Hilarious NYT article about "misblurbing" (quote-doctoring). Sketchy at best: Charles Frazier's publishers plucked only the word "Genius" (and slapped it on the cover of Thirteen Moons) from this sentence in a review: "Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details." Downright unforgivable: This: "Conran knows all the names, brand and otherwise, and she certainly knows where and when to drop them. 'Lace' doesn't sink under the weight of them, it soars--right up into the same stratosphere where you'll find 'Valley of the Dolls' and 'Scruples.'" became this: "It soars!"
April 30, 2007
See ya, April. Wouldn't wanna be ya.
On this fine drizzly Monday, NaPoWriMo (and with it, National Poetry Month) draws to a close. Has your appreciation for poetry been deeply enriched? I thought so.
Aside from the daily offerings of the blogosphere, what is everyone reading? I just finished Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever (which was great) and started Angle of Yaw by Ben Lerner.
April 28, 2007
Early & Often
Bill Knott wants to be Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere.
So, apparently, do several other people including Kasey Silem Mohammad, Rebbecca Loudon, and Amy King.
Have you voted?
April 26, 2007
Are Creative Writing Profs Supposed to be Shrinks too?
Nearly everyone with a television set now knows Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui exhibited signs of disturbance in his creative writing classes. In 2005, Nikki Giovanni had Cho removed from her class and according to an article in Salon, former English chair, Lucinda Roy, contacted campus police, student affairs and the dean's office with her concerns, but was told that without an overt threat, there was nothing to be done. Cho’s playwriting teacher, Ed Falco, expressed similar worries, but also noted "there was violence in Cho's writing—but there is a huge difference between writing about violence and behaving violently. We could not have known what he would do." This “unknowability” is precisely the problem, one that is particular for teachers of creative writing: when a student turns in work what disturbs you, what do you do about it? How do you know if the threat is serious or not? On the one hand, some great works of literature are very disturbing. A few scenes in American Psycho make me a little queasy, but I still think it’s a fantastic novel. But creative writing teachers can often instinctively tell when there’s something “off” with the student, if the narrator and author are conflated in a way that makes the work not appear on the page as a fictional or poetic construct, but as a frightening extension of the student. Nevertheless, it might be hard to convince a dean to take action based on instinct, and the Salon piece contains stories of professors being alarmed by student work and voicing their concerns, only to hit a dead end as they got farther up the administrative ladder. And in one case, when a student was expelled for exhibiting violent tendencies, his parents complained the student was only emulating a David Foster Wallace story, Girl With Curious Hair, which had been assigned in class. After the professor’s reading selections were questioned by school officials, she wasn’t invited to teach the following semester. To me, it seems like creative writing teachers are in an impossible quandary here. They’re not trained psychologists and can only rely on their instincts; in light of the Virginia Tech tragedy, being especially cautious seems prudent, but the consequences of being wrong about a student can be grave: they might be unfairly reprimanded by administrators, socially ostracized, and the teacher’s job might be jeopardized. Even worse, any students who are odd or simply on a different wavelength could become targets for judgment, and a culture of censorship might be created in the classroom. The Salon piece quotes school administrators who say they’re working on putting systems in place for creative writing teachers to deal with students who show signs of disturbance, so hopefully those systems will also help teachers of creative writing negotiate the murky waters of interpreting student work and identifying students who are truly in distress.
April 23, 2007
Quickie Interview #18: Dan Boehl
Dan Boehl's chapbook Work won the 2006-07 Pavement Saw Chapbook Award. His current projects include 2 collaborations with artist Jonathan Marshall: Grand Mal!!, line drawings with short poems, and a series of pirate poems/paintings entitled Kings of the F**king Sea. He works for the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.
I like that your chapbook has an epigraph by Bill Knott--does he know that you used it?
I sent him a copy of the book a couple weeks ago, so presumably he knows about the epigraph. I’m not sure he would mention it if he did know.
You work at an art museum—why can’t poems be more like paintings, or can they?
I hang out with mostly visual artists now, as opposed to Boston where all my friends are writers, so this is a question I think about a lot. The quick answer is, no, poems can’t be more like paintings because they aren’t singular works of art.
I mean, poems aren’t art objects the way paintings and sculpture are art objects, objects that exist as individuals. Poems are infinitely reproducible. That is their beauty and that is how they find an audience. Recently I gave a reading of my chapbook to a MFA visual art seminar class and someone said that my poem “Artist in Residence” made it sound like I was whining because the artist in the poem was getting attention. My reply was that they don’t have poem museums, so there is no reason to whine.
Chris Tonelli keeps telling me somebody is trying to start a poem museum. I don’t think the attendance will be very good. Poems just don’t work the same way as paintings. I can talk about this forever. Maybe it is best to suggest reading Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar. There is a chapter where he describes the commoditization of artworks.
Why are chapbooks so popular these days and what can they do that full-length books can’t?
Mainly, I think technology makes them easy to produce and promote cheaply.
Artistically, chapbooks deliver a certain immediacy you can’t get in a full length. Like Elisa Gabbert’s chapbook Thanks for Sending the Engine. She wrote those poems in a month, and then they go into a chapbook. Full-lengths take forever to write. Also, with 70 to 80 poems in a full length, the focus of the poet waivers. Chapbooks give the reader a solid focus. The reader gets to work through an idea or emotion or narrative. I think focus effects readers more deeply than a long book broken up into three sections.
First Car?
Black Cavalier. 140,000k miles when I traded it in. It never had any problems. I never got any ladies.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
The Little Prince. I read it in French class. It hurt my feelings.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
I hung out with all the people that didn’t fit into the other cliques. Like jocks that were too smart and goth kids that listened to reggae.
First job?
Stock boy in my dad’s warehouse when I was 12. He paid $2.50 an hour and bought me lunch on Fridays.
Car now?
I drive a Surly Crosscheck. It’s a bike.
Favorite book now?
Jesus’ Son. No link required.
What's new on you iPod or CD player?
Yellow Fever. They are my favorite Austin band. 2 ladies and 1 man. They make some sweet pop.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
I don’t watch movies. I prefer anime. Best anime: Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex.
What are you working on these days?
I am working on the Kings of the Fucking Sea with my friend Jonathan Marshall. I wrote poems and he is painting the paintings to go with them. He’s really good.
Anything coming out soon?
Besides the Work chapbook, my artist book with Jonathan Marshall is available online from Okay Mountain, a sweet Austin Gallery. A podcast of it is available too.
What are you reading that's fun?
What Good are the Arts? is way fun. It talks about visual arts and then says that writing is better. I like that kind of thing.
What's your favorite a) writing exercise, and b) physical exercise?
a) I pretend that I am a pirate rather than a museum administrator. b) I play tennis.
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
I have a vest that you can see there in my picture. It is from the seventies and was given to me by the owner of that dog. I also really like that green hat.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
Anime I said. Google chat.
Favorite recipe (please be specific, like so we can cook it if we want)?
Enhanced Mac and Cheese (I eat this when my wife, Anna, is in class)
1 ripe tomato
1 clove of garlic
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 package Annie’s Mac and Cheese
1 tablespoon of milk
¼ stick of butter
Make the mac and cheese. While that is going on, chop the tomato and chop the garlic. Throw the garlic and the oil into a hot pan. Brown the garlic, then throw in the tomato. It will get to be like sauce. Pour this sauce into your macaroni and cheese. Now you are awesome.
What's on your desk?
a paperclip dispenser/ unused like a collection box
Stones or Beatles?
Stones
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Zeke Ridge
April 20, 2007
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Is Jim Behrle's appearance on the Poetry Foundation's site a sign of some sort of apocalypse? Quoting one friend "whoa. that is wild." and another: "my mind is officially blown." Is anti-careerism becoming the new careerism? Has this sort of official annointing by the Foundation tainted a safe haven of anti-establishment (anti- school of quietude AND anti- post-avant)? Can we still turn to Behrle when we want to stick it to the...well...everyone?
April 18, 2007
Foucault On, Foucault Off
If there is a big bad theory name out there that causes undergraduates to scurry underneath their desks and recall fondly such thorny questions as whether or not Updike was the apex of American domestic masculinity, it's Foucault. (Honorable mention to Derrida, whose welter of translucent clauses are the grammatical equivalent of being trapped in an aquarium full of grease). Before these two, the most linguistically leaden encounter I had with theoretical language has to go to Herr Kant, whose plodding cascade of cinderblock definitions made me long for intellectual self-defenestration. (I much preferred that waggish Mr. Barthes, whose languorous suppositions made it seem like he would be loads of fun at parties, especially after too much red wine.)
Fortunately, there's cogent snarkiness to be had in Andrew Scull's review of Foucault's History of Madness, wherein Mister Scull highlights some selective scholarship on Foucault's part, inferring that he deliberately chose antique, erroneous, or superseded texts in order to buttress his diagnosis of power, race, politics, power, class, power... did I mention power? For instance, while it makes for good copy (in a kind of "Here there be dragons" sort of way) Scull points out that the 1815–16 House of Commons inquiry into the state of England's madhouses did not reveal "that Bedlam (Bethlem) placed its inmates on public display every Sunday, and charged a penny a time for the privilege of viewing them to some 96,000 sightseers a year" as Foucault claimed it did. Nor was there actually a "ship of fools" that wandered from port to port with a cargo of the insane. As Mssr. Colbert would say, “Truthiness is all."
April 16, 2007
The Long and the Short of It
I love short novels. And not just because I’m lazy. There’s something especially dazzling about a compact yet richly-rendered novel. It replicates (and prolongs) the experience of reading a really good short story, the sense of everything being essential, the precision and spareness, the lack of excess. Of course, those massive novels that could double as door-stops have their virtues too (Mason & Dixon makes a great paperweight), but a piece in The Guardian praising the short novel got me thinking about how, in most cases, I prefer those slim little gems to the epics. At the moment, my favorites are The Lover, Madeline is Sleeping, and A Sport and a Pastime—all of which I re-read from time to time, while I will never re-read Infinite Jest or War and Peace. Ever. And I remember so much more from my favorite short novels, whereas all I can remember from War and Peace is the drunken bear. Although that scene is arguably the best one.
April 13, 2007
Useless Friday
Braindead. How does one work when one is braindead? It is uncomfortable at best. Society has little to gain from me today.
Go read the NaPoWriMo offerings of K. Silem Mohammad. Each is an anagram of one of Shakespeare's sonnets, w/ sonnetness roughly preserved. Mohammad states: "The pleasure taken in anagrams has to do with the indulgence of the fiction that words and phrases, at the molecular level of the letter, retain a microcosmic imprint of their total sense, so that when rearranged, those letters still produce a configuration of relevance to the original arrangement."
If you like ordering people around, Mike Young is taking requests for constraints. Comment him a rule.
And finally, can somebody tell me who this is/are?
April 12, 2007
So he goes
Kurt Vonnegut, author of some of the best and most idiosyncratic novels of the 20th century, including Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Bluebeard, Cat's Cradle, Welcome to the Monkey House, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and so on, essayist, lecturer, secular humanist, doodler, erstwhile Cape Codder, lifelong chain smoker, grump, World War II veteran, silkscreen artist, sculptor, longtime depressive, cynic, one-time reporter and PR flack, pacifist, environmentalist, liberal, and actor best known for his brief but memorable cameo in Rodney Dangerfield's "Back to School," died Wednesday. He was 84.
April 9, 2007
Quickie Interview #17: Dennis Loy Johnson
Dennis Loy Johnson is the publisher, along with his wife Valerie Merians, of Melville House. He is also a writer whose short fiction has won the Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts prize, and appeared in numerous anthologies such as New Stories from the South. He is also the author of a book of reportage, The Big Chill: The Great, Unreported Story of the Bush Inaugural Protests.
You used to run the blog MobyLives—how and why did you make the transition from book blogger to book publisher?
Melville House grew out of MobyLives. On Sept. 10, 2001, Moby was the pick website of the week on Yahoo. So on Sept. 11th, there I was, blogging away live in the morning as per usual, and instead of the usual tips coming in as I posted the news, email was coming in asking “Are you okay?” I wrote back to one, “Fine. Working. Why ask.” They wrote back, “Turn on your TV.” I wrote back, “Don’t have one. Working. Leave alone.” They wrote back, “Then look out your fucking window.” And that’s how I found out about the attacks. I’d actually heard the first plane but hadn’t put two and two together, of course.
Anyway, not to get into another account of that day, but during the course of the day the missus and I spent a lot of time on line because we couldn’t get any information—the area’s radio towers went down with the twin towers—and as I was on line, email kept coming in from writers we knew or who were fans of Moby about what was going on. The poet George Murray, for example, who worked in Number 7 World Trade wrote a horrifying email about trying to get out of his building only to find a giant wheel from an airliner leaning against the front door, then having to dodge falling bodies. The playwright Mike Daisey wrote in about the stunned and be-sooted staggering across the Brooklyn Bridge. The novelist Linda Yablonski wrote in about walking past fire houses in lower Manhattan later that day. It was amazing stuff. And I posted it all. And over the next few days, we found ourselves just aghast at the way the mainstream was covering the story that we were living in New York, especially as the fever for revenge took hold. It was all just a massive misrepresentation of the reality New Yorkers were living through, and their spirit a that time—which was not murderous—and of what had happened in general. And somewhere in the midst of it all I was posted a dispatch from a poet on Moby one day and Valerie came in and looked over my shoulder and said, “That stuff tells the real story. We ought to put it out there.” And so we decided to form Melville House to do exactly that. Our first book was Poetry After 9-11, a book that collected work by New York City poets written in the aftermath of the attacks, much of which first appeared on MobyLives.
Can you explain the story behind the names of your blog and your publishing house?
Nothing mysterious. I’ve read a good deal of Melville but I’m not expert on him. MobyLives just occurred to me as a nice slogan. It hearkens to the graffiti that appeared around New York after Charlie Parker died—fans and believers scrawled Bird Lives! everywhere. Well, I thought how if you consider the great whale as representative of American literature, and he was interestingly enough still alive at the end of the book, MobyLives was a good slogan. As the two publishing efforts are related, we extended the concept to Melville House, reasoning that Herman Melville was a classic American artist: A pop, bestselling writer, he basically created modernism with “Bartleby the Scrivener” and The Confidence Man, and was destroyed by the critics for it, and died a sad and lonely and impoverished death scribbling poems and stories he no longer sent out. It seemed a fitting thing to name a publishing house after him.
Upon learning that you were this year’s recipient of the Association of American Publishers 2007 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing, you said that you “honestly believe that books are more important than ever”—what did you mean by that?
I mean that the mainstream media has failed to report the truth for at least a decade now, starting with White Water, through the stolen election of 2000, and on through the war in Iraq. That is, if you ask me, the New York Times is as complicit in Iraq as the government is, has just as much blood on their hands as the President does. And I think really the only medium delivering any semblance of news now is books. And I think people know this. After 9/11, for example, books from independent and university presses (not to be confused, by the way) about Islam spiritual matters were bestsellers. A book by Noam Chomsky from little 7 Stories Press—a book of media and governmental criticism—was probably the bestselling book in America for weeks, maybe months, although it never made the New York Times bestseller list. And during the last presidential campaign, it was books that drove the conversation—think of all the books that were the main topic of conversation in the press. It started with Ron Suskind and Paul O’Neil’s The Price of Loyalty, continued through Richard Clark’s book, went on through books by Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh and right up to the final days of the campaign with the collected wit and wisdom of the Swift Boat Veterans. Books were on each and every story first, and the rest of the media was struggling to keep up.
It’s like this: People regard politicians and mainstream media in exactly the same light: as being profoundly and entirely untrustworthy. Conversely, they have an inherent faith in books. I think that is deepening even as it is threatened by entertainment culture.
And do you also think that independent publishers are more important than ever? Why?
I think the importance of independent publishing is highlighted by how threatened it is right now. You hear less and less about them in the mainstream as they reveal more and more of the lies of the mainstream—for example, our book detailing what was behind the president’s motivation for going to war, as he explained in his famous “sixteen words,” makes the mainstream look bad. We have a book collecting reports from a foreign journalist who reported the facts two years ago. The New York Times can only hold up the ludicrous reporting of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon. Or our book Torture Taxi. The Washington Post reported there was a torture prison in Kabul called the Salt Pit, but they never sent a reporter there to try and find it. We did, and they came back with photos. We couldn’t get any mainstream coverage of that book, and I think part of that is that we scooped the big boys, and part of it is that mainstream media is so arrogant it has not a clue about its weaknesses, which little publishers like us are exploiting regularly. It holds true for fiction, too, by the way—people are as starved for the truth of literary art as much as for reportorial truth. That’s why we publish people like Stephen Dixon, Justine Lévy and Tao Lin—writers who address the culture in their very punctuation, let alone their narratives and sense of humor and anger.
First Car?
Used 1969 Ford Mustang.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
Too many and too wide-ranging to list.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
It was pretty varied–I was in rock bands and in the orchestra, on the football team and student newspaper staff (music critic), as well as president of the drama club.
First job?
Washing dishes at the VFW hall.
Car now?
Don’t have one.
Favorite book now?
That’s like asking me which is my favorite child. No can do.
What's new on you iPod or CD player?
The newest CD I’ve gotten is a compilation of songs taken from different recordings of the guitarist jazz Tal Farlow, stuff from the 1940s and ‘50s.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
A Russian movie called Burnt by the Sun.
What are you working on these days (either personally and/or for Melville House)?
Melville House IS personal. I’m working on editing several books, reading the slush pile, writing tons of publicity, jacket copy, and so on, and having endless meetings with accountants, bankers, investors, etc.
You are a fiction writer as well as an independent publisher—how do you find time to do both, or do you?
I haven’t written any fiction since we started, although I did write a book of reportage and plan to do another next year.
Anything coming out soon?
No.
What are you reading that's fun?
Another question I can’t answer. I can’t separate “fun” from “interesting” or “necessary.”
What's your favorite a) writing exercise, and b) physical exercise?
Writing is my favorite physical exercise.
Favorite recipe (please be specific, like so we can cook it if we want)?
I don’t cook. I open, order, or, closest, assemble.
What's on your desk?
The usual–manuscripts and books and notepads and pens and two old cups of coffee.
Stones or Beatles?
Stones? Are you kidding? Beatles.
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Sorry, I don’t find porn funny. I find it pitiful.
Any tips, hints, or advice for aspiring independent publishers?
Realize going into it that 1. You’re never going to have enough money; 2. Everyone you encounter has written a book or thinks they can if you just give them five minutes, so be prepared for a pitch; 3. you are going to make a lot of enemies because you spend much of your day saying no – sometimes no to power, but more often no to the milkman who has this great idea for a novel; 4. publishing is a system whereby the publisher makes the least amount of money off a book, and yet everyone thinks you’re ripping them off; and 5. you’re never going to have enough money.
April 6, 2007
Together, we can make Boston more...poemy!
Today, I officially nominate myself for poet laureate of Boston. Of course, this is equivalent to Dennis Kucinich bidding for the democratic presidential nomination. However, in my favor, I did raise $26 million this morning alone. So I have that going for me. Luckily, my biggest competition for the job, former poet laureate of the nation, Robert Pinsky, is against the idea. Ahhh, poet on poet crime. How sad that I find myself agreeing more with a city councilman than a major Boston poet. In any case, one would have to assume he isn't throwing his hat into the ring. Phew!
Is appointing a laureate a waste of the city's time and effort and resources? Should we instead, as Pinsky suggests, acknowledge a dedicated teacher or librarian? Because of the obvious risk of factionalism (Back Bay vs. Jamaica Plain, Neo-Formalism vs. Slam) should we avoid it all together? Would the laureate have to be a "yes" man or woman, a rubber stamp poet, and be ousted immediately upon any mis-step a la Amiri Baraka in NJ?
While you are pondering all of this, do keep in mind that a vote for me would ensure Allison the post as First Lady of Boston poetry. And while she hasn't made a any definitive decisions, it looks like her cause will be to reverse Nancy Regan's puritanism with a "Just Say HELLS YEAH!" campaign. Stay tuned!
April 4, 2007
Speaking of the Indefensible
Thinking about norms today. Reading Jonathem Lethem’s recent story in The New Yorker, and feeling like fiction is such a better ambassador than poetry, if you take it on a likeability basis. Mainstream fiction in its most diplomatic form--the short story--has a very small space to shake hands with you, pass you a drink, and charmingly sketch a random trauma with a cocktail toothpick, and then slope off to the buffet table, never to be seen again. You have to establish the norms of the character, all the while doing a soft-shoe behind the text to establish your authorial norms (i.e. “I don’t like to eat puppies, am not aroused by the smell of cordite, and do not have 25 cats which I think of as my ‘community’”). Maybe it’s this constant, polite stream of implied social mediation (“Hmm, yes, of course the folk arts of Romania have some relevancy to my life” and “Yoga can be a transformative presence in the lives of electricians”) that makes fiction reading sometimes feel like eating a whole mess of vitamins.
Yet people rarely ever discuss norms in poetry. It’s taken for granted that the author and/or the speaker is unapologetically rapturous, irritable, hermetic, erratic, aphasic, etc. and that’s that. If the poem lingers on a mosaic of chewing gum on the underside of a baby carriage and appears to hold it up as evidence of some obscure consecration, poetry readers seem trained to buy into the system of signs. Not sure if this makes poems compact little logic bombs or just scams hiding behind a long, distinguished history.
April 1, 2007
April's fools
Calendar says April, and to some of us that means NaPoWriMo: National Poetry Writing Month. A bunch of crazy bastards are writing a poem (or more!) every day, all month. Maureen Thorson "invented" NaPoWriMo in 2002. Shanna Compton is keeping a list of the players. Be sure to check often and vigorously for smart(ass)/stupid(huge) collaborations by me & Kathy and Chris Tonelli & Sarah Bartlett.
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