NYC Area Alert: What’s better than AIDS? Fun Literary Events!

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The venerable and perpetually awesome Housing Works Bookstore–a nonprofit that helps homeless people with AIDS in NYC–is throwing two events in the near future that you should know about. The first one is Thursday (as in The Day After Tomorrow) and it is a Literature Quiz Show, emceed by father-daughter team Kenneth and Jenny Davis, authors of Don’t Know Much About Literature: What You Need to Know but Never Learned About Great Books and Authors. All comers are welcome to get in on the action, and you’ll be playing against literary notables such as Garth Risk Hallberg, Jason Boog, Ed Champion, and HTMLGiant’s own Catherine Lacey. I wish wish wish I could be there quizzing it out with ya’ll, but I’ll be stuck doing the next best thing–hanging out in New Jersey generating fodder for more Creative Writing 101 posts. Full event details here.

And hey, now that you know how to get to Housing Works, why don’t you come back the next night (Friday) for something called the “Read-N-Rock-N-Roll YA Variety Show” which will feature Frank Portman, the author of King Dork (and, apparently, the dude from Mr. T Experience–who knew?) reading “and singing” from his new novel Andromeda Klein. There’s a lot more going on at this, but if I let this post get any longer Father Blake is going to slap me with a “read more after the jump,” so just click here if you want to learn more about the special guests at the Portman thing.

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September 16th, 2009 / 11:59 am

Taking old one-eye to the optometrist

Dr. Millmoss gave hippo gas.

Dr. Millmoss gave hippo gas.

Had some minor eye surgery today. Negotiating the New York City subway with no depth perception (they taped an aesthetically displeasing patch to my face) is tricky business. Would it kill them to use some Snake Plissken apparel? Anyway, I started Interneting one-eyed artists, and revisitedsome of the timeless cartoons of James Thurber, one of which I share now with you all, my beloved dual-eyed brethren. Beware of hippo, nature’s most aggressively hungry creature.

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September 16th, 2009 / 11:44 am

Power Quote: Shelley

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Ah, woe is me!

What have I dared? where am I lifted? how

Shall I descend, and perish not? I know

That Love makes all things equal: I have heard

By mine own heart this joyous truth averred:

The spirit of the worm beneath the sod,

In love and worship, blends itself with God!


Epipsychidion

Power Quote / 6 Comments
September 16th, 2009 / 9:48 am

National Book Award’s book-a-day

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National Book Award’s daily blog on fiction winners has been going on a while, so sorry I’m a little late — but it’s kinda good in a way, since now the majority of the content is already there. It’s a great in depth resource for those who like to tap now and then the esteemed list of winners. If you’ll grant me a commentary (as I always seem to have one), it’s funny how some of the titles shine throughout history, while others become completely obscured over time. One wonders if the former ones are simply written by authors with greater career trajectories, or if the “inherent quality” of the works is at matter. There’s this idea we have that capital T truth takes time to show us who was right all along, never mind that political despots and religious fanatics subscribe to this same idea of “in the end I am right.” Just pointing this out because I see a lot of “aesthetic/artistic fundamentalism” in creative circles. Pretty scary way to think, I think.

And for every winner there are the oh-so-close runner ups and the oh-kinda-close shortlist. In this numbers game of cultural eternity, disappointment is on one’s side; and even when one wins, one may not even be remembered — and that’s all one wants right? to be remembered? The ego is like a first relationship: we want to be remembered forever for just okay sex.

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September 16th, 2009 / 2:08 am

Ander Monson Will Hack You

Ander Monson

Ander Monson

I re-read Ander Monson’s brilliant “Essay as Hack” today and thought I might share a section for anyone out there who is writing memory-based stories or personal essays.

The brain reconfigures memory, reorders events, resets them among other events to form narrative, causality: it creates sense. The mind tells itself stories about what happens to it. So me saying that I did X because of Y rests on thousands of assumptions about who or what I think I am, how I thought of myself then—transmuted into how I think about myself now.

…Any sort of attempt to sort meaning from the past is fraught in thousands on thousands of ways, exponentially splintering. The more you think about it the more it asymptotically approaches impossibility.

This is not to suggest we shouldn’t attempt it. The attempt is glorious, and attempting rewires the brain. It moves the circuitry around, attaching a new conclusion to an action, reconstructing self. In a way, thinking about the self hacks it.

Power Quote / 8 Comments
September 15th, 2009 / 10:29 pm

chris higgs’ latest post produced a discussion about audience.  i have thought about this before.  my question is: can you ever have an audience (outside of yourself) in mind while you are writing?  if you have an audience in mind before writing, doesn’t that mean that you are dealing with something that is already common?  and doesn’t that mean that you are offering something that is not truly unique?  the discussion branched off into the classic “indie small audience” versus the “mainstream big audience” talk.  i don’t understand anyone wanting either in advance.  audience seems to be something that happens afterward, long after anything the writer does.  i understand eventually feeling good about a large group of people reading something you are pleased with, but i don’t understand wanting this in advance of pleasing yourself.  again, i am not suggesting that only small audiences are good (good meaning representative of quality) and big audiences are always bad.  what i mean is, can you imagine how drained a book that appeals to the whole world would be?  i don’t think it’s even possible to imagine a book the entire u.s. would like, or an entire state.  which to me, seems to mean that the audience you don’t have is also important.  i’m just thinking.

Is Dan Chaon a god? Yes. Yes, he is. This interview proves it. As does his insanely great taste in music. (Seriously, read Await Your Reply, yo.)

News of the World of the Day

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Stephen Elliott at The Rumpus- “Notes on Book Publishing in a Socially Networked World.” Our main man does some post-game on his Adderall Diaries galley-lending library project. >>One thing to remember: If you don’t write the right book nothing will work. The reader has to connect with the work. I would advise against putting significant time and resources into a work you don’t really believe in.<<

Joann Wypijewski is probably the most incisive and trenchant writer in America  on matters of sexuality and sexual politics.  In this new piece in The Nation, she talks about the profit-motive behind medicalizing sexual behavior- “Sexual Healing.”

Sex has been missing from the healthcare debate. A shame, because sexual health, and disputes over its meaning, reveals most nakedly the problem at the core of a medical system that requires profit, huge profit, hence sickness, or people who can come to believe they are sick or deformed or lacking and therefore in need of a pill, a procedure or device. Case in point: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), said to afflict great numbers of women–43 percent according to some, 70 percent according to others, an “epidemic” in the heterosexual bedroom according to Oprah. Ka-ching!

Over at the Barnes & Noble review site, Maud Newton is onto Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. >>Since the publication of her first collection, Self-Help, in 1985, so many readers have identified with Moore’s witty, cynical and yearning failed-relationship stories at a similarly impressionable stage that her writing has become as formative an influence on American fiction as her hero John Updike’s was in an earlier era.<<

Oh, hey, special The Nation bonus: William Deresciewicz on a new biography of Marquez, and this classic by Akiva Gottlieb, a great short piece by him on one of my favorite subjects/bands, Against Me!: “Political Punk: Rage Against the Band.”

Random / 3 Comments
September 15th, 2009 / 10:04 am

New issue of The Collagist | Kim Chinquee judges Collagist flash fiction contest | HTMLGIANT designer Gene Morgan redesigns Pank Magazine | Excerpt from Shoplifting from American Apparel at Hipster Runoff | Leo Tolstoy that guy on Led Zeppelin IV album cover