I’ve missed you.
1. There have been a hundred things that I’ve wanted to tell you in the time since I last wrote here. 2. I have a new job. 3. I was sick for a week. 4. I was busy playing text adventures with strangers and friends. 5. I was reading. 6. Here is a list of what I’ve read since AWP, mostly over lunch: Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson, Motorman by David Ohle, Theater State by Jack Boettcher, RASL 3 by Jeff Smith, Adventure Time issues 1 & 2 by Ryan North and pals, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting, The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden, My Only Wife by Jac Jemc, some of Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby, some of Humboldt’s Gift. 7. If you would like to say something about one of these books then I would like to hear it. I have enjoyed them all a lot. (Well, I had my issues with RASL.) (I am trying to withhold judgment on RASL.) 8. I wanted to tell you about Brian Oliu’s Level End, which is stranded at my in-laws’ home because of a Paypal snafu, and which has an actual Gold Edition, supplies limited, with video, audio, glorious NES-style art, etc. 9. My friend Carrie Murphy has a book coming too. It is made of fun, pretty, sticky, weird, nervy, sexy poems; some of them I have known and loved for a long time. 10. My wife and I saw H. Jon Benjamin and David Cross from a distance at a bar during the Mission Creek festival. (We were selling magazines and toy snakes. We were eating chicken salad and fish sandwiches.) My wife couldn’t stop smiling. We have spent a lot of time listening to H. Jon Benjamin’s voice. 11. When you come to this blog do you sometimes feel stressed out and angry about how much time everyone else is finding to read? Sometimes I feel that way when I come here. 12. And sometimes I am glad. 13. I’ve been playing lots of Dark Souls. We could talk about that too. So far there is nothing in it as strange as the best parts of the first game. Unlike the rest of the world, it seems, I am a little disappointed. 14. There is nothing more humbling in its arbitrariness than truly good news. 15. Soon I will write here about the handful of design mistakes that every press, yours probably included, is making. 16. Sometimes waiting to hear back about a book I am submitting feels like waiting to find out if I am dead or alive.
{LMC}: “Foreign Wedding” by Maile Chapman
It’s all these damn faces. They’re all over issue 28 of Salt Hill, and I can’t get them out of my mind. Frederik Heyman’s watercolors and pencils grace both the cover and an inside portfolio—faces in profile, faces looking at the reader, ghostly watercolored faces looking at each other. Then on page one, before the title of the journal or the table of contents or anything else, we’re confronted with the first of Andrew Jilka’s many pencil drawings. The Jilka drawings resonate. They’re layered and repeated, almost like a collage, close-up drawings of faces twisted in ecstasy and reproduced over and over—each time the same face, yet each slightly different. Mouth wide, eyes screwed shut or gaping. The Jilka drawings are meant to be sexual, reverent, and horrifying.
How fitting then to find Maile Chapman’s wondrous short story “Foreign Wedding,” where looking at other people, faces thrust together, examining each other’s movement and motivations, figures so heavily.
(!x==[33]) Book 1 Volume 1 by .UNFO
(!x==[33]) Book 1 Volume 1
by .UNFO
Blanc Press, 2011
776 pages / $50 Buy from Blanc Press
To be clear: (!x==[33]) Book 1 Volume 1 is a reformatting of Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The book itself, a conceptual work by .UNFO (a collaboration between Dan Richert and Harold Abramowitz) published by Blanc Press, acknowledges its source only obliquely. The publisher’s website simply tells us that this series “seeks to indexically lengthen the world’s most monumental texts through failed software operations”—that is, by filtering existing texts through the eponymous formula, redistributing chapters and paragraphs into chunks of approximately 33 syllables (rounded to the nearest whole word). On the book’s title page we find an innocuous url for a “0200601.txt” containing a (different) English translation of Mein Kampf archived by Project Gutenberg Australia. Indeed, the source text is apparent enough. We read the signature that follows the author’s forward, the table of contents, the recurring page header: MEIN KAMPF. It seems evasive, even disingenuous, certainly loaded, to characterize this project in such detached terms as a conceptual exercise, a “failed software operation”—the predictable imperfection, somehow poetic, of a system applied to lived reality. This instrumentalization maintains the willfully problematic stance that words are just words—stuff, material, to be shoveled around at will.
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April 16th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
April 16th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
Does the Pulitzer suck, and if so, whom?
Winners of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize will be announced today at 3pm. Any predictions? The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded to no one, apparently. Nominees were Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. I’m curious what you think of the prize (Fiction category or in general). Is it
a) a highly prestigious stamp of approval that guarantees an enjoyable and edifying read
b) a mainstream award given to a conventional, palatable work (though the work may be formally inventive in superficial ways), leading to increased sales, certainly among readers of “serious literary fiction” but mostly among a segment of people who want to acquire cultural capital without too much effort
OR are you an enlightened in-betweener? If you tell me I will put it in a pie chart. I remember “at one point in my life” having a lot of fun making lists in a .txt file of Pulitzer winners and a future reading order that I would never end up following. I also remember (much later) finding Finding a Form by William Gass in the library, [I don’t mean this to sound like a conversion story. Beloved was pretty phenomenal. Lonesome Dove features a river full of snakes.] and reading this on the first essay’s first page:
…the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill…
from “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize” by William Gass
from “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize” by William Gass
“I tell them, ‘You never had the chance to make 7,000 women happy in one day.'”
It’s weird how the 1,364th story about Amazon sucks mentions my favorite book, Everyone Poops & a lady getting screwed by Amazon when she tried to buy books for my old school district, which I feel was a terrible place; in fact my principle retired & was arrested for soliciting sex in a public park where he told the cop he’d been with all sorts of young bods. Coincidence? I think not.
I was thinking the other day how the cycle of literature : how we burn oil for the light of life lived long ago :: paper pressed down as hard as possible : a blood diamond shines light like everyone deserves to know the truth but at what cost to whom. I don’t know. What do you think. When will small literary presses give Amazon the proverbial bird call? Would anyone care or would it be like when a kid throws a rock in a pond & people just glance & think, “Cute.” But imagine if there were like a thousand kids throwing rocks in a pond. I feel like people would notice that. Have we talked about this 782 times or 783? But if you whore it out someone will write about it maybe? Again? Worth a shot. Just like cage-free eggs. THIS BOOK SOLD WITHOUT AMAZON. Give some good Ra Ra’s & record yourself on VHS kicking an elephant in the junk. So why haven’t you? What are we going to do. Does anyone even care about the weather anymore or was that just something to talk about because the clouds looked like a chorus for a second.
Book + Beer: Tom Wolfe and St. Sebastiaan Belgian Ale
The rain stopped. At that point the guy (knobby head like an asteroid) from the repair shop comes out to tell me that my baby-baby scooter (sweet ride, ODI grips, Kelsey throttle, a desperation of chrome) needs another ninety-four bucks’ worth of repairs, even though they just got finished fixing it, or saying they fixed it, and he says what do you want to do? And I say I don’t want to do anything, Mr. ASS (teroid), you owe me a scooter I can drive away from this crime scene after the last two hundred bucks I spent here, and he says it’s not their fault, it’s a piece-of-shit scooter that hasn’t been properly maintained, and I say hey, I am not paying another cent for repairs that don’t repair, and he says okay, fine, they’ll junk it, and I say okay, fine, junk it then, it’s junk now anyway since you guys mangled it, and he stomps off, so there I am, up a creek and scooterless. So anyway I call my brother, sit down, and finish reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Get in my brother’s car (a brown turd Kia) and he hands me a beer and sees the pink/yellow/retina-detachment bus of a book cover and prowls the title and says, “Is that the kind of shit people who drive scooters read?”
The bottle is ceramic. It has an oatmeal look. I thought, “Oatmeal.” Oatmeal is an OK word to have conked in your kettle while drinking Belgium ale. Has a slight bottled taste to it and that makes some sense. The finish was bitter. I like bitter finishes, I do. I like gas station coffee and going to bed after a big, crazy fight. I find it comforting. One time I took my car for a tire change and afterwards I felt taller. I’m not kidding. I felt taller. My car was purring along. Then about eight minutes later I crashed into a deer committing suicide on highway 69, Indiana. This deer just leapt into its moment. I wanted to take the poor doe home for dinner but they said I’d have to contact the local game ranger and get a special permit and who wants to deal with yet another guy in uniform? Ah, bitter finish, this slouched gray bag of bones, I felt, as I watched my thunked car towed away into the cornshine. There are some peppery notes, too.
What my brother really meant was, “You should have already read that book, like when you were 20.”
sentences I liked from Tim Kinsella’s book
“From textured freckling, like sand had been thrown at her when her thick skin was wet once and stuck, her blanched blue eyes burst.”
“Against Beau’s head to the floor Will pushed.”
“There might be someone older than her who had spent more cumulative hours, but no one had ever spent as high of a percentage of their time pretending to sleep.”
“The multiverse, she thought, infinite dimensions.”
“Clinical lighting heightened by contrast the blue outside, the space cavernous, so sparse with shoppers.”
“The light fell where it did and stayed where it fell and did not dispense in any functional way and who could help but think, seeing this lighting strategy in action for the first time, What kind of place have I agree to surrender all of my younger self’s hopes for my future self to?”
“Once the thick pee started, the stories and him were made totally separate by it.”
“Only troubled does anything point back at itself.”
“Always did surprise him, the plans he made, like dares to himself, You really gonna? You got the nerve? When it came time to execute those plans, he was still just trying to surprise himself even when seeing a plan through.”
“I am aware I am a type, the type who at every opportunity has rejected any decision that would make one more of a type.”
“Despising it in others, it was still sometimes all he ever wanted, silliness.”
“‘Jesus, Ronnie, your daughter is a bitch-daughter.'”
{LMC}: Salt Hill 28
I admire Salt Hill because of the strong writing found in each issue and the impeccable production values. I first learned about the magazine at AWP in 2009, when I came across their table and found two issues, one a hardbound book, and the other, a paperback filled with glossy, color pages. In both instances, the design was gorgeous and clean and showed that the editors valued both form and function. Each issue looks different, not radically so, but enough to get the reader’s attention and in each issue there is always something that stuns me. Salt Hill 28 did not disappoint in this regard. Laura Eve Engel’s, “For You Out of Soft Materials,” is one of those poems I loved starting with the title, all the way through the last line. There is no unnecessary flourish in the language and still each stanza evokes something really interesting. I loved lines like Once I admitted I made my face/for you out of soft materials,/so you’d have a place to put all your fingers and the final stanza, There are all these ways/we can decide not to be very tender. Another standout was the work of H.L. Hix, and “Counterexamples,” with the last line, “You say what we can imagine matters most. I say what we cannot.” “Gown Rain,” by Sarah Rose Etter was as imaginative as I have come to expect from her. The sky is raining gowns, you see, an unstoppable downpour of fabric. The writing is as strong as the premise and the ending is both satisfying and unsettling. The strongest work in a very strong issue was, Maile Chapman’s exceedingly smart “Foreign Wedding.” There’s a woman, likable in her unlikability, attending a foreign wedding, not connecting to anyone, just out of a marriage, having awkward encounters as she takes in France, and you think with all that you know where the story is going. “Foreign Wedding,” is not going there and the ending is not only unexpected, it is quite chilling. The issue also contains art and an interview with Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia.
Have you read Salt Hill 28? What did you think? What pieces stood out to you? Why? Why is Ben Mirov’s “Destruction Manual” oriented differently? Did some of the art disturb you?
Let’s talk in the comments.