Maggie Nelson Roundup
1. The book is all there is, and it doesn’t matter who wrote the book. The text is the text and has no relationship to anything outside the text. What’s outside the text doesn’t matter. All that matters is what’s inside the text.
and/or:
2. This book is so interesting that I have come to believe that the writer of the book is very interesting. I want to read the writer’s other books, and I want to know about the writer and read interviews with the writers and find out what the writer has said about herself.
This second impulse is amplified when the book is confessional or obsessive or in some way different from other books you’ve read. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is all three of those things. It’s a hybrid of essay and prose poem which starts as a meditation on the color blue, but ends up being about almost everything. If you look at a thing to which you’re drawn closely enough, the book seems to be saying, all your other important attachments will rise alongside the meditation about the thing you’ve taken as your subject.
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Weekend Writing Prompt: Make it rain.
Hiphop has moved—swaggered, even—on from the 2006 rules and regulations. Sure it has. So—yes, I guess—we’re well past making it rain on country’s exotic dancers. Or, well, they’re well past it, those who make themselves their livings rhyming over a usually 4/4 beat.
But maybe you don’t have to be. Over it, I mean. (I mean, who are you to follow the moving-on happenings in the game of being on the grind, right?)
So this weekend when you sit down to do a little writing, do it with a little of the lesson somewhere in Ms. Hoang’s earlier-today lovely disorganalia on overwriting by going in on a story and overwriting it to the point where you move past a disappointing lack of discipline to that moment where excess overwhelms all its many sins and leaves one’s writing in a pure state. Pile on the muck until the muck becomes the point and the muck becomes the beauty.
And if you don’t feel like making it rain in that way, make it rain like this:
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The Adventures of Bluey and the Childhood Writings of Paul Bowles
“Drugs, bigamy, desertion, lawsuits, the plague: these are hardly the elements one expects to find in the writings of a nine year old.”
—Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, biographer of Paul Bowles
When Paul Bowles was 9 years old, he created a diary that documented the adventures and pitfalls of imaginary characters who went on wild journeys and were continually surrounded by death, disease, chaos, and crisis—all of which were conveyed by little Paul in a tone that is eerily mute, terse, and affectively stunted while also being intellectually sophisticated and highly developed in terms of narrative. The 3rd person diary entries have a strange and disturbing quality to them—we immediately pick up on Paul’s obsessive preoccupation with names (characters, places), numbers, measurements, etc. In the entries, Paul invented, among other things, a drug called “postage hypodermic” and a plague called the “Green Horror” (“Marshelle gets Green Horror. Marshelle dies of Green Horror…. Dukol Whitman dies of Green Horror….”). We also get a sense of the way he was trying to emulate the adult world and—in doing so—revealed its utter absurdity. I can’t get over how evocative and fascinating Paul’s childhood writings are—and to think that he had to pen them in secrecy, fearing the disapproval of his father, who once beat him and took his journals away for 2 months when he was caught scribbling.
Below the cut is a brief excerpt from Paul’s childhood narrative, which consists of over 450 entries in total. This particular passage, which was published by surrealist literary magazine View, deals with the mishaps of Bluey Laber Dozlen, who travels to Wen Kroy (“New York” spelled backward) from an unknown European city.
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{LMC}: January’s Selection: Ploughshares
Our third selection for Literary Magazine Club is Ploughshares, a literary magazine based out of Emerson College in Boston, MA. Ploughshares has been publishing since 1971 and is widely considered one of the most pre-eminent literary magazines in the country. Pre-eminence, is of course, a relative concept but many great writers have been published by Ploughshares and they’ve been publishing continuously for 40 years, which in literary magazine years, feels quite a bit older. Published in April, August, and December, each issue of the magazine is guest-edited by a prominent writer. The issue we are reading this month, Ploughshares 36.4 or the Winter 2010-11 issue, was edited by National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes. In his introduction, Hayes writes, “Some say imperfect lines don’t belong in a museum, but I think a sentence’s shortcomings make it human. And anyway this museum is not after perfection. Perfection is not only oppressive, it’s boring.” The writing he has selected for this issue promises to be imperfect in really interesting ways. Each week this month, starting this coming Monday, I’ll post a question that has come to me as I start reading through this issue so we can generate some discussion.
Why are we reading Ploughshares? Why the hell not. After announcing this month’s selection, one member voiced the concern that a magazine like Ploughshares doesn’t really need the extra attention it might get by being one of our selections. He felt our attention would better be directed to lesser known magazines rather than one with a higher, national profile. I understand that concern but at the same time, there’s a lot to discuss about and learn from a magazine like Ploughshares that is well-organized, well-funded, and well-regarded. In the realm of literary magazines, that combination of qualities is rare. You often have excellent magazines that aren’t well-funded or well-funded magazines that aren’t necessarily excellent. I also think there are interesting things to talk about when talking about a high profile literary magazine. Is the reputation deserved? Why? How much does reputation matter? How does it influence as both as readers and writers? Is the guest editor structure a useful one? What do those different perspectives bring to the magazine that a single editor cannot? In what ways does using guest editors, perhaps, detract from a unified voice for the magazine? What can new or lesser known magazines learn from more well-established magazines? How can independent magazines achieve a Ploughshares like reputation without university support? Is such a thing even possible or desired by the editors of independent magazines? There are countless other questions but more than anything I feel that success does not inherently make a magazine less interesting. The notion that it does feels short sighted.
The content from this issue that’s available online rotates each day so you can sample the offerings and participate that way. The best way to get the magazine though is to buy it. Even magazines like Ploughshares need reader support. Information about ordering (well worth it) is also available on the issue’s main page. As always, if you’d like to write a guest post about any aspect or piece(s) in this issue, or if you would like to join the Google Group, please e-mail me at roxane at htmlgiant dot com. I would love to hear from you. I look forward to our discussion this month! In February, we will be reading Unsaid 5. If you haven’t gotten ahold of this magazine, get on it! You will be blown away.
On over-writing, distance, fiction, theater, and film: A series of disorganized thoughts
Last night, I saw Black Swan.
Last night, I read Linda Lê’s The Three Fates.
Last night, I didn’t fall asleep until after 4am.
The first two things contributed to the last thing. I’m usually a very good sleeper. It’s one of the few ways I cope with anxiety: sleep. It is something I’ve trained myself to do since I was a kid. That sounds stupid, but I’m sure a lot of people here have problems sleeping. We’re an anxious lot, what else can I say?
Last night, while I was trying to get to sleep, I kept thinking about Linda Lê’s book. The Three Fates is a book about a two sisters and a cousin (the three fates) who want to bring their old father (called King Lear) from Vietnam to France to show off their successes. The three fates were whisked away from Vietnam before the fall of Saigon. Their father remained. The book is written in this hyper-stylized way, seemingly over-written, over-the-top, a fairy tale with characters unabashedly stolen from other literary works (notably: plays). What sticks to me with this book though is how over-written it is. Every sentence is excessive. If this were a fiction workshop, I’d write next to every single line: “Over-written.”
Bernhard, etc.
There have been several mini-posts on this site about Thomas Bernhard this week. One of our readers, Jonathan Callahan, pointed me toward an essay he wrote in the Collagist about Bernhard, Kafka, what he calls phrase-level and sentence-level virtuosity, reading in translation, and more. It’s an essay in the active Montaignian sense rather than the write-to-thesis sense. Probably someone here has linked to it before, but even if so, it deserves another look. Here’s an excerpt:
Maybe it’s best to begin by considering what it actually means to achieve effects on the reader at either of these levels. “Phrase-level” effects, as I conceive of them, reflect the writer’s scrupulous attention to individual words and his meticulous shaping of these words into the little phrase sculptures we tend to associate with writing that’s lauded as anything from “lyric” or “beautiful,” to “startling” or “uncanny” (or maybe in some quarters dismissed as “opaque”). There are all kinds of phrasal effects available to the rigorous writer, of course, and writers variously adept at making use of them compose a long gamut that runs from, say, the saguaro-like jut of certain singular phrasings in the stories of Denis Johnson and Amy Hempel, Gary Lutz and early Sam Lipsyte, through the quilted prose-poems of Michael Ondaatje or Anne Carson, into Don DeLillo’s uncanny, disorienting hyper-precision, the entrancing syllabic cadences and capering puns to be found in Martin Amis (by way of Nabokov) or Donald Antrim’s alliterative, consonance-rich lilt, all the way through the lingual looking-glasses conjured in the works of Donald Barthelme and Ben Marcus—but the common element is a kind of lexicalmanipulation. This is where the writer rejects the easy, familiar, or prefabricated phrase, vigorously resists the stale and timeworn, dismantles easy idiom, dispenses altogether with overused figures of speech, and not infrequently is forced to discard reams of what he ultimately deems superfluous or weak.
Here’s the rest: “Some Thoughts that Begin with Kafka and Bernhard but Wind up Straying Pretty Far Afield” at The Collagist.
Geography Thursday #I lost count
“Science is not about verification, it is about falsification. And science is therefore the art of being precisely wrong!” -David Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise
Two Sentences from Bernhard’s The Loser
In the opening pages of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, the narrator says:
If I hadn’t met Glenn Gould, I probably wouldn’t have given up the piano and I would have become a piano virtuoso and perhaps even one of the best piano virtuosos in the world, I thought in the inn. When we meet the very best, we have to give up, I thought.
