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5 noggles of rye

1.) Every editor for every Best American series 2010 is a white guy.

2.) I stumbled across this Julia Harris blog. Pretty ordinary, but I was amused by the sidebar Percival Everett–“cocky writer of many books– hate. Julia needs to drop by for Mean Week.

3.) I have been blinking into some of the Xbox games everyone here suggested. I notice they keep asking me to make ethical decisions. Is that the new trend in games, or what makes them “literary”? The Call of Duty crazy in that scope clarity makes human look human and then you bring the rain/pain from high above like god or government. Little green people scurrying. I feel excited and dirty while playing. Maybe the point?

4.) A powerful article on violence, women and violence, literature and women and men and violence. Smart.

5.) Snow loses its beauty.

Justin Taylor—

This is what it looks like where I live right now. Readings were canceled tonight. Schools are closed tomorrow. I uploaded a few more pics here, if anyone wants to see them.

Matthew Simmons

Funny conservative poetry: a contest

For the most part, conservatives do horrible political satire. Ahem. Ahem. Ahem.

Browsing our sales table today, I found a book by a National Review contributing editor named W.H. von Dreele. It’s a book of poems. “Funny” poems. It’s called There’s Something About a Liberal (Arlington House Press, 1970). Here’s one:

Dr. Goldwater, Call Surgery

Although I live in New York State,
I’d cheerfully accept my fate
If Barry sawed the seaboard off
And watched us vanish in a trough.

New York is full of liberals. Hah!

Yeah. Well. How about this:

Repression, Anyone?

Take me back to boola-boola;
Row me to the Raritan
Strum a uke for dear old Duke;
Raccoon it, on rattan.
Tired watching campus cuties
Brawling for their next degree.
Sock ’em up and lock ’em up.
Then throw away the key.

Really stuck it to those campus radicals, there. I’m glad those kids got shot at Kent State.

Also in the book? At least two Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick poems. Which I think we all know is a classy thing to write funny doggerel about, right?

This book calls for a contest, I think.

What say we help ’em out. We’re writers. Some of us are probably funny. If you are a liberal, drink deep from your well of self-loathing. If you are a conservative, bump your game up a little. Write me a funny, conservative-leaning satire in verse. Best poem gets a copy of There’s Something About a Liberal AND a copy of Ariana Reines book of slaughterhouse poems, The Cow. (Balance.)

Go.

Contests / 25 Comments
February 25th, 2010 / 9:07 pm

Roxane Gay

Our Submission Need Not Be Guided

Unsaid 4 has been discussed here before and I’m going to discuss it again. The magazine is fairly new to me and after reading all the glowing reviews of the fourth issue, in particular, I was really intrigued but that intrigue was coupled with a dash of skepticism that was short-lived once I began reading. From the very first story, Unsaid had my attention. There is a breathtaking range of writing in this issue and as I read, I would fold the corners of every page that had some really interesting turn of phrase. By the time I reached the end of the massive, 504 pp. issue, more than half of the book’s pages were folded (See Figure 1). I was not familiar with most of the writers in the issue so it was also great to be introduced to new (to me) writers and writing styles. A lot of the content from this issue is online at the Unsaid website and I highly recommend checking the magazine out if you haven’t already.

Kevin Sampsell Week (5): Unedited Cover

The original cover for A Common Pornography included “Hank,” a harness compatible silicone flesh-tone (Caucasian, wtf!) dildo resting in its intended vector on a retro 70s wool lounge chair. Sampsell, who gave up minimalism when they said “negate the wieners,” propagated his living quarters with various intra-orifice objects, though he prefers to name them after country singers. “Johnny Cash,” a real doll who looks strikingly like, well, Johnny Cash, is not pictured, but lies supine on the floor outside of the camera’s frame. Thanks to Sampsell, Cash’s plastic sphincter is now a “ring of fire.” Jonathan Ames, as his blurb will tell you, calls the book “heartbreaking”; what he fails to mention is that the heart is not the only thing being broken — so if Sampsell should sit down with a grimace for his next interview, please note that it is not any qualms of the mind which cause such facial strain, but rather tribulations of a more bodily, self-inflicted sort.

Author Spotlight / 22 Comments
February 25th, 2010 / 3:09 pm

Justin Taylor

Let’s All Love Molly Young

In fact, some of us already do. I know I have linked/mentioned her before, but it feels like this is the right time to make things official, and so I invite everyone to join me in declaring our Official Love of Molly Young. But just what is it that we love? Well…

Here she is at the Poetry Foundation (thanks for the link, Travis), writing on Frederick Seidel.

Like that of Miller and Bukowski, Seidel’s style is one of incriminating self-exposure coupled with an exacting (and therefore imitable) aesthetic. But here’s a funny thing. Writing a poem about lust, pride, imprudence—about ordering a call girl or staying at “literally the most expensive hotel in the world” or racing a bike at 200 mph—has a way of neutralizing the unpleasantness of that vice. To write a good poem about an ugly thing, as Seidel does often, is not to write an ugly poem.

And on Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder.

Romanticism as a cultural force, Holmes points out, is generally regarded as “hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity.” Yet both pursuits followed the same imaginative principles and notions of wonder that fueled their advancements, and it is Holmes’s contention that a Romantic science exists in the same sense as a Romantic poetry, and both flourished during what he calls the Age of Wonder.

You can also find her all over This Recording, and n+1 (including “Kickstart my Heart,” the adderall in the Ivys piece, and a more recent double-review of Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds and a Hefner biography) and she tumbles! And she collaborates on art books. The new one is called TROUBLESHOOTING . It also says she blogs for Urban Outfitters, but I didn’t actually click that one. Instead I clicked on “Rules on Writing” at More Intelligent Life. And now I know the rule: which is there is no rule, which is just what I’d always hoped. Molly!

Author Spotlight / 420 Comments
February 25th, 2010 / 2:38 pm

Amy McDaniel—

Yoko Ono answers questions posed by her twitter followers. Some are funny, like

p_oem: If I were a wave would you surf me? Ono: If I saw a big wavelike you, I will flee

Others are dumb, like

sugarspeak: Who is your favorite female, contemporary poet? Ono: I don’t read poetry. I imagine.

Blake Butler—

Are you going to AWP? Why for?

156

Blake Butler—

1. Another excellent interview by Kimball at the Faster Times with Christopher Higgs.
2. Artifice Magazine is selling a special edition of their first issue, as well as beautiful screenprint illustrations of the works inside it.
3. The most majestic Matt Jasper’s Moth Moon is now live on sale, some of which you may have seen, or should now, in his chapbook from Publishing Genius.

Blake Butler

Kevin Sampsell Week (4): A Common Interview by Michael Kimball

Kevin Sampsell lives in Portland, Oregon and works at Powell’s Books. He started the press, Future Tense Books, in 1990 and has published many writers including Mike Topp, Zoe Trope, Chelsea Martin, Susannah Breslin, Elizabeth Ellen, and Claudia Smith. His own books include Portland Noir (as editor), Creamy Bullets, and A Common Pornography. Harper’s Magazine says, “Sampsell’s talent for observing the ordinary….is perhaps best displayed in chronicling the cringing inelegance of adolescent sexuality: the embarrassing hookups, the acne-cream-flavored kisses, the obsession with pornography, and the preoccupation with discarding one’s virginity.” And Jonathan Ames says, “This is the kind of book where you want to thank the author for helping you feel less alone with being alive.”

Michael Kimball: One of the most striking things about A Common Pornography is the way you lay yourself bare on the page. There are so many awkward, funny, difficult, honest, and maybe embarrassing episodes in the book. How did you get to a place where you were able to do that and what was your mindset as you approached each episode (maybe especially as compared to your mindset writing fiction)?

Kevin Sampsell: It’s mainly a matter of time going by. I’m 42 now. You just get to the point where you don’t really care if other people are bothered or feel uncomfortable with whatever you’re writing. I always think it’s weird when people say, ‘I didn’t like this book because it was so depressing or so dirty.’ I don’t think an author should treat readers like children, or like they have to protect the reader. Personally though, it was hard sometimes to let go of some of these things that I didn’t tell anyone about. I didn’t even tell my girlfriend, now my fiancé, about the prostitute stuff until a couple of years ago. The dilemma I think most writers have is that they don’t care about embarrassing themselves but they do worry about how their family or co-workers or lovers will react.

Compared to fiction, it’s maybe a little harder. At least with fiction you can say to your mom or whomever, ‘Oh, I just made that up.’