memoir bully, memoir befriend!

On memoir, Fran Lebowitz says that if your life were all that interesting, someone else would write a book about it.

In basic agreement, Lorrie Moore replies to Lebowitz:

Despite having some sympathy with this idea, or with caustic wit, or with avoiding writing, one can nonetheless assume that there are good reasons to embark on a memoir: the world and the self collide in a particular way that only you, or mostly you, can narrate; you would like a preemptive grab at controlling the discourse.

And, among several gleaming shreds, this analogy of the memoir to:

Are you coming into the house of narrative through the back door because the back door is where the money is?

or…

People are telling us their personal stories and speaking to us of their private lives and even if the structure is rickety and the prose has, to borrow Dick Cavett’s phrase, “all the sparkle of a second mortgage,” we are going to hang in there because it is true.

You can already see Moore’s reluctant (real at all–I dunno) respect (attack?) of/for the form. A funny thing NYRB chose her to review memoirs, but possibly they knew exactly what they were doing. Dinty Moore responds to Moore:

I’m throwing up my hands here.  I just don’t know what to say. We write memoir.  We work very hard to make our memoirs compelling, artful, and true.  Why all the hating?

Craft Notes & Random / 12 Comments
April 26th, 2011 / 2:37 pm

A Tale of Two Jennifers

Jennifer Egan had a pretty great week last week. She won the Pulitzer for her novel The Goon Squad and the news broke that HBO optioned her work for a television series. Then she did an interview with the Wall Street Journal, an interview I read and thoroughly enjoyed. She talks about winning the Pulitzer, fielding the usual questions one might get about how it feels to receive such recognition, how she found out (at a restaurant as she was sitting down), and a little about the work itself. Because she is a woman who writes, and does so prominently, Egan was asked about gender and how male and female writers come off in the press. The exchange looked like this:

Q. Over the past year, there’s been a debate about female and male writers and how they come off in the press. Franzen made clear that “Freedom” was going to be important, while others say that Allegra Goodman was too quiet about “The Cookbook Collector.” Do you think female writers have to start proclaiming, “OK, my book is going to be the book of the century”?

A. Anyone can say anything, that’s easy. My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them. Look at “The Tiger’s Wife.” There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models? I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.

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Web Hype / 60 Comments
April 26th, 2011 / 1:43 pm

Last Sentences

Last sentences are more difficult to evaluate absent context than first sentences, because first sentences are a handshake, a promise, an invitation, an opening. They are establishers of context. They mean in conversation with what follows them, but not only in conversation with what follows them. Last sentences mean only in conversation with what precedes them. Still, I think it is (or I hope it will be) a useful exercise to look at some last sentences absent context, and see what’s there. I plan to post about this matter again, and at greater length, but for now I want to just offer a selection of last sentences for your edification and mine:

“The widow begs you, therefore, if you ever pass through our village, to be good enough to spend the night in her house as her guest, and when you leave in the morning, to take the santuri with you.” – Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“These spirits, they’d left her for good the morning that the news was broadcast on the radio that her brother had set his body on fire in the prison yard at dawn, leaving behind no corpse to bury, no trace of himself at all.” – Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker

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Random / 34 Comments
April 26th, 2011 / 6:07 am

Some Ort Stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sevrTZRAibQ

Great essay about James Frey and his new “art” book from Art in America.

On another, much sadder note, the (total badass) artist and activist Ai Weiwei has been detained by Chinese authorities for “tax evasion, bigamy and spreading indecent images on the internet.” Since early this year the media in China has portrayed him as a “deviant and a plagiarist” which is maybe the most direct thing that can be said of the role of an artist. While it is possible that Ai knew he was going too far by offering the above photo (and many other nudes with many other people) to Chinese authorities with the caption『草泥马挡中央』 a double-entendre meaning both “the central grass mud horse” (in China that alpaca is an internet meme named Cao Ni Ma, which is a pun) and “Fuck your mother, Communist Party Central Committee” (I’m sure they deserved it), you can sign a petition for the release of Ai Weiwei right here, via the Guggenheim. I don’t know if petitions really matter much in dealing with a government that clearly does not believe in freedom of expression and so on (though I do not know if they do much good in my country either), but anyway there you go.

This is Ai’s map for “a fake editorial”:

Random / 11 Comments
April 26th, 2011 / 4:36 am

Vote BULL!

Jarrett Haley, editor of BULL, needs your help:

BULL is now one of five finalists up to win 100K in funding through Dockers’ (Levi’s) “Wear the Pants” Contest. It’s an unprecedented sum for a lit journal, and an unprecedented chance for the literary community to show its strength in numbers.

WE NEED YOUR VOTES—one a day, every day this week. Here’s why you should care about this and take action:

  • Your votes are a statement—that reading and writing matter, that journals and small presses are deserving of funding, that stories are important to people and their authors should be compensated.
  • The money will go straight to writers. No one’s getting a salary out of this. All funds go towards expanding BULL as a journal and small press. This funding will go into the pocket of artists like you.
  • The exposure will bolster the indie lit scene, engaging and informing the public of what’s happening on all these pages, on all these sites. Independent literature is too good to be kept a secret. We want to make more readers in the world, and we’re starting with men.
  • This is not a handout, not a Kickstarter campaign, and we’re not asking for a dime. All you have to do is click a button on Facebook. Those clicks alone can create a paying fiction magazine, one with a proven commitment to working closely with writers and building editor/author relationships.
  • The opportunity is unprecedented! This is the first time a journal and small press can be founded and well-funded simply by enough people clicking their mouse.

If this is your first time voting, you’ll have to “allow” the voting app and “like” Dockers. There will be boilerplate permission notices, but I assure you it’s legit. Dockers sees only your most basic profile info—what’s already public, what any old stranger can see. They won’t use it for evil and they won’t bombard with you ads. It’s a legitimate contest through a legitimate company.

Dockers is Levi’s, and Levi’s is fucking Levi’s. If ’49ers trusted it during the Gold Rush, so can you today. Do not let skepticism keep you from this opportunity.

A chance like this comes along never. BULL wants to win this with, and for, the literary community. We can’t do it without YOU. Just one click a day and you’ll have done your part. Vote today, and every day, here:

VOTE BULL NOW!

Web Hype / 31 Comments
April 25th, 2011 / 7:27 pm

A Conversation With Jac Jemc

Jac Jemc‘s novel, My Only Wife, is forthcoming from Dzanc in 2012, and she is also the author of the just released These Strangers She’d Invited In, a beautiful chapbook published by Greying Ghost Press.

I loved These Strangers She’d Invited In. How did this project come about and what’s really going on in this chapbook? I had so many questions.

The project actually started as a class exercise a few years ago. We were supposed to imitate a classmate’s work and there was this filmmaker guy who kept turning in these character names with a bulleted list of traits. My way of ‘copying’ him was to look up a bunch of names of Russian stage actors and make up details about them. Then I turned the details into stories instead of lists. I made a lot more than are in this chapbook, but when I started looking at them as a whole, these were the ones that made sense as a collection.

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Author Spotlight / 15 Comments
April 25th, 2011 / 3:00 pm
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A lovely article/interview with PJ Harvey in which Harvey reveals nothing and everything about life-in-writing-and-song to Dorian Lynskey. Also, Harvey recommends some of her favorite poets.

2

Reviews

René’s Flesh, or, the pleasure of flesh, or, the masochist’s wetdream: A Letter to You

[Note: I changed the picture because so many people got pissed off about it. Here is a nicer photo to look at.]

Dear HTML Giant Universe,

Have you heard of René’s Flesh by Virgilio Piñera? If you haven’t, don’t feel bad. I only heard about it a few days ago. Then, I read it. And I am obsessed. Piñera was a huge Cuban writer, among the likes of Reinaldo Arenas, Jose Lézama Lima, and Alejo Carpentier. And yet, I’d never heard of Piñera. If I had an iron memory, I’d know that he was a character in Before Night Falls, but I don’t have an iron memory.

A few days ago, a friend of mine put René’s Flesh in my hands, an exchange because I’d told him about 2666. He said, If you like Bolaño, you’ll love this book. Despite having my ever-growing stack of books-to-read-and-review, I put my trust in this friend. I read the book in 24 hours. I took five baths, snuggling in the warmth of water and the titillation of this book.

This book: a fairy tale without magic. There is no magic, but in its absence: pain. Lots of it. The pleasure of pain, the torture of pain, it gave me nightmares from which I hoped to never wake.

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52 Comments
April 25th, 2011 / 12:59 pm

Recipes for Writers: An ‘umble bean soup

I’m all for seasonal cooking when it counts, but some days, especially good industrious days when I’ve expended as much as I can, I want something homemade and restorative, but there’s nothing much in the larder except dried beans, a can of tomatoes, a dried crust of bread, and a few staple vegetables–carrots, onions, celery.

And so bean soup. It is a lovely thing, that lasts. I made one last Monday and ate on it all week, and it’s Monday again and I’m already tempted to put another pot on. For someone who has as short a culinary attention span as I, that’s saying a lot about the simple rightness of this soup.

What I did was, I dug up this 20-ounce bag whose label said “15 Bean Soup.” But it wasn’t soup, it was 15 kinds of dried beans (and a paper envelope labeled “Ham Flavor” that I discarded). I brought half the beans (so, 10 ounces, and this was everything from lentils to cranberry beans to something even bigger, so any kind of beans you got will work) to a boil with enough water to cover by an inch, turned off the heat once it boiled and let them sit covered for about 45 minutes. This, instead of soaking them all night. I’m told by people who know that beans don’t need to soak or even pre-cook, but this soup was so delicious that I want to give it to you just as I made it.

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Behind the Scenes / 4 Comments
April 25th, 2011 / 11:31 am

Book + Beer: Jac Jemc and Magic Hat Wacko

Jac Jemc has a rejection blog, though it often includes acceptances.

Jac Jemc’s These Strangers She’d Invited In arrives at my door with fragments of maps and playing cards and a GREYING GHOST pin and a belly band. The paper is of very high quality. The front matter includes some drawings of a nautical bent, possibly mid-19th century in feel, several fish and then several paragraphs—possibly found text—explaining the economic superiority of trawl fishing (thank you, dear Britain, for inventing the otter board). I feel an aesthetic immersion here, to wet my toes, to enter the water, to prepare myself for the feelings of shift or chill or floating or to hold breath. To be caught? The cover is the color of the Bering Strait (known to natives as Imakpik). Hand pressed love like vodka trains. Siberia is 1/12th of the entire earth. Belly bands are generally cool.

Magic Hat Wacko claims to be the liquid song of summer but it is damn well not the liquid song of summer.

It is an English Ale (otter boards!) with Appolo hops, pale malts, and a gravity of 11.00 Plato.

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Random / 13 Comments
April 25th, 2011 / 10:12 am