Someone I dearly love alerted me to this op-ed which ran yesterday in the NYTimes. At the grave risk of preaching to the converted I want to say a few things about it. READ MORE >
3 Things Good Today
1. Michael Rapaport in the movie Special.
2. Isak Dinesen’s short story, “The Blank Page.” Read it here.
3. The first paragraph of Winter’s Bone, a book I was given before it made the now-infamous and stupidly misguided List, which I began reading today. At least it has a female protagonist? Nice sounds:
…Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs…
Catching Up with Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, a novella of sexual passion and transaction in Bulgaria, which calls to mind the richly textured fictions of Imre Kertesz, W.G. Sebald, and Marguerite Duras. Greenwell grew up in Kentucky, studied poetry at Harvard, and taught high school in Michigan, before settling (for now) in Bulgaria, where he teaches at the American College of Sofia. Mitko is available in bookstores, and also through Small Press Distribution, Amazon, and the publisher. We corresponded last week by Facebook messaging.
MINOR: I first became acquainted with you through your poetry, but your first book, Mitko, is a work of fiction, a novella, which reads in some ways like that variety of fiction that hews close to autobiography.
GREENWELL: Until coming to Bulgaria, all of my creative work was in verse, and in some way I don’t fully understand I think that moving to a place so free from things I recognized or understood READ MORE >
RIP Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)
Poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron passed away today in New York City. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, indeed.
The Well Read Man
Books are popular fodder for lists, and why not? There are so many books being published. Book-related lists can be useful in cutting through some of the noise in a time when more than 200,000 new books are released each year, in the United States alone.
Yesterday, Esquire released a list of 75 books every man should read. They make such lists regularly so the list, in and of itself, is not remarkable. There are some really great books included like Lolita and Call of the Wild and The Things They Carried and Winter’s Bone and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. The list offers a nice blend of contemporary and classic fiction. I was particularly pleased to see Edward P. Jones’s outstanding The Known World mentioned. I cannot say there’s a book on that list that doesn’t deserve the recognition. The list is certainly very masculine in tone, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Great books are great books and there’s something to be said for muscular prose. My list would probably look somewhat different but so would yours. Reading is personal and taste is subjective.
It is curious, though, that out of all 75 books every man should read, only one, not two or five or seventeen, but one of those books, A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, is written by a woman. I should be surprised by this imbalance but I’m not. Is anyone?
Twitter MFA
In which we do a close-reading of a Tweeter’s Tweet draft and assess its tone, theme, synecdoche and narrative arc, among other things. Today’s Tweet draft was written by Drew Kalbach. This is the final installment of Twitter MFA. Thank you for reading.
The Tweet draft:
my face is continually jealous of my face
Drew Kalbach’s Tweet draft utilizes a heavily deconstructed sonnet sequence to describe the dissolution of a romantic relationship between his face and his face. With its ABBA rhyme scheme–the pairing of ‘face’ and ‘face’ and the softly assonant ‘continually’ and ‘jealous’–Kalbach alludes to a Miltonic sonnet in 140 characters or less.
‘If you intend to pursue work’ by Harvey Pekar
A while back some of you were asking about Russian authors. Then yesterday I found a note on a shelf in my Man Room. It made me wistful and sad. It was from a genius and gracious man, Harvey Pekar. We had dinner a couple years ago. (He had onion rings, I had veggie nachos—neither of us eat meat in restaurants.) He talked jazz. I talked bow hunting. Then we discussed Russian authors. The next day Mr. Pekar walked into my office and handed me this exact note:
Here’s what I think it says, though maybe you could help. I couldn’t find some of these Russians, or figure out what exactly to look for, but possibly I just couldn’t decipher Mr. Pekar’s handwriting. Any help would be appreciated. (I found Andrey Bely and Khlebnikov–I mean the others.) I respect Mr. Pekar’s opinion, and following up on these authors would help us all who love Russian lit.
Sean, If you intend to pursue work, Belyo, check out Petersburgh or St. Petersburgh (don’t get the old translation) and The Silver Dove, which are considered by many his best. More daring are Kotekhetaev and his eary early short stories (1900).
Here are some other Russian writers: zamyotin (“We”), Ivanov, Olyesla or Olesha, Pilnyok, Ilb and Petrov (a team). And the poets Khlenikov.
Good to meet you
Harvey
* Update: just figured out IlF and Petrov.
SALTGRASS 6
I’m pleased to announce that the new issue (#6) of Saltgrass is available, starring these lovely contributors:
Cynthia Arrieu-King, Anselm Berrigan, Justin Carrol, Tina Brown Celona, J’Lyn Chapman, Cathy Linh Che, Sandra Doller, Brian Foley, John Gallaher, Anne Cecelia Holmes, Lily Ladewig, Heather Monley, GC Waldrep
What!
So you can order a print copy on our website: www.saltgrassjournal.blogspot.com
Only $5!
Please help us support our contributors and spread the word.
We will have an open reading month this June. We hope you submit.
Thanks,
Julia Cohen & Brian Foley
Editors, Saltgrass
www.saltgrassjournal.blogspot.com