Four Brief Notes of Varying Significance
If you’re interested in antique printing, there’s a whole plant for sale in Boston.
I love stand up comedy so I really enjoyed this profile of comedian Greg Giraldo and his untimely passing in The Awl.
Mima Simić writes a disturbing account of how her work was edited, without her approval, for Best European Fiction 2011, by an editor at Dalkey Archive. One of the edits assigned a gender to the narrator when the gender ambiguity was a deliberate authorial choice. It’s not a good situation.
Vida released a count for how women writers are represented across several publications great and small during 2010. Meghan O’Rourke responds at Slate. The numbers are not surprising. The issue is, of course, more complex than mere statistics but statistics are always a good place to start. I find the numbers disheartening. Actually, I think it’s fucked up. I do. I understand if you don’t and why. We’ve had this conversation already but I thought I would share the latest numbers.
Which Problem is the More Vexing Problem?
1. You want to make a thing, but the thing you want to make is too big, so you spend your time thinking about how big it is instead of making it big.
2. You want to make a thing, but the thing you want to make is too big, so you spend your time trying to make it big instead of attending to the smallnesses from which big rises.
3. You want to make a thing, but the thing you want to make is too big, so you spend your time reading other big things searching for pathways to bigness instead of working on your big thing.
11 Pringle cans of furled knees
14. WTF? I thought Shane Jones killed February? (as noted) Today I learned that freezing rain is different than sleet. The hayseed fear-mongering weatherman just went simile on the ice; he said, “It’s like a candy shell.” Not bad, though a discord of tone. University dismisses the pacing, caged jaguar of classes; milk and bread sales go all Kelly Clarkson; and I wonder how many sit at home on their MePhones? Just years ago would have been a book for every downtime: waiting room while oil is changed, the vehicle registration line, the afternoon at the bar, this big-ass blizzard. Now it’s a phone. Just saying, but not me. I’m about to cuddle up with Into Thin Air and my Hobart flask.
9. To shit you or to shit you not. I shit you not. Reality rajah Mark Burnett is making literary Cliff’s Notes (yes, those little yellow pamphlets that borrow their color scheme from roadsigns) into a TV comedy series. OK.
1. Dawn Raffel at Willow Springs (with all kinds of good extra links).
94. Look here you smarmy-asses: novels in which the author appears as himself!
2. A sudden thought: What if AWP is snowed in and everyone having to sleep on the Book Fair floor curled inside their satchels, lean-tos made of idiosyncratic eyeglasses, perfect-bound tents of spine-broken books? And when the power fails, what book will we burn first for heat?
2 girls and 1 song
I had to google “Ke$ha,” and now I know she’s a singer, and that “Tik Tok” is a song of hers. Amy is really pretty and sings the song relatively well, lending a folkly sensibility to a hip-hopish song. In the comments, guys say they love her, and that she’s really beautiful. Katie, conventionally speaking, is pretty ugly, and doesn’t sing the song that well. Due to her weight problem, she speaks and sings in that “fat” way that sounds like gasping for air. I’m not trying to be mean, or exploit Katie. I’ve just been obsessed with these two clips for awhile. I want this post to be about how deep down inside Katie is a great person and how deep down inside Amy is some bitch, but that would be presumptuous and unfounded. You might want this post to be about how I see beauty in Katie, perhaps even a humane fumbling truth, but I don’t. We all want songs to sound good, and for people to look good. The videos are “related,” so many of the guys who said they love Amy were also really 2x mean to Katie in the comments. One guy even said his dick fell off. I once had dinner with a friend, among other friends, and she said how attractive everyone was, not in a flirty way, but a self-satisfied way. I remember being disgusted by that comment, and felt sad for this world. I know I sound like god damn Holden Caulfield right now, but I think I’m frozen at age 17, save my hair line. Everything I’m saying is obvious. I’m a hypocrite. I like James Joyce and hot chicks. I guess I’m saying I wish I weren’t shallow. And dare I say, I wish you weren’t shallow either. I wish I liked Tom Clancy and Thomas Kincade. I wish the dollar symbol wasn’t “cool.” I wish we’d all stop trying to fuck hot people. I hate sexy, and I’m starting to hate sex. But Morrissey ruined celibacy for me. I hope Katie is a happy person. This post has depressed me.
Ursula LeGuin on Roberto Bolano’s Monsieur Pain
I wish I could stick a USB jack into certain heads and simulate the experience of reading certain books through the filter of the host head’s consciousness/aesthetic inclination/interior life/knowledge/etc. I would like a simulation of the experience of being David Foster Wallace and reading Tom Clancy. Here are some other dream scenarios I’d like to inhabit: Susan Sontag reading Barry Hannah, Philip Roth reading Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer reading Erica Jong, James Wood reading Vladimir Nabokov, Lydia Davis reading Marcel Proust, Brian Evenson reading Robert Coover, Diane Williams reading Christine Schutt, Rick Moody reading Dale Peck, Alice Hoffman reading Richard Ford, Stephen Dixon reading Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Bernhard reading Thomas Mann, Slavoj Zizek reading Deleuze and Guattari, William Gay reading William Faulkner, Jennifer Egan reading Edward P. Jones, Edwidge Danticat reading Lyonel Trouillot, Pauline Kael reading Walter Murch, Lawrence Weschler reading Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter reading Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood reading Dan Brown, Borges reading Kafka, Kafka reading Nathan Englander, Nathan Englander reading Zadie Smith, Zadie Smith reading Edward Said, Edward Said reading Snooki, Snooki reading Milan Kundera, or Ursula LeGuin reading Roberto Bolano. READ MORE >
Death to February
That I hate February so much is one of the reasons I love Shane Jones’s Light Boxes. To mark the first of this horrid month, here are two questions I posed to Shane.
CL: Does February feel like it lasts a few years to you, the way it does in Light Boxes?
Shane Jones: It feels long, like another month hiding inside February, but not a few years. It mostly feels like I’m wearing a blanket of sludge-ice and still trying to go to work and smile at everyone in my sludge-ice blanket.
CL: Given the chance, would you actually remove February from existence?
SJ: Probably not because as much as I’ve talked and written about February, I kind of like it. It’s comparable to Oscar the Grouch. You hate Oscar because he’s a scummer, but you also like him because he’s just exactly who he is, Oscar the fucking Grouch. Every once in a while I have a vision of spending all of February in a place like Los Angeles. That would be a different experience from New York.
Belladonna * at AWP!
I’m overwhelmed by how jam-packed with goodness AWP is this year! Belladonna * are going to have some pretty amazing events, which you all should attend! Here are the details:
Belladonna * is part of Table X at the conference bookfair:
ROW I1 – I11 and I28 – I36
AWP BELLADONNA EVENTS:
Friday, February 4, 2011; 4 – 6 pm
SAYING IT:
A Walking Poem Against Censorship
JOIN US for a march & speak-out against the silencing of voices that want & need to be heard and a celebration of voices, of our voices, of your voices. Bring signs, texts, images, costumes!
Location: GATHER outside Marriott Wardman Park Hotel (conference hotel) on corner of Connecticut Ave & Woodley Road NW, Washington DC.
MARCH on Connecticut Ave to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Monument at M Street NW for SPEAK-OUT, reading, breaking of silences.
Friday, February 4, 2011; 6:30 pm
PROSE EVENT:
Reading and Conversation with Bhanu Kapil, Eileen Myles, & Vanessa Place
The first of four Belladonna* Collaborative PROSE EVENTS: a reading and conversation with prose writers who write at the intersection of fiction and the essay, producing texts that are urgent and often unclassifiable.
Limited edition chaplets available!
Location: Hamiltonian Gallery;1353 U Street, Suite 101; Washington DC
Directions: Half block away from U Street / Cardozo Metro stop at 13th St. Take the Red Line from Woodley Park, transfer over to green line at Chinatown/Gallery Place, and get off at U Street. Or a 15 minute cab from AWP.
A Conversation with Deb Olin Unferth
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of Minor Robberies, a collection of stories, and Vacation, a novel, both published by McSweeney’s. Her new memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, has been excerpted in Harper’s and The Believer. It will be published tomorrow in hardcover by Henry Holt.
MINOR: You left college in 1987 to join the Sandinista Revolution. You’ve written plenty between then and now, but not this story. Why did it take so long to decide that this was a subject for a book, and then to write and publish the book?
UNFERTH: I was very self-conscious about writing a memoir. For many years I wasn’t sure if it was a form with enough intellectual energy, which I now know was silly, since I’m very excited about memoirs and feel like they have tremendous intellectual energy. It was probably just an excuse for me. Also, I think maybe the story wasn’t over yet? Maybe I had to live a little more to figure out what the story was. Also I think I’ve struggled as a writer to figure out how to open up and reveal myself. Writing my novel, Vacation, helped me figure out how to do that, and afterwards I was ready to jump into the memoir. People had been telling me to write up my “revolution story” as a memoir for years. Tao Lin mentioned it to me I don’t know how many times. Also Nate Martin.
MINOR: What was the thing you figured out that allowed you to open up and reveal yourself more than you had in the earlier stories?
UNFERTH: I started out as a philosophy major. And I’ve always had an interest in form and in more intellectual styles of fiction writing. I think I was afraid to write with bald emotion, I thought it was too feminine or something. I think the breakthrough came when I read Chris Ware. I read that big red book of his, the compilation of Acme Novelty Library. It was very formal and right from the first pages dealt with ideas and theories about art and philosophy, and yet it was one of the most emotional books I’d ever read. READ MORE >
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January 31st, 2011 / 12:00 am
January 31st, 2011 / 12:00 am
Coming Soon
Nephew, an imprint of Mud Luscious Press, publishes raw & aggressive pocket-sized titles in limited-editions. Readers will have exactly three months from the first day of sales to purchase one of 150 available copies. Once all 150 copies are ordered or when we reach three months of sales, whichever comes first, that title will immediately print & ship. There will be no subsequent editions & only e-galleys will be available for reviewers. Titles will also not be revealed until their sales period opens, though we are willing to give you a peek of the first:
“It beguttons the buttoning of alarms or the on of the radio. Somewhere pianoish, Rachmaninoffish. Awake. A little chilly. In the hall where the hall rolls bathroom-toward near the mirror and our donkey, a bit of trouble, of seeing himself clearly. Nevermind that. He dabs drips which are of a muskier something. The mezzo-soprano sang, then bang, ended, the audience sang, off with their pointed hats.”
XXX XXXXXX XXXXXXX by XXXXX XXXXXX, coming very soon.