COIN
The editors of Copper Nickel, the literary journal at the University of Colorado Denver, have launched Coin, a companion website which mines (forgive me) some of the better work from the literary journal, and presents it alongside ancillary materials (interviews, conversations, essays about the making of stories, etc.) The inaugural issue includes poems from Dan Albergotti, Sandy Florian, Ed Pavlic, and Ginny Hoyle, Snezana Zabic’s essay “Meet Satan,” and, most interestingly, a portfolio of work by and about Michael Copperman, whose story “It” is written, as he describes it, in “black Delta dialect, not reproducing African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) so much as depicting a particular boy speaking it,” although the story’s author self-describes as “a Japanese-Hawaiian Russo-Polish Jew” in his essay “Race, Authenticity, Culpability,” which appears alongside the story.
What is Experimental Literature? {Special Announcement}
Starting tomorrow, I will begin a month-long series I’ve blandly entitled “Five Questions About Experimental Literature,” which will showcase responses from ten contemporary innovators in the field: Bhanu Kapil, Miranda Mellis, Debra Di Blasi, Tantra Bensko, Susan Steinberg, Kate Zambreno, Amelia Gray, Danielle Dutton, Alexandra Chasin, and Lidia Yuknavitch.
The goal is to continue the exploration of this topic by opening the conversation to other perspectives.
I’m super excited to share with you the amazing responses the writers have given. The range is staggering. The insights are enlightening. I can’t thank the writers enough for all of the time and energy they’ve offered to this project, which promises to be very rewarding.
I hope you’ll enjoy this month’s series. If all goes well and it seems like people are into it, I plan to continue the series by creating five new questions for the month of April and inviting ten new writers to participate.
The Ben Greenmans
Ben Greenman’s book What He’s Poised to Do is worth your time. I’m not sure which Ben Greenman wrote it, since there seem to be around 43 Ben Greenmans sharing similar biographical notes. One of them wrote Celebrity Chekhov, in which Chekhov characters are replaced by the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Alec Baldwin, Kim Kardashian, Oprah, and so on. That Ben Greenman also runs the Celebrities with Character blog, where you can write letters to actual celebrities. Both of these Ben Greenmans READ MORE >
11 wet velveeta on jar knuckles
11. In his craving for fame and fulfillment he dumped his family, bullied his friends, ripped off ideas and lied about his past. Charlie Sheen? No, Gauguin.
11. Seventy-one copies or eighty-two days remain to snort up Darby Larson’s The Iguana Complex. Go there.
11. Lorrie Moore weighs in on the Carmelo Anthony/New York Knicks trade.
1. Top 10 counter-culture books. At first I gandered and thought where is Trout Fishing? But it seems like this guy glows memoirs. I’ve read zero of them. Summer?
11. Your best guess: What the fuck is a personal library? It sounds like I am a book. We are not books, but the idea is comforting (beginning, middle, end–nice delusion…). Here’s a new one: What is on your personal library shelf right now that isn’t a book. I am going to go look right now: empty wine rack, candles with dust balls, 3 family photos (all three professional, posed bullshit photos), a gnome dressed as a Tennessee Titan, a plastic pumpkin (fuck, it stayed up since Halloween), a fake hollowed-out book that is a hiding spot for letters from a young lady in South Africa, a rope bracelet that protects you from sharks, __________, two deeds to automobiles, a buckeye, a single .44 bullet, a chocolate coin, a treasury bond. You?
Percival Everett on Literary Politics
From a 2003 interview with Robert Birnbaum:
RB: And then there are the attacks on writers like Morrison and Salman Rushdie and DeLillo and now young guys like Franzen and Foer and it strikes me that they are being attacked by people who haven’t read them…
PE: It’s always easier to condemn something when you haven’t read it.
RB: But why get so worked up? On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing that people are passionate about these things.
PE: If that’s really what they are passionate about? If somebody is really offended by the artistic sensibility of some writer that would be a great discussion. But if they are simply jealous of that person’s success or something personal, I don’t get it.
To Write As a Woman Is Political
I started writing this on my personal blog but then I decided I would post it here. I got the most gorgeous letter today from someone who read my latest short story, “Strange Gods,” in the current issue of Black Warrior Review. In her letter, she talked about how important the story was to her and things so flattering I kind of choked a little. It was such a, I don’t know what it was, it was something to have a complete stranger I have never interacted with say, “your writing is important; your writing reached me.” She she thanked me for reminding her to fight the good fight. I have a point here that is not self-indulgent, I promise.
I receive the most correspondence about the stories I write about women, stories that are often intense and dark and intimate. Most of these letters come from women who thank me for telling these kinds of stories, for bringing a kind of testimony to certain women’s experiences and when I’m starting to lose faith in my writing, it is really humbling to hear that sort of thing. It reminds me that my stories may not reach everyone but they do reach some people and I think that’s what most of us want, to reach people, to make them feel, to make them bear witness.
There are a wide range of women’s experiences. A woman’s story is not just about violence or rape or the loss of an unborn or barely born child though, admittedly, those themes are the foundation of most of my writing. There are happier stories, painful stories, easier stories, different stories that are just as complex and necessary and important. As far as I’m concerned, any story that speaks to a woman’s experience is important. Now, please don’t misinterpret what I am saying. To affirm one kind of story is not to disaffirm another. Men’s stories are just as important but this not about that.
Another story from Thomas Bernhard’s Prose is available online, this one at Asymptote. It is titled “Is It A Comedy? Is It A Tragedy?”
(via Scott Esposito)
5 things killed in Hawaii after falling into a bulltrap
1. ASU’s online literary mag yawps for submissions for short fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and art for its 7th issue, which is scheduled to come out in May 2011. The guillotine (a term I argue should now replace the tired deadline) is March 31. For accessories, check out www.superstitionreview.com.
1. Fairy tales thrive in the face of technology.
1. Hey listen:
(Two nights ago someone offered to buy me a Kindle. I just couldn’t. But I am thinking on it.)
5. Today is President’s Day so go compartmentalize, punks.
This again, not this again
I wasn’t going to write this, feeling like the last thing anybody needs is another post explaining or defending or extolling paper, but then two events became bridged in my mind and I felt like I would be restless until I wrote them, about that bridge, so there you have a little apologia for what follows, which is that I moved some months ago to a new house, and recently found myself sitting on the floor late at night amidst boxes filled with folders and smaller boxes, and several folders were marked MISC and contained all kinds of paper, critical essays that I wrote during college and grad school about Emily Dickinson and Auden and post-structuralism and William Blake, and pages from the first novel I wrote, and pages from the first “novel” I wrote, and notebooks filled with other writings, and long letters never sent, and then I opened a box within a box and it was filled with floppy discs, each one labeled with the year and some vague tags, like “teaching stuff” and “post-mod essays” and “stories/summer” and “Needle,” and I just held those floppies like they were quaint artifacts from my Victorian childhood, realizing that I had no means of accessing their contents, and then stacking them neatly back into their smaller and then larger box, and returning to the piles of paper feeling a kind of profound agitation with regard to permanence or the myth of permanence, and remembering standing outside of the office where I worked just a couple blocks from the World Trade Center READ MORE >