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.
Another dispatch from the Axis of Who Gives a Shit? Michiko Kakutani’s s just not that into the new, apparently Poe-inspired E.L. Doctorow novel. To save everyone a lot of time and effort, I put MK’s thesis through the Translation Party engine that seemed to make everyone so happy when I posted about it last week.
Poe’s stories and complaints, his psychology, pathology Pejidokutoro for some new facts will be generated using a mixture of the first patent.
HTMLGIANT and the RUMPUS love each other; everyone knows that. We also work together often; everyone knows that too. It’s like this office romance everyone is really okay with and maybe even roots for because it’s between two basically likeable freelancers who are each a dozen freelancers, none of whom ever actually go to the office, and if they did it wouldn’t be the same one anyway. Which is another way of saying it is AWESOME. But given that fact, it seems ludicrous to pretend to anything like objectivity or critical distance about Rumpus-editor/steam-engine Stephen Elliott‘s new book, The Adderall Diaries. Therefore, I decided to drop all pretense and just write him a letter that says what I think of his book, which, by the way, is officially available today. (Click through to see his generous offer of free used galleys for would-be readers who make less than $25k/year.)
Dear Stephen,
So wrote Benjamin De Casseres–a lost legend of the early/mid-20th–a man about whom I knew nothing until today, when I read the latest Tabletmag.com piece by the great Joshua Cohen (whose “Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge)” will be out from The Cupboard Pamphlet later this year). Here’s a little taste of the article. Click-thru anywhere below for smorgasbord.
Specifically, the version on Live Rust, but this version from Hamburg ’96 (~28 years later) is pretty great too.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdUC_GU4hYw
In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.)
The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.
– Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”
Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, wants variety and spirit. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.
“Seeing Through Masks: What Jonathan Franzen Gets Wrong about Writing the Other” by Darin Strauss.
Using the novelists’ secret formula — one part research, three parts empathy — I hope I’ve made my Darlene a credible veteran of the Black experience. But you never know; I’ve been faulted for even trying. (My 2000 book Chang & Eng was about the famous “Siamese Twins,” and some reviewers questioned my right even to attempt a novel about Asians.)
Also, FT’s main books guy–as well as regular Giant commenter–Lincoln Michel presents a compilation of literary humor from The Onion. Look for such classics as “Did I Say That, or Did John Updike?”; “Man Reading Pynchon on Bus Takes Pains to Make Cover Visible”; and my personal favorite–so good I can’t stop myself from linking it directly, even though that fucks Lincoln over, so please do not click the following link but instead go and read Lincoln’s post–“Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added to Curriculum.”
Double also, how did we miss that two weeks ago Lincoln posted about the re-emergence of a lost George Saunders story?(!?!?!) Holy smokes. We’ll be keeping a closer eye on these guys, from here on out.
I traded books with the hot girl who works at the coffee shop across from my house. She’s got my Collected Jack Spicer and I’ve got her copy of the pictured-above: We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the Collected Interviews. (Though not the “complete” interviews. This book came out from Akashic in 2001.) So far my favorite thing in it is this interview that Steve Albini gave to Luis Illades of Pansy Division. The whole thing’s worth reading, but here’s a power quote for you (me? us?).
At this point, being a musician as well as an engineer and a producer, it seems as though you’re pretty satisfied with where you’re at and what you’ve done. Are there goals you still have that you want to meet?
[…] The way I operate now–and this is what’s bred contentment in me–is that I know how I’m going to behave. I know how I’m going to interact with other people and weigh the importance of the things in my life and the things I have to do for other people. I don’t know the results; they’re going to be a surprise. That’s true of almost everything in my life. I know how I’m going to live. I don’t know what my life will entail.
Just got the galleys of my story collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, in the mail today!(!!!!) It’s massively exciting, and you can see pictures of them here. Meanwhile, all art everywhere–past, present and forthcoming–is instantly defeated by this thing’s being-in-the-world:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh_JXJoV2Yo&
(As always, bonus points for anyone who can source the title quote without Googling.)