[via 1987 David Foster Wallace student evaluation
[Used with permission of Jessamyn West. Thank you to her.]
Jeez, Jackal, You Sure are a Jackal!
I feel loathe to spread attention about a dude who goes by the goober moniker “The Jackal,” but the story is moderately interesting enough to bring up: supposedly notorious literary agent Andrew Wylie makes a supposed splash by selling e-book rights for books that had not supposedly had previous e-rights contracted, including Updike, Nabokov, and etc., in an exclusive contract to Amazon via his newly established Odyssey Editions, formed entirely for ebook handling. Now there’s a big legal kerfuffle over who gets to do what with what and why to who and for how much and why not me and what are you doing motherfucker that’s my vacation house #2 fund we’re talkin’ bout. Moby Lives has the full scoop.
Agents. I mean look at this guy!
Props to MHP for the 'shitforbrains' image filename
Now look at him again, in 1972!
All the LeatherJacketed Young-Once Not-Really-Literary Men
If you’d like to buy a copy of that picture to hang over your bed, the pricing & information has been included in the image like a good salesboy.
I wish George Bush era brains had popularized Styrofoam-books instead. That seems more fun.
Touch Me How I Want to Be Touched
@grahamfoust responds like a human being to the Paris Review retroactive rejection on twitter: “I’m actually not that upset–they’re giving me fries with my kill fee, and the poems were all just shit I took from Google anyway.”
@ the Observer, Christian Lorentzen gives the most evenhanded coverage of the thing in full: Dead Poem Society.
But really, if we’re going to talk about this, which I guess people insist upon, here’s a question: as a writer do you feel entitled to careful handling?
Is this handling different, say, than the care you’d receive at McDonald’s? If it is different, how is it different? Because McDonald’s is a service you are buying, and selling writing is a service you are offering, shouldn’t the quality control be more on the McDonald’s end than the other?
If kill fees are common in all other art, including journalism, why should poems carry different weight? Even outside of art, why more than any other object? If I buy a table from Crate & Barrel, then decide I can’t use the table, for whatever reason, I take the table back no questions asked.
Why should art be given special treatment? Should it?
Am I wrong to return a book I don’t like to Borders after reading part of it? What if I read the whole thing? Have I consumed?
Furthermore, why are the most popular blog posts online always about topics such as rejection, submission, balance, all things that pertain wholly to the self? Are we a consolidation of 8 year olds, looking for fingerpainting time? Where is fanfare needed more?
Breaking News on Paris Review Scandal
Sheep in Wolf's Clothing
Latest in the controversy regarding manuscripts recently turned down post-acceptance at the Paris Review, apparently we may get to see the maligned documents see daylight after all. According to insiders at the Peemsmen Monthly, a second-shift janitor at the P.R. headquarters, upon realizing what literary-scandal-wrongdoing-travesty he’d been made to take part in, ran back out into the trashyard where the massive P.R. dumpster is and fished out said to-be-and-no-longer-ParisReviewianed language.
The janitor, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, is currently looking to publish the lot as a “found manuscript.” He is available for contact via representation by Marble-Withersby Agency in New York.
Currently tallied among the rubble:
– A haiku by Jonathan Franzen on the brevity of life and the deliciousness of fat free yogurt
– An erasure by Nam Le of his mother’s travel diaries as a child, concerning her impregnation with him, which Nam Le erased himself from entirely, a retroactive comment on the Gulf War
– Two halfcompleted crossword puzzles teamwritten by Alice Mattison & Barbie Smeemersund
– A photograph by Charlize Theron taken from the midgrade-price seating of a recent Chicago Bulls practice (kinda blurry)
– Another haiku by Jonathan Franzen about the writing process of the first haiku, which originally appeared on a popular upcoming literary journal’s twitter feed at the tune of $400 a syllable
– A concrete poem self portrait by Rick Bass repeating the word fishinglure in various crazy anagrams
– A transcript of every adjective Richard Ford spoke while restringing his son’s guitar twice in the same afternoon
– A third haiku by Jonathan Franzen regarding the phone call he received from his mother while writing the poem about the writing of the poem, and her subsequent medical condition
– A tear-out unfoldable paper shirt designed by Martin Amis’s agent’s neighbor, a previously unpublished author
– Letters written to Al Gore by Denis Johnson in the voice of Al Gore’s dog, with audio samples contracted to have been available online for $.99 a download on a portion of the website that also will no longer grace the web
I don’t know about you, but I’m positively peeping in anticipation and great terror. Robin Hood or hoodrat? Sylvia Beach or motherfucker? We’re living in a no-holds-barred world here, people, where wicker elephants walk among the real ones. First Tin House is trying to force people to actually buy books, and now these guys want to change their minds on history. Hold me!
Ellis on Wallace
Everybody’s innovator-buddy Bret Easton Ellis, during a q/a in Hackney:
Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?Answer: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well i don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching…
[via The Howling Fantods]
“Galco holsters, specializing in gun holsters, including, pistol holsters, western holsters, concealed carry holsters, shoulder holsters”
I feel like I’m wired for clutter. The apartment I grew up in was crammed and overstocked. My bedroom looked like a garage. There was a giant wooden cabinet in the middle of the room—way larger than my bed if you’d set it flat—full of things like paint thinner, power drills, broken toys, empty old tins of Danish cookies and Slim Jim boxes stuffed with expired coupons. This was not my stuff. This was being stored. READ MORE >
America: The Rippin and the Tearin
Your book competes with this.
Another Cool Idea
Some awesome literary projects have started this year like Submishmash and Vouched Books. I’m equally excited for LitSense, a collaborative advertising network for literary communities. I’m looking forward to learning more about this project. It would be great to see something like this take off. Advertising = money and money = good. Math!
Take Two: Firework
Firework by Eugene Marten has one of the most amazing endings I have ever eyed in literature. I read the ending 3 times. Just the ending. It made me feel like a dropped doll or a foghorn playing Tupac or a person who couldn’t draw freehand at all except for horses, could do excellent horses, etc. Amazing. Please buy this book. It is short fuse, independent, G-string, and prayerful–a word people keep using on Facebook. After I read Marten I prayed he will write a similar book and I’ll be alive to read the glow.
But this isn’t about Firework. Rather fireworks. Ah, Scorch Atlas, that ear trumpet. That brushed steel mobile home. A sign of a good book is you can’t kill the thing…but I am stoic and persistent and dumb to criticism, like any good American.
Enjoy: