The Postman’s Mother by Megan Savage
The postman has never penned a letter. Not on paper. For the postman a letter has always been a prayer sent upward from head to heaven. He has also never left home. Now, Mother rests abed, breath labored, bedsores hot. For supper, he serves her mashed potatoes and coleslaw, and afterwards he reads from Pearl S. Buck.
— from “The Postman’s Mother” by Megan Savage, published in Spork, 2006
There are no letter “i”s in this piece, a convincing nod to George Perec’s A Void, which I find very impressive. Try to write just one sentence like this; it is very difficult. This was originally published in 2006, but deserves a fresher read. Read the rest here.
Long Song Cave
The Song Cave is a chapbook press run by poets Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. Each chapbook comes in editions of 100, is signed, and contains a “single poem in a single volume.” Their latest release comes from Ben Lerner.
Make sure to check out available past editions from Cyrus Console and Amanda Nadelberg and keep an eye on this press in the future. What they have coming is new light.
Group Effort #2 Results
It’s fitting that the author of the book that inspired my new favorite tv show should appear in this piece, particularly due to his “abiding hatred” for the blogosphere. Thanks to all who participated. in the second installment of Group Efforts!
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS [REDUX]
We are goober. We are brontosaurus. In the back of a car, we are dumb luck.
We drink our quiet through a straw and piss whispers behind the neighbor’s shed.
Sometimes, when we are sleeping, ferns the size of houses make us cry. Not because we are sad. But because they are beautiful. And we are hungry.
*They,* however, have shown no interest in us or our activities. For that we are grateful, though not a little bemused.
Was it not they who, after considerable wining and dining, sold us on moving here?
Did they not offer our sons their daughters? We must be vigilant, lest we be unmoored.
[Our parents have no idea! Even though we are so close to home! They never know we are hungry! They never think we are asleep!]
And so one night we wake, the hunger in our heads spilling out like lantern light at last.
We shake our daughters from sleep and dress them, lacing their toe shoes and lowering their tulle veils. We tiptoe down the courtyard, past our full and sleeping parents, and lead our dancing daughters to their bridal feast.
Our greed is a moonslice on the gravel.
[I saw Buzz Bissinger in Pittsburgh. He sounds a lot like Lewis Black. Called a guy who asked a dumb, confrontational question a “fuckhead.” I like Buzz Bissinger a good deal.]
“Oh, woe!” cried the sisters. The tulle-veiled, toe-shoed, whispering fern-dream sisters. “We don’t like Pittsburgh! And we don’t like Lewis Black! Please don’t make us marry him! He sprays spittle! Every time he speaks!”
*Please don’t make us…
I read that Buzz Bissinger hung himself the next day. He didn’t even leave a note.
Just a birthday card from his mother. The card was three weeks late and did not even make a joke of its own belatedness. I doubt the sisters read the newspaper. I know *they* don’t. Our parents don’t read at all.
The Middle Path
Robert Cohen has a new piece worth reading called “Going to the Tigers: Notes on Middle Style” now up at The Believer.
Ultimately, I disagree with Cohen because to my mind he’s implicitly recuperating the old Aristotelian virtues we know so well from Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, in order to illustrate his point about the value of avoiding both excess and deficiency. What seals my disagreement is this statement:
Reading a novel that feels overly finessed, not quite visceral, makes us antsy and peevish. Enough with the light show, we think, enough with the incense, the dry ice, the elaborate riddles and evasions. No wonder people hate novels.
For one thing, I disagree with his use of first person plural. It makes “us” antsy? “We” think? Really? You’re gonna make a claim that you know what reading an overly finessed, not quite visceral novel makes me feel? That’s bonkers. And point of fact, I almost exclusively (and purposefully) read works that strive for light shows, incense, dry ice, elaborate riddles and evasions. I’m being serious. That’s why I attend to literature: for the spectacle.
But before I skin my tongue, I’ll leave it there. Take a gander. Seems like something that might/could spark some conversation.
Uncategorized / 120 Comments
February 3rd, 2010 / 11:34 pm
February 3rd, 2010 / 11:34 pm
Matthew Simmons—
“He died in a monstrous blooming rose of blood and fire outside of Munsan-ni, under a mortar attack. A week earlier, Chinese rounds had tracked a squad across a valley floor with relentless, elegant, fussy precision, killing two and wounding two.” An excerpt from Gilbert Sorrentino’s posthumous novel The Abyss of Human Illusion at The Brooklyn Rail.
24
Hidden behind the buzz: Leon Botha
Hidden behind the buzz around this wonderfully strange—and slickly produced—band called Die Antwoord is the inclusion in this video:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc3f4xU_FfQ
of an artist named Leon Botha. Botha is one of the oldest living persons in the world with a condition called Progeria. He’s 24 but he appears to be in his 80s.
The two vocalists in Die Antwoord have done some work to make themselves as visually arresting as their costar—the severe and unflattering haircuts, the poor needle and ink tattoos on the man, the peroxide on the hair and eyebrows of the woman—but they can only achieve so much. Botha steals the attention of the viewer. And what I like most about this is that I think Botha wants that. He wants to be seen. But how many will notice him behind the catchy music, funny haircuts, and—interesting, I’ll admit—artifice of Die Antwoord? Some attention to him is paid after the cut.
READ MORE >
2 STORIES
Wow, I just read the Bolaño story in the most recent New Yorker—it’s here, and it’s called “William Burns”–and I loved it. First anything by Bolaño that I’ve loved. I had very mixed feelings about 2666. But this was great. It kind of reminded me of a Ligotti story, with the degrees of distance from the narrator, the surreal dread, the shifting perceptions of the source of danger, and the dreamlike progression. It feels like transcribed dream, which is of particular interest to me at the moment.
Similarly, I’m loving I. Fontana’s “UB” at Spork, just as I loved the Jean Harlow story from a while back. I’m interested in anything Fontana writes these days; he knows what he’s doing.
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February 3rd, 2010 / 7:28 pm
February 3rd, 2010 / 7:28 pm
Another Blowjob, Live
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-0xDa4-fi0
And yet another (of the transfinite number) reason to live in New York.
Six-Word Memoir on NPR
Since I missed the live broadcast, I’ve been waiting all damn day for NPR to post today’s “Talk of the Nation,” and now they have! Today’s show features a segment with homegirl-in-chief Rachel Fershleiser and guy-I’ve-met-a-couple-times-who-seems-cool-too Larry Smith, who are talking about their massively successful series of Six-Word Memoir books, the newest of which is It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs from Writers Famous and Obscure. These books have become so big and so ubiquitous over the past few years that I think it’s easy to forget what a coup their success represents–the project was developed on the indie webzine Smithmag.net, and even after getting picked up by Harper Perennial (disclosure: also my publisher, blah blah blah) thrived in large part due to Fershleiser’s and Smith’s tireless hands-on DIY ethos, their willingness to throw countless events all across the country, and their ability to stimulate the continued interest, support and attention of thousands of contributors. None of which are remotely easy things to do once, much less over and over. So a hearty cheers to Rachel and Larry, and to the many NPR listeners who called in from all over the country during the segment to share their own six-word memoirs, especially Shelby the lunch lady from Lacrosse, Wisconsin: “The hairnet. Now we are equal.”
Matt Bell—
From Michael Rudin’s “Writing the Great American Novel Video Game” at Fiction Writers Review: “The keyboard we writers know so intimately… lives a double life, spellbound in passionate affairs with a video game community that dotes on it as affectionately as we authors ever have. For every keystroke a writer uses to describe character or establish scene, somewhere in cyberspace a gamer uses these same keys to navigate gunships and commandeer submarines.”