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Finding Something
—Jack Gilbert, 1925-2012

I say moon is horses in the tempered dark,
because horse is the closest I can get to it.
I sit on the terrace of this worn villa the king’s
telegrapher built on the mountain that looks down
on a blue sea and the small white ferry
that crosses slowly to the next island each noon.
Michiko is dying in the house behind me,
the long windows open so I can hear
the faint sound she will make when she wants
watermelon to suck or so I can take her
to a bucket in the corner of the high-ceilinged room
which is the best we can do for a chamber pot.
She will lean against my leg as she sits
so as not to fall over in her weakness.
How strange and fine to get so near to it.
The arches of her feet are like voices
of children calling in the grove of lemon trees,
where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds.

6

Tangible Values

 

Is there anything journalists love writing about more than the death of the publishing industry? Every few weeks there is a new surge of articles and essays pointing at the sky, suggesting said sky is falling, even though nothing ever seems to reach the ground. Magazines are going all digital, they say! Print is dying! Print must be dying so we cannot look for fallibility anywhere else. In recent weeks, there has been a lot of talk about the merger between Penguin and Random House. Two massive publishers will become even more massive.

Today, The New York Times, published yet another article, predicated on the assumption that publishing is declining. As I’ve asked here before, has any industry functioned in decline as long as publishing? Medical doctors should be studying publishing because, clearly, the key to immortality therein lies.

Perhaps it isn’t that publishing is dying but, instead, publishing is being killed. At the popular Brain Pickings, Maria Popova wrote a footnote to a post about Jane Mount, an artist who creates portraits of writers based on their ideal bookshelves. The Ideal Bookshelf featuring Mount’s art and essays by each featured writer, was released today from Little Brown. It’s an interesting idea, beautiful art, and offers us the insight we seem to crave into how the minds of great writers work.

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Presses / 15 Comments
November 13th, 2012 / 4:47 pm

So Say the Waiters

I hope Justin Sirois gets back to work soon. He’s written five installments of a really fun serial novel called So Say the Waiters. It’s as gripping as 24 or whatever your favorite TV show is these days. Each episode, which takes like an hour to read, ends with a cliffhanger.

I hope he gets back to work because I really want know what happens in episode 6.

Since the beginning of autumn, Justin has been releasing the episodes separately as eBooks for like $.99. Now he’s bundled what I guess would be the “first season” in a printed book, and he’s doing a contest to promote it. To win the contest, you have to send in a kidnapping scenario. The best idea, as judged by Michael Kimball and Ken Baumann, will have their submission written into a future section of the book. That’s neat.

It might seem weird that the contest is based on writing a kidnapping situation, but it wouldn’t if you’re familiar with So Say the Waiters. It’s all about this smartphone app/social network through which people can sign up to be kidnapped. It’s actually not that farfetched, the way Justin handles it. The characters seem like real people. They just want to escape for a while.

When I want to escape, I read a book like this one. I read it on my iPhone.

Author News / 5 Comments
November 13th, 2012 / 4:11 pm

Author Spotlight & Random & Reviews

Matthew Vollmer: Inscriptions for Headstones

I saw Matthew Vollmer’s Inscriptions for Headstones on the floor, alongside a gun cleaning kit and a disc golf disc and a dead spider. I picked it up. I actually began the book thinking I would skim through it, maybe perusing a third, just seeing what it was all about. I read the entire book, from first to last page, in one sitting. This doesn’t happen to me very often.

The text is 30 short essays, crafted as epitaphs, each one unfolding in a single sentence. On reading this idea, I thought, “That seems a bit much. That might be gimmicky.”

It actually works. Why?

The epitaph concept (a sort of “appropriated form”—a type of structure I’m into lately) adds many echoes, many layers, many possibilities. We arrive immediately on significant terrain—death. And a summary of life. We enter a mood of meditation, of introspection, not so unlike a walk through a cemetery (30 headstones aligned). And what is an epitaph on a headstone? First, a lie (actual epitaphs are 99% abstract and pithy and positive), but then instantly an absurdity (the measuring up, in a few words, on a stone). But, if you twist the epitaph (one concept of appropriated form work is to make it your own, to take the original—whether a complaint letter, Facebook post, list, whatever—and morph the form to your unique intent and way and need, etc.), lengthen the epitaph, broaden the epitaph into a lyrical remembering, the form can open us up to questionings. It can even lead us to ask, “What is life?”

The one sentence works, too.

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6 Comments
November 13th, 2012 / 3:35 pm

Crowd Sourcing Question: What are the essential texts of third wave feminism?

Helpful suggestions greatly appreciated. I’m trying to put together a research list, and thought others might also be interested.

I posed this question on Facebook last week, and I got some good recommendations. I also got a sense that there’s some confusion over what constitutes “third wave.” (Does Camille Paglia “count”?) While I have a general idea about the distinctions between first, second, and third wave, I’d like to be more familiar with the important works that contribute to this specific conversation.

So here are the suggestions I received via Facebook…please help to increase and/or complicate the list…many thanks…

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Random / 15 Comments
November 13th, 2012 / 1:21 pm

Reviews

25 Points: The Body is a Little Gilded Cage: A Story in Letters and Fragments

The Body is a Little Gilded Cage: A Story in Letters and Fragments
by Kristina Marie Darling
Gold Wake Press, 2012
56 pages / $12.95 buy from Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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1 Comment
November 13th, 2012 / 9:09 am

I’m sorry, Mario, but your cultural critique is in another castle: some thoughts on hipster irony

Last August I attended a live reenactment of Total Recall (the classic 1990 version, natch, not the remake). It was a deliberately shambolic affair, a loosely-focused variety show run by Everything Is Terrible and Odds N’ Ends, involving puppets, videos, intentionally bad acting, and dancing. It was, I suppose, what some would call “hip” or “ironic.”

At one point we watched a reedited version of one Total Recall‘s many chase scenes—the infamous escalator shootout where Arnold uses a bystander as a shield—now set to Drowning Pool’s “Bodies.” (You can watch the video here.) Which is about as cliched as it gets, but it totally works as comedy.

Part of what makes the video funny is that the Everything Is Terrible folks have upped the intensity of the Drowning Pool song: “Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor … Oh, wait, they’re totally stepping on that dead guy’s squishy body—ick.” Here we must pause responsibly to acknowledge that Drowning Pool frontman David Williams has always stated that the song is not actually about “the violence thing,” but rather the “respect and code” of the mosh pit, or some such other bullshit. That hasn’t stopped Hollywood folk from using the song in numerous action movie trailers. Nor has it deterred legions of Drowning Pool fans from making their own YouTube versions.

In other words, the Everything Is Terrible video’s ironic effect depends on the pairing being a cliché. Like a lot of satirical and ironic art, it proceeds by imitating an otherwise naïve or sincere effect, then subverting it. (This is why “irony vs. sincerity” is often an unhelpful binary when thinking about phenomena like hipster irony or the New Sincerity; those scenes or movements aren’t strict artistic opposites, since they necessarily share a lot of their aesthetic maneuvers. Where they differ usually lies more in their degree of self-effacement, and in their authorial intention.)

Hipster irony is commonly perceived purely as dismissal: “You’re just making fun of Drowning Pool.” And there’s certainly truth in that—fuck Drowning Pool! But is that all there is? Because the EIT video, I think, and the entire Totally Recalled show, could be perceived as something more. Those behind the show, and those in attendance, I’d argue, were actually trying to appreciate “Bodies”—but in the only way they now can. Irony, in other words, allows hipster audiences to make use of material that would otherwise be off-limits to them.

It won’t surprise you that I want to turn here to Viktor Shklovsky, because he identified a concept that I think might help us. It is his concept of deterioration:

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Craft Notes & Film / 18 Comments
November 13th, 2012 / 8:01 am

Seated Man

Ingres’ The Valpinçon Bather (1808) was originally known simply as “Seated Woman,” but was eventually come to be known by one of its 19th century owners Valpinçon, a bow to patronage’s constant finger in history. The painting may be seen as a more mature and restrained follow-up to Woman Bathing (1807), whose side-view titty shot and pronounced sexual imminence is argued, with many others like it, to have been the porn of that day. With the Valpinçon version, we only have the plush concavity of the sheets, barely burdened by her, caving in to her calm neutrality. Whether she looks elsewhere, or concedes to our gawk, is unknown. Baudelaire is to remark on her serene chastity, a contradiction to the overt sexuality of the rest of his female subjects. We are taught what is extreme by the very boundaries meant to be straddled, us sliding down the wrong side. Pornographic images essentially commemorate that such events actually happened; the fantasy is not contingent on its possibility, but actual manifestation. (I am a keen on outdoor sex by railroad tracks, preferably in Eastern “fallen” Europe, or the Balkans, whose culmination requires paper towels that are never around.) Shame (2011) follows an emo sex addict with a python dong who likes to jog to Bach and breaks down and cries, all under the Picasso blue period tint of lower Manhattan. He follows women home from the Metro and fucks them in the presumable pooper. He slams them against the glass wall panels in lush condos overlooking the Hudson. Through a disappointing homophobic lens, to convey just how fucked up he has gotten, our protagonist (Michael Fassbender) gets punched in the face and winds up in mysterious “gay underworld” lit by fuchsia lights, blowing or being blown, the up-close crooked handheld camera mimicking head bobbing motions. The secret to this laptop, and yours, is before facebook, nytimes, and weather channel, it’s the sad honesty of complete strangers fucking with more feigned professional conviction than real relationships could ever propose, or would ever dare to. This is the beauty of our kidnapped gaze. This morning, my legs splayed across a black Pier 1 dining chair, I saw a Japanese girl blow a fisherman (yeah, right) in the bait shack, his resuscitated dong under the costume of scintillating pixels, her lips exposing each solemn purple inch as she slowly withdrew with his child in her. Sex addiction is like saying food addiction: the biological need can easily justify the adandoned insanity of its consumption. My favorite scenes were of Fassbender on his pristine bed, the minimalist camera trusting the viewer enough to barely move, stoically wanking it to his black Dell laptop, whose averted screen, like Valpinçon’s face, begins to tell the story of what can’t be told.

Film / 1 Comment
November 12th, 2012 / 4:30 pm

Reviews

The Weave and Werve of Words in William Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry

On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
by William Gass
D. R. Godine, 1975 / 1991
91 pages / Buy from Amazon (1975 ed / 1991 ed)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday is a good day to think about William Gass’s On Being Blue because Mondays often are. The color blue, Gass’s muse, is, in this slim book, organized, discussed, described, pondered, and psychoanalyzed; the first page is a list of just a few things that could be blue—stockings, movies, laws—and the last page is a fading away, these wild words all we have left, as  “everything is gray.” From blue to gray to yellow and green and wherever in between, On Being Blue is a hopscotch around the rainbow. It infects you with synesthesia. There’s the “disapproving purse to pink”, “violet’s rapid sexual shudder,” and “the rolled-down sound in brown.” There are also lots of curse words and fucking.

(Some form of the word blue appears 412 times, according to my count.)

Not only fucking, there’s also “ficking,” “facking,” and “focking.” Blue is the color of obscenity-laced literature and balls. It’s a portal into the sexual, a catch-all color that captures the deliciously libertine, our deviant wants and protruding desires that in fiction are titillations of the imagination provoked through language. Gass turns sex into linguistic gymnastics, so he fascinates us with “not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs.” Beautiful language is, to Gass, a great aphrodisiac. He quotes verse by Sir John Suckling and a scene from The Lime Twig. He pokes around Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.

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3 Comments
November 12th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
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They’re going to make the National Book Awards dinner a flashy thing, like the Oscars/Man Booker: The goal is to add more sex appeal to an industry that’s not exactly known for it — but not, the organizers insist, just for its own sake. “It’s not about being glitzy,” said David Steinberger, the chief executive of Perseus Books and chairman of the foundation. “It’s about increasing the impact great books have on the culture.”

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