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.
Shteyngart & Cohen at Vox Tablet. Shteyngart, btw, also just got a mind-erasingly ecstatic review from Michiko Kakutani. Cohen, not to be outdone, is running for mayor of Annapolis, Maryland.
Snowden Wright loved Eugene Marten’s Firework.
Ed Champion did not love Richard Yates.
Did somebody say politics? Not bloody likely. But anyway, let’s meet Emily Henochowicz. I got turned onto her personal blog after reading about her in the New York Times. Seems the 21 year old artist / exchange student / demonstrator lost an eye after being shot in the face with a tear gas canister by Israeli police. But that news is almost two months old. The article I read, which went up on 7/27, is about how the Israeli Ministry of Defense is refusing to pay (and denying responsibility for) her hospital bills. Anyway, if you go over to her blog you can check out Emily’s art, including this pair of one-eye-favoring glasses that she designed herself.
The Economist had a great cover story this week (last week?) on the absolute fuckedness (my paraphrase) of the American prison system. The web version seems to be behind a paywall, but maybe you can find the issue at the story. Did you know that over 1 in 100 Americans is currently incarcerated, and that if you factor in people on parole and probation, the figure rises to 1 in 31* Americans under some form of corrective supervision. Related, this Nation piece about BP’s use of prison labor in Louisiana.
Also, the Economist apparently has an arts/books blog now. It is called Prospero, and here’s an interesting piece about arch-agent Andrew Wylie partnering directly with Amazon (and bypassing publishers entirely) to release e-book editions of Portnoy’s Complaint, Updike’s Rabbit books, and a suite of others.
Finally, Unsaid editor David McLendon announces on Facebook that Allison Titus is the 2010 recipient of the Transport of the Aim Poetry Prize. You might remember that Titus’s Sum of Every Lost Ship was one of five small press poetry titles to read this summer. I liked her book a whole bunch. So congrats, Allison! And a hearty cheers to Unsaid.
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*For a few days this read “1 in 3.” Thanks to Steven Augustine for catching the typo.
via Nathan Salsburg‘s facebook page- the above was shot on 7/26/1983, or 27 years and 2 days ago. Some of you might recall that I really liked I Want to Go Where Things are Beautiful, a Nimrod Workman album made from recordings done by Mike Seeger, and released through Twos & Fews, the Drag City imprint that Salsburg runs. What you may not know is that Salsburg is also the driving force behind Face a Frowning World: An E.C. Ball Memorial Album, which is one of the most spectacular comps I’ve acquired in I don’t know how long–years. Even if you don’t have a clue who E.C. Ball was, you’ll find plenty to love about this record. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, the newest Twos & Fews release is called The Good Old-Fashioned Way; it is a collection of recordings by a man named Hamper McBee.
Hong Kong skyline w/ self-portrait & living room.
Hey it’s night time here but morning there–unless there is here for you, too, which if it is you should leave me a note and we should hang out. Anyway, here’s some stuff I’ve come across recently that might be of interest.
First, in honor of my being in Asia, here’s your weekly dose of Tao Lin- homeboy’s got “An Account of Being Arrested for ‘Trespassing’ NYU’s Bookstore” up at Gawker.
Hoist the blowhard flag! Ron Rosenbaum jumps a stack of sharks, and the moon too (jumps the moonshark? sharks the jumpmoon?) propelled by nothing more than an endless current of his own hot air. If you thought that the Original of Laura was a tempest in a teapot, then his “next big Nabokov controversy” is, I don’t know, a cheerio on a baseball field or something. Basically, Rosenbaum takes the fact that the poem “Pale Fire” from the novel Pale Fire is going to be published as a de luxe essay-accompanied strand-alone by Gingko Press, in November, argues for a reading of the poem that boils down to “even when Nabokov was bad he was good,” and then flogs the fact with the argument like an octopus against a stone. When it’s over, four breathless screens later, he passes out in a sweaty heap of his own inane superlatives, leaving the Slate commentariat to communally shit the bed with rage, which they promptly do. In a fitting Kinbot(e)-ian irony, the most interesting piece of interesting and useful information in this article (to me, anyway) is the footnote-fact that the artist half of this art-book, Jean Holabird, was for many years a collaborator with the great poet, Tony Towle. Here’s a picture of the two of them together in 1981. You can see some samples of their collaborative work at Tony’s website (look down near the bottom).
You may or may not remember that I was also in Hong Kong this time last year, and my visit happened to coincide with the Hong Kong Book Fair. Well, it happened again- I came, and so did the Fair. So I went back. The line for entry was even longer this year, despite the controversial banning of the pseudo-models in effect for the first time. Once more the Kubrick bookstore/art-publisher booth won my vote for Best In Show. Unlike last year, where I just gawked, this year I came prepared to buy some art books–and I did. More on these later. I also made it over to the Hong Kong University Press booth and bought a few books about Hong Kong: Ken Nicolson’s The Happy Valley: A History and Tour of the Hong Kong Cemetery, after reading about it this morning in this article in the HK Weekly, and Ackbar Abbas‘s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance.
In non-meatspace news, a preview of The Incongruous Quarterly #1 is now available. The new magazine will have fiction, poetry, and a section called “Kill Fee,” which will feature “Work that was originally meant for other publications gets a new lease on life. Featuring art, essays, fiction and articles that were supposed to belong to the New York Times, the Believer, the Globe and Mail, NPR, Daily News and Analysis India and more.” This is especially interesting, because I had been under the impression that the term “kill fee” was invented by the Paris Review two weeks ago, so I can only wonder where these guys heard it. Speaking of which, I’ll end this post in my least-favorite way possible, which is with a self-correction & apology. I contributed a piece of bona fide “shit talk” to the comment thread attached to this post of Blake’s. Without rehashing what it was I had a bug up my ass about, let me just say that I completely misunderstood what I read, and responded from a position of pure ignorance. So, you know–sorry.
Here’s a big ole FYI for y’all. There’s not a thing in this world that would keep me from this event, save for the fact of my being on the other side of said world until mid-August. Take it away, Joanna Yas of Open City:
David Berman will be making a very rare appearance in New York on Sunday, July 25, 6pm, for a reading and discussion at the NYU Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street (btw 5th & 6th).
This event is part of the the Open City Summer Writing Workshop, but we have a very limited number of seats available for the public for $15.
Tickets are available here (tickets will not be sold at the door)
http://www.opencity.org/ocsummerberman.html
Greetings from Hong Kong! It is early in the morning here and a five-year-old is trying to get me to help her watch some kind of Barbie-as-the-little-mermaid DVD, but instead I am doing this. Mark Doten, good friend of HTMLGiant’s (and of mine), has put together a Day dedicated to The Mountain Goats for The Weaklings. It is filled with riches, not the least of which is a new interview with John Darnielle. Here’s a choice gleaning:
MD: People often speak of certain common technical mistakes in the work of young fiction writers — POV that doesn’t gel, overuse of adverbs in dialog tags, that sort of thing. Are there specific technical problems you see repeatedly in the work of beginning songwriters?
JD: Yeah there’s one, a pet one, which I’ll get to shortly, but the main thing is less technical than – well, for lack of a better term, “moral.” Not moral problems in the sense so much of “what you are doing is morally indefensible,” but more of a “the terms of the moral universe in which you are setting your song are lame, and since you’re the one setting those terms, this is a problem you should fix.” What the hell am I even talking about — this: young men (this problem really doesn’t seem to exist for young women who write songs) often like to present a narrator whose self-destructive “urges” (they usually aren’t real “urges” so much as cosmetic choices about how to present himself) are clearly placing him on a collision course with doom. The narrator of these songs often seems to hope that the important people in his life will be both very impressed by the special nature of his pain, and that some people who have spurned him will be so horrified by the things his pain has made him do that they will either a) give him what he wants from them or b) speak with awe about him.
Really can’t stand that kinda stuff. There is one thing special about your pain: it’s yours. That ought to be enough, in my opinion; you can describe it from there, and take control of it, detail it lovingly, etc. But when a narrator seems to think that he is somehow beatified by his own particular collection of neuroses, well, this bugs me. I was as guilty of this early on as anybody, and one of my most popular songs is pretty much One Of These Types, and it’s not that all songs like this are bad. In fact many of them are quite good. But it’s a tendency that should be outgrown quickly. Often there are two main characters in a song like this, and almost always, the song would be a much better one of the two weren’t acting like a child.
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You should definitely go over there and check out Mark’s Goats Day. Also, you might want to refresh yourself on this Goats essay by Alec Niedenthal, published here last November.
I’d rate the movie solidly in the middle of the pack of Disney live-action films: Escape to Witch Mountain, The Gnomemobile, and the Midvale High movies. Better than the Apple Dumpling Gang, but not as good as Old Yeller.
– Michael D. Houst, Barrington NH, reviewing the new Sorcerer’s Apprentice in the comments section of A.O. Scott’s review of same.
There are very few things in music right now that excite me more than the words “new Alasdair Roberts record.” I became something of a Roberts evangelist last year when his album Spoils came out, and since then I’ve been availing myself of his back catalog, which includes several wonderful albums of traditional ballads and songs. His new record, Too Long in This Condition, is another collection of traditionals, and it is a delight. Sonically, it feels closer in spirit to Spoils–which was a (relatively) boisterous album of Roberts originals–than to his earlier traditionals records, in particular The Crook of My Arm, which remains (by a small margin) my favorite thing Roberts has put out to date. But there’s plenty to love about Too Long in This Condition. Highlights include marvelous takes on “The Two Sisters”, “Barbara Allen” and “The Daemon Lover”, the ecstatic jaw-harp-featuring “Kilmahog Saturday Afternoon,” and “The Golden Vanity,” this last being the record’s standout track. Also look out for “Little Sir Hugh,” which as near as I can tell is a song about Jewish blood libel–and I don’t mean “about” in the sense of “discussing” or “critiquing,” but rather in the sense of “features a Jew luring a child into her house and then murdering him for his precious blood.” Ahh, history!
via Ellen Kennedy’s tumblr, which is rarely updated but always worth checking up on. Did she take these pictures herself? Here’s hoping. I especially like this one, which looks like something tiny that floats near the bottom of the sea:
I wonder if people noticed that one of the three categories in which this post is classified is a brand-new one. That would be the “Craven self-promotion” tag–something we’ve probably needed here for a long time, and which I hope all the contributors will feel inclined to make use of, as needed. That said, wanting to direct your attention to this first thing isn’t actually all that craven. I’ve written an essay for the Poetry Foundation, “A Dog Days Reading List: five books of poetry as hot as the sun.” Titles discussed are: The Wonderfull Yeare (a shepherd’s calendar) by Nate Pritts, Fort Red Border by Kiki Petrosino, Sum of Every Lost Ship by Allison Titus, The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey, and Mean Free Path by Ben Lerner. Eight poems from four of the five books are posted with the essay (dunno what happened with Titus, but you can read some of her work here) for your sampling pleasure.
Okay, second thing. Have you seen the July issue of Bookslut? Among its many treasures, there’s a great review of Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine, an interview with Rae Armantrout, and–here it comes–a long interview with me, by Mark Doten. It’s a little hard to articulate just how excited I am about this, and why, but I’ll give it a shot. In the version of my own biography that I tell to myself, the start of my career as a “real” writer is marked by the first piece I wrote for Bookslut, an interview with Dennis Cooper published in February 2005. Dennis and I would wind up becoming frequent co-conspirators, and friends, and lately press-mates, but at the time he was just this guy whose books I was in love with, who had actually agreed to talk to me. Looking over the “Articles by Justin Taylor” on Bookslut, it occurs to me that (1) I haven’t written anything for them in over two years, which is inexcusable, and (2) that pretty much all the people I spoke to on their behalf–and several of those I reviewed–wound up becoming friends and/or colleagues in some capacity. Even five years ago Bookslut had a long rich history–without its trailblazing and its model, a site like GIANT would almost certainly not exist–and they should be commended for their ongoing commitment and apparently perpetual vitality. So that’s why it’s a special moment for me to find myself on the other side of the interview on their website, and why I hope you will go read it. Also, if I do say so myself, the piece is awesome. Mark Doten is a good friend, an incredible writer, a wise reader, and a savvy interviewer–what I mean by this last remark is that he was smart enough to get me drunk, and decent enough to get at least as drunk as I got.