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.
The Poetics of Non-Arrival: KAFKA
Illustration by Shaun Tan
“Am I a circus rider on two horses? Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.”
–Franz Kafka in a letter to Felice Bauer, 1916
He was talking about the Jewish horse and the German horse
(But there is also the Czech horse.)
What horse did Kafka ride?
Where does Kafka belong?
Who owns Kafka? *
These sentences kill me.
Imagine: prostrate on the ground.
That’s what an exilic existence is like
Prostrate on the ground.
Living in the place that is no place
Riding the no horse
Going nowhere, only not-here
With no language
Never quite comfortable in any language. **
When the narrator in the story “My Destination” is asked where he is going
He says,
“I don’t know.”
“Away from here, away from here.”
“Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.”
Always away, never arriving. ***
Butler: “…the monstrous and infinite distance between departure and arrival….”
Kafka: “For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.”
.
.
.
NOTES
* [I love this essay about Kafka by Judith Butler.]
** [Butler: “We find in Kafka’s correspondence with his lover Felice Bauer, who was from Berlin, that she is constantly correcting his German, suggesting that he is not fully at home in this second language. And his later lover, Milena Jesenská, who was also the translator of his works into Czech, is constantly teaching him Czech phrases he neither knows how to spell nor to pronounce, suggesting that Czech, too, is also something of a second language. In 1911, he is going to the Yiddish theatre and understanding what is said, but Yiddish is not a language he encounters very often in his family or his daily life; it remains an import from the east that is compelling and strange. So is there a first language here?”]
*** [Kafka: “Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.”]
The American ____?
People love to make equivalencies. For instance, Stuart McLean is the Canadian Garrison Keillor, or The Agenda is the Canadian Charlie Rose.
Obviously, equivalencies are problematic. The Canadian anything seems to be paler version of the American thing. (Call me nationalistic.) That is, they aren’t really equivalent. And yet, there seems to be some value in these equivalencies, right? (Maybe I’m wrong.)
That being said: Is DFW the American Roberto Bolano?
For the shit genre!
Opening my notebook the morning after a night of woozy ambien scribbling is like opening a present: you never know what’s inside. Today there was a note that said, “Beckett—101-2. Shit genre.”
Here is the passage I noted. It’s from Samuel Beckett’s first play Eleuthéria, which was disowned by the Beckett Estate.
Dr. Piouk: What does he do?
Mme. Meck: (With pride) He is a man of letters.
Dr. Piouk: You don’t say! (Enter M. Krap. He reaches his armchair and cautiously sits down)
M. Krap: You were saying nice things about me, I feel it.
Mme. Meck: There isn’t anything the matter with her?
M. Krap: She is unharmed.
Mme. Meck: She is coming?
M. Krap: She’s getting ready for that.
Mme. Piouk: There was a time when you were unaffected.
M. Krap: At the cost of what artifice!
Dr. Piouk: You are a writer, Monsieur?
M. Krap: What gives you leave to–
Dr. Piouk: It can be felt in the way you express yourself.
Mme. Piouk: Where has she been?
Mme. Meck: She is going to tell us.
M. Krap: I will be frank with you. I was a writer.
Mme. Meck: He is a member of the Institute!
M. Krap: What did I tell you.
Dr. Piouk: What genre?
M. Krap: I don’t follow you.
Dr. Piouk: I speak of your writings. Your preferences were for what genre?
M. Krap: For the shit genre.
Mme. Piouk: Really.
Dr. Piouk: Poetry or prose?
M. Krap: One day the former, another day the latter.
Dr. Piouk: And you now deem your body of work to be complete?
M. Krap: The lord has flushed me out.
Dr. Piouk: A small book of memoirs does not tempt you?
M. Krap: That would spoil the death throes.
Mme. Meck: Admit that this is a bizarre way to treat guests.
Mlle. Skunk: Extremely odd.
The shit genre. I love that. I’m stealing that. Whenever someone asks me what genre I prefer I will tell them, “The shit genre, of course.” You’ve never heard of it? You must not know much about literature. (Like Beckett’s characters, I sometimes fantasize about getting sassy with “legitimate” types….)
Behind the Scenes & Craft Notes & I Like __ A Lot & Massive People & Random / 8 Comments
March 31st, 2011 / 3:02 pm
March 31st, 2011 / 3:02 pm
Criticism and The Pale King
Elegant but problematic write-up on The Pale King in GQ by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Read it for the elegance, but I’d like to unfairly isolate the review’s conclusion, which alarmed me for the reasons articulated below. Quote:
Wallace’s work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative sense, but in the special sense Faulkner used when he said about American novelists, “I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.” Wallace failed beautifully. There is no mystery whatsoever about why he found this novel so hard to finish. The glimpse we get of what he wanted it to be—a vast model of something bland and crushing, inside of which a constellation of individual souls would shine in their luminosity, and the connections holding all of us together in this world would light up, too, like filaments—this was to be a novel on the highest order of accomplishment, and we see that the writer at his strongest would have been strong enough. He wasn’t always that strong.
Insightful, or regurgitation of the “humanist” DFW diet? At what point will critics realize that there is not one single sense to DFW’s work–that is, Wallace as what Kyle Beachy, ironically or not, called the “empathy machine,” the brain with a heartbeat? There is no question that this caricature of Wallace suits our time, but it nevertheless should be considered as just that: a pitiful reduction of what Wallace demands, and the ensnaring of criticism in the dangerous matrix of “human values”–as if he awoke from his postmodern slumber merely to mourn the “souls who would shine”–which is, incidentally, my answer to Blake’s recent post. Answer: a critic should be critical, a problem which will be the challenge and measure of reviewing The Pale King.
Prince on writing
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHaFj7gOWh4
It’s International Women’s Day 2011!
What follows is a list of writers who amaze me.
Locals: Roxane Gay • Evelyn Hampton • Lily Hoang • Kristen Iskandrian • Catherine Lacey • Chelsea Martin • Amy McDaniel • Alissa Nutting • Alexis Orgera • Jackie Wang
Notables: Amelia Gray • Aimee Bender • Judy Budnitz • Trinie Dalton • Christine Schutt • Jac Jemc • Lydia Millet • Catie Rosemurgy • Claire Donato • Renata Adler • Leni Zumas • Eudora Welty • Eileen Myles • Amber Sparks • Flannery O’Connor • Joyelle McSweeney • Jackie Corley • Patricia Highsmith • Ellen Bryan Voigt • Mary Ruefle • Myla Goldberg • Karen Russel. Carolyn Chute • Kathrine Dunn • Mary Miller • Kate Walbert • Amy Hempel • Amanda Filipacchi • Tillie Olsen • Joanna Howard • Claudia Smith • Melissa Broder • Grace Paley • Katherine Anne Porter • Pagan Kennedy • Suzanne Burns • Victoria Blake • Sandy Florian • Shirley Jackson • Emily Dickinson • Marcy Dermansky • Lorrie Moore • Kate Bernheimer • Alice Munro • Kim Chinquee • Francine Prose • Janet Frame • Brandi Wells • Robin Romm • Mary Robison • Antonya Nelson READ MORE >
Al Burian US reading tour
I recently caught up with Al Burian in Berlin to record a podcast and I realized that I should let all of you know that you should not pass up the chance to see Al Burian read if he is rolling through your city on his upcoming reading tour. Seriously. I’ve seen him read several times and he’s always delivered. Tell him Jackie sent you.
NEW PUBLICATIONS BY AL BURIAN
BURN COLLECTOR #15 will be out in March, published by Microcosm.
http://microcosmpublishing.com
March will also see the release of OK, OK, You Smote Me, a short story in zine format, available exclusively from Quimby’s bookstore of Chicago.
READINGS
March 12 Bookthugnation, Brooklyn NY
March 13 Molly’s Book Store, Philadelphia PA
March 15 Towson University, (near Baltimore) MD
March 17 Sugar City, Buffalo NY
March 22 Quimbys, Chicago IL
March 25 Chicago Zine Fest
5 required test of the status of the gouts of yellow snot of
11. I never understand what a translator must feel. To “guess” what word might represent the author’s intent. Like dancing about architecture or fucking about bowling parties, I’m sure. Here is a fascinating interview about translating Haruki Murakami.
55. At a thousand thousands, Sam Lipsyte reads Hob Broun.
5. There is no # 5. Ok, this: Taylor Swift is vacuous. So there is no # 5.
14444. Sean D. Kelly writes an essay about Scylla, blow-driers, Charybdis of religious delusion, the conditions of thigh chaffing and self-deception, the dancer as the dance, and the anxiety and nihilism of George Michael/Nietzschean post-God secularism. Well done, sir. And worth your time. Click. Trust me.
7. Hey you opinionated cacafuegos. What makes bad writing bad? This is sharp blow glow. Watch:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raWLS2_PEfI
There’s no rule that says you get steadily better.
I had a big Hemingway boner.
It’s pretty bad.
Slavoj Žižek’s Metaphorical Symphony
You see this here? This is the world’s smallest cello playing playing the saddest song just for you. I’m a Marxist, and the State stopped making violins in 1910, so we only have cellos now — is that okay, huh, you capitalist pig? I learned this “smallest violin” expression in Barnes & Noble circa 2007, after noticing they shelved Slavoj Zizek Presents Leon Trotsky: Terrorism and Communism under Trotsky instead of me. I started bitching in some incomprehensible foreign accent and my friend was like “Dude, I’m playing the smallest violin just for you,” while rubbing his fingers together as if in effort to stimulate some long lost clitoris down the block. But enough about feminism.
Baby, I Was Faking the Whole Time
David Bazan’s approach to lyric writing is often to appropriate attitudes, functional approaches to life, or social or interpersonal behaviors which are almost always unarticulated, unacknowledged, or in many cases wholly or partially unknown to the person in whose consciousness they take up residence, and to literalize them into a first-person dramatic monologue of counterculturally brutal honesty. Here is one example, in which a husband (or possibly a wife) admits to his or her spouse that “I never wanted you /I never wanted to / Although I told you I did / In front of witnesses,” and concludes: “I know you never suspected / Because I never said / Baby, I was faking the whole time.”
