Stuff Left Behind
Paper Towel, June 3, 2011, Jeffrey Simmons
I have a small file cabinet under my desk that has in it scraps of paper with notes—on notebook paper, printer paper, index cards, Post-It notes, and even (yeesh) napkins. Early drafts of stories—from a time when I wrote everything long hand first, and then typed them up—are in there. Little bits of research that I printed out, glanced at, and then decided to ignore. Pictures I took out of magazines.
There’s another pile on my bookshelf that’s twice the size of my mid-sized cat.
Why am I keeping it all? I thought about throwing it away, recently, READ MORE >
Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees
The Trees The Trees is a wrecking ball covered in flowers. These poems by Heather Christle make me feel, often simultaneously, all of the following things: that I am riding a fucked-up carousal in the middle of the woods, that I am an animal pulling out my own wires, that my skin is a new kind of candy, that my brain and my heart are in a tree and that, somewhere up in that tree, they are kissing, calling each other the wrong names.
The poems look like prose blocks with holes punched in them. If you unfocus your eyes while you read it looks like pieces are missing. Like a puzzle from the thrift store. But what’s missing is what makes these poems right. Consider the line “my friend the golden onslaught married stuff in bloom” from the poem “Happy Birthday To Me.” Nearly each word in this line pushes against the emotional quality of the word next to it, as if the line is trying to break out of its semantic skin. The word “onslaught,” made physical because it is “golden,” sits there in the middle of the line wreaking all kinds of contradictory havoc. The ambiguously casual “stuff” makes the line colloquially wobbly. Then “bloom” comes in with a tender, exuberant punch in the heart, not to mention filling out the line’s weird music. Good parts in a good machine.
Reading The Trees The Trees is akin to the logical disturbance one feels while watching YouTube videos of the late Macho Man. Indeed, the ever-quotable, sequined Savage bewilders and entertains in a surprisingly articulate brand of Dada-esque madness. In an article at espn.com, Bill Simmons sums up Savage’s influence on his sport, noting that “Wrestling moved pretty slowly back then [the mid-80s]: lots of headlocks and clotheslines, lots of rolling around, lots of killed time, lots of fat rolls and labored breathing. Savage murdered that era almost overnight.” Simmons describes Savage as “phenomenally bizarre and undeniably entertaining,” saying that, “You needed a translator even if he was speaking in English.”
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July 12th, 2011 / 12:47 pm
July 12th, 2011 / 12:47 pm
Innovative Residency Underway
The Palovista residency, located on a 1,920-acre ranch outside of Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, seeks to foster community among young innovative writers and artists, and to promote a mode of critical exchange that privileges writing/speaking to and with, rather than about. Throughout the residency, a number of visiting publishers and poets are hosted for readings and conversations with the younger writers. Visiting speakers in 2011 will include Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Charles Alexander, Cynthia Miller, Debra di Blasi, Evan Lavender-Smith, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Stanley Crawford, and Miriam Sagan. All events are open to the public. Residency operations are funded by the Junior Fellows Prize from the Kelly Writers House.
Co-directors: Leo Genji Amino & Daisy Atterbury. Participants: Natalie Jacoby, Benny Lichtner, Tamar Nachmany, Mugi Takei, Nicholas Taylor, Valeria Tsygankova, and Zachary Valdez.
You can follow the readings / writings / productions / performances of the Palovista Residency here from July 10-24, 2011.
I bet you remember the first person who encouraged your writing. (You probably want to thank them, or kill them.) I bet you remember the first person who discouraged your writing (or maybe even the writing life).
We like stories. Do tell.
Hi I want to talk about influence a little bit
I read this post the other day over at Montevidayo. It’s about influence. It’s not terribly long, so you can read it if you want, but I’m going to focus on Joyelle’s opening sentences, the post’s premise:
I want to begin by suggesting my discomfort with the conventions of discussing literary influence. I want to suggest that influence need not come from literary forebears, elders, teachers, or even people. For me this notion of influence, regardless of the gender of the participants, is too close to patrilineage, which bothers me for three reasons: its method of conserving property and wealth, ownership of originality; its copying over of heterosexist, male dominated bloodlines and the reproductive futurism that goes with it; and its commitment to linear notions of temporality—that what comes before causes what comes after, and that the most important thing is to move forward in time. I find all these structures suffocating and confining. I think we’re all conceptually limited by the unexamined assumptions about temporality, property, gender, sexuality, wealth and inheritance implicit in most discussions of literary influence, regardless of the gender of the writers under discussion.
Applies to Oranges Giveaway Results
There were some fantastic responses to the Applies to Oranges giveaway contest. The comments to that post are like their own wonderful literary journal. And why can’t we host an online journal in a comment stream at HTMLGiant? I’m calling it the second issue of the Crystal Gavel, the “Trouble in Paradise” theme. I think I’m going to nominate the winners here for Pushcarts, too. I’m applying for the ISSN tomorrow.
Maureen Thorson has selected the winners: Josh Thompson, for “Clerical Work” and Heather Sommer, for “Ex-Pats” and Nick Francis, with “Vacationing.” (Josh, Heather, Nick, please email your address to me at adam at publishinggenius.com and we’ll get you your prizes.) Their entries can be read below the fold, or in Crystal Gavel 2, naturally.
Thanks to Maureen for putting this together! Check out her very truly wonderful book over at Ugly Duckling’s wonderful website. READ MORE >
Cobweb or Lace or Chains?
Been WAY out of town. You hear me? Checked The Google twice in last week (for very brief periods). Been a good while since I plummeted off The Series of Tubes like that. As a writer, it seemed to open me, my, uh, doors of perception (?), geode cracked. I suppose I mean to say I felt I was absorbing more, of people I met (mostly strangers—always a synapse crackle), the sights/sounds/smells/feels/tastes (NY city, outside NY city, sick gorges, fog, wind, microbrews, jackknifed dreams, etc). I don’t know. Seemed like I was eating new food and meeting new words said in new ways and it seemed, well, different.
Possibly I was cleansed, in the manner of detox beverages or Pringle binges or long, long runs through old forest? Off the Net, on the Net. I am now wondering if I shouldn’t take regular, extended periods away…it seems to have surged me, to have prepped me to write, to have planted the brain’s gray furrows with inlaid jewels ready to pry and bloom and sparkle. Thoughts? Do you make yourself leave the Virtual? Or maybe binge on the Virtual, then write? What are your thoughts and ways?
On Lost Films
I formerly suffered an unhealthy obsession (if I’m honest it’s still around, but it’s certainly depleted) with the conceptual implications of lost films. As a self-termed “archaeologist” of obscure media, discovering the possible existence of an artifact (mostly, for me, films/books/zines, photographs of art-events, etc), researching everything about it, and then possibly unearthing details to add to a collective knowledge base on said artifact is, well to be blunt, a really fucking awesome feeling.
A couple of days ago at Big Other, Amber Sparks posed the question “What lost film would you love to see?” The question found me immediately excited, because it was something that had managed to escape my head-space for a while. There’s any number of reasons why a film might be lost; if it was shot in the early days of cinema, the chemicals used to process the film itself could have deteriorated the celluloid, leaving nothing. It’s possible that the film was never completed, but screened to producers in an incomplete state, leaving a mark on an individual. The only copy of a film (smaller budget films) could have burnt in a fire, destroyed in some sort of natural disaster, or literally just misplaced.
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