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.
If it’s 10 AM on a Monday, and I’m in my bedroom, in my underwear, taking and posting the above-photo rather than on the NJ transit headed to Rutgers to teach, then it must be SNOW DAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY (YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY)
Happy weather-induced freedom to all those who have it, and heartfelt sympathy to everyone else!
Other than to say, thanks Amy, for the tip! (Also, this came from here.)
Is anyone else over here in lit-land also a fan of the dynamic duo pictured above? I’m generally a fan of Jezebel, but these guys are always an extra dose of fun. If you’ve never seen it, the premise of Pot Psychology is simple- Rich and Tracie get stoned (off-camera) and then give sex advice (on-camera) to people who write in. There’s usually an episode (they run under 10 minutes) posted every Friday, but then there was a silence after 12/26/08, broken only by the terse, uninformative announcement on 1/16/09 that “FYI for those who have been wondering: Pot Psychology will be on hiatus until further notice. Sorry, folks.” So how happy was I this morning, when I saw Pot Psychology listed as a headline link at the top of Gawker this morning? Very happy. Still no explanation as to where it went, or why it’s back, or if we can expect it to be a regular feature once more–but let’s save the truth commission for another day. On this day, we are just glad it is here.
Read the post, and all will be explained.
I met the good people of Canteen Magazine during the last NYC LitCrawl, and they were swell. At the time, they had just put out issue #3, which featured words by Porochista Khakpour, Ben Kunkel, Dana Goodyear, Shellie Zacharia, and Lee Klein, just to name a few. You can see thumbnails of the covers on the Canteen website, but they don’t really convey the full story. Canteen is a 9 x 9 full-color magazine printed on heavy-stock paper. It’s filled with art and photography as well as literature. (My favorite thing in #3 was “Returning Thing,” a portfolio of photographs by Martin van de Griendt, from his book Smokin’ Boys Smokin’ Girls, which anyone who wants to should feel free to buy for me.)
Anyway, I just got an email from the Canteen folks, which mentioned among other things, the imminent release of issue #4 (which I have a story in- so full disclosure, or whatever), that they’re going to have a booth at the Armory Show (an NYC art gathering that runs from 3/4-3/7), and this thing about the contest, which is what I thought YOU PEOPLE might want to know about-
Today, I will be your Bill Kristol.
Dear Octopus Fans,
We have five announcements to make:
1. Eric Baus’s Tuned Droves
2. Shane McCrae’s One Neither One
3. Open Reading in April for full-length manuscripts
4. Subscriptions for 2009-2010
5. T-Shirts
[details on #s 1-5 after the jump, and at the very bottom: a picture of Bill Kristol getting nailed by a pie -JT]
Hey it’s been a while since we spoke with Stephen Elliott about The Rumpus, the awesome online magazine he runs. So I thought that this would be a good time for us to check back in and see what the site’s up to this week.
“Winston Smith is 39” by James Warner.
Winston Smith is 39.
And, rereading 1984 for perhaps the fifth time, so am I.
I notice now how conscious he is of being middle-aged. Orwell tells us early on that Winston has a varicose vein above his left ankle and has to take his time walking up seven flights of stairs. He has difficulty touching his toes when instructed to do so by the instructress on the telescreen.
A Long Interview with Bill Ayers.
What we thought fascism would look like was that it would have two faces: the face to black people was going to be increasing depression, increasing economic hardship, and the murder of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. That’s what fascism looks like. That’s exactly what it looks like. Targeted assassinations. Terror against communities. I was in Detroit during the riots of Detroit, I was in Cleveland during the riots in Cleveland, I was in Chicago during the riots in Chicago. And what that looked like was fascism. They were lining up bodies in Cleveland like cordwood. It was disgusting.
The face of fascism in the white community would be conspiracy trials. What we envisioned for ourselves were endless trials, endless prison sentences, conspiracy indictments. And it was all happening. I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That’s what fascism was going to look like. That’s what it did look like.
Even Sugar, the advice columnist, gets in on the social meltdown action!
Dear Sugar,
How in the fuck am I going to survive the econopocalypse? Seriously. What’s your plan? Do you have a plan? What should my plan be? Holy. Fucking. Shit. I am so scared.
[She responds:]
[…]The long dream of American consumption is over. Gil Scott-Heron told us this would happen 25 years ago. Nobody listened. That’s our national specialty, it turns out. That and porn. You can count on the government to keep printing money – it’s what they do when the tea leaves read “busted” – but the real recovery program will be taken on by you, brother. Your personal economy is just about to wave bye-bye to the inefficiencies of abundance.
Speaking of porn, one of the (relatively) more upbeat pieces currently on the site is this addition to The Rumpus Oral History Project, featuring porn performer Lorelei Lee.
Porn was an incredibly therapuetic thing for me. I got to go into rooms with people and experiment with being vulnerable in a place where I had no emotional responsibility. I went into work and people said, “What do you want to do today? What don’t you want to do today?” Nobody ever asked me that before in terms of sex. I could decide at any time that I never wanted to go back. I had to be there for four hours for the shoot and I got to deal with whatever the emotions were afterword on my own.
Not that everything in LL’s essay is sunshine and simultaneous orgasm, but it’s a fascinating insider’s take on an endlessly complicated subject. Also, fyi, the link to LL’s piece is SFW but several of the links from the piece are not.
Tough times call for tough heiresses.
The play is an adaptation of Avital Ronnell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, a critical theory text which, according to that same NYT critic, was “created at the height of Derrida-style deconstructionism and laid out (by the graphic designer Richard Eckersley) in the style of a Dadaist phone book… Under the direction of Ken Rus Schmoll, a cast of three and a sharp-eyed design team turn what might have come across as gobbledygook into a stylish and stimulating show.”
So cheers, Ariana, and to everyone in NYC, the show is playing at Cherry Lane Theatre through February 28th (even though there doesn’t seem to be anything written about it on CLT’s website) so catch it while you can.
MORE OF ARIANA REINES
The Cow which won Fence’s Alberta Prize, was published in 2006.
Coeur de Lion was published by mal-o-mar editions in 2008. I wrote about Coeur de Lion (and Katy Lederer’s The Heaven-Sent Leaf) in my FLAUNT magazine column (print only- it appeared in issue #100).
The Agriculture Reader #3, the magazine I co-edit, contains a new piece of prose by Ariana Reines.
Ariana Reines poems at Coconut Poetry.
The real deal. To the real deal's immediate right (photographer's left), wearing his signature green hoodie, basically not in the photograph, is yours truly. - Stain Bar, Brooklyn, 2008.
In this weekend’s NYT books section, David Orr weighs in on the sweat-to-brow question of whether Poetic Greatness is suffering–or has already suffered–its Peak Oil moment.
In October, John Ashbery became the first poet to have an edition of his works released by the Library of America in his own lifetime. That honor says a number of things about the state of contemporary poetry — some good, some not so good — but perhaps the most important and disturbing question it raises is this: What will we do when Ashbery and his generation are gone? Because for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness.
Yikes. I keep wanting to be annoyed with this essay, and when Orr is throwing out gems like “Poetry has justified itself historically by asserting that no matter how small its audience or dotty its practitioners, it remains the place one goes for the highest of High Art[,]” it’s really hard not to just smack myself in the forehead, except my head already hurts for some seriously non-poetry-related reasons, so I’m going to save all self-flagellation for the repentance session I have scheduled for later this afternoon.
My contributor copy of Torpedo #4 showed up the other day, and it’s such a wild, exciting jam-packed ball of awesome that I can barely even tell you. I’ve been a fan of Torpedo–the quarterly published by Australian indy press Falcon vs. Monkey, Falcon Wins ever since they solicited some of my work for issue two, but totally irrespective (or anyway, independent) of how generous they’ve been to me, they’ve so thoroughly outdone themselves with #4, the BRAUTIGAN issue, that I’d be writing this same blog post even if I’d never met them and couldn’t testify personally to their friendliness and general stellar-osity. Here’s the little blurb about #4 from their site (click thru to go to their store) and after the jump there’s a short Q&A with editor Chris Flynn, some excerpts from the issue, scans of some of the art, and a full T.O.C.
