Marie Schutt interviewed me for The Collagist blog.
We talk about “This Doomed Gift Before You” as cash-in sequel, artistic pitfalls, what I want people to feel, what I’m reading and writing, UMass, communal burning, Salinger, and the future.
Thanks, Marie, for spending time with my story and coming up with good questions! Interviews are like the cupcakes of writing. Good for me? Nah. But what I fantasize about sometimes while eating my green beans?
Well. That’s a stretch. But I’m doin stuff this month.
2/8 – The Rendezvous – 7 pm -Reading a little some thing of mine and then one Daniel Bailey’s DRUNK SONNETS, along with Ben Kopel, Anne Holmes, Gale Thompson, Jack Christian, and Christy Crutchfield. Put on by Magic Helicopter and Slope.
2/17 – Northampton – Green Street Cafe – 7:30 pm – Reading poems with Jack Christian. My first ever poetry reading–come see me squirm. It’ll also be my first time reading at length from Fun Camp.
2/18 – UMass – Memorial Hall – 8 pm – I get to introduce Donald Antrim. Then Donald Antrim reads.
2/26 – Amherst Books – Live Lit - 8 pm – Reading fiction with Robin McLean, Luke Goebel, and Mark Koyama.
For one magic week, Jason Behrends at Orange Alert handed me the reins to his excellent feature, The Watch List, where I reported on the arts I’ve been consuming.
We also used the occasion to give away a few “Complete Genealogy” chapbooks. Congrats to quick draws Mel Bosworth, Ben Segal, and Pete Anderson!
My story, This Doomed Gift Before You, came out in this month’s issue of The Collagist. The story features the same two guys from another story I wrote called The Cracks and Strains, published by Word Riot about a year and half ago.
Big thank you to Matt Bell for selecting it, editing it, and engaging in a spirited email back and forth regarding the story’s title. (Other titles considered included “Ducking the Limebulb,” “Burn After Admiring,” as well as a number of others.) I’ve been paying attention to Matt and enjoying his writing for some time now, so I’ve been especially excited to catch his attention, first in Mid-American Review and now in the Collagist.
From the release note:
In this first issue of 2010, we’ve got new fiction by Tina May Hall, Alan Michael Parker, Gabe Durham, and Gabriel Blackwell, as well as a novel excerpt from Louis Paul Boon’s My Little War, which is out this month from Dalkey Archive Press, an essay from Jennifer S. Cheng, and poetry by Mary Jo Firth Gillett, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Emily Kendal Frey, and Doug Ramspeck.
In this month’s book review section, we’ve got coverage of My Bird by Fariba Vafi, The Complete Collection of people, places, & things by John Dermot Woods, Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis, and Ever by Blake Butler.
Finally, we’ve also got the third occurrence of our Classic Reprint series in Padgett Powell’s story “Scarliotti and the Sinkhole,” introduced by Dzanc author Jeff Parker, one of his former students.
The new EP is mostly pre-Silver Wrens tracks, OK, but what are you going to do, not buy it?
There’s a great new Stephen Dixon story up at matchbook.
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Been reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics–so smart and fun. (Thanks Other Words committee for the tip.) I’m sure the book is outdated in a number of ways I’m too ignorant of the comics/graphic novels universe to understand, but many of these concepts are timeless and applicable to all the arts.
For instance, there’s a whole section on the concept of closure, “observing the parts but perceiving the whole.” Example: When we see a partially obscured Pepsi bottle, our brain fills in the rest from experience. In comics, it relates to the way our brains fill in/animate the space between comic panels.
This concept is absolutely applicable to the novel I’m reading, Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, which is told quick panel-like snippets, leaving just enough for the reader to fill in her own picture of what’s going on in between. (Kind of like My Loose Thread.) In comics, we’ve trained ourselves to do this in childhood. We learn to “read” comic strips before we learn to read. In Robison’s book, I spent the first 30 pages or so pretty resistant to the idea. I wondered, “Is this form worth the work?” But once the book trained me to read it, I’ve been addicted to the rhythm, and the effort is no longer conscious.
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I’m delighted to say, 2010 is shaping up to be my biggest year for stories yet. Lots to look forward to:
I’ve got stuff coming out in the next Collagist, Keyhole 9 (which I got a sneak peak of and can tell you is a solid issue, including a moving story by Nick Kocz) two different issues of Mid-American Review, The Normal School (my first time having a story available in a Barnes and Noble, I think, and I admit this excites me), The Lifted Brow’s next beast of an issue (maybe the contributor copy I’m most eager to receive/read/listen to), Bust Down the Doors and Eat All the Chickens’ upcoming online issue, and a contribution to a forthcoming Magic Helicopter chapbook.
Meanwhile, Fun Camp is on the march! In the next indeterminate number of months, 18 more shorts with appear in notnostrums (4 of them), A cappella Zoo (1), Nano Fiction (3), Saltgrass (2), and FriGG (8!).
Since the sidebar is getting a little unruly, I’m keeping it all straight on the Publications page.
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Chris Bachelder did a reading this summer in which he read three pieces–two short stories and one short essay–all relating to The Great Gatsby. The essay just went up at the Believer (fortunately one of the full-text freebies) and my favorite of the two stories has been up at Subtropics awhile now (same deal, full-text freebie + bonus interview). Lately, though, I think his main thing is publishing excerpts of his next novel, like this one in storySouth. It’s gonna be good.
Home again, cold again.
Mike Young’s first collection of stories, Look! Look! Feathers, is coming out from Word Riot Press in the Fall of 2010. I’ve read at least 3 of the stories that’ll be in there and many older ones, and they’re all great. This is going to be one to own.
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Edward Mullany has a new blog, notes about permanent things, where he writes about the arts. He’s also blogging and tweeting for matchbook and generally taking over the internet.
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I won a contest over at Big Other. Contestants were invited to write fake bios of the writers of the books they were giving away. My entry was as follows:
Trinie Dalton never had a chance, her poor heart weak-walled from birth. She wrote long books in bed on her desktop computer, keyboard in lap, staring straight out the window. Every half hour, Tina glanced at the monitor to her right to make sure it was still on. It usually was. The author of This Squirrel is Really Up to Something, Dolly Tinti slept and slept. The maid snuck Dilly’s hard drives to New York City and the rest, as they say, is as follows: Born in 1984, I wasted how many years praying to Trinity Dalton not knowing her claim to answer prayers was just the title of her 12th book. Who could fault Tiny Delton, though, with her itty deltoids that she swore would swell up like avocados after track practice but only she could tell? I’m asking–who? Her heaviest book, Call Me Guacamole Maybe, swept the Nobels. She got season passes to Dulles International and whenever she flew, strong chipper men whisked Duly Tutu past security, laughing nervously at the very idea of a frisk. Put me down, Dolly cried, loud enough to charm us all, too softly to hear.
Mine may or may not have been the only entry in my category, but it won, won, won. Her book, Sweet Tomb, is gorgeous. You can order it and others from Madras Press. I think all the money goes to a charity of the writer’s choice.
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I felt sorry for Donald Antrim and all the fans Jack and I were going to pull away from his February 18 UMass reading and got our Green Street reading changed to Wednesday, February 17. You’re welcome, Don.
Uproarious hilarity aside, I would have been pretty disappointed to have missed Antrim’s reading. I just read The Hundred Brothers last week and it was amazing. Solid throughout, but those last 50 pages are killer. It’s the most organically climactic book I’ve read in awhile. The book also takes place in one scene, which makes it the third consecutive one-scene novel I’ve read (first Matchpoint, then Vox). It’s a natural form with a lot of potential. Also seems really hard to pull off. Makes me want to try to write one. Of the three, I think Brothers is the best, but I liked them all.
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I also just finished Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana under the heavy recommendation of a number of people, and they’re all right. I don’t know when I last smiled so many times while reading a book. Probably not since Infinite Jest last summer. The story of our last century told in a headrush of convoluted, self-contradictory, self-consciously naive yet all-knowing sentences. It’s political as hell but hard to pin down, avoiding all the pitfalls. It’s billed as fiction, but it’s closer to nonfiction than most nonfiction out there. Here’s hoping Gerald Turner translates something else of his and Dalkey Archive (or someone) has the good sense to print it.
My shorts, Speak Up for a Treat and Thank You, Brother Dave are rounding out stellar month at Everyday Genius, guest edited by Sasha Fletcher. Here’s rest of the month’s roster:
Happy Christmas, friends.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Stanley Elkin, The Living End
Joe Brainard, I Remember
Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
Lorrie Moore, Birds of America
Lydia Millet, My Happy Life
Lydia Millet, Love in Infant Monkeys
Nicholson Baker, Checkpoint
Nicholson Baker, Vox
Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me be Lonely
Aram Saroyan, Complete Minimal Poems
Etgar Keret, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God
Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
Jay McInerty, Bright Lights, Big City
Dennis Cooper, My Loose Thread
Dennis Cooper, God Jr.
Mary Robison, An Amateur’s Guide to the Night
Kafka, The Trial
Kevin Wilson, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Zach Savich, Full Catastrophe Living
Tobias Wolff, The Night in Question
Michael Czyzniejewski, Elephants in Our Bedroom
Brian Evenson, Last Days
Richard Yates, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
** Update: Thought of two more. Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night and Mary Miller, Big World. So that’s 27. Not changing the header, though. **
I read Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint a couple of days ago. It’s about two guys, Ben and Jay, in a hotel room in DC. Jay wants to kill George W. Bush, Ben tries to talk him out of it. That’s the whole book. It’s simple, fun, funny, and well-executed.
Then went and read some reviews that came out around the time it was published in 2004. I was surprised at how much some of them hated it. The main strikes against it, among the reviews I read, were that 1) it’s too slight to qualify as a novel, 2) it’s not a well-informed argument, and 3) the silliness of the weapons undermines the drama.
So, my reply: 1) It’s not a novel. It’s a one-act play. Anyone can tell looking at it that it’s a play. OK, it calls itself a novel on the front, but who cares? It’s the format and length of a play, it moves like a play, it’s nakedly political/current the way a play allows itself to be. And as the play it is, it’s absolutely successful. 2) Of course it’s not a well-informed argument. The book goes out of it’s way to discuss the difficulty of writing about history as it’s happening. The facts aren’t in, so all we can do is draw angry, ill-informed conclusions about what we do know. And the better-researched these guys’ positions are, the more they would start to sound like talking heads–a real danger for a book like this. 3) The wacky weapons serve as both an early tip-off of the extent of Jay’s unhingedness and a gift to the reader–our cartooney revenge plots literalized. Who at some point in the Bush presidency didn’t want to see him leveled with a large boulder? I admire the way the book weaves realism, melodrama, and absurdity. The very simple concept of the book is complicated by its resistance to a dominant mode.
It’s not a perfect book. The ending kind of falls flat. Some of the dialogue is a little too cute. But I wonder if it’s going to only get better with age: a document of rage over an unjust war, negotiated by one guy’s delusion and another’s pacifism. You could change a few names and re-release it next time America scrounges up enough money to do something this stupid again.
I had a vision. Yes, last night, I had a vision. And I felt God’s breath go through me, and it moved down into my stomach, and sloshed around, and my stomach spoke in a whisper, not a shout: “Touch this woman with your hands, and caress her.” My dear, Mrs. Hunter. You have arthritis, don’t you? … Yes, the Devil is in your hands, and I suck it out. Now, I will not cast this ghost out with a fever, for the new spirit inside me has shown me I have a new way to communicate. It is a gentle whisper. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, ghost. Get out. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, and don’t you dare turn around and come back, for if you do, all the armies of my boot will kick you in the teeth, and you will be cast up, and thrown in the dirt, and thrust back to perdition! And as long as I have teeth, I will bite you! And if I have no teeth, I will gum you! And as long as I have fists, I will bash you! Now, get out of here ghost! Get out of here, ghost! Get out of here, ghost!
- Eli, There Will Be Blood
There are so many incredible subversive lines in There Will Be Blood, each spoken so naturally that you’re almost sure you misheard. Not just the “all the armies” part in the quote above, but also: “it moved down into my stomach, and sloshed around. And my stomach spoke in a whisper, not a shout.”
Or when Daniel’s “brother” shows up and introduces himself, “I’m your brother… from another mother.” It’s such a bizarre and delightful space to hear someone speak those words.
Then there’s Daniel, of course–Every fourth thing out of Daniel Plainview’s mouth should be knit on a cozy:
I can’t keep doing this on my own with these… people.
I drink your milkshake!
One night I’m gonna come to you, inside of your house, wherever you’re sleeping, and I’m gonna cut your throat.
You look like a fool, don’t you? Yes, you do.
Give me the blood, Lord, and let me get away.
What a movie. It’s going to be with us a long, long time.
My story, Peek Here, Progeny, is up at Dogzplot along with other flashes by XTX, HOWIE GOOD, NATE EAST, MATT DEBENEDICTIS, TIM HORVATH, BEN SPIVEY, and ANI SMITH. “Peek” is from Fun Camp.
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