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.
I don’t know if anyone else on this site is planning to write about my pressmate Kevin Sampsell’s new book–I hope someone is–but I feel like sharing some thoughts about it, so here goes. The main thing that strikes me is how effortless and propulsive the reading experience is. The package containing A Common Pornography (and a galley of Dennis Cooper’s Smothered in Hugs–it was like Christmas all over again!) arrived this afternoon around five, and yet, somehow, here it is a quarter after ten and I’m about three quarters through it. I read it sitting in my desk chair. I read it on the subway. I read it in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s. I read it on my couch. If I hadn’t put it down to write this blog post about it, I’d be reading it now.
Now, I know that Kevin is–like me–a Richard Brautigan fan, and I think there’s a very Brautigan-y energy at work in this book. Not a Brautigan tone, mind you–Kevin’s book isn’t emo or surrealistic–but here, as in a Brautigan, the chapters are very short, typically a page or two at most, and tend to be anchored by a single image or idea. The book doesn’t demand so much as suggest your attention–hey, you wanna hear a story? Sure. The subject matter (the author’s superlatively deranged upbringing) is sometimes dark (and/or gross) but Sampsell doesn’t plea for your sympathy, he doesn’t go for pointless shocks, and he doesn’t attempt some sort of showy “defiance” or “reclamation” or whatever. He’s just this guy remembering stuff that he did or that happened to him, or to people he knew, and sort of thinking about how it was all maybe a little weirder than he thought it was at the time. Some of it’s funny, and some of it’s touching, and some of it’s sad–and a lot of it is two or more of these things at once–but I think what it really succeeds at doing is creating an atmosphere that encompasses all of those states without forcing the reader to choose one, and that too for me is very Brautigan.
So anyway, that’s my first reaction to Kevin’s book. I’m excited to see him in February, because Harper has us scheduled to do a handful of events together–we’re doing a night in Boston (2/17) and then the following two nights in NYC, and hopefully I’ll be out to see him in Portland sometime later this spring. Want to know how we met? Okay, I’ll tell you the story. We met because right before I moved to Portland, Oregon from NYC in early ’05, I found a copy of Susannah Breslin’s You’re A Bad Man Aren’t You? which he had published through Future Tense, on the bookshelf at St. Mark’s. So I emailed him to say that I was moving to his town and we should get together. He was, I think, looking for an intern, and I know that I was looking for someone to publish the mess of short stories in my backpack. So we had lunch one day near Powell’s. There are a number of ways this meeting might have ended poorly, but instead what happened was I interviewed him for Bookslut, and we’ve been friends ever since. You can read that interview here. Fun interview fact: Kevin Sampsell was the first person I ever heard mention the following names–Sam Lipsyte, Gary Lutz, Gordon Lish, Diane Williams, Amy Hempel, Tao Lin. Not bad, right?
Alyssa Carver, "fragment from Faulkner" - Brooklyn, New York
From the very first day that Eva Talmadge and I announced that we were putting together a photo-anthology of literary tattoos–in a post I made from Hong Kong to this blog, on 7/24/09–we have been overwhelmed and elated by the response. Photos have come in from all over the world, from all different kinds of people, each with their own reason for having chosen their line or lines or illustrations that pay homage to everything from Twain to Twilight, from Shakespeare to King’s Dark Tower, Plath, Dickinson to Salinger, Shel Silverstein, Dostoevsky, John Berryman, J.K. Rowling, T.S. Eliot, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Foster Wallace, Moby-Dick–I could go on (which reminds me: several fine Becketts already, including at least two versions of the line alluded to here). And yet, despite the sheer volume of amazing work we’ve received–and the fact that we had declared 12/31/09 the submission deadline–we are still looking for more. We’d love to hear from you anytime between now and, say, Valentine’s Day. But don’t delay, because after that it really will be over. We will turn the book in to our editor at Harper Perennial very soon after that date, and it will be on shelves this coming fall. Detailed guidelines are posted on the original call for submissions, but here is the most important thing: Please send clear digital images of the highest print quality possible as an attached file in jpeg format to tattoolit@gmail.com. Pixel resolutions should be at least 1500 x 2000, or a minimum 300 dpi at 5 inches wide. I can’t tell you how many people have sent us excellent ink in unusable formats or at too-low-for-print quality levels–this close to the deadline, there simply may not be time to wait for re-sends, even if we love the work. A million thanks to everyone who has shared their work with us thus far, and to everyone else–hope to hear from you soon.
Alec Bryan, "Dore's Ezekiel with Melville Banner" - Ogden, Uta
Dan Slessor, "text from Neuromancer" - Brighton, England
As regular readers of this blog know, over the past year or so I’ve been reading a lot of Harold Bloom. I’ve blogged my favorite quotes from his books as I’ve come across them, read several books on the strength of his recommendation (Bleak House, Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad). But I don’t think I’ve said much about his body of work as a body of work, or articulated what it is about him that compels my sustained interest. And I’m still not going to do that–at least not today; first, because I’m not yet prepared to articulate that thought or those thoughts (blogs happen basically in real time, and my own work here is a present-tense record of my own ongoing education and expanding horizons, rather than any kind of attempted statement of intractable positions or beliefs); and second, even if I was prepared to attempt such an undertaking, I’ve got other things to do this afternoon. But, since the Viceland interview I linked to the other day seems to have been received well, I thought I would share another bit of Webvailable Bloomiana: this New York Times Review of Bloom’s Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?. The review is from October 2004, and is written by the great Melville scholar Andrew Delbanco. It offers a concise and articulate an introduction to Bloom’s virtues and talents–as well as a clear-eyed but vitriol-free acknowledgment of his limitations. I don’t know–or care, quite frankly–whether it will sell you on Bloom, but I think it will help make clear why I have become such a regular customer.
Considering that I don’t have cable or broadcast television in my home, and that the entirety of my TV-watching consists of hulu’d Simpsons, South Park and Daily Show episodes (plus of course the biannual celebration of Let’s Netflix A Whole Series of Something, Probably West Wing Again), I’ve been surprised and delighted at my own sustained interest in the NBC-inspired Late Night Free For All. I have been watching the YouTube’d clips with enormous enthusiasm and rapt attention. Here, David Letterman–who seems to be the true winner in Leno V. O’Brien, and in any case is the horse I’d back over any and all of the rest of them–sort of takes us through the “controversy”‘s major movements. But don’t just take his word for it. Bother yourself to get over to this Gawker post that catalogues all the major snarking and bitchery from all of the Late Night shows, including the weird episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! in which JK impersonates Leno for the entire duration of the episode.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A98_-EeXS_I&
Read a report today in the Yale Daily News that Harold Bloom has had to cancel his classes this semester due to illness. He’s had a brutal last several years, but had seemed to be doing well lately–up until today’s announcement, anyhow. Here’s hoping that this is just a blip on the screen for him. Anyway, the above is from a great, and weirdly sweet, interview that I just uncovered that he gave to Vice Magazine last year. It’s worth reading in full.
Lastly, since HB tends to be a lightning-rod for controversy and/or ignorant invective, you are hereby reminded that a man is ill, perhaps gravely so, and you are forewarned to say something kind/useful, or else keep your bullshit to yourself for once.
Hearty congratulations to Ben Mirov, winner of the 2009 DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press chapbook contest. Read the press release–including exultant blurbs from Dobby Gibson and the great Elaine Equi–over here (pdf). That page also has a poem from the book, and an order form–you’ll want the latter after reading the former. Also, here’s Ben’s blog. Also^2, you can find even more Mirov in the premiere issue of Maggy, a sweet-ass new poetry journal that will be getting its own post later this week. (You’ll also find him in the next Agriculture Reader.) Anyway, congrats again to Ben, and here’s another poem from I is to Vorticism, which I was super-delighted to receive in the mail the other day, and have been happily working my way through:
Wind-Up Birds
Dear Mr. Murakami:
I am like that guy in your novel
who goes down in the well
and gets trapped there until
he finds a secret passage and escapes
or maybe someone lowers a ladder?
I don’t remember where he goes next
but I’ve wanted to tell you this
since I read your book in San Francisco
after a horrible breakup and discovered
a pale blue light behind my eyes
I had never noticed before.
I thought you’d written your book about me
without knowing it, of course.
I had the urge to write you a letter
explaining this but I didn’t want
to freak you out. I just wanted
to say thanks for being in my poem
and for the sense of wellness
that pervades my life these days.
P.S. I almost forgot to ask!
What should I do next?
Employee: See, the thing is — and I don’t know how much you know about it — it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.
The Rumpus has scored an interview with an anonymous Facebook employee for Conversations About the Internet #5.
Today we celebrate the birth of the inimitable, incomparable, and indispensable Dennis Cooper–one of our absolute favorite writers and a true brother-in-arms. How will you celebrate Dennis’s big day? You could:
– Order yourself a copy of his most recent book, the story collection Ugly Man.
– Pre-order yourself a copy of Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback & Obituaries, his forthcoming nonfiction collection, which according to Amazon will be published on 6/29, which happens to be my birthday. Neat, right?
– See if there are tickets left for any of the remaining performances of JERK, Dennis’s latest collaboration with Gisele Vienne, starring Jonathan Capdeville. JERK is running through January 17th as part of the Under the Radar Festival. I saw the show last night, and it was just stunning–unlike any other theater-going experience I’ve ever had. (See above photograph.)
– Visit Dennis’s blog, which this weekend has an incredible feature on the Winchester Mystery House.
– Blast some Guided by Voices. Here’s a fan-made video for “Smothered in Hugs” the nonfic collection’s namesake song. Happy Birthday!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlvn9LfRETM
PS- Here’s a live version that has the embedding disabled for some reason, so you have to watch it on the Youtube site.
Things are really heating up (also freezing) here in NYC. My boss is in town–and staying at my place no less, so it looks like I’m working through the weekend. Last night Old Man Butler made me have some serious party-catch-up time with erstwhile Giantess Kendra Grant Malone, and I think the plan for the day is to hit MoMA with Shane Jones and Ken Baumann, then tonight we’re going to see Dennis Cooper’s JERK. God, when did my life become such a Dilbert cartoon? Anyway, here’s some stuff. I’m cranking it out while Old Man Butler is in the shower–before he drags me off to another @*&#(@*ing “team-building” exercise.
Over at The Rumpus, Joshua Mohr has an interesting essay about the fraught experience of reviewing one’s peers, in this case, Ron Currie Jr.
Also in Rumptown, Funny Women #12: Destroying Angels, a How-to Guide by Susan Schorn.
Something called Go360 has written a big piece on Terese Svoboda. It popped up in my Google Alert because it mentions her story, “80s Lillies,” which appeared in The Apocalypse Reader.
There’s lots of awesome going on at Chance Press, including new and forthcoming titles, and directions on how to make your own cloth-covered bookboards. Hurders! Way to go again!
Also, here’s the regular weekly NYTBR roundup: ______. No sex-charts this week, just Elizabeth Gilbert and Douglas Coupland.
Check this out- Gawker’s got copies of a whole bunch of paperwork related to the Herman Rosenblatt fake-Holocaust memoir that Oprah made a big deal about back whenever. It’s a nifty little peek into publishing.