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.
One of our regular commenters-in-good-standing, mimi, posed this question in a comment on this post of mine from a couple days ago.
>>I sometimes wonder how contributors feel about posts that don’t get any (or any serious) comments, because they _have_ gone to some effort. I for one am paying attention, even though most of my comments are kind of goofy.<<
I started to answer her in the thread, but then thought that maybe this was something more people would like to know about, so I’m posting it here. My longer-than-she-probably-wanted answer after the break.
Hey! New Yorkers: I just got word that there are still a few seats left for Stephen Elliott’s “Writing from Experience” lecture, which he will be delivering on 3/11 (ie THIS THURSDAY) at the LGBT Center on West 13th street. I’m going to be out of town on this particular day, but I have only and always heard the best things about Stephen’s classes and lectures, so if you’re around, and interested in the topic, you could do a lot worse than to give this thing a shot. Read the full description of the event here. Buy a ticket here.
image by Lori Nix, via Blood Milk Jewelry
Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow gets around to reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, a study of consumer behavior that challenges the “rational consumer” hypothesis. CD also links us to this NPR story on obsolete professions, such as switchboard operator, ice-deliverer, and “lector,” who is the guy hired by all the cigar workers in the factory to sit in the center of the factory floor and loudly read the workers left-wing newspapers and pro-union propaganda, so that everyone can better themselves and become less alienated from their labor. If this job ever makes a comeback, I want to do it! The NPR piece has photos of each profession and audio clips of very, very old people talking about when these things existed and they themselves–young then–did them.
Dennis Cooper is testing your sight recognition skills at a French wax museum. I already failed utterly.
The Rumpus asks: Would you like to write about poetry (for the Rumpus)?
Tell us about the last poem or book of poetry you loved, no length requirements. The best will be published right here in the blog. Send your entries to poetry-at-therumpus-dot-net.
They’re also looking for people interested in reviewing full-length poetry collections. But FYI: Stephen Elliott and I had a long conversation the other night about the problems with book reviews for sites like his (and ours); we are both highly suspicious of the kinds of “reviews” that read like press releases or protracted blurbs, because they don’t tell us anything we can’t glean from a blurb, which is two lines long instead of seven paragraphs. The site-meters prove that these pieces don’t get read or linked the same way that more incisive, interesting books-pieces do, so neither the book nor the review-author nor the site is benefiting. If you’re going to try and review some poetry for The Rumpus–which you absolutely should–be sure and give them some red damn meat to sink their teeth into–something we’ll want to link to after they publish it, something that tells me something about the book I couldn’t glean on my own from its Amazon page. Good luck!
NYTea Time: Lydia Millet loves on the new Lipsyte, and Laura Miller likes the new John Banville, but Allison Glock seems to like Tammy Wynette less after reading Jimmy McDonough’s new biography of the country star.
The life story of the fame/drug-addled brat is nothing new, but McDonough wants more than for us to appreciate Wynette, he wants us to like Wynette. Because he likes Wynette — a little too much at times. He writes a handful of chatty letters to his subject. Page 1 begins: “Dear Tammy . . . Don’t worry, I won’t spill all the beans — I can’t. There’s just too much about you that will never be resolved.” Putting aside the dubious choice to shoot your biography in the foot on the first page, writing mash notes to a dead woman is oddly creepy — and only grows more so as the letters progress, one recounting a dream he had about her in which she wore “a yellow pantsuit and matching headband.” At another point he admits to having had “the hots” for her.
Yeesh. Also: A book about making moonshine, Sam Lipsyte answers Stray Questions, and Daniyal Mueenuddin won the Story Prize.
I posted about this yesterday, but I’m not sure it registered in the collective whatever, so here’s another snatch from Joshua Cohen on Seymour Krim at the Forward.:
A literary critic is somebody who lives in a brownstone or penthouse, wears a suit, and is affiliated with either an academic institution or wealthy relatives; a bookreviewer, however, lives in a shabbier apartment, wears shabbier clothes, and drinks and smokes cheaper drinks and cheaper smokables. William Hazlitt and Matthew Arnold were literary critics, and 10,000 summer intern humanities undergraduates become book reviewers when the publications they slave for run short and need a quickie 500 words (those publications that still run book reviews).
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Also (via Casey McKinney’s facebook page) here’s this-
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bse7gZrvV8
“The Beaten Canoneer”: Joshua Cohen on Seymour Krim at the Forward.
Seymour Krim was a book reviewer who wanted to be a literary critic, and then he was a critic who wanted to be “an essayist,” but instead of either, he became a beautifully wretched, snappy hack. He was the Kerouac of Jewish New York journalism, whose takes on literature and its strange gossip column practice — “the literary life” — would become founding documents for 1960s New Journalism; especially for the journalism of Krim’s nemesis, Norman Mailer.
And (via Rumpus) Violet Blue leaves the SFChronicle because of content-distortion and de-linking in their digital archives. Her full statement is up on her website (article is SFW but the ads running down both sides of the page are decidedly not).
I’ve written a short piece for Paper Cuts: “Literary Mourning–Thoughts on Barry Hannah.”
Paper Cuts has a Living With Music playlist by graphic journalist Joe Sacco, on the occasion of his new book Footnotes in Gaza.
And I’ve got a short double-review of two books about New York: Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis, and Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch, over at Time Out New York.
