Best friends forever

These two shirts were worn by Beavis and Butthead between 1993 and 1997, though one may presume that our friends still wore their shirts in our collective consciousness following the show’s end — through spin-offs King of the Hill and Daria, via ones Tom Anderson and Daria Morgendorffer, respectively — to this very day, we among the kids who unwittingly grew into near adults, the thick riffs of the invoked bands still sawing away at our heads, some distant drum roll ready to lift our arms in the tethered rapture of a limb. Watching MTV into the night, I always wished I had someone to share my feelings about the death of masculinity, or rather just feelings in general. The odd effeminate misogyny and the perverse coital nuances of their guitar holding were misguided directions to manhood, so I had no choice but to look towards my father, who picked up dog feces on the lawn with his bare hands. I told him to wear gloves and he called me a girl.

READ MORE >

Random / 18 Comments
June 5th, 2011 / 11:49 am

What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Series Returns Monday!!!}

Here is the publication schedule for the next volume of my ongoing series “What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions}” which promises to be dynamite, thanks to the amazing contributions from the writers who have graciously joined the conversation. New writers, new questions!

Week of June 6th
Brian Evenson
Dodie Bellamy

Week of June 13th
Eileen Myles
Evan Lavender-Smith

Week of June 20th
Johannes Göransson
Sesshu Foster

Week of June 27th
Dennis Cooper
Selah Saterstrom

Week of July 4th
Vi Khi Nao
Michael Martone

Random / 8 Comments
June 4th, 2011 / 10:09 am

me: htmlgiant Ryan: HTMLGIANT me: i want to post something really stupid Ryan: you should

Random / 41 Comments
June 3rd, 2011 / 3:26 pm

Q & A #6

If you have questions about writing or publishing or whatever, leave them in the comments or e-mail them to roxane at roxanegay dot com and we will find you some answers.

How formal should I be when submitting work to a place where I’ve been accepted before? It doesn’t seem like I should be totally laid back about it, but it also feels weird to send a “Dear Ms./Mr. [Editor]:” type thing to someone who I’ve personally corresponded with before.

Ryan Call

I’ve done this once before, but the situation was unique in that I had a collaborative story that was two files, so I wrote to just ask if he’d be interested in reading it. He said yes, so I sent it. It was all pretty informal. I plan to send a story to another editor who accepted a story of mine a few months ago, and asked to see another one. I’ll most likely email him to ask how he would like me to send it: something like “Hey [First Name], I’ve got that second story ready for you; how should I send it to you?” As with most things submissions-related, I tend to feel pretty relaxed about how I try to interact with editors. I think it’s important to get a sense of each relationship, and go with what feels best. To me, “Dear Mr./Mrs. Editor” feels too formal, but “Dear [First Name]” is fine. I don’t know.

Roxane Gay

I think it depends on how well you know the editorial staff. Dear John seems like it would be appropriate if you’ve established an editorial relationship. The chances are, at most magazines, that editor John won’t see your submission initially but he will eventually. I find that Dear First Name always works well with editors who have published me while I use Dear First Name Last Name for magazines where I am submitting unsolicited work and with which I have no previous relationship.

READ MORE >

Behind the Scenes / 30 Comments
June 3rd, 2011 / 2:00 pm

Reviews

I Listened to Blood Meridian at Work

I have a job. The job is a summer job. I don’t have a full time job because I’m a college student. The job is working on a farm. I am a farmhand. My boss tells me to shovel dirt in a specific direction and I do it. Sometimes I hoe around Swiss Chard. Other things too. Most of the tasks are pretty monotonous and can several hours to complete. Different workers have their own way of dealing with this. The Skidmore grad chain smokes. The middle-aged Vietnamese man takes piss breaks. I listen to things on my iPod. I’d never listened to an audiobook at work, nor had I read a Cormac McCarthy novel, so I decided I’d kill two birds with one stone and give Blood Meridian a try. It took about three days of work to get through the story. When I started it, I was shoveling mulch from bigger piles into smaller piles. When I finished it, I was sitting down in a field my boss calls “The Plain.”

READ MORE >

82 Comments
June 2nd, 2011 / 6:54 pm

6 Books: Deb Olin Unferth on Nonfiction

In this week’s installment of 6 Books, Deb Olin Unferth, author of the brilliant, laconic memoir Revolution, recommends 6 nonfiction books. Here are her picks:

To After That (Toaf) by Renee Gladman

It’s a book dedicated to a book she has written: what is a cooler premise than that?

Parrots for Dummies by Nikki Moustaki

Yes, from the Dummies series, a simple how-to book: feeding, cleaning the cage, etc., but stay with me here. I found the book very moving. Her portrait of the parrot is of a tragic figure in a cage—it feels almost Kafkaesque. She captures the personality of the parrot as a beautiful, complex, panicky person who you’d do anything for in hopes that it’ll fall in love with you. And there’s also the sadness of the author, who you can tell is struggling: she has to write about clipping, though she mostly hates it. She has to talk about breeding though she thinks it’s a terrible idea. She includes pictures of birds flying in the Amazon—there, isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that where they belong? They fly a hundred miles a day out there, while here they can move only a few feet. Which is better for them, do you think? she wonders.

Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith

This book has shown up on so many lists now that it’s almost like putting Consider the Lobster on this list. But I’m including it here because you know what? Zadie Smith is a badass.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein

This may be my favorite book of all time. This is the book that made all my short shorts possible, that made my memoir, Revolution, possible. I first read it riding a train to Chicago and I’ve never been the same. How to write about war and make it funny. How to write about furniture and make it sad.

A Giacometti Portrait, by James Lord

For Lord—who agreed to sit for a portrait for Giacometti—what initially seemed like a pleasant afternoon turned into an existential nightmare, as Lord discovered just what “finishing” a portrait meant to Giacometti.

Atlas of Remote Islands, by Judith Schalansky

How can descriptions of islands far, far away—islands that I’ll never visit, islands that the author has never visited—feel so lonely?

Author Spotlight / 5 Comments
June 2nd, 2011 / 5:09 pm
—

In which This Recording editor Alex Carnevale tells you everything you always suspected about Roald Dahl* (*but were afraid to have confirmed). What do you think of the last sentence? Please don’t answer this question unless you read the whole damn thing.

7

Sentimental, Narrow, Women’s Writing. Alas, Alack, Anon!

People tend to e-mail me about two things as of late–anything related to gender and One Tree Hill. They’ll say things like, “Have you seen this?” or “What do you think?”

Yes, I know One Tree Hill has been renewed for a ninth season and I couldn’t be happier about it. I have said a few novenas for Hilarie Burton and Chad Michael Murray to return for the final season. If that happens, let’s just say I will be giddy.

Yes, I have seen V.S. Naipaul’s comments that he doesn’t consider any woman writer his equal. I have a Google Alert set up under the phrase, “Bullshit.” He need not worry. We hardly consider him our equal either. Before that Google alert came through though, several people e-mailed me and Tweeted me about Naipaul’s comments. Certain brands of crazy are beneath comment. They cannot be taken seriously. Take Donald Trump, for example. When he began to rant, publicly, about President Obama, it was fairly easy to dismiss his racism and xenophobia because it is difficult to take a man like that seriously. We’ve seen Celebrity Apprentice. His actions were clearly borne of a desperation to remain relevant.  Sometimes rich and/or famous people need attention so they say crazy or provocative or stupid things over and over again to get a little attention. (See: January Jones, et al)

READ MORE >

Mean / 54 Comments
June 2nd, 2011 / 2:06 pm

HTMLGIANT Features

I Want It All To Be Kind of Shitty: An Interview with Johannes Göransson

I can’t say enough about how important the work of Johannes Göransson has been to me, both as a field of language and image, and as a person. Besides co-editing both Action Books and Action Yes, two places where you can always depend on reading work that is new, singular, challenging, and actually fun, he has published four full length books of his own work, including Dear Ra, A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Pilot, and most recently Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate from Tarpaulin Sky, as well as translations of important Swedish writers like Aase Berg and Johan Jönsson [if you haven’t read his Swedish issue of Typo, holy shit], and wrangling of the insane machine that is the hybrid litblog Montevidayo. Not to mention being a teacher (which, when reading some of his students’ work, and what mechanisms he gets out of them so early, equals a particular feat), a father, a husband, and a person. In no small words, a fucking force.

Over the past few weeks I exchanged emails with Johannes about all of the above and more.

* * *

BB: I remember reading pieces of the Pageant years ago I think under the name New Torture Operations, yeah? How did this project begin and manifest itself into the book it is, on an assemblage level?

JG: Yes, I think that was one early version of what became, among other things the pageant. It also became the second half of the performance piece The Widow Party and my novel Haute Surveillance (which is not published). Assemblages do play a big part in the way I compose these. In part they come out of a piece I wrote over a couple of years a few years ago, The Black Out Sessions or The Secessions (it has many names), and which I haven’t and won’t publish (well I did publish some of them before deciding that it wasn’t the right thing to do), but from which I create various assemblages – such as in The New Torture Operations, The Widow Party and Pageant, all of which form assemblages between torture and fashion, the anorexic body and performance, atrocity and kitsch, colonialism and the nuclear family.

When I was working on these Black Out Sessions I was also studying Brazilian-Swedish artist-poet Oyvind Fahlstrom’s work from the 1950s and 60s and he uses this funny pun – he doesn’t make “collage,” he says he makes “kalas,” which is Swedish for “party”. And the way this works out is that his artworks parties (though it’s usually translated as “feast”) on other works of art or texts. So there’s a party on Mad Magazine, or a party on Burroughs etc. So the Black Out Sessions were parties on just about anything I could find. I was both very creative and totally unfocused so I decided this wasn’t a finished text but something that I would party with/against/on with these other manuscripts. The Black Out texts became a kind of “party” energy which I used on other texts and subject matters to form assemblages. In the particular pieces that are in The New Torture Operations and pageant are parties on this 19th century antique textbook a student gave me years ago – what every student needs to know about the world. This includes chapters on astronomy, “The Vasty Deep,” and “The Flowery Kingdom” (China). A lot of what a student needs to know, it turns out, is about the morality of various colonial ventures (Stanley and Livingston get their own full chapter). Interestingly my home country of Sweden gets I think one sentence in a paranthesis and it’s something like “… (in difference to the Scandinavian countries, about which not much is known other than that they are the ugliest and least intelligent of people).”

READ MORE >

25 Comments
June 2nd, 2011 / 1:15 pm

Breast Stein Blood Drug

1. Simmons is running in a fundraiser for breast cancer, and generously giving away unique objects if he gets $600 in pledges. Consider making a contribution.

Also, if you happen to be in Portland tomorrow, Simmons is reading with Tim Horvath in support of the new Conjunctions here.

2. At Jewcy, a great interview with Paris Review editor Lorin Stein by Adam Wilson.

3. Joe Hall & Brandon Shimoda discuss their recent titles from Black Ocean on the radio at The Blood-Jet Writing Hour.

4. Tao Lin has a new weekly column on Vice involving Drug-Related Photoshop Art.

Roundup / 3 Comments
June 2nd, 2011 / 12:22 pm