“Belief: An Essay” by Jamie Iredell
The always awesome thought-space continent. has an excerpt from Jamie Iredell’s forthcoming nonfiction book, Last Mass, a memoir about growing up as a Catholic in California, and about the Spanish missionaries who first settled the state.
I can only imagine how golden the whole book will be, given that this brief excerpt covers dinosaurs, hallucinogens, Sir Francis Drake, Wallace Stevens, quantum physics, The Sound of Music, and the Devil, just to name a few. Here’s a snippet, then check out the whole thing:
My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography. After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word—pornography.
Boudinot! An Appreciation by Aaron Burch
[Massive Novel Alert #2! Here’s a Boudinot appreciation, a little bit of online journal history, and a “This Is Your Life,” sort of piece by Mr. Aaron Burch, the man behind the unstoppable Hobart journal. The occasion for this appreciation? The publication of Ryan Boudinot’s stellar new novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife.]
In 2003, I think it was, I still lived in Seattle. I’d moved away, and then moved back, and had been doing Hobart for a couple of years. I’d just put out #3, a joint issue with Monkeybicycle, because they (Steven Seighman and Shya Scanlon) were also on their third issue, and we were all in Seattle, and none of us really knew what we were doing, but we were figuring it out and everything seemed new and exciting. And readings! Steven and Shya started a Monkeybike reading series and brought together people in and around the northwest (Kevin Sampsell! Matthew Simmons! Ed Page! Sean Carman! Matthew Stadler! Adam Voith!) and we formed something of a lit community, reading with each other, hanging out and drinking, seeing one another at other readings – at Elliott Bay or University Bookstore or various cafes and bars and even a makeshift garage or warehouse or someone’s living room. READ MORE >
The Crow Arts Manor Needs the Classics.
The Crow Arts Manor—a new-ish writing endeavor in Portland that hosts readings and sets up workshops with Massive folks like Kevin Sampsell, Emily Kendal Frey, Zachary Schomburg, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Monica Drake as instructors—is gathering a library. Here’s a note I got from the director, Sid Miller:
Crow Arts Manor, located in a Northeast Portland, is a 501c3 non-profits writing center, that provides low costclasses and workshop. Over the last 9 months we’ve been hard at work assembling a literary library. Through donations we’ve been able to obtain a large amount of current literary journals, magazines, books of poetry, short fiction and criticism. But it’s been difficult to obtain the classics, from writers going back to Whitman reaching to the end of last century. So now we’re asking the public for help. We’re looking for folks willing to donate a title or more from their own personal library. Our library will be open to the public and will be a tool for local writers, as well as local schools and non-profit organizations. It will be a place to read, write, and engage with other writers. We will never charge a fee for use of the library. If you are willing to donate, we are happy to send you a present, a past copy of Burnside Review (our partner). Please e-mail me if you are interested in helping.
sid@crowmanor.org
Help ’em out?
Whoa: PRISM Index and What You Will
Here I have two great publications with incredible design and construction. They are 1) Prism Index, a magazine in its second issue, edited by Jeffrey Bowers, and 2) What You Will, a chapbook of poems by Kyle Schlesinger and published by NewLights Press.
They are both amazing — unbelievable, really, in their existence. It’s remarkable that human beings can do this stuff.
One example of the future tense is “Future Tense Books will do amazing things for the next 20 years too”
20 years is a long time. Future Tense Books, run by Kevin Sampsell, has been putting books out for 20 years. These books are about things like talking to the moon and petting whale carcasses. They’re about finally figuring out what it means to belong to what you are, which is that it means you’re a freak. They’re about when your son loves Spiderman. They’re about pictures of ceiling fans in different emotional states. They’re also Gary Lutz, Zoe Trope, Elizabeth Ellen, Shane Allison, Chloe Caldwell, and 20 years worth of folks all the other peppermint cans were too freaked out to publish.
Along with putting out these books, Kevin Sampsell has also been, for 10 of those 20 years, single-handedly curating the most amazing small press cave at Powell’s in Portland, OR. Occupy Indie Lit is a leaderless casserole, except Kevin is probably the one who lent us the stove. He’s been around. He’s helped everybody. He’s sexy. He’s the shit. All of which is to say: do you want a cake maybe? Do you want someone to write a ukelele song for you maybe? Do you want incentive perks, I mean? Most importantly: do you want to support a press that’s been around 20 years and is now running its first ever official fundraiser to help push itself to the next level, literally shank anything depressing you can think of about “the state of publishing,” and take over the world? Well then go here. Help the Future of Future Tense.
6 Books: Maggie Nelson on Nonfiction
This is Part III in a series where I ask writers I like for 6 book recommendations according to some loose guideline. Part I is here; Part II is here. This week is another installment on nonfiction, this time brought to us by Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets (Wave Books), the forthcoming The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton), and five other books of poetry, criticism, and essay.1. My Parents, Herve Guilbert, trans. Liz Heron
The back of my book calls this a blend of fiction and autobiography; I read it simply as a great example of what some non-Americans would call “life writing.” Guibert—a French writer and photographer who died of AIDS at 36—here gives an astonishingly weird account of how his parents “divided up the ownership of [his] body.” “Something about this story is not right,” he says about his aunt’s faulty account of his circumcision—and indeed, Guibert’s book is blessedly not right in the most compelling of ways.
2. The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, Eileen Myles
A tour de force of major and minor nonfiction jewels by Myles, one of the world’s most important living writers. Not only a rocking example of what art criticism, or “vernacular scholarship,” could be, but also a radical, casual act of canon/world re-creation, one which includes Nicole Eisenman, Sadie Benning, Peggy Ahwesh, Daniel Day Lewis, Ann Lauterbach, William Pope.L, and Bjork, among others.
3. A Place to Live, and Other Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg, trans. Lynne Sharon Schwartz.
I’m utterly entranced by Ginzburg’s style—her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay-things-bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, and clear. Her 1944 essay “Winter in the Abruzzi,” a 6-page account of the months she and her family spent in exile, directly before the torture and murder of her husband by Fascist forces in Italy, is a punch-you-in-the-stomach-with-grief-and-beauty masterpiece.
4. Ventrakl, Christian Hawkey
Is Ventrakl nonfiction? “Documentary Poetics”? Who cares—and I would hesitate to cast about for magic-stealing phrases which might detract from Hawkey’s rich investigation of the life and work of German poet Georg Trakl. Hawkey approaches his subjectfrom every angle under the sun, ever-deepening the stakes of identification and translation, ever-reveling in the glory of strange & beautiful language.
It’s Weird That People Think That That’s Weird: An Interview with Jamie Iredell
Earlier this year saw the release of Jamie Iredell’s second book, The Book of Freaks, from Future Tense Press, on the heels of his much beloved Prose: Poetry, A Novel. Essentially an encyclopedia-style catalog of human oddities and the author’s wild ruminations on everything from Russians to People Named Spencer and Their Wives, the whole assemblage works as a collage you can dip in and out of with immediate pleasure, but also manages to construct among its pieces a hybrid narrative that is truly singularly Iredellian. Over the past several weeks, Jamie was kind enough to take some time to talk about some of the manners of the book with me via email.
– – –
BB: Having published your first book that was largely autobiographical, but in some ways also a book full of freaks, how did you end beginning work on an actual, encyclopedia-styled Book of Freaks?
JI: I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it at all, in that I wasn’t thinking “I’m writing a book.” I was just writing shit mostly in the Notes App on my iPhone. Basically talking shit. When I thought something was funny or fucked or whatever, I’d write about it, and then in rewriting I’d make it better. Eventually I saw themes developing. I caught a bunch of these A&E shows about obese people, or folks with other debilitating conditions, like this woman with one part of her body (legs) growing out of control her entire life, so her legs were all fucked up huge while the rest of her was normal. Then I figured, if there’s something interesting about those people then there’s something equally interesting about Mexicans, or people who purposely style their hair into fauxhawks.
“Kill me outright with looks” : 139 Books I Read in 2010
MacGyver, that sexy-bellied genie show, and the show about California highway cops with the weirdly lowercase i—all of these television shows ran 139 episodes. In 2010, I read 139 books. I mean, I think I did. Most chapbooks I didn’t include in this list, even really good ones, so there’s that. Also there’s always an also, so who knows? Here are 139 books I probably read this year and what I spontaneously remember of them. As a bonus, I am sometimes unexpectedly or tangentially “mean-ish” in my notes, so if you have an idea of me as being “unable to be mean,” maybe this will change your mind (probably not): READ MORE >
I Like What The Hell Is Going On Over Here
The Birdsong Collective and Micropress is having a contest: $50 to the winner, plus some other junk for your trunk (publication in the zine, &c). Deadline is early next month so hurry the chop up! Only catch, I suppose, is you have to be in the city of New York for their reading in mid-December. Include me out, but guess what? No reader’s fee! That’s because it’s a contest, not a fundraiser! That’s good!
If you’re in Portland tonight, Future Tense is celebrating their 20th birthday! Special guests include Zachary Schomburg, Elizabeth Ellen, and Chelsea Martin! I wish I were there, Kevin Sampsell is a super-sweet dude.
You don’t need to make up a stupid name for yr witch house and/or chill wave band/book/film/mixtape, just let this thang do it for you, right? Duh. Don’t know what I’m talking about? That’s perfectly alright.
A bonus level for “Return of the Quack” (videogame based on Matt Furie’s arts) is available for to play online. And the full game is available in Giant Robot 67. Think I’m gonna wander over to the store today for to get mine own. $5 means the price is right.
WORD RIOT HAVIN’ A CONTEST
contest!
Yo! Word Riot, publisher of me (oh and some other folks, like Mike Young and Paula Bomer and Kevin Sampsell), is having a contest. THREE contests. Poetry, flash fiction and short story. The winner of each will receive half the contest money (from their respective individual contest, I assume) and be published in the WR 10th anniversary anthology. They’ve also opened up submissions for the WR 10th anniversary anthology from authors previously published on the site. More info here: http://www.wordriot.org/archives/2019. I just got a galley of Paula Bomer’s book Baby this week and I’m gonna read it ASAP, like as soon as I finished this amazing Aldous Huxley book The Devils of Loudun that I got from the library. (Read this shit, it’s so good!)