Grading got you down? No problem.
28 April 2010
23 April 2010
Juniper Literary Festoon
If you google "juniper festival" the almighty search engine brain will suggest the search "juniper festoon" to you.
I like this option. I plan to get myself festooned with lots of books, chapbooks, maybe a broadside. Juniper festival is lit nerdery with a wine glass and a ping pong tournament. Like summer camp.
You might see me at the Small Beer Press table for awhile. Or dancing around to the Cinnamon Urns. Or just dancing around, staggering under a pile of books.
Here's the schedule:
I like this option. I plan to get myself festooned with lots of books, chapbooks, maybe a broadside. Juniper festival is lit nerdery with a wine glass and a ping pong tournament. Like summer camp.
You might see me at the Small Beer Press table for awhile. Or dancing around to the Cinnamon Urns. Or just dancing around, staggering under a pile of books.
Here's the schedule:
Friday April 23
3:30 pm Eric Carle Museum: Antonio Frasconi Exhibit Tour: curator tours of the internationally acclaimed artist's woodcuts, including works inspired by Pablo Neruda and W.S. Merwin
4:30 pm: Eric Carle Museum: Roundtable: On Poetry & The Visual Arts: Jen Bervin, Terrance Hayes, & Matthea Harvey, moderated by Jane Curley
6 pm: Fine Arts Center Lobby: Independent Journal & Book Fair Opening Reception
7:30 pm: University Gallery: Reading & Performance: Jen Bervin, Christian Hawkey, & Michael Teig, followed by the premier of a performance based on Christopher Smart's “Jubilate Agno,” staged by Missoula Oblongata
Saturday April 24
10:30 am: Fine Arts Center Lobby: Journal & Book Fair Continues
11 am: University Gallery: Roundtable: Poetry, Publishing, & the Pioneer Valley : the dreaming up, creating, & evolving of jubilat, Verse Press/Wave Books & Rain Taxi with Rob N. Casper, Matthew Zapruder, & Eric Lorberer, moderated by Dara Wier
12:30 pm: University Gallery: Roundtable: The Future of Poetry, Part II with Heather Christle, Cathy Park Hong, Evie Shockley, & Rebecca Wolff, moderated by Rob N. Casper
3 pm: Amherst Cinema Arts Center: Reading: Terrance Hayes, Caroline Knox, Dean Young, & Matthew Zapruder
Journal and Book Fair Participants Include
A Public Space, Action, Amherst Books, Adventures in Poetry, Aufgabe, Bateau, Black Ocean, Boston Review, The Canary, Canarium, Clockroot, Conjunctions, Factory Hollow Press, Forklift, Ohio, H_NGM_N, Hobart, Jellyfish, jubilat, Kelly Writers' House, Kenyon Review, Magic Helicopter, Massachusetts Review, Microfilme, Noo, Nor by Press, notnostrums, Now Culture, Open City, Paris Press, PennSound, Pilot Press, Pocket Myths, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Society of America, Publishing Genius, Rain Taxi, Schoen Books, Slope Editions, Small Beer Press, Thermos, Ugly Duckling Presse, Walser Society, Wave Books, Zephyr Press
11 April 2010
Those Annoying Postmodernists
This morning I was excited to see an article in The Observer about David Mitchell, author of the captivating, polyvalent novel Cloud Atlas (link came via LargeheartedBoy).
While I'm all for anxiously awaiting Mitchell's new book The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (out this June from Random House), and for praising his "extraordinarily entertaining" style and his "extraordinarily nice and unassuming" personality (never met the guy, myself), I am a little bit tired of the way cultural commentators frame discussions about writers they label "experimental." That is, "experimental" writers who (shockingly!) are good writers, despite their experimentation.
Don't worry, Skidelsky seems to be saying about Mitchell. He might write big, challenging, sprawling books, but he's not one of those writers, one of those postmodernists known for their "achingly self-conscious and (probably) insufferably earnest" prose. (I can just see the fingers pointing to David Foster Wallace as I'm writing this.)
I suppose I could go on a mini-tirade about why using experimental with air quotes is dumb, since we should, as writers, be trying out new ways to tell our stories or to write our lyrics all the time. Writing is nothing less than experimentation, although we really notice this when writers move outside of established genres or forms or cross between them and then back again. (Okay, so I fell for the mini-tirade.)
Skidelsky is also picking up on something interesting here, even as he dances around it to talk up Mitchell's strengths. What makes us, as readers, feel annoyed by what we call a writer's "self-consciousness"? What my old workshop teacher used to call "trying too hard"? Sometimes I think it's something beyond the disappointment of seeing the puppetmaster pull the strings, of pulling back the curtain on the wizard of the emerald city, but maybe it's really as simple as that, too. We don't want to be reminded that someone is doing actual work to put a novel or a poem together, in fact we praise artists more highly when we have no idea how they just did what they did. Or we do know, but we can't explain it because our knowledge is just a happy, glowing recognition sitting in the back of our mind. Regardless, we see this seamlessness as a sign of mastery.
I would hazard a guess that most, if not all, contemporary writers and readers, from cultural bloggers to academics, take some kind of weird pleasure in seeing and pointing out the seams that come from stitching a narrative together, or from dismissing a writer who seems to be "trying too hard."
Ah-ha! they cry. I caught you! And if I caught you, then you can't be very good.
This is precisely the irony of what I call postmodernism lite (kind of what I imagine a WholeFoods generic brand knock-off of BudLite would look like). Calling attention to form or narratorial authority is part of the project. But the other irony here is that real postmodernism has irrevocably changed the way that we think in 2010. We're all already postmodernists who are hyper-aware that someone is pulling the strings, who feel more than certain that we're all part of some larger "social construct," even if we don't know to talk about it using academese. Calling something "postmodernist" with that implied sigh of contempt is really just like rolling our eyes at our mother for telling us how exciting the World Wide Web is.
The other problem is that postmodernism lite has filtered down through cultural criticism with an implied eye-roll for some thirty-odd years now, even though very few people have actually taken the time to study it and to sit with it for awhile. And, for the newer generation of academics, a generation of which I am a part, all this postmodernism stuff starts to take on the blueish hue of déja vu. It all sounds and seems strangely familiar, like a place I've been before but am not sure when or why.
I guess I'm really talking about two, interrelated problems--the way postmodernism lite has created a culture of dismissiveness and hubris that I find "achingly self-conscious" and "insufferably earnest" and, ultimately, pretty shallow. Dismissing art out of hand because you think you can see the "seams," even though, admittedly, sometimes you really can, is easy. Sitting with art and asking questions about it is hard.
That's why I like David Mitchell and David Foster Wallace and probably most other "postmodernist" writers whose names you can throw out. They make me think. I love that they play around with structure and voice. Sometimes I might hate them for pulling my strings, but that's a knee-jerk reaction. When I sit really still, I see other things worth sticking around for.
As a final caveat, I might add that narratorial awareness and calling attention to form is really nothing new at all--Denis Diderot, an eighteenth-century philosopher and writer, played around with these ideas in Jacques le fataliste, just to give one historical example.
So, really, we have seen all this "experimental" stuff before. It was just French and wearing a powdered wig instead of American and sporting long hair and a colored bandana.
While I'm all for anxiously awaiting Mitchell's new book The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (out this June from Random House), and for praising his "extraordinarily entertaining" style and his "extraordinarily nice and unassuming" personality (never met the guy, myself), I am a little bit tired of the way cultural commentators frame discussions about writers they label "experimental." That is, "experimental" writers who (shockingly!) are good writers, despite their experimentation.
Don't worry, Skidelsky seems to be saying about Mitchell. He might write big, challenging, sprawling books, but he's not one of those writers, one of those postmodernists known for their "achingly self-conscious and (probably) insufferably earnest" prose. (I can just see the fingers pointing to David Foster Wallace as I'm writing this.)
I suppose I could go on a mini-tirade about why using experimental with air quotes is dumb, since we should, as writers, be trying out new ways to tell our stories or to write our lyrics all the time. Writing is nothing less than experimentation, although we really notice this when writers move outside of established genres or forms or cross between them and then back again. (Okay, so I fell for the mini-tirade.)
Skidelsky is also picking up on something interesting here, even as he dances around it to talk up Mitchell's strengths. What makes us, as readers, feel annoyed by what we call a writer's "self-consciousness"? What my old workshop teacher used to call "trying too hard"? Sometimes I think it's something beyond the disappointment of seeing the puppetmaster pull the strings, of pulling back the curtain on the wizard of the emerald city, but maybe it's really as simple as that, too. We don't want to be reminded that someone is doing actual work to put a novel or a poem together, in fact we praise artists more highly when we have no idea how they just did what they did. Or we do know, but we can't explain it because our knowledge is just a happy, glowing recognition sitting in the back of our mind. Regardless, we see this seamlessness as a sign of mastery.
I would hazard a guess that most, if not all, contemporary writers and readers, from cultural bloggers to academics, take some kind of weird pleasure in seeing and pointing out the seams that come from stitching a narrative together, or from dismissing a writer who seems to be "trying too hard."
Ah-ha! they cry. I caught you! And if I caught you, then you can't be very good.
(The new Penguin Great Ideas cover for Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)
This is precisely the irony of what I call postmodernism lite (kind of what I imagine a WholeFoods generic brand knock-off of BudLite would look like). Calling attention to form or narratorial authority is part of the project. But the other irony here is that real postmodernism has irrevocably changed the way that we think in 2010. We're all already postmodernists who are hyper-aware that someone is pulling the strings, who feel more than certain that we're all part of some larger "social construct," even if we don't know to talk about it using academese. Calling something "postmodernist" with that implied sigh of contempt is really just like rolling our eyes at our mother for telling us how exciting the World Wide Web is.
The other problem is that postmodernism lite has filtered down through cultural criticism with an implied eye-roll for some thirty-odd years now, even though very few people have actually taken the time to study it and to sit with it for awhile. And, for the newer generation of academics, a generation of which I am a part, all this postmodernism stuff starts to take on the blueish hue of déja vu. It all sounds and seems strangely familiar, like a place I've been before but am not sure when or why.
I guess I'm really talking about two, interrelated problems--the way postmodernism lite has created a culture of dismissiveness and hubris that I find "achingly self-conscious" and "insufferably earnest" and, ultimately, pretty shallow. Dismissing art out of hand because you think you can see the "seams," even though, admittedly, sometimes you really can, is easy. Sitting with art and asking questions about it is hard.
That's why I like David Mitchell and David Foster Wallace and probably most other "postmodernist" writers whose names you can throw out. They make me think. I love that they play around with structure and voice. Sometimes I might hate them for pulling my strings, but that's a knee-jerk reaction. When I sit really still, I see other things worth sticking around for.
As a final caveat, I might add that narratorial awareness and calling attention to form is really nothing new at all--Denis Diderot, an eighteenth-century philosopher and writer, played around with these ideas in Jacques le fataliste, just to give one historical example.
So, really, we have seen all this "experimental" stuff before. It was just French and wearing a powdered wig instead of American and sporting long hair and a colored bandana.
08 April 2010
06 April 2010
Jellyfishing Around
Jellyfish Magazine (2.0) hit the web a few days ago, and it looks lovely as ever. Two of my poems, selections from a longer series, appear alongside great poems from:
Anne Holmes & Lily Ladewig, Carolina Cabrera, Luke Bloomfield, Seth Landman, Zachary Schomburg, Hilary Plum, Zach Savich, Miranda Dennis, Chad Abushanab, Philip Muller, Jade Ramsey, Jessica Dylan Miele, Samantha Nataro, P. Edward Cunningham, Andy Stallings, Kyle Crawford & Francesca Chabrier.
With great thanks and admiration to Gale Marie Thompson for designing, editing, and general jellyfishering.
03 April 2010
Basic (Spring) Space
It's spring! A beautiful day for crocus-spotting and dog-walking and ice-cream eating and poem-reading on porches. And for noticing that people I know are doing cool things.
Now, five years later, I'm excited to discover Sara has turned into a poetry mastermind of sorts. She's carved out a niche for herself on HTMLGIANT and with her very cool Pretty Panicks Press, a small press related to rock and roll music.
She's reading in a few weeks at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn (see link above for more info.). Pardon me while I live vicariously (!!!).
Other cool happenings include:
The new Octopus, with poems and reviews by Lesley Yalen, Natalie Lyalin, Chris DeWeese, and Seth Landman (whose chapbook I am still waiting to read!).
The new h_ngm_n with poems from my very dear friend Philip Muller, along with Lily Ladewig and David Bartone. And with fiction from Emily Toder.
And! Something to look forward to for term's end: BookExpo in Brooklyn, where, hopefully, I'll be rocking out with Small Beer at Two Dollar Radio's benefit concert for Girls Write Now (and, you know, trying to sell some books.)
23 March 2010
I Care, You Care, We All Care About Health (Care)
...er, sorry about that.
NPR is running a story right now about opponents of the health care reform bill--not that this is anything new exactly. But apparently there will be certain states who oppose the federal mandate for health care based on the argument that the law is unconstitutional.
Sigh.
While I'm glad that there is now going to be some kind of national health care in this country, I'm (uselessly) frustrated about the fact that health care is still largely a privatized, for-profit block of stupid.
Health care isn't a commodity, it's a public service--which is why nationalized health care programs like those in Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and other parts of the EU make so much more sense than our hybrid monster. I realize that the combination of health insurance companies with deep pockets and a massive herd of lobbyists, along with a national psyche that promotes individualism and individual profit at the expense of the collective, means that this will probably never change. But it should.
NPR is running a story right now about opponents of the health care reform bill--not that this is anything new exactly. But apparently there will be certain states who oppose the federal mandate for health care based on the argument that the law is unconstitutional.
Sigh.
While I'm glad that there is now going to be some kind of national health care in this country, I'm (uselessly) frustrated about the fact that health care is still largely a privatized, for-profit block of stupid.
Health care isn't a commodity, it's a public service--which is why nationalized health care programs like those in Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and other parts of the EU make so much more sense than our hybrid monster. I realize that the combination of health insurance companies with deep pockets and a massive herd of lobbyists, along with a national psyche that promotes individualism and individual profit at the expense of the collective, means that this will probably never change. But it should.
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