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.
WO: I guess I don’t know where any information other than what I choose to provide on the records is really anybody’s business. That’s kinda it. I understand that doing interviews… Look, the record labels like that to happen, and I understand on some level why they like that to happen, because it provides some sort of eye-catching thing. It’s like some kind of advertising, for a minimum expenditure of energy and money. But to me, the best purpose of an interview would be to illuminate some things about how somebody works for the benefit of somebody else who wants to do those things. And that’s not where most interviews go at all, so to me, they seem like strange exercises in small talk and wasted air.
And printing credits… I think for those of us who make records, it’s our business how we put it together. Same with a book. You know, the publishing industry has somehow avoided having a light shone on their process. In a book, you basically have the name of the publisher and the name of the writer, and you’re led to believe that those are the two things that created this book. And you and I both know that’s not the case. There’s an army of people involved with the production of each book, most essentially the editor or editors who work closely with the writer on shaping and forming and developing a piece of work, plus the writer’s agent, blah blah blah. And yet somehow it doesn’t matter to us that all of that information is never publicly, readily available. Yet we want that on our records.
Is Adbusters the single most obnoxious magazine on the face of the earth? If their articles matched their headlines, and their execution matched their ethics, they’d be a valuable cultural resource, as well as a kickass read. I would be willing to bet that on a checklist of political positions and beliefs, Adbusters and I would agree about 98% of the time. It’s not their politics I object to. It’s their holier-than-everything-all-the-time posturing, combined with the fact that their articles read like the diary entries of intelligent but under-achieving 8th graders. Also, their high-gloss “I went to design school but I’m still punkasfuck aren’t I please tell me I am oh tell me please” aesthetics. It’s Disneypunk, and I just can’t figure out how the people who produce it live with themselves, or why they don’t use all their energy to do something useful for the causes they champion, instead of striving to be the vapid polyanna incitement-jockeys of the blinders-on knees-jerking nobody-likes-you-and-there’s-a-good-reason-for-that Left.
When Tao lived here he had a free subscription, I think because he was in it once, and the issues still show up. I usually just let them pass me by, but I flipped through the most recent one because there was a cover story about the ubiquity of what we’ll call porno-culture, and I thought that might be worth reading (it’s also online). Boy was I ever wrong. See if you can get through the whole thing. I’ll wait here…
At his blog, Mathias Svalina’s many screen-captures offer a better argument for Flarf than it ever dreamed of making for itself.
And over at his blog, today Dennis Cooper is all about the amazing Maurice Blanchot.
My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness. (Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 323-24)
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.
[After the jump, I write Ken a note about what I thought about the essay]
Sometimes in our sleep we touch
The body of another woman
And we wake up
And we know the first nights
With summer visitors
In the three storied house of our childhood.
Whatever we remember,
The darkest hair being brushed
In front of the darkest mirror
In the darkest room.
Dead ringer.
I’m not sure how many people know this already, but “Justin Taylor” is–among other things–also the name of a fictional character from the now-defunct TV show Queer as Folk. What’s NOT defunct is the stream of fan-fiction concerning Justin’s relationship with Brian Kinney. There’s tons of it being produced and published, almost entirely on Livejournal. Often times they move the characters into new environments/situations/worlds, such as a sci-fi-ish future or else, as in today’s offering, a high school that’s also somehow “like Muppet Babies.” In the grand tradition of slashfiction, all of this *ahem* literature is known by the collective title of Brian/Justin fiction, or, simply–and perfectly, am I right?–BJ fic. How do I know all this? Uh, own-name Google alert–anybody? Here’s an extract from chapter two of QAF Babies (click anywhere to get swept away to QAFland):
I smile. “Justin. Justin Taylor.”
He repeats slowly, “Justin Taylor.” My name has never sounded sexier.
In response, he asks playfully, “Why shouldn’t I take home ec? Where else will I learn how to cook my man a hearty meal, balance his checkbook, care for all our adopted babies, and darn his socks?”
I stare at him blankly. After a minute or two, he chuckles. “Maybe I just want to ogle your hot ass as you bend over to put cookies in the oven…”
Donna Jean & Jerry onstage at the Winterland Ballroom
…are on the top of the New York Times website right now. It makes me love life. Ben Ratliff provides a concise introduction to GD/taper culture and engages in the fine art of arguing about what the best Dead show/tour/era of all time is/was. The hook for all this is that the surviving band (now known simply as The Dead) is touring again, and Grateful Dead Productions has just released To Terrapin: Hartford ’77 (which I am listening to right now- there’s a 19 minute version of “Sugaree!” On disc ONE!!). 5/28/77 is a fascinating choice because it was a mere 20 days after 5/8/77 at Cornell, a show which is historically regarded by most hardcore fans as THE BEST Grateful Dead show and which has never seen an official release. (Personally, I think there’s a good argument to be made for 12/31/78, The Closing of Winterland, which is where the photo above was taken.)
Deadheads have often been polled about their favorite show, through fanzines and Web sites. The answers have stayed fairly consistent. May 8, 1977, at Barton Hall, Cornell University. The pairing of Feb. 13 and 14, 1970, at the Fillmore East in New York — perhaps the first widely traded shows. The Veneta and Binghamton shows. You’d think the canon would have been displaced as more and more information came along, but it hasn’t, really; it has only widened. I have spoken to young Deadheads who, surprisingly, respect the ancient judgments. “I’ll stick with May 8 because of its historical importance,” said Yona Koch-Feinberg, an 18-year-old from Manhattan. “That’s almost as important as the musical ability of the evening.”
The article is accompanied by a gallery of user-contributed photos from all eras of the band’s career. Awesome awesome. But, uh, books? Books. Yes, right. Okay. Well, my favorite book about The Grateful Dead is Carol Brightman’s Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure. I also really enjoyed Phil Lesh’s autobiography, Searching for the Sound. And of course, you need a copy of David Dodd’s Complete Annotated Grateful Dead lyrics, which overlaps quite a bit with but is not to be mistaken for or in any way replace Robert Hunter’s A Box of Rain: Collected Lyrics 1965-1993.
I just got this in the email like a second ago. So it’s just a press release, but I figure who wouldn’t want to know about this? Goons, is who. So all you non-goons, read on:
One Story would like to take a moment to announce the publication of our next issue, “Hurt People.” This story is by Cote Smith, a previously unpublished author.
At One Story, we are committed to discovering new talent and showcasing original voices. For this reason, One Story will never publish an author more than once. We are proud to say that 10% of our writers are published for the first time in our pages.
This issue marks the launch of our “Introducing New Writers” series. “Hurt People” will arrive in a custom envelope, marking it as a fiction debut and inviting subscribers to congratulate the author on our blog.
We will host a reading in Lawrence, Kansas–where Cote Smith is finishing his MFA in fiction writing–in May. As part of this series, we will be hosting hometown readings for writers who publish for the first time in One Story in 2009. This is made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
We hope you enjoy “Hurt People” and the introduction of a bright new literary voice.
(Did you miss Part 1?) Yesterday I taught Ernest Hemingway’s very short story “A Very Short Story” to my English 101 class. It was a pretty successful venture, I think. After teaching the story twice in as many hours, I got on the 4:26 New Brunswick->Penn Station train, and read “Pet” by Deb Olin Unferth.
There may not be quite a PhD dissertation to be written on similarities between Hemingway’s and Unferth’s work, but all the same, I found myself dwelling on how my two tours through “A Very Short Story” seemed to have primed me for “Pet,” which I heard Unferth read once but hadn’t yet myself read on the page.
For Immediate Release
We are excited to announce a wonderful event upcoming on April 23-25 in New York: A Celebration of the Chapbook, a three-day festival featuring panels, workshops and a bookfair. For a full schedule of events, visit http://centerforthehumanitiesgc.org/festival .
This festival celebrates the chapbook and highlights its rich history, as well as its essential place in poetry publishing today, as a vehicle for alternative poetry projects and for emerging authors and editors to gain entry into the literary marketplace. The festival hopes to forge a new platform for the study of the chapbook inside and outside the academy.
We invite you to visit the fair and attend the panels and workshops, all of which are free of charge. Please note that the workshops require registration, and will fill up fast, so reserve your seat now. Visit http://centerforthehumanitiesgc.org/festival for instructions on how to register.