11 Pringle cans of furled knees
14. WTF? I thought Shane Jones killed February? (as noted) Today I learned that freezing rain is different than sleet. The hayseed fear-mongering weatherman just went simile on the ice; he said, “It’s like a candy shell.” Not bad, though a discord of tone. University dismisses the pacing, caged jaguar of classes; milk and bread sales go all Kelly Clarkson; and I wonder how many sit at home on their MePhones? Just years ago would have been a book for every downtime: waiting room while oil is changed, the vehicle registration line, the afternoon at the bar, this big-ass blizzard. Now it’s a phone. Just saying, but not me. I’m about to cuddle up with Into Thin Air and my Hobart flask.
9. To shit you or to shit you not. I shit you not. Reality rajah Mark Burnett is making literary Cliff’s Notes (yes, those little yellow pamphlets that borrow their color scheme from roadsigns) into a TV comedy series. OK.
1. Dawn Raffel at Willow Springs (with all kinds of good extra links).
94. Look here you smarmy-asses: novels in which the author appears as himself!
2. A sudden thought: What if AWP is snowed in and everyone having to sleep on the Book Fair floor curled inside their satchels, lean-tos made of idiosyncratic eyeglasses, perfect-bound tents of spine-broken books? And when the power fails, what book will we burn first for heat?
2 girls and 1 song
I had to google “Ke$ha,” and now I know she’s a singer, and that “Tik Tok” is a song of hers. Amy is really pretty and sings the song relatively well, lending a folkly sensibility to a hip-hopish song. In the comments, guys say they love her, and that she’s really beautiful. Katie, conventionally speaking, is pretty ugly, and doesn’t sing the song that well. Due to her weight problem, she speaks and sings in that “fat” way that sounds like gasping for air. I’m not trying to be mean, or exploit Katie. I’ve just been obsessed with these two clips for awhile. I want this post to be about how deep down inside Katie is a great person and how deep down inside Amy is some bitch, but that would be presumptuous and unfounded. You might want this post to be about how I see beauty in Katie, perhaps even a humane fumbling truth, but I don’t. We all want songs to sound good, and for people to look good. The videos are “related,” so many of the guys who said they love Amy were also really 2x mean to Katie in the comments. One guy even said his dick fell off. I once had dinner with a friend, among other friends, and she said how attractive everyone was, not in a flirty way, but a self-satisfied way. I remember being disgusted by that comment, and felt sad for this world. I know I sound like god damn Holden Caulfield right now, but I think I’m frozen at age 17, save my hair line. Everything I’m saying is obvious. I’m a hypocrite. I like James Joyce and hot chicks. I guess I’m saying I wish I weren’t shallow. And dare I say, I wish you weren’t shallow either. I wish I liked Tom Clancy and Thomas Kincade. I wish the dollar symbol wasn’t “cool.” I wish we’d all stop trying to fuck hot people. I hate sexy, and I’m starting to hate sex. But Morrissey ruined celibacy for me. I hope Katie is a happy person. This post has depressed me.
Ursula LeGuin on Roberto Bolano’s Monsieur Pain
I wish I could stick a USB jack into certain heads and simulate the experience of reading certain books through the filter of the host head’s consciousness/aesthetic inclination/interior life/knowledge/etc. I would like a simulation of the experience of being David Foster Wallace and reading Tom Clancy. Here are some other dream scenarios I’d like to inhabit: Susan Sontag reading Barry Hannah, Philip Roth reading Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer reading Erica Jong, James Wood reading Vladimir Nabokov, Lydia Davis reading Marcel Proust, Brian Evenson reading Robert Coover, Diane Williams reading Christine Schutt, Rick Moody reading Dale Peck, Alice Hoffman reading Richard Ford, Stephen Dixon reading Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Bernhard reading Thomas Mann, Slavoj Zizek reading Deleuze and Guattari, William Gay reading William Faulkner, Jennifer Egan reading Edward P. Jones, Edwidge Danticat reading Lyonel Trouillot, Pauline Kael reading Walter Murch, Lawrence Weschler reading Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter reading Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood reading Dan Brown, Borges reading Kafka, Kafka reading Nathan Englander, Nathan Englander reading Zadie Smith, Zadie Smith reading Edward Said, Edward Said reading Snooki, Snooki reading Milan Kundera, or Ursula LeGuin reading Roberto Bolano. READ MORE >
Can We Not Talk About What We’re Working On Again, Please?
The pendulum has swung, as pendulums are so woefully apt to do. When I was small, and first starting reading about what writers said about writing, they all seemed to say that it was better not to discuss a work in progress. At the time, this seemed a kind of magic trick, a superstition of some kind. But I’d be damned if I didn’t take their word for gospel, even though I didn’t understand it any better than I understood the actual Gospels (I heard “Jesus is everywhere” and imagined a thousand teeny tiny invisible Bethlehem babies lounging around even as I bathed).
Apparently, I was damned. By the time I started writing in earnest, the whole mechanism had to do with not only discussing but sharing your work in progress. In college, this was great, because I wasn’t in any way ready to complete anything to the point that it could be published. So participating in workshops was like army boot camp. I learned lots.
In MFA school, I still learned, especially in literature seminars, but I certainly didn’t complete anything publishable. But this time, I was probably ready to, but was hampered by the workshop process. There were three reasons for this, I think. 1, in no workshop that I took did anyone say that a piece should just be abandoned. All criticism was constructive, which was the point, but in reality some work needs to be torn down so that something better can be built in its place. I’m very impressionable, so after hearing my work discussed for 20 or so minutes, I became convinced it was worth my continued attention even if it really wasn’t. But I ran into trouble with the continued attention because 2, my classmates’ and professor’s opinions about any one piece, even a 3-pager, were so conflicted, and the problems they unearthed so convoluted, that I was totally lost when faced with revision. To make matters worse, 3, my professors and classmates (not to mention lots of other people in my life–they all agreed) also told me what book they thought I should write, and how I should go about it. Almost five years later, I have only just really decided that they were wrong, and that the book they had in mind is not the one I should write, at least not right now. Like I said, I’m very impressionable. I have confidence in my own work, sure, but there is something powerful about everyone you know saying they want to read the same as-yet-unwritten book by you. Powerful and dangerous.
Glam Lit: Eight questions from the Jaipur Literature Festival
The DSC Jaipur Literature Festival, held January 21-25 at the Diggi Palace in Jaipur, India, is the biggest literature festival in the Asia Pacific region and supposedly the biggest free literature festival in the world. I spent the festival investigating the new culture of literary glamour that has arrived in the subcontinent.
i. Do glamour and literature make good bedfellows, or should they stop hooking up?
Jaipur is a city on the edge of desert. It is a few-hour or half-day drive from New Delhi (depending on who you’re asking), which is India’s publishing and intellectual capital. I’ve never been to The Hamptons, but Jaipur feels like it could be an equivalent, except the white linen and Bentleys are exchanged for multicolored, mirror-work ethnic wear and camel carts. It is also the bastion of very old money, meaning the town is populated with the offspring of an 11th century clan of feudal rulers known as the Rajputs, who built hundreds of opulent palaces, most of which have been turned into tourist attractions or guest houses.
Scene from the balcony of the crowded Jaipur Literature Festival front lawns.
Hearing writers speak under grandly decorated tents at a Rajput mansion built in the 1860s gives all of the Jaipur Literature Festival’s events (even a panel named “The Return of Philosophy”) an inherently glamorous feel. Glamour is defined as “the quality of fascinating, alluring, or attracting, especially by a combination of charm and good looks,” and it is the preposition that makes me suspicious when it comes to the literary scene. But maybe, just two months in to a year of living in India, I’m just not used to it. Because in my experience, book events in America are held in convention center rooms under florescent lights, or in the children’s section of a bookstore set with uncomfortable folding chairs, or in the usual stronghold of American literary glamour: the grimy bar. READ MORE >
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February 1st, 2011 / 10:56 am
February 1st, 2011 / 10:56 am
Death to February
That I hate February so much is one of the reasons I love Shane Jones’s Light Boxes. To mark the first of this horrid month, here are two questions I posed to Shane.
CL: Does February feel like it lasts a few years to you, the way it does in Light Boxes?
Shane Jones: It feels long, like another month hiding inside February, but not a few years. It mostly feels like I’m wearing a blanket of sludge-ice and still trying to go to work and smile at everyone in my sludge-ice blanket.
CL: Given the chance, would you actually remove February from existence?
SJ: Probably not because as much as I’ve talked and written about February, I kind of like it. It’s comparable to Oscar the Grouch. You hate Oscar because he’s a scummer, but you also like him because he’s just exactly who he is, Oscar the fucking Grouch. Every once in a while I have a vision of spending all of February in a place like Los Angeles. That would be a different experience from New York.
Get Me Up Close To the Lives of Others
Anytime an essay’s title riffs on a variation of “The Problem With [insert perceived source of a problem],” there is likely to be a problem. It is a provocative way to begin a conversation, surely, and provocation is often useful to instigate discussion but when there’s “a problem” with something, vague generalizations are likely to follow. In the Sunday Book Review this week, Neil Genzlinger wrote an essay, “The Problem With Memoirs,” where he takes issue with this “age of oversharing.” He writes, “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment,” as if there should be a vetting process for who is or is not eligible to write a memoir.
For a long time, I was fairly skeptical of memoirs and did not necessarily see the utility in reading an accounting of someone else’s memories, particularly when those memories seemed to come from an ordinary life or a life not yet fully lived, as is the case for young memoirists. I understand Genzlinger’s frustration but his lament felt a bit narrow and shortsighted. When a very young person writes a memoir, I often wonder what they could have possibly learned, but that attitude is not necessarily fair, particularly because people often mistake memoirs for autobiographies and they are not the same thing. As I understand them, autobiographies recount the entirety of a life lived. Memoir, which takes its meaning from the Latin memoria, to reminisce, is about a moment or series of moments in time that might speak to something greater. Memoirs are more intimate in scope. A memoir tells a close story so it is not surprising then that memoirs are written by people of all ages, whether they have accomplished something noteworthy (a relative concept) or had an unusual experience (also relative), or not.
15 random sentences from Raúl Zurita’s Song for his Disappeared Love
15. Now Zurita – he said – now that you got in here into our nightmares, through pure verse and guts: can you tell me where my son is?
14. It’s not tough not the solitude, nothing has happened and my sleep rises and falls as usual.
13. Now everyone is fallen except for us the fallen.
12. From there the wind blew across the inexistent pampas and as it settled the massacred faces became visible, Amen.
11. For his disappeared love he went form hole to hole, grave to grave, searching for the eyes that don’t find.
10. Everything dies sucking itself.