Sean Lovelace—
Should a SS collection be all winners? Or is it OK to be like (most) albums. A couple hits, a few so-sos (with redeemable aspects, though), and, oh, a dud or two.
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Good Advice
The new issue of Gulf Coast features a roundtable between Matthew Rohrer, Heather Christle, Matthew Zapruder, & Zachary Schomburg on what “surrealism” means today in American poetry.
Most interesting is what Matthew Rohrer says about surrealism and optimism.
Batter my heart, third-person omniscient god
Unicorn Mask print by Matty8080
What is your preferred point of view? Your go-to voice when you write, if you write, or the one you’re happiest to see when you open a new book? Can you use second-person without feeling like a wanker? Do you love “I” for its accessibility, its steadfastness, its immediacy–the narrative fuzzy bedroom slippers ever at the foot of your crafty little bed? Because I can be “me” but “not-me,” whereas you is always only you, and third-person, well, forget it. That actually starts to feel like work.
Louise Bourgeois on Writing
“Art is manipulation without intervention.”
“I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.”
“Surrealism is anathema for me. Because the surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy.”
“I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them, but he knows also that he can escape from day to day and stay alive, and he does that because his work gives him a kick.”
“Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning.”
“Art is not about art.”
“It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.”
meta-blah
I’m reading Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star. Lispector is a powerhouse writer, no question about it. Her sentences are like the rapture, like the world is ending all around me and there’s only this, her words, and I want to grab them by the fistful and hide them in my shirt pocket for safekeeping, even though doom and thunderbolts are all around me. BUT, but, even as I read, I’m skeptical because the book is metafiction, and I’ve found myself increasingly bored with metafiction.
SkyMall and the Emerging Writer Image
I can scarcely believe I have never ordered anything from SkyMall. Shopping for ill-advised items—particularly while intoxicated—is what I do best (for example, coming out of a bourbon fog at 3 a.m. and waking up to an infomercial for a personal massage device called the Dr. Ho. Its creator, the human Dr. Ho, has a braid down to the middle of his back and is wearing nothing but biker shorts. I call in and buy one immediately. When it arrives, it does little more than deliver a series of painful electric shocks that feel like bites from a robotic gerbil).
And I am a nervous flier (read: sedatives). You’d think I already would’ve ordered the Bigfoot Garden Yeti Sculpture in slurred speech while suspended 32,000 feet above the ground. The problem is that to order on the plane, one has to pick up The Phone That Lives Inside The Seat. I have a lot of anxiety about doing this. Buried snugly inside the cushion, its curved receiver looks like the fossil of a slender bone that should not be disturbed. Were I to pick it up with fluffy clouds just outside the window to my left, I fear the voice of a deceased relative would be on the other end via some weird heavenly reception, or that my call would be promptly and embarrassingly connected directly to the pilot. Or something even weirder: no voice at all, just heavy breathing that would prompt me to respond “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret” in a shaky voice and to waft my remaining drink vouchers above my head like they’re Wonka’s golden ticket.
But returning home from AWP, I glanced at SkyMall’s pages with a new mission: how might an emerging writer come to stick out at these conferences? I needed some kind of gimmick, some angle. Then I saw it: the travel bidet.
Yes, I realized. I could be the writer who carries around a travel bidet in a small pink suitcase at all times. When people say, “Who is Alissa Nutting?” others could then answer with certainty: “She is that writer who carries around a travel bidet.” It sounds pretty great; the description promises that “this little wonder, which comes with its own handy travel pouch, provides a refreshing, pulsating spray of water just where and when you need it.” The bidet sales-pitch informs me of the link between sanitation and ego: “personal appearance starts with personal hygiene, something people don’t always like to talk about but that is at the cornerstone of our self-image.” The write-up also assures me that not being comfortable “can affect our performance and self-confidence in important business and social functions.” Where was this little gadget before my panel??!?
I will BeDazzle my bidet briefcase. I will spend all year BeDazzling it, and when I get to AWP 2011, I will be the most confident writer in the room. What worries me is that people might be reluctant to shake my hand, or hug me, when I am carrying my bidet briefcase. This makes no sense because I will actually have a superior level of cleanliness. Perhaps I can write this in jewels across the case-top: FEEL FREE TO SHAKE MY HAND, I AM ACTUALLY CLEANER THAN YOU ARE.
Writing Prompt: Holy Shit! CHUD Penguins!
Graham Racher
Nicholson Baker wrote a horror story about potatoes. Penguins live in the sewers of Cape Town, South Africa.
Potatoes are a part of the family of plants sometimes called the nightshades. People refer to penguins as “nature’s clowns.”
READ MORE >
Hypothesis: Collaboration and Alienation
There is a split in experimental fiction, it would seem, which is hardly a split: a duality which is hardly dual. Articulating it, in addition, will not add to or subtract from what I’m provisionally calling “experimental fiction.” I am not going out of my way to break open or unmask a binary which has, till now, subsisted in relative silence. The following is a brief and incomplete diagnosis–neither positive nor negative, or else both at once. Most importantly, perhaps, these are not two distinct regimes (again, a split which is hardly, or is not, a split). Nor should this be taken as a statement of fact, but as a condition which I’ve begun, more and more, to see in what I read.
die my pretty
The neighborhood is not glow. For some reason, dandelions have swarmed the lawns of our imaginations (and also our lawns). A vexation unseen. Everyone asks, “How do you kill the dandelions?”
Here’s one: What exactly is wrong with dandelions?
Someone relate this to writing.
Styles
Do you fear style in poetry?
Do you skeptic it?
Once the style is figured out, does it become less impactful?
My favorite writers are styled.
Their words have good hair.
Lack of style seems to be what keeps good words from becoming distinguished words.
I still look for things that I think are “cool”
“Cool” I think appeals to the mind more than the heart.
It doesn’t need to be overt.
“Cool” is the neon sign that comes to mind when reading Cows by Frederic Boyer just published in the new Puerto Del Sol
V.
The cows are useful and sure. Their existence is an infinite number of successive
presents.
It is thus understandable with what pleasure we exterminated them.
The cows are only themselves when gathering into their own finitude the infinite
totality in which they found themselves. Beneath a tree. In a meadow. On the earth
lost in the universe.
The human being is quickly jealous of the cows. Oh, if only the gods would arm
me with such power—comes the muffled voice of tiny Telemachus that is held in The
Odyssey.
The cows don’t read what’s in our hearts. They don’t understand us any better
than we understand ourselves. They ask neither for our recognition nor our gratitude
nor our hate as we ask it of ourselves. And never have we contemplated them in their
truth.
Thought, the cows immediately knew in our presence, betrays general indifference.
It’s only when dangers become evident that indifference ends. In our presence
the cows learned this at their own expense.