Curtis White will be reading in Chicago this Thursday
At City Lit in Logan Square, at 6:30pm. Curt will be reading from his new book, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers, which just came out through Melville House.
I did my Master’s degree with Curt at Illinois State University, and he’s one of the smartest and best writers I know. (He’s one of the two profs who first got me reading Viktor Shklovsky.) In the 1980s, he and Ron Sukenick transformed Fiction Collective into FC2, and I learned about FC2 (and ISU) partly through the two “sampler collections” they put out (something I wish more presses did). Curt’s also written seven works of fiction, including The Idea of Home and Memories of My Father Watching TV, and now five works of nonfiction, including his infamous attack on Terry Gross (among other things), The Middle Mind. (He may not have made Gross cry, but he sure pissed off a lot of her fans.)
I’m only halfway through this new book (and will be writing more about it later), but so far I’d describe it as an attack on the idea, currently very en vogue, that scientific knowledge is the only or most superior form of knowledge, and thus the only means of accounting for what it means to be human. Right from the start Curt shows how much of science’s own knowledge is shoddy and unexamined. For example, it’s not uncommon to hear scientists like Stephen Hawking claim that the universe is beautiful, but how do they understand beauty? Not very well, Curt argues. Like in The Spirit of Disobedience, Curt demonstrates how other intellectual traditions—specifically Romanticism, which he traces through the Beats and punk—offer a way around and past some of the more inane debates consuming so many today, such as “science vs. religion.” Plus he’s funny, too.
If you’re in Chicago this Thursday, come by and hear Curt! Discussion will follow during which you can ask him embarrassing questions.
Announcing Requited Journal #8
It is my pleasure to tell you that Requited #8 is now online. This issue features:
- Fiction by Thomas Mundt, Berit Ellingsen, and Matt Rowan;
- Poetry by Lucy Biederman, Carol Guess & Kristina Marie Darling, Gillian Cummings, Zachary Scott Hamilton, Kamden Hilliard, Kati Mertz, M. Pfaff, Amanda Silbernagel, and Michelle Sinsky;
- Performance pieces by Marisa Plumb, Dave Snyder, and Brian Torrey Scott;
- Visual art by Tyler Mallory (including the image you see above);
- Jeff Bursey’s review of Sam Savage’s Glass.
Check it out!
. . .
I am the non-fiction and reviews editor for Requited and am always eager to consider submissions. Previously I’ve published work by William Bowers, Jeremy M. Davies, Julianne Hill, Steve Katz, Mark Rappaport, Keiler Roberts, Viktor Shklovsky, and Curtis White, as well as interviews with Robert Ashley, Vanessa Place, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Curtis White, and reviews by Daniel Green and Jeff Bursey.
Also, please do check out the Requited‘s steadily swelling archives, where you’ll find poetry by Molly Gaudry and Nate Pritts, fiction by James Tadd Adcox, Jimmy Chen, Jac Jemc, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Suzanne Scanlon, and (ahem) myself, as well as many other nice fine things.
Enjoy!
The Internet Political Magazine Blog of the Future
David Fishkind recently asked “Are You Afraid of Politics?“, and a lot of people, myself included, chimed in. Since then I’ve realized I have much more to say on the subject.
I normally don’t think of politics in Democrat/Republican/presidential election terms. I’m registered as an independent, and I prefer to live my politics on a daily basis—which is why I don’t drive, buy organic food when I can, and support local businesses run by people I know, etc. But it would be damn foolish of me to not recognize that “the political is personal” (to invert a phrase), and that the gentle people elected to the state and federal levels regularly impact both my daily life and my career as a writer. Specifically:
Announcing Issue 7 of Requited
"Fresh Cherries" by Mark Aguhar (video still, 2012)
Requited is an online journal that I help edit. I’m pleased to announce that the seventh issue is now up. In the section that is my province (essays) you will find:
- Jeremy M. Davies on reading Gilbert Sorrentino;
- William Bowers on watching Spider-Man;
- & Curtis White on rethinking Freud and childhood sexuality.
There is also a review, by Daniel Green, of the book We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, edited by Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer (Skyhorse Publishing, 2011).
In the rest of the issue you will find:
- fiction by Maya Sonenberg, Hilary Plum, Eugenio Volpe, & Adam Moorad;
- poetry by Neal From, Christine Hamm, j/j hastain, Stephen Daniel Lewis, Amy Pence, Andrea Rexilius, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, & Daniel Godston;
- excerpts from Calamari Press’s Ark Codex ±0;
- a performance text by Michael J Pagan;
- visual art by Mark Aguhar;
- a video by Dara Greenwald;
- & a comic by Dylan Williams.
Requited is edited by Amanda Marbais (fiction), H.V. Crammond (poetry), Ira S. Murfin (performance texts), Fereshteh Toosi (visual art and videos), and myself (essays and reviews). We publish two issues per year. Our complete archive is accessible here, and our submission guidelines are here. If you have any further questions or comments about the journal, I would be happy to receive them.
Enjoy Issue 7!
Viktor Shklovsky wants to make you a better writer, part 1: device & defamiliarization
When I was finishing up my Master’s degree at ISU, I worried that I still didn’t know much about writing—like, how to actually do it. My mentor Curtis White told me, “Just read Viktor Shklovsky; it’s all in there.” So I moved to Thailand and spent the next two years poring over Theory of Prose. When I returned to the US in the summer of 2005, I sat down and started really writing.
I’ve already put up one post about what, specifically I learned from Theory of Prose, but it occurs to me now that I can be even more specific. So this will be the first in a series of posts in which I try to boil ToP down into a kind of “notes on craft,” as well as reiterate some of the more theoretical arguments that I’ve been making both here and at Big Other over the past 2+ years. Of course if this interests you, then I most fervently recommend that you actually read the Shklovsky—and not just ToP but his other critical texts as well as his fiction, which is marvelous. (Indeed, Curt has since told me that he didn’t mean for me to focus so much on ToP! But I still find it extraordinarily useful.)
Let’s talk first about where Viktor Shklovsky himself started: the concepts of device and defamiliarization.
Cinema x 3: Melancholia, The Tree of Life, Feature Friday
1.
You no doubt read Greg Gerke’s deeply critical post about Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Curtis White has now posted his own much more positive impressions of the film. I’ve tried convincing the two of them to go at it like me and Chris Higgs—I even introduced them during AWP—but they’re being too polite. Chime in in the comments section, demanding blood!
2.
Martin Seay is currently posting a series on Tree of Life; the first part went up yesterday, and part 2 is supposedly forthcoming today. (Meanwhile, don’t miss Martin’s meditations on Anonymous.)
(My own thoughts on Tree are here. I have nothing to say about Anonymous.)
3.
Every Friday at Big Other, I’m posting links to feature-length films that are up at YouTube. And I’m doing it for you!
Requited Journal #6
"Call and Response" by Adam Grossi
As the nonfiction & reviews editor of the online journal Requited, it’s my pleasure to announce that Issue 6 just went live. In the Essays section you’ll now find:
- an autobiographical comic by Keiler Roberts (Powdered Milk Volume 5);
- a video essay by Julianne Hill (“So, Mary?”);
- and interviews with Robert Ashley, Vanessa Place, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Curtis White regarding the materials and habits of their respective writing practices (see the introductory note here).
There’s also a new review: Jeff Bursey‘s take on J. Robert Lennon’s story collection Pieces for the Left Hand.
And much more!
Death x 3: Frances Bay, Curtis White on lit’s (lack of) future, & “Why Originality Isn’t All That Important”
1. Charles Napier isn’t the only one who’s left us: Frances Bay passed away last month. No creamed corn was served at her memorial service.
2. My mentor Curtis White wrote something pretty pessimistic at Lapham’s Quarterly about the future of literature.
3. I wrote something a little more optimistic about why originality isn’t all that important.
Art’s a Fucking Mess
My friend Tadd over at Big Other has a post up about why Plato wanted to kick all the poets out of his ideal republic. And I’m no philosopher. But my understanding has long been that Plato’s problem with poets/art (besides the whole mimesis “copy of a copy” thing) is that art is messy, uncontrollable.
Like, consider this:
Someone—some artist somewhere—decided to make this. Is it good? Bad? Funny? Sick? Evil? Juvenile? Calculated? Hip? Clever? Stupid? Immoral? Amoral? Sure—it’s all those things, and more! It supports a variety of readings. In fact, the better an artwork is (I think this is a pretty OK one), the more irreducible it tends to be (at least, according to certain lines of aesthetic reasoning that I think Tadd would agree with).
Good art disrupts the social order. It wakes you up, shocks you, makes you feel alive—it makes you see the world again, differently. Bad art is boring, predictable, prescribed, a weak illustration of what you’ve already been thinking. (That’s my problem with so many depictions of September 11th, Roxanne—they reduce that day into something so digestible, so mundane, it’s as though it never happened.)
What’s Up, Rumpus?
Been a little while since we checked in with Stephen Elliott and his merry band.
Rumpus original fiction! “Bobcat,” a short story by Rebecca Lee: “Ray was failing at being a person. He’d been fooled by life. It had triumphed over him. I wanted to call out to him, over his wife’s head, Hey Ray, life has triumphed over you.”
Jeremy Hatch points us toward “The Dark Side of Sustainability,” which is itself commentary on “A Good Without Light,” an essay in the new Tin House by Curtis White which is happily available in full online. Hatch: “White argues that our capitalist industrial technocracy, underpinned by an arrogant scientism, has led us into this mess and is incapable of leading us out; that we must look beyond this economic system, and draw from other “systems of value” (religion, the arts, even social science, and I’d add secular philosophy to his list) to find a way out; and that we can do this without necessarily discarding all of capitalism, industry, technology, or science.”
Ted Wilson reviews the Bible and finds it wanting: “Usually I’m better at finishing books, but the Bible is comically long. Whoever published it used super thin paper, so it’s like twice as long as it looks. (I think there might be some duplicate pages accidentally printed.) And it certainly doesn’t help that it’s written in that old-timey language. Plus, I’ve never liked fantasy and the Bible is full of magic powers and other worlds. That’s just not my thing. It would probably appeal more to Harry Potter fans.” To be perfectly honest, it’s this kind of well-worn “satire” that’s just not my thing. But I assume I’m in the distinct minority on this, so if the preceding entertained you, you might as well click through for a whole lot more of the same.
Max Ross reviews Sleeper’s Wake by Alistair Morgan: “[I]n Sleeper’s Wake, the first novel by the South African writer Alistair Morgan, Wraith’s penis is actually a pretty neat literary device. It provides character depth and motivation, is the jumping off point for learning about Wraith’s past, and is central to every plot twist in the book.”
And Stephen himself has new Notes From Book Tour (#10) : “Then yesterday I went to a free clinic in Alameda for H1N1 vaccine. When I arrived there was a line that stretched for three blocks, thousands of people, almost everyone pushing a stroller or holding a baby against their collarbone. A woman behind me blew her nose and an old man coughed loudly. He looked like he was dying. I thought it would be ironic if I caught flu while waiting for the vaccine.”
Oh and for New Yorkers, the Rumpus is back at the Highline Ballroom on 11/17, with Rick Moody, Starlee Kine, Jonathan Ames, Todd Barry, the Six Word Memoirists, something called Care Bears on Fire, and who knows what else.
Uncategorized / 4 Comments
November 11th, 2009 / 11:29 am
November 11th, 2009 / 11:29 am
