IT’S ANOTHER CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS! As with THE WORD MADE FLESH, edited by Justin Taylor and yours truly and launched from this very blog last summer, here’s another announcement for a tattoo book. This time around we (the royal we; I’m doing this as a solo project while Justin devotes his time to writing) want to see your band tattoos. Song lyrics, band logos, record labels, musician portraits, you name it. If you’ve ever loved a song or a musician or a band so much you went to the tattoo shop and made your devotion permanent, we want to see it.

We’re looking for high-quality images of tattoos inspired by a wide range of genres and eras–from classical to rock’n'roll to hip hop, punk rock, indie and soul. And as with THE WORD MADE FLESH, we don’t want just the photos. We also want a few words from you about why you got your tattoo, and what the music means to you or used to mean, or how it’s changed for you over time.

And of course please do provide us with tattoo artist/shop credit, photographer credit, your name or pseudonym, the city and state or country where you live, and the name of the band or song or composer your tattoo refers to (even if it’s obvious).

Please send clear digital images to tattoolit@gmail.com. We’re aiming for large files–2000 pixels across, or a minimum 300 dpi at 5 inches wide–but if you’re not sure about all the technical stuff just set your camera to its highest resolution and take the best photo you can.

And finally, Justin and I are indeed still collecting literary tattoos for THE WORD MADE FLESH tumblr blog at tattoolit.com. If you have a literary tattoo and want the world to see it, send it to tattoolit at gmail or the tumblr page directly, and we’ll post it there.

Hey, guess what? Fourteen months after first announcing our project on this site, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is as real as a needle driving ink into your skin. Today is Publication Day for us, and my co-editor Eva Talmadge and I want to take a moment to offer our gratitude to all of the HTMLGiant readership. Without your early support, encouragement and re-blogging, this project might well have come to nothing. But instead, we’ve got this full-color anthology of hundreds of tattoos in a panoply of languages from book and body-art enthusiasts all over the U.S. and the world. Eva and I have done a lot of press already, and there’s more coming. I won’t be gumming up the works here at Giant with a running tally, but one of the highlights for us thus far has been our appearance this morning on NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook. You can stream our segment here. Also, many listeners are uploading pictures of their own literary tattoos to a fan gallery that NPR is hosting on their site. We’ve also been getting a lot of new tattoos to our submissions address, tattoolit@gmail.com , and we’ve been posting those on the book’s official site. If you’ve got one (or ten), we want to see it, so please do keep ‘em coming in. And thanks–seriously–for everything. Cheers!

GIRLS TO THE FRONT: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, by Sara Marcus

Harper Perennial; September 28, 2010

384 pages; $14.99 list; $10.79 at Barnes & Noble.com, $10.11 at Amazon

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[NOTE: A vigorous subjectivity is hereby asserted]

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I was thirteen in 1994, born a few years too late and too many hundreds of miles away from DC or Olympia to catch the first wave of Riot Grrrl, before the media declared Courtney Love its leader and made short skirts, ripped fishnets and combat boots another uniform to choose from, on the rack next to grunge and goth and punk. The punk rock girls in Miami sort of had the right idea. We wrote zines and covered our hands (and arms and shoes) in magic marker, wore too much black eyeliner and publicly made out with one another, smoke and drank and bragged about the good drugs we could find, and applied duck tape to the rips in our backpacks and notebook covers and black jeans. But we were copying the look from MTV, not inventing it ourselves, and we were more interested in intoxicants than radical feminist politics. We mixed up Riot Grrrl with trampy adolescent showboating, equated it with bands like Hole and L7 and the Lunachicks, plus local favorites Jack Off Jill (more Manson-fanclub than feminist, but at least female), and generally, in the way of all younger siblings aping their older sisters’ trends, didn’t exactly get it right.

Luckily Sara Marcus is here to set the record straight.

Girls to the Front is a scorching history of the Riot Grrrl movement, from the roots of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile in 1989 and 1990 to the emergence of a nationwide scene, heralded by articles in USA Today and Newsweek and Spin, to its eventual petering out and “death” by 1996. But it’s not just another rock history or last-minute addition to your feminist studies class, and its appeal isn’t limited to to readers who remember those years—and have the zine collection to prove it—or to fans of punk minutiae. Girls to the Front is a full-throttle history of the feminist counterculture of the early 90s, and a swift chronicle of the political scene that sparked so much anger. There was NOW’s march on Washington and the failed Freedom of Choice Act of 1992, the furor over abortion rights for teenage girls as the Supreme Court moved to uphold states’ parental consent laws that same year, the emergence of the Christian Coalition (Pat Buchanan actually called Bill and Hilary Clinton’s politics “radical feminism”), and Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” And Time magazine published an article that said most women didn’t consider themselves feminists.

But Girls to the Front doesn’t stop at history or politics. At the heart of the book is a collection of personal stories, starting with Marcus’s own. She was a participant-observer in the movement and an active member in the music scene, playing in bands and attending Riot Grrrl meetings at the Positive Force house outside DC. The meetings were a big part of the movement, where sharing ranged from the intimate and painful to the political and practical. Young women and girls related accounts of domestic violence, rape, and childhood abuse; they organized shows and played music, stapled zines, drew up fliers, and generally spoke their minds. At the first Riot Grrrl meeting she went to as a young teen, Marcus writes, “[w]e talked about sexual harassment from classmates and teachers, crushes on boys and girls, our favorite kinds of tampons and ice cream, and our outrage over the sexist stories and images we saw in the newspapers and on television.” The meetings emerged as a place where girls could gather to support each other against an outside world—both within the boy-dominated punk scene and society at large—that often left them feeling like no one understood them, stuck as they were “in that aggravating period of time when girls get hit from all sides, belittled as children and sexualized as women.” Some of the best and most touching writing in the book comes from Marcus’s account of those vulnerable, “stuck” years: pinned to a locker by an older boy; threatened in a dressing room. “I experienced female adolescence as a constant affront with calamity always loitering nearby, licking its lips, waiting for an opening. I spent the beginning of my teens miserable, alienated, and isolated. And I was sure I was the only one who felt this way.” Enter Riot Grrrl, and the movement that gave power and belonging and a voice to a generation of girls just coming of age.

Girls to the Front is one hell of an empowering read. Even a decade and a half later, reading Marcus calls up all those old feelings of anger and rebellion and unity more clearly than I probably ever experienced them at the time. As I read, I caught myself holding my head higher, imagining myself screaming along with the riot grrrls at the front of every show. I even gave a few of the usual leering creeps on the subway some nice cold intimidating stares. Fuck yeah. It left me wishing that the spirit of those first Riot Grrrl meetings could have outlasted the media explosion that followed, and that there’d been a little more feminism—and not so many older punk guys offering malt liquor in yogurt cups—back in the scene when I was coming up. But, history book though it may be, Girls to the Front also left me thinking about the future. There’s inspiration here. Read this book and feel it—a renewed energy, in talking about the roles women play in the scenes that we live in today.

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Eva Talmadge is the editor, with Justin Taylor, of THE WORD MADE FLESH: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide, coming from Harper Perennial October 12th. She lives in Brooklyn.

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YOU THINK YOU HAVE IT HARD

by Eva Talmadge

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Sometimes I steal books from Justin. It happens. Last week I swiped a good one: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, selected and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers. If Justin ever catches on and tries to steal his book back, I’ll go out and buy it, and then read it all again—because this funny, strange, and gruesome short collection is well worth paying full retail ($15) for.

But I don’t want to write one of those reviews that reads like a press release or a protracted blurb. Petrushevskaya is a master storyteller, and like all good fairy tales, hers end in tears. You already know that. Just look at the cover. And it’s easy to say Petrushevskaya is the “heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol and Poe”—it says so right there on the back of the book. So okay. Any decent batch of gothic and supernatural short stories is going to get a Poe comp, and Americans will give just about any fiction translated from Russian a Gogol mention. Those are two writers whose names sell books, and pretty much no-brainers here, but (here’s where it gets blurby) damned if Petrushevskaya doesn’t live up to those comparisons and then some, matching both in inventiveness and in gore—and perhaps beating them in heart.

“Incident at Sokolniki,” a ghost story that would do Poe proud, opens straightforwardly enough: “Early in the war in Moscow there lived a woman named Lida. Her husband was a pilot, and she didn’t love him very much, but they got along well enough.” Petrushevskaya plays a classic gothic trick, and the story ends in an act of tenderness (a kind of duty, if not love) that echoes throughout this book: hardships are plenty and survival—not happiness—is the point of life. But even in a warzone there is room for kindness. In “Hygiene,” a young girl and a cat survive a plague that ravages their city. Again the tenderness is hidden behind a portrait of an unhappy home: “Nikolai ate a great deal. He ate so much the grandfather felt compelled to make a remark. Elena came to her husband’s defense, and then the little girl asked why everyone was arguing, and family life went on its way.” The plague that follows spares only those who take care of one another—a stranger, the little girl, her cat—while the rest die fending for themselves.

And let’s not forget Gogol. A nod to “The Nose” ends one of the grimmest stories in this collection, “The Miracle.” Just as things couldn’t possibly get worse for Nadya, whose son has stolen her life savings and whose only hope, Uncle Kornil, has fallen over dead, everything is “suddenly enshrouded in fog.” But here’s the thing: the Poe and Gogol labels really don’t do Petrushevskaya justice. In the century-and-a-half since those writers’ deaths (both would have turned 200 last year), a lot of shit has gone down: two world wars killed 25 million people in Russia alone, some 14.5 million died in Stalin’s de-kulakization and famine in neighboring Ukraine, and another 12 million were killed or imprisoned in gulags with 10% survival rates in the purge that followed. (These figures come from Wikipedia and Robert Conquest, and we aren’t even counting other massive disasters—the Russian Revolution and Civil War, two other famines, plus everyone who died post-Stalin or killed themselves after reading Conquest’s books.)

So what does all that history do to fiction? How can anyone dare to write after that kind of horror? Petrushevskaya’s answers that question by taking one of the oldest story forms—the fairy tale—and recasting it for the post-disaster world. We process our experiences, especially the bad ones, by telling ourselves stories: “it happened like this,” or “it happened for this reason,” or “it really did not happen at all.” So each narrative helps carry the weight. Petrushevskaya’s characters walk around under it—whether it’s her personal history, or Russia’s—in purgatory, widowed or suicidal or orphaned or so lonely they’ll take in any baby that turns up, scraping the meagerest of existences out of the miserable earth. Wearing one of Gogol’s shabby overcoats or chasing after a severed nose wouldn’t even rate as minor problems for her people.

That’s not to say her stories are uniformly depressing—there’s plenty of gallows humor here, and moments of cheerfulness that mark the truly desperate. And sometimes things turn out okay: the relatively well-off mother-daughter of “There’s Someone in the House” (my stand-out favorite) throws away her clothes to outsmart a poltergeist, casting off the weight of a lifetime’s worth of abuse. And even in the bleakest settings, as in “The New Robinson Crusoes: A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century” (if you only read one story, make it this one), the characters may be without hope but the prose is pure, consoling art:

“If in fact we’re not alone, then they’ll come for us. That much is clear. But, first of all, my father has a rifle, and we have skis and a smart dog. Second of all, they won’t come for a while yet. We’re living and waiting, and out there, we know, someone is also living, and waiting, until our grain grows and our bread grows, and out potatoes, and our new goats—and that’s when they’ll come.”

[ WORK DISCUSSED: Tuesday (9/22) - Adrienne Rich, five poems and an essay. Thursday (9/24) - "New York" by Tony Towle; "Texas" by Padgett Powell; "Babalu-Aye" by Eva Talmadge;" writing exercise.]

I never know how to start the class off. Or anyway that’s how it feels. I usually arrive in the room a few minutes early, and start chatting with whoever else is already there. If there’s a conversation already in progress I’ll try to join it, and if they’re all just sitting around quietly I’ll pick someone and ask how his or her day is going, or how the weekend was. If they throw the question back at me (“and how about you?”) I’ll tell them. I try to take attendance right at the official start time, not so much to punish the stragglers as to reward those who got there early. I want them to see me seeing the effort they’ve made. So we do that, and it’s like–now what? “Okay,” I often find myself saying, “what did we read for today?” It’s not that I can’t remember what we read. It’s just that I think there’s something useful about saying it out loud. I asked the class if they preferred to talk about the poems or the essay first. A few people kind of said “poems,” so I said okay, but then there was another choice to be made–which poem? One of the pitfalls of my teaching style (which strives to be dynamic, responsive, and rigorously un-structured) is that it’s hard to get off the ground. It’s like an old prop plane, where you need to start the propellers spinning by hand and then sort of guide it down the runway and hope everything is timed just right and take-off actually happens. Sometimes this takes a few tries. Nobody seemed to care where we started, and consequently we weren’t starting at all.

I attempted to project a bit more confidence than I was actually feeling, and waited to see who would say something. Soon enough, a student ventured that she liked the ending of “Origins of History of Consciousness.” As good a place to start as any, I thought. If I’m remembering correctly, she liked the last stanzas-

But I can’t call it life until we start to move

beyond this secret circle of fire

where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall

where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps

like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.

Because I’m an evangelist for the value of the concrete detail, we began with the dumb beast of night, and talked about how the image gains power through the accumulation of establishing detail: the head on paws, the location (corner) in physical space. Then we worked together back up through the stanza, teasing out what some of us took to be an allusion to Plato’s cave. Since some people were unfamiliar with this, I asked the girl who’d first named it for us to explain it, and she did–probably with more concision and clarity than I could have managed. The notion of only being able to see the thrown shadows of really-existing but perpetually inaccessible things set a lightbulb off in another student’s head, and he proposed that the closing image of the shadows on the wall was a balancing or responding image to the opening stanzas-

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon

sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,

disssected, their bird-wings severed

like trophies. No one lives in this room

without living through some kind of crisis.

 

No one lives in this room

without confronting the whiteness of the wall

behind the poems, planks of books,

photographs of dead heroines.

Without contemplating last and late

the true nature of poetry. The drive

to connect. The dream of a common language.

We theorized that “the wall behind the poems” was the empty page, the literal wall of the room from the first stanza become figurative (though, importantly, not abstract) in its transformation into the page. It seems to me that the page-as-wall seems to highlight the solipsism of the artistic process, a process that is paradoxically inspired by “the dream of a common language.” The ink thrown on the page is at best a proximal representation of the untranslatable feeling or emotion or urge that set the pen to the paper in the first place: a shadow of something infinitely elusive, and yet the presence of which is undeniable. The proof is in the shadow.

So what about that title? The movement of the poem takes us from the development of a self in section I (all the tics of the aspiring young writer: Great Works on the wall, rigorous self-interrogation, booze in the glass, etc.) to that self’s increasing need for engagement with the outside world. In section II the speaker meets a lover, but also, importantly, gains a sense of what it means to be part of a society. I wish there was enough time in my Expository Writing class’s syllabus to take a class period aside and talk about this poem in terms of their assignment to write about urban safety and citizenship (they’re reading Rebecca Solnit and Malcolm Gladwell)-

…these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching–

to wake to something deceptively simple: a glass

sweated with dew, a ring of the telephone, a scream

of someone beaten up far down in the street

causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream

 

knowing the mind of the mugger and the mugged

as any woman must who stands to survive this city,

this century, this life…

And it is only with all of these things in mind that the closing of the poem can be understood in the fullness of its gravity and scope- this idea that community is a version of the kind of love and especially trust that is required (but also: terrifying, and very very hard) for two people to share if they are to share a life together–and how much more complex and delicate for being writ so large! Also that the perpetual elusiveness of the strived-for Real doesn’t excuse us from striving for it, or from making the most of what’s actually in front of us, even if those things are in the end just shadows.

Intermixed with this long discussion of “Origins” was some solid talk about “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev” and “Dedications.” All these ideas about what it means to imagine “the other”- whether the chorus of phantom voices who narrate “Phantasia” or the many and several addressees of “Dedications” (“I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light / in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out” — hey, she nailed us!). Then I had some things I wanted to say about “Diving into the Wreck,” mostly about how far afield its structure is from “Origins” or “Phantasia.” I want to instill in my students this idea that form and content are unified–or rather, that form is a species of content–and that the choices you make about both inform one another. “Phantasia”‘s snowy stutter of fragments in long lines shot through with spaces as compared to “Origins”‘s tidy compartmentalization as compared to “Diving”‘s longish skinny stanzas that just come one after the other after the other, at the deliberate speed of a diver bound bottomward. That plus the line- “the wreck and not the story of the wreck” which I think has a valuable koan-like quality to it. It tells us something about what writing should do, and also about how it should do it. There are far worse mottoes for a young writer to have “crucified on the wall.”

The only poem we didn’t talk about was “Storm Warnings,” which was fine with me. It was my least favorite of the group, and only assigned because there’d been space leftover on the page when I was making the copies. I feel like that poem is too infatuated with its own portentousness, and I was glad nobody brought it up. We moved on to talk about “Legislators of the World.”

I had brought my copy of Shelley’s Major Works to school with me, and had hoped to read “The Defence of Poetry” before class started, but the day conspired against me, It would have been nice for us all to have read the several pages of text leading up to Shelley’s declaration that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” having none of us do it was pretty good too. As Rich points out, in the “Defence” he was saying it for the second time, having already said it once (and included “philosophers” alongside poets) in “A Philosophical View of Reform” sometime earlier.

We spent a good bit of time unpacking what Shelley meant by this. We theorized that poetry, philosophy–and more generally, all the creative arts–have the ability to instill values, shape worldviews, etc. by playing a formative/generative role in the public imaginary. It is not the place of art to shape policy, or write laws, but it is the place of art to cultivate the spirit of those people who do. The arts are powered by what Rich calls “the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference.” This capacity for drawing likeness from otherness is central to both the human ability to feel compassion and to the project of imaginative literature. If anyone ever asks you why the arts in general tend toward a progressive bias, explain it to them in these terms. Because progressivism (in all cultures at all times, not just in America today) is based on the value of compassion, and the perpetual identification of the self with the other, sameness not despite difference but actually through it. The conservative rejection of those values is essentially a rejection of the entire project of the humanities as such.

We talked about Rich’s claim in the essay that “There is no universal Poetry” in light of both Shelley’s remark about poets as legislators and in light of “the dream of a common language” from “Origins.” We decided that there was no contradiction between the various assertions, even though at first there seemed to be one. An urge toward (or from) the universal may yet be the inspiration for writing poetry, but the final product does not function on anything like a universal scale. It works its magic on individuals, is experienced in solitude even as it was written in solitude, and is in the end a transmission from one self to another self, though it requires the very world itself as the medium of transmission. Poetry doesn’t fail because it fails to achieve universality–or at least, no more than anything else that fails to achieve universality, which is pretty much, uh, everything. Poetry succeeds because it can succeed in achieving an individual connection. Very often, that connection is between a person and her/hisself. The tiniest scale imaginable, but also perhaps the most miraculous.

So that was Tuesday.
 
 

Thursday. So Tuesday was pretty heavy, huh? After that, I thought we deserved a change of pace. So I assigned the class two short-shorts and a poem. I also want to start moving the class away from philosophical discussions about the nature of literature/life, and toward a more craft-oriented approach. I’m supposed to be teaching them writing after all. So today was the first installment of what will eventually be a multi-session lesson on Place, and different approaches to writing place.

In “New York,” by Tony Towle (which you can find in The History of the Invitation, or in Agriculture Reader #3), the city is depicted as a bright, enchanting, and overwhelmingly generous place. It’s a very unusual way of writing NYC, which is so often depicted as grimy, gothic, lonely, and otherwise miserable. It’s a very good-natured poem. It’s funny, quirky, and largely about food (“A peaceful bite of hamburger and your mind is blown into space,” it famously begins–or anyway that beginning should be famous). The class wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. Nobody wanted to say much of anything. So I said something like “well I like this poem because it’s really funny.” I think–here comes the opposite lesson of Adrienne Rich day–too often people are taught that Literature Must Be Taken Seriously, to the point where if a reader’s instinctual reaction to a piece of writing is that it seems light or amusing, she or he assumes they’re just reading it wrong. I know that I was practically humorless about Literature when I was the kids’ age. I could hardly imagine a worse insult to something than calling it a joke.

But as Dylan says, “Ahh, but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.” Have I quoted that line already in this series? I hope so. I feel like I should quote it every day, or maybe write it on the ceiling over my bed. Anyway, I now understand that when a writer endeavors to amuse or delight you, and then succeeds in so doing, this process is not typically called “failure,” but is better known by its synonym, “success.” (There’s another Dylan line lurking off-stage here, but I’m gonna let it sit where it is. As Towle writes in another poem, “if you know, then you know.”)

So we had fun with Tony. Then a different kind of fun with Padgett. My first task was convincing the class that a piece of writing composed almost entirely of one-line sentences, which fits neatly on a single piece of paper, could have possibly come from a book of short stories. They just kept wanting to call it a poem. “Texas” (from his first collection, Typical) is one of my (and Eva Talmadge’s) favorite things our old teacher ever wrote. It’s one of several wonderful short-shorts, at least four of which are titled after states, but for some reason this is the one I always come back to. Eva and I used to get a big kick out of reading it out loud to each other, and if I’m not mistaken a photocopy of it is to this day pinned to a bulletin board above her desk. “I fell off the lightning rod.” Talk about your great opening lines. It’s the kind of story that just begs to be read out loud–actually check that. Powell’s work doesn’t beg for anything. It warrants being read out loud, for the benefit of the reader at least as much as the work.

So we said our favorite lines to each other there in class, and I answered some questions about lines that confused some students (Such as where or what is Fort Worth? and, What natives?) and we talked about how Powell paints such a fascinating and strange picture of Texas–or anyway of a certain breed of Texan–through his use of (wait for it) detail, especially in the positively Barthelmeic list that constitutes the longest paragraph in the piece.

I wish I were a redheaded Fort Worth millionaire ten times. I’d have a good truck, jewelry, ironed jeans, neat house, docile wife, decent daughters, bushy eyebrows, pithy maxims, damn nigh aphorisms now, and very little trouble except possibly nagging prostate. And good boots: Preferably Luccheses, settle for Sanders.

Try reading that out loud. Seriously. I’ll wait.

See?

Anyway. The day’s third selection was the least, uh, funny, but–with apologies to the boys–it might actually be the most powerful piece of writing. It’s a story called “Babalu-Aye,” by my friend and co-conspirator (and Padgett’s former student) Eva Talmadge, published in New York Tyrant #4 and as-yet uncollected. Talmadge’s sense of South Florida is so vivid and visceral its astonishing. You can feel the humidity on your skin. We both grew up down there (though we didn’t know each other) and reading her writing about Miami always makes me think maybe I’m wrong to hate it so much, which is disorienting for me, because I know I have good reasons for hating the place, but in her hands–and hers alone, it seems, so suck it, Carl Hiaasen–Miami just seems so rich and overgrown and alive that I start thinking it’s somewhere I might actually want to spend time. Which it’s not–but such is the power of literature.

Eva’s story is about a teenage boy who dies of cancer. It’s told by his girlfriend, who is speaking directly to him. The story’s main action is her recounting a visit the two of them made to a Santeria priest, in now apparently vain hope of a cure.

The house was small from outside, pale blue and hidden by a dark Ficus filled with chattering green birds–eating berries, coating the walkway with juice. The front room was paved with cold white tile, and crowded with a big TV and a pair of black couches, and two air conditioners, drowning the praying out, and an African Gray in a canary cage, lording over the kitchen. I waited by the bathroom door for you, and looked at the statue of San Lazaro, with bright crying sores. There were glassfuls of scissors at his feet, bound together with rust, and the toilet was filled with cut flowers. Amber light came in through a small frosted window over the sink. I wandered into the kitchen, to look at the bird. He was saying something, like Cara, Cara, but I didn’t know. The light in the house was the brown-bottled color of beer, slanting in through the blinds, wet and cool. The counters were covered in flower petals, and long drippings of honey-dark light streaking the plates.

What can I tell you about this that the prose isn’t already saying? Even interiors are landscapes, or they can be.

The assignment was to write about the place you’re from, drawing on any or all of the three pieces we read as models. We took about fifteen minutes to do this, then spent the rest of class sharing what we’d written. I heard about Bloomfield, Newark, and Nutley–all towns in New Jersey; also, Mexico, a living room couch, and a long drive in search of a Burger King.

One day soon I’m going to assign my creative class the Rebecca Solnit essay my expos kids are reading, because I think it’s a great piece of narrative nonfiction and because I want them to recognize that just because something is anthologized in a comp textbook, that doesn’t make it not art anymore. They groaned when I told them this was coming, because a lot of them have been forced to read it (and presumably taught to hate it) once already. I’m going to make them not hate it anymore. I promised them this. They didn’t believe me. Meanwhile, the other kids (who haven’t read it, because they’re not taking comp) wondered what the hell we were talking about.

But in any case, We’ve been so frenetic so far this semester, always reading handfuls of work, and parsing pairings, and skipping around. It seemed worth delaying the Solnit experience (which will come paired with several poems Solnit cites) in order to just slow down a bit, besides which the class seems ready for something a little more traditional, like a single “regular” short story for us to read then talk about on its own. I don’t know if Lorrie Moore’s “Two Boys” from Like Life qualifies as “regular” or not, but anyway that’s what I gave them for Tuesday.

Did not give them this for Tuesday.

Dear Whoever this is a picture of, Call me?

THE WORD MADE FLESH:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS! We are seeking high quality photographs of your literary tattoos for an upcoming book. Send us your ink! Submissions are open to all kinds of literary tattoo work: quotations from your favorite writer, opening lines of novels, lines of verse, literary portraits or illustrations. From Shakespeare to Bukowski to The Little Prince in a Baobab tree, if it’s a literary tattoo and its on your body, we want to see it.

All images must include the name (or pseudonym) of the tattoo bearer, city and state or country, and a transcription of the text itself, along with its source. For portraits or illustrations, please include the name of the author or book on which it’s based. And of course, you are heartily encouraged to credit the artist who did your work.

We’d also like to read a few words about the tattoo’s meaning to you — why you chose it, when you first read that poem or book, or how its meaning has evolved over time. How much (or how little) you choose to say about your tattoo is up to you, but a paragraph or two should do the trick.

Please send clear digital images of the highest print quality possible to tattoolit@gmail.com. Pixel resolutions should be at least 1500 x 1200, or a minimum 300 dpi at 5 inches wide. Text should be included in the body of the email, not as an attached document. Also be sure to include one or more pieces of contact information, so we can let you know if you’re going to be in the book.