Recipes for Writers: An ‘umble bean soup
I’m all for seasonal cooking when it counts, but some days, especially good industrious days when I’ve expended as much as I can, I want something homemade and restorative, but there’s nothing much in the larder except dried beans, a can of tomatoes, a dried crust of bread, and a few staple vegetables–carrots, onions, celery.
And so bean soup. It is a lovely thing, that lasts. I made one last Monday and ate on it all week, and it’s Monday again and I’m already tempted to put another pot on. For someone who has as short a culinary attention span as I, that’s saying a lot about the simple rightness of this soup.
What I did was, I dug up this 20-ounce bag whose label said “15 Bean Soup.” But it wasn’t soup, it was 15 kinds of dried beans (and a paper envelope labeled “Ham Flavor” that I discarded). I brought half the beans (so, 10 ounces, and this was everything from lentils to cranberry beans to something even bigger, so any kind of beans you got will work) to a boil with enough water to cover by an inch, turned off the heat once it boiled and let them sit covered for about 45 minutes. This, instead of soaking them all night. I’m told by people who know that beans don’t need to soak or even pre-cook, but this soup was so delicious that I want to give it to you just as I made it.
Some Thoughts on Self-Publishing (or, How to Start Self-Publishing)
Today I received an email asking me for publishing advice: “I just finished a book, and thought you might have some tips for publishing options. I want full color and nice fancy paper.” A few weeks ago, I had another inquiry: “I love that you have a printing business! I have something that needs to be printed… do you print these things, or should I just go to Kinko’s?” These questions, along with others garnered at the recent Chicago Zine Fest, have made me realize how much I’ve learned about publishing, and how skewed the perceptions of publishing can be.
Bookmaking: !@#$%^&*
[In this series I will think aloud about the multifarious process of publishing a first book.]
The first time I ever cursed was in the fourth grade. I’d just transferred out of Catholic school to public school. I was standing at the door to Mrs. Rogers’ portable classroom, friendless and waiting to be dismissed, when I mouthed the word “shit.” Then I whispered it. Then I said it. Just like that. Shit! I couldn’t stop smiling.
I didn’t feel the same exuberant freedom again until I was 18 and shaved my head. I remember looking into the rearview mirror of my ’86 Le Sabre after I’d buzzed my hair off; I couldn’t stop grinning.
I’m 33, and it just happened for the third time. For weeks I’d been awaiting the publication of my first book, but I’d become petrified of its first poem—that it IS the first poem in the book with its one goddamn, one fucker, and one motherfucker in 20 lines, and that certain people (such as my Italian Catholic grandmother) would read that first poem and get their feathers ruffled, feel disappointed that I’m actually such a no-good heathen. What were my publishers thinking?
This poem will always be the first poem of the book. It’ll always set a tone, which is why it’s the first poem. It’ll be there to remind me that I like to run my mouth (but also to remind me that I enjoy mis-hearings, misunderstandings, and even occasional misanthropy). That’s a lot of pressure for one little guy in a sea of bigger fish (it’s close to the shortest poem in the book).
Then I got my author copies in the mail, and I realized that the language I very deliberately chose for this poem—and every poem—simply embodies my fourth-grade epiphany or my freshman-year hair buzz, those times I used my body as the subject of my own story, pleasuring in the language of the forbidden, simultaneously defining and deferring definitions (the eternal tension of différance), and felt the freedom therein.
Basically, I’m saying that if I ever go to hell, I hope it’s because of my motherfucking mouth. That’s not all I’m saying, but it’s a start.
my face is a gavel
Is there a correlation between someone’s personality and their literary output? Do you ever find yourself anticipating/hypothesizing/predicting/assuming what someone’s work will be like based on their intelligence/sense-of-humor/self-awareness/”‘moral’ character”/etc.? If someone is annoying in real life do you assume that their work will come at you in a 14 pt., bold, helvetica-like font and be annoying as well? And then, after you assume that, how often do you find that to be the case? If you are well liked, will your work be well liked? For those of us TOTALLY CONSUMED BY POETRY AND LITERATURE, is not our work the truest representation of ourselves? I want stories. Please share.
Book Klub [w/ Sam Pink, Noah Cicero, & Jordan Castro]
3 dudes and some ladies talking to each other about wild ass books, you know?
The Poetics of Non-Arrival: KAFKA
Illustration by Shaun Tan
“Am I a circus rider on two horses? Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.”
–Franz Kafka in a letter to Felice Bauer, 1916
He was talking about the Jewish horse and the German horse
(But there is also the Czech horse.)
What horse did Kafka ride?
Where does Kafka belong?
Who owns Kafka? *
These sentences kill me.
Imagine: prostrate on the ground.
That’s what an exilic existence is like
Prostrate on the ground.
Living in the place that is no place
Riding the no horse
Going nowhere, only not-here
With no language
Never quite comfortable in any language. **
When the narrator in the story “My Destination” is asked where he is going
He says,
“I don’t know.”
“Away from here, away from here.”
“Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.”
Always away, never arriving. ***
Butler: “…the monstrous and infinite distance between departure and arrival….”
Kafka: “For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.”
.
.
.
NOTES
* [I love this essay about Kafka by Judith Butler.]
** [Butler: “We find in Kafka’s correspondence with his lover Felice Bauer, who was from Berlin, that she is constantly correcting his German, suggesting that he is not fully at home in this second language. And his later lover, Milena Jesenská, who was also the translator of his works into Czech, is constantly teaching him Czech phrases he neither knows how to spell nor to pronounce, suggesting that Czech, too, is also something of a second language. In 1911, he is going to the Yiddish theatre and understanding what is said, but Yiddish is not a language he encounters very often in his family or his daily life; it remains an import from the east that is compelling and strange. So is there a first language here?”]
*** [Kafka: “Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.”]
Depression and the Kinesthetic Theory of Writing
Photo by Viennese artist Eva Schlegel
Sometimes the holy writing spirit possesses you.
There’s no summoning it. I’m beginning to understand that now.
Not like that. Not like: SIT DOWN TO WRITE AND BE INSTANTLY INSPIRED.
There are conditions
There are kinesthetic conditions
There’s running downhill in the park as the rain approaches and the top of your head flies off like a hat getting blown away by a gust of wind.
There is inside the sensation of bodies touching bodies that move toward each other bodies that approach trembling but without fear.
There’s the orange light in the rain-paved streets and the stranger under the bridge.
Hello stranger I am lost.
These are things I cannot generate my own, alone in a room.
There are kinesthetic conditions
Sore muscle conditions
And the understanding that the more I move,
The more I will be able to access the world.
For the shit genre!
Opening my notebook the morning after a night of woozy ambien scribbling is like opening a present: you never know what’s inside. Today there was a note that said, “Beckett—101-2. Shit genre.”
Here is the passage I noted. It’s from Samuel Beckett’s first play Eleuthéria, which was disowned by the Beckett Estate.
Dr. Piouk: What does he do?
Mme. Meck: (With pride) He is a man of letters.
Dr. Piouk: You don’t say! (Enter M. Krap. He reaches his armchair and cautiously sits down)
M. Krap: You were saying nice things about me, I feel it.
Mme. Meck: There isn’t anything the matter with her?
M. Krap: She is unharmed.
Mme. Meck: She is coming?
M. Krap: She’s getting ready for that.
Mme. Piouk: There was a time when you were unaffected.
M. Krap: At the cost of what artifice!
Dr. Piouk: You are a writer, Monsieur?
M. Krap: What gives you leave to–
Dr. Piouk: It can be felt in the way you express yourself.
Mme. Piouk: Where has she been?
Mme. Meck: She is going to tell us.
M. Krap: I will be frank with you. I was a writer.
Mme. Meck: He is a member of the Institute!
M. Krap: What did I tell you.
Dr. Piouk: What genre?
M. Krap: I don’t follow you.
Dr. Piouk: I speak of your writings. Your preferences were for what genre?
M. Krap: For the shit genre.
Mme. Piouk: Really.
Dr. Piouk: Poetry or prose?
M. Krap: One day the former, another day the latter.
Dr. Piouk: And you now deem your body of work to be complete?
M. Krap: The lord has flushed me out.
Dr. Piouk: A small book of memoirs does not tempt you?
M. Krap: That would spoil the death throes.
Mme. Meck: Admit that this is a bizarre way to treat guests.
Mlle. Skunk: Extremely odd.
The shit genre. I love that. I’m stealing that. Whenever someone asks me what genre I prefer I will tell them, “The shit genre, of course.” You’ve never heard of it? You must not know much about literature. (Like Beckett’s characters, I sometimes fantasize about getting sassy with “legitimate” types….)
Behind the Scenes & Craft Notes & I Like __ A Lot & Massive People & Random / 8 Comments
March 31st, 2011 / 3:02 pm
March 31st, 2011 / 3:02 pm
Vicarious 7th Grade
This is a picture of three people whose identities are either already known or shall be implicated herein. What follows — not the picture, which happened in a cool city (not Dublin), but related discourse — took place within the last hour between (a) this contributor, (b) the lady in mention, and, separately, (c) our managing editor, a kind man who often offers emotional and grammatical counsel.
Our Atrocity Exhibition: A Theory of the Spectacle of the Banal: Within the Spectacle, A System Within A System Within A System Within A System Within A System
I lived in the desert and in the desert I had cable TV and an internet connection and the local CSA gave me basically all the food I need because I won a lifetime supply of it from some contest, I don’t know, and my great great grandfather or whatever owned the land I lived on so I didn’t have to pay rent and uh I had electricity and water by stealing it from my neighbor. My neighbor lived far away but I was creative. I didn’t pay for the internet or cable TV but I had them and I didn’t ask questions. Maybe somebody loved me and paid for them. The point is: I didn’t have anything to spend money on.
Miles away from my home in the desert there was a tent in the desert and in the tent there was a preacher, and the preacher encouraged all to stay within all that which was holy, because everything outside was sin. Sometimes I went to the tent and watch the men and women climb in the glass tank that held rattle snakes. The snakes would bite people sometimes but nobody screamed and no one collapsed in pain and I reckon they were de-poisoned, I’m not sure how snakes work, the adders in the desert leave slithers at at night my baby rattle shakes like death breeze.
Inside of my disconnection from the world at large I was exposed only to one thing: I saw the banalization of culture, I let it float over my head and wash my body, I refused to know of the existence of anything that was special, because here in this world everything to me was free and the machine of capitalism were the only gears still turning.
REBBECCA BLACK HAS BECOME A STAR
FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN