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 is not where I am. I was there. Now I'm elsewhere.
…Saw it from a hill in the Golan, but still. DATELINE: A kibbutz in Northern Israel. This is gonna be quick because I’m paying by the minute and also Shabbat starts soon, which seems to be a sort of big deal holiday in this country, which is kind of cool given that they do it every damn week and don’t seem to be tired of it yet. Anyway I just wanted to say that I’ve been pimping my galley of The Adderall Diaries on the tour bus, and there are now 38 more college-age Jews in the world who know it exists, plus the bus driver maybe (doubtful). At a used bookstore in Tel Aviv I picked up copies of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz, and Notes Toward the Definition of Culture by T.S. Eliot. Looking forward to digging into those on the plane home–after I finish the Adderall of course. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming. Super hot girl in a bathing suit wants this computer. If I give it to her, there’s really no telling what else she might ask me for. Cheers.
By this time tomorrow I’ll be at JFK airport, probably getting grilled about my associations by humorless Shin Bet agents. That’s right, kids, they’re sending me to Israel, so this is your last mess of links to my regular obsessions until at least the 15th. Keep my side of the bed warm, wouldja?
MOBYLIVES announces new occasional feature on “unusual book events given by something other than the usual suspects” to be written by MHP-author Zachary German. I’m not sure what any of that means, exactly, but Zachary’s first post is about Dennis Cooper’s conversation with Tony O’neill, which took place at the Bryant Park Reading Room the week of BEA. Also, Time Out New York digs Ugly Man. Also^2, Dennis posted some really good vintage gay porn on his blog yesterday.
Pieces from Mathias Svalina’s “Play” are now available at This Recording. Other pieces from “Play” are available in the current issue of The Cupboard Pamphlet. A future issue of TCP, btw, will feature Joshua Cohen, who has an essay in the current issue of New Haven Review (heads up it’s a PDF): Hung Like an Obelisk, Hard as an Olympian: An alphabet of English-language literature in Paris.
A few weeks ago Dave Eggers gave a talk in NYC wherein he promised to personally email a reassurance that print isn’t dead to anyone who wanted one. He didn’t count on that promise getting leaked to the web, and then being flooded with emails. So personally sort of fell out of the question, but he did send a pretty amazing mass email out, about the future of indie publishing and newspapers. Someone else on this site should/will spend some more time parsing what he said, but in the meantime, Gawker has the full text of his letter.
Finally, the NYT asks “Is Slam in Danger of Going Soft?” There are two possible answers: First, obviously, is “who cares?” The more nuanced approach, however, would be to say, “well, if the Times is covering it now, then the answer must be ‘yes–two and a half years ago.'” Either way, there’s really no good reason to click that link.
Later, kids.
This man wants to tell you something. Are you going to listen?
Was anyone else on this blog ever really into Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson), author of such classics as Pirate Utopias, The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism, and myriad other political/philosophical/religious tracts and edicts? As I mentioned the other day, I recently re-bought and am now re-reading DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, and one of the most powerful scenes in that novel–which I’d pretty much forgotten about, until I re-encountered it–is of billionaire Eric Packer’s white stretch limo getting caught up in the middle of an anti-globalization demonstration that suddenly breaks out into a Seattle ’99-style riot.
Those of you who have been following “Cover to Cover” probably remember that I ended Part 3 with the announcement that Part 4, about Bill Hayward and his Collaborative Self-Portraits project, would come in the form of a guest-post on Dennis Cooper’s The Weaklings, in an unprecedented Giant/Coop crossover. Well, today is the day you learn all about those amazing photos that appear in every issue of NOON, as well as about the man behind the camera and his many other projects. My multi-media Q&A with Bill will be on the top of DC’s blog until Monday, but the permanent link for it is here. You can leave any comments on this thread or over at the post on DC’s blog. And now, I’m off to get ready to go to You’re Not Alone, the Rumpus/McSweeney’s/6word event that we gave away tickets to earlier this week. Catch ya’ll on the flipside.
Asketh and ye shall receiveth, Friends. Today we look at two Major Critics Writing for Major Magazines, who are Getting Down With the Young and Indie.
At Boston Review, Stephen Burt discusses and attempts to define an emerging school/movement/moment in contemporary poetry. He traces the [whatever]’s origins/motives/aesthetics back to Oppen, Creeley, and especially W.C. Williams’s famous declaration that there are “no ideas but in things.”
The poets of the New Thing observe scenes and people (not only, but also, themselves) with a self-subordinating concision, so much so that the term “minimalism” comes up in discussions of their work, though the false analogies to earlier movements can make the term misleading. The poets of the New Thing eschew sarcasm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit.
The poets Burt discusses include Jon Woodward, Graham Foust, and my friend Justin Marks, whose first book, A Million in Prizes, just came out this year. It’s a long essay and will give you plenty to think about.
Burt identifies Flood Editions as the preeminent press of the New Thing poets, so it’s sort of interesting that his essay doesn’t mention Jennifer Moxley at all. But Moxley is given plenty of attention by Ange Mlinko, in the Nation Spring Books issue. Mlinko’s review of Moxley’s new book, Clampdown (Flood Editions; and yes, named after the Clash song) is illuminating and persuasive; it also does double-duty as a thorough introduction to Moxley’s whole body of work. Subscribers and/or newstand buyers can also avail themselves of Joshua Clover’s take on a new translation of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen by Keith Waldrop.
Also noteworthy is the poetry in the issue itself, including poems by Robin Blaser and Adrienne Rich. Also also, a not-poetry-related but Nation-related PS— Remember when my man Deresiewicz wrote this about James Wood? Well it seems to have peeved Vivian Gornick, and she wrote a long letter explaining just how and why. Her letter and Deresiewicz’s response are both here.
There should be no rules for this but it should be
simultaneous if at all.
Homosexuality is essentially being alone. Which is
a fight against the capitalist bosses who do not want
us to be alone. Alone we are dangerous.
Our dissatisfaction could ruin America. Our love
could ruin the universe if we let it.
If we let our love flower into the true revolution
we will be swamped with offers for beds.
– “Homosexuality and Marxism” (from Three Marxist Essays)
+
Several months ago Wesleyan University Press sent me My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer (Peter Gizzi & Kevin Killian, eds). I got side-tracked and hadn’t really looked at it, until the other day when I read Language, a collection from later in Spicer’s life (he died at age 40, in 1965). It right about knocked me on my ass, and you’ll be hearing more about Vocabulary in the weeks to come, but for right now, here’s some of Spicer’s work that’s available online courtesy of the Electronic Poetry Center. Also: audio at PennSound. Also, if you’re feeling like you need a proper introduction to JS, here again is Jared White’s fine long essay on Vocabulary, which I linked to in passing several months back.
Here’a a big FYI: the excerpt from Hannah’s novel-in-progress, Sick Soldier at Your Door, which was published in the Winter ’09 issue of Gulf Coast, has been picked up by the “Readings” section of Harper’s. It’s reprinted in the current issue, the one with the Vonnegut short story and the large roundtable with contributions from–among many others–Ben Marcus and Zadie Smith. I guess those are all pretty good reasons to pick the issue up. Actually, Harper’s is one of those magazines you’re better off subscribing to than buying on stands. It’s under 20 bucks for a year subscription, compared to something like 7 bucks per issue if you buy them one at a time. Basically, if you feel like you might want to buy a Harper’s twice in a given year, you’re better off just subscribing, and letting it come right to you.
Congratulations to JENNIFER, for her winning entry in yesterday’s contest. Here’s what she wrote-
I have always been my opposite.
[Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides]
Runners up, honorable mentions & other details after the jump, but first: TO ALL THOSE OF YOU WHO DID NOT WIN / ENTER: WHY NOT COME TO THE EVENT ANYWAY? TICKETS ARE STILL AVAILABLE, AND THE LINE-UP KEEPS GETTING BIGGER AND MORE AWESOME. THIS MORNING THEY ANNOUNCED THE ADDITION OF AMANDA PALMER FROM THE DRESDEN DOLLS.
Look alive, kids. This sweet mother is coming to NYC on May 30th, and we’ve got a pair of tickets to give away. First read the flier and get yourself all worked up, then I’ll tell you how you can win.
So okay, you might have noticed that one of the event sponsors is SMITH magazine, the force behind last/this year’s bizarrely wonderful Six-Word Memoir phenomenon. And the last time I blogged about the Rumpus it was about their “Last Book I Loved” column (which, btw, now has its own index page, so you can see all the entries in the series). So let’s make this easy as sin- if you want the pair of tickets to this event, you need to write a six-word “Last Book I Loved” entry and leave it in the comment thread on this post. Book title and author’s name don’t count against your word limit. Also include a way for me to get in touch with you, or else don’t forget to check back here tomorrow to see who won. The contest will be open all day today, with entries closing at midnight EST. Good luck.
On the origin of awesome beards.
…is on stands now. I haven’t seen a hard copy yet, but if you click over to their website the top story is an essay by William Deresiewicz, for whose critical writing I expressed much love in a previous post. Here’s a meaty little excerpt from “Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism.”
Human beings expend an enormous amount of energy doing things that don’t seem to have any survival value: singing, dancing, painting caves, decorating spears and, above all, telling stories. (Think how much time you spend consuming fictional narratives–novels, movies, TV shows–in one form or another.) The nascent field of Darwinian aesthetics seeks to account for the art-making impulse in evolutionary psychological terms. If art is a product of the mind, and the mind is a product of evolution, then art is a product of evolution. Again, as an intellectual project, this is perfectly valid. But there are also strong selection pressures pushing in the direction of such an approach. Evolutionary thinking is, at present, an aggressively expansive species within the academic world, a kind of emergent Homo sapiens outcompeting the old-school Neanderthals across a wide swath of intellectual territory. Having colonized the social sciences–where it has begun to displace the view, predominant throughout the twentieth century, that the mind is a highly malleable product of culture–it has now set its sights on the humanities, the last area of resistance.