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Kristen Iskandrian—

First The New Yorker, now Wikipedia (via The NY Times):

“Gender is a huge hot-button issue for lots of people who feel strongly about it…I am not interested in triggering those strong feelings.”

HTMLGIANT Features & Random

Kyle Minor

A Conversation with Deb Olin Unferth

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of Minor Robberies, a collection of stories, and Vacation, a novel, both published by McSweeney’s. Her new memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, has been excerpted in Harper’s and The Believer. It will be published tomorrow in hardcover by Henry Holt.

MINOR: You left college in 1987 to join the Sandinista Revolution. You’ve written plenty between then and now, but not this story. Why did it take so long to decide that this was a subject for a book, and then to write and publish the book?

UNFERTH: I was very self-conscious about writing a memoir. For many years I wasn’t sure if it was a form with enough intellectual energy, which I now know was silly, since I’m very excited about memoirs and feel like they have tremendous intellectual energy. It was probably just an excuse for me. Also, I think maybe the story wasn’t over yet? Maybe I had to live a little more to figure out what the story was. Also I think I’ve struggled as a writer to figure out how to open up and reveal myself. Writing my novel, Vacation, helped me figure out how to do that, and afterwards I was ready to jump into the memoir. People had been telling me to write up my “revolution story” as a memoir for years. Tao Lin mentioned it to me I don’t know how many times. Also Nate Martin.

MINOR: What was the thing you figured out that allowed you to open up and reveal yourself more than you had in the earlier stories?

UNFERTH: I started out as a philosophy major. And I’ve always had an interest in form and in more intellectual styles of fiction writing. I think I was afraid to write with bald emotion, I thought it was too feminine or something. I think the breakthrough came when I read Chris Ware. I read that big red book of his, the compilation of Acme Novelty Library. It was very formal and right from the first pages dealt with ideas and theories about art and philosophy, and yet it was one of the most emotional books I’d ever read. READ MORE >

11 Comments
January 31st, 2011 / 12:00 am

Christopher Higgs

Coming Soon

Nephew, an imprint of Mud Luscious Press, publishes raw & aggressive pocket-sized titles in limited-editions. Readers will have exactly three months from the first day of sales to purchase one of 150 available copies. Once all 150 copies are ordered or when we reach three months of sales, whichever comes first, that title will immediately print & ship. There will be no subsequent editions & only e-galleys will be available for reviewers. Titles will also not be revealed until their sales period opens, though we are willing to give you a peek of the first:

“It beguttons the buttoning of alarms or the on of the radio. Somewhere pianoish, Rachmaninoffish. Awake. A little chilly. In the hall where the hall rolls bathroom-toward near the mirror and our donkey, a bit of trouble, of seeing himself clearly. Nevermind that. He dabs drips which are of a muskier something. The mezzo-soprano sang, then bang, ended, the audience sang, off with their pointed hats.”

XXX XXXXXX XXXXXXX by XXXXX XXXXXX, coming very soon.

Random / 6 Comments
January 30th, 2011 / 5:10 pm

Alexis Orgera

The Fallacy of Fixed Meaning

“…the dogma that words come to us out of the past with proper meanings—fixed and immutable—is a fallacy. The only meanings a word has are those that the speakers of the language choose to give it.” The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing

This from Wikipedia’s entry on linguistic prescription:

In linguistics, prescription denotes normative practices on such aspects of language use as spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and syntax. It includes judgments on what usages are socially proper and politically correct. Its aims may be to establish a standard language, to teach what is perceived within a particular society to be “correct” forms of language, or to advise on effective communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might (appear to) be resistant to language change; if the usage preferences are radical, prescription may produce neologisms.

Prescriptive approaches to language are often contrasted with descriptive linguistics, which observes and records how language is practiced. The basis of linguistic research is text (corpus) analysis and field studies; yet description includes each researcher’s observations of his and her (own) language usage. Despite apparent opposition, prescription and description (how language should be used, and how language is used) exist in a complementary dynamic tension of mutual linguistic support.

Again, from Kane in Oxford: “Words, then, are far from being tokens of fixed and permanent value. They are like living things, complex, many-sided, and responsive to pressures from their environment. They must be handled with care.”

I love the freedom of language, neologisms, mutability–moments that allow for creative energy. I also love grammar, rules, usages that make the reading experience universal. Maybe that’s why I write poems and edit. This is a political topic, to be sure, but it’s definitely a matter of craft as well.

Where, as a writer, do you think should be and is [of how language is used] meet?

Craft Notes & Random / 3 Comments
January 30th, 2011 / 3:46 pm

Sean Lovelace

4 lightstands, nightstands, washstands hurtling past

14. Literary profiling. The books you ‘like’ on Facebook. Do you ever go vexatious on what books populate your most obvious bookcase? Like maybe you’re having a Superbowl party at the house and what books will the visitors eyeball? Ever left a book out on your desk/table/car floor with intent? Come on, do tongue. Like Play it Again, Sam and the track and field medal. To be petty is to be human.

2. McCain aide outed as “anonymous” O author? I wonder what vice-presidential nominee he is describing here, The Barracuda:

thick hair piled up high, chin out, defiant, taunting, flaunting that whole lusty librarian thing, sweet and savory, mother and predator, alluring and dangerous…

Kyle’s summer reading

99. Holy shit Truman Capote’s house is selling at a bargain price! Discount, discount, and with 7.5 bathrooms. Now if I can only hustle a few more chapbooks…

4. The 10 greatest child geniuses in literature. What?! Hal Incandenza only gets 2nd place? And they left off Ignatius Jacques Reilly, Dolores (AKA: Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo and L), and that daughter from Stories in the Worst Way. Man.

Random / 8 Comments
January 29th, 2011 / 6:01 pm

Kyle Minor

I Plan to Spend My Summer Reading This

The Devil All The Time, Donald Ray Pollock‘s debut novel. Here’s the cover:

Random / 11 Comments
January 29th, 2011 / 3:15 pm

Lily Hoang

An apolitical writer?

For the past 36 hours or so, I’ve been hooked on Al Jazeera.

Egypt. Fuck. Things are happening. Yemen. Jordan.

And yet, on writing blogs and other social networking sites, almost nothing is being said about it, at least from the writers. It leads me to think that many writers develop an apolitical stance, a focus on aesthetics as politic rather than politics as politic. Ken Baumann wrote a smart rant about electronics, which was ridiculed by some, praised by others, but what’s noteworthy is the immediate suspicion and rebuttal against his overt political message. Why is this?

Should we care about Egypt? Why? Why not? Do you see this apoliticization and what do you think causes it? Or: please prove me wrong.

Events / 145 Comments
January 29th, 2011 / 2:42 pm

Reynard Seifert

If your instrument does not exist yet you build it. Then you fuck around.

This is Moondog with his Trimba, which he built himself. Moondog is a blind homeless man on the streets of New York City. It is 1953 (I think) and he dresses like a viking because vikings are rad.

“I am essentially not an instrument builder, but a composer. I am a philosophic music man who long ago was seduced into musical carpentry. As a composer and a musical philosopher I make my living by selling records of my music. I am both the manufacturer and the retailer. And I distribute the records very largely by mail.” — Harry Partch, 1958

Love will tear us apart cover

I found out from wikipedia today that Ian Curtis hung himself. Sorry I did not know this earlier. He was the singer of Joy Division, named after what Nazis called a special area designated for all the attractive Jewish girls to rape. Because I’m morbid, I often think about how bad it would feel being slowly herded towards my noose, seeing that circle from afar, that apathetic rope just hanging there. When you’re young and sad, maybe you gravitate towards Joy Division, and then in high school art class when the teacher asks you to draw something, you draw Ian Curtis. You draw it with paint or pencil, filling in your self-made lines like a coloring book, fleshing out the shading in the name of a human. And maybe when you hear “love will tear us apart” in that robotic monotone, you think of that boy or girl you really like, and how you’ll never be together, how love — that soft word oft used to describe, oddly, the pit in your chest those sacred moments they pass in the hall — has failed to tear you apart. It only punctured you. And you remember these people forever, each syllable that made up their name, until the past becomes the present in f , and each facebloat is a little bloated older, a little less mind-photoshopped as you remembered, and here we are.

Necro, Necro, Necropastoral

Hieronymus Bosch - Garden of Earthly Delights (1503)

Like Joshua Corey & others, I’m bewitched by Joyelle McSweeney’s concept of “the necropastoral.” (read her posts at Montevidayo) I fear I have little to contribute, but much to wonder about. My inclination is to assume I’m misunderstanding what she means by the term, even after reading her definition:

[the ‘necropastoral’ is] a term which denaturalizes the pastoral by focusing on its always/already unnatural qualities. In its classical form, the pastoral is a kind of membrane on the urban, an artificial, counterfeit, impossible, anachronistic version of an alternative world that is actually the urban’s double, contiguous, and thus both contaminatory and ripe for contamination, a membrane which, famously, Death (and Art) can easily traverse (Hence, Et in Arcadia Ego). [here]

But since I’ve never let misunderstanding stop me from asking questions, or engaging in conversation, I thought I would share some thoughts (more bricolage of ideas than exposition) provoked by the evocation of “the necropastoral.”