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.
(via Jason “the B. is for Bookslut” Jones.)
Hey, look. the Chronicle of Higher Education is saying the thing I’ve been saying for years now. From “The New Math of Poetry.”
The notion that writing and performing “poetry” is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame has spilled out of our campuses and into the wider culture. You can’t pick up a violin or oboe for the first time on Monday morning and expect to play at Lincoln Center that weekend, but you can write your first poem in May and appear at an open mike in June waving a “chapbook” for sale. The new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of “publication.”
Here’s another: “Were a conscientious anthologist of this year’s poetry to spend just 10 minutes evaluating each published poem, he or she would need to work 16,666 hours, which means it would take eight years to assess the eligible poetry for a 2010 anthology.” That’s a fascinating/terrifying thought. But then, in the great tradition of Chronicle articles, there’s a long dead patch in the middle where Alpaugh gets incensed-by-numbers about how much nepotism is/n’t involved in BAP, Poetry Daily, and a few other premiere journals. Is there anyone left in the poetry world for whom these “allegations”/”revelations” (take your pick, depending on whether your own jury is still out on “the case”) are anything like a surprise, or remotely of interest?
If you stick around, the article eventually emerges–sort of–from this funk. “Marginalizing independent poets and the diversity of life experience they bring to poetry may help bolster M.F.A.-teaching careers; but how healthy is it for the art? Almost all of the world’s great poetry has been written by independents, and most of the poets writing today (myself included) remain unaffiliated with any institution.” By any metric, this is a salient point, and I think if it had appeared in the thesis instead of the conclusion, the article would have sounded a lot less like sour grapes. Then there’s a few lines about how if “Howl”/”The Road not Taken”/”Daddy” were published today, they’d all be relegated to niche journals and wouldn’t make BAP, to which I can only re-iterate my earlier sentiment: YAWN. Because the premise of the question is bullshit- if “Howl” was published today it would absolutely not appear in BAP or any journal of note. But the reason isn’t that we’re no longer smart enough to read. The reason is that the poem would be coming fifty years too late. You can’t blame the culture for having moved forward from its own major milestones. That’s kind of the whole point, yeah? Anyway, there is one nice Pound quote about the value of editors (I believe he’s speaking here specifically about anthologists; Pound of course edited several)–“The weeder is supremely needed, if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.” We’ll leave things there. And as usual, because it’s the Chronicle, the comments section is bustling. So if anyone feels like scrapping, you’re welcome to join their fray (I see our own Mark Leidner is over there, spreading some genial insurgency) or have your own here. Like I need to tell you that.
PS- all artwork in this post is by David Foox. I don’t know how I got on his mailing list, but I’m glad I wound up there. These little guys right here are from the “elemental badgers” series. You are looking at the SOUL, FIRE, and AIR badgers. Up top is a painting entitled “I Am Not a Toy.” More at Foox-u.
This is what it looks like where I live right now. Readings were canceled tonight. Schools are closed tomorrow. I uploaded a few more pics here, if anyone wants to see them.
In fact, some of us already do. I know I have linked/mentioned her before, but it feels like this is the right time to make things official, and so I invite everyone to join me in declaring our Official Love of Molly Young. But just what is it that we love? Well…
Here she is at the Poetry Foundation (thanks for the link, Travis), writing on Frederick Seidel.
Like that of Miller and Bukowski, Seidel’s style is one of incriminating self-exposure coupled with an exacting (and therefore imitable) aesthetic. But here’s a funny thing. Writing a poem about lust, pride, imprudence—about ordering a call girl or staying at “literally the most expensive hotel in the world” or racing a bike at 200 mph—has a way of neutralizing the unpleasantness of that vice. To write a good poem about an ugly thing, as Seidel does often, is not to write an ugly poem.
And on Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder.
Romanticism as a cultural force, Holmes points out, is generally regarded as “hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity.” Yet both pursuits followed the same imaginative principles and notions of wonder that fueled their advancements, and it is Holmes’s contention that a Romantic science exists in the same sense as a Romantic poetry, and both flourished during what he calls the Age of Wonder.
You can also find her all over This Recording, and n+1 (including “Kickstart my Heart,” the adderall in the Ivys piece, and a more recent double-review of Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds and a Hefner biography) and she tumbles! And she collaborates on art books. The new one is called TROUBLESHOOTING . It also says she blogs for Urban Outfitters, but I didn’t actually click that one. Instead I clicked on “Rules on Writing” at More Intelligent Life. And now I know the rule: which is there is no rule, which is just what I’d always hoped. Molly!
The Rumpus has a long interview with Paula Fox.
Okay, this one’s actually two, but I stole them both from Bookslut, and “fourfer” sounds stupid. Therefore, (2a) everybody’s homeboy (that is, Bookslut’s and ours) Michael Schaub is interviewed at Willamette Week. (2b) Anarchist news dot org has an interview with Eric Hazan of La Fabrique, the French publisher of The Coming Insurrection, which I have read a lot about and plan to own by the end of the day today.
Question: What is the reason for the resurrection of the communist idea?
Eric Hazan: People feel that there is no longer a choice between the Right and the Left, but between ways of getting out of capitalism. That’s the key question. If it remains in the domain of ideas, one can only go round in circles. For me, thinking about communism isn’t heading towards a political organization, but towards practical reflections.
And finally, the other day I was trilling about having finally received my copy of The Axioms of Religion in the mail. What I did not understand was that the 1977 edition, attributed to Hobbes and Mullins, is not in fact Mullins’s original work as edited by Hobbes, but is rather a wholesale revision by Hobbes of the original work. As such, he rightly credits himself as the primary author, and it’s not clear where and to what extent he is quoting or paraphrasing Mullins, whose writing is the actual locus of my interest. Also, after reading the intro and the first chapter, it’s clear to me that Hobbes is an incredibly annoying–though basically well-meaning, and only unintentionally racist– propagandist for his own weird notion of the Baptist cause. His edition, published during the (brief) heyday of the Carter administration, is basically designed as a primer to introduce the Baptist faith to a general American audience that, at the time, apparently needed a documentary special to explain what it was to be “born again” after Carter declared himself so. What a difference a generation makes! Yikes. Anyway, I want to read the real, original Axioms of Religion by E.Y. Mullins, which has apparently been out of print since 1908. HELLO INTERNET ARCHIVE. THANK YOU PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. I recommend the B&W pdf version, which is easier to load than the full-color one, and all you really lose is the yellowness of the scanned pages. Very, very excited to start reading this. Soul competency, here I come!
PS- As long as we’re all careening toward some weird conversionary episode, Mathias Svalina and I were talking the other day about Xian-era Bob Dylan. I was talking about listening somewhat obsessively to Shot of Love but he said the real action is on Saved. They’re both pretty amazing records. Have you ever seen the original cover art for Saved? It’s so hardcore that they actually switched it out after the first edition of the album, for this kind of crappy picture of BD playing live. But I still think Shot of Love would make a better poster.
You know what I love? Waking up to a Google alert that has a story in it called “Justin Taylor is Cool.” Who wouldn’t love that? So imagine my surprise when I clicked through and wound up at something called the Reformation21 blog. It’s a post about me and my doppelganger, Justin Taylor of Crossway Books, a preacher from Wheaton, Ill about whom I’ve blogged many times, and whose awareness of my existence I’ve frequently been given to speculate about. Well it seems all but certain that he knows about me now, and furthermore, this post by Stephen Nichols seems to make clear once and for all that he is not my doppelganger, but rather that I am his. Since it’s a short post it is reproduced in full, but you might as well see Ref21 for yourself.
So here I am thumbing through my latest copy of Paste catching up on the latest Indie and post funk metal ska offerings and there it is:
“Justin Taylor’s first short story collection” . . . “artfully captur[ing] the view of the 2000s.” Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever–great title, despite being riddled with theological problems.
Apparently our Justin, “Editorial Director at Crossway and follower of Christ” by day, is a Brooklyn-living professor of writing at Rutgers on the side.
I knew someday being Justin’s friend would raise my HQ (hip quotient for those not in the know).
Stephen, if you’re reading this- thanks for the shout! And yes, EHITBTE presents something of a theological problem–hardly beside the point, btw. You might think about it as an intentional release of the self-destructive powers of the exponential and the recursive onto Leibniz’s notion that “all is for the best in the best of all possible wolds.” Not that that solves anything- but solving problems is your homeboy’s line of work. Mine is causing them. Seems like we’ll work together splendidly. And Justin, if you’re out there, pleased to meet your acquaintance! I’m really sorry I keep putting out books that have titles that sound like they could be your books- The Apocalypse Reader, and the (forthcoming novel, provisionally entitled) The Gospel of Anarchy. We have things in common! I love GK Chesterton! And Kierkegaard! And I just got my copy of The Axioms of Religion by Hobbes and Mullins in the mail today and am very excited to read it. Let me know if you ever want to chat about the history of American Baptist thought and sectarianism.
NYC Area Alert Quad-shot:
First off, rival readings on Friday the 26th: Celebrate the fifth anniversary of Earshot!, the venerable series hosted by Nicole Steinberg. The reading will feature my buddy Jeff Johnson, Kate Greenstreet, Jennifer Firestone, Megan Williams, and Margarita Delcheva. It’s in Williamsburg, BK. Directions here. That same night, over at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Joanna Smith Rakoff will mark the paperback release of her novel, A Fortunate Age (NYT Editors’ pick; IndieNext pick; B&N First Look Club; SFChronicle best-seller–wow, not bad, right?) with a little help from the M Shanghai String Band and something called the Story Pirates. Also, JSR will be reading with yours truly at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY on March 11. Yes, that one banner thing says the 13th, but don’t believe it. All the other stuff says the 11th, which is a Thursday. But in between the 26th and the 11th is March 4th, which is the day of the 2nd annual Canteen magazine gala fundraiser, which is offering some seriously schmancy good-times. Tickets are on a sliding scale, beginning at $75 and going as high as $1000+. These guys are emphatically not screwing around. Just for showing up you get cocktails and hors d’oeuvres from a Michelin-starred chef, recognition on the Canteen donor page, a copy of the magazine, and your literary fortune told by Porochista Khakpour and, um, me. Higher-level donors can get–among other things–a cocktails class with a mixologist from Per Se, a private tour of “a major museum collection” led by Arnold Lehman, the director of The Brooklyn Museum and also, the host of the event (it’s being held at his house). So if you’re up for feeling like part of High Society (don’t click that- nsfw), you can buy a ticket here (click this- it’s totally sfw).
I was just mucking around in the GIANT stats and noticed something wild- on 2/21 lightning hit our transmitter and HTMLGiant had a huge 18,501 unique visitors. That means that yesterday was in striking-distance of the site’s all-time high, which was December 4, 2009 when every single person in the world (or, rather, 20,249 people in the world) decided they wanted in on the DFW Grammar Challenge (part 2, part 3). So what was it that brought the teeming hordes back over our way? Was it Jeremy Schmall’s poems? Was it Amy again? Was it my post of Harold Bloom reciting a Stevens poem? Actually, it was Jimmy Chen’s “illustrated account of Tom Wolfe’s wardrobe on the Charlie Rose show.” The post went up on the 16th, but the 21st was the day that Andrew Sullivan linked it from his blog, describing it to his readers as “brilliant.” So kudos & salutes to Jimmy, and Andrew, if you’re reading this–thanks! I’m a regular reader of yours already, and it’s very gratifying to know you’ve got an eye on us. Cheers, all!
At The Rumpus, Vanessa Garcia reviewed Kathleen Rooney’s new essay collection, For You, For You I am Trilling These Songs. Garcia’s consideration was highly ambivalent, and she ultimately rendered a verdict against. Then all hell broke loose in the comments section. Daniel Nester, Kyle Minor, Elisa Gabbert, and Tim Jones-Yelvington are just some of the local (to us here) luminaries who weighed in with complaints against the review. Rumpus Books editor Andrew Altschul has responded several times; he and Nester are particularly aggressive with each other. What makes this more interesting than a flame war is that the vitriol seems not excessive, but central and perhaps necessary, to an earnest conversation about how nonfiction–memoirs in particular–ought to be read and discussed. My one critique of said discussion is that there seems to be an undercurrent of umbrage–palpable but pointedly not articulated–at the fact of a negative review having been written at all. Critics who pan things should expect to have their prerogative cross-examined, their biases speculated upon, their motives questioned, etc.–which is not to say that Garcia’s critics are wrong, only to point out that a positive review is never reprimanded for its angle, however wrong-headed or idiotic that angle might be. If we are willing to court and accept facile praise, do we have the right to demand anything better from our detractors? (Again: not to suggest Garcia’s piece is facile, or “wrong”; having not read Rooney’s book I withhold judgment on both it and the crit of it.) Anyway, the comment-thread is still active as of this morning, and the whole thing is worth giving a look to.
with a hearty hat-tip to Adam Fitzgerald. Happy Sunday!
crash art by Scott Teplin
I was lucky enough to hear Fred Moten read at the Segue Poetry series at the Bowery Poetry Club a month or so ago. This post at Beatrice.com has one of Moten’s poems, as well as a link to Pennsound where you can hear him read some of his work.
Schools used student laptop webcams to spy on them in school and at home. (h/t to Rumpus for the link.)
There was a Times profile of DeLillo and we somehow missed it when it was new. But now it’s NYTea Time. William T(ea) Vollmann has the cover story, a review of Ted Conover’s The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today. Dwight Garner discusses Elif Batuman’s The Possessed–remember this book? We all flipped out over the excerpt that was published at the Chronicle of Higher Education a few weeks ago. You probably don’t remember that this book was first discussed on this site before the Chronicle “controversy,” when Keith Gessen mentioned it in his anti-top 3 top 3 of 2009 guest-post. Jenifer Egan, whose reviews I always appreciate, discusses Eight White Nights by Andre Acimann. On the Paper Cuts blog, I am answering Stray Questions , and David Goodwillie has a playlist for his new novel, American Subversive.