Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. He is the editor of The Apocalypse Reader, Come Back Donald Barthelme, and co-editor (with Eva Talmadge) of The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. With Jeremy Schmall he makes The Agriculture Reader, a limited-edition arts annual. He lives in Brooklyn.
Two from Dennis Cooper: Yesterday was “Neon Angel Day”, celebrating Cherie Currie of The Runaways and her new book Neon Angel: The Story of a Runaway, which is co-authored by one of our main men, Mr. Tony “O” O’Neill. the day before that, one of Dennis’s regular readers/community-members presented a list of 10 Graphic Novels “chosen…as recommendations to Mr. Cooper and his brilliant flock.” The list includes Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, Derf’s My Friend Dahmer, and eight other fine titles besides, all with descriptions and excerpts. Also, Dennis, if you’re reading this, you were right about Return of the Grievous Angel–duh.
They’re talking about the James Franco Esquire story on Gawker, but here’s the interesting part- instead of burning the story themselves, they make light fun of it and then leave the real burning to us!
The litblog HMTLGIANT says of the story: “If it weren’t by James Franco, this 100% would not be in Esquire… Seems like a pretty typical ‘MFA story,’ if that’s even a type of story.” Burn? We are not literary critics, so let us just say this: James Franco is such a good actor!
Adrian Chen, if you are reading this, thanks for the link! I don’t know whether this is the first time we’ve been Gawker-linked, but it’s the first one I know of, and it made me feel great, even though that wasn’t even my post. According to the Tao Lin/Marty McFly reality-index, my hands are not see-through anymore, and I am allowed to make one facial expression of my own choosing–though obviously I’ll choose not to make one. But seriously, Adrian, I miss Foster Kamer. Also, from all of us to Nick Denton–feel free to start picking us off whenever. Imagine if instead of Ann Coulter, Peaches (naked) Geldof and Steve Jobs, the top stories on Gawker were about Harold Bloom, Natalie Lyalin, and probably Harold Bloom again. WHAT IF?
Lastly, the guy whose doppelganger I am, the other Justin Taylor (or JTO as I like to call him) has a short post called “On Scary Stories and the Moral Imagination.” It’s kind of the same argument Stephen King makes in Danse Macabre about horror as a fundamentally conservative genre, because it is founded on a fear of the other, except made by a believing Christian with a much narrower and more specific definition of “moral,” plus also it’s really short, and just quotes some other things, and so is not really very much like that at all. JTO, if you are reading this, sorry to have put words in your mouth kind of. It’s a big bridge between us, but I’m really committed to building it. What slowed me down, see, is that I can’t get my pdf copy of The Axioms of Religion by EY Mullins to print out properly–I’m trying to do it two-book-pages-to-the-printed-page–and so I haven’t been able to read it yet. But I WILL get there, and then we’ll have that to talk about. Anyway, my favorite part of your post was the Chesterton-opener, the note on which I will end-
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist.
Children already know that dragons exist.
Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziUYE3Xaww4&
Video courtesy of Matt DeBenedictis.
Forwarding-video-to-me courtesy of Jeremy Schmall.
[NOTE: The reviewer discloses several personal acquaintances, and asserts his unequivocal subjectivity.]
A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking
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When I was a kid my parents had a no-censorship policy on my reading material. The only exception they ever made to this rule was when I wanted to read a book that my dad was reading, called American Psycho. This was sometime in the mid ’90s, when the book was out of print. Dad had gotten it from a woman who worked in his office, who herself had found it on a website that specialized in hard-to-find books—probably the first person we ever knew who had used the internet to actually get something. I remember asking him about it, and that my interest was immediately piqued by his no-doubt abridged description. I remember asking to read it, and how, after much deliberation (which was baffling in itself, because I hadn’t meant “can I” so much as “when can I”) he finally told me, not without evident regret, that he would not let me read the book. “It’s not the content itself,” he said, “so much as that I don’t think you have the context to understand the content for what it is.” I must have expressed some outrage—this was unprecedented, after all—and he, concerned I might sneak a peek despite the ban, hid the book so well that we never found it again, even years later, when we emptied that house out and moved.
I started college in the summer of 2000, a few months after the film version of American Psycho debuted at Sundance. Now the book was everywhere. You could just walk into the store and buy a copy—with Christian Bale’s face on the cover, no less. I didn’t go see the movie in theaters, but I went and got the book. And I’ll tell you something—my father was absolutely right. Even at eighteen I didn’t really understand the book for what it was, namely the darkest of satires, mostly because I didn’t know enough about what was being satirized: Wall Street culture, the ‘80s in general, etc. So I took the book absolutely seriously, and treating it in this way made for one of the single most disturbing reading experiences I had ever had before, or have had since.
Zachary German would have been eleven years old the year American Psycho was released in theaters, and though I don’t know whether he saw the film before he read the book, it’s highly likely that a trailer for the film alerted him to the book’s existence in the first place. He would have understood going in, then, that the ultra-violence was a kind of cartoonish excess, and that the whole thing was to be understood (on some level) as a comedy, but he would have probably been still too young to fully grok how (or even that) the pathological cataloging of brand-names was meant as an extension of the central “joke.”
Josh Cohen double shot! If this doesn’t get you out of bed, it’ll put you back in. JC considers The Sabbath, among other Jewish contributions to the science of keeping Time.
Shmita
The Torah ordains every seventh year a Sabbatical Year, as it says in Leviticus 25: “Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.” This septennial respite is known as shmita, Hebrew for “release” or “freeing.” After seven of these seven-year cycles, Leviticus declares a Jubilee, a special fallowing during which all debts are forgiven and all slaves must be manumitted—two tenets not currently observed in the State of Israel, though the agricultural component of the shmita year still is.
And “Thirty Six Shades of Prussian Blue,” which I think was previously mentioned in the Triple Canopy post the other day.
At the Bombsite, Susie DeFord interviews (new to me) poet Damian Rogers.
At Moistworks, noted fictionist and writer-on-music Ben Greenman remembers Alex Chilton of Big Star. This is a short, affecting piece that is worth reading. Also, there are some mp3s to download there.
I remembered beginning to date the woman I’d later marry, playing lots of Chilton’s music for her, and trying to figure out his secret: the way his try-anything-once aesthetic was both forthright and evasive, how he could combine an anarchic sense of humor and an unironic ability to convey pain, his addiction to the brilliant throwaway, his graceless grace. He drew lines back to Slim Harpo and Ronny and the Daytonas and Danny Pearson, so many it seemed he’d get trapped in the tangle. He escaped, again and again–but escaped to what?
And finally, I had always heard that SxSW was some sort of music festival, but apparently it is some sort of international conference for the dork industry. perennial home-girl Rachel Fershleiser and her partner-in-brevity Larry Smith present a flickr album of the nerdiest tee shirts at SxSW, which for some reason is also being referred to in some place as SxSWi. No idea what that’s about but please, don’t anyone tell me, as I’m finding the ignorance very soothing. The picture up top is drawn from their album, as is this one here, which happens to be my favorite of the lot, and on which note I leave you.
Big hat tip to Elliott David for passing this along to me.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Weq_sHxghcg&
Okay, I’m being a little dramatic, but seriously, Michael–a Long Island iced tea to end the night with? You’re an animal. My kind of animal. ANYway.
The Rumpus has an interview with the artist Jake Gillespie (worksample above), whom we in Poetryland know as “the guy who did that cool cover (and interior) art for Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth.”
The Second Pass celebrated their 1-year anniversary recently (hey, cheers!) and they mark the occasion by taking a break from the newer-newer-now pace of publishing/culture to take a look at some very untimely (and in some cases, unavailable) books. “Tales of the Unread.” I was especially intrigued by Jacob Silverman’s discussion of Past Continuous, a 1977 novel by the Israeli author Yaakov Shabtai, and Matt Weiland’s discussion of Killings by Calvin Trillin, a 1984 true-crime book from more or less the last person on earth you’d ever expect to produce a true-crime book.
Speaking of things you’ve never heard of. Over at The Daily Beast, Elif Batuman introduces the Tolstoy-weary Russo-phile to four “alternative Russian classics” by Shklovsky, Platanov, Mandelstam, and Kharms.
For all you writers out there with kids, or are kids, or just eat like kids: Mom buys Happy Meal and puts it on a shelf in her office to see how long it will take to decay. It doesn’t. Ever. Decay. “Happy Birthday to My Happy Meal” by Nonna Joann at Babybites.
And via Phil Campbell’s facebook- The Beliefnet blog takes a look at some ugly churches.
Here’s “Rory Ride Me Raw” by the Vaselines, performed live in-studio at KEXP last May.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyjraokQy9E
Including work by Erik Anderson, Cynthia Arrieu-King & Kristi Maxwell, Sarah Bartlett & Emily Kendal Frey, Eric Baus & Seth Perlow, Sommer Browning & Brandon Shimoda, Adam Clay, Gary L. McDowell, and Brandon Shimoda, Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina, Thomas Cook & Nate Slawson, Bruce Covey & Terita Heath-Wlaz, MTC Cronin & Peter Boyle, Mark DeCarteret, DZ Delgado & Sandy Florian, Jennifer K. Dick, Camille Dungy & Ravi Shankar, Annie Finch & Erika Howsare, Shawn Huelle & Jess Wigent, Kirk Keen, The Pines, Seth Perlow & Catherine Theis, Dani Rado, Andrea Rexilius & Susan Scarlata, Kate Schapira, Paul Siegell, Justin Taylor & Bill Hayward, and William Walsh.
Learn about horse less press here.
To celebrate, The Dead Weather cover Bob Dylan’s “New Pony” on what seems to be French television:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7qZPJG-sjA