January 2012
17 posts
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You know nothing, nothing, but nothing
You can’t touch me.
I have no eyes, no ears, no teeth, no tongue, no brain tissue, no hair, no lungs, no heart, no bowels, no cock, no voice, no smell; there is no blood in me, there is no lymph in me, there is no feeling in me, no devotion in me, I do not know hunger, I do not know the roads, and I do not know pain, I do not know the directions, I do not know the hiding places and...
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No one sings all the time
No one sings all the time By everything else we shall also be judged
But only we ourselves can do it
This is without exception We who are everything else In the dark
song, bright, beyond
all comprehension
...
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I Found a Beating Heart Half-Buried in the Woods
mythologyofblue:
Is this your beating heart? I asked. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have a larynx. She didn’t even have a thorax. She didn’t have anything. Not even arms or legs or a head. She really wasn’t a woman as much as she was the space between dead leaves. No, it’s yours she said.
—Zachary Schomburg
(cocophony)
There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t...
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Two New Poems →
ecantwell:
Splash of Red just published two new poems of mine - go check them out, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Trust me, you are very much into this kind of thing.
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What will we do without Ed Park? We’ve been... →
No. Ed Park is leaving to be an editor in the newly created publishing wing of Amazon.
I know Ed only a very little but respect him endlessly and like him enough that that little feels too little. I want to be his friend, I mean. I want to go on double dates with him. He’s also a great editor, a great writer, and more polite than you could imagine.
But he will be working for Amazon. My...
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“Literature is sacred. It is as sacred to me as anything I know. I suspect that...”
– Tom Bissell, from his 2003 essay for The Believer, anthologized and published in the book Magic Hours out this April and available here. The essay is much larger and better than this very good paragraph, and has had me making sort-of-exclamatory noises through my nose. But this passage in particular...
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My favorite part about HuffPo articles is that...
In person, Saviano is at once intense and friendly, slim, in shape. He is 32 and handsome, in the way only someone who has committed his life to uncovering the truth can be. Behind his captivating eyes lies a neverending well of fascinating information. Yet he never appears to know it all — which by the way, I am convinced he does — but rather allows for a spontaneous mutual dialogue...
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“Mark Licinius Sept was found by the door of his dimly lit tablinum: he lay dead...”
– Three colons from Chapter Six.
The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Translation by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov. Published by NYRB Classics. Available here.
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“Insane electrified ephemera winking, twitching, tracing, devouring the black...”
– Osip Mandelstam on fireflies. From his “Journey to Armenia”, translated by Clarence Brown, collected in The Noise of Time from Northwestern UP.
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December 2011
18 posts
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“They also note that ‘cyberspace and forest space may also be seen as holey...”
– You would be correct in assuming that a brief essay about the Deleuzean geophilosophy of Tolkien’s Middle Earth by Adam Roberts, Paul Kincaid and others is far, far up my alley.
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Listen
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“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects;...”
– John Keats, from a letter to his brothers (George & Thomas) on Dec. 22, 1817. (via ecantwell)
This is still perhaps the single most desirable quality in literature, and the one with the single most useless name. Even literatures, like Science Fiction, whose very generic definitions demand of...
swisslandia asked: Hi. Loved your post rebutting that tool at Slate's tool-y article. Well done. One question - what is the book that you described as "a book about light and scents and changing seasons and lust and memory, set in a small south-eastern Polish town"? Because I want that. Bad. Really, I was sold at light & scents, but by the time you got to memory I was vibrating with desire....
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Chad Post on our friend at Slate. →
Chad Post, whose post yesterday absolved Amazon a bit much for my tastes, (though as I tried to make clear he and I agree about 99% of the issue) has just written a much better response to Manjoo’s Slate article than my own.
The best part of his post, other than his reiterated but somewhat misleading Three Paths of Action conclusion (I’d say that the concerned actors from your first...
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“Amazon have access to more readers every day than I have seen in ten years as a...”
– Bookavore and I sometimes, rarely, argue about specific books, but when it comes to talking about what we should be talking about, she is always right.
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Surprisingly, I am less sure than this guy on...
A gentleman named Farhad Manjoo just posted a proudly contrarian article on Slate explaining why independent bookstores are not only irrelevent but maybe even harmful. I work at an independent bookstore, so that’s an argument I’d be very very curious to see made well. Honestly, I know the failings of small booksellers as well as anyone, and it’d be good to see them articulated....
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A brief note to Chad Post, because his comments...
Here is Chad over at Three Percent, the blog of his really great press Open Letter, spurred into commenting again by today’s Times op-ed from Richard Russo about Amazon’s recent showrooming app promotion.
A point of clarification: Chad Lives in Rochester, is a swell dude, is very supportive of indie bookstores and translation, and has taken grant money from Amazon for his press. So...
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My New Policy
I will pay $5 if you go into your friendly local Amazon retailer and take a photo of some of their barcodes. Help yourself to a coffee and book reading and comfy chair while you’re at it.
That, or Jeff Bezos being pied. I’ll pay for those photos, too.
“There are moments in novels which are absolutely true–and those are the kinds of...”
– Jeffrey Eugenides (via theparisreview)
Such a tragic misunderstanding of fiction and truth and, assuming this isn’t a butchered quote, how indicative words work in sentences.
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November 2011
16 posts
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“It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for....”
– Thomas Paine, quoted at length in John Nichols’s The “S” Word.
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“No one can force a way through here, least of all with a message from a dead...”
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Endorsements I Meant to Make
The other night I was asked to speak about some new books this season that an audience should strive to read at all costs.
I took some time the night before to write down a few thoughts on index cards. I use index cards for everything.
When going to speak with the audience—residents and curiosity seekers at an artist’s colony in Greenwich Village—I brought the index cards and...
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“You solved those skirt folds beautifully. Her face and hat are all you need to...”
– A text from a stranger. I feel like an Auster character.
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“April 2, 1984
I finally made some sense of the Orwell, after two tries, and...”
– Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited by Richard Cook, Published by Yale UP. I love this book.
rachelfershleiser asked: Wait, sorry, whose mom made which sweater for whom?
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