What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Debra Di Blasi}
Debra Di Blasi (www.debradiblasi.com) is founding publisher of Jaded Ibis Press and president of Jaded Ibis Productions. In addition to her publishing role, she is a multi-genre writer and artist whose books include The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions; Drought & Say What You Like; Prayers of an Accidental Nature; What the Body Requires, and Skin of the Sun (forthcoming). Awards include a James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Thorpe Menn Book Award, Cinovation Screenwriting Award, and Diagram Innovative Fiction Award. She teaches and lectures on 21st Century narrative forms.
while we’re at it…
Shoplifting from American Apparel is being made into a movie. Here is a link to the kickstarter page. All of the information is there. It’s being done by the same people who did Noah’s The Human War and I think it looks pretty exciting. I’m going to donate. I suggest you do the same if you want to. Don’t donate if you don’t want to. Smoke weed if that’s your thing. I’m disabling comments because I don’t care.
Syd Barrett on acid
Interview by Meatball Fulton (1967)
Transcription by Mark Jones
SYD: Well I’ll, I’ll say… for example, painting at an art school. Or painting, say, in infant’s school. The initial desire to paint or initial suc-first successes at painting arised, I think, out of a very genuine basic, um, drive one way or another. So, an-and because of family and social set ups are channeled into success or otherwise and, er, er, through schools and such like and one gets different things. And I think un-and, course, one comes across teachers and people like that, teaching and, sort of, instruction and to talk to and there came, and I feel now that having left art school that there are a lot of things… um… that I could do. A lot of things I see now, a lot of things went in to me, into my head and thinking that these would, perhaps, changing and altering things. For instance I made a painting the other day… and… it’s, I could see and hear very clearly, sort of, different instructions and different criticisms going in to the picture which were in fact p-um-criticisms that I could relate back to art schools and teachers and various things that’d come at that time. So… maybe… this would be very valuable, this break. I don’t know… and, er, sort of, to… try painting again after a break of going in to pop music and going to… playing this sort of music… just might work out that, get more, sort of, basic freedom. I don’t know, it’s something to d-, just things like shape of the paper and, er… seem to be a lot of assumptions taken place. READ MORE >
Rebecca Solnit on a Deficit of Language
I’m a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone at home, but I also spend a lot of time as an activist in the streets, in gatherings and things like that, and following revolutions around the world: the Velvet Revolution, Tiananmen Square, the Zapatistas … In those moments, I’ve discovered in myself and in others a deep happiness, an unknown desire that’s finally fulfilled to be purposeful, to be a part of history and society, to have a voice.
One of my arguments in A Paradise Built in Hell is that we have almost too much language for private needs and desires and not nearly enough for these other things. This need and desire is so profound that when it’s fulfilled, you find these weird moments of joy despite everything in disaster. The whole world is falling apart, but I am who I was meant to be: a citizen, a rescuer, a resourceful person who belongs to and is serving a community.
Try + Mechanics Giveaway
Try by Dennis Cooper and The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse by Lonely Christopher are up for grabs. These are courtesy of the super talented & friendly Joel Westendorf, whose photography and design work are wow. Email satorpress (at google’s mail thing) your address and I’ll pick one winner for each. NOW CLOSED.
The Spirit-Bone of Water
Wilson Harris
In this 2003 interview with Fred D’Aguiar, Wilson Harris speaks of place as character:
FD’A: A great magical web born of the music of the elements is how one may respond perhaps to a detailed map of Guyana seen rotating in space with its numerous etched rivers, numerous lines and tributaries, interior rivers, coastal rivers, the arteries of God’s spider. Guyana is derived from an Amerindian root word, which means “land of waters.” The spirit-bone of water that sings in the dense, interior rain forests is as invaluable a resource in the coastal savannahs which have long been subject to drought as to floodwaters that stretched like a sea from coastal river to coastal river yet remained unharnessed and wasted; subject also to the rapacity of moneylenders, miserable loans, inflated interest. READ MORE >
Adam Robinson—
What books are you looking forward to this summer? IT DOESN’T MATTER. (via Chris Toll.)
5
Doing the Things You Ain’t Sposed To Do
J. Robert Lennon’s Ward Six blog has something interesting at least twice a week. The latest post, “Forbidden things you can do anyway,” concerns:
an amusing exchange with a friend on facebook, a fellow teacher, who presently is grappling with inexperienced writers’ mistakes. She has been citing the mistakes, and then I have been firing back with examples of really good fiction that uses the “mistake” to greater ends. For instance, to “it was all a dream” I countered David Foster Wallace’s “Oblivion.” “Everyone dies in a car accident at the end” reminded me of Charles Baxter’s “Saul And Patsy Are Getting Comfortable In Michigan” (although he did bring them back to life in a later story and novel). And when my friend complained that her students don’t even know to start a new paragraph for dialogue from a new speaker, I threw down Stephen Dixon’s Interstate.
Reading it put me in mind of a beloved former teacher who intentionally pushed everyone’s dare-me buttons by passing out a list of twenty declarations about writing he called “The Rules” at the beginning of every new class, and no one ever seemed to notice amidst the grousing that Rule #20 was: You can do anything you want, so long as you can get away with it, or that none of his own stories strictly followed the prescriptive regime The Rules would imply.
This week in one of my classes, a student turned in a story that began: Here I am, facing the blank page, and someone said: You can’t do that. But I was thinking of the second paragraph of E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, which goes like this:
This is a Thinline felt tip market, black. This is Composition Notebook 79C made in the U.S.A. by Long Island Paper Products, Inc. This Daniel trying one of the dark coves of the Browning Room. Books for browsing are on the shelves. I sit at a table with a floor lamp at my shoulder. Outside this paneled room with its book-lined alcoves is the Periodical Room. The Periodical Room is filled with newspapers on sticks, magazines from round the world, and the droppings of learned societies. Down the hall is the Main Reading Room and the entrance to the stacks. On the floors above are the special collections of the various school libraries including the Library School Library. Downstairs there is even a branch of the Public Library. I feel encouraged to go on.
A young woman I know once wrote a beautiful story from the point of view of a wine glass that sat in a room where a pair of lovers were ruining themselves. READ MORE >
Noah Eli Gordon & Sommer Browning Reading Tour
In support of both of their new books, Noah Eli Gordon (whose The Source just came out from Futurepoem) and Sommer Browning (whose Either Way I’m Celebrating just came out from Birds LLC) are hitting the road and the nation with some singular languages. Come do a look and hear where you can. I just read Sommer’s book of poems and comics and it is brimming with some other energy, kind of like if Dickinson & Kafka had survived to see the advent of malls and complex sugars (or not at all, but you know… it’s electric). Noah’s book, based on his “ambient research” of a year of reading only page 26 of books, is currently glowing in my wait-brain to be eaten hard. Do not miss!
If your city doesn’t appear here, fret not: Noah & Sommer will be reading live here on the site for the return of our Live Giants reading series. Plan to show up March 15th at 9 PMish. More info later. Dates after the jump.