Michael Kimball Guest Lecture #3: The Rough Parts
Here’s a quote from Rachel Carson: “The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.” I always read “still” as “sit still,” which makes me think of this quote from Harry Crews (via Opium): “Sometimes you need to affix your ass to the chair.” That is, sometimes, sitting down and doing the work can be the most difficult part of being a writer. Sometimes, it’s the other parts of life that get in the way. Other times, it is the fiction itself, how we think about the fiction at different points in the process.
So how does the writer get through the rough parts, the blank parts, the parts that we know suck? Virginia Woolf says it is determination: “It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.”
Blake Butler—
Winners for the Artifice Magazine contest (belated in announcement on my part, as I’ve been across the map) are:
Daniel Powell for “1 fiction in the form of a Wikipedia article that’s been e-vandalized”
Mark for “1 Game Genie”
mjm for “0 honeybees framed as the plight of the working man”
To collect their winnings, folks need to email Artifice their addresses at editors@artificemag.com.
Meanwhile, I received issue 1 and gotdamm is it beautiful. Do a look.
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Monday Morning Webahol
Image chosen by word association game with one of the main subjects of this post. Any guesses?
There’s a new poetry blog in town. Contributors to The The Poetry include the Maggy Poetry editorial A-team, plus about eight more fine people, plus^2 some sort of daily-rotating tag-team editorial arrangement. And a key word cloud-sphere that rotates bewitchingly. What else do you want from life? GO THERE.
Several pieces of news from Sentence: (1) The winner of the Sentence Book Award is (for a book-length manuscript of prose poems or a book-length manuscript consisting substantially of prose poems) is Sinead O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds by Maureen Seaton and Neil de la Flor. (2) 25 Sightings of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker by Re’lynn Hansen has been selected as the winning manuscript of The Firewheel Chapbook Award. (3) Sentence #7 is now available. (4) Also available now, An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Congrats all you winners!
Some people know about my doppelganger, the Other (or, since he’s older, perhaps the Original) Justin Taylor, who is a Baptist preacher out of Wheaton, Illinois and the co-author of a book called Sex and the Supremacy of Christ. ANYway, JTO left a comment on his friend David Murray’s post at The Gospel Coalition Blog the other day, which naturally triggered my Google alert, and though I don’t always keep this close track of JTO’s doings, the title of the blogpost caught my eye: “101 Writing Tips.” Turns out that Mr. Murray actually meant “Writing Tips 101;” he’s actually offering his Top 5 writing/preaching tips, which themselves are actually only intended to summarize some video about “preaching blunders” that he linked to. Here’s one now-
3. Don’t overuse nouns
Use verbs much more. Not, “It is our suggestion…” but, “We suggest.”
Heartily recommended to all you young preachers out there. Also: JTO’s blog, Between Two Worlds, is here.
Salute to Salu
Caustic Cover Critic interviews Michael Salu. Salu just did the Vintage Classics’ Italo Calvino and Raymond Carver reissues. His blog here.
“It is like a paler Earth, he says.”
Really astoundingly good new story from our friend Matthew Simmons at The Nervous Breakdown: “We Never Ever Went to the Moon.” It’s got plot and heart and floating. In a self-interview, Matthew says that the story’s from an as-yet-unpublished collection called Happy Rock, all about people who believe in things even while other people are watching them. Somebody needs to make that collection appear, if you ask me.
Alexis Orgera—
I’m loving Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. What a seduction technique: Your coyness might be cute if we weren’t going to die some day, but we’re mortal so let’s fuck. Ha. Read the poem out loud and pay attention to enjambment. It’s really lovely.
"The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace."
Noah Cicero Form Letter
Valentine’s Day is coming again, so i’m going to write a love letter. Anyone can use this love letter for their lover.
Dear Lover,
There are a lot of butterflies on the planet. But none in the winter. You are my winter butterfly.
I want to lick the inside of your belly button. I want to lick the lint out of it and then kiss you. Then you have the lint in your mouth. We are naked and you laugh.
[If you are a straight man or lesbian] I want to grab your pussy. I want to cup your naked pussy in my hand. Your pussy is like a leaf with dew on it on a July Morning. That means I like when your pussy is wet. I like your pussy more when it is wet than when it is dry.
[If you a woman or a gay man] I want to hold your soft penis in my hand. Then I want to caress it until it becomes hard and then I’ll call it a cock. I want you to do things with your cock that will make me moan and make strange sounds.
I want to eat candy with you and check our facebooks sitting close.
We need each other like poor people need food and politicians need votes.
We need each other like cell phones need signals and books need readers.
Right now I’m yearning for your genitals to be near by, for your laugh, for your arms, and your legs to wrap around me and pull me deeper.
I can never get deep enough into you.
I want you have my babies. I want our babies to look like us.
We will raise our children to be nervous and strange and to love music like we do.
I keep seeing your belly in my mind, your belly flat, I rest my head on your belly, your belly is soft and we watch a movie. A movie staring Will Ferrell. Everything is right with the world. We have good credit and our grades are good.
I want to fuck until both of our genitals are chafed and sore.
There are a lot of butterflies on the planet. But none in the winter. You are my winter butterfly.
Sincerely,
Your Lover
(Originally posted here.)
Noah Cicero has several books published on several small presses, The Human War, The Condemned, Treatise, Burning Babies and in a short while The Insurgent will be released. Noah Cicero is currently spending his days snowblowing his driveway. Noah Cicero stands in the snow, in the freezing cold weather, looking around, he likes at night in the winter, when it is quiet. There are no birds, sometimes the wind brushes over the snow, making that sweet sound that politely touches the soul of the kindest and even the meanest of souls. If you ever meet Noah Cicero you should first fist bump him, then give him a hug, he likes fist bumps and hugs. Noah Cicero voted for Barack Obama because he smokes.
Your Very Non-V-Day V-Day Roundup
This will be as mushy as it gets.
At The Fanzine, Jeff Johnson considers Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path.
Dennis Cooper hosts the official online launch of Mark Gluth’s The Late Works of Margaret Kroftis. I have yet to hear anything but the best about this book.
Because we love Roger Ebert now, we are interested in his review of Valentine’s Day.
“Valentine’s Day” is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it’s more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.
Also, did you know that Ebert wrote a book called Your Movie Sucks ?
William Deresiewicz on Tolstoy at The Nation. (I’ve become such a committed Deresiewicz reader I can now type his last name without having to check the spelling first–I check after, and I’m usually right. This goes for you, too, Moe Tkacik.)
NYTea Time: Dominique Browning is quite taken with Cathleen Schine’s The Three Weissmanns of Westport. She locates the book in the updated-Austen trend, but hastens to identify a crucial distinguishing feature: “The strange thing about the Jane brigade is that most of its practitioners have raided only her plots, apparently not quite up to the task of honoring the essence of Austen. But Schine’s homage has it all: stinging social satire, mordant wit, delicate charm, lilting language and cosseting materialistic detail.” Hey, there’s a new Peter Handke book! And Adam Haslett wrote a novel! About the financial crisis! Michiko Kakutani did not like Union Atlantic–-but that was on a Monday; Liesl Schillinger likes it quite a lot today. What else? Jon Caramanica looks at a couple of rock & roll books; Catherine Rampell on the interesting-looking academic-ish-seeming, Capitalism and the Jews by Jerry Z. Muller; Dahlia Lithwick on death row lawyer David R. Dow’s memoir, Autobiography of an Execution; and Todd Pruzan makes my weekend.
Happy Sunday!
Nick Antosca—
Martin Amis’s new novel, The Pregnant Widow, is out in the UK, and once again he’s the subject of much British comment, according to Olivia Cole at the Daily Beast. I cannot wait to read The Pregnant Widow, and I thought House of Meetings was the best novel of his career. Amis recently predicted a “silver tsunami”: “There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops. I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years’ time.”
A Light Has Gone Out in the Land of Poetry
Just heard the sad news that Lucille Clifton has died.
wishes for sons
by Lucille Cliftoni wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
I wish them no 7-11.i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn’t believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.