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.
No, it’s not the title of Blake Butler’s next book. MESSIANIC URBANISM is discussed over at BLDGBLOG, which I had never heard of until right now and am promptly in love with. Thanks for the link, Alice Townes!
Also, while you’re over there- THE CITY AND ITS FLOODED DOUBLE.
Last week was a big book-buying week for me. I don’t know why, exactly, but I just kept going for it. If anything, I think I was reminding myself how thoroughly lucky I am to live in a city where there are literally dozens of independent bookstores that I can go visit anytime I feel like it.
Bookthug Nation – a newly opened used bookstore on North 3rd street between Berry and Wythe, in Williamsburg. This place is really fantastic, and I’m thrilled that they exist. The space is super-intimate, the curation is stellar, there’s art on the wall by the guy who does Cometbus, and they hold events there. Books purchased: (1) A hardcover copy of The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth ($5). I already own this book as part of the Zuckerman Unbound quartet, but my copy of that book is falling to pieces, and I figure that GW is the one I’m most likely to re-read. (2) The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald ($3). This is the best-known translation, and owning it feels sort of like owning a copy of the King James Bible–something you ought to have on-hand, irrespective of when (or whether) you actually read it. (3) Bawdy Verse: A Pleasant Collection ($4) edited by E.J. Burford. A sweet little anthology of dirty poems and songs from Old England. “The weather is cold and chilly / And heating will do thee no harm, / I’ll put a hot Thing in thy Belly / To keep thy body warm.” – “Mine Own Sweet Honey-bird-chuck,” ~1655. And so on.
On Friday, November 6, Jeremy Schmall and I hosted Jen Hyde, Heather Christle, Joshua Cohen, Diane Williams, and Matthew Rohrer at the Lillian Vernon Writers House at NYU, for a reading in celebration of AGR ’09. The audio of the reading is now available online here (.mp3). After you listen to our event, you should wander over to the Creative Writing Program’s podcast mainpage–it’s a real treasure trove. Charles Simic talking to Alice Quinn. Elaine Equi and Darin Strauss reading together. An evening with Wave Books (Joshua Beckman, Noelle Kocot, Chelsea Minnis–which I was in the audience for; try listen for my clapping). And so on and so forth.
Today we close out Ariana Reines week with a shift from the present to the imminent future, with sneak previews of two forthcoming works by Ariana Reines. The first, Miss St.’s Hieroglyphic Suffering, is based on act two of Reines’s highly regarded play, Telephone, and will be performed at a Works+Process show at the Guggenheim this weekend. (I’m going on Sunday. Maybe see you there?) The second is from a book of poems (or is it one long poem?) called Save the World, that seems to be forthcoming from FENCE Books. Pretty not bad, yeah? Fun starts below.
I read Dennis Cooper’s blog every day, and it’s always a pleasure, but I want to point out that there has been an especially good run this week, and so if you’re an only-occasional visitor over there, this is a good time to go check in. Let’s move backwards through time.
Today’s post is a collection of eleven YouTube clips of Stephen Malkmus singing–solo as well as with Pavement. It kicks off with an acoustic version of “Box Elder,” one of my all-time favorite Pavement songs, which I’ve only ever heard rendered in full fuzz.
Yesterday was a “back from the dead” post–originally posted 10/19/06 on an earlier incarnation of the blog that was hacked and destroyed. DC occasionally painstakingly re-produces one of those lost posts, and I can’t think of one I’m happier to see again than “Great Moments in Gay Porn #8: Klark, a mini-retrospective.”
Career-wise, porn stars are to movie stars as dogs are to humans. That’s to say, their time in the spotlight may constitute a blip relative to their more respectable peers, but their lifespans as fan magnets can be no less storied and impressive. By that reckoning, Klark is something like the Paul Newman of Russian gay porn. In his ten or eleven year long run as a superstar, he has pretty much done it all without ever losing his Gary Cooper-esque stoicism (and consequent aura of dignity), his ever battle-ready attitude, his quasi-underraged everyboy bod, or his very Russian yet strangely nonspecific good looks. He may not get as many starring roles these days as he did when his competition was all but nonexistent, but he’s managed to outlast many of his famous predecessors by never quite stooping too low in his choice of roles to make a quick buck.
Irrespective of your particular level of interest in gay porn (my own is, let’s say, limited) Klark’s story is a compelling narrative, and I think the post is highly instructional in terms of how it approaches and handles certain challenges inherent in discussing an artist’s full body of work. Cheers to whoever it was put the special request in for this one.
Tuesday’s post was “Four Books I Read Recently and Loved: Urs Alleman, Eileen Myles, Reinard Seifert, Matthew Simmons.” In which DC enjoys and excerpts from (respectively) Babyfucker, The Importance of Being Iceland, How to Skin the Moon, and A Jello Horse. And Monday we learned about “Heavily plotted non-linear structures whose velocity lacks narrative drive“–aka, mazes.
We began Ariana Reines week with AR’s original translation of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, published through her own press, Mal-o-Mar Editions. Now, after two days cavorting with Dan Hoy and Jon Leon, whose split book (The Hot Tub / Glory Hole) is also new from MoM, we return to Reines-as-translator, and consider a new book from Semiotext(e), The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore. Here (from the site) is the briefest of introductions to Real:
Hailed as a virtuoso writer and a “revolutionary whore,” Grisélidis Réal (1929–2005) chanced into prostitution at thirty-one after an upper-class upbringing in Switzerland. Serving clients from all walks of life, Réal applied the anarcho-Marxist dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” to her profession, charging sliding-scale fees determined by her client’s incomes and complexity of their sexual tastes. Réal went on to become a militant champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes’ rights. She has described prostitution as “an art, and a humanist science,” noting that “the only authentic prostitution is that mastered by great technical artists … who practice this form of native craft with intelligence, respect, imagination, heart…”
The main action of the Semiotext(e) volume is a series of lengthy interviews between Real and Jean-Luc Hennig (a professor at the University of Cairo) but the final section, a hearty selection of entries from the titular Little Black Book are not to be missed. They are the concise, practical, hilarious, and delightfully NSFW. Click through to read some of my favorites.
Since the reaction to yesterday’s Hoy-Leon extravaganza, I figured the best–perhaps the only–thing we could do is double down. Here, then, are some more selections from The Hot Tub (Leon) and Glory Hole (Hoy), the new split poetry collection out from Mal-o-Mar Editions.
THE UNIVERSE IS A PIECE OF SOMETHING EVEN WORSE (Hoy)
I feel at home when I forget
life. I phone it in because
this shit is real. My world
is made of systems and worlds. I give up
nothing and make no mistakes.
I try to be awesome because I can.
Been a little while since we checked in with Stephen Elliott and his merry band.
Rumpus original fiction! “Bobcat,” a short story by Rebecca Lee: “Ray was failing at being a person. He’d been fooled by life. It had triumphed over him. I wanted to call out to him, over his wife’s head, Hey Ray, life has triumphed over you.”
Jeremy Hatch points us toward “The Dark Side of Sustainability,” which is itself commentary on “A Good Without Light,” an essay in the new Tin House by Curtis White which is happily available in full online. Hatch: “White argues that our capitalist industrial technocracy, underpinned by an arrogant scientism, has led us into this mess and is incapable of leading us out; that we must look beyond this economic system, and draw from other “systems of value” (religion, the arts, even social science, and I’d add secular philosophy to his list) to find a way out; and that we can do this without necessarily discarding all of capitalism, industry, technology, or science.”
Ted Wilson reviews the Bible and finds it wanting: “Usually I’m better at finishing books, but the Bible is comically long. Whoever published it used super thin paper, so it’s like twice as long as it looks. (I think there might be some duplicate pages accidentally printed.) And it certainly doesn’t help that it’s written in that old-timey language. Plus, I’ve never liked fantasy and the Bible is full of magic powers and other worlds. That’s just not my thing. It would probably appeal more to Harry Potter fans.” To be perfectly honest, it’s this kind of well-worn “satire” that’s just not my thing. But I assume I’m in the distinct minority on this, so if the preceding entertained you, you might as well click through for a whole lot more of the same.
Max Ross reviews Sleeper’s Wake by Alistair Morgan: “[I]n Sleeper’s Wake, the first novel by the South African writer Alistair Morgan, Wraith’s penis is actually a pretty neat literary device. It provides character depth and motivation, is the jumping off point for learning about Wraith’s past, and is central to every plot twist in the book.”
And Stephen himself has new Notes From Book Tour (#10) : “Then yesterday I went to a free clinic in Alameda for H1N1 vaccine. When I arrived there was a line that stretched for three blocks, thousands of people, almost everyone pushing a stroller or holding a baby against their collarbone. A woman behind me blew her nose and an old man coughed loudly. He looked like he was dying. I thought it would be ironic if I caught flu while waiting for the vaccine.”
Oh and for New Yorkers, the Rumpus is back at the Highline Ballroom on 11/17, with Rick Moody, Starlee Kine, Jonathan Ames, Todd Barry, the Six Word Memoirists, something called Care Bears on Fire, and who knows what else.
If there’s a musician out there today writing more literary lyrics than John Darnielle, the great dark Chekhovian pen, voice and guitar at the center of The Mountain Goats, I haven’t heard her or him. (And don’t come near me with that Decembrists shit.) To help mark the occasion of the release of a new Mountain Goats album (their 17th studio effort), The Life of the World to Come, I asked extreme Goats enthusiast Alec Niedenthal to write a piece about the band’s body of work. Click through and find yourself in the life of the world of Alec’s capable, busy hands.
Did you follow that headline? New from Mal-o-Mar Editions is a poetry split– Jon Leon’s The Hot Tub and Dan Hoy’s Glory Hole, together in one spine. You might remember Jon from Hit Wave, the wonderful chapbook he did for Kitchen Press, and Dan Hoy is of course the co-editor of Soft Targets, the journal that did one (two?) legendary issue(s) before apparently winking out of existence, though it, like Jesus, may yet one day return. Anyway, to celebrate the Leon-Hoy Pact (it’s like the Glass-Steagall act, kind of) I thought it would be nice to pair some of their poems together, in little flights. We were doing this the other night at my house–me and some friends, getting slowly loaded on asscheap bourbon and reading these proudly defiant poems of obscene opulence and opulent obscenity aloud to one another. Fun starts after you click the button.