I am drinking gin & wrote about 18 long titles i randomly chose using wikipedia
If the New Sincerity is anything real or coherent (and I wrote that post last Monday because I, like others, am trying to figure out whether that’s so, or will be so), then we should be able to identify the devices or moves that define it—that arguably make a piece read as being “New Sincere.” The “New” implies they produce that sincere effect right now, in the current literary landscape; whether the techniques or devices are entirely new doesn’t matter (they could be older techniques, fallen out of prominence, now returned). Similarly, it’s irrelevant whether the author using them is “really” being sincere. What matters instead is that
- Those devices exist;
- People think they “feel sincere” (as opposed to other devices, which don’t);
- “Being sincere” has some value at the present moment.
Why sincerity? What is its present value? My broad and still developing belief is that “sincere” writing is one means of breaking with the aesthetics of postmodernism and self-referentiality: invocation of Continental Theory, metatextuality, excessive cleverness, hyper-allusion, &c. What makes writing “sincerely” even more delicious when perceived against postmodernism 1960–2000 is that it proposes to offer precisely what pomo said didn’t matter or couldn’t exist: direct communion with another coherent, expressive self, even truth by means of language. (Don’t tell Chris Higgs!)
One of my first impressions of the NS came when I started noticing artists and authors using longer titles—in particular, long rambly ones with strong emotional resonances. My thought then and I think now was that both the length and the ramble, as well as the emotive quality, signaled non-mediation: a desire to appear uncensored, unrevised. Those titles stood out (defamiliarized the title) because they failed to comply with what a “proper,” “edited,” “thoughtful” title should be.
Is this a sensible thing to argue? Have I had too many G&Ts? Let’s pursue …
Tao Lin’s Big Kid Book Deal
I hope this is the last time I’ll find myself writing about Tao Lin. In July I wrote a lengthy story for The Morning News that delved into Lin’s publishing venture, Muumuu House, and looked at a few of the prominent (allowing for a loose definition of “prominent”) writers in his literary cadre. (The post engendered quite a comment chain on this very site.) Mere weeks later, Lin landed a $50,000 book deal with Vintage for his next novel. And that was when someone commented on the Morning News piece that they’d be “interested in an update on all of this” (presumably they meant an update from me) and wondered whether his deal would “change things.”
It does change things, yes. The fact that his next novel (it’s tentatively called Taipei, Taiwan) will come out under the Vintage label means that, like it or not, it’s going to get a lot more notice than his books have had in the past when published by Melville House. And that’s no knock on Melville House, which does a fabulous job both with publicity (the Moby Lives blog is fun and occasionally gets good pickup on Twitter etc.) and with the aesthetic look of its titles (see: the Art of the Novella series). But it’s still a tiny press. A book published by Vintage will be seen, not just by critics that have managed to avoid Lin and maybe still haven’t even heard of him, but also by mainstream readers, the Barnes & Noble shoppers who have definitely not heard of him and who read the Stieg Larsson trilogy. This isn’t to say they’ll pick up the novel and buy it, but it may catch their eye, they’ll take a look, and now they’ll know who or what a Tao Lin is.
i’m a bullhole cliche / assshit: An Interview with Victoria Trott
When I started reading online literature, sometime in mid-2008, I discovered a short list of bloggers/writers (Tao Lin, Ellen Kennedy, Zachary German) with similar attitudes and approaches to literature. Later, when Muumuu House was established, I found, among them, a new name: Victoria Trott. I read her poems, her blog, and it was all very strange, funny, and poignant. On Halloween 2009, I met her at a late night get together in (where else) Williamsburg. She seemed quiet, estranged, grinning aimlessly. By then she’d sort of disappeared from the online scene, leaving behind only a few publications (not to mention an unreleased forthcoming issue of German’s now-discontinued litmag), an altered moniker, and a lot of questions. In late 2009, she created a hilarious, ingenious Twitter account, and in summer 2010, a wonderful new blog. Finally there was some clarity, openness, continuity, but still, I was curious. Last fall, I compiled a list of questions I had for (and regarding) Victoria in a Gmail draft. Then I emailed her some of those questions, commencing a slow correspondence, spanning three months. Here are the results:
David Fishkind: Hi Victoria, How are you?
Victoria Trott: Hey David, someone bought me breakfast today and I took half of a Ritalin, I feel pretty good. How are you?
How did you get involved with online literature? Or maybe, what is your time line of involvement?
Here’s a timeline of my involvement with online literature, which has the stuff about blog switching, I think
2007 – high school sophomore, read Hikikomori on Bear Parade. showed Tao Lin’s blog to my friend, she said “amoeba ass?” and laughed with a puzzled face.
Excess of bad poetry: an interview with Luna Miguel
Luna and I have been preparing this interview for five months–or, I should say, I’ve been lazy and bad enough to (with the swerving and errant dedication that is now emerging as my style) let this one sit, short as it is, raveled and incomplete since October, asking a question every few weeks, no doubt irritating Luna in bookish, unpromising bursts. Which is all so stupid, so feckless of me because of how much of a force–a clearly, as you’ll find out, erudite and redoubtable force–Luna is in contemporary literature. Eg, here she is in Elmundo yesterday. As one might expect, Luna writes with the irreverent edge of a Rimbaud, but goes beyond mere edge, beyond what one might call the chintz of aspiration, to the “elsewhere,” not of youth, but of style, which is the earmark of youth; she might be called one of those writers who is not ahead of her time, who in fact has no toehold in anyone else’s time, but rather is planted squarely in her own time, but precisely because she has founded it–not alone, but en bloc with her comrades, who are amply referred to below (in fact, what we have there is a catalogue for the future). Hers is the time of a new world poetry. Welcome her.
It’s International Women’s Day 2011!
What follows is a list of writers who amaze me.
Locals: Roxane Gay • Evelyn Hampton • Lily Hoang • Kristen Iskandrian • Catherine Lacey • Chelsea Martin • Amy McDaniel • Alissa Nutting • Alexis Orgera • Jackie Wang
Notables: Amelia Gray • Aimee Bender • Judy Budnitz • Trinie Dalton • Christine Schutt • Jac Jemc • Lydia Millet • Catie Rosemurgy • Claire Donato • Renata Adler • Leni Zumas • Eudora Welty • Eileen Myles • Amber Sparks • Flannery O’Connor • Joyelle McSweeney • Jackie Corley • Patricia Highsmith • Ellen Bryan Voigt • Mary Ruefle • Myla Goldberg • Karen Russel. Carolyn Chute • Kathrine Dunn • Mary Miller • Kate Walbert • Amy Hempel • Amanda Filipacchi • Tillie Olsen • Joanna Howard • Claudia Smith • Melissa Broder • Grace Paley • Katherine Anne Porter • Pagan Kennedy • Suzanne Burns • Victoria Blake • Sandy Florian • Shirley Jackson • Emily Dickinson • Marcy Dermansky • Lorrie Moore • Kate Bernheimer • Alice Munro • Kim Chinquee • Francine Prose • Janet Frame • Brandi Wells • Robin Romm • Mary Robison • Antonya Nelson READ MORE >
Some Thoughts Re Muumuu House
'nylon': 2009 Nylon article re Muumuu House
[Ed. note: A month or two ago, Jordan Castro wrote me an email containing a review he’d written for Matthew Savoca’s long love poem with descriptive title. The review was less a review and more a personal reflection on Jordan’s part, referring to things about the book pertaining to himself: what he did while reading it, how it made him feel, etc. In fact, the review ended: “I really only thought about myself. Again.” I felt interested, or at least curious, as to why this kind of review, and really, this kind of relating to things by one’s self rather than the thing itself, compelled not only Jordan, but also a kind of group with which Jordan has been grouped, i.e. Tao Lin and Muumuu House, writers of an often readily identifiable, and sometimes ire inducing, style, that pertains often mostly to feelings, incidental observations, and what might could be called “absurdist emo” (I just made that up). Instead of the book review, then, I asked Jordan to write about these associations; what fuels them, why the self-focus, maybe even what is kind of going on? Jordan’s thoughtful, and I think generous, and probably in more than one way controversial, reply follows below. -BB]
INTRODUCTION
Throughout the history of literature – or the history of anything, rather – people have found other people like them and they’ve “stuck with” those people for a period of time, supporting them, “hanging out” with them, etc.
This is what people do. They communicate. They form relationships. They do things to alleviate the monotony of their existences.
Muumuu House (est. 2009) [http://muumuuhouse.com], a publisher of poetry, fiction, Twitter selections and Gmail chats, seems, to me, to “simply” be those patterns of humanity “in action” – a group of socially alienated individuals who chose literature as their means of alleviating monotony and who, as a result of that and other things, inadvertently (invariably?) “united.”
In other words, I feel like Muumuu House – or “the Muumuu House group of writers” – are a group of people who like similar things, like any other group of people.
If this essay exists to “say anything,” it exists, I think, “simply” to explore my own thoughts about Muumuu House and a certain type of writer/person.
Long Ass Interview with Tao Lin part 2 of 2
[Hi, this is Stephen Tully Dierks. I interviewed Tao Lin re his second novel, Richard Yates. This is part two of the interview. You can read the first part here.]
Are there any other artists with whom you’d like to collaborate, either directly or indirectly?
I would like to draw the album art for any band that I like. I would like to be the cover artist for an issue of McSweeney’s or Best American Non-Required Reading.
I think I feel like not collaborating on writing things at this point, unless it is a letters-type thing, like hikikomori with Ellen Kennedy.
Haley Joel Osment states in the book that Nobel Prize winners used to be depressed existentialists and now they are sociologists. Could you expound on this idea?
I think he was being sarcastic to a large degree. He maybe had some vague idea that people like Camus, Hermann Hesse, Sartre used to win the Nobel Prize and that there has been some kind of change, and that different kinds of writers now win the Nobel Prize, ones focused more on how people are like within a culture or a society, rather than within the universe, maybe, in that the “write-ups” about them seem, to Haley Joel Osment, to always mostly focus on their political or gender-issue or cultural themes (Haley Joel Osment assumes, though, that that’s just the journalists “doing their thing” and not an accurate portrayal of the writers; for example many articles connect Kafka to Prague rather than to “existential issues” or something).
Who do you think Haley Joel Osment would say is his favorite Nobel Prize winner for literature?
Maybe Knut Hamsun.
By what writer do you feel most interested in reading a review of Richard Yates for what venue?
Maybe a 5000-word review by Dennis Cooper that is somehow in New York Times Magazine (don’t think they publish reviews).
19 Comments
October 13th, 2010 / 10:57 am
October 13th, 2010 / 10:57 am
GIANT’s Backwards Birthday Party!!!!!!!!!
We’re giving away some free stuff to you, our birthday party guests. We already ate the cake, so we can’t give that back (well, we could…), but we do have books & other stuffs. How this works:
We’re going to award a few random winners, and split up the stuff randomly. To throw your name in the hat, email us at our house (htmlgiant@htmlgiant.com) by October 10th!
If you’d like to add stuff to the prize pool, list it in the comments and we’ll add it below. THE GIFTS:
- 1/2 rotation in one of the top book cover ad spots for the month of November
- 1 copy of From Old Notebooks, by Evan Lavender-Smith
- 1 SIGNED copy of the new Light Boxes, by Shane Jones
- 1 copy of Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, by Justin Taylor
- 1 copy of AM/PM, by Amelia Gray
- 1 copy of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, by Christopher Higgs
- 1 audiobook version of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney
- some random back issues of The Believer
- a couple of new books from HarperPerennial
- 1 copy of The Evolutionary Revolution, by Lily Hoang
- 1 copy of Changing, by Lily Hoang
- a random assortment of random books from Lily Hoang’s bookshelf
- 1 copy of In the Devil’s Territory, by Kyle Minor
- 5 collector’s itemish backissues of Frostproof Review #2 (includes Kevin Wilson’s story “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth,” novellas by Christopher Coake and Jennifer Spiegel, excerpt from Mark Svenvold’s book-length poem Empire Burlesque, a Molly Peacock sonnet, and reading lists from Stephen Elliott, Jim Shepard, Lee K. Abbott, Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, a water witcher, a Methodist minister, etc., etc., etc.)
- READ MORE >
Justin Taylor—
via Ellen Kennedy’s tumblr, which is rarely updated but always worth checking up on. Did she take these pictures herself? Here’s hoping. I especially like this one, which looks like something tiny that floats near the bottom of the sea:
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A Million Little Top 3’s: The 2009 List of Lists
[12/10/09. Email from Justin:] Hi. I’m putting together a year-end post for HTMLGiant, and I’m soliciting very brief lists from a wide variety of authors, editors and lit-people. If you’re reading this, you’re one of them. I want to make this is as quick and painless as possible, so all I’m asking for is the names of your top three new books that came out this year. You can read “top” as “best” if you like, or as “personal favorite,” or any other way you can think of. You are welcome to offer a few lines in explanation or praise of your choices, but you’re by no means obliged to do so. Also, feel free to pass this along to any friends or colleagues whom you think might want to play too. You (or they) should just email me back sometime in the next few days, week at the outside, with your selections, and I’ll compile everything into one big blog post. It’s really that simple. Feel free to plug your own work, but if there is a salient-seeming fact about your relationship to a book (“I loved ____ so much I published it”) please do mention it. Hope to hear from everyone- and thanks, as always, for your time.
Here is an alphabetical list of the respondents: Kate Ankofski, Claudia Ballard, Blake Butler, Jordan Castro, Heather Christle, Joshua Cohen, Brian DeLeeuw, Stephen Elliott, Rachel Fershleiser, Roxane Gay, Keith Gessen, David Haglund, Christopher Higgs, Jen Hyde & Zachary Sussman (writing together), Steven Karl, Ellen Kennedy, Catherine Lacey, Tao Lin, Christian Lorentzen, Fiona Maazel, Amy McDaniel, Charles McNair, Tony Perez, Michael Schaub, Jeremy Schmall, Ronnie Scott, Matthew Simmons, Zak Smith, Mathias Svalina, Eva Talmadge, Justin Taylor, Drew Toal, Deb Olin Unferth, Mike Young.
Their lists are presented in the same order as their names appear above, and each respondent has a brief bio-tag (not even a note, really) which indicates that person’s most recent publication and/or most relevant-seeming credential. These were written by me, not them. Also, there is no standard formatting. Everything was copy-pasted and some links have been lost. The rule is: if it piques your interest, Google it. Did you need me to tell you that? Anyway, a million thanks to everyone who participated. The list of lists–and all the fun–begins after the jump.
40 Comments
December 16th, 2009 / 12:11 pm
December 16th, 2009 / 12:11 pm