Issue 100 | September 2010
"I have zero regrets, Mr. Schaub. There have been not-at-all-great-times during the years, but I would not trade them in for anything. I am blessed to have you, to have the writers, to have Bookslut, to have Berlin, to have Honeybee, to have the life I lead, and there is not a day that I am not aware of it. I somehow constructed the life of my dreams. It may have been an accident, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate it."
by
Jessa Crispin and Michael Schaub
The Nobel Prize is the oldest literary prize in the world. But it is also more than that. It is a fingerprint, a lingering and traceable mark on the history of literature. As part of the Nobel Reprise, the writers Pauls Toutonghi and Ben Greenman have set out to read and reflect upon at least one book by every Nobelist, in letters. Letters are a way that books stay alive; a conversation, about them, and their ideas, in dialogue on the page.
by
Ben Greenman and Pauls Toutonghi
I spent my birthday in a beautiful restaurant in Soho with flickering light everywhere and a dark pool of floating flowers, eating an endless tasting menu that made me tired, drinking a passion fruit cocktail. Ten or fifteen years ago I felt like I had wandered off the path. Now I am trying to be open to surprises. It was my New Year’s resolution. I want to be open to surprises and maybe even create some. If you start looking around, surreality trumps reality every time. Except, I’m not really so sure where I am right now.
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"It’s good to be self-critical, and I think you have to be if you’re going to write about yourself -- that’s the key to autobiographical writing that’s not incredibly obnoxious. Autobiographical writing is often faulted for being self-absorbed, but I think the people who write it are often not intrinsically self-aware. There’s a difference between being self-involved and self-aware. And that’s an area where I feel like my acting background has actually really helped, being able to look at myself as a character."
by
Eryn Loeb
"We once thought -- now that God is dead -- the rise of machines and technology offered us the potential to become God, a form of transcendence we have always wanted to achieve, but due to technology’s meteoric rise throughout modernity this is now a flagrant impossibility because of the distance between us. There’s nowhere for us to go now. We are stranded. We have been marooned."
by
Michele Filgate
And so it is with reading’s double delights. In perfect passages, when we encounter an everyday emotion or situation, we are invited to know ourselves, and others, better; when we bump up against the unfamiliar, perhaps even the uneasy-making, we are ushered to the threshold of a new perspective.
by
Barbara J. King
"Life is always awkward. I would never value a momentary unawkwardness for the sake of a poem. Because I think I think there is a power in it. And a poem is a place in life where any person can be powerful, so why not?"
by
Elizabeth Hildreth
"Space travel has changed so much. Besides getting multi-generational and involving longer, longer periods of people confined in the capsules and stations, it has gotten [some] revitalized press after a long dormancy, and I figured people would want to know about these everyday, mundane matters, taking place in such an exotic locale."
by
Richard Wirick and Mira-Lani Bernard
"I remember when we were in college you used to rant about writers who didn’t pay enough attention to sentences, comparing them to carpenters who showed up to work without their toolbox. I’m a late convert to that way of thinking, but a convert I am."
by
Snowden Wright
Sex is still repressed, we don’t allow it to be what it is: this beautiful, scary thing that opens up pieces of yourself -- suddenly you are five and embarrassed, or 10 and embarrassing someone. I think many contemporary writers are creating an honest depiction of sex, addressing the bigness of it, and, yes, how sex is good, but also how not-sex is good. And why can't being naked and laying on someone “count” as sex, anyway?
by
Rachel Rabbit White
"We are all of the same tribe. We all wear the same markings. The book is, in one way, a family portrait: a portrait of our tribe. There are obviously many people missing from this portrait, but that makes sense to me. Someone is always missing."
by
Blake Butler
"I have always believed that my poems were little TV commercials, ultimately. I think that is what I aspire to because I want them to be accessible to everyone. It would be fantastic if poems could take the place of television. It would be fantastic if the experience of watching TV and reading a poem was similar. In a way, it is."
by
Elizabeth Hildreth
By teaching us how to spot surprising juxtapositions, how to discover sublimated implications in the juxtapositions, and how to separate the images, poetry provides skills we need to figure out which politicians actually support our beliefs and what products actually meet our needs and wants. Reading poetry, alone, won't conquer this anti-rhetorical technique, but it could help, and because it could help, I think poets have a responsibility to do whatever it takes to push poetry to the forefront of the American reading consciousness.
by
Josh Cook
"Authors are usually more introspective -- I think San Francisco might be an exception to that, but a lot of them are quieter thinkers, and their disposition is not necessarily to go out and ring the bell. And I would just say, you know, try new things. This is a time when publishing hasn’t really evolved like other industries. And I think the book is a terrific art form. But I think we’re looking at a generation that expects more bells and whistles."
by
Evan Karp
