kathryn regina is curating the next two weeks at wunderkammer. she will be posting pieces from a project she supervised, where a group of writers submitted a childhood picture, then another writer wrote about that picture.
go here to check out the first intallment, featuring writing by chris killen.
Again, some bits from the Sonora Review DFW Tribute Issue, which I’m still reading through; this time I’ve excerpted Rick Moody’s interview of Michael Pietsch, who edited Infinite Jest while at Little, Brown. The whole interview is interesting, as Pietsch talks about how he acquired IJ, how he and Wallace worked together to edit it, and how ‘it felt as if [they’d] published a book that mattered, and that would last.’ Pietsch calls it ‘one of the great thrills’ of his working life.
Of the editing process, Pietsch says that ‘every decision was David’s. I made suggestions and recommendations and tried to make the reasons for them as clear as possible. But every change was his.’
After the jump, you’ll find some responses Wallace made to Pietsch’s requests for cuts.
George Carlin has short essay about how common it is for people to misidentify coincidence as irony.
“Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence. If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. If Barry Bonds attains lifetime statistics identical to his father’s it will not be ironic. It will be a coincidence. Irony is “a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result.”
Not irony. He goes on:
If a Kurd, after surviving bloody battle with Saddam Hussein’s army and a long, difficult escape through the mountains, is crushed and killed by a parachute drop of humanitarian aid, that, my friend, is irony writ large.
Irony.
And then there are those who think something is ironic when it is neither ironic nor coincidental. The last line of this news story about a murder/suicide involving a woman best known for bringing a loaded gun to her little girl’s soccer game : ‘”It’s shocking,” Weisberg said of the shooting. “And sadly ironic.”‘
But this is not irony. This is not coincidence. This is a Chekhovian certainty.
“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
Is an Asian who has never seen Asia more equipped to write about Asia than a not Asian? Furthermore, is an Asian who grew up and spent his or her whole life in Asia more equipped to write about Asia than a not Asian?
Over at The Nation, Scott Saul makes the case for Eliot Weinberger’s new collection of essays.
The pieces in Oranges and Peanuts for Sale cover a wide range of topics–the arts under the Bush administration, Obama’s presidential campaign, ancient and contemporary Chinese poetry, the color blue, exoticism, the relationship between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz–but are knit together by a sensibility that prizes exactitude in its formulations yet is open to the unpredictable complications of the larger world. Put another way: weak prose and parochialism are two of Weinberger’s chief enemies. One of the delights of reading his essays is that they reveal the interconnections between the two; the Wittgensteinian idea that the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world becomes, in his hands, a tool for revealing the blind spots common to our culture.
I’m sold.
There are all kinds of how-to books out there about writing focusing on the craft both broadly and narrowly. What I don’t see are a lot of books or other resources out there for how to start and sustain a literary magazine.
i enjoyed reading this story by kevin wilson. i also enjoyed the apple i just ate. in conclusion, if you are looking for two enjoyable things, there is this story by kevin wilson, or the apple that i just ate.
Jacques Derrida
Alejandro Jodorowsky
2 Douchebags
Bad book titles seem harder than good book titles. What’s the worst title of a book you ever heard?
