dull, humourless, uptight, inhibited, mindless, depressing, boring and swaggering
1. Amazing Herzog interview in GQ. You should read this:
I’ve always been suspicious. I don’t even look into my face. I shaved this morning, and I look at my cheeks so that I don’t cut myself, but I don’t even want to know the color of my eyes. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century. A major, major mistake. And it’s only one of the mistakes of the twentieth century, which makes me think that the twentieth century in its entirety was a mistake.
If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him.
I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.
11. Interesting thoughts on biography in this review of Avraham Shlonsky.
7. American Short Fiction short-short contest ends in 4 days. Send.
12. Photo montage of writers posing with their typewriters. What is a typewriter?
13. Cathy Day with an interesting post about linked story collections and how to teach such a thing.
What is a novel-in-stories? A linked collection? A story cycle? I find it hard to make distinctions between these terms. Instead, I think of it this way: On one end of the prose spectrum is the traditional linear novel. On the other end is the collection of disparate stories. Linked stories exist on the narrative spectrum between “novel” and “story collection,” and they are unique and valid formal artifacts.
6 Books: Dinty W. Moore on Memoir
This is the first installment in a new feature where I ask a writer to recommend 6 books, old or new, sometimes according to some roomy guideline. In this case, I asked Dinty W. Moore, editor of Brevity and author of the memoir-in-essays, Between Panic and Desire, to recommend 6 memoirs. Here’s what he had to offer.
Narrowing my list of representative memoirs down to six was an agonizing task, because there are so many solid examples. To keep the undertaking manageable (barely), I’ve limited myself to the last twenty years or so, and instead of a ‘favorites’ list, I’ve chosen six examples that I think show the range of what memoir can do.
My concise description of memoir is “the truth, artfully arranged.” Now we can argue about the meaning of the word truth for weeks, but I’d rather not. I think – despite all of the weakness of memory (and for that matter, observation) – that sophisticated readers understand that the truth they are given in memoir is the author’s subjective truth. There is no hope of objective accuracy, nor would that be as interesting to read. But you go after your truth, with honest intent. That means that an author who is willingly, consciously subverting what he remembers is not writing memoir, by my definition. Cross that line, and you are writing fiction. Which is fine, but it is another project entirely.
So I’ve pulled these six memoirs down from my shelves to illustrate how a life can be presented artfully. Starting with:
This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff (1989): Wolff’s memoir is the first that I remember reading. I had read autobiography, of course, and long-form journalism, but Wolff’s brutally-honest, cinematic childhood memoir was the first to give me what previously I had only found in novels: the ability to escape into someone else’s life and another world, another time. Wolff wasn’t the first to write memoir in this way, but This Boy’s Life remains a touchstone to me and many other writers. I love the opening note to the reader: “I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology. Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome. I’ve allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell.”
The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison (1997): Like many people, my first introduction to this book was the wave of denunciation that followed its release: denunciation of the author’s life (she engaged as a young woman in an incestuous relationship with her estranged father), and denunciation of the author’s decision to speak of it in this book. Thank goodness I eventually read The Kiss. Harrison’s restraint, her precision, her shocking honesty, and the chilling detail combine to create an unforgettable psychological portrait. Should victims remain silent? Hell no. (Random House is reissuing The Kiss next month.)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Dave Eggers (2000): Not my favorite book to read, frankly – it goes on too long in places, seems too clever by half in others – but Eggers shook up the form, opened possibilities, brought younger readers into the genre, and I tip my hat to him for the chances he took.
Semester Over: Go Right Ahead
Jane, Jane, tall as a crane!
Did I hear the word whiskey?
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits
We will have beer for lunch
The final crumbling of the rusty triangle
Dead, the leaves that like asses’s ears hung on the trees
Huge glasses of sloe gin
Yellow, meaningless, and shrill
I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish
No liking but all lust
Old people do have falls
Suggested Pairings: Etgar Keret and Kuhnhenn Blueberry Panty Dropper
The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Karet has a blurb from Salman Rushdie on the cover which is major street cred with all of Rushdie’s hot ex-wives, leggy current girlfriends, not to mention the Rushdie sneer and the notorious fatwa, especially provocative in context, blurb on Israeli author’s book (this book translated from the Hebrew), book often about Arab/Israeli conflict, book often situations of paranoia, hidings, possible violence, also the cover a medical green/blue, but let’s return to contemporary Arab/Israeli situation possibly presented here as dreadfully fantastic, possibly absurdly horrific, possibly the hyperbole and horror of the prose/situation, warped looking glass, warped words, oh gods, just say it, OK possibly all Magical Realism, all creative counter-distortion, not here as detached, mystical, balloonish, Big Pictures KABAM!!, or/as magical at all/at all but or/as considered here by literary skill as true.
Kuhnhenn Blueberry Panty Dropper is one fruity beer. Those kind folks at Kuhnhenn Brewing Company used actual Michigan blueberries, I shit you not. This reminds me of a bar in Rhode Island where you can order beer with blueberries floating in the glass. Don’t do that. Only douches want fruit floating in their beer. So you want to start with the color? Fine, we’ll start with the color. Pours out a light pinkish purplish periwinkle saffron, with adjacent radiation regions of a dark European honey hue, flashes of chestnut and burgundy, coffee-like, Big Red in a glass. Oh, I’m fumbling a bit here. Not sure how to exactly pin down this hue. Have you ever seen the type of rust/blood stains a person will obtain on the fleshy parts of their palms while hand-drilling a water well (or even augering, sludging, or jetting)? Or like maybe the clouds of delicate almond petals you will see on windy days across the Island of Cyprus? Well, like that.
Twitter MFA
In which we do a close-reading of a Tweeter’s Tweet draft and assess its tone, theme, synecdoche and narrative arc, among other things. Today’s Tweet draft was written by Daniel Bailey. Join us next Friday for a discussion of a Tweet draft written by Colson Whitehead.
The Tweet draft:
i will gain street cred by shit-talking all streets in my hood on yelp.com. current mood: ti holding a baby. future mood: unstoppable
In reading Daniel Bailey’s Tweets, the reader imagines that Bailey is binge-Tweeting drunk from his bathtub. If he were a reportage-style Tweeter, or (god forbid) a promo-Tweeter, these excessive Tweetouts wouldn’t work. But Bailey’s laissez-Tweet style is like messy hair that looks really fucking good. So we’ve often wondered how ‘hard’ is Bailey ‘trying’? Is he a pre-drafter? An off-the-cuffer? A hybrid? Regardless, the Tweet draft that Bailey sent us, to use academic jargon, is ‘da bomb.’
3 monday micro-reviews
Like it was her Place by Kim Chinquee (Mud Luscious Press). The cover is a muted blue of soapstone clay. Kim Chinquee is a high-caliber writer of flash fiction. Many writers do not hold their own voice. She holds her own voice. Concern for verisimilitude, deterministic tone—this leads to this to this, narrator observing bemused or watchful or somehow self is outside of self, or narrating quietly, distance, a feel of floating, well, you know her voice, you have read Kim Chinquee I hope by now, by gods, by help yourself buy or find yourself to her words. Like it was her Place a floating “she” visits house of former ______, of former self, of former lover/hater/friend:
She was passing through now.
She wasn’t ready to go up yet, to his bedroom.
The key still worked.
XBOX 360 Instruction Manual: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2009. The cover is the glossy of lips. Tiger Woods in his green Friday shirt, in follow-though of an iron shot. It is all 2009 and a Band-aid on his finger from a broken hand mirror. His mind is a fluttering caddy-book of sticky pages, baby diapers, golden trophies, and ghost phones. Like many of us, I am self-disgusted by the allure of Tiger Woods while at the same thankful I learned the finer points of Ambien sex through media reports of his unraveling personal life. The XBOX manual is a helpful mix of images, charts, and technical jargon, but then often an unexpected glimpse of word-play:
IN THE BAG: Be as funky or smooth as you want to be by choosing your swing and purchasing animations.
or
Loft.
A Conversation With Jac Jemc
Jac Jemc‘s novel, My Only Wife, is forthcoming from Dzanc in 2012, and she is also the author of the just released These Strangers She’d Invited In, a beautiful chapbook published by Greying Ghost Press.
I loved These Strangers She’d Invited In. How did this project come about and what’s really going on in this chapbook? I had so many questions.
The project actually started as a class exercise a few years ago. We were supposed to imitate a classmate’s work and there was this filmmaker guy who kept turning in these character names with a bulleted list of traits. My way of ‘copying’ him was to look up a bunch of names of Russian stage actors and make up details about them. Then I turned the details into stories instead of lists. I made a lot more than are in this chapbook, but when I started looking at them as a whole, these were the ones that made sense as a collection.
those guys who want to be one guy: an interview with HUMAN 500
HUMAN 500 is Jerimee Bloemeke, Henry Finch, and Jeff Griffin — 3 poetry students at Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Their first release is a chapbook called Luxury Arcana, which was authored by the three of them, though not in the split-chapbook kind of way. It’s its own thing — a collaborative consciousness, fractured and polymorphous. It’s structured in sections, but the sections often differ in physical orientation (i.e. sections are upside down relative to each other), so the very act of left-to-right, front-to-back reading is not applicable or possible. There’s a number of ways to approach the construction and the poems themselves reflect what’s going on formally as they reference each other, repurpose lines and images, and are full of subtle discoveries. It’s a book that’s almost impossible to read the same way twice, one that I’ve returned to many times, and one that continually excites me in its exploration of collaboration, consciousness, and the physical space that a book occupies.
For a sense of the tone/affect, here’s one of my favorite pages:
This is the whole story. How she doesn’t look at me across the table. I stare at her sequence. I’d love it if she could get me some rows. Some beautiful beautiful rows.
Pigeons bust up and I nearly lose it. I fall up the stairs, one more tumble to make my point. She follows me and I’m telling her, You should go home with me. She’s looking at me now. I may be laughed at along the highway but not here. Let’s get lit and do drugs because as long as I hauled them here I’m going to give them to you like anthologies. It was torture spilling my drink while kissing you to ballads.
Trivial, selfish, frivolous. This is some really low motive, man. She returns with a full glass of whiskey and I’m thinking I need to hear some Lefty Frizzell and if that’s a dress she’s wearing I’m totally going to lose it.
For the interview, I emailed questions to Jerimee, Henry, and Jeff and they responded using the same collaborative process in which the book was written.
Grammar Challenge: Answers and Winner
Thanks to all who participated in the Second Grammar Challenge. “essysea” is the winner; if you are “essysea,” contact me in some way that allows me to contact you back, and I’ll do you a prize. There were 47 comments on the post, which is fitting.
Here are my answers and, in cases where I missed something, Wallace’s edits to my answers:
(1) It was the yuletide season like I had never seen it before.
It was the yuletide season as I had never seen it before.
(2) We were in Innsbruck, Austria and we could not find a place to stay the night.
We were in Innsbruck, Austria, and we could not find a place to stay the night. [Comma after Austria]
(3) We passed by the inn.
We passed the inn. [By is redundant]
(4) It has made its way into the mainstream of verbal discourse.
It has made its way into mainstream discourse. [Discourse is already verbal]