Matt Bell—
The Book Design Review blog has posted their Favorite Book Covers of 2009. Which others did they miss? What was your own favorite cover of the year?
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Craft Fitness: On Writing Exercises
The first writing exercise I assign in any class is to have students write a brief (500 words) essay, reflection or story (depending on the course) in response to a specific prompt using only one syllable words. As I relay the assignment, students express a charming range of reactions from “this bitch is crazy” to “this is impossible and this bitch is crazy,” but off they go to their dorm rooms and apartments and two days later, they return to class having written something within the assignment’s constraints and having learned about the value of a thesaurus.
Blake Butler—
Nice thread on the Dalkey Archive Facebook, featuring interviews with authors from their Best European Fiction 2010: Julian Gough, “Any decent writer is playing with nuances, rhythms, echoes, soundstuff that will evaporate in any literal translation. I like a lot of layers. Puns, resonances, double-meanings, Tipperaryisms, things my mum says at Christmas. Often the point of the sentence hasn’t anything to do with its literal meaning at all.”
PHOTO: THE CREEPIEST NURSERY SCHOOL FACADE EVER
I swear to God, this is a real nursery school in Manhattan. I took the picture.
jhonen vasquez school for tots
Get Down Moses
I. If you enjoy it when people come over and casually browse the spines of your bookshelf, you are a nerd.
II. When your literary journal is a wordpress/blogger subdomain using one of their templates, I imagine someone who felt they wanted to be an editor for 20 minutes, during which time they started said journal.
III. When your literary journal has per inch/pixel ‘wrap text’ margins (vs. defined paragraph width), despite how wide the browser is, such that a full paragraph reads as one single line the length of a child’s arm, I feel bad and don’t read the stories.
IV. When your blog’s color/font specs are antagonistically provocative (blaring colors, extremely small or large fonts) only crazy or bored people who think you’re charming will read your blog.
V. When your friend with the ’20 minute set-up’ blog template journal nominates you for a pushcart, it just means he/she put an envelope with some paper in it in the mail, sorta like sentimental recycling. You weren’t ‘realistically’ nominated.
VI. When you diss on someone more successful than you, you’re just being human. When diss on someone less successful than you, you’re just being a dick.
VII. When you dismiss people for either having or not having an MFA, for being or not being a particular gender or race, or for just liking a book, band, movie that you don’t like, you are being provincial.
VIII. When your third-person bio is longer than the flash fiction piece it’s accompanying, that’s fucking lame.
IX. If you are lucky enough to get ‘fan e-mail’ and you don’t respond (even if it’s just “thanks, I appreciate it”) because you are ‘busy,’ or in some sick way you think not responding to fans further legitimizes your fame, you are an asshole.
X. If you think I’m a dick, you should have a drink with my dad.
Alec Niedenthal interviews Rudy Wilson
[Please welcome once again the incredible Alec Niedenthal, our to-be next Giant, herein talking language in a quite incredible Facebook-based interview with Rudy Wilson. Enjoy. – BB]
I have Blake’s original post on the book, and Peter Markus’s write-up on the same, to thank for running me into Rudy Wilson’s masterful and wildly original The Red Truck. Or, I guess, for running The Red Truck into me. If I’m remembering right, after one or two editions on Knopf, The Red Truck stayed out of print until Ravenna Press reprinted it earlier this year alongside Wilson’s new collection, Sonja’s Blue. The Red Truck is Lish-edited. Lish cut about two-hundred pages out of the book and carve(re)d the sentences to his liking. Blah blah blah. The result–though I’m quite confident that the original manuscript has the same beating heart–is haunting, colorful, relentlessly strange; The Red Truck has a light and sinister southern music very much its own. This kind of writing, to me, counteracts the sordid history of the South; it is evil confronted by the sleeping noise of a brain-fucked boy (though a girl does eventually narrate, there is really no differentiation between voices), by the rhythm of his throat. Not dissimilar to Peter Markus’s boy-based songs, The Red Truck is the record of a boy shrouding violence in his sound.
Wood Not Waiting For Mean Week
Wow. In these days of all Nicey-Nice, I thought the truly scathing book review went the way of disco or actually meeting someone before you made them your “Friend.” I was wrong. Picked up a New Yorker (OK, it’s a month old, which is like a decade in Internet years, but bear with me) all crumpled/curled on my bedside table in Relaxed Rat position, and inside James Wood takes Paul Auster to the blender.
If you need a primer on evisceration via book review, here you go:
Uncategorized / 58 Comments
December 21st, 2009 / 5:09 pm
December 21st, 2009 / 5:09 pm
One Reader Writes
This comment appeared yesterday on a very NSFW post of mine from back in June, “Getting to Know Furry Girl & Feminisnt”. It comes from Janet Hardy, co-author of The Ethical Slut, and it clears up some confusion I had about a seeming change in authorship–namely hers–between the original and revised editions of the book.
December 20th, 2009 / 10:58 pm edit Janet Hardy—
Janet Hardy here — a Google alert pointed me toward your blog when you started talking about Ethical Slut. “Catherine A. Liszt” and I are the same person — she’s a pen name I used to use when my kids were still minors (“cat-a-lyst,” get it?).
The new edition of “Slut” is an extensive rewrite and expansion of the original book — after 12 years, we found we had a lot more we wanted to say, and a lot of changes we wanted to make in how we said it. I’m glad you enjoyed the original book but I think you’ll like the new one even more.
Thanks,
Janet W. Hardy
You can learn more about The Ethical Slut (the perfect last-minute Christmas gift for that special slut in your life–or, better yet, that special non-slut you’re looking to loosen up) at the Greenery Press site (while you’re over there, be sure to also check out The Compleat Spanker and A Hand in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting for all Genders and Orientations). And the best part of this whole episode is that I was reminded of how long it’s been since I checked in with either Furry Girl or with Susie Bright. Anyway, we can all look forward to more sex-positive literature-related pornography appearing on this site in the nearish future.
PS- bonus points for any commenter who, without googling, can cite the literary reference in the title of this post.
The Laminated Cat (Rule of Threes #2)
Urban Perspective with Self-Portrait, Federico Garcia Lorca from graphicwitness.org
1. …and I just spilled coffee all over García Lorca’s “Dance of Death” from Poet in New York. Just listen to these lines (read them aloud, I mean):
They are gone, the pepper trees,
the tiny buds of phosphorous.
They are gone, the camels with torn flesh,
and the valleys of light the swan lifted in its beak.It was the time of parched things,
the wheat spear in the eye, the laminated cat,
the time of tremendous, rusting bridges
and the deathly silence of cork.
Now imagine those lines swimming in Starbucks Christmas blend. What is a laminated cat? WHAT IS A LAMINATED CAT? (Other than the band or the song.) I don’t care–I’m a believer in Keats’ negative capability argument:
when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
Which could be a handy way of getting out of analysis, but I don’t think so.
If you buy any book with that holiday gift card from Aunt Mitzy, go out and get García Lorca’s Selected Verse, Revised Bilingual Edition, edited by Christopher Maurer. With cover art by the poet. I don’t actually understand very much Spanish, but I think it’s important to read the Spanish aloud anyway to get the rhythm and lilt into my bones.
2. On a more ridiculous note, I reread The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett this weekend. Yes, that’s The Secret Garden, the book many of you (girls?) read when you were nine or ten. I was at my parents’ house and forgot to bring a book. Dickon was one of my first literary crushes. He went around with a pet raven on his shoulder (those of you who know me will recall my only tattoo).
Remember the books that made you fall in love with reading? And the characters you first fell in love with? What were they? Sometimes I think we all get so caught up in what’s going on now, what’s cool now, that we forget the importance of our formative literary experiences…
3. Interesting article about female sexuality as portrayed in the media (New York Times).