The 3rd Man by Graham Greene
The ocean is full of flowers that betray most readers. Or Graham Greene’s adulterations of poetic form in The Third Man are particularly well suited to his subject—racketeering. As we all know, on March 13, 1938, Germany took over Austria (termed the Anschluss)–a contingency specifically disallowed in the Versailles Treaty. Then we all took Austria back, but then it gets messy. This book is a tale of a “secret agency” (in the words of Sun Tzu) told through dialogue, exposition, tunnel chases, elegiac couplets, literary quotations, assassinations, and letters. Greene continues to be, as one critic has put it, “compulsively readable,” especially in his characterization of his villain, a charismatic but chronically unfaithful racketeer who publishes his friend’s writing as his own (westerns), and who is capable of saying “…I never lied to myself.” For example, the author spent nearly five million pounds, and employed over 150 researchers, in his mission to destroy martini lunches inside and outside the country (concerning events that happened over 60 years ago!). When needs arose our author may have used words that lied. Nonetheless, the hatted fellow cannot resist the money (this book was meant to be a screenplay), and his complicity is evident in the desperate acerbity of their dialogue (whispered). At one point, spy # 7 unleashes a terrific string of epithets: “lazy… plotter…sewage sucker…acronym…shootout child…liar…destroyer sadist fake.” Our hero Bond counters:
If you wish not to go on with this I’ll shoot.
Don’t shoot.
I’ve shot everything before.
What’s wrong with us.
Fog of war.
Why are we at war.
Because I don’t want to give up my penicillin.
Your dreams are a mess.
They are my masterpiece.
It was our blood and guts: an interview with Patrick deWitt
Last year, many of us read Patrick deWitt’s excellent Western The Sisters Brothers. The novel (which I reviewed here) concerns two brothers, Eli and Charlie, who hurt and kill men for a living. A great work in a little-appreciated genre, the book went on to win a Governor’s General Literary Award and a Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. It is newly released in paperback (though I’ll admit I like the hardback’s cover better, and for my part, I read it on the Kindle). He is also, though the interview doesn’t touch on this, the screenwriter behind the recent film Terri. Mr. deWitt was kind enough to spend a little time with some questions I sent him. I don’t know if I touched his soul or anything, but his answers were good, and his book is very much worth your time.
In an interview for the Man Booker Prize, you said: ”It would be harder for me to write those same scenes without the twist. In real life, violence is graceless, pathetic, weird, or simply funny. But it’s almost never righteous or noble, and I tried to avoid writing about it that way.” I think a lot about violence, but I’ve never really experienced it myself. The idea that it’s not noble or righteous isn’t too surprising, but “pathetic” and “weird” are two adjectives I’ve encountered less often, I think, and I like them. Reading this made me curious about your experience with violence, and what leads you to see it in the way that you do.
I was never a violent person. It was never something I had any stomach or aptitude or reverence for. I went to a lot of punk etc. shows starting at the age of 12. This was in the San Fernando Valley in the late 80s, and anyone going to these shows certainly saw a lot of violence, though it wasn’t mandatory to take part, and I found it easy enough to skirt. Later on my friends and I got into drinking and drugs, and this was a blood-and-guts period of time, but it was our blood-and-guts. It was ugly but we weren’t, you know, marauders. Later still, working at a bar, fights were common, and these usually matched the description above (pathetic, weird). This was probably where I adopted that attitude toward violence, actually. We’d just stand there and watch. I remember these two meaty white guys with shaved heads going at it on the floor. They’d ripped each other’s shirts off, and a customer looked at me and said, “It’s like babies fucking.” Physical confrontation is just an awkward social interaction taken to the extreme, it seems to me. READ MORE >
Mein Kampf Revisted
Blake Butler’s domination in the lit world seems so assured that now not only can he call himself Blake Butler again, but he ruthlessly admits his ultimate internet and political designs. A section of his laptop openly owns itself to be a nightmare, yet even here it lies. For while his publishers try to make the rest of the world believe that the internet consciousness of Blake Butler finds its satisfaction in the creation of an online lit world, the Blake Butlers again slyly dupe the dumb reader. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Blake Butlerish lit world online for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their internet world swindle, endowed with its own blogging rights and removed from the intervention of other lit worlds: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Blake Butlerish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting twitter follower whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the literary foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and twitter followers, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Blake Butlers who bring the unpublished into the htmlgiant comments, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white laptop by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.
The Remaining Lost Poetry of Slash Lovering
Here are the Seattle-based poet’s remaining works, from the CD-R he gave me before his tragic death at age 38. More on Slash in my first post on him here. His graphic web-based poetry continues to inspire me – both for its raw emotion and for its quietness and grace.
From the Margins: An Interview with Peter Davis
With just two books of poetry, and a third on the way, Peter Davis has already established himself as an innovator with a great deal of intelligence and skill. Modest but assured, he explores ideas most poets would not think to broach and pushes the accepted limits of form in ways that expand what a poem can be. Whether pondering the heinous mustache of the previous century’s most infamous tyrant, or inventing satirical monologues for real and imagined audiences, Davis knows that in order to break ground a writer must be bold and open to uncertainties: “An artist has to pursue something he or she is unsure of, but then pursue it recklessly.” While these pursuits make great comic shtick, they are only half the story, for Davis’s sense of play services a unique moral vision. The text below is a collation of one face-to-face interview in April 2011 and several email exchanges from April to June 2011. – Tony Leuzzi
What was the genesis for the idea of writing an entire book of poems about Hitler’s mustache?
Book + Beer: John Jodzio + Magic Hat # 9
I do enjoy book as artifact. Funky front matter. Sudorific spine. A peplum on the paper edge, etc. This is something small presses do well. Mythical book as bible. As postcards. As a head shaped box (or a box shaped head?). Sometimes I hold these books, re-hold them, turn them, smell them (like beer, the odor of books simultaneously contains similarities and unique variances), bend them, watch them, pause during my reading and judge, question, critique (sometimes a book gets too cute in its design; this is about words), admire. I really do like when a book is a thing. Ok, let me hit this Magic Hat.
Here is a video of me talking about some of the stories and images I really enjoyed from Get in if You Want to Live. (I am pretty inebriated, so you may not be able to fully understand me. I do slur [though I never once feel compelled to fucking punch someone, now do I?])
Whoa, Magic Hat! I didn’t expect fruity. What is this flavor? A little lavender and pumpkin pie, a smidgen of doughnut, or is that musk? A hint of buttered popcorn vanilla peppermint cheese pizza roasting meat cinnamon buns strawberry parsley green apple rose Oriental spice baby powder chocolate pink grapefruit cranberry. Just a hint. Interesting. Let me try another one. That first bottle reminded me of the time I went horse-dancing in Mexico. (The riders are usually drunk, the horses are always beautiful, the music is deafeningly loud. All four legs move in time to the beat.)
Comic
DRUG-RELATED PHOTOSHOP ART – 38 YR OLD MORBIDLY OBESE TAO LIN
38-year-old “ironically”/”prophetically” morbidly obese and visibly jaundiced Tao Lin, author of 9 novels and 2 illegitimate “hapa” children, at Columbia University’s Creative Writing 2021 annual symposium “The Otherness of The Other: Other Ways to View Oneself Besides Boring” panel discussion (seated far left, visibly deflated after answering “seems like…I don’t know” to the three questions he was asked) vaguely “squinting” with left (and only operational) eye at group of semi-anorexic ~22-to-23 year-old recent graduates from Sarah Lawrence now fashion bloggers, all of whom he envisions having non-detached relations with, simultaneously, “on” 2x slow-release 20 mg Ritalin tablets, 3-month-expired NyQuil gel-caps, and a “sex swing” adorned with dried eucalyptus leaves imported from Australia affixed in PPOW gallery installation w/ speakers playing koala bear mating sounds. Lin is heard mumbling something about defunct literary enterprise Muumuu house, “needing only 217 twitter followers until [he] reach[es], like, one million maybe” and something about a pâté smootie moments before MDMA-induced seizure, by which gasps of Diane Williams-esque “odd” and vaguely passive-aggressive NOON worthy dialog followed.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MODERNIST?: JOÃO GUIMARÃES ROSA
Don’t let the cats fool you, João Guimarães Rosa is the man. The man like Mann or Proust or Melville or Faulkner or Borges or Calvino or Joyce…Only, you may have never been made aware of the fact. Don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. As a matter of fact: you’re right at home in the United States of America if you’ve never heard of João Guimarães Rosa.
PORTRAIT OF THE WHATEVER AS A YOUNGER MAN
the stupid squirrel collective
001:time for a bed time
I saw my father the other day, and he told me he had a bedtime now. Together we laughed and began to talk about how our lives have changed since time has passed. We decided that time was a good thing and that bedtimes were good things as well. He told me his bedtime was the only thing he looked forward to now since he retired and lost most of his sight. When I questioned him on this statement he simply looked at me and smiled. Today I lost my vision, henceforth I lost my job. I am tired now. I want a bedtime.
002:atari and the rise of the video game empire
once there was an imaginary man named atari and he liked to count and he counted to the number one-hundred and eighty-two and he decided he liked this number so much that he would invent a game around it. he called the game pong. he put pong on a big piece of cardboard and he called out one-hundred and eighty-two different places that you could put that piece of cardboard while his brother whose name was nintendo wrote them all down. atari invented a computer to play his pong on, and he named it after himself, calling it the atari 2600 because the number 2600 has nothing to do with one-hundred and eighty-two. nintendo decided that his wonderful brother named atari needed to invent the atari 5600 so nintendo invented the nintendo then he invented mario brother and then he invented mario brothers two and then he invented mario brothers three but then he died because the brothers cousin sega invented sonic the hedgehog and sonic ate the two brothers killing the atari and nintendo and now sony which is sonics nickname rules all the empire known as earth.
003:when I stuck my finger in the power outlet that I plug my fan into
when I stuck my finger in the power outlet that I plug my fan into nothing happened. I was expecting a shock or at least some minor pain, but I found out the reason the fan didn’t work was that the outlet was dead.
004:oops I ate you
once upon a time I decided to write a book and it was really horrible and nobody liked it so I decided to make a movie and nobody liked it so I decided to write a poem and nobody liked it so I decided to write a song and nobody liked it so I decided to make dinner and I accidentally ate you.
005:ouch my hand itches and my head hurts
I like cheese, and I like starch a lot. one time I ate a whole lot of cheese then I ate some bread and some pasta and lots of other starchy thingys and my hand started to itch, so I started to scratch it and then my foot began to itch so I used a staple gun and staple my foot to the ground ouch my head hurts.
006:blue
I saw this movie the other night, I believe it was titled, oh wait, it didn’t have a title yet, because it wasn’t real yet, it was a movie I saw in my head. I liked it a lot, and I clicked my heals together three times and said I wish I had blue pants I wish I had blue pants I wish I had blue pants! and I was still wearing the same pair of blue jeans I had always been wearing. anyway, the movie was really good, it was beautiful and I started to cry when I saw it, and the crying turned into paint and I used the paint to make a picture of god and it was a blank sheet of paper and it was an empty canvas and I woke up this morning depressed.
007:when you wish upon a star
when I wished upon a star this giant cricket came flying out of the sky and I was like, “Jiminy Cricket!” and everybody laughed and called me queer. then I said look it’s a giant cricket and hehehehehahahah I laughed out loud at my wonderful joke and then the giant cricket started to eat my friends and I got really mad and then I walked out under the giant cricket and he jumped on me and it hurt a lot then I saw snow white performing dirty deeds on the prince and she was smiling when she did it I wanted to take her to court for inaccurate portrayal of character but she said no so I said ok and laughed a lot louder than I usually do HAHAHAHEHEHEHEHAHAHAHEHE
008:the second time I stuck my finger in the outlet I plug my fan into
the second time I stuck my finger into the outlet that I plug my fan into nothing happened again. so I did it a third time and still nothing happened. I continued doing this for several hours until I got bored so I went and got a fork and stuck it into another outlet and now I have sinuses.
READ MORE >
Street-Side, Bedside, Broadside: An Interview With Shannon Cain
The Necessity of Certain Behaviors
by Shannon Cain
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011
160 pages / $24.95 Buy from Amazon
Stories in Shannon Cain’s The Necessity of Certain Behaviors pair exhibitionist events and their three-ring tableaus with characters who typify “marginal,” yet who nonetheless surprisingly assert not only their outsider status, often in correlation with their sexualities, but also their complexities—a young lesbian ventures to the set of The Price is Right to meet her father, Bob Barker, only to find not parental but sexual identities challenged; a mayor’s wife endures the scandalizing of her sexuality after she is caught masturbating in the YMCA’s shower room, only to find that her new relegation to sexual deviant has allowed her singular insight into victims of the myriad sexual minefields in her community—the cumulative effect of these stories also achieves a reversal: common notions of taboo or freakishness gain warmth and humanity, while the normative culture unveils its crippling deformities. Cultural critique couldn’t have a more compelling and sophisticated face. In an era often favoring equivocation as a substitute for vision, this collection is clear: take a stand, make it compassionate. Others agree, of interest to note: American Literary Review, American Short Fiction, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, Southwards, Tin House, The O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
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January 20th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
January 20th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
Sean Kilpatrick’s fuckscapes
This is a book you need. Language reset. Guidebook.
“The violent, sexual zone of television and entertainment is made to saturate that safe-haven, the American Family. The result is a zone of violent ambience, a ‘fuckscape’: where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on its victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick’s brilliant first book.” – Johannes Goransson, author of A New Quarantine Will Take My Place
“Pregnancy dream of poetry has this Sean Kilpatrick book by the fist. You learn to signal to others from the woken state, here, line-by-line. Do you have any extra money? Buy this book! If you have to skip lunch, buy THIS BOOK! “I held my breath so hard I ended up in the country.” Some poetry you read is forgotten, and never remembered. Some poetry, this poetry, Sean Kilpatrick’s poetry, is a manual for exciting the engine to throw you out of the vanquished pleasures. Here is your I.V. drip of sphinx’s blood.” – CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank
Leigh Stein Interview (5)
Leigh Stein’s yellow first novel, The Fallback Plan, is about a girl named Esther who has a degree in acting but has just been coasting since graduation, trying to adjust to a newer, sadder understanding of how the world works. “It was unfair that life was so irrevocable, that nothing could be frozen in time or retracted” she thinks in the final chapter called, appropriately, “Independence Day.” “I loved acting because it was like living inside of a fixed amount of time, looped from start to finish. In rehearsal, I went through the best and worst moments of some woman’s life, again and again, until I’d perfected them.” Now, feeling like a stranger in her parents’ backyard, she sits in the distance and watches the lives of the people around her and it seems like she resolves, at last, to take the long way through her own life. I asked Leigh about that for my last question in this week-long interview (see parts one, two, three and four). READ MORE >
Interview with Leigh Stein (3 and 4)
Leigh Stein’s meaningful first novel, The Fallback Plan, is about a girl named Esther who has just graduated from college and is feeling aimless and depressed, which, okay, sounds like a well-visited premise for a novel. But Esther is so witty and likable that you can’t help enjoying her mild misadventures. I’ve been emailing a question to Leigh every day this week, but yesterday she was caught up on her book tour (is she in your town?), so here are two questions
HTMLGIANT: Can I tell you something? Why is the novel so funny? Or, seriously, what was the writing process like? How many revisions did it take to get all the jokes in there? Like, “A small part of me threw up.” Or making a confused facial expression to trick the IPASS sensor, or a mom with a “hairstyle most conducive to storing pencils” instead of one who says “well look at that” when you show her how to enlarge the type in MS Word.
LEIGH: Esther makes jokes as a way of pricking the bubble of despair and stagnation she lives in, because that’s what I do. READ MORE >
Interview with Leigh Stein (2)
Leigh Stein’s laugh-out-loud-funny first novel, The Fallback Plan, is about a girl named Esther who has just graduated from college and, for lack of anything better to do, takes a job babysitting for a girl named May, whose parents, Nate and Amy, lost their first child a few years before. Bored, Esther spends a lot of time imagining a Chronicles of Narnia redux, featuring panda bears.
HTMLGIANT: One thing I am thinking about writing about it is about doors. The Fallback Plan has some good ones — the door to the dead child’s room, the door to the studio, the panda’s doorway to the other world, the father’s security concerns, the throwing of keys, and the whole book represents Esther’s passage into adulthood. Was there anything intentional you were thinking about the doors when you were writing this?
Leigh: I wasn’t thinking intentionally about doors…I wish I was! That would make me seem so smart. One thing I do sometimes to test my memory is try to remember doorknobs. Like in the house I lived in until I was 13 or 14, the doorknobs were very particular (inspiring the doorknob to the attic in my novel) and by remembering them, I feel like I still hold on to a little piece of that house.
Interview with Leigh Stein, who wrote The Fallback Plan
Leigh Stein’s laugh-out-loud-funny first novel, The Fallback Plan, is about a girl named Esther who has just graduated from college and, for lack of anything better to do, moves in with her parents. She takes a job babysitting for a girl named May, and she has a tepid affair with May’s father. She also has a crush on a guy named Jack, and they have sex, and right before they do it Esther tries to think about something sexy, so she thinks about a Winnebago. It’s with that in mind that I asked Leigh Stein to do this interview. I only had one question.
Me: Wait, are Winnebagos sexy?
Leigh: Winnebagos are sexy for the following reasons:
1. They suggest adventure, the romance of the open road, Americana.
2. You could say “Let’s run away!” to your loved one, and then actually do it in one of these.
3. A bed + a motor vehicle = sexy.
I can’t recommend this novel, and this manner of thinking, any more highly than I already do.
My fear arouses me: an interview with Dennis Cooper
The odds are decent that you know Dennis Cooper better than I do. After hearing about his work for years and constantly promising myself that I would try a little someday, I found myself graduated from the MFA program with time to read books of my own choosing again, and so I finally started reading his novels, and I haven’t stopped in the few months since. You’ve already read in this space about his latest book, The Marbled Swarm, a ludicrously powerful book that you really need. After reading The Marbled Swarm I had to send him some painfully earnest fan mail, and he received this note with a grace and generosity that will surprise no one who has read his blog. I asked if I could interview him. He said yes. His answers are more than worth your time; the book demands it.
So I had a really frustrating experience buying The Marbled Swarm at a local independent bookstore. I saw that they had two copies of Blake Butler’s There Is No Year shelved where you would expect, and I figured it would be easy from there because a) you share a press and b) “Butler” is alphabetically pretty close to “Cooper.” After a long search, I had to go ask one of the bookstore employees. She said that your book was supposed to be shelved in gay fiction, with a question mark at the end of her statement. (I was there with my wife; the employee seemed skeptical that I would want a book from the gay fiction section. I was sort of furious about that whole interaction.) And it was there! Do you like being shelved under the category of gay fiction? Do you think it’s been helpful for your work, commercially or otherwise?
I’m always surprised and disappointed when my books are cordoned off like that. I can’t speak to the reasons why that store in particular shelved The Marbled Swarm there, obviously, but, in general, I think it’s the result of a longstanding habit.
When I published my first couple of novels in the late 80s and early 90s, there was this vogue among critics and publishers regarding the notion of ‘gay literature’. I think that was the point where literary arbiters first cottoned onto the idea that there was a historical trajectory involving the work of authors who happened to be gay that had been largely unexplored and was ripe for a thinkfest. Also, there was apparently a decent sized gay male readership of fiction at that time. I remember people in the publishing industry saying that any gay-themed novel was pretty much guaranteed to sell around 5000 copies, so quite a number of writers who happened to be gay were being swept up by major publishers and given small advances based on the logic that the books would at least earn back if not even make everyone involved a bit of money. I’m not sure if that was actually true or not. READ MORE >
Boudinot! An Appreciation by Aaron Burch
[Massive Novel Alert #2! Here's a Boudinot appreciation, a little bit of online journal history, and a "This Is Your Life," sort of piece by Mr. Aaron Burch, the man behind the unstoppable Hobart journal. The occasion for this appreciation? The publication of Ryan Boudinot's stellar new novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife.]
In 2003, I think it was, I still lived in Seattle. I’d moved away, and then moved back, and had been doing Hobart for a couple of years. I’d just put out #3, a joint issue with Monkeybicycle, because they (Steven Seighman and Shya Scanlon) were also on their third issue, and we were all in Seattle, and none of us really knew what we were doing, but we were figuring it out and everything seemed new and exciting. And readings! Steven and Shya started a Monkeybike reading series and brought together people in and around the northwest (Kevin Sampsell! Matthew Simmons! Ed Page! Sean Carman! Matthew Stadler! Adam Voith!) and we formed something of a lit community, reading with each other, hanging out and drinking, seeing one another at other readings – at Elliott Bay or University Bookstore or various cafes and bars and even a makeshift garage or warehouse or someone’s living room. READ MORE >
The Soul Transformative Experience of Writing Itself: An Interview with Ryan Boudinot
Massive Novel Alert: Today marks the official release of Ryan Boudinot’s massive (in all senses of the word[seriously—it's going to create a gravity well]) new novel Blueprints of the Afterlife(Grove 2012). I got a chance to read this early on. I like Ryan’s work. I like Ryan. Ryan’s a solid citizen of literature in Seattle. And everywhere. I figured I would like the book.
I didn’t figure it would be as expansive, as imaginative, as powerful, and as quaking as it it.
Seriously. It’s awesome. Take a look. Here’s a sample chapter.
Over the next few days, I’ll be posting some Boudinot appreciations and a round-up. (And if anyone reading has something they’d like to add, feel free to get in touch with me @ giantblinditems @ gmail dot com.) Today, though, we begin with a long interview with the author.
***
You’ve written flash stories, short stories, a short novel, and a really long novel. Do you have a length at which you feel most comfortable?
You’re really wanting me to start this interview with a penis joke, aren’t you?
Heh. For the record, I think that no matter what is said in this email chain, we should use it in the interview. So, that line. And this caveat. We should just use everything said in here.
So, yes. READ MORE >
