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.
[a guest post by our erstwhile friend & former colleague, Soffi Stiassni]
The New Yorker’s legacy of cartoon and caricature is not limited to anecdotal fodder about the Berkshires. In the March 9th Life and Letters feature on David Foster Wallace the eulogized writer is remembered with words by D. T. Max, and an eloquent portrait by Philip Burke. This frontal facing portrait is a caricature of photographer Nancy Crampton’s iconic shot of Wallace, featured in her book, “Writers: Photographs.” The book is a compilation of portraits and accompanying text from a wide array of novelists, poets, and people of the pen, from Lorrie Moore to Chinua Achebe. Sitters are pictured with pets (George Plimpton with cat and Cheever with dog), with cigarette (WH Auden and Anne Sexton), in the country and about town, and in several cases, seated before a rather dour gray studio backdrop, reminiscent of a high school yearbook photos. Wallace is one of the writers photographed against this unceremonious backdrop; he sits, arms crossed, backwards in the wooden chair, and dons a cut off Pomona College sweatshirt and the scratchy beginnings of a beard. He is sans infamous bandanna, which Burke chose to include in his rendering. To sit for a yearbook photo, particularly a senior portrait, can be the worry of an entire August. Though these photos often make their way to living room mantels and family mailers, they are very much the most public image one presents to themselves. Quite different than a candid snapshot which might accidentally reveal latent character, the formal posed portrait is a presentation deliberately selected by the sitter for the benefit of the viewer.
“The only thing that keeps me going on my mission is the sacred inalienable right of the Confederacy to be the Confederacy, Christ Our Lord, and the memory of your hot hairy jumping nexus when I return.”
– “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed,” in Airships
So I thought it was long past time we checked in with Dennis Cooper’s blog, and it just so happens that today there’s a guest-post by Steven Trull, who is also something of a somewhat regular reader/commenter on this blog. Trull presents “The Kill Your Couch for No Reason Post.” As you’ll notice when you get over there, the title is preceded by “Steven Trull presents (part one)” which seems to me to suggest that there will be more Trull posts coming, possibly on topics unrelated to couch-killing. But for now: COUCH-KILLING. Click on over and watch the YouTube-culled videos of couches being burnt, run over with a station wagon, and otherwise KILLED.
So that’s all well and good, but else has been going on at Coop’s?
Well yesterday we looked at Notable Male Escorts of the World for March 2009
And the day before that was a Varioso Day (#18), which contains–among other things–an animated adaptation of James Tate’s poem “The Search for Lost Lives.”
And this picture of a Tom Friedman piece:
And a link to this Mary Gaitskill interview in the new Bookforum. It’s a short interview, but a good one, and it contains the possibly news-to-you that MG has a new collection out (it was news to me). So once I had clicked over there I got to browsing, and have the following further Bookforum recommended readings: William T. Vollmann on the ethics of photography, David Gates reviews the new Antonya Nelson, David Haglund reviews Andrew Porter, Mark Sarvas on John Haskell, and Wendy Lesser takes on both the O’Connor bio AND the Library of America Collected O’Connor.
There’s a new issue of elimae up! For those unfamiliar, elimae stands for electronic literary magazine, and they’re–so far as I know–the oldest lit journal on the web. (You might remember our Massive People Q&A with elimae editor Cooper Renner back in December.) They’re a fantastic journal–clear sense of mission, elegant minimalist approach to web aesthetics. Anyone looking to start a web journal would do well to take a long hard look at what makes elimae successful and sustainable. I haven’t read the whole new issue (YET) but I am prepared to report on what I”ve read so far.
“inconceivable wilson” (2 excerpts) by J.A. Tyler >>Go. He goes. Broken lines and the shape of circles. Circles. Go. He goes. The outside peeled off and he is in. He goes in. Go and he goes.<<
“Viral Video” by Kimberly King Parsons >> 3. The worst thing about the boy is that someone taught him to play the pan flute. << (It should be noted that KKP also provided the title of this post. – ed.)
“Creature” by Donora Hillard >>Invited friends over to watch. Saw me groom myself until the skin split.<<
“Threadbare Von Barren” by Nicolle Elizabeth >> you’ve changed your phone number you’ve changed your day to day your coffee guy moved somewhere else you’ve changed how funny you were you’ve changed how you touch my hand you’ve changed how<<
All this plus new work by Norman Lock, Michael Kimball interviewing Shane Jones, and a bunch of other stuff that I don’t know what it is yet. Go forth, friends! Read elimae and know peace.
WHAT: Blake Butler, Gary Lutz & Robert Lopez read at WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn on Thursday, 3/5/09.
Sorry, I didn’t get pictures of the other two. I don’t think Gary likes to have his picture taken, actually, and I didn’t want to spook Robert by shooting with a flash without warning first. As you can see, I didn’t give a damn about spooking Blake. He’s staying on my couch while he’s in town. Camera with flash is the least of his worries.
AFTER THE READING WE WENT TO THE PENCIL FACTORY
I don’t know what it is about the internet that causes people to forget what it means to be a human being. Look at the speed at which comments threads degenerate into hateful, vitriolic invective–people spew things out via their fingertips that they wouldn’t say out loud to someone who was mugging or divorcing them. But it’s a two-way street, and to me, what’s perhaps more interesting than moments when somebody forgets that s/he is talking to a REAL PERSON, are moments when the writer seems to forget that s/he him/herself is a REAL PERSON. I’m not asking for Victorian etiquette here. I’m just saying that when you pop into a stranger’s inbox, unannounced, in a message with no subject-line, from a personal email address with a joke-name (“redhotstudonearth”–seriously) asking that stranger to give you things without explaining who you are, what exactly you’re asking for, what you hope to do with it, or why you deserve it… I mean what do you expect is going to happen?
After the jump, the transcript of an utterly surreal email exchange I had yesterday, with annotations.
I am afraid, dear illuminator,
to tell you the truth. – “Book of Hours (Two)”
Of all the sweet, sweet things I saw/met/read/drank at AWP, one of the sweeter ones was a little chapbook called Illuminatrix, by a poet named Alexis Orgera. Illuminatrix is published by Forklift, Ink, the book arm of Matt Hart & Eric Appleby’s immeasurably badass magazine Forklift, Ohio. Anyway, my magazine was sharing a booth with Forklift, and so I was able to acquire Alexis’s book and spend a bit of time with her, without having to even leave the confines of our little patch of carpeting. It was very Dorothy Gale. (I was wearing beautiful red shoes.)
Illuminatrix is a skinny, fascinating book. Light is not exactly a novel theme for poetry, but this is surely a take on it that you’ve never encountered before. Orgera isn’t interested in light which dapples birch branches or reminds the poet of his childhood home–this is anything but SoQ country, is my point–her light issues forth from the place where physics meets metaphysics; it hearkens back to a time when mathematics was a branch of philosophy, then suitably distorts that mindset so it can live in a world of electric vacuums and lamps. Orgera’s “illuminators” are characters, all sharing the same name/title and therefore distinguished only by their actions–or else the poet’s frame of mind when, as above, she addresses one of them directly. In fact they are not distinguishable from one another. It is as if they have obtained a fluidity of identity and being, or perhaps are all part of the same secret order of shining ninja monks. After the jump, I Q&A with Alexis about her book, Florida, Dean Young and Courtney Love. But first! A poem from Illuminatrix:
“Falling”
There was some wabi-sabi between them
and like cherry blossoms they fell
into bed. There’s nothing in me that’s light, she said.
He buried his head between her legs
to make her sing. But there was no song
in her. She was thinking
about the impermanence of motion.
He was thinking about the inescapable
nothingness he felt on Sunday afternoons.
How life is a series of lightbulbs nobody uses.
A series of odd delinquencies called weekends
in which the ancient wabi-sabi drools between them.
I just got an email from HTMLGiant BABY-NAMING CONTEST alumnus Rachel Sherman, announcing that her short story “The Neutered Bulldog” appears on McSweeney’s Field Recordings Vol. 3, a new audiobook which also features Jack Pendarvis, Claire Light, Jonathan Ames, Keith Pille, and Jessica Anthony. The link she sent takes you here, to emusic, which if you don’t know is a music/audiobook subscription service, which gives you a set number of drm-free mp3 downloads based on a monthly rate that you choose.
Rachel says “I think you can download it free” but the site seems to suggest you need to sign up for a free trial to do that. For me, though, that’s not actually a consideration, since I’m already an emusic subscriber. (I get 75 downloads a month for about twenty bucks- it’s delightful.) Speaking of which, if anyone is seriously considering joining emusic, you should email me via my website and let me “sign you up” because if you let me do that (Columbia House Records style, like the old mail-order days) then WE BOTH get 50 more free downloads on top of whatever their regular offer is–plus no shipping and handling.
Dude, whatever. Free stuff is free stuff.
I found this earlier today. Who even knew that Cavett had an NYT blog? Anyway, he somehow got the Times to post a full episode of his show from October 1981, with Cheever and Updike as his guests. I’m not a huge fan of either man–dig Cheever, as far as it goes; basically have never read Updike–but there was something really fascinating about this, and I wound up watching the whole 28-minute clip. Cheever’s voice is amazing. They really don’t make ’em like him anymore. In the post itself, Cavett writes-
True, but that notwithstanding–or perhaps because of it–Cheever is the one to watch for. I love the part where he talks about church, and Cavett tries unsuccessfully to get him to recite the Apostles Creed.
Updike is mostly quiet, and I think very conscious of his role as the young up-and-coming writer. (How could he not be? Cheever points out “I’m old enough to be John’s father.”) He sits back trying to look comfortable for a few long stretches, while Cheever lavishes praise on him, his work, his talent, etc. They also talk about several things we still argue about more or less daily on this website: can you / should you live and write in NYC? What kind of public profile should a writer have? How does reviewing books fit into writing books? Even though you’re famous, will the New Yorker still reject your story if they don’t like it? (Updike: “they should.”) Etc etc. And plus there’s the sheer joy of watching this kind of televsion, delightfully stone-age, with no commercial breaks, cuts to new segments, and almost no graphics. Nothing but smart, decent people talking about stuff smartly and decently: an idea so out-moded and archaic it might just be revolutionary again.
We don’t post a lot here about food writing, mostly because the house we all live together in is sponsored by Chef Boyardee and Captain Morgan, so all we ever eat is canned ravioli washed down with straight warm light rum. But sometimes, something comes across our collective eye–or in this case, just mine–and you want to mention it.
Yesterday I was in my neighborhood coffee shop, and overheard a girl talking on her cell phone to somebody who seemed like a relative, about her day job (PR, of some kind, possibly book-related) and about a food blog she’s been working on for about a month now and feels really happy about. So before she left I aked her for the address of the blog, and went over there to check things out. Now I think you should check things out. The blog is called Omniamare, and the one I met is Lena, who posts as L. Day. Their site motto comes from a Robert Haas poem, and they seem to be pretty good at what they’re doing. Many of the posts come with recipes. Here are some of my findings: