on the occasion of the release of Mark’s second book, Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me, which is absolutely the shit (for a taste, two of the poems appear here), and available now from Factory Hollow, and for which the cover appears as such:
Blake Butler—
What is the date of the recording of the last piece of music or album you felt genuinely emotionally affected by?
63
Six Late Afternoon Items
1.
2. Huffington Post is getting into the e-book business.
3. Chris Newgent asks poets to rise up.
4. You should read Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen. It’s a fierce book. I didn’t realize this when I bought it but you can read the entire book online, for free. You should also buy it though.
5. The Awl has a really interesting essay on cookbooks as literature.
6. Kenyon Review is offering fellowships that pay $32,500 to writers with an MFA or PhD looking for some time to write and grow as a teacher.
“My mis-shapen head cracks through all the clichés.” – Jules Renard, on Writing
Years before Twitter and Robert Walser, Renard maximized the miniature. These are all from The Journal of Jules Renard, which Tin House reprinted in 2008, written between 1887 & 1910.
“You can recover from the writing malady only by falling mortally ill and dying.”
In the Devil’s Territory
In the Devil’s Territory
by Kyle Minor
Dzanc Books, 2008
220 pages / $16.95 Buy from Dzanc Books
Rating: 6.5
With In the Devil’s Territory, Minor writes primary characters who are to a one religious, but none who testify to supernatural events and miracles in their own lives, in part (it seems) to depict certain of them as areas of as much suffering as anywhere else, and where the traditional Christian lifeline, perceivable congress with God, has been cut and redirected through churches and church schools. He favors a multi-part story that shifts between perspectives to attempt “real story” triangulation (“A Day Meant to Do Less” and the title story). Characters each see a small part of a larger story, and the coordinates to which their narratives point is where the reader gains understanding they lack. Minor has a mind for simple, effective arrangements, which occasionally require narrational contortions to suit.
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September 7th, 2011 / 4:02 pm
September 7th, 2011 / 4:02 pm
The Time I Read a Lot of DeLillo Books and the Things that Happened
It was winter, and I took the bus home, or maybe it was the train, from Massachusetts to New York, so “home” is up for debate, and then a subway, probably, into my little apartment thing with a kitchenette and a big bathroom and no bedroom. Actually, maybe my sister drove me. It’s unimportant. I’d read Part 1 of White Noise, a copy I’d borrowed from the library over winter break. It made me feel happy, the descriptions, the opening chapter which I’d read on the internet several months earlier on a slow day at work. I already knew it was the novel I’d wanted to write the previous summer, the novel I’d abandoned at 30,000 words and character names that seemed true, but also false, and a number of edits that seemed confusing. I laid down on my bed. I think it was mid-morning, or mid-afternoon. The sun was in my window somehow, giving me natural light, but not enough to read by. I read Part 2, and it was about some sort of chemical disaster. I read it in a sitting that day, with the space heater from the bathroom on full blast. Then maybe I slept.
I’d returned from Vermont. We’d stayed at a bed and breakfast, and that week I would announce I was single and she would go to Germany, and I would be unable to read Part 3 of White Noise for several months, glancing through chapters on the subway to Bushwick, feeling drunk after zero beers. By this time, I’d returned my copy to the library and been gifted one from a friend who’d found the author underwhelming. I wondered if I should feel the same. I didn’t. I looked at the words. The sentences. The long paragraphs and the short, sparse dialogue. The radio and the television saying postmodern things. Things I’d later discuss with a friend that seemed similar to Updike’s “A&P” despite his distaste for “postmodernism.”
The semester passed. I was back in the former relationship. Vermont, but actually the next time we went to New Hampshire, stayed in a tent, drank PBR and bourbon and pickle juice. It was 90 degrees and we sweated in a pancake house. This was about two weeks after I’d finished the novel, back in Massachusetts, on a rainy afternoon, within a rainy week, the week before I would start work on a farm and listen to first Blood Meridian on my iPod, and later two other McCarthy novels.
Boris Spassky on Writing
“I also follow chess on the Internet, where Kasparov’s site is very interesting.”
“I don’t want ever to be champion again.”
“Computer defends well, but for humans it is harder to defend than attack, particularly with the modern time control.”
“Time control directly influences the quality of play.”
“I lost to Bobby [Fischer] before the match because he was already stronger than I. He won normally.”
“We were like bishops of opposite color.”
“The power of hanging pawns is based precisely in their mobility, in their ability to create acute situations instantly.”
“The shortcoming of hanging pawns is that they present a convenient target for attack. As the exchange of men proceeds, their potential strength lessens and during the endgame they turn out, as a rule, to be weak.”
“Nowadays the dynamic element is more important in chess – players more often sacrifice material to obtain dynamic compensation.”
“If they had played 150 games at full strength, they would be in a lunatic asylum by now.” – (on Kasparov and Karpov, 1987)
“The place of chess in the society is closely related to the attitude of young people towards our game.”
“When I am in form, my style is a little bit stubborn, almost brutal. Sometimes I feel a great spirit of fight which drives me on.”
“The best indicator of a chess player’s form is his ability to sense the climax of the game.”
“I don’t play in tournaments, but I follow some.”
Roxane Gay—
The 2011 Rona Jaffe winners were recently announced. They include Melanie Drane, Apricot Irving, Fowzia Karimi, Namwali Serpell, and JoAnn Wypijewski and one of my favorite newer writers, Merritt Tierce.
