Someone invited me to this thing called “Good Reads.”

My profile is here.

I reviewed my own book, EEEEE EEE EEEE.

I reviewed almost every book I like.

They link to places like Amazon to buy books from.

You can go to other places though.

The cash is in your hands.

The choice is yours.

McNally Robinson ships any book anywhere in the world.

I will give you some advice now.

Some practical advice to actualize your liberal politics in concrete reality.

1. To get free books go to your pile of books, in your room, and pick up an Amy Tan book, in your hands, bring it to Barnes and Noble or Border’s, and exchange it for a book by an independent press.

2. If an author you like is reading at Barnes and Noble or Borders and you want to give them your book, that you wrote, go to the bookshelf in the store, take the book, in your hand, write a note in it, then bring it to the author who is reading who you like, and give it to him or her.

Barnes and Nobles in NYC, and probably in other places, don’t have tags in the books, but I think Borders has tags in some books. You can just flip through the book and find it though, and take it out, and put it on somewhere else.

Go to Good Reads and be my friend and read my reviews.

I reviewed Noah Cicero, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Richard Yates, Lydia Davis, Matthew Rohrer, Jean Rhys, Ann Beattie, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Bobbie Ann Mason, Kobo Abe, Celia Farber, Peter Singer, Mary Robison, and some other people.

Richard Peabody: Mondo Literature

In the 1970s I published stories and poems in over 120 litmags–back then the now-quaint term “little magazine” was used somewhat more than “literary magazine.” At least 110 of those publications no longer exist, including Tom Whalen’s Lowlands Review, Dennis Cooper’s Little Caesar, Peter Cherches’ Zone and Miriam Sagan’s Aspect.

Nearly all of those still publishing are at universities: Shenandoah at Washington & Lee, Epoch at Cornell, Bellingham Review at Western Washington, Cimarron Review at Oklahoma State, Oyez Review at Roosevelt.

The only non-academic literary magazines on my 1970s bibliography currently active are Hanging Loose, ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, Apalachee Review (then Apalachee Quarterly) – and the 31-year-old publication that the Washington Post Book World has called “Washington’s preeminent literary magazine”: Richard Peabody’s Gargoyle.

peabody-garg51.jpg

Gargoyle was founded in 1976 by Rick and two others, but a year later he was the only member of the original triumvirate left. He ran the mag until 1990 with several different co-editors but he’s been pretty much on his own since then. Dedicated to printing work by unknown poets and fiction writers, as well as seeking out the overlooked or neglected, the magazine also published “name” writers — sometimes before they were “names” — like Kathy Acker, Rita Dove, Jennifer Egan, Naomi Shihab Nye, T.C. Boyle, Russell Edson, Allen Ginsberg, Ben Marcus, and Rick Moody.

(Check out the authors he’s corresponded with over the years in the magazine’s archive in the Special Collections at George Washington University’s Gelman Library.)

Richard Peabody is also the founder of Paycock Press, which in the ’70s and ’80s published some small press masterpieces of poetry and fiction, like Michael Brondoli’s The Love Letter Hack” and Harrison Fisher’s Blank Like Me and more recently published the work of two D.C. writers I knew, both of whom died far too young: the Collected Poems of pioneering gay poet Ed Cox and In Praise of What Persists, stories by the late Joyce Renwick, known to many of us who attended Bread Loaf in the ’70s as not merely a terrific writer but our caring writing conference nurse.

Rick has edited or co-edited nearly twenty anthologies since 1982’s D.C. Magazines: A Literary Retrospective, including A Different Beat: Early Work by Women of the Beat Generation, Mavericks: Nine Independent Publishers, Conversations with Gore Vidal, Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women, and the just-published Kiss the Sky: Fiction & Poetry Starring Jimi Hendrix.

peabody-mondobarbie.jpg mondoelvis.jpg

Probably Rick’s best-known fiction and poetry anthologies are the ones he and Lucinda Ebersole did for St. Martin’s Press in the 1990s: Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, Mondo Marilyn and Mondo James Dean, featuring such writers as Sandra Cisneros, A.M. Homes, Kathryn Harrison, Denise Duhamel and many others.

As if being an unparalleled literary impresario and entrepreneur isn’t enough, Rick is also a superb poet and fiction writer. I singled him out in my ’79 article on young writers for his first book of poetry, I’m in Love with the Morton Salt Girl. Since then, he’s published such poetry collections as Echt & Ersatz and Last of the Red Hot Magnetos, filled with work that Guy Davenport called “fresh, spritely, and enviably energetic.”

In addition, Rick is the author of the novella Sugar Mountain (Argonne Hotel Press, 2000) and two short story collections. You can sample his short fiction online: “Stop the War or Giant Amoebas Will Eat You” (2003) and “The Rain in Eritrea” (2005). Rick has taught at the University of Virginia, Georgetown, University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland.

peabody-salt.jpg

Full disclosure: I first knew Rick as the editor who rejected my early submissions to Gargoyle 32 years ago. After several years, he finally took one of my stories; I was interviewed by the magazine in 1981, and I’m also a contributor to his and Lucinda Ebersole’s Mondo Barbie and Sex & Chocolate anthologies.

I don’t see Rick very often — the last two times were in March 2005, at a writing and publishing conference at Florida State in Tallahassee, and in June 1995, when I paid a surprise visit to Atticus Books, the excellent U Street bookstore he owned for a number of years — but he’s been a great friend. This D.C.-area literary legend currently lives in Arlington with his wife and two daughters, and no doubt he’s currently working on at least half a dozen new writing and publishing projects.

Once, in talking about our writer friends from the ’70s and early ’80s who went missing in action, Rick said, “Richie, you and me, we’re survivors.” I guess. I guess all the writers from my 1979 “Some Young Writers I Admire” I’ve blogged about here are. If you think it’s that easy, let me know around, say, 2032.

And Let Me Be Clear

I’ve intercepted some extremely vicious hate mails over the past week pertaining to the Save the Blogs campaign. I’m stunned that anyone would get so angry about this. We’ve only been saying that the blog, by way of being a natural parasitic medium based in Terre Haute, actually demands a lobbying group fronting as a venerable organization of literary enthusiasts. Anger! That’s the only way to save blogs!

And when we’re done saving the blogs, we’re going to be working very hard to get half of U.S. teenagers hooked on nicotine. And then we’re going to curb any and all bans on handguns and assault weapons. What the world really needs, and this has been the purpose of the Save the Blogs campaign all along, is needless violence and utter mayhem. Our successful campaign to throw laptops at the humorless has been working. There have been several trips to the hospital and we’ll be uploading these clips onto YouTube. But we WILL NOT STOP until every humorless cad has been hit with an iBook or a Toshiba laptop.

And just to be clear: The Save the Blogs campaign is being run by the National Parasitic Bloggers Circle Board of Directors, NOT the National Parasitic Bloggers Circle.

The posts put up by the guest bloggers, despite appearing at Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant, do NOT — repeat, NOT — reflect the opinions of parasites as a whole. The only exception are those posts having to do with David Orr’s pants and, in particular, his left bicep. All parasites accept David Orr’s hunky physique as the genuine article. And we’re hoping to regale you with some hot fan fiction in the forthcoming weeks.

Nobody writing on this website answers to anybody. That’s the philosophy we’ve appropriated (parasite-like, natch!) from the print critics, who have greatly inspired us with their persistent paralogia.

Hello New York

On Friday morning, I signed a lease for an apartment in Brooklyn.

This explains, in part, my two week absence.

I’ll have more to say about all this later, including a lengthy and perhaps needlessly maudlin post about San Francisco. (I apologize in advance for any visceral fulminations. One doesn’t leave a city that one has lived in and loved for thirteen years with anything approaching ease.) But before I do, I’d like to once again greatly thank the guest bloggers who have been kind enough to step in as I continue this remarkably insane cross-country migration, as well as the kind people who have offered recommendations, kudos, plaudits, and all manner of positive juju. These are exciting times. More later.

From the Annals of Freelancing: Object Lesson #1

So I became a freelancer 100% as of February of this year. For awhile I was scrambling around for work and I wanted to take everything that came my way. I quickly learned this was a bad idea, but not before a few interesting experiences.

Probably the most interesting involved doing re-told Bible stories for young adults. I was really appreciative that my friend had recommended them and I read through all of their extremely horrible instructional information soberly.

As part of the indoctrination, I then took a conference call with the CEO and their creative director. I really didn’t know what to expect, except that they would be telling me more about the project.

What I did know upfront is that for their version, they were changing the name of the snake to something like Scottie and having him tell fart jokes…in addition to tempting Eve and all. That probably should have tipped me off.

So I get on the phone and the creative director tells me right off the bat that he’s an ex-comics executive, in a ham-handed style right out of Used Car Salesman Don’ts, adding, “This ain’t like writing for your penny dreadfuls, Jeff. This is mainstream audience. This isn’t penny dreadful work, Jeff.”

Okay…what the hell is a penny dreadful, was my first thought. And where can I get me some of that?

Followed by: “You can’t go wrong if you just think of Adam as being like Batman, except without parents.”

Batman, without parents. Okay…

And then, this kicker: “Pitch me the Tree of Life, Jeff. Pitch me the Tree of Life.”

Me: “Pitch you the Tree of Life? Um…what?”

“Ya know, how would you deal with the Tree of Life.”

“Um. Mysterious. Unknowable. Dappled in sunlight?”

And it just went downhill from there.

I wound up not doing anything for them. But it was an instructional experience in freelancing. Most definitely.

Jeff

im going to jfk to fly to france now

instructions for cooking avocado scrambled eggs

Delicious and easy breakfast: slice a soft avocado in half and remove the peel from the seedless half. (Put the other half in a plastic bag and store it in the refrigerator.) Put some olive oil in a frying pan and set the avocado-half, empty side up, in the pan. Crack an egg and pour the egg onto the avocado, containing as much egg as possible, particularly the yolk, in the avocado’s seed cavity. Turn the burner on. As the frying pan heats up, mash the avocado (and the egg in/on/around it) into a paste with a fork. Treat the resulting egg-avocado paste as you would regular scrambled eggs, sliding it around and so forth with a spatula.

When the avocado scrambled eggs have a delicate golden brown crust, turn the burner off. Lightly salt the avocado scrambled eggs. Sample a forkful; they should be crispy on the outside but soft, rich, and creamy within. It is best to eat them directly from the pan, while they are still hot.

The Search

My favorite line from The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s classic novel of lust and longing in New Orleans, is this: “To become aware of the possibility of a search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Which brings me to the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco, tonight, where the writers who take the stage at Inside Storytime will be reading short pieces based on the theme Searching. In the lineup: Michael Disend, author of cult classic Stomping the Goyim; Barry Wildorf, author of Bring the War Home; Elizabeth Koch, who will be reading from The World Tour Compatibility Test; Roger Pinnell, and yours truly. I’ll be reading from my new San Francisco-centric novel The Year of Fog, which opens with the disappearance of a child on Ocean Beach. You can read the story behind the book here in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In addition to The Moviegoer, other books that come to mind when I think of “searching” are two older Ian McEwan novels: A Child in Time, and The Comfort of Strangers. For readers who came late to McEwan with the mainstream successes Atonement and Amsterdam, the two earlier novels might show you a side of McEwan you haven’t seen. Both are very short and deeply moody, and both are absolutely chilling.

Won’t You Be My Friend?

New York Times: “Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.” (via Jenny D)

Book Reviews: Indebted to Nothing

From Cynthia Ozick’s excellent essay “Literary Entrails” (Harper’s, April 2007), which I hope Harper’s eventually makes freely available. Ozick’s essay should be read by anyone who has any interest in the current book reviewing climate, particularly as very few of the participants have the effrontery to look inward.

When, not long ago, the New York Times Book Review asked a pool of writers to name the best novel of the last twenty-five years, the results were partly predictable and considerably muddled. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a tale of slavery and its aftermath, won the most votes. Philip Roth, John Updike, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy were substantially represented. In an essay musing on the outcome of an exercise seemingly more quixotic than significant, A.O. Scott noted that the choices gave “a rich, if partial and unscientific picture of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details.” Or call it flotsam and jetsam. You could not tell, from the novels that floated to the top, and from those bubbling vigorously below, anything more than that they were all written in varieties of the American language. You could not tell what, taken all together, they intimated in the larger sense — the tone of their time. A quarter-century encompasses a generation, and a generation does have a composite feel to it. But here nothing was composite, nothing joined these disparate writers to one another — only the catchall of the question itself, dipping like a fishing net and picking up what was closest to the surface, or had already prominently surfaced. All these novels had been abundantly reviewed — piecemeal. No reviewer had thought to set Beloved beside Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (both are political novels historically disguised) to catch the cross-reverberations. No reviewer had thought to investigate the possibly intermarried lineage of any of these works: what, for instance, has Nick in DeLillo’s Underworld absorbed from the Nick of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? The novels that rose up to meet the Book Review‘s inquiry had never been suspect of being linked, whether horizontally or vertically. It was as if each one was a wolf-child reared beyond the commonality of a civilization; as if there was no recognizable thread of literary inheritance that could bind, say, Mark Helprin to Raymond Carver. Or if there was, no one cared to look for it. Nothing was indebted to nothing.

The Lincoln Assassination

One of the more interesting moments in history to me is The Lincoln Assassination. It’s kind of been stuck in my brain since I visited John Wilkes Booth’s grave.

Well, I’m tooling around the internet this morning and I find a news story on Yahoo regarding how modern doctors think Lincoln would have survived had he been shot in the same place today.

If Lincoln had survived, American history would probably have changed dramatically. Would Andrew Jackson still become president? Would the South find a way to rise again? Would there be repeated attempts to kill Lincoln during his recovery?

I wonder if Lincoln was wounded and weakened if it would have changed how the war ended. Lincoln became a martyr and, though the war was technically over, members of the south still wanted to fight. I wonder if a wounded and weak Lincoln (whether in office or not) would have spurred the south to fight on.

What do you think?

When is a book out of print?

More on Simon & Schuster’s power grab

…with the advent of technologies like print-on-demand, publishers have been able to reduce the number of back copies that they keep in warehouses. Simon & Schuster, which until now has required that a book sell a minimum number of copies through print-on-demand technology to be deemed in print, has removed that lower limit in its new contract.

In effect, that means that as long as a consumer can order a book through a print-on-demand vendor, that book is still deemed in print, no matter how few copies it sells.

The Authors Guild says that is not fair. “If a book is only available in print-on-demand, it certainly means the publisher isn’t doing much to promote the book,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “We’re not against the technology; we’re just against the technology being used to lock up rights.”

Mr. Aiken said that authors often ask to take back the rights of out-of-print books so they can place them with new publishers and give their work new life. He cited the example of Paula Fox, a novelist who had six out-of-print novels when Jonathan Franzen, the author of “The Corrections,” cited her work in an essay in Harpers Magazine. Ms. Fox took back the rights for her novels, resold them to W. W. Norton and revived her career.

For mid-list authors (and people like me, who aspire to be mid-list), The Authors Guild has been able to bring many OOP books back to life with its Backinprint.com program, which has also made Lazaruses out of neglected works by masters like Mary McCarthy’s The Oasis and Thornton Wilder’s American Characteristics.

(Thanks to the MSM for letting me be a parasite and cite it on this site.)

Bloggers Like to Gloat, Link to Themselves, Eat Small Children

According to the most shrill of the Critical Lumpians (see Ed’s post below), we’re just a bunch of self-linking, traffic-craving, nose-picking, basement-dwelling maggots. Well, I’m proud to be a maggot and I’m damn sure aiming to make a few bucks off it.*

*Not really.

Aside to Ed: Sorry for piping in just to post a link to my own blog. I’ll make it up to you with a free Totebag!

Frankly, Bloggers Lack Team Spirit!

cheerleader_small.jpg
[Our Save the Blogs coverage continues with a special guest post from fifteen-year-old cheerleader Shannon Byrne, who just received an C+ in her English 3A class and has some Michael Connelly team spirit!!!!!!!!!!]

Like, OH MY GAWD! It’s time to go all like EWWWWWWWWWWWW from those dorky bloggers with the taped glasses and the pocket protectors! They have bad B.O. and certainly NO team spirit! (Go Little Brown! Go Connelly!) The other day, I was passing Pietsch a note in class! And he was like, “What have the bloggers ever done for us?” And I go, “Exactly!” So I dropped my panties and pissed all over a scribbling my varsity boy did of Mark Sarvas! Ewwwwwwww! Grosssssss!

So, like, enough “newspapers are dying” stuff and we’re talking about, like, food chains and parasites. OH MY GAWD! Bloggers. EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Who Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up?

Whenever I sit down and I read a really good book, I think I want to be someone else. There are days where I want to be Duane, Ray Banks, Al Guthrie, or Laura Lippman (all right let’s be honest, I want to write like Laura… but don’t have the guts to go through all the operations to actually become Laura).

I envy these writers a lot of times because each one does things differently and they do them all well. They write their way. And I want to write like them. But I can’t. I don’t write that way. It wouldn’t come out of me well. And then I get mad. Why not? I ask. Why can’t I write like them?

And that’s when I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that as a writer, I don’t want to be Duane or Ray or Al or Laura. And I shouldn’t. They are entities unto themselves.

So I should want to be Dave White.

And that’s what I think a lot of the best writers do (and I know this is opening up a whole can of worms… NO I DO NOT THINK I AM ONE OF THE BEST WRITERS. BUT I AM STRIVING….) I think they find their own voice.

Yeah, they imitated those they liked when they first started (Parker imitated Chandler, Leonard-Hemingway) but they moved on from that. They moved away and found their own voice.

So my goal is not to be the next so and so… it’s to be the first Dave White…

Unless you count the Dave White who reviews movies.

Or the Dave White who was in Bewitched…

or…

(this is just a way to say BUY THE BOOKS that I just mentioned! They’re great!)

David Unowsky’s Second Act

In my report on the Magers & Quinn Irvine Welsh reading, I wrote about talking to David Unowsky, former owner of the Twin Cities’ much loved, now closed bookstore, The Ruminator. Turns out David Unowsky doesn’t just work for Magers & Quinn, he arranges their readings. I found a 2005 article about his “second act” in Publisher’s Weekly:

As Dylan Thomas might put it, David Unowsky simply refuses to “go gently into that good night” of bookselling.

Unowsky, former owner of the Ruminator bookstore in St. Paul, Minn., has joined the staff of 10-year-old used bookstore Magers & Quinn Booksellers, whose main store is located in Minneapolis’s trendy Uptown area. (There is also a downtown store.) Unowsky’s hiring reflects owner Denny Magers’s desire to expand his inventory mix to include new titles. The 9,000-sq.-ft. bookstore currently offers 100,000 used books with another 400,000 used books available on the store’s Web site. The bookstore will soon begin hosting author events, which will be arranged by Unowsky.

“This was an opportunity to get a heavy hitter, a real slugger, on our team, at a time when we’re going through a transition from being a used bookstore to being an entity that people think of right away when they want a book, no matter what kind it is,” Magers told PW Daily. “It takes a long time to change the public perception that we only sell used books. Having somebody as experienced and well-known as David will help us a lot.”

The Ruminator closed its doors last June after 34 years in business. By the time the Ruminator’s landlord, Macalester College, served Unowsky with an eviction notice, he had depleted his retirement savings, mortgaged his house and racked up $10,000 in credit card debt, trying to keep the financially beleagured store afloat.

Read the rest here. And another article by PW, published right before the store’s closing:

It is a sad end to an entrepreneurial career that began in 1970, when Unowsky opened the store under the name, Hungry Mind (he sold the name in 2000 and renamed his store). Hungry Mind earned a reputation as one of the few truly fine bookstores in the U.S., often mentioned alongside such greats as City Lights in San Francisco, Elliott Bay in Seattle and Tattered Cover in Denver.

Unowsky admitted that, like many independent booksellers, he’s always been more focused on books than profit. But he traced the financial problems that led to the store’s closing back to his decision four years ago to open a second store in Minneapolis. In hindsight, he said, he realizes the location was too isolated to sustain a bookstore. The store lost money for three years until it closed.

Struggling with debt, Unowsky fell behind on his payments to Macalester. Her tried a number of tactics to get back on course. Late last year he sold stock in his company, $1 a share for a minimum of 250 shares. He got enough takers to affirm how much book lovers treasure his store–but not enough to cover his debts. He abandoned the stock idea and gave the investors their money back.

Around the same time, he got help from some prominent authors, including Neil Gaiman, Oliver Sacks and Margaret Atwood, who donated items to be auctioned off on eBay to raise money for the store. Then, the horizon seemed to brighten considerably when a financial backer stepped up to negotiate directly with the school.

Those discussions dragged on for months, ending last week with the school demanding that Ruminator Books leave the property. “I’m evicted,” the bookseller said. “This isn’t my decision. I thought we had a deal with the college and we were going to go forward.”

But David Wheaton, Macalester’s vice president and treasurer, said they were never able to come to an agreement on future terms or dealing with the store’s past debt. “We had gone on for a long time and had been looking for a way to bring the discussions to a decision,” he said.

“I think that the store’s been an important part of the campus community and the larger literary community for a long time,” Wheaton added. “This is not something that we approached or did lightly, and I think it will be a loss for our campus and the neighborhood.”

He’s not the only one who thinks so. News of Ruminator’s imminent demise has provoked the usual laments from writers and readers, who laud the store as a literary oasis in an increasingly shallow and commercial culture. Unowsky must be warmed by such praise. What he really needs now, though, is a steady paycheck.

“I’m 62 years old,” he said. “I’d be happy to work for someone else–to work hard for someone else–and go home at night and not worry about making payroll.”

And what replaced The Ruminator? Patagonia. I currently live very close to this location and it kills me that I could’ve been MERE BLOCKS from The Ruminator. Now if I need outdoor clothing, Patagonia’ll provide.

Authors Guild Alert: Simon & Schuster Rights Grab

I joined the Authors Guild in 1978. It’s a terrific organization, one I’m always glad to pay annual dues to. Its Backinprint.com program has brought back four of my out-of-print hardcover books in print-on-demand paperbacks; I’ve got a really sweet deal on an author’s website through the Guild; and, before I became a lawyer myself, got great legal advice from their counsel. I urge everyone who’s published a book to join the Authors Guild.

Anyway, they also send out e-mail alerts from time to time. This one just showed up in my inbox:

Simon & Schuster has changed its standard contract language in an attempt to retain exclusive control of books even after they have gone out of print. Until now, Simon & Schuster, like all other major trade publishers, has followed the traditional practice in which rights to a work revert to the author if the book falls out of print or if its sales are low.

The publisher is signaling that it will no longer include minimum sales requirements for a work to be considered in print. Simon & Schuster is apparently seeking nothing less than an exclusive grant of rights in perpetuity. Effectively, the publisher would co-own your copyright.

The new contract would allow Simon & Schuster to consider a book in print, and under its exclusive control, so long as it’s available in any form, including through its own in-house database — even if no copies are available to be ordered by traditional bookstores.

Other major trade publishers are not seeking a similar perpetual grant of rights.

We urge you to consider your options carefully:

1. Remember that if you sign a contract with Simon & Schuster that includes this clause, they’ll say you’re wed to them. Your book will live and die with this particular conglomerate.

2. Ask your agent to explore other options. Other publishers are not seeking an irrevocable grant of rights.

3. If you have a manuscript that may be auctioned, consider asking your agent to exclude Simon & Schuster imprints unless they agree before the auction to use industry standard terms.

4. Let us know if other major publishers follow suit. Any coordination among publishers on this matter has serious legal implications.

Feel free to forward and post this message in its entirety.

The Authors Guild (www.authorsguild.org) is the nation’s oldest and largest organization of published book authors.

Miriam Sagan: The Survivor

It seems weird to me now that there were only two women of the ten “Young Writers I Admire” article from 1979’s A Critical (Ninth) Assembling – and no writers of color – but in any case, Miriam Sagan was a standout poet on the 1970s small press scene.

A graduate of Harvard with an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University, Miriam published her work in many of the same little magazines that Tom Whalen, Peter Cherches and I did. Her work attracted me from the beginning with its deceptively matter-of-fact voice, its subtle lyricism, its sense of wisdom and humor.

Miriam was one of the editors of the legendary Boston area-based Aspect Magazine, the 1969 brainchild of the late one-man phenomenon Ed Hogan. I’d meet Ed and Miriam at the yearly small press New York Book Fairs in the 70s, meeting at such weekend venues as the Customs House, the Park Avenue armory and the parking lot under Lincoln Center.

Aspect lasted through the whole decade of the 1970s, morphing from a political to a literary magazine in its long and storied run. In 1980 Ed shut Aspect down and he, Miriam and others founded Zephyr Press, still active as a publisher today although Ed’s death in a 1997 canoeing accident definitely caused it to break stride for several years. (Full disclosure: Aspect‘s 1978 double fiction issue contained a story by me and the first critical article about my work, Susan Lloyd McGarry’s “Twenty-seven Statements I Could Make About Richard Grayson,” and Zephyr published my 1983 collection I Brake for Delmore Schwartz).

In 1982 Miriam moved from the Boston area to first San Francisco and then Santa Fe, where Miriam has made her home since 1984. She’s published over twenty books, including Searching for a Mustard Seed: A Young Widow’s Unconventional Story, which won the award for best memoir from Independent Publishers for 2004; her poetry collections Rag Trade, The Widow’s Coat, The Art of Love and Aegean Doorway; and a novel, Coastal Lives.

Miriam has also co-edited such anthologies as New Mexico Poetry Renaissance and Another Desert: The Jewish Poetry of New Mexico and co-authored with her late husband Robert Winson Dirty Laundry: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery: A Joint Diary. Robert Creeley called her book Unbroken Line: Writing in the Lineage of Poetry “a work of quiet compassion and great heart.” Miriam has written a poetry column for Writer’s Digest and articles for the Albuquerque Journal, Santa Fe New Mexican and New Mexico Magazine, and she directs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College

I’m not often in touch with Miriam these days, but we did catch up after nearly 15 years when she came to South Florida to give a talk at the Palm Beach County public library in Boca Raton in November 2003. And last year I got to watch her in action as a poetry workshop leader and lecturer when she was a featured guest at the Celebration of Writing at the Jess Schwartz Jewish Community High School in Phoenix, where I taught AP English.

I wasn’t surprised what a fine teacher she proved to be, because Miriam has always been as good with people as she is with words, the kind of writer on whom nothing is lost. Driving her to the Miami airport during her 1982 visit, I detoured to show her the decaying mock-Arabian Nights architecture of slummy downtown Opa-Locka – only to open a literary magazine a year later and find that in our five-minute drive through town she’d seen enough to create a terrific, haunting, melancholy poem.

Last year in Phoenix, I got to meet Miriam’s second husband, Rich. (He was her high school boyfriend, I think.) Here’s her poem “Remarriage”:

My second husband says
He wishes my first husband
Would get married again—

My first husband
Has been dead for years,
But I dream about him.

At first, he was angry,
Or calling on the phone
Wanting to come home

But I was already
With the man who would become
My second husband.

Recently, I began to dream
My dead husband was dating
A very pretty—

But obviously not Jewish—
Blonde woman,
She seemed very nice.

My second husband
Was getting sick of my dreams—
He said he hoped they’d get married.

In my next dream
My first husband told me
He was indeed marrying her

But he enraged me
By inviting his sisters
But not our daughter to the wedding.

My friends politely mention
They think I am in denial
After all, my first husband

Is dead, not getting married.
But it is as if
He has some kind of life

That goes on without me
Perhaps because I have had
So much go on without him
.

I’ve got the Powers.

From the erratically irritating/illuminating NBCC site, Richard Powers:

The problem is, changing technology invariably produces its own head-on collision of values. The cost of conveying information has plummeted, and we are converging on that moment when everyone will be able to know what anyone else thinks about anything at any given moment. Ideally, I think this is great: it’s the logical extension of the promise implicit in that ancient and most destabilizing of technologies, writing. The complication, of course, is that noise and signal both become cheaper at the same rate, and the novels and reviews that are most capable of making me a better reader may well become harder to find, even as they become more numerous and more thoughtful and more robust. We are in danger of drowning in an ocean of liking or disliking.

I honestly don’t think our crisis is print reviews versus blogs, specialization versus populism, or even the exclusivity of the elite versus the tyranny of the majority. I think our crisis is instant evaluation versus expansive engagement, real time versus reflective time, commodity versus community, product versus process. Substituting a user’s rating for a reader’s rearrangement threatens to turn literature into a lawn ornament. What we need from reviewers in any medium are guides to how to live actively inside a story.

(cross posted at Condalmo)

My Two Minutes with Markson

Many thanks again to the guest bloggers filling in. I’ve been truly stunned and delighted by the remembrances, reading reports and general tomfoolery.

Since there have been a few emails, some news on my coordinates, cunning plans, and the like is forthcoming. But for now, I’ll simply confess that I chatted briefly with David Markson last night. My conversation went something like this:

ME: Congratulations! I very much enjoyed The Last Novel.
MARKSON: You’re drenching!
ME: I’d be interested in interviewing you for the…
MARKSON: You’re soaking wet!
ME: …sort of like radio, the…
MARKSON: You’re drenched!

Nobody informed me about the speed and manner in which starboard thunderstorms stub out sunny afternoons. More later.

Dem Uribe Apples

I’m nervous the ROTR fans will think me a cornball for posting a poem, but what the hoo. This is from Kirmen Uribe, whose MEANWHILE TAKE MY HAND (what you say when there is nothing else to say) was recently published by Graywolf Press. I offer you “Apples,” first in English w/translation by Elizabeth Macklin, then in the original Basque:

Homer used a single word for body and skin.
Sappho slept on the breasts of her friends.
Etxepare dreamt of stark naked women.

All of them silent for ages now.

Today it seems we have to be perfect in bed, too,
like those red apples in the supermarket,
too perfect.
We’re asking too much of ourselves,
and what we hope for
from any of us, nearest neighbors,
almost never happens.
The laws are different when bodies tangle.

Homer used a single word for body and skin.
Sappho slept on the breasts of her friends.
Etxepare dreamt of stark-naked women.

Still I have in my mind
that epoch when we slept holding each other,
scared tiger cubs in our vigil.

Kirmen Uribe, “Apples.”

Okay, Basque now.

Homerok hitz bakarra zerabilen gorputza eta azala izendatzeko.
Safok lagunen bularretan hartzen zuen lo.
Etxeparek emazte biluzgorriekin egiten zuen amets.

Aspaldi isildu ziren denak.

Gaur badirudi perfektuak izan behar dugula ohean ere,
supermerkatuko sagar gorri horiek bezala, perfektuegiak.
Larregi eskatzen diogu geure buruari
eta norberaz, ondokoaz
espero duguna ez da ia sekula gertatzen.
Legeak bestelakoak dira gorputzak korapilatzean.

Homerok hitz bakarra zerabilen gorputza eta azala izendatzeko.
Safok lagunen bularretan hartzen zuen lo.
Etxeparek emazte biluzgorriekin egiten zuen amets.

Gogoan dut oraindik
elkarri besarkatuta lo egiten genuen garaia,
tigrekume ikaratiak gu, gaubeilan.

Kirmen Uribe, “Sagarrak”

So, I had no idea Basque existed till I read Uribe. According to its Wikipedia entry, and of course other sources, Basque’s linguistic antecedents are in contention. It isn’t Indoeuropean, for instance. It’s spoken by roughly 1 million people in north-central Spain and southwestern France. Uribe was, according to MEANWHILE TAKE MY HAND, “born in 1970, in Ondarroa, a fishing town on the Bay of Biscay whose port and canneries now handle much of the catch between Galicia and Bayonne on Spain’s northern coast.”

The town, the book’s intro continues, “is home to some 9,900 people now, down from about 14,000 when Uribe was growing up. Just one of his cousins goes out on the fishing boats. Uribe’s mother lives in a farmhouse set back from the cliff that overhangs Saturraran, and these last months he has been living there, writing in a room that looks out at the ocean.” Nice.

Tom Whalen: The Most Underrated

The “oldest” writer, and by far the most underrated, from my 1979 “Young Writers I Admire” article was Tom Whalen, who was barely 30. I praised his poetry chapbook The Spare Key and the stories I’d seen in some of the same little mags I also got published in: Nantucket Review, Interstate, Panache, Laughing Bear, Iron – as well as his editorship of New Orleans’ Lowlands Review (the first publisher of soon-to-be-household-names like Madison Smartt Bell, then a Princeton undergrad).

Later Tom would become a close friend when he asked me to be a guest teacher at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where he founded and directed the most rigorous high school creative program in America from 1977 to 1999, giving teenagers the equivalent of a pre-undergrad MFA. Named New Orleans Public Schools Teacher of the Year in 1984, Tom has published literally hundreds of stories, poems, prose poems and reviews, as well as works of literary and film criticism and screenplays. It’s hard to think of a major literary publication of the last thirty years that hasn’t published Tom Whalen’s astonishing work, which The Review of Contemporary Fiction has called “thickly lyrical and meditative, interrogating the relation of language to things, of books to life.”

Now retired in Germany (but retired like I am — in other words, still working part-time, Tom as a visiting professor of film and North American Studies at the Universities of Stuttgart and Freiburg, respectively), Tom gets my vote for the undisputed world champion in the heavyweight division of Writer You Should Know About But Don’t.

exchange_whalen.gif

So you never heard of the little mags I mentioned in the first paragraph? Since Tom’s first story appeared in INTRO, the AWP anthology of graduate student work, when he was studying at Hollins back in 1972, he’s endured, like Dilsey, while many of the publications he’s appeared in have gone by the wayside. What has he done lately? See his recent stories “History Lesson” in AGNI Review, “Prose Piece for Martha Stewart” at Pindeldyboz and “Surviving Death” at Barrelhouse, for one. (Okay, I guess that’s three.)

The author of Roithamer’s Universe and other novels, Elongated Figures and other story collections, Winter Coat and other poetry collections, co-author of A Visitor’s Guide to the Afterlife and distinguished translator of Robert Walser, Tom has two new books out:

In the story collection An Exchange of Letters, just released by Parsifal Editions, levels of reality are exchanged, shuffled, made to dance, fuse and vanish. In “After the Rain”’s post-apocalyptic landscape, “Children congregate around the puddles and point to the reflection of the planes crashing at the water’s edges.” The eponymous “Jorinda and Joringel” (from the tale by the Brothers Grimm) appear trapped forever in their past, but the generative nature of the form of their discourse resists despair. “Report from the Dump,” “Twenty-six Novels” and “Critical Tendencies of the Middle Ages” present Tom’s chiseled prose in all its remarkable diversity.

And just out in the last couple of weeks (I got my copy in the mail only a few days ago) is Dolls, Tom’s winning entry in the 2006 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, judged by one of my favorite poets, Denise Duhamel (we’re old friends, I’m old friends with Tom, but like too many of you, Denise had never heard of Tom before she discovered she’d selected his anonymous manuscript). This is what she has to say about Dolls:

“Baudelaire wrote that ‘the overriding desire of most children is to get at and see the soul of their toys.’ Rilke claimed that when children realize that their dolls are inanimate, that their toys have no souls at all, they grow disgusted with their dolls. Enter Tom Whalen….these beautifully crafted prose poems are as animated and frightening as voodoo dolls—think the American Girl collection in the hands of Cindy Sherman. Dolls delighted and scared me beyond belief.”

caketrain.gif

The penultimate word on Dolls comes from Sven Birkerts:

“Tom Whalen’s book is malign and unsettling and darkly outré – he re-Wittgensteins the world that used to be the case through the impassive, but vigilant, eyes of his dolls, and returns it to us strikingly changed.”

The last word on Tom Whalen comes from me: Don’t just sit there, read him. What have you been waiting 35 years for?

Gettin’ to Know You

Forgive me this, I posted twice below without a proper introduction. Obvs, my name is Patrick Stephenson. I grew up in Saudi Arabia and currently reside in Saint Paul, MN, former home of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’m 24-years-old, a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota’s English department. There, I learned under such amazing (and I do mean amazing, the sort that’d change your life) profs as Edward Griffin and John Watkins.

My last day as a security guard was this past Monday—hooray!—and I begin an internship with Graywolf Press (which has published Ander Monson, Sven Birkerts, Jane Kenyon, Percival Everett, David Treuer, Charles Baxter, John D’Agata and about a billion other awesome writers) on July 1.

My websites are PatrickStephenson.net, where I haven’t posted much lately because of, y’know, busy-ness, and Smith & Stephenson, another sufferer of my inattention. (I do my best, man, c’mon.) The latter I co-run with Gregory Smith, editor of the Red Dirt Review, who appears occasionally in the comments section of this website. I expect these blogs’ll get a lot more love considering all the free time I have now.

I also TWITTER, if you’re into that sort of thing, here: Patiomensch

By the way, I’ll have a book of my own—ENDOTHERMIC—out in June, and (hopefully) beginning May 24th you can hear me every Thursday on KFAI’s “Write On Radio” show. If you live in the Twin Cities, this’ll be accessible through your radio—90.3 in Minneapolis, 106.7 in Saint Paul. If you’re not fortunate enough to live in TC, you can stream the broadcast from KFAI. I will impress you with my strong, very masculine voice and literary insights.

My favorite writers are Philip Larkin, A.M. Homes, Jonathan Ames, Richard Ford, John Updike and David Foster Wallace. Here is a photo of me wearing a reflective vest. I enjoy biking. Also, I’m attracted to girls who wear glasses. Nevertheless, prose before hos.