Summer JMWW: This with That
The new JMWW is a mind-fuck. How so? It gives us an essay (“MFA my way: In Writing, As in Life, You Must Have Character“) by Christine Stewart. She drops us three rules to creating literary work that will, in her words, “…makes my heart beat faster, that promises to cast a spell over me.” This advice:
How to do this? It’s pretty simple but I see people forget these basics all the time:
1) You must have a good handle on your main character.
2) Your main character must want something.
3) Your main character must do something.
I find Stewart’s “cast a spell over me” requirements as a worthy goal for a book. I also look for this type of literature, but I respectfully disagree with Stewart’s advice on how to create such a thing. While I have certainly dropped into fictional dreams due to character development, I have also been spun into spells by glow arrangements of words. Possibly I am confused on genre. Stewart opens with a poetry group situation, but is maybe writing only about mainstream fiction? Anyway, this is why JMWW is a mind-fuck. It’s an interesting essay to place along works (see below, among others) that do not meet the character sketch, character driven, character-with-clear motivation template. This juxtaposition fascinated me, and made for a verve/swerve issue. Click.
That We Never Knew This Reaches Upward, Assists the Room Grew by Andrew Borgstrom
From Michael Palmer vs. Michael Palmer (2) by Michael Leong
Damper by Cooper Renner
Ark Codex 0-01-08 by (?)
J. A. Tyler, ZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Author J. A. Tyler has put together a neat thing, a story across five stories, across five publishers. He calls it “wreckage” and describes the story with his uniquely destructive voice:
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ is wreckage. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ takes place as five distinct works, all built around the same core story. Each narrative is that of a girl who holds the last water in the world, a herd of chaos that takes it from her, and the boy who comes to resuscitate it all. But each story takes this kernel and shreds it in a new direction, incorporates other elements, reshapes the narrative in its own image. And each press that came aboard this project, releasing this wreckage into readers’ hands, worked on the same principle of core unity with distinct press-specific alterations. All that is left is the beautiful static hum: zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The publishers, linked here, are:
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [a well]: Greying Ghost
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [the stars]: Warm Milk Printing Press
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [this town]: The Collagist
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [an island]: NewLights Press
This week I received the installment from Aaron Cohick’s NewLights Press (home of the $400 Brian Evenson book), and it is an amazing artifact. It’s completely letterpressed inside and out, and sturdily constructed. It’s hefty. It’s probably about 30 pages, depending on how you count them.
You can see images of the NewLights book here.
Delonte West on Writing
I’m into all kinds of art. I enjoy beautiful things and I like to create.
I guess he had some emotions he wanted to get off his chest. He was just skipping down the Yellow Brick Road in the Wizard of Oz.
If we are going to play with a sock, I’ll play with a sock.
I got out of house arrest this morning.
Bugs Bunny is the smoothest dude I ever met. You know he be chillin’ like it just be a normal day and he- it be cold just like how it is in Boston and he just want to dive in the ground, pop up, he be like oh man this ain’t Albuquerque. That’s got to be the tightest life you just hop underneath the ground and go! No traffic, no Mass pike, no tolls, no taking Yankee hats off- just underneath the ground…BAM…carrots…
I did a study in college, and my study show, in the African American community, the Yankee hat, the navy blue and white, it just, I don’t know, do something for your swagger.
I like to paint murals of the ocean that I see beyond the horizon, because I feel if — in order for us to grow, we gotta know.
You kinda almost have to be the voice of reason out there.
My timing’s a little off. I felt a little foolish.
Soon, maybe this summer, I may get an art gallery going.
Twenty years from now, you’re going to see me riding in a drop top hummer buck naked with some ankle socks on and a headband on.
Well, there is two halves to everything.
One fish, two fish. Red fish, blue fish. Knick knack, paddy whack, give a dog a bone. Ding.
You can’t kill a G. Bugs Bunny is a G.
They took my uniform out of my locker today.
I think it’s kind of freaky.
Dispatch from North Country: The U.P. Book Tour
I started going to the library when I was a kid. My mom took me often, let me check out as many books as I wanted. During the summer, I participated in reading programs. Back then, it was popular to have contests to see how many books you could read in a summer. There were prizes and I enjoy prizes so I would read even more voraciously than I was ordinarily wont to do. It was always such a marvel to me that you could go and borrow books and when you returned them you could get even more books, all for free. I don’t go to libraries as much as I did when I was a kid but there are few institutions that impress me more than the modern library.
On Thursday I participated in the kickoff event of the U.P. Book Tour, which will feature more than 20 events and 65 writers all over Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for the next month. The tour was organized by U.P. writer and resident Ron Riekki who has been coordinating this project for months. Before moving last summer, I lived in the U.P. for five years so it was great to come back to the area and do a bunch of literary things and participate in the first leg of the tour. The tour event I participated in was a panel discussing Michigan books at the Peter White Public Library in Marquette, MI. At a time when libraries are under attack and facing severe budget cuts across the country, it was fantastic to participate in this event at a really amazing, community-supported library. The staff was gracious and professional and the whole set up was really welcoming. If you’re ever in the U.P., the Peter White Public Library is well worth a visit. The facility is really extensive and it’s not just a library, it’s also a community center. There’s a café, a community room with its own stage, public computers and wireless Internet, a really serious children’s library with a play area that comes in really handy during the impossibly long U.P. winters, and most importantly there is, as with every library I’ve ever known, a truly passionate and dedicated staff of librarians who love nothing more than books and putting books into the hands of readers. The library is also open late. It seems so rare these days to see a library open after 5 p.m. that I had to look at the door twice. During the week, they close at 9 p.m.
Book Giveaway: Applies to Thorson
Here’s a chance to win a copy of Maureen Thorson’s Applies to Oranges, which is one of the top five most beautiful books of 2011. No doy, it comes from Ugly Duckling Presse so that means it’s impeccably designed and intentionally detailed: good paper, letterpress cover, set in a typeface I hadn’t heard of (Bembo). But I don’t let that overshadow the poetry, which I first read and thought, “Damn, these are consistent.” They are the melt-in-your-mouth variety. You read one in a comfy chair after work and let it mellow. There’s an orange in every poem, and every poem is about 15 lines long and just one stanza. Earlier I thought the poems were quiet, but reading the book again now I realize no not quiet, tense. For instance, this sartorial sorrow:
If we had lived a hundred years, I’d say
give me washed leather, milliners’ pins,
Battenburg lace looped in orange silk.
Let me learn the politics of exclusion–
six hundred threads to the inch. In place
of island chic, a native’s pretend servility,
I’d dress to show that sorrow can harden
into a surface more starched than any collar,
more formal than the pleats of a skirt
as its hem dusts a dim corridor. It sets.
It makes creases I’ll never press out. READ MORE >
Metamorphoses
One morning Michael Richards woke up to discover he had been transformed into a giant racist. Saying “nigger” is the opposite of suicide, horrible for one’s career. He freaked out and kept repeating the n-word in a comedy club, caught on tape, the way the thousands of rapes and lynchings never were. Technology’s greatest capacity is its inadvertence to do some good. One morning I woke up to discover that I didn’t want to read any more of Kafka’s diaries, just too depressing I guess. To Milena Jesenská he once wrote, of his love for her, “love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself,” which — if I were a girl — would’ve done wonders at the bar, instead of that vodka martini and BMW car keys (or Roland Barthes, depending on the girl you’re after) rested ever gently on the counter. Love is to you the butter knife that spreads it on you, which is less of a compliment than a call to have your cholesterol checked. It’s a beautiful moment when, deep into a book you don’t enjoy, you finally stop. The most honest blurb is not finishing. As the make-up artists applied “baked” on Kramer’s face, I wonder if it reminded them of Blackface ☻. When white people want darker skin for socioeconomically convoluted reasons, I feel so happy ☺.
“… and to offer you a piece of cake, it’s wonderful.”
from Julio Cortázar, The Art of Fiction #83 in The Paris Review (via Matt Bell)
INTERVIEWER
Have fame and success been pleasurable?
CORTÁZAR
Ah, listen, I’ll say something I shouldn’t say because no one will believe it, but success isn’t a pleasure for me. I’m glad to be able to live from what I write, so I have to put up with the popular and critical side of success. But I was happier as a man when I was unknown. Much happier. Now I can’t go to Latin America or to Spain without being recognized every ten yards, and the autographs, the embraces . . . It’s very moving, because they’re readers who are frequently quite young. I’m happy that they like what I do, but it’s terribly distressing for me on the level of privacy. I can’t go to a beach in Europe; in five minutes there’s a photographer. I have a physical appearance that I can’t disguise; if I were small I could shave and put on sunglasses, but with my height, my long arms and all that, they discover me from afar. On the other hand, there are very beautiful things: I was in Barcelona a month ago, walking around the Gothic Quarter one evening, and there was an American girl, very pretty, playing the guitar very well and singing. She was seated on the ground singing to earn her living. She sang a bit like Joan Baez, a very pure, clear voice. There was a group of young people from Barcelona listening. I stopped to listen to her, but I stayed in the shadows. At one point, one of these young men who was about twenty, very young, very handsome, approached me. He had a cake in his hand. He said, “Julio, take a piece.” So I took a piece and I ate it, and I told him, “Thanks a lot for coming up and giving that to me.” He said to me, “But, listen, I give you so little next to what you’ve given me.” I said, “Don’t say that, don’t say that,” and we embraced and he went away. Well, things like that, that’s the best recompense for my work as a writer. That a boy or a girl comes up to speak to you and to offer you a piece of cake, it’s wonderful. It’s worth the trouble of having written.
Have You Seen This Bear?
This young fella (about 1 year old, according to some expert) has been creating quite a stir in the local Boston area. This picture, courtesy of The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, cycled across the local news channels last night, poking its cute little nose into the homes of thousands. One woman reported that she saw this guy rolling around in her backyard yesterday morning. Ah, imagine! A quiet New England summer, the sun just rising over the trees, lying down in the cool, wet grass and rubbing your naked back and ass all over it. Can’t say I don’t envy Mr. (or Ms.) Bear over there. Another visual witness filmed the great creature lumbering about its day, explaining that normally he is a simple wedding photographer, but this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity roused him to take up the camera in new and unprecedented ways. Truly an inspiration to us all. And this seemingly innocent candid bears (pun intended!) a great deal of weight. It shows the fear and isolation of the creature in the eyes of modern suburban culture. What he thought to be an open grassy knoll happened to be the cornerstone of middle class life. A life more foreign to the bear than its onlookers are to the wild. There is such beauty and grace in its stature. It grasps to the branch like a child to his mother’s leg, eyes wide, mouth puckered tight. The greenery just slightly blocking our view of its face. And is there not a better moment to talk about precision and power in metaphor? Man and nature have been torn so far apart, blah blah, no connection, alienation, etc. We all know that. But hey, this is aesthetics in action. This is not just a photo of a bear. This is a photo of a human pondering his surrounding world. So controlled, so conformed, so well known and understood and industrialized, and yet… Here we are, bear and man, so close together in the circle of mammalian life, but further separated than any two creatures that have ever shared a backyard. I went camping a few weeks ago with my girlfriend and there were signs everywhere warning us of bears, and we put all our food and beer in the car when away from the site, but man, can’t we all just get along? Ehh, I guess not. Anyway, that’s old news because Whitey Bulger is dead!
