I took my nephew to one of his two classes the other day. He's five months old. Five months! Baby class! A few days before that, I discovered my first four gray hairs. I'm not old. I don't think. But how old is old, how young is young, anymore?
Alfie Patten is thirteen and old enough to decide against an abortion.
I read an interview recently with Zoe Trope, whom Kevin Sampsell published when she was 16 (15?). The pressure to publish younger isn't a myth, is it? I've started seeing bios where writers list their age beside their publications.
Then there are the Granta lists.
I don't know. I feel old. Maybe I'm getting a little carried away because of my incoming birthday. Cold Mountain was Charles Frazier's first book at age forty-seven.
February 27, 2009
How Young Is Young?
February 26, 2009
Judging A Book By Its Cover
For various reasons, I've been immersed in the world of book covers as of late and, when pressed, I realized I didn't have a very adept vocabulary for describing what, exactly, makes for a good cover. Instead I fell back on that old saying about defining porn: I can't define a good book cover, but I know one when I see it. So the purpose of this post is to determine two things: A. what, exactly, makes for an excellent book cover and B. what are your all-time favorite covers and why?
Apart from worshipping at the altar of Chip Kidd, I've been head-over-heels for the recent-ish covers of Nami Mun's Miles From Nowhere, Nam Le's The Boat, Deb Olin Unferth's Vacation, and the forthcoming Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. Looking at these covers, I think it's some magical alchemy of contrast, imagination, and really good font.
PS: for more book cover talk from Pshares, check out an older post from Elisa on the subject. Also! Check out fwis and prepare to be sucked in.
February 25, 2009
Sassy sassy sassy
I won't go so far as to title this post "How How Sassy Changed My Life Changed My Life," but said book, which I just read, mostly on a plane down to and back up from Raleigh, NC (well, two different planes), brought on some pretty serious nostalgia. (I'm a little late to the parade I guess; the book came out in 2007.) HSCML is a sort of biography of, or a "love letter to," as the subtitle claims, the "greatest teen magazine of all time." Who all out there was a Sassy reader? I freaking loved Sassy when I was a "teen."
I seem to remember it having its most profound effect on my psyche/personality when I was in about 8th grade. Reading this book, I realized for the first time as an adult how much of what I liked back then I got first from Sassy, since I certainly didn't get it from my hip urban friends--all the "indie" music I was into (like Teenage Fanclub and Juliana Hatfield) ... I read a profile of Claire Danes that got me excited about My So-Called Life before the show had actually debuted (I now own all the episodes on DVD). Sassy writers introduced me to the terms "Maneuver X" and "frisson."
One of the more interesting points in the book (there's not a ton of analysis; it's mostly just the story of how the magazine came to be, highs and lows etc., the True Hollywood Story) is the suggestion that Sassy started off with the mission of being inclusive, of sending a message to teenage girls that it was OK to be themselves, that they didn't have to conform to the standards of the skinny tan blonde popular chicks that comprised most teen mags. But after a while Sassy seemed to be promoting an image as much as any other magazine, just a different image: The Sassy reader was supposed to be this cool alterna grrrl.
One student who worked on one of the annual reader-produced issues (RPIs) felt like an outsider among the other outsiders on the reader staff. She may have been on a different intellectual plane from her fellow high schoolers, but because she didn't sew her own clothes and have piercings and shit, the other staffers looked at her as "normal" and a goody-goody. To her they all seemed to be conforming to the same ideal of noncomformity. This really resonated with me. Although I felt Sassy spoke to me in a way no other teen magazine did, I also felt it was over my head in terms of coolness. No Sassy staffer would ever stop me on the street to get a snap of my rad outfit (probably from the Gap), the way they did with Chloe Sevigny. That's right, Chloe Sevigny was discovered by Sassy.
Toward the end of the book, co-writers Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer wonder if today's teens would really need a Sassy--kids who feel like outsiders at school have more outlets now. They can just go online and find freaks across the nation. To boot, the signature voice of Sassy--knowing, insidery, snarky--that made it stand out from other magazines is now readily found on ... blogs.
When I read that, I thought, Fuck. Is my sassy blog persona just refried Christina Kelly? Seriously. I kind of think it might be. Talk about anxiety of influence.
Former Sassy interns, RPI staffers and devoted readers went on to create the next generation of third-wave feminist magazines: Bitch, Bust, and Venus Zine. And, uh, the pshares blog. I'm such an underachiever.
Two Economies... (Wait for it...)
I’m sure that I’ve talked about the poetry world as an economy (who hasn’t? And if so, what constitutes coupons in this world?), but I have to say that in this interview, Gabriel Gudding really brings the earnestness into such a formulation, along with some might fine highfalutin’ argot:
I mean, basically there have been over the past 150 years a limited range of techniques that just keep getting relabeled and rebranded: collage becomes "cut up" becomes "flarf" or "flirph" or whatever it's called now; disjunctive anacoluthon becomes what William James called "automatic writing" and Stein takes that into cubist dada which is then rebranded via a different set of theoretical apparatuses (Frankfurt School) as L=A=N....; a hodgepodge of sleep-based techniques and collaborative aleatoric methods morph (thank goodness) with oppositional leftist politics into surrealism which then meld with the rightist political quietism of late modernism into deep image and...?
This is a market. Markets need a predictive mindset. If "art" and "writing" cannot divest itself of this fascination with symbolic exchange-value in favor of a use-value, it will continue to be just another inverted extension of the economic system.
Too, markets need a projected null point that serves to mask the manufacture of collective misrecognition: the new; imagination; the originary; celebrity and celebration.
Is it possible to write and to think about writing in ways that do not create and maintain hierarchies of artistic domination and power? Is it possible to write without belief in a universe of celebrants and believers? Is it okay to write without thinking oneself a potential object of celebration? And after having written, is it possible not to vie for status as a consecrated writer or as a writer who displays his own performative disinterest in the field of production?
As rhetorical questions go, the last spate is pretty grand. Also, I love “collaborative aleatoric methods morph”. That’s delightful syncopation. I quite agree with his argument, though it seems like such purity is much easier outside the academy. I’ve always thought that the work itself was a much better argument that anything one might be able to deploy, but I have some sympathy with trying to find ways to armor your soft underbelly, even if such performativity is at bottom an extremely subtle form of satire. As Gerald Fitch said, “I only practice philosophy in self-defense.”
And while we’re on the subject of economy, Peter Sagal started a hilarious meme on Twitter: sum up a novel in under 150 characters. Say what you want, this sort of thing is what the internet was made for. (That and finding out about the sex life of hedgehogs).
Here are some of my favorites:
Neuromancer: An AI covertly hires a burnout hacker to free it from its insane rich family creators. Plus: space rastas.
The Fountainhead: As an architect, the last people I should give a crap about are those who pay for or occupy my buildings.
Franny and Zooey: Jesus is a fat lady.
Emma: I'm clever, I'm clever, I'm.. duh
The Silmarillion: What? You find the Lord of the Rings trilogy interesting? We can fix that.
If on a winter's night a traveler: Odd chapters tell you how you read even chapters. All chapters are odd.
The Sun Also Rises: Lost generations seek comfort in booze and bulls. War doesn't mix with genitals.
Gone with the Wind: War sucks. Love sucks. Famine sucks. Families suck. I am fabulous.
Watchmen: Guns don't kill superheroes, other superheroes do.
This is the wisecrack equivalent of flash fiction, which I’m a sucker for. If it’s precipitous, I’m there.
February 22, 2009
Things are tough all over…
…what with the economy circling the drain, but it seems like things may be especially tough for independent bookstores. Like even tougher than usual, which is already pretty tough.
Kyle Minor and I have been traveling all around for our 25 (or so) city book tour, and anecdotally, we’ve noticed a lot of great indies going out of business between the time we were booking our readings and when they were supposed to happen, including Pages for All Ages in Champaign, Illinois and Harry Schwartz in Milwaukee. Even bars, such as the Charleston in Chicago (where the Sunday Salon Series used to happen), seem to be going under. That said, we have heard from other stores, like Skylight Books in LA, that they are having their best years ever.
It’s much better to hear the latter than the former, of course, but in any event, it made me wonder, Ploughshares readers, what are your favorite indie bookstores in your respective hometowns? What are they called? And how are they doing?
February 19, 2009
Cute + sublime = ?
Robert Archambeau, over at Samizdat Blog, is wondering about the intersection(s) of the beautiful, the cute, and the sublime. He gives a rundown of the characteristics of each: the sublime is vast in scale, dark, has gravitas, etc.; the beautiful is "polished" and "delicate"; the cute is small, rounded, vulnerable, nonthreatening. (The first two descriptions draw from Edmund Burke, who apparently didn't address cuteness.)
The beautiful and the sublime are often combined, Archambeau says, as are the beautiful and the cute (see Audrey Tautou). But what about the cute and the sublime? I immediately thought of Murakami (the visual artist, not the writer), whose huge murals can be both silly and menacing (this one doesn't even fit in the column widths).
I also thought of the guinea pig poems (by Aase Berg) I heard Johannes Goransson read at AWP, and which Lara Glenum in the new issue of Action, Yes links to the gurlesque. Glenum quotes Sianne Ngai:
In "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde," Ngai suggests that violence lurks implicitly in the aesthetic of the Cute. Ngai notes, "The formal attributes associated with cuteness--smallness, compactness, softness, simplicity, and pliancy--call forth specific affects: helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency [...] In its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is often intended to excite a consumer's sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle"I have a friend who says when he sees something really cute he just wants to crush it.
What else is both cute and sublime?
February 16, 2009
AWP post-mortem
What was your favorite thing about AWP? Even if you didn't go? I "went," but attended no panels ... I was staying about an hour north of the conference hotel by train, and I never managed to make it down there before about noon, at which point it was time for lunch, after which I would wander the book fair for a while and reunite with writerly friends and acquaintances and such until I felt lonely and despairing and thirsty for cocktails. AWP, I hardly knew ye.
My favorite event was the No Thousands reading at the Empty Bottle on Saturday night, hosted by Black Ocean, Octopus, Rope-a-Dope, Cannibal, and Forklift, Ohio. The lineup was dude-heavy but I was enraptured by the stylings of dudes including Sam Starkweather (City of Moths), Johannes Goransson (who read translations of Aase Berg, insane poems about guinea pigs and a fox heart, I think, which my friends and I happily misheard as "fuck's heart"), and Kevin Holden ("I eat strawberries like I drive a big car").
Possibly for the first time, I didn't come home with a cold. (Unless it's gestating.) Guess the panels are where germs get spread (and bored/underwhelmed).
Also: Go read Gary Sullivan's post/poem "WC Fields + WCW" -- excerpt:
A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money. Forgive me.Love.
A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her. Forgive me.
Ah, the patter of little feet around the house. There's nothing like having a midget for a butler. Forgive me.
February 11, 2009
Fusillade
This week, the magic 8-ball stops on Flarf. While I read a number of Flarf-ish blogs regularly (one of the most articulate and entertaining of which I find to be K. Silem Mohammad’s Lime Tree), I haven’t stopped and really surveyed the field.
For a sort of Present-at-the-Creation summary, Flarf could perhaps be encoded in Gary Sullivan’s recounting of a Flarf-ist response to 9-11:
The list had ground to a chittering halt in mid-summer 2001. By September 11, there hadn’t been a new post in more than a month. On other e-mail lists we were getting touchy-feely post-9/11. But not on Flarf. The dead silence continued for two weeks after the attacks, then, Katie Degentesh sent what was possibly the list’s most pivotal post:
“WAX in my STAR-SPANGLED UNDERPANTS!” the subject line read. The post itself consisted of a single word: “uh-huuuuuuuHHHH.”
Elsewhere, this might have been grounds for reprimand—if not expulsion. But on the Flarf list, it was the very breath of life. Soon, we were all posting, but instead of inside-jokes about minor annoyances, the target was The New Era. If irony, sarcasm, and general un-Americanism had tanked when the Towers fell, the Flarf list was too drunk to read the memo. Everyone posted reams of the most offensive rewrites of New York Times “think” pieces, hand-wringing blog-posts, and other well-intentioned public statements this particular reader had ever seen. I was in love. I had found my tribe.
As to what Flarf is specifically, Wikipedia says,
The term flarf seems to have been coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who notes that it variously "has been described as the first recognizable movement of the 21st century, as an in-joke among an elite clique, as a marketing strategy, and as offering a new way of reading creative writing"
Critics of flarf point to its hodge-podge assortment of Google searches and grammatical inaccuracies as evidence of a movement not to be taken seriously. Fans of flarf believe that it is a new, edgy, and clearer representation of our culture by poets and artists. It bears many similarities to the spoetry - also known as 'Spam Poetry' - movement, which appeared at a similar time.
Or, for a less stodgy perspective, Joyelle McSweeney enthuses in the Constant Critic thus:
Jangly, cut-up textures, speediness, and bizarre trajectories … I love a movement that’s willing to describe its texts as ‘a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness.’ This is utterly tonic in a poetry field crowded by would-be sincerists unwilling to own up to their poems’ self-aggrandizing, sentimental, bloviating, or sexist tendencies.
As I said before, I find Mohammad to be a good commentator/participant/combatant, as he seems to have (from my extreme layperson’s point of view) an excellent sense of the aesthetic issues and implications therein (and is even-handed and humorous without being snarky or abstruse--a rare quality in the blogosphere):
JS: Using the links from the piece, I saw lots of hilarious videos from the Flarf Festival 06 (mostly contributed by Jordan), including your own, and you know ... I laughed a lot. Really. They were mostly very, very funny. (But can there be a "bad" Flarf poem?)
KSM: Flarf gets judged good or bad for the same reason other poetry does: because it succeeds or fails at what it sets out to do, whatever that might be. And that, like lots else, is generally a matter of opinion and/or mechanics. It gets interesting (for me) when there's disagreement over what it is that the work's trying to do, and therefore over what the standards of evaluation ought to be. I think most of the past controversy over Flarf--e.g., Mike Magee's "Glittering Asian Guys" poem--stems from disagreements about what the poems' intentions are, or from firm convictions about certain forms of reference always being unacceptable regardless of context, and not really from any coherent theory of aesthetic goodness or badness. An exception would be people who look at the work and just can't get past the surface "badness": readers who say, wow, that's not very good, and who aren't really concerned with the purposive impulse behind that surface affect. And this position is unimpeachable. No one should have to value badness if they don't want to.
[…]
JS: Could Flarf exist in Gaza? Afghanistan? For people who have lost their jobs and homes? Whoops, getting too earnest again, gotta stop.
KSM: Black humor exists in almost any crisis-ridden social situation you can think of that still somehow retains the vestiges of human consciousness (viz. concentration camp humor, etc.). But of course Flarf is a culturally specific form, like anything else. "Annoying Diabetic Bitch" isn't going to seem very relevant to someone whose children have just been bombed, and that's as true here in the US as in Gaza or wherever. But neither will most other poetry (or art of any sort), beyond a very small subcategory of genres (mourning songs, war chants, etc.), and it's unfair to assume that it should. I don't know why you keep invoking earnestness in the way you do. I don't think any Flarfist ever claimed there was anything wrong with being earnest. I can think of lots of Flarf poems that exhibit varying degrees of earnestness, and lots that don't--again, just like any other kind of poetry.
JS: Actually, even though Sharon's lines were often a scream, the most hilarious line of the review for me was that her flarf "exposes cracks in the culture of banality"--I guess I didn't realize that particular culture needed an exposé.
KSM: Like I said, I didn't write the review. But I can make sense of that statement, I guess: "the culture of banality" is one that doesn't know it's banal, and that tries to present itself as non-banal. The "cracks" occur along those fault lines where the effort to assert non-banality, at its most degradedly heroic, meets the most resistance from the opposing obviousness of banality. I see why you think it's funny, but even though the cracks are already obvious to most intelligent observers, the ways in which the culture tries to cover them up can be insidiously complex, resourceful, and/or pathetic.
Flarf has even splashed over into radio, making an appeareance on Studio 360. How often does that happen for a poetry movement? Luminaries aside, the last thing I remember on NPR was Foetry (which now has a podcast...?) back in 2005.
Anyways, my spelunking in the reference section was spurred on by a recent kerfuffle around these matters, summarized here by David Hadbawnik of Primitive Information.
Apparently, some of Dale Smith’s musings on the subject have been taken as a shot across Flarf’s bow. After much reading, I was still unsure what the smoking gun was, so I hereby include this, because it seems apposite:
Part of what I want to say is that conversations in the blogosphere or elsewhere about the practice of poetry and ethical or social situations that give it definition and shape for others are necessary for the ongoing fluidity and movement of poetry as an art that straddles the practical and theoretical, the experienced and imagined, the felt and the thought. Insofar as we learn to speak with others about what we do—applying pressure when necessary and conceding the value in other practice when it is so recognized—then we are able to expand the capacities of our ability to advance new work into the world. This is not a formal problem—it is essentially an ethical one. The formal surface of a poem can be “inappropriate” (though it better bite), or it can be something else entirely. The thing is that it must open boundaries and not reinforce them; poetry must provide possibility and not foreclose on phronesis with theory; poetry must enhance theory by showing its practical value. We can say that poetry does not do these things—that it is not responsible for anything but itself—and this is absolutely true, too. And yet, as our lives interact within various disciplines, our sense of poetry moves over lines defined from without, and we can’t help responding in various ways to the influences of our working life, or professional life, our domestic life, our political life, and so many other intersecting claims on poetic attention, practice, ethics, and theory.
Mohammad responds hilariously here:
1. Flarf appropriates the discourse of many persons, many of them undoubtedly disempowered, by scavenging the traces of their utterances on the internet for use in the composition of poems. Since no credit is given to these persons, and since some of said discourse is extremely stupid, it is evident that Flarf is mocking the underclasses.
2. Flarf deploys a wide sampling of sometimes tasteless and insensitive language under the guise of social critique, but in ways that make it difficult for some readers (particularly those who are ignorant of the use/mention distinction, or who reject flatly on moral grounds anything that resembles irony) to tell the difference between said critique and the injuries perpetrated by the original subjects who are the source of that language.
3. Flarf sometimes takes advantage of the media attention that is focused upon it (a relatively small amount of attention compared to that enjoyed by more commercially viable art forms such as music, customized T-shirt design, or those plastic testicles some people hang from the tailgates of their pickup trucks, but more than is usually focused upon the work of Dale or his friends, and therefore enough to throw into disequilibrium the fragile economy of all the poetic communities concerned), thus making no attempt to hide its complicity in the Spectacle.
4. Flarf commits the dual error of a) resorting to humor as a means of engaging its readers, in a social climate where humor must be considered a grossly self-indulgent bourgeois barbarism; and b) not always bothering to make sure its jokes are funny.
5. Flarf fails to provide a coherent theoretical apparatus with which to contextualize its disruptions of sense and syntax as acceptable modes of political intervention, and so leaves itself open to the charge of willful obscurantism. This failure is exacerbated by the apparently total lack of interest exhibited by most Flarfists in answering its detractors' demands for such an accounting.
What seems at issue here is, among other things, the fallacy of imitative form (as my fiction professor used to say). Namely, that a poem about boredom must be boring, a poem about tedium should be tedious, etc. Andrew Neuendorf (of Ape and Coffee) encapsulates this particular critique so:
David,
I’d been thinking something similiar lately, regarding one of your above questions, which I will rephrase as, “Are flarfistas (flarfists? Flarfers?) merely imitating the problems of internet speech or are they actually critiquing it and thereby undermining its influence?”
Or maybe this is an unfair position in which to place poetry? Either way, because Flarf poems often use profane and crude language and mimicks the sometimes brash discourse of, say, youtube comments (man, if want to lose IQ points, spend five minute reading those), they take on a bigger burden, because they could merely replicate the damaging, demeaning, deadening nature of such language, thereby lowering the discourse, not, as we seem to expect from poetry, raise it or complicate it.
On the other hand, Flarf is read merely as a reflection of the nihlism of our discourse, the meaningless and utter stupidity of life in America, then merely replicating such langauge is the point, and placing it within the context of poetry is like setting off a bomb in our sacred halls, to, it seems, announce the end.
And when it comes down to it, as with any movement, no two flarfists probably agree on the function of flarf. Looking forward to hearing Kasey weigh in some more. His blog’s snazzy and smart.
For those of you who want to weigh in on the side of “Art shouldn’t be able to do these things, because its speakerhood/position/tools are compromised, and yet it does,” Joe Safdie is for you:
On the other hand, I can't speak for anyone else, but part of my problem with Flarf (and for that matter langpo) was always its uncertain connection with the world, for all that might mean. Someone a few days ago said that there's always a gap between word and world, signifier and signified (thought I'd throw in some semiotics for you Lanny), and if that's true, I'd have to say that the poems that I've always found most important are the ones that have tricked me into not believing that.
For my own part, I’d say that I usually enjoy the formal tension in a piece. Is there a sense of architecture and inevitability about the progression of the piece? Is the voice structured in such a way that there is a pleasing coherence (even in the incoherence)? Are the propositions that the piece sets out fulfilled?
I don’t have any issue per se with poems that do not seem compelled to solve a formal problem (and I’m not talking about meter here), fail to feel any urgency about working through a difficulties associated with a technique, or which derive the majority of their power from the violation of my expectations, rather than any complexity within the piece itself. I don’t think these are questions of “morality” or “immorality.”
[I do have a soft spot in my heart for transgressiveness, but generally when it is a strategy in a piece, and not the strategy.]
However, I usually have limited interest in them, simply because I don’t find their particular ambitions to be very engaging. (Especially when those ambitions have to do with my expectations of a poem. I know what my expectations are, and I don’t derive any particular thrill when they’re tweaked. [Unless you’re really really clever about it.] Literature is an artificial form. You know it. I know it. Any time you sit down to write something new, you are reminded all over again just how artificial your activity is.)
But I like thinkers who make some effort to transcend the artifice through strategy or sheer cleverness, and I tend to prefer elegant architectures or speakerhood that look for new ways to disable or illuminate that artifice. I’d like to have the sense that the writer had at least a complex experience writing the poem as I did reading it, simply because a complex thing tends to bears up under repeated examination better, and pieces that have a number of different concerns and techniques tend to have something to offer you at different points in your intellectual and writing career, as your tastes and most deeply held artistic principles tend to (or should) change over time. Someone said that Bertrand Russell was such an impressive philosopher because he held, at various points, every possible belief, which is not the worst intellectual epitaph in the world (especially since such a career would tend to enrage the critics].
I don’t want to limit anyone’s aesthetic ambitions, nor cobble together some sliding scale of artistic utility. I’m just a restless, finicky, and perverse reader, so poems that rely on instant gratification (though this is a very American device) tend not to hold my attention. (This may seem contradictory but it’s not: I am easily bored, so poems that do a lot of stuff and have a lot of different stuff in them hold my interest better.)
Plus, it’s more useful to talk about writers rather than hordes anyway. C.D. Wright, David Berman, Jeff Clark, Ada Limon, Jennifer Knox, Noelle Kocot, Anne Carson, April Bernard, Dorothea Laskey, Maureen Seaton, Tory Dent, Matthew Zapruder, Thomas Heise, Lyn Hejinian, Lynn Emmanuel, Arielle Greenberg, John Gallaher... these are writers are often claimed by one avant-garde school or another, and it always seems to diminish rather than enhance their work. They’re on my bookshelf, and I come back to them over and over again regardless of how narrative or non-narrative they may be. Raymond Chandler said, “There are no dull subjects. There are only dull minds.” I think this holds equally true when you substitute “styles” for “subjects.”
Though, as Dale says above, discussion is always a good thing, even when it does not make for an especially thermodynamically consistent intellectual universe.
February 5, 2009
Rules for Reviewing?
Since we've been mourning the late, great John Updike around here (as an aside, Pigeon Feathers is probably my favorite work by Updike, especially the title story), I thought it fitting to post about his "rules for reviewing," which I came across in the Critical Mass archievs. I've been doing a little more book reviewing as of late, and Updike's guidelines make a lot of sense to me (and also remind me of how much I loved reading his reviews in The New Yorker). I enjoy the process of book reviewing, but it can be anxiety-inducing too. If I love something, I worry about doing the book justice in the review, and if I have issues with something, I worry about rendering my qualms in a way that doesn't go against Updike's edict of not blaming the author for "not achieving what he [or she, Mr. Updike!] did not attempt."
If you do book reviews, what do you like/not like about the process? What are your rules for reviewing?
February 2, 2009
AWP Preview (AWPreview?)
It's almost that time again: the AWP Conference will be taking place next week, from Wednesday, February 11 through Saturday, February 14 in Chicago "First We Had Barack Obama, and Soon We Hope We'll Have the Olympics" Illinois. Who's going? Are you excited? What are you most excited about?
The Book Fair is usually my personal favorite--all those amazing small presses and pretty magazines. But I this year, I'm also really looking forward to the off-site events. This may change when I'm actually *at* said events, since often they creep well past their allotted times and are hard to hear and get overly crowded and uncomfortably hot and so on. But have you seen this year's list of off-site stuff? It's enormous, and so potentially good that you practically don't even need the conference itself. But that's probably not right--you couldn't have the off-site readings without the conference, exactly. And maybe some people are really psyched about the panels?
What are your favorite parts of AWP, if you go? And if you don't go, why not? And either way, have you seen that Facebook application that allows you to give Crappy AWP Gifts to your friends?
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