When she was back in Illinois for a visit earlier this month, my youngest sister, who has been working in Philadelphia public schools as part of City Year, brought me a copy of a book she thought I’d like. And was she ever right. This particular copy of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken (daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken) is a hardback from the early sixties with a bitchin’ cover by Edward Gorey that the school library, revamping their holdings, had stamped DISCARD and was going to throw away before Megan rescued it. It even has the little slip in back stamped by the librarian and signed by the lendee, including the kid who checked it out last on February 25, 1972 (a Daniel Gormley of Rm 108).
I offer that it is a fantastic book to read any time at any age, but think it would be an especially good February book, as so much of the action takes place on the desolate, windswept English moors beneath layers and layers of snow: “It was dusk—winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger.” That’s how it starts, with a passage that Laura Lippman rightly describes as “the YA version of James Joyce’s The Dead.”
Populated with characters with Dickensian names that allude to their personalities like the evil governess Miss Slighcarp, the stingy boarding school owner Mrs. Brisket, and the grifter Mr. Grimshaw, and strewn with such words as posset, ormolu, metheglin, wold and remonstrate, many of which I had to look up (there’s a good recipe for posset, for example, here), this book is full of writing that empowers girls without being all self-conscious or PC about it. It also has secret passages, oubliettes, impossible journeys and a goose boy with the heart of an artist.
A lot of kids’ books and movies that I didn’t actually get around to reading or watching as a kid, I come to as an adult and am completely underwhelmed by (The Dark Crystal is a key and very obnoxious instance of this phenomenon). But other books for kids that I read as an adult make me think that I’m probably able to enjoy them even more because I’m not a kid (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is an instance of this phenomenon). Do you have any books that strike you this way? What are your favorite kids’ books that you read as an actual kid? What are your favorite kids’ books you’ve read as an adult? What makes these books lose their luster or stand the tests of age and time? And have any of you guys read The Wolves of Willoughby Chase? Because OMG, you should stick it on your Goodreads and totally read it.
August 31, 2008
Oh, you naughty, naughty, precious children!
August 30, 2008
Do geese see God?
The Boston Globe names the top 10 literary journals in New England (I wonder how many there are?), among them Ploughshares (aw, shucks), Agni, Post Road, and Quick Fiction. I found their reasoning a little suspect. Angi heads up the list partly because "it begins with the 
letter 'A.'" Flattering. Redivider is hip because it's published by "all the trendy young things in the graduate program" at Emerson; to boot, "it has a hip palindrome for its name." Palindromes are hip? And the NER is "secretly sexy." Hidden centerfolds? Hip, hot sex aside, you should support these journals, especially the less established but excellent Redivider and Quick Fiction.
Also, go see Man on Wire. I'm ascared of heights and this documentary made my heart hurt but it's also unexpectedly hilarious.
August 27, 2008
Is there anything more annoying than Billy Collins' bemoaning the state of poetry?
I was just reading David Berman's Actual Air (published in 1999, when people knew how to party) on the bus, and this blurb from Billy Collins (very much of a piece with his introduction to the 2006 BAP which claimed that ~83% of poetry is not worth reading) aggravated the piss out of me:
David Berman possesses the most engrossing new poetic voice I have heard in many years of hard listening. [Italics mine.] When I first read him, I thought: so this is the voice I have been waiting so long to hear, a voice, I wish in some poems, were my own.
I wish David Berman's voice was your own too, Billy Collins. I'd hate you less.
And on that note, here is a David Berman poem worth reading (Bonus game: How would Billy Collins have ended this poem?):
The Spine of the Snowman
On the moon, an old caretaker in faded clothes is holed up in his pressurized cabin. The fireplace is crackling, casting sparks onto the instrument panel. His eyes are flickering over the earth,
looking for Illinois,
looking for his hometown, Gnarled Heritage,
until his sight is caught in its chimneys and frosted aerials.
He thinks back on the jeweler's son who skated the pond behind his house, and the local supermarket with aisles that curved off like country roads.
Yesterday the robot had been asking him about snowmen.
He asked if they had minds.
No, the caretaker said, but he'd seen one
that had a raccoon burrowed up inside the head.
"Most had a carrot nose, some coal, buttons, and twigs for arms,
but others were more complex.
Once they started to melt, things would rise up
from inside the body. Maybe a gourd, which was an organ,
or a long knobbed stick, which was the spine of the snowman."
The robot shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
Fine Print
I’m sure most people have heard about this publishing nightmare by now. There you are, happily burbling away with your new book contract, and then you get told you can have the full, unedited blurbs on the back cover, or you can have your author photo, but not both. Also, there will be ads for other books from the press on the back. Then you become a "difficult" author, your book contract is "revoked" and your name disappears from the press’s website. Plus, possibly, a gag order. Reb proposes an antidote here, as well as a disclaimer and a hilarious and depressing quiz for those of us who submit to contests. Outrage and sympathy abound elsewhere.
August 23, 2008
TV shows getting better or worse?
I've been thinking and arguing about this for a while now, with friends and more-than-friends and less-than-friends, but recently the end of Kathy's post on "The Lottery" (is literature that improves upon re-reading of more value than those first-read shockers?) brought it up again. Here's the question: Is TV getting better? Is it an art-form? On the one hand, shows like "Lost" and "Heroes" push television in the creative story-telling direction, but on the other hand reality shows are ubiquitous and popular. And as far as "first-reads" versus "re-reads," shows like the ones I mentioned often seem to be in the former category, if we can apply this to TV, in the sense that they are about cliff-hangers and shock value instead of replayability. The plot keeps us waiting for the next episode, even if we also like the characters--maybe why "Lost" lost so many viewers during its third season. (Lost lost, ha.) I don't know... let the debate begin?
August 22, 2008
The Printers' Ball--Tonight!
Attention blog readers--if you happen to live in or around Chicago, then be sure to check out The Printers' Ball, tonight at the Museum of Contemporary Art from 5:30 to 10:00. Admission is FREE!
The Printers’ Ball is an annual celebration of print literature in Chicago, hosted by Poetry, Newcity, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), in collaboration with CHIRP (Chicago Independent Radio Project), MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine, Proximity Magazine, Stop Smiling, Venus Zine, and over 100 local literary organizations. The event showcases a diverse selection of print publications, available free of charge, including magazines, journals, weeklies, posters, and broadsides, plus a full night of live entertainment.
August 21, 2008
Blogging Bread Loaf
I just got back from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and I'm feeling exhausted and a little depressed about leaving and excited to take everything I absorbed back to my desk and glad for some quiet (and sleep!). The short version: the place rocks. Big green Mountains. A great fiction workshop with Stacey D'Erasmo and the fellow in our class, Andrew Foster Altschul. Badass readings. Lake swimming. Wacky traditions like hay rides and a day where the faculty and fellows serve everyone lunch and dances that erupt into a mosh pit. But one thing I love most about being there is the full immersion quality. We were in rural Vermont with no cell phone reception—save for this one lone rock in the middle of a field, which you periodically saw people standing on, waving around their phone as they search for a signal—and it was easy to forget the outside world was still turning. Spending ten days cut off from civilization, taking in as much as possible and being exposed to so many different kinds of writers, opened me up to new ideas and possibilities with my own work. It was a jolt, in the best kind of way. Also, practically speaking, Bread Loaf offers many excellent funding opportunities—more than, to the best of my knowledge, any other conference.
Earlier in the summer, when other conferences were going on, I noticed that conference blogging seems to have become something of a trend. There were a handful of blogs about Sewanee that I read regularly. On some, the posts were so frequent and detailed that I almost felt like I’d been there, and I wonder how much people will research conferences on blogs if they’re trying to decide whether to apply. In an effort to add to the sea of information, do you apply for these kinds of things? If yes, what do you get out of them?
August 19, 2008
I've got moves you've never seen
I just read this poem by Beckian Fritz Goldberg in the new issue of Diode. Excerpt:
When they tried
to wake me I said no.
I meant, Leave me
snug in my own rain, I
meant to say brain but liked
the way it came out or
didn’t because I only thought
and was too at home to make
a sound.
I liked that, that "I meant to say." But as soon as I realized I liked it, I realized it reminded me of the very distinctive move at the end of Alice Fulton's poem "About Face":
At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It's intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.
I first read this poem in college and really loved that move, the sort of exposed revision. And I do think of it as a "move" now, though I'm not sure I did then. I guess this comes from having both read and written a lot more poetry and being able to recognize techniques and strategies as patterns. Realizing not everything is original and born of pure inspiration. Poetry is kind of like chess in that way: there are an infinite number of possible games, but experienced players know the classic openings and defenses and so on.
The only downside of this is that it's hard to read poetry without a slightly cynical view of the behind-the-scenes; I often read a poem and think, "That's a Dean Young move" or "That's a Jen Knox move" etc. The more you know about an artform, the more you can see the seams. A little of the innocence and awe of being a reader is gone.
August 17, 2008
The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago...
I’d been hearing for a while that the other short stories by Shirley “The Lottery” Jackson that are not “The Lottery” are pretty kickass. I wanted to see for myself, so I headed over to Myopic, my fave used bookstore in Chicago, and I was in luck: sitting on the copies-we’ve-just gotten-in cart was a copy of The Lottery and Other Stories that they’d just gotten in.
As the clerk was ringing it up, he said, “I hear this is pretty kickass. But have you read ‘The Lottery’ already? It’s, like, totally freaky.” It sure is, I agreed, remembering having read it back when I was twelve for a junior high assignment. It completely put me on edge and messed me up for days. I think we read it in a unit about “irony,” which would make sense. Anyway, as promised, Jackson’s other short stories were excellent—creepy and detached and highly recommendable. At the very end of the collection, of course, is “The Lottery,” so I re-read it, finally, and…it was good, but it did not totally blow my mind the way I remembered it doing 16 or so years ago. When it was published in The New Yorker back in the 1940s, according to the book jacket, “twenty-five states, two territories, and six foreign countries sent in the largest mail ever received by that magazine on a piece of fiction. ‘A little masterpiece,’ ‘horrible,’ ‘powerful and haunting,’ ‘driving me crazy,’ ‘superbly contrived, ‘cancel my subscription,’ ‘beautifully written,’ ‘nights of unrest’ were a few of the comments…”
After re-reading it, I actually photocopied “The Lottery” and handed it out to two co-workers and one intern who had never read it before. I didn’t know I was doing it at the time, but in hindsight, I think this is because I figured if I could not have my mind blown again by experiencing the story for the first time, I wanted, at least, to watch other people experience it. (Come to think of it, this may be the closest I’ve come so far to understanding why people have kids.) So, blog readers, have you read it? Did it freak you way out? More importantly, what are some things you wish you could read again for the first time? Anyone want to argue that literature that is indisputably best on the first read is inferior in some way to literature that gets better with subsequent readings?
August 15, 2008
Obsessions don't die, they just, you know. Whatever.
Tao Lin has posted some short interviews with people who have taught his writing in their college classes, including Deb Olin Unferth and Matthew Zapruder. Get the scintillating answers to titillating questions like, "What kinds of foods have you seen students eating in class?" and "What kind of clothes did people who disliked my writing wear?"
I have nothing to add.
August 12, 2008
Twofer
So Elisa totally got to this first, and how could she not? It’s might fine literary gossip. Everyone loves to see those creative types behaving badly.
[Small interpolation: I had to read an epithalamion by Georges Perec in a wedding recently, and was so fatigued by all the French words that I inadvertently substituted “pointy-headed philosophers” for “pointy-hatted philosophers,” so I guess I’m no better than anyone else in this regard.]
But I’m totally going to hitch my wagon to this gravy train (if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor), since I drafted this before Ms. Gabbert’s excellent post. As previously linked by her, on Exoskeleton, Johannes Göransson has posted a debriefing on what he learned at Iowa (via Lime Tree). It’s kind of funny and kind of depressing at the same time:
Lots of people bantered around the phrase "post-language poet"--as I am a... This means that they--like Jorie--used some of the textures of langpo to recreate high modernism, elegance, high learning--as opposed to Marvin Bell's old-guard poetics of authenticity. [...] I remember a debate I got in because someone called something (not mine) "pornographic" because it wasn't complex; I said "but I like pornos."
[This reminded me of my introduction to grad school. The very first week I was there, I got a writing conference scholarship, which involved a reading. After I gave my reading, one of the third years in my program (whom I had never met before) came up to me and said, “Don’t you think it’s a little weird for you to be writing about a teenage girl?” A rhetorical question if I’ve ever heard one.]
In my view, Göransson is extraordinarily open and even-handed in his “bullet points.” He names names and isn’t coy at all about the class politics--the least favorite and most uncomfortable subject even for most of the “revolutionaries” among us. But in the end, the conclusion he comes to is that whether or not he respected, liked, or despised his colleagues, people there thought about poetry all the time, and it was clear that they felt it was the most important thing. I would say that my graduate school experience was no less full of camps, palace coups, thefts, intrigues, betrayals, ideological attacks, and absurdities, but that this pervasive “pathological excitement” about verse made it all worth it.
I think writers would be comforted by the thought of a world in which poetry is a matter of dire public concern, and the question of whether or not Milton could have written Shakespeare’s plays is as scandalous as Lindsay Lohan’s choice of companions.
....
And now… because I’m not a total dittohead... some Whitman.
I confess that I’ve always had a hard time with his bellowing to the cheap seats, making sure that everybody knew who he was and that he was everybody. To quote Lynn Emanuel’s “Walt, I Salute You!”:
...inside, like you, I am in my hydroelectric mode.
The infinite and abstract current of my description
launches itself at the weakling grass. Walt, everything I see I am!
...Walt! You have me by the throat!
Everywhere I turn you rise up insurmountable and near.
He generally kind of makes me feel like a sock puppet, with his oratory and his wish to deposit many many podlings inside of us. I don’t think there’s ever been a more presumptuous use of the plural “I” in literature. Sure, his long lines and his train engine stamina for stanzas was and is impressive, and my undergrad poetry professor once spent half an hour demonstrating a brilliant metrical inversion in one of his lines, but I tend to bristle around poets who are anxious about community and solve this by appropriating every sentiment (or scrap of power) in sight.
That being said, I must admit that Richard Tayson’s piece in The Virginia Quarterly Review made me appreciate the kind of, er, speakerhood problems he was facing as a gay poet (NPR podcast here ).
I guess it never occurred to me to think of Whitman’s communal invocation/necromancy as a sort of cousin of camp. Instead of taking gender and distorting it by magnifying its traits, one could argue that Whitman’s mystical megaphone stole public speech in much the same manner. As Tayson points out, he did censor himself by muting less coy references to his love for men, but even the flourishes that remain can be viewed as a clever example of seizing the means of production, as it were, in order to insert one’s own emendations. And you’d have to go all the way in order to provide enough cover for one’s, uh, lyrical proclivities. Even constructing a towering messianic consciousness in verse wasn’t enough to protect him from the criticism, as Tayson points out:
His work was called “a mass of stupid filth” (New York Criterion, November 10, 1855); “indecent” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Atlantic Monthly, September 1890); “uncouth,” “grotesque,” and “reckless” (Charles A. Dana, Tribune 1894); “intolerable” and “disgusting” (critic Charles Eliot Norton, 1913); and “trashy, profane, and obscene” (J. P. Lesley, a geologist who apparently liked poetry). “It’s as if the beasts spoke,” Thoreau famously quipped. Emily Dickinson, also famously, indicated that though she’d never read his book and of course had never met him, she “was told he was disgraceful,” a phrase that would resonate with Willa Cather’s stance that Whitman was a “dirty old man.” Booksellers withdrew Whitman’s vanity-published 1855 Leaves from their stocks, and libraries, most famously Harvard, kept the book under lock and key, even unto Whitman’s death.
It always pleases me to find an extra facet of subversion hidden here and there in poems and writers.
August 10, 2008
What happens in Iowa
I found this rather fascinating: what Johannes Göransson learned at Iowa, from the required reading list to class politics. And the dominant aesthetic:
The guiding idea of poetry was that it was elevated language, complex language; the idea that it could be political was for example ridiculous. [...] "Images" were vulgar and had to be controlled [...] "indeterminacy" was important, but not for reasons of Marxism -- but because it was "complex" and thus more "realistic."
I'm fond of many of the poets he says were systematically revered there: Knott, Tate, Hejinian. Berryman and Stevens are favorites. Ashbery was apparently the end all be all. But I wonder if I would have felt similarly constrained by the uniformity of influence. On the other hand, my MFA program didn't strongly push a particular reading list so I didn't have much to adhere to or rebel against, and consequently I graduated feeling not much more well-read than I had arrived. I've been exposed to many more new poets through blogs and friends in the years since.
August 8, 2008
You're pretty. Pretty funny. Funny-looking.
Recently I Netflixed a couple of movies I'd seen recommended on poets' blogs. The first, a Japanese film called Funky Forest (not to be confused with Fern Gully), was an outlandish string of vignettes and dream sequences that screamed out for psychotropic enhancement. Though occasionally hilarious, some segments were so stupid/disgusting/tedious that I never finished it. Next came Funny Ha Ha, which I read about on Tao Lin's blog (and we are apparently obsessed with him around here); I let it sit around in the mail basket for like two months fearing similar disappointment, but since my plan only allots me one movie at a time, the longer I waited the more it was costing me.
So I watched it last night, and it totally blew my mind. Not because it was so good, exactly -- but when something is blowing your mind, whether it's good or bad is kind of immaterial.* It was the most realistic movie I have ever seen. Not that realism is something I value above all else, but at this level it was just really novel. The people it depicts, recent college grads who majored in things like engineering and religious studies, reminded me so much of people I knew in college. They are not cool, glamorous people, but neither are they stereotypical nerds. They are just utterly average -- for real people, not actors! -- average-looking, average hair, average personalities, no discernable style. They have awkward, kind of boring conversations, they call things "crazy" a lot, their jokes are the kinds of jokes people actually make. At one point two girls are talking in a car, and the driver revs the engine at a light, then says, "It would help if I put the car in gear, right?" OH MY GOD. That's exactly the kind of pointless shit people actually say.
They also really, really act 23 -- they drink scorpion bowls and Kahlua. The main character buys a six-pack of Lone Star beer!! (This made me wonder if the movie was in fact supposed to take place at Rice, in Houston, where I went to undergrad. This was infinitely more true to my experience than Reality Bites which was filmed there. But it turns out it was filmed in Boston; they're probably supposed to be recent graduates of Harvard or BC. Weird that it reminded me so much of Texas. I guess post-graduation is a state of mind.)
This is what Tao Lin had to say about it:I felt emotional watching "Funny Ha Ha" (Wikipedia). Sometimes I had urges to stop the movie or look away from the screen because it was making me feel like I was experiencing the things happening in the movie which made me feel "awkward" or like "errr." In the movie one person described a phone conversation as "We were like mmrrrr mrrr" and he made a face and did something with his neck. I felt excited when that happened. I looked at the person's head and thought "Wow, that was good, haha." I wasn't being sarcastic. I really thought something like "Wow, haha."
Word.
*I submit that mind-blowing experiences are always positive.
August 7, 2008
Tao Lin Strikes Again
Tao Lin, who's made appearances on the Pshares Blog before, recently announced that he'll be selling 60% of the US royalties for his second novel to the public, at the rate of $2,000 per share. In exchange, shareholders will receive royalty checks every six months after the book's publication. Despite the novel in question being uncompleted and unpublished, an update on Tao's blog reports that all six of the shares have been sold.
Tao says that since deciding to quit his day job, selling novel shares is one of his plans to make a buck while unemployed. He argues that people who buy shares will help him produce a novel of better quality: "There is a 90-95% chance my second novel will be released faster and be higher quality (in my view) if I do not have a 'real job,' do not feel pressure to sell art or 'piles of shit in my room that I draw on' on eBay." As someone who recently left her day job and is avoiding "steady work" for the time being in order to hunker down with my fiction, a part of me can't help but feel a twinge of admiration. I can safely say that I will not see the kind of revenue from miscellaneous freelancing jobs that Tao will see if he actually did sell six shares at $2,000 a pop. Maybe there should be a union for unemployed writers that helps them find absurdly easy ways to make buckets of money?
Tao also thinks selling shares will help promote his novel, saying that people who buy shares "will have concrete motivation to promote me." True, but seeing as there are only six shareholders, they better be awfully well-connected, and it stands to reason these people would have bought his novel anyway. That said, all this has been written about on the The NY Times Blog, The New Yorker Blog, and The Telegraph, who asks if Tao's plan is "shameless self-promotion or the future of the publishing industry?" You decide!
August 6, 2008
Senseless destruction is so senseless, and destructive
Last week on the 32 Poems blog, John Poch wrote of seeing REM:
Their performance reminded me what I dislike of most political poetry, and that is the rhetoric. When Yeats said “We make of our quarrels with others rhetoric; we make of our quarrels with ourselves poetry,” I think he was talking about the language that has made up its mind. You get it the first time. To me, good poetry is what I come back to again and again. I never “get it” the first time.
Which sounded very similar to what I had written in a microreview of the new Wave Books anthology of political poems, State of the Union; you can read that review here. My version of the above sentiment:
Many of the best poems in this collection come at their subject a little more obliquely, but are more fully realized as poems, by virtue of being emotionally complex and provoking more than one thought (e.g., War is bad or The government sucks)–I don’t read poetry to find assertions I already believe to be true.
Of course any kind of poetry can fail by way of stating the crowd-pleasing obvious, but it seems like political poems that commit this error are more likely to get a pass.
August 5, 2008
How does fiction work anyway?
At my parents' house this past weekend, I found myself paging through a copy of Newsweek in which there was this review of How Fiction Works, the latest book by literary critic James Wood While not explicitly billed as a how-to-write book, How Fiction Works is, in fact, a how to book for writers full of examples of effective (realism!) and ineffective (describing photographs!) techniques. (Semi-gratuitous aside: while researching this post, I came across the fun fact that when he was a judge for the Booker Prize in 1994, Wood recommended a novel written by his wife, Claire Messud, to his fellow judges while expediently failing to note their marital status. Presumably, in his new book, Wood does not discuss such criteria for evaluating fiction as whether or not you are married to the person who wrote it.)
Let's ask the obvious question: does Wood, a literary critic, have the authority to tell writers of fiction how to do their jobs? (Wood has published one novel, but is far and away a literary critic first. Then again, Wood may not be widely hailed as a novelist himself, but has probably read more widely and deeply than many successful novelists.) This question may just be another way of asking what is more important in learning how to write: reading or writing? Also, while we're asking questions: do most literary critics secretly or not-so-secretly wish they were famous novelists? And conversely, do most novelists wish they were famous literary critics (or is this chiefly a trait of the n+1 crowd)?
August 1, 2008
Writerly Correspondence
I came across this review in The New Yorker of a new book on Emily Dickinson. It starts off with this sentence: "In April of 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote to a stranger, initiating a fervent twenty-four-year correspondence, in the course of which they managed to meet only twice."
This got me thinking. We're not all shut-ins who can't meet others in person, but how many emerging writers these days keep up these blind correspondences? And via e-mail, right? Do we put the time into our emails that writers used to put into letters? Do we keep those emails around for posterity? With so many editors now who are also writers, the editor-to-writer correspondence (often? sometimes?) becomes writer-to-writer, no? These electronic conversations are surely valuable, and I like to engage in them myself, but I wonder who out there would write a book concerning emails on athletes suffering from giantism, for example . . .
