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.
For no particular reason, Family Guy has just done an episode of their own adaptations of Stephen King stories. I watched the episode on hulu yesterday. It won’t stay up there too long, since they only have 5 episodes at any given time, but I think it just went up. The Family Guy episode follows the basic pattern set by the Simpsons’s annual Treehouse of Horror specials, only without the peg to Halloween. The only thing about this that’s a bummer is that they parody the movies made out of the books, rather than the books themselves. Given that the guy is one of the best-selling writers on the planet, it stands to reason that they could have snagged at least ONE of his unfilmed stories to send up. Oh well. The first one, a parody of Stand By Me (published as “The Body” in King’s novella-collection Different Seasons) is definitely the strongest of the three. The second one is a parody of Misery with Brian as the kidnapped writer and Stewie as Annie Wilkes, and the last one is a pretty faithful re-creation of The Shawshank Redemption (originally published as “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, also in Different Seasons). Fun fact: three out of the four novellas in different seasons have been made into films. The third is “Apt Pupil,” about a kid who discovers his neighbor is an ex-Nazi, but instead of turning him in blackmails him and then becomes his sort of weird partner in crime. The movie had Brad Renfro, I think. The last story in the collection, “The Breathing Method,” is the only one not to have been adapted, and odds are against its ever being done. It’s understated, but basically weird as hell– a sort of drawing room ghost story with some weird Lovecraft shout-outs tossed in for good measure.
At Writers Digest, Robert Lee Brewer talks to Justin Marks about his first book, A Million in Prizes, which won the New Issues prize and which is out now.
One of the things a book is to me is in some ways a chart of a person’s development/growth as a writer during the time in which the book was written.
At Jezebel, Anna is talking to Feministing.com’s Jessica Valenti, whose new book, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women, came out just last month.
After all, how is it not focusing on young women’s sexuality by talking constantly about their virginity or bringing them to purity balls? If you are telling young women over and over that what’s most important is their virginity, that what makes them valuable is their chastity – then you’re sending the message that it’s the body and sexuality that defines who they are.
And Emily Nonko talks to Tao over at the Bomb magazine website.
The next two books are completely autobiographical. I just think about the most interesting parts of last two years. And then for the ending, I just ask: does it work?
You knew this day would come. As anyone who has ever watched a serial TV drama knows, epic feuds are always bound to reverse into epic loves, because the same engine–passion–is what drives them both and draws the players inexorably to one another. Shall we recap for the latecomers?
The motives for reading, as for writing, are very diverse and frequently not clear even to the most self-conscious readers or writers. Perhaps the ultimate motive for metaphor, or the writing and reading of figurative language, is the desire to be different, to be elsewhere. In this assertion I follow Nietzsche, who wanred us that what we can find words for is already dead in our hearts, so that there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking. Hamlet agrees with Nietzsche, and both might have extended the contempt to the act of writing. But we do not read to unpack our hearts, and so there is no contempt in the act of reading. Traditions tell us that the free and solitary self writes in order to overcome mortality. I think that the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness. That confrontation scarcely masks the desire to join greatness, which is the basis of the aesthetic experience once called the Sublime: the quest for a transcendence of limits. Our common fate is age, sickness, death, oblivion. Our common hope, tenuous but persistent, is for some version of survival.
–Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, “Elegiac Conclusion”
Which makes total sense to me. I mean what’s not to love? Handler’s extremely enthusiastic take on Take It, Beckman’s new collection out from Wave Books, is in this month’s Believer, but you can read it in full online here. I think Shake is still my favorite Beckman book, but the new one has a lot to be said for it, and Handler gets about as much into the tight confines of a one-page review as you can.
Also, here’s a link to Beckman’s author page at Wave.
And here’s a video of him reading.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R70778g8DY
Yet who reads to bring about an end however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards–their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble–the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”
— Virginia Woolf, from The Second Common Reader (quoted by Bloom in The Western Canon)
Those first three sentences have been my credo ever since I read them in my childhood, and I urge them now upon myself, and all who still can rally to them. They do not preclude reading to obtain power, over oneself or over others, but only through a pleasure that is final, a difficult and authentic pleasure.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, “Woolf’s Orlando: Feminism as The Love of Reading”
This one’s for my homies who asked for a more detailed commentary on Dickens/Bloom that I don’t have time to offer up this week.
One of the blessings of Dickens’s powerful influence on Kafka is the altogether Borgesian impact of Kafka on our understanding of Dickens.
– The Western Canon, “The Canonical Novel: Dickens’s Bleak House and George Eliot’s Middlemarch“
This isn’t strictly literary, but with a songwriter as smart and lore-versed as Alasdair Roberts, it’s not strictly not literary either. I really dig his new record, Spoils, and go into some detail about same over at the FLAUNT magazine blog. It’s out this week from Drag City. For the uninitiated, there are a few of his songs on his myspace, though none from Spoils. I thought Drag City was giving away a promo mp3 of a Spoils track, but I just checked for it again and can’t find it.
Does anyone remember that about a month ago I announced that I was putting my reading of Bloom’s The Western Canon on hold so I could read Dickens’s Bleak House before reading the chapter on Bleak House, because I didn’t want the plot spoiled by Bloom’s criticism? Well, I finished Bleak House on Monday, and yesterday I got to read my Bloom chapter. You know what? It was all worth it–the novel was, and the chapter was, and the reading the novel before reading the chapter absolutely was. I just couldn’t be happier with the sequence of decisions and actions that has led me to this place. Next up in The Western Canon, we learn about Ibsen. Tally ho!
(Previous entries in this series: Part 2, Part 1.)
It’s been a long couple of weeks for me, slogging toward the end of my teaching semester. I’m coming to you live right now from the basement of Murray Hall, New Brunswick NJ, for probably the last time until September. It’s a nice little office, as windowless cold rooms go, but I can’t say I’ll be sorry to be apart from it all summer. Anyway. Yesterday I finished grading my students’ last homework papers, and in a half hour I give them their final, which I spend all of tonight and tomorrow grading, so I can be done by Wednesday. What does all this mean? It means that I had a bit of time this morning to actually read something that wasn’t student work. So I whipped out my copy of NOON, uncapped my Krispy Kreme coffee, settled into my window seat, and picked up where I left off.