Yeah but come on, that’s the title of a book right there.
As Blake put it, it’s as if Megan studied at the Harvard for Ooh, and as Jeff Jackson said nicely, “You’re never sure what’s around the next comma.”
Lucy Corin said she remembers Megan’s dreams as if they were her own.
This book comes out today. It’s poetry and microfiction. It’s just $9 at PGP. And there are videos about it. Cool.
Unlike some other stuffed animals, I had a very good time in Boston. Admittedly, that’s probably because I didn’t get there until Friday. I also tried to avoid any and all conversations that had to do with books. The only time I talked about writing was when my buddy Mike and I drunkenly explained “epistemology ” to our non-MFA friends. Gross.
The two coolest stuffed animals I met there were Tyler Gobble and Layne Ransom. We probably hung out for a total of 25 minutes, but it was a real dope 25 minutes: we played dice and Tweeted from each other’s phones and hopped around on a dance floor that was pulsating. I always leave AWP with a swollen, stupid heart because of all those instances where internet user names morph into actual people. Meeting these two actual people was definitely one of my most swollen moments (ew).
But all that said, I have to apologize to Layne. Because I did something stupid.
The week before AWP, I had bookmarked about ten new online lit journals and chapbooks, because AWP was coming up and OMGWTF I had so many travel-sized tubes of toothpaste to buy. The last thing I wanted to do was virtually thumb through lit shit, but then someone posted a link to You Are The Meat (Layne’s new jumpoff from H_NG_MAN Books) right when I was about to eat some Chinese food. The Chinese food was disgusting; You Are The Meat was anything but. I was completely captivated by each of the fourteen poems in this digital chapbook (which you can download for free, BTW). Layne’s writing is like the dude you always want to invite to your dance party—these poems are going to hug you for twenty seconds too long, drink all the empties in your recycling bin, and pick a drunken fight with the choad who accidentally says something sexist. Then, in the morning—when you’re really hung over and want to do nothing but eat some eggs—they’re going to say something silly and beautiful that will remind you of how nice it is to be around good, good people. READ MORE >
This is what happened in my grad Form & Technique in Fiction class today:
Here is how it happened. Every Wednesday, students read articles and essays that are NOT fiction. Last class, they read & we discussed a unit I called “The Human Body,” which included the following texts: Dong et al, “Unilateral Deep Brain Stimulation of the Right Globus Pallidus Internus in Patients with Tourette’s Syndrome”
(from The Journal of International Medicine); Grahek, Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, “Ch. 1: The Biological Function & Importance of Pain”; Ramachandran, Tell-Tale Brain, “Ch. 3: Loud Colors and Hot Babes: Synesthesia”; and
Scarry, The Body in Pain, “Ch.3: Pain and Imagining.”
My Pet Serial Killer
by Michael Seidlinger
Enigmatic Ink, 2013
312 pages / $13.99 Buy from Amazon
Some people raise cats and dogs. Claire, the protagonist of Michael Seidlinger’s My Pet Serial Killer, raises serial killers. Caged within the pages of the book is the ‘Gentlemen Killer,’ his gallery of helpless women, and a whole panoply of cultural idiosyncrasies that seem strangely alien when viewed through the cool detachment of Claire. Claire is an experienced collector who dissects social rituals with the vivifying apathy of a biologist. I’ve read a lot of serial killer books in the past two years, most trying to differentiate themselves by latching onto a more unusual gimmick. My Pet Serial Killer distinguishes itself with a unique foray into the world of mass murderers that’s best encapsulated by Claire’s proposition to the Gentlemen Killer: “I support you financially. I give you a place to hide. I make sure you are never under suspicion of being what you really are, a cold-blooded psychotic killer (so hot), and, in return, you clue me into your process. You become mine.”
The prose flows in a conversational rhythm and her tone remains relatively level throughout, despite the fact that she is describing horrific scenes of murder. The macabre episodes are lent an especially disturbing tone because of the way Claire chastises her pet for not carrying out the murders in an optimal way. She treats him like a puppy gone awry and complains about him like an unruly boyfriend: “He doesn’t want instruction but, as master, I feel like I need to show him how it’s supposed to be done. He’s too lenient on method and MO. No wonder we find ourselves needing to find patsies covering our tracks every few girls.”
Interspersed within the narrative are italicized segments that are described as “optional” but provide deeper insight into the issues at stake and break apart traditional relationships. Targeted are friendships, classmates, strangers at parties, lovers, master and pet, and even reader and author. Claire refuses to reveal her name to Victor, AKA the Gentlemen Killer, who is a suave and dashing man that can woo almost any woman into bed. She’s less impressed by him, especially after her initial exhilaration dies down: “I’m quickly discovering he’s not much of a talker after he’s exhausted all introductions and quick casual lines. Everything’s practiced until he’s out of memorized and rehearsed material. He’s awkward at his most pure, and he’s incapable of matching my gaze when I’m still there looking for more… So I’m the one that has to tell him what to do. I’m telling him to go into his room.”
“The Silence” (still), directed by Ingmar Bergman (1963)
[Update: I posted a follow-up to this post, here.]
1.
Susan Sontag’s seminal mid-60s essay has come up several times at this site. I’ve been busy rereading it since Xmas, and want to take this chance to set down some thoughts regarding it.
2.
Obviously, whatever interpretation is, Sontag seems against it.
3.
What, then, does Sontag mean by “interpretation”? Does she mean any and all interpretation, as my fellow contributor Chris Higgs recently argued? Or something else, something more specific?
a.k.a. “Playing catch up with the stacks [5].”
In this series, I share with you a stack of my recently acquired and most anticipated reading materials. In 2012 I did one of these in November, August, and March, and in 2011 I did one in May.
Once again I have a heaping pile of awesome-looking unread materials just waiting to be experienced…
Between 1915 and 1923, Marcel Duchamp tedious arranged seemingly arbitrary shapes concerning a myth about a bride and her nine bachelors that he would refuse to convey to others. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even leaves us with an eerie Avant-garde cartoon embedded between panes of cracked glass which conform to a unique “mechanomorphic” law of physics, whose notes began in 1913, he was to incorporate in The Green Box (1934), a limited edition (of 320) scrap heap compilation of its conception and execution — though let not the word “edition” and the auspices of printing fool you; he produced each one by hand. The cracks in the glass are ostensibly controlled, which may explain why he was both insane and spent eight years to create it. None is this is really meant to make any sense. Duchamp’s self-enthralled solipsisms juggle meaning and nonsense, until the viewer is just left to stare. If there is a God, he too must be a fan: In 1926, the Brooklyn Museum accidentally broke the art piece in transport, making the cracks worse (via the actual laws of physics). Marcel, unfortunately, was not there to repair what he described as a “hilarious picture” in the first place.
How to Think More About Sex
by Alain de Botton
Picador, December 2012
192 pages / $16 Buy from Picador or Amazon
In the middle of Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, the narrator makes one of many comparisons between sex and the free market:
While Houellebecq has been derided by some as misogynistic and bleak, it is clear that upon reading Alain de Botton’s How to Think More About Sex, a slim volume that should have been titled How to Think More About Heteronormative Sex, the two would be in agreement about at least one thing: as those with partners age, both in their relationships and biology, individual desire for sex decreases until finally, death. In one of the more interesting sections of the book (the other being on pornography,) one of the first in Picador’s “The School of Life” series, de Botton repudiates the assertion first made by the Masters & Johnson study that states in order for a marriage to be successful, sex should be a constant. Ignoring this trend that was later capitalized upon by sex therapists and then pharmaceutical companies, de Botton argues that a decrease in our sex drive and the quality and quantity of sex is purely normal and is a “necessary comprise of long-term love.”
As many are already absolutely aware, beginning on March 6 and ending on March 9 there was a literary conference — sponsored by Bambi Muse and Fox News — of sparkly specialness. That literary conference — the Kmart Belles Lettres Conference — was clamorous, and clamor commands a summary. So here is a summary!
March 6 (Day 1):
Most of the attendees were in a foul mood for the first day. Edie Sedgwick, for one, lost her fur in a cab on the night before and refused to mingle with anyone, even the sharp society poet Edith Sitwell. Sitwell tried to offer Edie a coup of tea, but Edie insisted that no one speak to her about anything unless it was directly related to the recovery of her fur coat.
So, instead Sitwell started a conversation with none other than Baby Adolf, the first Bambi Muse baby. Here’s a snippet of their chat:
Project for a Revolution in New York
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Dalkey Archive, September 2012
183 Pages / $14 (buy it on Amazon)
FRONT MATTER
1. I’ve read all of the fictional novels that Robbe-Grillet published in France between 1955 & 1981, albeit in English, some multiple times, others not. This leaves out only 4 novels proper–the first two (Un Regicide & The Erasers) and the last two (Repetition & A Sentimental Novel). Half of those remaining have yet to receive English translations. This was my second reading of Project for a Revolution in New York.
2. This quantifying, of course, does not include everything else that Robbe-Grillet wrote: a short story collection–Snapshots in English, of interest perhaps only as spelled out examples of the theory set forth in For a New Novel; three “romanesques”, being, for want of a better term, “creative non-fictional” memoirs (only the first of which, Ghosts in the Mirror, has been translated into English–which, admittedly, is a bit of a snooze-fest when compared to the purely fictional novels); thee essay collections, with, once again, only the earliest, For a New Novel, available in English (a really valid collection if one is tired of a standardized canonical/literary fiction); a handful of cine-novels–the earliest (Last Year at Marienbad & The Immortal One) once again being the only ones translated into English; and perhaps the most interesting part of Robbe-Grillet’s oeuvre, the ‘collaborative’ works that ultimately feed, intertextually, into my favorite of his novels, collaborative works with artists (Magritte, Rauschenberg, Johns) & photographers (Irina Ionesco, David Hamilton). And one must not forget his films, a necessary contingency of his body of work.
3. Due to my engagement–perhaps even, one could say, obsession– with Robbe-Grillet’s work, I’ve found it easier to split his published novels into a number of categories, guided by this website, which was one of the earliest strongholds of info on Robbe-Gillet on the internet when I began my obsession in 2004.
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