In the magazine
June 2008
- An Interview with Jeff Warren
- The Banality of Eva: Angela Lambert's Biography of Hitler's Mistress
- An Interview with Nobuko Takagi
- An Interview with Rivka Galchen
- A Winter's Tale of Icy Light, and Justice, in New York City
- The Book House in Dinkytown: An Interview with Kristen Eide-Tollefson
- It's Never Too Late to Join the Circus: On Marie Carter's The Trapeze Diaries
July 03, 2008
Did Robert Graves steal from his mistress, Laura Riding Jackson? Mark Jacobs says yes: "Between 1926 and 1939, he was learning from her what she was doing and thinking," Dr Jacobs said. "He was taking her ideas, her research, he was simply shovelling it in to his own books.... She left her manuscript in Majorca. She later wrote to him [Graves] and told him to burn the manuscript. We now know that he didn't. It all appeared in dribble form in The White Goddess. He used it for his own ends without mentioning it to her. She only found out in the 1950s."
Relevant to last week's discussion of poetry & war: John Tipton has a new translation of Ajax-goes-to-Iraq: Tipton, who is highly conscious of the resonances of Sophocles' play with the current conflict in Iraq, includes a number of anachronisms, which anchor the play firmly in the present. For instance, his Ajax kills himself with Hector's gun, not his sword (a distracting mistake is that this Ajax also claims to be killed with "my own weapon," rather than simply "self-killed"); the Chorus compares Ajax to "a fast aircraft" and meditates on "the statistics of missiles." There are more obscenities than the conventions of Greek tragedy would have allowed: when Ajax realizes that he has "murdered farm animals" instead of soldiers, he shouts "Fuck. FUCK!" These details make it clear that we are to see these soldiers as modern combatants, struggling with the physical realities of modern warfare. (Via Philip Metres, who is I think too quick to identify Ajax & Achilles as sufferers of PTSD . . . .)
I commend to you PrimatePoetics, in which "Great apes using human language are creating a new literature": We are using the term poetry in a special sense. Poetry is a state of language in which we can't be sure to recognize it if we see it. Notice that our definition rejects as poetry most of the stuff written in broken lines which passes for poetry today. The very fact that there is still furious debate about the very existence of ape language shows that the language is still in its poetic phase.
Seth Abrams on the state of small poetry presses: out of the one hundred independent publishers of poetry in the United States I researched, I can only say for certain that two of them offer no-fee year-round readings of unsolicited full manuscripts.
Tess Taylor has a poem, "World's End: North of San Francisco," in Guernica: Here at the continent’s end, fortifications /linger for the end of the world. They greet / each California morning, these barracks in the fog.
Let me send American readers off for the holiday weekend with a beach-reading recommendation: Ciaran Carson's translation of The Táin, which came out in the US in February. The Táin is usually described as the Irish Beowulf--and there is *lots* of heroic violence, but also quick wit and raunchy fun for all! Screw Batman--I want to see Cú Chulainn: In that great massacre on Muirthemne Plain Cú Chulainn slew seven score and ten kings as well as innumerable dogs and horses, women and children, not to mention underlings and rabble; and not one man in three escaped without a staved head, or a broken leg, or a burst eye, or without being scarred for life in some way. And Cú Chulainn came away from that encounter without so much as a scrape or scratch on himself, or his man, or his horses.
Poet and Bookslut contributor Daniel Nester looks at “parodeities": rock songs with lyrics altered to make them Christian.
A perfect example of rock parody-as-study guide is “Learn Some Deuteronomy,” perhaps my favorite ApologetiX song. The tune is Def Leppard’s 1987 hit “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” said to be the greatest strip club song of all time. Here’s ApologetiX’s chorus:
Take your Bible—Shake it off
Everybody—breaks the law
Learn some Deuteronomy—can you name those laws
Learn from Deuteronomy—c’mon try because
Learn your Deuteronomy—you ain’t good enough
God’s Law—is tricky to keep—born again you must be, yeah
The London Review Bookshop -- where if I could, I would live -- has just turned five years old. Andrew Stilwell gives the secret of their survival, and it involves cake.
Neil Gaiman talks to Terry Pratchett.
I asked about the Alzheimer's. 'If I look at the table to see if my mobile is there, the chances are I won't see it even if it is actually there. But if I know it is there, I will see it. Sometimes the brain will overrule the eye and say that something isn't there, even though it is. And because that something could be the little girl in the pink dress on the zebra crossing, I don't drive a car any more.'
A federal judge threw out a new Indiana law requiring bookstores and other retailers to register with the state and pay a $250 fee if they want to sell sexually explicit material.
July 03, 2008
In my latest column for the Smart Set, I wrote about how teenage girls use the word "slut" as a weapon against one another, and how moralizing about sex is unproductive. The timing was coincidental.
As a cautionary tale about promiscuity, the book is a total failure. Easy is the slutty equivalent of Reefer Madness: Instead of marijuana that leads to murder, prostitution, and death, sex leads to disease, pregnancy, and social isolation. Jessica learns the error of her ways before the end of the school year and comes clean with her friend Elisabeth. Elisabeth asks, “Would you do it again?” “I consider this. ‘Only with someone I really loved. And only if I felt ready,’” Jessica answers.
July 02, 2008
Books Un-Covered
While die-cut hardcovers can be pretty great, the problem with die-cut paperbacks is that they are always getting torn. My local used bookstore always has one such book -- usually V.C. Andrews, with a ghoulish woman staring out of a die-cut keyhole -- that’s been Scotch-taped together by some diligent employee. My dad just bought me the paperback reprint of The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle (he seems to think I love horses, when in fact I am terribly afraid of them), which has a horse cut-out on the cover, framing a sky filled with brilliant stars. Except that my copy took a beating in my dad’s briefcase, so that the curled front leg came off and it looks like the horse is pregnant with a trapezoidal foal.
The Book Design Review posted on Jamie Keenan’s cover for The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, which has letters cut out of the jacket to form an anagram of the word “random.” The comments section features a lively debate between a bookseller and designer David Drummond on the subject of easily-ruined covers.
Here are two things I would be reading today, if I weren't about to run off to spend the day reading William James. It's for an assignment, I swear.
Tom Wolfe in conversation with Michael Gazzaniga (Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique) about free will and neuroscience.
Jenny Diski's essay on South Africa for London Review of Books.
The ‘you can’t understand until you’ve lived there’ argument had kept me from visiting South Africa quite effectively. If being there would make me understanding about apartheid, I preferred to stay away.
They're billing as a Netflix for magazines, which makes me think that I'll get a copy of Esquire after some 14-year-old girl has sharpied hearts around Johnny Depp's head. I'm a little disappointed to learn that's not how it works.
Hilary Mantel writes about the time she dreamt a story.
Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4am and typed it on to the screen. The story was called "Nadine at Forty". In its subject matter, in its tone, its setting, it bore no relation to anything I have ever written before or since. It extended itself easily into paragraphs, requiring little correction and not really admitting any; how could my waking self revise what my sleeping self had imagined?
If Neanderthals reviewed books, as imagined by Eddie Izzard.
Jonathan Karp wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post about how we're living in the age of the disposable book. He suspects that after the collapse of the industry, then publishers can get back to producing good works.
The Washington Post asked me to write a response, and I did.
Instead, publishers seem to be taking the music industry's lead on how to respond to this whole online thing, which goes something like this: "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU." And no, mailing every book you produce to a long list of bloggers does not count as embracing new media. Look what happened, for example, when Anne Enright won the Man-Booker Prize. When a heretofore-obscure writer was suddenly appearing in every major British and American newspaper, readers started Googling her name -- only to find a Wikipedia entry. There was no author Web site and no information about her backlist on her publisher's Web site. (And have you seen her publisher's Web site? Horrors.) Publishers complain about the lack of interest in literary fiction, and yet when it exists, they fail miserably at nurturing it.
July 01, 2008
A male poet who has been reviewed on Bookslut can effectively consider the magazine’s founder Jessa Crispin, a slut for his book. He can, if he wants, begin thinking about other women readers of his in that same way as well, as his personal booksluts, metaphorically fucked by his every word. How on earth does this pass for sexual or intellectual liberation for women? Andrea Dworkin wrote, “The pornographic conception of female power is fundamental to the anti-feminism of sexual-liberation movements in which unlimited sexual use of women by men is defined as freedom for both: she wants it; he responds; viola! The revolution.” Crispin’s choice to call herself a slut goes along with this male-supremacist version of sexual revolution — one which caters to men’s words, men’s desires, men’s construction of female sexuality, by giving men greater sexual access to women and greater freedom to think of us as fuck objects.
Bookslut fails, however, to address women’s inequality. It fails to offer a feminist, non-patriarchal vision of sex and women’s passion for reading and creating. Using women as sexualized commodity to sell literary magazines is not a feminist sexual revolution, and moreover, Cripsin’s choice to do that affects more women than just herself. Women who are not interested in reclaiming hate words now must deal with them more frequently in literary circles.
Oh dear. Still processing, but I think it important to say that I understand some women have problems with the word "slut." I do not have that problem. Nor bitch. Cunt, maybe. Sometimes. But this woman's assertion that I am "a slut for Thomas Mallon" is really too funny to even respond to. My riled up inner feminist gets mightily pissed off at the assertion that I am harming women by running Bookslut, however. Maybe we should have a cleaned up version of the site for sensitive feminists, put some pants on the chiquita up on top, change it to Book Lady of a Certain Character. Bookladyofacertaincharacter.com is, believe it or not, available.
Updated to add: As weird as I feel about the "Why I'll Never Be a Bookslut" essay, I do have to say that men blogging/commenting on the essay, saying that a 12-year-old girl should take "nice tits" as a compliment should be seriously ashamed of themselves.
Sticky Pages
You Don’t Know Me: A Citizen’s Guide to Republican Family Values by Win McCormack is really great bathroom reading. Organized alphabetically by topic, which range from the curious (Falafel) to the depraved (Beastiality -- that one was committed by Neal Horsley who started a website “advocating the murder of abortion doctors and imprisoning homosexuals”), this book is the perfect reminder that the people who are the loudest anti-sex crusaders are often the ones most likely to be doing the very thing they oppose (Rev. Ted Haggard, Larry Craig).
The book also gives me hope. Under the heading, Father/Son Bonding, McCormack writes:
At the 1988 Republican National Convention, when George H.W. Bush was running for president of the United States, future president George W. Bush was asked by a Hartford Courant reporter what he and his father talked about when they weren’t talking about politics.
Bush’s answer: "Pussy."
I don’t know, I mean after all we’ve endured during this administration and Bush pere’s reign, I just like to believe that they were sitting there counting their blood money and talking about the best ways to give oral. I’m an optimist. (Private message to GW -- check out She Comes First for tips on getting ladies off. It’ll keep them coming back for more!)
My favorite section in the book is Bad Sex Writing. And this, gentle reader is where today’s Sticky Pages is drawn from. Everyone loves a little girl on girl action.
McCormack takes a quote from Sisters, a 1981 novel penned by Ms. Lynne Cheney.
Page 46, You Don’t Know Me
The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage -- no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious… she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her… Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men… And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.
Yowza! Excuse me while I find a quiet place to finish eating of the fruit and getting to know myself as I truly am.
Happy Tuesday!
In this interview at Comics Reporter about her book What It Is, the great Lynda Barry reveals the startling, disturbing, depressing reason that it was published by Drawn & Quarterly:
Well, in my situation, until Drawn & Quarterly came along, I couldn't find a publisher who was interested in my work at all. There was no one.
The American University of Iraq is asking for book donations.
The Miles Franklin award is le grand fromage of Australian literature. This year's winner is Victorian (as in the state, not the lace-fancying Dickensian type) author Steve Carroll, for his novel The Time We Have Taken. It is the third book in his trilogy on a Melbourne family in the '70s, a series which took him ten arduous years to write:
"This whole romantic myth of the artist the person laying around at midnight with a fag and half a bottle of scotch, it's just bulldust."
In further antipodean book prizery, Geraldine Brooks whisked away with the Australian Book of the Year award and the Literary Fiction Book of the Year award at the Australian Book Industry shindig. Her winning title, People of the Book, is her fictionalised history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, which is not, as I assumed, the name of a Balkan pub, but an ancient Jewish text. Brooks is an old hand at this game, having won the Pulitzer for her 2005 novel March.
June 30, 2008
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Paul Fattaruso
Paul is the writer behind 2004's Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf (Soft Skull Press) (see our review). Recently, Akashic Books, under its Hotel St. George Press imprint, put out his new illustrated novella/prose poem Bicycle. Like the title infers, Bicycle honors the bicycle as everyday object and idol with micro-fiction pieces on every page, each reaching roughly two lines. I spoke to Fattaruso over the weekend with the hope that he would further illustrate what he was trying to do with this one.
Your last work, Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf, was a more traditional (in the words-on-pages-between-two-covers sense) novella. What made you decide to try something like Bicycle?
Bicycle actually started out as a medium-long poem, about 25 pages. I sent it by e-mail to a friend of mine, and he sent it back to me with comments. The computer I was using had some trouble opening the file, and when I finally got it open, the whole poem was in "strikethrough" font, except for the first two lines: "Do you prefer the machinery of the bicycle / or the softer machinery of a bird?" I wasn't sure whether it was a computer error or just a really harsh critique of the poem. It turned out to be a computer error, a ghost in the machine or something, but I went ahead and cut the whole poem and started over with just the two lines. After that, it just felt kind of inevitable to write it the way I did. I stared at those two lines and asked, "what now?" They told me what to do. It didn't feel like much of a decision.
In Bicycle, you celebrate the bicycle as both everyday item and idol. Where did the idea originate?
I didn't learn to ride a bike as a kid. I had a few misfired attempts, but just never got it. Then I got a bicycle as a wedding present. That inspired me to really finally learn how to ride. It was difficult and embarrassing. People on the other side of the street would point at me and laugh. But once I'd more or less figured it out, riding the bicycle became this magical thing for me. It was this eerily quiet, perfectly elegant form of motion and balance that I'd never experienced before. It was a revelation, and obviously I had to try to write about it. So I guess the book is sort of a memoir.
Michael Ian Black explains why he's written the book My Custom Van:
Books may be weird and old, but when the terrorists launch their EMF War against us (electro-magnetic frequency) and all electronic data is erased, isn't it comforting to know that you'll still be able to curl up with a book containing an essay entitled "How to Approach the Sensitive Question - Anal?"
Morgan Meis on those annoying State of Criticism articles/speeches/forums/blogs:
Critics have become bemoaners. It seems that every week a new article comes out lamenting the state of criticism in field X, Y, or Z. The critics are bemoaning the state of their craft, bemoaning the state of contemporary culture, bemoaning the fate of the world. A few centuries ago the intellectual world trembled at the steps of Samuel Johnson. More recently, careers were ended by a few words from Oscar Wilde or Walter Lippman. A generation of Americans checked in with H.L. Mencken on a daily basis to figure out what they thought about any given subject. Most of these figures were angry and disdainful to some degree or other. But they were not bemoaners. They stood confidently atop the world and proclaimed.
NYRB is reissuing George Rippey Stewart's Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, and Slate has an appreciation. From Names on the Land:
"The deepest poetry of a name and its first glory lie, not in liquid sounds, but in all that shines through that name—the hope or terror, or passion or wit, of those who named it. The second glory of a name, as with Marathon or Valley Forge, springs later from the deeds done there."
Violet Blue, who should achieve sainthood for her book The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus, has been removed entirely from the Boing Boing archive. Bookslut contributor Joanne McNeil explains that this is not the first Boing Boing deletion.
June 27, 2008
"Graphic Novels, All Grown Up." Big sigh, but anyway, CS Monitor talks to Jason Lutes (Berlin) and other comic book writers. Yes, the CSM writer brings up Maus.
“Tell me about your sister,” the little boy said. “Was she a witch?”
“Maybe,” the man said.
The little boy laughed excitedly, and the man leaned back and puffed at his cigar. “Once upon a time,” he began, “I had a little sister, just like yours.” The little boy looked up at the man, nodding at every word. “My little sister,” the man went on, “was so pretty and so nice that I loved her more than anything else in the world. So shall I tell you what I did?”
The little boy nodded more vehemently, and the mother lifted her eyes from her book and smiled, listening.
“I bought her a rocking-horse and a doll and a million lollipops,” the man said, “and then I took her and I put my hands around her neck and I pinched her and I pinched her until she was dead.”
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is 60 years old. (Thanks to Joanne for the heads up.) In celebration, find yourself a copy of The Lottery and Other Stories and read one of my favorite short stories ever, "Witch." (Also, Jonathan Lethem's appreciation here.)
Alison Bechdel (Fun Home) has posted the strip she wrote for Entertainment Weekly about all those authors you're supposed to read.
Authors bless me, for I have sinned. It's been three months since my last novel, and I didn't even finish that one.
June 26, 2008
At Harriet, Lucia Perillo has kicked started a conversation about one of my favorite topics: Why is contemporary poetry so exclusively left-wing, especially with regard to the war? In particular, don't miss Annie Finch's thoughtful intervention. (I'll grant that Perillo poses the issue badly at first, implying there aren't many poets who write about war besides Homer. But I've been looking for contemporary pro-war poems for a year now, and have gotten . . . absolutely nothing. Well, not nothing: The WSJ ran this largely embarrassing collection of poems in 2003. (And even many of those poems were from the early- to mid-nineties.)
What makes this an interesting question is--as several of Perillo's commenters have noted--is that it suggests a kind of isolation or even irrelevance among poets. Not so much because the war is secretly awesome, but because if poetry still spoke centrally to the lives of most people, then those agitating for war would have drummed up some serviceable pro-war verse. (I can think of pro-war novels, tv shows, and movies . . . . but no poetry. That probably means something--and I can't imagine that it's an unalloyed good.)
Also, see this interview with James Winn about his new book, The Poetry of War: Like many people in my generation, my most immediate experience with war was the war in Vietnam. Although I was lucky enough not to go there, I did get drafted in 1968 and found my time in the Army pointless and frustrating. So it was instructive to read poems by soldiers who genuinely believed in the rightness of the wars they were fighting. I remain deeply skeptical of war as a means of bringing about change, but I respect the determination and heroism of soldier-poets from many eras, and I have tried, in my book, to honor their memory.
Speaking of Lucia Perillo, she's on this list of 5 poets who also write excellent essays, by Sandra Beasley.
William Jay Smith is much less sanguine about the prose of poets in this CPR interview: The present state of criticism is just as bad as that of poetry since, of course, the two go together, linked inextricably.
From YouTube: Hayden Carruth on the backstory of "Emergency Haying."
For those memoirists out there, in case your family ever questions your claims of having been set on fire, abducted by aliens, or smoking crack during family dinners, Dave Pelzer has an excuse you can borrow: just say your perfectly mentally sound family member is "semi-retarded."
Can you imagine any serious film reviewer refusing to watch anything other than the major Hollywood blockbusters?
David Barnett investigates the lack of respect book critics show to independent and micro publishers.
Opium Magazine has impressed me with its wit ever since I started to frequent the website, oh, maybe two days ago. (That might not sound too impressive, but I give up on something if it's not clever enough in ten to fifteen minutes.) Thanks to their editorial team, I can now refer to myself as a genius AND have an answer when somebody asks me to "prove it" as their newsletter is addressed specifically to me and my MENSA colleagues. You can't read excerpts from the magazine online (unless you pay for PDF version, and I'm an old fashioned kind of girl) but you can order the print version from their website.
While you wait for the mail fairy to drop it in your mailbox, though, you can entertain yourself with the flash fiction pieces submitted that come with an estimated reading time for your convenience. In just seven minutes you can read five pieces: one by Village Voice editor Angela Ashman, one about the cruelty of childhood love, one that leaves much to be explained (in the best way possible), and one with the deliciously macabre title of The My Little Pony Graveyard. The last piece I recommend begins sounding familiar (read: boring, been-there-done-that) but ends on a note so aching I think I may wake up with tears on my pillow tomorrow. This one is Meadow by K.A. Brennan.
Okay, so it's really seven minutes and ONE second, but I have faith in you, dear reader. You can slice one second off your time.
Opium also hosts the Literary Death Match, a bi-coastal rapid-reading extravaganza. It sounds like a rollicking good time, so if you happen to be in New York City this coming Wednesday, you really ought to check it out. Seems like they also know the importance of two things I love dearly: booze and "intangibles."
Cognitive scientists claim you can’t dream of a face you’ve never seen. Well, I can’t read a room I haven’t inhabited.
June 25, 2008
Books Un-Covered
For my birthday, you can order me a copy of Lust & Cashmere by A. E. Simns, newly released by Green Lantern Press. It combines all three of my favorite things: choose your own adventure stories, silk screening, and beautiful sweaters. Lust is okay, too. Caroline Picard, Director of Green Lantern, talks about the book’s creation:
The design of the book:
Jason Bacasa designed the layout of the book. He does the layout for all of the Green Lantern publications. I know he was really interested in using the original choose your own adventure books as a launching platform for the design. At the same time, because there are different
forms of fiction in the book, he had to modify that source material. The design reflects the structure of the book; it begins with a short story -- what is in some way the real meat of the text, as it provides the context for the rest -- laying the groundwork for the "game" of the choose your own adventure in part two. To that end, Jason didn't want to make it exactly like a choose your own adventure (i.e. with bold numbers in the upper right hand corner) but to offer enough of a feel so that as the reader began to digest the first part, or "Introduction," the reader would recall, even vaguely, the anticipation of page turning and choice: a shadow of childhood.
Also, there is the constant motif of the sweater emblem -- what always reminds me of a generic, Ikea drawing of a sweater. The repetition of the motif is like a grounding element: the thing that keeps everything focused. In some way, this book is trying to transform a banal object, the sweater, into a fetishized object; something symbolic that might twist a picture to mean something different, something sexualized. In the writing, the sweater becomes a kind of code. Visually, it anchors that code, keeping it in the fore of the readers' mind.
Chicago press critic Steve Rhodes says Sun-Times advertising columnist Lewis Lazare shouldn't be complaining about the Internet dumbing down America while his paper is running a "Which Team's Fans Are Hotter?" contest.
Nicholas Hogg talks to Dogmatika about his novel Show Me the Sky.
Rebellion and survival may often be the same act. Particularly when attempting to maintain your identity. And in a time where intrusion into who you are is the norm, whether this is CCTV, Facebook profiles, a mobile phone and its twenty four hour connection, a rejection of modernity is one way of defining the line of self more clearly. And as 'self' is not only you, but the people around you, your environment, vanishing can be refuge from the bombardment of living – especially for a globally famous rock star scrutinised by press and fans.
"Confinement" by Tony Hoagland.
Library patrons can now renew and reserve books from their home computers and download audio books and digital music, thanks to an $11 million technology expansion almost entirely paid for by largesse generated by the Chicago Skyway lease.
Even though the title of the interview -- "Global Warming, Female Utopias and Gender Roles" -- sounds like a conference panel discussion during which you would end up drawing on your sneakers with your ball point pen to keep yourself awake, Sarah Hall and Daughters of the North are always interesting. So you'll have to come up with a different excuse for why you have "I Heart Brian Eno" written over and over again on your instep.
A profile of Canadian author and newly-minted IMPAC winner Rawi Hage talks about the devastation the civil war in Lebanon, his move to New York and eventual relocation to Canada.
"Living in New York was harder than living in the war. I was poor, I was struggling and I had no communication with my parents. I didn't know if they were alive or not. And I was alone."
Since then, we can now confirm that Hage was indeed getting drunk directly after winning the world's richest literary prize.
Drinking most probably occurred sometime around the delivery of the new Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance. Worth £5,000, it's a British prize for the Genre That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The ultimate winner, author Lisa Jewell, for her novel 31 Dream Street, prefers the term "popular women's fiction", and said:
"The award is definitely something the genre needs, and more importantly is something the reader needs. People say 'chick lit' and what they mean is 'crap'."
Needs? Steady on, love. We need oxygen and glucose and bedsheets of a reasonable thread count and Penguin Modern Classic editions. Do we really need another sticker on the cover of a pastel trade paperback?
Over in the bursting at the seams Petty Literary Feuds Dept., it's handbags at twenty paces over at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
Four-time national book awards judge Gordon McLauchlan says that in the United Kingdom, United States or Australia, "the judges would now be required to explain themselves and debate eccentric decisions, but that is not the New Zealand way. They have a bureaucrat stonewall on their behalf."
Warning: parochial bitchiness and pomposity can lead to reader strain from protracted eyeball rolling.
June 24, 2008
Today's self-promotional round-up: I'm participating in NPR's new "Books We Like" feature, and you can read my review of Sarah Hall's Daughters of the North, along with an excerpt from the book, on their website.
My column about Kevin Myers's Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast is up at the Smart Set.
One Republican, a man named Frankie Cards who gaelicized his name into Proinsias Mac Airt, was a Catholic bachelor, twisted into a worshiper of violence. “In a sane society this lunatic muttering morbidly into a few cooling cinders would not have been taken as anything other than a candidate for special care: in the asylum of Northern Ireland he was being hailed as a prophet.”
And, finally, my thoughts on the shame of summer reading, as part of this National Post article:
If you're carrying Tolstoy onto the sand with you, you're probably doing your vacation wrong anyway.
Sticky Pages
I’ve been a freelance writer for a year now and I’m getting a little tired of it. It’s isolating and pitching is a roller coaster of YAY they accepted it and BOO they're only paying that much and YAY I’ll have another byline and BOO now I have to write something. My goal is, by August, to have an office. With a few people who share it. And I will not work for them, but rather with them and we’ll maybe have a water cooler and we can chat around it. The idea of having others to speak with over the course of a week gives me sort of a blissed-out giddy feeling.
I think, too, I’d like an office crush. You know, a guy who wears a suit and smiles at me when I walk by. A guy that I can daydream about and quickly click my computer screen away from the various blogs I surf, to the Agent Provocateur website when he walks by -- "What? I was just doing some project management.”
Of course, I know office life is not like this. I know it’s a grind, which is why I have a firm knowledge that I will never, not ever, hold an office job again. But I like the fantasy of it. I like the idea of guys in suits. Okay, I like guys in suits, plain and simple.
So, you’d think Open for Business: Tales of Office Sex, an erotica anthology edited by Alison Tyler, would suit me just fine. But, oddly, it does not. The stories are bizarrely redundant. Several refer to a woman’s honey, being impaled or skewered on various cocks, and it seems like every single boss wants to give or receive anal sex. I guess most of us have had the same thought about our bosses: he or she doesn’t even deserve a reach around.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: The Whole Truth by David Baldacci.
Katie James was too hungover to care that every chapter seemed to start in much the same way. She remembered the boy's death that had sent her spiralling from Pulitzer prize-winning journalist to washed-up alcoholic on the obituaries page. A tragedy was always a good substitute for depth of character, she thought, as she looked out of her Scottish hotel window.
The Times on books that don't survive their age.
They seem to be books that fitted in far too comfortably with the sensibilities of a certain chattering-class elite when they were published. Remove a work of fiction from the milieu in which it was written and you remove some of its purpose and point, of course; however, with Hesse, Powell and Fowles, as with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you seem to lose all the purpose and point. Everything simply evaporates.
The God of literary magazines hath smiled down on me this week by bringing Tin House Volume 9, Number 3 into my life. The editor's note states that this issue focuses on "people and characters who make their home on the margins," a place I like to visit as frequently as possible (I'm currently applying for permanent citizenship), so I knew right away I had found a map to little peripheral lanes down which I had never traveled. Exactly what did I encounter there? A lesbian in a nursing home who harbors both resentment and love for the paramour of her past, a father and daughter who have lived secretly in the woods for years, an eccentric artist who enjoys using terms of endearment and writing poems to prostitutes, a commune full of cross dressing farm boys and a man with an unnatural attachment to his velvet portrait of Jim Morrison. I've also added four books to my reading list and am actually looking forward to exploring the existential ramifications of eating a cockroach. When visiting the margins, aka "the edge" (and not the one affiliated with Clear Channel but the one "perceived to make someone nervous," as brilliantly described in Anne Elizabeth Moore's "17 Theses on the Edge"), it is best to remember to bring some change so as not to get reamed out by La Dame Pipi, the Parisian goddess of les toilettes. It will be hysterically funny for those around you, but that won't comfort you while La Dame Pipi is chastising you for thinking you are above the fee.
Oh, and the issue also brought me back into the Xanadu Universe! Cue the shameless self promotion!
June 23, 2008
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Chuck Forsman
Chuck Forsman is the creator of the surreal comic series Snake Oil. The Center for Cartoon Studies graduate came to my attention through a friend's stockpile of zines and sundry other goodies from this year's MoCCA Festival. His work is reminiscent of Josh Simmons' Jessica Farm (see our April 28th Heartthrob entry) in visual style, tone, and the fact that he treats us to a story that has much to offer yet is in no way mapped to any foreseeable conclusion. He also takes the extra step in hand silk screening the cover for every issue and using a hard stock, darker linen paper, which creates an interesting texture to his printing that is not seen so often these days. Be sure to check out his blog for visuals and to pick up the first two issues of Snake Oil. And watch out for issue #3, which should be out sometime soon.
Tell me where the idea behind Snake Oil came from. What influenced the story?
Snake Oil started as my thesis project at The Center for Cartoon Studies. It was originally to be a collection of shorter stories. I was struggling with what I wanted to do as far as something that felt like my own until Lynda Barry came and did a two day workshop at CCS. She charged my creativity and showed us a way to write that really worked for me. The main narrative in Snake Oil is actually, for lack of a better term, made up as I go along. It stays very interesting for me to write as I go. Before, I was writing these stories and spending so much time sculpting them that by the time it came to draw the pages I was completely bored and it was hard to keep my attention. I think as I go along the story will start to close up and I'll have some sort of map to follow. But as a rule I never write out more than five pages in advance before I do the finished art.
Your series starts off with a man's marital issues and two giant buffalo goons. Where do you plan to take the story in Snake Oil 03?
As you can see from my last answer, I don't really know. That is not really true. I can't help but have some ideas but things seem to change so much during every step that it's really hard for me to say. Snake Oil is all about me experimenting and trying out new things. I realize that this may result in non-consistent story-telling and art but I can only hope that the folks that are reading are drawn in enough to not have that take them out of the experience too much.
Jezebel pays tribute to illustrator Tasha Tudor.
I have never read of Margit Sandemo before, but holy shit, she is now one of my favorite women.
More remarkably, Norwegian-born Sandemo survived childhood trauma, claiming that, when she was 11, she killed a man when he attempted to rape her. She is 84, but goes whitewater rafting every year in Iceland. She says she has a guardian angel called Virgil, whom she has seen on numerous occasions and I had read that she considers herself a psychic. "I'm not psychic, but I can see people from other dimensions," she says, gathering her English. "I see ghosts and I have seen little people." Like humans, she says, but about four feet high; pixies, I suppose.
(Future Bookslut contributor) Nicholas Hogg, author of Show Me the Sky, was on BBC to talk about his debut novel and read his short story "Womble." You'll have to fast forward through some random opera singing to get to him.
Paul Collins is the only writer whose essay about the overhyped (there, I said it) semicolon I can read without wanting to tear out my eyes. Has any previous form of punctuation ever received so much attention?
Jon Swift's review of Are Men Necessary by Maureen Dowd (link via Critical Mass):
I have not actually read this book but I want Ms. Dowd to know that men are very necessary. Without men, for example, I think we would be losing the War in Iraq.
Michael Ian Black has declared war on David Sedaris. He thinks it will help him sell books. But you can help, too.
When referring to him, put a "p" after the "S" in "Sedaris," so that what you're saying is "Spedaris." This isn't a put down exactly; it's actually just a mispronunciation of his name, but if enough people start doing it, I have no doubt it will drive him fucking crazy.
More people are taking the train these days, the poor bastards. I take the train to see my sister one state away, and I always regret it. They should pass out copies of Jenny Diski's book on train travel in the stations, so when you're losing your will to live, stuck out in a field somewhere with no explanation why you're not moving, you at least have something to read. From Stranger on a Train:
I was nauseous with lack of sleep, but smoked and drank coffee through the morning, as we passed through flat anonymous country shrouded in morning mist. All I could think of was arriving in Chicago and connecting with the Empire Builder, where I had a bed. We were running an hour late, but when we reached the outskirts of Chicago and the tracks multiplied, merging from all directions into the frantic hub that was the dead centre of the American railroad system, we slowed to an alarming speed where you know that nothing but a complete halt can come of it. Surrounded by goods trains and containers, overhead cables screeching and singing, iron and steel, clinker, smoke, rust, dust, grime and bone-juddering noise of metal wheels on metal rail jangling and grinding, shuddering to a stop, lurching into movement, the Lake Shore Limited finally came to a dead standstill about five hundred yards outside Union Station, Chicago. We waited in expectant silence, and then waited some more. The child in the seat next to me began to sing tunelessly: 'One hour we've been waiting... two hours we've been waiting... three hours we've been waiting...' He got to ten hours and then started again. And then again. I don't know how many times he started again, but a real-life hour and a half later we were still waiting in the goods yard and the freight trains took priority. No one murmured any complaint, we just sat, our bags packed, ready after our 19-hour journey to disembark and go home or make the next connection. Apart from the child next to me, who was beginning to sound like our psyches singing in our ears, and who, like my psyche, I thought needed suppressing, there was a grim silence of a captive, helpless audience with nowhere else to go staring through the grime of the windows into the noise and shunting chaos of filthy, smoky air just yards from, but utterly beyond the reach of, our destination...[Two hours later...] "That was nothing," a woman behind me said as we were bustled along by the porters as if being late was our fault. "I once waited in the Chicago yards for eight hours."
I understood the silence of the others on the train. It was sheer terror of what could be.
