January 29th, 2014 / 2:45 pm
Author News & I Like __ A Lot

A Tiny Addendum to Paul Auster’s Concept Concerning “Boy Writers”

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On 16 January 2014,  a writer boy named Paul Auster conversed with someone named Dr. Isaac Gewirtz (this boy likely had friends & relations who were a part of the Holocaust) at the Morgan Library (which seems quite splendid, though it may not be if Mayor Bloomberg was able to blow his matzoh-ball-soup breath on it).

According to girl writer & Huffington Post blogger Anne Margaret Daniel, Paul put forth the category of a “boy writer,” which means:

someone who is so excited, takes such a sense of glee and delight in being clever, in puzzles, in games, in… and you can feel these boys cackling in their rooms when they write a good sentence, just enjoying the whole adventure of it. And the boy writers are the ones you read, and you understand why you love literature so much.

I concur with Paul — because of “boy writers,” literature is the best thing ever (except Christianity).

Arthur Rimbaud is a boy writer, which is why he stabbed people at poetry readings and yelled “shit” after the insipid readers declaimed their dull verse.

Edgar Allan Poe, as Paul points out, is a boy writer, as he composed stories on murder and poems on special girls, like the “beautiful Annabel Lee.”

There’s not a lot of boy writers who are un-dead. Most, nowadays, correspond to what Paul terms a “grown-up writer.” Stephen Burt, Carl Phillips, Dobby Gibson, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Bob Hicok are examples of a “grown-up writer.” They don’t spotlight the “puzzles” and the “games” of the violence, theatricality, exploitation, and upsetness in the postlapsarian world. They document liberal middle class averageness. “It’s about settling down and settling in,” says Burt.

But some boy writers are un-dead.

Johannes Goransson likes makeup and violence. “mascara is infected / belongs to assaults,” the Action Books editor and boy writer elucidates in Pilot (Johann the Carousel Horse).

HTML Giant’s own Blake Butler is a boy writer. In Sky Saw, his characters aren’t given names but numbers (just like in the Holocaust and in the War on Terror). Reading his books are sort of close to witnessing a disembowelment.

Paul Legault (because he likes Emily Dickinson like someone would like an American Girl doll), Walter Mackey (because he likes Barbie), and Julian Brolaski (because his language reads like sticky, sweet, chewy watermelon bubblegum), are all un-dead boy writers.

But the best boy writers (maybe ever) are dead, and they’re Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Glee? Delight? Cackling in their rooms? Enjoying the whole adventure? All the attribute’s of Paul’s boy writer align with Eric and Dylan. They kept journals, websites, and videos so everyone in the whole wide world could be cognizant of the glee-enjoying-cackling-delight-adventure that they had in planning their massacre. As Eric stated, “I could convince them that I’m going to climb Mount Everest, or that I have a twin brother growing out of my back. I can make you believe anything.”

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7 Comments

  1. Adam Tyrrell

      You try too hard and everyone is embarrassed by your effort.

  2. Brian McElmurry

      the last paragraph has a I’m carrying the catcher in the rye and going to kill John Lennon things to it, and it is really in bad taste. I don’t know if this is trolling, borderline disorder or trying to be edgy and make some obtuse point about “boy writers”. Your other “boys who kill” are okay and somewhat interesting, but the last paragraph on this and the photo are just lame and bad taste and shitty!

  3. enick

      this is by me peter richards you pussy!!

      Boy for Sale

      I once knew a builder of sunken ships whose patch was horrible
      but the eye it hid was even worse.

      On still nights he held me close pointing to a wrecked sky he
      said he built himself.

      Behind the ditched salt-truck is where a boy’s first star-milk
      begins to leak.

      When the two of us ran off together he ran off with someone else.

      Closing my eyes, I can still see the painted lips that took my
      Place the black stockings spread out like spider webs, like a
      dark delicious grid.

      Now this wooden overcoat hurts to wear and a smaller rain
      hurts most of all.

      Now all the drowned sailors hate me and the living ones cover
      me with oil.

      Both float up, always face-down, mouthing my name.

      I’m still fine to lie down with, though when their ships are
      christened they send me away.

      From my hiding place they don’t know I can still hex a vessel or
      from this far curse the calmest sea.

      I never hold a shell and hear his wet kiss pounding me slowly.

      I never walk the waterfront wearing the tight dress designed by gulls

      I never see the night sky, his overlapping patches.

      I never call his name. Never in the half-light do I cry myself to sleep.

      The sea is a green circle with my feet tied to the edges.

  4. shaun gannon

      Will someone please write something else and post it? I’m sick of seeing those two pieces of shits’ faces on this site.

  5. sethoelbaum

      what’s bad taste?

  6. sethoelbaum

      why are u being mean to eric and dylan?

  7. shaun gannon

      don’t speak to me.