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.
The new issue of Gigantic magazine now exists! UPDATED: Though I’m not seeing much evidence of #2 on the site right now. The launch party for #2, the “Gigantic America” issue will be at PPOW gallery in NYC on 2/27, and will feature readings by favorites-of-ours Deb Olin Unferth and Sasha Fletcher, among others. The issue itself has interviews with Sam Lipsyte and Lydia Millet, plus new fiction from Robert Coover and Leni Zumas, plus “collectible biographies of famous Americans” written by the likes of Michael Kimball and Clancy Martin. Holy awesome!
Also, check out their exclusive preview of Paul Willerton’s Little Big Cremaster 3.
Meehan Crist’s review of John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay is now up at Powells.com. Crist, you may or may not know, is the reviews editor at The Believer. Her review originally ran in the February issue, to much acclaim, and was selected for publication on the Powell’s site by the NBCC. Cheers!
The Rumpus has an interview with the poet Gary Young. How often do you see a poet-interview at the very top of a general-interest culture website? Good God, I love these guys. While you’re over there, check out “Sexually, I’m More of a Denmark: A Highly Subjective Book Review” by Chelsea G. Summers, and then, if you like, get linked (via them) to Javier Marias’s KCRW Bookworm appearance, which went live yesterday.
It’s Derek Jarman Day at Coop’s Place. Re the photo above-
Jarman is also remembered for his famous shingle cottage-garden, created in the latter years of his life, in the shadow of the Dungeness power station. The house was built in tarred timber. Raised wooden text on the side of the cottage is the first stanza and the last five lines of the last stanza of John Donne’s poem, The Sun Rising. The cottage’s beach garden was made using local materials and has been the subject of several books
Speaking of which, do you know that Donne poem? It’s one of my favorites of his. Here are my favorite lines from it:
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
But you really should read the whole thing. Happy Friday!
This jumped right off the e-page at me as one of those things that readers of this site would/will LOVE if/when they found/find out about it.
The great Joshua Cohen wrote an introduction to Lind’s Landscape in Concrete, which Open Letter Books re-published last year. On the occasion of the third anniversary of Lind’s passing, also, OLB’s even more recent (ie this January) reissue of Lind’s Ergo, they have made JC’s introduction to Landscape available online. Here is paragraph one.
“Jakov Lind” was a pseudonym for a man without a name. According to the rolls of a host of long-since defunct regimes, “Lind” was once known as Jakov Chaklan, Palestinian Jew (this was back when you could be one of those), and before that he was Jan Gerrit Overbeek, Dutch bargehand, which was the Nazi-era identity of Heinz Landwirth, Viennese. The author of Landscape in Concrete—and also of the stories of Soul of Wood, the novel Ergo, two other novels, another collection of stories, an Israeli travelogue, three memoirs, numerous stage and radio plays, and occasional poetry—might have been all of these people, and he might have been none. This is not meant “deconstructively,” however, or in a spirit of relativism. What’s being asserted here, at the beginning, is trauma. Is not knowing what to call one’s self. Is not having a private name for one’s self.
Now that you’re interested, go read the rest.
Image chosen by word association game with one of the main subjects of this post. Any guesses?
There’s a new poetry blog in town. Contributors to The The Poetry include the Maggy Poetry editorial A-team, plus about eight more fine people, plus^2 some sort of daily-rotating tag-team editorial arrangement. And a key word cloud-sphere that rotates bewitchingly. What else do you want from life? GO THERE.
Several pieces of news from Sentence: (1) The winner of the Sentence Book Award is (for a book-length manuscript of prose poems or a book-length manuscript consisting substantially of prose poems) is Sinead O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds by Maureen Seaton and Neil de la Flor. (2) 25 Sightings of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker by Re’lynn Hansen has been selected as the winning manuscript of The Firewheel Chapbook Award. (3) Sentence #7 is now available. (4) Also available now, An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Congrats all you winners!
Some people know about my doppelganger, the Other (or, since he’s older, perhaps the Original) Justin Taylor, who is a Baptist preacher out of Wheaton, Illinois and the co-author of a book called Sex and the Supremacy of Christ. ANYway, JTO left a comment on his friend David Murray’s post at The Gospel Coalition Blog the other day, which naturally triggered my Google alert, and though I don’t always keep this close track of JTO’s doings, the title of the blogpost caught my eye: “101 Writing Tips.” Turns out that Mr. Murray actually meant “Writing Tips 101;” he’s actually offering his Top 5 writing/preaching tips, which themselves are actually only intended to summarize some video about “preaching blunders” that he linked to. Here’s one now-
3. Don’t overuse nouns
Use verbs much more. Not, “It is our suggestion…” but, “We suggest.”
Heartily recommended to all you young preachers out there. Also: JTO’s blog, Between Two Worlds, is here.
This will be as mushy as it gets.
At The Fanzine, Jeff Johnson considers Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path.
Dennis Cooper hosts the official online launch of Mark Gluth’s The Late Works of Margaret Kroftis. I have yet to hear anything but the best about this book.
Because we love Roger Ebert now, we are interested in his review of Valentine’s Day.
“Valentine’s Day” is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it’s more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.
Also, did you know that Ebert wrote a book called Your Movie Sucks ?
William Deresiewicz on Tolstoy at The Nation. (I’ve become such a committed Deresiewicz reader I can now type his last name without having to check the spelling first–I check after, and I’m usually right. This goes for you, too, Moe Tkacik.)
NYTea Time: Dominique Browning is quite taken with Cathleen Schine’s The Three Weissmanns of Westport. She locates the book in the updated-Austen trend, but hastens to identify a crucial distinguishing feature: “The strange thing about the Jane brigade is that most of its practitioners have raided only her plots, apparently not quite up to the task of honoring the essence of Austen. But Schine’s homage has it all: stinging social satire, mordant wit, delicate charm, lilting language and cosseting materialistic detail.” Hey, there’s a new Peter Handke book! And Adam Haslett wrote a novel! About the financial crisis! Michiko Kakutani did not like Union Atlantic–-but that was on a Monday; Liesl Schillinger likes it quite a lot today. What else? Jon Caramanica looks at a couple of rock & roll books; Catherine Rampell on the interesting-looking academic-ish-seeming, Capitalism and the Jews by Jerry Z. Muller; Dahlia Lithwick on death row lawyer David R. Dow’s memoir, Autobiography of an Execution; and Todd Pruzan makes my weekend.
Happy Sunday!
I’ve gotten so used to thinking about The Rumpus as one of my go-to sites, and linking to something of theirs in damn near every web round-up I do, that I’ve nearly forgotten about the days when I used to put posts together that focused exclusively on them. Let’s do that now.
Top of the site: an interview with the painter Caris Reid; funny Woman Elissa Bassist on “How to Move to San Francisco.”
And in Books Stuff: Virginia Konchan reviews Catherine Bowman’s The Plath Cabinet; Andrew Altschul on Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music; Catherine Brady on Eric Puchner’s first novel, Model Home; and that Steve Almond piece about self-publishing that I linked to yesterday.
All that and more. But hey, here’s something else important: New York folks, on March 11, Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott will be lecturing on “Writing From Experience,” something he damn well knows something about, at the LGBT Center on West 13th street. $30 reserves you a space, and you can buy your ticket here, but there’s also one free ticket up for grabs, and you can win it by leaving a comment on this post. From Stephen: comments can be “about anything at all, it could be why they should get it, what their project is about, or just random thoughts about the weather.” He’ll be looking over the thread and will choose the commenter whose post somehow says “Yeah, I’m worth giving free shit to and spending two hours with.” So, yeah. Happy Friday!
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PS- Art by Ryan Lauderdale, who has a show opening at Red White Yellow gallery in Houston on March 13th.
Today is Gordon Lish’s birthday. On behalf of everyone here (not just on HTML, but on the whole internet): SALUTES TO THE CAPTAIN. … And thanks to David McLendon, whose Facebook post reminded me. So what will you do for Lish’s birthday?
You could buy a copy of Extravaganza.
You could listen to these Don Swaim interviews with GL.
You could review the complete history of our coverage of Lish and Lish-authors (warning: may not be complete), including the original series of Lish quotations for which I coined the Power Quote category. #1, #2, #3, #4+#5, #6.
The Rumpus has got Steve Almond on “Why I Went Ahead and Self-Published.”
TNR’s The Book has reprinted Auden’s “A Preface to Kierkegaard” from their May 15, 1944 issue. First sentence: “In a just world, translators would be paid ten times as much as authors.”
NYT reports that the diary that Faulkner used as the inspiration for the grandfather’s ledger in Go Down, Moses has been discovered. “The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he ‘was always taking copious notes.’ ”
The Poetry Foundation has got Tao Lin analyzing five love poems by Michael Earl Craig, Matthew Rohrer, Joshua Beckman, Chelsea Martin and Ben Lerner. Quoth Tao from the thesis: “I have limited my thoughts to a context of “romantic relationships.” I have included, as the last sentence of each set of thoughts, when I would most like to be forced to read each poem for the first time (if I hadn’t already read them).” And on Ben Lerner’s “Mad Lib Elegy”: “Out of the poems in this essay I think I would most be interested in a psychology experiment—of which I would also like to be a participant—where one hundred people who have just been “dumped” to emotionally devastating results in the past hour are forced to read this poem then interviewed about their experience, with accompanying brain-scans.”
Ian Vanek from Japanther on Note Books at Largehearted Boy— Note Books being the feature where musicians discuss books like they like, as opposed to Book Notes, where authors discuss music they like.
And for NYC folks, tonight is the Greatest Three Minute Rock N Roll Story Ever at Bar Matchless in Lower Greenpoint. I’ll be one of over a dozen readers, including Jami Attenberg, Zachary German, Kendra Grant Malone, Franz Nicolay, Lincoln Michel, and James Yeh, who is also hosting the event along with Jason Diamond of Vol 1 Brooklyn, which itself is the site I ganked the DeLillo and Japanther links from. Come on out and see us why don’tcha? There’ll be booze specials, The Wailing Wall will play, and each reading will run 3 minutes or less.
This is Brooklyn right now
This is an NYC Area Alert: in two hours, Sam Lipsyte, Colson Whitehead and Heidi Julavits will be reading on behalf of Harper’s as part of Love: A Rebuke, at Housing Works Bookstore and Cafe. Schools are closed. Roads are treacherous. Love sucks. And literature–well, she marches (anyway, stumbles through snowdrifts) bravely on! I am leaving my house for the first and presumably only time today to catch this awesomeness. Hope to see you there.
Moe Tkacik’s “Journals of the Crisis Year” is now live at The Baffler‘s website. Tkacik considers a baker’s dozen books about (and/or by players in) the Recent Financial Crisis.
“From time immemorial,” Tett explains, “the worlds of business and finance have been beset with the problem of default risk, the danger that a borrower will not repay a loan or bond.” This is frustrating to read if you think of this lingering “problem” as a bank’s fundamental reason for being.
This is a long piece that demands and deserves your full attention. It will make you aware of things that you ought to be aware of. Also, while we’re at it–Holy Shit! The Baffler! I always thought of them as that small, weird journal whose publication schedule never made sense to me, but thanks to Moe’s piece I’m now looking at their front page and am thoroughly thrilled. Matt Taibbi, Christine Smallwood, Walter Benn Michaels. And I guess if/when the actual issue comes out (is out?) there’s also Naomi Klein and Lydia Millet in the paper version.
Not that I’m against the Super Bowl, but hey, maybe you are. Or maybe you’re just killing time Until. Anyway, here are some ways to do whatever it is you’re doing.
There’s a new installment of Weiden+Kennedy’s Story Time. They’ve got Patrick deWitt reading from his first novel, Ablutions, with music by his brother Nick deWitt, whom you may also know as the dude from Pretty Girls Make Graves and/or Murder City Devils. NdW also offers an entry into WKE’s mixtapes series.
You could (read=should) also check out the video for Rock Plaza Central’s “(Don’t You Believe the Words of) Handsome Men.”
Oh and last but not least, after watching the “I Am Not a Lawyer” Mr. Show clip that Blake posted in a comment thread about something else, I started playing the YouTube association clickaround game, and stumbled upon this open letter from David Cross to Larry the Cable Guy.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDimQTJMjB0