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.
Give Us the Dark That Keeps the Darkness Out
We finally get the terrain–its fever greens
and where’ve-you-been-all-my-life browns–
also cars, bridges, likewise decked out.
Admit we bow to a number of things, among
them October, distance to icecaps, radii
of moons. Neglect arrows through but certain
zeros will not rake us in. Obliterate as you
bloviate, bossman, on your occidental rug.
What spectacular thing could you make out
of all you’ve thrown away, then what would
you devise to make it explode? The proper suit’s
a posture, the wrong not yours but occupy some
semblance of a self. Catapult the propaganda,
dip it in disease and hurl it at the fourth
estate. Give back the hook stuck in skin,
the lake-like cold; follow prongs of fire
across denuded plains until we ghost
and summer underground.
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. Check back daily for fresh doses.
Hey remember when Blake posted about how major publishing houses have basically stopped taking on challenging, innovative fiction? Well it looks like big publishing has Struck Back. From Our Man’s personal blog, posted last night-
Sign of good times, indeed. Blake joins a team that already includes Dennis Cooper, Tony O’Neill, Kevin Sampsell, uh me, The Great Short Works of Tolstoy, the Six Word Memoir series, and all those amazing philosophy re-issues originally published in the Harper Torch series. Welcome to the family, brother!
Special Butler+Harper Bonus Reminder: “The Copy Family” at Fifty-two Stories. Remember back when this happened? I think it’s when HP’s love affair with Homebutler began. Which incidentally reminds me that it’s been way too long since we touched based with Fifty-two Stories. Cal, if you’re reading this- I’m on it.
I used to have the shampoo
by the balls but the wind hurt my hair so.
I can’t get over that retarded girl on the trike,
can’t find the apes in the apiary
can’t get hard for the hardtack
and the cannery is closed.
Well, this is just a trumped-up way of saying
your haircut is among the finest in Wyoming.
From the brightly arranged parlors of San Francisco
to the uncompromising river, beside which, huskily, we sang,
you can modify an adverb with an adverb–they do it all the time in France–
but I have not left my room in thirty years.
My life is shrinking like a desiccated organ,
wilted japonicas drenched in wine.
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. Check back daily for fresh doses.
Do you think it's gonna make him change?
The great Jason Diamond of Vol 1. decided to celebrate the announcement of next year’s Pavement reunion by asking a handful of people to cite their favorite of the band’s lyrics. Those polled included Ari Messer of The Rumpus, Jens Carstensen from The Giraffes, and a few other notables, including Gigantic-editor (and Giant frequenter) James Yeh and yours truly. In fact, James and I both went a little apeshit, so you’ll find our annotated selections down at the bottom, below the civilized metered discourse.
Wrong decisions are harder to make than most
people realize, tears flying sideways in a gale.
We swerve in the road so as not to hit dead things,
but I used to know someone who did the opposite.
He liked to drive through them. Stars are most
serious when seen from the back of a pickup truck
while very very drunk, and if someone kisses you
there it doesn’t count. I would grab your sadness
as a movie monster would, bring it to the harshest
part of the mountain: I haven’t seen this place yet
but I am told weeping is not part of its economy
and everything there is delicious if eaten alone.
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. Check back daily for fresh doses.
To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, & I feel Flatter’d when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil & Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason?
– letter to the Rev. Dr. Trusler, 23 August, 1799
The Rumpus has got a piece by the great Jim Shepard at the top of their page right now- An Appreciation of John Hawkes. Apparently, Shepard was a student of Hawkes’s at Brown. Aside from painting a fascinating picture of Hawkes, I really feel like Shepard is getting at something fundamental and urgent about the way that effective writing instruction functions, the inextricable dimension of personality, the deeply human nature of the whole enterprise. I said as much in the comments, which by the way have so far garnered responses from two other former Hawkes students: James Robison and Rick Moody (whose first story collection, The Ring Brightest of Angels Around Heaven, is dedicated to Hawkes), and the Brown-but-not-Hawkes-alum Shya Scanlon. Seriously. Go read this piece. Then order a copy of Travesty.
For people who are following this series, I’m starting to think that it will make the most sense to post 1 per week, on Friday, which will cover both meetings of the class during that week (on Tues & Thurs nights). To come home and do the Tuesday post that same night or the next day would be too much, besides which if the class is actually checking in here, it might feel a little too rapid-response. I’d rather let the whole week play out, then do the post-game and give everyone (me, them, you) the weekend to mull it over and/or forget it ever happened. So that’s the new plan, and here we are with the field reports from 9/15 (Schutt & Dickinson) and 9/17 (more Berman, Percy Shelley, and a writing exercise). And for people who are just coming to the series now, the first two installments are here (1) and here (2). Everyone else, I’ll see you after the jump.
You know how I’m always going on about Joshua Cohen’s genius? Sure you do. “Oh he wrote something about Jews again,” “oh his books are awesome,” “oh he cooks the best Thai fish balls”–blah blah blah. Well here’s the proof everlasting, kids, as if you needed it. This is what it looks like when JC forwards you a Youtube video.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo
The venerable and perpetually awesome Housing Works Bookstore–a nonprofit that helps homeless people with AIDS in NYC–is throwing two events in the near future that you should know about. The first one is Thursday (as in The Day After Tomorrow) and it is a Literature Quiz Show, emceed by father-daughter team Kenneth and Jenny Davis, authors of Don’t Know Much About Literature: What You Need to Know but Never Learned About Great Books and Authors. All comers are welcome to get in on the action, and you’ll be playing against literary notables such as Garth Risk Hallberg, Jason Boog, Ed Champion, and HTMLGiant’s own Catherine Lacey. I wish wish wish I could be there quizzing it out with ya’ll, but I’ll be stuck doing the next best thing–hanging out in New Jersey generating fodder for more Creative Writing 101 posts. Full event details here.
And hey, now that you know how to get to Housing Works, why don’t you come back the next night (Friday) for something called the “Read-N-Rock-N-Roll YA Variety Show” which will feature Frank Portman, the author of King Dork (and, apparently, the dude from Mr. T Experience–who knew?) reading “and singing” from his new novel Andromeda Klein. There’s a lot more going on at this, but if I let this post get any longer Father Blake is going to slap me with a “read more after the jump,” so just click here if you want to learn more about the special guests at the Portman thing.