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.
(for previous installments in this series, click here)
WORK DISCUSSED THIS WEEK: “Ancestral Legacies,” “On the Subject of Fiction Based on Non-Ficton,” and “The Gun Lobby” – all by Jim Shepard.
My goal for this week was to give the class another sense of the scope of writerly possibility. This time, instead of pairing different mediums of writing or organizing some little squad of unrelated writers together around a common theme, I chose to showcase two very different works of fiction by the same writer. “Ancestral Legacies” is historical fiction, and follows two Nazis on a pseudo-scientific mission to Tibet. (Himmler has ordered them to trace the path of a legendary Aryan ur-language; believing Himmler’s claims to be nonsensical, but their own to be legitimate, they’ve taken his funding and are using it to conduct their own research into the existence of the yeti.) “The Gun Lobby” is about a suburban marriage falling apart–the wife has taken the husband hostage in their home.
The biggest surprise came first– large factions of the class didn’t like “Ancestral Legacies.” They thought it moved too slowly, and was “boring.” I couldn’t believe this. Nazis! Tibet! Yeti! And they were “bored…”
Over at The Nation, Scott Saul makes the case for Eliot Weinberger’s new collection of essays.
The pieces in Oranges and Peanuts for Sale cover a wide range of topics–the arts under the Bush administration, Obama’s presidential campaign, ancient and contemporary Chinese poetry, the color blue, exoticism, the relationship between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz–but are knit together by a sensibility that prizes exactitude in its formulations yet is open to the unpredictable complications of the larger world. Put another way: weak prose and parochialism are two of Weinberger’s chief enemies. One of the delights of reading his essays is that they reveal the interconnections between the two; the Wittgensteinian idea that the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world becomes, in his hands, a tool for revealing the blind spots common to our culture.
I’m sold.
One of our regular & distinguished commenters, Michael James Martin, has some work in the new issue of New CollAge magazine, the magazine of–wait for it–New College, in Florida. Over at his site, MJM peruses the issue, which contains work by such luminaries as Dean Young, Matt Hart, Peter Jay Shippy, Emily Kendal Frey, and many more. It also contains a poem by yours truly. I’ve also got a copy of the issue sitting on my desk, and had been planning to write about it when I had a free minute to do more than just browse the thing (est’d occurrence of free minute: Nov. 7th, 5:42 PM) but since MJM nailed it, I’m just going to go ahead and direct you over his way. You can also view some excerpts from the issue (though not mine or his) over at the New CollAge website. Cheers, Michael! And a hearty cheers as well to Alexis Orgera (ed.) and the staff at New CollAge.
Stephen Elliott forwarded this to me. It was sent to him by a fan named Vicki Gundrum. She created some metrics for Stephen’s The Adderall Diaries. They’re funny and interesting. I turned them into a PDF and now you can view them by clicking here: Metrics for The Adderall Diaries. NYC People Reminder: Stephen’s at Joe’s Pub tonight and Bookcourt (launch party) tomorrow night.
I just finished watching the director’s commentary track on the re-issue of The Frighteners, a movie I truly love despite the fact that it’s deeply flawed, wildly uneven, and basically a failure. (It’s like the Philip K. Dick of horror-comedy crossover movies; though not like a Philip K. Dick movie). Hearing Peter Jackson discuss what he feels went right about the film, what went wrong, and how it all came together–or didn’t–was fascinating. I wasn’t much of a Peter Jackson fan going in–in fact I didn’t realize he had directed this movie until I netflixed it this most recent time–but something about his candidness, coupled with his obviously fan-boyish enthusiasm for cinema in general, really won me over. Plus I learned that he made a FOUR AND A HALF HOUR documentary about the making of this film, which apparently I need to netflix separately. As of this writing, it’s already on the queue. Does anybody else have favorite failed work of art, be they literary, musical, or filmic? I’d be interested to hear what, and why.
Checked in with the Faster Times Books Page lately?
Clancy Martin has been writing a column about love and lying.
Lincoln Michel will add monsters to any classic novel or novels of your choice, if you are willing to pay him to do it.
And Rozi Jovanovic has interviewed J.A. Tyler of Mud Luscious press.
‘experimental’ is often overused and really doesn’t mean much to readers / writers anymore because of its constant use. for me, it means something that I haven’t seen before, something that hits me as profoundly different – that is why I tend towards describing our work as violent / beautiful / pulsing – I want a text that shatters, that buries me in its lines. and I suppose too that I use ‘experimental’ or sometimes ‘innovative’ in order to scare away the exposition-heavy writers, those who spoon-feed actions / events as if readers are not smart enough to discover what a text is doing. I look to the work of james chapman as well as his fugue state books, jesse ball and blake butler, those writers who aren’t afraid to omit the narrative details in favor of descriptive tones and overall voice, those works that reach into me without pandering, hand-holding, without guiding me as if I am blind.
Big fun. Don’t miss it.
Inspired by 300+ comments thread on Blake Butler’s now-infamous “James Joyce Does Not Exist” post, Kyle Minor and I had a critical conversation about Joshua Cohen’s A Heaven of Others. It’s up at the Rumpus as of this morning.
Minor: Reading A Heaven of Others, I felt […] there was that same kind of shock one gets when entering into certain works of Faulkner or Woolf or Joyce, where you simultaneously are thrilled and a little intimidated by the surface, but it doesn’t take long to just fall into it, since the text is teaching you how to read the text. It’s been so long since I’ve discovered a book like that, it feels new, but then one realizes that it’s also old-fashioned, and mourns that it’s old-fashioned.
Come on by and see us, why don’t you? We’re sharing a booth with Ugly Duckling Presse. Also, come see all the other stuff. I mean, as long as you’re there.
Stephen Elliott leads an Adderall Diaries wheatpasting campaign in what appears to be the East Village, yesterday, accompanied by Karan Mahajan and Alina Simone. New Yorkers, Don’t forget: Elliott reads at the Happy Ending Series at Joe’s Pub on Wednesday, 10/7, and the official release party, sponsored by n+1, is at Bookcourt on 10/8. Non-New Yorkers, be aware: Stephen is doing a massive tour for this book. Virginia? Arkansas? Seriously. If you feel like you live somewhere where nobody ever comes to read, this might just be the exception that proves your rule. Full tour schedule here.
After the jump, some more highlights from the expedition.
(for previous installments in this series, click here)
WORK DISCUSSED THIS WEEK: “Two Boys” by Lorrie Moore & “Water Liars by Barry Hannah
Tuesday, 9/29 – “Two Boys.” I’m not a huge Lorrie Moore fan. I don’t dislike her, but I’ve had Birds of America taught to me several times and it just never…grabs me. I think the best experience I’ve had reading Moore was in David Gates’s lit seminar at New School when I was an MFA student. And even at that, what I mostly remember is David’s enthusiasm for “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk.” That, and a single line from the story that’s always struck me as incredibly beautiful and haunting. A blood clot discovered in a baby’s diaper is described as looking like “a tiny mouse heart packed in snow.” Beyond that, I’m content to know she’s out there in the world, making some people very happy. Good for her; good for them.
But a couple summers ago I was teaching a non-credit writing class at the Gotham Writers Workshop, and I was trying to find a way to spice things up.