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.
Guess which parts are which. But seriously--isn't this photo fucking gorgeous? Forget who it's a picture of for a second, and the fact that I found it on Gawker. Just look. Imagine it on a gallery wall. It's beautiful.
Tony O’Neill offers a pre-emptive FUCK YOU to Dr. Drew Pinsky for presumably planning to exploit the death of Corey Haim, and for being an asshole in general.
A controversial method of proselytizing to Muslims by starting with Jesus’s minor but significant role in the Koran, has generated–wait for it–controversy, drawing fire from Muslims and also some Christian groups. The procedure, naturally, is known as “The Camel Method.”
Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, loves the blazing hell out of Scott McClanahan’s Stories II.
There is a simplicity to the writing that feels very much like traditional storytelling, like a conversation, the easy way the character allows you to come into his life for a little while to hear what he wants you to hear. Despite the humor, which sneaks up on you and floors you, the stories are bleak; almost all of them are set in West Virginia and the propects for most of the characters in the stories are not good. There is sadness everywhere in these stories. And what I’m going to say next is why I think I love these stories so much. Amidst the sadness, the ways in which everyone fails each other, there is such an amazing tenderness that lifts these stories up. I felt very tightly connected to these characters and was grateful for having been around their stories…
Funny, because I was just saying something similar to fellow-Giant Amy McDaniel over gchat yesterday morning (she’s a fan too). I said that McClanahan’s book reminded me of the subtly acerbic, realist-ish Richard Brautigan not of the novels but of the short stories, like say “1/3, 1/3, 1/3,” crossbred with the big-hearted schlubbery of the Larry Brown of “Big Bad Love.” McClanahan seems like the kind of guy who probably read Breece D’J Pancake and came away thinking, “yeah, okay, true, but dude–take a load off.” No kidding. That said, it must be admitted that McClanahan’s lightness can occasionally, like Brautigan again, bleed into slightness, but if the worst thing you can say about a writer is that his not-bogging-you-down occasionally manifests as it-floats-off-on-the-breeze, he and his book are still in pretty fine shape. Anyway, the upshot is that we are all very much charmed/impressed/pleased by Scott McClanahan, and you should see if maybe you are too.
It’s worth noting, by the by, that this is not Giant’s first time delighting in Scott McClanahan. Back in January, Sam Pink reviewed Stories II. That post also conatins a story from the book, “The Couple,” which I think is exemplary and swell. And back last June, pr enthused about the original, Stories. And Scott’s own site is here.
Another of Theo Jansen's marvelous Strandbeests, via Dennis Cooper's The Weaklings
Here’s an interview with Titus Andronicus about their album, The Monitor, which I’ve been enjoying the hell out of lately. Question: am I the only person who thinks that first question about the lyric fusing allusions to Springsteen and Billy Bragg in “A More Perfect Union” also contains a third reference that they don’t mention? The line they quote is “I never wanted to change the world/ but I’m looking for a new New Jersey”, which is the Bragg paraphrase (“I’m not looking for a new England”), but the next line is “Cuz tramps like us, baby we were born to die”, which obviously is Springsteen at the beginning, but did anyone else hear “born to die” and think CHOKING VICTIM? Seems like something these guys would have on their radar. Anyway. If you like the idea of something that sounds like Bright Eyes but with its ball intact, or some version of the Hold Steady that is just as passionate but never has quite as much fun, this is maybe your new jam.
Here’s a playlist by fantasy/sci-fi legend Michael Moorcock at Paper Cuts. This made me really happy to read–his thoughts on the Dead (at the top) and Dylan (at the bottom) pretty much describe my own feelings to a T. The rest is good too.
Sometimes I wonder why I still bother to go to Pitchfork. Then I remember. It’s because sometimes I learn stuff like this.
From the Archives of WTF (not held at UT Austin): The year is 1996, and Snoop Dogg is reviewing The Aristocats for Entertainment Weekly. (via Angela Petrella‘s facebook.)
And Boing Boing offers up Son House’s “Death Letter” as their Greatest Song of All Time of the Day.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDCNbacVt5w&
In December 2005, my friend Adam got obsessed with Jenny Lewis and bought every magazine at the Borders with her face on the cover, which was a LOT of them. Among the plenitude of mostly miserable and intellect-proof “music magazines,” which I soon found myself flipping through in mild amusement/dismay, one thing caught my eye: an essay on Beckett and Christianity by Barry Hannah in a magazine called Paste, which I had never heard of before. I was so enraptured with this essay that I made it my business to track their books editor down, and indeed my gmail records reflect that by 01/05/06 I was bugging Charles McNair, author of the novel Land O’ Goshen and editor of the Paste books page, for attention and work. Charles has been a good friend and occasional employer of mine ever since, and it all stems from our shared love of Barry Hannah. As it turns out, Charles studied with Hannah at the MFA program in Tuscaloosa, back when–but let me not tell his story for him. He has a very fine remembrance of his old teacher up at the Paste site, which you should go read. And also, Paste has gone ahead and made available Hannah’s essay, “The Maddening Protagonist.”
I’ve studied the mystic poet William Blake a good long while. Blake’s prophetic books—driven by a man who saw angels in trees and advocated naked free love—I can’t read except as inspired lunacy, which would also hold true for other denominational texts discounted by every theological archaeologist without rabid wolves running around his head. But where do you stop the discounting? We’re only cursing the darkness from the position of our own predilections when it comes to religion and, even more difficult, faith.
For simple truthful laymen, the Holy Bible is inconsistent to an almost sickening degree, and we mainly just let it pass. Faulkner once commented about one of his male characters who, “like most men, never thought about God one way or another.” Through the ages there seems a redundancy of the outright mad clutching Bibles to their chests and spouting scripture incoherently as they proceed from one asylum to the next.
[Here’s another one for the “I know it’s a press release but I think you’ll actually be interested” files. Congrats to Melville House, the author, the translator, and everyone else to whom congrats are due; and a hearty cheers to Liran Golod, tireless arts champion at the Israeli Consulate, provider of this notice. – JT]
New York, March 11, 2010 – Melville House’s The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu, has won the 2010 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction. Organized by Three Percent at the University of Rochester, the Best Translated Book Award is the only prize of its kind to honor the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the U.S. over the past year. This year the awards ceremony was hosted by Manhattan independent bookstore Idlewild Books.
“We’re delighted to receive this award on behalf of the author, Gail Hareven,” said co-publisher Dennis Loy Johnson, “as it represents what we see as part of our mission at Melville House: Not just to publish both fiction and nonfiction in translation for the sake of essentially preserving it, as if it were something on the verge of going extinct. That strikes us as a way of further ensuring its obscurity. Rather, we see it as our mission to trumpet that work loudly, and to work aggressively to get that work in the hands of as many people as possible, especially those who would not normally encounter translated literature.”
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Strandbeest by Theo Jansen, courtesy of Gallerie Dennis Cooper
The Rumpus has a conversation with Banksy.
Here’s a Times article on testing Google’s new translation software (via Sara Faye Lieber’s facebook).
Jezebel has a sympathetic Q&A with a guy with a female-constipation fetish (believe it or not, this is actually SFW).
Julia Cohen posts poems by her 4th and 5th grade students.
Ron Rosenbaum, who you probably know better as Slate‘s resident Nabokov-obsessive, reviews Seth Rogov’s Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet for the Jewish Review of Books. Depending on your personal feelings about Dylan, this piece is either about as much or slightly less fun than it sounds like.(via Arts & Letters Daily.)
And in today’s installment of BANJO FEEVER, we’ve got Frank Warner and Pete Seeger on Pete’s old RAINBOW QUEST TV show, doing Frank Proffitt’s “Tom Dooley.” This was the first bluegrass song I ever got obsessed with. The version that caught my attention was Doc Watson’s, from a live album that I picked up because I wanted to hear a “more authentic” version of “Shady Grove,” than the Jerry Garcia / David Grisman version on their album of the same name, which I was already in love with.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OATZrTibcFY
I am giving a reading tonight with Joanna Smith Rakoff at Oblong Books, in (presumably) scenic Rhinebeck, NY. So I was trying to figure out which train to take there (Amtrak) and then how to get from the train station to the actual town/store–but then I got bored and figured I’ll deal with it when I get there. Which I will–or won’t, I guess. Anyway.
Last night I went to the KGB Bar to hit up the issue #3 launch reading of Correspondence, the journal of The Corresponding Society, itself the love-brain-child of Lonely Christopher, whose forthcoming Little House on the Bowery story collection (The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse; February 2011) I am very, very excited about. I first saw Lonely Christopher give a delightfully bizarre and divisive reading a couple years ago in the living room of founding Small Anchoress Jen Hyde; he read with Joshua Cohen, Mathias Svalina, and Joshua Furst, Small Anchor authors one and all. Anyway, last night’s reading featured Christian Hawkey, Jenny Stohlmann, A.E. Wilson, Jody Buchman, Ben Fama, Adrian Shirk, and LC himself, all of whom have work in the new issue. You heard it here first, kids: these guys are onto something. I can’t remember the last time I sat through a seven-reader poetry+fiction reading and wasn’t bored for a minute. Plunking down my ten bucks for a copy of Correspondence #3 was almost certainly the most fun thing I spent money on yesterday, and yesterday I had a great Vietnamese noodle soup and also several alcoholic beverages. But this was better. You should give their blog a look, and generally speaking keep them on your radar. They’re certainly on mine. Oh, and a hearty hat tip to Jeremy Schmall, who not only told me about the reading but convinced me to get my ass out of the house and actually go to it. Brother!
Okay, now I need to get back to figuring life (ie trains) out, but since the banjo tunes from yesterday seemed to be well-received (by one guy anyway) I leave you with this video of Pete Seeger and his grandson, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, singing one of my (and, apparently, Tao’s too) favorite Seeger originals- “Well May the World Go.” I’ve been pretty much obsessed with the version of this song that appears on the New Lost City Ramblers 20th Anniversary Concert album, and while this clip doesn’t quite have the heft of that version (there’s really nothing quite like Seeger when he gets his street-preacher shoes on) it’s pretty cool for a whole host of other reasons which I will allow it to disclose to you as you watch.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHDI7Yw0AkU
Here’s a piece of industry news. Brooklyn-based powerHouse Books (a publisher of visual arts books, as well as a bookstore/event space) is “going to Random House,” according to a press release I just got from them. The letter begins, “Dear powerHouse follower– You are, with any luck, a retailer, a reviewer, a promoter, or just someone vigorously involved in the visual arts…” Well, yes and no, but I am a guy with an INBOX, and apparently, plenty of free time on a Wednesday. The full announcement is copied below.
[NOTE: Guess which are which.]
“The Bubble and The Globe” – Joshua Clover on John Ashbery’s Planisphere as a chronicle of the financial collapse at The Nation.
Ashbery is heroically free of the world-was-better-when-my-body-was-younger piffle that mars some of his well-known contemporaries. Instead we have the sense of the poet (and us with him) being always inside time, suspended within it as within some queer medium (an entirely proprietary substance, one part limestone and two parts prosecco). There is no lyrical leap to ecstasy, to someplace beyond the capacious Ashberian land. Time itself is the worldly country, and there is no other.
Part two of Melissa Broder’s two-part series on twitter as a strange attractor in the writer’s life is now live. In Part 1 she spoke to poets, including Ron Silliman, Amy King, Tao Lin, and Reb Livingston. In Part 1.5 she spoke at some length with Brandon Scott Gorell. Now, in Part 2, she speaks to prose-writers, Kevin Sampsell, Dara Horn, Fiona Maazel, our own Blake Butler and Matthew Simmons, and yours truly.
Fiona Maazel: Twitter? What the hell is that? I, Neanderthal.
“Carded” – William Deresiewicz amply disgusted with the packaging of Nabokov’s Original of Laura at The New Republic.
The cards are perforated and, as Dmitri says in a note, “can be removed and rearranged, as the author likely did when he was writing the novel.” I’ll get back to the second half of that statement, a claim both strategic and semi-dubious (not to mention ungrammatical). The first breaks new ground in editorial chutzpah, inviting us to play a kind of Nabokov: Rock Band–the novel as theme park. One can only imagine what dear old dad–the ultimate artistic control freak, not to mention one of the all-time snobs–would have thought of the idea of letting his readers re-arrange his scraps and chapters at will.
And Boing Boing introduces us to Jake Adelstein, the American Jew who relocated to Japan and became the toughest reporter on the yakuza beat. Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice, will be collaborating with Boing Boing over the next two months, to bring out a series of exclusive stories about the yakuza. Which we’ll have our eye on, no doubt, but in the meantime they kick things off with an interview.
Do you worry about your family?
I have a guarantee from someone up high in the Yamaguchi-gumi that they won’t touch my family. Their word is pretty solid. It’s a gentleman’s agreement that they’ll only kill me, which makes me feel better.
So listen to this. Ariana Reines–poet, playwright, translator, publisher and frequent target of this blog’s affection–has been invited to join a UN Mission to Haiti which leaves on Thursday. She will spend March 12-19 traveling with a group of trauma clinicians, serving as the team’s only French-English interpreter. Ariana writes,
the group will be working primarily with traumatized doctors, nurses, and other medical workers, as well as children, orphans in particular. I know you have plenty of places to put your $: into the mouths of your children for example. i must raise $2500 in order to cover airfare, travel insurance, immunizations, malaria medication, mosquito netting, art supplies (for the children we will work with), and feminine hygeine + contraceptive items (for the grown people)
$2500 is an imminently crowd-sourceable figure, and with such a firm sense of this mission’s purpose and time-table, the impact of your giving can hardly risk being lost in the general abstraction of “charity.” So what do you say, team? I say let’s send Ariana Reines to Haiti. (UPDATE: NOW WITH LINK THAT ACTUALLY WORKS.) Whatever you can give will help. I’m going to go kick down twenty bucks as soon as I finish writing this post.
That’s right–many things; one bunch of them.
Faster Times books editor and commenter-in-good-standing-here Lincoln Michel takes on David Shields’s Reality Hunger over at The Rumpus. I have to say that Lincoln’s review is thorough, even-handed and thought-provoking; but after reading it, I can’t imagine anything I’m less interested in reading than this book. I say read Lincoln’s piece and call it a day.
Julia Cohen went to a small press festival in Boulder, CO. Then she ate some crappy pizza from a place called Sexy Pizza. She also talks about the new issues of Horse Less Review and Ugly Duckling’s 6×6. Plus, you know, other stuff–flowers, her brother, March.
Valleywag blows the pickles off the Cheezburger empire–sort of.
Also, Borders is firing lotsa people.
And what the hell has John Gallaher been talking about lately? Well, he likes the new Double Room, he’s interested in the new Sawako Nakayasu book from Letter Machine, he says the Laurel Review is looking for reviewers, and he digs the paintings of Glennray Tutor (see above), whom you know as the guy whose works adorns several of Barry Hannah’s Grove-Atlantic covers. Here’s Tutor’s site.