Miró Killer Joke Peaks Open Low
1. At Burnaway, an Atlanta arts blog, I’m curating a new column of “writers on art,” which today features Heather Christle on Joan Miró: “I wanted secrets, and I wanted to laugh, so I snipped letters from my head and sorted them by shapes: those which slant, those which curve, those which face left or face right.”
2. At Thought Catalog, Christian Lorentzen writes a long screed for the nonexistence of hipsters, with reasoning including that our generation has never had a good serial killer.
3. At The New York Times, Joshua Cohen turns in a take down on the brand new 1,000 page book from McSweeney’s, Adam Levin’s The Instructions, calling it “a very long joke.” Other readers: yay, nay?
4. At Montevidayo, Johannes Göransson writes about the “ambient violence” of Twin Peaks.
5. Submissions to New York Tyrant are now open.
6. I forgot about this great old music video from Low:
A Happy Decade
Happy birthday, Starcherone Books! One of the coolest, smartest indie presses turns ten today, and to celebrate, they’re having a party-reading in New York tonight, featuring kickass publisher Ted Pelton, Donald Breckenridge, Joshua Cohen, Janet Mitchell, our own Alissa Nutting, and Thad Rutkowski.
Starcherone (start-your-own) Books has published tons of beautiful, novel-pushing, genre-pushing, word-pushing books. They are a force. Love them, buy them, adore adore adore! They deserve it.
Show your thanks: buy a book, or, tell us what your favorite Starcherone book is. My favorites fill up an entire shelf…
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
Dare to be Stupid: on Gaspar Noe’s “Enter the Void”
[Caveat spoiler. Enter this and all voids at your own risk.]
Enter the Void, the new film by Gaspar Noe, is a nearly three hours’ slurry of blur and brightness, punctuated by lucid moments of pornographic violence and/or actual pornography, and informed by exactly two ideas: the first, that everything about a fluorescent light is utterly fascinating; the second, that the only remotely interesting thing about a woman is her tits. Everything else the film has to say–drugs are bad, kind of, but maybe they’re just really cool; fucking your sister, like fucking your best friend’s mom, has its pros and cons; Japan is really shiny and has relatively few Japanese people in it; something something reincarnation–is either so hopelessly garbled or else delivered in such cliched terms (“Rockabye Baby” plinked out on a celeste! A drug dealer who is also a gay rapist!) that the temptation is to think the movie is inviting your laughter. (O, would that it were so!) I saw it last night with Joshua Cohen at the IFC Cinema in New York.
Roundup
Christian Lorentzen does the Malcolm Gladwell.
The Guardian Books Blog on “How Writers Review their Critics.”
Elif Batuman’s epic piece in the NYTimes Magazine on the purgatory of some of Kafka’s papers.
There’s a great piece over at The Millions on what it means to be a “best bookstore” and how, contra the insidious “death of books/bookstores/reading/literacy” meme that we’re all always seeing spread around, there’s actually a lot to be excited about on these fronts. Among the other fun stuff in the piece, is this offhand list of “the top 10 booksellers in America … Stephanie Anderson from WORD, Emily Pullen from Skylight, Michele Filgate from Riverrun, Rachel Fershleiser from Housing Works…”. The article also mentions a crucial point first made–by Rachel F.–on the Housing Works blog, that many of the best bookstores in NYC have opened rather than closed within the last ten years. Counter-meme, anyone?
Every time you think you know Joshua Cohen, he finds something else to surprise you with. Apparently, homeboy has been (or is now?) publishing a new unpublished piece of short fiction every week on his website. Check out the Paragraph for Liu Xaiobo.
And finally, something I was right about. Remember back when we were talking about the suicide of Kevin Morrissey at the VQR? In a comment on that post, I argued that the charges of “workplace bullying” leveled against VQR editor Ted Genoways appeared off-base and reductive. I suggested that people read Emily Bazelon’s Slate reporting on the Phoebe Prince case. Well, a couple of days ago Slate published a big new piece by Bazelon about the VQR, what workplace bullying really is (and isn’t), and how the media made a caricature out of Ted Genoways. You should go read that piece right now.
Fire Beats Art
This morning, I heard a story on NPR about the wildfires in Russia.
Among the stories of the tragic loss of life and home was one about a woman in a small village who attempted to save her house from the flames by standing out front holding up a Russian Orthodox religious icon. One could react to this in a number of ways. This could be an opportunity to deride religious faith or a point in the “God is dead or never was” column. This could be seen as a cautionary tale about the right and wrong kind of fire extinguisher a person should have on hand in their home. Or this could be, for artists, a time to offer an apology.
To the extent that I might or might not be an “artist,” and bearing in mind the fact that, even if I could be considered an “artist,” the community of artists is likely never going to vote me in as their spokesman, I would still like to apologize to this Russian woman for the failure of the religious icon to stop the fire from consuming her house.
I realize that when holding up the icon against the fire, the woman was thinking of it as a lens through which to focus her religious faith, and hoped that through her faith her home would be spared. It was a religious icon being held up to beat back the fire, not, say, a de Kooning print or a copy of Joshua Cohen’s new novel Witz*. But religious proxy or not, it was still a piece of art, and it still failed to save her house.
Frankly, artists should be thanking this woman. She has a—probably misplaced—faith in art**. A faith most artists certainly don’t have***. She tried to hold back the destruction of her home with art and art failed her.
And when art fails, it is because the artist failed.
Go ahead and complain that the woman did not use art as directed. Try to find some clever loophole to absolve yourself of the guilt. Deep down, though, we know what we did. Or what we failed to do, anyway. Shame on us.
Russian lady: we’re sorry****.
* Have you readers heard anything about this book? Anywhere?
** And—possibly misplaced—faith in God. But who am I to judge?
*** Cynical, cynical bunch.
**** And those of us who aren’t should be.
self-love smorgasbord
Hey, let’s just do this once, okay? This picture was emailed to me by the journalist and photographer Alberto Riva, a man I’ve never met. It came with this note- “Hi Justin – I just read your book on a beach in Corsica, and I thought you might like to see a photo.” You thought right, Alberto, and thanks! Alberto’s got a website, and there’s some great stuff on there, including these images of New York, and a talk about photography with Lou Reed.
Matthew Simmons invited me to talk Apocalypse for Hobart. Our conversation is now live (and has been for a while, but I’ve been lazy/away).
I wrote an essay for the “Selling Shorts” series at Beatrice.com on “The Crazy Thought” by David Gates.
I gave this reading list to InDigest magazine.
I participated in a series called “The Great American Novel: An Honor Roll of Fallen Genres.” This is is in the new issue of Canteen (#6) which is available now or very soon. My response is not online, though Tao Lin’s is. Speaking of which, keep an eye peeled for the September Bookforum, which will feature a review of Lin’s latest by local favorite Joshua Cohen. Worlds collide! I’ve got a piece on Matthew Sharpe’s You Were Wrong in the same issue.
And last but not least, all of Brooklyn hails the return of Drew Toal, former Time Out (New York) books guy, erstwhile contributor to this blog, once and future roommate of yours truly–all his shit is in the living room and he is nowhere to be found. Now I am going to go and drink his beer. (UPDATE: That turned out to not be Drew’s beer.) Welcome home!
And to everyone else, thanks for bearing with. We won’t be doing this again anytime soon.
Uncategorized / 51 Comments
September 1st, 2010 / 10:34 pm
September 1st, 2010 / 10:34 pm
Length Matters
On several recent occasions, writers have apologized for sending me “long” stories as if we were exchanging contraband in the form of stories longer than 500 words. To give you a sense of how sad this length sensitivity has gotten, a grand writer apologized for sending me a 3,500 word story. Call me crazy, but a 3,500 word story is not a long story. It is a short short story.
I’ve also heard people complain about the length of Joshua Cohen’s Witz, which at 800 pages is certainly longer than the average book, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, at more than 1,000 pages, as if the length of these books was an insurmountable obstacle.
Let’s All Go Through the Wide Open Gate of Mount Holyoke College to Our Wednesday Roundup
Joshua Cohen on Paper Cuts! This is very exciting. Weirdly, his book wasn’t reviewed on Sunday–I’m holding out for this coming weekend, though.
This is really interesting. Thanks to Rachel Fershleiser for passing it along.
from Jeremy Schmall- the Crimethinc. guide to what to do when you are stopped by a cop.
Zizek Zizeks on the Iceland volcano.
Nathaniel Rich on Ray Bradbury at Slate.
Tao Lin interviewed on Chuck Palahniuk’s The Cult, a website I did not know existed and now am kind of wigged out by. They’ve got their own whole universe over there, apparently, with a writing workshop and tee shirts. Live and let live, I guess. Oh also, if you’re in the city, homeboy’s in an art show on Friday.
Last thing: this month’s Harper’s is fantastic. Readings opens with a commencement speech Barry Hannah gave at Bennington in 2002. Also includes an excerpt from Padgett Powell’s “Manifesto,” the long wild piece that was published in Little Star #1, and a collection of slang terms for methamphetamine. Why not? I don’t know if people realize this, but a subscription to Harper’s costs $16.97. Seriously. That’s it. Newsstand price per issue is $6.95. So basically, if there are decent odds that you might buy an issue of Harper’s three times over the course of a calendar year, you might as well just sign up and have it all the time.
This Wednesday Afternoon in May Triple-shot is brought to you by MIDNIGHT IN NOVEMBER
google image search for "nature is insane"
It is seeyerbreath cold in New York. Also raining. My friend in Denver says they got 3 inches of snow the other day. Dear Mother Nature, WTF!?!?! etc.
Speaking of Mother Nature and WTF, I can’t figure out why Crooks & Liars seems to be the only people to have reported this angle of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill–that the Gulf of Mexico is a major dumping ground for unexploded ordnance (UXOs)–ie bombs and stuff. BP WAS LITERALLY DRILLING IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING MINE FIELD!
Anyway, enough of that. Over at something called Review Fix, Mickey Ehrlich extols the virtues of and provides some contexts for understanding Joshua Cohen’s Witz.
Last November, Sarah Palin spoke to Barbara Walters about the expansion of settlements in Jerusalem: “That population of Israel is going to grow…I don’t think the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.” Israel makes such strange bedfellows. We Jews in America find ourselves building alliances with politicians whose wish is to corral us into the Holy Land, so the Messiah can return, and we sinners may repent or die.
In other news, have you checked out Pop Serial, edited by our own star commenter Stephen Dierks? The magazine can be downloaded for free right here. It features Tao Lin, Joshua “the aforementioned” Cohen, Zachary German, Kendra Grant Malone, I. Fontana, Miles Ross, Donald Futers, Paul Edward Cunningham, and a whole lot more besides. So go get it, yeah?
Speaking of MIDNIGHT, here’s a little culture for nothing extra- What secret ministry do YOU perform?