Primordial Theory Question

I am alive and did not ask to be

1. While any subject can be interesting to any bozo at any given time, history indicates that there are a limited number of topics that are always immediately and profoundly engaging to everyone, all the time.

2. These issues are what is referenced by the term “the human condition.”

3. They are: death, love, and the idea that I am alive and did not ask to be.

4. Death meaning, I am going to die and I don’t know when or how to behave in the face of that.

5. Love meaning, for instance, I am lonely and drawn to other humans, and yet I am human and drawn to inflicting pain.

6. I am alive and did not ask to be meaning I don’t know if you are, too, or if I made you up.

7. So my question is, what is all this other crap that people are writing?

8. In other words, how far from these issues can I take a story and still have a story that anyone will care about?

I defer to your expertise.

Random / 138 Comments
March 24th, 2009 / 10:46 am

I like Donald Rumsfeld a lot

In 2003 (sorry I’m late) Hart Seely, a reporter and occasional humorist, arranged Donald Rumsfeld’s evasive paradox-ridden Pentagon briefings and media interviews into poems, collected in Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. Political satire is not new territory, but this is just awesome. Here is an example:

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

Department of Defense news briefing
Feb. 12, 2002

READ MORE >

I Like __ A Lot / 39 Comments
March 23rd, 2009 / 5:21 pm

Power Quote: Harold Bloom

I myself, as a student of gnosis, whether poetic or religious, judge the poem to be neither truth nor fiction but rather Dante’s knowing, which he chose to name Beatrice. When you know most intensely, you do not necessarily decide whether it is truth or fiction; what you know primarily is that the knowing is truly your own.

– The Western Canon, “The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice”

Author Spotlight & Power Quote / 14 Comments
March 23rd, 2009 / 12:18 pm

K. Silem Mohammed is At Least Trying


“I’m trying really hard. But soy milk in coffee (and I’ve tried rice milk too) is one of the worst things I’ve ever tasted. Urgh yuck shudder. I run a news group on conjoined twins and I’m trying really really hard not to.”

-K. Silem Mohammed, from a poem on Squirrels in My Attic

 Good. I like it.

Horse Party image from Whispered Apologies

Everyone is having fun.

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 8 Comments
March 23rd, 2009 / 12:15 am

Haut or Not: Zachary German

Tao Lin emailed us a sideways pic of Zachary German’s bookcase. I decided there was no point in straightening out the pic since German wasn’t straight (that’s arguably not a gay joke). Also, one can better see the spines this way. I cropped the entry into three separate pics (conveniently separated by shelves). There’s no way to do this except after the break — trust me.

READ MORE >

Haut or not / 273 Comments
March 21st, 2009 / 11:06 pm

New Masthead at storySouth

storysouth

Jason Sanford has changed some things over at storySouth. Here’s an excerpt from his letter prefacing the latest issue.

The new publisher will be Spring Garden Press, a well-regarded literary publisher in Greensboro, North Carolina. storySouth‘s new editor will be Terry Kennedy, the Associate Director of the MFA Writing Program at UNCG Greensboro and the editor of Spring Garden Press. Joining him as fiction editor will be Drew Perry, a UNCG alum who teaches fiction writing at Elon University; as poetry editor Julie Funderburk, who previously served as one of storySouth‘s associate editors; as designer Andrew Saulters, who created the websites for the UNCG MFA Program, The Greensboro Review, and Spring Garden Press.

All of the current storySouth editors will remain involved in the journal in different ways—for example, I will continue to direct our Million Writers Award—but the journal will now be run by Terry and his crew. I’m really excited about the skills and abilities Terry and Spring Garden Press bring to storySouth., and I know they will continue the journal’s mission of publishing the best writings from the New South.

Anyhow, this is merely a press release post to let people know if they didn’t already know.

Nothing exciting here.

Goodbye.

Uncategorized / 4 Comments
March 21st, 2009 / 1:12 am

English lessons with Ma

avant

My mom recently (finally) started using email. I set up a yahoo account for her and she doesn’t understand the concept of passwords, so neither my father or I can use our yahoomail accounts, as we must keep her ‘signed in’ at all times. The few times when I signed her out, she freaked. She has officially acclimated/regressed like the rest of us. Now she emails me every day ad infin asking me to edit her emails to her friends in China. This was today’s discourse:

READ MORE >

Behind the Scenes / 18 Comments
March 20th, 2009 / 6:05 pm

Power Quote: Harold Bloom

Literature is not merely language; it is also the will to figuration, the motive for metaphor that Nietzsche once defined as the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere. This partly means to be different from oneself, but primarily, I think, to be different from the metaphors and images of the contingent works that are one’s heritage: the desire to write greatly is the desire to be elsewhere, in a time and place of one’s own, in an originality that must compound with inheritence, with the anxiety of influence. 

– “Preface and Prelude” to The Western Canon

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 6 Comments
March 20th, 2009 / 4:51 pm

The Suburban Swindle by Jackie Corley

 Femme Friday People! Next week I’ll highlight some old school righteous woman, but today, I review The Suburban Swindle by the amazing Jackie Corley:

 

“It’s impossible to be anything but a memory”  Juliana Hatfield

 

Jackie Corley, in her short story collection, The Suburban Swindle, (So New Publishing),  creates a loved and loathed world, a deeply felt suburban New Jersey, peopled by flawed, suffering characters and often narrated by an “I” that feels much older than her twentysomething years. Like Justin Taylor in his excellent book of poems, More Perfect Depictions of Noise (soon to be reviewed by my husband) Corley manages to use her youth as a writer to her great advantage. She is so close to her material that a rawness of emotion, a bewilderment with the edges of life, comes alive on the page.

 

The opening lines say it all and Corley never lets up after them:

 

What are we? What we are is oiled sadness. Dead Garden snakes and dried-up slugs. We’re what happens when you’re bored and scared too long, when you sit in piles in some dude’s basement trying to get the guy’s white supremacist brother to shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes.

  READ MORE >

Author Spotlight / 21 Comments
March 20th, 2009 / 1:25 pm

Fun with… Mathias Svalina’s iPod

Probably most of you know Mathias Svalina as half of Octopus. Well, unlike other-half Zachary Schomburg, Mathias made the mistake of coming over to my house and drinking beer with me. He also made the mistake of leaving his iPod here. Then he went to Nebraska for a week. Then I went to Atlanta for a few days. Now other stuff is happening, but the upshot is that I’ve had his iPod for at least two weeks now–maybe three? It’s just been sitting on my desk. And we keep emailing about setting up a time to get it back to him, but we never seem to be able to meet up. So I finally decided I should make the most of my time, and share some of the highlights with you. 

READ MORE >

Behind the Scenes / 6 Comments
March 20th, 2009 / 11:34 am