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.
Here’s another lengthy-ish response to my call for Top 3’s. It comes from n+1‘s Keith Gessen and I’m short on time right now so it’s going up with no further ado. And FYI- the full List of Lists will post tomorrow.
[Keith Gessen writes] You know, a few years ago, in 2004-2005, I was the regular book critic for New York Magazine. But I was kind of irregular, and I didn’t read all that much fiction. And so when at the end of the year they asked me to write up my top three books, I said no way. Who knows what the top three books are? I said. This is a dishonest exercise.
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The Rumpus talks to Peter Hughes of The Mountain Goats. They also have a review of Wormwood, Nevada, a new novel by David Oppegaard.
Christopher Hitchens on Stieg Larssen.
Guerrilla cyclists paint illegal bike lanes back into an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood where the woman-hating morality squad got special permission from the city to have their bike lanes removed because they didn’t want inappropriately dressed women (read- in shorts, maybe *gasp* tee shirts) riding freely through their streets. What part of Jerusalam is this happening in? Try Williamsburg, Brooklyn, motherfuckers.
And, since I’m annoyed with the far-asshat Right flank of “my” people, why don’t we all kick a little sand in their eye by learning about the Shi’a legend/prophecy/doctrine(?) of The Hidden Imam.
Kimberly King Parsons on some developing competition for Amazon. Also at Faster Times: Jay Diamond reviews a graphic biography of Trotsky, Michael Kimball talks to Dylan Landis.
What else? Dennis C. has new male escorts up. I think my favorite is “BlondRobin,” or else the one tangled up in blue light. Anyone else? Favorites? Here’s another one to end on. Happy Tuesday!
All he wants for Christmas is for that cigarette to be stubbed out in the middle of his star tattoo.
The New York Times has Helen Vendler on the new John Ashbery collection, Planisphere.
And The Olive Reader, the blog presence of Harper Perennial, has yours truly on what he wants for Christmas.
And that’s all that is happening in the world today. Good morning!
A couple days ago, I sent out an email asking a fairly large group of writer, editor and publishing friends to send me their nominations for “top 3 books published this year.” I told them to interpret “top” any way they chose to, and to feel no pressure to expound on their choices in any particular way. The plan is to publish a large list of all the Top 3 lists next week (so far I’ve received 20 contributions, and they’re still coming in) but yesterday I kicked off the festivities early by posting one response by Zak Smith in advance of the full list. Today I’m offering up my own selections, prefaced by a short explanation of the way I chose to interpret my own injunction to choose the “top” books of the year.
I spent large swaths of 2009 struggling with fiction, especially novels, while also struggling to write one. (Anyone see a relationship between those two facts? … Didn’t think so.) Here are three novels that challenged and expanded my notion of what a novel could, should, or ought to be, but more important than that: they provided me with enormous entertainment and edification. The three are vastly different, but each is, I think, a work of startling interiority, and this seems to be what I needed in ’09. Each book in its own way offered me succor and deliverance from the confines of myself, by offering up for a getaway space the extraordinary confines of some other self, and I returned from each readerly excursion in better shape than when I left.
Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin.
The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell.
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker.
ALSO: A special shout-out to My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which has a 2008 © in it but didn’t really surface until early ’09. A massively important book and instantly among the most important and treasured Collecteds I own.
So yesterday I sent out an email asking a fairly large group of writer, editor and publishing friends to send me their top 3 books published this year. I told them to interpret “top” any way they chose to, and to feel no pressure to expound on their choices. One of the first responses was this exuberant, flame-throwing missive from Zak Smith, author of the eminently top 3-able We Did Porn (Tin House Books). I decided that Zak’s note was worth publishing in full, as is, but that it was really too long for the post of mini-lists I was compiling. So here, now, is Zak’s top 3, offered as a kind of advance payment on the full list of lists, which will hopefully be forthcoming next week.
I am writing this late on Thursday night, having just gotten back from my ~2 hour commute from Rutgers. I’ve got my shoes off and have poured myself a big fat Jim & Ginger, a solitary if not precisely lonely celebration of the end of my teaching semester, my first one as an instructor of college-level creative writing. If this were an MFA program, I probably would have insisted we adjourn our session to a bar, but since about 3/4 of the students can’t (or can’t legally) drink in a bar, I brought a box of Oreos to class.
Some of those who had been following the CRW101 threads expressed disappointment when they stopped appearing, about a month ago. As I think I explained at the time, that was because we switched from close-reading literature-discussion mode into workshopping-student-work mode, and since I made a commitment at the outset of this series not to identify individual students or subject them to public scrutiny, that didn’t leave me with a whole lot to talk about.
The December issue of Bookslut is the first one published with Michael Schaub as Managing Editor. It’s filled with goodies like an interview with Kathleen Rooney, and a review of Momus’s “novel” The Book of Jokes. Cheers to Michael! And we’re all looking forward to many more.
The Millions has a bunch of people giving shout outs to their favorite books of the year. Why haven’t/aren’t we done/doing something like that? (Note: I just decided that we are doing this. I am doing it right now–okay, email’s gone out). They’ve got Gass, Ferris, Flynn, and more.
Over at Vol1Brooklyn, Juliet Linderman is talking to Stephen Elliott.
And The American Prospect is concerned about the nature of the backlash against fans of the Twilight series. I’ll be honest with you, I’m not going to read this, but if you do, maybe you can tell us about it. Basically what I got from looking at the picture and not really reading the subhead is that maybe there’s a feminist critique to be made concerning the nature of the denigration of the teenage girls who want to dress goth-lite and stay chaste. Or something. It all seems pretty, um, oh fuck it.
Jeff Parker on Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood at The Rumpus.
Mary Gaitskill’s got some new fiction at New York Magazine.
Carolyn See on a life of Mithradates, “The Poison King,” at the Washington Post Book World.”He wasn’t a very savory person, unless, perhaps, you hated the Roman Empire with all your heart.” Hmm.
New Raleigh Quarterly features poems by Paige Taggart, Mathias Svalina, Claire Donato, Farrah Field, and then some. Also, I guess, the fiction and nonfiction.
Dennis Cooper’s got the Spotlight on Bataille’s Blue of Noon.
Also, over at Jezebel, they’re having a discussion nearly as contentious as our recent ones on racism, over some people in the audience at an Ariana Reines reading who laughed in the wrong place, or in the wrong way, or something. But don’t worry, this debacle seems to have an element of potential racism in it, too. Scroll down to the comments for a particularly vitriolic screed by Eileen Myles. To be honest, I can’t really get a bead on what’s at stake here, to have drawn this much of her ire, but my immense respect for her coupled with the apparent depth of her rage has caught my attention. I’m inclined to believe I’m missing something, maybe since I wasn’t there. Also, at the top of the post, they’ve got actual audio from the event–not the questionable laughing itself, sadly, but about a minute of the Q&A.
This Saturday I gave a one-day seminar on Gordon Lish and the Lish school(s) of writing at The New School. A lot of what I spoke about I’ve written about on this site, and some of it may be posted in the future, when its written form is a bit more polished than lecture/discussion notes, but for right now I just wanted to share one tidbit from the class. Actually, it happened before the class. And actually, it didn’t even happen to me. I was sitting in the classroom, and the first student walked in. He was holding a copy of “Guilt,” a story from GL’s collection What I Know So Far that I had assigned as pre-reading. He told me that he’d been looking it over in the elevator, and the man next to him had noticed what he was reading. He said the man was a good bit older, and presumably affiliated with the program, because if you weren’t taking a class or teaching one, you wouldn’t be there on a Saturday. He said the man leaned over and remarked irritably to him: “Everything Gordon Lish says is lies.” Then the ride was over and they parted ways. He came into class and told me this story. It made me feel like it was bound to be a great class, and moreover, despite the gray sky and freezing rain, a wonderful day. I thought, that, right there. That’s why I love Lish- he brings it out in people.
