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.
A little browsing on this site suggests that the proprietor seems to think “hot” means either “any” or else “high school.” Or possibly “any [chick in] high school.” So that’s a little whatever, but dude still gets points for being an absolute genius and an absolute asshat at once. I want to throw this guy an awards dinner and crown him with an ass-shaped hat that has the word GENIUS scrawled in glitter across the cheeks. And be sure to check out the (markedly less interesting) sister sites, the best of which seem to be “Hot Chicks with Fists in Their Mouths,” “Hot Chicks Plunging Their Toilets,” and “Hot Chicks with Stubbed Toes Making Sex Faces.”
Oh, the minor but very real discomfort! Oh, oh, oh!
in⋅stau⋅ra⋅tion
[in-staw-rey-shuhn] –noun
1.
renewal; restoration; renovation; repair.
2.
Obsolete. an act of instituting something; establishment.
Origin:
1595–1605; < L instaurātiōn- (s. of instaurātiō) a renewing, repeating.
Related forms:
in⋅stau⋅ra⋅tor [in-staw-rey-ter] , noun
+
…Thanks (yet again), Harold Bloom!
I do not count my borrowings, I weigh them. And if I had wanted to have them valued by their number, I should have loaded myself with twice as many.
– Montaigne, “Of Books”
quoted in Where Shall Wisdom be Found? by Harold Bloom
a sweet find from Jeremy Schmall- The Abe Books Weird Book Room. I would like to point out that I have actually read one of the books featured on the site (but not pictured here)–Dominique Laporte’s History of Shit.
All poetry power-couples should be required to have dueling(/dualing) blogs. As JC has mentioned on her blog before, her parents are retired to sunny Mexico, and so she and MS went down from Denver to spend the holidays in the not-snow. His slideshow is here. Hers are here, here, and here. Also, his new (debut full-length!) collection, Destruction Myth, and her chapbook, For the H in Ghost.
Here are photos they took of each other.
Oh, and here’s Mexico-
Good deal.
As he writes about old men failing at sex, and raging about failing at sex, we see the old writer failing at writing about sex, which is, of course, a spectacle much more heartbreaking. […] The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé.
from The Naked and the Conflicted: Sex and the American Male Novelist, by Katie Roiphe. If you like her article, she’s also on the podcast.
Also in the Review this weekend- the magnificent Arthur C. Danto, on a new book about Tiepolo, the legendary Frank Kermode on a new translation of the Hebrew Bible by David Rosenberg, and the Nonfiction Chronicle is rather unkind to Daniel Nester, though I can sort of see using ” ‘He’s Annoying’ –The New York Times” as a blurb. Chuck Klosterman and Stephen Elliott don’t fare much better. Seems like the only book Gregory Beyer liked was Richard Rushfield’s memoir of attending Hampshire College in the late ’80s. Yeah.
(1) I came across this review of Dylan Landis’s Normal People Don’t Live Like This, by Megan Casella Roth and published in The Rumpus. It sounded interesting so I linked it on this site in a round-up post.
(2) I came across this interview with Landis by Michael Kimball. It was fascinating. I (or somebody here) linked that piece too.
(3) I decided to buy the book, but then I had to go to Florida before I could make it to the store.
(4) Thought: I could order this from Amazon and it will be at my house when I get back. Didn’t do it.
(5) Thought: [in FL] I should get my mom to drive me from Grandma’s to the B&N. Maybe they’ll have it there, or at least checking for it will kill an hour. But then I thought “I’d really rather buy this from an indie store that I like,”and they don’t have those in that part of Florida, so I went back to reading my galley of Witz by Joshua Cohen.
(6) Got back to NYC. Went to St. Mark’s Book Shop on East 9th street and 3rd Avenue. The store had exactly one copy, which happened to be the exact number of copies that I needed. After taxes, it cost $16.33, which in round numbers is about what it cost to see Avatar with the 3D-glasses sur-charge and my half of the bag of popcorn I split with my mom at the Boynton Beach Cinemark Whatever, with the main difference being that the Landis book is not covered in “butter-flavored” floor polish–and unlike the 3D glasses, I don’t have to give the book back when the show is over.
CONCLUSION: It feels like this is how the system is supposed to function. I got interested in something, decided to buy it, and was able to do so in relatively short order. Not immediately, mind you, but that slight delay seems like it was a valuable part of the process. It helped me establish that my interest in the book was genuine, plus it gave me the chance to yearn a little. I didn’t buy the book used. I didn’t bug the publisher for a review copy. I wanted to read the book, and so I bought the book–new, from a store I respect, whose balance sheet I feel good about appearing on.$16.33 isn’t exactly piss in the snow, but it’s not a fortune either. It’s almost $2 less than the price of two Maker’s Mark on the rockses at a bar I like on West 13th street (before tip). It’s almost half of what a weekly subway pass costs.
And I’m writing all of this in advance of having so much as opened the book itself. I guess if I hate it I’ll wish that I’d had those 2 drinks instead, but I purposely chose to post this anecdote before forming an opinion of the book, because I think even if I don’t end up liking it, the acquisition process still counts as a success story, complete in and of itself. (Of course I expect that I will like it, and in any case will report back once it’s read.) Here is a proposal: Every person who cares about literature should start to do exactly what I did, and we should all do it more often. Once a month, go to a local bookstore, and take a chance on a brand-new full-price book that you are interested in. If we all did this, 2010 would probably be the best year for publishing in a decade.
[Liu Xiaobo is a Chinese literary critic, poet, and dissident. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Christmas Day for “inciting subversion of state power.” Learn more at the PEN website.]
Dear Friends:
Tomorrow’s press event/rally to protest the conviction of Liu Xiaobo in China will take place ON THE FRONT STEPS OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, 42nd Street at 5th Avenue, at 11:00 a.m.
We are hoping for a large turnout of PEN supporters to send a strong image, and message, of solidarity. Please join us for this event, which kicks off a year that marks the 50th year of PEN’s organized efforts to defend writers under threat around the world.
Many thanks,
Larry Siems
Director, Freedom to Write and International Programs
These are some thoughts in response to Sean Lovelace’s post the other day, which asked “You do send your Very Best work Every time when submitting to a literary magazine, right?”It started out in the comment thread, but then I decided that his question deserved more of a commitment than that. Here goes.
I think this idea of “best” vs “not-best” is based on a fundamental, and mistaken notion that *every*thing one writes ought to be published. One-offs, exercises, middling poems and pieces of “flash”–well I already wrote it, the logic goes, so why not place it *some*where?
Are the new [stupid fucking] post-flight-253 regulations the best thing to happen to publishing since the week before James Frey turned out to be a liar? From the Gizmodo Unofficial Guide to Flying After the Underwear Bomb.