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.”
I asked Brandon Stosuy about black metal.
As I am lately wont to do, I was thinking about black metal. Specifically I was thinking about my difficult relationship with the less savory elements of the philosophies of some of my favorite black metal artists. As I have been wont to do since the column started, I was read Haunting the Chapel by Brandon Stosuy and noticed that the same issue had come up for him recently. I like to listen to synchronicity. (And I used to like to listen to Synchronicity—weird, huh?) So, I dropped Mr. Stosuy an email with a couple of questions on the subject. Here are his answers:
READ MORE >
What’s More Annoying: Special HTMLG Self-Reflexive Edition
What’s more annoying:
How Amy McDaniel never misses an opportunity to remind us that she studied with David Foster Wallace, which somehow endowed her with a magical (foolproof) grammar wand?
OR
How I never miss an opportunity to come across as a rotten pretentious elitist who loves the sound of his own voice yet can’t seem to talk about anything of interest or importance other than worn out concepts like experimental writing?
OR
How often HTMLG discusses Tao Lin?
OR
The fact that Chelsea Martin is still on the roster, even though she hasn’t posted since the great Wiggergate fiasco?
OR
How Justin Taylor, the inventor of the “craven self-promotion” label, which (btw) appears to have been discontinued, can somehow always find a way of self-promoting in every post?
OR
How Jimmy Chen seems both extremely smart and utterly incapable of playing any role other than class clown?
OR
The way Roxane Gay champions good ole fashion storytelling, the way regular folks do?
OR
How Ken Baumann is so smart and handsome and successful?
OR
???
The Crime People
A parallel indie lit scene labors beside us, and the cross-traffic ain’t enough to satisfy a muddied-water type like me. I’m talking the people of the night, those unafraid to cozy up to labels such as crime, noir, mystery, slash-and-burn, thug lit, or kill-for-thrill.
The Blake Butler of this shadowy world is Plots with Guns honcho Anthony Neil Smith, a ne’er-do-well graduate of Frederick Barthelme’s storied (and soon-to-be-gone, if the rumors are true) graduate program at Southern Miss, a place where a stripped-down violent prose would likely feel at home. Smith has nurtured plenty of online writers toward the big leagues — notably Scott Wolven, who appeared in six straight editions of Best American Mystery Stories on his way to a deal with Scribner’s, and, more recently Frank Bill, the phenom factory worker from Corydon, Indiana, whose novel Donnybrook is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, Giroux. (I’ve read it. It’s hot as hell. It’s kin to Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God and Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff.) READ MORE >
Blake Butler—
Further from Jessamyn West on David Foster Wallace as a teacher: her remembrance of him @ librarian.net, including his quote, “Just because it really happened, doesn’t make it good fiction.” Thanks again to her.
Unto Us, These States of Grace: A Love Letter to Sugar
When I was younger, I used to read Dear Abby and Ask Ann Landers. Those advice columns offered brief glimpses into the troubled lives of others. Sometimes, the columns were lighthearted and humorous with advice on how to deal with inlaws or children who refused to move out at the age of 31. There were more serious columns that dealt with addiction, or the death of a loved one, or a crumbling marriage. The advice of Ann and Abby was always sage, albeit a bit tame. In a few sentences they applied down home wisdom and common sense but more than anything their advice felt like a brief reminder that we are not alone.
Vouched Books
Christopher Newgent has a new project, Vouched Books and it is pretty awesome.
The concept around Vouched is simple.
Vouched is here to spread and promote small press literature by peddling literary wares at art events and farmers/flea markets around Indianapolis. Every book on the Vouched Books table is a book that Chris personally read and enjoyed and wants other people to read and enjoy.
Most of all, Vouched is about talking about books. Small presses are putting out some of the best and most artistic literature out there. Chris wants to talk about these books, and wants these books to be talked about.
Check them out and consider making a donation to support the project.
THE FROWNING SUN by Ariana Reines
[Regular readers might recall that back in March, Ariana Reines was trying to raise some money to send herself to Haiti as a translator for a group of trauma clinicians. We helped her, and then checked back in a month later. Today we've got something very special- over the approximately five pages that follow, Ariana offers an original piece of nonfiction, two paragraphs of journalism, a reading list, an explanation of WHAT [SHE] DID, an appendix, and some links. You can download THE FROWNING SUN as a .pdf, or click through and read it all here on the site. – JT ]
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THE FROWNING SUN
One day two years ago I was drunk and angrily fucked my boyfriend while the movie Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti played on ubuweb with the volume turned up loud. Eight months ago, that boyfriend found my subsequent boyfriend in bed with me and beat him severely in the head, screaming “You fucking rapist”. Now the former is married and the latter is far away.
While I was in Haiti, about five weeks ago, the man I referred to above as “my boyfriend,” “that boyfriend,” and “the former” got shot in the stomach by a neighbor in what the internet reported as a “dispute over a dog.” I hope he is alright and can continue to eat spicy foods, which he enjoys, and that his career of violence, like mine, is at an end.
5 dune ungrazed haircuts
11. Alexandra Chasin at the always glow zoran rosko vacuum player.
2. Question: Is Andy Warhol’s art on the moon?
19. Fady Joudah interview over at Willow Springs.
Nevertheless, it is just the idea that you store something you don’t want to throw away, your sense of existence—you store it and ignore it. Only when you move from that house do you check what you left in the attic and see what you want to take with you or throw away.
5. The words inside were solid, but the cover for Oxford American 2010 Best of the South sort of annoys me. Some type of Euro-model riding on the back of her adolescent brother? Is it the toy gun? The Tide clean T-shirt? Or the airbrushed/possibly perfectly placed strand of horizontal hair on her head? Something. It doesn’t click for me.
