And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
(From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Grasa de Pantera Classics Illustrated edition.)
Scene
I had most need of blessing, and Amen
Stuck in my throat.
(Macbeth. Act II. Scene 2.)
Tao Lin: reading
Picked up from his blog.
New elimae
The July issue of elimae is now posted.
Lish’s The Quarterly
We talked about this a few months ago, but can someone scan the table of contents of some of the issues? Or, rather, which are the best issues to purchase? I’d love to read the issues with Cooper and Daryl. And of course Diane Williams, etc. Thanks.
hotbooks
hotbooks has kindly taken note lately of publishers Ravenna and Calamari, their authors Kim Chinquee, Miranda Mellis, Robert Lopez and Brandon Hobson, and even elimae. Just scroll down a bit and. . .
The Woman in White
I just began Wilkie Collins’ famous “sensation novel” (1860) night before last, and I’m already pretty sure that Mr. Fairlie will be one of the most memorable minor characters I’ve yet encountered.
3rd Bed
As many as of you know, 3rd Bed recently folded, or has been in an indeterminate state of folding. Last weekend I went up to Providence to rescue what was left of the inventory from Brian Evenson’s cellar and these titles are now available and will be reissued through Calamari Press:
- back issues of 3rd Bed
- Motorman by David Ohle
- Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz
- the false sun recordings by James Wagner
I guess you can think of Calamari Press as a literary no-kill shelter. Please help me keep these books alive.
I blogged about the trip/exchange here.
I also released my own Marsupial book into the wild.
The Serialized Case of Benjamin Button
If you’re at all like me, you’re exceedingly excited about David Fincher’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (with Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett, and Brad Pitt, and in theatres this Xmas). Also if you’re at all like me, you probably would like to read the original story in anticipation of the film, but you probably don’t want to read it in the crappy HTML version that’s available on the University of Virginia’s website.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to put together a nicely typeset and proofread (lots of little—but obvious—typos in the UVA text) version and serialize it, one chapter per day over the next eleven weekdays, over at my site. Chapter One (PDF) is available now.
I apologize for shamelessly promoting my own crap here at the ‘flock, but it seems like the sort of thing you guys and gals might be interested in.
a short review of The Levitationist
Today Blake Butler wrote a short review of my book The Levitationist over at hotbooks.today.com.
Opium 6 Go Green! (But Save Me First)
The Go Green! issue of Opium Magazine (Spring 2008) is now available. Sample spreads at davidbarringer.blogspot.com. (You can also see sample spreads of issues 3, 4 and 5 on my site). Meanwhile, buy the issue or subscribe here.
Contents: stories by Aimee Bender, Benjamin Percy, and many others. Winners of the Opium Bookmark Story Contest. Each issue comes with a bookmark on which is printed the winning 250-word story. Interview with Amanda Lear. 100-word stories from Tuesday Shorts, including one by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Select stories from the wit-lit ezine Sweet Fancy Moses. Beautifully wrought satire from the “Go Green! Guidebook of Restraint & Responsibility,” by yours truly. Art from Tymek Jezierski. Cartoons from CM Evans and John Callahan. Editor Todd Zuniga.
yes I said yes I will Yes
Happy Bloomsday, clusterflock!
June elimae
The June issue of elimae is now posted.
President Faust
Whoa, have I been out of it. Just noted a Coudal link to J. K. Rowling’s Harvard commencement address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination“. Went to check it out and read the opening line.
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
President Faust. I did not know that. Whoa, have I been out of it.
Dear Clusterflock
- “I Dream of Wires” or “Please Push No More”?
- Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Ulysses or Finnegans Wake?
- “7 & 7 is” or “96 Tears”?
Marsupial
I posted the cover and opening excerpts from my forthcoming novel here.
Dismembering Milton
At the end of Jonathan Rosen’s assessment of Milton, he offers this account of locals plundering his grave a century after his death.
In 1790, during a renovation of the church, the grave was dug up, because church elders wanted to pinpoint the exact burial spot so they could erect a monument. The coffin was located and left lying deep in the ground. The next day, a group of curious local men, including a churchwarden, a publican, and a pawnbroker, after a “merry-meeting,” hauled it out of the ground. They prized back the leaden lid, and, carried away by ghoulish irreverent devotion, or simple greed, knocked out Milton’s teeth for souvenirs. They grabbed hanks of his hair, which he had worn down to his shoulders, like Adam, and which came away easily, and snatched what bones they could from under the shroud.
The next day, a gravedigger named Elizabeth Grant, with the aid of workmen who kept the church doors barred to all but those willing to pay the price of a pot of beer, put the remains on display. Order was eventually restored, but the news shocked the country—the poet Cowper wrote a poem about the desecration. Milton was reburied, but, like the torn figure of Osiris in “Areopagitica,” he was incomplete. Still, a man named Philip Neve, who wrote an account of what happened after interviewing the participants, managed to buy up whatever “relics” he could and return them to the coffin before reinterment. Most hauntingly, perhaps, he had managed to recover a rib.
Little Known Verse from Leviticus
Oh, that Pinky and his Scripture learning.
Too Hip for Words
“Any place that is too hip for words is too hip for me,” replied Cooper.
Classics Illustrated: “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”
Camera phone snaps. 25 May 2008.
Bryan Ferry. “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” (Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure, 1973)
In every dream home a heartache
And every step I take leads me further from heaven
Is there a heaven? I’d like to think so
********
But what goes on?
What to do there?
Better pray there
Ohle reading part II
Weekly Picture 117
Moby Dick, Austin, TX, 3.30.2008
Neutrodyne-Settler Cross-Pollination
zzz ><()*>
Graphing Jane Austen
Jonathan Gottschall proposes embracing the scientific method in literary theory. As ridiculous as that may sound, he makes an interesting case in talking about Roland Barthes’ assertion that the author is dead (meaning, all interpretation is subjective, therefore, no text can be presumed to have a consistent interpretation). Gottschall speculates that much of what passes for literary theory is based on the force of the personality of the person who said it. In testing Barthes’ assertion, he set out to find how much variation really existed in reader’s perceptions of, in this case, 19th Century British novels.
Instead of forcing professors to rigorously test their big ideas, as scientific methods do, literary methods encourage us merely to collect and highlight evidence that seems to confirm them. The result of this laxity, as Berkeley’s Frederick Crews points out, is that “our bogus experiments succeed every time.” And since it is so hard to be wrong in literary studies, it is equally hard to be right. So books and papers pile up but, more often than not, genuine advances in knowledge do not. To fix this problem, literary scholars need to develop more rigorous ways of testing their ideas, demand a higher standard of proof from their colleagues, and be willing to discard the theories that fail.