the cover?
Over at the Paris Review blog which is always entertaining, Jason Diamond writes about, among other things, “books as objects of design in clothing stores.”
The Millions has a useful list of books we can look forward to in 2012.
James Franco* sold his novel to Amazon. It’s a scandal! Or something! I mean, he’s what? Congratulations? I don’t know! It’s going to be called Actors Anonymous, and yeah…. I, there are no words. Actually, there are words. I am going to make a plot prediction. Young, “handsome” and intelligent actor named Fames Danco takes Hollywood by storm, makes quirky choices, struggles to remain authentic amidst the hypocrisy of Hollywood. After taking a starring role in a big budget movie, say, Mission Impossible 14, he joins a support group, tongue in cheek, to cope with being torn between fame and being true to himself. In the end, he finds a happy compromise by making great independent film choices that lead to many critical accolades and magazine covers. When he wins his Oscar, he thanks the Academy and the nameless members of Actors Anonymous. He also finds love. I will take bets on the accuracy of my prediction.
At Full Stop, Maud Newton takes on the situation in American writing as part of an ongoing series. As always, she is savvy and insightful.
The Rumpus is starting a print publication, where four times a month, or so, they will send you a letter. I’m excited for this. I may be writing a letter. I love getting postal mail. You should consider subscribing.
A League of Their Own is a classic sports film.
Michiko Kakatuni, Twitter, fake account, this is the future.
This movie poster really exists.
Small towns are losing their post offices and it is a real shame.
*Is anyone else disturbed by the Franco storyline on GH right now?
This week, I read an article in the New York Observer that baffled, bothered and bewildered me. The article tells a story about Marie Calloway, a “part feminist, part fame whore,” young woman writer (pseudonymous) who e-mailed a much older Internet writer in New York she admired, told him she was coming to the city and wanted to sleep with him, slept with him, and wrote a 15,000 word “story, “Adrien Brody,” about the experience. None of that is necessarily shocking though some of the details (his relationship status, for example), make the assignation a bit sordid.
We are in the age of Internet confession. Have blog, will reveal, memoir, pixilated for a hundred random strangers to read. Or more. I wonder about the cost of confession these days, and the reach.
When I am asked about my writing process I am generally vague and will say I don’t really have a process because I don’t know how to explain my process without sounding completely insane. I saw this movie once, The Muse, starring Albert Brooks, Sharon Stone, and Andi McDowell. It was terrible. He was a burnt out screenwriter and Sharon Stone convinced him she was a muse or something, and suddenly he was writing again on this script he thought was really hot shit. Even though the people around him thought he was crazy for believing in this muse, he needed that faith to keep writing. He needed to believe the inspiration came from some external influence.
Throughout history there have been many famous muses–Kiki de Montparnasse, Patti Smith, Edie Sedgwick, Amanda Lepore, figures great artists drew some kind of inspiration from. Writers have muses too. F. Scott and Zelda seemed to bring out a certain something in one another. The Brownings were clearly inspired by each other in their poetry. A lot is made of these muses and they are often as lauded as the creative types who drew inspiration for them. It’s so exciting that these muses have a certain je ne sais quoi that brings about great art and literature.
Richard Russo offered an opinion on Amazon’s ill-advised price comparison promotion. Farhard Manjoo thinks bookstores are difficult to use (?) and just hates having to get book recommendations from a human being instead of an algorithm. He simply cannot understand why everything is so much cheaper at Amazon. I am not anti-Amazon but this guy is being willfully ignorant. Amazon is pretty open about their willingness to operate at staggering losses to undercut competitors. By Manjoo’s thinking, booksellers should probably just give books away for free to compete, to benefit the greater good of affordability and convenience.
PressBooks, a new way to make an ePub and print-ready PDF of a manuscript, is open to the public. I haven’t used the service yet but it seems interesting, particular when so many small presses are trying to find affordable, uncomplicated ways to create e-books.
At The Millions, Edan Lepucki explains her reasons for not self-publishing. Both the essay and the comments are interesting.
In cool news, Ben Tanzer’s You Can Make Him Like You is the December selection for The Cult, Chuck Palahniuk’s book club. You can buy the book here.
This may be the best corporate apology ever.
I really enjoyed this interview with Dagoberto Gilb on the Zyzzyva blog (via Chris Arnold).
John Branch’s three-part series on the life and death of hockey player Derek Boogard is some of the finest long form journalism I’ve read in a while. Boogard’s story is at once infuriating, intriguing, and ultimately, heartbreaking. I learned that there are “enforcers” in hockey which makes the sport seem infinitely more menacing.
On the Paris Review blog, Avi Steinberg writes about the art of air travel crises.
A leaked memo from Hachette explains why publishers are still relevant.
[Matchup #21 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Gmail chat people who are always visible
We get it. You are always online and you want the world to know it. You are connected and plugged in and able to immediately respond to every electronic message appearing in your Inbox. You are there, waiting beneath the pale glow of your monitor, to chat and abuse emoticons and the English language typing phrases like i want 2 c u cum. You are the Motel 6 of Gmail—your light is always on, always green. When you’re busy, you do not hesitate to turn on the red light but still, you are there. Never, though, is your light yellow. Never does that light fade to gray. You do not idle. You do not step away from the computer. You do not stop typing. Your fingers are always tap tap tapping away, letting the world know you will not abandon your virtual post. You are the Internet presence. You are the bright e-mail light in the dark, dark night. We see the messages you leave, floating in the screen ether just below your name. You’re writing or you’re reading or you’re promoting the last thing you wrote. More often than not, you are passive aggressively communicating your displeasure about the state of the world or, as is usually the case, the state of your world. You are pithy or bitter or bitterly pithy but at least you are there. You will always be there. The rest of us, lurking silently behind the gray dot of feigned absence, we watch and we wait. Sooner or later, your time will come. Your light too, will go gray. READ MORE >
It has been a great month and some change talking about Beecher’s. I had a roundtable discussion with editors past and present about the magazine, what they look for, and what they hope for the future of Beecher’s.
Why the name Beecher’s?
Chloe Cooper Jones: Obscure Kansas history reference!
Iris Moulton: It’s meant as a reference to Henry Ward Beecher, an abolitionist who wanted to make sure Kansas would enter as a free state. He packed rifles for this cause in crates labeled Beecher’s Bibles, sneaking weapons for the cause. Chloe’s right, it is an obscure Kansas reference, and that’s part of why it endeared itself to us. And we felt like we were putting some serious ammunition in an unsuspecting package as we worked to assemble Beecher’s One.
Ben Pfeiffer: Also, we liked the simplicity of Beecher’s, the sound of it, and we liked the flexibility that name provides to future KU-MFA students: They can put their own stamp on Beecher’s while retaining continuity with earlier editorial boards. In the future, we anticipate editions with titles like Beecher’s Last Stand, Beecher’s Grocery List, and Beecher’s Carnival of Sadness. Even in the beginning we were thinking: “How do we build a magazine that lasts once we’re graduated?”
In January 2012, we will be reading Versal 9, a literary journal out of Amsterdam. The editors of Versal have been kind enough to offer ten four two one remaining free copies of the magazine and a discount for those who buy the magazine. If you’re interested in a free copy, e-mail me with your name and address.
The sale price for LMC members is $10 instead of the usual $14.95. You can buy the issue here.
Versal is a literary & art annual out of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Versal was founded in 2002 by American poet Megan M. Garr to help foster the translocal literary community in Amsterdam. In 2010, Versal was named one of seventeen “Indie Innovator” presses by Poets & Writers Magazine, which called it “the most visible product of a passionate group helping to sustain ‘transnational networks’ for writers.”
Community, wide-reaching aesthetic and bold design have been at the core of the Versal project from the outset. Today, Versal is built by a volunteer team of nearly 20 writers and artists around the globe. The team is currently working towards Versal’s 10-year anniversary, which will be marked by the release of the tenth issue in May 2012.
Do we have the right to read, discuss and analyze the personal papers of famous writers, often who have died? I think about this a lot because I am as curious (nosy) as I am uncomfortable with the idea of intellectually traipsing through a writer’s personal papers. In Slate last week, Katie Roiphe wrote about David Foster Wallace’s syllabus. Her article wasn’t particularly noteworthy but I was reminded of how often writers write about DFW and, increasingly, draw from his personal papers. Who knows how many hundreds, if not thousands of articles have been written about the man, the writer, and the scholar, each one trying to offer some kind of new insight into the man and his work. Certainly, there’s a lot to be learned from most things related to DFW including his syllabi. He had a unique, at times incisive approach to communicating to his students the material that would be covered in his courses as well as his general expectations of students in his classes. At the same time, as a teacher, I shudder to imagine anyone reading too much into my syllabi because I know how the sausage gets made.
At UC Davis, students protested nonviolently, the campus police responded, an officer casually sprayed a group of student sitting their arms interlocked, like plants, he became a meme and, along with the police chief, was placed on leave. Many people in many places expressed outrage, students participated in a powerful, silent protest. Assistant Professor Nathan Brown wrote an open letter to Katehi expressing his outrage. The UC Davis English department has changed their website so that the header issues a call for the chancellor, Linda Katehi, to resign and for the police force to be disbanded. On a national faculty mailing list I’m on, a member issued a call to action stating, “We cannot sit this one out.” During turbulent times, writers often ask themselves, how do we write about this? How do we respond? What is our responsibility to social change? How do we participate and avoid sitting this one out? Poet Robert Hass wrote a New York Times editorial that has been widely read and lauded but he also avoided sitting this one out because he and his wife were at the Berkeley protest. As writers, do you feel a need to respond to what happened at UC Davis, or UC Berkeley, or at any of the occupy movements? Do you feel the need to physically participate in these protests? Why and how?
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A few weeks ago, Glen Duncan reviewed Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and he certainly got a vocal reaction, not necessarily because it was a less than glowing review but because of how he wrote the review, the strange and insulting analogies he made and so on. In his review he, among other things, attempts to predict what those ultimate arbiters of literary taste–Amazon.com reviewers–might have to say. As he discusses the literary nature of the novel, Duncan writes, “ We get, in short, an attempt to take the psychology of the premise seriously, to see if it makes a relevant shape.” He also revisits this idea of porn starts, throughout. Ooh! He said porn star in a literary review! Edgy! Today, he wrote a defense (???) of his review. He responded to the criticism of his criticism with more criticism! Meta! The follow up can be summarized thusly: You are all haters who didn’t understand what I wrote.
Gregory Sherl is the author of the excellent poetry collection Heavy Petting (my review, here, at Diode). I’ve always admired the sensuality and openness of his writing so we talked about the way he exposes himself in his poetry, Ryan Gosling’s satin jacket in Drive, and the matter of fucking in poetry.
What is your obsession as a writer?
Trying to stop myself from being so desperately aware that I’m a writer. Or maybe my obsession is figuring out how to pay for healthcare when my only income comes from being an Adjunct English Instructor. Or maybe it’s me obsessing over obsessing about the fact that I need to apply for my MFA like today but not doing it because writing new poems is better than putting old poems together in a packet with some stamps on it. Or maybe it’s watching the doctor try to figure out the right cocktail of medication so I don’t sleep nineteen hours in one day. Or maybe it’s trying to watchFelicity in its entirety as quickly as possible (a little over two weeks, I believe). Or maybe these aren’t my obsessions as a writer but my obsessions as me but I’m a writer so I think it fits.
