A Seth Abramson Sighting—-
blogging again, woo-hoo!!!
Seth’s blogging again (The Suburan Ecstasies). And this time he’s butting heads with Mr. and Mrs. Lehman…..
That was the last contact of any kind I had with Mr. Lehman or his wife–the last time I spent more than a moment thinking of either him or her. When I wrote my methodology article for the Poets & Writers MFA rankings in 2009, I didn’t (needless to say) mention either of the Lehmans, or single out his employer, as the MFA rankings have absolutely nothing to do with the Lehmans generally or with Mr. Lehman’s employer specifically. So when Mrs. Lehman (Ms. Harwood) decided to pick a fight with me over the rankings I was (though perhaps I should not have been) more than a little surprised–as her blog, the official blog for the Best American Poetry series, normally has absolutely nothing to do with MFA programs, so there was no obvious reason for her to pen a screed about either the rankings or about me
To see it all go here.
I’m just glad to see Seth back in his real blogging shoes. I mean this man was meant to blog. So, love him or hate him, just enjoy. Just stand in the Seth-showers and enjoy !!!
Who Is Justin Taylor?
I’m not about to tell you, except for this: Justin Taylor is very dear to me, and I to him. He even dedicated his–wait for it–chapbook to me. No joke. Some days, we are engaged to be married. We’ll have an early-morning wedding, family only, with a luncheon of cold meats and fowls following. But you don’t know me too well, either, so none of that info should really affect what I’m soliciting from you.
Knowing Justin heaps better than any one of you, I always love to read all the inaccurate insults hurled at him by HTMLGiant peeps. But there haven’t been nearly enough this Mean Week, for my liking. I would like to provide one place, right here, to collect all the wild misconceptions, ad-hominem attacks, and elaborate speculations. I’m especially interested in the latter. It seems that people here have especially detailed mental images of who this man is. Please share, right here, at the end of Mean Week. Don’t hold back. It’ll be more fun than hating on Tao Lin (are they really roommates!?!?!), I promise, because Mr. Taylor is more truly our own.
Gore Vidal Endowed Chair
Is Gore Vidal just old or did something bad happen to him? (I’m not so glib to write this post usually, but it’s mean week.) He’s been sitting down, by my estimations, since c. 2002 and I wonder what his problem is. Maybe he always wanted an Endowed Chair.
Here he is in his reading chair with what appears to be either flat champagne or apple juice. He’s gonna have to get up to pee soon, and I’m worried about his efficiency. Below on the left is an image from the 14th Los Angeles Times Festival and the wheelchair clarifies that the sitting down might be an imperative. Notice the Prada shoes — good to know the royalties are in good shape. The picture on the right is him as close to camping as he’ll ever get. The cerebral man has no need for a suntan. He’s probably petitioning for the invention of color photography.
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Dan Nester Doubles Down on Mean: FUCK GERUNDS
Just fuck ’em.
Or better yet, let’s fucking fuck gerunds.
That way, it–the fucking–will keep going into the eternal present.
That is all.
—D.N.
Paul Haggis Deservedly Mean to Scientology Because Scientology Undeservedly Mean to Gays, Everybody Else
From Paul Haggis’s public resignation letter from the Church of Scientology. Via Gawker, who have the whole letter.
The church’s refusal to denounce the actions of these bigots, hypocrites and homophobes is cowardly. I can think of no other word. Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.
I joined the Church of Scientology thirty-five years ago. During my twenties and early thirties I studied and received a great deal of counseling. While I have not been an active member for many years, I found much of what I learned to be very helpful, and I still apply it in my daily life. I have never pretended to be the best Scientologist, but I openly and vigorously defended the church whenever it was criticized, as I railed against the kind of intolerance that I believed was directed against it. I had my disagreements, but I dealt with them internally. I saw the organization – with all its warts, growing pains and problems – as an underdog. And I have always had a thing for underdogs.
But I reached a point several weeks ago where I no longer knew what to think. You had allowed our name to be allied with the worst elements of the Christian Right. In order to contain a potential “PR flap” you allowed our sponsorship of Proposition 8 to stand. Despite all the church’s words about promoting freedom and human rights, its name is now in the public record alongside those who promote bigotry and intolerance, homophobia and fear.
The fact that the Mormon Church drew all the fire, that no one noticed, doesn’t matter. I noticed. And I felt sick. I wondered how the church could, in good conscience, through the action of a few and then the inaction of its leadership, support a bill that strips a group of its civil rights.
GUEST MEAN: Daniel Nester
In preparation for MEAN WEEK, I sent out a small call for meanness from some people whom I trusted to have some bile to spill. Pretty much everyone ignored me, or else g-chatted gleefully and cruelly but refused to go on-record (I made non-anonymity a requirement). Only Dan Nester–author of How to be Inappropriate–actually sent me something usable, and so he is the first contributor to a new feature that I hope will outlive MEAN WEEK, and appear as often as needed from now on. It is called “Breaking the Cycle of Consent,” where a person announces her or his unwillingness to continue pretending to respect things that s/he has absolutely no respect for. It’s not (necessarily) a call for the things in question to change in any way or to “be stopped;” it is simply an announcement to the world that one does not respect these things, and is no longer going to pretend that one does simply for the sake of social codes. Dan is tired of pretending to respect The Lyric Essay.
Cowering Literary Peons
This post’s a bit apples and oranges. Or rotten bananas and rotten (or as we say “Vrot”) pineapples. In fact it’s not very organized. And it is a response, in a way, to Blake Butler’s 15 Towering Literary Giants.
But, what’s a Cowering Literary Peon??
—a weasel?
—an overrated supposed Giant?
—a talentless p.o.s.?
—a fucking weasel?
—a fraction and no more than a real Towering Giant who came before?
A mix maybe. Or maybe just one of the above. And again, this is all apples and bananas. Etc. Etc.
What’s Right & What’s Wrong #1: Reb Livingston
(This is the first in an interview series: What’s Right and What’s Wrong with the Small Press World ?)
QUESTION ONE (Rauan Klassnik): What’s right and what’s wrong with the small press world?
ANSWER ONE (Reb Livingston): There’s a lot that’s right. There’s thousands of gatekeepers and thousands of others sneaking in the side. I like that. I like that on an almost daily basis I stumble across a magazine, press or website I never heard of before. Try as I might, I can’t keep up. That’s good. Nobody should be able to keep up. I like that the traditional publishing tower is beginning to topple. It’s time to start over. Tear that shit down. I’m waiting for someone to radically change how literature gets to readers. Or what it means. Or something I can’t even comprehend at this very moment. Yes, it’s changed a lot already this past decade and changing right as I write this, but I’m talking about something few of us can imagine. It’s going to come from an individual or a small group of people. That’s the only prediction I feel comfortable making. It’s not going to come from Amazon or Random House or Conde Nast (snort!) or a university (which these days are run more and more like wannabe corporations, despite some of the fabulous people they employ as teachers and staff).
CA Conrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises
There were a bunch of these in this issue of Fence a while back, which I have since read 4 or 5 times. Basically Conrad lists instructions (from very far gone to very direct) on experiential episodes to cause a text. They are pretty hilarious and wild in and of themselves. In getting ready to write a post about them, I realized he posts them regularly on a blog (or used to) (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises.
Here’s an example:
Go to your local graveyard, spend some time searching for a spot to sit. Find a spot where no one will pester you, you’re busy, you’re here to write poetry, not to be pestered with small talk! When you have found your spot sit down on the ground. Take time to look closely at ALL OBJECTS at your feet, in the trees, etc. Find three objects, one of them on the ground, or at least touching the ground: your feet, a grave marker, tree trunk or roots, etc. The other two off the ground in a tree, a building, but make them things which are stationary so you can stay focused on them. Draw a triangle between these three objects. Focus hard on the contents of your triangle, keeping in mind that the ground object you have chosen connects to the dead. Imagine your triangle in different forms of light, darkness, weather, and seasons. Imagine someone you love inside the triangle dying. Imagine yourself inside it dying. Gather notes in this process, take notes, as many notes as you can about how you feel and what you feel. Then PAUSE from these notes to focus again on your triangle, THEN write QUICKLY AND WITHOUT THINKING for as much time as you can manage. Often it’s these spontaneous notes which dislodge important information for us. DO NOT HESITATE to write the most brutal things that come to mind, HESITATE at nothing for that matter. Take some deep breaths and think about death by murder, war, cancer, suicide, accidents, knives, fire, drowning, crushing, decapitation, torture, plagues, animal attacks, dehydration, guns, stones, tanks, bombs, genocide, strokes, explosions, electrocutions, guillotine, firing squads, parasites, suffocation, flash floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, cyanide, poison, capital punishment, falling, stampedes, strangulation, freezing, baseball bats, overdose, plane crashes, fist fights, choking, etc., imagine every possible form of death. Take notes on your feelings for death at this point, DO NOT HESITATE. Now, TAKE ALL YOUR NOTES, and using THE FILTERS “QUICKEN” and “EMBLEM” shape your poem.
Not all of them are that brutal. Some are about carrots and bananas.
Heavily recommend checking the rest of these out, and perhaps putting them to use? Bloodfun.
Also, if you haven’t read CA’s The Book of Frank, make it a priority.
Jamie Iredell’s Prose. Poems. A Novel.
Out today!
In his debut collection, Jamie Iredell calls on a classic and reemerging literary form to tell a story of travel, adventure, boredom, and life in general. Prose. Poem. A Novel. is a precisely written series of poems that when collected tell an addictive story. However, don’t expect to see complex titles and strict structure; this after all is a novel. Iredell masterfully pushes the reader through every detail, but as each page is turned form and genre melt quickly into a vital story.
Prose. Poems. A Novel., the third release from Orange Alert Press, is filled with brilliant and thematic illustrations from Christy Call (Literary Dispatch, Publishing Genius, and Willows Wept Press). These illustrations are in full color and add an even more vibrant visual element to Iredell’s story.
Here is my blurb on the book: “If Mary Robison listened to more punk, grew up in Las Vegas in the 80s before the 80s sucked, did whippits while reading Ben Marcus and scrolling the alternative personals for golden lines to crib, she might have exploded into the post-post-Beat sentence index that is Atlanta. But she didn’t. Jamie Iredell did, and in reading this lean but dense meat-eater of a sui generis prose poem cycle, one realizes there might still be a way for chapbooks to compete with porn.”
“What in the hell are these things? Stories? Poems? Stoems? Whatever they are, they have (lucky for us) catapulted from the brain, indeed the life, of this epicurean-poet-goonmaniac from Atlanta-via-Reno-via-northern-California. This book (much like the speaker himself) moves with a moody cat, and resolves amidst (and beyond) the sometimes seedy underbelly of Atlanta with its cavernous tavern dives, its ungodly cockroaches, its lust for excess. When you put down this book, you might suffer a hangover. But these pieces simultaneously achieve a sense of bildungsroman (think Joyce, not Sherwood Anderson). The consistency of voice and style here is remarkable, as is Iredell’s knack for creative metaphors (think Richard Brautigan). James Iredell has the skillz to pay the billz. Wait, he’s a poet so he can’t pay his billz. What I mean to say is, he has the skills to throw out the mail and keep scribbling, which is something he is always doing, and doing well.” – Mike Dockins, author of Slouching in the Path of a Comet
Great book from a great guy. Buy.