Hi I want to talk about influence a little bit

I read this post the other day over at Montevidayo.  It’s about influence.  It’s not terribly long, so you can read it if you want, but I’m going to focus on Joyelle’s opening sentences, the post’s premise:

I want to begin by suggesting my discomfort with the conventions of discussing literary influence. I want to suggest that influence need not come from literary forebears, elders, teachers, or even people. For me this notion of influence, regardless of the gender of the participants, is too close to patrilineage, which bothers me for three reasons: its method of conserving property and wealth, ownership of originality; its copying over of heterosexist, male dominated bloodlines and the reproductive futurism that goes with it; and its commitment to linear notions of temporality—that what comes before causes what comes after, and that the most important thing is to move forward in time. I find all these structures suffocating and confining. I think we’re all conceptually limited by the unexamined assumptions about  temporality, property, gender, sexuality, wealth and inheritance implicit in most discussions of literary influence, regardless of the gender of the writers under discussion.

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Random / 24 Comments
July 11th, 2011 / 1:47 pm

Applies to Oranges Giveaway Results

There were some fantastic responses to the Applies to Oranges giveaway contest. The comments to that post are like their own wonderful literary journal. And why can’t we host an online journal in a comment stream at HTMLGiant? I’m calling it the second issue of the Crystal Gavel, the “Trouble in Paradise” theme. I think I’m going to nominate the winners here for Pushcarts, too. I’m applying for the ISSN tomorrow.

Maureen Thorson has selected the winners: Josh Thompson, for “Clerical Work” and Heather Sommer, for “Ex-Pats” and Nick Francis, with “Vacationing.” (Josh, Heather, Nick, please email your address to me at adam at publishinggenius.com and we’ll get you your prizes.) Their entries can be read below the fold, or in Crystal Gavel 2, naturally.

Thanks to Maureen for putting this together! Check out her very truly wonderful book over at Ugly Duckling’s wonderful website. READ MORE >

Contests / 6 Comments
July 11th, 2011 / 12:57 pm

Cobweb or Lace or Chains?

Been WAY out of town. You hear me? Checked The Google twice in last week (for very brief periods). Been a good while since I plummeted off The Series of Tubes like that. As a writer, it seemed to open me, my, uh, doors of perception (?), geode cracked. I suppose I mean to say I felt I was absorbing more, of people I met (mostly strangers—always a synapse crackle), the sights/sounds/smells/feels/tastes (NY city, outside NY city, sick gorges, fog, wind, microbrews, jackknifed dreams, etc). I don’t know. Seemed like I was eating new food and meeting new words said in new ways and it seemed, well, different.

Possibly I was cleansed, in the manner of detox beverages or Pringle binges or long, long runs through old forest? Off the Net, on the Net. I am now wondering if I shouldn’t take regular, extended periods away…it seems to have surged me, to have prepped me to write, to have planted the brain’s gray furrows with inlaid jewels ready to pry and bloom and sparkle. Thoughts? Do you make yourself leave the Virtual? Or maybe binge on the Virtual, then write? What are your thoughts and ways?

Craft Notes / 1 Comment
July 11th, 2011 / 12:20 pm

On Lost Films


I formerly suffered an unhealthy obsession (if I’m honest it’s still around, but it’s certainly depleted) with the conceptual implications of lost films.  As a self-termed “archaeologist” of obscure media, discovering the possible existence of an artifact (mostly, for me, films/books/zines, photographs of art-events, etc), researching everything about it, and then possibly unearthing details to add to a collective knowledge base on said artifact is, well to be blunt, a really fucking awesome feeling.

A couple of days ago at Big Other, Amber Sparks posed the question “What lost film would you love to see?” The question found me immediately excited, because it was something that had managed to escape my head-space for a while. There’s any number of reasons why a film might be lost; if it was shot in the early days of cinema, the chemicals used to process the film itself could have deteriorated the celluloid, leaving nothing. It’s possible that the film was never completed, but screened to producers in an incomplete state, leaving a mark on an individual. The only copy of a film (smaller budget films) could have burnt in a fire, destroyed in some sort of natural disaster, or literally just misplaced.
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Film / 34 Comments
July 10th, 2011 / 10:24 pm

Resources: Modernism


The Modernist Journals Project

Magazine Modernisms

The Virtual Newsstand: 1925

Modernist Magazines Project

The Modernism Lab

Random / 7 Comments
July 10th, 2011 / 10:23 am

“[…] The outcry was shrillest from those who confuse art, which exists to make people uncomfortable and to spur them to new thinking, with entertainment, which is meant to gratify, relax and confirm preconceptions of decorum, prettiness, or good citizenship.  No art is great if it makes its consumers feel comfortable.”

–Richard Davenport-Hines, “Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin”

Coco on Writing

“When I was around [Ice-T] for a couple weeks, I gathered all the facts of what he liked and what he didn’t like, and I just shape-shifted into that woman for him.”

“If you saw my boobs before I got them done, they were actually a nice size; nice and squishy, waterly [sic], flip em’ around, you know…”

“My hips were always a little bit bigger than the top half of me and I wanted to even it out.”

“It’s too time consuming, and honestly, people with lives don’t really have the time to make comments at all. I don’t even have the time to go on the Internet anymore. Who has the time to actually log in, put your email address in, put if you’re female or male and all of that good stuff, and then make a comment…” READ MORE >

Blind Items & Craft Notes / 18 Comments
July 8th, 2011 / 10:12 pm

What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Michael Martone} ***NOTE: final entry in the series***


Michael Martone‘s most recent books are Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover, Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories. Michael Martone, a memoir in contributor’s notes, Unconventions, Writing on Writing, and Rules of Thumb, edited with Susan Neville, were all published recently. He is also the author of The Blue Guide to Indiana, published by FC2. The University of Georgia Press published his book of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction, in 2000.

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Random / 32 Comments
July 8th, 2011 / 10:32 am

Setting is not character. Stop saying that.

The Millions most-anticipated list for the second half of the year attempts to rip its penis off.