At The Rumpus, Vanessa Garcia reviewed Kathleen Rooney’s new essay collection, For You, For You I am Trilling These Songs. Garcia’s consideration was highly ambivalent, and she ultimately rendered a verdict against. Then all hell broke loose in the comments section. Daniel Nester, Kyle Minor, Elisa Gabbert, and Tim Jones-Yelvington are just some of the local (to us here) luminaries who weighed in with complaints against the review. Rumpus Books editor Andrew Altschul has responded several times; he and Nester are particularly aggressive with each other. What makes this more interesting than a flame war is that the vitriol seems not excessive, but central and perhaps necessary, to an earnest conversation about how nonfiction–memoirs in particular–ought to be read and discussed. My one critique of said discussion is that there seems to be an undercurrent of umbrage–palpable but pointedly not articulated–at the fact of a negative review having been written at all. Critics who pan things should expect to have their prerogative cross-examined, their biases speculated upon, their motives questioned, etc.–which is not to say that Garcia’s critics are wrong, only to point out that a positive review is never reprimanded for its angle, however wrong-headed or idiotic that angle might be. If we are willing to court and accept facile praise, do we have the right to demand anything better from our detractors? (Again: not to suggest Garcia’s piece is facile, or “wrong”; having not read Rooney’s book I withhold judgment on both it and the crit of it.) Anyway, the comment-thread is still active as of this morning, and the whole thing is worth giving a look to.
Vanity Fair or Unfair?
Kevin Sampsell Week (1): Chongo
Earlier this month saw the release of my label-brother Kevin Sampsell’s memoir A Common Pornography, which I read in the light of a late evening on a sofa I bought from a friend. I’d had big expectations and excitement about this book, which in the course of reading turned to not only the pay off of that wanting, but being stuck simultaneously by a kind of reading feeling I could have never seen coming. Herein, this week we’ll be talking about the book and other things Sampsell, including his press Future Tense Books.
Among the many wonderful things about this book, perhaps the most surprising and beautiful for me was how the period chronicled in Kevin’s book, essentially his youth, adolescence, into his current age, felt at some points so familiar, and at the same time catching me by the side of the head. Kevin’s rendering of the odd but somehow most defining moments of aging so often missed in these kinds of books is so well nailed–he doesn’t overdescribe them, or romanticize them, but lays them out in all their hairy light–calm, common, uncommon, etched.
From his obsessive collecting of select pieces of porn (which he keeps hidden in the ceiling of his parents house), to the strange ways of sexual becoming with friends and paid help, to just the air of those spaces and people that exist with us for a time and somehow are that time, all of this rendered in eerily calm and perfect sentences, sometimes somewhat like a minimal Gary Lutz, A Common Pornography is a book I will long remember for its poise, heart, and humor, and for its making of a picture of an age that no one else has nailed quite so beautifully, and singularly.
The book is made up of many 1-3 page sections, each with titles, that together follow the timeline of Kevin’s life, each of which alone makes for its own little amazing object. Here’s one to whet your bib.
The toughest kid at our school was named Chongo, and he was a short but muscular Mexican who always seemed to be suspended or doing Saturday school. He lived in the pit of this valley that ran alongside a long irrigation pipe. The pipe was connected to the ditches surrounding our neighborhood and it had a flat surface on top lined with flimsy two-by-fours. For some reason, we always called this pipe “the floons.” My friends and I would often have races on the floons. There was an element of danger whenever we did because there were big gaps where you could fall through and go into the dirty water. And if we went too far down the floons we’d be dangerously close to what we called “Chongo Country.” Other kids had told us that if you got a good look into Chongo Country, you’d see all sorts of stolen bikes and bike parts in his weed-filled yard. When Chongo had his shirt off, they said, you could see a tattoo of Pontius Pilate across his chest. We never dared to look.
Purchase A Common Pornography at the links above, or from the publisher, or Amazon.
Experimental Detective Fiction
One of my all time favorite writers, Robert Coover, has a new book coming out in about two weeks called Noir. It’s a detective novel written in the second person. Say what you will about writing in the second person, I’m super excited to see what Coover does with this puppy.
You can read an excerpt at Vice.
You can listen to Coover read from the book and answer some questions via Kelly Writers House.
Here’s a blurb from Ben Marcus:
“At age 75, Coover is still a brilliant mythmaker, a potty-mouthed Svengali, and an evil technician of metaphors. He is among our language’s most important inventors.”
Here’s the summary:
You are Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. A mysterious young widow hires you to find her husband’s killer-if he was killed. Then your client is killed and her body disappears-if she was your client. Your search for clues takes you through all levels of the city, from classy lounges to lowlife dives, from jazz bars to a rich sex kitten’s bedroom, from yachts to the morgue. “The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow” unfolds over five days aboveground and three or four in smugglers’ tunnels, though flashback and anecdote, and expands time into something much larger. You don’t always get the joke, though most people think what’s happening is pretty funny.
The HTMLGIANT So Many Books Contest
HTMLGIANT is holding a writing contest.
The prize is the Dalkey Archive 100 books for $500. If you want to contribute to the prize pool, let us know in the comments and we’ll add it to the package.
We want your writing, up to 3,500 words however you want to assemble them.
The theme: love stories, however you interpret those two words. The numbers 100 and 500 should also somehow be involved in your writing and not just as an afterthought.
HTMLGIANT contributors will select 10 finalists. Special Guest Judge Rick Moody will determine the winner of which there can be only one.
The winning entry as well as the work of the finalists will be published on a sweet website to celebrate their words.
Send your entries both in the body of an e-mail and as an attachment (.doc/.pdf/.rtf) to contest@htmlgiant.com.
There is no fee to enter.
You do not need to submit a cover letter.
You do need to include your name and address so we know where to send your prize(s) if you win.
Deadline is Midnight, Sunday March 21. Winners will be announced on Tax Day, April 15.
Questions? Ask them in the comments or e-mail contest@htmlgiant.com.
Jeremy Schmall Poems
from Jeremy Schmall & the Cult of Comfort
Andrew Jackson
finished off the Creek Indian
civilization after fighting beside them.
Why Andrew?
& he puts his finger in my nose.
To the gods goes my excess asparagus,
linoleum tabletop & coffee-bruised newspaper.
I say the mountain’s not coming.
I say “the traffic,” and shrug.
There’s just not enough Vaseline
for the whole room.
I do apologize.
If the presentation never ends maybe
I can keep this laser pointer.
Rabbit under truck tire
by the high school
already cold.
Socks up to my teeth.
Electric drill to the avocado.
Striped wallpaper behind a plastic folding chair.
It’s certainly not always the case
that infidels will stalk the dumb hallways
rimming the family manor
but we’d like to believe
our cheap picture frames & outdated
electronics are at least worth stealing.
There is an exercise inside everyone’s skull
that forces them to stop slathering
lotion on their hands and wonder
what we can’t know until next March.
The assignment now is to ruin the face
of your opponent with a grapefruit spoon.
There’s a certain trick to remaining
calm while a grizzly claws
through the meat under your ribcage
but no one’s ever lived to tell it.
Jeremy Schmall is the founder & co-editor of Agriculture Reader, and author of “Open Correspondence from the Senator, Vol. 1: But a Paucity of His Voluminous Writings” (X-ing). His work has appeared in PEN America, The Laurel Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Juked, and Forklift Ohio. He lives in New York City.
The Next Step and The Whole Point
When reading the work of prodigiously–okay wildly–talented contemporaries–people like Natalie Lyalin, Heather Christle, Sabrina Orah Mark, Chelsey Minnis, Claire Becker–I tend to think first:
I love this. This is essential and beautiful.
And then at some point, my thoughts turn to my own work, and a voice says,
I can’t do anything like this.
It is all too easy to stop at that point, and stew, and–to drown out the voice–spend the next part of the day doing something that isn’t writing.
But the voice isn’t done talking.
That is going to have to be okay. There are other things I can do.
Listen to that, and return to your writing. This is the next step.
It’s not as if Chelsey Minnis can do what Sabrina Orah Mark does. It’s not as if Sabrina Orah Mark can do what Chelsey Minnis does. This is the whole point.
Harold Bloom recites “Tea at the Palace of Hoon” by Wallace Stevens
with a hearty hat-tip to Adam Fitzgerald. Happy Sunday!