Deb Olin Unferth has a Daytrotter Session!!!!!
Okay, so this news is almost a month old, but I only just discovered it ten minutes ago. (Now overnight plus ten minutes, since I’m going to post this tomorrow.) ANYWAY. The point is that Deb Olin Unferth is badass, and so is Daytrotter.com, so the fact that they got together (apparently on 12/14/08) is just super exciting.
“Slush” by Joshua Cohen
Not sure if anybody’s noticed, but I’m a bit of a creature of habit. I like getting turned onto new stuff, sure, but once I’ve found something I like I tend to stick by it like a truly neurotic compulsive or perhaps like a faithful hound. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I was very happy to learn that Joshua Cohen, whose multi-part Nextbook essay about Kafka’s office writing I covered here, has a new piece of short fiction up at The Fanzine, which is a very cool site and probably not as widely known as it ought to be. So do yourself two favors: first, check out Cohen’s story, “Slush,” and second, start checking on Fanzine more often than you’ve been. (if you want to do yourself a third favor, pink up a copy of The Weaklings, Dennis Cooper’s most recent collection of poems, which Fanzine published in a special illustrated limited edition of unlimited awesomeness.) Here’s the beginning of “Slush.”
Dear Aaron Priestly,
Thank you for letting us take a read on your manuscript. STORY OF MY LIFE was bold, and compelling, but ultimately I was not convinced that I was the right person to represent it. I just did not find this a must read. It did not click, I regret to inform. Nor did it hold ME. I find your premise lacking, quite. Good luck elsewhere (*I can no longer accept queries from writers who have not been previously published or who have not been referred to me by a colleague*).
Please accept my very best wishes for the success of STORY OF YOUR LIFE. Though I did not fall in love with your story enough to continue reading it, I pass. We must pass. Obviously not for me, obviously. He, she, it, passes.
Michael Madsen is a Writer I’d Like to Fuck
I know what you all are thinking: Michael Madsen is not a writer! He is a movie star! That is cheating! Right? You think I am cheating. I am not cheating. Madsen has written more books of poetry (that you can check out here on his fabulous website) than Viggo Mortenson (and he doesn’t show his anus and ballsack, like Viggo did in that Cronenburg movie, and like, made me feel less hot for Viggo, seeing that. I do like Viggo. Maybe that will be another post.)
Now, again, you are not going to really believe me here, but I don’t actually really LIKE movies stars, as a general rule. Firstly, I watch very few movies, because hockey doesn’t take place in them often enough. Secondly, once I saw this thing on TV about Russell Crowe and they were showing this “behind the scenes” thing and he was pretending (acting) all tough, and then they said “cut!” and he stopped acting ,and they came and fixed his hair. Like he was some girl, getting his hair fixed. Not sexy to me, acting.
READ MORE >
FOUND/LOST/SALVAGED: The Recently Deflowered Girl, by Edward Gorey
My friend Alice Townes, layout editor at R2: The Rice Review, forwarded me this non-Rice-related link the other day to a post in the found_objects livejournal community. A guy named bo_bailey wrote: “I found this book on my friend’s 84-year-old landlord’s bookshelf. Published in 1965 with illustrations by Edward Gorey, I present to you The Recently Deflowered Girl.”
He posted scans of the whole book on Jan. 7th. Alice turned me onto it a couple days later. I fwded to my friend Amanda and planned to post on the book today. But then last night, while I was in Coney Island eating food from the Mongolian-Russian border region and watching snow fall on the beach, Amanda was writing me back that the link I sent her didn’t work. So I tried opening it myself, and sure enough–the post seems to be gone. (If it revives in the same spot, it was here.)
Luckily, I still had the now-gone page open in my browser, so I saved all the jpegs, and was going to just post the thing myself, but then I decided to Google it first, and it turns out that some quicker-on-the-trigger fellow had already had that bright idea. So, now with gratitude to Alice or the original tip, and to Joey Devilla for saving me a bit of work, I present to you: The Recently Deflowered Girl, by Edward Gorey.
Power Quote: Harold Bloom
Poetry and belief, as I understand them, are antithetical modes of knowledge, but they share the peculiarity of taking place between truth and meaning, while being somewhat alienated both from truth and from meaning. Meaning gets started only by or from an excess, an overflow or emenation, that we call originality. Without that excess even poetry, let alone belief, is merely a mode of repetition, no matter in how much finer a tone. So is prophecy, whatever we take prophecy to be.
– Ruin the Sacred Truths (p. 12)
*********SPECIAL BONUS**********
What do you mean you didn’t know that Bloom’s title is drawn from an Andrew Marvell poem about Paradise Lost?
Read Marvell’s “On Mr. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost'”
Then why not revisit the only Andrew Marvell poem you actually know?
Now let us sport us while we may
MIKE TOPP TYPES WORDS THAT FORM PHRASES THAT APPEAL TO ME
yesterday i wrote about THE STUYVESANT BEE, a one page publication by MIKE TOPP. after i read the STUYVESANT BEE i researched MIKE TOPP using google and pure instinct. i really like mike topp’s writing. i read some poems at BALTIMORE IS READS. each one was really entertaining. he also has a blog that i visited and clicked through thoroughly. i like his style. he is funny and sad and the balance works well. he also has a book out from FUTURE TENSE PUBLISHING called HAPPY ENDING. i will buy it when i buy all the other books i am behind on because of FUCKING PAYPAL. chelsea martin has MIKE TOPP’S phone number. i want to call MIKE TOPP and then act embarrassed and talk to people in the background like when you were in eighth grade and girl who liked you would call. MIKE TOPP, i am an eighth grade girl who likes you.
here is mike topp sitting on a bed looking upset, most likely because he just fell into a puddle of ink and ruined his suit
Power Quote: Allen Tate (with SPECIAL BONUS FEATURE)
I take the somewhat naive view that the literature of the past began somewhere a few minutes ago and that the literature of the present begins, say, with Homer. While there is no doubt that we need as much knowledge of all kinds, from all sources, as we can get if we are to see the slightest lyric in all its richness of meaning, we have nevertheless an obligation, that we perilously evade, to form a judgment of the literature of our own time. It is more than an obligation; we must do it if we would keep on living. When the scholar assumes that he is judging a work of the past from a high and disinterested position, he is actually judging it from no position at all but is only abstracting from the work those qualities that his semiscientific method will permit him to see; and this is the Great Refusal.
– “Miss Emily and the Bibliographer”
(from Praising it New: The Best of The New Criticism; Garrick Davis, ed.)
**********SPECIAL ALLEN TATE BONUS FEATURE*********
Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”
and Lowell’s rejoinder, “For the Union Dead”
bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye
The Internet: Serious Business
The image is facetious, but I think we – you and me and everyone we don’t know – are onto something. The internet’s constraints and agilities are being used in wonderful and inventive ways. I’ve noticed writers and editors either reappropriating online aesthetics or its practical functions. Here are three examples that kind of show a spirit to this point:
I. Mark Baumer’s everydayyeah will post a 365 word story this year, running one word at a time. He chose Jesse Ball, who just published The Way Through Doors. [Blake Butler’s review forthcoming in The Believer, April.] One simply could not ‘distribute’ or publish in this form without the easy accessibility of the internet, made more so with the advent of RSS feeds and Google reader. Baumer seems obsessed with finding beauty in the redundancies of every day. True, it will take a devoted fan to check in every day, but let’s compromise: how about every week? We might even learn something about Ball’s structure.
II. Jillian Clark’s brilliant poem (haiku?) untitled under her “so i go in alone” blog post, wherein the entire poem is comprised of wikipedia picture captions.
an okapi cleaning its muzzle with its tongue
an okapi at bristol zoo cleans itself
okapi at chester zoo
an okapi reaches for some leaves
“New Year’s Day” by Robert Lowell (with special free associative bonus)
Okay, it’s almost 3PM now, so I guess I better start pulling it together. The passed-out girl is officially getting up off the picnic table, and trying to figure out where she threw her top. A week or so ago I was buying a book for a friend on Amazon, and figured what I always figure when I buy from Amazon, which is that I should put the money I was going to spend on shipping charges into another purchase, because once you nudge up to $25 the shipping becomes free. So which book?
Benjamin Percy is a Writer I’d Like to Fuck
Bejamin Percy is Fucking Hot
Benjamin Percy begs the question, do I have to like a writer’s writing to want to fuck him? Alas, I think the answer would be yes, but I would make an exception for Percy if I were to not like his writing. He’s that hot. Now, as it is, I really REALLY like his writing! So, the question is really moot. But, my point is, how smoking HOT is he? (I’ll get to his fiction in a minute). Here’s a bit from an interview in Bookslut that exemplifies one of the reasons I’d like to fuck him:
Some writers go for walks when they’re trying to work something out in their head. I go to the gym. Sometimes you need to get away from the keyboard and feel the blood flowing through your stiff limbs before the next idea comes hurtling toward you. So I pick up large pieces of metal and put them back down again.
The man has PIPES! As does his prose. Percy is an unabashedly masculine writer. A rich manliness oozes from not only his subject matter- war, guns, all sorts of men stuff–but also his prose style. I wouldn’t call him a “plain” writer; indeed, he can be very stylized, with an acute attention to the music of language. But his fiction feels honest and hard, like a dick in my hand should feel.