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 fine folks at Electric Literature have launched a blog. The first two posts at The Outlet are a chapter of Shya Scanlon’s Forecast and this short essay by Jim Shepard about writing non-fiction-based fiction.
The first worry writers have when they consider working with something like historical events has to do with the issue of authority: as in, where do I get off writing about that? Well, here’s the good and the bad news: where do you get off writing about anything? Where do you get off writing about someone of a different gender? A different person? Where do you get off writing about yourself, from twenty years ago?
Has anyone else been checking out “The best Books of the Millenium (So Far) at The Millions? Plenty to fight about there!
Last week I posted a poem Mark Bibbins wrote with D.A. Powell. Today I have an interview that Travis Nichols conducted with D.A. Powell.
Dan Nester wrote a fascinating essay about the New York poetry scene, and his disenchantment with same. If this is a taste of his forthcoming book, How to be Inappropriate, then I’m hereby predicting great things.
At The Rumpus, Rozi Jovanovic has a long interview with Tao Lin.
Also, in case you missed it when it was new last week, Dennis Cooper posted 15 stories and poems by Joe Brainard.
REMINDER: Way back on Labor Day I announced that The Agriculture Reader (which I co-edit) would be offering discounted copies of Issue #3 until the end of September. And now the end is nigh. The arts annual, published in a limited edition of 600, usually sells for $14 per copy, but is still available for ten bucks for two more days. Please, if you’re still thinking about supporting us, take advantage of our sale-price. We’ll both be glad you did. For more details about the issue, you can click through to our page or to my original post here about the sale.
Sometime last week, Alan, a distinguished local in Dennis Cooper’s The Weaklings blog community asked DC a question about the relative virtues of submitting work to online and/or print publications. DC put the question to the community, but for whatever reason few took the bait, so DC told Alan that it might be a better question for a blog like ours. Of course this was all happening in the daily-epic “p.s.” section of DC’s blog, so I saw it, and offered to make that notion a reality. Here’s the question Alan asked. After the jump you’ll find the answer I posted on DC’s blog. And please do leave your thoughts in the comments section here on this post.
THE QUESTION: Is there a big difference in readership or prestige these days between print publication by a journal and web-only publication (by same journal)? I notice a lot of outlets for submitting my story are asking me to choose which one I’m trying for. I’d love to know what other people here think.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOsgqG5OOlM&
This might be a good time for us to re-visit Chris Bachelder’s 2004 essay, “A Soldier Upon a Hard Campaign,” which was written about the problems of integrating satire and politics into one’s writing, without continually being upstaged by the world.
I found it poignant that Animal Face-Off was airing just as Bear v. Shark was sliding quietly out of print. It seemed to mean something, but I wasn’t sure what. I suppose I couldn’t figure out if the TV show made the book more or less urgent and necessary. Probably less, I decided. The lag time between absurdist, futuristic satire and American reality was something like two years in this case.
The essay also contains the following maxim about the nature of art which has stuck with me ever since I first read it. I was just thinking about it the other day, in fact. It goes: “Beauty without Conviction is a beer commercial; Conviction without Beauty is a pamphlet.”
So, if this was my Expository Writing class, the essay question would be something like: Using the Norton anti-virus commercial and Bachelder’s discussion of satire as our critical sources, let us work outward toward a more general discussion of the nature of the avant-garde in literature. When randomness, absurdity, and anti-narrative are the standards of the mainstream (and what is advertising if not mainstream desires and values served back to the mainstream in their purest forms?) what does the cutting edge look like? Can the avant-garde seek to invert those values by embracing “classical” values and forms such as linear storytelling in a realist mode, or should we seek to break out of the dialectic entirely? What might that breaking-out look like?
5 pages, double-spaced. Rough draft due Tuesday; final draft due a week from Tuesday. Or whatever’s on your mind right now, left in the comments here. Whichever.
[ WORK DISCUSSED: Tuesday (9/22) – Adrienne Rich, five poems and an essay. Thursday (9/24) – “New York” by Tony Towle; “Texas” by Padgett Powell; “Babalu-Aye” by Eva Talmadge;” writing exercise.]
I never know how to start the class off. Or anyway that’s how it feels. I usually arrive in the room a few minutes early, and start chatting with whoever else is already there. If there’s a conversation already in progress I’ll try to join it, and if they’re all just sitting around quietly I’ll pick someone and ask how his or her day is going, or how the weekend was. If they throw the question back at me (“and how about you?”) I’ll tell them. I try to take attendance right at the official start time, not so much to punish the stragglers as to reward those who got there early. I want them to see me seeing the effort they’ve made. So we do that, and it’s like–now what? “Okay,” I often find myself saying, “what did we read for today?” It’s not that I can’t remember what we read. It’s just that I think there’s something useful about saying it out loud. I asked the class if they preferred to talk about the poems or the essay first. A few people kind of said “poems,” so I said okay, but then there was another choice to be made–which poem? One of the pitfalls of my teaching style (which strives to be dynamic, responsive, and rigorously un-structured) is that it’s hard to get off the ground. It’s like an old prop plane, where you need to start the propellers spinning by hand and then sort of guide it down the runway and hope everything is timed just right and take-off actually happens. Sometimes this takes a few tries. Nobody seemed to care where we started, and consequently we weren’t starting at all.
All this week, HTMLGiant posted poems from The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon) Mark Bibbins’s eagerly and long-awaited followup collection to 2003’s Sky Lounge. Day #1 is here. Day #2 is here. Day #3 is here. Day #4 is here.
tricks the boat. Even at night,
colors freeze when they would
rather bleed. He likes delay,
He says, the long ascent to sex.
[first his finger to his lips]
He of the somewhere-wadded-up
mainsail, half hard and too tired
[to the knuckle now] to try–
when in doubt he demurs
then dissolves, spooked
as I and twice as strange.
The glass we handed back
and forth sits on the sill:
mouth- and fingerprints
overlap, more reasonable
as a form of mimesis [out now
and glistening] than simple
trajectory–and what about
the bridge, under which
the boat [back in, slowly,
slowly] has slipped, its
chain of lights, distorted
by the edge of the glass,
just now turned out?
All this week, HTMLGiant will be posting poems from The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon) Mark Bibbins’s eagerly and long-awaited followup collection to 2003’s Sky Lounge. Day #1 is here. Day #2 is here. Day #3 is here. Check back daily for fresh doses.
Random snag from the website of Ian Huebert, genius.
Last night I was introduced to Ivy Pochoda at a bar. Very, very smart, that one is. She spoke of the difficulties of translating Egyptian hieroglyphs (tell me about it!) and knows quite a bit about James Merrill beside. Maybe it’s because she was a James Merrill House fellow last spring? Maybe… Anyway, this morning, the Rumpus greeted me with Kate Munning’s glowing review of Pochoda’s debut novel, The Art of Disappearing, which is just out from St. Martin’s Press. Cheers, Ivy!
Elsewhere at the Rumpus, Rozi Jovanovic runs down the Brooklyn Book Fair.
Porter Shreve interviews Donald Ray Pollock (Knockemstiff).
And there’s a new installment of Ian Huebert’s rad comic, Pornographic Barn Owl.
Special Ian Huebert Bonus: visit his site: The Milk Machine.
Lincoln Michel of The Faster Times and Gigantic tipped me off to two interviews of probable high-interest to Giant readers, one from each publication. Over at FT, they’ve reprinted Michael Kimball’s conversation with Blake Butler from Unsaid #4. And over at the newly re-designed Gigantic website, Lincoln himself has interviewed Clancy Martin. That second one gets pretty epic, so make sure your boss isn’t around and then get ready to dig your heels in.