What’s wrong with liking what other people like?
Recently, I’ve been listening to the radio.
Pop music.
God, it is soooo good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaPW5le3cug&feature=player_embedded#!
I mean, Rihanna’s Only Girl has a beat you (read: I) can’t help bopping my head to. I’ll admit it: I love pop music. And not in an ironic-I-like-this-but-only-to-show-how-much-better-I-am-than-it (or, hipster) kind of way. No, I really like it. But I’m embarrassed that I like it. As in: when I’m walking down the street listening to Lady Gaga on my iPod and I pass a cool looking person, I have this intense urge to turn it down so he/she doesn’t hear it (and thereby judge me), or, I want to take out my earbuds and convince them how I mostly listen to indie music and this is just my running mix or some stupid excuse like that. But why? Why should anyone be embarrassed about liking what other people (read: a lot of Americans) like?
Things I Have Wanted to Post About
Sometimes I have too many things I want to post about and not enough time and then I spend more time thinking about all the posts I’m not writing so in order to focus on a few upcoming posts, I need to clear my mental decks of these tidbits I do not have the time to turn into longer posts.
According to The New York TImes, literary magazines are thriving. I wonder if that’s true. I don’t disagree but I would love for us to have a broader conversation about this topic. The magazines noted in the article are all Bay Area (SF) magazines with significant readerships that are fairly well-established, although The Rumpus and Canteen can certainly be considered newcomers that are thriving. What does it mean for a magazine to “thrive”–financially and editorially? Do other editors feel their magazines are thriving? Publishing is supposedly not thriving (though I disagree). What can book publishers and magazine publishers learn from one another about thriving?
A friend sent me this great link to a Lifehacker article about why it is futile to compare ourselves to others. At The Rumpus, Sugar offers some really timely and pointed advice about begrudging the success of other writers through peer jealousy. These things are connected and also remind me of several conversations I’ve seen around the “blogosphere” in recent months about writing, success, feeling the pressure of social networking as a writer, and how we measure ourselves against other writers and so on.
“The Writer”
Carson Mell has a story in the new Electric Literature, which I bought because he and Lynne Tillman were published in it. I bought a copy of that and all the Supermachines (which are at least as great as everyone says they are because it’s true) and so I felt really indie lit and hip and stuff for about a week on the bus with people wondering “oh that must be the contemporary literature I hear so much about never” and then I fucked around and started re-reading a book that was written ninety years ago and which made me feel I could climb a building if I only wanted to.
Anyway I don’t much care for Mell’s fiction and I thought the publication quality of Electric Literature was quite poor considering how cool their website is, but then they do manage to pay their contributors and obviously care much more about the web with their apps and all, so maybe that makes up for it. I dunno nothing. Lynne Tillman’s thing was great of course. All in all though, I was underwhelmed. But I still think Carson Mell is a genius at making these videos, so who gives a shit I guess.
Interview: Darby Larson 14
10. You are a sturdy man. How does that affect your writing?
Thank you I think. I’m taking “sturdy” to mean like level-headed or rational or maybe even relativistic, because I’m really out of shape physically. I think it helps but also hinders me (it’s relative!), see answer to #4 above. It’s not healthy to be so level-headed because it leaves little room for heart.
14. “Stop using words” is a pretty heavy thing to write on the page. Yet you write those words in The Iguana Complex. Discuss.
Mike Young—
Poets are dreamers who don’t understand capitalism. Poets are sandwiches who don’t understand fried chicken. And some of them are going to be reading for Supermachine tonight @ 8PM at the Outpost (1014 Fulton Street) in Crooklyn. And by some of them I mean all of them are good: Paige Taggart, Justin Marks, Jeannie Hoag, and our own troublemaker Andrew James Weatherhead.
Comments Off on Supermachine Tonight @ 8PM at the Outpost
Chomsky on Ali G
I’m boning up for “The Poetic Sentence,” a panel I’m moderating tomorrow at the Conversations & Connections conference in DC, and I found this video pretty insightful.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zPHAhj_Cio
If you’re nearby DC and you’re a writer, you will probably want to cancel whatever you’ve got going on so you can attend this conference. For the $65 admission fee you’ll see Michael Kimball’s 1-Hr MFA lecture, which is worth twice $65. You’ll also get to attend my panel with Mel Nichols, Magus Magnus, Maureen Thorson, and our own fingerlickinggood: Mike Young. Other panels and lectures by a hot list of my faves. You’ll also get one of the featured books, a subscription to a magazine, speed-dating with an editor (an intellectual lap-dance, basically) and a kissing booth with Steve Almond. Maybe not a kissing booth, I don’t know, that’s unconfirmed, but he’ll be there so why not?
Roxane Gay—
Vice has an excerpt from James Frey’s forthcoming The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. I loved Bright Shiny Morning so I’m really looking forward to this book. (Thanks for the heads up, Sean Doyle)
On “Pushcorpse”
The experiment that was “Pushcorpse,” organized (and conceived?) by Shya Scanlon, is now published in No Colony 3. 65 writers all writing the same story, or rather pushing its corpse forward.
Reading it now, no longer as 1/65 of a contributor but just a casual reader, in its final No Colony resting place, what I found to be a curious aspect was that it served as a microcosm for the flow of memes. The one meme that holds on throughout is the Ginger meme. Remember that there was no obligation on the part of anyone to keep any character as a protagonist, yet Ginger continued to fill the role, despite efforts to kill her (often in grotesque description). Yet after she would die she would be back at the bar again a few paragraphs later. The plot summary seems to be Ginger at a bar while 65 people impose their will upon her, often killing her, but in doing so over and over again, keep her alive.
The whole work is an unusual example of metafiction. A reader is constantly aware of the struggle of too many people trying to direct the flow of something. There was meta-self-deprecation when writers felt the work as a whole was not meeting their expectations. The use of STOP became a meme as people became frustrated at the flow and wanted to abruptly change it. There is a moment when the meta element becomes literal (Ginger actually becomes one of the 65 and is trying to decide what to write) and from that point on, the work’s meta-ness becomes a meme and it all ends on this note.
Buy a book; help Japan.
I was thinking yesterday about the parallels between the literary world and the culinary world while my domestic goddess sister and her chef boyfriend spoke to each other about various chefs (the brilliant ones and the megalomaniacs) and restaurants (from gastronomic pilgrimage sites to pretentious failures). The uneasy union between these two disparate worlds? The cookbook.
So, if you are the home-cook variety of lit geek, consider adding one more book to your collection: This all-star collection of recipes from giants of the culinary world– all the proceeds from the sale of this e-book (yeah, I said it) will go to the recovery in Japan.( I can’t think of a better excuse to buy an ebook.)
Of course, you’re not going to find any mass market recipes in there– no sir. These recipes are from chefs who’ve earned things equivalent to the Pulitzer. If you’ve ever wanted to brush up your knife skills or broaden your kitchen repertoire past your mom’s lasagna, now is the time. Braised black cod and wakame soup awaits you.
What Could Small/Micro/Indie Presses Learn From The Concept Of Transmedia Storytelling?
I often think about the various ways in which the small press world differs from the big press world in terms of company practices and choices and how the former could potentially benefit from borrowing some ideas from the latter.
For example, back in the summer of ’09 I asked the question “How come indie publishers don’t do audio books?” This led me to imagine one-upping big presses by suggesting that small presses produce audio commentary for books, like having a writer walk through their book and talk about each section as though it were director commentary on a dvd.
For the most part, neither of those practices have really materialized in the small press world, as far as I know. Although I didn’t do the audio commentary thing, I thought making an audiobook sounded like such a good idea that when the time came last year I made one for my novel, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, which turned out pretty cool. (You can sample it here, and you can get it here for whatever price you want to pay — just scroll down when you get there.) Thankfully, Ken Baumann, the visionary behind Sator Press, who published my book, is such a fantastically forward-thinking publisher that he supported and nurtured the idea — making Sator Press the first small press (that I know of) to offer a complete audiobook version of one of their titles. Full disclosure, my audiobook has yet to garner much critical appreciation or even very much public commentary at all — which is probably to be expected, at least in part because it’s such an anomaly — but in fact I have received emails and gchats and even a few pieces of snail mail from people saying how much they dug it, leading me to believe that there is potential interest to be found in this untapped market.
Which brings me to what I propose could be another untapped market for the indie/small/micro press……something called “Transmedia Storytelling.”