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.
February 23. Unwritten letter.
–Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks (Fourth Notebook)
Well, let’s see, shall we?
“A Faithful Grope in the Dark” – Joshua Mohr writes about trying–and failing–to place his first novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, with a major publisher, and then finding a happy home at Two Dollar Radio (publishers of Rudolph Wurlitzer and the new Gary Indiana).
I then spoke with a former editor at several major publishing houses and asked how she knew what would sell. “It’s a crapshoot,” she said. Her tone wasn’t smug or ambivalent; the calm way she conveyed this sentiment made it feel honest.
“The Last Book I Loved” is an ongoing Rumpus feature. Right now they’ve got David Ebershoff on City of Theives. Recently they also had friend-of-Giant (or is that Giant Friend?) Kevin Sampsell on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Lincoln Michel on Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, and person-who-is-me Justin Taylor on Bleak House.
Also, the latest installment of Peter Orner’s column devoted to the short story, The Lonely Voice, is about John Edgar Wideman.
Oh Also too, if you live in NYC, know that the Rumpus is coming. The NYC event, You Are Not Alone, is May 30. You can get more info about the event (Eugene Mirman, Anthony Swofford, Amy Tan, the list goes one…) here, or check back in with Giant early next week when we’ll be giving some tickets to it with some sort of contest that’s so simple and fun and right-on that I still haven’t figured out what it will be.
They were given the choice of becoming kings or the kings’ messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless. They would gladly put an end to their miserable life, but they do not dare to do so because of their oath of loyalty.
–Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks (Third Notebook)
You ever have one of those books you just can’t seem to hold onto? For me, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis is one of them. I’ve bought it several times over now–always in hardback, at the severely discounted price of $5, and always from The Strand–most recently yesterday. And I swear this is the last @#&$%-ing time. What happened to my other copies? I feel like one got left behind in a move. Maybe one is at my friend Amanda’s house in Portland, Ore, or else in storage in Nashville, TN where my parents put my shit when they got divorced and sold their house a couple years ago (unless the Nashville and Portland copies are *different* copies, which is also possible). Basically, by this point I’ve sunk enough money into cheap used Cosmopolises that I could have bought one at regular sticker price, which if I had done I probably would have actually taken care of. The funny thing is that it’s not like Cosmopolis is the greatest book ever, or anything. I’m a big DeLillo fan, to be sure, and I think it’s got a lot to be said for it, but it’s certainly not Underworld or The Names. It’s a short novel, and like all his work incredibly beautiful. It’s about a multi-multi-billionaire taking his limo across town to get a haircut. It’s a poem, really, a sort of elegy-in-advance for technologies that are obsolete before they’re even fully emergent (it’s set in the year 2000), and how money makes a man vast until he is no longer a man at all anymore, but something enormous and organic, powerful in ways the self cannot account for or comprehend. Imagine if the ocean tried to know itself, or a nebula did. I’ve always thought of the book as a sort of working-through of Marx’s proposition that “all that which is solid melts into air.” Maybe you’re getting a sense of why–even though it’s a relatively “minor” work–I keep finding myself drawn back to it. I wake up one day thinking, “Man I’d really like to take another look at Cosmopolis” and I reach for it and then it isn’t there. I’d say I’ve been feeling this way for about a month now, but especially since I read Nick Paumgarten’s “The Death of Kings” in The New Yorker a week or two ago. So, here I am, a humbled but determined owner–yet again–of Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. I swear I’m going to take care of if this time, to hold it close.
Ever since they debuted with an issue that featured Hubert Selby Jr. and Mary Gaitskill, plus art by Jeff Koons, Open City has been one of the best literary magazines around. And since 1999 Open City has also been publishing books, including David Berman’s Actual Air, Sam Lipsyte’s Venus Drive, Rachel Sherman’s The First Hurt, and Edward St. Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and named a New York Times notable book in 2005. Open City is either about as cool as prestigious things get or as prestigious as cool things get. I’m not sure which, but I guess it doesn’t matter. The point is, they’re awesome–but for how much longer? The thing about Awesome, see, is that she’s always hungry, and so Open City is holding a benefit to raise some much-needed scratch so that Awesome can eat during the next fiscal year.
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2-zdxy2dpg&
Don’t wait for the DVD extras! Watch them now. Books of poetry (and at least one novel) are “reviewed” with short bizarre bursts of cinema, intended to make you free-associate and baffle happily. I’m highly pleased to report that this latest installment contains a review of my poetry chapbook, More Perfect Depictions of Noise. Here’s what they thought-
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6Ht-Lsg_U4&
I say that video is the equivalent of one thumbs up. Also reviewed this issue is Bob, or Man on Boat by Peter Markus, To Hell With Sleep by Anselm Berrigan (the other video included in this post), and a shit-hell of a lot more. Check it out.
The history of the world, as it is writen and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man’s intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one. And so, for instance, the tradition of the seven wonders of the world has always had associated with it the rumor that there was another, an eight wonder of the world, and concerning this eighth wonder there were various, perhaps contradictory, statements made, the vagueness of which was explained by the obscurity of ancient times.
—The Blue Octavo Notebooks (Second Notebook)
This is just a friendly reminder that tomorrow night is LitCrawl NYC, masterminded by Opium master-chef Todd Zuniga, and sponsored by Harper Perennial and LitQuake (the SFCA literary festival, gone bicoastal). The promotional bookmarks they gave me promise 40 authors giving 11 readings over the course of 2 hours, to be followed by 1 afterparty. Phase 1 begins at 7 Pm and is the East Village Phase. My top picks for this round are either Muumuu House at Botanica (readers are Zachary German, Brandon Scott Gorrell and Abigail Lloyd) or Harper Perennial’s “Silk Ties vs. Black Eyes” at the KGB, where my man Tony O’Neill will be teaming up with Simon van Booy for a nnight of “sartorial and pharmacological trivia.” Sure, why not? Phase 2 is the Lower East Side Phase, and begins at 8 PM. (The idea is you bolt from one thing to the next, bar-crawl style.) This time there’s a clear favorite choice. Is it Opium’s trademark OpiumLive show at Happy Ending? No. Is it the Gigantic magazine microeading at Home Sweet Home, featuring Ben Blum, Shane Jones, Tao Lin, and more? Almost…but no. I’m going to have to go ahead and nominate the New York Tyrant reading at Fontana’s, featuring Robert Lopez and…who is that other guy? Oh yeah! It’s me. Gian (aka Mr. Tyrant) tells me they’ve got it set up so Lopez and I will be on a balcony, reading down to/at/on the crowd, like a true tyrant addressing his loyal subjects, possibly while deciding how many of them to slaughter. Does fun get funner than this? Only at the afterparty, which is ALSO at Fontana’s, so if you come to the NyTy reading you get the double bonus of already being where the blow-out’s at. To see the full schedule, including complete list of readers and directions to all the bars, click here.
February 19, 1917.
Today read Hermann und Dorothea, passages from Richter’s Memoirs, looked at pictures by him, and finally read a scene from Hauptmann’s Griselda. For the brief span of the next hour am a different person. True, all prospects as misty as ever, but pictures in the mist now different. The man in heavy boots I have put on today for the first time (they were originally intended for military service) is a different person.
–The First Notebook
The new issue of The Daily Moth, the nifty two-page pdf journal that appears only via email and anything but daily, is now out. For our previous Moth coverage (including downloads of issues 1-3) click here. I tried to upload the new one for all of you, but apparently I can’t post files larger than 2mb, and the new issue is 2.4. So if you want it, you’ll need to get yourself added to the email list, which I think you can do by writing to thedailymoth at gee male dockom.