A D Jameson—
R.I.P. Carlos Fuentes. I just found out. He was one of the greats. Places to start if you haven’t read him: Where the Air Is Clear (1958), The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Terra Nostra (1975). & here he is on the BBC (audio), and here are various YouTube videos.
Godspeed, good sir.
2
RIP Maurice Sendak
Progress vs. Catastrophe: Underworld by and beyond Benjamin’s Angel of History
A Brief Introduction to the Themes
In 1940, Walter Benjamin published an essay, consisting of a collection of brief reflections, titled “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The ninth thesis describes Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, in which an angel “look[s] as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating” (Benjamin 257). Benjamin links this to “the angel of history” observing the world through the position of the past. While the future pushes on inevitably—insists he take notice—the angel is turned away, caught up in the disasters of the past. This overseer wants to arrest the present, stop progress altogether in order to amend the disasters and failures of history, and finds itself in a struggle against the powerful reality of the ever-advancing state of existence. Thus, a rivalry between progress and catastrophe is established.
Don DeLillo’s 1997 magnum opus Underworld meditates heavily on Benjamin’s ninth thesis. The progress of society, through the lens of the Cold War begins in 1951 and is presented in reverse chronological order, backwards from 1992, after the complete dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. The undulating anxiety regarding Western society’s seemingly imminent doom is displaced by an anxiety within the context of the American Dream. Baseball, bureaucracy, sex, waste, art, religion, and crime take on the weight of the present’s baggage through the obsessive compulsions of the past.
There is no direct solution to the conflict of Benjamin’s thesis, just as DeLillo offers little individual resolution for his characters. However, the driving force of salvation, the one in which we thrust our faith and loyalty, is the same in both dilemmas: the angel. The angel of history is trapped in a moral and physical bind; it seeks some way in which to move on from humanity’s historical failings—the “single catastrophe”—and to avoid, or amend, the forthcoming quandaries of the world—the “storm” (257-8). DeLillo’s angel, Esmeralda, extends this notion further, and acts as a Christ-like sacrifice for history and an entity from which to begin anew, look around, and turn toward progress.
Lily Hoang—
Dana Levin is a poet. She’s super cool. She’s so cool that someone wrote a song about her. (Seriously, click the link, listen to the song.) How often do poets have songs written for them? Well, if you’re Dana Levin…
“I know you are reading this poem …”
It is June 1993 and I’m halfway through a roadtrip that will kill a friendship. I’ve fled the campground for the beach, trudging through the sandy tunnel under the highway with a notebook and a copy of An Atlas of the Difficult World. Because I can’t imagine spending fifteen dollars to tour Hearst Castle, my roadtrip companion has gone off to do it herself, in a huff. I take my chair, my notebook, my Adrienne Rich volumes and head out to the beach, free for two or three hours to read and write.
The trip is going very badly, and I can’t quite articulate why, even to myself. I am 29 years old, in the summer between a masters and Phd program. I’ve started a novel, and been admitted to a PhD program where I hope I’ll have time to finish it. I’m terrified of taking on more debt but stopping now means I’ll have to get a “real” job to pay off the MA I’ve just finished, and if I do that I doubt I’ll finish my novel. I’m betting on myself in a way that seems outrageous. I’m broke, but I’ve always been broke, so I’m used to it, but my friend is not, and although I told her before we started that I didn’t have any money, she seems startled by how little money no money actually is.
Sampson Starkweather Strips it Down to Just Chapbooks
The 2012 Chapbook Festival starts tomorrow. I call it “the good AWP.” In preparation, this year I’ve asked Sampson Starkweather, 1/5th of the Birds, LLC braintrust and chapbook enthusiast, some questions about the form. Go get a blanket–he links up some great stuff that is way worth the read.
Hey Sampson, what’s the deal with chapbooks?
Funny, that’s how I start all my stand-up comedy gigs. It kills of course. So I wanted to start with a quote from James Haug’s Why I Like Chapbooks (Factory Hollow, 2011), who waxes lyrical “Chapbooks are stealth books./ They can slip under a door./ They don’t impose. They suggest./ They’re not one thing or another. They don’t take much time. They’re sly and easy to ignore. They imply, insinuate, inquire./ They don’t expect an answer./ They have a long history; they have no history.” READ MORE >
Mike Young—
“My religion is Poetry, not a religion of kindness and love but one of absolute permission. If poetry doesn’t strip me naked in front of my enemies then nothing will.” — CAConrad, in an amazing (duh, it’s CAConrad) and even downright rousing interview with Thom Donovan at The Academy of American Poets, excerpted from A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, Conrad’s new book of (Soma)tic exercises out April 1st from Wave.
Noah Cicero interviews Elizabeth Ellen
Elizabeth Ellen & Kendra Grant Malone
Elizabeth Ellen writes in the classical sense: she focuses her energy on the story being told. She doesn’t two things most writers fall into: she doesn’t over styilize and use experimental weirdness to express emotion. Her stories are always very linear, have beginning/middle and end. But at the same time she doesn’t write in cliché language and have big explosive plots involving guns and beautiful people walking around. Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen takes the middle ground between alternative/experimental and popular literature.
The stories come out strange and unique, I think because Elizabeth Ellen is inspired by writers like Dave Eggers, but at the same time because of the circumstances of her life she did not get an MFA and go through many writing workshops, her writing turned to be a marriage of Bukowski and Eggers. The writing has some of that nice Eggers clarity and smoothness but at the same time covers Bukowski themes like humiliation, failed romantic relationships, divorse, raising a child in difficult circumstances, violent sex, drinking, weight gain, disapointment, in general about failure and hardship.
“To do this Biennial justice would require an encyclopedic, Baudelaire-style ‘Salon’ review”
Last week’s New Yorker (3/12) covers the Whitney Biennial. One passage that caught my eye:
“See, for instance, Gisèle Vienne’s mechanized boy mannequin wielding a hand puppet, with a chilling soundtrack by the Los Angeles poet and novelist Dennis Cooper. ‘I’m not dead,’ the boy muses, ‘unless this is death.’ The sinister-voiced, twitching puppet comments on things that the boy imagines, in what sounds like a game of exquisite cadaver: ‘decapitated head upon severed arms upon mutilated trunk-like logs and branches in a fireplace.’
‘Because I said so is the fairly witless way most images get you to look at them,’ the poet and performer Ariana Reines writes in an essay that complements, rather than addresses, the grotesque montage photographs and assemblages, satirizing high fashion, by the artist who styles herself K8 Hardy.”
RIP Whitney Houston / Whitney Houston On Writing
“God gave me a voice to sing with, and when you have that, what other gimmick is there?”
“It’s like, that’s my lair, and nobody messes with my lair.”
“I coulda been a rich man if I accepted all the bribes from the guys wanting to be in this room today.”
“I almost wish I could be more exciting.”
“I finally faced the fact that it isn’t a crime not having friends. Being alone means you have fewer problems.”
“I like being a woman, even in a man’s world. After all, men can’t wear dresses, but we can wear the pants.”
“I’m not crazy about arenas just because I can sell them out. It doesn’t do anything for my ego at all.”
“When I decided to be a singer, my mother warned me I’d be alone a lot. Basically we all are. Loneliness comes with life.”
“Sometimes you do have a good time. But when it gets to the point where you’re sitting in your home and you’re just trying to cover what you don’t want people to know. It’s painful. And then you want more just so that you don’t let anybody see you cry.”
“I have to pray it away.”
“I had the money. I had the cars. I had the house. Had the husband. Had the kid. And none of it was really that fulfilling. For a time, I was happy. I was happy, but I needed that joy. I needed my joy back. I needed that peace that passes all understanding.”
“I will fight you back with anything I can find.”
A Lesson on Not Apologizing
Ever written something salacious and regretted it? Well, you shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. Take pride, bitches. Badass Die Antwoord released this video for “Fok Julle Naaiers,” which uses the word “faggot” generously:
α language having a cΩω
Rembrandt, "Landscape with a Cow" (1650)
Amen
Richard Beck: “5.4: Pitchfork, 1995–present,” in the forthcoming n+1.
You know what Pitchfork has always most reminded me of? Ain’t It Cool News.
Gordon Lish, 1986
A former professor of mine recently gave me a copy of StoryQuarterly 21: Stories from the Gordon Lish Workshops (edited by J.D. Dolan). I don’t want to excerpt too much, but here are some words from Lish:
“This feels good. I tell you, it feels good to have my hands on this forum, and I am not going to let the moment get away from me without my offering a remark or three….I tell you, I take such delight in them all, in all these students, in all these writers, that I’d like to sit here and start reciting names–this in the exorbitant spirit of the madman who thinks the mere calling out of the entries in a list must offer to all who hear an invitation to war.”
Now Showing: Goat in the Snow
Some people are unreasonably unselfish, and Emily Pettit is one of them. An editor for Notnostrums and Factory Hollow Press, she is also the new publisher of jubilat, which, under her thumb, just released a bad motherfucker of an issue (see: Julia Cohen, Michelle Taransky, James Tate, Rachel Glaser, Dara Wier, lots!). Her devotion to art is exemplary and climbs no ladder, but aims at making our anxious little world a bigger, bettered one. It should come then as no surprise then that her poems, too, are of the giving kind; and her new book Goat in the Snow, now available for pre-order from BIRDS LLC, gives and gives and gets it right. Im not one to blurb (ed note: bullshit), but when a wise old man once again feels the change coming in his bones and scrys the truth, you listen:
Her kindness is always ahead of us, anticipating the problems we will or won’t run into, and we always end up in a different, precise place than the one we started out from, as she reassuringly tells us: “You know/ you know you know. It’s all uncertainty/ and your neck. You walk slowly/ in a calm voice.” Goat In The Snow is multicolored, ever-changing, a delight to try to clasp. -
JOHN ASHBERRY
Author venn diagram
This pie chart illustrates what’s in my head in terms of what I think about writing, and who goes where. This of course is just a partial list, and my apologies for the lack of contemporaries, and women. Again, this is a view into my head, and probably subject to some disagreement. I think of all writing being from the head (pros: cerebral, conceptual; cons: didactic, dry), the mouth (pros: language, poetics; cons: empty banter, pure form), and the heart (pros: empathic, intimate; cons: sentimental, emotional) . My favorite writers, those in the white dashed center, are able to write from all three places. Other writers I admire are writing from two places. Others tend to fall into just one category, somewhat consumed by that point of view. Authors near the outer edges of their category may be seen as my critique of them, for the excessiveness of that sensibility. It would be interesting to see where you disagree, and why, and list those who I’ve failed to mention, and place them accordingly.
Fan Mail #2: Lidia Yuknavitch
Dear Lidia Yuknavitch,
It’s your birthday, and I am grateful you exist.
Even if it wasn’t your birthday, I’d be grateful.
Lidia, the first book of yours I read was in 2004, Her Other Mouths. I read it for a class with Steve Tomasula. I read it and thought: fuck, writing really can do this. Mind you: I’d read Kathy Acker. I’d read James Joyce. I’d read Raymond Federman. I’d read Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and David Foster Wallace and Anne Carson. I’d read a whole bunch of people, but it was your book that told me that I could write what I wanted to write, how I wanted to write it. Your book was brazen and unapologetic. Most of the other books I was reading were cowering and pretty, like princesses rather than heroines.
Your book was a heroine.
RIP Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)
Poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron passed away today in New York City. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, indeed.
