Beth Lapides interviews Mary Roach
Our Beth Lapides (she of Did I Wake You?—you can get a signed copy at BEA at our booth) interviews Mary Roach.
May 07, 2008
April 18, 2008
"The animals that want to talk, the people that want them to..."
A gentleman blogger by the name of Matthew Cheney, who is quite quite excellent, went to the trouble of transcribing a bit of the current interview in BOMB between Lydia Millet and Jonathan Lethem.
Jonathan Lethem: I was recently reading an essay by Mary McCarthy, a quite brilliant, free-ranging one that she first gave as a lecture in Europe, called "The Fact in Fiction." At the outset she defines the novel in quite exclusive terms, terms that of course made me very nervous: "...if you find birds and beasts talking in a book you are reading you can be sure it is not a novel." Well, as the author of at least one and arguably two or three novels with talking animals in them, I felt disgruntled. McCarthy is one of those critics whose brilliance dedicates itself often to saying what artists shouldn't do -- like the equally celebrated and brilliant James Wood, with whom I disagree constantly. For me, the novel is by its nature impure, omnivorous, inconsistent, and paradoxical -- it is most itself when it is doing impossible things, straddling modes, gobbling contradiction. But anyway, when I lived with McCarthy's declaration for a while, I found myself replying, "But in the very best novels the animals want to talk, or the humans wish the animals could talk, or both." [...]
Lydia Millet: [...]The animals that want to talk, the people that want them to...exactly. But to the critics -- it's so easy, and so exhilarating, to denounce things. Isn't it? But prohibitions like that -- "It's not a novel if it has talking animals in it," "It's not a novel if it has philosophy in it" -- besides being snobbish and condescending, serve more to elevate the critic than to advance or innovate the form. In fact, I think it's a sign of an art form losing power in culture when its arbiters try to define it by its limitations, what it can't or isn't allowed to do. Shoring up the borders of the form, in other words, to isolate it and make it puny. Novels should do anything and everything they can pull off. The pulling off is the hard part, of course, but my feeling is if you don't walk a line where you're struggling to make things work, struggling with the ideas and shape and tone, you're not doing art. Art is the struggle to get beyond yourself. And if you want to use talking animals to do that, and you can make them beautiful, nothing is verboten. [...] Once you exclude you're calcifying. You're well into middle age and headed for death.
March 25, 2008
Mo Mazza
On Chicago Public Radio and with the charming folks at Pilcrow Lit Fest.
March 22, 2008
Ragazze lupo
Matt Staggs talks to Martin Millar about lonely werewolf girls.
Also recommended, the Italian publisher Fazi editore MySpace page for their edition Ragazze lupo.
From the interviewer's intro:
Martin Millar's novel LONELY WEREWOLF GIRL is an offbeat urban fantasy tale about werewolves that's not afraid to cast the creatures in a completely different way. Far from mindless, bloodthirsty beasts, Millar's werewolves scheme and intrigue, design fashion, sing in rock bands, and do just about everything but meet conventional genre expectations. That's not to say that these wolves have been de-fanged. Far from it! Released in the UK last year, it has just arrived on US shelves. Martin was kind enough to take a few minutes to speak with us about his work in this short interview.
March 20, 2008
“You don’t have to be a student of an era to be the product of it.” That’s my label.
Flashpoint interviews Cris Mazza, includes kick-ass photo.
Current Cris Mazza-related project? Due to book's setting, find suitable Maine literary festival to invite her this summer. Always schemin' here...
March 19, 2008
Nerve interviews our OCD-est author
Nerve: When I heard about the concept, I was skeptical. It sounds like a gimmick.
Graham Rawle: That's the thing that concerned me the most, that people would look at it as a novelty rather than a novel. For me, if the story doesn't work then it's quite a spectacular waste of time. So with the editing process, we had to be as ruthless as you would be with a straight novel. My editor would say, "We should cut chapter thirteen," and I'd have to go, "Okay. Well, that took eight months to make, but that's fine." [Nerve.com interview and Jessa's starting to buy into it]
March 04, 2008
One word for you...
Amanda.
Or rather, Hal.
Amanda Stern's one word interview this week is with Hal Hartley, whose book True Fiction Pictures and Possible Films we're publishing in the Fall—see below for a couple of spreads.
[Amanda's first One Word Interview was, appropriately methinks, with Moby.]
February 23, 2008
Matthue-Roth-a-Go-Go
Amy Guth, organizer of the Pilcrow Literary Festival and Chicago writer at large, takes Matthue Roth for a ride in the sporadic guest-authoring interview on her blog. Among other things, they Kevin Baconify each other and she tests his knowledge of Smiths lyrics.
In other Matthue Roth news, Candy in Action is out, he has a new daughter Yalta (as do many Soft Skull authors and staff members it's been a fecund time...), he's chatted with Jewlicious, and Jeneration, and writing for Jewcy.com.
Oh and Candy got a kick-ass review in Foreword... When a YA novel's protagonist is compared favorable to Hermione Granger at the start, it's gonna be good:
The feminist call for good female role models has been wildly successful. Hermione Granger’s wit and grit shine brightly among wizards, while Candy Cohen sparkles in the realm of mere heroines with mortal skills.
February 15, 2008
Indiespensible
So, I was going to be writing this post to tell you about how you should join this new Powells program, a subscription service for limited editions of new books, in fancypants packaging, called Indiespensible.
I was going to be telling you, because I wanted to support the program, which is think is part of the future of the book business (we need to find more price points, people, we need to find ways to sell $100 editions, and $0.99 editions!), and because Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream is the first selection.
They announced the program yesterday at 11:00am EST...and by 9:00 EST they'd sold out, all 200 copies.
So they didn't really need my help.
But you know, in the middle of writing this post, I finally got around to reading the interview of Lydia by Dave Weich, Powell's marketing guru, and I think it may be the best interview of Lydia I've ever read. I can't quite explain why, but it made me jealous.
So, kudos to Powells for an incredible launch and to Dave Weich for a great interview.
January 09, 2008
"[J]ust call it the dream date — we're a race of princesses pining for the prince that never comes."
The gorgeous thing about publishing a book (and mind, How The Dead Dream doesn't officially publish til Jan 25th, but folks are chomping at the post X-mas bit, it seems) is that the interviews come and you learn things about the book, and the author, and the author's next book, that you as editor and Head Pimp never knew.
Herewith from the interview in this month's Bold Type:
BT: Do you have animals? Were you able to spend solitary time with rare animals while researching the book?
LM: I have a pug dog and some tropical fish. And I did visit rare animals for the book, but not alone. Never alone. You can't be close to captive animals alone, really, short of doing what T. does in the book and violating the compact. Maybe there's an occasional fleeting moment at a zoo where you stand outside an exhibit and stare in and no one passes by you — maybe there's that. An arrested kind of moment in which you think for a second that it's just the animal and you. But you feel the artificiality of that moment, the frozen tension of it.
BT: Dream is reportedly the first book of a trilogy. What's next?
LM: The second book, called Ghost Lights, takes up where Dream leaves off, a few weeks later in the narrative chronology. It follows a minor character from the first book, a middle-aged IRS agent named Hal, who goes looking for T. down in the tropics after T. disappears.
December 04, 2007
Holman, Estep, Sirowitz, Gonzalez, Celena, Garcia, Del Valle, Park...
Through the delightful and endless hustle of Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, we're partnering up with IndieFeed's Performance Poetry channel to present the "oral" in the oral history of slam we're publishing next month entitled Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam
Here's the schedule of interviews with some of the denizens of poetry slam who provided the raw material.
Bob Holman - Mon Dec 3rd
Maggie Estep - Wed Dec 5th
Hal Sirowitz - Friday Dec 7th
Guy LeCharles Gonzalez - Mon Dec 10th
Celena Glenn & the 2000 NYC-Urbana Team - Wed Dec 12th
Ed Garcia - Friday Dec 14th
John S. Hall - Mon Dec 17th
Mayda Del Valle - Wed Dec 19st
Ishle Yi Park - Friday Dec 21st
November 27, 2007
Oh [Im]pure and Radiant Millet
Kick ass profile on Lydia Millet (entitled "Oh Pure and Radiant Millet") by Louisa Ermelino in this week's Publishers Weekly. They've gotten much better about not hiding stuff behind the subscription barrier, which is deliciously nice.
Many choice items, I'll give ya two, one about her very first book, published by Algonquin in the mid 90's, and the other Ermelino's rather lovely description of How the Dead Dream her soon-to-be-latest.
“I started out working for a magazine called Fighting Knives, edited by a mercenary in South America, so when they offered me a slot at Hustler, I jumped to the porn side happily.” She sold her first book, Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996) during the two years at Hustler and says she learned a lot from the philosophy of the prisoners who made up a large part of the subscription base. And then there was her gun-running managing editor, a dwarf whose dominatrix visited once a month and destroyed the furniture in his office.
How the Dead Dreamis about the evolution of a young boy, T., obsessed with money—“His first idol was Andrew Jackson”—who becomes a wealthy real estate developer as an adult while ruminating on the big questions of identity, religion, death and nature. T. also experiences them: his father abandons the family to embrace his homosexuality and to work as a bartender in a transvestite bar in Key West, Fla., while his devoutly Catholic mother has a near-death experience and returns to tell T. that there's an IHOP on the other side with fluorescent lights and patrons “fat, pasty-faced, and dressed in loud prints,” not to mention that none of them were Catholics. T. takes to breaking into zoos, spending the night with the animals in their cages, finally setting out on a Conradian journey into the rain forest. The novel is pure Millet, dark, funny, brilliant, and a departure from all the others.
Oh and I can't resist a third which describes what happened when she turned in her second book:
Her editor at Algonquin was gone and his replacement called the book terrible, rude, inappropriate, filled with obscenities and without likable characters, notably the pornographer protagonist.
The second book was Everyone's Pretty, the manuscript languished unpublished for the best part of a decade, but it was that manuscript, touted to me by Josh Beckmann of Wave Books, that first turned me onto Lydia, and which we published before Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and re-issued My Happy Life.
November 20, 2007
One of my favorite author website features?
Stacey Richter's Q&A.
November 09, 2007
Waterbaby...
...is the title not of another post featuring my new daughter, but rather of a new book, publishing this week, by Cris Mazza, featured here at Time Out Chicago, and interviewed here at Bookslut, and interviewed here at the Chicago Sun-Times, and reviewed by the Chicago Reader, so I rather think, given the forgoing, that a media outlet located somewhere other than Chicago should really get on board...
September 27, 2007
"It's just the condition of my soul ... It will pass."
So yesterday my new colleague, the iconic Jack Shoemaker (editor of David Markson, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, MFK Fisher, Geoffrey O'Brien etc etc etc etc) sends me an email in which he reports that an Oregon-based writer's program's director emailed to say "Tell Jack that C.A. Conrad's Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull) kicked my ass." Jack in turn tells me, I in turn tell Jack how much CAConrad really does rock and then I see this great interview in this week's Philly City Paper and I know that Conrad does not believe in coincidences, only certain queer cosmic forces (aka deviant propulsions) and I'm therefore compelled to post the forgoing...
Also, please note this references an event in Philadelphia at Robins featuring the Soft Skullers Hal Sirowitz and Eileen Myles.
July 19, 2007
Landsman
While we're figuring out what the online presence of our mothership Counterpoint will look like, I'm going to avail of this blog to alert folks to certain activities in Counterpointville—Exhibit A being an excellent interview on the Amazon books blog with Peter Charles Melman.
Frankly, I had no real desire to write a Civil War novel. For me, the spiritually redemptive arc of its protagonist was always far more intriguing. On a global level, I'll admit that one of the novel's aims was to explore the involvement of Jewish soldiery for the South during the Civil War, true. The moral ironies of why one minority--a minority into which I myself was born--might fight to maintain the enslavement of another, proved too altogether human a subject for me to ignore. Ultimately, though, I hope Landsman serves to take the Southern, Civil War-era Jew beyond the province of villain, victim, or saint, and to place him squarely where he belongs: into the realm of flaw and decency of which we're all understandably a part. I say this because to deny the grosser elements of Jewish-American history is to deny the very most human elements of Jewish-American history. That many of my characters--Jew and Gentile alike--are depraved, that they swear and sin, is testament to the frailties and moral subjectivities of every single one of us. And while it's while certainly a worn trope in fiction writing, that we're subsequently capable of redemption at all I quickly discovered to be the book's true focus.
Page 23
To my mind, on of the most important new moves in the world of bricks-and-mortar indie bookseller retailing is the Page 23 program launched by Changing Hands in Tempe AZ. Here's their spiel on why they did it:
Changing Hands Bookstore spawned Page23 in 2005 in response to the NEA's "Reading at Risk" report--a study showing readership plummeting at an alarming rate (especially among those in their 20's and 30's). Our mission is to support writing that speaks to this elusive generation of readers, as well as those hungry for books outside the mainstream. We identify and promote edgy and unusual fiction, nonfiction, poetry and art books--titles that too often fly under the radar of the Sunday book pages and the big box stores. At Page23, we see ourselves as a tool for readers and booksellers alike, working to connect people with books that might otherwise go unnoticed and unread.
You might notice, if you check out the link on Page23 that their home page is a MySpace page—one of the things they're doing with that is a series of interviews and I'm pleased to report that the current one is with Lydia Millet. herewith, Lydia on our reissue of her 2002 novel, My Happy Life.
The main character in My Happy Life, a woman left to die locked in an abandoned mental institution, is pleasantly nostalgic about her considerably awful past. What made you want to devote a whole novel to her?LM: I don't know that I'd say "pleasantly nostalgic," though I get that maybe you're trying to be succinct for people who haven't read the book. That phrase makes it sound light, even, dare I say, fatuous. In fact, in her memory, everything is imbued with empathy. Everyone gets the benefit of the doubt—even inanimate objects. Pardon is extended infinitely. I wanted to write about a person like her partly because I'm so unlike her—I'm judgmental, I'm opinionated, and though I hold empathy in high esteem I feel its limits everywhere, pressing. And partly I wanted to write the book in an affective, almost philosophical gesture, one I wanted to feel for myself as well as offer to the reader. She's clearly an extreme portrait. But not for nothing, I wanted the reader to be involved in this magnanimous empathy—this refusal to objectify or distance.
June 29, 2007
"I took a bus to follow a man to New York."
I don't quite know why I loved Elizabeth Merrick's interview with Jillian Weise as much as I did, but I do like it so very much. This is part of the reason:
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?I took a bus to follow a man to New York. I didn't know I was following him at the time but that became apparent when he got off the bus and we walked the same direction twenty blocks and we were standing at the corner of 57th and 9th. He turned around and said, Are you following me? Maybe, I said. As it turns out, he was already following someone else, an aspiring model, and on top of that he was a writer. So I waited and started writing some letters addressed to the man I was following. When I showed him the letters he thought they were okay and anyway, it didn't work out with the model.
May 08, 2007
Two interviews; Two askance-lookers
John Zuarino interviews Matthew Sharpe for Bookslut and takes issue on the Blog of a Bookslut with the NYTBR; and
Scott Esposito interviews Matthew Sharpe for Small Spiral Notebook and really takes issue, on his own blog, with the NYTBR...
Ed picked up on Scott's critique and also refers us to Richard's at The Existence Machine.
I also got words of support from others about the miserly and dim review, which means a lot, though begs the question—should I worry about these? Sadly, yes. In fact, I was already worried when I heard who the reviewer would be, since she'd already panned Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and clearly didn't like, a priori, political/satirical ahistorical fantasias. And the reason to be worried is that there is a thing in bookselling called sales velocity and, while the NYTBR can't create velocity except in unusual circumstances, it can accelerate it, or put the brakes on it, especially with hardcover $25 literary fiction. And velocity, because it affects the visibility of the books in the stores, where they're shelved, when they returned, is crucial—the difference between selling 3000 copies and 8000 copies, let's say...
Thus, one must worry. As a rule, I worry too much, but this time, for the moment at least, I was right to worry...
May 04, 2007
"[T]he great white hope of independent publishing..."
Lovely interview here with Matthew Sharpe, by Anne Elizabeth Moore (Soft Skull author, Houghton Mifflin author, New Press author, Punk Planet co-publisher). It's so delightful I reproduce here as much of it as Anne does in her blog but, in the spirit of helping out a fellow indie, I also reproduce the link to buy the issue of Punk Planet in question, cause I should, and you should...So Buy it here!
Matthew Sharpe, in many ways, is the great white hope of independent publishing: a tremendously successful—and very good—writer with an entrenched sense of integrity equally at home with Katie Couric on the Today Show as he is on the phone with Punk Planet.Despite his family background in the independent press—his father runs the research and academic publishing house ME Sharpe—his first two books (Stories from the Tube and Nothing is Terrible) were published by Villard, a division of Random House. “I really did have this delusion that I think many authors do, that in order to be successful—even in order to be successful in my own self-image—I had to be published by one of these big, widely recognized names.” But the books didn’t sell very well, so when he start sending around the third—which eventually became the overwhelmingly successful Soft Skull Press-published The Sleeping Father—“the book was being rejected not on its merits but on the weakness of the sales of the two previous books. So no corporate-owned house would have me.”
Life at the indie, he says, is “in so many ways to be better, more lucrative, more pleasurable, more personally satisfying than I found my experience of working with the multinational conglomerate. Everything is on a more human scale.” Yet he’s still comfortable enough in the corporate world to allow the latest book, Jamestown, a soft-cover deal with Harcourt. It was a deal brokered in the nick of time, too: not only did it allow Sharpe a decent-sized advance—more than most independent houses can pay—but it offered some stability when it became clear that Soft Skull’s distributor, PGW, could give all its publishers serious financial trouble for some time to come.
His previous books have all focused on families—middle class, mostly—but Jamestown is a fictionalized account of the first ten years of the Jamestown settlement, and reenvisions the lives of real historical figures John Smith, Pocahontas, her father Powhatan, John Ratcliffe, John Martin, and John Rolf. But Sharpe, a nearly ridiculously engaging conversationalist with a penchant for knock-knock jokes, adds a psychiatrist/adviser named Sidney Feingold, text-messaging, and a bizarre onslaught of linguistic influences that range from pop songs to urban street lingo. For a story supposedly set 400 years ago, the backdrop the story plays against is far more September 11, 2001 (when a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC killed almost 3,000 people) than January 20, 1607 (when a tsunami swept the Bristol Channel and killed almost 2000 people).
Sharpe sat down with me on the phone on January 10, 2007, the night President Bush announced his plan to call for a surge of 21500 more troops to Iraq, an ongoing part of the post-September 11 War on Terror and a fitting backdrop against which to be discussing the bloody, messy foundations on which we first established this country 400 years ago.
Interview by Anne Eizabeth Moore, cuttings excerpted from the interview in PP79
So, what’s the new year got in store for you?
Oh you know. This.
You’ve planned it through the tenth and that’s it?
What else . . . I’m going to go back to school in a couple weeks and teach. I’m going to travel around reading out loud from my book.
In English?
Yes. Although I thought I might try reading it with sort of a Swedish Chef accent. It’s sort of a grim book, and I think anything would add a little “spice.”
Well, you did put a lot of jokes in there.
Oh! I have so many jokes for you, although they may not be appropriate for the interview.
No, go ahead. We can always cut out the inappropriate ones.
OK, well you know the one that goes, “Knock Knock?”
[There is an awkward pause.] That’s it? That’s not very funny.
Oh, wait! You hate jokes! That’s right! Oh, you’re a terrible person to tell jokes to.
What? No. That’s just not a funny joke.
There’s more. You have to do the second part. There’s two roles for you in this joke.
That’s what I hate about jokes. I have to do all the work.
The payoff here is gonna be so worth it. Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow.
Interrupting—
—Moo. Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Schizophrenic horse.
Schizophreni—
—Moo. Isn’t the buildup totally worth it?
The buildup is fantastic, but now I’m tired.
[Laughs.] Would you like to take a nap and call me back?
No, no. I think I’ll be OK. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? The Sleeping Father was extremely successful, and received overwhelmingly positive reviews and netted you an appearance on the Today Show. Do you feel you have a lot to live up to with the new book?
We here at Matthew Sharpe, Writer and Educator, are giving ourselves a manicure with our teeth as we speak. I’m nervous and excited. The Today Show was a lovely, flukey thing. It’s shocking what five minutes on television will do for the life of an obscure literary author. I don’t know that the new book will sell quite as well as the other, but that part of it is really not under my control. The part that is under my control is already done. I tried something different with this book, and I figured out a way within the very limited thing that I do to express my beliefs about American foreign policy. And so I’m happy . . . I shifted to write about something that happened 400 years ago, and so I had to really rethink how I do everything.
Well . . . it was sort of 400 years ago.
Yeah, I guess one of the first things I had to do was figure out how to write about a place and time that is so remote from us, and me not being an historian and not thinking that I could write the way that people talked or wrote back then and really feeling like, as many books as I read on the subject, I did not feel confident that I had the text of what consciousness was at that time. Or even what any 48-hour period of someone’s life would be like. So one of the things I had to do was accommodate my own lack of knowledge and ability. Which is always a big thing that one must do when writing a novel. You have to make the best of your weaknesses.
The remainder of this interview can be found in PP79. Buy it here!
April 06, 2007
Suicide "Girl" Daniel Robert Epstein talks to Beth Lapides
Right here. And check out all his interviews, they're great and not behind a pay wall.
February 12, 2007
What it takes to write a book...
Michael McColly in the Chicago Sun-Times on his book The After-Death Room and what it took to write it:
But as Michael McColly well knows, more tangible perks are harder to come by. In The After-Death Room: Journey Into Spiritual Activism, he catalogs his trips through Asia, Africa, and the United States as he attempts to get a grip on the global AIDS crisis. It's a powerful, panoramic glimpse into the religious aspects of AIDS activism, the reality of the problem among poor sex workers, and the various bureaucratic bottlenecks that hamper better treatment. But struggling to get it published did McColly's bank book no favors.
McColly, an adjunct writing professor at Northwestern and Columbia College, took two unpaid leaves of absence in 2002 and 2004 to travel, research and write. "I'm not doing that well financially, frankly, because of the choice I made to do this book," he says. "It takes a lot of time to research. I took a second leave in 2004 because I realized that the book wasn't getting done fast enough. I sacrificed some financial security to get this done."
See also, Michael's essay on Beatrice;
this interview at The Publishing Spot; and
listen to his interview on Chicago Public radio...
February 09, 2007
The Page Sixty-Nine test
Lynne Tillman was asked to apply the "p. 69" test to American Genius, A Comedy. Here's what she had to say (and what follows is a great round-up of what folks have had to say about AGAC, as we call it around the office...)
In a way, every page of American Genius, A Comedy is representative of it until the last third of the novel, when it changes significantly. On Page 69, the narrator refers to her skin condition -- dermatographia, or skin writing -- and speaks about the importance of skin. Skin is one of the connectors in AGAC, a theme in the book: skin as barrier to the world, or indicator of your own world, like blushing, or skin is permeable, also letting the outside in, skin tells others, exposes, something you may want hidden, it can betray you. Skin contracts and expands, which is what I wanted the novel to do: to move from small events and issues, like a facial or an annoying dinner partner, to great ones, like American history, democracy, sensitivity, sex, race and racism. Kafka and his ex-fiancee, Felice, also play their part in the novel, because they're the obsession of one of the characters the narrator meets -- Contesa, a mysterious and fascinating woman. The narrator meets many such people, all cloistered together for a time in an institution of some sort.
November 10, 2006
Jim Ruland interviews Delia Falconer for The Elegant Variation
TEV: On one hand, the literal lost thoughts of the soldiers in your book, particularly those of Star-Gazer and Handsome Jack, have the density of poetry; on the other hand, their yearnings and quotidian catalogs could fill several books. Why did you choose the form of a novella for this story?DF: Two writers were guiding influences as I was writing The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers: W G Sebald and Junichiro Tanizaki. I'm a huge fan of Sebald's, especially the way in which he assumes our knowledge of the Holocaust in his novels and works around its edges to concentrate instead on ephemeral details of trauma and longing. In doing this he completely renews that history's capacity to shock; this is what makes his novels profoundly moving and deeply moral. This idea of renewing history to make it sting appealed to me greatly. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Tanizaki writes about Musashi's abiding sexual obsession with "woman-heads", the noseless heads of warriors slain on the battlefield and taken as trophies. There is a compelling Japanese elegance about Tanizaki's choice to focus his story on this bizarre detail; and, again, that history seems more alive and human to me because of that choice. Sebald gave me the courage to assume that readers were already familiar with the story of Little Bighorn and to concentrate instead on the human detail, the "seams and spaces in between" as Benteen himself says. And there was something about the west that seemed compatible with an almost Asian approach. The haiku-like brevity of people's speech in Wyoming, for example; and the sense of a shadow-world at its edges. I wanted to emphasise the strangeness of that history, to make it foreign, in order to take the spotlight off Custer and turn the focus onto poignant, ordinary moments.
The complete review and interview here.
November 03, 2006
A late-night, drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag
...is Wayne Koestenbaum, so sayeth Bidoun magazine. What magazine? BIDOUN. It's amazing. Check it out.
And a snippet of what you'll find vis-a-vis our boy Wayne, as interviewed by Bruce Hainley:
BH: I'd like to begin this sitting on a bench at the intersection of poetry and politics. The title of your most recent book, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, recalls an early essay of yours, which when first published was, I seem to remember, called 'The Aryan Boy Who Pissed on My Father's Head.' I'm interested in the way your writing continuously pulls toward porn while retaining all its stern, Sontagian glamour and purpose. Where do you situate the porn-poem, or poem-porn, given the precedents of Shelley's 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'?WK: I'm ready to talk politics and poetry and everything else under the sun. I got splinters on my butt-cheeks from sitting so long on this bench. And then the splinters got infected. I was worried I'd have to amputate flesh gobbets. But then the Valium kicked in, with its little-studied antibiotic properties. So I'm raring to go, ass in gear. The porn-poem: to write a poem is pornographic, in the senses of wasteful, useless, awful, ignored, debased, hurdy-gurdy, repetitive, regressive, navel-gazing, ass-licking, time-killing, boring, ludicrous, transcendent, dilated. I've been reading mischevious L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E practitioner Charles Bernstein lately (he's against National Poetry Month, thinks it's bad for poetry). Also Slovenian writer Tomaz Salamun, also Austrian pathbreaker Ingeborg Bachmann. I'm feeling entranced, once again, by the possibilities of language that ignores the supervisor. It's my regular May/June fever, the high of rediscovering poetry's rankness, naughtiness. And, for me, these days, naughtiness exists in being minimal. Some of the most exciting pieces at the MoMA, New York, on a recent visit were by Walter De Maria and Ellsworth Kelly, nice old-fashioned staunch minimalists. Looking at them, I think I "got"-perhaps for the first time-what a thoroughly anal pleasure, like gin, minimalism can be, so spiked with content in its refusals and excisions, its "Why bother?" So "up there," as Andy would say. Like a good old-fashioned hit of poppers. Like Warhol's goodbye to art. Like rambunctious poet Ed Smith. Or Sturtevant. The porn-poem is there, where Smith meets Sturtevant. Poetry is politics on poppers?
October 16, 2006
Jenny D. on memoirs and blogs...
Jenny Davidson (of Heredity and others) on memoirs and blogs.
September 25, 2006
Bill Burroughs, Jr.
So we've a book coming out in November called Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of Williams S. Burroughs, Jr., the memoir of the "Son of Naked Lunch." But, because this book has been so long in the publishing (long story to tell, I'll spare you...), some folks are already writing and talking about it...this from today's International Herald Tribune and then, next week, you can do an online chat about Billy Burroughs with writer David Ohle, who compiled and edited Cursed from Birth and who is also the author of the Soft Skull book The Age of Sinatra...
September 18, 2006
Bookforum and BOMB
The new Bookforum is out, with, delightfully, two reviews of Soft Skull books—American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman, and Mark Swartz's H2O, though sadly neither of them are available online—much other stuff there though.
However, the Geoffrey O'Brien interview of Lynne Tillman in BOMB magazine (not [yet?] online) is partially transcribed by Brian Sholis at In Search of the Miraculous...
Also, apologies for the lack of posting last week, the German Book Office had me in Munich and Berlin meeting a gazillion German publishers and editors, in the company of folks from Arcade, Grove, Melville House, Graywolf, and Publishers Weekly. Will try to post some little bits about all that later this week...
August 22, 2006
A poem should help you rob a bank.
A truly remarkable interview with CAConrad, this excerpt does not do it justice...
Tom Beckett: What do you think poetry does? What do you want a poem to do?
CAConrad: A poem should help you rob a bank. What kind of fucking poem wouldn't help you rob a bank? A bad poem wouldn't be able to drive the getaway car. You better be certain you've got the right poem behind the fucking wheel, things are tight these days on the streets, they'll kick your ass unless the poem behind the wheel is the right poem.
But I really do LOVE when a poem strips down, gets on its back and holds me in the air with its delicious feet, and lets me feel naked flight. A child should come out, a new one, a wonder, the poem makes everything that new to the sudden brand of alternate realness it makes. There are poets whose poems do this to me (with me) (for me) nearly every time.
It goes way back, this Great Love. Photograph of a camera in the front room. Then four or five more photographs of cameras in the hall. There's a large cabinet and our wild guess of eight, maybe nine hundred snapshots of cameras in the drawers. Sometimes it's different angles of the same camera. And you might stand in the room with me wondering about the camera that took the pictures of the cameras. Or, was it more than one camera? Or, are some of the cameras in the photographs the cameras used to photograph the other cameras? We spend a good half hour looking everywhere but there are no cameras, just the photographs of cameras. In the end there's a box of cherry tea. Have you ever had cherry tea? Me neither, let's have a cup.
A very expensive, very old vase was accidentally broken in the British museum recently. The BBC cameras got as close to the flower and branch design as they could so that our eyes could SEE the repair. See, look, do you see the epoxy? Yes, that's it. The reporter helped us see. See? Yes. And many hours and much money was spent in the reparation of this vase. Yet British and American troops are responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's being brutally killed or injured. Museums and libraries burned to the ground. Tax dollars and patronage to fix a vase. Tax dollars and private interests to wage war, and then to have the NERVE to "give" "aid" to "rebuild." Just like, just days ago, on the news the reporter said that America was expediting bombs to Israel, and a semicolon later said that America was THE FIRST to arrive in Lebanon with "aid." Bombs and bandages. It was SO SHOCKING! You send bombs to Israel, NOT JUST send bombs, but EXPEDITE them because they're not getting there quick enough. And almost at the same time send medical supplies to Lebanon to "help" with the injuries caused by the bombs, GEESH! Were the bombs and the bandages in different planes I hope? Good old American cost effectiveness could very well send everything in one load. We can all relax now though that the vase has been repaired in the British museum. The camera zoomed in to let us see WHAT AN AMAZING JOB was done. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you for saving the vase!
Sometimes on the news the cameras show us a car crash. They zoom in, and flames, blood, spraying water, it's all there. Recently on the news the camera gave us details of a very still pile of hair poking up from behind a seat. It's just like a movie, the news. Wow, super duper, it's like it's not even real. Is this what we've been working toward? I have a notion to go to the car wrecks on Philadelphia's highways with my giant bags of potting soil and tomato plants and make a little garden on the charred hoods and roofs of the wrecked cars. And glue poems to the windows. This protest will be called HOW LOVE IS WHAT THE POEM IS GOING TO DO TO YOU! EAT A TOMATO FUCKER!
August 09, 2006
Soft Skull Poet now Poet-in-Residence on Riker's Island...
It's Jackie Sheeler. Story ran in yesterday's New York Times. She edited Off the Cuffs: Poetry By and About the Police.
Also, this constitutes a new strategy for keeping this blog fresh. Shorter entries, and more of them. Not as many as the blog run by Frank Wilson, books ed at the Philly Inquirer, but more than I've managed recently! We'll see how it goes...
February 04, 2006
I wanted to be the best Greek novelist and I can't understand the words, so I imagine that they mean all sorts of great things.
There's a great webzine, based out of Belfast in Northern Ireland called Dogmatika and they do some very nice little interviews, including a couple in the recent months with Soft Skull authors, herewith some out-takes and the links to the whole shebangs.
I wanted to be the best Greek novelist. An Interview with Robert Newman
One book you wish you had written, and why?
I most often wish to have written Anne Tyler novels, simply because of the person I would have to be and the life I would have to have been living to have written them. To have written her novels I would have had to have become be an understanding, sociable, loving, interested, observant, thoughtful, connected, in-the-moment person who took life seriously in all its manifestations be they never so humble. She makes you feel that to write well is to live well. More than be able to write well, I would like to be able to live well like that and understand well like that and to be that kind of soul.
If there's one novel though that would be Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex a) because it's the best novel for decades and b) because I wanted to be the best Greek novelist.
Which painting, or other piece of art, best describes you?
I can't think what visual art describes me, but I can tell you my favourite. Is that any good to you? My favourite piece of visual art is the slapstick routine performed by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin when they are both well into their sixties. The routine is at the end of the indifferent melodrama Limelight. Then suddenly, the two masters onstage together. Buster is playing piano and Chaplin is playing violin. Well, that's the plan. It's funny and moving. This is the last hurrah of two all-time geniuses. And the sketch is full of loads of surprises as if they are just inventing slapstick there and then, loads of gags and twists you have never seen before. They are performing to an audience who are really above this kind of comedy, and so there is an embattled dignity about the two men who are dressed for concert rectial in stuffed and padded tuxedos.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on a few things. A novel called Collide-O-Scope that involves a United States city under siege by a right wing government in the near future. A series of books with visual artist Jadina Lilien—the one we are working on now is an illustrated rock opera. A graphic poem with the artist Scott Gillis that is a mix of my experiences as a medic at the World Trade Center attack, the history of Afghanistan, and the early days of aviation. And a musical theater piece with Mabou Mines called Song for New York, for which I am the Manhattan poet. I also just finished a screenplay called Swirl with my writing partner Felicity Seidel.
Do you listen to music as you write?
Once in a while, depending on what I’m writing.
If so, what?
Greek gangster music from the 1920s. I like it because I can’t understand the words, so I imagine that they mean all sorts of great things.
January 04, 2006
Interviews, Past and present
I just found these two interviews with Lydia Millet today, on Jessica Lee Jernigan's blog, one from 2001 about My Happy Life re-posted yesterday, the other The Nuclear Sublime posted today.
They're both quite short and both are every bit the sublime punch in the face that I find Lydia's mode of expression to be.
From one interview:
I think the Apocalypse is happening all around us. We go on eating desserts and watching TV. I know I do. I wish we were more capable of sustained passion and sustained resistance. We should be screaming and what we do is gossip.
From the other:
None of us have visions of reality that are valid or invalid; we just have visions. How well we do in the world depends partly on how well our vision matches the prevailing cultural vision. In her case there’s really no match, and as a result she doesn’t fare too well in the world by conventional standards. But her vision is so strong that it sustains her through terrible adversity. And that’s what I cherish about her, and why I never considered stripping her of her delusions. Where would we be without our delusions? I’d fight anyone who tried to take mine away from me.
This reminded me of one of the loveliest things I find about my job as publisher—reading author interviews after the book is published. You think you know the book after you've edited it, and hung out with the author, and pitched it and pimped it, and talked it up...and then you read these interviews and it is like you completely rediscover the book.
So here are a few more semi-random interviews with Soft Skull authors...
Jennifer Knox, author of A Gringo Like Me, interviewed by Kevin Sampsell for Powells.com's great new blog.
KS: Billy Corgan and Jewel have done it. Which other pop stars should try their hand at publishing a poetry book?
Knox: First I'd like to say that I'm a huge fan of Michael Madsen's book, especially the poem about him masturbating to the girls changing in the windows of the dorms at Northwestern. That's what I call letting it all hang out. If Dean Martin was still alive, I'd love to read a book of his pantoums — but just pantoums. Ol' Dirty Bastard should have written a book of poems. I guess I can only think of dead people — and Michael Madsen.