NEW STORES: The Paper Cave & Weightless Books
Courtesy of two of the best book producers I know: Zach Dodson (of featherproof books) and Caroline Picard (of Green Lantern Gallery & Press): a new independent online book store, and rumored brick&mortar location in Chicago. All sorts of local favorites are among the first titles presented. This has me really excited; nice to see another outlet for great books gathered, as well as a built in support system for readings and other art.
And next: Weightless Books, an ebook store. Again: lots of great presses, all sorts of prices and formats (all DRM free). Fill up those chips. Say goodbye to money.
What Reconciles Me to My Own Death (John Berger)
“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.” – John Berger
Happy Birthday, Mary Jo Bang!
Today is awesomepoet Mary Jo Bang’s birthday. Over on her wall, the best wishes are piling up; fellow awesomepoet Erin Belieu even proclaimed-
All hail Mary Jo’s existence! Hip hip, hooray!
which seems just about right to me. As our regular readers know, HTMLGiant encourages you to celebrate the existence of writers you admire and enjoy by reading their work and buying their books. You can start over at Poets.org, where there are five MJB poems and a bio. A similar setup, but with mostly different poems, can be found at the Poetry Foundation. Her most recent collection is The Bride of E, and the one before it, Elegy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Those two are both published by Graywolf. I also know many people who are strong partisans for her early book, Louise in Love. All this plus The Eye like a Strange Balloon and The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, so there’s really no excuse for not getting your fill. Mary Jo Bang, HTMLGiant wishes you a very happy birthday, and advises that you never–ever–do a Google image search for your last name. Cheers!
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
The fact I can write this at a bar is almost like flying cars.
Seated for hours in front of a large glass of beer!
The odor of gin, of tar, of ginger, of leeks and cloves.
Murder the wine merchant!
From one end of the country to another, there exists a freemasonry of alcoholics.
Did you just drop my bishop in your beer?
This place smells of lazy crowds.
Today we should drink four bottles of wine and read the contents of our libraries haphazardly.
Blar.
I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.
BLUE
Do you write more or less during times when you’re depressed? For me there are two kinds of depression, the kind that comes from failure or rejection (which usually leads to long sessions of writing), and the kind that comes from feeling worthless because I’m not writing enough (which is tougher to beat because it’s not intuitively obvious that the cause is not enough writing; breaking this sort of depression requires more willfulness, because the insidious thing is that is doesn’t particularly make me feel like writing; I just have to remind myself from past experience that productivity makes me feel not-worthless).
A Million Little Catfish Pieces, or, the Question of Truth
Damn near a month ago, Blake saw Catfish and posted about it here. Well, Catfish finally came to my quaint Canadian town, and I saw it last night. It was good. It was scary.
But what strikes me about this film is the obsession (re)viewers have with whether or not it is true. And sure, I’m no different. After I saw the documentary, I went home and immediately plugged into Google to find an answer.
What is our obsession with authenticity? Why do we “have to know” if something is real or not? Of course, not so long ago, there was a big “to do” about James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, if only because he called some real that was not real. Why does it matter though?
Do Mechanics Matter? Get Off My Lawn!
In my writing classes I often tell my students that I’m teaching writing, not grammar, that there’s a difference between the two. I talk about how I’m more interested in how they express themselves and demonstrate critical thinking than I am in grammatically perfect prose. I also tell students, however, that grammar does matter—to be well versed in the mechanics of writing can only strengthen their work and, where applicable, their argument.
In creative writing, the same thing is generally true. I can forgive unpolished prose if I’m reading an amazing story or poem. At the same time, I’ve seen a rash of work lately where writers have clearly not taken the time to read their own work. I’ve seen missing words and characters whose names have changed mid story, sometimes more than once. The quality of writing is just terrible at times, so terrible that I cannot focus on whether or not the story, creatively, is something I am interested in. It’s quite difficult to take a writer seriously if you cannot really read their writing.