I mentioned last week in the context of Johannes Goransson's poetry a definition of good writing that entails embarrassment or discomfort (in that case, on the writer's part); yesterday I read this intriguing quote attributed to Brian Micklethwait:
As for the endlessly repeated claim that art is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, I don't buy that. And I don't believe the people who say that they do buy it are being honest. I think that a picture which they have no problem with, but which they believe makes other people whom they disapprove of uncomfortable, makes them very comfortable indeed, and that that is the kind of discomfort (i.e. not discomfort at all, for them) which they like, and are referring to with all this discomfort propaganda. They no more like being genuinely discomforted by art than I do.
This seems both true and not true, meaning that I'm sure there are art-snob poseurs out there who feel this way, who believe themselves "edgy" and get some smug satisfaction out of knowing that a bit of art or writing etc. would make others uncomfortable.
At the same time, I don't accept that that's
all there is to the theory, that it's merely propaganda. I have certainly felt genuine discomfort while viewing or reading something, and then, after the fact, appreciated that art for evoking that feeling, even if I didn't exactly enjoy the discomfort in real time. To aver that no one really likes discomfort seems naive. Some people obviously do enjoy discomfort and even pain (else wherefore S&M?), because boundary-blurring brings pleasure and/or because being moved to a strong reaction of any sort is rare and to be valued.
As a really obvious and timely example, doesn't this explain why (some) people like watching horror movies? Being scared is uncomfortable, but also fun, and the relief of the fear when the movie is over is pleasurable (like the high you can get after heavy exercise, which is also in itself uncomfortable). Another kind of discomfort I relish is books/TV/whatever that remind me acutely of the painful awkwardness of youth. It's squirmy and awful but the sheer strength of the recognition can be awesome.
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As Kathy said in her last post, given the proximity to the election, I too am pretty much incapable of thinking, talking, or blogging about anything else. So, to continue on the topic of political narratives, what did people think of Obama’s TV spot last night?
I thought it was good—hitting the American symbolism (amber waves of grain, anyone?) and “I’m just like you” notes a little hard, perhaps, but then I imagine that’s largely the point. He also didn’t so much as mention McCain’s name, which makes the absurd allegations McCain and Palin keep throwing out seem even more desperate and petty. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I actually felt kind of moved, but perhaps that’s just symptomatic of my pre-election zombie state.
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As you may have noticed, there’s only a little over a week until the 2008 Election, and if you’re like me, that is pretty much the only thing you can think, talk, or blog about at this point. So first, I want to call your attention—if you haven’t already seen them—to a couple of hilarious pieces in the New Yorker, one by George Saunders and one by David Sedaris, the latter of whom says of undecided voters:
“I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?’ To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”
But I also want to pick up a thread of Elisa’s from last week, when she was mentioning how she doesn’t buy into the workshop saw about deleting or changing “references that will ‘date’ a piece.” How does this “rule” apply—or does it—to political writing? Not just political poetry which tends not to have to be terribly specific as long as it sort of says tyranny is bad and war is evil and being a citizen is tough and so forth, and not satire, which, by definition, is timely, but political fiction. Does anyone read Primary Colors anymore? Is it because it is too un-timeless, or just because it wasn’t that good to begin with?
Bonus question: Ploughshares blog readers, what are your favorite pieces of political fiction (aside from George W. Bush’s entire premise for the Iraq War, and John McCain’s pants-on-fire crap about Obama’s tax plan and Joe the Plumber. Ooh, burn.)
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Over at the tautologically named No One Does That, Blake Butler engages in one of my favorite forms:
Q: What did Anne Frank eat and drink when she was in the cupboard?
A: Anne Frank had large rivets in her skull cut from where while she lay in the womb her mother had smoked 'skonk,' Anne Frank's mother was heavy into the late 1920's Manchester black metal scene and had imprinted a large tattoo of a jackrabbit on her hind ass, as a result Anne Frank was capable of storing vast quantities underneath her hair that in her younger forgetful years she would often forget about until the taffy or goose fur or tea leaves she'd shoved inside herself had begun to rot and grow mold, it was because of the blue mold off a certain early kind of Triscuit that Anne Frank lost most of the vision in her right eye and often would faint without warning when she heard certain tones from birds
(The above: very cool. But I check out later on when Mr. Butler gets a bit Mark Halliday-ish: “I've Gogged the smeepie where I hardly borshbum Gogg I Gogg or Gogg. The neepy-nee-naw will keep on Goggsleereening without me, and Gog can't Gog anything to Gog lissmissum anyGogg. I'll just Gogg matters Gogg their leiffumwitzis and ictrerunnum on Gogg and Gogg Gogg Gogg will Gogg all Gogg in the nordvunt.”)
As a kid, I had a bunch of Choose Your Own Adventure books, where you always died, fell into a pit, got lobotomized, got knocked on the head, or were taken prisoner as an intergalactic sex slave on page 146). Wikipedia formally codifies the types of endings here:
At least one, but often several, endings depicting a highly desired resolution, often involving uncovering a handsome monetary reward.
Endings that result in the death of the protagonist, companions of the main character or both, or other very negative ending (e.g., an arrest), because of a fatal choice of the reader.
Other endings that may be either satisfactory (but not the most desired ending) or unsatisfactory (but not totally bad).
Occasionally a particular set of choices will throw the reader into a loop where they repeatedly reach the same page (often with a reference to the situation being familiar). At this point the reader's only option is to restart the adventure.
One book, Inside UFO 54-40, revolved around the search for a paradise that no one can actively reach; one of the pages in the book describes the player finding the paradise and living happily ever after, although none of the choices in the book led to that page. The ending could only be found by disregarding the rules and going through the book at random. Upon finding the ending, the reader is congratulated for realizing how to find paradise.
Maybe they’re the reason why I really like a fundamental level of uncertainty about a text. Alternate histories have this cool retroactive way about them, where anything could be allusive or invented. One of my favorite adolescent series was the Wild Cards, an alternate history version of America where an alien virus killed, mutated, or gave superpowers to whomever it infected. They were written by a bunch of different authors and went right up from WWII to the present. (Of particular interest to me and my gossipy historical tastes was the book that covered the 1988 Democratic National Convention.) I liked the way the popular culture and the vernacular was refracted through the prism of the virus. Possibly this is why I was born to both write and enjoy snarky poems.
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When fellow workshoppers tell you to delete or change references that will "date" a piece.
First of all, if the piece gets published, it's going to come to readers in the context of a dated periodical or book. How often do we read something without having a vague idea of when it was written and published? Secondly, if we should be so lucky as to have our work read by future generations, then readers will likely have a grasp on when we were writing. By then you're "famous." Thirdly, even if we don't use timely brand names, popular slang and so on, our constructions and our vocabulary and our topical interests will betray us anyway. One can't speak without dating oneself. And so what? Shakespeare sounds pretty dated these days, but we're still reading him (and watching him at the movies). The writing of a given generation always has its markers. That doesn't make it a time bomb counting down to its own obsolescence.
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I've said before I dislike poems that begin with titles or lines like "Dear History" or "Dear Radiator," but nonetheless I liked Dear Ra (A Story in Flinches) by Johannes Goransson (Starcherone), which includes those exact titles/lines. Someone in an interview I read once said he knew what he'd written was good when he felt embarrassed. Or uncomfortable? Something like that. Dear Ra is full of embarrassing-in-a-good-way lines about masturbation and ridiculous sex dreams. There's a kinship with Tao Lin here, "elevating" (I think JG would hate that word!) adolescent angst into poetry. Not that this is all it accomplishes, but the book is pretty much worth reading for the throw-away lines alone:
America turns people into turnstiles.
The problem with windows is not rocks; it's the kids who don't throw them.
Most people prefer to look at their own reflection in a shower handle.
Yay.
OK, random feminist interjection: Seth Abramson announced that he won the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize ($5,000!) from Poetry; past winners, he writes, include W.S. Merwin and shit. He named seven other famous to semi-famous men. I always notice a gender bias in a list, so I clicked over to the full list of winners, wondering if it was a prize for men only? Turns out three women have won, out of fifteen total, since 1994. Is Poetry really consistently publishing better poems by men than women? (There's no description of what the prize is for, exactly; maybe it's not for the "best" poems?) The women who have won also seem comparatively less "famous" than the men. I'd never heard of Rebecca McClanahan (1994); not sure about Heidi Steidlmayer (last year). Maybe Seth Abramson is comparable (though I know of him through blogging; plus he has been published everywhere). But the other men! Charles Wright. Carl Dennis. Billy Collins. I don't know what this means, if anything. But it's kind of a weird list.
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All these awards now have got me thinking again about what academy secretary Horace Engdahl said, that "the U.S. is too isolated, too insular." He says we "don't participate in the big dialogue of literature." (Thanks to Amy. H. for this link, which I wanted to put up again.)
My first reaction to this was that it was a ridiculous statement, but now there's this nagging thought that Engdahl might be a little bit right.
For example, I go to a bookstore here in Korea and there is a huge selection of translated books. This, of course, has something to do with the population difference (40 million here versus 300 million in the States) but there's also something else I've noticed. In the States, reading a book from another country has a certain mystique. When you tell people you're reading, say, Bohumil Hrabal, they give you that look like you must be one of those intellectuals. But here, it's nothing special. It's normal for Koreans to read books from other countries. Kids grow up versed in the classics of world literature, including American. They're supposed to "participate in the big dialogue of literature" from an early age, whether as readers or as writers.
But Adam Kirsch makes a good point about America being a culturally diverse place full of culturally diverse literature (i.e. Hemon, a Bosnian writer who learned English alarmingly quickly, being nominated for the National Book Award). A lot of the American literature that I love would probably get stuck in the "ethnic" section in a Sarah Palin library--literature about the immigrant experience, or about experiences in other countries, or about what it means to be American as someone who looks different, thinks differently, has different beliefs, from the majority of Americans.
So is it true or not? Are we too insular?
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What the H does that mean anyway? (NB: I didn't do any historical research. I prefer to speculate at this juncture.) The generous interpretation would be, "Cut the bits you love that no one else does." But as such it sounds like advice I might give but would never take, and at that only give to writers I don't particularly like. Unless the author's sensibilities are quite different from your own, why should it be true that his or her darlings wouldn't be precious to you as well? Which is why I sometimes read it in an ungenerous light to mean, "Cut the good parts." As though it's show-offy to have any standout lines or something. I mean, in the end, who are you going to trust, your readers or your gut? Right? More often than not, your readers are also your competitors! Maybe they're just jealous.
Seriously, somebody tell me if this is actually good writing advice, and if so why. Is it strictly for beginners? People whose darlings are probably crap? Or did Faulkner actually follow this? What if he trashed all his best books thanks to this dumb rule?
I guess the most ungenerous interpretation would be "Murder your real live babies." They're distracting you from the real work.
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It's that time of year once again: the finalists for the 2008 National Book Awards are in! Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Kushner, Peter Matthiessen, Marilynne Robinson, and Salvatore Scibona (who Kathy recently interviewed for the blog) round out the fiction list. I was a little bummed by the absence of story collections, but excited to see Graywolf with a finalist (Salvatore Scibona). Graywolf is a pretty big indie at this point, but since the major NYC houses traditionally dominate the NBA nods for fiction, it was cool to see an indie break through.
Frank Bidart, Mark Doty,
Reginald Gibbons,
Richard Howard, and Patricia Smith make up the poetry list. Thoughts from the poets out there?
In nonfiction, I was psyched to see Joan Wickersham on the list for
The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order. Wickersham won the 2007
Cohen Award from
Ploughshares for her story
The Woodwork, which, I believe, was the origin of
The Suicide Index—you saw it first in the pages of
Ploughshares!
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Mary Biddinger asks, in response to a talk by Olena Kalytiak Davis (whom I kind of love), what is the value of "not writing" as an act in itself? She seems reluctant to concede that it has much value, and suspicious that it's an excuse or cover-up for writer's block.
I can see how very steady and/or prolific writers would have that view, but as someone who tends to go through prolific periods and not-so-prolific periods, I tend to agree that occasionally engaging in not-writing is important. For me it's like letting the fields lie fallow for a season. The not-writing act is never, ever intentional (in my case), and rarely enjoyable in any way. It makes me feel restless and worthless and jealous/competitive with other writers I know who are writing. And yet--any "breakthroughs" I have usually happen on the sly while I'm not writing, so when I do begin writing with urgency again, I feel that I've actually gotten better at writing, am doing something I wasn't doing before. Whereas when I try to write during a not-writing period, I usually feel like I'm just spinning out old tricks.
But I hate not writing. I'm not writing (much) right now.
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Have you had a chance to check out the e-panel publishing panels that Dan Wickett is running over at the Emerging Writers Network?
The latest one centers on chapbook publishers including New Michigan Press, Tameme, Dancing Girl Press, Greying Ghost Press, Kitchen Press, and Future Tense Press. The other day, Kevin Sampsell of Future Tense and I were sort of talking about places that publish chapbooks of prose (and he mentions this in the panel as well), and we couldn’t think of very many at all. His press does, of course, and so does Rose Metal Press, and Dan Wickett mentioned that Tameme sometimes does, but aside from that very short list, we were coming up dry. Are there any other prose chap publishers that we’ve overlooked? A chapbook seems like a good delivery device not just for poetry, which seems to be how most publishers use it, but also for prose—but is it? Or isn’t it? Also, while we’re on the subject, if you happen to write short short prose and to have a chapbook’s worth of it, the third annual Rose Metal Press chapbook contest opens this week on October 15, so please do consider submitting.
In the meantime, to quote Kevin’s question: “Do you think the ‘fiction chapbook’ is an oddity?”
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I love this post by Gary Sullivan about a series of "interventions" carried out by Jacques Debrot involving the name John Ashbery, including sending out fake poems and recording a fake interview. I find this especially interesting in contrast to the Issue 1 thing, because here is a case where the poet in question actually has a reputation which could be threatened (i.e., he is "famous" and still alive); because this project centered around Ashbery alone, and not 3,000 other people, whose "poems" all look the same, readers could/would certainly believe that the words attributed to Ashbery were actually Ashbery's. At the same time ... did these acts really do any damage to his reputation? This is the first I'd heard about them. In a way it seems that the greater your reputation, the more immune it is to damage. But paradoxically, a minor reputation is also protected from damage; there's no one to perceive the damage if no one knows who you are to begin with.
I also like how Sullivan characterizes Ashbery's voice in The Tennis Court Oath: "I’m amazed at how contemporary the writing feels, how much of this book—written in the late 50s and very early 60s—seems to have seeped out into the poetry of the present." This is one of the ultimate goals of poetry for me. I've heard some people say they try to write "timeless" poems and what they mean is that although they're writing today, their poems seem like they could have been written in the past. I want the opposite: for my poems to seem like they could have been written in the future. (It's a lofty goal I obviously don't achieve (yet?).) This is what I was getting at in "Poem with Variation on a Line from Saturday Night Fever."
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As you might know, we here at the electronic Ploughshares annex love us some hoaxes. There’s nothing we like more to discuss in our smoking jackets as we wave around our meerschaum pipes and swirl brandy. Yup, if there’s hilarity, snarkiness, or just plain misdirection, then we’re on it.
For your consideration: Issue 1, a 3,785 page issue of just about every poet you can think of, writing a bit like trauma patients trying to explain how a dandelion is sexier than a rhinoceros, if said dandelion had read lots of linguistics textbooks. Here’s the hook. And the... apology?
Say what you want about the poems here (which can be best characterized as being the linguistic equivalent of “easy on the eyes,” but not in the attractive sense), Issue 1 has managed to add something to the literary world: a massive, simultaneous appropriation of poems not written by anyone.
Reactions abound. Many people comment on Harriet, seemingly unaware that the internet depends on people not stopping to think that when you look into the void, the void also looks into you. Then stays up all night composing a suitably arch and becoming phrase to conceal the scathing hyperlink to your comment.
I think my favorite reaction is this:
THIS IS AN OUTRAGE. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED YOU LITTLE SCRABBLE RATS. YOU TURTLENECK FONDLING GOOSE EXCREMENT.
Delightful.
I’m sure that I have spent more time thinking about the nature of Issue 1’s stunt than the creator of said text. Which I generally find to be a bad sign. Hoaxes should be hard work, I feel; otherwise, one might suspect that the nature of your critique is to make someone else come up with a critique for you. Which means you are the intellectual equivalent of Brad Pitt’s character in True Romance, smoking out of a HoneyBee container, and feeling your brain dribble down your spinal column.
Jeffrey Bahr points out that even the sheet number of poem-like-things isn’t even evidence of hard work on the part of the impresario, as a few selective IF/THEN statements can reproduce the effect exactly. (Check out the accompanying manifesto and advice to students.)
Much cleverer, I find, is The Futility Review (where people are deliberately not published). Their submission interview is especially entertaining. It at least assumes an audience. Any audience, rather than a simple assertion that there is none, or that turning one’s back to the audience is the only cue required. I get irked when the more complicated a reaction I’m supposed to have, the simpler the gesture is. (And this holds true for both a lyric and an avant-garde piece).
I must confess that I immediately searched the .pdf file for my name. And this was after I read K. Silem’s Mohammad’s adroit little deconstruction of the value-making of aesthetics and naming. Does this mean I have been co-opted? Maybe. Ridiculously easy to shrug off, if so. Aesthetics involves arbitrary currency. Authorship involves some sort of bad faith contract in order to gain authority. I have an uncle named Stritch. Further bulletins as events warrant.
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The Nobel Prize for Literature will be given out on the 9th, but to whom? If you're a betting (wo)man, you could put money on it here. Also, have a listen on NPR. (I wonder if I should say something like "we don't support or encourage gambling blah blah blah...")
In case you're interested, the odds are on Italy's Claudio Magris, at 3-1, followed by Joyce Carol Oates and Israel's Amos Oz. Is this the year JCO gets a Nobel? Who deserves one? Can we get a vote/survey going?
Also, politics (as if the Nobel isn't political). Let me add a link to Tina Fey's SNL skit to Laura's Palin responses. Because the bailout plan is all about health care, right? Hm. I kind of think of the bailout like this: I took my significant other to the hospital yesterday after her nosebleed didn't stop for four hours, and they shoved about ten inches of medicine-soaked tissue up her nose. I mean, yeah, that'll stop the bleeding, but...
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Perhaps I'm one of the few Joy Williams fans who didn’t already know about this, but I was psyched to come across these three audio interviews with the super-genius author. Williams is one of my all time favorite writers, and a truly singular talent. The Quick and the Dead is one of those books I feel compelled to foist upon people like a born-again Christian hawking everlasting salvation. Williams does few interviews and seems to live a life of relative seclusion, so I was excited to come across this trio, though my excitement was a little dampened was how annoying I found the interviewer to be. Instead of cultivating interesting and spontaneous conversation, he was more invested in mining Williams’ work for Big Deep Meaning and then asking her about her intentions. Ugh.
Another one I recently found interesting was an Art of Fiction interview with Marilynne Robinson from the Fall 2008 Paris Review. Robinson does quite a few interviews, but this was one of the more substantive conversations about her religious and philosophical perspectives that I’ve read.
In turn, the Robinson interview made me think of an older Paris Review interview with Anne Carson, where she talks about “the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available,” and I realized my ideal Battle of the Intellects would be between Robinson and Carson. They seem very well-matched to me. Perhaps this could be offered to the public as an alternative to the presidential debates and the whirlwind of largely empty commentary and spin that follows. I think we’d all be better for it.
And, speaking of the elections, if anyone feels like laughing their ass off today, check out these clips from recent interviews with Sarah Palin, and some equally hilarious responses.
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I enjoyed this response to the critics of his recent Hart Crane review in the new Poetry, in which Logan argues that poetry criticism needn't be less biting in times of war, as Daniel Halpern had implied, and that "a kitten in the wilderness" is not a line to be praised. Also:
Criticism is the exercise of taste under the guise of objectivity—the psychology of taste is such that few readers are perturbed when some mediocrity is praised, but mobs begin lighting torches when their favorites are ignored or damned. Yet criticism is surely most valuable when it argues against the grain—at least, the reader is likely to learn more from it, even if he disagrees down to his horny soles.
In the spirit of responding to critics: Blogger
Laura Hirneisen wrote that
my post below on Kevin Prufer's poem was "an unsuccessful attempt to be
subversive." This surprised me, but I can't say I'm sorry I didn't succeed in being subversive, since I actually was not trying to be. If there was any doubt, my praise was 100% sincere. I loved the poem, and its method, which I think could accurately be described as subversive.
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