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.
The great Bill Hayward–film-maker, regular NOON photography contributor, all-around badass, and occasional collaborator of mine–has been staging his ongoing multi-disciplinary work, The Intimacies Project, from the Northwest wing of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The project went up on the 20th and lasts till the 29th. Now Bill’s got a couple of poets–illustrious poet-couple, Claire Donato and Jeff Johnson–blogging the experience live from the site, mostly in verse. From the site:
THE INTIMACIES PROJECT at 41st Street & 8th Avenue is a daring multi-media event about relationships and the impossibility of love. This visual art installation and live performance is a rare look at the danger of intimacy expressed through dance, music, film, images, and audience participation. The installation incites individuals to focus on emotion while they are in motion. Commuters and passersby are invited to participate by sharing their thoughts and feelings in response to questions about relationships and love.
So yeah, get your Apocalypse on! And come see me! I’m on a panel tonight entitled “Doomsday Over the Ages & How to Survive The Apocalypse,” with Nicholas Thompson from Wired, Hugo Award-winner Ron Miller, Lee Quinby (author of Millenial Seduction: A Skeptic Confronts Apocalyptic Culture), and Andrew Rosenthal–a chaplain. There’s stuff happening all weekend long, including an Apocalypse Literary Reading on Sunday (which I’ll also be part of). As near as I can tell, the whole thing is going down at DCTV (87 Lafayette, NYC). All the details are here, and it’s perfect for date night–so I’ll see you there, and/or in Hell.
So I took Mischa Barton aside and said, “Are you aware of this? What are you okay with? Give me an arena.” She said, “If you talk about my ass, it’ll make me cry.” So I did, and I wasn’t loving it—I don’t love that stuff—but she felt that it was important for me, so we did like 20 takes where I made comments about her ass, and then she cried, and then we all went home.
The Onion talks Random Roles with Bronson Pinchot.
Sucks to be me this week, sort of. Now, granted, I was just paid to spend a long weekend in Colorado talking literature, eating great food, and cheerfully screwing around. But the resulting logjam of review-work and teaching-work (plus the upcoming Doomsday Film Festival & Symposium this weekend, about which, more later) caused me to miss not one, but two awesome parties this week. This first, on Tuesday, celebrated the release of Rachel Sherman’s debut novel, Living Room, now available from Open City. The second, last night, was for Daniel Nester’s prose debut, a self-help guide from Soft Skull entitled How to be Inappropriate.
Luckily, even though I missed the parties, I’ve got the books sitting here in front of me. And I swear to Christ, as soon as this death’s head of a month has passed me over, I’m going to read the hell out of ’em. But no need for you to wait for me on this one. Ya’ll should get to it right now. Also, be sure to check both authors’ tour schedules (respective clicking above will take you there). Rachel is reading all over NYC throughout this month and next, at Cakeshop, KGB, and elsewhere. Nester doesn’t seem to have as many dates on his docket, so maybe you should invite him to come read for you. Here’s a taste of his book from McSweeeney’s.
This hot tip comes from Alec Niedenthal. Apparently, indie rock demi-god Jason Molina–of Songs:Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. fame–has already got a followup record to this summer’s striking, and (I thought) underrated, Josephine. The new record is a straight-up collaboration with Will Johnson of Centro-matic (and the current drummer for Monsters of Folk). Molina & Johnson will be out November 3, from Secretly Canadian. There’s a biggish interview with Molina at Pitchfork, which contains all this information and a whole lot more, including that they’re planning to tour for the record.
Could this day get any sweeter?
NYTBR has got some interesting stuff going on this weekend, mostly in the form of its bylines. They’ve got William T. Vollmann reviewing Crossers by Philip Caputo, August Kleinzahler on a new biography of Thelonious Monk, Amy Bloom on a book about feminism (When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present), and George Packer on Mark Danner’s Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. Plus, you know, a bunch of other stuff. The usual run of whatever, plus as near as I can tell there seems to be only one new entry this week into the NYT’s famous vortex of nobody-gives-a-shit. That would be David Kamp (The United States of Arugala) reviewing the new Michael Chabon essay collection, Manhood for Amateurs (yikes!) which features that infamously stupid essay about childhood that made everyone hate him. Anyway, here’s the beginning of the Vollmann review:
Once when I was so weak with amebic dysentery that all time not spent on the toilet was passed in bed, I found in my host’s house one book in a language I could read. It was one of those storm-tossed but ultimately upbeat women’s romances, a genre I had not yet sampled. I read it, then read it again and again, since there was nothing better to do. If I ever have the luxury of repeating such an experience, I hope to do so with a Philip Caputo book. For how many decades in how many used bookstores have I seen “Horn of Africa” standing steadfast, a Rock of Gibraltar compared with the mere boulders of Ken Follett and Sidney Sheldon? And only now, with a half-century of my life already over, have I finally learned whom to turn to for a good potboiler in my next wasting sickness!
Palette, cleansed.
Tuesday, 10/13. Shredded Text Day.
For Tuesday we read a few brief excerpts from Naked Lunch (Dr. Benway’s “aesthetic surgery,” and “have you seen Pantopon rose”) plus four selections from Gentle Reader! a collaborative book of poetry written by Joshua Beckman, Anthony McCann and Matthew Rohrer. If you’ve never heard of this book, it’s because it was privately (or, if you want to be a dick about it, self-) published by the three poets, and hence is not generally available. (I cadged a copy from Rohrer.) The poems are not written collaboratively–I don’t think–but they’re all unsigned, so you have to guess who wrote what. Also, each poem is an erasure of a Romantic-era text. There’s a key at the back. Since I don’t have the materials ready-to-hand (I’m posting this from a writers’ retreat in Breckenridge, CO, where I’m serving as writer-in-residence for the weekend) I can’t tell you much about the poems, other than that the one called “I Was Alive” is an erasure of Frankenstein, and that it was written by Anthony McCann–both of which things I know because McCann first published the poem non-anonymously in the Agriculture Reader.
Anyway, we didn’t do a lot of textual analysis, and so you won’t be getting the usual slate of close readings. I was more interested in presenting a variety of non-narrative forms, and in talking about the technical aspects of the processes used to create the works. Then we busted out the scissors, Sharpies, and photocopies, and got down to the good work of fucking shit up.
Former Tao Lin Intern Reviews Current Tao Lin Novel
My good friend, Soffi Stiassni, formerly of the Tao Lin Internship Program, and also an alumna of this site, has reviewed her ex-boss’s new novella. Now, I know a lot of people feel like we’ve been linking to Tao-related and SFAA-related stuff too much. Well, go fuck yourselves. Seriously.
Well, since you asked. There’s new fiction (“Mark the Sun”) at The Brooklyn Rail plus a, uh, “non”fiction piece at n+1: “Famous Infamous Jews.”