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.
First of all, a big & hearty hat tip to Mathias Svalina for this- he was a real sport when I dicked around with iPod, and then he sent me this amazing and terrifying link to this essay by Tom Zoellner in Scientific American:
Click through anywhere above to get to the full article, which is itself an extract from Zoellner’s new book, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Reshaped the World, which is just out now from Viking. The SF-Gate seems to have liked it. Oh, and here’s Zoellner’s own website.
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If the essence of poetry is invention, as Dr. Johnson rightly maintained, then the classical Walpurgis Night shows us what poetry essentially is: a controlled wildness, a radical originality that subsumes previous strength, and, most of all, the creation of new myth.
— The Western Canon , “Goethe’s Faust, Part Two: The Countercanonical Poem”
Getting excited about the new issue of a magazine or journal is easy enough, but sustaining that interest is a more difficult proposition. Look at your book shelf right now- how many of the “awesome new issue[s] of” whatever it was at the time end up getting abandoned three-quarters, or halfway, or a third of the way through? Today I want to introduce you all to something that I hope will become a regular feature on HTMLGiant. (And not just a feature I write– any of us can do this, and on your own blogs, you can too.) Friends, meet COVER TO COVER, in which I (or YOU) walk the walk of digging your favorite journal by committing to actually read the entire issue from start to finish. For the first COVER TO COVER, I have chosen NOON #9, the tenth anniversary edition of Diane Williams’s and Christine Schutt’s perpetually awesome literary annual. I’ve chosen NOON in part because I just think they’re great (there are few magazines I would rather read from COVER TO COVER) but also because I think that literary annuals are especially dependent on a self-motivated readership, people interested and willing to engage with the publication over a sustained period of time. After all, this will be the “new issue” for twelve full months.
After the jump, I issue my first report on what’s been read so far: Clancy Martin, Kim Chinquee, Brandon Hobson. Also, Augusta Gross’s artwork!
Okay. In a totally non-sequitur comment on the post below this one (which is about Mathias Svalina’s iPod) some person identified only as ‘j’ (no link to website or email add’y) had a little freakout, the point of which seemed to be the sentence that is the title of this post. I couldn’t figure out whether ‘j’ was happy or sad that Krasikov just won the Rohr Prize, which carries a purse of $100,000–pretty sweet stuff for a book of short stories (One More Year, Random House)–and I also don’t know Krasikov’s work, so I am in a singularly uninformed position on basically all aspects of this story. But it seems to qualify as “literary news,” so what the hell? here’s a link to the Jerusalem Post, who has the full story, which really isn’t much more than what I’ve already said. Thanks to ‘j’ for the tip.
It’s really obscene that I still have this thing in my possession. Well, supposedly I’m going to see him tomorrow at a reading at Pete’s Candy Store, so I figured I should make the most of what time remains. Today instead of focusing on a letter, I’m going Onion-stlye and SHUFFLE IT. The little machine tells me it’s got 11387 tracks on it, so this should be pretty good. Seatbelts on?
I myself, as a student of gnosis, whether poetic or religious, judge the poem to be neither truth nor fiction but rather Dante’s knowing, which he chose to name Beatrice. When you know most intensely, you do not necessarily decide whether it is truth or fiction; what you know primarily is that the knowing is truly your own.
– The Western Canon, “The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice”
Literature is not merely language; it is also the will to figuration, the motive for metaphor that Nietzsche once defined as the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere. This partly means to be different from oneself, but primarily, I think, to be different from the metaphors and images of the contingent works that are one’s heritage: the desire to write greatly is the desire to be elsewhere, in a time and place of one’s own, in an originality that must compound with inheritence, with the anxiety of influence.
– “Preface and Prelude” to The Western Canon
Probably most of you know Mathias Svalina as half of Octopus. Well, unlike other-half Zachary Schomburg, Mathias made the mistake of coming over to my house and drinking beer with me. He also made the mistake of leaving his iPod here. Then he went to Nebraska for a week. Then I went to Atlanta for a few days. Now other stuff is happening, but the upshot is that I’ve had his iPod for at least two weeks now–maybe three? It’s just been sitting on my desk. And we keep emailing about setting up a time to get it back to him, but we never seem to be able to meet up. So I finally decided I should make the most of my time, and share some of the highlights with you.
Has anyone heard of this awesome thing? The Daily Moth is a mysterious pdf zine that comes via email on an extremely non-daily basis. They don’t have a website. They publish poetry, movie reviews, and graphs–at least so far. Who knows what will happen next? ONLY THE MOTH KNOWS. It’s average length is two pages. It is run by people named Justine and Timothy–one of each (one for each page?) Did I mention it’s mysterious? This dude who works at a bookstore thinks it’s cool.
I HAVE MADE A SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT WITH THE MOTH. IT ALLOWS ME TO POST ALL THREE OF THEIR BACK ISSUES HERE AS DOWNLOADS. THE ARRANGEMENT WENT LIKE THIS: “Can I post the back issues?” “Yes.”
If you would like to join the mailing list, and have future moths flock to your inbox, you should email thedailymoth@gmail.com.
