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.
This weekend at Coop’s place, a guest-post from one of DC’s regulars explores the question- Do the Angels in John Milton’s Paradise Lost have gay sex?
A thousand and one cheers to my friend Nick Burd, whose debut novel, The Vast Fields of Ordinary, just got made very nice to by Ned Vizzini in the NYT.
Q: How cool is it that this exists? A: Pretty cool.
One of those distinguished people is none other than Mary Gaitskill, who has written on four clips so far, one of which is Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” video, which was the essay that inspired my friend Meehan to alert me to this site’s existence in the first place. Another one is “Sarah Palin at the Republican Convention,” wherein Gaitskill discerns an analog between Palin and the “false Maria” of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Other, non-Gaitskill contributors to Ryeberg include –
Alana Wilcox – “Knuckles and Narrative” (an essay on boxing, with a video of a guy teaching a little kid to box)
Peter Lynch – “The Nobody in All of Us” (on Warhol and Scorceses’s The King of Comedy)
Alexandra Shimo – “What Nazis Watched Over Dinner” (exactly what it says)
When I got back from Gainesville, there was a big fact package from Open City waiting for me. I felt like I had won a prize. Inside were three books: Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories About Flying; and a galley of Rachel Sherman’s debut novel, Living Room (dropping this October); and Lost & Found, the second Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood anthology, which clocks a thoroughly impressive gut-busting 853 pages. (The first anthology, you might recall, was Before & After, in 2002). Just a few of the names included: Sam Lipsyte, Jonathan Ames, Charles D’Ambrosio, Phillip Lopate, Daniel Nester, Mickey Z., Iris Smyles, and several dozen others. As Beller explains in his introduction (apropos the question- why does NYC produce so much writing about itself?), “The essential ingredient is density. The density is the drug.” I’ll cheers that one. Anyway, for those of you who actually live here, I thought you might want to know that there’s a reading for the Beller book tonight in Washington Square Park. Details after the jump (and more on the Sherman and Flight books at some point in the nearish future).
1) from Goerings, the best (and nearly last) indie book store in town
2) a tee shirt for the band Andrew Jackson Jihad, about whom I knew nothing at the time; but I had made it a personal goal to drop 20 bucks at Wayward Council before leaving town. A tee shirt for AJJ’s “Only God Can Judge Me” EP, plus a Wayward tee shirt still only ran me 18 bucks, forcing me to simply leave the other 2 as a donation like some sort of big-city New York Asshole, though the girl on volunteer duty made life a lot easier by being too punk to acknowledge my presence, so instead of having to take the change and then give it back, I just left a twenty on the table in front of her and then split. Also, my mom was with me. It was weird. Anyway, back home now in BROOKLYN, and it turns out that Andrew Jackson Jihad is Arizona anti-folk. My jury’s still out on what I think of them, but you might as well decide for yourself:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBs3ived_Zw
File under: Wow. You can get the full text of Sarah Palin’s baffling, incoherent “I quit” speech here, at the official website of the state of Alaska.
I do not want to disappoint anyone with my decision; all I can ask is that you trust me with this decision – but it’s no more “politics as usual”.
Got that right, lady. It’s back to terrorizing the PTA for you–at least for now.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87-d0Mg7Xzc
So the other day I linked to Ange Mlinko’s Seidel piece at The Nation website, where she comes down pretty hard on Frederick Seidel, as well as a number of critics who have praised him. It was just a snippet link, because I don’t know the first thing about Seidel or his work, but I thought her piece was interesting in its own right, and so I passed it along. Since then, I’ve been reminded that the best solution for un-acquaintance with a subject is acquaintance, and so here then are several Seidel-related links for your weekend-
Seidel’s author page at Macmillan is loaded with audio.
“Hell on Wheels” by Christian Lorenzten; this was one of the reviews with which Mlinko took issue.
Frederick Seidel poems at Harper’s (you have to be a subscriber to view these)
David Orr reviews Seidel’s Poems, 1959-2009
“Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin” by Frederick Seidel
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auQJVhNH99c
This isn’t really literary at all, I just thought people would be interested to know that Glenn Beck and Michael Scheuer are on TV praying for all of us to be terrorized and hurt. Just something to, uh, think about when you’re searching for “inspiration.” (via Gawker)