Does anyone have the balls to do this?
Socrates Adams-Florou and Crispin Best just started a new online magazine. It is called Rejection Digest.
If you have written something that someone has rejected, we want to read it. Send it to thisstoryhasbeenrejected@rocketmail.com as soon as you can. In order to qualify for submission, we also require a copy of a rejection e-mail of some sort. There is a special rule. If you can provide us FIVE rejection e-mails, we GUARANTEE publication. If you have less than five, we do not guarantee publication.
Dare you.
Let’s Get Baffled!
Moe Tkacik’s “Journals of the Crisis Year” is now live at The Baffler‘s website. Tkacik considers a baker’s dozen books about (and/or by players in) the Recent Financial Crisis.
“From time immemorial,” Tett explains, “the worlds of business and finance have been beset with the problem of default risk, the danger that a borrower will not repay a loan or bond.” This is frustrating to read if you think of this lingering “problem” as a bank’s fundamental reason for being.
This is a long piece that demands and deserves your full attention. It will make you aware of things that you ought to be aware of. Also, while we’re at it–Holy Shit! The Baffler! I always thought of them as that small, weird journal whose publication schedule never made sense to me, but thanks to Moe’s piece I’m now looking at their front page and am thoroughly thrilled. Matt Taibbi, Christine Smallwood, Walter Benn Michaels. And I guess if/when the actual issue comes out (is out?) there’s also Naomi Klein and Lydia Millet in the paper version.
Stranger Than Fiction?
Sorry, this is funny. Good spirit. But funny.
Song of the day? Converge? Trying to figure out the perspective here. On a Wallace review video for the recent Pale King excerpt he talks about how you can mention “DFW” at a hipster party when people are talking about “hipster lit” like Bolano and Lispector. F’real?
The Complex of All These
While a resident at the Women’s Studio Workshop last year, Abigail Uhteg created The Complex of All These, a neat handmade book in limited edition. She took over 3,000 photos of the entire process and put them together into this video.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9a5hH5idQc
Hidden behind the buzz: Leon Botha
Hidden behind the buzz around this wonderfully strange—and slickly produced—band called Die Antwoord is the inclusion in this video:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc3f4xU_FfQ
of an artist named Leon Botha. Botha is one of the oldest living persons in the world with a condition called Progeria. He’s 24 but he appears to be in his 80s.
The two vocalists in Die Antwoord have done some work to make themselves as visually arresting as their costar—the severe and unflattering haircuts, the poor needle and ink tattoos on the man, the peroxide on the hair and eyebrows of the woman—but they can only achieve so much. Botha steals the attention of the viewer. And what I like most about this is that I think Botha wants that. He wants to be seen. But how many will notice him behind the catchy music, funny haircuts, and—interesting, I’ll admit—artifice of Die Antwoord? Some attention to him is paid after the cut.
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“We had the feeling of a new morning / with the lights off.”
Looking for tic-tac-toe with yourself? When you are not even sure you have a self, when it feels more like a rumor shivering in a cathedral? Then hustle like a clod. Keep the night like an arm-around. And check out your new favorite poet, Jack Christian, who paints his boats to display the night and take you to it. He is all over the internet: featured at Ink Node, live at Sixth Finch, Thermos, and Gregory Lawless’s blog I Thought I Was New Here. He’s a poet of the fairgrounds, the airport, and the goodbye-for-real. I think his poem “I Am Yours” from Sixth Finch is my favorite of this web blitz, because it is true in the way that true-making is the only way true happens.
Dance Dance Imperialism
Do they hate us or is it us that hates them? Probably a little bit of both, but sometimes it’s just nice to relax.
Elisa Gabbert begins her blog post, “Publish the Poem, Not the Poet” with the following anecdote-
Going through Absent subs lately, I’ve been reading a lot of poems that feel basically perfunctory. They are perfectly competent poems written by poets who have every indication of being good writers: I recognize their names and the places that they’ve been published; their credentials are impressive; often I’m already pretty familiar with their work. (Everyone submits to and gets published in the same online journals, for the most part.) But the poems are merely competent; they have no [oomph/je ne sais quoi/duende/poetry]. It’s like the poet wrote them just because you gotta write something. These writers are probably capable of turning out a “publishable” poem any day of the week.
The post is worth reading in full. Also interesting is the comments section, where there’s a lively thread going. It seems, for the most part, that people are in agreement with her, some of them quite vocally so. Personally, I felt my own agreement-strings tugged hard at the out-set, but then the upwelling of a consensus so perfectly in line with my own made me distrust my own first instinct. If we’re all in such fine agreement on what the problem is (that is, the problem of “competence,” as outlined above; later EG introduces and “image vs. idea” argument with a highly tentative relationship to the ostensible initial concern of the post) then why has the problem not resolved itself by dint of our own collectively adjusted behaviors? Is there anyone out there who knowingly practices the poetry of mere competence, or sufficiency? Is there a describable (defensible) logic or ethos informing such practice? I would love to hear from that person or those people. Also, does anyone want to make the argument FOR publishing the poet rather than the poem? I actually think there’s a strong, albeit difficult argument to be made for this practice, though not necessarily as it applies to the mid-rangers and “competents” EG is talking about. DISCUSS!
Let’s See What Some Stuff’s About
The Scott Timberg io9 piece I mentioned the other day is live now. “Welcome to the Soft Apocalypse.”
At TNRBook, Sophia Lear is unimpressed by Sheila Kohler’s Becoming Jane Eyre. Also, reprinted classics by George Orwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Two things I pinched from Bookslut– “The Poetics of Amateur Products Reviews” and Margaret Drabble introduces you to William Wordsworth. And why the heck not?
Okay, NYTea time- Tom Carson really likes Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of Robert Mapplethorpe. I’ve heard amazing things about it as well–out in “the streets”. Wells Tower is pretty ambivalent about the new T.C. Boyle. Antonya Nelson calls Robert Stone’s Fun With Problems “a book for grown-ups,” which is a concept I both do and do not understand; both am and am not vaguely attracted to. Has anyone out there ever read any Stone? Also, obituaries. Charles McGrath on Salinger and Michael Powell on Zinn. A blog I’d never heard of (before Paper Cuts linked to it) called “Classics Rock: Books Shelved in Songs” has playlists of songs that reference the works of each man (Zinn, Salinger). But the Farah Fawcett Memorial Overshadowed Death of the Week (literature edition) has absolutely got to go to poor Louis Auchincloss, who wrote over 60 books over 50 years, mostly while also still practicing law, and who, at 92, had a year on Salinger and four on Zinn.
Finally, a question. For three days now I’ve left Emerson’s Divinity School Address in an open tab on my browser. Will today be the day I print it out and actually read it? (That’s really two questions.)
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January 30th, 2010 / 11:54 am
January 30th, 2010 / 11:54 am
i do this sort of shit BECAUSE I CAN
Quote of the day (see above; also left) belongs to Amanda F. Palmer, alumna of The Dresden Dolls, fiance of Neil Gaiman, and friend of The Rumpus (who have almost certainly already linked this, so even though I found it on my own let’s assume a HAT TIP to them; if nothing else they had AFP play one of their fundraisers and she was great). Anyway, AFP went to the Golden Globes because NG’s film Coraline was nominated for something. Her debrief on this experience is about a thousand pages long and worth every minute of your time–pissed off security guys! playing dead on the red carpet! Mike Tyson! armpit hair!
Jason Diamond interviews Gary Shteyngart for Jewcy.com.
The Nation has Rebecca Solnit on how the media exacerbates the problems faced by survivors of disasters by the way in which it covers them–particularly in referring to scroungers food and supplies as “looters.” “Covering Haiti: When the Media is the Disaster.”
Felicia Sullivan blogs an elegy for Salinger that I think speaks for itself.
Matt Taibbi is still a badass. David Brooks thinks economic populism is like racism against rich people. Michael Steele wishes! Everyone else just thinks DB is a giant flaming dick. Anyway, here’s Taibbi-
And the really funny thing about Brooks’s take on populists… I mean, I’m a member of the same Yuppie upper class that Brooks belongs to. I can’t speak for the other “populists” that Brooks might be referring to, but in my case for sure, my attitude toward the likes of Lloyd Blankfein and Hank Paulson has nothing to do with class anger.
I don’t hate these guys because they’re rich and went to fancy private schools. Hell, I’m rich and went to a fancy private school. I look at these people as my cultural peers and what angers me about them is that, with many coming from backgrounds similar to mine, these guys chose to go into a life of crime and did so in a way that is going to fuck things up for everyone, rich and poor, for a generation.
Their decision to rig the markets for their own benefit is going to cause other countries to completely lose confidence in the American economy, it will impact the dollar, and ultimately will make all of us involuntary debtors to whichever state we end up having to borrow from to bail these crimes out.