Probably everyone tries hard when writing. But how hard? Glenn Gould hard? I don’t think we should settle for anything less. READ MORE >
Nick Antosca—
A reader of my earlier Patricia Highsmith-related murder post forwarded a picture of Highsmith topless. NSFW, obvs. I was not aware that that existed. (Thanks, Nicole.) Enjoy your weekends, everybody.
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2010: What are you looking forward to?
2009 has been a hell of a year for books, I think. Will 2010 be even better?
The answer, of course, is an emphatic maybe.
“MAYBE!”
Here are three coming in 2010 you should be looking forward to. Comment with more. READ MORE >
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December 11th, 2009 / 3:07 pm
December 11th, 2009 / 3:07 pm
Blake Butler—
Johannes Göransson posted an excellent rumination about the Gurlesque on his blog, including considerations of Kenneth Anger, Lara Glenum, Jack Smith, kitsch, and other: “It’s interesting to me how descriptions of kitsch and trash almost always come in lists. Whether it’s Rimbaud’s “Parade,” Walt Whitman, Ginsberg, Clement (and Arielle!) Greenberg: The “poetic crap” (Rimbaud) always come in these long lists. It’s as if there was an implicit notion of montage in the junk. No wonder Dada, Cornell, Rauschenberg etc etc made collages and assemblages out of this excrement. Our idea of kitsch is already as a pile of crap that we have to wade through. It lacks hierarchy or narrative. We have to wade through it. Just a bunch of excrement.”
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WRITERS WHO ARE REAL OR POTENTIAL MURDERERS
ominously hot: Patricia Highsmith at 21
I recently heard someone state the offhand opinion that Patricia Highsmith was a sociopath who managed to use her “condition” to produce excellent fiction. The New York Times has a big, fascinating article today on a new biography of Highsmith (“She kills so many dogs… She hated dogs. She couldn’t bear sharing attention”), who in fairness I think was not really a sociopath but just a very troubled person. Also, as the photo above suggests, a pretty sexy one as well.
A Top Three, by Zak Smith
So yesterday I sent out an email asking a fairly large group of writer, editor and publishing friends to send me their top 3 books published this year. I told them to interpret “top” any way they chose to, and to feel no pressure to expound on their choices. One of the first responses was this exuberant, flame-throwing missive from Zak Smith, author of the eminently top 3-able We Did Porn (Tin House Books). I decided that Zak’s note was worth publishing in full, as is, but that it was really too long for the post of mini-lists I was compiling. So here, now, is Zak’s top 3, offered as a kind of advance payment on the full list of lists, which will hopefully be forthcoming next week.
Jimmy Chen—
If websites were books and if movies were video games and if you got 11:24 to spare cos you subtle like that.
Creative Writing 101: All’s Well That Ends Well
I am writing this late on Thursday night, having just gotten back from my ~2 hour commute from Rutgers. I’ve got my shoes off and have poured myself a big fat Jim & Ginger, a solitary if not precisely lonely celebration of the end of my teaching semester, my first one as an instructor of college-level creative writing. If this were an MFA program, I probably would have insisted we adjourn our session to a bar, but since about 3/4 of the students can’t (or can’t legally) drink in a bar, I brought a box of Oreos to class.
Some of those who had been following the CRW101 threads expressed disappointment when they stopped appearing, about a month ago. As I think I explained at the time, that was because we switched from close-reading literature-discussion mode into workshopping-student-work mode, and since I made a commitment at the outset of this series not to identify individual students or subject them to public scrutiny, that didn’t leave me with a whole lot to talk about.