In a community as small as what can be loosely termed the independent publishing community, the lines are easily blurred. With blogs and social networking and sites such as this one, it’s easy for writers and editors to become familiar and sometimes friends. There are days when it feels like every writer is an editor and every editor is a writer, and we’re all submitting work to each other in a deeply incestuous whirlwind of writing. The Internet has also made the word friend interesting. I’ve written on this subject before. I correspond with lots of people. I have many acquaintances and writers/editors with whom I get on well, but the people I consider friends have my phone number and could call me at 7 am and that’s not many. With few exceptions, we’ve spent time together, in person. We know things about each other that we wouldn’t share in 140 characters or less.
A lot of editors write about finding rejection difficult. While I don’t cackle gleefully while sending rejections, I don’t have a problem with doing it. I don’t find it troubling. Sending rejections is inevitable and necessary. It is part of the process for putting together a magazine. Whether I know you or not, whether we are friends, acquaintances, or strangers, I am looking for great writing. If you don’t send me great writing, or if for whatever reason your writing isn’t a great fit, I will reject you and sleep soundly. If we’re friends or acquaintances, I will send you a really nice note. I don’t know if friends expect that friendship translates into an automatic acceptance but I hope not.
READ MORE >
Behind the Scenes / 171 Comments
June 24th, 2010 / 1:00 pm
Did you read the recent, and excellent, Laura Miller piece in the New Yorker about dystopic YA literature? It’s built around Suzanne Collins’ massively popular Hunger Games novels, which I’ve read (clumsy sentence-for-sentence writing, but great/addictive plotting) and which are basically Battle Royale for younger readers (group of kids dropped into arena/island, forced to hunt and kill each other as part of a game)… but it also name-checks the great House of Stairs and Singularity author William Sleator (with whom I once did an interview in which he effectively came out of the closet), Patrick Ness (whose The Knife of Never Letting Go had big problems, but was still immersive), and M.T. Anderson, whose amazing novel Feed is like A Clockwork Orange or The Informers or J.G. Ballard stuff masquerading as a YA novel. It’s really brilliant in every respect including the prose, and you should read it immediately if you haven’t and you’re into that sort of thing.
33 Comments
June 24th, 2010 / 11:05 am
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Magnum Photos
Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, 1945
A good article titled “The Second ‘Second Sex'” about translation, specifically of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, in The Chronicle of Higher Ed. Have you translated? What are your problems/concerns with translating?
Another interesting one in The Chronicle about vampires and dead people in general: “All the Dead Are Vampires.”
A + B = C. de Beauvoir plus dead people = A Very Easy Death. I haven’t read this memoir of de Beauvoir’s mother’s death in a long time, but I remember it being a powerful meditation on death. Describing her mother’s fears after a fall in the bathroom that breaks her femur, de Beauvoir writes, READ MORE >
Random / 6 Comments
June 24th, 2010 / 9:33 am
This Ain’t Rosedale Library is one of Canada coolest bookstores. Seriously: even the Guardian thinks so. (They said it was #8 in the world!!) I found the bookstore on accident. I was in Toronto to give a reading and had some time to pass, so I walked around until I found this little bookstore, there were hipsters hanging outside (and in), which would usually be a deterrent (I find them intimidating), but then, I saw a glimmer, yes, I saw Rikki Ducornet’s One Marvelous Thing displayed in the window. Next to it, wow, Jesse Ball, and suddenly, like magic, I was inside the store, only it wasn’t a store, it was like looking at the bookshelves I always wanted. The whole store was filled with beautiful indie books, both from the States and Canada. It was a candy store, or maybe one of those medicinal marijuana stores they’re rumored to have in California, or maybe it was like getting to heaven and finding yourself with 72 beautiful virgins: that was This Ain’t Rosedale Library to me.
READ MORE >
I Like __ A Lot / 31 Comments
June 24th, 2010 / 8:11 am
Circa 1800 Goya painted “La Maja Desnuda”; three years later, in 1803, perhaps feeling a little guilty, he does another, this time with clothes on her. This was before feminism, so let’s just say ol’ Goya was a little pensive about the Inquisition. (The paintings were owned by Spanish prime minister Manuel de Godoy, who preferred to go by “Manual” while gazing at the former painting.) Maja’s fate is ours as well — to start off naked, then end up clothed as some apology. Don’t blame eve, but Ross dress for less.
READ MORE >
Random / 10 Comments
June 23rd, 2010 / 5:56 pm
Turns out, making time to read the Times was totally worth it, although this article is free online.
Basically, computer scientists have programed a supercomputer named Watson (not yr dad’s supercomputer, a new one – so you can chew on what that means) to interpret English syntax well enough to answer Jeopardy! questions using a shitload of data uploaded from books, magazines, and newspapers (all the stuff we don’t have time to read ((yet))).
While it’s far from perfect, there’s definitely some potential here for the same sort of freakish synapse connections we make when we play with language and such and !
READ MORE >
1. At The Observer, another stockbroker says another dumb thing about the state of fiction.
Dear Lee: When your weathervane is James Wood, you might as well be covering the World Cup. Where have all the Mailers gone? I only ever knew of one, and he’s dead. Try actually investigating something. Open your eyes.
2. At the Guardian, Jeremy Kay reports from the set of the new Herzog/Lynch collaboration.
3. At Pop Damage, an interview with James Grauerholz, the executor of the William S. Burroughs estate.
Roundup / 32 Comments
June 23rd, 2010 / 1:23 pm
