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.
It’s Career Day at Gawker. Today we learn about how to be a “literary manboy.” I was happily/worriedly checking off boxes when I realized I’m still a good nine years below the beginning of the designated age range (36-45). Also, the Gawker piece is actually a response to this Times profile of a freelance journalist named John Bowe. The piece is called “A Bachelor’s Effort to Understand Love,” which is a feat I have never even attempted, so uh–bullet dodged? Also, the Gawker piece ends with this priceless rant by the great Moe Tkacik-
I also asked Moe Tkacik, a former Jezebel and Gawker editor, what she thought. Her analysis was that men are “just incredibly late, and until then loathe, to acknowledge that there are rewards and advantages to companionship/fidelity/love that aren’t purely romantic/sexual/possibly, on some largely delusional level ‘spiritual.’ So they conflate ‘that time when I allowed myself to be vulnerable because I was in fucking Saipan WRITING A BOOK ABOUT MODERN DAY SLAVERY OF ALL LIFE AFFIRMING THINGS’ or ‘that time when I was somehow more emotionally available — possibly I suppose owing in part to the fact that I was fifteen years old?’ with ‘the only real time I fell in love,’ the transcendence of which, until it is somehow surpassed — not super likely to happen at the next Housing Works party btw — stands as the unimpeachable order from within themselves to neglect all other minor romances.”
A+, Moe, though for the record, wonderful things can and do happen at Housing Works parties. Happy Friday, everyone!
Over at The Daily Beast, Taylor Antrim is complaining about memoirs, in particular Alex Lemon’s Happy and Nick Flynn’s The Ticking is the Bomb. Over at The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott has responded with a defense of the memoir. Which you should go check out. Meanwhile, I’m going to harp on a point that neither Antrim nor Elliott raised (though Elliott came awfully close).
Antrim’s essay is mostly a re-tread of fairly (or extensively) well-mapped territory, but his charmingly wrong-headed thesis actually succeeds in opening up an interesting discussion, albeit one he doesn’t ever get around to having. It’s right there in his piece’s headline- “Why Some Memoirs Are Better As Fiction.” First of all, what he means to say is that “some memoirs would be better as fiction,” but stick a pin in that and let’s move on.
Antrim unaccountably assumes that the writer sat down and chose between these and only these two mediums: the novel and the memoir. If you don’t accept this conceit, then his entire piece makes no sense. I would, therefore, like to point out to Antrim, that both Alex Lemon and Nick Flynn (despite the latter’s previous success as a memoirist) are poets by trade, and that their decision to write memoir has less to do with any kind of turning-away from fiction (which was probably never of significant interest to them anyway) than it does with the general sustained interest in personal nonfiction narratives across the board, and the kinds of opportunities that shift might afford to an early- or mid-career writer with a decent reputation and public profile, but a primary vocation that nobody is willing to pay them to practice (though they may yet be paid handsomely to teach other people to practice it, but let’s stick a pin in that, too).
Flynn and Lemon are only two of the latest in a burgeoning tradition of prose memoirs penned by poets, one which in recent years has included Maggie Nelson’s Jane, Sarah Manguso’s Two Kinds of Decay, and Katy Lederer’s Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers, and so on. Flynn’s own massively successful first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, might have been the catalyst for this current wave. (Not to suggest that the poet-memoir is a new phenomenon, only that this is its newest iteration.) Many poets already write what can fairly be called autobiographical poetry, and so it only makes sense that, with Flynn’s first prose book as the example, other people got the idea that they could funnel that same poetry-energy into a medium that would command more rather than less critical attention and financial reward. This is not to say whether any of the particular books I’ve named are good (or bad–I’ve not read them), or what this trends means with concern to poetry and/or literature in general, but it seems to me that for the first time in at least a generation, contemporary poets are surveying a field that is expanding rather than contracting. Bully for them.
And just to end where we started–with Antrim–a large part of his complaint is that the memoirs in question may be meditative or ruminative, and densely packed with arresting prose and striking images, but they are light on plot, story, or narrative arc. Which is why he thinks he is describing failed novels. He seems to not realize that he may actually be describing successful poems.
Because hey, why not?
(via Bookslut blog) Barbara J. King, long-time Bookslut contributor, has just published a new book. It is Being with Animals: Why We are Obsessed with the Furry, Scaly, Feathered Creatures Who Populate Our World. Congrats, Barbara! Also, Jessa keeps linking to Dinosaur Ballet, and if it’s important to her then by God it’s important to us, too.
Scott Timberg has been writing about Philip K. Dick at the LA Times’s Hero Complex blog. It’s a six-part series, of which two parts are live so far. Here’s Part One, and here’s Part Two. Also, note that Timberg is doing a guest-blogging stint on io9.com this week. Highlights from the run so far include “How SF Crushes Highbrow Fiction,” “New Evidence that Frank Herbert Loved David Lynch’s Version of Dune,” and “The Extinct Animals We Never Knew.” He and I were emailing today about Apocalypse stuff–so one presumes there’ll be a that-related, me-quoting post in the imminent future. Stay tuned. (Also, Scott’s own blog, The Misread City.)
The Nation‘s got Miriam Markowitz on Cristina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century.
Did it already get blogged here that The Story Prize nominees have been announced? In any case, they are (for the maybe second time) Wells Tower for Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned; Daniyal Mueenuddin for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; and Victoria Patterson for Drift. Hearty cheers all around.
At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow tells us about The Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results. (Go direct to the JSUR here.)
Oh, and what’s TNR’s The Book been up to? Well, Sean Wilentz says that “no great American has suffered more cruelly and undeservedly at the hands of historians than Ulysses S. Grant.” The hell you say! He takes a good long look at U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth by Joan Waugh. Meanwhile, Ellen Handler Spitz review a children’s book, The Three Pigs by David Wiesner, and it is on this note that I will leave you.
The earliest versions of the Three Pigs story are buried in time, although we do have nineteenth-century English renderings of it. I want, as a foil, to consider Disney’s Silly Symphony animation, from 1932, with its refrain, “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?,” frequently issued in print form and known worldwide, because it forms, like so much of Disney’s work, an inescapable template. Disney’s pigs are “little,” that is, they are children; whereas Wiesner’s pigs are neither verbally nor pictorially “little.” On the book jacket, Wiesner’s three porkers zoom in and eye us. We go snout to snout with them, as if looking in a mirror.
Gawker is reporting, via Boston.com, that Howard Zinn has died of a heart attack. He was 87. From the Boston.com piece-
For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”
Dennis Cooper’s blog today: “Four Books I’ve Loved Recently: The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, Marsupial by Derek White, A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell, and Stories II by Scott McClanahan.” Also, don’t miss yesterday’s “17 examples of how musicians conflate the terms ‘mawkish’ and ‘arch’ with varying degrees of success.”
From Salon, an article on Bloomsbury’s newest case of the white-outs. “Publishers whitens another heroine of color.” (You might remember that we bugged out about this the last time it happened too.)
Here’s an introduction to “The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary.”
From Jeremy Schmall- Rick Steves on Haiti.
Check out this rad new feature/series at Portland-based Wieden+Kennedy called Story Time, which produces “recorded readings of short stories by published young authors set to soundscapes.” Trinie Dalton is episode #1, Kevin Sampsell’s #2, and that’s all that there is so far, but we’ll be (duh) keeping an eye on these guys, and one hardly doubts that there’s more great stuff ahead. And what is Wieden+Kennedy exactly? They say: “We are an arts and culture digital content delivery platform, a subsidiary of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. Our goal is to renegotiate the relationship between art, media, advertising and the consumer.” Ahh, okay then. To help further advance negotiations, you might also check out their other series, Don’t Move Here: Inside Portland’s Music Scene.
What do we think, team–is this shit for real? And if it is, can we solve the riddle of this person’s identity? And if anyone happens to know for sure, feel free to say so in the comments, or for improved anonymity, email me via the address on my website. Actually come to think of it that would result in me knowing who you are, but I promise I won’t tell anyone. Okay, go!
Published by Cleveland State University. $15.95, 83 pages.
[NOTE: The author of this review discloses a high personal regard for the author of the book under consideration.]
The first forty-four of the poems in Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth are called “Creation Myth”—that’s all of them except the very last one, which happens to be the title poem. It would be easy enough, and also probably correct, to read deeply into the title, locate there the thematic and/or philosophical and/or theoretical matrix that centers and informs the work. One could go off on the whole thing about how all creation is in some sense a destructive act (even ex nihilo creation requires a rending of the nothingness that exists prior to thingness), or, better still, how even as creation is ongoing and ever-renewing, we can never escape the essential fact of destruction: the limitless variety of creation, for all its glory, can never not be overshadowed by the singular fact of destruction, the final and re-unifying change that awaits us all. But to be perfectly honest, I’d rather not get into it, because there are few things duller than diligent, well-intentioned exegesis, and a book as big-hearted and bonkers as this one deserves better.
Yesterday I quoted Rebecca West’s 1914 essay, “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,” which was recently republished by–and, they say, will serve as the guiding principles of–The New Republic‘s new longform web literary review, The Book. The site is already packed with stuff, and you can expect to hear more about them from me in the future, but here are some starting-points for you: Isaac Chotiner explains the purpose and ethos of The Book; Michael Kimmage considers The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism; Leon Wieseltier on the new Philip Roth; Tom Bissell on Elizabeth Fraterrigo’s book about Playboy; and a TNR Classic: Edmund Wilson’s “Meditations on Dostoyevsky.”
Did you know that Believer editor Andrew Leland keeps a blog? Well, since the predictive text function on this blogger page seems to remember the address I just typed into the link-maker, maybe the answer is yes. But whether you’ve been there before or not, the real question, as I see it, is have you been there lately? Don’t miss “Pure Gesture,” a recent poem, or “acting bonkers is a calmative,” which is actually from late ’08 but so?
The Guardian has an interview with Sir Frank Kermode.
Neil Genzlinger, the Times critic who last week made me so angry I held a porn contest in his name [UPDATE: and later deleted, out of a belated and therefore probably worthless attack of the common decencies, but still], is in the Book Review this weekend, considering David Thomson’s book about the significance of Psycho. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Genzlinger comes out against significance. Elsewhere in (Electric) Gray Ladyland, Jay McInerney is unimpressed by the new Joshua Ferris, Motoko Rich has an interesting piece on Kindle books that become “best-sellers” because they are being given away for free, and there’s a huge profile of Army of One (plus a handful of “co-writers” and three full-time Little, Brown employees) James Patterson.
And last but not least (except probably it is, in fact, least), Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald food critic Simon Webster uses my “Anonymous book review” piece from the most recent Believer to frame a piece of his own about restaurant reviewing. How cool is that? Webster imagines that if restaurant reviewers ate their meals without the narrative context of the restaurant/owner/hype/etc itself, “the Sydney restaurant scene would be turned on its head.” Which is what I’ve been saying it needs for years now! But seriously, thanks for the notice, Simon–it’s glad to know you, and cheers!
For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.
– Rebecca West, “The Duty of Harsh Criticism”
So as part of “Night of the Week of the Lifted Brow” Week here, I asked Lifted Brow editor Ronnie Scott a handful of questions about editing his magazine, about the Australian publishing scene, and about his own work as a writer. What he returned to me, less than a day later, is such an embarrassment of riches that I hardly know what to do–other than publish it, obviously. Also, in case you missed them, earlier this week we ran excerpts from TLB 6– “Little Cayman” by Christine Schutt, and “Nicaragua” by Deb Olin Unferth and Clancy Martin.