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.
Hey, melt your brain! Why not?
Musician Jay-Z’s DECODED, in which he will “decode all the lyrics from my records; I’m going to pick the select ones and reveal the double entendres that people may have missed or may have got and want confirmation on it,” to Chris Jackson at Spiegel & Grau, by Matthew Guma at Guma Agency.
(h/t to Kate Ankofski, who had this posted as her gchat status message)
“Ten Things You Need to Know to Live on the Streets” – a handy guide for the dispossessed, conceived by Walter Mosley, at The Nation.
5 Food and clothing are easier to find than a safe place to sleep–the first truth of homelessness is sleep deprivation. Always have a blanket. Whenever possible, sleep in groups with staggered schedules, so you can look out for one another, prioritizing children’s needs over those of adults.
It’s a love-fest! A couple of days ago I posted about an old essay of mine on an art book called the Codex Seraphinianus, and about all the responses I’ve gotten to that essay over the years. To my enormous pleasure, that post generated a whole new round of reader response, which came in via the comments section here, via email, and via Facebook. A few people who wrote in mentioned Dr. Terry Harpold, the professor at UF who first introduced me to the Codex in a course called Eccentric Spaces and Spacialities. Dr. Harpold, it seems, has the makings of a cult web-following, and that’s a fire I feel is well worth stoking. As it happens, I was down in Gainesville over July 4th weekend, visiting my little sister. I hadn’t been there since 2005, and I was only in town for a few days, so I didn’t even attempt to touch base with Dr. Harpold (or any of my other former profs) but when I visited Goerings Bookstore–which gets the book orders for the sweeping majority of UF’s English department course offerings–I saw the reading list for the most recent iteration of Harpold’s LIT 4930, and snapped the photo you see just above. It seems that the latest version of the course is called “The Literary Representation of Space,” and is being offered Summer B, 2009, ie right now. I’m straight-up jealous of anyone who gets to study Mrs. Dalloway with Dr. Harpold, a book that wasn’t on the syllabus when I took the course. Housekeeping, however, is a Space/s mainstay. It’s one of my all-time favorite pieces of literature. I don’t even know how many times I’ve read it, but I do know that I read it for the first time because Dr. Harpold assigned it to me. One more thing I’ll always be grateful for.
LIT 4930 Summer B – The Literary Representation of Space
Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2008) by Terry Harpold
Let’s be honest. In the scheme of things, Starbucks is a fairly benign corporate citizen. Sure, their union record sucks, and they run local businesses under, but on a variety of other issues–wages, environment, fair trade coffee–they’re somewhere between middling and decent, and they produce a variety of quality products that people actually want. So why does everyone hate them so much? Well in NYC, there’s almost no single Starbucks from which you cannot see another Starbucks. It’s sickening. They run local businesses out, and then all you’re left with is their Borg-like monoculture with its idiotic patois and 2k calorie frozen drinks. Now, however, Starbucks is trying to go back the other way, by testing out new Baudrillardian nightmare stores that will simulate all aspects of local indie coffee shops, from faux-hip furniture and art, to the branding on their in-store products. The Rumpus got the story from the Seattle Times, and I got it from them. The shift, essentially, is from Borg to Cylon.
The ubiquitous coffee-shop giant is dropping the household name from its 15th Avenue East store on Capitol Hill, a shop that was slated to close at one point last year but is being remodeled in Starbucks’ new rustic, eco-friendly style. It will open next week, the first of at least three remodeled Seattle-area stores that will bear the names of their neighborhoods rather than the 16,000-store chain to which they belong. … If the pilot goes well in Seattle, it could move to other markets. … Those who can capture a sense of community and offer consumers a compelling experience will win in the long run, said Michelle Barry, senior vice president of the market-research firm Hartman Group in Bellevue.
(Boldface is mine.) The article then goes on to detail how a bunch of Starbucks suits spent several months sitting in local coffee shops, not buying anything, but taking notes on decor and operations. How fucking evil is that? Seriously. Their policy is literally to target the market of people who are making a concerted effort to buy local, and then trick those people into sending their money out of said community, back to Starbucks. I don’t think you need to be a ski-masked anti-globalization activist to read this article and instantly think brick.
Dear Starbucks, When you do shit like this, all the other good(ish) stuff you do stops mattering. You’re like a child-rapist who donates a lot of money to the fight against cancer. It’s like, yeah, thanks for that, but still–this thing with the child-raping. Anyway, this is why everyone hates you. Asshole.
Wow. Is that even an English sentence? How can something be “cloaked” with “trappings”? It’s like a black hole of meaning, only much less interesting than that would be. Dear NYT, somebody needs to put Janet Maslin to bed.
It’s a cold day in Hell when I agree with every. last. word. of a Peggy Noonan column. Anyone down there want to shout back with a thermometer read? Here’s one of my many favorite parts of her take on the lately departing Mrs. Palin-
If I had to pick the single piece of my own writing that has generated the most reader responses, I would without hesitation name “The Codex Seraphinianus: A Fragment of the Complete History of an Unknown Planet,” an essay about Luigi Serafini’s hallucinatory faux-encyclopedia which The Believer published in May, 2007. (Aside: I’m hoping to meet or beat this record with “A Figure in the Distance Even to My Own Eye,” my new essay in the current issue of The Believer.) Two years out, the Codex essay continues to bring me new and interesting correspondence, to the tune of at least a letter or two per month. People write to say they enjoyed the piece, to thank me for turning them onto the Codex, or to share their own stories about when they first discovered it, or what they think it all means. Sometimes they want to know if the text has been “deciphered” yet, or if I personally think it can be deciphered at all. Often, they just want to know if I can send them the full text of Calvino’s introduction (it isn’t available in English, so I commissioned a translation from the French version, but it was only briefly quoted in the essay). Anyway, today I’m thrilled to share with you all news of a new Codex-related publication: Confronting and Collecting the Works of Luigi Serafini, available as a severely-limited edition (100 copies!) chapbook by Jordan and Justine Hurder.
(via Rumpus) At The Millions, Sonya Chung writes about the bizarre process of picking out a cover image for her first novel. (I just went through a similar process, and though I can’t share the image yet, suffice to say it pleases me greatly and I’m eagerly awaiting the day when I can.)
Coldfront has a new Poets Off Poetry, this time authored by the vicious and delightful Erin Belieu.
And a new issue of Trickhouse (#5) is up, featuring an experiment conducted by Brandon Shimoda and Lisa Schumaier. They need you to participate, so you better get over there.
Oh and Slate’s got Katha Pollitt on Edna O’Brien on Lord Byron.
Hello from Hong Kong, everyone. Among the various goings-on I’ve missed blogging during the past few days, this one’s especially close to my heart, seeing as how the Solar Anus reading series is jointly run by Our Own Herr Butler, my dear friend Amy McDaniel, and all-purpose badass Jamie Iridell. Amy posted the following to facebook yesterday-
Hi writers!
I co-run a poetry and fiction reading series in Atlanta called Solar Anus. Past readers include Justin Taylor, Johannes Goransson, Rauan Klassnik, and Bruce Covey. In the interest of future readings that are every bit as fabulous, I thought I’d reach out to all of you in two ways:
First, please let me know if you will be in the Atlanta area…ever. I’d love to discuss the possibility of hosting you to read to us.
Second, pass this along to other writers whom you respect who either live in or near Atlanta or who might be passing through. Encourage them to query me at amymcdaniel@gmail.com with a brief bio and a link to something they’ve written. We especially love promoting writers who have books or chapbooks to sell.
Very many thanks.
Amy
I feel like Jessa Crispin right now. Doesn’t/didn’t she always blog about what books to pack for trips? Well, this time tomorrow I’ll be at JFK, boarding a plane to Hong Kong, where I’ll be spending the next month. (No worries, I’ll still be wired there, so you’ll hear from me, albeit perhaps in the middle of the night, since HK is 12 or 13 hours ahead of the East Coast.) Anyway, I’m trying to pack my reading materials for the trip, and have narrowed the list down to a dozenish candidates. I’ll probably take about half that many. The idea is to ensure a variety of options (I learned last year that English language bookstores in HK are basically non-existent, and what’s on offer tends to be horrible) but without making my bag weigh 100 pounds. Read the list and feel free to vote for favorites or suggest other options, though at this point, if your picks aren’t already in my bedroom they’re probably out of the running.