Saturday Afternoon Links Because Rain Threatens
Robert Lipsyte wrote for the New York Times that boys aren’t reading. The Rejectionist neatly sums up everything that’s troubling about Lipsyte’s piece.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Emily Green writes about how her work was plagiarized.
Anna Clark wrote a lovely essay about writing, necessity, heat, performing the role of writer and more.
That essay was inspired by this week’s Dear Sugar which is also well worth the read. That column is always worth reading.
White Readers Meet Black Authors has a list of fall releases including Percival Everett.
Maud Newton offers a really interesting take on how DFW has stylistically influenced the way we argue on the Internet, and not for the better.
Fuckscapes by Sean Kilpatrick is available for pre-order from Blue Square Press.
My favorite new Tumblr is Fashion It So which takes a close look at the beautiful fashions of Star Trek: TNG.
News of the World of the Day
Stephen Elliott at The Rumpus- “Notes on Book Publishing in a Socially Networked World.” Our main man does some post-game on his Adderall Diaries galley-lending library project. >>One thing to remember: If you don’t write the right book nothing will work. The reader has to connect with the work. I would advise against putting significant time and resources into a work you don’t really believe in.<<
Joann Wypijewski is probably the most incisive and trenchant writer in America on matters of sexuality and sexual politics. In this new piece in The Nation, she talks about the profit-motive behind medicalizing sexual behavior- “Sexual Healing.”
Over at the Barnes & Noble review site, Maud Newton is onto Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. >>Since the publication of her first collection, Self-Help, in 1985, so many readers have identified with Moore’s witty, cynical and yearning failed-relationship stories at a similarly impressionable stage that her writing has become as formative an influence on American fiction as her hero John Updike’s was in an earlier era.<<
Oh, hey, special The Nation bonus: William Deresciewicz on a new biography of Marquez, and this classic by Akiva Gottlieb, a great short piece by him on one of my favorite subjects/bands, Against Me!: “Political Punk: Rage Against the Band.”
Jonathan Baumbach at Maud Newton
not USAirways #1549, from which everyone appears to have safely escaped
I just finished reading this post by Jonathan Baumbach over at Maud Newton’s blog. He talks a little about the founding of FC(2) and then mentions his surprise at how long the collective has lasted. Originally, he had meant for the alternative press to be a ‘stopgap action in a period of emergency.’ He writes though that his assessment of the situation back then was maybe too optimistic, which explains, perhaps, why FC2 has continued so long. I hadn’t realized that the original collective was meant only as a temporary fix, to ‘jostle the publishing establishment into taking more chances with work that was out on the edge.’ But as time passed, Baumbach says, the industry turned more conservative in its tastes, and FC2 was needed more than ever.
Here’s a tiny bit more from the post:
Originality tends to generate difficulty in that it breaks faith with expectation, undermines the prevailing verities of last season’s fashion. Originality, by definition, takes us by surprise.
And:
Commercial publishing tends to court literary work that is a thinly disguised variation on the recognizably artful — last year’s award winner tricked out to seem at once new and safely familiar.
Thanks to Maud Newton for posting this.