First City Review, edited by Michael Pollock, is in the last few weeks of accepting submissions for the next issue. May 31st is the deadline.( Click here to go to their website). They accept email submissions, they publish an ambitious variety of styles in fiction and poetry and they put out a beautiful journal. Send them your best stuff, people! I plan to.
First City Review: Call for Submissions
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May 7th, 2009 / 1:24 pm
May 7th, 2009 / 1:24 pm
Literary Doppelgangers: Quartet
MICHEL FOUCAULT & CHRISTOPHER LLOYD
Michel Foucault tells us of The Order of Things, which is pretty simple: Back to the Future, Back to the Future II, and Back to the Future III. Jeez, that was easy. Call me a philistine, but I’ll pick those movies any day over freakin’ semiotics. Up until this post, I thought that photo of Lloyd was a Ron Mueck sculpture. In the age of mimesis, everything is suspect.
Vicarious MFA: Home stretch
The Vicarious MFA!
Informal survey: Are writers with MFA’s the only writers who give a damn what people in other MFA programs are reading? If so, thanks to all you non/anti-MFA HTML giant readers who put up with the all this MFA chatter. Here is your last dose of Vicarious MFA hoo-hah.
+ Surprise guest class with Richard Ford!
Before the class, everyone who signed up for it read Indian Uprising by Donald Barthelme, Louis Menand’s New Yorker article about Barthelme , and an interview with Umberto Eco. Richard Ford talked about Barthelme for a little while and we asked him a lot of questions about his writing process, philosophy and ideas about the collage element that is innate in all forms/types of writing. He brought his “notebook” to class, which, in fact, was not a notebook at all. It was a huge, purple, three-ring binder in which he collects quotes, thoughts, facts, research, etc for whatever novel he’s working on at the time. He told us about how he’s dyslexic and how that effects his writing. At one point Ford said, “Rick Moody, who I deeply disrespect, once said something about how there are only two kinds of writers: writers like Hemingway and writers like Beckett. I disagree with that… It’s too narrow a perspective on what a writer can be…Writing is supposed to broaden your world, open things up… Rick is probably a nice boy, he just says silly things.” I got to chat with Ford for a moment afterwards, just to say thanks and hello. I was excited about this because we are both from Mississippi and we’ve both lived in New Orleans, which is the nearest refuge for people born in Mississippi. We talked about New Orleans for a minute, how easy it is to get nostalgic about New Orleans and how we both want to buy houses there.
More Highlights:
+Amy Benson made strawberry-rhubarb pound cake for our last meeting of Non/Fiction. I turned in a monster crazy-weird essay that I will be excited to get her feedback on.
+Last workshop is kicked off with a few bottles of champagne, which went straight to everyones’ heads, loosening a hysteria of honesty. It was a good group, but I will be happy not to have to read anyone else’s first drafts for a while.
Power Quote: One of Harold Bloom’s Hands Clapping Edition
This one’s for my homies who asked for a more detailed commentary on Dickens/Bloom that I don’t have time to offer up this week.
One of the blessings of Dickens’s powerful influence on Kafka is the altogether Borgesian impact of Kafka on our understanding of Dickens.
– The Western Canon, “The Canonical Novel: Dickens’s Bleak House and George Eliot’s Middlemarch“
Wigleaf Top 50/2009
Scott Garson has posted the Wigleaf Top 50 little stories for 2009. Darlin’ Neal, the selecting editor, writes in her introduction:
In choosing the final fifty, I looked for story. I looked for some sort of sense of completion, some sort of narrative movement. What drew me were shapes that offered more than a trick, more than a scene that cries to go on, more than a one-note joke. I discovered pieces, ends in themselves that take my breath away with sorrow or resonant laughter, leave me with lingering memories.
I’m not going to list any names here because I don’t want to type the names out, and I’d feel like I ought to list all fifty names. Many of the names on the list are no surprise (not a bad thing), and there are a few stories on the list from some old pros as well.
New this year (correct me if I’m wrong?) is the long list, the two hundred stories that Scott sent on to Darlin’ Neal to judge. I like having this list and the Top 50; both are a good map of what’s happening right now, a good reading list for those who haven’t caught up yet, like me.
So yes, congratulations to the Top 50ers, and thanks to Scott Garson and Darlin’ Neal for their time/effort.
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May 6th, 2009 / 1:15 pm
May 6th, 2009 / 1:15 pm
Stephen Elliott’s ‘The Adderall Diaries’
Head prognosticator of the ever-lovely Rumpus, one Mr. Stephen Elliott, author of, among other things, the amazing ‘Happy Baby’ that remains in my mind as one of the most brutal and visceral autobiographical novels I’ve read in the last 5 years, is offering folks potentially interested in checking out his new memoir forthcoming from Graywolf:
I have a few advance copies of my forthcoming true-crime/memoir The Adderall Diaries, to give out.
The book will be published in September, but if you send an email to adderall@therumpus.net I might send you an advance copy (I also might not, we’ll have to see how this goes, I’ve only got a couple). Here’s the hitch, if I mail you a book I’ll also email you the address of the next person to send it to. You have a week to read it, then you have to send your copy to the next address. First class postage is $3.04. So this is not totally free.
In your email please include your address and a little bit about yourself. Priority given to people who are verifiably real.
Anybody interested in taking Mr. Elliott’s fine offer up and reviewing the book for us here at the Giant, please contact Stephen and see if you can wrangle a copy, and let me know. :)
Either way, this is one to get excited about.
5 Comments
May 6th, 2009 / 12:58 pm
May 6th, 2009 / 12:58 pm
Music Break: Spoils, by Alasdair Roberts
This isn’t strictly literary, but with a songwriter as smart and lore-versed as Alasdair Roberts, it’s not strictly not literary either. I really dig his new record, Spoils, and go into some detail about same over at the FLAUNT magazine blog. It’s out this week from Drag City. For the uninitiated, there are a few of his songs on his myspace, though none from Spoils. I thought Drag City was giving away a promo mp3 of a Spoils track, but I just checked for it again and can’t find it.
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May 6th, 2009 / 10:01 am
May 6th, 2009 / 10:01 am
Fiction break: Eric Hobsbawm
Leon and I are birthday buddies
Good historians are hard to find. I was awhile ago reading this book Reappraisals by Tony Judt (that book is worth reading for sure), and he wrote this piece on Eric Hobsbawm in which he says:
Hobsbawm doesn’t just know more than other historians. He writes better, too: There is none of the fussy “theorizing” or grandiloquent rhetorical narcissism of some of his younger British colleagues (none of the busy teams of graduate researchers, either—he does his own reading). His style is clean and clear. Like E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Christopher Hill, his erstwhile companions in the British Communist Historians’ Group, Hobsbawm is a master of English prose. He writes intelligible history for literate readers.
No small praise, that. So when I saw a copy of Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 on the discount non-fiction table at the Strand, I dug deep into my linty pockets, dumped a pile of quarters at the register, and cracked open my purchase. The book is the last in a series of four in which Hobsbawm pretty much dissects the cadaver of western civilization to find out how we got where we are (much of it with an endearing pinko slant). So, yes, I’m suggesting that you read both Judt and Hobsbawm if you’re sick of reading the Bleak Houses of the world, but, also, I was thinking of this panel I read about at the PEN World Voices Festival in which they discussed non-fiction and why (or why not) the better examples of it should be considered literature. Fun! Thoughts? I’m looking at you, Orwell.
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May 6th, 2009 / 8:21 am
May 6th, 2009 / 8:21 am
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I used to feel fine
R.E.M frontman Michael Stipe seems keen on auditioning as the fourth member of the Blue Man Group. Tibet is nice and all, but Michael, you’re making people suffer here. Why is it that artists so ‘mature’ in their youth can be so ‘immature’ in their elder years? I use quotes around those words because I don’t fully subscribe to such simple dichotomies, though I do often wonder — what the fuck happens? Is fame that bad?
Literary Doppelgangers: Jonathan Safran Foer and Brian Chase
James Scott points out this doppelganger: Jonathan Safran Foer and Brian Chase, drummer for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
What do you think?
Seems like there’s a missing mole in there somewhere.