I have become dead to your book recommendations.
Roxane recently mentioned one of those weird, unspoken things about writers: we are constantly pretending to buy and read each other’s books. Publish something yourself and you’ll quickly see what I mean. You get an e-mail every time someone makes an order. The e-mail tells you the buyer’s name and even where he or she lives. So when someone says on Facebook, “I can’t wait to get this book!” and they tag you in the post so you’ll definitely see it, you get really excited about the order and you look forward to mailing them the book that you’re sure they’ll enjoy, and you wait and you wait for that e-mail with the person’s name and address, but the order never comes, and because you want to stay friendly with the person you tell yourself that it wasn’t a lie, that they probably just forgot. And sometimes they really did forget.
Sometimes they say, “I just ordered this book, you should too!” and you can plainly see that they haven’t ordered the book, and this is harder to forgive, but really, who cares? Why should anybody care?
Sunday Service: Tim Earley Poem
from The American Folkways Series
Spring placed its finger on my spine. I am not some kind of zombie with a surfboard and ham. I am not some kind of pigeon cooing itself to death. The engine of my flatbed truck cuggles on the hill. The neighborhood wyvern sits alilt on the berm of its own brain. I am ready to have some babies. I am ready to be a bellicose producer and have some babies and toss them into the air for years until the Lord strikes them with the gift of speech and their tales turn the mountain’s insides out into the meat I eat for breakfast. Until then I will watch my squash grow and pine for the cleft of some long lost beauty’s historical chin. The daily path is riddled with deceits, dresses, yellow hems. We were merry once. We hung curtains. The Lord brought us together in a shallow pool, the water beaded on her fur. I loved and despised both her vicious and enduring parts. She could not get on with my mother and left for the insolvent side of Jacksonville, Florida. The blue mouth killed my mother. Her head-wrap. Her incessant dusting. The hymnal contained eternal springs and she sang over it, her thick ankles and periwinkle eyes. The spard-misted clouds of March reached inside us. Walking to the church was terrifying. Walking into the church felt like walking into your own mouth. Inside the church Jesus was hairy with milk, laments, and there was a copperhead swimming in the baptismal. The blue mouth killed her. Do not put your mouth on the spigot, dear Lord, do not insert into your mouth a hickory twig, Sweet Peter James. I suspect my children will not exist or else become legendary in their silences, mute puttocks scrimmed from the sourmash. And yet the mountain rain, all kinds of spectacular dying, Biblical black leather, going to town, hair that won’t stop growing, a mosquito stealthing blood, the asylum inmates buried vertically. I shall play my toothpick. I shall eat yonder cabin. I shall ride yonder donkey. I shall ho yander cake. I shall be wrought from my own particular orality. I shall wear the yellow dress in private. I shall smoke my mother. I am not some kind of zombie with a surfboard and ham. I piss upon your digital age and your perfumes rent from dog eggs. I am wrenched into this mountain. It is airish out. Aroint my crotch with your killing gun. Scoop out my scrotum like a pumpkin’s entrails. Remove my potato eye and shove into its gulch the caché-bearing fury of your Quaker cock. Break my spine, silver rain, a bait of ruined teeth and quick-feckled lies. She remains in Jacksonville, still, and in my dreams tiny dobros hang from her firm and too large ears. My warped singing shovel hangs in the barn. I have never heard a more vatic rooster. Some bright morning. A song more dead. That dazzle. Oh, Twila.
Tim Earley is the author of two collections of poems, Boondoggle (Main Street Rag, 2005) and The Spooking of Mavens (Cracked Slab Books, 2010). His poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, Conduit, Typo, Hotel Amerika and other journals. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
3
RIP Whitney Houston / Whitney Houston On Writing
“God gave me a voice to sing with, and when you have that, what other gimmick is there?”
“It’s like, that’s my lair, and nobody messes with my lair.”
“I coulda been a rich man if I accepted all the bribes from the guys wanting to be in this room today.”
“I almost wish I could be more exciting.”
“I finally faced the fact that it isn’t a crime not having friends. Being alone means you have fewer problems.”
“I like being a woman, even in a man’s world. After all, men can’t wear dresses, but we can wear the pants.”
“I’m not crazy about arenas just because I can sell them out. It doesn’t do anything for my ego at all.”
“When I decided to be a singer, my mother warned me I’d be alone a lot. Basically we all are. Loneliness comes with life.”
“Sometimes you do have a good time. But when it gets to the point where you’re sitting in your home and you’re just trying to cover what you don’t want people to know. It’s painful. And then you want more just so that you don’t let anybody see you cry.”
“I have to pray it away.”
“I had the money. I had the cars. I had the house. Had the husband. Had the kid. And none of it was really that fulfilling. For a time, I was happy. I was happy, but I needed that joy. I needed my joy back. I needed that peace that passes all understanding.”
“I will fight you back with anything I can find.”
Don’t Blog
You can always microblog, Houellebecq had told him when talking about his career as a blogger, and try to string together tweets; but to launch yourself into the writing of a blog post you have to wait for all of that to become compact and irrefutable. You have to wait for the appearance of an authentic core of necessity. You never decide to write a blog post, he had added; a blog post, according to him, was like a block of concrete that had decided to set, and the blogger’s freedom to act was limited to the fact of being there, and of waiting in frightening inaction, for the process to start by itself.
–Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory
Reconsidering Existential Texts in a Mario Broian Context
The Fall of Man’s vector is of course down, a direction consistent with our tiered notion of heaven and hell, the latter’s visceral intuition made more compelling by natural physical laws, that is, the acceleration of gravity precluded by the surface on which its falling object lands. Though we never hear Mario land some 60 ft. below, breaking all his bones and liquifying his internal organs, his final breaths squeaking through paralysis. He simply dies — or rather, his death is commemorated by his very reincarnation — before he actually dies, before we hear his cries. One could offer, however, that the pit never ends, towards the core of the earth it falls until upward again and out the other side. Camus’ last novel (a) The Fall, claimed by Sartre to be “perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood” of his books, amounts to a long-winded dramatic confession that one Clamence tells to a stranger, presumably at a bar or cafe. READ MORE >
{LMC}: Comfort in the Labyrinth
I was not terribly familiar with the literary magazine scene when I first read Versal magazine, so I have to admit I was somewhat astonished with its contents. Just beyond the beautifully crafted cover the labyrinths of Borges used the dead ends of Lynch, and the absurdity and refined metafiction of Flann O’Brien morphed and distorted the images on display. It was obvious that Versal had a deep respect for the innovators of the fiction craft. However, the modernity of the stories, their own innovation, showed that they didn’t define the magazine.
I knew I wanted to work with Versal after finishing the first couple of stories inside, and with that desire I had a lot of expectations of what was necessary for my participation.
My relationship with Versal started when I moved from London to Amsterdam. Eager to get involved with the local literary scene in any way possible, I joined a workshop run by the Versal editors. There I met Megan Garr, founder of the magazine. We found we had a lot in common. After several months of drinks, meeting a social events and climbing together (Megan is an excellent boulderer) I asked if I could join the editorial team. She kindly said yes.
Don’t Write a Novel
You can always take notes, Houellebecq had told him when talking about his career as a novelist, and try to string together sentences; but to launch yourself into the writing of a novel you have to wait for all of that to become compact and irrefutable. You have to wait for the appearance of an authentic core of necessity. You never decide to write a novel, he had added; a book, according to him, was like a block of concrete that had decided to set, and the author’s freedom to act was limited to the fact of being there, and of waiting in frightening inaction, for the process to start by itself.
–Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory
The Tension of the Likable Unlikable
Treasure Island!!!
by Sara Levine
Europa Editions, 2012
172 pages / $15.00 Buy from Powells
I love unlikable characters. In the fictional world, I want bad people to get away with doing bad things. I want the serial killer to slip into the night or live happily never after. One of the reasons I love American Psycho so much is the methodical and unwavering way Ellis portrays Patrick Bateman as an unrepentant psychopath who is as interested in the right restaurant reservation as he is in committing sadistic acts. It’s all very unpleasant (or it isn’t) but the writing is such that it is easy to be as fascinated as you might be repulsed.
I love finding writers who can hold the reader in that complicated tension where you like the unlikable character.
5 Comments
February 10th, 2012 / 1:00 pm
February 10th, 2012 / 1:00 pm
Chance and Attention
Ideally what happens in creative writing classes is less different from the way we write on our own than academic trappings and the rituals of workshop™ might make it seem. We’re hopefully reading widely and intently regardless, developing a personal canon and an ear for line-level nuance, an eye for overall shape. We identify techniques, try them out, learn to recognize our failures, and move on. We do most of this on our own, and presumably want to.
While planning the introductory poetry and fiction class I taught last fall at UMass, foremost in my mind was how in classes I’ve taken, discussions led me to my own variations of terms or techniques, either right then while class went on around me, or later over texts whose formerly mystical workings became suddenly plain. Happy accidents—the confluence of readings, instructor, classmates, beverages caffeinated or alcoholic. In each instance, class was only the primer. The instructor didn’t know what proved important for me; I don’t know what others in the class might have fastened onto. And each instance occurred during craft study, not in workshop.
READ MORE >
Pull Up!
I was watching a small child play indoor soccer and honestly it had its moments but I was feeling that inevitable weight, boredom. I mean the kid was falling down, sort of tumbling, and I just wasn’t feeling that, so I walked about a block in a type of cold, hard rain (like smoke on the sidewalks) and across two streets and into the library. I selected a novel by James Salter. It was one of those old yellowing hardbacks that smell like my grandmother’s hallway where she used to keep a bottom drawer of ‘toys’ for when the kids dropped by. (The toys were a wooden block, a rock, an ancient, battered lunchbox, and one leather shoe.) I love those types of books. And it was about rock climbing and lyrical and plot-driven, as is often the way with Salter and, you know, reading is odd, some odd, inevitable chain—this book leads to this book leads to—and I started thinking about fighter pilots (Salter was one) and way leads to way and I finished Salter’s wonderful little novel and got online and bought Once a Fighter Pilot…by Jerry W. Cook. This was a mistake.
You ever been in a conversation where the person finds out you write (Oh Jesus, here we go…) and they cough up some variation of, “Yeh I’m going to write a book when I get the time.” Hmmm…that sort of gives me mixed feelings. I first think, Fuck off. But that’s just a harsh thing that kicks in. I relax and think, “Go right ahead” in this sort of drawl-type thinking, still a tinge of acid. One time over beers my recently retired dad, a dedicated and experienced organic gardener, said “I should write a book about my life as an organic gardener.” I answered, “Good idea. Bring me the first three pages tomorrow.” He did not. Another response I feel is, “Just because you have material doesn’t mean you have a book.” Or I might think, “When you get the time, why not try brain surgery, too?” I have other responses but I’m rambling and I wanted to get to my point: not everyone should write a book.
I should have known. There were warning signs: