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Most of the blockquotes, via Wikipedia entries for Mythical origins of language & Origin of language, are slightly edited.

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Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom will be the next Oprah Book Club selection. Between the two of them, nice will be made.

And remember: future events such as this will affect you in the future.

Get out your diapers, sluts! PW weighs in with the top 50 MFA programs. My dad says this is totally out of whack with the actual parameters of what young thugs want in language learning these days. What are you to think? (click img for larger versions)

boxers or briefs

[guest posted by Daniel Bailey]

On Sunday, August 15, 2010 Eva Talmadge and I shot a book trailer for our forthcoming photo-anthology, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. First we spent a couple of hours with our videographer, Dev, at Eva’s apartment. We answered some questions, tried not to cut each other off too much, and did an impromptu scrounge of Eva’s library for books that inspired tattoos included in our book. I guess we found about two dozen. Then it was off to the legendary Fineline Tattoo on 1st Street and 1st Avenue. Fineline is the longest continually running tattoo shop in New York City, with a history that goes back into the underground days when tattooing was still illegal in Manhattan. Eva and our agent, Brandi Bowles, got themselves some literary tattoos from Mehai Bakaty, the son of Fineline founder Mike Bakaty and a worldclass tattooist in his own right. (I had initially promised to get inked, too. Needless to say, I bailed.) The trailer itself should be available sometime in the next couple weeks, but in the meantime I offer the following photo gallery- a preview of the preview, if you will (please do).

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A letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 8, 1988, from Gary Lutz:

[via Caketrain]

Are there people you see writing/publishing/commenting online that you feel like you don’t like, even though you’ve never met them? I’ve been thinking about the way persona comes out of no tone mostly online and how people can seem unlikeable and some people even become so angry as to physically hate the person, based mostly on an exchanging of ideas (even if the idea are, you know, bitchy). I often feel I personally have come off like an ass in situations where if it were bodies talking I wouldn’t have been perceived the same way, and yet I also feel I am better at expressing my opinions in text than I am in speaking. It’s a strange duality. I wonder who people hate and what it is that might make someone dislikable someone based on their online appearance? Is it more childish to judge someone based on their online action or to be childish online in the first place? Have you ever felt you didn’t like someone online and then met them in person and felt differently, or vice versa? I know this shit doesn’t matter really, but I wonder.

Let us now acknowledge the passing of Ralph Records, home of The Residents who, in secret, have been the greatest band on the planet(tm).

Someone break out the Duck Stab. And the Eskimo. And Songs for Swinging Larvae. And Amerikka Stands Tall. And some Snakefinger. Scour the rekkid stores. BUY OR DIE!

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$20,333.08. That’s how much money I’ve spent on Publishing Genius since January 17, 2008. This includes printing books, marketing, shipping, and numerous miscellaneous fees. (To give an idea of operating costs, deduct the cost of printing from that number. Printing spend is $12,916.51.)

$13,640.24. That’s how much I’ve taken in from direct sales, Amazon payments, bookstores, sale of rights and so on. Both of these numbers astound me.

$6692.84 is the difference.

For that much money, I could have made the movie “Clerks.” READ MORE >

Alexandre Dumas said: The man of genius does not steal, he conquers.

And Robert Schumann said: Talent works, genius creates.

And Oscar Wilde said: Talent borrows; genius steals

And Pablo Picasso said: Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

Or maybe Pablo Picasso said: The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal.

And Igor Stravinsky said: Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

And T.S. Eliot said: One of the surest tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

Today I have been thinking about book reviews as tentacles of the book being reviewed, as an extension of the book, an addition to it. Like a book is a blog post and a review is the comment stream. Each blog post shares a symbiotic (parasitic?) relationship with its comment stream – unless, of course, you disable the comment stream, in which case you disallow the formation of direct extensions — of course someone could always do their own blog post linking to your post thereby forming an extension at their own site. In a way, thinking this way calls into question the notion of authorial sovereignty, which is to say: according to an older type of model, I write a book and therefore I am the author and I control the object — whereas in a newer type of model, if I write a book (or a blog post) the reviews (or the comment stream) can easily overtake the book (blog post) thereby pushing my role into the background and replacing it with whatever creation those extraneous appendages (comment streams) create, which is to say that my authority over the text gets taken out of my hands. But that’s not really where I want to go with this post. I don’t want to argue that a book review can somehow surpass the book being reviewed, because the whole reason I got on this mental pathway is because I have recently read a few book reviews that I thought were stand out pieces of literature in their own right – not better than the work being reviewed, but on par with it, as if the review was in some ways a productive extension of the book, a part of the book written by someone else…

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[via Magic Molly]

[Used with permission of Jessamyn West. Thank you to her.]

I feel loathe to spread attention about a dude who goes by the goober moniker “The Jackal,” but the story is moderately interesting enough to bring up: supposedly notorious literary agent Andrew Wylie makes a supposed splash by selling e-book rights for books that had not supposedly had previous e-rights contracted, including Updike, Nabokov, and etc., in an exclusive contract to Amazon via his newly established Odyssey Editions, formed entirely for ebook handling. Now there’s a big legal kerfuffle over who gets to do what with what and why to who and for how much and why not me and what are you doing motherfucker that’s my vacation house #2 fund we’re talkin’ bout. Moby Lives has the full scoop.

Agents. I mean look at this guy!

Props to MHP for the 'shitforbrains' image filename

Now look at him again, in 1972!

All the LeatherJacketed Young-Once Not-Really-Literary Men

If you’d like to buy a copy of that picture to hang over your bed, the pricing & information has been included in the image like a good salesboy.

I wish George Bush era brains had popularized Styrofoam-books instead. That seems more fun.

@grahamfoust responds like a human being to the Paris Review retroactive rejection on twitter: “I’m actually not that upset–they’re giving me fries with my kill fee, and the poems were all just shit I took from Google anyway.”

@ the Observer, Christian Lorentzen gives the most evenhanded coverage of the thing in full: Dead Poem Society.

But really, if we’re going to talk about this, which I guess people insist upon, here’s a question: as a writer do you feel entitled to careful handling?

Is this handling different, say, than the care you’d receive at McDonald’s? If it is different, how is it different? Because McDonald’s is a service you are buying, and selling writing is a service you are offering, shouldn’t the quality control be more on the McDonald’s end than the other?

If kill fees are common in all other art, including journalism, why should poems carry different weight? Even outside of art, why more than any other object? If I buy a table from Crate & Barrel, then decide I can’t use the table, for whatever reason, I take the table back no questions asked.

Why should art be given special treatment? Should it?

Am I wrong to return a book I don’t like to Borders after reading part of it? What if I read the whole thing? Have I consumed?

Furthermore, why are the most popular blog posts online always about topics such as rejection, submission, balance, all things that pertain wholly to the self? Are we a consolidation of 8 year olds, looking for fingerpainting time? Where is fanfare needed more?

Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

Latest in the controversy regarding manuscripts recently turned down post-acceptance at the Paris Review, apparently we may get to see the maligned documents see daylight after all. According to insiders at the Peemsmen Monthly, a second-shift janitor at the P.R. headquarters, upon realizing what literary-scandal-wrongdoing-travesty he’d been made to take part in, ran back out into the trashyard where the massive P.R. dumpster is and fished out said to-be-and-no-longer-ParisReviewianed language.

The janitor, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, is currently looking to publish the lot as a “found manuscript.” He is available for contact via representation by Marble-Withersby Agency in New York.

Currently tallied among the rubble:

- A haiku by Jonathan Franzen on the brevity of life and the deliciousness of fat free yogurt

- An erasure by Nam Le of his mother’s travel diaries as a child, concerning her impregnation with him, which Nam Le erased himself from entirely, a retroactive comment on the Gulf War

- Two halfcompleted crossword puzzles teamwritten by Alice Mattison & Barbie Smeemersund

- A photograph by Charlize Theron taken from the midgrade-price seating of a recent Chicago Bulls practice (kinda blurry)

- Another haiku by Jonathan Franzen about the writing process of the first haiku, which originally appeared on a popular upcoming literary journal’s twitter feed at the tune of $400 a syllable

- A concrete poem self portrait by Rick Bass repeating the word fishinglure in various crazy anagrams

- A transcript of every adjective Richard Ford spoke while restringing his son’s guitar twice in the same afternoon

- A third haiku by Jonathan Franzen regarding the phone call he received from his mother while writing the poem about the writing of the poem, and her subsequent medical condition

- A tear-out unfoldable paper shirt designed by Martin Amis’s agent’s neighbor, a previously unpublished author

- Letters written to Al Gore by Denis Johnson in the voice of Al Gore’s dog, with audio samples contracted to have been available online for $.99 a download on a portion of the website that also will no longer grace the web

I don’t know about you, but I’m positively peeping in anticipation and great terror. Robin Hood or hoodrat? Sylvia Beach or motherfucker? We’re living in a no-holds-barred world here, people, where wicker elephants walk among the real ones. First Tin House is trying to force people to actually buy books, and now these guys want to change their minds on history. Hold me!

Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?

Answer: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well i don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching…

[via The Howling Fantods]