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.
Okay, for those of you short on time and eager to spend some cash, first the bad news: You can only spend half as much cash as you’d hoped to, unless you buy two copies of fmC #1, because dudes are having a RECESSION SALE and slashed the price of copies of their 1,500 copy-limited, first edition run by 50%. They also said there would be a new fmC website up and running sometime in the next few days. So why don’t you go over to the site, buy a couple copies of the issue–which features new work by Ha Jin, as well as a Jorge Luis Borges story that is otherwise unavailable in English—and take a look at the old site before it is replaced by something several orders higher on the awesome scale.
Also, stay tuned for our long overdue and only maybe still forthcoming review of their first issue. They sent it to us and we loved it, then totally fucking flaked on telling you about it, because we were all too busy either blogging about Tao, picking fights with people who blogged about Tao, or checking out pr’s goods. So we’re still trying to get to that, but what I’m saying is that the world moves on, and you really shouldn’t wait on us. In fact, if you buy the magazine and have trenchant analysis to offer, email your remarks to me and I’ll post them here.
Full text of Editor Kaelan’s press release/facebook post after the jump.
Okay, so this news is almost a month old, but I only just discovered it ten minutes ago. (Now overnight plus ten minutes, since I’m going to post this tomorrow.) ANYWAY. The point is that Deb Olin Unferth is badass, and so is Daytrotter.com, so the fact that they got together (apparently on 12/14/08) is just super exciting.
Not sure if anybody’s noticed, but I’m a bit of a creature of habit. I like getting turned onto new stuff, sure, but once I’ve found something I like I tend to stick by it like a truly neurotic compulsive or perhaps like a faithful hound. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I was very happy to learn that Joshua Cohen, whose multi-part Nextbook essay about Kafka’s office writing I covered here, has a new piece of short fiction up at The Fanzine, which is a very cool site and probably not as widely known as it ought to be. So do yourself two favors: first, check out Cohen’s story, “Slush,” and second, start checking on Fanzine more often than you’ve been. (if you want to do yourself a third favor, pink up a copy of The Weaklings, Dennis Cooper’s most recent collection of poems, which Fanzine published in a special illustrated limited edition of unlimited awesomeness.) Here’s the beginning of “Slush.”
Dear Aaron Priestly,
Thank you for letting us take a read on your manuscript. STORY OF MY LIFE was bold, and compelling, but ultimately I was not convinced that I was the right person to represent it. I just did not find this a must read. It did not click, I regret to inform. Nor did it hold ME. I find your premise lacking, quite. Good luck elsewhere (*I can no longer accept queries from writers who have not been previously published or who have not been referred to me by a colleague*).
Please accept my very best wishes for the success of STORY OF YOUR LIFE. Though I did not fall in love with your story enough to continue reading it, I pass. We must pass. Obviously not for me, obviously. He, she, it, passes.
My friend Alice Townes, layout editor at R2: The Rice Review, forwarded me this non-Rice-related link the other day to a post in the found_objects livejournal community. A guy named bo_bailey wrote: “I found this book on my friend’s 84-year-old landlord’s bookshelf. Published in 1965 with illustrations by Edward Gorey, I present to you The Recently Deflowered Girl.”
He posted scans of the whole book on Jan. 7th. Alice turned me onto it a couple days later. I fwded to my friend Amanda and planned to post on the book today. But then last night, while I was in Coney Island eating food from the Mongolian-Russian border region and watching snow fall on the beach, Amanda was writing me back that the link I sent her didn’t work. So I tried opening it myself, and sure enough–the post seems to be gone. (If it revives in the same spot, it was here.)
Luckily, I still had the now-gone page open in my browser, so I saved all the jpegs, and was going to just post the thing myself, but then I decided to Google it first, and it turns out that some quicker-on-the-trigger fellow had already had that bright idea. So, now with gratitude to Alice or the original tip, and to Joey Devilla for saving me a bit of work, I present to you: The Recently Deflowered Girl, by Edward Gorey.
Apparently a lot of big, cool stuff happening for Cannibal this year. Off the top of my head, I’m excited about the Claire Donato and Jared White chapbooks because I think both these cats are rad. Rad cats, they are. (You might remember that I blogged a poem of Claire’s when I wrote about Harp & Altar #5. For some instant Jared White-ification, check out this long great essay on Jack Spicer he wrote for Open Letters Monthly.)
But then there’s the cats I don’t know about, and only assume are rad. For example, Sommer Browning, who hosts a great reading series here in the city, and is super funny and fun to hang out with, but I don’t know her own work very well, so this’ll be my big chance. I also don’t know too too much about Shane Jones, except that he has a lot of fans among the writers/readers here on Giant–in particular I recall that Kendra was a huge partisan for Jones’s now-sold-out Greying Ghost chapbook, I Will Unfold You With my Hairy Hands–so I guess a lot of people are excited for that one and I further guess that if you’re excited I’m excited, because friends help each other learn and grow. Anyway, click through for the full press release from my favorite wife-husband duo in poetry:
FOUND: A printout of what appears to be most of a short story, with parenthetical comments not hand-written but apparently typed into the document before it was printed out. Document pages are not numbered. There is no title or author name or critic’s name or any other identifying marks. The document was found by this agent, at a restaurant a few blocks south of NYU.
All things considered, it seems wrong to have more than a wee bit of fun with this, but a wee bit never hurt anybody, right?
The unravelling aspect of the piece is perfectly timed. The change in Howard’s attitude toward his mother’s situation is not sudden; it builds up slowly, each negative thought concerning Suzette’s appearance erasing her hold on matters. Edith is manipulative, but subtly so. That she is probably as physically frail as Suzette never really becomes an issue; such is her grip on Howard. There are many wonderful comic phrases throughout and plenty of fresh observations, such as the anthropodal patellas and the hilarious notion that obesity offends Suzette, but an obese irresponsible pet owner is more egregious. The only thing I might add is that while the attitudinal changes arise purposefully and come at correct intervals, the actual visit to Edith’s seems quite long. I enjoyed every paragraph, however, so it may not be such a pressing concern.
Poetry and belief, as I understand them, are antithetical modes of knowledge, but they share the peculiarity of taking place between truth and meaning, while being somewhat alienated both from truth and from meaning. Meaning gets started only by or from an excess, an overflow or emenation, that we call originality. Without that excess even poetry, let alone belief, is merely a mode of repetition, no matter in how much finer a tone. So is prophecy, whatever we take prophecy to be.
– Ruin the Sacred Truths (p. 12)
*********SPECIAL BONUS**********
What do you mean you didn’t know that Bloom’s title is drawn from an Andrew Marvell poem about Paradise Lost?
Read Marvell’s “On Mr. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost'”
Then why not revisit the only Andrew Marvell poem you actually know?
Now let us sport us while we may
I think I almost made my mother cry on the phone the other night when–in a non-twist which surprised absolutely nobody–I explained my opposition to the present war. Probably this is because I used fiery invective and very few statistics or facts of any kind, but that’s what happens when you have an argument while cooking dinner. For what it’s worth, no statistics or facts of any kind were marshalled against me, but in any case, making my mother angry/sad was not the goal of the conversation, so later I sat down and tried to find some things online to send her that would make my case in a more nuanced and articulate way, not just because I thought she should be exposed to the information, but because I thought that I should.
This short comment-piece by Akiva Eldar, published first in Hebrew in Ha’aretz and then translated to English by Jessica Cohen for The Nation seems to me to have said what a better-informed, less irate version of myself would have said, and what this version of myself wishes he would have said. I have a copy of the book Eldar wrote (co-wrote, actually, with Idith Zertal), Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s Settlements and the Occupied Territories 1967-2007 sitting on my shelf, but I haven’t read it. Yet.
You might also take a look at the BBC’s Key Maps and Timeline (from which above-image is borrowed)
I take the somewhat naive view that the literature of the past began somewhere a few minutes ago and that the literature of the present begins, say, with Homer. While there is no doubt that we need as much knowledge of all kinds, from all sources, as we can get if we are to see the slightest lyric in all its richness of meaning, we have nevertheless an obligation, that we perilously evade, to form a judgment of the literature of our own time. It is more than an obligation; we must do it if we would keep on living. When the scholar assumes that he is judging a work of the past from a high and disinterested position, he is actually judging it from no position at all but is only abstracting from the work those qualities that his semiscientific method will permit him to see; and this is the Great Refusal.
– “Miss Emily and the Bibliographer”
(from Praising it New: The Best of The New Criticism; Garrick Davis, ed.)
**********SPECIAL ALLEN TATE BONUS FEATURE*********
Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”
and Lowell’s rejoinder, “For the Union Dead”
bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye
Okay, it’s almost 3PM now, so I guess I better start pulling it together. The passed-out girl is officially getting up off the picnic table, and trying to figure out where she threw her top. A week or so ago I was buying a book for a friend on Amazon, and figured what I always figure when I buy from Amazon, which is that I should put the money I was going to spend on shipping charges into another purchase, because once you nudge up to $25 the shipping becomes free. So which book?