Gordon Lish: Collected Fictions
For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.
(Via @orbooks | http://ORBooks.com)
NOON
Bye-Bye, Boner Party
Today Ned Hepburn shut it down. Boner Party, perhaps the greatest bait-and-switch blog of our time, (I’ll distract you with breasts but really I’m going to talk about how it’d be great to just settle down.) is over and done with.
I’m sad to see it go, but I think the last post sums it all up.
On Writing, Publishing, and Living
In an age with an unprecedented amount of published material, both printed and electronic, these words ring even truer.
“We need more true mystery in our lives. Hem. The completely un-ambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.” – Evan Shipman to Hemingway (in A Moveable Feast)
Lately, I’ve been wondering if sitting quietly in a café, pretending to read a newspaper, and not writing is the most earnest expression in our age: no echoes of language, nothing to reblog, just pure unmitigated self sitting with self. I might, after a time of blank staring, find myself constructing sentences in my head, maybe a paragraph, simply letting the words roll around in my mind. I will not. I repeat. I will not write them down. They are my secret sentences, not yours.
I try to do this at least once a week.
Let a Professional Do It
When I posted this, the phrase “insert in post” caught my eye.
Let’s Talk Ned Hepburn.
Ned Hepburn is the best. He’s like this experiment in writing-yourself-to-life, as I can never tell what is a real memory and what is an invention that plays true. He’s also keenly, achingingly, hyper-aware of everything that goes on around him in this disturbing GoodFellas-level-of-detail way.
it’s rather sad, because i’ve hung out with “normie” women before and they’re really nice people. they like shitty bands like The Fray and think that “Chuck Klosterman” is something you get from sleeping with guys with leather jackets. they’re nice people, though. i just know that we can never be together. we are too fundamentally different. she says tomatoes, and i say that i liked tomatoes better before “everybody else started liking them”.
the only thing that overlaps normies and scene kids is Trader Joes, bad television, and the underlying reality that “i hate her because she owns a camera and calls herself a photographer” and “she hates me because i own a MacBook and call myself an artist”.
Perhaps it’s too-too to like it when someone points out obvious things. I don’t give a crap. Hepburn loves Los Angeles, Natalie Portman, getting high and is writing some of the funniest stuff around. Yet another person I wanna hang out with for an afternoon and interview cause it’d be a great story no matter what happened.
Yours for a freer New Albany
New Albany, Mississippi, birthplace of William Faulkner, will allow beer sales for the first time in over half a century. Faulkner himself pled for tolerance in 1950:
“Yours for a freer Oxford,” wrote Faulkner, who had a long history of drinking binges, “where publicans can be law-abiding publicans six days a week and ministers of God can be ministers of God all seven days in the week.”
Indeed.
“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing”
So what about the safe?
The Salinger camp isn’t talking.
Author-editor Gordon Lish, who in the 1970s wrote an anonymous story that convinced some readers it was a Salinger original, said he was “certain” that good work was locked up in Cornish.
Lish said Salinger told him back in the 1960s that he was still writing about the Glass family, featured in much of Salinger’s work.
Among other speculation.
Faulkner Fashion
From the Life collection of Famous Literary Drunks and Addicts.
We lose nothing by having closed systems
There is a complaint running around that the iPad is a closed system, that people aren’t free to customize it, that it’s not opened up so that we can all poke around inside it. Complaints are that the iPad is killing off an idea of computing that’s open and free for all.
To which I say: Good! Does anybody remember what using a computer is like? I spent a week after reinstalling my operating system picking out the right tweaks and gizmos and gadgets to make things more manageable. Weblogs exist that do nothing but teach you how you can make your experience on a computer less shitty. On a closed system, you can’t do that. You work with what you’ve got. Even if what you have is suboptimal — and guys? We live in the future; suboptimal for us is leagues beyond what the poor savages of 2008 had — when you’re using a device, you have to use it do do something, not just to fuck around.
Some of the biggest complaints come from programmers that say the closed system means people won’t be able to satisfy their computer curiosities. To which I again say: Good! Then they’ll have to satisfy their curiosities about emotional maturity and social interaction and possibly even thinking about making the world a better place.
I like this guy. Never heard of him until this but I can’t wait to dig through his archives, Amanda Mae-style.
Pomo Jukebox
Pomo Jukebox is a new music blog I’m contributing to. Go have a look.
from the comments
So long was that shadow of one so little, stretching across the stubble of the field, snagging and tearing but going on. I would reach home late, and knew it by the light at my back that failed into my larger self. I tried to imagine I was huge, and a faint courage came then with each stitching lift of my shoes. But when I was bigger still—as large as the night—approaching a small light in a window, I stopped, and looked. Fearing to go in to my father.
something, 35
Andrew — holding two remotes — won Mr. Bachelor, Brooklyn, 2009. Mary asked, what happened? I was happy to tell her.
Quote out of context
A man cannot withstand a story, even if the man is remarkable and the story is simple. The story always wins.
Going out in style
Donald Jack Wickman
WICKMAN Donald Jack Wickman – A truly pulchritudinous man, Donald Jack Wickman gallivanted off to a new adventure January 12, 2010. While he made the peregrination alone, he was surrounded by and given a rousing valediction by so many of the ones who loved him: his wife, daughters, sons, daughter-in-law, and a plethora of friends. Yet, he was greeted by those who had gone before him: his mom and dad, brothers and many more of the friends he made during his undaunted life. Some of these multitudinous friends were made amidst jumping out of perfectly good airplanes as a member of the 82nd Airborne, and others while shellacking criminals as a cop in Boulder and Thornton, Colorado, and writing himself tickets (and taking himself to court.) Don made many friends after arriving on Dauphin Island in a blue limousine, and as he travailed with his wife, Lynn, to spawn the world famous Treasure Trove. Copious friendships were also developed as he hunted down antiques and refurbished them into pristine status, while debating with the people of Mars Hill Church, and during the creation of flabbergasting paintings. All of these friends and family are invited to gather in his and his wife’s home on Friday, January 15, at 7 pm to celebrate Don’s superlative life. He may be gone from us in body, but he is surely not forgotten. So, tell your friends about him.
I hope that when I die, somebody has the awesomeness (and worthwhile material) to post such an exuberant notice for me. Rock on, Don & company.
(Thanks, sc!)
Johnson Dynasty
Another member of the Johnson dynasty is writer/drawler/drummer Zach Johnson, who writes very well at any age, but particularly well on the site of his cousin Rian Johnson (dir. of Brick, The Brothers Bloom.) This bit is from 2005, I believe:
I’ve been short with my mom all day, too. I dunno why. She asked me to unload the dishes and I didn’t answer her. “Zach?” she said. “Ok,” I said. Earlier she was asking me to clean my room sometime this summer, which is a very reasonable thing to ask considering the state of my room, but before saying it she said this: “I didn’t want to ask you, because I didn’t want to bother you with something like cleaning your room when you were busy, but you always seem so tired or busy that I never know when to ask you.” I was playing the piano, and she was hesitant to ask me to clean my room sometime this summer because she didn’t want me to get irritable. I’m very irritable a lot of the time when I am doing nothing in particular.
I wanted to cry then, too. I get the feeling that a lot of people have been short with my mom throughout the years because she is so soft-spoken and loyal. It can be very easy to brush-off the people who love you the most without even giving it much thought. You know they’ll always love you, and so you don’t have to worry about being loving towards them if it’s not convenient at the moment. And they keep on loving you, and they hope you won’t be short with them, and they are overjoyed when you are just nice to them. It makes me want to cry whenever I see that my mom is happy just because I wasn’t short with her. It makes me feel like puking.
(via)
What’s so good about Johnson’s writing, and especially his tour diaries , is the way he portrays himself. Much of the writing I’ve read in recent years is about the lies you tell about yourself. Johnson’s writing is more like telling other people the lies you tell yourself.
quote out of context
He went on to say, “the extent to which you think writing is about something other than words then you will fail.”
The snowfall in my neck of the woods is impressive, all right –
but my house is not nearly so spacious.
Today could mark the beginning of a long winter.
It’s as if I wrote it myself
Mouth-frothing for Malcolm Gladwell is at near-fever pitch this year. I’m not saying the guy doesn’t make an interesting argument for how success is nurtured (or can’t be nurtured . . . or whatever the theory of “Outliers” is), but can we get some love for author and McSweeney’s publisher Dave Eggers? Firstly, the guy is seriously committed to educational reform — setting up his 826 tutoring centers in cities across the country. More importantly, perhaps, he’s putting out some of the most compelling contemporary writing on victims of injustice (both domestically and internationally) through titles like “What Is the What,” “Zeitoun” and his “Voice of Witness” oral history series. But beyond being worthy endeavors, they’re actually really good stories.
From The Top 10 Unsung Global Thinkers.
Edward Cullen is Adam-God
John Granger makes a compelling case for why Twilight isn’t just mindless fluff.*
In a nutshell, Bella is Eve and Edward is the Adam-God of Mormon theology. Their “Fall”—when Bella/Eve/Man chooses the apple from the tray of Edward/Adam/God, although rife with dangers and difficulties, is the beginning of a spiritual transformation culminated by an alchemical wedding with the God-Man. The story is a romantic allegory depicting the roles and responsibilities of the divine and human lovers, but it has the specifically Mormon hermetic twist that sex within marriage is the endgame and the only means to personal salvation and immortal life.
The article is actually quite fascinating, I’ve read it twice. Bonus points: send it to your Christian sister who doesn’t want her kids to read those sexy vampire books.
(*You might find it hard to read if you struggle with concentrating on black text on a white background sans photographs and ads.)
Zadie Smith on The Essay
The literal truth is something you expect, or hope for, in a news article. But an essay is an act of imagination, even if it is a piece of memoir. It is, or should be, “a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking”, but it still takes quite as much art as fiction.
Eggers On Authenticity
Great response to what is definitely a tiresome question:
You actually asked me the question: “Are you taking any steps to keep shit real?” I want you always to look back on this time as being a time when those words came out of your mouth.
50,168
I finished NaNoWriMo a day early. From this month spent writing everyday whatever came to mind as fast as I could type, I hope to have new posts to remembery and RICK ruminating and some “artful” submissions to some places some of us frequent. I ran the marathon, y’all! I could just bust out bawlin’.
Horton Foote Enhances Harper Lee
Film version, To Kill a Mockingbird. Screenplay by Horton Foote. Atticus on the porch, overhearing the bedtime conversation of his children.
Jem?
Uh-huh.
How old was I when Mama died?
Two.
How old were you?
Six.
Was Mama pretty?
Uh-huh.
Was she nice?
Uh-huh.
Did you love her?
Yes.
Did I love her?
Yes.
Do you miss her?
Uh-huh.
For Cindy
How to use an apostrophe.
Thanks, Quips!