February 19, 1917.
Today read Hermann und Dorothea, passages from Richter’s Memoirs, looked at pictures by him, and finally read a scene from Hauptmann’s Griselda. For the brief span of the next hour am a different person. True, all prospects as misty as ever, but pictures in the mist now different. The man in heavy boots I have put on today for the first time (they were originally intended for military service) is a different person.
–The First Notebook
Justin Dobbs tipped us off that The Rumpus had published last week a nice review of Shane Jones’ Light Boxes. Jovanovic writes:
Jones makes use of ambiguity and possibility in the fabulist tradition of Gabriel García Márquez, but Light Boxes should not be considered a magic-realist novel. The sidereal reality of Thaddeus and The Solution is not simply one where magical elements are introduced into ordinary settings, like the man vomiting rabbits into flowerpots in Julio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” (though Thaddeus does vomit ice cubes)—in Jones’s novel there are few touchstones to the world as we know it. Light Boxes partakes in the traditions of folklore, archetypal myth, and oral history, a pedigree reflected in its images and descriptions. Clouds have legs and shoulders. They are shaped like a hand and can fall apart like wet paper.
Dobbs’ email reminds me that I need to read The Rumpus more, because likely I’ll find good stuff over there, such as this blog post by Deb Olin Unferth on Stanley Crawford’s The Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine.
If I had to make a small, partial statement here about book reviewing, I’d say this: I find that the most effective reviews (those that affect me most, I mean) tend to be the reviews that make me remember how much I enjoyed reading a certain book (for some reason, I rarely read reviews of books I haven’t yet read?). And I’m using ‘reviews’ here in the loosest sense. Jovanovic’s review and Unferth’s blog post both do this. I enjoy reading another’s telling of his or her experience of a book and I enjoy the connections that telling ignites in my head.
Is this a stupidly simple appreciation of book reviews? Probably.
The new issue of The Daily Moth, the nifty two-page pdf journal that appears only via email and anything but daily, is now out. For our previous Moth coverage (including downloads of issues 1-3) click here. I tried to upload the new one for all of you, but apparently I can’t post files larger than 2mb, and the new issue is 2.4. So if you want it, you’ll need to get yourself added to the email list, which I think you can do by writing to thedailymoth at gee male dockom.
It’s like Milo & Otis meets The Hunt for Red October! As I read about Napoleon and Mollie and all the rest of the barnyard communards, I begin to wonder: This isn’t really just about talking animals, is it? It’s, like, a metaphor or something, right? Touché, Mr. Orwell.
Allison Glock’s article “I Blame Blogs” at the Poetry Foundation says two things: 1) blogs are bad and people who blog are bad, and 2) poetry is good and people who write poetry are good. (Of course, she doesn’t really say ‘bad’ or ‘good,’ but you can tell from the derisive rhetoric this is some kind of ‘moral’ issue with her.) She says that poetry does for the world what blogs fail to do, which is fine an all, but she’s just so mean about it:
[…] blogs inevitably activate our baser human instincts—narcissism, vanity, schadenfreude. They offer the petty, cheap thrill of perceived superiority or released vitriol. How easy it is to tap tap tap your indignation and post, post, post into the universe, where it will velcro to the indignation of others, all fusing into a smug, sticky mess and not much else in the end.
Rauan Klassnik recently lived through and posted up an interview with http://rauanklassnik.blogspot.com/2009/05/eating-kafka-etc-interview-with-ca.htmlCAConrad re his wonderful book of poems The Book of Frank. http://BOOKofFRANK.blogspot.com
After all the dust had settled and all the fluids dried (blood, cum, sweat, disgust and hate, etc, etc) they went at it again.
Here, then, is the 2nd interview : Eating, Kafka II
This is the Bio that CAConrad provided:
CAConrad is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a forthcoming collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Books, 2010). CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He invites you to visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.comand also with his friends at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com
Here is the sixth response to my influences post. The respondent is Barry Graham. He chose Christopher Kennedy’s Trouble with the Machine.
Prompts:
1) Pick one of the pieces you chose and describe the thing about it that seems particularly innovative about it.
2) Tell me what changed about your writing because of that innovation.
Answers after the jump: READ MORE >
Night Train just published this excellent short short story (click here to read it) by some man named Nathan Graziano (website here). Rusty Barnes over at Night Train does such a good job. I bow down to Rusty. I will add that I like these characters so much I hope he turns it into a longer story. Does that make any sense? Thank you.
To enter, simply email me a short description of your favorite independent book store. Make sure to include the city and state it’s located in, and why it’s your fav. Also include your mailing address (sorry, no entrants outside the U.S. and Canada, and no PO boxes) and make the subject line Conversational Reading May Contest.
I’ll pick five winners at random and announce here next Friday.
Here are the books:
1. B as in Beauty By Alberto Ferreras
2. Into the Beautiful North By Luis Urrea
3. Hungry Woman in Paris By Josefina Lopez
4. The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos By Margaret Mascarenhas
5. Houston, We Have a Problema By Gwendolyn Zepeda
I’m not sure if he’ll post all of the entries, but I hope he does. I enjoyed reading the Bookstores Category at Maud Newton, so it would be nice to have more of that, I think. After the jump, some memories of my favorite used bookstore.
For no particular reason, Family Guy has just done an episode of their own adaptations of Stephen King stories. I watched the episode on hulu yesterday. It won’t stay up there too long, since they only have 5 episodes at any given time, but I think it just went up. The Family Guy episode follows the basic pattern set by the Simpsons’s annual Treehouse of Horror specials, only without the peg to Halloween. The only thing about this that’s a bummer is that they parody the movies made out of the books, rather than the books themselves. Given that the guy is one of the best-selling writers on the planet, it stands to reason that they could have snagged at least ONE of his unfilmed stories to send up. Oh well. The first one, a parody of Stand By Me (published as “The Body” in King’s novella-collection Different Seasons) is definitely the strongest of the three. The second one is a parody of Misery with Brian as the kidnapped writer and Stewie as Annie Wilkes, and the last one is a pretty faithful re-creation of The Shawshank Redemption (originally published as “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, also in Different Seasons). Fun fact: three out of the four novellas in different seasons have been made into films. The third is “Apt Pupil,” about a kid who discovers his neighbor is an ex-Nazi, but instead of turning him in blackmails him and then becomes his sort of weird partner in crime. The movie had Brad Renfro, I think. The last story in the collection, “The Breathing Method,” is the only one not to have been adapted, and odds are against its ever being done. It’s understated, but basically weird as hell– a sort of drawing room ghost story with some weird Lovecraft shout-outs tossed in for good measure.