Breaking News on Paris Review Scandal
Sheep in Wolf's Clothing
Latest in the controversy regarding manuscripts recently turned down post-acceptance at the Paris Review, apparently we may get to see the maligned documents see daylight after all. According to insiders at the Peemsmen Monthly, a second-shift janitor at the P.R. headquarters, upon realizing what literary-scandal-wrongdoing-travesty he’d been made to take part in, ran back out into the trashyard where the massive P.R. dumpster is and fished out said to-be-and-no-longer-ParisReviewianed language.
The janitor, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, is currently looking to publish the lot as a “found manuscript.” He is available for contact via representation by Marble-Withersby Agency in New York.
Currently tallied among the rubble:
– A haiku by Jonathan Franzen on the brevity of life and the deliciousness of fat free yogurt
– An erasure by Nam Le of his mother’s travel diaries as a child, concerning her impregnation with him, which Nam Le erased himself from entirely, a retroactive comment on the Gulf War
– Two halfcompleted crossword puzzles teamwritten by Alice Mattison & Barbie Smeemersund
– A photograph by Charlize Theron taken from the midgrade-price seating of a recent Chicago Bulls practice (kinda blurry)
– Another haiku by Jonathan Franzen about the writing process of the first haiku, which originally appeared on a popular upcoming literary journal’s twitter feed at the tune of $400 a syllable
– A concrete poem self portrait by Rick Bass repeating the word fishinglure in various crazy anagrams
– A transcript of every adjective Richard Ford spoke while restringing his son’s guitar twice in the same afternoon
– A third haiku by Jonathan Franzen regarding the phone call he received from his mother while writing the poem about the writing of the poem, and her subsequent medical condition
– A tear-out unfoldable paper shirt designed by Martin Amis’s agent’s neighbor, a previously unpublished author
– Letters written to Al Gore by Denis Johnson in the voice of Al Gore’s dog, with audio samples contracted to have been available online for $.99 a download on a portion of the website that also will no longer grace the web
I don’t know about you, but I’m positively peeping in anticipation and great terror. Robin Hood or hoodrat? Sylvia Beach or motherfucker? We’re living in a no-holds-barred world here, people, where wicker elephants walk among the real ones. First Tin House is trying to force people to actually buy books, and now these guys want to change their minds on history. Hold me!
lobsters lasters incense 5
5. Aaron Burch interview at new Word Riot. Glow like lung tattoos.
I don’t know. I think one of the interesting things of having been writing stories for a good handful of years now is looking back at stuff and seeing what recurs and finding those fascinations that you weren’t really aware of. I guess I could say something like I believe, often, you have to be taken apart, by yourself or something else, and then be put back together to really grow/change/etc., and so I guess that was kind of what the book became about, though that’s the answer I put together just now for this interview; I’ve certainly never thought of it that prescriptively before, nor was it an intention when working the book.
1. You can buy Andy Warhol’s turtleneck.The same people will sell you Martian Meteorites and Madonna’s appointment books.
February 1999: Pick up dog at daycare. Do crunches. Run LONG! Select polymer for breast cone. Step into groove. Drink 3 ounces lemon juice. Tell Pepsi Co. to go fuck themselves. Wax.
7. If every single poem you wrote was published in mags would you gather those poems and send out the mss? Aren’t they already out in the world?
213. Prime Number Magazine is open for submissions starting now. You miss 100% of publications you never submit to, blar me, rosy tunnel, etc.
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.
The Coming Envelope
Compelling format from BookThug’s new literary journal, The Coming Envelope:
The Coming Envelope is BookThug’s new publication of experimental prose fiction edited and designed by Malcolm Sutton. Every issue features work from five writers. It accommodates hard-to-classify work by those already treading various precipices: uncomfortable here, courting the perverse, typographically observant, exposed to the elements, politically not unaware, falling alongside language.
Issue 1 features work by: Jacob Wren, Sheila Heti, Lily Hoang & Debra Di Blasi, John Goldbach, and Lee Henderson.
$10, on sale now.
McCarthy Lives
In a year of many masters dead, today is Cormac McCarthy’s 78th birthday. Tyler Flynn Dorholt started a thread on FB for sharing some favorite lines in celebration. Really it could be most any of his lines in most any of his books. Add your favorites here?
“Friends row by row watched his passing and waved at him with their fingers and whispered among themselves. Who’d spoke of disorders of the soul and news of the night. When you asked for the shop of the heart’s apothecary we thought you mad. We saw you took down to the brainsurgeon’s keep, deep in the cellar, under the street. Where saws sang in stoven skulls and wet bonemeal blew from an airshaft in the alleyway. Out there in the blue moonlight a gray shecorpse being loaded into a truck. It pulled away into the night. Horned minstrels, small dancing dogs in harlequin garb followed after.” – Suttree
Happy bday, big dog.
THE SICK CITY “CHANGING SEATS ON THE TITANIC” TOUR 2010
Tony O’Neill’s new novel Sick City drops today, and in the wake of it he’s hitting the road. If you are in the trajectory, have a mark! Annotated dates after the break, including NYC, TX & CA…
“I’ve handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.” – Josef Albers
Mike Young—
The Paris Review is unaccepting previously accepted poems, citing change of editorship. Daniel Nester has the scoop.
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chemically free but not in a straight edge kind of way
“The real story, which we have grown unaccustomed to, is chemically free of explanation. . . . The story is always about something unexplainable. The art of narration declines as explanations are added.” -Cesar Aira