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.
Art by S. britt
There’s a new issue of the unstoppable Australian biannual, The Lifted Brow, packed tight with music, words, and art. We are in talks with lead brow-lifter Ronnie Scott about doing some excerpting here, but in the meantime, here are some extractions from the issue that were posted over the course of last week at MBV Music. Cheers, Brow!
Day 1: Jana Hunter song; Ben Kunkel excerpt; art by S. britt
Day 2: Diamonds song; Ruby Murray excerpt; art by Josie Morway
Day 3: Fulton Lights song; Rachel Haley Himmelheber excerpt; art by Ian Dingman
Day 4: Little Wings song; Krissy Kneen excerpt; art by Michelle Blade
Ben Greenman’s fragments from Tiger! The Musical .
Dan Nester on The Outfield at Poets Off Poetry.
Here’s an analysis of The Economics of Pinball.
That image, btw, is borrowed from today’s post at The Weaklings: Pictures of 14 Scandinavian Theme Parks.
John Oakes (among other things the former editor of Four Walls Eight Windows) is at the Huffington Post talking about his new publishing venture, OR Books. “Imagine taking the guesswork out of publishing. Imagine a publisher printing only to fulfill orders, and with a minimum of waste; imagine further a system that sidesteps warehouses, wholesalers, and even–at least at the outset of a book’s life–bookstores and online retailers. This would be a process wherein the publisher focuses on developing ideas into workable manuscripts, carefully editing them–and, above all, devoting substantial resources to marketing the finished product. These tasks were once the exclusive province of publishers, but in the last twenty years or so, development and editing have increasingly fallen to agents, and marketing has become the responsibility of authors themselves.”
Jason Diamond, editor of Vol. 1, offers a Kaddish for Jewish Zines. “Beyond the pictures of Roseanne dressed like Hitler, and the ads showing a tefillin-wrapped arm with a needle plunging into the vein–which even as a non-observant Jew made me pretty uncomfortable–my time with Heeb has brought one incredibly positive change into my life: it’s helped me become comfortable with my place in the “Jewish world.”
Why do we become what we most desire to contend with?
– Cynthia Ozick, preface to Bloodshed and Three Novellas
The Rumpus has an interview with Eileen Myles!
Ange Mlinko on Rilke at The Nation.
There’s a new issue of Mike Topp’s Stuyvesant Bee. (pdf download)
Here’s Tolstoy’s epilogue to The Kreutzer Sonata. I just read that story for the first time, and thought it was brilliant how vividly Tolstoy detailed the main character’s delusions, obsessions, and psychosis. Then I discovered that Tolstoy actually meant the story as a kind of polemic, and that his character’s deranged views were actually delivered in earnest, being more or less Tolstoy’s own. Sigh.
Slate’s got a new Robert Pinsky column, on Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, and how they were complainers.
Also, here is a Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time walkthru from IGN.com. A couple months ago I found an old Zelda cartridge and started playing a saved game I left unfinished 12 or 13 years ago. I have completed all the temples for adult Link (without the walkthru, btw) and am now trying to figure out which 2 of the 4 bottle quests I have already completed, and which still need doing, because I want to go into Ganon’s Castle fully prepared. Oh fuck, I also need ice arrows. Eesh.
Gawker went to the National Book Awards and got a whole bunch of big lit-names to sign a copy of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, which they are now auctioning off for charity. It seems to be part of a campaign to get the book short-listed for the 2010 fiction award. That’s this year’s fiction winner, Colum McCann, in the picture.
I always forget The Atlantic exists. But then they’ll bring out Christopher Hitchens to talk about Arthur Koestler, and it’s like, oh yeah, those guys. Though to be fair, if it wasn’t for Arts & Letters Daily, I’d have never known.
Julia Cohen’s got a video of Seth Landman (ed. Invisible Ear) doing something I don’t understand.
She also mentions that Mathias Svalina’s debut full length, Destruction Myth, is now officially out. Expect to hear rather a bit more about that book in this space in the near future.
Joshua Cohen’s memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Fall 2009 online issue of Rain Taxi, including a review of Evenson’s Fugue State and a look at Zizek & Milbank’s The Monstrosity of Christ.
Also, Glenn Beck is in a fight with the Anti-Defamation League because they called him “fearmonger in chief” in their new special report, “Rage Grows In America: Anti-Government Conspiracies.” Basically, the report is exactly what you think it is, only longer. If you go to Crooks & Liars, you can hear Beck on his radio show, flipping out and daring the ADL to name anyone who has been a better friend of Israel than he has. Not sure what that has to do with domestic American politics, but–oh wait, yes I am. Dear ADL, maybe if you supported something like an even remotely sane Israel policy, instead of taking all your talking points from the pro-violence right (the Kissinger/Lieberman/Dershowitz school) you wouldn’t find yourself in bed with fucktards like Beck in the first place. Well good for them for putting the report out, at any rate, when its come down to siding with Abraham Foxman or Glenn Beck, it’s dark days all over the land.
Sasha Grey at the First Thanksgiving
DD: Do you think it can be a really positive thing to do so much so young because you learn so much.
SG: Yeah, over the past few years my learning curve has been huge and sometimes people say, ‘Don’t you just want to be a normal 21-year-old and go party and have fun?’ No, I mean why do you think great artists of our time have always said youth is wasted on the young? I don’t want to be an old a person in regret and think I should have done this but I was off being lazy. There are enough mistakes we make as human beings anyway, so let the mistakes be real mistakes not chosen mistakes.
You know what? I think this is great advice. The rest of the interview isn’t bad either. (via Jezebel.)
To see this at a more reasonable size go here or just click the picture.
To learn more about the history of Cuil Theory.
Matt Taibbi has the best review so far of Going Rogue: “Sarah Palin–WWE Star.”
Nerve.com had one of their rare fits of being amusing- “Sex Advice From D&D Players.” (via Boing Boing)
Dennis Cooper’s got a spotlight on Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis.
Ben H. Winters is at Slate, talking about how he wrote Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.
Penguin has named the ten “essential” classic books (a kind of best of the best of their Penguin Classics line), and made dopey little trailers for each of them.
David Haglund on Javier Marias.
Oh, and our own Chelsea Martin is interviewed at The Rumpus.