Brooks Sterritt
http://twitter.com/brookssterritt
Writing by Brooks Sterritt appears or will appear in The Believer, Subtropics, Salt Hill, Denver Quarterly, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago.
The Weaklings Library
An impressive compilation of Books Dennis Cooper Loved appears at The Weaklings Library.
Brooks Sterritt—
Those interested in the Oulipo should peep Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature by Daniel Levin Becker, out today from Harvard University Press. [addendum: excerpt of an excerpt from The Believer]
Brooks Sterritt—
HTMLGIANT is seeking anonymous reviews, which can be sent to brooks [at] htmlgiant [dot] com. Guidelines and previous reviews are here; questions are welcome.
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
Brooks Sterritt—
What kind of sandwiches do you like to eat? What kind of sandwiches do you like to make? Have you ever enjoyed a sandwich made by a stranger and attempted to make a copy of your own in private? Have you ever stolen a sandwich? Have you ever stolen food? Have you ever stolen anything that was quite expensive? Have you ever committed a felony? Are you a criminal? What is the most exotic animal you’ve ever ridden? Are you interested in ambergris? What is the longest you’ve ever gone without eating? Do you read anything that makes you think it is possible to interact with humans in consistently positive ways? Have you ever had sex on a plane? Have you ever seen anything no reasonable person would believe? What’s the best way to kill an hour? What is your favorite color? Do you know anybody named Fanny who is under 40 and isn’t British? Ever been inside a pyramid? How long have you gone without showering? Ever met a venerator of Satan? What do you think about globalization and the internet? What can you tell me about the “dark web?” How about that line from Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… that mentions a “27-inch Zenith” which has in the interim become a respectably-but-not-shockingly-large TV size? Do you think you’d be one of the people refusing to administer shocks to someone with a heart condition if ordered to do so by an authority figure? Have you ever been really, really star-struck? Has anyone you’ve told about being star-struck appeared bored by your experience? Have you ever had intercourse on [a] psychedelic substance[s] and thought you were inside an octopus or that you were an actual octopus? What do you think about the narrative possibilities of a series of questions? Have you ever owned an Erector Set? If someone hasn’t read P.P. is s/he also allowed to construct a series of questions in book form and plaster excerpts in public places and make vimeo videos with celebrities and porn stars reading from the series and still love J.J. for implanting the image of an arm inserted elbowdeep in a male vulva in his/her mind and for coining (among xxxxxxx) pronouns “shis” and “hrim?” What’s your sign, birl? Have you ever been dangerously close to murdering someone? Maiming? Do you take the national security of the United States of America seriously? Would you take a bite out of a human heart (and not even necessarily swallow) for $3,500 (or for nothing if you must) if a donor had stipulated in THEIR will that THEY would donate $3,500,000 to all cancers if someone did the heart biting thing and took money for it.com? Do you ever slip into certain modes of thinking/speaking based on your level of ______? Does heavy whipping cream always sound erotic to you? Ever listen to “I Like It Rough” on repeat while beating yourself in the face with a velveteen hammer just to “see what happens?” EP UPI RBRT make coffee at night then put it in cup and place the cup somewhere so it can cool off and not “attract attention” then after it has cooled off place the cup next to your bed so it will be there when you wake up because if you wake up without the cup there you might not be able to get up and make coffee and you also like the shudder induced by the cold bitterness? Have you ever seen your name on a blimp/”met” Jason Schwartzman? Do you think I spelled it correctly without looking it up? Do you know what an SP-1200 is? What is the most notable song (and only one I can think of right now) referencing the SP-1200? Wanna go inside a pyramid?
“To do this Biennial justice would require an encyclopedic, Baudelaire-style ‘Salon’ review”
Last week’s New Yorker (3/12) covers the Whitney Biennial. One passage that caught my eye:
“See, for instance, Gisèle Vienne’s mechanized boy mannequin wielding a hand puppet, with a chilling soundtrack by the Los Angeles poet and novelist Dennis Cooper. ‘I’m not dead,’ the boy muses, ‘unless this is death.’ The sinister-voiced, twitching puppet comments on things that the boy imagines, in what sounds like a game of exquisite cadaver: ‘decapitated head upon severed arms upon mutilated trunk-like logs and branches in a fireplace.’
‘Because I said so is the fairly witless way most images get you to look at them,’ the poet and performer Ariana Reines writes in an essay that complements, rather than addresses, the grotesque montage photographs and assemblages, satirizing high fashion, by the artist who styles herself K8 Hardy.”