Gordon Lish, 1986
A former professor of mine recently gave me a copy of StoryQuarterly 21: Stories from the Gordon Lish Workshops (edited by J.D. Dolan). I don’t want to excerpt too much, but here are some words from Lish:
“This feels good. I tell you, it feels good to have my hands on this forum, and I am not going to let the moment get away from me without my offering a remark or three….I tell you, I take such delight in them all, in all these students, in all these writers, that I’d like to sit here and start reciting names–this in the exorbitant spirit of the madman who thinks the mere calling out of the entries in a list must offer to all who hear an invitation to war.”
Now Showing: Goat in the Snow
Some people are unreasonably unselfish, and Emily Pettit is one of them. An editor for Notnostrums and Factory Hollow Press, she is also the new publisher of jubilat, which, under her thumb, just released a bad motherfucker of an issue (see: Julia Cohen, Michelle Taransky, James Tate, Rachel Glaser, Dara Wier, lots!). Her devotion to art is exemplary and climbs no ladder, but aims at making our anxious little world a bigger, bettered one. It should come then as no surprise then that her poems, too, are of the giving kind; and her new book Goat in the Snow, now available for pre-order from BIRDS LLC, gives and gives and gets it right. Im not one to blurb (ed note: bullshit), but when a wise old man once again feels the change coming in his bones and scrys the truth, you listen:
Her kindness is always ahead of us, anticipating the problems we will or won’t run into, and we always end up in a different, precise place than the one we started out from, as she reassuringly tells us: “You know/ you know you know. It’s all uncertainty/ and your neck. You walk slowly/ in a calm voice.” Goat In The Snow is multicolored, ever-changing, a delight to try to clasp. –
JOHN ASHBERRY
Author venn diagram
This pie chart illustrates what’s in my head in terms of what I think about writing, and who goes where. This of course is just a partial list, and my apologies for the lack of contemporaries, and women. Again, this is a view into my head, and probably subject to some disagreement. I think of all writing being from the head (pros: cerebral, conceptual; cons: didactic, dry), the mouth (pros: language, poetics; cons: empty banter, pure form), and the heart (pros: empathic, intimate; cons: sentimental, emotional) . My favorite writers, those in the white dashed center, are able to write from all three places. Other writers I admire are writing from two places. Others tend to fall into just one category, somewhat consumed by that point of view. Authors near the outer edges of their category may be seen as my critique of them, for the excessiveness of that sensibility. It would be interesting to see where you disagree, and why, and list those who I’ve failed to mention, and place them accordingly.
Fan Mail #2: Lidia Yuknavitch
Dear Lidia Yuknavitch,
It’s your birthday, and I am grateful you exist.
Even if it wasn’t your birthday, I’d be grateful.
Lidia, the first book of yours I read was in 2004, Her Other Mouths. I read it for a class with Steve Tomasula. I read it and thought: fuck, writing really can do this. Mind you: I’d read Kathy Acker. I’d read James Joyce. I’d read Raymond Federman. I’d read Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and David Foster Wallace and Anne Carson. I’d read a whole bunch of people, but it was your book that told me that I could write what I wanted to write, how I wanted to write it. Your book was brazen and unapologetic. Most of the other books I was reading were cowering and pretty, like princesses rather than heroines.
Your book was a heroine.
RIP Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)
Poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron passed away today in New York City. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, indeed.
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.”]
The American ____?
People love to make equivalencies. For instance, Stuart McLean is the Canadian Garrison Keillor, or The Agenda is the Canadian Charlie Rose.
Obviously, equivalencies are problematic. The Canadian anything seems to be paler version of the American thing. (Call me nationalistic.) That is, they aren’t really equivalent. And yet, there seems to be some value in these equivalencies, right? (Maybe I’m wrong.)
That being said: Is DFW the American Roberto Bolano?
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