Interview: Darby Larson 14
10. You are a sturdy man. How does that affect your writing?
Thank you I think. I’m taking “sturdy” to mean like level-headed or rational or maybe even relativistic, because I’m really out of shape physically. I think it helps but also hinders me (it’s relative!), see answer to #4 above. It’s not healthy to be so level-headed because it leaves little room for heart.
14. “Stop using words” is a pretty heavy thing to write on the page. Yet you write those words in The Iguana Complex. Discuss.
11 wet velveeta on jar knuckles
11. In his craving for fame and fulfillment he dumped his family, bullied his friends, ripped off ideas and lied about his past. Charlie Sheen? No, Gauguin.
11. Seventy-one copies or eighty-two days remain to snort up Darby Larson’s The Iguana Complex. Go there.
11. Lorrie Moore weighs in on the Carmelo Anthony/New York Knicks trade.
1. Top 10 counter-culture books. At first I gandered and thought where is Trout Fishing? But it seems like this guy glows memoirs. I’ve read zero of them. Summer?
11. Your best guess: What the fuck is a personal library? It sounds like I am a book. We are not books, but the idea is comforting (beginning, middle, end–nice delusion…). Here’s a new one: What is on your personal library shelf right now that isn’t a book. I am going to go look right now: empty wine rack, candles with dust balls, 3 family photos (all three professional, posed bullshit photos), a gnome dressed as a Tennessee Titan, a plastic pumpkin (fuck, it stayed up since Halloween), a fake hollowed-out book that is a hiding spot for letters from a young lady in South Africa, a rope bracelet that protects you from sharks, __________, two deeds to automobiles, a buckeye, a single .44 bullet, a chocolate coin, a treasury bond. You?
On “Phone by Darby Larson,” with digression
“Phone by Darby Larson,” by Darby Larson, in the current issue of The Collagist, is one of the most refreshingly original pieces I’ve read in a while. The fading sequence of gray fonts mirrored at both beginning and end make the words, or ‘tips’ of the story, receed along an arc into visual space, as if the story itself were a giant sphere — a circular notion aptly mirrored in the jumpy, overlapping, entropic, and ultimately symmetrical narrative. Here, Larson (also per Abjective’s editorial fancies) is not just interested in telling stories, but writing them. In my mind, the two are different: the former merely a transcript of what one might say aloud to a spectator, the latter being actively aware, pensive even, of its ‘wordness’s’ function, capacity, limitation, and artifice. Oral history is fine, but I prefer writing that is seen, upon which, in this case, the structure looks like an almost palindrome, with wonderful tiny placed errors.
Happy Birthday
from the editor, Darby Larson:
ABJECTIVE turned one year old over the weekend officially with Stump by David Peak. I as a human being want to personally thank everyone who submitted over the last year. As an editor it was humbling to be able to have so much to choose from. Maybe peruse the archives. They are already in love with you and ready to be loved. Love.
Uncategorized / 30 Comments
November 19th, 2009 / 3:09 pm
November 19th, 2009 / 3:09 pm
Blake Butler—
Interesting back and forth between Darby Larson of Abjective and a submitter submitting work already published at the site by another author, check it: Especially when it comes to the deep unconscious nature of such work, would you not agree that language can have the tendency to oddly criss-cross between unknown individuals? Editors: got a good weirdo story? Send it our way…
20
Haut or Not: An Assortment
David Hodges
Heller, Kafka, Orwell, Vonnegut — welcome to class kids. This semester Mr. Hodges will be teaching us how horrible society is and how to maintain a negative attitude. Then we’re gonna read A Confederacy of Dunces and all kill ourselves in hopes of also being posthumously published. And don’t forget, you can use Tom Wolfe’s book as an ottoman. Lastly, we’ll finish off with a biography of Clarence Thomas, cuz there’s nothing that says justice more than a pube on a can of Pepsi.
Rating: not.
Abjective: A Review
I had to look up the definition of Abjective, which means — yes all you smartypants I know you already know — (adj.) tending to degrade, humiliate, or demoralize (sounds like my first hernia). Editor Darby Larson, who is not a stranger to getting work published, has started Abjective, which posts a new piece every Saturday.
I write about Abjective, and not another journal, because Larson seems intent on doing something ‘new,’ two particular cases in point being Drifter by Jeff Crouch and ……and This Is About All I Knew Do Say…..by Zachary Bush.
Uncategorized / 14 Comments
January 13th, 2009 / 2:35 pm
January 13th, 2009 / 2:35 pm
Mean Week vs Puppies and Rainbows Week
Darby Larson has posted about Mean Week over at his blog. I like Darby. He is good at arguing things, and he thinks hard about things. Many of his comments on blogs are very thoughtful, and I usually read them and think I should make my brain smarter in order to respond to them.
Darby on Mean Week:
I don’t think mean week has been mean, by my definition of it. The problem is that if it were mean, then there would be consequences. Friendships would end, would have to be mended over time, would depend on a puppies and rainbows week just to heal.
Maybe we could learn a thing or too from Gridskipper, a travel blog, that had its own Mean Week back in 2007. Apparently, they traveled places and were mean to babies.
Where is everyone?