5 hidden to lurk on the furky lake
11. Decent collection of James Thurber fables. Dude had a series of glass eyes he would change out at parties, each one for his drink level at the time, each a little bit more red-eyed. He also had an American flag glass eye. He would go to the bathroom, toss in the flag eye, reenter the party.
5. Holy shit! Jeff either snagged the shark, lost his best spoon, or this:
About two weeks ago I tried living as if I were an indie writer.
Oh, the writerly worries of “going indie.” Though it’s one of those things where genre writers think indie means genre. As if genre is subversive. Or indie. Or that they correlate. Or something. Some tidbits, though, or why would I even yawn it here?
14444. Aimee Bender interview in Guernica.
1. Avant-Garde time capsule found.
9. Is caffeine important to the writer? How much do you use?
A Conversation With Charles Dodd White
Charles Dodd White is author of the novel Lambs of Men and co-editor of the contemporary Appalachian short story anthology Degrees of Elevation. His short fiction has appeared in The Collagist, Fugue, Night Train, North Carolina Literary Review, PANK, Word Riot and several others. He teaches English at South College in Asheville, North Carolina. He has an old rescue mutt that sheds a sweater’s worth of hair each day. His home page is www.charlesdoddwhite.com. We had a fantastic e-mail conversation about Appalachian writing, his novel, and much much more.
Roxane: What are some of the challenges of writing historical fiction? What are some of the pleasures of writing historical fiction? What kind of research did you do for Lambs of Men?
Charles: The funny thing about historical fiction is that I’m not exactly sure what it is. How old does something have to be to meet that definition? Some contemporary novels have a strangely historical feel, something say like Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, while other stories set thousands of years in the past, like Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, are eerily contemporary. I didn’t set out to write something that was consciously trying to perform a certain type of literature. I set the story in the past, specifically in the period shortly after the First World War because I wanted to write a story on the edge of time, a situation aware of a kind of eschatology, and for me WWI with its stark, nightmarish images was the most natural choice. I was also interested in writing a book that was essentially a primitive story, a fabular treatment of the real cost of violence, and I needed an earlier century for the verisimilitude. I’ll admit too, I take a comfort in a world without cell phones. It calms me.
Like one of the main characters, I was a Marine, and much of what I wrote about was from previous knowledge of Marine Corps history. I also have spent a hell of a lot of time in the woods with guns, so I guess you could say a lot of the research was pretty much first hand.
Four! Mark Neely Interview.
Lately chapbooks design/appear more glow than many book-books. Example winner of Concrete Wolf contest. Interview below:
The Food Network has perfected the cooking show by turning it into soft porn. The hosts actually moan when they taste what they have made. And although the chefs on the show are grating their own horseradish and making their own sausage, most of the commercials are for American cheese slices and frozen dinners. That doesn’t seem common to me. It seems insane.
No matter how hard humans try and wall ourselves off from the natural world, we still have mites living in our eyebrows.
Online publishing is young. Like a young person it is energetic, cocky, innovative, various, unstable, and full of shit. I’m excited to be around to watch it grow up.
Shya Scanlon interview, Part Two
PART 1 OF THIS INTERVIEW AT HOBART
Once upon a time, there was a journal called Monkeybicycle. There is, of course, still a journal called Monkeybicycle, but there used to be one, too. And way back when, one of the guys editing that journal was a guy named Shya Scanlon of Seattle, Washington. And one day I sent a story to Monkeybicycle. And then I waited a while. A while. But, hey. He took it. When the story appeared, it was an issue of Monkeybicycle that flipped over and became and issue of Hobart—a journal I was unfamiliar with at the time. I am now their interviews editor. Small world.
Shya Scanlon’s latest work is a novel called Forecast, which he initially serialized online, each of the 42 chapters on a different blog or journal. Forecast now has a print publisher, Flatmancrooked, and should be available mid-November. I know a bit of the early history of the book, having been a friend of Shya’s throughout the writing of the book and beyond, so I asked him a little about it and his other prose work.
Tortoise and the Hair
Malcolm Gladwell
Getting really tired of Malcolm Gladwell’s “genius” hair, that intentional stylization, or at least neglect, of the intellectually consumed. His 1999 appearance on Charlie Rose is proof that he understands what normal hair is (no comment on the tie). In 2008, on the same show, he looks either high on meth or himself. Gladwell has made a career of being a provocative thinker, and while I do find him pleasantly curious at times, his constantly enthralled persona is exhausting. One more cappuccino on the per-diem en route to The New Yorker offices and he’s gonna have an epiphany about foam. (What the tale don’t tell you is that a fast rabbit is running away from itself.) True, everyone is a poster child of their own cause; I’m just weary of the cause.
A Sorta Mean Review of Grease Stains etc
This morning I woke up early and read Mel Bosworth’s book, Grease Stains, Kismet and Maternal Wisdom. I read the Aqueous Books version, the original one. Apparently there was some sort of disagreement between the publisher and author, though, and Aqueous dropped it. It was quickly republished and is available again here for only $3.95. I thought I’d pan it for mean week, sorta.
The book is a quick read and a good story. The earnestness at the center is keen, the elation and vertigo and palpable excitement of infatuation. I understood the feeling from my own personal experience, so Bosworth’s accomplishment is how he draws that feeling out, how the writing comes together to remind me of that experience. READ MORE >
Doris, your door is open
"Nobel Prize was a bloody disaster" -- Doris Lessing, The Independent (2008)
Jesus lady, get a grip. So you got post-Nobel prize ennui, a plight shared by us all. Evidently, you haven’t spent any of that prize money on new clothes, just what appears to be a large bag of bird seeds (which ought to last you a while), and two plastic bins of who knows what. There’s a bunch of mint on your right, which is our way of saying “take five mojitos and call me if you’re still mourning.”
The Independent article from which this picture was culled reads like an Onion piece. Lessing laments, “All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.” Give this woman some Oil of Olay and an ego for god’s sake. I guess men fair better with a gentle pat on the back, their spines broken by this world. She goes on to say that her will to write is “[…] sliding away like water down a plughole,” which I guess is a tact simile. Less may be more, but Lessing is more dramatic than I imagined. Smile, not simile Doris, it’s called a camera.
Happy Birthday, Mary Jo Bang!
Today is awesomepoet Mary Jo Bang’s birthday. Over on her wall, the best wishes are piling up; fellow awesomepoet Erin Belieu even proclaimed-
All hail Mary Jo’s existence! Hip hip, hooray!
which seems just about right to me. As our regular readers know, HTMLGiant encourages you to celebrate the existence of writers you admire and enjoy by reading their work and buying their books. You can start over at Poets.org, where there are five MJB poems and a bio. A similar setup, but with mostly different poems, can be found at the Poetry Foundation. Her most recent collection is The Bride of E, and the one before it, Elegy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Those two are both published by Graywolf. I also know many people who are strong partisans for her early book, Louise in Love. All this plus The Eye like a Strange Balloon and The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, so there’s really no excuse for not getting your fill. Mary Jo Bang, HTMLGiant wishes you a very happy birthday, and advises that you never–ever–do a Google image search for your last name. Cheers!
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
The fact I can write this at a bar is almost like flying cars.
Seated for hours in front of a large glass of beer!
The odor of gin, of tar, of ginger, of leeks and cloves.
Murder the wine merchant!
From one end of the country to another, there exists a freemasonry of alcoholics.
Did you just drop my bishop in your beer?
This place smells of lazy crowds.
Today we should drink four bottles of wine and read the contents of our libraries haphazardly.
Blar.
I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.