Jeremy Schmall and I will be hosting an Agriculture Reader event tomorrow at the NYU Lillian Vernon Writers House (58 West 10th Street). We will be presenting Ag alums Heather Christle, Joshua Cohen, Diane Williams, and Matthew Rohrer. The reading starts at 5:00. There is no cover, and there will be refreshments provided. Copies of AGR #3 and Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm will be available for sale. Hope to see you there.
Blake Butler—
The 15 Most Expensive Paintings in the World seems more interesting than The 50 Sluttiest American Apparel Ads of All Time. But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
46
Ken Baumann—
‘If it moves you to attentiveness, it is art. If it doesn’t, it’s something else.’
-from an excellent interview with Milton Glaser, just one of many
Everything Is Everything
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym0LaSAn5n8
Amy McDaniel—
The marketing and mythologizing comment thread on the Moya essay recalled, for me, David Foster Wallace’s remarkable 2004 review of a Borges biography. Wallace talks about the intentional fallacy and, if my reading is correct, indicts the practice of literary biography in general. (The connection to the Moya essay is oblique, but the review is worth reading on any terms.)
The Failure Six by Shane Jones
This second novel by Shane Jones is out now from Fugue State Press and getting excellent and interesting reviews. I like Darby Larson’s thoughts on the book here.
Shane is doing a contest on his blog with a giveaway for the book.
In The Failure Six, a group of messengers, who work for a vast bureaucracy, all struggle with the same task – to retell the life story of a woman named Foe who seems to have lost her memory. The irrepressible emotions of the messengers – and Foe’s clear need to be left alone in her amnesia – make for a strange, unaccountable, untellable story.
In this town, speech is accomplished through stacks of paper so tall they touch the sky…the floors of a teahouse are built in seconds…and a mysterious character named DH threatens the town with bombs and his “Deliverer” who wields the world’s most expensive revolvers. The Failure Six is a mystery grounded in Kafka, Gogol, and human dreams.
I read this book in draft and am excited to read it in full and final form. Shane’s got the magic.
Blake Butler—
Thank god, I’ve been waiting for this: Bolaño Inc.: “The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S.” [Via Matt Kirkpatrick.]
Blake Butler—
“Hitler had the right idea; he was just an underachiever! Kill’ em all, Adolf! All of ’em! Jew, Mexican, American, White, kill ’em all! Start over, the experiment didn’t work!” – Bill Hicks
Heather Christle Week (4): Cocorico
The epigraph to the Gordon Lish book I quoted the line about poetry from earlier today is this:
Of the world as it exists,
it is impossible
to be enough afraid.– T. W. Adorno
I got out of bed this morning and looked at that and thought about posting the 4th poem this week from Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm, and then thought, Gordon Lish, you wrote this book in 1983, and though it is still full of many truths, Heather Christle might have you bushwacked, brother. Because I do not feel a fear in Heather Christle’s poems, and by that I do not mean she is fearless with ideas, though she surely is. I mean these poems feel beyond the realm of fear, in that they have accepted fear, and ate it, and though the fear is warm inside them, they are concerned more with discussing, as in the below ‘Coco Rico,’ whether the person sitting next to you on the Ferris Wheel is an impostor or not, and how warm they might be. Also somehow the hairstyling in the face of this great unspoken black wind among black hens: it is less a blank, and more a waking that has already happened: that inversion I was talking about. More meat than there is air. Beautiful stinging pink meat. Heather Christle is our future soda water (and the sound of a French rooster). Thank you.
There is no epigraph to Heather’s book because it has not arrived to the time in which the rest of the book has arrived. So eat it. And take that, Lish.
COCORICO
Any time you buy anything,
you should buy an extra, in case
you really like it. I am aware
this makes me sound dumb, like
I am a really dumb shopper.
But buried in my shoulder
is a light that swells constantly
from dim to full-on glow and back
and it provides me with endless
knowledge, like a nutritional syrup
for the astronauts whose mania
for leisure’s renowned. Maybe
one day we will be the two
lonely souls forced to sit together
on the Ferris wheel. We will need
a signal. What if when we reach
the top you start humming something
from “The Planets”—then I will know
it’s really you and not some radio DJ
trying to give me another prize.
There are a few things I still
have to tell you, like how women
harvest flowers under unfair
conditions and there are members
of my family with less than
perfect hair. Most importantly,
I must convince you that while
it’s true I have the face of a human,
this does not make me a centaur,
manticore, or great Icelandic king.
I’m sure you’re full of questions,
such as Have you heard we are
surrounded by daffodils of normal
proportions? And all I can tell you
is that yes, we are surrounded,
by daffodils, perhaps, but even
more so we are swimming in an air
that’s been touched here and there
with the kind of dust that, once
lit up, won’t let the swimmers go.
Critics on Criticism: William Carlos Williams
What follows are excerpts from a kind of (scathing) review of a (scathing) review. WCW’s essay, called “A Point for American Criticism,” is directed at Rebecca West, who had published some comments on Ulysses that WCW found wanting in every respect. Sometimes he says “they,” presumably meaning West and her critical cohort. So, from his red wheelbarrow full of glorious vitriol:
Forward is the new. It will not be blamed. It will not force itself into what amounts to paralyzing restrictions. It cannot be correct. It hasn’t time. ….
Comment if you like on Joyce’s narcissism but what in the world has it to do with him as a writer? Of course it has, as far as prestige is concerned, but not as to writing….But the expedient is convenient if we want to gain a spurious (psychologic, not literary) advantage for temporal purposes.
What Joyce is saying is a literary thing. It is a literary value he is forwarding. He is a writer. Will this never be understood? ….
The thing is, they want to stay safe, they do not want to give up something, so they enlist psychology to save them. But under it they miss the clear, actually the miraculous, benefits of literature itself. A silent flower opening out of the dung they dote on. They miss Joyce blossoming pure white above their heads. ….
She speaks of transcendental tosh, of Freud, of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of anything that comes into her head, but she has not yet learned–though she professes to know the difference between art and life–the sentimental and nonsentimental–that writing is made of words. ….
Here Joyce has so far outstripped the criticism of Rebecca West that she seems a pervert.