Steven Patrick Morrissey on Writing
I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet
And no reason to talk about the books I read but I still do
Don’t leave it all unsaid
Well, I wouldn’t object to being approached, put it that way
They said they respect me, which means, their judgment is crazy
If you really concentrate on the Top 40 there aren’t really that many striking individuals so it is rather easy within that block to be anarchic
Artists aren’t really people. And I’m actually 40 per cent papier mache
I find agreeable people immensely disagreeable
I was always attracted to people with the same problems as me. It doesn’t help when most of them are dead
Am I looking in the mirror?
Any fool can think of words that rhyme
There are some bad people on the rise
Sell all of your clothes
We hate it when our friends become successful
The traditional viewpoint is to scowl, but I don’t understand that
Rejection is one thing – but rejection from a fool is cruel
There’s more to life than books you know, but not much more
Follow up to my review of Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness
After reviewing Awkwardness, I have gone back to explore Adam Kotsko’s group blog, “An und für sich,” and would like to recommend it to readers of htmlgiant. Particularly interesting is their comment policy. You thought we were assholes, take a look at this:
We also have little tolerance for people who whine that the conversation is mainly for insiders — we know it is; we chose for it to be that way on purpose. If you’re not an insider to the various discourses we participate in and you’re still interested in the topic, figure out a way to become more of an insider. If you want advice about that from one of the blog authors, try to ask in a way that shows you’ve done some work on your own.
The whole thing is worth a look, as is their “Open letter to lurkers.” Actually, I don’t think theirs is really a bad perspective, just one that sounds bad when said out loud. Other posts that I like are “Further Symptoms of Insanity,” in which Adam outlines why he might write another book that doesn’t impact his chance at tenure, and this uncomfortably hilarious video called “Conventional Wisdom Parody Technique.”
Weird Lens of the Unconscious: An Interview with Brian Conn
Brian Conn’s novel The Fixed Stars is a braid or a maze of fragments that together create an apocalypse, or an illusion thereof. It operates in turns as horror novel, as dystopia, as utopia, as Star Trek/Shakespeare pastiche, and also other modes, with language at once rock hard and dream-logicked. It was one of the most beautiful, challenging books published in 2010, and it didn’t get the attention it deserved. You should really and actually buy it. He is also the co-editor, with Joanna Ruocco, of Birkensnake, one of the more adventurous and interesting-to-touch journals available online and in print.
Brian was kind enough to talk with me at length about the ways we sort fiction, how he perceives character and voice, and other things.
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MM: You wrote, in a blog comment I can no longer find, that you feel many of the major stories now seen as “literary” or “mainstream” and often offered as examples in creative writing classes, were actually very experimental works that created their own genre, and that these have only been elevated to/claimed as official literary works after the fact. I think you were responding to a post about The Things They Carried at the time, which I see as a good example. Another one that I might suggest would be Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which hasn’t been as tamed and integrated as The Things They Carried, but is often offered as a model or set of rules of how certain stories ought to be written. His story “In the Penal Colony” also spawned a sort of mini-genre, I think, but it’s a weirder story and so it hasn’t really gotten the same treatment. Have I butchered your argument or would you like to further refine it? Do other examples come to mind?
BC: I do remember saying that at some point, and also forget where. The examples you mention are good ones, but it actually seems to me that literally every great (whatever that means) story is radically experimental in its own way. Last week I reread “The Dead,” which I usually think of as pretty straight, but even that gets bizarre once you start looking at it — for example the way various characters’ voices are continuously fading subtly in and out, so that even though there appears to be an omniscient narrator it’s hard to find a single line that’s purely in that narrator’s voice, and instead the whole narrative is sort of floating on this shifting sea of character voices.
I mean, what is a canonical “normal” story today? Hemingway? “A Good Man is Hard to Find”? But those are totally weird, right? “The Lottery”?
combine your abilities on the fly!
11.
well I sincerely cannot think of a way that the holidays, as we know them, have anything to do with art. except for the ways we are tested.
Lucy Corin
78. Soth takes photos worth eye-meat.
14. Christmas Eve flash (scroll down–it involves a ham) by Pamela Painter.
22. Hey, pick me up that Thomas Pynchon first edition for $51,000.
00. What are the best books that fit in a stocking? I’m going Big World, but you?
Lonely Christopher’s “Milk”
You can read a story from the forthcoming full length collection by Lonely Christopher The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse at the Akashic Books blog: “Milk”.
I read this book last month and it is an incredible array of styles and tones and images. It seems difficult for one book to pull off as many styles as this one does and still seem so cohesive. Here’s a wholly different shape of a story, “That Which,” from Fanzine. The book in full will be released next month from Little House on the Bowery.
You can preorder and hear more here.
It is Friday: Go Write Ahead
Reason, Magic, Skill and Love
Frankly, I think poorly of
Taste the drink, add a little more whiskey, taste again, now put the bottle aside
Oh, I’ll stagger
An open can spread frank before the sky
Cheap gin, cheap ginger ale, not much ice
The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes
I like to drink and read with my mom
Anyone’s who drunk, I know it myself, they’re likely to exaggerate
Rye whiskey in the green celluloid glass of a bathroom
It’s just the thing for shock
God doesn’t believe in the easy way
Precede into the kitchen
I don’t even drink anymore, just wine
This is one gigantic day
But you’ve got tomorrow to reckon with
Mike Young and Rachel B. Glaser, talking
Mike and Rachel met in 2007 in the popular Northampton hangout “Hugo’s.” They were both friends with the charismatic Chris Cheney and all three were enrolled in the Umass-Amherst MFA program. One year Rachel lived with Cheney and a bunch of troubled cats. Mike lived really far away. The next year Rachel lived with Mike in a clean looking apartment (like repainted recently and tastefully and blandly) that they kept pretty messy. Then Rachel moved to a big polluted fancy loft space and Mike stayed in his collapsed book palace. Then they got their books (Pee On Water and We Are All Good if They Try Hard Enough) published by Publishing Genius as part of Publishing Genius’s ‘platonic friends publishing plan.’
* * *
Rachel: Why didn’t we hang anything in our apartment?
Mike: hahaha i am not sure, i thought we did
we hung that poster behind the TV
i feel like there was at least one painting in our living room
Rachel: The ‘painting’ you are referring to, is this switch plate cover that my cousin made that was instead of a normal light switch cover.
Mike: ah yes!
that was it
Mike: hmm ok let me think of a question READ MORE >
5 required test of the status of the gouts of yellow snot of
11. I never understand what a translator must feel. To “guess” what word might represent the author’s intent. Like dancing about architecture or fucking about bowling parties, I’m sure. Here is a fascinating interview about translating Haruki Murakami.
55. At a thousand thousands, Sam Lipsyte reads Hob Broun.
5. There is no # 5. Ok, this: Taylor Swift is vacuous. So there is no # 5.
14444. Sean D. Kelly writes an essay about Scylla, blow-driers, Charybdis of religious delusion, the conditions of thigh chaffing and self-deception, the dancer as the dance, and the anxiety and nihilism of George Michael/Nietzschean post-God secularism. Well done, sir. And worth your time. Click. Trust me.
7. Hey you opinionated cacafuegos. What makes bad writing bad? This is sharp blow glow. Watch:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raWLS2_PEfI
There’s no rule that says you get steadily better.
I had a big Hemingway boner.
It’s pretty bad.