Gordon Lish, 1986
A former professor of mine recently gave me a copy of StoryQuarterly 21: Stories from the Gordon Lish Workshops (edited by J.D. Dolan). I don’t want to excerpt too much, but here are some words from Lish:
“This feels good. I tell you, it feels good to have my hands on this forum, and I am not going to let the moment get away from me without my offering a remark or three….I tell you, I take such delight in them all, in all these students, in all these writers, that I’d like to sit here and start reciting names–this in the exorbitant spirit of the madman who thinks the mere calling out of the entries in a list must offer to all who hear an invitation to war.”
ToBS R2: Daily facebook updates of what you ate / listened to while writing today vs. Gordon lish
[Matchup #39 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Daily Facebook Food Updates
As I write this comparison I am eating a burrito composed of Eden Organic Black Beans (no salt added), Seapoint Farms Veggie Blends with Edamame (the wonder veggie), Sunripe sweet grape tomatoes, and Sabra brand, all natural spicy guacamole; the burrito is topped with diced red onions, Polly-O shredded low-moisture part-skim mozzarella (an excellent source of calcium), and Cholula Chili Lime flavor hot sauce, and while enjoying it very much, I admit that my meal is tainted by a somewhat wistful wish that I had a liberal dollop or sour cream or perhaps even crème fresh with which to adorn one of the two large whole wheat tortillas given to me, gratis, by Rock, the Korean owner/operator of the grocery on the first floor of my building in downtown Manhattan’s Financial District. I feel I should explain that my wistfulness is perhaps due primarily to the fact that I’ve only recently returned from a vacation in Tulum, Mexico—an important vacation for a variety of reasons not relevant here—wherein I was continually treated to vast quantities of high quality, though often quite simple, Mexican food, made from fresh local (though doubtless not “organic”) ingredients, and prepared with dutiful attention and care by people whose sincere smiles smashed through my preconceived notions about the disdain and disgruntled attitudes my presence might inspire in the local population. READ MORE >
ToBS R1: gordon lish vs. foot fetish
[Matchup #14 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Background – Feet
Casanova dabbing at some polenta around his mouth, glimpsing the toe cleavage of a passer-by, dropping his neckerchief, hanging his head, leaving his still-full plate on the table, going after her.
F. Scott Fitzgerald looking through the peephole at Zelda (hyperventilating in her chair), writing something in a notebook, lying on the carpet so he can see, under the door, her bare feet shuffling back and forth.
Goethe with writer’s block, sketching a foot, a viaduct, a foot, a cliff face, a foot, a shoe, a foot, a liberty pole, a castle, a foot, a foot, a foot.
Dostoyevsky at a bakery, queueing behind a woman, noticing her sandals, leaving loafless to follow her home, being invited in for vodka in his imagination, his stomach a sad animal.
Elvis looking at a pamphlet, blinking at the words “somatosensory cortex” rereading them for the fifth time, wishing he was holding a pineapple close to his face, wishing he was 13 again with his mother tired from work, taking off her shoes, relying on him. READ MORE >
Gordon Lish Explores a New Gimmick
The esteemed author and former editor continues to push the limits and exceed our wildest expectations.
Watch Lish do the Ugly Dance here!
Cynthia Ozick commented, “The surprise of surprises, the grotesqueries of bizarre-ities (and vice versa). A new invention, catapulting into the blackest hole of all, grinning all the way.”
DeLillo, delighted, stated that Lish is “famous for all the wrong reasons.”
I for one can’t wait to see what the old trailblazer will do next.
Michael Hemmingson’s Lish Project
Gordon Lish Edited This
Forgotten and Ignored Books Edited By Gordon Lish 1978-1994
Gordon Lish Knopf Bibliography [1977-1995]
Gordon Lish began working as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf in 1977 after leaving his role as editor at Esquire Magazine. He continued work with Knopf for 18 years until parting ways in 1995, having assembled what is arguably one of the greatest editorial runs in publishing.
The listing below is a catalog of the titles and authors Lish published during this time. This is surely not a complete list, but is at least a decent stab at the continuum; comments are welcome with any suggestions as to the extant.
Most of these titles, if not having been reprinted by other houses, are available used on Amazon or in places like Abe Books.
1976 Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star
Cynthia Ozick, Bloodshed and Three Novellas
1977 Don DeLillo, The Players
1978 Stanley Crawford, Some Instructions to my Wife…
Don DeLillo, Running Dog
Barry Hannah, Airships
1979 Mary Robison, Days
2010: the books I didn’t read
Yeah, I read some books in 2010. I wish I had read more. These are my favorite 2010 releases I didn’t read.
Iambik Audiobooks: Lish, Tillman, Hunt, etc.
Iambik Audiobooks is a new publisher of audio editions of curated literary fiction. Their current roster includes Gordon Lish, Lynne Tillman, J. Robert Lennon, Laird Hunt, Lydia Millet, and several others, all priced at a very reasonable $4.99 for the majority of their titles.
I picked up the 18 hour compendium of Lish reading selections from his recent Collected Fictions. The recording is pristine, and includes often introductions or lead ins by Lish. It’s the first time he’s ever read his own work aloud for the public. Because the hefty length, this one is the most expensive at the site, but still only $9.99 for the whole set, and also available in smaller editions for a lower price. Hearing him read the work himself adds a whole other layer to the fold. You can preview it here [EDIT: the preview is not of Lish himself; some of the works are read by Gregg Margarite]. I feel like I’ll be listening to this again and again over the years. Maybe I’ll drive somewhere, and now I don’t have to buy like Clive Barker.
Really excited to see such an excellently executed version of a great idea. Check them out.
Gordon Lish Interview @ BOMB + Harry Crews
1. Fantastic new interview with Gordon Lish at BOMBBLOG, on the occasion of his revision of his work for the Collected publication.
GL: The less I have in mind, the more my mind can be counted upon. Unhappily, for me, mind is scarcely the whole of what applies. Call it the art of the bricoleur—making do with less. Making much out of little, a mountain out of a molehill.
2. Edited manuscript, plus photo and brief audio excerpt of Harry Crews teaching in Florida in 1980, at This Long Century.
5 moth-beaten mumblings
14. Flash, prose, short thing? This is your last day to enter the Fineline contest.
2. There is a Gordon Lish Facebook page.
7. Ten best short story collections? Maybe…
5. Here is that David Foster Wallace piece about Federer you should read every year around Wimbledon.
1. Sexcast # 8: Interview/podcast with Roxana Shirazi, author of The last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage.
Do You Really Want To Live Forever??
[Giancarlo Ditrapano sends word of Lish's upcoming class in NYC -BB]
So you still want to be a writer? Ah man, you are relentless! Good for you and all, but it’s getting kind of annoying, so here’s your last chance for a shot at immortality. (But if it doesn’t pan out for you after this class, you’ve got to promise me you’ll just go to law school and give up your dreams, okay? Okay.) Here’s your golden ticket, Charlie. Don’t choke on it: The Mercantile Library in NYC and Noreen Tomassi have organized another superb class for this summer. Every Monday, starting June 7th and ending on the 23rd of August, Gordon Lish will be teaching again. He took a little break (ten years) but started up again last summer. Due to how wonderfully that went, he is coming back for more. The classes run from 5 o’clock until around 11 or 12. Whew! That is a lot of hours, huh? So many hours! And all beside each other, one after the other! But you won’t believe how fast the hours fly by. The energy in that room could power a train.
N.B. If you have any ego whatsoever, or your feelings are easily rattled, or you think you’ve got Gordon’s number and you just might have something to teach the class yourself, then you should probably bag it. You are already dead in the water, my friend. But if you are prepared to throw it all away and start anew, here is your chance. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’ve heard about the Lish classes. I’ve heard it too. Who hasn’t? But instead of sounding like an idiot after spewing a bunch of garbage about them and then saying you’ve never taken one or even met Lish, why don’t you take the class so you can really back that garbage up, huh? Wouldn’t that be great? For once talking about something you actually know about? What do you have to lose? No, really. What do you have to lose?
Here’s the link. And you’re welcome.
Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish
Wow. Forthcoming from OR Books. [via Clusterflock]
In literary America, to utter the name Gordon Lish in a conversation is like adding hot sauce to a meal. You either enjoy the zesty experience, one that pushes your limits or you prefer to stay away. Its Lish who, first as fiction editor at Esquire magazine (where he earned the nickname Captain Fiction) and then at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, shaped the work of many of the country’s foremost writers, from Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah to Amy Hempel and Lily Tuck.
And as a writer himself, Lish’s stripped-down, brutally spare style earns accolades in increasing numbers. His oeuvre is coming to be recognized as among the most significant of the period that spans the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries. Kirkus Reviews wrote of his last collection that “Lish…is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist.”
This definitive collection of Lishs short work includes a new foreword by the author and 106 stories, many of which Lish has revised exclusively for this edition. His observations are in turn achingly sad and wryly funny as they spark recognition of our common, clumsy humanity. There are no heroes here, except, perhaps, for all of us, as we muddle our way through life: they are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and writing teachers, men lost in their middle age: more often than not first-person tales narrated by one “Gordon Lish.” The take on life is bemused, satirical, and relentlessly accurate; the language unadorned: the result is a model of modernist prose and a volume of enduring literary craftsmanship.
Publication April 30, 2010 546 pages
Paperback $17 Ebook $10
Paperback and ebook $22
“When you realize how little these people like being themselves, you begin to understand why they want to escape consciousness”
Today at the tree-tucked magic barn of Grey Matter Books in Hadley, MA, I bought for $8 the very first issue of Genesis West, the magazine Gordon Lish edited pre-Quarterly, so we’re talking on the fun bus with Neal Cassady and not out to lunch with Raymond Carver. Grey Matter Books had the entire set of Genesis West, all seven volumes, except now they don’t, because Nat Otting owns six and I own one.
In this 1962 issue is an interview between Lish and Jack Gilbert, whose book Views of Jeporody had at the time just won the Yale Younger Poets Series award. After the break are two cool excerpts from the conversation, one about that old hobbyhorse of poetry’s relevance, and one in which Gilbert takes to task the aesthetics of the Beat movement. The whole interview is terrific, and I post these excerpts not to signal unequivocal agreement with Gilbert’s grouching, but to air for the consideration of contemporary relevance some pretty solid gnashing from the early mouth of a major poet.
Happy Birthday, Captain Fiction!
Today is Gordon Lish’s birthday. On behalf of everyone here (not just on HTML, but on the whole internet): SALUTES TO THE CAPTAIN. … And thanks to David McLendon, whose Facebook post reminded me. So what will you do for Lish’s birthday?
You could buy a copy of Extravaganza.
You could listen to these Don Swaim interviews with GL.
You could review the complete history of our coverage of Lish and Lish-authors (warning: may not be complete), including the original series of Lish quotations for which I coined the Power Quote category. #1, #2, #3, #4+#5, #6.
Sarki on Lish
M Sarki with an interesting defense (I guess) of Gordon Lish at EWN. I found the intrigue here in Sarki, not in Lish (not so riveting to revisit the Carver thing). Not sure I’ve seen such reliance on another in judging an individual work. Sarki sends his poems to Lish via mail then gets a YES, NO, or SO SO written on the poem. Sarki writes:
But after so many years of working with him I pretty much have a feel for what he’ll like and what he won’t. I get mostly a Yes these days.
Carve
Here is an interview with Carver biographer Carol Sklenicka at The Economic Times, India’s leading business newspaper. This website is quite the thing, especially for the epileptic. It is cluttered and jangly and tries to sell you every square inch of someone’s soul or something. Just focus on the interview.
Noted: a dip in sales of Carver’s books. Why? Why, person who wrote “…a masterful biography rated by the New York Times as one of the best 10 books of 2009″?
For one thing, he was too much imitated and for another, it is usually more important for younger writers to look at living writers.
The imitation thing is one persistent myth, I’ll say that. Is it really more important for younger writers to look at living writers? I absolutely disagree, and my MFA program disagreed, and I am thankful.
Blake Butler—
Gordon Lish is at the pulpit again this summer. “Center for Fiction, Twelve Mondays from June 7 – August 23, 5-11PM $2600 members; $2800 non-members.” Watch yoself.
2
Overheard in NYC: Why Do the Heathen Rage? Edition
This Saturday I gave a one-day seminar on Gordon Lish and the Lish school(s) of writing at The New School. A lot of what I spoke about I’ve written about on this site, and some of it may be posted in the future, when its written form is a bit more polished than lecture/discussion notes, but for right now I just wanted to share one tidbit from the class. Actually, it happened before the class. And actually, it didn’t even happen to me. I was sitting in the classroom, and the first student walked in. He was holding a copy of “Guilt,” a story from GL’s collection What I Know So Far that I had assigned as pre-reading. He told me that he’d been looking it over in the elevator, and the man next to him had noticed what he was reading. He said the man was a good bit older, and presumably affiliated with the program, because if you weren’t taking a class or teaching one, you wouldn’t be there on a Saturday. He said the man leaned over and remarked irritably to him: “Everything Gordon Lish says is lies.” Then the ride was over and they parted ways. He came into class and told me this story. It made me feel like it was bound to be a great class, and moreover, despite the gray sky and freezing rain, a wonderful day. I thought, that, right there. That’s why I love Lish- he brings it out in people.
Blake Butler—
It is all the same to me–the goddamn fancy phony rug, what’s on it and its fucking whereabouts.
Gordon Lish, ‘How to Write a Poem’
